Friday, December 26, 2008

Classic campaign detritus

This might have been the best campaign video from this year:

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Economists move in herds....they do move in herds

A clever explanation about why most economists failed to foresee the current crisis. Sounds true to me...

Competence chic

The more people I talk to, the more of a consensus there seems to be about this Caroline Kennedy business--namely, that she is not qualified for the Senate and appointing her would be flagrantly nepotistic. This is my view as well, but I also think that Kennedy is choosing a particularly bad moment for this sort of thing, because we are just now ending the reign of cronyism and incompetence of someone who rose to power through sheer nepotism, and the country is hungry for a change to meritocracy in Washington DC. Merit, in other words, is "in"--which is unfortunate for children of Presidents looking for careers in politics.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Harper's

On the flight to LA I switched things up a bit and picked up a copy of Harper's instead of the Economist (my usual airplane fare). It was okay: a little more literary than the sort of thing I'm used to reading. The increased creative freedom of the writers turned out to be a double-edged sword, because sometimes you'd come across a truly memorable "gag" (as Bertie would call it)--for example, noting that a gambler's eyes had the "watchful opacity" of a security camera--but other times I felt it was just providing rope for the author to hang himself with, as with the not-so-impressive "everybody making out like a bandit with his own designer neckerchief pulled over his nose". That sounds like what I imagine Adbusters is full of.

In any case, there was an interesting article by one Scott Horton that outlines the political dilemmas entailed by prosecuting Bush et al with warcrimes, and how such a process might be designed. Ultimately he recommends a "two-part solution", where an investigative commission is formed in such a way that it enjoys broad public support--and has robust fact-finding powers such as top-level security clearance and supoena power--but that does not have the power to prosecute. Instead, at the end of the investigation it would make a recommendation for a formal prosecution if the facts supported it. From there the government would be in a position to decide if it should appoint a special prosecutor to make a case in the federal courts.

Friday, December 19, 2008

The young blogging elite

In response to Lindsay's comment: no, Ross Douthat is like 29. Matt Yglesias is my age, and Ezra Klein is somewhat younger, I think like 25. Maybe that serves to strip those blogs of the patina of old-guy wisdom they may have had...

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Transition Edition!

From HuffingtonPost:

High-ranking officials with Barack Obama's transition team met for roughly two-and-a-half hours with a wide range of Jewish groups that encompassed nearly the entire ideological spectrum.

The meeting, which involved 29 organizations ranging from hawkish (Zionist Organization of America and, to a lesser extent, AIPAC) and conservative (the Orthodox Union) to Democratic (the National Jewish Democratic Council) and progressive (J Street, Peace Now), took place in the transition's Washington D.C. office on Thursday afternoon.

Reflecting the variety of viewpoints at the table, a host of foreign policy and domestic topics were raised for discussion.
I wonder if this will find its way into anti-Israel talking points as an undue example of Jewish influence in American politics. In any case, it's good to see all the ideological diversity on display: it should remind people--especially on the left--that being pro-Israel does not mean that you must be some kind of warmongering neocon:

Douthat, Greenwald, Torture

Ross Douthat, a (sane) conservative blogger at the Atlantic writes a searching, brutally honest post about his conflicted thoughts on the torture issue; and Glenn Greenwald proceeds to blow him out of the water. Says Greenwald:

I don't want to purport to summarize what he's written. It's a somewhat meandering and at times even internally inconsistent statement. Douthat himself characterizes it as "rambling" -- befitting someone who appears to think that his own lack of moral certainty and borderline-disorientation on this subject may somehow be a more intellectually respectable posture than those who simplistically express "straightforward outrage." In the midst of what is largely an intellectually honest attempt to describe the causes for his ambiguity, he actually does express some "straightforward outrage" of his own. About the widespread abuse, he writes: "it should be considered impermissible as well as immoral" and "should involve disgrace for those responsible, the Cheneys and Rumsfelds as well as the people who actually implemented the techniques that the Vice President's office promoted and the Secretary of Defense signed off on."

Nonetheless, Douthat repeatedly explains that he is burdened by "uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved," and one of the central reasons for that uncertainty -- one that is commonly expressed -- is contained in this passage:

But with great power comes a lot of pressures as well, starting with great fear: The fear that through inaction you'll be responsible for the deaths of thousands or even millions of the Americans whose lived you were personally charged to protect. This fear ran wild the post-9/11 Bush Administration, with often-appalling consequences, but it wasn't an irrational fear - not then, and now. It doesn't excuse what was done by our government, and in our name, in prisons and detention cells around the world. But anyone who felt the way I felt after 9/11 has to reckon with the fact that what was done in our name was, in some sense, done for us - not with our knowledge, exactly, but arguably with our blessing. I didn't get what I wanted from this administration, but I think you could say with some justification that I got what I asked for. And that awareness undergirds - to return to where I began this rambling post - the mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt that I bring to the current debate over what the Bush Administration has done and failed to do, and how its members should be judged.

This is the Jack Goldsmith argument: while what Bush officials did may have been misguided and wrong, they did it out of a true fear of Islamic enemies, with the intent to protect us, perhaps even consistent with the citizenry's wishes. And while Douthat presents this view as some sort of candid and conflicted complexity, it isn't really anything more than standard American exceptionalism -- more accurately: blinding American narcissism -- masquerading as a difficult moral struggle.

There is probably also some severe cognitive dissonace going on. Greenwald continues:

The moral ambiguity Douthat thinks he finds is applicable to virtually every war crime. It's the extremely rare political leader who ends up engaging in tyrannical acts, or commits war crimes or other atrocities, simply for the fun of it, or for purely frivolous reasons. Every tyrant can point to real and legitimate threats that they feared.

Ask supporters of Fidel Castro why he imprisoned dissidents and created a police state and they'll tell you -- accurately -- that he was the head of a small, defenseless island situated 90 miles to the South of a huge, militaristic superpower that repeatedly tried to overthrow his government and replace it with something it preferred. Ask Hugo Chavez why he rails against the U.S. and has shut down opposition media stations and he'll point out -- truthfully -- that the U.S. participated to some extent in a coup attempt to overthrow his democratically elected government and that internal factions inside Venezuela have done the same.

...

But none of those facts justify tyranny, terrorism or war crimes. There are virtually always "good reasons" that can be and are cited to justify war crimes and acts of aggression. It's often the case that nationalistic impulses -- or genuine fears -- lead the country's citizens to support or at least acquiesce to those crimes. War crimes and other atrocities are typically undertaken in defense against some real (if exaggerated) threat, or to target actual enemies, or to redress real grievances.

...

The laws of war aren't applicable only in times of peace, to be waived away in times of war or crisis. To the contrary, they exist precisely because the factors Douthat cites to explain and mitigate what our leaders did always exist, especially when countries perceive themselves at war. To cite those factors to explain away war crimes -- or to render them morally ambiguous -- is to deny the very validity of the concept itself.


Cowardice at the New York Times

The New York Times editorializes that "top officials" in the Bush administration should be investigated for their role in implementing a torture program, with the possibility of bringing charges--however, it somehow stops short of saying that Cheney and Bush should be held accountable as well:

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War.

It's all quite baffling. Why shouldn't Cheney and Bush be investigated along with Rumsfeld and other "top officials"? If the torture programs was somehow carried out without the knowledge or approval of the elected officials in charge, then an investigation should bear that out. And if the elected officials did approve the programs, then they should be held at least as accountable as their underlings, if not more so. It simply does not make sense to believe that we should consider bringing charges against officials as high ranking as the Secretary of Defense, and yet at the same time also believe that the President that Secretary served under should get a free pass.

Of course, the editorial doesn't explicitly state that Cheney and Bush should be exempt--but the omission is glaring. I imagine that there was quite a heated discussion amongst the editorial board about how high to set the target--whether it would be "top officials", or Rumsfeld, or all the way up to Bush. I imagine that they believed, in the end, that calling for the investigation of Bush and his possible arrest for war crimes would be going too far, banishing the paper to the "angry left" and polarizing a debate that can only succeeed if it remains unpolarized. Maybe they're right.

However, at the end of the day, the press isn't doing its job if it refuses to take risks in speaking truth to power when the stakes are highest. I understand that a newspaper can only be persuasive to a large number of people if it remains, by and large, comfortably within the mainstream. But what is the point of saving up all that "persuasion capital" if you don't spend it on something as important as holding an American president responsible for war crimes? Maybe Barack Obama cannot let himself be perceived as trying to take down the soon-to-be ex-President, but there is no reason why the New York Times should have any reticence.

By refusing to "go there", the NYT reinforces the conventional wisdom that to hold President Bush himself accountable for war crimes is outside the mainstream and not a view that Serious People hold. But this conventional wisdom will have to be overturned if America is to even begin to rectify the abuses that have been going on since September 11.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Fine print

It looks like a new way to read the internets had been developed:



This, it seems to me, ought to revolutionize internet access, particularly for mobile devices. Think of it: now on the NYT, the entire paper can be right there on the front page, just at varying scales. So you'd have a headline and subhed, say, and then the entire article right underneath it. With something like the iPhone's two-fingered zoom, you could easily zoom to whatever scales you want. Neat!

UPDATE: As someone pointed out to me over lunch, this would actually be a pretty horrible UI. But: whatever!

Monday, December 15, 2008

Divine Right of Kennedys

Caroline Kennedy--who has never run for public office, has led a life largely in seclusion from the public eye, and who basically is a nobody with a not-nobody family--has decided that she will deign to be appointed Senator for the state of New York as Hillary Clinton's replacement.

I have no idea what kind of Senator Caroline Kennedy would be. But the idea of this person having such a sense of entitlement that she seriously thinks she deserves to be appointed to a seat in the Senate because the blood of the Kennedys flows through her veins is just too much. If Caroline Kennedy wants to start a career in politics, that's just fine--but she'll have to do it the old-fashioned way: by making a name for herself, and winning an election.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

More on supply shock

Re the post below, Alex sez:

This domino effect idea is kind of hard for me to buy. It reminds me of the Y2K bug or something.

Basically, the disaster rests on the idea that if a bunch of consumers (car manufacturers) of some product (car parts) cease to exist, then the manufacturers of those products (car part manufacturers, natch) go out of business.

Uh, what? I thought that when demand goes down, even drastically, supply goes down to match, not to 0. Sure, they'll have a hard time for a while. But to me, the natural thing to happen would be the following: all suffer for a little while, until one fails, then another, then another. As these part manufacturers fail, business gets better and better for the rest, until we reach equilibrium, and the supply meets the demand. It's not like they'll all fail exactly simultaneously.

Why would this not happen? Admittedly, this is still very bad.

Apparently, it's a bit more complicated than that. I've found a better explanation of the supply shock phenomenon here--definitely worth a read.

The problem isn't so much that globally people won't be able to manufacture cars--it's that nobody will be able to manufacture cars in America for the next year or so. And this will cause all car manufacturers in America to shutter their plants--even the ones who were performing well, like Toyota, Honda, etc. Moreover, the problem is greatly exacerbated by the fact that we are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit crisis: normally when companies encounter short term revenue shortfalls they simply borrow money to cover operating costs, but these days they can't get a loan, and so a short term revenue shortfall can spell doom for a company. Given a long enough horizon things will even out again, but most of the car manufacturing will have moved overseas by then.

In the end, the potential number of jobs lost is staggering: it could be as much as 200,000 just from the car companies alone, plus like 600,000 more from all the companies that support them. To put that in perspective: suppose that tomorrow, Adobe, Google, and Oracle all went out of business. Imagine how that would affect the economy of the Bay Area, and even California as a whole. You know how many people those three companies employ? About 90,000. So if all this really happens, it's going to be, like, Armageddon in the Rust Belt. And when you think about all that economic devastation, and the timing of it--coming as it does in the midst of a credit crisis and on the brink of recession, if not depression--a $20b loan seems like a small price to pay to keep the auto companies alive until things get stable again.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Take that, Alex

It seems that my age old argument--that the moral decisions you make in video games reflects, at some primal level, your actual moral character--has got legs.

I always pick the good guys, by the way.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Supply shock

A must-read article in the NYT--one of the few I've read that actually do a good job explaining a concept from economics. Apparently, one of the main risks of GM and Chrysler failing is that it will effectively destroy the entire car manufacturing industry in the United States, including companies like Toyota and Honda, which have factories in the South. The reason is because GM and Chrysler generate a lot of the revenue for parts suppliers--the companies that make axels and sparkplugs and such--and, do to the credit crisis, these parts suppliers can't borrow money to stay in business. But if they go out of business, then all the other car companies--Ford, Toyota, Honda, etc.--will suddenly not be able to buy parts, causing their assembly lines to stop:

As a result, the hypotheticals about the domino effect of the companies’ troubles through the vast network of auto supplier firms — which employ more than twice as many workers as the carmakers — are becoming real.General Motors and Chrysler, for example, owe their suppliers a total of roughly $10 billion for parts that have been delivered. G.M. has held off paying them for weeks, and Chrysler is paying in small increments. But the cash shortages at G.M. and Chrysler are getting more severe, according to their top executives and other officials.

...

Many of their suppliers are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy themselves, and do not have the luxury of extending credit much longer.

“I don’t think that suppliers will be able to get through the month without continued payments on their receivables,” said Neil De Koker, chief executive of the Original Equipment Suppliers Association in Troy, Mich., a trade group.

When suppliers big and small start failing, the flow of parts to every automaker in the country will be disrupted because as suppliers typically sell their products to both American and foreign brands with plants in the United States.

“There’s no question it will hit Toyota, Honda and Nissan too,” said John Casesa, principal in the auto consulting firm Casesa Shapiro Group.

“Many of the small suppliers will simply liquidate because they don’t have the resources to go reorganize in Chapter 11 bankruptcy,” Mr. Casesa said. “They’ll just go away.”

It is the dire scene laid out at the first set of Congressional hearings on an auto bailout in mid-November by Ford’s chief executive, Alan R. Mulally.

“Should one of our domestic competitors declare bankruptcy, the effect on Ford’s production operations would be felt within days, if not hours,” Mr. Mulally said.

...

In years past, suppliers have often been able to assist a troubled automaker by extending payment periods to get through tough times.

But by Mr. De Koker’s estimation, hundreds of suppliers no longer have that flexibility. They cannot borrow money in a frozen credit market, and they cannot buy raw materials without first being paid for parts they already shipped.

The Big Three, along with their foreign competitors, are what most people think make up the entire auto industry. But the car manufacturers are just the top of the pyramid.

While G.M., Ford and Chrysler employ 239,000 people in the United States, the country’s 3,000 or so auto suppliers have more than 600,000 workers.
If the bailout effort fails, and GM and Chrysler go under, can't the government work out some kind of plan to extend credit to the parts suppliers, so that they can keep feeding parts to the surviving car manufacturers in the US? At least that way GM and Chrysler wouldn't take everyone down with them...

PS: Here's a quote that doesn't bode well for the Mixed Metaphor Index:

“It’s like the dog chasing the tail,” said Tom Mullen....

“Everyone is stretched like a bungee cord,” he said. “We are waiting to hit the bottom of the river and waiting to be slingshot back up, hopefully."
I count four, with some pretty serious incoherence. What kind of a river slingshots you up when you get to the bottom of it?! First we're a dog, then we're sinking in rivers...there's even a bungee cord thrown in for good measure. Insanity.

Fast, slow

You hear a lot of metaphors in talk about the economy, and one of them is talk about it in terms of speed, as if it's a vehicle of some sort chugging along--so you get an economy that is in a slowdown, or that is in danger of overheating, or that is humming along nicely. But I never really grasped in what sense an economy could be like a vehicle like this.

Maybe it's something like this: in America you have a bunch of stuff--natural resources and factories and the like--and you have a couple of hundred million people standing around doing nothing. It's also the case that most of those people would like to have more stuff for themselves (including things which they, as human beings, definitely need, like food and shelter). And so a bunch of them get to work, using their individual time and energy to take the stuff that's there and work it into other stuff, which they can then trade for stuff that they want.

So the important things to keep track of here are two different rates: the first is the rate at which people make new stuff out of the stuff that's there, and the second is the rate at which they trade that stuff for other stuff. And, of course, the two rates are related: for example, if people are very willing to trade stuff they have for other stuff, then there's going to be a lot of demand for people to step up to the plate and start making that other stuff; contrarywise, if people are very reticent in their trading for other stuff, then the makers of this other stuff will soon find themselves without a trading partner, and will once again go idle.

Now, this relation between the two rates creates the potential for a vicious circle, because if lots of individuals decide to lower the rate at which they trade their stuff for other stuff, and makers of this other stuff go idle as a result, then these makers must lower the rate at which they trade their stuff for other stuff. And everybody else is watching this chain reaction slowly build, and so--since they as makers figure they may well go idle soon--they all decide to conserve the stuff they have by lowering the rate at which they trade it for other stuff. And so the rate of trading lowers across the board, causing there to be less of a need for making stuff to be traded, causing the rate at which stuff is made to go down. And so you have this suboptimal arrangement, where far more of those hundreds of millions of people are standing idle than need be.

So that is, I think, the way in which an economy could be said to be going "faster" or "slower". If it's faster, then that means the rate of making stuff and trading stuff is really high, and all those hundreds of millions of people are busy as bees, making stuff for the first half of the day and then trading that stuff for other stuff for the second half of the day (and on weekends, trading all day). But if the economy is "slow", then that means that the rates of making and trading stuff is low, and that--while lots of people are still busy as bees--there are also lots of people just standing around idle, not making any stuff and trying to keep their trading of stuff they have to an absolute minimum.

So that's the metaphor, I think. It is worth adding that the government, via a central banking system, can take steps to control the speed of the economy to interrupt the positive-feedback loops that occur, where increasing speed begets increasing speed and decreasing speed begets decreasing speed. If I understand it correctly, it does this in a very tricky way. Above, when I say that people exert time and effort to work stuff that's there into other stuff, which they then trade for stuff they want--well, as you have probably noticed, people tend not to directly barter, but to trade their stuff for an intermediary thing--dollar bills--which serve no other function besides being containers of value. So when there is a slowdown in the rate that people trade their stuff--their dollar bills--for other stuff, this rate can be effectively raised simply by increasing the overall number of dollar bills. The government does this by allowing banks to borrow into existence dollar bills, and charging the banks interest on those newly created bills. When the government lowers the interest rate, the banks borrow more, and thus they are able to spend more--that is, the banks are able to trade more of their stuff for other stuff, and all that extra trading propagates through the economy. If the economy is moving really fast, the government can slow it down by raising that interest rate, and thereby reducing the rate at which the banks trade their stuff (their dollar bills) for other stuff. Of course, by constantly creating dollar bills out of thin air, and thereby increasing the total number of dollar bills in existence, eventually prices start to go up, because everybody has more dollar bills in their pocket, and so everybody bids up the price of everything. This is inflation.

What's happening now--and the reason why people like Paul Krugman are saying that the federal government should run deficits of many hundreds of billions of dollars to get the economy sped up--is that we're in a so-called "liquidity trap". This just means that the usual mechanism for speeding up the economy--cutting that interest rate, thereby allowing banks to borrow into existence more dollar bills--doesn't work anymore, because that rate has already been cut to (virtually) 0%. Moreover, even when the big banks do borrow a bunch of dollar bills into existence, it doesn't help increase the rate of trading, because the banks are hoarding the dollar bills rather than using them to trade for stuff (first off, the banks are worried that the assets on their books will plummet in value, causing them to fail; second, they don't want to lend to anyone because they're afraid they won't get paid back). And so the only way now to increase the rate of trading is to have the government itself actually start doing a whole bunch of trading (i.e., trading dollar bills for things like subway systems, improved roads, etc., or just straight up giving dollar bills to people who will surely spend them, like the unemployed). This is called "stimulating the economy".

The last time there was a massive slowdown in the economy like this was the Great Depression. The thing that eventually got the economy back up to speed again was World War II, because it required the government to singlehandedly spend absurd amounts of money on war thingys. So now it looks like it's up to the government to spend and spend and spend.

It's all so strange. I remember my grandfather once told me that, during the Depression, some communities--communities with able workers and plenty of natural resources and factories and such all around--nevertheless found themselves mysteriously idle. There were no jobs and no one could borrow money. People were starving in the streets, and yet farms were throwing away truckloads of fruits and vegetables because they couldn't find buyers for them. There was a shortage of dollar bills! So: they printed their own script. And in no time economic activity started up--people started making stuff, and trading that stuff for other stuff (using their script as the intermediary). And lo, they were busy as bees once again.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

There can be no doubt

...that Paul Krugman is the Nobel-prize winning economist for nerds.

PS: The comments for this post are pretty funny, too.

Four-dimensional internets

This video is worth checking out if you've got the time. It shows an application that allows you to select portions of a web page and turn back the clock, giving you a glimpse of what the page used to look like. I suppose in the future the whole internet will be constantly archived, and it will be common to specify a date range parameter in, say, a Google search. The thought is scary from the standpoint of trying to erase something stupid you said on the internet, but awesome from all other standpoints.

Review of The Dark Side

Via the Dish, a very good review of Jane Mayer's The Dark Side that criticizes her tendency to overlook American war crimes pre-Bush in the interest of supporting her narrative of a Great Nation Fallen. I recommend reading the whole thing--it is extremely well-written (the writer, Wesley Yang, writes for n+1--which doesn't surprise me, since just about everything I read from there is really, really good).

While I basically agree with Yang's criticism, I also think that Mayer's "wounded innocence" routine is serving a very specific rhetorical purpose. If your goal is to make a persuasive case to the Washington and media establishment, then you don't want to waste time, energy, and the reader's indulgence by criticizing stuff the United States did in Vietnam, valid as those criticisms might be. Instead, you want to establish your pro-America credentials, so that the reader won't dismiss you as some kind of shrill activist type when later on you detail all the ways in which America has been behaving like the Spanish Inquisition.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Newt Gingrich: A Reminder

There has been an idea floating around that erstwhile Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is the heir apparent for the struggling GOP, and may end up running in 2012. If that comes to pass, I hope everyone remembers well the sorts of things he says today, because he really does say batty things. A snippet from a Bill O'Reilly interview about the aftermath of the Prop 8 result:

O'REILLY: OK, now the culture war, I know you’ve been flying around the country and doing stuff. In the last three or four days, really nasty stuff. I mean, you know, hyper. We’re going to show you some of the video. A woman getting a cross smashed out of her hand. We had a church in Michigan invaded by gay activists. We’re going to show you the video on Monday of that. We have exclusively. We had a guy in Sacramento fired from his job. We have boycotts called on restaurants. I mean, it is getting out of control very few days after the election. How do you assess that?

GINGRICH: Look, I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants impose its will on the rest of us. It is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government, if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact, and frankly for that matter if you believe in the historic version of Islam or the historic version of Judaism, you have to confront the reality that the secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they’re the opposite of what you’re taught in Sunday school.


Gingrich has an interesting habit--on display here--of taking some emotionally charged but unrelated concept, such as fascism, and shoehorning it into his argument via the strategic deployment of adjectives. Thus, we get constructions like "gay and secular fascism" and "historic Christianity"--phrases that don't actually mean anything, but are just academic-seeming enough to not sound completely ridiculous on television. It's pseudo-intellectualism providing cover for the ugliest kind of divisive rhetoric.

I mean, think of it: even if we accept for the sake of argument O'Reilly's (shamelessly) exaggerated portrayal of secular/gay reaction to the Prop 8 results, Gingrich's comments are still out to lunch. Surely, violently "invading" churches and knocking things out of people's hands is unjustified and wrong, but how on earth is it the 20th-century-era anti-liberal form of government known as fascism? When an extremist pro-lifer bombs an abortion clinic, is that "pro-life fascism"? When some civil rights protesters went too far in the 1960s, was that "black fascism"? The only way "fascism" has any bearing at all to any of this is if we trivially define "fascism" to be merely the violent pursuit of some political ends--a definition that renders the observation "the violent gay reaction to Prop 8 is fascist" completely redundant.

And what does it mean to add the word "historic" to the front of "Christianity", "Judaism", and "Islam"? Certainly, Gingrich could not say simply that "if you believe in Christianity, then you will be confronted with the reality that secular extremists will impose values that are antithetical to yours", because it's not true: there are plenty of Christians who are okay with gay marriage, separation of church and state, and other secular values. And so he says, "if you believe in historic Christianity...". But what kind of Christianity is that? It is a term that he just makes up, and which apart from having a sort of anti-modernity tone to it, doesn't really contain any information aside from what we can trivially infer, which is that someone who believes in "historic Christianity" is someone who is a Christian that believes that gay marriage is antithetical to Christianity. And what does "historic Judaism" mean? Does it mean Orthodox Judaism? It's true that Orthodox Jews are anti-gay-marriage, on the whole--but it's also true that most Jews aren't Orthodox and are, in fact, a fairly liberal and tolerant bunch. Is Newt really pandering here to Orthodox Jews? And what does "historic Islam" mean? If it means a strain of Islam that has remained relatively untouched by modernity, well then, er--isn't that what Republicans like Gingrich are always so quick to label "Islamo-fascism"?

I get the impression that when Gingrich orders a bagel, and it is not toasted to his liking, he decries the bagel fascism he has been subjected to, and yearns for a proper historical bagel.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Quick, someone call a philosopher

I think this Andrew Sullivan reader has it wrong:

A reader writes:

I think that Mr. Ward doesn't understand certain things about the scientific process. He writes:

If a belief is forced (you cannot avoid it), vital (of great practical import), and living (a realistic and plausible option), then, James suggests, it is rational to commit yourself to it even with less than overwhelming evidence. That seems to me to do no more than reflect the practice of good scientists when they believe that “there is no event without a cause,” “there are universal laws of nature,” or “the universe is comprehensible and mathematically intelligible.

These are hypothesis, not just beliefs. There is a difference, and it has to do with whether or not your beliefs can change as the evidence changes. These hypothesis can and have changed as more evidence has accumulated.


Take, for example, the weather. There are no real fundamental scientific issues concerning the weather, and there haven't been for quite some time. There are, for example, no scientists hoping to overthrow General Relativity or the Standard Model by looking at thunderstorms or hurricanes. Likewise, as far as I know, there are no religious bodies that claim that we cannot predict next week's weather because of Weather Gods that make it rain, or that Hurricanes and tornados (both highly organized structures) show evidence of Intelligent Design.

However, we now know that the weather is, in a deep sense, not "comprehensible and mathematically intelligible." The weather is chaotic, and is not predictable more than a few weeks into the future. We will never be able to predict whether it will rain in some location August 1, 2020, at least not until July, 2020, rolls around. This was a surprise to the mathematicians and meteorologist working in weather prediction; they expected to be able to predict the weather like astronomers predict the motions of the planets. John von Neumann even thought we could control the weather by using its chaotic nature. He was wrong and they were wrong and people have adjusted their thinking.

Unlike in (most) religion, there are no scientific hypothesis (beliefs) that could not be changed if the evidence so indicated.

Claims like “there is no event without a cause,” “there are universal laws of nature,” and “the universe is comprehensible and mathematically intelligible" are not hypotheses within science--they are assumptions that science itself rests upon. Indeed, as David Hume pointed out some time ago--and as any freshman Philosophy undergraduate is taught--it is impossible to derive the necessity of cause and effect from empirical data. And, along the same lines, you cannot somehow empirically demonstrate that the universe behaves in a law-like way that is comprehensible to humans.

The example involving weather is quite a bad one. He takes the unpredictability of weather to be evidence that, in at least one respect, the universe is "not comprehensible or mathematically intelligible." But nonlinear systems like the weather are mathematically intelligible--in fact, there is a whole branch of mathematics that deals with irreducibly complex systems like that, and scientists have had much success replicating these systems using computer simulations. So there is nothing incomprehensible or mathematically unintelligible going on there.

In short, this Sullivan reader doesn't know what he's talking about and his response never should have gotten posted to the blog. Indeed, if Sullivan himself were on duty, I'm sure he would have vetoed it, since if I'm not mistaken he has a Philosophy degree from somewhere fancy. But Sullivan is on vacation and his assistent Patrick Appel is running things, so we get this.

Friday, December 5, 2008

Chutzpah

Just received what I consider to be an outrageous campaign email from Joe Biden:

David --

President-elect Obama and I have been assembling our team, and we plan to hit the ground running next month.

We want to be ready to go, and that's why I'm asking you to help us honor an outstanding commitment we made during the election.

Our campaign pledged to help Senator Hillary Clinton -- one of the vital members of our team and our future Secretary of State -- retire her campaign debt. That's the money her campaign owes to the vendors across the country that make our political process possible.

Barack and I had the deepest respect for Hillary as an opponent on the campaign trail. Her undeniable intellect, talent, and passion strengthened Barack as a candidate and tested our movement for change.

We welcome Hillary as a partner in our administration, and I hope you will show your support by helping Barack fulfill our campaign promise.

Will you make a contribution of $100 or more now to retire Hillary's campaign debt?

I saw your generosity and commitment to this team throughout the election, and I know we can do it.

In the general election, Hillary was one of our strongest advocates. She traveled the country and did more than 70 events, raising money and bringing new supporters into our campaign.

As Secretary of State, she will be indispensable in furthering Barack's agenda for change.

Let's welcome Hillary to the team and thank her for her efforts in support of our campaign by helping to retire her debt to the hard-working individuals and small businesses that were a part of the election:

[url removed]

Your support and generosity got us this far, and I know I can count on it now.

Thank you,

Joe



I've never understood this. In the first place, if as a candidate you borrow a whole bunch of money and then can't repay it, that's your problem--it's not your supporters' problem, and it's certainly not your opponent's supporters' problem. Second, it is my understanding that the Clintons are worth tens of millions of dollars. And they want my money? Are they fucking joking?

This is the first email from the Obama campaign that has actively pissed me off.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

The headlines come home

Tough day today at work:
Adobe also announced the implementation of a restructuring program, and has taken steps to reduce its headcount by approximately 600 full-time positions globally.
That about says it all. My job was spared, but many in my business unit were not. Lots of people sending "Farewell" emails and cleaning out their desks. Hopefully there will not be any further rounds of layoffs...

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

More West Wing chat

Lindsay's response to my criticism of the West Wing is worth promoting from comments:

David, you're confused on the subject of Magical Negroes. You're mixing them up with the concept of Competent Humans.

Firstly, a Magical Negro is never in a true position of recognzied power in society. Secondly, their power is always connected to the earth and to a spiritual truth that white people (excepting Southern women and Bohemian women) are allegedly not connected to. The conceit of a Magical Negro as a hackneyed story device is to help the main white character connect with that spirituality. No character on the West Wing does that, ever; least of all the black characters. What the black characters do, however, do is to constantly demonstrate to the show's liberal characters that even in their open-mindedness, they're sometimes total cocks about race, by assuming again and again that black will always stick with black. And this I find genuinely satisfying, as it a) sometimes needs doing and b) actually often ends up being the tedious work that a black person will have to do when a white person is unwittingly being a cock.

The characters you point to merely happen to be black. Their competence, intelligence, insight, and warmth is not an indicator of a Magical Negro character. It's a competent, intelligent, insightful, warm character who happens to be black. Go back and look at scenes between Charlie and Barlet, Fitzwallace and Bartlet, and so on. You'll notice that their being black doesn't really have anything to do with it, it's the position they hold. Whereas with a truly insulting Magical Negro character, it has everything to do with race. That's what's so insulting about the Magical Negro/Wiccan Woman character - that merely by being black/a woman, you're plugged in. Sorkin's desire to write well-rounded, compassionate black characters is just that. He writes very strong female characters too.

The reason the white characters are the only ones fucking up is because they're the main characters. So obviously, they're going to have wins and losses, good choices and bad choices. Main characters simply have the freedom and longevity to be more well-rounded. And really, Sorkin just likes moding his characters. Sometimes it's a black person putting them in their place, sometimes it's a Republican, sometimes it's a call-girl ... any variety of characters are doing the moding, not just the black characters.

Anyway, that's my argument against calling Charlie, a young, intelligent, college age black man a Magical Negro. There's an injustice in that. You may as well call Obama a Magical Negro. It's off-base. I thought there was something off in your calling Tim Gunn a Magical Gay the other night too, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. But it's clearer after reading this post. Someone being FUCKING AWESOME isn't what makes them a Magical ____. It just makes them FUCKING AWESOME.

Alright, I take your point--I think I was conflating awesomeness and Magical-ness. Clearly, Charlie is very awesome, which is completely different from being spiritually plugged in and close to the earth, which is what the Magical Negro concept is all about. Charlie is no Bagger Vance.

However, though I might have been misapplying the "Magical Negro" concept, I think there is still something off--or at least, dated--about the way black characters are treated in the West Wing in the aggregate. What I mean is, I don't think any one black character taken in isolation is anything to raise an eyebrow at. But what is conspicuous is a pattern where every black character, without fail, is super-awesome and, indeed, super-emblematic-of-what-America-is-really-all-about: humble, hardworking, magnanimous, competent, fair, pragmatic. After a while you suspect that Sorkin is being a little too self-aware with his black characters--that he is so afraid of reinforcing negative stereotypes that he forgets that black people can be jerks too.

Again, I only bring all this up because I think it contributes to a peculiar 90s feeling to the series. I am accusing Sorkin of nothing more than pre-South-Park, pre-Curb-Your-Enthusiasm unreconstructed political correctness (Curb--and to some extent Seinfeld as well--are masterful at leveraging political correctness to wreak cognitive dissonance on the viewer. For example, a character in a protected category--say someone who is disabled--will invariably turn out to be a complete asshole). Even it it's true, it's really no big sin.

So, anyway. All of this is based on the first 8 episodes--it could be that episode 9 features a cut-throat, heartless black lobbyist who gets pwned by Josh Lyman, and I'll have to eat my hat. But I won't be holding my breath.

PS: I think there was some kind of blogging Murphy's Law going on with the first West Wing post, because it was a fairly dumb post, and yet for some reason received like 3 times as much traffic as any other post to date. Maybe if I write a really dumb post it will really boost traffic...

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Bush, Orwell

It's a shame that invocations of George Orwell are so cliched, because sometimes the government does something that really and truly is "Orwellian", and yet when you point this out it doesn't ever seem to make much of an impact.

There has been a conversation brewing on the internets about a dilemma, which is this: it's pretty clear that the Bush administration is guilty of war crimes, and yet it is also pretty clear that prosecuting Bush administration officials--and Bush himself--is a political non-starter. Such an attempt to prosecute by the Obama administration would bitterly divide the country and completely derail the legislative agenda. So it's a bit of a pickle.

But in the meantime, various folks have been convincingly calling out the way in which--yes--Orwellian language surrounding torture has obscured public debate on the subject. Glenn Greenwald (definitely worth reading in full):

...[A] major reason why the Bush administration was able to break numerous laws in general, and subject detainees to illegal torture specifically, is because the media immediately mimicked the Orwellian methods adopted by the administration to speak about and obfuscate these matters. Objective propositions that were never in dispute and cannot be reasonably disputed were denied by the Bush administration, and -- for that reason alone (one side says it's true) -- the media immediately depicted these objective facts as subject to reasonable dispute.

Hence: "war crimes" were transformed into "policy disputes" between hawkish defenders of the country and shrill, soft-on-terror liberals. "Torture" became "enhanced interrogation techniques which critics call torture." And, most of all, flagrant lawbreaking -- doing X when the law says: "X is a felony" -- became acting "pursuant to robust theories of executive power" or "expansive interpretations of statutes and treaties" or, at worst, "in circumvention of legal frameworks."

And in the NYT Opinion pages, Roger Cohen:

Of the 770 detainees grabbed here and there and flown to Guantánamo, only 23 have ever been charged with a crime. Of the more than 500 so far released, many traumatized by those “enhanced” techniques, not one has received an apology or compensation for their season in hell.

What they got on release was a single piece of paper from the American government. A U.S. official met one of the dozens of Afghans now released from Guantánamo and was so appalled by this document that he forwarded me a copy.

Dated Oct. 7, 2006, it reads as follows:

“An Administrative Review Board has reviewed the information about you that was talked about at the meeting on 02 December 2005 and the deciding official in the United States has made a decision about what will happen to you. You will be sent to the country of Afghanistan. Your departure will occur as soon as possible.”

That’s it, the one and only record on paper of protracted U.S. incarceration: three sentences for four years of a young Afghan’s life, written in language Orwell would have recognized.

We have “the deciding official,” not an officer, general or judge. We have “the information about you,” not allegations, or accusations, let alone charges. We have “a decision about what will happen to you,” not a judgment, ruling or verdict. This is the lexicon of totalitarianism. It is acutely embarrassing to the United States.
Chilling? Yes. Disturbing? Yes. Outrageous? Definitely. Of course, everyone sounds like a high school sophomore when making these arguments, so it's hard to get through to anybody.

At the very least, he's got dogs right

The Michelle-Barack cute-a-thon is getting to be a bit of a national embarrassment, at this point, but it is worth observing that he is on the right side of the small dog/big dog issue:

Obama: "Cha Cha?"

Barbara: "It's short for Cha Cha Cha."

O: "What is a Havanese?"

B: "It's like a little terrier and they're non-allergenic and they're the sweetest dogs.."

O: [Face suddenly changes.] "It's like a little yappy dog?"

Michelle: "Don't criticize."

O: "It, like, sits in your lap and things?"

M: "It's a cute dog."

O: "It sounds kinda like a girly dog."

M: "We're girls. We have a houseful of girls."

O [with hand gestures]: "We're going to have a big rambunctious dog, of some sort."


Judge Richard Sanders is friggin awesome

Apparently, Washington state Supreme Court Judge Richard Sanders has within him the ability to speak with enough force to literally knock people down:

A video on the Federalist Society's Web site shows that Sanders' outburst came just over 17 minutes into Mukasey's speech, after Mukasey talked about what he said was the "casual assumption among many in media, political and legal circles that the administration's counterterrorism policies have come at the expense of the rule of law."

Shortly after that point on the video, a voice is clearly heard yelling: "Tyrant! You are a tyrant!"

Mukasey can be seen briefly stopping and looking up from his speech. A few minutes later, Mukasey began shaking and slurring his words.

His FBI security detail ran to catch him as he fell. He was released from the hospital the next day and his office said he had suffered a fainting spell.

Was it a coincidence, or did Mukasey's guilty conscience overwhelm him?

(Via Sullivan.)

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Perspective on the bailout

Sullivan points to a comparison of the bailout, in inflation adjusted dollars, to past gigantic expenditures and finds that the bailout is costing more than all of those combined. The numbers:

Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

So far $4.6165 trillion has been committed towards the bailout.

However, I think the comparison is specious. Unlike most of those other things, the money is being invested--in other words, the United States is essentially nationalizing a significant chunk of the financial industry. The real "cost" will be the difference between what we paid for that ownership and what the upside will eventually be when the government withdraws its stake. This cost will undoubtedly still be very very high, but it won't be anything like four and a half trillion dollars.

Monday, November 24, 2008

The internet: it knows

This blog-analyzing tool has been making the rounds. It rates Izott an INTP, just like me:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.





Sounds about right, for better or for worse. And they even correctly pegged me as a MacBook-using, cafe-camping hipster who is constantly thinking about intersecting rows of numbers and letters.

"Final total panic"

Was perusing a collection of reactions to the Citigroup bailout, and saw this comment from one Bruce Wilder:

This is so completely beyond ridiculous, it is hard to even express it adequately. I really wouldn't be surprised if the sheer cluelessness on display doesn't eventually trigger the final total panic.

Hah--I love that. "Final total panic". I almost wish it would just come already so we could get this financial melodrama overwith. Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved FTP--repeat...

By the way, the consensus opinion seems to be that this latest bailout was a staggeringly incompetent move, and an outrageous giveaway to Citigroup.

PS: The features of the deal: the taxpayers lend the company $27 billion at 8% interest (which are worse terms for the taxpayers than the terms that Warren Buffet got recently for lending Goldman Sachs money--he lent at 10%); taxpayers buy $2.7 billion worth of stock at a price of $10.61/share (the closing price Friday was three times less, $3.77/share); taxpayers agree to insure up to 250 billion fucking dollars in losses on mortgage-backed assets. So if those assets take heavy losses, the taxpayers are going to get soaked.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Flighty writing

Sometimes writing can get what I call "flighty"--the writer throws caution to the wind and sort of lets loose with as much figurative language as he/she needs to naively say a thing, even while knowing that what is said might not stand up to analytical cross-examination later (what this means to me--"not standing up to analytical cross-examination"--is basically that it would receive a bad grade if submitted as a Philosophy paper). Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. A couple of excerpts on Sullivan today I think are good examples. The first, about Facebook:

Rob Horning bashes Facebook:

In exchange for making our social lives more convenient, Facebook seizes the right to transform our sociality into commercially useful information, turn our relationships into market research and use that data to anticipate and shape our future selves with the ads it calculates that we should be presented with. It manages our friendships and then processes the data interrelationships to guide the process of how we subsequently develop our identities through its site.

Since it is mediating our friendships, and in effect making the effort for us, it is also directing what the fruits of that effort will be, supplying the framework through which friendships develop and making itself the very medium of friendship. At that point Facebook succeeds into making friendship a consumption product, and itself as the service provider. The other friends we have through it, on the other side the screen, are the product it marshalls for us. And our consumption of Facebook, rather than the actual experience of friendship with all the effort that would otherwise require, now shapes our personalities—in accordance with the commercial goals it has set our for ourselves. In that way, it isolates us more by promising to mediating our connections with the rest of the world. It deprives us of the optin [sic] to make more effort, and make our social efforts more meaningful. Is this too pessimistic?



My reaction to this was: what the hell is this guy talking about? I honestly have no clue. Now, compare that to the second example of flighty writing:

Mark Danner opines:

...scandal represents that media-age dream, the perpetual story. Scandal can be rehashed, debated, photographed, from initial leak, to perp walk, to hearing, to trial, to appeal. Scandal offers an endless stream of what the business is after all supposed to be about: news. As in: what is new. Scandal brings the heart-pumping, breath-gulping surge of stop-the-presses excitement, letting us know that into our fallen world the Gods of Great Events have finally come down from on high to intervene. Scandal represents movement, the audible cracking of the ice. And yet it is all an illusion, for beneath the rapidly moving train of gaudily hyped "breaking news," beneath all the grave and breathless stand-ups before the inevitable pillars of public buildings, beneath the swirling, gyrating phantasmagoria of scandal lies a kind of dystopian stasis. Everything changes and nothing does.
My reaction to this was: well, that's very interesting! I especially like the idea of "the Gods of Great Events" coming down from on high to intervene in human affairs. I think that's right.

Strange days

It looks like, despite his campaign promise, Obama may well refrain from reversing the Bush tax cuts.

I must say that it is very strange that we're going to have a President that makes politics a means for doing the right thing, rather than an end in itself--and that "the right thing" is determined empirically with the aid of experts in the relevant field. Economists of every stripe agree that what is needed is massive economic stimulus, including not just government spending directed in the right places but tax cuts, too (even so-called deficit hawks--whose main concern is keeping deficit spending in check--are saying 'screw the debt').

Is Obama some kind of awesome, pure politician? No. Ultimately, I think most Presidents do the right thing in a crisis situation, Democrat and Republican alike. It's just that this Bush fellow has strayed from that tradition, and it is a shock to the system to return to normalcy.

Some initial thoughts about the West Wing

My sister and I have set ourselves the task of watching The West Wing, in its entirety, in preparation for the real life Santos administration (replete with Chief-of-Staff Lyman). And I must say, even though the series ran from 1999-2006 (which I was surprised by--I thought it had started in the mid-1990s, given an early subplot involving swapped pagers), it has a very odd, very dated vibe to it. I think a part of it might be that, after the epic 2008 general election--and the emergence of an ESPN-watching, Jay-Z referencing, inspiring-speech-giving, campaign-finance-revolutionizing, unabashedly intellectual post-Boomer black President--the idea of a platonic Clinton--which my sister and I agreed is pretty much what Bartlet is supposed to be--just isn't that gripping. While in 2000 the idea of a frumpy sarcastic old white guy suddenly stopping in the middle of a chili cook-off to address his staff with a speech about how surely we can achieve a great feat of humanity, "[a]s we did in the time when our eyes looked toward the heavens, and with outstretched fingers, we touched the face of God"--these days, when my prime concern is that the United States stop, you know, torturing innocent people and detaining them without charges, such contrived eloquence fails to register.

Another weirdly dated aspect of the show--and another thing that made me think the series began in the mid-90s--is that there is no shortage of Magical Negroes: a character being black on The West Wing is a sufficient condition for that character being noble, resolute, uncorruptable, competent, hard-working, good-natured, humble, and unfailingly wise. For instance, it is a black General who gently convinces Bartlet not to overreact to an attack on an American plane--an incident that Bartlet is particularly upset about, because it caused the death of his favorite black doctor, Capt. Morris. And Leo--Bartlet's muscle, a man so connected and powerful he could end the Vice President's career if he had to--meets his political match when he tries to pressure a black Congressman into a vote on a watered-down gun control bill. Finally, there's Charlie, who applies for an ordinary White House job to support his sister after the tragic death of his mother but is instead given the prestigious post of the President's "body man" (real life's Reggie Love) after Josh Lyman has a "feeling" about him. Charlie is, of course, unfailingly competent. All this goes on against the backdrop of white people sleeping with call girls (although not qua call girl), white people making fools of themselves, white people having drinking problems, white people making hard-hearted political calculations, white people acting eccentric, etc. I don't find any of it offensive--just quaint and very politically correct in a Clinton-era sort of way.

In any case, all this, I think, doesn't make the show bad, so much as not current. It is still fascinating to see a depiction of what things might look like in a functioning White House, and I still like the characters. Oh, and also, all this is only a judgment made from the first handful of episodes--no doubt some of the awkwardness will be smoothed out once the show really begins to hit its stride.

PS: Recently, I re-read that dialog between Bartlett and Obama written by Sorkin (in Maureen Dowd's column space) from during the election. It's interesting how wrong the advice is that Bartlett gives. He says, "GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist?...Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it." It's exactly the sort of fightin' posture that makes sense for an embattled Democratic President of the 1990s, and that doesn't make any sense for a Democratic President of 2009 who is the head of a governing majority.

"We live in a dangerous world"

I'm calling bullshit on the constant refrain from conservatives that "we live in a dangerous world". They are quite fond of repeating this at every opportunity, and they never fail to press liberals on the question: "Surely you agree that we live in a dangerous world?" As if this statement somehow encapsulates some core governing philosophy.

The truth is, it is an emotionally charged statement with no actual substance. When you say "the world is a dangerous place", you are not saying anything anyone would disagree with, and you are not saying anything that favors one set of policies over another. The purpose is merely to set a tense emotional tone, an atmosphere of alarm and urgency that resonates with an ideology that favors aggression.

Now, does this mean that it is somehow warmongering to press someone on how great a threat something is when it seems that they don't appreciate the danger posed by it? No, not at all. If you are debating someone, and it seems that this person is naive about the threat posed, by, say, Bin Laden, then by all means ask: "but surely you think Bin Laden poses a serious threat?" The problem with the general statement "we live in a dangerous world" is just that--it's too general. It is an empirical claim stated with all the certainty and general application of a law of physics: as if it's some kind of immutable fact that at all times we must be on a war-footing in every situation.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Calling out East Bay Exress

I was reading the free weekly East Bay Express while riding BART today, and came across this:
Down at Cal State Fullerton, a new study has determined the economic cost of smog in California. According to the report, California loses $28 billion a year in medical bills and lost work time due to the health consequences of breathing disgusting particulate matter from car and industrial emissions. We sure could use that cash right about now, because a new report from the state's Legislative Analyst's Office has concluded that the state will face an annual $22 billion budget deficit until at least 2014.
Well, sure, smog costs us $28 billion a year--but this figure is meaningless unless you compare it with the costs of reducing or eliminating that smog. It could be the case that getting rid of that smog will cost more than $28 billion a year.

So take that East Bay Express reporter Chris Thompson! I'm keeping you honest!

Torture

Andrew Sullivan is always at his most powerful and eloquent when condemning the use of torture by the United States:
Even the word "torture" can be too vague and abstract a term. So let us state in plain English how Bush, Cheney, Tenet, et al. actually got information. They did it by subjecting prisoners to repeated drowning, or freezing, or heating, or sadistically long sleeplessness, or shackling or crucifying them until the pain could be borne no longer, or beating them until they pleaded for mercy, or threatening to kill or torture their children or wife or parents. Or all of the above in combination, in isolation, and with no surety of ever seeing the light of day again, with no right to meaningful due process of any kind, sometimes sealed off from light and sound for months at a time, or bombarded with indescribable noise day and night in cells from which there was no escape ever. This is what "under coercive conditions" actually means. It drove many of the victims into become mumbling, shaking, insane shells of human beings; it killed dozens; it drove others still to hunger strikes to try to kill themselves; and it terrified and scarred and "broke" the souls of many, many others. For what? Intelligence that cannot be trusted, and the loss of the sacred integrity of two centuries of American history. Did it save lives? We do not know. We do know that the people who are claiming it did have been unable to bring any serious case to justice based on their original claims, and are the people who are criminally responsible for the torture they have committed. Why would they not say it saved lives? And yet we have no other way to know. And we have the terrifying possibility that false information procured by torture provided a pretext to torture others in a self-perpetuating loop in which any ability to find out the actual truth is lost for ever. That, after all, is how some of the flawed intelligence that took us into Iraq was procured.
In fifty years, people won't remember Katrina or a corrupt Justice Department, and the Iraq War will be a footnote. But the fact that the United States government committed war crimes will be remembered by all as one of the worst moral failures in this nation's history. And it is a fact that I, as an American, am utterly ashamed of.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Fuck J.J. Abrams

Lindsay convincingly makes the case. You'll agree as soon as you watch the trailer for the new Star Trek movie.

Get ready for a terrible post

The auction house in World of Warcraft is kind of weird, but I find it interesting. Basically I've been trying to figure out an arbitrage scheme that works consistently, and I think I've found one.

Basically what I do is buy raw cloth materials, work them into bolts of fabric, and sell those. For example, it takes four pieces of Silk Cloth to make a single Bolt of Silk Cloth. So what I do is buy up all the Silk Cloth with a unit price of 5 silver or less. Then I convert it into bolts of fabric. Then I sell the Bolts of Silk Cloth at a unit price of around 35 silver--netting a me a 15 silver (40%) profit on each Bolt of Silk Cloth sold. The turnaround on this is a day or two.

Sometimes I get outbid on the buying end, but so far I haven't had any problems on the selling end. I kind of don't understand it, since the only people who can use bolts of fabric also, like me, have the ability to convert Silk Cloth to Bolts of Silk Cloth. So really all I'm doing is marking up the price on something for doing labor on it that the buyers can already do themselves for free. Go figure.

Dude--Palin. Dude.

An interview with Sarah Palin in which a man distractedly slaughters turkeys in the background:



What I want to know is: when did we branch off into the alternate universe? Was it 9/11? I feel like nothing's been real since that happened.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Hold your breath

Apparently we're once again moving to the brink of disaster in the credit markets. Krugman tells us not to worry about the plummeting stock market:

Panic about the credit markets instead. Interest rate on 3-month Treasuries at 0.02%; interest rate on high-yield (junk) bonds over 20%.

This is an economic emergency.
If my understanding is correct, the spread between those two numbers indicates how scared investors are that borrowers in the private market (including banks, companies, and you and me) will default. Treasuries are loans to the federal government, and are considered virtually 100% safe (since the government can always tax, borrow, or print money to repay a debt, and will basically never default). Since everyone is "flocking to safety" and loaning to the federal government, the federal government can demand to borrow at very low interest rates and still find a lender. In fact, the federal government can now borrow $100 today and only have to repay a total of $100.02 three months from now!

On the flipside, "junk" bonds--which are considered higher risks for default, and which can only find lenders by offering to borrow at very high interest rates--their interest rates are shooting through the roof. This is because nobody wants to invest in the private markets, because they are afraid that private borrowers will default.

And so a wide gap between those two interest rates indicates people are getting the hell out of the private markets and essentially stuffing their cash under the government's mattress.

Incidentally, while this is all bad news, it also illustrates why federal deficit spending is required in these situations. The government can borrow money for free; now is the time for the government to borrow lots of it and get it spent in the economy, so as to make up for the decrease in consumer spending and keep lots of businesses alive (thus preserving jobs). And of course, this should be done in a constructive way, with spending on things like increased unemployment insurance, infrastructure, financial aid to the states, and tax relief for everyone.

Anyone who talks about balanced budgets right now just doesn't know what they're talking about. Obama needs to run, like, a 500 billion dollar deficit next year.

Getting old

A must-read post from Kottke. Actually it reminds me of a realization that Chris D'Anna and I once had, which is that when we are elderly and passing time in some old folk's home many years from now, the "old man" activities will include playing lots of video games. So, picture 80 year old me playing Mega Man II (and perhaps operating under the dimensia-induced delusion that I am at Raja's house circa 1990). Weird.

By the way everyone: let's all kick it at the same old folks home when we get old! That way we can all play video games with each other.

EDIT: Raja didn't have Nintendo, come to think back on it. So maybe amend "Mega Man II" to "NHLPA 94", and "circa 1990" to "circa 1994".

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Yglesias demoted

Before today, my top political bloggers were Sullivan, Yglesias, and Klein, in that order. But after Yglesias' dumb post today and Klein's several awesome ones, Klein is my new #2. This is especially true now that we are in full DC-inside-politics mode with Obama building his administration and gearing up for the legislative battles ahead.

Let me filter some excerpts from Ezra Klein's blog, which has been on fire:

On Daschle and healthcare reform:

CNN is reporting that Tom Daschle will not only be Health and Human Services Secretary, but also health reform czar under the Obama administration. This is huge news, and the clearest evidence yet that Obama means to pursue comprehensive health reform. You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress. You tap him because he understands the parliamentary tricks and has a deep knowledge of the ideologies and incentives of the relevant players.

...

Compare the choice of Daschle to Clinton's decision to task Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner with health care reform. Neither Clinton nor Magaziner had any relevant experience in Washington, either with the health care bureaucracy or with the legislative branch. They did not have deep relationships on the Hill or a nuanced understanding of the players. Hillary Clinton had spent the last few decades in Arkansas. Magaziner had helped Rhode Island build a new economic plan. Both of them were, fundamentally, policy wonks. And so they built a process that was, in essence, by wonks and for wonks. The resulting bill might have passed a meeting of the Brookings Institution's Executive Committee. It was an elegant and innovative policy idea. But it was not a robust piece of legislation. It was not responsive to the concerns of the public, and it was not built to win votes in Congress. All of this is explained at greater length in the lessons of 1994.

The choice of Daschle suggests that the Obama team has learned those lessons well.


On Lieberman:

Here's what you need to say about Lieberman: His heterodoxies have remained contained. Unlike John McCain, who conveyed his post-2000 disgust with the Republican Party by sponsoring a lot of liberal legislation on essentially random issues, Lieberman's fight with the Democrats has not strayed from foreign policy. For instance: His 2007 AFL-CIO voting record was 84 percent. That's exactly the same as his lifetime AFL-CIO voting record. In the most recent Congress, his score from the League of Conservation was 96 percent (which is actually a recent career high). Lieberman is, arguably, an extremely reliable Democratic vote. The exception, of course, is foreign policy, where he's an extremely reliable Republican vote.


On Rahm, Hillary, and the generally centrist feel of Obama's administration so far:

Rahm Emanuel sez:

He stressed that the new administration would "throw long and deep," taking advantage of the economic crisis to push wholesale changes in health care, taxes, financial re-regulation and energy. "The American people in two successive elections have voted for change, and change cannot be allowed to die on the doorsteps of Washington," Mr. Emanuel said.

Of course, the key is not what they want to achieve, but what they can achieve. The clear theme of Obama's transition team, White House staff decisions, and leaked cabinet appointments has been experience. Rahm Emanuel. Tom Daschle. Eric Holder. John Podesta. Hillary Clinton. Jim Messina. Pete Rouse. Phil Chiliro. And on, and on, and on. There's not much "change" here. Rather, the emphasis is on folks who know how Washington works, with the clear operating theory being that they'll know how to get things done. That's a different conception of "change" then presidents who come in and bring a lot of new people, which is what Clinton did (though, to be sure, Clinton didn't have a successful recent administration he could draw on for talent).

...

...[D]eciding to shorten the executive learning curve as much as possible and appoint folks with the experience to harness a transient opportunity isn't an implausible strategic decision. The staff will carry out the president's agenda. What's being sought out, then, is not brilliant new ideas for what that agenda should look like, but indisputable technical competence.
And there you have it.

Paging P.T. Barnum

Via Sullivan, news that a lady in Oregon actually fell for the Nigeria email scam, sending the con-artists a total of $400,000. Clearly, this lady is born every minute.

The AP will be here all night, ladies and gentlemen

My sister pointed me to this AP article in the NYT, which is just a bunch of Yugo jokes. As she says: "WTF? Why was that in the NYT????"

EDIT: Possible explanation, again from my sister: "Have since found a separate article explaining that Yugos are not going to be made anymore. Maybe it was supposed to be a little sidebar to run with that article in print, and it wasn't supposed to get picked up on it's own. That's what my editor brain thinks." I think that's right.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The right move

Lieberman stays in the Democratic caucus, keeps his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, but is stripped of a subcommittee chair on the Environment and Public Works Committee--a symbolic retributive gesture.

This is a good outcome. First, it gets this distracting, inside-the-beltway melodrama overwith and out of the news well before Obama takes office; second, it gives Democrats a shot at nabbing a filibuster-proof 60 vote majority in the Senate; and third, it all but guarantees that Lieberman will be 100% on board with Obama's ambitious domestic agenda (although I think this would have more or less been the case no matter what).

Ah, conciliation! It gets legislation passed. And that's the only thing that matters.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Divinity and magic

I want to jump off of something from a previous post:
The criticism challenges the believer to account for just how--or in virtue of what--God is to be distinguished from a human being who claims supreme power. The believer can reply by saying that God is omniscient or infinitely wise, or whatever other assertion of superlative virtue, but it's probably not as strong a claim as the believer wants to make--it rests too much on accidental properties, is still too grounded in this-worldliness. I mean, we can imagine a powerful alien that had all these same superlative virtues, and yet the believer would still say that God is in a whole other metaphysical league compared with this alien. So for the believer it is really about getting across this idea that God exists in a fundamentally different and other-worldly kind of way--it participates in an altogether purer, perfect form of being that regular stuff doesn't normally have access to. But the problem for the believer who pushes this sort of point, in my view, is that his words start to lose their impact, their grip on anything meaningful: the believer falls into the pattern of distinguishing between God and some-ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God by insisting somewhat circularly that God is such that it is just totally not on a par with that ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God. But it becomes very difficult to conceptualize this--this metaphysical secret sauce, this thing in virtue of which God is different--as a thing in its own right, and not just a negatively defined argumentative construct.
This discussion--about the possibility of the divine as a special, purer being that is separate from normal profane (non-sacred) being--is I think a very important one, because it leads naturally to the idea of false or mistaken divinity, or what I call magic (or magical thinking). Simply put, magic is what you get when you take something that is purportedly divine or sacred--which is, ostensibly, of that purer being--and shoehorn it or put it into the context of normal, non-sacred being. For example, I may believe that oak trees are somehow very mystical and sacred, that they perhaps play a special role in the cosmos--but in a different, non-sacred context, these same beliefs, which before were quite epic and meaningful and cosmically important, are now just silly, superstitious, arbitrary, wrong, quaint, and easily dismissed with a condescending chuckle. So what happened here? Clearly there was some kind of mismatch, where either there was a miscommunication, or a mistaken belief, or perhaps, if we want to avoid seeming judgmental, we could say it was a case of two people "living in different worlds". However its put, the important thing is this idea that when divine being is stripped if its divinity, it becomes something debased, profane, and silly: magic.

And so in the conversation outlined in the quote above, what is going on is a struggle, where the believer is trying to get across this idea of divine being, of something fundamentally different from normal being, and the atheist is failing to see or understand this specialness, and instead all of this stuff is registering as mere magic, as no more or less superstitious and silly than the cosmic sanctity of oak trees. There is a mismatch where the believer and atheist are indeed "living in different worlds", and the believer is trying to resolve the mismatch by bringing in the atheist to the world of legitimate sanctity and divinity, and the atheist is trying to resolve the mismatch by trying to bring the believer into the profane world, explaining away the believer's world as a confused bundle of routine falsehoods.

I think what both believer and atheist could do to keep the conservation productive would be to directly address this divinity/magic problem: how can one distinguish between the two--and is the distinction even really coherent? And if the distinction is coherent for the believer but not the atheist, then why is this the case? Is it because the believer has or had access to a special kind of experience that the atheist does or did not, like a direct exposure to the divine, a "conversion experience"? Or is there some other special insight or motivation at work, that does not require some special event in the believer's life-narrative?

Anyway, that's enough for now. I'll have more to build off of this later, but I think I want to keep these to short bursts because otherwise I risk losing focus...

Auto bailout

I've been watching the Sunday talk show videos about the looming bailout of the auto industry, and been trying to figure out what I think about it. Generally speaking I agree with what conservatives (and most liberals not from Michigan) say, which is that we should not be in a situation in which the government is keeping alive a handful of giant corporations that otherwise would go out of business. At the same time though, General Motors is gigantic, employing just by itself millions of people, with many more millions of jobs (parts suppliers, dealerships, etc.) directly dependent on it. Were it to go under, it would be an incredible shock to the industrial economy.

Ordinarily, in a normal economy, I think I would advocate letting the big car companies go bankrupt (which would mean filing for Chapter 11), but soften the blow by 1) boosting unemployment payments and providing assistance for relocating to a different region, 2) making sure health care is affordable or free, especially for children, and 3) investing massive amounts of government money into infrastructure improvements and green industries in the devastated regions. But the problem now is that we're not in a normal economy: we're in a crisis economy, where the financial sector nearly imploded and the real economy is headed towards a severe recession. And so I don't think anyone knows exactly what would the effects would be of these gigantic companies failing, especially in the midst of rising unemployment and a collapsing retail sector--it could trigger even lower consumer confidence, causing the recession for everyone to be much, much more painful than it otherwise would be. It's a timing thing, and the timing is right now is bad.

Of course, these are all just tentative thoughts--I'm not any kind of economics or finance person, after all, so maybe I'm just wrong about some things. But I think I have the outline right. I think maybe the prudent thing to do is give Detroit the bailouts it needs until we get out of the crisis--and then, once out, have the political fortitude to tell Detroit that it's on its own.

Politically correct

I have a new politically correct term for "dead": actuarially impaired.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Rahm/Colbert crack

For die-hards only, a pretty crappy bootleg of a roast featuring Rahm Emanuel and Stephen Colbert. Rahm starts about 5 minutes in; Colbert at about 15 minutes.

Friday, November 14, 2008

The brothers Emanuel

Rahm Emanuel is the basis for the character Josh Lyman on the West Wing; Ari Emanuel is the basis for the character Ari Gold on Entourage; and Ezekiel Emanuel is a big shot doctor who so far remains untapped as an inspiration for a fictional character. Oh: and they're all sharp-elbowed, abrasive assholes who get results, dammit. I ran into this Charlie Rose interview and found it pretty entertaining:



Also, my favorite Rahm quote that I've seen so far:
Emanuel is dramatic, impatient and profane, willing to speak truth to power in the crudest terms and the most difficult moments, as in the heat of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

"You got it backwards," Emanuel, who is Jewish, reportedly told Clinton at the time. "You messed around with a Jewish girl, and now you're paying a goyish lawyer. You should have messed around with a goyishe girl, and gotten a Jewish lawyer."
Hah!

A more satisfying debate about God

Usually any debate between an atheist and a full-fledged believer ends before it ever really gets started because religion entails a whole bunch of empirical claims that there just isn't any reason to believe--for example, that God created the earth, or that God parted the ocean. Ultimately, nothing the believer says about faith or anything else is going to get the atheist to allow miracles or God or any other supernatural thing into his empirical sanctum sanctorum. And this is as it should be: it is not valid to believe an empirical claim to be true when there is a total lack of any supporting evidence--even if you really, really, really, really want it to be true, as is often the case with religion-motivated empirical claims that are not or cannot be substantiated.

However, though I certainly feel that these short-lived debates resolve in the atheist's favor, there is the lingering feeling of having won on a technicality--like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. And the dogmatic tone of the atheist's argument--These are the rules of empiricism!--makes atheism sound paradoxically religious.

The truth is, there are many more interesting conversations to be had between believer and atheist beyond that initial empirical sticking point. But how do you carry on a conversation about God when there isn't even any agreement at the outset that God exists?

I think one way to break the impasse is to ask a slightly different question than the one usually posed. Rather than, "Does God exist?", the question ought to be: "Is the existence of God possible?" By "modalizing" the question ("modal" means having to do with possibility), we elide the usual questions about evidence and proof and faith and instead focus on a more substantive target: the divine itself. We move the conversation from a primarily epistemological one ("How can we know that God exists; what is the evidence?") to a primarily ontological one ("What kind of a thing is God; is such a thing possible/coherent?"). We set aside the question of which, of all possible worlds, is the one that we happen to inhabit, and take up instead the broader question of divine being, irrespective of which possible worlds this divine being happens to reside.

Indeed, I think a lot of the more compelling arguments against God are the ones that criticize the God concept itself as incoherent, or unable to deliver on its metaphysical promises. For example, acerbic atheist Christopher Hitchens regularly characterizes God--giver of laws and arbiter of good and evil--as nothing more than a dictator in the sky. The criticism challenges the believer to account for just how--or in virtue of what--God is to be distinguished from a human being who claims supreme power. The believer can reply by saying that God is omniscient or infinitely wise, or whatever other assertion of superlative virtue, but it's probably not as strong a claim as the believer wants to make--it rests too much on accidental properties, is still too grounded in this-worldliness. I mean, we can imagine a powerful alien that had all these same superlative virtues, and yet the believer would still say that God is in a whole other metaphysical league compared with this alien. So for the believer it is really about getting across this idea that God exists in a fundamentally different and other-worldly kind of way--it participates in an altogether purer, perfect form of being that regular stuff doesn't normally have access to. But the problem for the believer who pushes this sort of point, in my view, is that his words start to lose their impact, their grip on anything meaningful: the believer falls into the pattern of distinguishing between God and some-ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God by insisting somewhat circularly that God is such that it is just totally not on a par with that ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God. But it becomes very difficult to conceptualize this--this metaphysical secret sauce, this thing in virtue of which God is different--as a thing in its own right, and not just a negatively defined argumentative construct.

Anyway, that's just one example of the direction things can go once the question shifts to the possibility of the existence God, rather than simply the existence of God. And I think it's a much more satisfying and fruitful way to go--for both believer and atheist.