Pragmaticism

Ron Paul vs. the world

2008-01-07T21:23:00.000-05:00

During the New Hampshire Republican debates, Ron Paul asserted that radical Islam is related to our foreign policy. He gives our bases in Saudi Arabia as a specific example, and then asks the audience to imagine how they would feel if a well-intentioned China invaded America.

He's not just disagreed with by the rest of the field--he's laughed at, mocked and ignored by the other candidates. Giuliani and Romney say that Islamic terror has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with any of the US's actions.

Now, I know you can't get up on stage and give the history of 9/11 and our involvement in the Middle East, but isn't saying that Islamic terror has NOTHING to do with our foreign policy a little...insane? You could at least grant that they were RELATED without saying that we were responsible...couldn't you?

No major candidate in either party will deal with the current geopolitical position we're in honestly.

Pushing the river

2007-10-29T13:50:00.000-04:00

A group of law students at Stanford Law School has begun rating prominent law firms on their diversity. The group is called “Building a Better Legal Profession,” and they have an official faculty adviser, Michele Landis Dauber.

The article explains how the process works:

“Law firms in the top fifth received A’s, in the second fifth B’s, and so on. Overall grades were arrived at by averaging grades for partners and associates in five categories: women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and gay people.”

Now, you wouldn’t think that an absence of minorities by itself, without any evidence of discrimination, indicated anything definitively, would you? I mean, that would indict Iowa.

“This is 2007,” Professor Dauber said. “If you can’t find a single black or Hispanic partner, that’s not an accident.”

There you have it--any prominent law firm without a black or Hispanic partner did it on purpose.

The first sentence of the article tells you what this is really about: the market.

“A bunch of law students at Stanford have started assigning letter grades to their prospective employers, which pretty much tells you who holds the power in the market for new associates. It’s not easy to persuade new lawyers from the top schools to accept starting salaries of only $160,000.”

I mean, you need to pay back those loans somehow.

Supposedly, “a second-year student at Stanford recently turned down an offer from one firm as soon as he saw that it got an F on the diversity report card.”

Probably because he had a better offer somewhere else irrespective of the report card.

More of Stanley Fish's Post Modern Rules About Everything

2007-10-25T11:00:00.000-04:00

Stanley Fish, literary theorist and Intellectual Decider for the New York Times, comes down hard on Lee Bollinger for getting too political as a university administrator in this column. Now, I don’t necessarily disagree with Fish--I am no expert on what university administrators should and should not do or say. But I would like to point out that Fish’s rules are quite narrow:

“Columbia does not, or at least should not, stand anywhere on the vexed issues of the day, and neither should its chief executive, at least publicly.”

Ever? On anything? Can Columbia as such ever condemn or support anything? Could they have condemned Nazism as a university? (Godwin’s Law strikes again!)

“Remember always what a university is for – the transmission of knowledge and the conferring of analytical skills – and resist the temptation to inflate the importance of what goes on its precincts.”

The conferring of analytical skills? People pay $200,000 just to have analytical skills conferred?!

And finally:

“A university president doesn’t have the luxury of choosing whether to speak as a citizen or as a faculty member or as an administrator.”

anglicancalvinist, please have at Mr. Fish for me.

Taxes and snake oil!

2007-10-25T10:50:00.000-04:00

The House Democrats have unveiled an ambitious tax overhaul package. It’s not clear to me how or when it would be passed, or how many bills it would take, but I like most of what I’ve seen so far. It phases out the AMT, reduces the top corporate tax rate, eliminates off-shore deductions, taxes investment management income at income tax rates instead of capital gains rates, and slightly increases the standard deduction for a married couple. Those seem to me like sensible and fair measures, because it’s always seemed to me that we could cut taxes for both the middle class and the affluent if we simply enforced existing tax rules. Of course, what hedge fund manager would RATHER pay 35% than 15%? And which corporation taking a massive deduction for being located in the United Arab Emirates WANTS its breaks eliminated?

Republicans reacted predictably.

"This is the largest individual income tax increase in history," Rep. Jim McCrery of Louisiana, Rangel's low-key GOP counterpart on the committee, wrote fellow Republicans. Rangel, he said, "is selling pure snake oil."

Mmm, snake oil! I’ll take two!

Details:

-The plan phases out the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was originally designed to prevent wealthy people from taking too many tax breaks but was never indexed for inflation, by applying a replacement tax of 4 percent of married couple income above a certain level, not to be less than $200,000. The tax would be 4.6 percent on income in excess of $500,000, or $250,000 in the case of a single taxpayer. High-income individuals would see a limitation on itemized deductions and a phase-out of deductions for personal exemptions, raising $29 billion over 10 years.

-The plan reduces the top corporate marginal tax rate from 35 percent to 30.5 percent, at a cost of $364 billion over 10 years. This would be paid for in part through such measures as repealing the domestic production activities deduction and requiring that U.S. corporations that defer income through controlled foreign corporations also defer the deductions that are associated with this income. The last-in-first-out accounting method would also be eliminated, saving $106 billion over 10 years.

-Married couples filing jointly would be entitled to take an additional $850 as a standard deduction, at a cost of $48 billion.

-The number of lower-income taxpayers qualifying for earned income credit would grow, at a cost of $29 billion.

-The refundable child credit would be increased, at a cost of $9 billion.

-Investment fund managers would be prevented from paying taxes at capital gains rates, raising $26 billion.

-Hedge fund managers would be prevented from using offshore tax haven corporations to defer taxes on compensation received for providing investment services, raising $23 billion.

-There would be mandatory cost basis reporting by brokers for transactions involving publicly traded securities, raising $4 billion.

Stanley Fish, eminent writer of opinions, gets liberalism wrong

2007-09-06T12:30:00.000-04:00

Stanley Fish, a prominent literary theorist who has spent his career thinking about stuff and who now writes about stuff for the New York Times, gives an unconvincing and I think incorrect assessment of liberalism and secularism in his latest post. It's behind the firewall, but that’s okay because there is only one part I want to focus on. In regard to when today’s politicians are asked about their faith, he writes the following:

"[Today's] candidate must say something like, “My faith generally informs my moral values, but my judgments and actions as president will follow from the constitutional obligations of the office, not from my religion.” In other words, I too believe in the public-private distinction and I will uphold it. I won’t insist that you adopt my values and I will respect yours.”

I think he’s wrong here in asserting that “the public-private distinction” and constitutional obligations are coterminous. Some candidates may derive all of their judgments and actions as president from their faith, and they just happen to line up with liberal goals. I also think he’s wrong in saying that liberalism is a non-imposition of values. I think liberalism is, just like Islamic fundamentalism, a serious imposition of a set of values; it just happens to be a different, and better, set. Liberalism is also very intolerant; Islamic fundamentalism tolerates all sorts of things that liberalism does not, like the repression of women. I digress. Fish continues:

“A candidate who didn’t say something like that but instead announced a determination to reshape public institutions in accordance with the dictates of his or her faith would be seen as too closely resembling the Islamic fundamentalists who, we are told again and again, are our sworn enemies.”

I disagree. It would completely depend on what the "dictates of faith" were. A candidate whose dictates of faith were bringing terrorists to justice, improving the economy and bringing sweet American dreams to everyone would be acceptable no matter what language they used.

John Kerry was able to say that he recognizes that while Catholicism prohibits abortion, he was not going to impose that requirement on the country. I’m not able to put things like that, but that discounts neither of us from running for office.

Fish is doing some of the same things that redhurt criticized Christopher Hitchens for--he comes along all postmodern, fuzzies everything up, denies absolutes, muddles with all of our clear thinking, and then when he’s done, issues categorical statements about religion and liberalism. Sorry, gentlemen: you’ve removed your own support.

Establishment of religion, or helpful pluralism?

2007-08-31T09:50:00.000-04:00

What do you think?

Modern science is amazing.

2007-08-08T15:27:00.000-04:00

Homo habilis was likely more vegetarian and Homo erectus ate some meat, he said. Like chimps and apes, "they'd just avoid each other, they don't feel comfortable in each other's company," he said.

"You can tell from this tooth fragment right here--Homo habilis liked to sip Chardonnay by the fire, while Homo erectus was more likely to be downing Sam Adams out in the yard. Not very compatible, you know?"

Tax and die.

2007-07-26T16:57:00.000-04:00

Of all the meaningless, stupid political catchphrases out there, is there a dumber one than "tax-and-spender"? What politician doesn't tax and spend?!? My head asplode.

"By calling for tax increases for the wealthy, Edwards risks opening himself to criticism that he's a tax-and-spender in the mold of Walter Mondale, the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee who said he would raise taxes."

Richard Rorty

2007-06-13T09:43:00.000-04:00

From the New York Times:

Richard Rorty, whose inventive work on philosophy, politics, literary theory and more made him one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers, died Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 75.

Mr. Rorty’s enormous body of work, which ranged from academic tomes to magazine and newspaper articles, provoked fervent praise, hostility and confusion. But no matter what even his severest critics thought of it, they could not ignore it. When his 1979 book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” came out, it upended conventional views about the very purpose and goals of philosophy. The widespread notion that the philosopher’s primary duty was to figure out what we can and cannot know was poppycock, Mr. Rorty argued. Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily life and not on what they discover by theorizing.

Mr. Rorty drew on the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine and others. Although he argued that “no area of culture, and no period of history gets reality more right than any other,” he did maintain that a liberal democratic society was by far the best because it was the only one that permits competing beliefs to exist while also creating a public community.

In recent years, Mr. Rorty fiercely criticized the Bush administration, the religious right, Congressional Democrats and anti-American intellectuals. Though deeply pessimistic about the dangers of nuclear confrontation and the gap between rich nations and poor, Mr. Rorty retained something of Dewey’s hopefulness about America. It is important, he said in 2003, to take pride “in the heritage of figures like Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and so on,” he said, and “to use this pride as a means of generating sympathy” for a country’s political aims.

Brownback vs. Coyne

2007-06-08T16:42:00.000-04:00

It was inevitable that certain people of Science, such as Jerry Coyne, were going to flip out about the three Republican candidates who raised their hands during the debate to assert that they did not believe in evolution. But Coyne goes too far:

“Whether he knows it or not, Brownback's forthright declarations, denying any possibility that empirical matters of fact might differ from those assumed by his creed, amount to nothing less than a rejection of the whole institution of science.”

No, Jerry Coyne, they don’t. It’s possible not to believe in evolution without rejecting the whole institute of science, and Brownback’s performance in the Republican debate doesn’t dictate what course he would take as president. (It certainly presages it and influences it.) "Whether he knows it or not?" Has Brownback succumbed to false consciousness?!

We in America (mostly) make public decisions based on the principles we share, and in private we’re given much more freedom. When our most deeply held beliefs come into conflict with a public rule that’s been agreed to by most of the population, you get seriously intractable issues, like how severe restrictions on abortion should be, and whether Jehovah’s witnesses can prevent their children from getting blood transfusions, and whether Christian scientists have to vaccinate theirs. There isn’t any handbook to tell us how to handle these cases, and in a democracy like America the religious belief doesn’t always trump the public rule. Amish citizens are largely exempt from compulsory public education, but this is due to their history as well as their beliefs. My truly believing I should start my own religion and exempt my children from education would not be permissible. I am willing to give Amish people this area; conversely, if they were to pass a rule requiring the severe beating of all male 10-year olds on Thursdays, I would not give them this no matter their history or beliefs. Thus, there seems to be some sort of flex area between our personal beliefs and the actions of others. Compulsory education is law and is absolutely without exception--except for the Amish. No one is allowed to beat their children.

It’s my opinion that Brownback’s beliefs and statements fall into this flex area. Whether he, as president, would actually violate our tentative democratic agreement cannot be known beforehand by public statements on evolution during a Republican debate. He certainly was not rejecting the entire institution of science. Jerry Coyne does not have a monopoly on it.

Blogversating with j. morgan.

2007-06-06T13:15:00.000-04:00

me: Question:
Was Judge Reggie Walton just doing his job in the Libby case, or does he have nerves of steel to mete the sentence he did?
I'm going with the latter.

Joshua: I'm with you on this one.
I just checked, Walton was appointed by Bush
that complicates things considerably

me: I saw that.
Hey, Patrick Fitzgerald is a Republican too.
Democrats don't have a monopoly on integrity.

Joshua: That'll do just fine

me: Indeed
It's nice to live in a country where you aren't killed for sentencing presidential aides.
Though it does seem to me that Cheney, Rove etc. don't particularly care for this setup.

Joshua: Agreed
or rather, they want such a setup to be flexible so that it mostly is the case except for when it shouldn't be

me: Yes, much better put.
They don't actually want us to be, say, Egypt.
They do want some powers reserved for themselves, though.

Joshua: right
it is this sort of arrogance that allows them to think that they can be trusted with power rather than systems in times of need but others can't

me: Right.
Is that too sophisticated a point for the American public to grasp?

Joshua: not at all

me: Good

Joshua: the trouble is that a large portion of the American people think that's okay because they share the hubris
they think they also could make the right call when given power
it probably has to do with having a southern accent and going to a megachurch or something
so they trust those people because they trust themselves

Sarcasm, or something else?

2007-05-10T15:50:00.000-04:00

Dr. Realmuto’s university salary is $196,310.

“Academics don’t get paid very much,” he said. “If I was an entertainer, I think I would certainly do a lot better.”

I guess we haven't learned anything.

2007-04-05T09:18:00.000-04:00

This is not a good idea--it's a bad idea. It's badong.

"Israel is concerned that the Bush administration’s ambitions for an American-Israeli-Sunni coalition allied against Iran may never materialize, or that there could be a revolution in Saudi Arabia that would leave the mostly American-made Saudi arsenal in the hands of militant Islamists."

I just don't get it. Not only do we have to have a specific bill to prevent the incidental arming of Iran, but our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan haven't taught us the danger of selling weapons to ambiguous allies like Saudi Arabia. (15 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian.) It must be that the people profiting from the sale of the weapons will never be the people who get shot at with them.

More hard-hitting analysis from Time

2007-03-08T14:51:00.000-05:00

I don't have much of a sustained argument here...I'd rather just point out how bland, debatable and arrogant most of this article is. Liberal bias? I guess. Really stupid fluff? Definitely.

"Cheney was so driven and hands-on, the aides would say, that he and Libby would routinely ask to see raw intelligence rather than the processed analysis put together by the CIA and other agencies."

He listened to phone calls still in Arabic? He looked at satellite photos without labels?

"What was really on trial was the whole culture of an Administration that treated the truth as a relative virtue, as something it could take or leave as it needed."

Nope. Wrong. Libby was on trial. He was just Cheney's chief of staff. Had Cheney or Rove been indicted, you would have come closer to trying "the whole culture." That statement remains a poetic hyperbole.

"Everyone knows now that Bush and Cheney took the country into a deadly, costly and open-ended war on flimsy evidence of weapons of mass destruction."

I don't think so. No way. I doubt a majority of the country would assent to that statement as phrased. So even if that's what Bush and Cheney actually did, that statement is false.

"When the verdict against Libby came down, it was also a rebuke to the hermetic power-sharing arrangement at the top of the White House. "

No it wasn't. I don't know what it was. It wasn't that.

"Libby's conviction comes at the end of a dreadful year for Cheney."

No it doesn't. I mean, his year wasn't great, but there's a freaking war on, okay? And I swear, if I hear one more thing about how Dick Cheney's daughter's existence somehow refutes the Iraq war, my head asplode.

TIME actually plays its hand and admits the whole article is a sham at the end:

"So long as Bush remains Commander in Chief, however, and Cheney his faithful lieutenant, the Vice President's power will flow through the Oval Office."

Always close persuasive essays by contradicting your thesis.

This opportunity comes once in a lifetime you better lose yourself

2007-02-21T14:37:00.000-05:00

In 1998 the US controlled and funded of team of Afghan spies that acted as anti-Taliban agents in Afghanistan. They were well-equipped, loyal to the US and the Northern Alliance, exceptionally well-trained, bellicose and trigger-happy. A plan was hatched for them to kidnap Bin Laden from his Tarnak Farm compound in Afghanistan. Although there were fears that the team was just using the CIA for money or prestige, they did supply useful intelligence, and it wasn’t for this reason that the raid was ultimately canceled:

“If they did go through with a Tarnak raid, some White House officials feared, women and children would die and bin Laden would probably escape. Such a massacre would undermine U.S. interests in the Muslim world and elsewhere.”

Any thoughts on this?

Term limits for Supreme Court Justices?

2007-02-09T14:32:00.000-05:00

Sandra Day O'Connor remarked the other day that she left the Supreme Court earlier than she would have liked:

Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor would have preferred to stay on the Supreme Court for several more years, but she stepped down because of her ailing husband. "Most of them get ill and are really in bad shape, which I would've done at the end of the day myself, I suppose, except my husband was ill and I needed to take action there," O'Connor said.

Look, I don't want justices to have to take tests every year or something to prove their competency, but I don't know if I'm comfortable with this lifetime appointment thing when they absolutely come hell or high water refuse to retire.

The article goes on:

As a retired judge, O'Connor maintains an office at the Supreme Court, still draws a salary and occasionally sits as a judge on the federal appeals courts.

She's doing all right.

Here are some judge fun facts.

Relativism?

2006-11-29T11:04:00.000-05:00

Why don’t I blog more? I don’t know. Should hans’s blog even count as a blog, or should it be called “Really good theological reflections once a year?” With those questions in mind, keep reading. This is a random post about something I’ve been thinking about.

I don’t think Richard Rorty is a relativist. I even wrote a paper about that once, took it to Texas, and presented it. Some of the people didn’t agree with me--some did. But the ones who didn’t were able to point to statements like the following:

“A given society is just if its substantive life is lived in a certain way – that is, in a way faithful to the shared understanding of its members.”

That was actually written by a political theorist named Michael Walzer. (Just to throw you off, if he sounds like a peace-loving latte-sipping cutting-and-running hippie relativist, think again: he supported the war in Afghanistan and was critical of our European allies for their conduct before the Iraq war.)

Rorty quotes Walzer in multiple places in his work and endorses such statements. Since for Rorty there are really no such things as “moral principles,” only “things most people agree about,” the above definition is all that’s possible for a society: if no one's complaining, how would you know anything was wrong?

I don't agree with the statement, however. Just because a society gets together and decides what's just and then lives it out and no one complains is NOT a necessary and sufficient condition for justice. To be honest, I don't know what those conditions are. (John Rawls might, but since I can't get through his books, it doesn't look good for me.) I would say that a given society is just if and only if it's just. There's more to say, but I can't get it into one sentence.

Rorty says that lots of people think of morality as the following: a thin, core set of unarguable principles and practices surrounded by a thick accretion of customs and contingencies. He proposes that we think of evyerthing as contingency, and "principles" as those things we can abstract from the set of all behaviors of the human race.

In conclusion: Richard Rorty remains not a relativist. The unqualified endorsement of statements like the above does not help his case.

Why Sudan?

2006-11-21T19:09:00.000-05:00

In Slate, Anne Applebaum asks why the crisis, genocide and refugee situation in Sudan have generated so much fanfare, when there are so many other debacles across the world:

"Darfur is not the only place in the world where there has been mass murder, even ethnic mass murder, on a large, historically familiar scale. The North Korean regime has for years run concentration camps directly modeled on the concentration camps of Stalin's Soviet Union. But, though there is excellent documentation of Pyongyang's camps—the U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea even has satellite photographs on its Web site—and though some religious and university groups have made an effort, the level of interest, and therefore perhaps of U.N. involvement, is much lower."

She makes a good point, but for me, the level of interest in NK vs. the Sudan is because I feel like I personally can have an impact on the situation in the Sudan, while I can't affect NK, which is locked tight. Doctors Without Borders, a 4-star charity and recipient of the 1999 Nobel peace prize, doesn't even operate in NK:

"MSF operated inside North Korea from 1995 to 1998. During this time, the organization attempted to supply drugs and medical training for approximately 1,100 health centers and to run 60 therapeutic feeding centers for malnourished children in three provinces. In 1998, convinced that its assistance was not reaching the most vulnerable people, and was, on the contrary, helping to feed the regime oppressing them, MSF withdrew from the country."

Contrast that with its $25 million budget in the Sudan:

"MSF has been running projects in Darfur since early 2004 and today has 123 international and 2,233 national staff working across the region's three provinces. With a total budget in Darfur for 2006 of nearly $25 million, it is one of the most significant operations in the world for MSF."

That's my take.

Intellectual discord, presidential elections and atheism.

2006-10-30T13:04:00.000-05:00

UPDATE:

(1) j. morgan has asserted, correctly, that the fact that thirteen states switched does not necessarily mean that voters did. Despite this fact, I still think that there are lots of people in this country who voted for Clinton in '92 or '96 AND Bush in '00 and '04, and that if we met one of them, we'd demand an explanation from them.

(2) I don't know if this post is worth rescuing, but redhurt has also challenged my point. What was my point? I'm not sure anymore. Basically, Dawkins seems to think that being a "supernaturalist" definitively indicates certain things about a person, while I don't think that it does. He says in the article that sensible religious people are on the side of the fundamentalists simply by virtue of their believing in God. I think that's nonsense. redhurt and I agree that most people don't really wrestle with this stuff. j. morgan agrees that the Enlightenment was basically a train wreck, and that the only way out is sweet post-structuralism.

ORIGINAL POST:

Check this post out. Read the Wired article. Then come back here.

Look at 2004's electoral map.

Now look at 1992's electoral map.

What happened? I'll tell you what happened. THIRTEEN states that Bill Clinton won in 1992 were won by George Bush in 2004.

My point is that "beliefs" and "memes" don't dictate behavior to the extent that people, including Richard Dawkins, think they do. Millions of people had no trouble voting for Bill Clinton, a liberal considered very liberal by conservatives, in 1992 and then for Bush, a conservative considered very conservative by liberals, in 2004. Who are these people? Where can I find them? Why won't Richard Dawkins have a conversation with them and figure out that everything doxastic is a big mess?

Brights.

2006-10-30T12:22:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I told my Sunday School class of 5th and 6th graders that Martin Luther pledged to become a monk and devote his life to God if he survived a dangerous thunderstorm he was caught in.

Cautious little Lutherans that they are, they raised their hands slowly.

"Did that REALLY happen?"

"Yeah, did it?"

"Sounds made up."

Ha! Healthy little skeptics!

That's a lot of migrants.

2006-10-17T09:28:00.000-04:00

Wow, nearly five times as many migrants as births in this country! Wait a second...

UPDATE:

As of 3:23 PM EST it's been fixed.

300 million

2006-10-16T13:19:00.000-04:00

What's the deal with this article from CNN.com?

THEN:

"Forty years ago, Elizabeth Heydanek lived in her "heaven on earth" -- Schaumburg, Illinois. She chased lightning bugs in her back yard, filled buckets on the porch with tadpoles from a nearby creek, played tag with friends. Elizabeth was 7 years old in 1967, one of 200 million Americans at the time. As she and her country grew -- the 300 millionth American will be born at 7:46 a.m. ET Tuesday, the U.S. Census Bureau says -- things changed in Schaumburg and the country."

NOW:

"With population growth comes stress. Those care-free playtimes Heydanek remembers from Schaumburg don't exist for many of today's 7-year-olds, an American Academy of Pediatrics study released this month said. The report cited hurried lives, intense competition to get ahead, poverty and lack of open space -- all related to a growing population -- as adding stress to kids' lives and depriving them of the development opportunities that old-fashioned play provides. Heydanek attests to that. Though her three children are now in their 20s, she recalls just a few years ago how the nightly family sit-down dinners she had in Schaumburg were replaced in Cary with a microwave and a bag of fast food in the middle of the table."

Look, I don't want to be Johnny Nostalgia-Killer, but...know what? I'll just stop here, because anything I say will get me in trouble. Mair, j. morgan, and the rest of the blogosphere: what do you think?

Defeatocrats?

2006-10-03T11:36:00.000-04:00

Everything is completely backwards. Upside down.

Replace Frist with Reid and Afghanistan with Iraq, and imagine the press this would get:

"U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said Monday that the Iraq war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the insurgents and their supporters into the Iraq government."

And yet--it was the Taliban that harbored and supported Bin Laden and Al Qaeda...so we're going to pull out of Afghanistan and let the Taliban into the government there so we can fight harder in Iraq?!

My head asplode.

Bloom, Nietzsche, Rorty.

2006-09-25T12:26:00.000-04:00

I read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind as a polemic against the American university with two prongs:

(1) An easy description of American university students as ungrounded, shallow and "nice", and

(2) A technical argument about the influence of German philosophy on contemporary American society.

Despite the fact that the book was published in 1987, it remains bold and trenchant 20 years later. Bloom makes a number of assertions in prong (1) that I believe that he would hold to today were he alive, nearly all of which I disagree with. Here are three of the boldest:

-All American college students are thoroughgoing relativists.
-European students are vastly superior to Americans in their education, ability to discuss books, and civic engagement.
-Liberal education is dead.

Prong (2), which I don't quite follow and need to rereread, has to do with the fact that we've imported anti-Democratic German philosophers like Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Heidegger as well as their vocabularies and are in danger of becoming useless relativists because of it. What strikes me as massively ironic is the fact that Bloom is so critical of the masses in American being allowed to make decisions through voting, even as he clucks at the fact that we pretend that there is no danger in our cherrypicking of the parts of Nietzsche we like. Bloom worships Plato and thinks that the un-Republic-ed life is not worth living--his elitism leaps from every page through a series of anecdotes about him pithily refuting everyone he encounters and knocking American university students down like tenpins. Richard Rorty, a classmate of Bloom's at the University of Chicago, describes the university at the time as having been enveloped in a "neo-Aristotelian mystique," and Bloom never escaped it.

For me, Bloom's first critique is interesting and illuminating but misguided, and his second is (despite my lack of complete understanding) nearly certainly wrong. One of the parts of pragmatism I've kept in my journey away from Rorty is a lack of faith in someone's assenting to believe something as a prediction of how they will necessarily act.

Any thoughts? J. Morgan, I'm particularly interested in your take on our appropriation of the German vocabulary.

Insightful? Depends on what you mean by insightful, and if you're Larry Sabato.

2006-09-13T13:13:00.000-04:00

I love some of this "analysis." Here's Amy Walter, House analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report newsletter:

"I don't think the question any longer is can Democrats win control of Congress, it's can Republicans do anything to stop it?" she said.

Well...that's actually the same question phrased a different way, Amy, because if the answer to "can Republicans do anything to stop it" is YES, then the answer to "can Democrats win control of Congress" is NO. Those questions aren't independent...

"It's too late to fix the national mood -- it's not going to be fixed," said Republican pollster Frank Luntz. "The major issues are not playing well for Republicans this year, and Republicans are not playing well with America this year."

I actually think that the major issues ARE playing well for Republicans, and that Republicans ARE playing well with America this year...almost no one is predicting that Democrats will actually take control of the House or Senate, let alone House AND Senate, so at least half the country, despite any misgivings about the issues, are okay with Republicans. Republicans continue to successfully hammer Democrats about security in the eyes of the voters, and somehow, Donald Rumsfeld is still secretary of defense.

And then there's the ubiquitous Larry Sabato:

"This looks like a classic sixth-year election," said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato, who called the president's low approval ratings, hovering at about 40 percent, "the single best indicator for any mid-term election."

Classic, eh? Turns out that the last exception to the opposition party gaining seats was...1998...the last time there WAS a sixth-year election...

Anyone have any analysis of their own?

The Pope vs. Canada

2006-09-08T16:45:00.000-04:00

In a condemnation of Canadian Catholics, the Pope said the following:

"In the name of tolerance your country has had to endure the folly of the redefinition of spouse, and in the name of freedom of choice it is confronted with the daily destruction of unborn children," the Pope told a group of bishops from Ontario. Such laws, he said, are the result of "the exclusion of God from the public sphere."

Setting aside completely the issues of gay marriage and abortion, does the Pope have the causality correct? I think we have several different options:

(1) The exclusion of God from the public square CAUSED liberal abortion and marriage laws.

(2) Liberal abortion and marriage laws CAUSED the exclusion of God from the public square.

(3) The exclusion of God from the public square is correlated with the rise of such laws.

(4) The exclusion of God from the public square and such laws are both due to another factor or group of factors, but are directly causally related.

(5) The exclusion of God from the public square and such laws are only coincidentally related; it is completely historically contingent that they happen to be occurring simultaneously.

What does everyone think? After the discussion gets rolling I'll probably throw in with (4).

(Ironic that one of the most nightmarish scenarios of a reversal of such laws was written by a Canadian?)

Drudge's biased headlines

2006-09-05T19:27:00.000-04:00

The Drudge Report has this headline today: MoveOn.Org's Website Filled With Anti-Semitic Rants About Dem Lieberman...

Unfortunately for Drudge, their FORUM was filled with Anti-Semitic rants, not their website.

In a statement posted on the MoveOn site Saturday, Pariser condemned the anti-Semitic rants. "Once in a while - as in any public forum - inappropriate material is posted," he wrote. "Recently, a few of the thousands of comments that are posted every week contained anti-Semitic language. The comments that were posted were abhorrent. We were dismayed to see them, and removed them as soon as they came to our attention 17 days ago."

Drudge's headline is the equivalent of saying that a blog was filled with anti-Semitic rants because someone commented to that effect.

Ridiculous.

Lieberman loses a primary, every pundit on the planet goes totally insane.

2006-08-30T15:58:00.000-04:00

The normally calm and always pretentious William F. Buckley:

"The wires are heavy with the question of Iraq. The defeat of Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut was a call to outright defiance by Democrats running for re-election. They have been warned now, by the unforgiving, that they must reject the war in Iraq and labor with the single end in mind of returning American troops and dissolving U.S. commitments."

Again, I can only think of one thing to say: wow. I mean, wow. I already posted a shredding of this on my blog, here. I'm still stunned--I can't get over the fact that people can't get over the CT primary. You can picture the sort of conversation Buckley has in mind:

Joe Lieberman: I'm running for re-election as a senator.
dailykos: I'm warning you: reject the war in Iraq and labor with the single end in mind of returning American troops and dissolving U.S. commitments.
Joe Lieberman: No.
dailykos: I'll never forgive you.

Someone explain this to me.

The ACLU strikes back

2006-08-28T16:38:00.000-04:00

Take this, Bill O'Reilly.

Every year, the Frenchtown Elementary School in New Jersey presents an after-school talent show, open to kids from kindergarten through eighth grade. The performers can choose to play an instrument, dance, create a skit or select a song. This past school year, a second-grader decided to sing Awesome God. Principal Joyce Brennan explained in a letter to the child's mother that the song was "inappropriate for a school-run event with a captive audience of, in many cases, quite young children because of its religious content."

In the Frenchtown Elementary School's case, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey is supporting the child plaintiff. Attorney Jennifer Klear, who took the case on behalf of the ACLU, filed a brief to the court. In it, she made the es sential - and to me, obvious - point that it was the child who chose the song, not the school.

Katherine Harris, R-Mars

2006-08-28T15:34:00.000-04:00

There's almost too much wrong with this even to post about, but I'll link to the article, maybe in protest? Maybe. I'll also link to TPM's decoding of Katherine Harris's Starbucks drink of choice.

j. morgan remarked recently that public figures as well as citizens should be cautious of invoking traditions (such as ancient Greece's martial tradition/warrior culture) if they're not prepared to do so in a manner that does justice to it. It would be interesting to ask Harris to defend this statement:

The nation's founding fathers did not intend the country be "a nation of secular laws".

Unfortunately, we're probably more interested in her take on the JonBenet case, and her Starbucks drink, to do so.

I also wonder if she believes everything she's saying?

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...CNN.com?!

2006-08-25T13:18:00.000-04:00

This is the kind of thing at which CNN.com, Time and other “news” purveyors excel—something that’s neither an editorial, a polemic, or even really reporting.

(1) The headline is a question (A gathering anti-incumbent storm?), not a report (“Two wounded in shooting”) or a strong assertion (“Clinton’s health-care plan an utter debacle.”) So no matter what the author says, he can’t lose, because he was merely asking a question.

(2) The sub-headline (The Web is making it easier to challenge the establishment) is directly contradicted by facts given in the “article”:

“Since 1980, we've had only three incumbent senators lose primaries…Alaska's Frank Murkowski is only the fourth governor to lose a primary in the last 12 years.”

(3) The article’s body contradicts itself:

“For me, it lies in the emergence of the Internet as an organizing and money-raising tool.”

BUT

“The power of the Web may be easy to overanalyze.”

ALSO

“The trouble with extrapolating from these and other incumbent defeats, though, is that there seems to be no common explanation.”

BUT

“Sometimes it's a question of character or personality. The other key reason is policy or ideology.”

So, there are no common explanations, but there are four common explanations: character, personality, policy, and ideology, which together encompass… everything?

This guy’s like John Madden in the video games: the receiver can’t catch the ball when the defender knocks it down! Thanks for your “analysis.” I’ll stick with dailykos and National Review.

Twisting and turning

2006-08-23T11:53:00.000-04:00

From the White House:

THE PRESIDENT:

"The main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction. But I also talked about the human suffering in Iraq, and I also talked the need to advance a freedom agenda. And so my question -- my answer to your question is, is that, imagine a world in which Saddam Hussein was there, stirring up even more trouble in a part of the world that had so much resentment and so much hatred that people came and killed 3,000 of our citizens. You know, I've heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of "we're going to stir up the hornet's nest" theory. It just doesn't hold water, as far as I'm concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

Q What did Iraq have to do with that?

THE PRESIDENT: What did Iraq have to do with what?

Q The attack on the World Trade Center?

THE PRESIDENT: Nothing, except for it's part of -- and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a -- the lesson of September the 11th is, take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq. I have suggested, however, that resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding grounds for terrorists who are willing to use suiciders to kill to achieve an objective. I have made that case.

Michael Tomasky punches the MSM in the face. (Possible victory for terrorists.)

2006-08-14T09:58:00.000-04:00

From Slate:

Many commentators, including Slate's Jacob Weisberg, have looked at Ned Lamont's victory over Lieberman and concluded much too hastily that the Democratic Party is galloping recklessly leftward...But there aren't even two Democratic senators facing more than nominal primary opposition. Four of the seven (Clinton, Feinstein, Carper, and Kohl) represent blue states where anti-war fever is running high. Why aren't they fighting for their political lives?

Because the Connecticut primary was about one man and one state. It was about Lieberman's excessive fawning over the president. It was about Lieberman's voting not only against the showboating withdrawal resolution introduced by Sen. John Kerry, but also against the moderate and reasonable resolution introduced by Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, which merely urged the president to "expedite the transition of United States forces in Iraq to a limited presence and mission." (Lieberman was the only blue-state Democrat, except inexplicable retiring weirdo Mark Dayton, to vote against Levin.)

It was about anger—fully justified anger, and from a far larger constituency than Z Magazine readers—at the notion, widespread among the commentariat, that national-security "toughness" demands support for the mendacious and ruinous policies of the Bush administration in Iraq and elsewhere. And, of course, it was about other things besides Iraq, too.

Business as usual?

2006-08-13T22:15:00.000-04:00

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

I think the cappuccino I just bought was a victory for the terrorists.

2006-08-10T16:23:00.000-04:00

Lieberman exits reality, becomes Karl Rove:

'Mr. Lamont’s goals for ending the war in Iraq would constitute a "victory" for the extremists who are accused of plotting to blow up airliners traveling between Britain and the United States.'

Contrast that talking point with the facts:

--British and Pakistani authorities joined forces to block the plot to bomb the airliners.
--British police acted urgently overnight, arresting 24 people in what U.S. government officials said privately could have been the biggest terrorist attack since September 11, 2001.
--Among those arrested were a Muslim charity worker and a Heathrow Airport employee with an all-area access pass, according to Britain's Channel 4.
--Information gathered after recent arrests in Pakistan convinced British investigators they had to act urgently to stop the plot, sources told CNN.
--Pakistani authorities also made arrests in coordination with Britain, said a spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry.

So, Pakistani British nationals have been empowered by Lamont's victory over Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary, because Lamont wants to bring the troops home from Iraq. MAYBE THE TROOPS SHOULD GO TO HEATHROW OR PAKISTAN.

I hate everything.

Liberalism is alive and well!

2006-08-09T09:40:00.000-04:00

Not really. Not really at all. Ned Lamont just happened narrowly to defeat Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary, which I was closely watching, having grown up there. (I went to school in quite a conservative school district for blue Connecticut, which canceled out redhurt's absurdly liberal district in Colorado, where his teachers were Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag and he did Aztec math for 18 years.)

Lamont on the race:

"I want to thank Sen. Lieberman for his campaign. I want to thank him for the dignity and decency in which he has represented our state and our country, for many, many years. I'm hoping that over the next few days that he will come to the conclusion that the party is going to stick together and go forward united."

And Lieberman:

"The old politics of partisan polarization won today. For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot, I will not let this result stand."

The old politics of partisan polarization? I mean, I'll give him +10 for the alliteration, but who's the partisan? The guy who won fair and square, or the guy who refuses to support the winner? Phrases like that are total BS that don't mean anything. It's almost like Lieberman is saying that the simple fact that Lamont would run against him in the primary is an affront to him personally, and not a challenge to his office. "Old politics of partisan polarization" belongs in the mouth of Karl Rove, not in the mouth of a Connecticut Democrat. Our blood runs blue, we can't make up our minds about anything, our views are nuanced, and we lose elections.

Vote Aztec.

Rove vs. truth, fairness, justice

2006-07-31T15:43:00.000-04:00

Presidential adviser Karl Rove said Saturday that journalists often criticize political professionals because they want to draw attention away from the "corrosive role" their own coverage plays in politics and government.

In a blatant use of newspeak, Rove attempts to draw attention away from the corrosive role political professionals play in politics and government and tar journalists with it. Spectacular. It's difficult to know whether he actually believes what he's saying--but I bet he does, because I think he really does hate the press.

What's certain is that Rove has been effective in raising the ire of American voters and turning it into Republican votes. I wish the Democrats had a Rove. I hate my life.

Who decides what's science?

2006-07-31T15:40:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure what spin I want to put on this. In one corner, we have Ken Ham and John Morris, somethings, who had this to say:

"Americans just aren't gullible enough to believe that they came from a fish," he said.

And in the other, we have Mary Dawson, scientist:

"Genesis is a tale that was handed down for generations by people who really knew nothing about science, who knew nothing about natural history, and certainly knew nothing about what fossils were."

I mean, don't get me wrong, it'd be cool to watch creation unfold in a 180-seat special effects theater...

Second-Rate Dictators Club!

2006-07-26T11:34:00.000-04:00

This article both amused and depressed me: amused because you have to wonder if Chavez and Lukashenko really take themselves seriously or are just being ridiculous to look good for their people; and depressed because of the way they're hurting the average Venezuelan and Belarussian. Seriously, though, if you were going to write an Onion article about the posturing of irrelevant countries, you'd probably pick these two. You'd write something like:

Venezuela, Belarus form strategic alliance in order to combat US hegemony

And then you'd have quotes like these:

"After a day of intensive work, we have created a strategic alliance between our countries," [Chavez] said, speaking through an interpreter. "It is absolutely vital to protect our homeland, to guard against internal and external threats. The jaws of imperialism and hegemonism have both us and Belarus in their grip."

Wait, those quotes are real? I see...

This is not good, either.

Webb v. Allen

2006-07-25T14:18:00.000-04:00

Allen: Reagan inspired me to get involved in politics. Reagan would come to Rams football practices. As Governor, I wanted to bring forth a renaissance like Reagan did. Strong national defense, strong economic security, high academic standards. Reagan was criticized for calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. Yet millions today are tasting the "sweet nectar of liberty."

Webb: Ronald Reagan didn't bring down the Soviet Union by invading Czechoslovakia. I have another Presidential hero - Andrew Jackson. Jackson's precept was that you measure the health of a society not at its apex but at its base. I think Ronald Reagan would be wondering what's happening to the average American worker today.

You can see Webb subtly trying to appeal to both Republicans and Democrats. He's not out of the woods yet, but Allen can't like the poll numbers: one I saw had him with an 8-point lead over Webb, down from 20+ just a few months ago. Take that, Christian Kantianists!

Public and private

2006-07-21T09:53:00.000-04:00

My company subscribes to a number of magazines about the federal IT marketplace. They have names like "The Federal IT Marketplace" and "Government IT Federal Computer Contractor Synergistic Marketplace Monthly." The latest issue of one such magazine had this gem:

Two employees sit in neighboring cubicles working on the same project. Both have comparable responsibilities and are equally effective. However, the similarities end when it comes to what motivates them. The first empoyee works for the government and believes the work has intrinsic value and that there is a duty to serve the American public as well as possible. The second employee, a contractor, enjoys the job but needs to work 60-hour weeks, split between this project and two others, to earn a bonus this year. The contractor also wants consideration for a future promotion up the corporate ladder.

Wow. I mean, wow. I'm glad our federal IT managers think like this. Aren't you? Curse those mercenary contractors.

More X's and Y's: CEO pay

2006-07-21T09:41:00.000-04:00

This article carries the headline

"Study: Tech CEO Pay Doesn't Match Performance"

which is, I think, underwhelming. I wonder in how many industries CEO pay maps accurately to anything, really--stock price, employee morale, growth, profits, market capitalization, anything.

A tracking firm executive said, carefully and correctly:

"We don't know exactly the reason why a company does things," says Dolmat-Connell. "A company may be in the midst of a major business transition--we don't know the intricacies of the situation to know whether [a compensation package] was right or wrong."

He is implying in this statement that compensation packages should be tied to something, contra jackscolon (look at that fiery red hair!) who thinks that CEOs occupy an echelon of humanity in which nothing they can do is unjust or, really, is subject to judgment by we lowly bloggers at all. If Larry Ellison wants to pour hot soup in my eye and park his yacht on my face, he should be able to.

In conclusion, the data so far is inconclusive.

Rich Lowry can do better than this

2006-07-12T11:38:00.000-04:00

The National Review is a well-written, insightful and fair publication.

Rich Lowry's current article is none of those things. The things j. morgan said in his sleep when he was 4 are more intelligent. There's this:

"After the 2004 election, then-New Republic editor Peter Beinart wrote an influential article calling on liberal hawks basically to purge the antiwar zealots from the party. Instead, the anti-war zealots are conducting a purge of the liberal hawks."

I used to like to play the Protoss in Starcraft, because one of their units was an anti-war zealot. You'd get a group of those together and they were unstoppable. And this beautiful turn of phrase:

"[Ned] Lamont is a straight Deaniac, not just in his opposition to the war, but in his demographic profile: white, well-off and highly educated."

Yeah...white, educated, well-off people who oppose the war...I call them "straight Deaniacs" too...I think everyone does...anti-war zealots, they are, whose burning, all-consuming zeal to oppose war leads them to...change their minds about things...

This just goes to show that not all X's are Y's.

Physics makes me strong

2006-07-11T16:11:00.000-04:00

Now, I'm no geographist, but I did just read a hyperbole-laden article about physics.

The article's headline is

"Scientists Question Nature's Fundamental Laws "

Which, as far as I can tell, scientists have always been doing. So what part of this is news? This part:

"Public confidence in the "constants" of nature may be at an all time low. Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the invisible glue that holds nuclei together, may have been different in the past. The observed differences are small-roughly a few parts in a million-but the implications are huge: The laws of physics would have to be rewritten, not to mention we might need to make room for six more spatial dimensions than the three that we are used to."

George W's approval rating: 35%

Public confidence in the constants of nature: 14%

Rewriting the laws of physics?! Can we DO that? Johnny, your report on invisible glue? F-! Where's the evidence?!

Well, I'm going to go rock some Starbucks while I jam to my iPod--and tomorrow I'm going to get a heart transplant and fix my air conditioning. If I suddenly float up to the ceiling, I'm going to be VERY angry. Easy on the rewrites, gentlemen.

Time: grasping at straws

2006-07-09T19:17:00.000-04:00

The author or authors of this article either totally don't understand the Bush administration, or badly needed material for a cover article. You decide. What follows is a long quote and then my destruction of their argument.

"In the span of four years, the administration has been forced to rethink the doctrine by which it hoped to remake the world. Bush's response to the North Korean missile test was revealing: Under the old Bush Doctrine, defiance by a dictator like Kim Jong Il would have merited threats of punitive U.S. action. Instead, the administration has mainly been talking up multilateralism and downplaying Pyongyang's provocation.
The Bush Doctrine foundered in the principal place the U.S. tried to apply it."

This implies that behind closed doors, Team Bush is sitting down and having a heart to heart. Rummy leans over to Cheney and says, "Gosh, Dick, that whole unilateral War on Terror thing just didn't pan out. We're going to have to take a different approach."

I don't think so.

This "new" approach to North Korea doesn't represent a policy shift. The war in Iraq was a unique event precipitated by another unique event (9/11), and a long history (a father's invasion.) Whether or not Team Bush is taking a different approach to North Korea than the Middle East is irrelevant to it being a policy shift. Had North Korea gone forward with its missile tests before, during or after 9/11, there would never have been an invasion like the one into Iraq. (Had they shot Japan or Alaska in the face with a missile, sure, there might have been action taken. But firing a missile that failed two minutes after launch into the ocean is a different matter.)

In sum: there's no rethinking; there aren't any heart to hearts; there's no policy shift. The War on Terror was the War on Terror, and North Korea is North Korea.

Shades of gray?

2006-07-03T10:48:00.000-04:00

Thanks to columnist Ben Shapiro for this nuanced view:

"Those who burn the flag are no less traitors than those who renounce their citizenship to fight with our enemies."

Got it--heading over to Afghanistan to kill American soldiers is morally equivalent to burning a flag in protest.

Lutherans and gay marriage: your head asplode.

2006-06-29T09:50:00.000-04:00

The ELCA has been passing resolutions like crazy lately. They usually read like this:

"To prayerfully consider, and thoughtfully cogitate, and carefully ruminate, before taking disciplinary action against congregations that prayerfully call pastors in covenanted same-sex relationships into leadership positions."

"Not to be overtly hasty in the passing of resolutions that deal with the thorny, divisive and hurtful issues surrounding same-sex relationships."

"To prayerfully consider before hastily passing resolutions that deal with resolutions surrounding the possibility of disciplinary action being prayerfully taken by congregations attempting to prayerfully deal with same-sex relationships."

This is not to say that I have any wisdom that they don't. I've blogged about this before, and the ELCA has walked the finest line that can be walked on this issue:

In language first proposed by the church's Conference of Bishops in 1993 and formally adopted by the Churchwide Assembly in 2005, the ELCA holds "there is basis neither in Scripture nor tradition for the establishment of an official ceremony by this church for the blessing of a homosexual relationship. We, therefore, do not approve such a ceremony as an official action of this church’s ministry." However, in acknowledgement of the complex nature of this issue, the Churchwide Assembly also expressed its "[trust in] pastors and congregations to discern ways to provide faithful pastoral care for all to whom they minister." Though some on both sides of the issue have found this position to be tacit permission for same-sex blessings by individual pastors, no allowance is made for such blessing services in the church's governing documents, and the Churchwide Assembly declined to change church policy to provide for such services.

So, we don't accept it, but we don't...not accept it!

I'm praying, and hoping, that this issue doesn't split the ELCA.

Libertarians for Webb

2006-06-27T14:39:00.000-04:00

In response to this article, I wrote the author the following e-mail. Thoughts?

* * *

Hi David,

I enjoyed this article and was glad that you came to your provisional conclusion:

"It might be in libertarians' best interest to ally with Democrats for this election."

I found it insightful until the last few paragraphs, when I think you moved a little bit away from your initial cogent analysis:

"Even when [the Democrats] are railing against NSA wiretapping, they're wishing they could be passing higher taxes and entitlement payouts."

It's certainly up to you whether or not you'd be let down by some future Democratic majority that you helped elect solely because it was preferable to a Republican one, but I think that last sentence of yours I quoted was off the mark. All of our politicians these days love entitlement payouts: the Democrat or Republican label simply tells you which ones. Republicans spend more on tax breaks and the military; Democrats spend more on social programs and the environment. Neither party wants to do the responsible and correct thing, which would be to cut taxes AND cut spending. Jonah Goldberg of the National Review recently said that George W. was spending like a pimp with a week to live--what a reversal of the party line! Libertarians might end up rightly being disappointed by Democrats they elect for their own reasons, but no Democrat wants to raise taxes just to raise taxes. I think that increasing spending and increasing taxes, while terrible, is always better than increasing spending and decreasing taxes, which can lead to a recession. I'm open to revision on this position.

I hope this is helpful--I'm glad we both agree that we need more people like James Webb.

Have more babies.

2006-06-22T11:57:00.000-04:00

As wife_of_charlespeirce will tell you, I love statistics. One area that particularly fascinates me is demographics, and more specifically, why the US is still having babies while the rest of the developed world is not. German women have 1.4 babies each, which means that in Germany they're closing elementary schools and nurseries, the tax burden on the working class is growing, and the population is projected to shrink by 9 million (to 73.6 million) by 2050. (hans, does this concern you? Where's your German hegemony now!)

Meanwhile, we're chugging along here in the US. While Hispanics have a nominally higher birthrate once they get here, nearly all races in America have an average of 2 babies each, keeping us at replacement. Add immigration to that, and our population is still growing. (We're projected to hit 300 million in October.) In Italy the Pope is telling the people to have more children, and Putin in Russia is offering to pay families to do so.

This is from the Washington Post article linked to above:

What explains the American exception? Eberstadt cites three differences with Europe and most other advanced countries: greater optimism, greater patriotism and stronger religious values. There's some supporting evidence. A survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago asked respondents in 33 countries to react to this statement: "I would rather be a citizen of [my country] than of any other." Among Americans, 75 percent "strongly" agreed; among Germans, French and Spanish, comparable responses were 21 percent, 34 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

(Mair, you should get a kick out of that: citing optimism, patriotism and religious values as demographic/sociological explanations moves toward that human factor you appreciate and want to see more of in sociology.)

Here's the CIA's listing of all fertility rates. Does this represent the Death of the West, or is it just a phase?

Income inequality

2006-06-22T11:40:00.000-04:00

This article in the Economist assesses the current wealth gap in the United States in detail and looks for explanations. Read it. It contains some striking facts, one of which is that the share of aggregate income going to the top 14,000 taxpayers in this country of 300 million is nearly 3%. That's spectacular. A graph also shows the amount of income controlled by top earners over time, from 1913 to 2004. Top earners controlled the least amount of income in this period around 1970, which is when labor unions reached their height.

This issue concerns me, because as j. morgan has eloquently argued in those long comments that gmack hates to read and refuses to write, it tends to negatively impact civic life. No one objects to certain people working harder than others, or controlling more wealth than others; but when governments start working more for the interests of the rich and powerful it becomes a problem in its own right.

The flip side is that I think that the US compares favorably in many regards with the wealthy Western European countries, Japan, Argentina, Canada and other world powers. Despite the fact that the Economist article mentions that social mobility is more flexible in Europe than most people think, I'd still rather live here than anywhere else. We have such vast wealth, so many natural resources and such hard workers that the share of income divided up by the middle class is still high, and the American dream is still possible (though not guaranteed.)

When I approach issues like this, I DON'T think to myself: how can I redistribute the earnings of those 14,000 taxpayers, so that they make less and BillyJoe down at the BP makes more? I think: how can we have a more just country?

So: is income inequality a problem? If so, what should we do about it? If not, is anything a problem? And will this blog post finally bring down the repressive North Korean regime?

Moral authority

2006-06-20T09:50:00.000-04:00

Ann Coulter is in the news (again) for her latest book's attack on some of the 9/11 widows. Here's an excerpt from that article:

'Ann Coulter, the conservative pundit with a penchant for creating controversy, caused a ruckus when she called 9/11 widows "witches" and accused them of using their husbands' deaths for their own political gain.'

I saw her interviewed on TV and she coupled her playground insults with an actual argument. She said that what frustrated her was the fact that she saw the widows as saying "Because we're widows, our positions simply can't be attacked and our motivations simply can't be questioned." Now, I've not heard them claim this directly, but technically she's right: to say that one's stance guarantees the truth of one's statements is a logical fallacy. Unfortunately, to talk about this in such a manner is basically another, subtler ad hominem attack. Instead of taking the high ground and doing what she thinks they should do, which is attack arguments on their own merits, she's poisoning the well: everyone leaves the discussion viewing the war widows' putative unimpeachability as arrogance.

What then do we do with John Murtha, whose Vietnam experience doesn't guarantee the truth of his claims, or Cindy Sheehan, whose loss doesn't guarantee the truth of hers? One word: respect. It's possible to combine an attack on someone's position with a deep respect for their experiences. How not to do this was demonstrated on the floor of the House by Louis Gohmert.

Rep. Gohmert: Let me close by saying some have not had nice things to say about our colleague Mr. Murtha, and others wanting to pull out of Iraq quickly. I understand the faithful visitation that he does routinely. So I say thank God for his big heart. I say thank God for his compassion. Thank God for his visits to the wounded. Thank God for his ministering to grieving families. But thank God he was not here and prevailed after the bloodbaths at Normandy and in the Pacific or we would be here speaking Japanese or German. Thank you.
Rep. Murtha: Was the gentleman at any of those locations? Either at Normandy or any of those locations?
Rep. Gohmert: You want to know which locations?
Rep. Murtha: Yeah. Normandy?
Rep. Murtha: I say were you there?
Rep. Gohmert: No, sir. I wasn't.
Rep. Murtha: Were you in Vietnam?
Rep. Gohmert: No, sir.
Rep. Murtha: Iraq?
Rep. Gohmert: No. I have been over there. I haven't been fighting.

So, to sum up:

Left: takes experiences as guarantors of truth. WRONG.
Right: takes possible arrogance because of such experiences as excuse for ad hominem attack. WRONG.
Gohmert: to attack a decorated Vietnam vet by saying thank God he wasn't at Normandy, while simultaneously comparing Iraq to World War II? Wow. I mean, wow.

Final score: Dr. Trammell 2, John Murtha 1, Ann Coulter 0, Louis Gohmert -957.

A June election

2006-06-13T10:24:00.000-04:00

The Democratic primary for the 2006 Virginia Senate election, to choose the person who will run against George Allen in November, is today. Virginia doesn't register voters by party, so any registered voter can vote.

This mini-election pitted ex-Republican, decorated Marine, and former Navy secretary James Webb against IT lobbyist and lifelong Democrat Harris Miller.

Either candidate would be better than Allen, but I respect Webb's having changed his positions because of the current administration's mistakes. I think he has more political experience, and I also think that Allen would do a hip-hop dance on Miller's face in the general election, while Webb at least has a shot. wife_of_charlespeirce and I voted for Webb.

Here's a good article about the campaigns; here's another.

In other news, don't try to be gmack's friend unless you're AT LEAST an 8, and a solid 8 at that; read the New York Times and not Cosmo; and come with the sociological imagination, or don't come at all.

Maximum wage

2006-05-31T12:28:00.000-04:00

There is an interesting juxtaposition of articles in the New York Times: this one, about how "Chicago may become the first city in the nation to require big box retailers like Wal-Mart or Home Depot to pay employees a living wage of at least $10 an hour plus $3 an hour in benefits"; and this one, about concern over Home Depot's CEO's compensation package, which was $245 million over the last 5 years.

I think that it's unjust both that our minimum wages are so low, and that people like Robert Nardelli make $50 million a year. I just don't know what to do about either. A living wage should be paid by all companies, but it should be paid by those companies voluntarily; no one should make $50 million a year, but no one should be forced not to make $50 million a year. What I'd like to point out is that situations like Home Depot's, in which the compensation committee is stocked with cronies, contribute to the fact that cities like Chicago feel they have to take steps to effectively double the federal minimum wage. If you argue that Chicago is driving away business by doing so, I'd respond that Robert Nardelli is driving away business as well, in his own way.

jackscolon will hopefully tell me how to fix both these problems.

Christians, contingency and crisis

2006-05-15T09:26:00.000-04:00

Stephen Jay Gould on Freud:

"Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. In Freud's three examples, Copernicus moved our home from center to periphery, Darwin then relegated us to ‘descent from an animal world’; and, finally Freud himself discovered the unconscious and exploded the myth of a fully rational mind."

One of the nice things about pragmatism is that it knocks the arrogance of statements like this off their own pedestal. I don't know if Gould is paying any attention to the way that people continue to operate in 2006, but as far as I can tell, these revolutions have limited bearing on the average person's life: what they do have the most bearing on is the people who spend all day thinking about them, like Gould or Freud. To say that human arrogance has been knocked off its pedestal has to involve a claim about the way the entirety of humanity operated in the past--so you'd have to assert that in the 12th century, say, every single person alive was arrogant about their own self-importance, and now they're not. On the contrary--despite the fact that past thinkers might have insisted on some cosmic silliness, like that the earth was at the center of the universe, this was still a belief that was dictated to them by the ruling class. Whether to live in the universe of the South American tribes, whose harvests were arbitrarily forced on them by capricious gods demanding human sacrifice, or that of Gould's mechanistic loneliness: what a choice! I'll take neither, thanks. The victims of the black plague in the 14th century were offered no comfort by their or the clergy's cosmology, and neither is Gould offered any by his view of the universe. Luther was terrified by God; Pascal was terrified by the beginning of science.

I made the point here that beliefs are flexible creatures. That we live on a planet orbiting the sun, and that we most likely evolved, has about as much bearing on how most people keep doing the things they love as any. Gould thinks he's being purely scientific, but he's not: he's offering normative claims about how people should live disguised as pure empiricism. How we put beliefs and scientific statements into practice is largely but not completely up to us, as Rorty points out.

Maybe Gould could have gotten Kim Jong-Il to set North Korea free by telling him that our self-importance has been irrevocably shattered by the advance of science.

Thanks, Bill Frist.

2006-05-12T12:03:00.000-04:00

I can't wait to get my $47.

I shred an Ann Coulter argument

2006-05-03T16:41:00.000-04:00

In her latest column, Ann Coulter writes the following:

"The Democrats' only objection to current gas prices is that the federal government's cut is a mere 18.4 cents a gallon. States like New York get another 44 cents per gallon in taxes. The Democratic brain processes the fact that "big oil companies" get nearly 9 cents a gallon and thinks: WE SHOULD HAVE ALL THAT MONEY!"

Her point is that this current situation is unjust: oil companies get only 9 cents on every dollar of gas that's sold, while the federal government gets 18.4 cents.

This is total BS.

First, that 9 cents is the oil companies' PROFIT per dollar. I don't know what amount they "get" (we call this revenue), which then goes back for R&D, salaries, paying for equipment, etc. Ann Coulter doesn't know either. It's a complicated equation. Second, everybody acts these days like tax money just evaporates. This is not the case. I will be the first to admit that the tax system today is ridiculously complicated and unjust, but this doesn't mean that tax money just goes away. As I've argued before, how much your taxes benefit you is nearly 100% determined by WHAT YOU DO and not HOW MUCH YOU MAKE. Neither I nor Ann Coulter knows how much of that 18.4 cents per gallon goes right back to the oil companies in deferred taxes, subsidies, uncollected royalties, and money in the pocket of consumers who can then buy more gas.

The clear example I gave in the past is as follows: taxes that pay for education benefit software companies greatly, because such taxes give schools and colleges more money to spend on software and computers. Microsoft benefits enormously from property taxes. Other people don't. To figure out exactly who benefits from what tax is time-consuming, difficult, and requires lots of research.

That's why Ann Coulter writes columns like the above.

Democrats (or our lack thereof)

2006-05-03T16:18:00.000-04:00

Lately, Democrats are criticized endlessly in newspapers and in blogs, by the very people who vote for them. In a column the other day, Ted Rall said this:

"As usual, Democrats don't have much to say at all."

On the Daily Show the other night, Jon Stewart said that when it comes to immigration, the Democrats are hiding in a corner praying that no one asks them what they think.

It's all true--from the New Republic to the Village Voice to the New York Times to this blog to Harry and Maude in Wisconsin, you hear the same thing: the Republicans are badong on nearly everything; and the Democrats are an empty shell of a party with no agenda (on the federal level.)

My question: why? And I don't mean why, as in

redhurtmachine: the democrats are stupid liberals

I mean why, as in, what do Harry Reid and Barack Obama talk about with their wives at night? What are they thinking? Are they cleverly triangulating? Are they trying to block even more damage by a Republican administration, and then move in when it's their turn? What?

What do you all think?

In the meantime, keep "tragic Target shoppers" going. There's got to be more to say.

J. Morgan and Foucault: tragic Target shoppers.

2006-05-01T09:37:00.000-04:00

J. morgan's definition of a post-modernist is someone who lives in a post-modern society, and his definition of a post-modern society is, roughly, where there are Targets, and one can "shop" for metanarratives.

What the hell's a metanarrative?

Wikipedia defines it as "a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience." I'll localize that and say that it's a psychological construct which dictates decisions--from who you can marry, to where you can live or travel, to what you do for a living, to whether the bread and wine are really the body of Christ, etc.

It matters less for j. morgan than it does for me how fully people still operate under metanarratives. The fact, for him, is that we don't have to be psychologically bound the way that people in other societies are, or the way people in past societies were. That's what's important. That's what's post-modern. QED. The consequences of this shift (what we've lost and what we've gained) are still up for grabs.

In discussing this j. morgan and I divided everyone on the planet into 3 camps: post-moderns, Papua New Guineans, and Scrantonites. (Note: these camps are not made to be definitive and final; there are exceptions; this is just a framework for discussion.)

Post-moderns are those like J. morgan and Foucault who have stood under the bright lights of Target and appropriated modernism properly: recognizing the signs of the age, like Pascal, Nietzsche, Henry Adams, or Lyotard. Papua New Guineans are those who still manage, in 2006, to have an honest-to-goodness metanarrative. (We're referring to tribal groups.) Scrantonites, the most problematic of the 3 camps, are those on whom metanarratives still have a grip. They might be promiscuous; they might have a MySpace page; they might shop at Walmart; they might live in a Penthouse in Manhattan; they might cut you from their bloated budgets like sharpened knives through Chicken McNuggets. When it comes down to it, though, many if not all of their decisions are still dictated by a metanarrative, like Catholicism, or being a West Virginia coal miner, or Buddhism, or neofascism, or the 1980s.

My objection: how do you fit the Scrantonites into J. morgan's structuralist approach?

Intermission: gas price insanity!

2006-04-27T16:25:00.000-04:00

Every other news story right now is about how high gas prices are, how upset this is making people, and how much our politicians are going to do to help us. As Jacob Weisberg points out at Slate (the link behind "other" in the previous sentence), the politicians are having a stupid idea contest, and everyone's winning. From sending every American taxpayer a $100 check for gas money to imposing a windfall tax on oil companies to drilling in Alaska, there's no shortage of ideas--just sense. Unfortunately, those ideas are, respectively, a ridiculously stupid waste of money; a catastrophically misguigded abuse of government power over corporations functioning just like corporations should; and an attack on one of the last wild places left in the world.

A commodity doubling in price doesn't mean jack. Politicans should get back to making the country's laws and quit screwing with something they have no business touching. There is one solution to this problem: taking the country's infrastructure off of oil.

Postmodernism: psychology or structure

2006-04-26T11:32:00.000-04:00

When people say "postmodernism is" or "postmodernism requires that" I'm generally skeptical, and move to argue. I did that in this post, from which the following is an excerpt:

"We've had some great discussions lately touching on post-modernism, and I'd encourage everyone to check out the books that started this whole debacle. Mair would be rightly all up on if you said "Sociology is" without doing the reading, thinking and discussing to back up your pronouncement of the essence of a discipline, and there are grad students in ivory towers around the globe whose heads would explode if they read some of what passes for posting in the blogosophere. Don't be satisfied with some book by James W. Sire that devotes 3 pages to the godless scourge of post-modernism--go ad fontes, my friends."

Now, it is certainly not the case that you have to have read everything Derrida or Rorty wrote to be PM, or to speak in a PM manner--I'd never argue that. (But you definitely can't get your ideas about PM from youth group.) I've heard several speakers and authors use phrases like "in these post-modern times" or "in our post-modern world." When challenged, they back up such proclamations by talking about how and what people think and what they take to be authority, and how back in the day it was so much better and so much easier to keep people in line, and everyone was a Christian, etc. Conversations like this can quickly devolve into shouting matches about who's a relativist, and so that's why I always take what I'll provisionally call the psychological approach to conversations about PM: dealing with PM in terms of people's beliefs.

Recently j. morgan put forth to me the argument that being in the post-modern condition has little to do with one's own beliefs (see this post for some of the conversation so far) and much more to do with the structure of one's society. He would argue that most of us in America in 2006 lack a metanarrative that dictates our decisions and social structures (which I grant), and that post modernism simply is living in a society that has Walmarts and Targets. This turns the debate upside down, and makes sense of comments from j. morgan like these:

"I think that most of us, while acknowledging some problems with Modernity, aren’t honest about how radical that shift has been."

"The problem is that the only consistent way to shop at Target is to be Foucault. For those of us who cannot bear to be consistent, we are forced to bear being inconsistent."

For j. morgan, Foucault stands in the same position to post-modernity as Henry Adams did to modernity: as a prophet who correctly read the signs.

I have objections to this position, which I will provisionally call the structural approach, though they are less strenuous since j. morgan and I seem to agree on at least the nature if not the extent of the psychological issues involved. I'll deal with those in my next post. So, to summarize:

Papua New Guinea tribesmen have metanarratives and hunt and are not PM. Americans have multiple competing metanarratives available, which they can shop online for. They're PM.

Any questions?

The ACLU: they're probably fighting for freedom.

2006-04-13T19:22:00.000-04:00

In this article the ACLU defends the right of an American teenager to display an American flag.

People love to hate the ACLU; the bottom line is that they're consistent. If your civil liberties are violated, you call them. If Jerry Falwell calls them, they'll get his back.

Data on wealth and taxes

2006-04-05T10:57:00.000-04:00

This New York Times article has all sorts of information about the effects of the Bush tax cuts on income, and some sweet accompanying graphics. Here's a summary of what the tax cuts did:

"There have been three tax cuts for individuals under President Bush.

The top tax rate on compensation was trimmed twice and is now 35 percent, from 39.6 percent when President Bush took office. Most compensation also faces a 1.45 percent Medicare tax, which is matched by the employer, making the effective federal tax rate on high earners 37.9 percent.

Then, the top rate for most investment income was reduced to 15 percent in 2003, from the 39.6 percent for dividends and 20 percent for profits on asset sales that were in effect when Mr. Bush took office.

A result is that the wealthiest Americans now pay much higher direct taxes on money they work for than on money that works for them."

The most interesting figure in the graphics is the "effective tax rate," which is as follows:

Income in 2003/Effective Tax Rate:

Less than $50,000: 2%
$50,000 to $100,000: 9%
$100,000 to $200,000: 14%
$200,000 to $500,000: 21%
$500,000 to $1,000,000: 25%
$1,000,000 to $10,000,000: 26%
$10,000,000+: 22%

This is NOT income tax--this is the overall tax rate on everything, including income, property, stocks, bonds, investments, asset sales, etc.

Is this fair? What should the top income tax rate be? Should the tax on dividends and asset sales be the same, more than, or less than the income tax rate?

Taking these numbers as gospel, here's another chart I made from the data:

Income group/Total Tax Paid to Government:

Less than $50,000: $43,652,296,248
$50,000 to $100,000: $172,714,138,947
$100,000 to $200,000: $162,310,472,683
$200,000 to $500,000: $120,868,503,424
$500,000 to $1,000,000: $60,214,014,360
$1,000,000 to $10,000,000: $97,087,072,902
$10,000,000+: $35,413,952,676

The 6,236 members of the elite $10 million+ income group paid the government $35 billion in 2003, nearly as much as the 92 million members of the less than $50,000 group.

Total tax paid: $692 billion.

Unfortunately, the data don't break up tax bills by type, so I can't vary investment tax rates against income tax rates to see what we would come up with if, say, we made income tax flat at 20% and investment taxes flat at 30%.

So, if we go to a flat tax of 15% on everything, we get $931 billion in revenue. Good. Now, it seems grossly immoral to me to tax households making less than $50,000 at all, so let's drop them. Without them, we still have $661 billion in revenue, $31 billion less than our revenue from the convoluted mess above. Awesome, right? Much more fair, right? A few cuts here and there, and we have a fairer system and a balanced budget! Well, yes, except that the effective tax rate on the 30 million tax payers who make between $50,000 and $100,000 a year just DOUBLED.

Are you a liberal?

2006-03-28T14:57:00.000-05:00

On some political questions I find myself agreeing with conservatives about goals but disagreeing about methods--on others it's the reverse. One example of the latter (agreeing with methods but disagreeing about goals) that comes to mind is that of freakishly overpaid executives. I read in a NYT article that the current CEO of Pfizer, whose stock price has fallen significantly, stands to receive close to $60 million in compensation next year. This is grossly immoral--but it's not something that should be legislated or punished. Instead, we should create a culture from the inside in which such an executive is ashamed to be paid that much when his lowest paid worker gets so much less.

The top tax bracket in America is 35% right now, much lower than in some other industrialized Western countries. That seems to me to be about right. (While I'm open to lower top tax rates, other parts of the system would have to be fixed first. Read this post and my response to it for more on that.)

The CEO of Whole Foods receives a salary of $342,000, 14 times the employee average; its lowest-paid workers make $13.15 an hour. Is that totally great? Yes. Should we try to legislate our way there? Probably not. I bet Whole Foods workers are healthier, more productive, and work there longer than at many other similar companies. If it's a profitable company others will follow suit.

Minimum wage is a tougher issue. I'll make this argument: if there should be a minimum wage, it should be higher than it is now: $5.15, and last raised in 1996. WTF?

Speaking truth to power?

2006-03-22T10:37:00.000-05:00

Helen Thomas asked President Bush what his "real reason" for going to war was. Bold. Now, I'm not posting this to start another argument about the Iraq war. I'm posting it to demonstrate that the administration can't talk about Iraq without mentioning 9/11 or Al Qaeda. Does that mean anything to anyone? I couldn't believe that this exchange actually took place.

* * *

HELEN THOMAS: I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, from your Cabinet -- your Cabinet officers, intelligence people, and so forth -- what was your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil -- quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it?

THE PRESIDENT: I think your premise -- in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist -- is that -- I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect --

HELEN THOMAS: Everything --

THE PRESIDENT: Hold on for a second, please.

HELEN THOMAS: -- everything I've heard --

THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me, excuse me. No President wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true. My attitude about the defense of this country changed on September the 11th. We -- when we got attacked, I vowed then and there to use every asset at my disposal to protect the American people. Our foreign policy changed on that day, Helen. You know, we used to think we were secure because of oceans and previous diplomacy. But we realized on September the 11th, 2001, that killers could destroy innocent life. And I'm never going to forget it. And I'm never going to forget the vow I made to the American people that we will do everything in our power to protect our people.

Part of that meant to make sure that we didn't allow people to provide safe haven to an enemy. And that's why I went into Iraq -- hold on for a second --

HELEN THOMAS: They didn't do anything to you, or to our country.

THE PRESIDENT: Look -- excuse me for a second, please. Excuse me for a second. They did. The Taliban provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where al Qaeda trained --

HELEN THOMAS: I'm talking about Iraq --

THE PRESIDENT: Helen, excuse me. That's where -- Afghanistan provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where they trained. That's where they plotted. That's where they planned the attacks that killed thousands of innocent Americans.

I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That's why I went to the Security Council; that's why it was important to pass 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences.

Books and Isms

2006-03-21T10:16:00.000-05:00

We've had some great discussions lately touching on post-modernism, and I'd encourage everyone to check out the books that started this whole debacle. Mair would be rightly all up on if you said "Sociology is" without doing the reading, thinking and discussing to back up your pronouncement of the essence of a discipline, and there are grad students in ivory towers around the globe whose heads would explode if they read some of what passes for posting in the blogosophere. Don't be satisfied with some book by James W. Sire that devotes 3 pages to the godless scourge of post-modernism--go ad fontes, my friends.

My candidate for a good, first post-modernist is Pascal. He's easy to read, as is Nietzsche. Some of the 20th-century folks like Heidegger and his structuralist, hermeneutical and post-structuralist children are impossible--dark labyrinths of thought. Wittgenstein, who metamorphoses from a Bertrand Russell clone to a Norwegian gardener to an anti-foundationalist linguist, is not as hard as your Heideggers and Gadamers, but is not easy. He's also essential reading. Start with the Tractatus. Move on to the Philosophical Investigations. They're both short.

Derrida and Foucault get dragged in as well. Of Grammatology is the only Derrida I've read in its entirety, and it's tough and frustrating. I've not read anything but excerpts of Foucault. Lyotard's 1984 book The Postmodern Condition is short, difficult, and good.

Richard Rorty counts himself a pragmatist and disciple of John Dewey. (If you want to see redhurt's face fall off, tell him that John Dewey is the only person you like more than Hillary Clinton.) His earlier works, like Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and Consequences of Pragmatism, are hard; his later works, like his books of papers and Philosophy and Social Hope, are easy.

Let me know how it goes.

Tenured radicals, or something

2006-03-14T10:20:00.000-05:00

I read this book yesterday. It was a silly book. My children will write books of this caliber at the age of 6.

After the introduction, Horowitz dives right in, profiling 101 of the most "dangerous" academics in America. Here's what the dust jacket says:

"We all know that left-wing radicals from the 1960s have hung around academia and hired people like themselves. But if you thought they were all harmless, antiquated hippies, you’d be wrong. Today’s radical academics aren’t the exception—they’re legion. And far from being harmless, they spew violent anti-Americanism, preach anti-Semitism, and cheer on the killing of American soldiers and civilians—all the while collecting tax dollars and tuition fees to indoctrinate our children."

Here's the thing. There's a real debate to be had here, about freedom of speech and expression, tenure, and Ward Churchill. But this book is merely a caricature of one side of the debate: that these professors, who probably average teaching about a class a year, really are radically disconnected from American society and that their colleges graduate legions of clones each year. Horowitz's main problem with each professor seems to be that they opposed the Iraq war. Sorry--that's not radical. The people in America who take geopolitics and policy and history and blogging seriously are pretty much split about the war, and the rest of the American public changes their minds about it on a regular basis-- the same people that voted for Bill Clinton in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000. It's 2006. Teaching women's studies, opposing the Iraq war and having Marx on your syllabus is just not that radical, and it's certainly not dangerous. (A few of the professors do seem to have pretty insane views.)

AND, there's no list or index of the professors: you can't see that Howard Zinn is on page 141, or Alison Jaggar is on page 67. I bet someone has made one, but the book doesn't have one. Horowitz could at least stand by his own list.

Is it Constitutional? Four views.

2006-03-10T07:23:00.000-05:00

I've done a lot of thinking about the " legislating from the bench" argument, which derives from the disagreement about whether the Constitution is a living document or not, which is really just two different ways of expressing how people think social change should come about. I don't know that I have a coherent position yet, but Lord knows that won't stop me from blogging.

A while back I thought to myself for the first time that many justices don't try to "get it right" when they adjudicate a case--they try to get it Constitutional. Is this what they should do? One extreme position might be that the court is a mechanism of social change that should be employed in any way possible. The other side--that the Constitution is fixed and should shape all legal decisions--isn't so extreme.

Trying to see what's Constitutional and leaving legislation up to the legislators--radical! I've come to respect the closely worded opinions of conservative justices who don't try to overreach--who say, I disagree with this decision, but it's clearly what's in the Constitution. If you want the law changed call your senator. I just can't decide if I agree with this or not.

But what philosophical view is that?

(1) Morality by fiat--the Constitution establishes what is right and wrong.

(2) Absolutism--the Constitution gets nearly everything right, so it's the best guide possible.

(3) Pragmatism--the Constitution is a decent way of doing law, and we need some way to decide cases while we continue to make new laws and get closer to being a just society.

(4) Local relativism*--the Constitution is all we have, so we might as well go with it.

I'd think that conservative justices mostly fall into category 2, but I realize that these categories don't map isomorphically onto the labels judges choose for themselves, which can include originalist, cautious liberal/cautious conservative, or moderate.

Well? John Roberts or John Stevens?

*Caveat on 4: I don't mean "relativism" in the full-fledged philosophical sense that nothing is right or wrong--I mean that 4 takes a very pessimistic view of what it's possible to know and how well it's possible to decide cases in general.

Bush logic

2006-02-28T16:36:00.000-05:00

This article reports of the following statement by President Bush:

"If Bin Laden doesn't want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush."

This is of the argument form "If Bin Laden doesn't want X to happen, then X must be good." I don't think this is true--presumably there are lots of things that Bin Laden doesn't want to happen that would be bad. Plus, the Bush team would have spun anything in any Bin Laden tape to their advantage, just as the Kerry team would have.

Anyway, in the CNN.com survey attached to this article, an overwhelming majority of people thought that the Bin Laden tape had helped Bush get re-elected. What do you all think? I don't think so at all. I think the Bush campaign ran like a well-oiled machine, and that Bush began winning people over (whether he should have or not) as soon as he took the presidency. While he didn't win in a landslide or with a mandate, his 3 million more votes than Kerry's were impressive. Americans are attracted to his charisma, his faith, his policies, and I think most of all to his certainty, and he began winning people over way before most Americans had heard of the lanky Saudi murderer.

Thoughts?

Richard Rorty vs. Mair

2006-02-23T15:06:00.000-05:00

Check out the sociological imagination for a thoughtful, eloquent take on the problems of Christian scholarship. Then check out this post, where I take up one aspect of mair's frustration.

The philosopher Richard Rorty (difficult / easy) addresses part of this issue in an essay/book review of Stephen Carter's excellent "The Culture of Disbelief." I'll take Rorty to be Mair's interlocutor--he represents, in her words, a "champion of tolerance [and] cultural relativity," someone who might be opposed to the inability to separate religion from politics (or in her case, sociology.) We''ll start things off by summarizing Carter's book in one sentence. Sweet.

Carter attacks what he views as the intelligentsia's trivialization of religion--their insistence that religion not be mixed with politics and that it play no role in shaping public policy. Rorty begins his essay by playing the "Jeffersonian compromise" card--he says that people of faith did (and have to) trade the privatization of religious faith for religious freedom, and that this is a good deal for everyone.

BUT, he then concedes a crucial point to Carter: that it's disingenuous for academics/liberals/whoever to insist that people of faith not base their politics on religion, and then to go and base theirs on enlightenment principles/utilitarianism/liberalism/whatever. Good pragmatist that he is, Rorty says that it's impossible to separate your politics from your personal beliefs from your religious beliefs from your morals from the policies you favor, as if these were all distinct entities that one could pick and choose. His modern update to the Jeffersonian compromise: when we're in the public square, we "drop the sources of the premises of our arguments;" IE, it' s okay to argue that abortion is wrong and should be restricted as long as you don't say "Because it's God's will."

Now, whether this (A) works in practice or (B) will satisfy Carter is up for debate. What's interesting about Rorty's take on the whole issue is his admitting that there's no separating "religion" from politics--I think this represents a paradigm shift from previous intellectuals' insistence on or predictions about the destruction of religion.

Mair wrote: "My statements will be necessarily grounded in what I see as a right and true order for society. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and I just want to know why other sociologists do." To pick up Rorty's argument: I think these other sociologists are wrong, and not only that, but they're being incoherent by pretending they occupy some perfectly neutral super-position from which they can see every other position. You can hold their feet to the fire without bringing religion into the picture. We never need to play our hands as Christians in such discussions: the deep incoherence of their position can be attacked by the arguments of members of their own ranks (like Rorty.)

In the meantime, we need to figure out exactly how religion should be brought into the picture. That's a post for another day.

The lives of America's politicians

2006-02-23T12:25:00.000-05:00

The American Prospect spared us no detail in their look into Senator Santorum's life.

"The total Starbucks charges [to Senator Santorum's PAC] since 2001 come to $558.65."

I wish I had a PAC for Starbucks charges. That would be unbelievable.

Ann and Michelle? These aren't really your articles, are they? They are? Hmm...

2006-02-17T16:48:00.000-05:00

I happened to read two articles today in which the respective authors went off the respective deep ends of the left and right, respectively. What rattles my chain is not that Ann Coulter is racist and hates Muslims--she's not and doesn't--or that Michelle Cottle is a far-left lunatic--she's not--but that each columnist chose to use their public forums to write empty diatribes, with the emphasis on EMPTY and not partisan. No insight; no recommendations on what I should do about Islamic fundamentalism or the current administration; no research. The articles were a waste of space and a waste of my time.

Coulter resorted to simple taunting which I will not reprint here, as I don't want pseudo-racist slurs to appear in this blog. Cottle (get log-in here) wrote the unbelievable paragraph below:

"[Cheney] cannot stand the idea that he should in any way be accountable for anything to anyone--much less the weak, sniveling, unwashed mass of voters he ostensibly serves...The man could be caught on film slow roasting babies over a burning, swastika-adorned crucifix and he would simply shrug, sneer, and growl something about national security and the unitary executive theory."

Michelle, Ann? Have something else on my desk by 8 AM Monday. And get me some Starbucks.

craigslist and discrimination

2006-02-16T15:06:00.000-05:00

This is a tough issue. To summarize: craigslist is a massive, not for profit (mostly) classified ads site where people can post or look for jobs, housing, objects, relationships, whatever. craigslist is currently being sued by the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law for allowing users to post discriminatory housing ads, like the ones listed in the CNN article (no minorities; female Christian wanted; etc.)

There are at least two questions at issue here: one, should the same statues that apply to newspapers apply to craigslist? And two, if a female Christian wants a female Christian roommate, how does she go about getting one?

Conservative?

2006-02-07T15:28:00.000-05:00

The NYT analysis of the budget; a Heritage Foundation report on the budget.

NRO's Jonah Goldberg:

"[Bush] is tossing around money like he's a pimp with a week to live."

Reverse 360 punt'd

2006-02-01T10:00:00.000-05:00

UPDATE:

Has anyone gotten the chance to read this whole exchange? It's fascinating and well-argued from both sides, though I think Saletan wins both empirically and abstractly. It becomes clear that Pollitt views abortion as a straight-up moral good; regrettable would probably apply for her only in cases where the mother thought it should. mair, any thoughts?

I don't want to detract from the two posts below, but I wanted to link to this article, in which William Saletan drop kicks Katha Pollitt. Read it.

Evolutionary biology and truth?

2006-01-31T10:47:00.000-05:00

redhurt asks:

"What does this do to the notion of truth? I've recently been thinking a lot more about how truth is important, and how Christianity is a religion of truth, and how that's one of its unique qualities. I'm in agreement with everything you've written here, but it seems it could quite easily fall into relativism to me. Any thoughts on that?"

I thought this would make a good post, and I'll address it by first continuing along the philosophical path I started below. One of the stark differences between William James and Richard Rorty is their conflicting notions of truth.

James wants to (1) hold on to a version of the good ol' correspondence theory, but he also (2) wants to update philosophy for the 20th century and tie it to science. That's why people who read a broad range of his works note the tension between his assertion of classic correspondence formulas in some places and his use of slogans ("the true is what is good for us to believe") in others. Rorty, in contrast, wants to EITHER (1) completely dismantle the notion of truth by convincing us that the correspondence notion is incoherent and unworkable, OR (2) accept the Platonic definition (true, justified belief), and then get us all to shut up about it and work on actual concrete problems like poverty, free speech, Howard Dean, etc.

What's most fascinating to me is that you can appropriate lots of Rorty's points without giving up any ground on the correspondence theory. While he treats beliefs solely as indexes (see previous post), we can treat beliefs both as assessments of factual statements about the world AND as indexes. Why be parsimonious about our appropriation of the insights of great philosophers?

With that in mind, I don't see any worry about evolutionary biology leading us into relativism. Just as our stomachs have evolved to digest food and our hands have evolved to grasp and make tools, so our minds have evolved to make, assess and revise accurate statements about the external world.

The books to read: Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, for his take on evolutionary biology's impact on truth; and Hilary Putnam's Realism with a Human Face, which reconciles regular old objective truth with some of the insights of the post-modern philosophers.

redhurt, if you'd care to elaborate on specific concerns I'd be happy to address this issue further.

Evolutionary biology and faith

2006-01-27T16:21:00.000-05:00

Science, especially evolutionary biology, and faith are often cast as separate domains, alternately seen in harmony and opposition. Mostly, this seems to be done to give magazines like Time and Newsweek headline articles--some weeks they tout some breakthrough in biology as undermining some tenet of religion; other weeks it's lending support. In this post I'm going to argue that if you approach this supposed tension from a neo-pragmatic perspective, no "reconciliation" is ever needed, and we can let biology be biology and faith be faith. What I mean by a neo-pragmatic perspective will become clear as we proceed.

Pragmatist philosophers like William James, John Dewey, Charles Peirce, Josiah Royce and Richard Rorty help us to sort out these matters by emphasizing two key points again and again. (Side note: the articles at the Stanford encylopedia are technical, thorough, and tough. For an easier introduction to any of the above hit wikipedia instead.)

(1) Beliefs are flexible. Dewey especially treats our mind and beliefs as a pure evolutionary biologist would treat our anatomy: as things that evolve over time in response to both external and internal pressure. From this perspective, beliefs are not only logical statements that we use our intellect to come up with: they are ways of coping with the world, just like an arm, antlers, a sentence, or a hammer. As our environment changes, so do our beliefs. Rorty, following Peirce, abandons the Cartesian notion of a true belief as a clear and distinct perception entirely and turns it into an index of our action. Thus, "I believe in God" turns into the sum total of the actions, both mental and physical, that humans who assent to this belief perform. Long quote from Rorty:

"...beliefs and desires are not pre-linguistic modes of consciousness, which may or may not be expressible in language, nor are they names of immaterial events. Rather, they are what in philosophical jargon are called "sentential attitudes" - that is to say, dispositions on the part of organisms (or of computers) to assert or deny certain sentences. Pragmatists complement this biologistic approach with CS Peirce's definition of a belief as a habit of action. On this definition, to ascribe a belief to someone is simply to say that he or she will tend to behave as I behave when I am willing to affirm the truth of a certain sentence....On this view, when we utter such sentences as "I am hungry," we are not making external what was previously internal, but are simply helping those around us to predict our future actions. Such sentences are not used to report events going on within the Cartesian Theater, which is a person's consciousness, they are simply tools for coordinating our behavior with those of others. This is not to say that one can reduce mental states such as beliefs and desires to physiological or behavioral states."

Note Rorty combining evolution, Dewey and Peirce to attack Descartes; note him also avoiding reductive materialism and determinism. Now, I'm not sure whether Rorty is completely right or not; but the point that he makes that he is definitely right about is that beliefs are not like puzzle pieces: they are much more flexible than that. Keep this in mind as we go along.

(2) Domains are fuzzy. In conversation we correctly refer to things like biology, religion, the church, faith, society, government, and raving fundamentalist as if they were neat, coherent concepts; there's no other way to talk without doing this. We all know, though, that if you put ten people in a room and asked them for a definition of any of the above you'd end up with ten unique definitions. We need to broaden this point when we speak of science and faith and make it clear that it's anything but clear where one area leaves off and another begins. For me, following the pragmatists, saying that there is sometimes tension between science and religion is really a way of asking the question, what tools should I bring to bear in my current situation? Stephen Jay Gould came up with a way of addressing this problem.

In this respect, I personally don't see science and religion, biology and religion, or evolutionary biology and religion in any more conflict than I see math and physics, sociology and philosophy, astronomy and robotics, political science and mechanical engineering, or any other combination of disciplines. There IS real tension, of course (how about relativity and quantum mechanics?), but when you appropriate point 1 above you don't need to run for the hills every time two of your beliefs conflict or every time a choice of disciplines needs to be made. (The caveat is that our society currently forces religion and biology to go at it. But that doesn't mean we have to.)

THE PROBLEM

Here's the problem. People think there needs to be a dramatic reconciliation between evolutionary biology and faith, or at least a concession by one or both sides, because evangelicals have set up a series of Modus Ponens arguments like the following two examples:

A1: If evolution happened, God does not exist.
A2: If there are any errors or inconsistencies whatsoever in the Bible, then our entire faith collapses.

It's obvious why such a mindset sees biology, genetics, evolutionary psychology and related disciplines as a threat. But I don't (and we shouldn't) agree to such terms.

THE SOLUTION

The reason no reconciliation is needed as science merrily proceeds is because Christ's coming is the defining event of our faith and of our existence, because it establishes our solidarity with God. Now, at first blush this sounds like an evangelical platitude, but it's one that's abandoned as soon as we leave church. What it means is that at the end of the day, it's not design, or general revelation, or some spiritual sense or feeling that we have, or the cosmological constant, or the chaos in the universe, or the beauty in the universe, or any generality about science's explanatory powers, or the inability of science to explain everything, that establishes our solidarity with God--it's the fact that Christ actually was present with us two thousand years ago.

That's why we can be biologists in biology class, sociologists in sociology class, and evolutionary psychologists without the need for a dramatic reconciliation every time science explains something. It's in church that we try to put it all together. With fuzzy domains and flexible beliefs it's okay to wonder about why we have an appendix or cheat, five fingers on each hand, and blog. (Anaximander actually came up with the first version of the theory of evolution in 550 BC, but then everyone forgot, so that they could flip out when Darwin showed up.)

I'm done.

Nice white collar you have there

2006-01-25T10:30:00.000-05:00

Barbara Ehrenreich is an author and journalist (wikipedia calls her a social critic and essayist, but we're all social critics here) who wrote a book about the effects of welfare reform and the experiences of the working poor called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. I read it and thought it was worthwhile, but didn't find it particularly galvanizing or insightful. She went "undercover" and became a member of the working poor for a while, seeing what it was like to live on minimum wage (and busting out for the occasional latte and visit to see her husband.) Then she wrote a book about it. Sweet.

Well, she did it again, and now has a book called Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, this time about the crazy white-collar world, in which most of us here in the blogworld live and move and have our being. I have not yet read it, but will, soon. In the meantime, there's a strange mini-interview with her at the Amazon site for the book, which includes this preposterous statement:

"There's a lot of camaraderie in the blue-collar world I entered in Nickel and Dimed. People help each other and look out for each other; they laugh together--often at the managers. The white-collar world doesn't encourage camaraderie, far from it. There it's all about competition and fear--of losing one's job, for one thing. Other people are seen as sources of contacts or tips, at best; as competitors or rivals, at worst. And among the unemployed add shame and a sense of personal failure, the constant message that it's all your own fault. All this discourages any solidarity with others or real openness."

What do you all make of this? I think it's completely wrong and myopic. For her to say that in general, in the blue-collar world, coworkers laugh, help and look out for each other, and in the white-collar world they don't, is just ridiculous...and I don't think the blue-collar boys and girls at Chrysler or Ford are feeling the job security right now. This is a gross oversimplification up with which I will not put. I've had 9 blue collar jobs and 2 white collar in my 23 years, and the competition, fear, and camaraderie were about the same at each.

Students lack real-life skills.

2006-01-24T11:52:00.000-05:00

Did anyone see this article?

Here's a summary of the findings:

"[The students surveyed] cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school."

Here's the bottom line:

"Do they do well enough for a highly educated population? For a knowledge-based economy? The answer is no," said Joni Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent and nonpartisan group.

I understand that Ms. Finney had to issue a statement, and wasn't going to candidly and insightfully outline the consequences of the study and what we should do, but her conclusion was wonderfully vague--"They aren't doing well enough."

JOHNNY BIGSHOT: Jones, we've enjoyed having you work here, but...well, to be honest, you're just not doing well enough.
JONES: Well enough for what, sir?
JOHNNY BIGSHOT: For our knowledge-based economy, you cretin.

Any thoughts on what this means for America, for the 7 billion Chinese engineers that graduated last year who can build power plants out of Nancy Pelosi's integrity, or Ms. Finney and her opinion?

Short post

2006-01-19T14:30:00.000-05:00

I just saw a bumper sticker I'd never seen before--it said

"War never solved anything--except for fascism, Nazism and communism."

Articles you should read.

2006-01-17T09:14:00.000-05:00

Alien vs. predator.

The great debate.

Armando's take on the WP's "endorsement" of Alito.

Immigration info and discussion at the Corner.

Alito confirmation hearings

2006-01-12T12:36:00.000-05:00

I blogged briefly about the John Roberts hearings here and got some great comments. redhurt wondered about the relevance of the procedure given how strong of a candidate Roberts was; standingout pointed out that since it's a given that presidents pick judges, you have to understand that when you're voting; inviolable asked about what qualifies senators to review justices; and jackscolon went to church with Bill Clinton.

Is anyone paying attention to the Alito confirmation hearings? I haven't watched them but I read some of the transcripts on the Washington Post. (Do a search for "Roe" in that document and see what you come up with.) I thought it was annoying how much Kennedy and others were focusing on the CAP stuff (which I won't explain here but you can easily google) until I read this on Slate. It helped me put things into focus:

"As trivial as the screaming over CAP may seem, it matters. Not because it proves the nominee hates women or minorities or criminal defendants or immigrants. That's a caricature of a conservative judge. It matters because CAP was code in 1985 for all the things Alito refused to write on his application and refuses to discuss before the committee now. Instead of being forthright about his convictions, Alito hides behind the fiction that there is only one way to decide cases."

Basically Lithwick is saying that (1) Alito refuses to be forthright about his views and (2) the Democrats refuse to be forthright in asking him about him. Obviously she thinks that this is unfair to the American people, but if I'm Alito and the Dems are being spineless pansies (which they have been since 1999), I'm going to avoid saying anything controversial and glide into confirmation. If there is anything controversial or bad about him, it's the Dems' job to tactfully find our or bring it up; if not, shut up and confirm him.

Labels

2006-01-11T12:03:00.000-05:00

The labels that people use to refer to others in printed media are amusing, especially in America, where we have a two-party system. I found this on NRO's the Corner:

"In his Fred Thompson interview, Matt Lauer felt compelled to note that Alito is an ultraconservative. [But] You wouldn't catch Katie Couric telling C&B that Hillary's an old-fashioned liberal wing nut."

I don't know about the rest of you, but when I think "UltraConservative" I picture some sort of robot stomping around and vaporizing things with its laser eyes (while probably cutting our taxes.) Another fun adjective is "hard," as in the hard left or hard right; in a Bill O'Reilly column one time he used it three times. That's a pretty damn unyielding left!

Seriously, though, Alito's not all that conservative, and Hillary Clinton's not all that liberal. (Don't confuse "soulless" and "expedient" with liberal.) In America our politicians and public figures tend to fall on a pretty narrow spectrum, unlike in Europe, where you really could have, say, a radical environmentalist running against a Neo-Nazi. We all disagree about abortion, and capital punishment, and gay marriage, and a whole host of other issues, and so do our elected leaders, but I really don't think we have all that many maverick politicians in office right now. Right?

Drilling in Alaska

2005-12-21T16:55:00.000-05:00

Question for everyone out there: I want to know whether you think, as Senator Ted Stevens does, that drilling in Alaska in the ANWR is vital to national security. I don't want to know whether you think it's a good idea; I don't want to know whether you think it will bring jobs to Alaska; all I want to know is whether or not it's vital to national security and fighting the so-called war on terror.

Go.

Bias!

2005-12-19T13:10:00.000-05:00

The title of this article is "Google blamed for jump in high-tech pay." I think that's a strange choice of words and represents the executive point of view only; I doubt any IT engineer whose pay has gone up significantly in the last 5 years is cursing out Google (unless, of course, they're a rival into whose bottom line Google is cutting.) I think more neutral language would have been appropriate, like "due to" or "credited with." The opposite extreme would be "Google praised for jump" or something like that.

Am I a nit-picker, picking pickable nits?

Colorado

2005-12-19T12:15:00.000-05:00

If redhurt were a congressman, would he talk like this?

"I want this underlying bill. That's what I want," Tancredo blurted. "There are so many f------ egos involved in this already."

The democratization of knowledge?

2005-12-15T10:56:00.000-05:00

This post is going to fail to live up to its title, because I don't have anything profound to say. I just thought that this article was pretty impressive. Thoughts, anyone?

More on education, accountability and privatization

2005-12-09T15:27:00.000-05:00

Read this post over at the Christian Kantianist if you haven't yet, comment on it, then come back here and read this post. And give me my freaking sweater back.

I have two comments I want to make, and I think they deserve their own post.

First is the issue of accountability. I think that when we talk about holding teachers accountable, we're really conflating at least two issues: the broad, abstract question of "To whom are teachers accountable?" and the procedural, pragmatic question of how we measure teacher success and what we do with the results. This comment is concerned with the former.

Secondary school teachers are accountable to their students, to their students' parents, to their peers, to the chairs of their departments, to their school administrators, to their county administrators, and to every taxpayer in their jurisdiction. The parents of every single one of my wife's students have her e-mail address and her cell phone number. The students can come during her office hours and during scheduled tutoring times to get tutored or to discuss classroom approaches. Her department is responsible for making decisions among themselves about the way they want things handled, the equipment and supplies they want, and the ideas they have, and presenting those decisions to the rest of the faculty and the administrators. She is evaluted several times a year by her boss, an assistant principal, and those results are seen and discussed by different groups of teachers and administrators at different levels. On multiple back-to-school nights each year, parents and other members of the public are invited to discuss the progress of the students or educational issues in general.

In what other area is the system set up with more apertures for the public to influence it? What civil servants have more transparent lives than teachers? barnabas18 asked "Why wouldn't schools like the accountability of teachers needing to perform to earn their money?" They do like it, because in good schools, it's already in place.

Second is the issue of government, the view of government that is espoused in posts like this one. standingout's questions, while legitimate and provocative, presuppose "government" as a distinct entity from "the people." This view allows standingout and others with his views to say things like this:

"The government needs to gradually give our society back to us."

I believe I can cast doubt on this distinction with an example. Just up the road from me in Montgomery County, MD, a heated and important debate is taking place on the role of schools in teaching about sex and homosexuality. (Catch up here.) Initially, this seems to support the view of standingout and barnabas: that schools, as a government institution, have the power to go against the will of the people by shoving certain curricula and ideas down our throats whenever they want. But, a close read of the WP article proves that view completely wrong.

The school is merely the place where this debate is happening. It's incorrect to view this as a debate between the school and the people. On one side of the debate are students, parents, teachers, administrators, and elected officials; on the other side of the debate are...students, parents, teachers, administrators, and elected officials. They're merely having this debate in the context of curriculum:

"Jim Kennedy, a Montgomery County parent and member of Teachthefacts.org -- a group that supports comprehensive sex education in the county's public schools, including discussions regarding homosexuality -- said it's important for kids to understand what homosexuality is, in part because they may be struggling with issues of sexual identity."

QED.

Tuesday round-up

2005-12-06T15:15:00.000-05:00

The New Republic: the Civil War and the Iraq war.

NYT: The New Berlin Wall.

The rise and fall of Randy Cunningham.

Someone stop this man. Please.

Redistricting and racism.

The education/privatization debate.

Talking about my generation

2005-12-01T11:18:00.000-05:00

My company just received a glossy flyer in the mail. On the front is a picture of a school bus, with the words "Today's student...tomorrow's consumer" next to it. On the back is this text:

You can speak to them...now.
School Bus Media...an early message.

School Bus Media is currently offering a limited number of opportunities for wholesome, motivational branding in a captive environment never before available. Every day thousands of students from 6-18 years of age make the trip to the classroom. Now you can teach them with your product or service, through positive messaging, before they even get there...and again on their way home.

http://www.schoolbusmedia.com

Read this article.

2005-11-29T15:02:00.000-05:00

The current situation.

Bush: a classic liberal

2005-11-28T15:04:00.000-05:00

redhurt and I largely agree that, however you judge the actions of George W. Bush in the end, he's not a traditional conservative. We've even tossed around the idea that he's the second coming of LBJ--a hawkish, affable, big government Texan. Now, I've got Jonah Goldberg backing me up on this, even mentioning one of LBJ's programs in a column:

"President Bush's compassionate conservatism was never intended to be radical, it was meant to be the Republican version of feel-your-pain Clintonism. If Bush's domestic spending were a Broadway musical, reviewers would call it "Lavish!" and "Spectacular!" His big first-term domestic initiatives — aside from tax cuts — were an education bill cosponsored by Ted Kennedy, campaign finance "reform" favored by the sensible-shoes types and the biggest expansion in entitlements (prescription drug benefits) since the Great Society."

What's worst about GWB is that, for progressives, he's the worst of conservatism and liberalism put together. (I've said parts of this before in posts where I've had to clarify both what I believe and what I think liberalism should be: I'm not usually for "greater federal involvement" in things, I don't believe we should solve problems by "throwing money at them," I think affirmative action is ridiculous, I think a president's judicial nominees should, most of the time, be accepted and ratified, etc.) But GWB wields the twin powers of big government and big business recklessly: he starts wars, he creates new departments, he cuts taxes. It doesn't add up, and I'd like to hear if any of the conservatives in the room are disappointed. I was crushed last year when Kerry lost, after I voted for him before I voted against him; not because I believed in the shifty weasel, but because Bush damages everything he touches.

I am Jack's catalyzing comments

2005-11-22T16:37:00.000-05:00

In a comment on this post jackscolon provided me material for a post of my own. Thanks.

"I think the Democrats have largely achieved their point. I find it very unlikely that the United States will really undergo much in the way of militaristic foreign policy in the future short of an obvious state sponsored attack comparable to 9/11. What President isn't going to be gun-shy and realize that he has to meet a higher burden of proof before action?"

This comment begs two questions:

(1) Will presidents really be gun-shy about military action in the future because of Iraq, and therefore have to meet a higher burden of proof?
(2) Is this a good thing?

My short answer to the first question would be no, obviating the second question. But my no is not because I don't think the Iraq war will change the way we debate and embark upon armed conflicts; I think it will, and it's just too soon to say how. I think the answer is no because the United States is in a curious position: that of a permanent state of military readiness, with an economy dependent on military proceedings and hardware, and in possession of no-one-but-the-Joint-Chiefs-know how many military bases, compounds, and prisons abroad.

People overestimate the bellicosity of a George W. Bush and understimate it in a Bill Clinton. When the presidents who are traditionally seen as the most dovish were president, there were still wars fought, there were still military actions carried out, the defense dollars kept flowing, and we kept up intelligence and maintenance actions abroad. George W. Bush, two wars, and a pathetic response by the intellectually bankrupt and feeble Democratic party don't change ANY of that. IF, as I believe, there was manipulation and deception about intelligence during the build-up to the Iraq war, it was merely the latest example of an essential component of American foreign policy.

More snippets

2005-11-22T16:23:00.000-05:00

(1) NRO's blog is quite good.

(2) The Republicans stepped up and drop-kicked the Democrats right through the goal posts on Friday by calling a vote on a resolution to pull out of Iraq. The bill was thunderingly defeated 403 to 3, as intended. Here's the AP's take:

"Republicans hoped to place Democrats in an unappealing position -- either supporting a withdrawal that critics said would be precipitous or opposing it and angering voters who want an end to the conflict."

I thought calling the vote was a totally sweet move by the Republican leadership, and wish Democrats would do more things like it. Nancy Pelosi, D-Hypocrite, disagreed and called it "a disgrace." Ha. Several Democrats called it a "political stunt." REALLY? Thanks for the incisive analysis--I couldn't tell.

Read about it here, here or here.

(3) Anyone have any thoughts on this weird article by Jack Shafer, Slate's Guy Who Hates on the New York Times and Google?

The straight talk express

2005-11-17T15:14:00.000-05:00

John McCain was on NPR this week. Asked in an e-mail whether or not Iraq was worth it, he said, plainly, "If we succeed, it was--if we don't, it wasn't." We can all agree that success would be a free, stable, Democratic Iraq free of most US troops in 2-10 years.

Is McCain correct?

Slate strikes back

2005-11-16T14:11:00.000-05:00

For those of you who read my blog but don't read Slate, go read Slate! Start here or here and read all of the "College Week" articles--they're provocative, particularly relevant to those of us who are still in school or recent graduates, interesting, and (mostly) short. Anyone is welcome to use this post as a forum to discuss them. I'll throw down a comment or two after I get through them all.

In other news, Cheney is a well-connected man; here is a good Jonah Goldberg column about Harry Reid; and only 5 more days until Christmas.

The new corporate raiders

2005-11-14T21:33:00.000-05:00

That college presidents are, in some cases, making more than they have in recent years is inevitably going to trigger conservative talk about the free market and supply demand being pitted against liberal talk about justice and fairness. (Perhaps liberals will propose that we assess a windfall tax on the salaries of college presidents.) What I think most analyses miss is the fact that this is a self-perpetuating system.

"We've created a cadre of hired guns whose economic interests are totally divorced from students and faculty," said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, a nonprofit group based in San Jose, Calif. "It creates a real problem for leadership, and does nothing to help higher education."

I don't think Patrick Callan is correct. The prestige, new buildings and increased endowment and salaries that skilled presidents can bring in might sit fine with students and faculty. Thus, Callan misses the point of his own first two words: WE'VE CREATED. The demands of trustees, influential donors and faculty, and uninvolved parents are to blame for Ben Ladner spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on chocolate, or whatever the heck he did. Students made a website back in 2002 (2002!) pointing out his excesses, and no one picked up on it until 2005.

If we really want to discuss this intelligently, we need to bring in the enormous pressures on permanent fund-raisers WITHOUT sacrificing our ability to criticize people who abuse the system. Like Ladner.

When blogs attack

2005-11-08T16:06:00.000-05:00

Pragmaticism was vandalized recently. I apologize for the interruption--the culprit is now being reeducated, and by reeducated I mean we're making him listen to "Justin Timberlake: A Tribute to Bono" over and over.

Forbes magazine had an interesting and polemical cover story the other day: Attack of the Blogs. They throw down the gauntlet at the beginning of the article:

'Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo..."Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality," says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford.'

The main point of the article is that blogs are a difficult-to-fight way to attack brands and people. I don't disagree--they (1) do attack brands and people, and (2) they are difficult to fight. But it's almost as if the article undermines its own point by doing what it's railing against--taking blogs so darn seriously. Because there are fewer checks and balances on a blog, it's harder to get a blog to stop, or track down its author, than, say, a newspaper story. BUT, the flipside of that is that (at least in theory) we'd take a blog less seriously than an article in the newspaper. So, do these two forces cancel each other out, or does, as the article asserts, the bad outweigh the good?

I wonder if comments on this post will split down political lines. I'll put forth my own argument after we get into the discussion.

Justice

2005-11-02T09:31:00.000-05:00

(1)

The changing of the judge that was going to decide Tom Delay's case is unreal. The message it sends is that if a wealthy and powerful person does not like the way their case is shaping up, they can use wealthy lawyers to get it changed. In this case, Delay wanted his judge removed because he's a Democrat who's donated to Moveon.org, and his trial moved out of Austin because it's a liberal college town. This is a bad, bad precendent to set. This means that Ken Starr shouldn't have investigated Clinton, and that we need to check the political alliances and contributions of our Supreme Court justices before they decide cases.

(2)

Harry Reid forced the Senate into a rare closed-door session yesterday for a sweet partisan huddle about the intelligence failure leading up to the Iraq war. Republican leaders quickly derided the move using all sorts of fancy words devoid of content, like "grandstanding" and "stunt." But I think Harry Reid is right: this was a victory for the American people. Ask yourself this question: is more or less information about Iraq going to come out because of this? The answer CAN'T be less, and more information about the political workings of the most powerful politicians is ALWAYS a victory for the people.

QED.

The lugubrious game

2005-10-26T15:26:00.000-04:00

Check out LGF for all sorts of links about the press's coverage of what I'll call the 2,000th serviceperson's Iraq-related death. I use that odd phrase because it's false that 2,000 soldiers have died fighting on the ground in Iraq.

This debate about the media's coverage of the 2,000th death, with liberals saying "grim milestone" and conservatives saying "irrelevant," is cute, because it obscures multiple more important issues: one, that (contra the liberals) the number of deaths has little to do with whether or not the war was justified; and two, that (contra the conservatives) American soldiers do continue to die on a daily basis. 67 American servicepeople have died THUS FAR in October--that makes October the 9th deadliest month in this 32-month war, and we have 6 more days to go.

We don't want to grapple with the real issues of Iraq--the intelligence failures, the dissent of top brass, the fact that our children are going to have to pay for this war, that we need to continue to support the troops that are fighting and pray that they succeed. (Read Slate's fascinating attack on something I posted about here.)

I would like to point out that the "MSM" is making a big deal out of #2,000 because...it's NEWS. Not because they're die-hard gay-loving universal health care having abortionist relativists. Because they need news, and they'll make news out of anything.