Doctor Science Knows

The P Game

2011-06-20T06:20:00.000-07:00

I am putting this post up here for reference, lest it trip spam/NSFW filters at Obsidian Wings. Contains accurate and frank descriptions of middle-school vocabulary, so may be NSFW depending on your workplace.

In a family dinnertime conversation about riding the schoolbus, the children (currently in high school and college) mentioned "The Penis Game". "Say what?" we said. And so they described it:

Kids A and B are sitting close to each other.

A (whispers): Penis!

B (slightly louder): Penis!

A (slightly louder yet): Penis!

B (another notch louder): Penis!

This witty entertainment continues, getting progressively louder, until the players either break down into helpless laughter (first one to break loses), or they're stopped by the bus driver or other authority figure.

The game is played by both boys and girls, and is a characteristically middle-school activity -- by the lofty age of 15 it's lost most of its charm. But before then, as Sprog #1 explained:

The boys on the bus go penis, penis, penis
Penis, penis, penis
Penis, penis, penis
The boys on the bus go penis, penis, penis
All through the town

-- sung in the most weary and disgusted tones you can imagine.

Parallels to media coverage of the Anthony Weiner scandal may occur to you.

Video parodies more interesting than their targets

2011-05-27T19:16:00.001-07:00

At Obsidian Wings, May 5.

A Mother's Day Ode to BCBs and other delights

2011-05-27T19:14:00.000-07:00

At Obsidian Wings, May 8.

The Women Men Don't See

2011-05-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

At Obsidian Wings, May 12.

Authoritarianism and the Slut Who Walks*

2011-05-27T18:51:00.000-07:00

At Obsidian Wings.

With or Without You

2011-05-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

At Obsidian Wings

Are We Reaping the Whirlwind?

2011-05-27T18:49:00.000-07:00

At Obsidian Wings.

Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves

2011-05-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

At Obsidian Wings.

A Billion Made-Up Conclusions

2011-05-04T18:58:00.000-07:00

At Obsidian Wings.

The Real Life of Thrones

2011-05-04T18:56:00.000-07:00

At Obsidian Wings

Book report: Japan's Medieval Population

2011-04-24T16:35:00.000-07:00

at Obsidian Wings

The First Obesity Epidemic

2011-04-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

At Obsidian Wings

Distributed Denial of Blogging Service Part I

2011-04-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

at Obsidian Wings.

Catholics, Gay and Lesbian Issues, and a Null Hypothesis

2011-04-01T22:01:00.000-07:00

At Obsidian Wings.

Treason Against Family

2011-03-30T08:09:00.001-07:00

Posted at Obsidian Wings.

Iran and Israel at the Atlantic, Day 8

2010-09-12T09:19:00.001-07:00

Reuel Marc Gerecht came back with A Cold-War Lesson: Be Ready and Willing to Go to the Brink With Iran.

I will just underscore one fact of the Cold War that must be transferable to any scenario where we imagine the Americans and the Israelis countering the supreme leader and his terrorism-loving Guards, who will de facto control Iran's nuclear weaponry. The United States and/or Israel must be prepared to go to the brink -- to conventionally and covertly counter the Islamic Republic's aggression, and to credibly threaten nuclear war -- in order to maintain the peace. The Cold War was hot and very bloody.

my comments:

I have to agree with the commenters above -- this truly sounds like frothing madness, not serious policy.

Much of the argument for a strike is based on "the Iranian leaders are crazy!" -- but really, Gerecht sounds crazy, too.

Again, I really wonder what is going on inside the American security/policy culture. Is this kind of thinking not recognized as insane? Or did The Atlantic deliberately pick wackos to be the "strike Iran" proponents in this debate, to make their side look bad?

In other words: why is Gerecht considered a Very Serious Person? Who in the security/policy culture is agreeing with him?

SpiffmanSpace wrote:

His point is that if Iran is NOT prevented from achieving nuclear weapons capability, THEN inescapably a nuclear standoff will develop in the Middle East. And that along with that nuclear standoff will be all the real risks of nuclear war that were associated with the Cold War. (And for a variety of reasons I have spelled out elsewhere, a Middle East nuclear balance will be far less stable than that during Cold War.)

He is not advocating nuclear war. Rather, he is describing the situation we wish to avoid.

Now, do I think he could have made this point more clearly ? Yes, I do.

OK, I can see how I misread him -- he's saying, *if* Iran has the Bomb *then* the US and/or Israel would have to practice nuclear brinkmanship. The subjunctive, Reuel! Learn to use it!

However, Gerecht doesn't really explain to me why, if Iran's nukes would force Israel and the US to make difficult decisions and play a dangerous game, Israel's nukes have no effect on Iran's present-day decision-making. Is it because, in Gerecht's opinion, the Iranian leadership knows that Israel would never make an unprovoked nuclear attack, and the Iranians would feel no such scruples? Even though they'd be destroyed in retaliation?

I'm missing a step in his argument.

Now that Spiffman has clarified Mr. Gerecht's rhetoric, I can address some of the other points in his post.

Since Mr. Gerecht himself has brought in the little matter of "wars liberals are reluctant to start", I will point out that he was one of the hawks promoting the Iraq war. When he says we wimps

always try to put off military confrontations even when their leaders know that diplomacy has a near-zero chance of solving the dangers before them. They inevitably preempt themselves with the worst-case scenarios associated with military action, while reassuring themselves with the solace that comes with preserving the status quo.

-- he is overlooking that the actual results of the Iraq War have been much too close to a worst-case scenario. To refresh your memory:

- at least 100,000 dead, uncounted numbers wounded or crippled physically and pschologically
- millions of refugees
- war ongoing
- money wasted, priceless heritage looted or ruined
- terrorists encouraged
- anti-Muslim bigotry surging in the US

All the evidence indicates that Mr. Gerecht is dangerously bad at weighing either the downsides of war or the benefits of peace.

Furthermore, when he talks about Revolutionary Guards as "the wickedest of the wicked" and "terrorism-loving," bent on campaigns of rape, torture and murder, I guess he doesn't realize that someone who helped Blackwater as much as he did (at least indirectly) is in no position to accuse other people of supporting wickedness, rape, torture, and murder.

Marc Lynch replied with The Burden of Proof for Declaring a Failure of Diplomacy.

Gerecht's argument ultimately comes down to a premature dismissal of other options and to the hope that if the U.S. or Israel hits Iran hard, the situation might look a little better when the dust settles. If Iraq has taught us anything at all, though, it's that the situation could just as easily look a lot worse. The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq is the clearest case available of a liberal democracy violating Gerecht's axiom about the preference to defer going to war -- and the invasion led to disaster.

I commented:

But the costs and risks of military action are sufficiently high that the burden of proof for declaring diplomacy a failure must be accordingly demanding

I must note that in Mr. Gerecht's experience the risks of military action are *not* particularly high. Though he promoted the Iraq War, he seems to felt no consequences from its failure: he is still considered a serious and thoughtful person, worthy of taking part in this discussion. He did not predict, acknowledge, or learn from the costs of that war; why should we pay attention to his predictions about the costs of another one?

I also do not think I agree with your mutual assessment of

liberal democracies' tendency to avoid tough decisions and push decisions to go to war down the road.

I do not see the Spanish-American War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War as ones the US was particularly reluctant to enter. On the contrary, in my experience the tough decision that our system tends to avoid is the one that *ends* a war, that admits failure. In a democracy, the sunk costs of war are so monstrous that once we start we *cannot* seem to finish, because admitting that it was a bad idea is intolerable to leaders and populace alike.

Not to mention that IMHO "pushing decisions to go to war down the road" is a *good* thing, because it buys years of peace that are worth living in. To Gerecht, peace seems always to be the twin of appeasement, a time-out at best between the wars where the real work of history takes place. To most human beings, though, peace is an active good: we little people may not get to make history, but at least we get to *live*.

Iran and Israel at the Atlantic, Days 6-7

2010-09-12T09:17:00.000-07:00

Marc Lynch wrote Striking Iran Is Unwarranted, and It Would Mean Disaster

the whole discussion of an Israeli or American strike against Iran seems to take place in an historical void, as if we have not just lived through the brutal, griding experience of a war chosen and sold on shaky grounds. I would hope that the lessons of Iraq will not be so easily forgotten. When we are presented with claims of a ticking clock approaching midnight, we should recall Colin Powell at the UN and be very suspicious about the alleged urgency and absence of options.

My comments:

I assume that the link to Abrams -- and the fact that he and Dr. Lynch are on the same panel, as though they are equally worth paying attention to -- is due to The Atlantic, not to Dr. Lynch.

Nonetheless, it's worth asking, rather pointedly, why the editors at The Atlantic thought it was worthwhile giving Abrams some of their very valuable space -- especially since he is on the panel with Reuel Mark Gerecht, Patrick Clawson, and Gary Milhollin, all of whom promoted the Iraq War in terms which may now be objectively described as "wrong." Of course, so did Jeffrey Goldberg, so this may be an exercise in "Shape of Earth? Opinions Vary" to soothe Goldberg's feelings.

[arvay wrote:]

It's really worthwhile reading the Israeli press, gives you insight into a nation that is in many ways deeply disturbed. There are still some rational people like Barak, but increasingly -- as many moderates leave for safer places -- the discussion is being taken over by nut jobs.

Frankly, we in the US are also seeing the general political discussion being taken over by nutjobs, and we can hardly blame it on moderates leaving for safer places.

Dr. Lynch's post is IMHO the most substantive contribution we've seen from the panel so far: he presents his insights into history and policy in a way that conveys that he has actual evidence to back him up. His is the first post in this series that strikes me as substantially better than the best of the comments here -- he's either more of an expert, or he's better at conveying his expertise.

I honestly don't understand why the rest of the posts are so "thin" by comparison -- does this reflect a bias or blind spot on the part of The Atlantic, or is The Atlantic honestly reflecting an often glib, slapdash, and morally vacuous policymaking community?

Monday Roundup: Does an Air Strike on Iran Mean War?

[replying to a commenter]
I think you are absolutely right about this:

By Israel bluffing, it sure makes the hardliners in Israeli’s government strong. By Iran bluffing, it sure makes Sepah Pasdaran and Mollas strong in the country and in the region.

This is what I call the "Clausewitz-O'Neill Principle":
http://doctorscience.blogspot.com/2010/08/israel-and-iran.html
Wars are started for domestic or local political reasons, to impress friends and enemies within a country, more than to send signals to people in other countries.

Some rhetorical advice: from your sentence structure, I suspect you may not be a native speaker of English. Your paragraphs are too long for easy reading in this format; make them shorter, double-space between them to make them easier to grasp. Your "LISTEN TO ME!" at the end comes across as yelling, online, and rather crazy yelling, at that. Yes, these are desperately serious issues, but it's all the more important for your seriousness to come across calmly, or people won't bother to figure out what you're saying.

Friday Round-Up: If Force Is the Answer, What Is the Question?.

I love the title you chose for this post. What, indeed?

[skamble asked:]

Given Iran's commitment to complete liberation of Palestine, how can we avoid getting nuked?

(1) A nuclear strike on Israel would kill enormous numbers of Palestinians, directly and indirectly. They would be liberated to death.

(2) That's why you have your own nukes already. Anyone in the Mideast who makes a nuclear attack on Israel can expect to see mushroom clouds over their own cities. That's why we've been saying that nuclear weapons are terrible for attack, but great for defense. Israel's nuclear shield is one of the tightest in the world.

Why don't your weapons already give Israel a sense of nuclear security? That's what they're for.

How to tell fanfiction from literary fiction: you can't

2010-09-05T18:23:00.000-07:00

Eric Rauchway of Edge of the American West wrote Banana Republican, a book about Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband from The Great Gatsby. Henry at Crooked Timber posted Mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers and persons of inferior education, a review of a bad (in both senses) review of the book. Hijinks ensued, including mine:

Helen:

Maybe there’s a point at which this extrapolation from previous novels jumps the shark? Or on the other hand, maybe it’s become a genre in its own right so each one should just be taken on its merits?
(And what should be the name for that genre? Is there already one out there?)

We call it "fan fiction". There's rather a lot of it, and a good deal of scholarship, too.

As for the particular trope of making a secondary character from an existing work into your primary character, I'm not sure it has a separate name -- partly because it's so extremely common. I'm pretty sure I've seen the suggestion that such alternative-POV [point of view] stories are one reason current fanfiction is much more commonly written by women and girls than by men and boys. Women are used to not being the central character in the story, to knowing that we'd be off to the side, not really central, not the hero. This is much more the case with movies and TV than with books, and fanfic for filmed sources is enormously more common than fanfic based on purely text sources -- e.g. fanfic based on The Lord of the Rings was rare before the Peter Jackson movies started coming out.

ajay @16:

Really? I find that surprising given that a) fanfic is so closely associated with the SFF fan community and b) Lord of the Rings is reasonably well liked in this community. I wonder why that should be.

I'm sure it's true, because I helped someone track down stories before the Fellowship movie came out and we could only find a few hundred. Later that summer, LOTR stories were being posted at fanfiction.net at the rate of a hundred *per hour*.

IMO, fanfiction for unfilmed books is rare because books (and stories) have a strong inner voice. In the case of LOTR, that voice -- that style -- is very distinctive and difficult to mimic, so people have rarely tried. Film -- movies and TV -- has no inner voice: all we see is the outside, we make up our sense that the characters have thoughts and feelings in a kind of enthymeme.

Also, film is very pretty. In the case of Orlando Bloom, *extremely* pretty.

alex @19:

“if it’s published, it isn’t fanfic”

Are you a fanfic writer or reader? If you aren't, your definition is somewhere between idiosyncratic and worthless. Not to mention your definition of "published".

Zamfir @23:

I’d say the Odyssee is itself Iliad-fanfic, probably even made up by a community of Iliad-readers.

Not readers, remember, listeners -- the Iliad and Odyssey come out of an oral tradition.

More generally, though, many fanfic writers/readers recognize that what we do is very like pre-copyright storytelling: sitting around the fire, each telling part of one story or different (or contradictory, mine-is-better-than-yours) versions of the same story or set of characters.

alex @22:

Otherwise we’re back where we started, and Ulysses is Homer fanfic.

To me, it is obvious that it *is* Homer fanfic -- not least because it was initially banned, even though not for the usual reasons fanfic is scorned, banned, or looked down upon. "You got sex in my Homer!" is not an argument that can be made with a straight face, though it's amazing how many people will assure you that Achilles/Patroklus is a horrible perversion of the text, and you have a depraved mind to even think of such a thing.

Yet the first recorded slash discussion is in Plato's Symposium, where Socrates and the fanboys are hangin' out, drinkin', and discussin' "Achilles/Patroklus: who tops?"

y81 @33:

it seems more useful to confine the word to unpublished work, generally of a literary quality too low to result in publication, written by aficionados of the underlying work. To expand the word to include every work that includes characters from another work is to make it less useful, unless you are the kind of person who genuinely cannot detect any difference in kind between the Odyssey and some online Hermione/Malfoy slash

Your statement is riddled with problems, which I'll outline not to beat up on you, but because other people probably share them:

- "more useful", "less useful" -- to whom?

- "unpublished work" -- what counts as published, in your mind? Back in the days when fans traded stories in mimeographed zines, perhaps you could say "unpublished" meant "not widely available." These days, a story posted on the Internet for free is likely to be *more* widely-available than one published in a book or magazine. Or does it only count as "published" if you get money for it?

- "generally of a literary quality too low to result in publication" -- otherwise known as *writing*. Most writing is of too low a literary quality to be published in the New Yorker, and even "published" writing generally conforms to Sturgeon's Law.

Conversely, as cofax points out @47, the best fanfiction is fully as good as the best "published" fiction. Here's an example: Apple Blossoms and Laurel Leaves is a brief Midsummer Night's Dream fanfic about Hippolyta. As you can see, its style is just as literary as any story in the "literary fiction" genre, it's based on a work emphatically in the public domain, and it's widely-distributed.

- "the kind of person who genuinely cannot detect any difference in kind" -- I submit that there *is* no difference in kind -- that is, as texts -- between "Apple Blossoms and Laurel Leaves" and the New Yorker's literary fiction. They *are* the same sorts of things.

What makes them different is the communities in which they are written and read. As you may have deduced from its header, "Apple Blossoms" was written as part of an annual multifandom gift exchange of stories in fandoms (or for sources) where there aren't many stories. Several thousand fanfic writers submit lists of "what I'd like to read" and "what I'm willing to write", Computer Magic! occurs, and everyone ends up writing and receiving at least one story. And then we *all* get to read them.

IMO the lack of distance between writer and reader, the fact that no money is exchanged, the way tropes are passed from hand to hand, the tolerance for repetition, and the whole tight social context makes fanfiction *more* like the way The Odyssey was created than the way your "published" fiction has been created in the copyright era.

- "online Hermione/Malfoy slash" -- Hermione/Malfoy would not be "slash" unless one of them has a sex change. "Slash" is used for same-sex pairings, especially male/male; the virgule in "Hermione/Malfoy" is not, technically speaking, a slash slash.

I'm quite startled by the fact that several of you think it obvious that the pre-movie LOTR fanfic "niche" was filled by role-playing games. To me, it seems obvious that RPGs and fiction are two very distinct art forms, as separate as painting and drama, and it would never occur to me to swap one for the other. How does that work, in your minds?

Salient @52:

Isn’t it a bit presumptuous to assume that, just because Author X appropriates Character Y or Universe Z, Author X is a fan of Character Y or Universe Z?

Fan fiction is referential fiction written by people who self-identify as ‘fans’ of the source.

I'm not sure what distintion you're trying to make. Was Virgil a "fan" of the Iliad? I'm not sure it's reasonable to talk about being a "fan" of something that is non-optional in one's own culture.

For James Joyce, it seems to me clearer that yes, he was a "fan" of The Odyssey: he thought about it a lot, he imagined the characters fully, he admired it and there were parts he didn't care for.

roac @63:
Speaking as another birder, fanfic writers and readers are *much* more widely derided than birders. Birders are at worst silly; fanfic writers are frequently accused of being perverts who drag respectable stories through the muck (by which they mean, writing the sexy bits), and who threaten the livelihoods and emotional stability of innocent writers, actors, directors, etc.

And lots of people write for a hobby, nothing strange about that at all—it’s the organized-social-circle aspect of it that I don’t get.

Your attitude is unusual. What I've found is that most people have a lot of trouble getting their minds around *writing* for *fun*. Writing is homework!

Oddly, even many people who love reading fiction have trouble understanding why anyone would write it for fun, as a hobby -- yet no-one has trouble believing that a basketball fan might also like to play hobby-level basketball.

Martin Wisse @64:

think Ulysses is a bit problematic as an example of respectable fan fiction, as it doesn’t take the characters of the original into a new plot, but rather recreates the form of the plot in an entirely new setting; certainly not the most common form of fan fiction.

Not "certainly" by any means. Such stories are called "Alternate Universes" or AUs, and they are *extremely* common. Ulysses would be a modern-day AU insofar as the characters are felt to be the "same characters" as they are in the Odyssey.

Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, for instance, is perfectly respectable fanfic, a modern-day AU of King Lear.

Joint Special Operations Command sued

2010-09-05T18:18:00.000-07:00

Marc Ambinder reported that ACLU Challenges the Joint Special Operations Command.

JSOC kills people, mostly in war zones. Since 9/11, JSOC's assets, called "special missions units," have been unleashed into the world, and, on the basis of a series of still-secret executive orders, given the authority to pursue members of the Al Qaeda terrorist network wherever they go, and kill or capture them as determined by a specific set of criteria.
...
the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union have challenged JSOC's right to engage in targeted killings outside the battlefield. They're basing their challenge on the public acknowledgment of JSOC's existence by two presidents, on the acknowledgment by a presidential adviser that lists of human targets, some including U.S. citizens, exist, and on an acknowledgment by the director of national intelligence that Yemen is a place where these targets could be "gone after."

[commenter VrDrew:]

On the one hand, I have a problem (morally as well as Constitutionally) with an Executive, answerable to no-one, killing anyone (American citizen or otherwise) anywhere in the world outside of a declared battlezone. On the other, I can also see the threat posed by terrorist organizers operating in essentially lawless states such as Yemen, the FATA areas of Pakistan, and Somalia.

To be honest, I don't see this "other hand" at all.

Terrorist or not, lawless state or not, what *possible* threat makes it even vaguely appropriate for the US government to secretly sentence US citizens to be assassinated? This isn't just a little bit outside the Constitution, this makes the whole idea of a Constitution a mockery.

It seems to me that you're saying, "on the one hand, it's evil *and* illegal. On the other hand, we're cowards."

The most terrifying image George Orwell could think of was "a boot stamping on a human face - forever." But even he didn't imagine that the person being stomped would be holding the boot in place and licking it.

[commenter airish:]

Tokyo Rose was a US citizen. What's your point? If you are actively supporting an armed adversary of the US during a time of war, you can't hide behind your (joint) US citizenship that was acquired as an accident of birth

To insist on being legally accused before you're killed by your government is not "hiding behind" US citizenship. *That's* the point.

You may want to pick a different analogy to make *your* point. Tokyo Rose (a) was accused in a court of law, (b) had a US trial, (c) was convicted based on perjured testimony, (d) went to prison, and (e) later got a Presidential pardon. Apparently you believe that the whole bit with the law and the trial and the prison should have just been skipped over, and she should just have been quietly assassinated by US agents. Your approach would also skip over the bit about the perjury and the pardon, too, but I'm guessing that's a feature as far as you're concerned, not a bug.

whether our friend al Awlaki gains any special consideration by virtue of his dual US citizenship over, say, Osama bin Laden

Dude, he's covered by *US law*. The US government's treatment of US citizens is *not* a matter of international law or treaty.

In the case of Osama bin Laden, we've had a public price on his head for quite a while. He is not in any way a covert enemy of the US, nor vise versa. A targeted assassination policy may be a bad idea across the board, but it's IMHO *certainly* a bad idea if the list of targets needs to be counted on a second hand.

Now obviously you feel that al Awlaki isn't a "real" US citizen, so the US Constitution and US law shouldn't necessarily apply to him. But that is clearly, obviously, a matter for Johnny Roberts and the Supremes -- you shouldn't be assuming it as a given.

More generally, surely you can see that it is *extremely* dangerous for the US government (or any authority) to have the ability to kill Americans whenever and wherever it feels like, without any public knowledge or review. This is what tyranny looks like; this is what tyranny *is*.

Links and online reading

2010-09-01T07:40:00.000-07:00

Harry at Crooked Timber posted about Nicholas Carr's latest luddite rant, against links. I commented:

I don't have time for the full critique here, but Carr is 100% wrong, Rosenberg mostly wrong.

How can I tell? Because neither of them cites (or links to) Jakob Nielsen, the Guru of Web Usability studies, including how people actually read online. Nielsen's most important discovery for this discussion: outbound hypertext links increase your credibility:

Links to other sites show that the authors have done their homework and are not afraid to let readers visit other sites.

Writers -- like Carr -- who don't link are making their arguments from authority: "trust me because I'm me!" The Web is *ideal* for scholarship because it makes it extremely easy for readers to check that writers have in fact done their homework, that they're not just outgassing.

Emma in Sydney's project is a superb example of how good linking can be done. The only thing comparable I've seen on any high-profile site is Frank Rich's column at the NY Times, which recently started using popup-explicated links.

John @12:

if we (writers and readers collectively) were only allowed One Book, that book would be written and read very carefully

-- and as nick s points out @18, that reading and writing would *become a hyptertext*, so Carr would *still* be unhappy*. No, he wants the Authority of the Author to be an absolute monarchy: only one Book, read only one way, and no passing notes, neither.

Harry @23:

I just ignore it until I have i) figured out whether what I am reading is worth reading to the end and if so then ii) have actually read to the end. Isn’t that what everyone does?

Assuming you are not being sarcastic, the answer is: No.

In the first place, as Nielsen shows, the nature of those links is a major factor in most readers’ decisions about whether the text is worth reading to the end. The limiting factor in online life is human attention: it is the most precious, unexpandable resource. Thus, the decision “is this worth reading to the end?” is a much more crucial one for an online reader than for a hard-copy reader, and she’s going to be much more cynical and distractable (= motivated by her own agenda, not the author’s) than Carr would like.

Iran and Israel at the Atlantic, Day 5

2010-08-21T06:45:00.000-07:00

Patrick Clawson wrote The U.S. and Israel: Same View of Threat, Different View on Force.

it appears that Washington and Jerusalem see eye-to-eye in their assessment of where Iran stands and how quickly it is moving forward. Their common view is the product of an extraordinarily close consultation among their respective intelligence, military, and political leaders. And the degree of their consensus is an important confidence-builder in Israel.
...
Jeff would still have captured only one of two key reasons for Israeli-American disagreements about the use of force -- namely, the differing threat perception. The other factor, arguably as important, is the differing perception about military force. Americans tend to like and embrace the Powell Doctrine: the overwhelming use of force to achieve decisive results. The view of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is encapsulated in the unfortunate expression "mow the grass"

I am stunned that Mr. Clawson mis-states the Powell Doctrine, even as he's linking to a Wikipedia article that exposes his mistatement.

IMHO what Americans like about the Powell Doctrine is the tests a proposed action must pass, including: Do we have a clear attainable objective? Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted? Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement? Do we have genuine broad international support? These tests overlap with traditional "just war" jus ad bellum criteria, especially those specifying a just cause, probability of success, proportionality, and last resort.

It is painfully obvious that Powell's own promotion of the Iraq War violated the Powell Doctrine (not to mention Just War Doctrine, as the Pope pointed out at the time). Nonetheless, the Powell Doctrine -- as I at least understand it -- crucially depends on circumspection, reluctance to use force, and careful planning, before you get to the ~~fun part~~ bit about overwhelming force and decisive results.

I *really hope* that Mr. Clawson's limited understanding of the Powell Doctrine is his alone; I very much fear that he reflects the general consensus of the US policy/security community. This may be due to the extraordinarily close consultation among their respective intelligence, military, and political leaders to which he refers -- Israel, of course, cannot use the Powell Doctrine, because they can't have limited engagements or an exit strategy for their own region.

Yes, I may have been being just a *little* sarcastic there. It's curious, though, that Clawson cites the Powell Doctrine to support his position -- even though it doesn't.

I couldn't bear the thought of reading "Supreme Command", so I'll ask you: does it suggest that American military policy people have picked up the "mow the grass" mindset from the Israelis?

Gary Milhollin replied to Clawson, and to NY Times reporting that U.S. Assures Israel That Iran Threat Is Not Imminent.

the assumption is false. The clock is still ticking, vigorously.
...
But why quibble about how long the final phase of bomb making might take? Instead, we should keep our eyes on the big fact here, which is that Iran is fast approaching the status of a "virtual" nuclear weapon state -- one with the ability to kick out UN inspectors and build a handful of nuclear warheads. This is not an argument for bombing Iran, by Israel or anyone else. But it is a warning -- a warning that we must confront the growth of Iran's nuclear capability, and not be lulled into imagining that it's not real.

I commented:

[replying to democraticcore:]

Timing is everything. The best way to speed up the clock is to start dropping bombs.

And, as you've pointed out, calmness and a low threat level from the US is at least as important as Israel's belligerence, because the US has far more ability to attack Iran than Israel does.

[replying to skamble, in Gerecht's post]

When Saddam Hussein attacked Iran, more than a million people were killed in the resulting war

A war which continued so long in part because the US provided and enabled financial backing for Saddam.

It also was provoked by the pro-Saddam insurgents and not by Americans

Dude, we *invaded their country*. It doesn't get much more provoking than that.

Elsewhere in this debate, you've made numerous comparisons between the situations under discussion and some aspect or other of WWII. If the US (or Israel) starts a war "pre-emptively", that makes us analogous to, say, the Japanese striking Pearl Harbor pre-emptively. "The war's going to start anyway, we have to make sure that we get the first hit in." Is this *really* the parallel you want to draw?

[continuing discussion with democraticcore, in Burns' post:]

I've been thinking about this some more, and if I were an Iranian leader I'd think of nukes as deterring Russia as well as the US. Iran's relationship with Russia is currently good, but a minimally prudent leader would not count on that long-term.

Batman has a stock of kryptonite -- just in case.

[replying to skamble, also in Burns' post:]

But would there be any aggressive intentions by anyone against Iran if Iran did not try to develop nuclear weapons?

Yes. Because, as you'd know if you had even the most minimal familiarity (=Wikipedia) with Iran, it has oil. And the US has been interfering there since the 1950s.

Iran's nuclear ambitions are a relatively recent development.

Iran and Israel at the Atlantic, Day 4

2010-08-20T06:36:00.000-07:00

R. Nicholas Burns, career diplomat, wrote on The Strength of Obama's Long Game With Iran:

I am more convinced than ever that a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would be potentially disastrous for U.S. interests. At worst, it could lead to a third war in the greater Middle East without the benefit of stopping Iran's nuclear program. It makes much more sense for Obama to stick to his bet that a combination of diplomacy and toughness might yet compel Tehran to yield.

My comments:

Iran is seeking a nuclear weapons capability that would destabilize the current fragile pro-American balance of power in the region

Your analysis avoids mentioning that Israel already has nuclear weapons, so "destabilizing the balance of power" translates to "Israel's power is no longer uniquely devastating". You make no argument that having two nuclear states in the region is more unstable than one -- or that Iran would be more likely to use nuclear weapons than Stalin or Mao was.

Logic and experience say that one consequence of multiple nuclear powers in the region should be talks between the powers, to (at the very least) create structures for dealing with nuclear tests, accidents, and the like. I have no idea whether Iran or Israel would be harder to get to the table, but this is an obvious area where US influence would be vital for everybody, including millions of bystanders downwind.

Marc Ambinder reports that

to some in the Obama administration, the "fact" of Iran's eventual nuclear declaration is already priced-in to their Middle East calculus.

They seem to understand your point, as I take it: the long game is the only game.

[democraticcore]

One question that has not really been addressed in this discussion is, why would Iran want nuclear weapons?
...
I agree with Mr. Burns that Ahmadinejad is a cynical thug but not messianic or suicidal, and unless the Iranian government is indeed suicidal, it cannot use nuclear weapons offensively against Israel or anyone else in the region.

Nor do I see how a nuclear Iran would somehow indirectly empower Hamas or Hezbollah.
...
History teaches that nuclear weapons are virtually useless for offensive purposes unless a country has a monopoly on them, as the US did in '45. That's because even in the cases of insane dictators like Stalin and Mao, MAD works. Nuclear weapons are, however, extraordinarily effective as defensive weapons. Nuclear armed nations do not get attacked by other nations (Israel hasn't been attacked by another nation since '73). There has never been a war between nuclear-armed nations (except for a relatively brief war between between India and Pakistan in '99) because of the very logical fear that any war could escalate to a nuclear conflict. A nuclear armed Iran would therefore effectively be impervious to attack.

Against whom is Iran interested in defending itself from an attack? Again, I would submit that the answer is clearly us. Iranian distrust of the US runs very deep, and for good reason.

Your logic is quite persuasive -- if Iran's nuclear weapons program is motivated by logic.

What is curious, though, is that the saber-rattling is between Israel and Iran, even though (a) Israel cannot effectively attack Iran, and (b) Iran needs nukes to defend itself against the US, not Israel. There's definitely a staged quality about this whole thing, but it's really hard to tell who the intended audience is.

It's possible, to my mind, that Iran's nuclear program is only partly logical or "practical", that it is intended more to function as a symbol -- of strength, technological sophistication, and importance on the world stage -- than to be truly strategic. As I've argued repeatedly here, the most important audience for such warlike displays is likely to be local, i.e. domestic. By having a nuclear program, the current Iranian regime is showing its people that it takes their defense very seriously -- attacks and threats from the US, Israel, or other outsiders will make Iranians *more* inclined to believe that only the regime can protect them.

Robin Wright replied to Burns, with What the Successful Containment of Iran Will Look Like:

So what provisions does a viable containment policy need to have? As one of the early steps, for example, should containment include trying to cut off Iranian access to foreign refineries, which Iran needs, given that it doesn't have enough refineries of its own to process oil for its domestic market? Sounds easy, but to work it needs full international cooperation -- in principle at the United Nations, and in practice from countries or companies servicing Iran -- as well as an enforcement mechanism to prevent smuggling. That's only one option of many, and we should imaginatively be thinking through others before racing into military action.

[democraticcore commented:]

I am very skeptical that any of this will work (if "working" is defined solely in terms of causing Iran to abandon a nuclear weapons program), although to the extent that it can buy time by preventing the neocons from taking over and starting a war against Iran, it probably doesn't do any harm. However, it seems to me that "containment" should be viewed as a strategy for dealing with a post-nuclear Iran.
...
1. Make sure that all countries in the Middle East, not just Israel, have a solid nuclear deterrent, which the US will provide.
2. Forge a military alliance to prevent any military adventurism by Iran, including proxy wars if necessary. The pillars of this alliance would be Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
3. Get widespread international support for the containment strategy. Most importantly, this means looking beyond Europe, and instead looking for diplomatic support from the rising powers of India, China and Brazil, and of course Turkey.

Economic sanctions and direct military action against Iran really would play little role in such a containment strategy, just as they had little to do with the success of the containment strategy in dealing with the Soviet Union.

"Like" is far too mild a term for my emotions toward this comment.

Trade relations would also be very helpful to opening up Iran to soft power influences, which at the end of the day, are what are going to bring down the Iranian regime. Like the Soviet Union, the Iranian regime will be taken down by jeans and hip-hop, not bombs and sanctions.

It seems clear to me that US policy/security circles, at least, have great patience with aggressive approaches even when they fail, and don't see negotiation and "soft" power as worth spending time on. The fact that someone from the "Institute of Peace" can't come up with anything more humane -- and workable -- than "really mean sanctions" is very discouraging. I had hoped that Ms. Wright might be able to think outside the psychological issues of some of the other contributors here, but apparently not.

J.J. Gould, who is editing the debate, highlit our comments exchanges about whether Israel's leaders believe an attack would work. I commented:

Thank you for highlighting this discussion, J.J. Looking it over, I realize I referred to the IDF when I should have said IAF, because clearly this would be an Air Force operation, not Defence Force (=Army).

I would like to add that what I call the Clausewitz-O'Neill Principle predicts that the most important audience for this saber-rattling is other Israelis -- which indeed is sort of what Goldberg suggests page 4 of his article, when he writes about the Israeli people's desire for a sense of safety through nuclear pre-eminence.

Israelis will seriously weigh whether or not an attack is worth it knowing that its enemies on its immediate borders will be poised to strike.

And yet, most Israeli commenters (here and elsewhere) seem to figure that the enemies are poised to strike *anyway*, and need an excuse more than a reason. So Israelis (or a significant segment within the Israeli population) might feel more positive toward their government even after a failed strike, even one with large civilian casualties, even one that alienates the US.

Another way of putting it is that Netanyahu's coalition may feel that their elected mandate entails striking at Iran's nuclear program, regardless of whether it has a realistic chance of operational success. It could be an *operational* failure, but still a (domestic) *political* success.

Basically, I'm with Clausewitz: politics *always* drives policy.

Iran and Israel at the Atlantic, Day 3

2010-08-18T22:45:00.000-07:00

My commenting continues at The Atlantic's discussion about Iran, Israel, and the Bomb.

Gary Milhollin wrote about The Futility of an Israeli Air Strike Against Iran's Nuclear Sites.

If Iran truly values its nuclear program, it would play the victim. The attack would give Iran a claim on the sympathy of countries that might otherwise be inclined to shun it, thereby invigorating its campaign to thwart U.S. and Western isolation efforts. But to remain the victim, it would have not to victimize others. Successful victimhood would therefore mean few or no Iranian-sponsored terror attacks against U.S. targets. It would also mean only limited terror attacks against Israel. If victimhood works, and Iran escapes isolation, its current rulers will have fended off one of the main threats to the regime anywhere on the horizon. That benefit would seem to outweigh whatever harm Israeli bombs could do to the nuclear program.

I commented:

If Iran truly values its nuclear program, it would play the victim.

Countries that have been bombed do not have to "play" the victim -- the civilian casualties which you rightly call "inevitable" do that for them.

Furthermore, your "If" calls out for an "If Not". If Iran *doesn't* truly value its nuclear program, then what? Are you suggesting that then it *won't* "play the victim", exhibit those (still inevitable) civilian casualties, ask for and receive sympathy from other nations?

And speaking of inevitable civilian casualties: you ask What would such bombing destroy? without ever mentioning that Iranians (civilian and military) would be killed. How many? Are you estimating casualties in the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or more? The American (and Israeli) people have proven tolerant of very high casualties on the part of other people, but the rest of the world won't necessarily see things the same way.

[to a commenter talking about Netanyahu's equation of Iran with Amalek]

I don't understand this Biblical reference.

"Amalek" is an existentially threatening foe that toward whom one is *commanded by G-d* to use genocide.

His job is to see that Iran does not destroy Israel, not try to destroy Iran.

If Netanyahu's circle is indeed using "Amalek" as a metaphor for Iran, then they think that Iran can only be prevented from destroying Israel by total war, targetting the civilian population.

Or they're indulging in hyperbole, like when a 12-year-old calls mandatory bedtime "fascism". But it's *really* self-indulgent, politically stupid hyperbole.

[to another commenter]

To me, it’s pretty clear that Israel cannot initiate a strike against Iran, and Israeli policy planners surely know this. They’re just keeping as quiet as possible about it in the hopes that the US decides to conduct the strike on its own.

Thank you very much for your input.

Goldberg reported (p1):

I have interviewed roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike, as well as many American and Arab officials. In most of these interviews, I have asked a simple question: what is the percentage chance that Israel will attack the Iranian nuclear program in the near future? Not everyone would answer this question, but a consensus emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.

but he also said (p6):

In my conversations with former Israeli air-force generals and strategists, the prevalent tone was cautious. Many people I interviewed were ready, on condition of anonymity, to say why an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites would be difficult for Israel. And some Israeli generals, like their American colleagues, questioned the very idea of an attack.

This supports your contention that the IDF knows an attack would fail; if they thought it was likely to succeed, they would have told Goldberg "it is the proud tradition of the IDF to follow orders and defend our nation successfully and unflinchingly", or words to that effect. Quietly ominous predictions that they could do what needs to be done would be the least enthusiastic way for the military to signal agreement.

Do you think that the Israeli political policymakers are fully aware that the IDF really doesn't think they could strike at Iran effectively? That is, do you think they were deceiving Goldberg, or are they deceiving themselves? The US invasion of Iraq illustrated to me that there is no real limit to the ability of politicians to believe that wishing will make it so in military affairs -- and no significant limit to the military willingness to go along, as long as the political leaders are ones the officer corps voted for.

I'm pretty confident that all of the Israeli policy makers that would be the ones making the decision on whether or not to attack Iran are fully aware of the IDF's limitations and know that a successful attack is not likely. Keep in mind that Netanyahu himself is a military man (coming both from a prominent military family and having served in the special forces) and has a deep respect for the military establishment. If they advise him that an attack is a very bad idea, he'll listen. ... I believe all the saber rattling is an attempt to get the world community more involved in isolating Iran (with the hope of getting them to compromise on their program) or to try and force other players, namely the US, to destroy Iran's nuclear program by force.

The Clausewitz-O'Neill Principle predicts that the most important audience for the saber-rattling is other Israelis -- which indeed is sort of what Goldberg suggests page 4 of his article, when he writes about the Israel people's desire for a sense of safety through nuclear pre-eminence.

Israelis will seriously weigh whether or not an attack is worth it knowing that its enemies on its immediate borders will be poised to strike.

Reuel Marc Gerecht replied to Milhollin with Israel's Compelling Reasons to Attack, Despite the Uncertainties.

What the Israelis need to do is change this dynamic. A preventive strike offers them the only conceivable alternative for doing so. Any bombing run will, at least temporarily, shock the international system and rock Iran internally. The Israelis will have shown that they are deadly serious about confronting the Iranian nuclear threat, that they are willing to go on a permanent war-footing with the Islamic Republic and its deadliest ally, the Hizbollah, which will probably unleash rocket hell on Israel in turn. Although President Obama may become (privately) furious with the Israelis, any Israeli strike will make the United States, and probably even the reluctant Europeans, more determined to shut down Iran's program.

James Fallows strongly disagreed. My comment on Gerecht:

Readers should be aware that Mr. Gerecht's deep insight into Iran let him predict, in 2002, that:

If the United States stays in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime, and ushers in some type of a federal, democratic system, the repercussions throughout the region could be transformative. Popular discontent in Iran tends to heat up when U.S. soldiers get close to the Islamic Republic. An American invasion could possibly provoke riots in Iran-simultaneous uprisings in major cities that would simply be beyond the scope of regime-loyal specialized riot-control units.

The fact that he is now predicting benefits to Israel from a *failed* mission against Iran indicates that he is still using the same sparkles-and-ponies-enabled crystal ball he used to promote the US invasion of Iraq.

Marc Ambinder wrote What the White House Really Thinks About Bombing Iran.

Importantly, to some in the Obama administration, the "fact" of Iran's eventual nuclear declaration is already priced-in to their Middle East calculus. For them, once such a nuclear declaration becomes a reality, the U.S. won't be forced to change its posture, basing, arms deals, or strategy -- all of which are designed to prevent Iranian (Shiite) hegemony in the region. (An implicit assumption: Iran would never actually use the bomb.) I've also spoken with Obama advisers who believe that breakout Iranian nuclear capacity would instantly create a new existential threat to American national security. But to a person, no one in power now believes that the consequences of an Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran would be productive, let alone acceptable.

To another commenter, I replied:

I find the notion that MAD won't work against Iran because its government is "crazier" than the Communists governments of the Cold War to be unsupported.... The Iranian regime may well be repressive, but no one has ever suggested that it has engaged in the systematic mass murder of its own people on a scale in anyway comparable to Stalin or Mao. ... Nuclear weapons have been quite effective in focusing people's attention on the desirability of survival.

Exactly. Crazy evil dictators have had nukes *already*, and yet managed not to be crazy enough to use them. And that was when the countries in question were a considerable distance from each other -- in the Middle East, a single nuke could have long-term consequences for quite a few countries who thought they were on the sidelines. Don't they teach kids these days about fallout?

At the Wednesday summary, I commented:

It is either deeply shocking or very characteristic of these experts that they weigh the positive/negative consequences of an Israeli strike on Iran without including civilian casualties in their calculations. Gerecht mentions them as "inevitable" just as he talks about Iran "playing the victim" -- as though hundreds, thousands, or more human beings would be "playing dead".

Hookups and "Counts As Sex"

2010-08-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

Oliver Wang (subbing for Ta-Nehesis Coates) posted about sociological research on hookup culture. I commented:

Thank you for shedding a little clarity and rationality on the topic.

One of the things baffling me, though, is that I don't know what you (or the researchers) mean by "having sex". The contexts.org article, for instance, includes under "hooking up" activities that in my distant youth were called "making out", which was definitely *not* classified as "having sex".

Similarly, I have a lot of trouble with remembering who is supposed to be "receiving" oral sex, and wish people would just say "fellatio" when that's all they mean. It's extremely difficult, reading this material, to figure out who is actively trying to have an orgasm with whom and how often, which I figured was the Gold Standard of When It Counts, but maybe I'm just a fogey.

In "This Side of Paradise", doesn't Fitzgerald talk about a culture of "petting" and "petting parties" in the 1920s? -- which sounds a lot like hooking up to me, if hooking includes what us fogeys called "second base".

Israel and Iran, Part 1

2010-08-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic is having discussions all week about Jeffrey Goldberg's article on whether Israel will attack Iran for nuclear effrontery. I will update this post with my comments as I make them.

Robin Wright wrote A Long Way From the Point of No Return With Iran. I commented:

Any polity's decision to go to war (or drastic military action) follows what I call the "Clausewitz-O'Neill Principle".

Clausewitz said, "War is the continuation of politics."

Tip O'Neill said, "All politics is local."

Clausewitz-O'Neill states: "Wars are a continuation of domestic politics: they are begun for domestic reasons, because they are perceived as the solution to a domestic political issue."

I'll go further and bring in Freud (I hate that): war is often[1] a projection onto an external enemy of internal domestic conflicts, which are thereby repressed. Just as with Freudian repression-projection, though, fighting an outside enemy is more of a distraction than a solution to your inside problems.

Goldberg's article is extremely useful because it implicitly acknowledges Clausewitz-O'Neill. Whether Israel attacks Iran or not will be driven most strongly by Israeli domestic politics, not by some objective measure of the threat.

Goldberg is so far inside Israel psychologically that he doesn't appear to see how limited his analysis of Iran is. Again, Clausewitz-O'Neill predicts that Iranian leaders will do things for their own domestic political reasons. In order for those of us who are neither Iranian nor Israeli to predict what will happen, we need detailed info on what things seem like to the powers in Iran. Goldberg didn't include those kind of sources, but Ms. Wright's sweeping generalizations here don't help. Her CV suggests that she may know what she's talking about, but she isn't *showing* it.

[1] Not always -- sometimes the domestic problem is "we want more stuff", and war is just how you get it. Looting is usually considered an ignoble reason for war, but at least it's honest.

[from an Israeli commenter]

I think I can sum up the Israeli side of domestic politics. It is this: the Israeli voters tell the government, do whatever is needed to keep us safe.

But what counts as "safe"? As someone around here was saying (comments on Ambinder, maybe?), it is much more unsafe to be a Jew in Israel than a Jew in the US ... or in Germany. You might well be safer (=less likely to be blown up on a bus) living next to a Palestinian state, or in a secular, non-Zionist state large enough that Jews, Muslims, Christians, and atheists *had* to work together, because no one group was dominant.

War is not safety. Peace is not insecurity.

[same Israeli]

The non-Zionist Palestine was tried already, the Jews of Hebron were slaughtered on one day in 1929.

That counts as "tried"?!? In recent years, the Jewish population of Germany has been booming, synagogues are being established and rabbis are being ordained again. People change, and cultures change even more as generations pass away. Letting something that happened in 1929 determine your relationship to your neighbors is refusing to learn.

lacking peace, the other sensible way is not to try to save on defense spending.

My experience living in a country that also refuses to save on defense spending is that the bigger your hammer, the more everything looks like a nail. The more money you spend on defense, the less willing you'll be to put up with the slow, fitful, unmanly process of getting along with people.

Not being a target of nuclear Jihad would be a good start

It's an open secret that the way Israel discourages nuclear Jihad is by already having a bunch of nukes.

I brought in Jewish immigration to Germany not to imply that you could move there, but to point out that events in 1929 don't have to determine what is feasible in 2010. The fact that a non-Zionist Palestine was "tried" in the 20s means little or nothing about whether a secular, non-Zionist state could succeed today.

The last time an Israeli civilian was lynched by Palestinians was just a few years ago.

I am an American. My country could not hold together at all if people couldn't co-exist with potential lynchers. It isn't easy or comfortable or always safe for groups that really hate each other to live under the same political roof, but it *can* be done. It's the difference between a large family where people yell and scream and maybe even hit each other (not good!), and one where they actually kill each other (much worse!).

Patrick Clawson wrote How Much Brinksmanship Will Israel Tolerate?. I commented:

I introduced the "Clausewitz-O'Neill Principle" over at Wright's post, and I'll say it again here:

"War is the continuation of politics" + "All politics is local" = "Wars are a continuation of domestic politics: they are begun for domestic reasons, because they are perceived as the solution to a domestic political issue."

Here is a perfect example:

Israel will act when it perceives a turning point has been reached, even though there is no air of international crisis. In other words, the "forcing event" which precipitates Israeli action is their perception of risk.

Risk to what? The physical security of other Israelis, or the security in power of current leaders?

Saying that "Iran has to be careful not to cross Israel's red line" is making Iran responsible for Israeli domestic politics. Yet to my mind Goldberg makes clear that Israel's internal dynamics are what is driving the confrontation, that's where the energy is coming from. Whether (or when) Israel strikes will depend on whether it seems useful to whoever's in change at the time -- and there are significant elements within Israel pushing in either direction.

The lack of cogent analysis of Iranian politics in his article and elsewhere on this site so far demonstrates IMHO that the problem is not with what Iran is or isn't doing. Whether Iran develops nuclear energy and/or weapons is also going to be driven by domestic politics -- but we haven't seen anything on this site about that.

Elliot Abrams wrote Obama Bombing Iran? Don't Be Surprised. My comment:

I've been pushing the Clausewitz-O'Neill Principle all over this discussion, and here comes Elliot Abrams, Distinguished Warmonger, to illustrate it exactly.

Clausewitz said, "War is the continuation of politics."

Tip O'Neill said, "All politics is local."

Clausewitz-O'Neill states: "Wars are a continuation of domestic politics: they are begun for domestic reasons, because they are perceived as the solution to a domestic political issue."

Abrams, as an experienced and successful warmonger, has a thorough grasp of Clausewitz-O'Neill. He knows that the way to promote a war is to present it as the solution to a domestic political problem, and that's what he's doing right here.

The problem, as he frames it, is: the Democrats are facing election problems because they are perceived as weak and submissive. The time-honored way to look strong and dominant? ~~Viagra!~~ War! That's why George H.W.Bush won re-election so easily, of course, after Persian Gulf I.

The value of Abrams' advice is worse than nil, and I won't engage with it further. But his post can be saved as a textbook example of the Clausewitz-O'Neill Principle. I may be the first person to explicitly formulate Clausewitz-O'Neill, but clearly the principle has been grasped -- and used -- by politicians and warmongers for millennia.

Karim Sadjadpour, whose piece is slated to go up later in the week, got pretty ticked at Abrams and posted Attacking Iran: The Last Thing the U.S. Administration Wants to Do. I commented:

Whoops, my original comment disappeared -- probably due to the Urban Dictionary link.

In other words, Sadjadpour is saying that Abrams is what kids these days call a concern troll:

In an argument (usually a political debate), a concern troll is someone who is on one side of the discussion, but pretends to be a supporter of the other side with "concerns".

After all, why should we doubt the advice offered Obama by such a staunch Republican? This is what bipartisanship looks like!

On the Monday Round-Up, I commented:

I call the last step that Ezra didn't take the Clausewitz-O'Neill Principle, and I've been pushing it all over this discussion.

Clausewitz said, "War is the continuation of politics."

Tip O'Neill said, "All politics is local."

Clausewitz-O'Neill states: "Wars are a continuation of domestic politics: they are begun for domestic reasons, because they are perceived as the solution to a domestic political issue."

This is *precisely* what Ezra is talking about with regard to Israel, as you show here. I actually think Goldberg's article did a pretty good job of showing how Clausewitz-O'Neill is driving Israel's policy toward Iran, though he was not self-reflective enough to say it straight out.

Similarly, though, I do not see the US policy toward either Israel or Iran to be really driven by the realities there, or even

because the US recognizes that is in its strategic interest to ensure that Israel maintains overwhelming military superiority.

Many Americans do not feel as though Israel is a truly foreign, external country -- Goldberg himself is an excellent example, but so is Sarah Palin. The American idea of Israel (largely formed by religion, of course) is a domestic issue, almost without regard to the Israel in the real world.

"Domestic politics" might not be the best way to put it -- "interests that are local to the warmongers" might be better.

I'm talking about things like: the military elite wishing to increase its influence and prestige within the body politic. The desire to offer Lebensraum, a "free" frontier, or just plain loot to elements of the population you want to keep on your side. In feudal societies, the aristocrats may feel as though they are local to aristocrats in other countries, and may use war as tool for personal revenge.

most wars generally start out unpopular or become unpopular if they go on too long

Wars invariably are popular at first with *some* domestic group, or they wouldn't ever get started. They might not be popular with the general population, but they have to have the backing and appear to serve the interests of some powerful constituency. If you throw a war and nobody comes, it's not a war.

Clausewitz-O'Neill explains why wars start, but not why they continue -- I suspect we are excessively patient with force as a solution because of the terrible sunk costs. As the bodies pile up, the ability to recognize that you're doing the wrong thing seems to shrivel in the people who are most responsible.

the decision-making process in the US national security establishment, which I believe is based on an assessment of the US strategic interest in preventing Israel from using or threatening to use its nuclear weapons. It is noteworthy the massive US military support for Israel really began after the '73 war. Eisenhower was not particularly supportive of Israel, castigating Israel for its actions during the Suez War. Johnson started to shift US policy in a more pro-Israel direction, but even as of the time of the '67 war, Israel's primary military supplier was France, not the US.

That is a very interesting take which I have not heard argued in public. I would like to believe it, because I would like to believe that the US national security establishment is that objective (even Machiavellian) about US strategic interests.

However, I don't believe it. I had no inside, specialized, or expert knowledge, yet it was blindingly obvious to me from the get-go that the Iraq War was morally wrong, illegal (as in "war crime"), and would undermine US interests. If the national security establishment could not see that -- or could not act on it -- then why should I assume that they are capable of anything Machiavellian? Why has Israel's nuclear arsenal *never* been a front-burner public issue in the US, if it's a lynchpin of our Middle-Eastern grand strategy? I'd *love* it if you could tell me why I'm wrong.

Libertopia and The Long Winter

2010-08-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber continues looking at libertarian utopias, and whether 19th Century America qualifies. I commented:

I find that Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter casts a particularly clear light on the libertarian vision of the American frontier.

There's no doubt that Laura' father thought of himself in libertarian terms. "Free and independent" is his mantra and that of the other settlers: they came west, they say, to be free and self-reliant, proud and independent, owing no man anything.

But if you pay attention to what they actually do and how they actually live, they are completely dependent on the government and the industrial society they claim to be fleeing. Laura's family stakes a claim -- on land expropriated from the Indians not in the misty past but within the past few years.

To hold the claim they have to live on the land, but they can't actually support themselves there -- the ground isn't ready for serious agriculture, even if the climate was suitable. They don't even have a place to live without materials that have to be brought in -- nothing available to them can be used to make a shelter they're willing to live in.

The women and children live on the claim to secure the legal title, but the family's income mostly comes from work on the railroad. Laura's parents talk about self-sufficiency, but at no point in her life do they actually survive on food they produce themselves -- purchased flour, meal, and meat are *always* the backbone of their diet. This food comes on the railroad from the East.

Their dependence is made clear during The Long Winter when the railroad is blocked. The frontier townspeople talk about being free and independent, but they are in fact still completely tied into the industrial economy. Without it, they begin to starve.

They only survive the winter because of collective action. Laura's future husband Almanzo and his brother are fronted money by the general store owner to make a perilous journey to buy wheat for everybody in town. They bring it back at great risk, and the storeman wants to sell it at a monopoly price -- giving the Wilder boys a fee for their efforts, of course. The Wilders, though, say *they didn't do it for money*, and they won't take money from the mouths of the starving. Laura's father tells the storeman that *of course* he's a free man who can do whatever he wants with his property -- but the townspeople will also be perfectly free to ignore him socially and economically after winter is over. It's libertarian rhetoric as a veneer over communitarian actions.

Furthermore, the more I've thought about their situation (while I read and re-read the book to my children), the more I've realized that their libertarian ideals are part of what brings the town to the edge of total disaster. Everyone in town *should* be living together, sharing warmth, food, and company -- not wasting precious fuel trying to heat individual houses. With communal living and eating arrangements, they wouldn't have nearly as much trouble getting through the winter.

lemuel pitkin @55:

I read that New Yorker article, too, and Rose's libertarianism is one factor pushing me to think Laura really did write most of the books. The difficulty with reading the Little House books IMHO is that young!Laura, from whose POV we see the story, is an unreliable narrator. She doesn't lie to us about what she sees -- but she doesn't see everything or understand it on an adult level. Writer!Laura IMHO makes a lot of her points indirectly -- like the fact that Pa Ingalls loves the wilderness, but spends his life destroying it. Young!Laura loves and admires him, but that doesn't mean Writer!Laura shows everything he does as loveable or admirable.

mw @69:

My point is that the cooperation in The Long Winter is not truly private nor voluntary. The wealthy storeman doesn't cooperate voluntarily, but because he is threatened by the public acting together. They *are* the government of the isolated town, and Mr. Wilder later was an elected official.

It's true that this is not state-level government, but it's community-level socialism (or something): Mr. Ingalls is a leader of the community against the wealthiest individual in it.

Gareth Rees @94:

arrgh, yes! the shame, the shame! The problem was that I was mentally translating from "Pa".

mw @95:

I wasn't clear in my retelling of the scene in The Long Winter. The citizens weren't originally "threatening to take their business elsewhere", they were getting ready to use (well-armed) mob violence. Pa Ingalls talked them down to threatening a boycott, and got the storekeeper to agree he didn't want it to come to that -- but the real alternative, not discussed explicitly, was violent robbery and/or lynching. They may not have had *state-level* coercion, but guns there were a-plenty -- courts and prisons would have been much nicer and less bluntly coercive.

Libertopia

2010-08-13T20:02:00.000-07:00

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber asked why has there never been a serious attempt at a real libertarian utopia?. My comments:

I’m surprised that no-one has yet mentioned the factor that jumps out at me.

You can’t have a functioning human society that isn’t at least 1/3 female. Unless the libertopians include a lot of women, they can’t possibly establish anything that isn’t basically a club instead of a society.

More broadly, I think it supports my personal definition: Libertarians don’t believe that humans are social animals. Trying to put together even a small human society that doesn’t take account of our social nature is of course highly problematic. If you think, as many libertarians apparently do, that the foundation of human society is private property, you’ve already turned your back on anything anthropology and the history of religion can teach you about how humans actually operate in small societies.

Brett Bellmore:

What libertarians believe is that social animals can cooperate in non-coercive ways. Trade, and other voluntary forms of interaction.

Libertarians who try to build non-coercive societies are leftists or anarchists, and they don’t think of *trade* as the quintessential non-coercive interaction. Lefty libertopias have often been attempted (with varying degrees of success, of course), but they generally take “family” or indeed “love” as their grounding metaphor. They never (that I know of) are structured around private property as a first principle.

John Protevi:

Your comments clarify for me that the sort of trade Brett is talking about—strictly fair, balanced, and freely-chosen—does not naturally occur inside human communities. Most basically, what I think I’m saying is that under what you might call “natural” conditions humans do not survive on their own. We live with each other because we must, because otherwise we (generally speaking) die.

So on the one hand, we are ecologically coerced to live in groups, that is our niche. On the other hand, our nature is adapted to our natural niche, so we need to live in a group to be happy. We need other people emotionally, in a way that libertarian trade and freely-chosen contracts cannot satisfy; we also ecologically/economically need other people if we are to survive. That’s what I mean by libertarians not believing that humans are social animals.

Metamorph:

Thank you for the link, that is extremely well-put.

I think your essay clarifies what right-libertarians like Brett are looking for: market-like social relations, because they simplify cost/benefit calculations, and thus can be more easily extended over a wider range of social contexts. As you say, traditional donation and obligation are both, by comparison, vague, difficult to predict, and prone to the stress of free-riding, for both sides of the exchange.

Now, those of us who’ve read any anthropology know that the description of a culture traditionally begins with a chapter on kinship—relationships that are not freely-chosen, so in libertarian terms they must be coerced. Because Right-Libertopia wants market-like, freely-chosen social relations, I have *no idea* what their kinship system would be. Without a kinship system, is there any surprise that there is no Libertopia?

Lee and the Custis family slaves

2010-08-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

Andy Hall was one of Ta-Nehesis Coates' pinch-hitters this week. Today he wrote about Arlington, Bobby Lee, and the 'Peculiar Institution'. I replied to another commenter, saying:

Lee owned slaves because his wife and her family did. As the original post implies, the slaves in question probably included *her siblings*, and doubtless other relatives as well.

By framing his relationship with the Custis slaves as purely economic, a matter of labor, Lee was wilfully ignoring the fact that the slaves should have been treated as blood relatives, his wife's siblings and his children's cousins. The Custises had "indulged" their slaves because on some level they recognized that they were literally family; Lee was a stern and legalistic master IMHO because he was denying that they were.

Remember, Lee marriage to Mary Custis made many people consider him to be George Washington's heir -- but the Arlington slaves were, by that same count, also Washington's heirs. By treating them rigorously, Lee was making sure that his children had no competition for Washington's legacy.

In Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), Dickens describes the Southern American as a man

who dreamt of freedom in the arms of a slave, and woke to sell her children and his own in the public marketplace.

More on the Book of Jonah

2010-08-12T19:45:00.000-07:00

Mark Kleinman, subbing for Ta-Nehesis Coates, posted a rather serious analysis of the Book of Jonah, but noted that some people read it as comedy or satire. I commented:

I'm glad that I'm not the only one who reads Jonah as comedy -- I think it's *hilarious*, as funny as a well-done megillah. [I then explained my take on the book]

I always assumed that the Hebrew Bible was basically humorless

Are you joking?!? Not only is there Jonah, but also:

- the Golden Hemorrhoids of I Samuel chapters 5 & 6.

- Rachel steals her father's household gods, then when he comes to look for them she sits on them and says she's having her period and doesn't want to get up, so he goes away. Genesis 31:34-35.

- Balaam and his talking ass, Numbers 22:21-38.

That's just off the top of my head. And I don't even know Hebrew, so I can't cite the puns that I'm sure are all through the texts.

I'm kind of boggled to see that you're Orthodox -- I thought not seeing the humor in the Bible was a province of literalist Christians, frankly. Reconstructionist/Renewal rabbis, at least, always are aware of the funny bits, the ha-ha-only-serious. I first became consciously aware of Jonah's humor during a bibliodrama one Yom Kippur afternoon, because it's impossible to act out Jonah's lines without realizing that he's hilariously absurd.

My 4th grade rebbe (who was hands down the greatest teacher I ever had) approached the material in a way that was, in retrospect, reminiscent of the Bible routines of comics like Bill Cosby or David Steinberg, but it felt like his own interpolations, not something inherent in the text itself.

I think I probably looked at it this way until I ran into the Golden Hemorrhoids. I contend that it is impossible for human beings, regardless of cultural background, not to see that story as humor. It *must* have always been intended as funny -- and if there is one instance of deliberate humor in the TaNaKh, there's bound to be others. Once I let myself see them, there they were -- especially when I realized that the Bible was not meant to be read, but to be read *aloud*, with inflection and "doing the voices" and all the other things you do when you're reading for an audience.

"Extra-legal"

2010-08-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic posted about White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs's reflections on his "inartful" comments. I commented:

novel and potentially extra-legal counter-terrorism campaigns overseas

"Extra-legal" is the wrong, mealy-mouthed word, dude. Illegal is the word you're looking for. As in "crime".

has fleshed out assertions of executive power by the previous administration

As in "war crime". As in "unconstitutional".

Maybe the "professional liberals" are mad because they're tough on crime, unlike those of you who are happy to trade away one eternal liberty after another for successive temporary securities. Maybe we're values voters who thought we were voting our values -- *serious* values, freedoms that are actually worth fighting for -- and aren't seeing them displayed.

The Thunder Rolls

2010-08-12T19:25:00.000-07:00

Garland Grey at TigerBeatDown posted about misogyny in music and music videos.

Twenty years ago another music video about intimate partner violence came out, Garth Brooks’ “The Thunder Rolls.” CMT and TNN both refused to play it.

I commented:

Not having heard of the Garth Brooks video, I went to YouTube. Whaddaya know, not there — though a bunch of other official Brooks videos are. You have to hit Teh Google and go to MySpace or similar to see the original Thunder Rolls vids.

Once you get past Attack of the 80s Hair, the most interesting thing about the video is that it shows an extra angle to the story. The cheatin’ man is killed because *the two women communicate*. They *both* want him dead.

But that desire isn’t enough. The man comes home, the wife accuses him, and he beats her. Then their daughter (age maybe 8) sees them, stares accusingly, and only *then* does the wife get the gun and kill him.

So it’s not just that the man is killed, he’s killed by a conspiracy of women to stop the cycle of abuse.

So tell me again why they pulled this video?

On the Book of Jonah

2010-08-10T06:04:00.000-07:00

Repost of a comment I made after the High Holy Days *last* year, for reference *this* year.

slacktivist posted on the Book of Jonah and its interpretation, especially in Christianity. In the ensuing long discussion, I wrote:

IMHO Michael Cule's rendition of the Book of Jonah isn't a parody, it's a faithful re-telling: Jonah itself is, originally, a parody or satire, in fact *humor*, one of the longest pieces of humor in the Bible. And it is humor of a very, very Jewish sort: try reading it aloud with a strong Yiddish accent and the cadence of a standup comic in the Catskills.

Look at the beginning. The other (older, more conventional) prophetic books always start with the prophet being called by G-d, and the prophet goes, "who, me? I am not worthy!" The prophet is always reluctant.

Jonah isn't just reluctant, he *runs away*. Jonah doesn't just disagree with G-d a little bit, he sulks and pouts. He predicts the future, all right, and it pisses him off -- he wants to be a fearful Jeremiah, calling destruction down on his enemies, but he knows G-d is too merciful for that. What a bummer!

And then there's the bit with the gourd, and Jonah's self-centered dramatics -- "The gourd died! Kill me now, I've had enough!" And the very ending, which trails off most peculiarly -- IMHO this was a knee-slapper of a joke 2500 years ago, but the reference has been lost so all we have is an inexplicable punch line, ba-dump ching! tip your waitress, I'll be here all week.

The thing about Jewish humor is that it's ha-ha-only-serious. Jacob gets the name Israel because he fights G-d to a draw: why do you think chutzpah is a Yiddish word? And then there's this classic story from the Talmud, which has been summarized as:
----
Rabbi Eliezar was arguing with three other Rabbis. He said, "if I'm right, the heavens will open up and a voice proclaim it is so!" And the heavens opened up, and a voice intoned, "Rabbi Eliezar is right."

*beat*

"So," said the other Rabbis, "that makes it two to three."
----

Now, this is both a joke, *and* an important principle of Talmudic interpretation. The simplistic, literalist readings a lot of you grew up on are incredibly thin gruel, by comparison. *This* is how you can read the Bible for a lifetime, for generations, without getting bored or coming to the end: by arguing with each other and with G-d, by not taking any reading as the final word, by not expecting it to be simple.

A couple pages of comments ago, someone pointed out that for Jews all of Jonah is very familiar, because the book is read in its entirety during day of Yom Kippur when everyone is in services. You might think this undercuts my theory that Jonah is humor, because Yom Kippur is the most solemn of Holy Days. But IMHO it is also characteristically Jewish to not focus on one emotion to the exclusion of all others: over the 27 hours of Yom Kippur the services are fearful and solemn and inward, but there are also stretches of anger, and grief, and some of the most beautiful music in the Jewish liturgy. The humor of Jonah is a slight relief, a lightening for an hour before we head into the final hours of the long fast, which includes the Yitzkor Service memorializing the dead.

The inequality boom

2010-07-29T17:37:00.000-07:00

Henry at Crooked Timber posted about the most recent issue of Politics and Society and its discussion of What Produced the Inequality Boom?. I commented:

I have to agree with Straightwood on the importance of propaganda and on a pervasive mental model of how the world should work. Ideology, maybe?

What I've noticed, especially in the last couple of decades, is that many Americans and almost all Republicans or libertarians have great difficulty assigning blame to rich people. In discussing any problematic situation or institution -- illegal immigration, for instance -- their first reaction is to see the source of the problem in the least powerful and wealthy people involved. In the example of immigration, if you bring up the complicity of major employers who want to hire illegal immigrants because they're cheap and exploitable, they'll nod and then ... it's as though their brains skid away and they start talking about anchor babies again. The idea that wealthy people have more power and thus may be more culpable doesn't seem to have an traction in their brains, it's a notion that doesn't seem to compute on some basic level. Wealth is the elephant in the room that *people can't actually see*.

From Henry's description of the articles, what stands out to me as an unconsidered aspect is something about the behavior of inherited wealth. It's not just that some people were able to get lots of money, it's that at least some people who started out with money -- Old Money -- didn't lose it in the time-honored fashion, but saw it grow in the way only New Money used to grow. See, for instance, a Wall Street Journal article about Charles Koch, which said he 'applied the "science of liberty" to become one of the world's richest men' -- apparently the "science of liberty" allowed him to make a very wise choice of parents.

chris:

It can't be just Calvinism, we've had Calvinism all along.

Currently, there's a discussion at Balloon Juice about Megan McArdle's piece in the Atlantic blaming the housing bubble on the 30-year fixed mortgage, because it

gives the consumer the power to shaft banks whenever it is to their advantage.

See Irvine Housing Blog for more evisceration.

McArdle is a useful ~~idiot~~ test case, because she so perfectly exhibits the attitudes I'm talking about. She's not a Calvinist; she calls herself a "libertarian". She's The Atlantic's business and economics editor, though it's thunderously obvious that she knows nothing about what Henry would call "economics".

What she *is*, is an MBA. As I recall, MBA programs became very popular and important in the late 70s, as the inequality boom was taking off. I wonder, now, if what these programs teach -- the mindset, the basic attitudes, what things are important and what aren't -- isn't where the Dives-blindness (or whatever it should be called) comes from. MBA programs, generally speaking, teach the wealthy to regard workers as tools, consumers as lawful prey. This is where our aristocracy is trained, and this is what they learn.

Now that I think about it, what has changed in how inherited wealth functions is that the scions of wealth are often expected to get MBAs. Dr. Hilarius @15 talks about how Old Money is tied up in trusts, etc., so the heirs can't spend it on hookers & blow, in traditional fashion. But since the 60s-70s the MBA has become a way to train heirs to a different kind of aristocratic tradition. You don't have to insulate your heirs from the money if you train them not to blow it, and that's why e.g. Charles Koch (who has an MBA) can be so obscenely wealthy. Gilded Age robber barons started small and made their businesses large; modern ones are Robber Dukes: they start with a large business and make it gigantic.

Blogcomment record: "Julian Comstock" UPDATED

2010-07-29T00:44:00.000-07:00

Paul Kinkaid reviewed Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden wondered if they read the same book. My comments:

I seem to have read the book pretty much the way DaveL@70 did, and the idea that Julian's homosexuality was "unnecessary" is boggling to me.

However, speaking of marked and unmarked states:

I am surprised that no-one has mentioned the unmarked elephant in this state room.
Am I the only reader who noticed [SPOILER! PROCEED WITH CAUTION! YOU MAY WANT TO FIGURE THIS OUT FOR YOURSELF DURING YOUR FIRST READING!]

that the narrator, his wife, and Julian's lover are all what we would call "black", but that it's apparently without "ethnic" significance? It is, IMHO, a very marked unmarkness, a joke Wilson is pulling on the readers, to put a lot of black characters (not just one, as in Left Hand of Darkness, but a *lot*) into a story and see if anyone notices.

The fact that Paul Kinkaid was reminded of the US Civil War but didn't see the black people strikes me as hilariously revealing, but in fact when I skimmed through a bunch of reviews *no-one* seems to have noticed -- even though this is set in a North America in which *slavery* has come back.

But then, I haven't come across anyone who's noticed that the ruling Church in Julian Comstock already exists, which is why Wilson put its headquarters in Colorado Springs. Or that the back-to-the-1880s political philosophy they use is actually taken directly from a certain trend in modern libertarians.

Chris Gerrib @ 77:

Actually, there are crumbs throughout the book indicating that the narrator and various other major characters are black. In particular, Wilson uses "tightly-curled" to describe what we'd call "black" hair. He's careful not to say "nappy", because he doesn't want the signal to be overt, he's *inclueing* the characters' race.

It's also not terribly relevant.

... um. You realize, don't you, that this parallels what Kincaid says about Julian's homosexuality. Indeed, I think one of the functions of homosexuality in the novel is to be the text while race is the subtext -- flipping the foreground/background in actual 19thC novels, where race could be text but sexuality had to be subtext.

No one else has spoken up, so I don't know if anyone here besides me perceived what Wilson does with race. I can't figure out which prospect boggles me more: that his clues were too subtle even for this group of very insightful readers, or that insightful readers noticed and thought it was trivial.

PNH @ 108:

Actually, it's more explicit than that: as Jeff Sharlet pointed out years ago, many important fundamentalist (and Dominionist) organizations have concentrated in Colorado Springs *precisely* in the hope that they can infiltrate/evangelize the Air Force. Focus on the Family is there, as is the New Life megachurch. In many ways, Colorado Springs already *is* the headquarters of Dominionism.

And yes, that's New Life Church as in "Ted Haggard", and that's why Julian Comstock's homosexuality is *crucial* to the story IMHO. Besides the Classic allusion, it's part of how Wilson shows that the tragedy of his future world is built from currently available ingredients.

OK, through the magic of Amazon.com, here are the descriptions:

Calyxa:

a pink and radiant face, and large eyes whose color I could not at this distance discern, although I imagined them (correctly, as it turned out) to be a handsome chestnut-brown; and a crown of hair that coiled list a vast collation of ebony springs, the light behind her making a spectacular Halo of it.

Now, I admit that "pink" is suggestive of what we'd call a white woman -- but it's not clear if he's talking about someone like Beyonce, either. The hair, IMHO, is the crucial element in Wilson's descriptions of "black" characters, and when I read this I thought, "she's got a 'fro!" Throughout the book, Calyxa's hair is described as "coiled" (if not "spring-loaded"), and in the Epilogue when their daughter Flaxie is described:

her hair is as glossy and dark and tightly coiled as her mother's was.

Now, for Magnus Stepney, Julian's lover, the description is unmistakable:

lustrously dark skin and wiry hair.

While searching for these citations, I also came across the first description of Lymon Pugh, who has an "unruly knot of black hair" under his cap, and I wonder whether he, too, is supposed to be black ... or not.

Like all good humorous novelists, I think the author spent some time laughing at *us*, the readers.

Jo Walton@179:

I'm very glad to hear that you noticed, because I remember looking up your review after I'd finally gotten around to reading the book, and was both boggled and distressed that you seemed to have missed the way Wilson marks (or rather un-marks) race. I'm relieved to know that I can still trust your powers of observation, but distressed that you didn't feel you could talk about what you observed in a way that wouldn't be misconstrued.

The fact that issues of gender, race, inclusion, and all that are under *constant* discussion on livejournal/dreamwidth made it easy for me to notice what Wilson does, but it also made it easy for me to think and talk about it.

I was hoping that someone in this discussion would know if Wilson has talked/written about the way he handles race in "Julian Comstock". I basically agree with Terry @242: I think the idea that slavery could come back to North America and *not* have anything to do with race is preposterous. But writers are allowed one preposterous assumption per book, and I'm willing to go along with this one.

Marilee @255:

I completely disagree. I think Wilson is describing this kind of hairstyle, not sausage curls.

Remember, Calyxa's hair is like a *halo* -- that certainly sounds like a 'fro. And black african hair definitely coils naturally -- each hair is like a little slinky.

In general, too, sausage curls are a highly artificial, high-maintenance hairstyle, and it seems clear to me that, throughout, the narrator is talking about Calyxa's natural hair, which her daughter inherits.

But I'm not sure if I would have come to the same conclusion about Calyxa's appearence based on this passage, except that I was looking for other unmarked black people once I noticed what Wilson did with the narrator.

Blogcomment record: Chinese characters

2010-07-22T07:40:00.001-07:00

Victor Mair at Language Log posted about amnesia for Chinese characters -- about Chinese people losing the ability to write characters as they become more used to entering e-text. Apparently the most common method for entering Chinese text is to go through pinyin. I commented:

Meanwhile, James Fallows recently observed that written Chinese is ideally suited to Twitter, because a 140-character limit is, in Chinese, a 140-*word* limit, which isn't much of a limit. I hadn't realized, though, that pinyin is being used as the bridge between the keyboard and the display.

Are people seeing "character amnesia" for reading as well as writing? Are literate Chinese just as able to *read* "sneeze" or "elbow" as they were before electronics, or is reading following writing?

Blogcomment followup: Israeli conversion bill

2010-07-18T16:23:00.001-07:00

More on the Israeli conversion bill. Haaretz reports that Netanyahu says he opposes bill because it will "tear apart the Jewish people. In the comments, "Jay" explained:

The origin of the conversion bill is by the secular Yisrael Beitenu Party consisting of recent Russian immigrants and mostly secular Jews or non Jewish immigrants. They live in Israel and appreciate having a conversion done in a way that will be accepted by all Jews.. Reform Judaism has nothing to offer to them. They live Jewish culture, celebrate Jewish holidays, and Judaismis their way of life. If they want to be Dati (orthodox) they can and if they do not wish to be Orthodox then they can be secular, Conservative or Reform Jews. The vast majority choose to be secular or Orthodox while a minuscule number choose to be "liberal " Jews. Unfortunately the intermarriage rate and assimilation of the non Orthodox Jews is creating a loss of future generations of Jews in the Unite States. We in Israel do not wish to import beliefs that will cause the loss of Israel as a Jewish Democratic State.

I replied:

Why is secular behavior not a problem for Israeli conversions?

Thank you for your explanation, now I'd like even more!

I'm an American Jew, and I'm having a hard time figuring out how the attitude that "Reform and Conservative conversions don't count because you don't live halachically" with the fact that many intended beneficiaries of the bill want to live as secular Jews, less observant than most Reform/Conservative/Reconstructionist Diaspora Jews.

You're talking about 5% of the population, right? This will only work if the conversions are exceptionally streamlined and quick, even slapdash, otherwise the backlog will *never* be cleared. Why are slapdash conversions without subsequent Dati behavior acceptable if they occur in Israel, but Conservative conversions in the Diaspora don't count?

Blogcomment record: Divorcing Israel

2010-07-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

The Knesset is considering a bill that would give the Orthodox Rabbinate a monopoly on matters of Jewish identity. This would, among other things, make Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and even many American Orthodox conversions "not count" in Israel -- only Haredi aka "Ultra-Orthodox" would pass their test.

Or, as Jeffrey Goldberg (normally a reliable cheerleader for the Zionist section) put it: Israel to Diaspora: Drop Dead. American Jews are *extremely* upset.

This is a summary of comments I left in Ta-Nehesi Coates' open thread, at a a Jerusalem Post article, at Tablet Magazine, and at Emily Hauser's; I also emailed Goldberg.

We non-Orthodox are like a woman who's been abused, insulted, stolen from, and betrayed by her husband. At last he's given her a get -- but it still hurts, to know how little she was ever respected.

A crucial aspect that both American and Israeli Orthodox (and secular Israelis) seem to be mostly missing is that non-Orthodox Jewish practice seems more *right* to us. We aren't interested in just being halachically "good" Jews, we want to be good people who are Jewish. We look at Israeli Orthodoxy and we see the same behavior and attitudes we see in Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists. We do *not* see the true foundations of our Jewish religion: Hillel's "one-leg Torah" (aka The Golden Rule), teshuva, tikkun olam, justice and wisdom, wrestling with G-d. Indeed, I think that to many of us Israeli Orthodoxy seems to make idols out of even the Torah and Eretz Israel, preferring to focus on these rather than the more difficult mitzvot: “Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the stranger or the poor", for a start. We let strangers into our congregations because we do still know the feelings of the stranger.

The NYT piece says:

Neither the Jewish diaspora nor Israel can afford a split between the two communities

I disagree. Diaspora Judaism *must* split, for the sake of our souls. In the first place, we’ve been handed our get, we need to recognize it, weep, and move on. In the second place, Israel was the wrong Bridegroom: there’s only One Who truly counts, and Who is the security of the Jewish people and faith.

Even when you've been kicked out, it's hard to walk away -- but I think that's what non-Orthodox Jews have to do to remain true to our Jewish obligations.

Emily pointed out that the law hasn't been passed, the divorce has not been finalized. There's still time for Israel to back away, to say "Oh baby, I never meant to make you *cry*." But I don't know how reparable the marriage is, at this point.

I invite my Israeli or Orthodox friends to persuade me I'm wrong.

Socrates and the Internet; Immigration

2010-06-07T20:34:00.000-07:00

At Crooked Timber, John Quiggin wrote on the Internet and our brains. I commented:

Socrates also IIRC was cranky about those young whippersnappers who think they can understand something by *reading* it, instead of memorizing it and actually holding in their heads where understanding happens. And if you base your knowledge on what you *read*, then of course you can flit from book to book, without the true discipline and concentration needed to study in an oral tradition.

Socrates was right, of course. If wisdom is based on what is in your head, then reading is pseudo-wisdom, a cheat. I prefer to think of it as off-site storage, and that reading is a way to access lots of information and ideas without having to keep them on-site. The Internet does the exact same thing, but it pumps the process up another couple of orders of magnitude.

I used to say that Aristotle was undoubtably smarter than I, but I plus the Columbia Encyclopedia know more than Aristotle. Today, I plus Wikipedia know *way* more than that, but the essential process is the same.

If you want to talk about how the Internet is changing the way we think, first look at how literacy changed the way people think.

At Obsidian Wings, von wrote about a Rasmussen poll on birthright citizenship. I commented:

russell nails it:

There are industries in this country that would be unsustainable as they are currently organized without cheap illegal labor.

What is interesting is how Rasmussen -- which is only an "allegedly legitimate public polling organization", not an actually legitimate one -- does not ask anything about those illegal industries. This poll, and the whole debate over "anchor babies" etc, are a way to let people express their anxiety about immigration without thinking bad thoughts about their masters. They can direct all their energy to kicking the little guy, and not have to worry about the (more frightening and effective) effects of kicking the big guy.

It's in Freud, it's all in Freud. I hate Freud, especially when he's right.

re Jes' cartoon:

American society was created by immigrants who basically said, "we're coming, we're staying, deal with it." One reason many Americans favor open immigration is that they know their ancestors used it, and it seems churlish to say "it was ok for grandpa, but not for *you*."

Immigration to North America has also characteristically been permanent. You (where by "you" I mean e.g. my Irish great-great grandparents, my German and Swedish great-grandparents, and my Irish grandmother) don't come here to make money and then go home, where the "real" civilization is; you come to stay, not intending to go back. That's why many liberals don't want "guest worker" programs -- we want the people who work here to *want* to live here, to be committed to this society as more than a source of money.

Lewis, Tolkien, and religion; Common law and originalism

2010-05-18T20:35:00.000-07:00

DougJ at Balloon Juice posted about Right Bloglandia getting into a swivet about a Muslim Miss USA. Tangentially, I commented:

@Amanda:

So would it be safe to say that the LOTR books are heavily influenced by JRRT’s bizarre personal blend of Catholicism and traditionalism, but are not meant to be overly polemical, while CSL’s works are merely apologetics dressed up as fiction?

Only half right.

CSL's works *are* pretty much apologetics dressed up as fiction -- but the dressing is IM[not actually humble]O done quite well, better than usual for the genre of apologetic fiction. The Narnia books are far less dogmatic than e.g. Pilgrim's Progress, or than the kind of children's books that he+ described as "They try to be funny and fail; they try to preach and succeed."

JRRT did *not* have a "bizarre personal blend of Catholicism and traditionalism", he had a pretty standard one -- for a well-educated Catholic of his era. He felt that LOTR (and the then-unpublished Simarillion from which it derived) was *pre-Christian*: it depicted an essentially Christian universe, but before Christ had appeared. LOTR resonates with Christianity, and specifically with Catholicism: the veneration of Elbereth, for instance, has no counterpart in CSL but is very familiar to any Catholic who's prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

It's surprising to me that conservative Catholics wanted to claim the movies for their own, because IMnahO Peter Jackson took out many of the most Christian parts of the books. Random example: in the movie (Return of the King) when Gandalf and Denethor have their confrontation, Gandalf calls Denethor "Steward!" with scorn in his voice. In the books, Gandalf reminds Denethor to be a good Steward, and says that he is one, too. Stewardship is a central Christian metaphor, and Jackson completely misses the point.

+ or maybe it was Tolkien? it's in the Essays Presented to Charles Williams, in any event.

Meanwhile at Obsidian Wings, Sebastian posted on The Supreme Court Says. My comment:

Troy:

The Constitution should mean what it says, not what we wish it to say.

I've been wondering recently how this kind of originalism squares -- or doesn't -- with the common law tradition of precedent. IANAL and many of those here are, so correct me, please: isn't one of the features of common law supposed to be that it evolves and that it relies on judges (aka "activist judges") for interpretation and extension? Whereas civil law, which the US supposedly does *not* follow, relies on the letter of legislation and other documents, such as written constitutions?

SWAT and Protagonist Privilege

2010-05-08T20:36:00.000-07:00

von, one of the conservative/libertarians at Obsidian Wings, posted about terroristic drug raids:

I was pretty pissed off at this raid of (according to the evidence) a small time dealer of marijuana. Maybe that's too mild a description of my tone. Here's an alternative: I ate the apple of the Garden in that post, and, with the knowledge so gained, declared the folks who participated in that raid "evil." (Actual quote; of mine.)

I commented:

I agree 100% with both von and Brett. Pigs are surprisingly aerodynamic.

Especially:

SWAT don't exist in this country to handle dangerous hostage situations. That's a tiny fraction of their work, an afterthought.
...
That's why the BATF were stomping pets before Reagan, and after him. That's why drug raids get so nasty. That's why prostitutes get treated like sh*t. The terror is the point.

And that's why police sent out to do "crowd control" look like Stormtroopers (either edition). The terror is the point.

I think the only factor you guys aren't incorporating is the one from Evil "Liberal" Hollywood, which is absolutely consistent about portraying SWAT teams and similar as heroic, effective, necessary, and cool. I bet one reason this particular team was composed of part-timers is that they *wanted* to be on it, it has cachet and gives out many manliness points.

I don't know if you can change the public's mind unless storytellers -- TV, movies, video games -- start presenting agents of the police state as other than the Good Guys, who always win because of Protagonist Privilege.

Lawyers on TeeVee

2010-03-12T20:38:00.000-08:00

At Obsidian Wings people have been talking about the attacks on lawyers who've done pro bono for accused terrorists. I wrote:

I suspect Marty's assumption that prosecutors are on the side of The Law and The Public, while defenders are on the side of The Miscreants, is widespread.

And I think fledermaus is correct to imply that TV is involved. When non-lawyers think about what lawyers do, TV lawyer shows are apt to be salient -- to be what first comes to mind.

Now, I don't watch lawyer shows, so I'm asking. Do the shows tend to be either "the defenders are the Good Guys" or "the prosecutors are the Good Guys"? Do they make it seem as though Defense and Prosecution are different kinds of people, with different goals?

jrudkis said:

When I worked at a public defenders office, there were two types of attorneys: the "social justice attorney" who were actually concerned about the accused, and conservative ones who were concerned about erosion of constitutional rights(and they sometimes overlapped). Both were very effective. What I did not see there were attorneys who were not passionate about one or the other.

Is this what you see on lawyer/cop TV? In some shows but not others? Opine, plz.

Corporate personhood

2010-01-23T20:49:00.000-08:00

Eric at Obsidian Wings posted about the Citizens United SCOTUS decision. In the course of the discussion, replying to Sebastian, I wrote:

you still have to protect the Constitutional rights of the people who make up the corporation.

I'm now starting ... dimly ... to understand what your issue is. Maybe.

To me, the humans do not "make up" the corporation, in the sense of being part of it. The corporation is a legal construct that protects them, the humans, from certain problems. It's like a building: it is not "made up" of the humans it protects, and they can move in and out of it at will.

The building -- the corporation -- has no human or civil rights, because it is not a human being. The fact that US law currently gives corporations partial human status is not something of which I approve: I consider "corporate personhood" a sociopathic abomination.

Anyway, to me the analogy is this: "corporate political speech" is like the building owner putting a huge sound system on the roof to blare out his political beliefs night and day. It becomes very difficult for actual human beings to have conversations down on the ground, because the building has given the owner such power over the whole social space.

But it seems to me that Sebastian (and 5 members of SCOTUS) are saying, "the building has rights, too! how dare you restrict the building's speech!" Or maybe it's that the owner has rights, and those rights include the right to be protected by the building (from, say, the squashy tomatoes of civil discourse) while using the building's power to amplify his voice.

I think maybe I've gotten tangled in my own metaphor.

In any event, I don't see why the idea that powerful people should get *both* extra protection (via limited liability) *and* extra volume for their speech doesn't repell you. But maybe my theory about the essence of conservatism is right: political conservatives *like* and desire that those who are at the top of the power hierarchy should stay there. Maybe you find it reassuring that very wealthy people should have their way smoothed to drown out any other voices.

War, responsibility, and generalship

2009-12-19T20:50:00.000-08:00

Bob Mackey is doing some posting at Obsidian Wings, and he wrote about The Argument for Manned Nuclear Bombers. I commented:

Count me in as a peacenik of considerable military (esp. history) reading who would like to see more posts like this.

In particular, I'd like to see your take on the religious issues wonkie mentioned.

I also have recently come across:

1. The Victory Disease, a quite prescient 2003 article by then-Major Timothy M. Karcher. LTC Karcher commanded the US forces withdrawing from Sadr City this past summer; he lost both legs above the knee in an IED attack, and is still in rehab.

2. Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template, by Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason. This article, also, strikes me as extremely clear-eyed on the strategic issues.

I found these articles almost at random, and was struck by how much more strategically aware and sophisticated they are than the military "analysis" and "commentary" I seem to hear from official or high-profile sources. It's enough to make me wonder how gung-ho the services really are about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, though that's the impression I get from the teevee and from the off-duty military I know or run into.

Bluntly, I had been assuming that the services were essentially in favor of the interventionist, imperialist policies of the Bush administration, and that doubters were rare and silent. Now I don't know, and it would interesting to hear your take.

Marty:

I have observed that most senior military people think in terms of mission. If given one they perform it, with great intelligence and focus. They don't think in terms of defining the mission, just executing it, training for it, evaluating alternatives and minimizing the human cost.

In other words, they are not thinking on the "grand strategic" level, where war is in fact part of politics.

It may be that the grand-strategic guys are at a much higher level than those you've encountered -- but I actually wonder if they're there at all.

Bob:

Don't expect a Clausewitz, Mahan or Jomini to popup there

The question is, why aren't we getting Washington, Grant, Sherman, or Eisenhower? In The Limits of Power, Andrew Bacevich argues that the current crop of flag officers -- since Vietnam at least -- are mediocre compared to the people they command, and especially mediocre at the grand-strategic part of their job. But the US military *has* produced great generals in the past, so there must be something different about the current system.

The larger problem I'm chewing over -- one which should be quite pressing to you -- is how far down the chain of command there is a legal or moral obligation to detect and stop war crimes. The crimes I'm thinking of are "Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace", and also "violations of the laws or customs of war", including "the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war".

Bob:

Washington was a pretty mediocre commander

I don't know what criteria you're using, though I don't know as much about the Revolution (militarily) as most of the other US wars. Washington IMHO had the critical quality of focusing on winning the *war*, not the battle -- which is, also IMHO, the most important quality at the grand-strategic level.

Eisenhower's strength was politically dealing with the various factions

And that's why he's on my short-list of greatest US generals. Getting all those interests and egos to work together and not forget the goal was an incredible accomplishment.

we really don't have a metric for judging what a good general will be

I disagree, at least for the highest level. A good grand-strategic general fights the war, not the battle. He has a realistic vision of what the endgame should be -- and that vision has to be political, not just military. He does not tolerate Underpants Gnomes.

As for Grant and Sherman -- if they reappeared in the present day, they'd be war criminals.

That implies (a) that what was important about them was their tactics, and that they'd use the same tactics today. I'm saying no, they used those tactics to serve the grand strategy, and with a different war and goal they'd have the sense to use different tactics.

It also implies (b) that modern US generals do not use such tactics nor include war criminals. Sherman's March and Vietnam argues that yes, Sherman's strategy and tactics are still current; I am arguing that yes, at least some current US generals are war criminals.

Cheney, libertarianism, rape

2009-08-31T20:52:00.000-07:00

ugh, what a subject line.
publius wrote about The Method of Cheney's Madness. I said:

Let me third (or fourth) the "tribalism, not idealism" explanation. *Everything* becomes a tribal marker for them, which is why they're only playing well in the white South, the most tribalistic subculture in the US (see Albion's Seed for details). There are no questions of morality (torture), or science (global warming), or common sense (Obama's citizenship) -- there is only Tribe. And the more contrary to morality/fact/sense an assertion is, the better it is as a marker for Tribe.

[someotherdude rec'd: The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: the Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States and The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America]

ooo, book recs. Thanks, someotherdude!

I really realized the tribalism angle in a discussion at Rod Dreher's, where he was horrified to find that conservative Christians were *more* likely to support torture than liberals are. A commenter there said that he was from the South, and that he thought a lot of people around him don't "really" support torture, but they would hear the pollster's question as really being about group identification, not the purported issue, and answer accordingly.

John Holbo at Crooked Timber writes about Megan McArdle and Rationing again: For all ponies, there is some pony, such that you won’t get that pony.♥ I wrote:

alkali:

A problem with arguing with libertarians at the level of abstraction is that libertarians have a comparative advantage in abstracting away the actual facts of the world in favor of the freshman-microeconomics models they have concocted in their heads.

Not just economic models. The working definition of libertarianism I have come up with, by observation, is “libertarians do not believe humans are social animals”.

So for instance: if you don’t have any money, you shouldn’t be entitled to any medicine is quite reasonable if the sight of people dying for want of medicine doesn’t bother you, and if you can assume it doesn’t bother anyone else (their families, for instance). If you’re a true *individualist*, the collapse of any sense of community is all to the good, because “community” is a delusion.

What most libertarians *do* seem to believe in is *corporations*. I have never been able to figure out if corporations, in their minds, are replacing communities, or if they’re kind of like individuals only cooler (that is, richer and more powerful).

Martin James:

Libertarians view taxes or laws as the product of “gangs”—aberrations—and believe that humans are naturally self-reliant and independent. They do not seem to recognize that the natural state of a human is in a social group, and that concepts like “property” are functions of particular social relationships, not Platonic ideals.

Either way, I still don’t understand how corporations fit into the libertarian world-view. They talk a *lot* about individuals versus the Big Government, but don’t seem to notice the actions of Big Corporations.

At TigerBeatDown, Sady and Amanda talked about who doesn't believe No means No (answer: conservative older women). I left a comment (which seems to be in moderation with everyone else for the weekend):

I don’t know if I have the fortitude to actually click through and read the studies, but I think you young ‘uns don’t completely grasp the Old Ladies’ position.

They were taught that a Good Woman *never* says Yes, except during her wedding vows. That’s it, the one time Yes is an acceptable answer.

So they were in the position where “No” had to do duty for both “no” and “yes” — both for any gentlemen they want to communicate with, and to themselves. How do you say “Yes” when you can’t admit you want to, and when everyone will think worse of you if you do? Well, one way is to say “no” in a lot of different ways, hoping to communicate subtextually.

The other way, frankly, is to get raped a lot. But you can’t admit you were raped, because as we know that makes you practically a slut. What the younger generation thinks of as “rape” is part of these Old Ladies sexual experience, but they’ve been getting by for decades by denying it was so. Rape is something that happens to *other* women, Bad Women, what happened to me was just the way the world is, only to be expected.

So IMHO for a lot of those Old Ladies what happened to the young woman in this case had actually happened to them, and for pretty much all of the Older Ladies it had happened to someone they care deeply about (mother, sister, friend). If they accept that lack of consent is rape, it casts a pall of horror over their own past, bringing up *way* too many things they’re dealing with by not thinking about.

Ted Kennedy; health care; incompetance

2009-08-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

Within you may find comments on: Ted Kennedy at Ta-Nehesi Coates'; incompetence as a strategy, at Crooked Timber; health reform, at Obsidian Wings.
Ta-Nehesi Coates, who's a young whippersnapper, asked How did he get that lion of the senate title? What were the nuts and bolts he screwed with to get business done? What's the why and how?. I said:

I think the main reason Kennedy could accomplish so much was that he was an hereditary aristocrat. His life is a textbook example of how that is both good and bad.

Because he came to his position essentially by inheritance, he didn't have to fight for it. He could afford to be principled, but he could also afford to be magnanimous.

Even very conservative Republicans could work with him, because what's more conservative than hereditary aristocracy? Indeed, he wasn't just an aristocrat, he was a *celebrity*, the very highest class of American society, rarified even by the standards of the Senate Millionaire's Club.

The good part of being an aristocrat is *supposed* to be being reared to public service; care for the downtrodden also *supposed* to be one of the emblems of Catholicism. In Kennedy's case they actually worked, so he was an aristocrat in a very Catholic mold, blending the sense of duty with the awareness of not being particularly "elect" in the Protestant sense. In Catholicism, "sinner" and "saint" are not opposites nor mutually exclusive.

And of course, being an aristocrat -- and more than that, a celebrity -- meant that Kennedy's ability to *do* things could not be destroyed by Chappaquidick or anyting else. His hereditary position could not be undone or unmade, so he could get away with things.

[in reply to an accusation of ignorance]
You misunderstand me. I admire Kennedy *deeply* and have for many decades.

But his virtues -- magnanimity, firm principle, kindness, friendliness -- are not enough to explain why *Republicans* got along with him and were willing to work with him. Virtue and strength of character aren't enough; he also needed power, the kind of unassailable power that came from his hereditary celebrity.

The contrast to GWB, of course, is painful and acute. GWB is the poster boy for all the ways aristocracy is a bad idea -- and how of all the hereditary aristocracies, the worst are the ones where the aristocrats think they've *earned* their positions.

TNC's question is *how* Kennedy could do so much. I don't think personality, principle, or a tradition of collegiality are enough to explain why Hatch and others were willing to work with Kennedy -- I think it's that he was, in an American way, of a higher social class than they were. He was able to use that power for good, but the foundation of his power was just as unearned as any X-Men's. (X-Man's?)

Karen in DC wrote:

.. after Kennedy got in trouble for cheating at Harvard, he ENLISTED in the army and served as a private, not as an officer as his older brothers had. So, he had to LEARN how to engage with people from other classes, including live and work with them and take orders from those who were not of a higher class. He had a lived experience as a "regular" person that his brothers had not.

Thanks for the info, Karen, I didn't know that. I'm betting that experience -- and being so far down on the sibling totem pole -- did indeed help give him experience seeing things through other people's eyes.

Nonetheless, his position in public life began and depended upon his lineage -- as the Charles Pierce bio a few years ago said:

If his name were Edward Moore . . .

He would not have served so long, if he'd served at all.

If his name were Edward Moore, Robert Bork might be on the Supreme Court today. Robert Dole might have been elected president of the United States. There might still be a draft. There would not have been the Civil Rights Act of 1991

This is the dream of aristocracy, as good as it can get: someone of such high, unearned position that they can be thorougly magnanimous. Alas for Plato, it doesn't happen often enough to justify the whole system, but at least we can recognize it when it does.

Henry at Crooked Timber posted on incompetance as a signalling device, linking to Scott McLemee's review of Diego Gambetta on Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, and makes comparisons to the Italian academic scene:

“Being incompetent and displaying it,” he writes, “conveys the message * I will not run away, for I have no strong legs to run anywhere else. * In a corrupt academic market, being good at and interested in one’s own research, by contrast, signal a potential for a career independent of corrupt reciprocity

I said:

Now *that’s* a theory with broad applicability, if you know what I mean.

I recently read Deer Hunting with Jesus, and was thinking about Sarah Palin and the glorification of ignorance and ill-education in what David Hackett Fischer calls American “Borderer” culture. Gambetta’s theory makes the light bulb go off, for me.

If education is a ticket out of poverty or marginalization, then poor and marginalized people will (rightly) see it as disloyal to the group or the family, unless it goes along with a strong tradition of supporting your parents and extended kin. Proud ignorance is proof that you won’t leave your kin behind—because you have no-where else to go.

Do any of you know if Gambetta talks about such signalling by Japanese yakuza? They are famous for using tattooing and self-mutilation as demonstrations of loyalty and commitment.

von, one of the conservatives at Obsidian Wings, posted about health care reform and his support for Wyden-Bennett. I wrote:

Having read a brief overview of W-B, von, I have a question:

Does any other country do this?

I personally have had *enough* of American exceptionalism and insisting on being the first penguin off the ice floe. There's no point in having a big world if you have to keep inventing the wheel to prove how Special we are.

I also am quite appalled at the idea that the solution to our problem is to give more money to insurance companies. Step right this way for yet more regulatory capture and market failure!

I will also add that the reason I am for single payer is that I abhor means testing. To people of means, means testing may seem "only fair", but in practice it is tiring, degrading, confusing, privacy-destroying, and taxing in every sense. It also inevitably involves huge, invasive bureaucracies and the pushing of much paper, things to which von is deeply opposed.

Blogcomment records: politics division

2009-08-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

I am reposting this because it took me so many tries to get the link to the Balloon Juice post right, and because the article is so good. arrgh! *stabs*

At Obsidian Wings, where publius wrote A heartbreaking work of staggering dishonesty, about Michael Steele on health care reform, I commented:

cleek asked:
why are they talking about [obesity]?

Anne Laurie summed it up quite nicely over at Ballon Juice the other day:

Suddenly, out of every media outlet, from the morning talk shows to the political blogs to the Wall Street Journal, comes a new slogan: Americans get less health for more dollars than any other industrialized nation because we don’t deserve good health. We haven’t earned it, and if we insist on using it anyway, we’ll be depriving other, more needy fellow citizens of their fair share. And the mark of our selfish unworthiness is that we’re *fat*.

And of course, this goes double for women, who (a) are more subject to relentless criticism about our weight, and (b) refuse to get in line with the "We're Number One! U!S!A!" crowd, but keep dragging the nation down in international health comparisons with our selfish infant and maternal mortality.

Fascinating discussion at Edge of the American West about the Medal of Honor, and the increasing tendency for it to be awarded posthumously. I commented:

There are also some very real, but unwritten, issues, including commissioned vs enlisted, branch of service, combat arms vs service/support, etc.

I would love to hear you elaborate on these “unwritten issues”. Are they also undiscussed issues, the sort of thing that is “mentioned” with nods and hand gestures, so that they never have to be spelled out?

For instance, you say there are issues of “commissioned vs enlisted”. Do you mean that a given action is more likely to garner the medal for a commission officer? — because the people making the decision are commissioned, too — or for an enlisted? — because bravery is more of an expectation for C.O.s, more beyond the call of duty for enlisted personnel.

I would be astonished if there were not also issues of race and gender, but I dare not guess how they play out.

Thanks for the info, TF.

I’ve been actually thinking about the converse of ScottyMac’s anecdote. The advantage to mostly posthumous MOHs might be that there are no pesky live winners around, to either (a) develop a cult of personality around them, or (b) say inconvenient things. If the object of the award is to develop a narrative of military virtue, it really helps if there’s no living narrator to muddy the message. Or to exploit it for their own purposes, either.

Josh:

I was thinking more of Julius Caesar, or Sgt. York. We haven’t had a sufficiently charismatic MOH winner collide with reality TV … yet … but it’s a scary thought.

Health care reform; Trutherism

2009-08-20T21:06:00.000-07:00

publius at Obsidian Wings posted on Keeping Perspective about health care, and Barney Frank. I commented, variously:

von:
Why should I accept the devil I don't know instead of the devil I know?

For the reason publius gives: because the current system is reprehensibly bad for many people other than yourself. The devil you know kills people for profit.

If you're afraid of a new massive government bureaucracy, remember that we've *already* got massive bureaucracy -- we'd be shifting it, not expanding the total supply. Your choice is *not* between government bureaucracy and no bureaucracy -- your choice is between Big Government or Big Corporation. If you say you're "opposed to big government", then you are *automatically* in favor of big corporations getting their way. "No large bureaucracies" is not one of the available options.

I might qualify as one of those batSH!& insane Truthers, by Sebastian's standards.

"People in the federal government took no action to stop the attacks"

-- The "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." memo makes this IMHO a matter of historical record.

"they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East."

-- the Project for the New American Century (signatories to whose Statement include Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby) makes this, also, a matter of historical record.

Does that mean they did it "because"? Not in a planned, strictly-speaking way, *necessarily*, they might just have ignored the Al Quaeda threat because they wanted to go to war in the Middle East -- and Iraq, specifically -- and preventing an Al Quaeda attack did not serve that goal.

So: they failed to protect the country; they wanted war in Iraq. The country was attacked; we went to war in Iraq (though Iraq had not attacked us). Conscious conspiracy? I doubt it. Letting things just sort of happen to get the result they wanted? Not unlikely.

Is there evidence against this hypothesis?

2009-08-18T11:29:00.000-07:00

I have this cynical, mean, low-opinion-of-humanity hypothesis, which I've been suppressing for a while. I am posting it at last, partly in hopes that people with greater knowledge will talk me out of it.

Many many details go into this hypothesis, but some of the more recent are:

1. The many-faceted Fail of the planned SGU episode "Sabotage" (as documented by sheafrotherdon starting here and here, especially the replies from Joe M. and the discussion here.

2. Joss Whedon talking about "Dollhouse" and his (and Eliza Dushku's) motives for making it.

What I suspect I'm seeing is men who are living in a world where many (most?) of the women they know are trading sex for something: money, position, access. They're living in a world where sexual harrassment is not a crime, but a perk -- it is accepted by all that a powerful man can do things like make an actress wash his car as her "audition". They don't just have casting couches, they have casting *lives*.

The Gate-PTB and Michael Bay IMHO don't even seem to know what consent *looks* like, much less why it's important. Joss knows better, but he seems more interested in relationships that are like prostitution than those like consent.

This is IMO completely ass-backward. One of the points of prostitution (and, I suspect, Hollywood culture's many variants thereof) is that it's simpler to have a relationship when only one of the parties is treated like a full human being. Consensual relationships, where *both* parties are thought of as people, are pretty much bound to be more complicated and interesting.

Basically, I think Hollywood sexual culture is a cross between that depicted in "Mad Men" and street prostitution. The next person who talks about "liberal Hollywood" gets my Vial of Wrath all over their head.

Tell me I'm misjudging. Go on, do it.

Socialism, capitalism, Cuba

2009-06-25T21:07:00.000-07:00

hilzoy quite reasonably asked Who Is This "Hard Left" Of Whom You Speak? -- because it is ludicrous to say Obama is part of any hard left, and yet they keep doing it. I wrote:

It seem to me that what McCarthy, Brett, et al. call the "hard left" are the left-wing authoritarians, corresponding to the right-wing authoritarians of the "hard right". Bob Altemeyer has looked for left-wing authoritarians in his studies, but he hasn't found statistically significant numbers of them over the past 20 years or so. Which is pretty much what people are saying in this thread.

There are *plenty* of people to the left of Obama, but they aren't the "hard left" because their style is anti-authoriarian and thus "soft", even when they're *way* left.

I don't know of any good history or study of why the LWAs withered away, but wither they did.

Public health in Cuba:

Best hurricane response system. In the past decade, a total of 22 hurricane-related deaths -- and Cuba gets a *lot* of hurricanes.

Cuban health markers are essentially the same as those in the United States and other parts of the industrialized world.

IMHO these are two of the reasons Castro is still in power: the government actually takes care of the people on the most basic level.

Brett:

Proper morality will protect the weaker from the stronger only because it's protecting everybody from everybody.

Only one truly socialist country is being invoked in this discussion: Cuba. As the public health cites I found show, Cuba has a remarkable and even admirable success at protecting its people from the most pervasive dangers humans face: disease and forces of nature. In what way is this not "doing better" than capitalist countries? I'm not saying life and health are the *only* good things, but without them the other stuff becomes secondary.

No-one in Cuba is wealthy; no-one in Cuba is starving. The Cubans are quite aware that this makes their median lifestyle much better than that in other Caribbean countries, and in many ways better than in the US.

To forestall an objection I suspect Brett will make: but Cubans are in prison! they can't leave!

IMHO to most Cubans, they aren't in prison, they're in this together. It's not that some people can't leave, it's that no-one gets to run away from their mutual responsibilities.

No, Brett, as I was saying: it forbids people to leave, because those who do would be running away from their responsibilities.

*Most* Cubans are better off in really basic ways than if Cuba were a strictly capitalist country. *Some* Cubans think that they personally would be better off under capitalism, even if everybody else would be worse off.

It's like a traditional extended family: it works because everyone's in it together, and that means some people have to stay in the family even when they want to be the prodigal son. And from the perspective of that tradition, the son who wants to run away to find his fortune in the big city (and not share it with the family) is a self-centered, irresponsible jerk.

I'm not actually saying Cuba's socialism is perfect. But I'm saying that it is not an obviously unreasonable system: it *really* works in crucial ways, and for the vast majority of Cubans it probably seems like a pretty good deal.

Look at it this way: Hurricane Ivan came roaring straight off the ocean, bounced all the way along the spine of Cuba -- and only 4 people died. And the Cubans were *shocked* that the death toll was so high. Why would they want to move to the land of Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina?

@nothingforducks: yes, you understand me correctly. I was trying to explain how things might appear to people in Cuba, and that a belief that Leaving the country you were born in is "running away from your responsibilities" and the state is like a "traditional extended family" are quite conservative and traditional approaches, in the broad scheme of things.

I am not talking about my own political philosophy, but about how it is reasonable for most people in Cuba to feel.

I disagree, Gary, that I am "romanticizing" -- I'm pointing out that there is hard actuarial evidence that Cuba isn't "a failure" compared to capitalist countries in its region. To assume that Cubans should care more about their principles than about their health and well-being, *that* it romanticizing.

Slarti:
I got my I-hurricanes mixed up -- I was thinking of Ike, not Ivan.

Sebastian:
US hubris certainly had a lot to do with the disaster of Katrina, but not everything -- and you're disregarding Andrew, Ike, and the rest. As the wiki link says, Cuba evacuated about 10% of its population for Ike (more than a million out of 11 million) -- Cuban disaster planning is widely acknowledged as the best in the world.

My point is that what GoodOleBoy calls "the prison of mediocrity" is measurably -- rationally -- a better place to live for most of the population.

novakant:

Oh, so you're a mindreader. This is one of the most condescending things I've ever read.

Good heavens, do you even believe what you're saying? It's not "mind-reading" to talk about what reasonable and prudent (or frightened, or angry, or happy) people are likely to do in particular circumstances -- except in the way that all human interactions involve trying to read other people's minds, and thus give philosophers a job.*g*

And I hardly see it as "condescending" to assume that Cubans are just as interested in health and life as my ancestors, who left Germany, Sweden, and Ireland for the US not out of some generalized ambition, but because staying at home involved things like "desperate poverty" and "being shot at".

The Islamic Republic

2009-06-22T21:09:00.001-07:00

hilzoy posted about the idea of an Islamic Republic. I commented:

mds:

Was there something in the air in the late 70s / early 80s?

IMHO, yes.

All over the world, the rate of cultural change was becoming too much for some people to handle. It was (and IMHO is) Future Shock. Technology and capitalism are the twin engines of change, and by the 70s it was becoming clear that there was no way out of dealing with them: everyone was going to get a full meal of change whether they're hungry for it or not.

I perceive that the biggest emotional problem people have is with changes in sexual mores and the role of women. I don't know if this is because sexual issues are actually more emotionally important than other things (pace Freud), or if all the issues of technology and economics that people have trouble dealing with are projected onto women. Either way, restrictions on women are the banner of fundamentalists all over.

I also find attempts by American Protestants to paint Shi'ites as "the more dangerous Muslims" rather ironic. When I read Hodgson's The Venture of Islam, it definitely seemed to me that over the course of history Catholicism:Protestantism::Sunni:Shiite.

It seems to me that Shi'a, like Protestantism, tends to be more doctrinally firm and thus prone to schism, and schism again, and schism again, so that today it is smaller but less unified than Sunni. Sunni is much more small-c catholic, more accomodating to different cultures and personalities, so it's got a lot of the amoeba-like quality of Roman Catholicism. I have the impression that Shi'a is also like Protestantism in being more apocalyptic than Sunni (or Catholicism).

In this analogy, the Wahhabis would be Opus Dei, I guess, but that may be a metaphor too far.

The Islamic Republic

2009-06-22T21:09:00.000-07:00

hilzoy posted about the idea of an Islamic Republic. I commented:

mds:

Was there something in the air in the late 70s / early 80s?

"Grass-eaters" in Japan

2009-06-15T19:48:00.000-07:00

I probably need to stop going to Rod Dreher's so often. Sometimes he's almost one of the Reasonable Conservatives, but then stuff like this comes out. And yet, he is definitely on the up side of a really pitiful bunch -- he's a Green in many ways, just so goddamned enraging about gender issues.

In any even, poor Rod was shocked by this article about 20-something male behavior in Japan. Rod calls them "grassy-eating sissy monkeys". *HEAD. DESK* I commented:

I'll have to check with my Japan-based sources, but there's one thing you should remember, Rod: Japanese masculinity does not have the same signals or boundaries that American masculinity does. In particular, the sharp boundaries of gender roles in Japan means that men there have a much wider ranger of behavior available to them.

Think of it this way: the defined border between masculine and feminine in Japan means that a man can go right up the edge and yet still count as firmly on the masculine side. In the US, the border is comparatively broad, shifting, and ill-defined, so a man who is anxious about appearing masculine has to keep much further away from the edge. American masculinity is subtractive; I don't know Japanese culture well enough to talk about how their gender roles are evolving.

The Japanese also have a very different approach to makeup and costumes than we do in the US. Thoreau said "beware of all enterprises that require new clothes" -- the Japanese say, "what's the point of one that doesn't?" So the makeup sales (which are likely to be the most accurate part of that story) don't necessarily mean what you think in your fevered American brain.

I wonder, too, if the use of "grass-eating" or vegetarian as an insult has a religious undertone, because vegetarianism is associated with Buddhism.

But as someone whose children are older than yours -- for all your sakes, don't box yourself into thinking that clothing, hairstyle or music choices are the appropriate battlefields for their upcoming teen and young adult years. Worry less about whether they seem manly to you, more about whether they're decent human beings.

Pro-Life and Seeing Women

2009-06-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

(not). Daniel Larison, who is extremely sensible for a conservative but is still Conservative, wrote his thoughts on Tiller. I commented:

jake has IMHO nailed it:

For whatever reason, many anti-abortionists believe the woman shouldn’t be held responsible for her actions. I think it is the same kind of thinking that underlies the resistance to abortion - the subject is defenseless, at the mercy of more powerful beings, and because we have an obligation to protect and defend the weak, we also don’t hold the weak (fully) responsible for their bad actions. In essence, a woman is a permanent ward of her family, and not an autonomous actor in her life.

In other words, the central question is *not*, despite the framing, “Is a fetus a human being?” but “Is a woman a human being to the fullest extent of the law?” You don’t get to say “of course! no-one ever doubted it!” when the historical truth is that it has *often* been doubted, at great length.

I must say it’s enraging to see Scott, Richard, and Daniel discussing abortion as though their opinions must be Serious and Important, even though none of them has any skin in the game. And it’s doubly enraging to see posts like Daniel’s that do not even mention the word “women”, as though we’re invisible and inaudible even when the battlefield is our own bodies.

Until you *act* as though women are autonomous actors in our own lives, it would be foolish of me to assume that’s what you believe. You may even tell youself you fully respect me as a human being with my own agency, but when you discuss what barriers to place between me and my doctor *without even mentioning my existence* your actions — that is, your words — show that I am not solid and real in your eyes.

Dehumanization

2009-06-14T08:54:00.001-07:00

hilzoy got righteously POed at Erick Erickson of RedState, who said flat-out "leftists celebrate each and every death of each and every American solider". In the discussion, some people said Erickson (et al.) are "not human beings". My comments:

CaseyL:

It's not about hurting them, it's about hurting you. Just as in the CS Lewis quote hilzoy used, the more you let yourself think of other people as "not human" the more of yourself you cut off. There is no "get out of species free" card (and I hear the Martian citizenship residency requirement is a *bitch*).

CaseyL:

When you say "this (group, behavior, whatever) is not human", you are not telling the truth. In addition to my moral reaction, I'm a biologist, and I invariably find that the behavior people are most ready to label "inhuman", "not a human being", etc., is in fact *precisely* human. Frequently-made comparisons are insults to weasels, snakes, and things that live under rocks. There are no "vicious" wolves, because wolves have no vice -- though there may be vicious dogs, because we've made them into half-people, psychologically.

When you label someone "inhuman", you are stating "there is no way that could be me, there is no commonality between me and that behavior." If there's one thing we learned in the 20th century, it is that this is a delusion. It is *always* us, it is always pure 100% human behavior with no non-human ingredients going on.

The Iranian Election

2009-06-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald had a round-up post, including a bit on the Iranian election. My comment:

If you look at the reporting linked from DailyKos, Andrew Sullivan, Talking Points Memo, to try to evaluate what's going on in Iran, and then go to the major US MSM sites, what you'll notice is:

1. much less coverage of Iran

2. most front-page photos show only Ahmadinejad, not any street-level shots

3. fewer headline references to "disputed election"

I keep being reminded of how little time Fox News devoted to the Holocaust Museum shooting this past week. When the event doesn't fit the narrative, the MSM just doesn't cover it.

I think any kind of close vote or disputed vote in Iran doesn't fit the MSM narrative in which Iran is *collectively* a force for evil that Must Be Stopped. The people in the US and Israel that want to portray Iran as a huge threat that we couldn't blame Israel for attacking are actively resisting any signs that Iran isn't monolithically behind Ahmadinejad.

Hm. Checking back to nytimes.com, I see that they've changed their slant in the course of the morning. There's now more Iran coverage, more street-level photos, and more doubt expressed in articles linked from the front page.

Smoking Bans and Smell

2009-06-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

shaddup. I'll work tonight.

At Crooked Timber Henry reports on the effects of recent smoking bans:

When Ireland banned smoking in enclosed spaces in 2004, I would have been prepared to bet large amounts of money that the ban would be universally ignored (Irish citizens have historically had a flexible attitude to the interpretation of legal rules that don’t suit them). In particular, I would have predicted that the ban would never work in pubs. But it did – pretty well instantaneously as best as I could tell. If it hadn’t been for the Irish example, I would have bet even larger amounts that the ban would never have taken off in Italy (where storeowners are legally obliged to give you a receipt when you buy something, to make it more difficult for them to fiddle taxes, and where the general attitude to large swathes of civil and criminal law seems best characterized as a kind of amiable contempt). But again, it appears to have worked.

I haven’t seen any research on this (if someone knows of any, let me know in comments), but my best guess in the absence of good evidence would be that the success of the ban reflected instabilities in previously existing informal norms about where people could or could not smoke.

My comment:

The Irish case is very interesting, and not what I would have expected, either.

I think one reason for the norm fragility on this issue is a peculiarity of the nervous system. Speaking as a lifetime non-smoker, one of the things that annoys me most is the smell. Smell is the most adaptation-prone of the senses: that is, we "get used" to smells more quickly and thoroughly than for other types of stimuli. The consequences for smoking are:

a) smokers have no idea what it smells like, none.

b) as the number of smokers goes down, the smoke from the remaining ones is *more* annoying and obvious to non-smokers, because we're no longer adapted to moving through a constant blue-gray fog.

In the 60s and 70s, everyone smoked in eating/drinking places all the time, it was just part of how they were. By the 90s, it was much less common, and I'd feel free to leave a place if it was too smoky. Now, I can tell if my husband has talked to a smoker, by the smell clinging to his clothes; I've returned books to the library, because the previous borrower had smoked while reading them and the smell wafting up from the pags was repulsive.

So I think it's partly that a lot of people were looking for an excuse to ask people to stop smoking, but also that the fewer smokers there are in the population the more stinky they seem.

Abortion and quickening

2009-06-12T17:33:00.000-07:00

OMG, I spent too much time today in the continued discussion at Erin's post All or Nothing:
my latest:

abortion stops a beating heart

I've often wondered about this slogan -- I used to drive by a billboard displaying it. Two things went through my head every single time:

a) so does a heart transplant

b) you're saying before there's a heartbeat it's OK, then?

When your billboard makes me think these things I'm not sure it was a successful slogan.

Let's see what sources I have to hand. In A Historical Summary of Abortion from Antiquity through Legalization (1973), Excerpted from A Christian View of Abortion By John W. Klotz (Concordia):

One interesting and oft cited distinction made in the early church was that abortion in the early stages of a pregnancy was not considered wrong. The reason for this can be traced back to Aristotle who held that the soul entered the body of a male fetus at 40 days and the body of a female fetus at 80 days. He believed that at conception the individual received a vegetable soul which gradually was replaced with an animal soul and finally by a rational soul. It was only after the appearance of the rational soul that abortion was to be considered murder. Sixtus V issued a bull in 1588, Effraenatum, wiping out the 40- and 80-day rule and punishing all abortion as murder; the punishment was to be excommunication. Subsequently Gregory XIV returned to the 40- and 80-day rule. However in 1869 Pius IX returned to the sanctions of Sixtus V.

Note that he says not just "not murder", but "not wrong". From The History of Birth Control, by Kathleen London:

The majority of women before the 19th century and many in the 19th century did not consider abortion a sin. Until the early part of the [19th] century, there were no laws against abortions done in the first few months of pregnancy [in the US]. Prior to the 19th century, Protestants and Catholics held abortion permissible until ‘quickening’—the moment the fetus was believed to gain life.

The issue was always killing, not a husband's rights, or else the act would not have been condemned had it been taken at the father's behest, which was not he case at all.Here I am relying more on my memory (it's been a long time since I read the primary sources, and the books I have to hand aren't the ones I need). In the 19thC, at least, doctors and clerics were very conflicted when husbands wanted their wives' pregnancies terminated when the wife did not. On the one hand, abortion (ew ew); on the other, undermining husbandly authority. I do not recall hearing about male authority figures advising wives to resist their husband's wishes on this issue, nor, frankly, does it seem plausible given the general emphasis on wifely submission and the extremely broad rights a husband had to his wife's body.

I do seem to recall that clerics (who tended to be more distant from the realities than doctors were) had a hard time believing that a husband truly *would* want his wife to abort -- and the situation where a wife wanted a child despite her personal danger[1] but the husband did *not* would not have been common.

The situation with unmarried couples was different, of course, and the rhetoric often stressed how aborting illegitimate pregnancy was covering up "the crime" -- the crime being illicit sex. In George Eliot's "Adam Bede", Hetty Sorrel is guilty of infanticide by abandonment, but her sentence of hanging is commuted to transportation (to Australia) when her well-born lover confesses. It's not clear how realistic this is, of course, and how much her life is spared because her boyfriend turns out to be the Squire's son. Within the novel, it's clear that Hetty's unwillingness to "name the father" is considered an aggravating circumstance.

Update #2 (multiple comments):

You don't do that when people's elderly parents die, do you, even though it is *possible* that euthanasia was involved?

My experience is that there *is* an investigation when an elderly person dies alone and unexpectedly. It's also my experience that the issue is far more likely to be suicide than euthanasia.

do you really think that when people hold strong to a moral principle, that means they are absolutely incapable of any nuance when it comes to law?

"All or nothing" is what it says.

Here's a primary source quote for you:

To the dismay of medical leaders, the public still believed that quickening marked the beginning of life. The practice of abortion persisted nationwide. "Many otherwise good and exemplary women," Dr. Joseph Taber Johnson reported in 1895, thought "that prior to quickening it is no more harm to cause the evacuation of the contents of their wombs than it is that of their bladders or their bowels."

[quoted in "When Abortion Was a Crime", from Joseph Taber Johnson, "Abortion and its Effects," American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children 33 (January 1896): 86-97]

As for how reasonable people would be in practice, here's a Boston Globe article on the abortion ban in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Chile. In those countries, poor women may find it difficult or impossible to be treated in a timely way for ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage, due to doctors' fear of prosecution. As you probably know, a D&C is both a method of abortion and frequently necessary to treat miscarriage -- doctors in public hospitals in these countries will wait as long as possible before performing one, lest they be charged with murder.

At present, do people hold inquests for every death that occurs? I was unaware of this practice.

AFAIK all "unattended deaths" are investigated, yes. I don't think they all go to the legal level of a formal inquest, but they're definitely treated as police matters.

Another citation:

While Aquinas had opposed abortion — as a form of
contraception and a sin against marriage — he had maintained that the
sin in abortion was not homicide unless the fetus was ensouled, and thus,
a human being. Aquinas had said the fetus is first endowed with a
vegetative soul, then an animal soul, and then — when its body is
developed — a rational soul. This theory of "delayed hominization" is
the most consistent thread throughout church history on abortion.

from Joseph F. Donceel, S.J., "Immediate Animation and Delayed Hominization,"
Theological Studies, vols. 1 & 2 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1970), pp. 86-88; cited here.

Rebecca:

I don't get it. How would abortions continue without any problem? How would doctors go around performing surgical abortions for a living? Attempting to self-inflict abortion is dangerous and I doubt many women would go for it.

I'm going to assume that this an honest question, and that you were born after 1960 or so. I have a post in moderation with links, but briefly: there would be a network of discrete, well-paid doctors performing safe, expensive abortions for well-to-do women. *Lots* of women who couldn't afford such doctors would try all kinds of things to induce abortion, and many, many of them would die.

When pro-choice activists say "No More Coat Hangers!" they're talking about a historical reality.

I don't get it. How would abortions continue without any problem? How would doctors go around performing surgical abortions for a living? Attempting to self-inflict abortion is dangerous and I doubt many women would go for it.

I'm going to assume that this an honest question, and that you were born after 1960 or so. Alas, this comment will go to moderation, but I hope the links will be worth it.

Some doctors would still make a living performing abortions for well-to-do women, as is the case in most of Latin America (as reported in the Boston Globe article I linked to previously). When Barry Goldwater's daughter became pregnant out-of-wedlock in 1955, he arranged a safe, though illegal, abortion for her in New York. Networks of safe, expensive, discrete abortion doctors were *everywhere* in those days, with referrals through an intense network of word-of-mouth, mostly woman-to-woman, and ads using the words like "full gynecological services" and "complete privacy and discretion". Women would go out-of-town if they could -- a "spa weekend" to "restore one's health" was a *euphemism* in my youth. I don't know what this kind of service cost in today's dollars, but I'd guess that if a legal abortion costs $400 today, a safe illegal one one would cost $1000 or more, if you follow me.

As for women who couldn't afford a good doctor, yes they did take awful risks. Here's one doctor's report:

The first month of my internship [in 1962] was spent on Ward 41, the septic obstetrics ward. Yes, it's hard to believe now, but in those days, they had one ward dedicated exclusively to septic complications of pregnancy.

About 90% of the patients were there with complications of septic abortion. The ward had about 40 beds, in addition to extra beds which lined the halls. Each day we admitted between 10-30 septic abortion patients. We had about one death a month, usually from septic shock associated with hemorrhage.

Right now, complications from illegal abortions are a leading cause of death for women of child-bearing age in South America. In Peru alone, an estimated 50,000 women a year either die or suffer serious complications after an illegal abortion. More women in Ethiopia die from complications from illegal abortions than from any other medical reason save tuberculosis, the World Health Organization reports.

Hector:

I have the impression that Rebecca thinks making abortion illegal would eliminate almost all of them, and that's what I was addressing.

Yes, making it illegal would reduce the rate -- but it would also severely *increase* the death rate for women, and abortions that did occur would be at a later stage because the finances and logistics would be more difficult.

Another cite from "When Abortion Was a Crime": The year after abortion was legalized in New York State, the maternal-mortality rate there dropped by 45 percent.

Rebecca:

It's true that I never heard first-hand of anyone using a coat hanger. I did hear first-hand stories about crochet hooks. Is that scary enough for you? You've said that "I doubt many women would go for [self-inflicted abortion]", but the historical record and what's going on in Latin America proves that many *will*. Shocking, dangerous, horrifying -- yes, but it's a *fact*.
-------

[1] How many of your great or great-great-grandmothers died in childbirth? Of my four great-grandmothers (born in various countries between 1865 and 1880), half died in or shortly after childbirth.

From the Abortion threads at Beliefnet

2009-06-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

Erin's post, All or nothing

Jon:

Pregnant women could not be legally put to death in any Christian culture (and in many non-Christian cultures), no matter how heinous their crimes; the mere suspicion of pregnancy was enough for a woman to escape the gibbet or the headsman.

This is not true. The "mere suspicion of pregnancy" was certainly not sufficient for a woman to "plead her belly" and delay an execution, she had to be examined by a midwife who would swear that she could feel the fetus move -- the "quickening", which was the common standard for when life begins regardless of the disputes of scholars. The time of perceptible quickening varies, but it's usually around 4 months.

In pre-modern times, any woman could claim to be in the first trimester and there was no reliable way to tell. In case you're wondering about women who had been imprisoned for more than 3-4 months, women who were facing execution are known to solicit sex from their jailers, in the hope that they would get pregnant in time to "plead their bellies" -- or to make such a plea plausible.

Making quickening the baseline for life has an extremely long pedigree, going back to Aristotle at least (and probably further). You'll note that the widespread belief that first-trimester abortions are OK is in line with this traditional approach. Most women were quite willing to use whatever remedies they could get to "bring on their periods", and did *not* consider this the same thing as the heinous crime of abortion.

Men (including male clerics) objected to these first-trimester remedies, but *not* usually on the grounds that it was destroying an ensouled human being. Rather, they said (truthfully) that it undermined male authority, and the husband's unquestioned right to control his wife's fertility.

I can't help noticing that the shift from "life at quickening" to "life at conception" follows a shift in when *men* can tell that a woman is pregnant, instead of taking her word for it.

at Erin's post on Abortion and civil rights (headdesk warning):

"Your Name" @3:40 has the crucial data:

the rate of unintended pregnancies among poor women (below 100% of poverty) is nearly four times that of women above 200% of poverty

In other words, poor women -- who are disproportionately non-white -- find it excessively difficult to obtain, pay for, and assert their right to use birth control.

When "pro-life" groups actively endorse effective contraception, I'll believe they mean what they say. If you say "abortion is murder" and don't promote birth control -- barrier methods at the very least -- I'll be forced to conclude that your primary motivation is to control women and our sexuality.

I have known quite a few individuals who are "pro-life" and also "pro-birth-control", and I can respect that. I know of *no* anti-abortion group which takes that stance. In reality, as you must be aware, the anti-abortion movement has consistently put up barriers between poor women and contraception. More unintended and unwanted pregancies, more abortions -- and the barriers the anti-abortion movement has constructed mean that poor women will tend to have abortions later, too, because it takes them more time to gather the money and make the arrangements. *There*'s your civil rights issue.

Hector:

I know quite a few "pro-life" individuals who take your position, and I have no major quarrel with it. What I do not know of is any significant "pro-life" organization or institution that is also pro-contraception.

People who are anti-abortion and anti-contraception are IMHO making their priorities clear: contraception is worse than murder. No, I'm exaggerating: they're making it clear that they don't actually believe abortion is murder, because everyone agrees you're allowed to cut moral corners to prevent murder, much less something that's called "a Holocaust".

At Erin's Is protesting against abortion a hate crime?

"Is protesting against abortion a hate crime?"

No. Learn what words mean.

"Hate crime" is not a separate category of crime, it is an an aggravating factor in an already-defined crime. Here is a summary from David Neiwert. He's guy you need to read if you're going to be talking about this stuff. The chances are that if you don't read Neiwert you do not know what you're talking about.

Protest is NOT a hate crime. No-one is trying to define protest as a hate crime. No-one in the US is seriously trying to pass "hate speech" laws, in the sense of trying to define *currently legal* speech as "hate speech".

Shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater is a speech crime. Shouting "Fire!" in a crowded church or synagogue may well be a hate speech crime. But the point is that in the US it has to be a crime first, before it can be a hate crime.

The reason you're getting the impression that leftists are calling abortion protests "hate crimes" and "terrorism" is because abortion protesters frequently don't just protest. Some protesters -- though by no means all -- also stalk, harrass, assault, and threaten women and clinic workers. Harrassment, etc., are *already* crimes. When the goal of the harrassment, etc., is to "send a message" not just to the immediate victim but to the group or community of which she is a part, *that is a hate crime*.

ETA -- yes, Carhart is talking about a more general use of the term "hate crime". He's wrong, but I'm prepared to overlook it because he doesn't have the pro-choice organizations backing him up on this issue, and mostly because he is in legitimate fear for his life.

Anti-abortion activists might fruitfully ask themselves what they can do to make the risks to Carhart less. I'm not talking about just verbally distancing themselves from people like Tiller's assassin, I'm talking about reducing the level of physical terror Carhart, his colleagues, and his patients experience.

And yes, I am using "terror" as in "terrorism".

No, "Another Michael". Abortion clinic violence is the terrorism that *works*. It's not the body count that matters, it's the fear. Abortion-clinic violence isn't limited to murder, the murders are only the extreme tip of the harrassment, assaults, stalking, and the general climate of fear -- terror, even -- that this violence produces.

The Axioms of Online Discussion

2009-06-10T06:20:00.000-07:00

The storm over Ed Whelan's outing of publius has moved into the cleanup phase.

Actually, you *are that* bad, mr. moto. But I am responding to you not for your benefit, but because a lot of new people are visiting, and it's clear you are not alone in your ignorance and confusion.

This whole blowup arose because Ed Whelan, a pro blogger, was just as ignorant of the rules of online communication as mr. moto is. Not just the rules, the *axioms* -- the principles that were worked out back in the Usenet days, before the WWW even existed.

No plagiarism
No outing
No sockpuppets
No obtaining material benefits (money, computers, lip gloss[1]) by fraud
No stalking
No deliberate spread of malicious software or links

I think that's it.

These aren't really rules of netiquette, these are the *premises*, the axioms which online communication has been found to require. These axioms aren't about politeness, they're about making communication *possible*.

This is why bloggers both left & right joined in condemning Whelan's behavior -- it wasn't that he was "too mean", it was that he broke an axiom. It was and is shocking that someone could be a paid blogger without keeping to these axioms reflexively.

And this is why mr. moto is wrong. publius' remarks might possibly have risen to the level of "flaming", though I personally would call it at most a slight scorching. But outing is not proportional retaliation, it is *breaking the whole system*, it's taking the conflict to a radically different level.

I'm not going to go into the rationale behind each of the axioms, because that would take too long -- can anyone recommend a good link? But as with any educational process, you obey the rules first, then study why we have them.

[1]Based on an actual event, I'm not kidding

Pseuds vs anons

2009-06-10T06:15:00.000-07:00

At Rod Dreher's:

I second Ruth's emphasis on the crucial difference between anonymity and pseudonymity. I am frankly astonished by how many bloggers -- especially though by no means only on the right -- cannot seem to recognize that they are two different things. I find the number of anonymous/pseudonymous commenters who say they'd never read a pseudonymous blogger *hilarious*.

I've put up a description of actual anonymous blogging here. No such thing is occurring in the political blogosphere, so I cannot fathom why you-all don't seem to be able to keep your terms straight.

no one else is under any moral or ethical obligation to respect that pseudonymity.

It is standard netiquette -- good online manners -- to not "out" people's pseuds. One reason for this is because pseuds are the default online. Categories of people who would be prudent to use pseuds include:

1. women

2. anyone under 25

3. anyone working as a teacher who is not a tenured college professor

4. anyone who doesn't always agree with their boss

5. anyone who doesn't always agree with their clients or customers

6. anyone who doesn't always agree with their mother or father

7. anyone who is not straight

8. anyone who is divorced

9. anyone who wants to blog about personal issues

In other words, *most people*.

Saying that people "should" blog under their RL name or that it's "best" to do so is tantamount to saying, only powerful men have the right to discuss things.

Even if there were no other good reasons to respect pseuds, there's a good conservative reason: respect is the community standard. That's why so many bloggers on both right and left have joined in condemning Whelan -- so that everyone knows that there *is* a community standard.

At The Volokh conspiracy:

Count me among those befuddled by the apparent widespread confusion between "pseudonymity" and "anonymity". I am extra-befuddled by Mr. Volokh's conflation of the two, given Jonathan Alter's post here yesterday discussing their crucial differences. As he said, A pseudonym operates like a brand name, and the value of the brand is, at least in part, a function of how the pseudonymous blogger acts over time.

Actual anonymous blogging is extremely rare -- I describe one example here, mostly to illustrate how nothing current in the political blogosphere qualifies. Why, then, are so many people who are otherwise careful with language saying publius was blogging "anonymously"?

At Riehl World View:

Riehl, I am baffled by your conflation of "anonymous" and "pseudonymous", a confusion that appears to be widespread. Do you honestly not see that they are not the same thing? You aren't anonymous at all, you have a consistent pseud, just as the Federalist Papers' "publius" or "George Eliot" or "Mark Twain" did. The fact that it may be tricky to get from "Riehl" to your physical address doesn't prevent you from accumulating a reputation and building up "trust networks" with other people.

I've posted about what actual anonymous blogging looks like here:[]. What you (and publius, and most of your commenters) are doing is not what I'd call anonymous at all -- what makes you say it is?

I see now that I was confused -- "Dan Riehl" is not a pseud, but a RL name. My question remains, though: why are you referring to "pseudonymous" as "anonymous"? Do you truly think they are the same thing?

I see no practical difference in this and most cases in which a blogger chooses to remain anonymous by using a pseud

A pseud is neither anonymous nor Anonymous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)
so I actually don't know what you mean by "remain anonymous by using a pseud".

Pseuds are social identities that can gather reputation and trust. Anyone who has to detach from a pseud has to lose the trust and reputation that identity has collected. When I say this is "not anonymity" I'm not just arguing semantics, I'm saying they function in different ways.

I believe blogging under one's real name is best
-- from this it follows that the "best" blogging is that which is detached and impersonal. Blogging about one's child-rearing experiences, for instance, by your standards cannot be the "best" blogging, because it is usually unwise to blog about one's children under a real name.

At The American Scene:

I’m asking this all over, because I am baffled. You seem to be using “anonymous” to mean “pseudonymous”, though they are two very different things, especially online. The link in my sig is to a post I made about what (rare) truly anonymous blogging looks like. What we are talking about is *pseudonymity*, a consistent internet identity. Do you not know the
difference, or do you not think it matters — and if so, why not?

If we were to do a complete cost/benefit analysis of the effects of pseudonymous blogging over the past decade, I have no doubt that the result has been mostly negative (the blogosphere would be a more civil place without it).

What is certainly true is that many, many fewer people would be able to blog or comment if they always had to use their RL names. As Tony rightly pointed out above, most women (for instance) would be imprudent to do so. For the majority of people (who are mostly *not* financially and personally secure men, accountable to no-one) blogging under one's RL name would be a dangerous luxury -- your standard would make a desert and call it peace.

Outing publius

2009-06-07T13:11:00.000-07:00

The National Review's Ed Whelan, scumbucket, outed one of the Obsidian Wings bloggers.

Humans, why must you FAIL so hard?

I find the objections to pseudonymous blogging from flagrant pseuds hilarious, and will only address them by pointing and laughing.

I have encountered a number of people who use only RL names online and are uncomfortable with people who use pseuds, but this attitude is baffling to me. Pseuds have an extremely long history for fiction writers and political writers, and I see no reason the "nom de net" shouldn't be accepted seemlessly in those fields.

More generally, objecting to pseuds puts you on the losing side of a generation gap. As my children grew up and started going online, I carefully instructed them in the construction of suitable pseuds and in basic techniques of internet compartmentization. For young people in general and women in particular, pseudonymity online is a matter of basic security. Objecting to it marks you as a clueless fogey, or at least as highly privileged.

In another decade, it's possible that the "presumption of online pseud protection" will become a legal principle, as it already is within the "old-growth" parts of the Internet. I do not think we're there yet, and I don't think any suit by publius would have a legal leg to stand on.

Thanks for the explanation, Slart. I now see what you mean.

I continue to be baffled by the number of people referring to "anonymous bloggers" -- especially while using a pseudonym (LOLZ). *No-one* here is blogging anonymously, we are mostly using *pseudonyms*, which is (a) completely different and (b) part of a very, very old tradition in both politics and fiction.

Here's what an actual experiment in anonymous blogging looked like [details redacted]: a group of several hundred people with a common interest formed a community in which *every member* had admin privileges. Both posts and comments were unsigned and IP addresses were unlogged, so there was no way to connect comments and posts to each other.

I was told that the advantage was:

Because it is detached from our named selves, it allows for fluidity of identity, I think. I can be the person leaving an idiotic comment and the person chiming in against them, and then also someone taking up that comment and rehashing it further in the discussion, all while still supporting an environment where everyone is instantly comfortable with each other.

In the event, as might have been predicted, one member of the community got angry and used hir admin privileges to delete *everything*, and there was much unhappiness. What was truly surprising was that this took *3 years* (a generation in Internet time), so it probably qualified as a remarkably successful experiment.

The point of this story is to make it perfectly clear that we in the political blogosphere are *not* talking about anonymous blogging.

I will assume that anyone who persistently uses the term "anonymous" to describe pseudonymity is part of the problem. That is, people like *you* are the reason fiction and politics have a long tradition of pseuds, of which the nom de net is just the most recent version.

Cherry Pie recipe

2009-06-03T22:02:00.000-07:00

Because J asked.

The pie filling is per lastscorpion, and presumes that you're starting with one of the bags of frozen cherries we put up at cherry time (1 quart pitted cherries + 1/2 c sugar):

take a bag of frozen cherries out and dump them into a medium-large saucepan. Squeeze all the stuff out of the bag and into the pan. Thaw it, either by putting the lid on the pan and leaving it sit for a couple hours or else by stirring frequently over low heat. In a cup or a small bowl or something, combine 2 Tablespoons (maybe heaping Tablespoons, depending on how much liquid the cherries have produced) corn starch and 1/4 cup sugar and a dash of salt. Mix the dry ingredients into your pan of cherries and goo. If it's very dry looking, add a little water, but no more than 1/3 of a cup. Cook and stir over medium heat until thickened and bubbly, and then continue cooking and stirring for one or two minutes more. Take it off the heat and put the lid on and le it cool without stirring, and use it just like purchased cherry pie filling.

We add 1/2 tsp lemon zest -- the dehydrated stuff from Penzeys.

The crust is this recipe at Fine Cooking:

8 oz. (1 cup) cold unsalted butter
9 oz. (2 cups) all-purpose unbleached flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 cup cold water

Mix it up in the stand mixer or with two knives or with the pastry thingy until the largest bits of butter are still pea-sized, but most of the rest are fine.

Cut it in half, roll it out *very* quickly, put it in your 9-inch pie pan. Cover it with the other half of the dough, crimp the edge, then chill it in the fridge while you pre-heat the oven.

Pre-heat to 450, then turn it down to 350 when you put in the pie. Cook for about 50 minutes.

In which my last nerve is dissolving

2009-06-03T21:12:00.000-07:00

Comments made at Obsidian Wings re the Tiller assassination.

At hilzoy's post on Terror Should Not Pay:

Why were the OB/Gyns who performed late-term procedures in Wichita, Boulder, and I think Florida, and not say in NYC or LA?

I'm guessing, here, but I'll bet there are in fact such doctors in the NY, DC, LA, SF, Seattle, and Chicago areas. The difference is, the doctors in those areas do not need to advertise their services -- they get as many patients as they can cope with in their respective metropolitan areas by local referrals.

myq: Thanks for the link, it's nice to see my guess was correct.

I made it in part based on a friend of mine who had a late-term, emergency ID&E in one of those major metropolitan areas about 5 years ago. I'm quite sure it saved the life of the other twin -- and indeed, ID&E aka "partial birth abortion" is frequently the best choice when one fraternal twin is dead or dying. But AFAIK the procedure is now banned *regardless*.

In my friend's case, I don't know if the one twin was absolutely certainly 100% dead when they began the procedure. But I am sure that if they'd have to flail around finding someone who knew what they were doing, both twins would have died.

I find it noteworthy that no restrictions on late abortion have a "life of the other twin" exception. Why, it's almost as though they're not really concerned about children's lives.

At hilzoy's post In which I disagree with Megan McArdle:

I'll say this for McArdle, at least she has some skin in the game. Over the course of the day I'm getting to the "Flames! on the side of my face!" point, having to hear/read/talk to *so many* people who have opinions about abortion but no skin. As echidne said after the final presidential debate:

"It is always extremely distasteful to watch two men discuss what should be done about abortion. Always, never mind what they say."

*Always*, guys.

stonetools:

I expect that for many here, Dr. Tiller was just a nice guy removing unwanted tissue from some women by performing perfectly legal operations.

I dare say you expect *wrong*. As cleek suggested, read some of the personal accounts Sully has posted today. Think about the friend I wrote about in the previous thread, who had a so-called "partial birth abortion" to save the life of one twin when the other was doomed.

Both medicine and motherhood sometimes involve hard choices, and they always have. The only question is whether women and doctors will make those choices *themselves* or not.

What WT said, not to mention that I have personally read discussions on pro-life fora about whether it's moral to abort an ectopic pregnancy. Their conclusion, BTW, was "no, but it's OK to take out the fallopian tube with the implanted embryo in it -- you may be destroying the woman's fertility, but you aren't *directly* killing anyone so that's OK".

At Sebastian's post, What conclusions should we draw?

In general, folks, I'm finding the use of sarcasm, irony, and rhetorical exaggeration in this discussion is a layer too far. I am having a lot of trouble deciphering what people are *actually* intending to convey. It seems that the widespread use of the phrase "the abortion Holocaust" has caused my sarcasm/irony detector to go offline, at least for the purpose of this discussion.

Specifically, Sebastian, I have no sense of whether you're rhetorically exaggerating or not when you parallel Tiller's murder and the recruiter's. I'd like it if you (or von, or whomever) addressed the points made by Jeff Eaton's not-at-all-rhetorical points.

Do you, Sebastian, truly think that Tiller's death was "a single murder"? Do you truly think that it was not incited? Do you truly believe that women and our doctors have not been made afraid -- terrorized, even -- by harrassment and violence directed at abortion clinics and birth control providers?

dana:

I don't think OR's rhetoric rises to the level of incitement

Why not? Is there something about the legal definition of "incitement" that you're relying on?

Even without Jeff Eaton's evidence, it seems perfectly obvious to me that OR (and O'Reilly, and probably others) have been trying to get someone to kill Dr. Tiller for *years*. Sarah Robinson has a good, simple round-up of the evidence at Orcinus.

Is anyone here truly surprised that Tiller was killed? Does anyone honestly believe that it was not assassination -- murder of a public figure for a political reason?

what a coincidence. no common thread at all.

clee-eek, that's what I'm talking about. Please try to restrain the sarcasm, it means that every sentence has to be re-parsed, which is more neuro-cycles than my current brain installation can afford.

Jeff:

As you say, a lot of the sarcasm is both a sign of very strong feelings and of a lack of respect for others. I have no problem with the former except when it leads to the latter.

Meanwhile:

Because of the high sarcasm concentrations in the air, I cannot tell if stonetools has changed hir mind about whether Roeder is a terrorist.

I also cannot tell if OCSteve is serious about equating rare protests at recruiting stations with the very common protests at abortion clinics. I also cannot tell if he seriously thinks recruiting-station protests actually frighten potential military recruits. The very fact that most abortion clinics need client escorts should tell him that yes, anti-choice protests are often frightening -- one might even say, terrorizing.

Star Wars in Star Trek

2009-05-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Here is the list of Star Wars references/homages/visual references friends and I have spotted in ST:Reboot, so far. Note that very few of these can be explained as due to "FX by Industrial Light & Magic"; most of these are writing and/or directorial choices. I have a theory, which is mine (as always), but I wanted to get the list up separately so people can appreciate how substantial and pervasive the SW influence is.

1. Spock watching destruction of Vulcan = Leia at the destruction of Alderaan

2. Scotty's Ewok-like friend, who I am informed is called a "clanger" in the SW-verse.

3. The snow-monster on Delta Vega, and the way it appears out of the foggy snow -- the whole SV sequence was *very* strongly reminiscent of Hoff.

4. the way SpockPrime pulls an Obi-Wan to rescue Kirk in the DV cave

5. when the doors open to the DV station, it sounds like Chewbacca.

6. When Nero confronts Kirk, he's in front of a space window that looks pretty much exactly like the Emperor's room on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi.

7. Nero and Kirk fight on a catwalk above a huge mechanical abyss, like Vader & Luke in "Empire".

8. "I am not our father" -- though this may be or also be a reference to Nimoy's books I Am Not Spock and I Am Spock

9. An actual cameo appearence by R2D2, ffs.

10. The style of Spock's "Jellyfish" ship, the engine sound reminded me of a pod racer. The jinking of Spock flying the Jellyfish ship.

11. The maze of destruction around Vulcan that the Enterprise warped into (reminded me of the asteroid field in "Empire").

12. The whole Romulan ship evoked the Death Star in design and role.

13. The mission for Kirk and Spock to beam aboard, sabatoge something, rescue Pike, and then leave evokes the similar rescue-Leia scheme in ANH.

14. The early "send detachment to the planet to sabatoge the drill" evoked the ROTJ scene of Han and Leia going down to sabatoge the shield.

15. Luke--sorry, Kirk--was suddenly a "farmboy"; I mean, Iowa, yes; farmboy, no, IMO. Kirk also raised ostensibly by his 'uncle'--whose voice was that on the car, chiding for him to come back.

16. "There's always a bigger fish" moment on DV.

Sonia Sotomayor was not an Affirmitative Action student

2009-05-07T18:49:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald has been doing a great job of holding Jeffrey Rosen and The National Review's feet to the fire, for Rosen's anonymously-sourced hit piece on Sonia Sotamayor, in which he said she is "not that smart", "[unable] to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservatives", whose good qualities are mostly that she's Puerto Rican and from poverty -- a combination that has led pretty much every blog I've seen, left or right, to connect the dots and say that what Rosen meant is that she benefited from Affirmative Action at Princeton and Yale Law.

I want to stop the right-wing meme that Sotomayor must have been an Affirmative Action admit to Princeton, intellectually second-rate but bossy. This meme is a lie: Sotomayor got into Princeton despite a restrictive quota system, and left with the highest award Princeton gives to undergraduates.

I'm highlighting and expanding on a comment that got lost in the barrage after Glenzilla's first post about Rosen's article.

Commenter "PollyPerks" noted that, based on dates and statistics alone, Sonia Sotomayor *could not* have been a "mere Affirmative Action" admit to Princeton, because she entered during the early years of Princeton co-education, when women were subject to a restrictive quota system.

I am a female member of Princeton's Class of 1978, 2 years after Sotomayor, and I have personal memory and experience to back PollyPerks up. Like Polly, I am also relying on Jerome Karabel's The Chosen, which I highly recommend and which made many things clear to me in retrospect.

I have no clear memory of meeting Sotomayor, though I certainly knew of her -- she was extremely energetic and politically active, heading the Latino student group and other campus activities. She graduated summa cum laude, a very rare distinction at Princeton, not to be acquired without both a stellar senior thesis and across-the-board As in one's major: many departments would have no summas in any given year.

Sotomayor applied to Princeton in only the 3rd year of co-education. Princeton came to co-education late even for an Ivy, and the Board of Trustees had set strict limits on how exuberantly women could rush in. In particular, the original agreement between the University administration and the Board stipulated that the number of men admitted would never decrease -- no man would risk being out-competed by a woman for a seat at Princeton. Instead, the total number of students would have to increase: we women were explicitly competing for a separate pool of seats, a rather small one at first because there wasn't enough housing for us.

(And if housing was a problem, a female friend in the Class of 1975 reminds me that bathrooms were worse. It was only several years after I entered that it was no longer common to see a bathrobe-clad woman going out of one dorm and into the doorway next door, in search of a shower.)

As Polly said, quote Karabel: only 14 percent of the female applicants were accepted, compared to 22 percent of the men. ...[T]he women who were admitted to Princeton were even more elite both academically and socially than their male classmates".

This was obvious and much-discussed by the students ourselves. We could see that pretty much every woman admitted to Princeton was abnormally bright, ambitious, and hard-working, while the male population included a certain fraction of guys who were just there because going to Princeton was what the [Family Name]s *did*.

It was those men -- the Princeton equivalents of George W. Bush -- who were the beneficiaries of "affirmative action" at Princeton, not Sonia Sotomayor. PollyPerks quotes from Karabel:

"1968-1969 was also the year Princeton began to recruit Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans and expanded its efforts to recruit more 'disadvantaged' whites" (p. 398).

In 1972, Princeton reported that the freshman class included 22 Latino students, 15 Chicano students, 27 "Oriental" students, 5 Indian students, and 113 black students, for a total of 181 "Third World students" (as Princeton then called them) out of a class of approximately 1127 (p. 399).

To compare, the number of students admitted as athletes was 310 (p. 477) and many spaces (approximately 200-250) were taken by legacies, who were admitted with significantly lower qualifications (p. 467, 478):

"Princeton ... was careful not to tamper with legacy preference. Admissions rate for alumni children never fell much below double the rate for other applicants, and in the mid-1970s preferences for legacies actually increased. In 1975, 48 percent gained admission - a rate 2.3 times higher than other applicants." (p. 478)

In working on this post, I discovered that Sotomayor not only graduated summa cum laude (which is determined by the departments), she received the M. Taylor Pyne Prize for 1976.

The Pyne Prize is the highest award Princeton gives to an undergraduate (it goes to two people per year), and is supposed to reflect both scholarship and leadership.

It is flatly impossible for a Pyne Prize recipient to be "not that smart" or to "lack intellectual weight", as Rosen's "sources" said. There may be fashions or pressures in what specific person gets the award, but it's always to someone who looks *really* smart even when they're surrounded by very smart people. Frankly, I would have to be *insane* to not assume that Sotomayor is smarter than me -- I mean, one Pyne Prize winner for my year (1978) was Eric Lander, and he's pretty much smarter than anyone.

Now, I will admit that based on my mostly-paper-but-slightly-inside knowledge, Elena Kagan (Princeton Class of 1981) is probably in Sotomayor's league. Kagan also was summa cum laude, and received a very prestigious scholarship to study at Oxford after Princeton. From the Princeton point of view, it's all good. But also from the Princeton POV, both Sotomayor and Kagan look much more impressive than Samuel Alito (Class of 1972), who did well there but not blow-your-socks-off well.

In contrast, on paper, based solely on their academic records, Scalia and Roberts really are (or should be) at the top of the league. But then, that should also be the case for Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter. I don't know whether there's actually much correlation between undergraduate record and performance on SCOTUS. Remember, it's the absolute pinnacle of the profession, but it's also *a committee*, which means issues of personality, temperament, and social cunning can be at least as important as pure intellect.

What Karabel's book illuminated for me was how much of a dance Princeton and its ilk were negotiating in the 60s and 70s. Princeton et al. did not become co-ed and more diverse out of pure goodness of heart. A certain amount of idealism was definitely involved -- people at the colleges thought it was *right* that their educations, and by extension membership in America's ruling class, should be available to a wider range of candidates.

But they also knew that change was coming, and it was important for the new faces in the American power structure have some of the old labels: "Bottled at Princeton" or "Bottled at Harvard". The strength of the Expensive Higher Education brand, as it were, depended both on helping those who *should* succeed, and making sure that those who *would* succeed regardless (because of their inherited money and family) still passed through their gates.

Back when Alito was joining Concerned Alumni of Princeton to protest the University letting in a bunch of riff-raff, IIRC (from Karabel) Shelby Collum Davis argued that there was no point in wasting some of Princeton's future-leaders spots on women, because it was preposterous to think women were going to be future leaders. Similar arguments could have been (and probably were) made for black students, Latinas, Asians, and so forth.

As an aside, I assume Alito, who got into Princeton out of pure ability (poor, local, Catholic, Italian) and was always a bit outside the WASP social structure, wanted to make sure that the club door was slammed behind him, to maintain the cachet of the brand he had worked so hard to achieve.

Now, at last, we can really start to see how well the Expensive Higher Ed admissions staff from the 60s and 70s did their job. Their job was to make sure that when Americans, decades later, went looking for possible Supreme Court justices or even Presidents who weren't white men, the obvious candidates bore the Expensive Higher Ed brand names. Sotomayor, Kagan, and both Obamas represent not only great advances for American inclusiveness, but great successes for the Ivy League system and its role, good and bad, in the American power structure.

Updated to correct some errors and obscurities.

Also: I haven't seen a blog yet, left or right, where either the poster or the comments doesn't say something about Sotomayor being an affirmative action beneficiary. I can't believe it's coincidence that the one of her cases that has attracted most attention was about affirmative action. Glenn Greenwald's update this morning has plenty of links to how this is being played out.

And to those still wondering "but why does it have to be a *woman*? What about the best person for the job?" -- The display the male justices put on during the recent oral arguments about the strip-search case made it brutally clear that the current gender balance on SCOTUS is intolerable.

Blogcomment record: Speaking as a woman who was there

2009-05-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

Another old comment: This one I left at Inside Higher Ed, in the discussion surrounding the nomination of Samuel Alito to SCOTUS and his membership in "Concerned Alumni of Princeton", or CAP.

I entered Princeton in 1974, in the 5th year of coeducation. Obviously I did not know Mr. Alito, but like all other undergrads I was very familiar with CAP and "Prospect", which was distributed free around campus.

Though this article did not show it, "reactionary" was indeed the only word for CAP. For instance, in 1973 Shelby Cullom Davis (CAP's founder and moneybags) said, "Why should not a goal of 10-20% women and minorities be appropriate?" (quoted in Jerome Karabel's "The Chosen") -- this at a time when the freshman class was already 25% female and at least 5% non-Jewish minorities, not to mention around 10-15% Jews. They wanted Princeton to reverse course to be again overwhelmingly white and male, and "reactionary" is the word that fits.

As Mr. Strauss said, most students found CAP mockworthy: e.g. the halftime show at the 1974 Harvard game:
http://www.princeton.edu/~puband/halftimes/1974.html
(warning: sophmoric humor).

My problems with Judge Alito & CAP arise from his claim that he didn't remember what the organization stood for. Arguments over CAP went on for years in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (and I expect the next issue to be pretty exciting, too) and occasionally spilled over to the New York Times. Tigers don't forget things about Princeton, and we don't stop caring.

Far from being opposed to affirmative action, CAP was in favor of quotas. They wanted to limit the number of female & minority students at Princeton, and were in favor of "affirmative action" (though not so-called) to boost the acceptance rates for white males, especially those from boarding prep schools. Before Princeton went to sex-blind admissions (1974) our standards for female admits were much higher than for males, and CAP wanted to exacerbate that.

Now playing

2009-05-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

Mixed bag of recent comments, to keep track of what discussions I'm in where.

More at Dreher's Culture and the knowability of truth:

the stupid Chris:

Shucks, my blushes. But really, you *have* to laugh -- when Copernicus did it, it was a watershed in human thought. At this point, it's a long-running gag.

the essence of the contemplative life is to banish C/certainty and A/authority as we muddle our way toward T/truth.

I think it's significant that various schemes for contemplative lives (in many traditions) all involve great discipline and stability in what you actually *do* with your time. Contemplatives may banish ontological certainty, but they generally live to very strict schedules. They still meet the basic human emotional need for stability, just not in philosophical matters.

at Ta-Nehesi Coates' It's the Racism, Stupid:

What was the gain from white supremacy? If not material, then what spiritual gain could people think they were getting? Something big enough to kill over, something important enough to forgo material gain in order to preserve. What?

Their place in the hierarchy.

As long as blacks were "in their place", not being "uppity", a white man -- no matter how poor and ignorant -- could not be the bottom rung. Upper-class or educated white men can afford not to be racist, because they won't fall to the very bottom just because blacks are in the hierarchy. But the further down the ladder a white man is, the more threatened he is by black equality.

I think the exact same process drives homophobia in the black community. As long as homosexuals are despised, no straight black man can be the very bottom of the social scale.

At Plumb Lines' Are "We" Guilty of Torture?:

our shared cultural belief that the body is different from the person

Wow, do I disagree. One would then assume that a less dualistic culture would be less prone to war crimes — the Japanese, for instance.

No, I think the reasons for both the high-level and low-level torture policiess were perfectly outlined by John Dean several years ago, in Conservatives Without Conscience: this is authoritarianism.

At Daniel Larison's Of “Centrists” And Moderates:

what pundits and journalists usually describe as “centrism” is capitulation to the other side on high-profile pieces of legislation by going against the grain of one’s own party in a melodramatic way and usually by backing the position that had won the approval of political establishment figures.

This is why a *lot* of us wanted you to get a Times/Post slot. Still want — surely they can swap out Krauthammer, now that he has re-defined “bottom of the moral barrel”?

At hilzoy's Disbar them:

I also really, *really* want to see professional sanctions against the doctors and psychiatrists. Are there any moves being made in that direction?

Today at ObiWi

2009-05-04T12:20:00.000-07:00

Keeping track of my comments at Obsidian Wings today:

In hilzoy's post on demographic trends:

lebecka:

But just wanted to point out that people have kids for many reasons, and in some countries, it's because no one else will take care of you when you're old.

Speaking as a biologist, I actually think that this is more often the case than not, and it's one of the most distinctive features of human demographics: most people (across societies and over the long course of history and pre-history) do not have offspring to reproduce, but for social security.

I *do* basically agree with Slart and Jes, that falling birthrates are *not* a global problem. The falling Russian birthrate discussed in that World Affairs Article would not IMHO be a "problem" if they were not due to factors like "mortality levels for women in their twenties ... have been rising, not falling, in recent decades."

Eberstadt drops this absolutely crucial demographic factor into his discussion, but then resolutely doesn't talk about it for the rest of the article. He talks about increased deaths from cardiovascular disease -- but surely that's not hitting women in their 20s. He talks about alcohol poisoning (traditionally a problem for older males) and has a vague discussion about "injuries". Could that lump under the carpet be women killed by drunken and/or stressed men?

At hilzoy's post on Cheney's character:

John Dean in Conservatives Without Conscience used Robert Altemeyer's The Authoritarians to classify Cheney as a "double-high authoritarian": someone who scores high on measures of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), and also high on measures of Social Domination. Such people are extremely dangerous. RWAs tend to have a stronger-than-normal fear response: an intrinsically frightening event like 9/11 will feel *even more* frightening to a RWA.

What has struck me recently, as more and more of Cheney's actions come to light, is how *incompetant* he is compared to Nixon. He may have been Nixon's apprentice, but he doesn't seem to have learned anything at all about how to actually achieve things, neither in terms of politics (getting people on your side) nor of administration (e.g. the Iraq war planning). But Nixon wasn't a true Double-High Authoritarian -- he never felt comfortable as the Number One Guy in Charge, Shut Up and Listen to Me, and that discomfort meant that he could do un-Cheneylike things like change his mind and go to China, or push through the Clean Air and Water Acts.

Cheney has, as far as I can tell, accomplished absolutely nothing but misery.

At publius' post on the Oklahoma Republican Party platform (comments include LOLarious accounts of various state parties' wacky hijinks):

On the internet I tend to use lgbt, but since I mentally pronounce it "legib′it", it's not really appropriate (or comprehensible) in airspace. What I want to say out loud is "queer", but that's *also* proved a source of confusion, so I just fall back on "homosexuals" when I want to be moderately clear and moderately inclusive without spending too many syllables on it.

later ..

In the UK, it's pronounced ell-gee-bee-tee, FWIW.

That tends to be standard in the US, too, but I find it tongue-tangling. Do you say "ell-gee-bee-tee" in your mind, or "legibit", or something else?

Blogcomment record: The Wealth of Nations, 1

2009-05-03T13:35:00.000-07:00

Steven Brust is reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. My comments on Chapter 1:

there is very little division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies

I absolutely disagree. Compared to, say, a baboon troop, there is enormous and striking division of labor in even the most “primitive” human society.

If you look in the Hunter-Gatherer Wiki thinking of chimpanzees or baboons as your baseline for “no division of labor”, what you’ll see is that in most cultures most jobs are the speciality of one sex or the other.

Because humans specialize, they are much better at both gathering and hunting than chimpanzees or baboons would be. Another way of looking at it is that a single human, trying to find food in the wilderness, is not going to be much better at it than a chimpanzee, and will probably die.

H-G groups start teaching girls and boys somewhat different sets of specialized skills at an early age, so by the time they’re adults they are, compared to other apes, specialized, highly-skilled, and co-dependent.

I think there’s a level of confusion here because agriculture is less skill-and intelligence-dependent than foraging. In modern terms, most agricultural work is unskilled labor; most foraging work is semi-skilled to skilled labor. There is no monotonic “progress” in specialization as you move from foraging societies to farming and then toward civilization (=cities), modern and post-modern.

Peter:

Yes, there are more specialists in an agricultural society. But *most* of the people are less specialized — less dextrous, in Smith’s terms — than their foraging forbears. That’s IMHO where the proletariat comes from — it’s only with agriculture that you get the possibility of large groups of unskilled and disposable adults.

Another old blogcomment record: The Rebel Flag

2009-04-28T17:53:00.000-07:00

David Neiwert of Orcinus had a post in February 2008 on Those Confederate Values and the use of the Confederate flag as a symbol. He wrote:

Why would the Confederate flag be an issue in northwestern Washington? Because it is a symbol of white supremacism for people well outside the South as well. This is why phony arguments about its meaning are only cover for the stark reality that anyone -- particularly anyone of color -- who is confronted by the flag knows all too well: The Confederate flag is meant to intimidate -- to trumpet the values of white supremacy. The "heritage" which it harkens back to is mostly rife with the charred corpses of lynched innocents.

My comments:

I must respectfully disagree. My knowledge is second-hand, based on the experiences of my husband.

He grew up in Atlanta -- so he saw plenty of Confederate Pride first-hand -- but he is also Jewish and grew up very well aware of its dark side.

It's his opinion that the Confederate-flag-on-the-pickup-truck guys do not necessarily choose that emblem as a symbol of white supremacy, but because they think of themselves as "Rebels". It's not about *State's* rights, either, it's about their personal rights not to do what other people say. That's one reason the flag goes along with the gun rack on their iconic pickup -- both are there to demonstrate individualistic cantankerousness.

So when you say the flag can *only* symbolize racism, I don't think that's true.

My husband also believes haystack is incorrect, it's not about "a deep-rooted respect for my elders" -- because the self-styled Rebels don't have much use for judges, teachers, or anyone else who tells them what to do. And they're just as willing to defy their state government as they are to defy the Feds -- it's just that defying the Feds is easier. It's a poor, petty, basically cowardly symbol of rebellion -- but that *is* an important part of what the Confederate flag symbolizes, and why those guys get so mad when people say it's all about race.

But what are they rebelling against? Let's be honest here, they are rebelling against those so called P.C. special rights that blacks have.

My native informant is of the opinion that many of them are rebelling against *everything* -- it's a generalized, free-floating rebellion, for a generalized, free-floating resentment.

Yes, the racism is there, and the sexism, and the anti-Semitism. But that's not what they're *thinking* of -- they're thinking of the Dukes of Hazzard, just good ol' boys fightin' the System, as they see it.

Now the fact that their actions & rhetoric end up supporting the System is thorougly ironic -- but they're not really ironic guys and they're piss-poor at perceiving social structures. So telling them that the flag on their pickup or on the roof of the General Lee can only be an endorsement of slavery will make them mad, and they'll also think you're stupid for not understanding them.

They think they're just Rebels. It's more of an emotional stance than a political attitude: Don't Tread on Me is another popular symbol used in pretty much the same way.

Not Celtic, exactly, as we will learn if Mrs Robinson has time to get around to the next parts of Albion's Seed.

Briefly, people from the Scots & Irish border areas of the UK came to the US backcountry. For centuries they had lived in a region swept back and forth by wars over which they had little control, and the result was a culture xenophobic, resentful, organized around family bonds and feuds, and libertarian. Borderers cling to custom and the idea of the past, but don't treat elderly people particularly well. They're culturally conservative but resent authority, especially when it gets all up in their faces.

As for the “rebellion” pose, why do these supreme individuals use the Confederate battle flag instead of the Jolly Roger?

Well, some *do* use the Jolly Roger, and others use the "Don't Tread on Me" flag.

As several people in this discussion have suggested, outside the area of the old Confederacy the Confederate flag is more likely to be a purely racist emblem. Inside, it's all mixed up with "Rebellion Without a Clue" (*well* put, Mitch) and local pride.

It sounds like Doctor Science is saying that the “rebels’” adoption is as ignorant of the meaning behind the symbol as that of other “rebels” who buy scrawled circle-A gear at Hot Topic.

Pretty much. There's a stronger element of pride in one's own ignorance, of willfully ignoring what might make you feel bad about yourself or your ancestors.

The thing is, I predict that in November there are going to be a surprising number of guys who will drive to their polling place in a truck with a Confederate flag decal -- and vote for Obama. And they will do this with no particular sense of dissonance, even if it makes *my* head explode thinking about it.

Obama appeals to these guys, because he makes them feel good about being American -- he makes them feel hopeful, he makes them feel like they can walk away from the past. That feeling is more important to them than the color of his skin.

Torture, various

2009-04-23T14:08:00.000-07:00

So I've been spending *way* more time than is comfortable reading about the unfolding torture memos saga. At Obsidian Wings, hilzoy posted about the "Perfect Storm" of policy-making ignorance. In the ensuing discussion, I wrote:

I agree with Nell that Shane & Mazzetti's "ignorance" explanation makes no sense.

they make it a technical, bureaucratic, institutional kind of failure rather than what it clearly is: a complete failure of moral judgement and courage on the part of powerful people

-- but I don't think the institutional/bureaucratic failure and the moral failure should be contrasting explanations. When Gary says:

most personnel working constantly with classified material tend to disregard material in the public domain

-- that's IMHO an extremely believable and important point. The allure of having the Special Classified (hermetic, esoteric) Knowledge makes people lose track of the fact that it isn't as good -- it's not been gone over by as many minds, it hasn't been looked at from as many sides. It will tend to be tactical and technical rather than strategic, or strategic rather than meta-strategic -- which is usually the level where moral thinking comes in.

Meanwhile, over at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, E.D.Klein was writing about how long it might take the tide to turn for current torture apologists. My comment (re: discussion):

I’d also like to know where this “recruiting tool” meme comes from.
From logic. … Do you not think the countrymen of the men we’ve wrongly tortured (and sometimes killed) would not have similar anger against the country that did that to them?

I would take it even further than that. Torture is *evil*, it is what the Bad Guys do. When we do it — when we excuse it, when we *endorse* it — we become Darth Vader, the obvious embodiment of Evil. We make people opposed to us look like the Good Guys. Of course it’s a wonderful recruiting tool — lots of people (especially the young kind who make good soldiers) *want* to fight Darth Vader, they *want* to be a Good Guy and fight the Bad Guys.

How could you expect it to be otherwise? Unless, of course, you yourself would rather be on the winning side than on the side of undoubted moral Good.

Medical insurance

2009-04-20T14:09:00.000-07:00

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings posted on Why We Need Universal Health Insurance, pointing to Kate Michelman's account in The Nation of what her family has gone through. In the ensuing discussion, I wrote -- in response to one of the local libertarians:

Brett:

What I honestly don't understand is why you're more frightened of the government than you are of the medical insurance industry. I wrangle with some government agency maybe once a year, twice if you count taxes automatically; I wrangle with a medical insurance company or their effects at least once every six to eight weeks.

I have not been personally *afraid* of what the gov't will do, even when we discovered we owed $2K for last year -- they can cope, they'll listen to reason. I have been *afraid* of insurance companies, I have had to experience direct physical pain because of their decisions -- like, for instance, not approving a medication I need before a weekend. Or the time when my coverage lapsed for a month, and I had to cut back on my meds to skirt the edge of illness. Or my husband being in constant knee pain but the company not having agreed to surgery for him, because it hasn't hurt *enough* yet.

You say the government works by coercion and the frequent threat of violence, but I honestly do not see that as realistic threat. The threat I feel from medical insurance companies is direct and personal, a matter of my daily health. What Kate Michelman is experiencing -- what Gary Farber here is, for another -- is closer to a literal life-and-death struggle.

Are you saying that this isn't familiar to you, either personally or in people close to you?

Domestic violence

2009-04-16T08:37:00.000-07:00

Over the past week or so there's been an interesting and emotional series of posts in the political blogosphere about domestic violence, which I guess kicked off with :Linda Hirshman talking about Morgan steiner's book Crazy Love.

hilzoy:

Why do they stay? (April 10) Must-read.

Battered Women: The Sequel (april 13)

And another thing (April 15).

Ta-Nehesi Coates:

When You Love Someone Who Chokes You

Abuse and Responsibility (april 9). Must-read.

Battered Women and Responsibility, Pt. 2 (april 14)

Rambling, rambling, and more rambling (april 15)

On Last Note on Spousal Abuse (April 15)

-----------
I can't remember if I posted multiple times, but I've certainly read a lot -- these posts, and their *voluminous* comments. My comment on hilzoy's latest post, for the record:

It's not often that I disagree with Jes[urgislac] by being the *more* radical feminist one, but this time I do.

in any discussion of partner abuse, domestic violence, I agree it's probably better to attempt gender-neutral language - difficult though that is.

Abuse of women by male partners is objectively worse (=more likely to lead to murder, for instance) but also *different* from abuse of men. It is different because it has been -- historically, and in many cultures or subcultures still is -- endorsed. It is expected, it is normal, it is something (some proportion of) men feel entitled to do. They feel that way because other people back them up.

The problem of humans getting violent with their intimate partners is probably eternal. The super-problem here, the over-arching problem, is that one particular sort of violence is tolerated, endorsed, classified as "chastisement" or business as usual. IMHO treating female-on-male abuse as the equivalent of socially-endorsed male-on-female abuse is a way of directing attention away from the social factors, and in particular from the way that *we*, the rest of society, are complicit.

Libertarianism and philosophy: some old comments

2008-12-10T20:59:00.000-08:00

Way back in June 06 there was a very long debate on Obsidian Wings that strongly influenced my thinking on a number of issues. I just realized I never posted my comments here, so I'm doing it now.

Back then hilzoy, a moral philosopher, was weighing in on a left blogostan debate about Libertarians: Can we offer them someonething to de-Republicanize them?

Libertarians And The Democratic Party: Part 1

I came to play:
-----------------------

In my observation, libertarians are people who don't believe that humans are social animals. They do not want to care about other people and they do not want other people to care about them. This at least is more honest than conservatives, who want to be cared for without being caring.

Presumably, she believes this not because she wants poor people to have untreated illnesses; I imagine that if libertarians could cure all poor people's illnesses by waving a magic wand, they would.

It's not exactly that they want poor people to have untreated illnesses, it's that they don't believe anyone should expect something (like medicine) they haven't earned, preferably in the marketplace. They certainly don't believe in magic wands -- you can't get something for nothing, everyone's got to stand on their own two feet, and if all they have is stumps, well, libertarians never told you life is *fair*, did they? So if poor people have to die to prove that life is unfair, that's just reality, not the fault of libertarians.
---------------------------------
later in the thread, I wrote:
---------------------
Gary:

It's quite possible that I *am* confusing libertarians (in general) with Randroids, because all the people I knew in my formative years who called themselves "libertarian" were, in fact, Randroids.

I am basing my opinions about libertarians not on the Libertarian Party nor even the Cato Institute, but on conversations I've had with self-identified libertarians over the years. And on Heinlein.
---------------------------------
The discussion rolled over to a part II, to discuss libertarian ideas about justice and property.:
Libertarians And Democrats: Part 2. I wrote:
-----------------
Heaven knows how long this discussion will be by the time I get my entry typed in.

Putting on my Evolutionary Biologist Hat, I say:

The "state of nature" for Homo sapiens is social. We are social animals, so our state of nature is one where we live, forage, and raise our young with other members of our species. The philosopher's state of nature is not just a theoretical construct, but untrue: it is an attempt to describe human nature in a way that is not our nature.

When I use a word, it means just what I want it to mean, and so when I say "state of nature" I mean: small groups of hunter-gatherers, related by blood and marriage, moving around a lot and interacting with other small groups from time to time. That is the human state of nature.

I agree completely with Hilzoy that Nozick and Hayek are mistaken in postulating that their concept of property is in some way the most basic, logical, or fundamental. On the contrary, it is highly derived and specialized, dependent on a particular set of social & historical constructs.

Now you see why in the other thread I described libertarians as "people who don't believe humans are social animals".

In the human state of nature we can expect ideas about property not to be based on a simple principle (such as the "labor theory of value") but on a system in which the concept "ours" is at least as important as "mine" -- because we are social animals.

Hilzoy kills the antelope and Mona comes to take it. In the human state of nature, *everything* depends on the relationship between Hilzoy and Mona.

If they are part of the same family unit, the antelope may belong to both of them regardless of who killed it, and Hilzoy may be considered immoral or thievish if she doesn't give Mona at least half.

If Mona is Hilzoy's mother or grandmother, it may be Mona's obligation to take the antelope from Hilzoy for redistribution, and Hilzoy might be a thief if she tries to hang onto it.

Or the antelope may be thought of as belonging to a goddess, and now that it is dead Hilzoy has the right to use certain parts of it, but others must be given away or burned.

None of Nozick & Hayek's views of property are found in nature.

1. you can own pretty much anything

If you look at any basic ethnography overview (the one I grabbed first is Indians of North America by Harold Driver) you see that in most societies what can be owned by individuals is restricted: tools and ordinary clothes are the most common individual property. Houses, different kinds of land, different kinds of food, ceremonial or fancy clothes and chattels, the right to farm, hunt or gather in a particular place, even songs and other incorporeal property -- all these things are usually owned by groups, anywhere from a couple to a whole tribe of tribes.

2. you can give or sell what you own at will

This is almost never the case. Even if the chattel is one you own directly, you may not have the right to sell it, exchange it, or allow others to use it. Frequently, a group will own land and have the exclusive right to use it, but not to give it away: it's basically entailed, and *must* be inherited.

3. you are entitled to all the proceeds of any voluntary transaction you enter into.

This situation doesn't correspond to much that happens in the human state of nature, but when it does the individual who makes the transaction almost never gets to keep all the proceeds.

Here's an example of modern property that is held in a way typical of the human state of nature, but doesn't correspond at all to Nozick & Hayek's views:

"My" wedding dress was made by my grandmother's sister for my grandmother's wedding. A generation later, it was worn by my aunt, and then by my mother, at their weddings. Still later, I wore it at my wedding. It is currently in storage, waiting for my daughters to grow up.

Who does this dress belong to? I wore it most recently, so N&H might say it's mine. But if you think I or anyone else in the family can give it away or sell it "at will", you're psychotically mistaken. The dress is the collective property of all the women in my family line, both living and dead. Everyone gets to use it, but no-one gets to sell it, and delicate negotiations would be required if someone else wanted to use it, e.g. a woman who married in to the family.

This dress is property, but it is about *relationships*, and property rights are really about what sorts of human relationships you think are most likely and important.
-------------
still later:
------------
My goodness, what a thinky bunch.

Jonas:

We are not merely on different pages, but seem to be reading from different books, so I'm not sure it's worth either of our times to try to understand each other better right now, especially given the stunning length of the comments here.

In general, as I think about this so very thought-provoking post and discussion, it emphasizes for me how absolutely critical it is to avoid leaping to postulates.

Nozick's postulates are deeply libertarian, so he's bound to come up with some pretty libertarian conclusions. He (and other libertarians) talk about radically individual humans, who enter only into voluntary associations, who mostly deal with strangers, for whom property is completely alienable in exchange for completely fungible money.

I'm arguing that none of these conditions are met by humans in a human state of nature (who are born into extended families, who encounter few strangers, who possess very little in the way of stuff, and who have no money at all). Because the human state of nature lasted far, far longer than our libertarian present day, thought experiments based on that state are likely to given results that fit our unconscious emotional needs, they will feel "right".

My gut reaction to Hilzoy's discussion of the "patterned view" of justice versus the "process view" is to go all Jewish-prophet-y and say, "Justice will come when you pay less attention to your damned stuff, and more to other people!"

Example: the story of Solomon and the two mothers with one baby (1 Kings 3:16-28). The evidence does not permit the King to judge which is the mother, so he says he'll do the "fair" thing and chop it in half. One mother says, "OK, that's fair", and the other says "No, give the baby to her, just don't hurt it!" By this Solomon knows that the protesting mother is the "real" one, and deserves the baby.

Solomon's threat is the threat of fairness; Solomon's justice is that he restores right human relationships. "Property justice" is not measured by a pattern -- of uniformity or otherwise -- *or* by a fair process which must logically produce fair results. "Property justice" occurs only when it supports just human relationships. It doesn't matter how fair the process, if a beggar starves while a rich man feasts *this is not justice*, because justice is about having the right human relationships.

Libertarians are extremely principled people, but my own philosophy is closer to "persons before principles" (quote from the works of Lois McMaster Bujold).

Political Branding: Family and/or Party

2008-12-03T18:23:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald posted about Nepotistic succession in the political class. GG said that this kind of near-hereditary political problem is a new and growing trend in the US; several of us wondered if that is true, in historical perspective. I wrote:

I agree that there's definitely room for a book and/or PhD thesis about political nepotism in American history. I went to Wikipedia's lists of Governors for New Jersey and Connecticut, two states (a) I've lived in (b) that go back to the beginning. Just eyeballing the lists of names (and not doing the statistics that someone really ought to do), it seems to me that there was more nepotism before the Civil War and then again after WWII.

My preliminary hypothesis would be that the intervening period was a time when political parties were extremely strong, stronger than they are now. When party is a strong identifying brand, family or name doesn't have to be -- and may even work against one. [just spent time trying to track down the pretty good book about turn-of-the-19th-century party politics I read in the spring, failed. bah.]

Preliminary prediction: nepotistic succession will be rarer in Parliamentary systems than in the US. Prelimary test: List of recent Prime Ministers of the UK, where you have to go back to Harold Wilson to find a P.M. from a political family. By comparison with the comparable period of US Presidents, the UK PM list also comes from a wider range of class backgrounds and a *much* wider range of educational backgrounds.

Very preliminary conclusion: we need either stronger parties (fewer independents, for instance), better nepotism, or some other way for rising politicians to acquire an identifiable brand.

Economicsts' mistakes

2008-12-02T05:16:00.000-08:00

Brad DeLong posted Why I Was Wrong. In the comments, I said:

I basically agree with Barry. The people who caused this mess appear to have been *flawlessly* rational actors: they have been personally enriched to a truly astounding (one might say "obscene") degree without taking any personal risk or suffering any personal consequences.

When Brad says, for instance, that he didn't expect:

"(3) the discovery that banks and mortgage companies had made no provision for how the loans they made would be renegotiated or serviced in the event of a housing-price downturn."

and

"(8) the failure of highly-leveraged financial institutions to have backup plans for recapitalization in place in the case of a major financial crisis"

I submit that he was wrong because he was expecting those organizations to act like single entities, for the people within them to work (generally speaking) for the good of the institution. Instead, to Barry and me it looks as though the most powerful people in those organizations were acting as libertarian individuals, concerned only with their own ends -- which is exactly the philosophy they claimed to admire. And it certainly seems to have worked for them, so why were you surprised?

When Alan Greenspan said "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms." I didn't believe him. How could The Compleat Randian *not* expect individuals to be looking after their personal interests first?

But the fact that Brad, whom I think is less likely to prevaricate than Greenspan, says the same thing leads me to believe that maybe Greenspan was telling the truth. You-all believed on the one hand that people are and should be rational, self-interested, selfish and greedy actors -- but you also believed the people *you* know personally, the smart and the wealthy and the powerful and the well-connected, aren't "like that".

mike: The "fat cats" are not losing compared to everybody else. In relative terms, they're still on top. In absolute terms, they're even more secure: they don't face unemployment, homelessness, loss of medical coverage; their children will not be eligible for reduced-price school lunches. They suffer no direct personal suffering.

"because of the egos and attitudes of the main participants, and as such it was not predictable"

My argument is that the ego and attitudes of the main players were *entirely* predictable, especially given that economics is about predicting human behavior. The collapse of Lehman specifically might be contingent, but that institutions without enough insider support would fail was completely foreseeable.

Is there a "Religious Left"?

2008-12-02T05:14:00.000-08:00

Tony Jones of beliefnet, responding to Jeff Sharlet, asks Is There a Religious Left? I wrote:

As "Your name"* demonstrates, the answer to Tony's question is "Yes".

Back in November 2004, Jeff Sharlet confessed it quite clearly, talking about questions he and Peter Manseau were asked while discussing Killing the Buddha:

"What’s the common denominator of American faith? What is it that most of us share?"

We lied every time. We offered up sincere but misleading tributes to freedom of speech as the American devotion. We avoided the answer that had made itself as plain as the two-lane roads we drove on: The greatest common denominator of American belief is anti-homosexuality."

I will extend that to say that opposition to women's free choice of abortion is a cross-denominational metric of the "religious right".

What these two tenets -- anti-homosexuality and anti-choice -- have in common is opposition to anything other than traditional sex roles. So:

The "religious right" is anyone who believes that the most important function of religion is to support traditional sex roles.

The "religious left" is anyone who believes that the most important function of religion is *anything else*.

Anything. If opposition to abortion and/or gay marriage is not your first-tier, make-or-break religious issue, you're on the religious left. That's all it takes. So in a way, yeah, you could say there's no "religious left", because they have no unifying principle except not thinking the patriarchy is all that. The only way the religious left could be unified is by coming out (pun intended) as anti-patriarchal.

*the homophobic troll who had made the comment before mine on the blog.

A Traditional Turkey Day

2008-11-27T11:28:00.000-08:00

As a public service, here are the recipes for My Traditional Turkey Dinner: Herb-Brined Turkey, Chestnut-Rice-Rye Stuffing, Roasted-Garlic Gravy, and Two-Cranberry Sauce with Grand Marnier.

In order of preparation:

1. Stock

6 lb turkey parts such as backs, necks, wings, drumsticks, or thighs
3 medium yellow onions, left unpeeled, then trimmedand halved
3 celery ribs*, cut into 2-inch lengths
3 carrots, quartered
6 fresh parsley stems (without leaves)
1 Turkish or 1/2 California bay leaf
10 black peppercorns
5 qt cold water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Preheat oven to 500°F, put rack on lowest level. Roast turkey parts in large ungreased roasting pan, starting skin sides down and turning once, until golden brown, 30 to 45 minutes. Transfer to stockpot with tongs, then roast vegetables in fat rendered from turkey, onions cut sides down first, stirring halfway through roasting, until golden, 10 to 20 minutes total, and then add vegetables to pot. Deglaze roasting pan with 2 cups water. Pour pan juices into stockpot with rest of water and remaining ingredients and bring to a boil over high heat, skimming froth as necessary. Reduce heat and gently simmer, partially covered, 3 hours.

Remove pot from heat and cool stock to room temperature, uncovered, about 1 hour. Pour stock through a large fine-mesh sieve into a large bowl and discard solids. Measure stock: If there is more than 10 cups, boil in cleaned pot until reduced; if there is less, add water.

Cool stock and remove fat.

2. Brine:

12-16 lb turkey
3/4-1 1/2 c salt
3 gals water
1/2 cup whole black peppercorns
1/3 cup fresh thyme sprigs
1/3 cup fresh marjoram sprigs
1/3 cup fresh sage sprigs
12 Turkish bay leaves

Clean turkey, cut off tail and reserve, along with neck. Feed rest of giblets to cat if he cares for them.

Put a turkey-sized oven bag in a large cooler, then place the turkey in the bag. Pour in the brine and seal tightly. Place ice over and around turkey, close the lid tightly, and let it brine 8 to 10 hours, adding ice periodically to keep temperature at 40° or below.

3. Stuffing

2 cups rice (brown or white)
bay leaf
fresh or dried thyme
fresh or dried sage
1/4 c. unsalted butter
3 medium onions, chopped medium
3 stalks celery plus all the leafy bits from the bunch of celery*, chopped
3 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
1 14-oz jar cooked peeled chestnuts (or boil or roast your own, but these are *well* worth the money)
1 big round Knackebrod wheel (or equivalent in other rye crackers), about 4 oz.
white wine

Cook the rice with the bay leaf, 3-4 sprigs of thyme, and 3-4 big leaves of sage.

Melt the butter in a frying pan and saute the onions and celery until the onions are translucent.

Put the rice in a big mixing bowl (or your largest salad bowl) and add the onions & celery with their butter and the eggs. Crumble in the chestnuts and Knackebrod. Crumble in thyme & sage to taste. Mix together with the hands. Taste the stuffing and add pepper if you like, but not salt -- it will get salt from the brined turkey. Moisten with white wine until it hold together nicely.

4. Turkey

Turkey, above
Stock, above
Stuffing, above
1/4 c unsalted butter, softened
1/4 cup mixed herbs, chopped: thyme, sage, parsley, winter savory
8 large cloves garlic, unpeeled
white wine
1/4 c. flour

Preheat oven to 425°F. Mash herbs into the butter.

Take the turkey out of the brine and wipe off the herbs. Wipe out the inside with paper towels, but don't obsess over getting out all the herbs & pepper. Dry off the outside with paper towels as best you can.

Loosen the skin over the breast with your hands and smear herb butter inside. Wipe your buttery hands off all over the turkey. Tuck the legs into their holder, tie or tuck up the wings. Stuff the small (head end) hollow and tuck or sew the skin flap over it. Stuff the large hollow (tail end).

Put turkey on rack over roasting pan, put in oven on lowest level, and immediately turn the oven down to 350°F. Put the remaining stuffing in a casserole and lay the neck & tail on top. Set it aside to cook after the turkey is out of the oven (because you only have one small oven).

Roast the turkey 30-45 minutes, pour a cup of stock over. Roast 30 minutes, pour over another cup of stock. After another 30 minutes, baste turkey with pan drippings. Continue to baste at 1/2 hour intervals until done.

When you figure you have maybe 30-45 minutes left (depending on size of turkey), lightly oil the garlic, wrap it all up in aluminum foil, and put it in the oven next to the turkey.

When the thermometer says the turkey is done, take turkey, pan and garlic out of the oven. Pour a cup of stock into the casserole dish of extra stuffing, put it in the oven, and turn the oven up to about 400°F. Put the turkey on the carving board to cool down. At some point while you're making the gravy you'll need to turn the neck & tail over so their greasy tastiness gets into the stuffing.

Pour off the drippings from the pan into a measuring cup so the grease rises to the top. Deglaze the pan (=heat up with liquid to scrape up tasty bits) with 1/2 c white wine or whatever you need.

Squeeze the roasted garlics out of their skins into a medium saucepan. Add 1/4 c. flour and 1/4 c grease (from the drippings) and mash the garlic into the flour and grease over medium-high heat. After everything is nicely blended, mix in the wine & deglazed goodies from the roasting pan. Pour or scoop the extra grease out of the cup of drippings, and slowly add them to the pan. When the mixture thickens up, add two cups of turkey stock. Let it thicken, then add another 2 cups. Thicken again, another 2 cups stock. Taste for salt & pepper.

Make someone else carve the turkey.

Take the stuffing that comes out of the turkey and add it to the stuffing in the casserole, or put them together in a large bowl, mixing the two lots of stuffing together for uniform tastiness.

For extra credit:

A. My cranberry sauce

2 bags of fresh cranberries, picked over
1 bag dried cranberries
orange juice
2 cinnamon sticks
4 whole cloves
4 whole allspice
about 1/4 c brown sugar
1-2 tablespoons Grand Marnier (or other orange liqueur)

Put the fresh and dried cranberries in large saucepan, add orange juice to barely cover (amount will depend on how many cranberries were bad). Add spices (reduce amount if lots of the cranberries were duds) and brown sugar. Cook over medium-high heat until most of the fresh crans have burst -- about 15 minutes. Taste, and add more sugar if necessary. Take sauce off heat, put into bowl, and add Grand Marnier to taste. Chill.

The herb brining comes from this Epicurious recipe, the herb butter from this one, the stuffing was invented by my mother (who finds traditional bread stuffings too gluey and greasy), the gravy and cranberry sauce are basically my own inventions -- insofar as anything in a traditional meal counts as any one person's invention.

*this year I used the tops from celeriac (part of our CSA farm share), instead of celery.

False accusations of rape

2008-11-25T20:26:00.000-08:00

At Shakesville, Sunless Nick posted the definitive reply to people who say false accusation of rape is as big a problem as rape. My comment, in reply to another commenter (not Nick):

I think being accused of rape when one is innocent is as bad as being raped

I think *not*. Let's put it this way, of what other crime would you say something similar?

"Being accused of murder when one is innocent is as bad as being murdered."

"Being accused of beating someone to a bloody pulp when one is innocent is as bad as being beaten to a bloody pulp."

"Being accused of kidnapping when one is innocent is as bad as being kidnapped."

"Being accused of theft when one is innocent is as bad as being robbed."

"Being accused of plagiarism when one is innocent is as bad as being plagiarized."

The last one starts to come close to what you're talking about -- but notice that for plagiarism and the accusation, neither side is actually physically hurt: both the crime and the false accusation are about issues of repute and honor. Rape is a *physical assault* -- of course it's worse than a false accusation. The only possible reason to say that a false accusation is "as bad as rape" is if you take a really old-fashioned patriarchal approach, and say that the crime of rape is really against the honor and property value belonging to the raped woman's owner (husband, father, brother). In that case, rape *is* much more like theft or plagiarism: an attack on something that belongs to you, but not a direct attack on your person, the body where your self lives.

To equate rape and false accusation like that makes the actual woman and her actual suffering unimportant, and makes it seem as though she is not a real person, not as real as a man.

Books to understand America

2008-11-25T20:20:00.000-08:00

ari at Edge of the American West put up his list of history books that would allow an interested but non-expert reader to "understand America". My comments:

Albion’s Seed is a book I’ve given as a present several times, always to great effect. I absolutely think it belongs on the list, because its social history gives the context — the bones, as it were — for the political history on the rest of the list. For me, American Slavery, American Freedom can be subsumed into Albion’s Seed — that is, ASAP fleshes out a subset of the ideas in AS.

And for giving real context to your context, I think you also need to include 1491.

And if you’re looking for a book to open the door to discuss issues about women, the frontier, land use, industrialization, and education (to name a few), there is no source better IMHO than Laura Ingalls Wilder. If you have to pick just one volume, it should probably be either Little House on the Prairie or The Long Winter.

I am not kidding.

teofilo, the mandate is “10 books to help an interested but non-expert reader to *understand America*.” I think for that purpose I would drop the Gordon Wood, which is, as ari said, over-focused. I don’t know if there’s a Revolution-through-Constitution equivalent of McPherson.

If we’re including fiction — which I certainly would — I don’t see how Moby Dick gives an enormous amount of “understanding America”; Huck Finn is the lynchpin. I’m racking my brains, but I can’t think of a fiction about 20th-century America that is as pivotal and illuminating. The defining works of 20th-century culture are on film, IMHO.

SEK:

The reason I favor Huck Finn as opposed to Moby Dick for this purpose is that both landscape and characters are so varied yet characteristically American, and the ending of the book, though IMHO a literary failure, is a failure of an extremely American type. I think MD is a better *novel*, but HF is more helpful in understanding what we are and where we come from, what kind of people America has tended to grow up and what kind of stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

Also, SEK, in what way does Moby Dick contain a “larger sociological cast” than Huck Finn? The thing that jumps out at me is that Moby Dick contains neither women nor children: it is 100% guy with no non-guy elements, so calling it sociologically large strikes me as, well, wrong.

Not that there probably isn’t a paper to be written on “Huck/Jim and/or Ishmael/Queequeg: the Interracial Bromance of American Literature”, if Eve Sedgwick didn’t write it already.

War crimes and reconciliation

2008-11-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald interviewed Scott Horton about his Harper's article on how to prosecute Bush Admin war crimes. My comments:

"Get over it", they tell me.

Recently I've posted about my hope for war crimes trials in several different fora, and every time someone pops up to tell me to "get over it".

I have a question, for those whose memory is clearer than mine.

Back in the 90s, did Democrats use the retort "Get over it!" a lot, to Republicans who were talking about Clinton's sex life, etc.? Or did this start within the 8 years, and if so, when and why? I have the vague sense that I first encountered it as a catchphrase used to dismiss misgivings about Bush v. Gore, but I may be wrong.

First the national trauma, *then* the reconciliation

South Africa could have a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" because they had already had decades of national conflict and trauma. Post-WWII Germany could have de-Nazification because their country had been bombed to flinders.

The United States has not collectively *earned* Truth and Reconciliation, because most people in this country simply don't feel bad enough about what's gone on under Bush/Cheney. Obama showed no hints of righteous wrath during the campaign, which was undoubtably politically prudent -- there's no way an *angry* black man could have won this election.

Americans are very resistant to feeling bad about ourselves, but what about when we *should*? How do we get to the point of truth and (maybe) an eventual reconciliation, unless a large proportion (even a majority) of Americans are willing to say, "this was evil and it was done in our name." I gave up hope on that account in November 2004.

Fetal rights, category errors, and the Invisible Woman

2008-11-16T20:05:00.000-08:00

At Crooked Timber, John Holbo linked to a post about category errors and whether fetuses are human. In the ensuing discussion, I wrote:

Aulus:
But I think the arguments raised in this post all apply perfectly well to the purely personal, moral question, “should I abort this pregnancy?”

It is my impression that of the participants in this (local) discussion only Katherine, aimai, and I could ever theoretically ask this question.

What the rest of you (presumed) guys are asking is, “should I permit this woman to abort this pregnancy?” By making the question, “when is the fetus a human person?” you-all are gliding over the true issue, which is: “when is the woman a person?”

Don’t tell me “of course the woman is a person!” There is no “of course” about it—we women have not (historically, traditionally, conservatively) had the full rights of “real”, male human persons. We might not have the right to own property, drive a car, initiate a divorce, vote, run for office, be a doctor, have legal custody of our own children … it has depended on circumstance. A cynical woman would not assume, a realistic woman should not assume, that she has will automatically be granted all the rights a man may assume.

In particular, I don’t think any of you male-type persons here have been told that your body does not belong to you. If your sibling needed a bone marrow donation to treat their cancer, for instance, you would not be legally obliged to give it. You would not expect to be shackled to a bed for weeks or months if necessary, to keep someone else alive—even someone you should love (whether you do or not). You would certainly not expect total strangers to come up to you and give their opinions about whether you are drinking too much coffee, or smoking, or to stroke parts of your body and discuss your medical condition, lifestyle choices, etc.

It’s possible I’m the only one in this discussion here who’s actually *been* in that position, who’s borne children and who knows what it’s like to have my body be considered public property, to a certain degree. Fortunately for your male-type people, the worst offenders (by far) are women of the grandmotherly demographic, and I can kind of understand where they’re coming from—though it is certainly not a place know to most philosophers, so I suggest you back off. Unless you can talk about things like “episiotomies” without turning a hair.

A zygote will.

No, Julian, a zygote *might*, but it usually doesn’t. To get a human being requires both a considerable amount of luck *and* months of cooperation from a woman. You don’t get to decide that the zygote—not coincidentally, the only part of the process requiring a male—is the important bit, and then force the woman’s far more substantial contribution whether she likes it or not. Not to mention blaming her for all the factors known as “luck”, which in the normal course of events doom more than half of all zygotes anyway.

jcs:

I was going for an overcurrent of anger, actually. I’m not angry because you can’t bear children, I’m angry because, once again, a bunch of men are sitting around talking about what women should do with our bodies and our lives. As echidne of the snakes said after the final Presidential debate:

It is always extremely distasteful to watch two men discuss what should be done about abortion. Always, never mind what they say.

*Always*, dudes.

Do really believe this is a legitimate analogy? I mean I am pro-choice, so you do not need to convince me, but do you really think the two situations are comparable?

Organ donation and pregnancy? Yes.

In both cases, I’m giving up use of part of my body for the benefit of another person. In both cases, the consequences for me are at minimun painful, may include permanent changes to my body, and may be life-threatening.

Differences include that organ donation doesn’t generally take 9 months of increasing physical risk and constraint, doesn’t normally involve a 20-year commitment thereafter, and is hardly ever done more than once in a donor’s life.

In what way do you see them as *not* comparable situations?

jcs:
Should I understand your position to be that no man has any business ever discussing the notions of personhood and rights as those terms may pertain to a fetus?

He has no business discussing them without even noticing the woman. He has no business talking about fetal rights without mentioning that what makes fetal rights different is that they are literally embedded in another person’s rights. To discuss fetal rights without talking about women is to make women invisible, to erase us as persons, to make us The Women Men Don’t See.

I’m not so much angry at you personally, jcs, as at the way John H. could start this discussion and you-all could take it down to comment #14 before Katherine (surprise, surprise—NOT) mentions that there is a woman in the issue. At least you, jcs, seem aware that perhaps you *should* notice the woman, instead of some of the other commenters who just glide right over her, nothing to see here, move along.

Cheney and the Rule of Law: Scary

2008-11-16T13:27:00.000-08:00

At the new conservative blog Culture 11, Conor Friedersdorf worries:

if Dick Cheney is found guilty of a prison worthy offense, the process of investigating, trying and convicting him is going to be an exceedingly ugly one for the country.

I commented:

Count me in with those who don’t see how the “domestic nightmare” of trying Cheney for breaking the law is worse than letting him get away with breaking the law.

You’re going to have to be much more eloquent about what is in this domestic nightmare. What *specifically* are you afraid of? Rush Limbaugh (et al.), or Timothy McVeigh 2.0?

That is, are you afraid of:

1. Frankly authoritarian rhetoric from the right? From my lefty POV, we’ve had that for years anyway.

2. Frankly anti-authoritarian rhetoric from the left? Strikes me as implausible but happy-making.

3. Conservatives having to make a public stand either for or against might-makes-right authoritarianism? And the downside of this would be ….?

4. More right-wing terrorists (on the McVeigh model) foaming out of the woodwork? That’s a worry, all right, but doesn’t seem worth giving up the rule of law for — and reigning in the right-wing demagogues would do a lot to keep the lid on these people. But the right-wing demagogues can only be reigned in by other (rich powerful) people on the right — we lefties aren’t going to get Rush to ratchet back.

5. Full-fledged insurrection? On behalf of *Cheney?!?*

Conor (and Charles, in this discussion), you seem to be deeply fearful about *something*, but I really don’t understand what is so frightening that the idea of undermining the rule of law isn’t clearly worse.

Divisions with the GOP

2008-11-13T23:43:00.000-08:00

John Cole was talking about splits in the Republican Party. I wrote:

I’d say there’s a leftist consensus that there are two main factions in the GOP: the plutocrats (aka "economic conservatives") and the religious right (aka "social conservatives"). Of course there are also libertarians, neo-cons, and others, but those strike lefties as the most important divisions.

Those of you who read extensively in Right Bloglandia, is that how they see themselves? Do they see plutocrats versus social-cons as the important conflict? My superficial reading suggests that they don’t generally perceive plutocrats as such: everyone on the Right claims to be 4-square for Capitalism Uber Alles, so I’m not sure they notice where the real capitalists are.

Train Travel

2008-11-13T23:42:00.000-08:00

I returned on Sunday from the longest train trip I've taken in quite some time, maybe ever (I'm not sure if I remember taking a train from Chicago to NYC in the early 60s). My aunt passed away on Oct 28th, just before her 80th birthday. Yesterday was the memorial service and wake in North Carolina. We decided to go by train from Trenton NJ to Cary NC, about 9 hours and 540 miles (775km) each way.

We found the train trip to be both cost-effective and sane. It's cheaper than going by plane, and it takes longer it's not "that" much longer given the time it would take to get to the airport and go through Security Theater.

Even more important, my 6ft-tall husband can sit *comfortably*, without tormenting his bad back or worse knee. There are power strips down the sides of the cars, so he could plug in a laptop and even get work done (yes, I use a desktop. I read a book and snooooozed). Not a full, but something -- and you get off feeling exhausted and in need of a chiropractor. Especially if you were snooooooozing.

I've never taken a train south of Washington DC before. I don't think I've ever been down to Atlanta, etc., except by superhighway or air. Because there are no local trains in VA (south of the DC Metro area) or NC, there are only 2 train track "lanes" instead of the 4-5 or more you get in BosWash. So the trains are closer to the landscape and the area about the tracks is less grubby, making for a prettier ride than I'm used to in the NorthEast.

The Distant Future of Fandom and I were very interested to see how different the land use patterns are in in VA and NC compared to NJ & New England. I hadn't realized how *flat* the region is, and how much larger the fields are than the standard for farms further north. I was surprised not to see any tobacco fields (or at least none I recognized -- there's some tobacco farming in the Connecticut River Valley, believe it or not, and the barns for drying the tobacco are quite distinctive).

The house styles, the way the streets are laid out -- broader and straighter than north of the Mason-Dixon line -- reminded D very much of Georgia where he grew up, though the VA/NC area we went through is much flatter and not quite as piney. But to my surprise we went through areas in NC still being cultivated for lumber.

The landscape is beautiful right now -- north of DC the leaves are mostly fallen or past peak, but in VA/NC they're lovely and golden. I was suprised at how low the rivers in VA are -- crossing the James at Richmond, wide stone shoals are visible all across the river. The land doesn't look particularly drought-stricken -- weeds and vines are still green -- but they clearly didn't get as much of a hurricane season as usual.

Do you non-USans take long (more than 300mi/500km) train trips any more? What's train travel like for you?

My Favorite Martian Economist

2008-10-13T18:48:00.000-07:00

So my favorite economist won the Nobel-ish Economics Prize. Why is Paul Krugman my favorite economist?

1. As Patrick Nielsen Hayden said, for "his distinguished work in the field of Being Right".

2. He became an economist because he wanted to be Hari Selden.

3. He knows Doctor Who.

4. He quotes Monty Python.

5. He posted a LOLcat at the New York Times.

6. He wrote a paper on The Economic Theory of Interstellar Trade.

7. He writes as though his readers aren't dumb.

The Gender Gap in Voting

2008-10-01T16:07:00.000-07:00

Thinking vaguely through a political issue, again.

echidne of the snakes notes The Secret Demographic Topic in These Elections:

[quoting a Time poll:
Non-college-educated white women split virtually evenly, 46%-45% for McCain. By contrast, Obama remains weak among white men. That group supports McCain 57%-36% overall, and non-college-educated white men back the Republican ticket by an even greater margin, 63%-27%.
Do you know what I think? I think we can learn enormous amounts about the culture by asking why we don't discuss the voting patterns of white men.

I've been thinking about the voting gender gap: the fact that since about 1980 American women have been more likely to vote Democratic than men. Or that men are more likely to vote Republican, though it's usually not phrased that way.

This is a modern development. female conservatism was for many years a feature of voting behaviour in Europe and the United States. In Europe there is currently no particularly clear pattern -- in some countries women tend to be more conservative, in other countries it's men. Overall, there's a tendency for women to be risk-averse, which in many countries makes the average female voter slightly right of center.

All of the studies of the voting gender gap take male voters as the norm. But statistically, if there is universal adult suffrage *female* voters are expected to be the norm, because men have shorter lifespans and thus women will be more than 50% of adults.

If you assume female voters are normal, then what we've seen in the US looks like men moving rightward. Because men have disproportiate power, both major parties end up being toward the right. And that's just how it looks to our European friends: the US has one slightly-right-of-center party and one far-right party, but no significant leftist party by their standards.

I've just started reading "The Developmental Theory of the Gender Gap: Women and Men’s Voting Behavior in Global Perspective." by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. (pdf), and it looks as though their conclusion is that women are becoming more leftist than men in most post-industrial societies:

the modern gender gap is more strongly the product of cultural differences between women and men in their value orientations, especially attitudes towards postmaterialism and the women's movement...

in postindustrial societies the modern gender gap was strongest among the younger age groups while the traditional gender gap was evident among the elderly.

What it looks like to me is not so much women moving toward the left, but a pervasive and even growing sense of aggrieved entitlement among men (especially, in the US, white men), which is moving them toward the right, and dragging the mostly-male power structure with them.

In the US, at least, I think there's also something about war. War has become a distinctly conservative value, and a distinctly male value, in a way that wasn't necessarily the case historically. I tend to link this with subtractive masculinity, in which only sports and war are safely masculine endeavors, but there may be something else at work, too.

Meltdown in Progress: Useful links

2008-09-24T05:36:00.000-07:00

I am spending too much time reading about the financial crisis/bailout/meltdown. I hate money.

Good links that may help explain things:

Paul Krugman's blog, always.

Stirling Newberry on "The Crooked Deals that Made This Financial Meltdown Inevitable", Part 1. He promises Part 2 will be RSN.

The underlying problem then, is not the housing bust, since that could be dealt with by a relatively modest FDIC bail out of banks and changes to Freddie and Fannie, nor even the wall of paper that was created, since that could be dealt with by cleaning up a few toxic funds. It is that the very basic bet of the economy was wrong.

The very bet was that war and debt were all that was needed to grow for ever. Because every cent was being poured either into the war, or houses, or into gambling double and triple that these would expand forever, there was no money for anything else.

Nouriel Roubini on "The shadow banking system is unravelling".

Last week saw the demise of the shadow banking system that has been created over the past 20 years. Because of a greater regulation of banks, most financial intermediation in the past two decades has grown within this shadow system whose members are broker-dealers, hedge funds, private equity groups, structured investment vehicles and conduits, money market funds and non-bank mortgage lenders.

Like banks, most members of this system borrow very short-term and in liquid ways, are more highly leveraged than banks (the exception being money market funds) and lend and invest into more illiquid and long-term instruments. Like banks, they carry the risk that an otherwise solvent but liquid institution may be subject to a self-fulfilling and destructive run on its liquid liabilities.

But unlike banks, which are sheltered from the risk of a run – via deposit insurance and central banks’ lender-of-last-resort liquidity – most members of the shadow system did not have access to these firewalls that prevent runs.

Roubini emphasizes that the crisis will necessarily involve European financial institutions, as well.

Jerome a Paris is one of the people best placed to say "I told you so." Over the past couple of years, he has been talking about The Anglo Disease:

The Anglo Disease is the label I have been using to describe the current situation, whereby too much debt has made the financial sector dominant, and starved the rest of the economy of oxygen - and not-so-coincidentally transfering massive wealth from the working classes to the very rich: debt, managed by the financial sector, and working under assumptions of ever increasing returns, is both the core tool of very obvious policies and the very instrument to hide these from view; feeding the ideology of selfishness, and hiding (temporarily, but for much longer than even its creators dared hope, I think) the empoverishment of the many, it is both self-sustaining and popular for the masses, is it has become a full scale addiction.

White-collar deterrance

2008-09-22T18:05:00.000-07:00

I've left versions of this comment hither & yon. This one is from Bailout at Obsidian Wings:

You say "petulance" and "high moral dudgeon", I say "deterrance."

Stanley Hauerwas is a great theologian, scholar, ethicist, and proponent of non-violence. In Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence he argues against the "capital punishment has a deterrant effect" position, by saying (paraphrased), "if we really wanted to see effective deterrance, we'd have public executions on Wall Street for insider trading, and it would probably work."

I'm sure Hauerwas is being ironic and doesn't *really* believe in capital punishment for white-collar crime, but I think there's a lot to be said for direct, shaming punishment of wealthy malefactors. It's the Stan Lee principle for avoiding moral hazard: "With great power comes great responsibility, and also serious personal consequences when you f*ck up."

Vengence and schadenfreude are all very well, but what I want to see is some *deterrance*.

Meanwhile, at echidne's post about executive compensation, commenter Dr. Wu writes:

I am concerned that among your various proposals for achieving a long-term solution, you have not given sufficient consideration to the idea of identifying the best of the "smart and clever financial managers" and eating them.

It's a proposal, he said modestly.

Where are the McCain canvassers?

2008-09-17T03:53:00.001-07:00

I've decided to take this relationship to the next level, as they say, and start canvassing this weekend. I'm in safe-blue NJ, but just across the river from PA, so the local Obama office is sending us to Bristol/Lower Bucks County to go door-to-door on Saturday.

I've never canvassed before, so I've been surfing around looking for "helpful hints" and "what to expect". And I stumbled across something weird.

If you plug canvass for obama into Google, you get 282,000 hits. If you use canvass for mccain, you get only 141,000 hits -- but scanning the first few pages, most of those are about canvassing *against* McCain, not for him.

If you put everything in quotes, "canvass for obama" gets 8180 hits -- and "canvass for mccain" gets only 7 (seven) hits. That's a boggling and almost literally unbelievable thousand-fold difference.

Where are the McCain canvassers? The GOP has got to have a ground game, but where is it? How are they organizing their people? Are they not going door-to-door at all, but just reaching people on the phone?

I can't figure out if the McCain campaign is totally clueless, or if they have some sort of ninja canvassing force that's invisible until it strikes. Does anyone know?

It's not just Palin

2008-09-09T14:28:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin has been getting much-deserved flak because while she was mayor of Wasilla, rape victims were charged the cost of the forensic rape kit. The state had to pass a law making it illegal to charge victims for evidence collection. (the link is to the local Wasilla paper, from 2000.)

However, I don't think we can pin this on her, specifically. Charging rape victims for evidence collection turns out to be standard in North Carolina and Tennessee.

H/t to Women's Health News.

False witness

2008-09-09T06:19:00.001-07:00

Fred at slacktivist is really hitting it out of the park with False Witnesses, about lie- and rumor-mongering by supposed Real True Christians. I wrote:

I can't really figure out how it *works*, that people so tolerant of false witness for "a good cause" (this is also a leitmotiv of one of the books I'm currently reading, The Devil in Dover: An Insider's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America, by Lauri Lebo) can have so many serious discussions about whether it's OK to lie to save a life.

I mean, the point of such discussions in Sunday school, etc., is to get people used to the idea of consistent truth-telling as a highest goal, right? So why doesn't it take?

Do the discussions, sermons, etc., always involve dramatic and unlikely scenarios, instead of daily life? Or is it that Lying for Jesus is just too accepted for those in the culture to even notice it's happening?

What flags are for

2008-09-06T19:54:00.000-07:00

From hilzoy's post about Sen. Inhofe's questioning Obama's patriotism. The comments went on to include discussion of who took the flags from Invesco Field. I wrote:

My question for OCSteve (or whomever) is, why is this Democrats-threw-out-flags! story important to you? *Even if it were true* (which IMHO it is not), what would it signify?

What the Republican reaction looks like to me is idol-worship, fetishization. Flags are not particularly *good* symbols for a country: in the case of the US flag, for instance, they're objectively ugly and poorly-designed. They have no nuance, no complexity, no thought, no expression. A flag is not just simple, it's simplistic.

And what flags are for is war. Flags were developed to give soldiers something easily identifiable to follow or rally around -- they *have* to be simple and visually blunt to do that job. The Constitution would be a very poor battlefield token. And soldiers, in turn, need to be trained to react strongly to the flag, to follow it without taking vital time for thinking.

But what Republicans seem to be demanding is for civilians to have that kind of reaction, that kind of unthinking, reflexive response to a simple visual stimulus. This is not just idolatry, this is militarism -- which IMHO is a perversion of human society, whether it leads to Sparta or the Nuremburg Rallies.

Put Down the Sexism

2008-08-29T18:22:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted from DailyKos.

Just, drop it. Turn around and walk away.

Try going 24 hours while making comments about Sarah Palin that do not reference:

1. her anatomy or physiology

2. her attractiveness

3. her clothing

4. her hair or cosmetics

5. anything that can be abbreviated "I.L.F."

6. any of those qualities with regard to her husband or children

The biggest single danger of Palin's candidacy is that it will bring enough foaming misogyny out of the Democratic side to repel some female voters over to McCain.

The day after the NH primary, kos wrote of Hillary Clinton:

the more assholish her detractors behave, the more you help her. The way she was treated the past few days in New Hampshire was a disgrace, and likely a large reason for her surprise victory. So keep attacking her for bullshit reasons, and you'll be generating more and more sympathy votes for her.

...

The more she's attacked on personal grounds, the more sympathy that real person will generate, the more votes she'll win from people sending a message to the media and her critics that they've gone way over the line of common decency. You underestimate that sympathy at your own peril. If I found myself half-rooting for her given the crap that was being flung at her, is it any wonder that women turned out in droves to send a message that sexist double-standards were unacceptable?

Over at Shakespeare's Sister, the Sarah Palin Sexism Watch is already at Post #3. (#1, #2) They're doing it not because the Shakesvillagers agree with any of Palin's policies, but because that's how feminism works. They're getting too much material from this site. Dry up that well, people.

Thursday night, Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet for us, too:

one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character

Although Barack referred specifically to accusing your opponents of lack patriotism, I think he's also talking about other "fighting words", as well.

Here's one guideline: if you put your insult about Palin through a couple rounds of babelfish, would the translation be "She is female"? If so, you're doing it wrong. Worse yet, you're *hurting your own side*.

Obama's Denver speech

2008-08-29T07:34:00.000-07:00

From the post-speech discussion at Obsidian Wings:

socratic_me reported:

My sister, a long time very conservative Republican from the middle of Oklahoma, decided tonight that she was voting for Obama. ... Her reason: She is tired of the fact that Republicans always want her to be frightened and angry and Obama has clearly set forth for her a better way.

The "socratic_me's sister" metric proves once again I am not a very good politician.

I'm one of the few people who was disappointed by the speech because he made almost no acknowledgment of the fear, rage & shame I feel when I think about the Bush administration. Torture, black sites, mercenaries, ceaseless surveillance, imperialistic invasion, rape both figurative and literal, arbitrary and unchecked Presidential power aka tyranny -- as Glenn Greenwald said yesterday, those are the issues that no-one at the DNC seems willing to call out and reject.

But socratic_me's sister won't vote for change if she feels ashamed of her country -- even though she *should* feel ashamed. My approach would be wrong, Obama's is right -- or at least, it is likely to work.

But it still sticks in my craw that we won't get war crimes trials, and I'm afraid that without them we're going to get future war crimes.