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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The truth about Larry Summers

Via Ezra Klein, it turns out that a story going around about potential Treasury Secretary Larry Summers--that in a memo he advocated increasing pollution in "under-polluted" third-world countries--is false:

So when Max Blumenthal writes that “Summers authored a private memo arguing that the bank should actively encourage the dumping of toxic waste in developing countries,” he’s lying. Either that, or he is guilty of gross journalistic incompetence for not researching the subject enough to know that Summers didn’t write the memo and that it didn’t earnestly argue for increased waste dumping.

Just for the record, I personally haven't formed an opinion of Summers--but I thought I might as well repost this here as a good internet Samaritan.

President-elect Obama

Just finished watching Obama's first post-election press conference here on my lunch break. He seemed a bit off, like maybe it's still hitting him that he's going to be President--at some points I could swear he was trying to stop himself from breaking into a wide, silly grin. And maybe he was laying it on a bit thick with the JFK-style riffing with the press corps. But, hey, whatever, I'm sure he'll get used to all of it soon enough.

It was great seeing Rahm literally flanking his left. The whole thing is very surreal. The next four years are going to be pretty exciting...

Ah, Nader

In case you haven't seen it, here's Ralph Nader holding forth on Obama's victory:



More than anything else, it just goes to show what a lazy idealogue Nader has become. Yes: any black politician who disagrees with Ralph Nader's politics is an "Uncle Tom". Right.

It's kind of weird that I voted for this guy back in 2000, when I was 18 years old. Back then, we had had 8 years of frustratingly centrist leadership from the Democrats and Bush was running as a center-right non-interventionist. Nader's thesis that Gore and Bush were essentially the same made sense to me, so I jumped ship (of course, being in California, my vote wasn't too meaningful anyway). By the time 2004 rolled around, that thesis had been completely shattered: 9/11 had happened and Bush had used the occasion to get us into a war in Iraq on false pretenses and secretly wiretap Americans without warrants. Moreover, he was able to muscle through an extraordinarily right-wing agenda. When election time came, it was obvious to me that electing Bush had been a blunder of the highest order, and that the task for everyone from the middle of the spectrum leftward was to kick him out. Nader, though, somehow didn't see this: he ran again, potentially splitting the Democratic vote, still making the now-ridiculous contention that Kerry and Bush were essentially the same. If he hadn't already alienated most of the left by handing Florida to Bush in 2000, this definitely put him over the line: he was now a genuine pariah.

I don't begrudge Nader for having the out-of-the-mainstream views that he does, or even for running for president in 2000. Within the suboptimal electoral system that we have, third-party runs are a legitimate way to exert force on a major party that tacks too far towards the center, and he could not have known how dramatically the political landscape would change a year later, when America came under attack. However, I do begrudge Nader for the way that he has, since 2004, divorced means from ends, effectively casting his movement even further into the wilderness than it already was by alienating just about everybody in the country who would have lent him a sympathetic ear.

Ralph Nader was a fine activist; but he was a terrible politician, and one who shall remain forever unburdened with power.

PS: I think Shep Smith is overdoing it in the video...a little melodramatic, no?

A question of loyalty

Via Paul Krugman, a remarkable opinion piece in the WSJ:

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have.

...

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

This is a really bizarre outlook, and the sort of thing that would make Will Wilkinson puke in his mouth a little. I hardly need to say that there is no obligation of loyalty of the American people to the President of the United States; in fact, I would say that the only real loyalty there needs to be is that of the President of the United States to the Constitution. By this standard, George W. Bush has been most disloyal, and his presidency really can in my estimation be called "a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House."

Hair of the dog

For those of you who, like me, are treating the election crack withdrawal with...more crack, Phil suggests an excellent article from usually-insipid Newsweek. Phil sez:

So far, three of the seven parts are available, and they're kind of everything I've been wanting -- intriguingly candid moments from within the campaigns. For example, here's this little tidbit: "At Coretta Scott King's funeral in early 2006, Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert Kennedy, leaned over to him and whispered, 'The torch is being passed to you.' 'A chill went up my spine,' Obama told an aide. The funeral, he said, was 'pretty intimidating.'"

Awesome!

I liked this part:

I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' Instead of being appropriately [the tape is garbled]. So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f–––ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

The f-bomb! Never thought I'd see Obama drop it on the record...

The Senate race stays hot

It looks as though there will be a run-off in the Senate race in Georgia, which could get crazy if the Democrats can muster 59 seats:

If Franken holds on, if Jeff Merkley in Oregon can win (Multnomah is the big Portland Democratic engine and is largely outstanding), then it is increasingly likely that the Dems will converge on Georgia for the next four weeks to try to win the 60th Senate seat.

A lot has been made of the fact that two of the "Democrats" in that would-be filibuster-proof 60-seat majority would be Independents, and one of those Independents--Joe Lieberman--actively campaigned for the Republican side. However, despite his move rightward, Lieberman remains a centrist Democrat on domestic issues. Thus, I think we could count on him to block a filibuster on something like a big energy or healthcare bill.

Election night in a nutshell

More specifically, when they called Ohio for Obama:



PS: Note that none other than I uploaded this video, which I created on my MacBook. Thanks, MacBook!

The proper map

Via Krugman.

What I'll be watching for tomorrow night

I think we're going to know the winner relatively early on tomorrow, because McCain has so many states in the East that he needs to win. From 538:

Also, there are some states that truly do appear to be "must-wins" for McCain. In each and every one of the 624 victory scenarios that the simulation found for him this afternoon, McCain won Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Indiana and Montana. He also picked up Ohio in 621 out of the 624 simulations, and North Carolina in 622 out of 624. If McCain drops any of those states, it's pretty much over. (Emphasis mine.)

Also, it would seem that McCain must win at least one of the following: Pennsylvania||Virginia.