iz/ott

Casablanca quotes in the style of The Wire

2011-11-26T00:40:00.000-08:00

I have a good idea. Let's divide up Casablanca into sections, and then select a quote from each section that would be the quote shown in the beginning of an episode if Casablanca was made in episodes like The Wire. Got that? Let's go:

Introduction
"We hear very little, and we understand even less." - an Englishman
The arrival of Major Strasser
"Everybody comes to Rick's." - Captain Renault
The letters of transit
"I found myself much more reasonable." - Ugarte
A 10,000 Franc wager
"Yvonne, I love you, but he pays me." - Sacha
The arrest of Ugarte
"Are my eyes really brown?" - Rick Blaine
The arrival of Victor Laszlo and Ilsa
"Play it, Sam." - Ilsa Lund
Rick gets drunk
"...if it's December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?" - Rick Blaine
Flashback to Paris
"We said 'no questions.'" - Ilsa Lund
Laszlo comes in for questioning
"Even Nazis can't kill that fast." - Victor Laszlo
The black market
"...the Germans have outlawed miracles." - Ferrari
Rick does a beautiful thing
"Oh, he's just like any other man, only more so." - Rick Blaine
The Marseillaise
"Your winnings, sir." - the croupier
Ilsa plies Rick for the letters of transit
"...a story without an ending." - Rick Blaine
Rick and Laszlo have a chat
"Since no one is to blame, I demand no explanation." - Victor Laszlo
Rick sets up to leave Casablanca
"I shall remember to pay it...to myself." - Ferrari
Rick turns on Capt. Renault
"I suppose you know what you're doing, but I wonder if you realize what this means?" - Captain Renault
Rick reveals his intentions
"...soon, and for the rest of your life." - Rick Blaine
Conclusion
"Round up the usual suspects." - Captain Renault

Where is all the money going?

2011-11-09T17:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a chart showing that America spends way more per capita on health insurance than any other country:

What I don't understand is: where is all this extra money going? Who is profiting from this? Big insurance companies or something? Then wouldn't these companies have gigantic revenues, like ExxonMobile or WalMart or something? I don't understand it very well.

Three detainees at Guantanamo were clearly tortured to death

2011-11-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

The amount of circumstantial evidence for this is almost comical.

You need 51 votes to pass a law in the Senate, not 60

2011-10-12T00:08:00.000-07:00

But you wouldn't know it from the way this NYT article is presented:

Obama’s Jobs Bill Fails in Senate in First Legislative Test

By ROBERT PEAR

The vote of 50 to 49 to open debate on the measure was shy of the 60 needed to overcome procedural objections, forcing the White House to consider breaking up the package.

When is the Washington establishment going to realize that you can't govern with supermajority requirements in the legislature, and that this way of doing business in the Senate is a radical departure from the past?

The Senate needs to abolish the filibuster, or neither party will be able to make headway with the gigantic structural problems the country faces.

Economics follows the logic of self-fulfilling prophecy, not morality

2011-10-08T00:58:00.000-07:00

It is common for humans to understand things in moral terms when confronted with a phenomenon they don't understand. For example, faced with the inscrutable vagaries of weather, ancient peoples would interpret poor weather as some sort of recrimination from the gods, and favorable weather as a divine blessing. It is in some ways a very narcissistic view of the world, because it posits human goings on as the ultimate cause of the phenomena.

However, once humans achieve an empirical understanding of the phenomenon, the old moral framework is abandoned in favor of a scientific one. Suddenly the drought is no longer seen as divine vengeance for our moral transgressions. Instead, it's seen as an indifferent naturalistic occurrence that can be predicted and maybe even stopped with the aid of tools, technology, and a coordinated plan of action.

I've noticed that with economics--and particularly the current recession--many people are reverting to a morals-based view of the economy because they lack a proper understanding of it. Hence, the recession and unemployment must be due to some moral failing of the American people: we lack a good work ethic, or we're being one-upped by the Chinese, or we're not educated enough, or we're not thrifty enough, etc. The general idea is that we are being punished for one moral failing or another, or a deficiency in our character, or for the sins of our ideology or way of life. Bad things are happening and it's not clear why; surely we must have angered the gods!

The problem with this way of thinking is that, not only is it not helpful, it is actually actively harmful, making the situation worse. For when we view economics in a moral framework, the remedy that presents itself is the one that makes us feel the cleansing, righteous pain of punishment. And so we undertake "austerity measures"--we begin to spend less, buy fewer things. But ironically when everyone does this in unison--as well as convince politicians that the government should be spending less money, as well--it makes the recession worse and everyone more poor than if they had never changed their spending behavior at all. But this in turn only causes people to become even more austere. It is a vicious cycle; a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Once this understanding of the economic situation is reached--once it is realized that there is a mechanism of self-fulfilling prophecy, a feedback loop, that is the driver of mass unemployment--a very different remedy than austerity presents itself. Indeed, we see that what is needed is a way to break the vicious circle by introducing a giant amount of demand (spending) into the economy. The only player big enough to inject this much demand is the government: it can encourage people to spend by targeting tax breaks to people who will spend the money (e.g., the unemployed), lowering real interest rates so more people will take out loans and/or repay their debts faster, and increasing government spending on infrastructure and state aid (money given to the states will be used to sustain government employee payrolls). What is causing the recession is the downward spiraling of demand; what is needed to end it is a giant, forced injection of demand into the economy.

Pivoting back to the moral understanding of the economy, this advice--to spend spend spend--seems bonkers. That we are experiencing tough times morally implies that we must have done something irresponsible to bring it upon ourselves; surely the irresponsible behavior must have been reckless spending; so how can the remedy to our troubles be even more reckless spending, to double-down on the unvirtuous behavior that got us here? The answer, of course, is that it is simply not the case that immoral behavior on our part has caused the recession, any more than immoral behavior on our part can cause a drought.

To be sure, there are some people who actually really are responsible for what is happening--specific people who did specific things, not all Americans in general. After all, the recession was caused by the financial crisis in 2008, and certainly there were people to blame for this: the investment elites who recklessly leveraged their positions, positions that ultimately rested on the false belief that housing prices would never fall, and complex financial instruments called CDOs were risk-free, AAA assets. And after the recession hit, it was Republicans and gun-shy Democrats who prevented the government from injecting enough stimulus into the economy (Obama's stimulus needed to be somewhere between $1.5 to $2 trillion; it ended up being a paltry $800 million); and even now, it is the Federal Reserve who pursues the lender-friendly (i.e., bank friendly) policy of keeping real interest rates high, which sustains the recession and high unemployment. So there ARE people to blame, but it is specific people for specific, technical things that they are or are not doing; the blame does NOT lie with the American people in general or society in general, and it doesn't have anything to do with moral character or anything like that.

And indeed, when you think about it for a moment, it becomes clear that the moral understanding of the recession doesn't really make any sense. In the 1990s things were going wonderfully; then there was the dot-com bust, and then in the Bush years things were growing again. Then in 2008 the financial crisis struck, and we've been in recession ever since. So in a 20 year period we went up, down, up, and back down again. Are we to believe that we, as a people, were driving this movement in economic fortunes with our personal moral behavior? Were we especially frugal and responsible in the 90s and then suddenly became lazy and incompetent at the end of the decade? Were we hard-working Protestants in the 00's and then suddenly decided we would slack off and charge too much on our credit cards in 2008? The answer is, of course, no. We have been the same people, with the same financial moral fiber, through all these ups and downs.

So this is something to consider as the Occupy Wall Street movement consolidates into whatever it is it's going to consolidate into, and as voters continue to pressure the government into austerity mode, and as the Federal Reserve continues to keep inflation low and (therefore) real interest rates--and unemployment--high. What is needed right now is demand, even though that requires further deficit spending. This isn't sinful behavior; in macroeconomics, there is no such thing.

The Super Mario Bros. 3 interpretation of continents

2011-09-20T14:03:00.001-07:00

This video about the arbitrary way we divide the globe into continents has been making the rounds. While I don't think there's anything very interesting about this--just an issue of semantics, really--I do think that insofar as cultural considerations enter into it, one thing people of a younger generation have in mind is the video schema of different "worlds", where each one has some recognizably different aesthetic or gimmick. For example, there's always an ice world, a fire/volcano world, maybe a cloud world, etc. And there's usually around 7-10 different worlds.

The upshot of all this is that you HAVE to count Antarctica because that's DEFINITELY the ice world.

Off I go

2011-08-27T01:57:00.001-07:00

I'll be back in SF after Labor Day Weekend.

This earthquake taunting doesn't make any sense!

2011-08-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

Californians, taunting the east coast for overreacting to a 5.8 earthquake does not make sense, because, unlike here, nothing on the east coast is built to withstand an earthquake. So a 5.8 earthquake over there ought to be regarded as a big deal.

It's like when SF people complain about 90 degree weather. At first it sounds like ridiculous whining until you realize that the city isn't built to withstand heat--e.g., no one has air conditioning here.

That is all.

Informative post on California high-speed rail

2011-08-17T20:06:00.001-07:00

This is a must-read post to get oriented the facts for CA high speed rail. Cost estimates have been drastically revised upwards recently, but some of that has to do with accounting changes and some of it is legitimate.

Bottom line, though, per-mile costs are about lining up with the international average. Moreover, it's important to remember that the state's population will be increasing over the next few decades and so infrastructure will have to be built, whether that's a high-speed rail system, more airports, or more highways. No it's not a question of rail or no rail, but rather, rail or some other transit option.

If you're poor, you spend a lot of your income on food

2011-08-15T16:50:00.000-07:00

To me, one of the best measures of wealth is the percentage of one's income that is spent on food. If you check out this map, you'll see that the wealthy spend down around 10% of their income on food, whereas those in poverty spend up to 50%.

This is also a good way to intuitively grasp the dramatic increase in total worldwide wealth since the industrial revolution. I tried finding looking for some historical data for this but my Google-fu wasn't strong enough. If I find something though I'll post it.

Greek yogurt sales soar

2011-08-14T23:08:00.000-07:00

An odd factoid:

Indeed, the Greek yogurt market in the U.S. has undergone a growth spurt that a recent Wall Street Journal article called “nothing short of astronomical.” While sales five years ago amounted to a mere $60 million annually, today they represent nearly a quarter of the $6.8 billion spent on yogurt in the U.S. every year.

The theory is that Americans associate Greek cuisine with healthy, simpler, natural foods.

Is a perfect investor possible?

2011-08-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

The previous post made me think of an idea I've had for a while that isn't really fully formed, which is: is it possible for there to be a "perfect" investor, or is there some formal/logical reason why such perfection would be self-defeating?

On the face of it, it would seem that the presence of a perfect investor would break the market. For normally when we make an investment, it's based on some empirical fact about what we're investing in--that the company is profitable, or that the currency will be devalued, or a trade agreement will be signed, whatever. But suppose God were an investor, and invested in X. In this case, I would also invest in X, not because of anything having to do with X, but simply because God invested in it and I know that God can do no wrong in the market. What's more, all other investors would think the same way, and also make the same investment. At this point, market behavior would become detached from empirical reality, and a prolonged (infinite?) period of irrational exuberance for X would follow.

Of course, one way out would be to simply point out that a truly perfect investor would strive to keep the fact of his perfection a secret by deliberately losing money on investments from time to time. Specifically, the investor could only continue to win so long as his success itself did not become the basis for other players' decision making. In such a scenario, whatever empirical data being collected by the perfect investment algorithm would cease to be relevant, because a new theory--that generates some other set of empirical data--would now be regulating investor decisions. (In this case, the "new empirical data" would be what investment choices the perfect investor is making. The new theory would be, "whatever the perfect investor invests in is a good investment". In the short term, switching to this new theory would not hurt the perfect investor--everyone would continue to invest in X. But eventually the pattern would have to collapse, for the same reason that pyramid schemes always collapse: at some point, you run out of new investors in X--and besides, there would undoubtedly be bizarre and disastrous global effects of so much wealth accumulating to one arbitrary investment.)

How humans use cognitive salience to guide mutually recursive decision making

2011-08-14T04:37:00.000-07:00

Try the following experiment:

In a classroom, give every student a slip of paper. The challenge is that they must devise a way to all meet each other at some location in France at some time during some arbitrary day in the future, say October 14 2012--only they are not allowed to communicate with each other. Each student must write down what is essentially a guess on the slip of paper, completely incommunicado.

As you can probably guess, the students are for the most part successful: most will write down "Eiffel Tower, noon" on their slip of paper.

What happens, of course, is that each student goes through a process of mutually recursive decision making: the student must guess what the others will guess, knowing that those students' guesses are dependent on his own, and so on ad infinitum. Realizing that the guess will be hopelessly arbitrary, the student supposes that, all things being equal, he would meet the others at the most canonical place and the most canonical time of day. But, knowing that the others will also gravitate to this same canonical time and place, the student can now know with some certainty that they will choose the same time and location. And so it is the very rational arbitrariness of the decision that reveals the particular salience of one time and place (in this case, Eiffel Tower at noon). This salience is then used as an empirical datapoint to rationally arrive at a now-suddenly-non-arbitrary choice, "Eiffel tower at noon".

My thinking is that this process is precisely the same one that governs markets. Stock price, for example, though naively a reflection of the "value of a company", is strictly speaking a reflection of other investors' demand for the stock. But since all investors are using the same decision function, and the function takes as its inputs the decisions of all other investors, rational decision making stalls on an infinite regress, rendering the decision arbitrary. But the arbitrariness of the decision, now placing all choices on an equal footing, reveals that some choices are more salient than others--in particular, the ones that correspond to the "naive" understanding of stock price as a reflection of the "value of a company". Because if all theories are equally arbitrary, what other theory would everyone pick? Surely, they will pick the naive theory, since that is the most salient one--because canonically, one buys the stock of a company that is doing well.

However, if there is no most-salient theory to fall back on when the initial mutually recursive decision process fails in infinite regress, then chaotic instability ensues, and bubbles and sell-offs will non-linearly continue until a sufficiently salient theory once again takes hold, and investors bind their decisions once again to independent empirical data. (Note that it is entirely possible that the chaotic movements of the stock will themselves form the basis of a new theory about the company--for example, if the stock chaotically plummets in a sell-off, this will be interpreted as an "adjustment" in response to "new information" that reveals that the company was "overvalued". But if the stock had chaotically risen in a bubble, the community might just as easily have interpreted this as "renewed investor confidence" and selected some good news about the company to use as cognitively plausible "evidence" for the company's good prospects.)

Given all this, you have to wonder how it is that computers can model the movements in financial markets. Unless your algorithm somehow is able to take into account the salience of various explanatory theories, you cannot make headway into the problem, unless you already assume some empirical theory, and use the empirical data from the theory as inputs for the computer program. But even with this, it would be the human's task to monitor the investor zeitgeist to determine when it shifts to a different most-salient theory, or when there is a theory vacuum and the market goes into chaotic instability.

This whole post was instigated, by the way, by a blog post by Zachary Karabell, where he concludes:

That is where trust becomes even more essential: we have to know that executives are behaving responsibly, in their own self-interest, and that regulators are ensuring that leverage isn’t excessive and capital is. We have to believe that ratings agencies are diligent in affirming strength, especially if we then give them credence when they announce weakness à la downgrading the United States. And we have to imagine that the media report things that have a tangible relationship to something called the truth. But we do not live in that world, and that is a headwind pushing against currents of balance, growth, and repair.

Here, I take him to be saying, in so many words, that the most-salient theories need to be reinforced credibly by institutions if we are to avoid the dreaded state of theory-less chaotic instability in the markets. However, I wonder if what he advises next makes sense:

In that world of trust deficit, we’d do well to repeat the following mantra: just because it happened last time doesn’t mean it is happening again. Being skeptical is healthy; being cynical, not so much. And the only way to judge the present is on the present, not on false application of the lessons of the past, and not on irrational fears of what the future might hold.

My problem with what he says here is that he seems to be placing the blame--or at least, expecting the fix to come entirely from--the investors who have lost "trust" in the prevailing salient theories, rather than the institutions that are charged with instilling and maintaining trust in the theories. It's hardly "irrational" of investors to withdraw from the market when suddenly there's a chance the US Government will stop paying its bills and the German government is mulling over whether it should just let Greece, Ireland, and Spain default on huge amounts of government debt--these remarkable and historical economic events threaten to bring into being a "new normal" that wipes away the old, long-agreed upon most-salient theories
that kept the markets from spiraling off into non-linear chaos.

In light of this, I would think the right "call to action" is to get Wall Street and the rest of the financial world to put extreme political pressure on the US and German governments to guarantee government debt and double-down on the prevailing global financial world order.

The high cost of dysfunctional government

2011-08-11T01:47:00.000-07:00

As Yglesias points out, 5 year, 7 year, and 10 year US Treasuries have such low rates that their real interest rates (that is, the interest rate after inflation is taken into account) is negative.* Which means that the US government is in a better position than someone who can borrow money for free; investors are actually paying the US government to borrow their money.

This means that, at a minimum, the US can borrow a bunch of money and just let it sit there, and that would be better than not borrowing any money. But more reasonably, it means that for any expenditure that we know must take place within the next 10 years, it makes sense to pay for it now rather than later (if possible).

The most obvious category of spending that presents itself is infrastructure. Over the next decade, we know we're going to have to build new schools and hospitals and upgrade old ones; expand airport capacity and update our air traffic control systems; repave roads and replace old pipe and sewer systems; build new highways and bridges; dig new tunnels; retrofit a lot of old buildings; expand existing rail and other mass transit; improve energy efficiency to eliminate dead-weight loss, for example by painting roofs of buildings white; etc. So there's a lot of work to be done. But there are three reasons why infrastructure spending now is a particularly good idea:

We know with certainty that the work must be done over the next decade anyway
Much of the work is done by state and city governments, and so federal dollars would be providing a timely boost to ailing state and city budgets
These projects will efficiently stimulate overall demand because they will mobilize the huge amount of idle labor in the construction sector, which was hit hardest by the bursting of the real estate bubble; so there is no danger of inefficient "crowding out"**

The idea of spending infrastructure dollars now rather than later is agnostic to what ideology you subscribe to or what specific policies you prefer--it's just the common sense avoiding of dead-weight loss, like our implicit daily decision to NOT just burn a bunch of $100 bills for no reason. And yet, because Congress--specifically, House Republicans--have made obstruction their number one priority, we are forced to go right on ahead and set fire to large piles of money.

* Say I borrow money from you at 5%. I repay you in a year--but money by then has become 5% less valuable, due to inflation. So in real (as opposed to nominal) terms, I paid 0% interest. So inflation works as a discount on borrowing money.

** In a recession, by definition, there are a bunch of idle resources in the country--perfectly good employees and machines, but no demand that puts them to work. So the way to end a recession is to increase demand so that idle resources are mobilized into productive action. One way to do that is to encourage the private sector (companies and consumers) to spend money, for example by making it cheaper to borrow money (lowering interest rates), increasing the money supply (increasing inflation, which as discussed in * has the effect of lowering real interest rates), or just giving people extra cash and hoping they spend it (tax breaks). But if that doesn't work, the federal government can just employ the idle resources directly by spending a bunch of money, say on new bridges or F-18 jets or something (stimulus). However, what happens when the government spends a bunch of money in non-recessionary times, when there are not a bunch of idle resources? Well, in the case of construction say, the government would be bidding with private entities (companies and consumers) for the scarce supply of construction labor. The government would end up bidding up the price, thus pricing out of the market a bunch of private companies and consumers--in other words, "crowding them out". Crowding out might be bad if you think the government doesn't do things as efficiently as private entities do; but this concern is moot if no crowding out is happening, which is precisely the case when the government hires labor that would have been idle anyway.

Screed against Cambridge Journals Online

2011-08-10T15:31:00.000-07:00

It's a well known fact that the business of academic journals is a racket, pure and simple. So when I found out I couldn't read an esoteric Philosophy article without paying thirty goddamn dollars, I wrote them this very satisfying missive:

Subject: you people are the scum of the earth

Hello,

I just wanted you to know that, in my opinion, you people are a bunch of rent-seeking societal leeches who contribute nothing to society. Here I am, just an ordinary non-academic person who has taken an interest in David Hume, and who wants to better my understanding of his argument about induction by taking a look at Alan Schwerin's article Hume On Our Notion of Causality. Imagine my disgust when I see that I can have access to this completely obscure academic article for the outrageous sum of $30! Congratulations, you have effectively walled off higher education from the common man and made academic knowledge completely unavailable to a wide audience in a time, ironically, when it costs virtually nothing to disseminate information.

Just what is it that justifies this price for the privilege of downloading an electronic copy of the article, which costs you almost $0.00 to send to me? What value are you adding to the product? What on earth are you doing with the money you receive? Surely, it is not as if you yourselves peer-review all the content of your publication with your own stable of well-paid professional philosophers. And yet that is the only value added from "prestigious" journals such as yourself.

If you're reading this and nodding along and thinking, "I agree buddy, but I'm just a low-level lackey earning my paycheck in a bad economy, like everyone else", then that's fine--we all have to pay the bills. But if you get any satisfaction--or think there's anything noble at all--about the industry you work for, please understand that you are badly undermining the ability of people to pursue knowledge, and what's worse, doing so in pursuit of your own grotesque and stupid greed.

If there's any justice in the universe, your dismal company will soon be replaced by an institution that does everything you do, but for free or at an extremely low cost.

Burn in hell,
David

PS: I see in your "About Us" section your ostensible "commitment...to advance learning, knowledge and research worldwide". More like a commitment to line your own underserving, rent-seeking, stupid pockets with the hard-earned cash of people who want to learn, advance knowledge, and do research. Assholes.

PPS: I mean really.

Markie Post Burnnnnnnnn

2011-08-06T04:06:00.000-07:00

From YouTube:

To think I used to consider Markie Post to be hot.

tzkelley 1 month ago

Ouch.

At least the debt ceiling crisis is really over

2011-08-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

Read this just now:

Prices for Treasury securities jumped Thursday, sending the yield on the two-year note to a record low, as investors rushed to US government debt in search of safety.

If the US had defaulted, we might have been living in a world where investors sought safety somewhere besides US debt.

Using "Like": maybe it just happened

2011-06-28T10:49:00.000-07:00

Via Sullivan, an interesting theory on the rise of the word "like" and the fact that women use it more than men:

Saying "I'm an aerospace engineer," or "I enjoy reading Don DeLillo" sounds much more intimidating than "I'm, like, an engineer," or "I enjoy reading, like, Don DeLillo." Maybe women of my generation have been taught, through positive social reinforcement, that we're supposed to pepper our speech with meaningless modifiers that make us sounds a little less sure of ourselves, a little less credible. No one likes a show off or a know-it-all.

Hm. Maybe. But--being a native of the San Fernando Valley, which is ground-zero for the emergence of "like"--I've always felt that the word truly is a meaningless modifier, and isn't meant to convey any sense of vagueness or uncertainty, but rather serves to give one's overall speech a certain kind of cadence and tone. In other words, it's just one of those linguistic traits that emerged arbitrarily, and doesn't carry with it any semantic or other significance--just like a dropped t or something.

Of course, it can be the case that speaking this way makes you seem less serious or intelligent, but that can be explained purely by social convention--usually any dialect that strays too far from what is by convention considered the elite dialect will cause listeners to take the speaker less seriously. That could be a heavy Valley-girl dialect, but it could also be a syrupy Southern drawl, or Ebonics. So it's not that the word "like" causes one to be less serious, per se, it's just that that word is the hallmark of a particular non-elite dialect, and having that dialect is what affects elite listener's interpretations.

But who knows?

Asking too much of morality, con't

2011-05-05T00:41:00.000-07:00

Alex writes:

I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine a few years ago, regarding ticking-time-bomb-torture. We were discussing the legality, not the morality, but there's some crossover. My opinion was that torture should never be legal, but that if the situation really demanded it, someone in the right position should just do it anyway. If the situation were really so dire, shouldn't there be at least one person willing to risk the consequences to their own life? The idea to me was that the legal code should embody the principles that we stand by, but not literally define the bounds of our actions. That's one of the advantages of living in a lenient, humanisitic government: we leave room for the fallibility of the laws themselves.

Anyway, he thought that this was bizarre, to consciously build a set of rules into our government that would `enforce' the wrong thing in certain explicit circumstances.

I don't see why your friend should think this was bizarre; it seems to me to be very common. Take, for instance, the law against stealing bread. Even if you are starving it is illegal for you to steal the bread. And yet, if your family was starving, and you had no other options, surely the moral thing to do would be to steal bread to feed them. And yet, you couldn't simply codify into law an exception that says you can steal bread if you are hungry: universally applied, you would essentially be legalizing bread riots, and would have no end of trouble in determining the legal definition of "starving". Of course the pragmatic thing is to keep the law as it is, with no exceptions, and to perhaps take other measures to prevent people from being in the position of having to steal bread in the first place (e.g., a food stamp program). THEN on top of this, as a final recourse, build into your technocratic legal system plenty of room for ad hoc leniency by adding such elements as a trial by jury or judicial discretion during sentencing (hiring nice cops wouldn't hurt, either).

I think what applies above applies to torture law, as well. The problem is that even if you only legalize torture in some explicit circumstances, there will inevitably be "torture creep", and you will start seeing torture in non-ticking-time-bomb cases, as well (and in fact, this is precisely what happened with the torture programs under the Bush administration). Better to keep the law as is and focus on the practical problem of making it so that we will never be in a ticking-time bomb scenario (many torture apologists would say that torture is justified in preventing the ticking-timb bomb scenario. But there's torture creep already!).

So, yeah: I think we're in agreement...

Asking too much of morality

2011-04-27T23:49:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan has a pretty interesting response to Sam Harris' claim that we should not rule out torture as an ethical choice in certain extreme circumstances.

To me, I look at this sort of position--that there are some "ticking time-bomb" scenarios in which torture should be sanctioned--and I start to ask myself if we're asking more of morality than it can give us. After all, human society is a big, complex, organic system. These kinds of systems defy description by analytically rigorous and consistent first principles--you see this all the time in our efforts to model or duplicate things with computers: the more organic something is, the harder it is to duplicate. Figuring out chess moves and modeling proteins comes easy, but things like natural language and even just simple walking turn out to be the difficult problems. With this in mind, it seems weird to me that we would think that there would be an analytic, derived-from-first-principles ethical system that perfectly provides a solution to every possible human choice and dilemma. In other words: even given that there is one true morality, it's weird to think that this morality is complete in the sense of the term used to describe algorithms (an algorithm is complete if it can find every possible solution).

What this means in practice is what we also find to be pretty obviously true: though moral principles guide us through life in general, they don't perfectly apply to every situation, and sometimes remain maddeningly silent on the best course of action. We tend to think of a "moral dilemma" as something we can find our way out of by applying some code of morality ever more judiciously, but it seems to me what causes the dilemma in the first place is the absence of clearly applicable morals. When we're in a dilemma--like the ticking-time bomb scenario--we're beyond morality's ability to help us. There is no "morally right" choice--there's just muddling through.

Note that what I'm saying here isn't that morality is relative or anything like that. It's as universal as you like. It's just that it's incomplete. We're used to the idea that for every choice, our morality can tell us which one is least bad--that morality always shows us the way out. But maybe there are times when there is no way out. There are times when you are--for lack of a better word--fucked. There are times, for example, when you are President and morality tells you that it is wrong to incinerate thousands upon thousands of innocent Japanese people, and yet you do it anyway. Morality tells you to do A, and yet no one in their right mind would do A. Does this mean the moral code that told you to do A can't be right? Only if you assume that the right moral code must be complete. But if you do away with that, another answer suggests itself: you had been ethically checkmated. There was no way out. You were simply fucked.

If this sounds like defeatism, I think things make a little more sense when we think about the crucial role that wisdom must play in exercising morality. Sometimes you end up in a dilemma--an ethical cul-de-sac--out of bad luck. Ask any hard-boiled noir detective, he'll tell you all about it. But sometimes you end up there because of your own foolishness and immorality. (Or maybe it's a little of both.) You can't just run amok and expect to be able to consult your little book of moral rules whenever you have to make a decision. You need to have the wisdom and foresight to avoid getting trapped in those cul-de-sacs in the first place. If you're in a ticking time-bomb situation, the real question isn't what the moral thing to do is--morals don't matter, you're going to torture the guy no matter what--the real question is, how did we get here? This guy's about to nuke a city. Where was the anti-nuclear proliferation strategy that would have stopped this from happening? What about other security measures? Why is this guy so pissed off that he wants to blow up a city?

To me the real sign that a code of morality is correct is that when you zoom out to the macro level and consider the events leading up to these impossible, no-way-out quandaries, it turns out that morality and wisdom work in harmony. It turns out that, if we had only adhered more closely to our code of morals, it would have led, in the long run, to wiser choices, and we would have avoided the ethical cul-de-sac altogether.

A moral code giving you the wrong answer in a highly specific, constrained, and contingent scenario doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't the right code; it could just mean that, through some combination of immorality, foolishness, and plain bad luck, it's already too late and there's no way out. You muddle through as best you can and at the end someone mutters in your ear, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

The military industrial complex jumps the shark

2011-03-22T00:56:00.000-07:00

This story is fucking incredible:

But I was a central player in the Afghan war — and if our delivery didn't make it to Kabul, the entire strategy of building up the Afghanistan army was going to fail. It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces, and I didn't know what their motives were. But I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on.

Read it.

How a monotheistic God undermines itself by issuing universal proclamations

2011-03-09T23:03:00.000-08:00

There is a strain of atheism that rejects belief in God not (only) on empirical grounds, but also because such a God could have no claim to any kind of moral authority. On this view, God is no different in principle than an all-powerful dictator, who issues laws that are not subject to rational scrutiny and cannot be changed by the people who must live under them.

The reply of the religious believer to this is that God is a fundamentally different kind of thing than a human dictator, such that God's actions cannot be morally evaluated in the same way a human being such as Saddam Hussein's actions can be morally evaluated. But this reply lays bare what is at the heart of the matter, which is an ontological disagreement about the possibility--and coherence--of there being fundamentally different kinds of things in the world where different metaphysical rules apply, versus an ontologically flat, materialistic world in which no chunk of matter has any metaphysical privilege over any other chunk of matter.

What I like about this atheist challenge is that it unveils the nub of the difficulty of trying to analytically compare contradicting ontological claims--the one has no truck with the other. For the atheist analytic descriptions of the divine cannot be differentiated from assertions of a profane magic that accompanies certain convenient objects and texts; for the believer, attempts to describe divine being itself run into the same difficulty as describing a sense modality to someone who congenitally lacks that modality--while you can build descriptions in the object layer with someone who shares access to the metalayer/substrate, you cannot build a description of the metalayer/substrate itself that is independent of a reference to a shared human experience. Religious Man and Profane Man find themselves on opposite sides of a communication barrier that cannot be overcome except by a profound change in one or the other's essential way of being.

However, this does not mean that we cannot tease out certain tensions in the religious believer's ontological framework, because certain kinds of assertions imply certain thing about one's ontology. What I am thinking of here is God's penchant for issuing laws that are universally applied--that is, applied to all actors, regardless of the actor's ontological standing. What a universal law ends up doing is ontologically flattening all that it applies to, because suddenly what matters is the action being done, independent of anything about the essential being of the thing doing the action. Murder is wrong; ok, but if it applies universally than it applies equally to a king and to a peasant, thus in this instance placing the two on the same level. In fact, I would go so far as to say that universality is the key driver of any materialistic, flat ontological viewpoint, precisely because of the ontologically equalizing process of factoring a thing's essential being out of the relevant equation.

In any case, the more condensed and monotheistic the God, the more flat will this God's universal proclamations render the ontological landscape. When a universal proclamation is divine in origin, the separation between the divine and the profane is reinforced. However, this separation is doubly reinforced by the fact that these proclamations do not apply to competing entities in the divine space--another, different set of proclamations governs these intramural squabbles within the divine space. So for example, the Hebrew God says "do not kill", which is a diktat to the profane world; however to deal with rival gods, is not a question of binding them to the same rules as the profane mortals must abide by, but rather, attacking them along the appropriate ontological vector: "do not worship those other gods". For an early monotheism that is struggling against a bevy of polytheistic rivals, then, the divine space is a large and bustling one and its protrusions into the profane world many: false idols abound. However, later on a mature monotheism becomes the victim of its own success: with all competing gods eliminated, the divine space contracts to a single point and loses its vibrancy. Without an element of drama to sustain it, it recedes from human awareness except as the 1-dimensional, inscrutable source of universal proclamations that now apply to the whole world--and flatten the whole world--except for that one tiny little dot.

And so the monotheistic religion enables its self-destruction by stultifying the divine and reducing its chaotic protrusions into a profane world increasingly bridled by human will, in the forms of scientific investigation, technological innovation, self-organization, and commodification. The atheist who accuses God of moral bankruptcy is representative of a new kind of humanity that emerges, blinking, in a flat materialistic world whose only essential purpose is to provide something for human wills to work on as they aimlessly proceed through history, eating and procreating and--if they're the lucky ones with material wealth--frittering away afternoons watching Iron Man sequals.

This is a funny caption

2011-01-20T01:55:00.000-08:00

Levy's face.

(Via here.)

The pop-culture singularity

2010-12-28T11:45:00.000-08:00

Patton Oswalt:

That’s when we’ll reach Etewaf singularity. Pop culture will become self-aware. It will happen in the A.V. Club first: A brilliant Nathan Rabin column about the worst Turkish rip-offs of American comic book characters will suddenly begin writing its own comments, each a single sentence from the sequel to A Confederacy of Dunces. Then a fourth and fifth season of Arrested Development, directed by David Milch of Deadwood, will appear suddenly in the TV Shows section of iTunes. Someone BitTorrenting a Crass bootleg will suddenly find their hard drive crammed with Elvis Presley’s “lost” grunge album from 1994. And everyone’s TiVo will record Ghostbusters III, starring Peter Sellers, Lee Marvin, and John Candy.

For a while now I've made mention of a certain quality of "self-generated-ness" that certain pop-culture artifacts have. Like keyboard cat. It feels like it spontaneously generated out of the primordial soup of the internet...

What Wikileaks reveals about the US

2010-12-25T01:42:00.000-08:00

Says Glenn Greenwald:

As revealing as the disclosures themselves are, the reactions to them have been equally revealing. The vast bulk of the outrage has been devoted not to the crimes that have been exposed but rather to those who exposed them: WikiLeaks and (allegedly) Bradley Manning. A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing. That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon's own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence -- zero -- that any of WikiLeaks' actions has caused even a single death. Meanwhile, the American establishment media -- even in the face of all these revelations -- continues to insist on the contradictory, Orwellian platitudes that (a) there is Nothing New™ in anything disclosed by WikiLeaks and (b) WikiLeaks has done Grave Harm to American National Security™ through its disclosures.

Continue reading

It's unsurprising that political leaders would want to convince people that the true criminals are those who expose acts of high-level political corruption and criminality, rather than those who perpetrate them. Every political leader would love for that self-serving piety to take hold. But what's startling is how many citizens and, especially, "journalists" now vehemently believe that as well. In light of what WikiLeaks has revealed to the world about numerous governments, just fathom the authoritarian mindset that would lead a citizen -- and especially a "journalist" -- to react with anger that these things have been revealed; to insist that these facts should have been kept concealed and it'd be better if we didn't know; and, most of all, to demand that those who made us aware of it all be punished (the True Criminals) while those who did these things (The Good Authorities) be shielded.

Wikileaks must-reads

2010-12-23T01:32:00.001-08:00

In case you haven't run into it, a seminal piece of commentary on Wikileaks and Julian Assange's mission is here--it's a long essay but well worth the read, and--BONUS--even makes a reference to The Wire (you can read the interesting account of how this obscure blog post came to dominate the commentariat here).

In general, you will want to keep up with Glenn Greenwald, who is the gold standard in civil rights advocacy. I have also found NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen to be insightful.

Also, the Atlantic has a post that contains a general summary of Wikileaks and a timeline of events so far, which you may find useful.

For continuing news on Wikileaks, Assange, and the revelations from the cables themselves, the best place to check is the Guardian.

The DDoS attacks aren't lie-ins--they're tea parties

2010-12-22T22:44:00.000-08:00

Here Boing Boing contributor and all-around internet superstar Cory Doctorow talks about the recent DDoS attacks by Anonymous and whether they can be justified:

Doctorrow from REC Radiocentrum on Vimeo.

I think I mostly agree with everything he's saying here, though I would say that, though ultimately anonymous DDoS attacks are not a legitimate and effective tactic for the reasons he describes, it's also true that in rare cases it's more important to take a drastic, imperfect action than no action at all. For all the ethical hand-wringing and negative public reaction the attacks have induced, they have also made the issue of internet freedom and corporate control of political speech front-page reading in newspapers around the world, and the subject of discussion and debate in the blogs.

As Doctorow mentions in the video, supporters of the DDoS attacks have likened them to the lie-ins of the civil rights era, but to my mind a closer historical parallel isn't the calculated, well reasoned lie-ins of the 1960s but the cathartic "fuck you" impetuousness of the Boston Tea Party in 1773. As in today's case, that act of defiance--in which 342 chests of British East India Company tea were dumped into the ocean--was carried out anonymously and, it seems, without a whole lot of forethought:

While Samuel Adams tried to reassert control of the meeting, people poured out of the Old South Meeting House and headed to Boston Harbor. That evening, a group of 30 to 130 men, some of them thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of tea into the water.[59]

A further similarity to today's DDoS attacks is that the Tea Party--which involved the destruction of private property--was not readily embraced by supporters of the Colonial cause, and did much to anger and unify the broader British consensus against them:

In Britain, even those politicians considered friends of the colonies were appalled and this act united all parties there against the colonies. The Prime Minister Lord North said, "Whatever may be the consequence, we must risk something; if we do not, all is over".[63] The British government felt this action could not remain unpunished, and responded by closing the port of Boston and putting in place other laws known as the "Coercive Acts".

In the colonies, Benjamin Franklin stated that the destroyed tea must be repaid, all 90,000 pounds. Robert Murray, a New York merchant went to Lord North with three other merchants and offered to pay for the losses, but the offer was turned down.[64]

Like today's DDoS attacks, the Boston Tea Party was difficult to justify and, on its face, harmful to the cause it purported to defend. But its value was not in its academic correctitude or tactical efficacy, but rather in its function as a catalyst of events and the rallying effect that such a sheer act of bravado can have on the hardcore supporters of the cause. Consider the chain of events--of harsh British responses and resulting Colonial escalation--that the Tea Party helped set in motion:

The Boston Tea Party was a key event in the growth of the American Revolution. Parliament responded in 1774 with the Coercive Acts, which, among other provisions, closed Boston's commerce until the British East India Company had been repaid for the destroyed tea. Colonists in turn responded to the Coercive Acts with additional acts of protest, and by convening the First Continental Congress, which petitioned the British monarch for repeal of the acts and coordinated colonial resistance to them. The crisis escalated, and the American Revolutionary War began near Boston in 1775.

We must remember that when Anonymous launched the attacks, it was not working with the benefit of hindsight. There was no way to know how many people would end up joining the attacks, or if they would provoke the government into some kind of blundering over-reaction, or what. And yet, it was a near certainty that if no extraordinary action were taken, the government and its corporate proxies would continue business as usual and the establishment media would do little to challenge them. So it was a way to shake things up and perhaps introduce a little serendipity into the historical proceedings.

In the end, though of course it is important to dutifully rebuke the DD0S attacks, I would hope that rather than spend our energies heaping criticism on Anonymous and their flawed methods we would instead salute their pluck and turn our attention to a more constructive task: devising an ethical and tactically sound method of internet civil disobedience.

The erosion of civil liberties: we have slipped down the slope

2010-12-20T00:29:00.000-08:00

Quick thought:

Generally speaking, the pattern for many civil liberties arguments is of the form, "we must protect the rights of X, for tomorrow the government may go after Y", where X is someone or something unsympathetic and universally reviled, and Y is someone or something seen as meriting praise and protection from government abuse. And so we protect Larry Flynt's right to publish filth so that some future muckraker may be protected; we give an undisputedly guilty monster of a human being all the trappings of a trial and due process to insulate some future target of a witch hunt from injustice; and so on. In all these cases, we apply a general prohibition on government power in order to protect against those relatively rare instances (well, hopefully they're rare) when government power really is misused to imprison the innocent or silence dissent.

It occurred to me that perhaps what has gotten me so wound up about the Wikileaks case is that--in my opinion at least--what we're witnessing is a violation of civil liberties against not a reviled X, but a praiseworthy Y. Since 9/11, throughout the Bush years and right on up through the Obama years to today, we as a society--and the political and media establishment--have stood idly by while the government has opened up huge exceptions into the general prohibitions on its powers--the prohibitions whose very generality is the means of protection from government abuses. And now we're seeing those exceptions expand and swallow up the legal system whole, to the point where now a media organization, Wikileaks--who in the case of Cablegate has done nothing different than any other media organization--must struggle to remain online as one corporation after another bows to government pressure and withdraws its services from Wikileaks.

Even if you disagree with me that Wikileaks is serving a legitimate role, the government's due-process-free campaign to silence the organization should be causing alarm bells to go off. Should the government's campaign be successful, a precedent will be set that could allow it to target (or threaten to target) mainstream publications like the New York Times in the future. Of course, at that point we would have fallen very far down the civil libertarians' slippery slope. But as the Wikileaks case shows, we've fallen quite a ways already.

The corporate enablers--and disablers--of free speech

2010-12-19T19:53:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I wrote a lengthy comment responding to a post by Wendy Kaminer called "Wikileaks and the Unfree Market". In that post, she observes that "corporate control over speech is nothing new":

Authors and journalists in the pre-digital age were dependent on publishers willing to disseminate their work -- without publishing support, they were mere street corner pamphleteers.... Still, recent demonstrations of corporate power over WikiLeaks seemed to resonate with the force of revelation, mocking any lingering illusions of the Internet as a frontier free from corporate as well as state control.

Yes, it's true that the Internet potentially offers significantly larger audiences to electronic pamphleteers than they'd ever find on any street corner, even in Times Square; and for better and worse, a few break through, thanks to their demagoguery or thoughtfulness, marketing acumen or luck. But the Internet is an ocean, and without a berth on a corporate or corporate sponsored ship, most people will quickly sink, or swim unnoticed. And, while the street is a public place in which the government's powers of eviction are limited by First Amendment rights, the Internet has always been (pardon the metaphor shift) a gated community. If virtually anyone can enter, the right to remain and speak your mind is generally subject to corporate control, as the WikiLeaks fracas has shown.

...

I'm not dismissing concerns about the threat that corporate control and homogenization of speech poses to the flow of information and dissent. Having worked as a freelance writer for some 30 years, I am only too keenly aware of marketplace censorship. But it's a fact of life, and First Amendment editorial freedoms, which the private press enjoys.... There is no significant political constituency for free speech on the Internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is right: "Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary." But we the people, not private corporations, are the weakest links in the chain.

My response, in which I try to make the argument that there is in fact something unprecedented going on here:

Wendy, I think you are mistaken in viewing Wikileaks' position as no different in principle than that of a pre-digital age individual "dependent on publishers willing to disseminate their work". Wikileaks is not a single author or publisher--it is itself a media organization, no different in principle (I argue) than the New York Times.

Suppose Lieberman had called for all companies to sever ties with the New York Times, so that the NYT suddenly found nobody could pay them using a credit card; their bank accounts were frozen; their domain name was deleted by their domain name provider; and that whoever they rent their servers from dropped them as a customer, essentially hounding the NYT from the internet. Does this strike you as analogous to a pre-digital age author who cannot find a publisher for his political pamphlet? It seems to me the proper pre-digital age analogy would be if the government told all paper and ink companies to stop selling their wares to a particular newspaper, and took steps (freezing accounts, making it difficult to transfer money) to keep that newspaper from functioning on a day-to-day basis. To my knowledge such a snuffing-out of a publisher, orchestrated by the US government in concert with corporate interests, is indeed unprecedented.

I take your point that free speech has always been dependent on the distribution mechanisms provided by corporate entities. But what has changed is the degree of this dependence, and the higher-ordered-ness of the dependence. In the pre-digital age, you would need money of course to print a newspaper, but political and cultural norms rendered the idea outrageous that the government could suffocate the operation by denying it the raw materials it needs to function or the financial infrastructure (bank accounts, credit transfers, loans, etc.) is needs to survive as a business. In other words, the individual was dependent on a wealthy corporate publisher; but the corporate publisher was not dependent on some higher, more powerful corporate entity. What we are seeing in the Wikileaks case is unprecedented and, I think, extremely alarming: now political speech is at the mercy of entities further upstream in the corporate food chain (Visa, MasterCard, Amazon), handing the government a far more powerful means for controlling political speech than anything that has come before.

My feeling is that large corporations like Amazon and MasterCard--that provide a platform for some general activity that is abstracted from the specifics of the particular activities that take place on the platform--do not like being in the position of free-speech arbiter or government-enforcer. I think their preferred outcome would be a law that ties their hands and prevents them legally from meddling in cases such as these without some kind of judicial court order, thereby protecting them from the possibility of political recriminations for not complying with the government. For example, in the current case, Amazon would have simply said to Lieberman: "Sorry! We legally cannot kick Wikileaks off our servers. You have to get a court order for that."

I would just add a couple of things. First, interestingly enough it turns out that the New York Times rents its server space from none other than--you guessed it--Amazon. So that comparison turned out to be pretty apt: if the government can get Amazon to kick Wikileaks off its servers, what's stopping it, in principle, from getting Amazon to kick the New York Times off its servers?

Second, it is worth pointing out that, ironically, the leaked cables themselves provide an insight into the ways that large corporations like Visa and MasterCard can be beholden to the US government. According to the Guardian, documents show that the US government was actively involved in lobbying the Russian legislature on Visa's and MasterCard's behalves, to ensure that the card payment companies were not "adversely affected" by some proposed legislation there. This clearly illustrates that for an international corporation to take a stand against a government request--however informally or implicitly made--is to risk political recriminations in the form of losing out to one's competitors when it comes to special favors such as these.

Wikileaks awakes me from my blogmatic slumber

2010-12-19T11:57:00.000-08:00

Oh hi there.

A little more than a year ago Izott went silent, partly because of a conscious decision to spend less time on the internets, but mostly because I had become disillusioned and bored with politics in general. I had always meant to write a conclusionary post to tie things up properly, but just never got around to it. So Izott has been collecting dust and the odd Chinese spam comment ever since.

Now, though, with this Wikileaks story, I'm motivated to write a few posts so that I can get my thoughts straight about the matter. It's a very important story, I feel, and one that deals with a pretty foundational basic right--freedom of speech--which is not a topic that has really come up in a serious or interesting way since I started blogging. For the first time in a while, there's something new under the sun in politics.

San Fernando Valley REPRESENT

2010-07-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

Derek Fisher lives in the Valley:

Q: OK, quick break from questions about your age and whether you're over the hill. I hear you live way out in the San Fernando Valley. What's that, like, an hour to practice every morning? I was born in the Valley and I like it there. But you know, like, there's kind of a stigma to living there.
A: I think it's just a certain lifestyle that I think is important for when you have a family and kids. Then again, even before I was married, I was in the Valley, too. I think being from Little Rock, Arkansas, it's important for there to be grass and trees and a little bit of a slower feel to where I live as opposed to being in the city in a penthouse-townhouse kind of place.
Q: Would you still live there now if you didn't have the family?
A: No, Even though I'd be drawn to that area I've learned a lot more of how important it is to manage your rest and your body and your time. So two to three hours out of the day in the car wouldn't be at the top of the list, but for them it's more than worth it.

I wonder if he hangs out at Twain's.

Prices come to parking in SF

2010-06-21T20:22:00.000-07:00

I was really excited to discover today that San Francisco is implementing a plan to build an integrated system of "smart parking meters" that will be able to track parking capacity in real time, and also adjust prices depending on parking demand. So not only will you be able to see online how many and which parking spaces are available, but higher prices in peak periods will ensure that there is always parking spaces readily available (and in slow periods, lower prices will ensure that parking capacity is being used efficiently).

The program is in the pilot phase right now, and will come online in a few neighborhoods around the city this summer (including the Mission, between 16th and 24th).

Generally speaking I'm in favor of any and all policies that do something to set a proper price on driving--whether that means a carbon tax, tolls, market-priced parking, etc. So long as we continue to subsidize driving by offering cheap gas, free roads, and free parking (including the government mandated building of parking structures and parking lots), we'll be stuck in sprawling, trafficky cities that don't work very well. Setting a price on these scarce goods--parking space, road space, etc.--will change people's behavior, encouraging more carpooling, more public transit usage, more biking, and more off-peak usage of the city's roads.

Or at least, so the theory goes. It will be interesting to see what the data from the pilot program ends up telling us.

is/ought

2010-03-31T00:19:00.000-07:00

Generally speaking, I'm sympathetic to Sam Harris. I read The End of Faith, and found it to be pretty well thought-out and argued--a useful book.

However, recently he did a TED talk in which he argued that science can answer moral questions, and I must say I find his main argument and especially his responses to critics to be pretty underwhelming. You can read one such response here.

Something especially troubling is his insistence that there really are huge moral stakes attached to this philosophical dispute--so much so that he believes people who he disagrees with should be characterized as amoral monsters who condone the hypothetical blinding of innocent people:

At the conclusion of my talk, I fell into debate with another invited speaker, who seemed, at first glance, to be very well positioned to reason effectively about the implications of science for our understanding of morality. She holds a degree in genetics from Dartmouth, a masters in biology from Harvard, and a law degree, another masters, and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of biology from Duke. This scholar is now a recognized authority on the intersection between criminal law, genetics, neuroscience and philosophy. Here is a snippet of our conversation, more or less verbatim:
She: What makes you think that science will ever be able to say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong?

Me: Because I think that right and wrong are a matter of increasing or decreasing wellbeing—and it is obvious that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating or killing them if they refuse, is not a good strategy for maximizing human wellbeing.

She: But that’s only your opinion.

Me: Okay… Let’s make it even simpler. What if we found a culture that ritually blinded every third child by literally plucking out his or her eyes at birth, would you then agree that we had found a culture that was needlessly diminishing human wellbeing?

She: It would depend on why they were doing it.

Me (slowly returning my eyebrows from the back of my head): Let’s say they were doing it on the basis of religious superstition. In their scripture, God says, “Every third must walk in darkness.”

She: Then you could never say that they were wrong.
Such opinions are not uncommon in the Ivory Tower.

I think Harris is confused here about what function a philosophical argument like this serves--specifically, the sort of skeptical argument offered here by his interloqueter (in this case, skepticism about universal morality/grounding for cross-cultural moral claims). The point of a skeptical argument isn't to argue that such skepticism is justified or that we should walk around actually believing it; rather, it's to draw attention to an inconsistency or lack of explanation in our way of thinking about things. One of my favorite philosophers, Barry Stroud, likened it to Meno's paradox: the point isn't to seriously contend that two objects can never touch (since the closing distance needs to be infinitely halved), but rather to draw attention to an apparent contradiction--or at least bit of weirdness--in our conceptions of numbers, distance, etc. Here Harris being horrified at his interlocutor's skepticism regarding the ability to morally condemn his hypothetical cruel society would be like someone responding to Meno by saying, "I refute it thus", and knocking two rocks together--in both cases, they are missing the point of the exercise.

(Indeed, I think proof that Harris did not understand the point of his interlocutor's questioning is given by the fact that he doesn't include enough of the conversation to understand what the interlocutor was getting at. Rather than turn on his heel, Harris' next question should have been: but that is a counter-intuitive answer; you would think you would be able to make a moral condemnation of the society in such an extreme case. Explain to me why you find such a condemnation is problematic. I will be charitable and assume that you do indeed substantively believe it is wrong to blind people for no good reason.)

I find it hard to believe that Harris' interlocutor is truly a "moral relativist"--that she gives an uncomplicated shrug of the shoulders to cruelties perpetrated by foreign cultures. I also find it hard to believe that Sam Harris truly believes his interlocutor has such a set of beliefs--which makes his pretensions of horror and outrage so tiresome. The truth is, there is quite a lot of distance between someone's avowed philosophical beliefs on a relatively esoteric point in analytic philosophy and someone's actual substantive positions on the various political and moral questions of the day. I'm sure there is someone out there who considers themself to be a proud "moral relativist" or something along those lines, but who nevertheless has a substantive set of beliefs that are not very different from Harris'--I would not call this person any less moral for staking out that philosophical position. Nor would I consider someone who naively doesn't think at all about the validity of their moral claims less moral than someone who thinks a lot about it, all else being equal. Harris is caught up in the melodrama of his own intellectual quest, and is forgetting that real actions and political beliefs make moral monsters, not esoteric philosophical claims.

Of course, Harris' intent seems precisely to infuse his project to science-ize morality with a fierce moral urgency--he wants results, dammit! There are women forced to wear sacks in Afghanistan! All true enough. But if he really cares about those substantive issues--and they are of course serious issues to think about and take action on--then he must know that arguing for a philosophical grounding of morality in science has to be the most ineffective, roundabout way of addressing them of all time. It's not like on Monday you come up with a knock-down argument of Hume's is/ought distinction, submit it to Philosophy Today on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the US government is meticulously implementing your program. Philosophy in general is an ivory tower activity. Thinking it's not is exactly the sort of thing that someone in an ivory tower would think. So Harris' fierce moral urgency shtick is truly misplaced.

I acknowledge this hasn't been a substantive critique of Harris' main argument so much as griping about the way he has conducted himself. But I do think there is something very much awry when someone comes away from a philosophical tiff believing that the person they just spoke to was History's Greatest Monster, when in fact it was probably just a nice lady with lots of advanced degrees.

PS: I'm sure Sam Harris is very smart and all, but I'm also sure that David Hume was probably about a hundred times smarter. And unlike scientific fields such as physics, philosophy doesn't "advance" in a Kuhnian way that renders important conclusions quaint and invalidated years later. It's not like Hume was theorizing about humors in the body or something that a school child could refute today; his epistemological arguments are actually alive and kicking still, and difficult to get a full and complete understanding of, even for dedicated scholars. Philosophy is hard! And yet from this obnoxious passage, you would think that philsophy was a relatively straightforward exercise, and Hume some sort of obscure crank:

Many of my critics piously cite Hume’s is/ought distinction as though it were well known to be the last word on the subject of morality until the end of time. Indeed, Carroll appears to think that Hume’s lazy analysis of facts and values is so compelling that he elevates it to the status of mathematical truth:
Attempts to derive ought from is [values from facts] are like attempts to reach an odd number by adding together even numbers. If someone claims that they’ve done it, you don’t have to check their math; you know that they’ve made a mistake.

This is an amazingly wrongheaded response coming from a very smart scientist. I wonder how Carroll would react if I breezily dismissed his physics with a reference to something Robert Oppenheimer once wrote, on the assumption that it was now an unmovable object around which all future human thought must flow. Happily, that’s not how physics works. But neither is it how philosophy works. Frankly, it’s not how anything that works, works.

And:

I must say, the vehemence and condescension with which the is/ought objection has been thrown in my face astounds me. And it confirms my sense that this bit of bad philosophy has done tremendous harm to the thinking of smart (and not so smart) people. The categorical distinction between facts and values helped open a sinkhole beneath liberalism long ago—leading to moral relativism and to masochistic depths of political correctness.

Look Sam Harris: it's obviously just fine to challenge arguments made by great thinkers. I mean, that's what you're supposed to do. But have some effing respect. "This bit of bad philosophy"? And when you launch a big argument about how science can be a grounding for morality, and you don't call your argument, "My Controversial Argument Against Hume's Is/Ought Distinction", shouldn't you expect the first words out of everyone's mouth to be, "what about Hume's is/ought distinction"?

Meanwhile, Google continues to be awesome

2010-03-27T04:31:00.000-07:00

A while back, I sent some feedback to Google regarding their Google Maps bicycle directions. Apparently a "preferred route" that the algorithm selects in SF is Caesar Chavez, which is actually a terrible street to bike on. Here is their response:

Hi David,

Your Google Maps problem report has been reviewed, and you were right! We'll update the map soon and email you when you can see the change.

Report history
Problem ID: D0F8-9BDD-28BA-A469

Your report: Cesar Chavez St. in San Francisco is marked as a preferred route (dotted line), but this is a fast, busy street that sucks to bike on. 26th St. a block up is a much better street for biking.
--
Thanks for your help,
The Google Maps team

Google: so good. All the time.

Adventures in corporate communication

2010-03-25T22:02:00.000-07:00

Here is an email I just sent off to Virgin Atlantic:

******************************
*******
* VIRGIN ATLANTIC GENERAL ENQUIRY *
*************************************

Details

Flying club number:
Name : David Morris
Email :
Address :

City :
County :
Postcode: 94110
Country : US

Enquiry Type: Flight Info/Reservations

Flight Number: None
Flight Date : -1/None/-1

Feedback:

Very frustrated here.

I'm trying to change the date of my flight. Apparently, according to the FAQ, you can only do that over the phone. I waited on hold for 30 mins. calling the American number; I tried calling the UK number but I guess my phone can't make international calls.

Anyway, my confirmation number is XXXXXX. I'm flying roundtrip from SFO to Heathrow. I need to change the return flight from May 30 to Sunday May 23. Ideally I'd also like to change the outgoing city from London to Dublin, but if that's not possible/too expensive then I'll just settle for flying out of Heathrow on May 23.

Well, that's all I'm trying to do. I heard Virgin Atlantic is supposed to be super awesome and modern but so far it's been like trying to settle a dispute with the phone company (I don't know how phone companies are in the UK--hell you probably don't even call them phones over there, you probably call them something weird like 'bothams'--or no we need an extraneous 'u' in there, so let's make it 'bouthams'--but here in the US they are not known for their customer service savvy).

Ha--ok, enough of me. I've had a long day. I hope you can help me out.

Hey here's a joke to lighten the mood: what do you call a pig who can only see out of one eye? Give up? Well, you shouldn't give up. Quitter.

That's the joke. It's not very good because I made it up AS I WAS TYPING IT.

Thanks,
David

PS: Stay real. You know what I mean? Stay YOU. Yeah you know what I'm talkin about.

I'll let y'all know what ends up happening.

The size of food portions in depictions of the Last Supper over the centuries

2010-03-25T17:06:00.001-07:00

This is pretty rad:

My brother—a religious studies professor at Virginia Wesleyan College—and I indexed the sizes of all of the entrees, loaves of bread, and even plates in the 52 most famous Last Supper paintings from the past millennium featured in Last Supper (2000, Phaiden Press), based on the sizes of people's heads. Through plagues and potato famines, the average size of entrees increased by 69 percent, plates by 65 percent, and bread by 23 percent. (The only thing that didn't continually increase with time was the number of wine bottles on the table—that peaked in the apparently party-happy 16th century.)

The idea is that, since the kind and amount of food during the Last Supper is not specified anywhere, artists would insert whatever seemed natural to them in their culture and time period. So this would reflect humanity's growing bread basket...

Beatles observation

2010-03-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

Here's a Beatles observation for you: anytime there is non-lyrical melodious filler, you can be sure it's Paul, and never John. Any whistling, or "doo do doo", or humming--always Paul. I don't think there's even one instance of John doing this (or George, but I'm not as sure about that).

Examples:

Mother Nature's Son ("doo do doo do doo do...")
Your Mother Should Know ("da da da..")
Fool On the Hill (instrumental verse; "oh oh oh ohhhhhh round round round...")
Hey Jude ("na na na na na na naaaaaaaaaaaa...")
Rockey Raccoon ("da da dada da daaaa"; "do doo do do dooo do")
Honey Pie (instrumental segment/"I like this kinda, kinda muuuuuusic"; "oh ho ho ho ho hoo ho")
I Will (humming)

I'm sure there's lot of other examples.

Anyway, if someone knows of a John song (or John part of a song) with similar melodious filler, I'd like to hear it.

John Lennon orders sushi

2010-03-23T19:31:00.000-07:00

Health care reform: see how you're affected

2010-03-23T16:03:00.000-07:00

Input your insurance status, income, and marital status, and this handy tool will tell you how the new legislation affects you.

RIP Alex Chilton

2010-03-20T03:43:00.000-07:00

I'd never explicitly heard of the Box Tops, but this song has been wending its way through my brain for the last couple of days:

I think as a rock n' roll pop song it's kind of perfect: 2 minutes. Catchy melody. Straightforward lyrics about some girl. Badass vocals.

Well, anyway. I think a bonus is that everyone looks pretty damn cool in the above video. GO 60s

Not since Bill Clinton's star appearance in NBA Jam has a president been more associated with the game of basketball

2010-03-17T17:20:00.000-07:00

In all the hubbub about Obama being the first black president, you sometimes forget that he's also our first president who's into basketball:

Pretty rad. Politics aside, how fun would it be to play a pick-up game with this guy and, like, Reggie Love?

Quote of the day

2010-03-16T21:37:00.000-07:00

"[Conservatives] have used a skepticism of change, to mask a defense of institutional evil." - TNC

Rainy day memories

2010-03-10T23:00:00.001-08:00

I don't seem to be able to embed it, but here is one of my very favorite Sesame Street moments, where Oscar the Grouch recounts the time he first met Slimey on a rainy day in the park. Seems appropriate since we're coming to the end of the rainy season and all.

I'll also add that there's nothing like dozing off with a friend when it's pouring out and you're cozily tucked away somewhere. I remember when I was a kid and used to hang out with my grandpa a lot, that when it rained it would make a nice, loud sound on the corrugated aluminum overhang just outside, and we'd take afternoon naps like that. It was nice.

Bike news

2010-03-10T22:06:00.001-08:00

Item 1: You've probably already heard this, but Google maps now has bicycle directions that take into account hills, bike paths, avoiding busy streets, etc. It doesn't work too well yet, though--for example, to get to work, it suggested a zigzag path down Ceasar Chavez, up Harrison, cutting across 22nd to Potrero, then on up to the Division/Townsend roundabout. But that's nutty! Caesar Chavez is a horrible and dangerous street to bike on, and you end up going right through an unnecessary hill. Which brings me to my second item.

Item 2: It turns out there's plans in the works to totally redo Caesar Chavez into a bikable, walkable, green non-hellscape! Currently there's 8 lanes: one parking lane on each side, and six traffic lanes in the middle (3 in each direction). The renovation will keep the parking lanes but add bike lanes and a 14-foot median strip with trees, leaving 4 total lanes for traffic. Once done, it will make that street look about a thousand times nicer.

Of course, if I had my druthers, if they're going to make the street walkable I'd also like to see more commercial frontage, especially since it's still in walking distance from BART (though just barely). It'd be great to see it take on more of a 24th St. character. But all in due time, I guess.

(Photo by Ian Sane)

Baseball and the law

2010-03-10T21:39:00.000-08:00

Via Josh, an interesting article pointing out that it is far more accurate to say that a Supreme Court Justice is a commissioner of baseball, rather than an umpire:

The Supreme Court hears only a small number of cases. Most of its work consists of providing guidance to lower courts, rather than correcting all judicial errors on a case-by-case basis. Similarly, the Commissioner of Baseball relays instructions to the umpires regarding how to interpret the rules of Major League Baseball, rather than reviewing their every call.

In a related note, I always thought that it would be funny to try to change California's Three Strikes Law by way of changing the rules of baseball to increase the number of strikes needed for an out.

In yet another related note, baseball analogies are alive and well in our current political discourse. Here's Harry Reid, talking tough on filibuster reform:

For now, the process seems to be proceeding from the premise that Senate Democrats are fed up with the filibuster. "In baseball," Reid said in a clipped tone, "they used to have the spitball. It originally was used with discretion. But then the ball got wetter and wetter and wetter. So soon, they outlawed the spitball." The same, he said, had happened to the four-corner offense in basketball. "And just the way the spitball was abused in baseball and the four-corner offense was abused in basketball," Reid said, "Republicans have abused the filibuster."

What the hell is the "four-corner offense"?

A truly poignant moment

2010-03-07T03:25:00.000-08:00

If you've got 6 minutes to spare, you might want to take a look at this old Colbert Report interview with one Neal Katyal, who is a lawyer who defended some Gitmo detainees in court. I only post it here because of this little moment at the end, where--since apparently Katyal helped Al Gore's side in the fateful Gore v. Bush case--Colbert asked him "how that went".

Katyal responds that he kicks himself, thinking that if only he had tried to help Bush, Gore might have become President. To me that was just so heart-rending. This is a guy who obviously loves his country and the fundamental principles its based on (what is this country based on?), and who feels like he failed his country as a defender of those principles.

I like to think it's this guy's extended o-face

2010-03-05T15:40:00.000-08:00

Probably the best article ever

2010-03-04T12:08:00.001-08:00

Oh man.

Favorite line: "...I even caught a hacker or two." It's like: wut

Via Sullivan.

A Captain and Tenille flame war for the ages

2010-03-01T23:31:00.000-08:00

Of course, I fully realize that by the time you're reading a YouTube comments flame war, you really ought to have gone to sleep. But: in this one the stakes are so high:

Bag0fRats (2 months ago)

Toni Tenille now wears a calostmy bag, being a druggie is never smart

vicnored (3 weeks ago)

@Bag0fRats y do u know this

Bag0fRats (2 weeks ago)

@vicnored it's well known. Didn't ever hear of the concert she gave in the late 80s in LA when she dropped her colostomy bag on stage ?

InformingChristians (1 week ago)

That is not nice of you to spread falsehoods. Toni Tennille and her husband did not do drugs. And she looks very health to me.

They have a website. Google Captian and Tennille.

Shame on you...

Debra J.M. Smith
of
Informing Christians

Bag0fRats (1 week ago)

@InformingChristians Falsehoods ? I suppose you could tell the thousands that saw her perform in LA in the late 1980s that saw her drop her colostomy bag on stage are all lying and coincidentally made up the same lie. Oh, and all the morning radio shows must have lied too as well as all the callers who were joking about it.

InformingChristians (4 days ago)

@Bag0fRats

I never heard anything about it. And even if a situation happened that she had such a health issue, that would not mean that it was from drug use.

I never heard of her doing anything mean to anyone. Why go after her in such a hurtful way? It makes no sense. She has feelings too.

Debra...

Bag0fRats (3 days ago)

@InformingChristians how is pointing out a fact hateful ? She did drop her colostomy bag on stage in LA back in '89. Maybe you didn't hear because you live in the east or whatever. If you did live here you would have known about it because it was the joke of every morning radio show in the morning. so again, how is that hateful ? Please explain.

InformingChristians (3 days ago)

@Bag0fRats,

If that did happen, then it is very cruel that people would have joked about it. And it does not mean that she was on drugs.

Debra...

Bag0fRats (3 days ago)

@InformingChristians Cruel maybe, juvenile yes.

It seems that poor Debra--who I'm sure is a very nice, ordinary person--hasn't learned not to get lured into YouTube comments flame wars with people named "BagofRats".

Work naps

2010-02-27T13:27:00.002-08:00

I've been saying this for a while. After lunch you're typically pretty sleepy and a short nap would be the perfect pick-me-up--but since sleeping at work is taboo, everyone is forced to resort to drugs (read: coffee, which is of course provided to everyone for free). The American siesta: LET'S DO THIS.

Haiti-capitalism bruhaha

2010-02-26T03:25:00.000-08:00

There should be a term for when your comments on a blog post are orders of magnitude larger than the blog post itself. "Overstaying your welcome"?

PS: The Sword and the Ploughshare--no doubt an obscure Magic: The Gathering reference--is the old Target Practice, just with a face-lift and a name change.

It's the way of the world, son

2010-02-21T18:46:00.000-08:00

The other day when I was, er, occupying a stall in the restroom at work, I overheard this adorable conversation between a father and maybe his 4 or 5 year old son:

Boy: Hey! It smells like lemons in here.
Father: Just stand right there, ok?
Boy: Ok.
Father: Hey! No no no! Don't touch that. It's dirty.
Boy: Dirty?
Father: It's filled with dirty pee.
Boy: (incredulous) But it smells like lemons!
Father: They make it smell that way, so that you don't smell the pee.
Boy: Wow!

Government stimulus impossible?

2010-02-18T14:29:00.000-08:00

I usually try to stay away from The Corner, but this (via Yglesias) strikes me as pretty egregious:

The idea that government spending creates jobs makes sense only if you never ask where the government got the money. It didn’t fall from the sky. The only way Congress can inject spending into the economy is by first taxing or borrowing it out of the economy. No new demand is created; it’s a zero-sum transfer of existing demand.

This, in a word, is bullshit. The concept of "borrowing money out of the economy" is a non-sequitor--if anything, money is borrowed into the economy, in the sense that every dollar borrowed is a dollar spent (in other words, people don't borrow money just to stuff it under a mattress--they borrow money with something to buy in mind, like a house, car, etc.).

In fact, normally the main mechanism by which the economy is regulated is by manipulating the amount of borrowing going on. This is accomplished by the Federal Reserve, which has its finger on the interest rate--lowering the rate makes borrowing cheaper, and so more borrowing--and therefore more spending--takes place. And more spending==increased demand==stimulus (these are just semantically equivalent terms).

The problem these days is that the Federal Reserve can no longer increase demand amongst the private sector by lowering the interest rate because the interest rate is already at zero (or near zero--I think it's like 0.25% or something). And so the federal government has stepped in to shoulder the burden, borrowing--and spending--hundreds of billions of dollars on its own. I have a feeling Riedl wants to say something like, "yes, but this demand is canceled out by the fact that the money will have to be repaid later via taxes", but this is no different in principle than the fact that the car or house-buying private citizen needs to eventually repay the loan that was taken out. Obligation to pay down debt later doesn't negate the fact of money being spent now, whether you're talking about a private individual, a company, the government, or whatever.

All the conventional wisdom that's fit to print

2010-02-17T00:04:00.000-08:00

Remarkably, there is an entire article in the NYT about "party gridlock in Washington" that doesn't even contain the word "filibuster", let alone any explanation of its historically unprecedented abuse. It's "analysis" like this that prevents me from feeling all that bad when I hear that newspapers are going under.

Femme fatale

2010-02-12T01:24:00.001-08:00

I think one of my favorite things about this Age of the Internets that we live in--and YouTube in particular--are all the covers of songs by amateurs sitting around in their living room. Even songs I've listened to a million times seem to come out fresh and new. I could watch 'em all day.

Anyway, here's Femme Fatale, sung by a beeyootiful lady:

Quote of the day

2010-02-10T15:21:00.000-08:00

“Give me whereon to stand”, said Archimedes, “and I will move the earth.” The boast was a pretty safe one, for he knew quite well that the standing place was wanting, and always would be wanting. But suppose he had moved the earth, what then? What benefit would it have been to anybody? The job would never have paid working expenses, let alone dividends, and so what was the use of talking about it? From what astronomers tell us, I should reckon that the earth moved quite fast enough already, and if there happened to be a few cranks who were dissatisfied with its rate of progress, as far as I am concerned, they might push it along for themselves; I would not move a finger or subscribe a penny piece to assist in anything of the kind.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)
“Archimedes”

Terms of abuse?

2010-02-07T12:22:00.000-08:00

Via some guy on Twitter, it seems as though Burning Man enforces some pretty ridiculous restrictions in the fine print of the ticket:

Last year we noted how the Burning Man Organization (BMO) used online ticket terms to require participants to assign to BMO—in advance—the copyright to any pictures they took on the playa. Tickets for the 2010 event went on sale in mid-January, and we hoped the new terms would acknowledge the concerns we had expressed. Sadly, the new terms are just as onerous as before.
The "assignment in advance" clause is not the only burdensome provision. The BMO ticket terms limit participants' rights to use their own photos online, obliging them to take down any photos to which BMO objects for any reason and forbidding them from allowing anyone else to download or copy the photos. This means participants cannot donate their works to the public domain or to license their works, even through Creative Commons—no matter what is depicted or whether a use is noncommercial.

Even the notoriously protective Olympics allow spectators to take their own pictures or videos under their Ticket License Agreement, requiring only that the images "not be used for broadcast, publication, or any other commercial purpose." It is disappointing that the BMO cannot be at least as flexible.

Burning Man also continues to strip ticket holders of their right to make perfectly legal uses of its trademarks, forbidding participants from even using the (trademarked) term "Burning Man" on any website. In other words, participants who’d like to blog about their experiences at the event can’t use the words ”Burning Man.” Thus Burning Man uses contract law to do what it cannot under either copyright or trademark law—exert extraordinary control over participants' speech.

It's hard to say where I come down on this. The thing is, at Burning Man there are a lot of respectable people doing things that are normally not very respectable, like strutting around in the nude. So there's a big danger to people's reputation if some wise guy decides to snap a bunch of photos and post them online without permission. This gives Burning Man the authority they need to immediately take down any such photos.

However, though it might make sense in this particular case, it does seem to set a troubling precedent. It doesn't seem right that a company can use a contract to arbitrarily limit what a person can say or do with content collected at an event (although some limits I think are pretty reasonable to enforce). But, really, I'm completely unfamiliar with the thinking on this issue.

PS: It's a pet peeve of mine when causes resort to using silly insults to refer to their targets. For example, this organization keeps substituting "terms of use" with "terms of ab(use)". Not only is this grammatically wrong--it should be "terms of (ab)use"--it just makes the organization look petty and impotent, like they're so powerless to stop what's going on and are so infuriated that the only thing they can do is stand on the sidelines and uselessly sputter in rage. It's like when people use "U$", or "Amerika"--or, for that matter, "Stanfurd" (something I've always been against).

They do it their way

2010-02-07T11:55:00.000-08:00

Apparently, singing Frank Sinatra's version of My Way at karaoke in the Philippines can get you killed. Which is, you know, ridiculous.

The Beatles are the universal solvent of mashups

2010-02-07T11:39:00.000-08:00

This one has Wu-Tang--very nice.

EDIT: Via my friend Laura.

Juking the stats

2010-02-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

Life imitates The Wire.

BONUS SECTION: I just learned yesterday that there is, indeed, a The Office-The Wire connection. It seems that Office producer/actor B.J. Novaks is a big Wire fan, and so he's been giving Wire alums bit roles. What's funny, though, is that the actors invariably end up playing basically the same character in the Office as they were in the Wire. So, for example, Stringer ends up playing the hardass corporate boss; Beadie ends up playing the mellow love interest (Holly); and in a recent episode, we had the wormy Managing Editor from the Baltimore Sun, Thomas Klebanow, play the wormy fact checker from the new parent company.

Extra extra read all about it

2010-02-03T02:55:00.000-08:00

This has to be one of the best trashy HuffPo headlines of all time:

Grammys Chest Dressed: Who Wore Low-Cut Best? (PHOTOS)

105 Comments

Ohh, HuffPo. So not legitimate.

Sweet budget proposal interactive graphic thingy

2010-02-01T22:12:00.000-08:00

The NYT does it again. Check it out if you want to know what the federal budget is like.

I don't know whether to slap my forehead or rub my temples

2010-02-01T21:53:00.000-08:00

From a front page NYT article:

Mr. Obama has published the 10-year numbers in part, it seems, to make the point that the political gridlock of the past few years, in which most Republicans refuse to talk about tax increases and Democrats refuse to talk about cutting entitlement programs, is unsustainable.

Arrrrrggggggg! This is just not true. Health care insurance reform was projected to reduce the deficit by, among other things, raising revenue and cutting back somewhat on existing Medicare entitlements for seniors. And if the liberals had really had their way, and included a robust public option, the deficit would have been cut far more substantially. (All this according to the CBO!)

Meanwhile, it has been the Republicans who have been promising not to cut Medicare, not the Democrats. And it is the Republicans who passed the unfunded expansion of Medicare, the unfunded tax cuts, and financed the unfunded wars of the Bush years.

So the real story is that it is the Republicans who are overwhelmingly responsible for the unsustainable levels of debt that our nation finds itself in. But in the mainstream press you always get the "both sides are to blame" narrative.

"Under Construction"

2010-02-01T12:14:00.000-08:00

A bit of internet history.

Quote of the day

2010-01-30T14:48:00.001-08:00

"The GOP is as interested in restraining spending as I am in wanting to have sex with women." - Andrew Sullivan

The broken Senate

2010-01-24T12:28:00.000-08:00

Via Yglesias, a nice chart that demonstrates that the current abuse of the filibuster is historically unprecedented:

Though today's Republicans are really taking it to the next level, I'd say that the use of the filibuster has been problematic since the 1990s. Not coincidentally, there has not been any major tax increase or entitlement reforms (with the possible exception of Clinton's welfare reform) since that time. Those are the politically difficult laws to pass that will simply never get through the Senate so long as the minority party can block it with a mere 41 votes.

Pardon Me

2010-01-23T18:30:00.001-08:00

Why Ariana Huffington is a hack

2010-01-20T01:44:00.000-08:00

I don't make it a habit to delve too deeply into the cable news/HuffPo daily news cycle vortex. One of the reasons why is interviews like this with Ariana Huffington. In it, she says that the defeat of health care reform is a "blessing in disguise" for Democrats because it was a politically unpopular bill, and ditching it will better position them for the 2010 races. She does not mention anything substantive about the uninsured Americans that the bill would have aided, or how the legislation would have prevented insurance companies from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions. For her, the highest priority is that Democrats stay in power, and that they don't find themselves on the wrong side of a Zogby poll. It's pure politics, devoid of any substance whatsoever.

Me: I would happily give the Republicans Congress if it meant passing health care and other vital reforms. The proper pattern should be something like this: one party gets a bee in its bonnet. It eventually attracts enough centrists to seize power. It enacts legislation which, due to the sausage-making process, is significantly watered down, thus alienating the original base. But it gets something through which is good enough. Now the party in power no longer has any pressing reason to stay in power. So it treads water, becomes increasingly corrupt and unprincipled, until it loses to the opposing party. And the process repeats.

So, really, staying in power for long stretches of time is inherently a problematic goal for a political party to have. The attitude should be: "let's get the best possible legislation through before they kick our asses out", rather than "let's be sure to circumscribe our agenda so that we can remain in power indefinitely".

We're effed

2010-01-19T21:19:00.000-08:00

Well: health care reform is dead. Coakley's loss means that the Democrats have one vote short of a filibuster-proof majority, which is giving centrist Democrats an excuse to run for cover. Democratic support for the bill is caving as speak, as Jim Webb volunteers that there will be no more votes on heath care until Scott Brown is seated, and no less a Massachusettes liberal than Barney Frank rules out this possibility as well. Senator Evan Bayh is already acknowledging the election as a rebuke to the Democratic agenda.

But this whole experience proves something more than a failed attempt by Democrats to reform health care insurance: it shows that the United States government is incapable of passing major legislation that will solve our biggest problems. Health care needs to be reformed, one way or another: its costs are spiraling out of control, and the ranks of the uninsured keep growing. If costs continue growing apace, the federal government will go broke paying for Medicare in the next fifty years.

Of course, broadening health care insurance isn't the only way to solve the looming budget problem; you could go the Republican route, and cut entitlements. The problem is: no Republicans are seriously advocating this. Scott Brown ran on a platform of not reducing a penny of Medicare spending, and he supports Massachusettes' own universal health care program. Indeed, the fact that the Dem's reform package would have resulted in Medicare spending cuts was used by Republicans as a talking point against the legislation. And of course, it was a Republican President and Congress that last decade passed Medicare Part D, the largest expansion of entitlements since the passage of Medicare itself--all of it funded with deficit spending (which is to say, none of it was funded at all).

Now, ultimately this failure is attributable to the rules of the Senate--specifically, the recently adopted practice of requiring a 60 vote supermajority to pass any legislation whatsoever. If a simple majority was all that was needed to get something through, the legislation would have passed in the middle of last year. But so long as this supermajority requirement remains, it will be impossible for either party to pass any legislation that is capable of solving our nation's biggest problems. I think it would behoove the leadership in both parties to agree to abolish the filibuster in a set period of time from now (6 years, say, when it is unknown which party will be in power). Otherwise crucial legislation--whether it is coming from the left or the right--will continue to crash on the shoals of arcane procedural votes in the Senate.

This story will be buried

2010-01-19T02:19:00.000-08:00

Scott Horton--one of the few actual journalists left on the planet, it seems--has a new piece in which witnesses step forward to question the official account of the deaths of three inmates held in Gitmo. According to the Navy, the inmates all committed suicide. Simultaneously. And bound their legs and hands together and stuffed rags in their mouths before hanging themselves. A fact which could not be medically verified after the fact because the bodies were returned to their families with the necks removed.

I'll have more to say later. But you really should read the whole thing.

The anti-Leno revolt

2010-01-15T03:15:00.000-08:00

The internets have not been kind to Mr. Leno. Via Phil, some folks got wise and started using Hulu tags to comment on the situation:

You can click on the image for a closer view.

Google in over it's head with the Nexus One?

2010-01-13T13:48:00.000-08:00

Seems like Google underestimated the amount of business infrastructure that is required in order to be in the cell phone game:

New owners of the Nexus One, the latest touch-screen smartphone to run on Android, Google’s mobile operating system, have found themselves at a loss when it comes to resolving problems with the handset. They cannot call Google for help, and the company warns that it may take up to 48 hours to respond to e-mail messages.

...

...Google, more accustomed to providing minimal support for its free services, has been unprepared to deal with the higher service expectations of customers who are paying as much as $529 for its high-end smartphone.

I think they're going to have to pony up for tech support--which is one of the most costly expenses for the big carriers.

I like this cat

2010-01-12T17:18:00.001-08:00

The diner in its natural habitat

2010-01-12T00:27:00.001-08:00

Randomly I was looking at a site that had a bunch of tips for waiters, and laughed at this:

When their good food and conversation is over, they will start looking around at other diners or the walls. This can tell you when to clear plates, offer desserts or drop the check.

I just like the idea of diners as these harmless critters that amble in, eat and talk, and then when done just kind of start looking around blankly. Awwwwwwww...

“Hi Nikola, Al Gore wants you to change the numeral one in Brioni.”

2010-01-11T16:21:00.000-08:00

Via Ezra Klein, a pretty great story involving Al Gore and fonts.

The Simpsons

2010-01-10T13:03:00.000-08:00

The Simpsons turns 20 today. Jonathan Chait tries a bit of analysis:

In the world of the Simpsons, people are capable of bottomless cruelty, greed, and hypocrisy -- indeed, these traits are so widely shared that they go unremarked upon. In this case, Barney is not only launching a competitor to his best friend's livelihood, he's savaging his character on television. And he's attacking him in terms that not only apply more to Barney himself, but utterly define his character -- the only things Barney ever does are be a loser and a boozer.
The show doesn't make a joke about, or even highlight, this violent hypocrisy. It's just accepted. That's how people are. That's why it was such a deadly satire.

I don't know if I buy that. To me, the denizens of Springfield were never ultimately cruel, greedy, or hypocritical--they always redeem themselves in the end. Even in the episode that Chait cites, Mr. Plow, Homer and Barney eventually make up and become friends again. So I kind of don't know what he's talking about.

Moreover, in my opinion, the satirical bite of the Simpsons came not from some cynical portrayal of how "people really are", so much as an irreverent send up television itself and its central place in American society. Recall that when the Simpsons debuted it was pre-Seinfeld, pre-South Park, and during the heyday of the Cosby Show. TV characters never exhibited true dysfunction, did not exhibit the now-familiar American pathologies of overeating, laziness, and basic ignorance. Most importantly, unlike real Americans, the Americans depicted on television never watched television. Whereas the typical American was watching an average of 4 or 5 hours of TV a day, Bill Cosby was spending 5 hours a day kibitzing with Rudy in the living room. The Simpsons was the first to portray Americans as the true television-watching, fast-food eating, pop-culture consumers that they are.

Of course, this is also what made The Simpsons a uniquely post-modern affair. Whereas characters on the Cosby Show and Cheers seemed to live in an idealized alternate reality free of consumerism and pop icons, the characters in the Simpsons traded in them as a matter of course: pop cultural references were the show's trademark. There were parodies of Patton, of the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and countless other movies; the characters, too, were often parodies of famous people in the old Warner Bros. cartoon style, such as Mayor Quimby standing in for a generic Kennedy (right down to his wife always being shown as dressed in the pink dress and pillbox hat--which is actually pretty morbid now that I think of it) or Karl having a Sly Stallone inflection, or Ranier Wolfcastle as Arnold Schwarzenegger. Part of the game of watching the Simpsons was seeing if you could catch all the references being made.

In any case, personally it feels a little awkward to analyze the Simpsons all academic-like, because it's such an organic part of who I am, and who my friends are. When the Simpsons began, I was 10 years old. Though obviously I didn't understand all the subtle layers of humor at work, I did understand that this is what funny was. I was fluent in the language of Simpsons quotes, and the day after a new episode aired, conversation with my friends before homeroom would consist almost entirely of quoting the best parts of the episode from the night before. It was a universal language, too: everyone from ever click and group had at least a basic knowledge of the Simpsons. And as we all developed our senses of humor, it became clear that we owed a tremendous debt to that show, which traded so much in pop cultural references and absurd tangents.

On a final note, I'll just add that my favorite episode of all time is Homer the Heretic, the one where Homer skips church and ends up having the best day of his life. Off the top of my head, I can think of these choice jokes from that episode:

God saying to Homer, "I have to go now. I have to appear in a burrito in Mexico."
"We interrupt this political roundtable to bring you: professional football." The graphic being shown while this is said is two pundits battling on what appears to be a mesa somewhere, one of them brandishing a suitcase and the other, a mace.
Everyone freezing their butts off in church and reveling in the imagery of hell.
Homer relecting on the best days of his life, including one of him dancing in a fountain of beer emanating from a crashed beer truck.
"Rich, creamery butter..."
Moon waffles, including liquid smoke
Communing with nature, various birds and forest critters light on Homer's head and shoulders; later, when he's taking a shower, they're still there.

Anyway. Yeah. The Simpsons.

Fallows on the brokenness of the Senate

2010-01-10T12:37:00.000-08:00

Again, it all really just boils down to the Senate:

When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Giving them the same two votes in the Senate was part of the intricate compromise over regional, economic, and slave-state/free-state interests that went into the Constitution. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it’s unchangeable. Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the “saucer” George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might “cool,” into a deep freeze and a dead weight.
The Senate’s then-famous “Gang of Six,” which controlled crucial aspects of last year’s proposed health-care legislation, came from states that together held about 3 percent of the total U.S. population; 97 percent of the public lives in states not included in that group. (Just to round this out, more than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which together account for 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes.) “The Senate is full of ‘rotten boroughs,’” said James Galbraith, of the University of Texas, referring to the underpopulated constituencies in Parliament before the British reforms of 1832. “We’d be better off with a House of Lords."

Of course, the present-day version of the filibuster--where a supermajority of 60 votes is required to get any routine thing passed--is a relatively recent development, emerging only within the last 15 years or so. Still, though, the Senate is almost single-handedly responsible for America's inability to tackle any of its major, long-term problems.

The problem with bank bonuses

2010-01-10T01:31:00.001-08:00

An article in the NYT explains how Wall Street bonuses work:

Though Wall Street bankers and traders earn six-figure base salaries, they generally receive most of their pay as a bonus based on the previous year’s performance.

Of course, the problem isn't so much that they are paid millions of dollars when they make lots of money; it's that they aren't penalized millions of dollars when they lose lots of money. It's all upside, never any downside for those guys. And that's what pisses everyone off.

Yet another cool Flash chart from NYT

2010-01-09T10:36:00.000-08:00

Netflix movie queue data.

Forget it Jake, it's Iraq

2010-01-08T14:01:00.001-08:00

In a NYT op-ed today, a reserve soldier explains that one of the most frustrating things about her time in Iraq was not knowing whether her efforts were having any impact:

In the fantasy, you know exactly what you’ve done, what impact it’s had, and you’ve put smiles on peoples’ faces. But in reality, you don’t necessarily ever get to find out the true impact of your actions. You’re left with questions instead. Did rebuilding all those schools over there have any kind of lasting impact? Did the Iraqis we tried to assist believe that we were sincere in our efforts?
In my hero fantasies, there are no such loose ends or doubts.

Fog of war and all that, but it also reminds me of Chinatown:

EVELYN
 Tell me something -- does this
 usually happen to you, Mr. Gittes?

  GITTES
 What's that, Mrs. Mulwray?

  EVELYN
 -- Well, I'm only judging on the
 basis of one afternoon and an evening,
 but if that's how you go about your
 work, I'd say you're lucky to get
 through a whole day.

  GITTES
  (pouring himself
   another drink)
 -- Actually this hasn't happened
 to me in some time.

  EVELYN
 -- When was the last time?

  GITTES
 Why?

  EVELYN
 Just -- I don't know why.
 I'm asking.

Gittes touches his nose, winces a little.

  GITTES
 It was in Chinatown.

  EVELYN
 What were you doing there?

  GITTES
  (taking a long drink)
 -- Working for the District Attorney.

  EVELYN
 Doing what?

183  Gittes looks sharply at her. Then:

  GITTES
 As little as possible.

  EVELYN
 The District Attorney gives his
 men advice like that?

  GITTES
 They do in Chinatown.

She looks at him. Gittes stares off into the night.

Evelyn has poured herself another drink.

  EVELYN
 Bothers you to talk about it,
 doesn't It?

Gittes gets up.

  GITTES
 No -- I wonder -- could I -- do
 you have any peroxide or something?

He touches his nose lightly.

  EVELYN
 Oh sure. C'mon.

She takes his hand and leads him back into the house.

184  INT. BATHROOM - MIRROR

Gittes pulls the plaster off his nose, stares at it in
the mirror. Evelyn takes some hydrogen peroxide and some
cotton out of a medicine cabinet. Evelyn turns Gittes'
head toward her. She has him sit on the pullman tile
adjacent to the sink.

  EVELYN
 Doctor did a nice job...

She begins to work on his nose with the peroxide. Then
she sees his cheek -- checks back in his hair.--


  EVELYN
  (continuing)
 -- Boy oh boy, you're a mess

  GITTES
 -- Yeah --

  EVELYN
  (working on him)
 -- So why does it bother you to
 talk about it... Chinatown...

  GITTES
 -- Bothers everybody who works
 there -- but to me -- It was --

Gittes shrugs.

  EVELYN
 -- Hold still -- why?

  GITTES
 -- You can't always tell what's
 going on there --

  EVELYN
 ... No -- why was it --

  GITTES
 I thought I was keeping someone
 from being hurt and actually I ended
 up making sure they were hurt.

  EVELYN
 Could you do anything about it?

185  They're very close now as she's going over a mouse very
near his eye.

  GITTES
 Yeah -- make sure I don't find
 myself in Chinatown anymore --
 wait a second --

He takes hold of her and pulls her even closer,

  EVELYN
  (momentarily freezing)
 -- What's wrong?

  GITTES
 Your eye.

  EVELYN
 What about it?

  GITTES
  (staring intently)
 There's something black in the
 green part of your eye.

  EVELYN
  (not moving)
 Oh that... It's a flaw in the
 iris...

  GITTES
 ... A flaw...

  EVELYN
 (she almost shivers)
 ... Yes, sort of a birthmark...

Gittes kisses her lightly, gradually rises until he's
standing holding her. She hesitates, then wraps her arms
around him.

As an aside, I always thought a cool idea would be to make a show--on HBO, say--about Jake Gittes' days on the Chinatown beat (that are only obliquely alluded to in the movie).

NBC continues its "screw the guy in the 12:30 slot" strategy for late-night

2010-01-07T22:14:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, NBC screwed David Letterman--who occupied the 12:30am slot after Carson--out of the Tonight Show. Now, it looks like they're going to similarly screw over Conan O'Brien, by pushing the Tonight Show to 12am and putting Leno back at the 11:30 slot with his own half-hour show.

If I were Conan, I'd say "to hell with this" and go grab a proper 11:30 slot at Fox or something.

Countermeasures

2010-01-05T01:20:00.000-08:00

This is pretty great.

Down the slippery slope we go

2010-01-01T15:51:00.000-08:00

Sullivan talks torture:

Notice again how far down the slippery slope we have gone. Krauthammer's first position was that torture should be restricted solely to ticking time bomb cases in which we knew that a terror suspect could prevent an imminent detonation of a WMD. His position a few years later is that torture should be the first resort for any terror suspect who could tell us anything about future plots. Those of us who warned that torture, once admitted into the mainstream, will metastasize beyond anyone's control now have the example of Charles Krauthammer's arguments to back us up.

Civil unrest in Iran

2009-12-28T01:48:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't already, it's definitely worth it to check out the Iran coverage over on Sullivan. Of course, all the videos, Tweets, etc. are very fragmentary and amount to unconfirmed reports, but you can still get a feel for the atmosphere over there. There's so much energy in those crowds, and confidence.

Now I'm just really curious as to what's going to happen. I don't know much about Iranian politics or anything. I don't know what the likely scenarios are as far as an end game for all this. But one thing that seems certain is that the protests won't just fade away. Something's gotta give. I guess at some point the generals will pick a winner...

Anyway, watch this haunting video. What you're hearing is the sound of thousands of people shouting slogans from their windows and rooftops:

How the hell does the Iranian government get out of this? They're in so deep..

NBA notes

2009-12-25T23:57:00.000-08:00

Ugh. What a terrible effort by the Lakers. And Kobe whining because he wasn't getting the calls he wanted wasn't very fun to watch, either.
Apparently, Stan Van Gundy thinks there shouldn't be NBA games on Christmas, because it prevents the players from spending time with their family. I can't abide this whining. I mean, think of it: these people are paid millions of dollars to play friggin' basketball--the least they can do is work on a holiday. And guess what: there are millions of people who do work on Christmas Day, but who don't get millions of dollars for it. And what about the troops overseas? Not only are they working during Christmas, but they're away from home; and not only are they away from home, but they are in actual life-threatening danger; and not only are they in life threatening danger, but they're doing all this for practically nothing. So, spare me, Stan, and go play some fucking basketball. Lots of people would give their right arm to be in your position--you should just be thankful for that.
How old do you have to be for it to be meaningful in any way that the Knicks are good? I'm always hearing about how "good for basketball" it is when the Knicks are good, and how classic and legendary and important Madison Square Garden is. But the Knicks never won a ring in the 90s when I was growing up--they were just standard issue Eastern Conference Jordan fodder. And in the 80s they didn't do anything either. And if you asked me to name a great Knick (besides Ewing, who wasn't even that earth-shatteringly great--nowhere near Olajuwan, for example)--I don't think I could. So I don't get what's so special about the Knicks.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-25T03:17:00.000-08:00

...and go Lakers! I hope it's a good game..

Decade in review: Shitty Events of the Aughts

2009-12-22T22:44:00.000-08:00

The list is unranked. (Edit: on my machine the HTML is kind of wonky, such that the table is placed too low on the page. Apologies if you're seeing the same.)

No.	Shitty event	Cultural corollary	Explanation
1	Terrorists destroy the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/2001	Flag pins	It is worth noting that, for all the awfulness of the 9/11 attacks, their effects on the nation as a whole were primarily psychological. Strictly speaking, the destruction of two buildings in downtown New York hardly constituted an existentially threateneing attack--in a nation of 300 million, a mere 3,000 were killed, and America's infrastructure and capabilities were completely intact. Compared to a country that is actually attacked in a sustained conventional war--e.g., Britain during the blitz, or Iraq during the most recent invasion--the damage done was insignificant. Of course, the real felt threat of the attacks was that it demonstrated that another attack could come anywhere, any time. And it could be worse--it could, for example, involve a biological or nuclear weapon. Americans for the first time in memory felt physically unsafe--and, it seemed, not very prepared for this feeling. There didn't seem to be a protocol for what to do in a crisis like this--there was no tradition, for example, of the stiff upper-lip, "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude as in Britain. So we seemed to be making up our own protocols on the fly. The most prominent and emblematic of these was, of course, the flag pin, which quickly became a ubiquitous accessary on news people and politicians everywhere. Though I think the initial sentiment behind it was a fairly benign one--establishing some sense of underlying national unity in a crisis--it was not long before it curdled into a cynical symbol of heavyhanded jingoism, one more politico-cultural bludgeon at the disposal of the pro-war right. The "death" of the flag pin came during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Barack Obama was criticized for not wearing the pin. Eventually the controversy fizzled when Obama began wearing the pin, but sporadically. By that time though terrorism had faded into the background, with the economic crisis at the forefront of everyone's mind. So the flag pin saga tracked, I think, the rise and fall of the post-9/11 "everything is different" mindset--the psychological effect of those attacks.
2	United States invades Iraq on false pretenses	B.O.B, by Outkast	Maybe this Pitchfork article puts it best: "B.O.B." is not just the song of the decade-- it is the decade. Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title-- aka "Bombs Over Baghdad", a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later-- is only the start of it. In "B.O.B"'s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear an obliteration of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro, setting the stage for a decade of dance/rock crossovers. We hear a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals. We hear André 3000 and Big Boi fire off a synapse-bursting stream of ripped-from-the-headlines buzzwords ("Cure for cancer/ Cure for AIDS"), personal anecdotes ("Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo") and product placements ("Yo quiero Taco Bell") that read like the world's first Twitter feed. We hear four minutes of utter fucking chaos yielding to a joyously optimistic denouement (a point reinforced by the Stankonia cover's re-imagination of the American flag, which anticipates a White House set to be painted black). In a lot of ways, I think, the Iraq War was the real crux of the Aughts--the American establishment's "original sin", as Frank Rich once put it, that revealed its character as utterly wanting, and its fealty to core liberal democratic principles a fiction. If 9/11 was the question posed, the Iraq War was the answer given: an answer that had nothing to do with the question, that was based on false evidence, that was, as Obama would put it during the campaign, "dumb". The Iraq War revealed so much: the failure of the mainstream press to hold those in power accountable; the willingness of the Bush administration to dispense misinformation to achieve its political ends; the utter incompetence of the Bush administration; the spread of torture techniques throughout the military; the failure of the Democrats to stand up to jingoism and demogoguery; the failure of the Democratic establishment in general to identify the war as a mistake at the time. It is no coincidence that the current president was the only serious contender in the primary who was against the Iraq War from the beginning--the war had tainted everybody else. The narrative arc of the Aughts--the crisis, the fall, the attempt at redemption--has, as its central event, the Iraq War. It's tentacles reach into everything, into both parties, into the past and the future. The war, after all, had been prefigured, since before 9/11--since before Bush took office, when the neocons ran think tanks instead of US foreign policy. Saddam Hussein was on the minds of top officials in the White House from literally the first days that the towers came down. The false evidence that was eventually used by Colin Powell to make the case for the war was extracted using the same torture techniques that would spread to Guantanamo and back to Iraq at Abu-Ghraib. The incompetence of Bush's war plan forshadowed the incompetance that would be on display years later in the handling of the Katrina aftermath. And, finally, the Iraq War begat the political career of one Barack Obama, who would bring--or try to bring, at any rate--the conflict to a close.
3	United States tortures detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and US law	24	America's shift to a torture state did not happen in a vaccuum: at some point, it became an acceptable mainstream moral position to support the use of torture in dire circumstances. Out of this mindset was Jack Bauer born--or maybe, out of 24 was America's pro-torture mindset born.
4	Domestic abuses of power by the federal government: illegal wire taps, politicization of the Department of Justice, interference with various regulatory agencies	Dick Cheney shoots a man in the face, and the man apologizes to Cheney	In the heyday of Republican power, the Bush administration seemingly got away with anything, whether it was conducting unconstitutional surveillance on millions of Americans, using Justice Department lawyers to settle political scores, or censoring reports by the EPA to make them more industry-friendly. Not only was there no legal consequences of any of these actions, but the mainstream press--and the US Congress--seemed uninterested in holding anyone accountable for these transgressions. We all knew we were really through the looking glass when, one day in February 2006, we were informed that Dick Cheney had indeed shot a man in the face with a shot gun. For a delerious day or two as confused accounts trickled in and Cheney exhibited odd, guilty-seeming behavior we thought the whole Bush ediface would finally come crumbling down in the craziest scandal ever. But in the end it turned out to be a common hunting accident--and the victims bizarre apology to Cheney for "all the trouble" confirmed the invincibility of the Bush-Rove-Cheney political machine.
5	New Orleans is destroyed by Hurricane Katrina	"George Bush doesn't care about black people."	Katrina was the moment when the establishment realized that Emperor Bush had no clothes--when the idea that the Bush administration was incompetent and reckless finally made its way into the canon of conventional wisdom. The failure of an adequate response to the disaster was not in question whatsoever. In those heartstopping few days after the hurricane struck, the nation shook its collective head in wonder at how there could be people going thirsty and dead bodies lying uncollected in the streets in an American city. Meanwhile, Bush dithered in his response--and it quickly became clear that he had staffed FEMA with a bunch of unqualified cronies. His legendary assessment of FEMA director (and former horse pageant judge) Michael Brown's performance marked the moment at which his administration descended into farce. That outward sign of this state of affairs was when, at some MTV related event, Kanye West went off-script and uttered, next to a memorably flummoxed Mike Meyers, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Now, let me say that I don't think George W. Bush was or is any kind of racist, and that I don't think Kanye West is a very important figure in the grand scheme of things. But this little moment was significant because West's comment gained traction, as opposed to bouncing off Bush without incident. Bush was no longer the teflon president he once was. Katrina marked the beginning of a long downward slide in Bush's approval rating that ended at a record low 22% by the time he left office.

Lamar Odom is a really weird guy

2009-12-22T22:21:00.000-08:00

American pantheism

2009-12-21T21:24:00.000-08:00

I'd go so far as to confer "must-read" status on Ross Douthat's latest column, which uses Avatar as a jumping off point for the kind of elevated discussion that you don't often find in a newspaper op-ed piece, and offers some pretty cutting observations:

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

Go ahead and read the whole thing.

Like you do

2009-12-20T14:43:00.001-08:00

I'm a sucker for caricatures. I'm even more of a sucker for caricaturists who find the time to do Eddie Izzard from Dressed To Kill:

American gibberish!

2009-12-20T14:19:00.001-08:00

Just yesterday at a party I was mentioning that one thing I've always wanted to hear was someone who didn't know a lick of English putting together a string of English gibberish. And now today I see a video that features exactly that: specifically, it's an Italian doing American gibberish.

Enjoy!

Only a little arsenic

2009-12-17T13:02:00.000-08:00

There's a big feature in the NYT comparing tap water safety all around the country. It seems that San Francisco County is doing pretty good, with the worst of it being just 3 chemicals that are within the legal limit, but above what's considered healthy. However, those 3 are doozies: arsenic, lead, and radon (although how bad can radon be for you? It's inert, right?).

Not batshit, but then, not really serious either

2009-12-14T21:09:00.001-08:00

I got momentarily excited by Conor Friedersdorf's insistence that I read one Jim Manzi's "manifesto of sorts" that lays out a "framework for understanding the challenges that America faces". I was promised that his would be a "serious voice" that moves us beyond "bromides about liberty and tyranny" that you typically hear from the right these days.

Anyway, I read the thing, and was unimpressed. Far too high-level and vague to be of any use to anyone, it strikes me more as a formulation of right-wing conventional wisdom and political narrative than any real attempt to deal with substantive issues or engage the opposition in an intellectually honest way. He passes comment on things like the bailout of Wall Street and the nationalization of GM without any sort of discussion of what the consequences would have been if those actions had not been taken; he pooh-poohs cap-and-trade as "economically extravagant" (which is something of a non sequitor, I might add) without addressing the costs of not regulating carbon output; he utterly fails to address military spending as a component of the government's precarious long-term financial position; he urges the repeal of fiscal stimulus without offering an alternative approach to alleviating America's 10% unemployment rate; he offers no way forward on health care reform.

If his goal with this essay was to engage in a productive way on any of these fronts, I'd say he failed. If you're going to dismiss cap-and-trade, for example, you have to at least address why you think it's a bad policy--whether that means a critique of the way the policy will be implemented, or empirical skepticism about the dangers of global warming, or whatever. But Manzi offers no such arguments; just blank, high-level assertions that seemed to be backed by nothing other than implicit conservative conventional wisdom.

In any case, here are a few specific things that I think Manzi either mischaracterizes or doesn't address:

He mainly frames America's politics as a tension between Great Society liberal welfare statism and Reagan-era economic deregulation, but I think this picture is no longer accurate today. In the first place, it's not the case that today's liberals are fighting to undo the Reagan revolution: Reagan won that war, and liberals conceded long ago. To see this, just check out what marginal tax rates were like before and after Reagan took office:

During the Great Society era top marginal rates were up around 80%; by the time Reagan took office they had already been coming down quite a bit, but part of Reagan's legacy is that that level of taxation is permanently off the table. Of course, taxation is more than just the top marginal income tax bracket--but I find this to be a useful barometer for the overall level of taxation a population is willing to bear. Keep in mind that accompanying this were decreases in the capital gains tax and, at the state levels, significant rolling back of property taxes, following the Prop. 13 "tax revolt" in California. No serious liberals today propose we fully reverse these cuts and return to Great Society levels of taxation, and even the mainstream Democratic establishment favors pro-market policies such as free trade and economic incentives such as cap-and-trade rather than direct government regulation and intervention. We live in a supply-side America.

Secondly, not only is the conflict that Manzi sets up already resolved, but he misses the crucial point that the fiscal sins that have occurred since Reagan have been largely perpetrated by the Republican party and (too many) centrist Democrats. I don't want to make this too partisan a point, so maybe I'll just say this: since Clinton took office, we've seen the California-fication of the federal government, where de facto supermajority requirements in Congress--the Senate specifically--make it impossible to implement tough decisions (like increasing taxes or cutting entitlements), and yet still allow politically popular spending initiatives to go through (like Medicare Part D and the Bush tax cut). By the time the financial crisis hit, and Bush was forced to pass a stimulus bill and a Wall Steet bailout (yes, Bush did both those things; Obama then passed a second, far larger stimulus bill), the US found itself badly overextended, and with mounting health care costs to boot.

So the narrative is not Great Society social cohesian vs. Reagan supply side economics forever dueling for our national soul; it's more like, Reagan wins, then the Republicans totally lose their bearings and abandon conservative fiscal principles while in power, and then meanwhile leverage an increasingly disfunctional Senate to obstruct any Democratic reforms from coming through.
Manzi shows here he doesn't understand the rationale for stimulus spending:
Only about 5% of the money appropriated is intended to fund things like roads and bridges. The legislation is instead dominated by outright social spending: increases in food-stamp benefits and unemployment benefits; various direct and special-purpose spending relabeled as tax credits for renewable-energy programs; increased funding for the Department of Health and Human Services; and increased school-based financial assistance, housing assistance, and other direct benefits.
The point of stimulus spending is to increase overall demand in the economy. You can do this by building roads and bridges, yes, but you can do it just as well by, say, lining the pockets of a poor person with some cash that he will be certain to spend in the near future (like, say, on food). What matters is the stimulative effect of the spending, not on whether the spending happens to be on infrastructure or more welfarish services.
More:
All told, finance, insurance, real estate, automobiles, energy, and health care account for about one-third of the U.S. economy. Reconfiguring these industries to conform to political calculations, and not market-driven decisions, is likely to transform American economic life. And the fiscal consequences of the spending involved will be enormous. The federal budget deficit for 2009 was about 11% of gross domestic product, which is far higher than any the United States has experienced since World War II. This deficit spending is the real stimulus. Something like 10% of all the economic demand in the United States is supported by government borrowing from the future, which is essential to propping up the current "recovery."
Gah. Where to begin. First: "This deficit spending is the real stimulus." That. Is. The. Point. The whole point of fiscal stimulus during a liquidity trap (i.e., when the Fed's interest rate is at 0% and cannot be lowered any further) is that the government's deficit spending props up demand until the economy gets going again. It's no big secret that stimulus spending is deficit spending. Second: nobody is reconfiguring the real-estate industry. Nobody--and it's a shame, really--is reconfiguring the finance industry. As for energy, cap-and-trade is a market solution--no different in principle than a carbon tax. Health care you can make more of a case for, obviously, but it's also true that a) the government already accounts for a high percentage of medical spending in the US, since we have, you know, socialized medicine for everyone over the age of 65, and b) the whole aim of the current health care reforms is that they will reduce the deficit over the course of a ten year time frame. Third: in economic terms, there's no difference between a recovery and a recovery with scare quotes around it--a recovery is a recovery, a job is a job. Conservatives seem to have this thing where a recovery fueled by government spending is somehow "artificial", or that jobs created by the government aren't real "jobs" (make-work, I think the term is they use). But this isn't a meaningful distinction at all (that said, I think you really can call the current recovery a "recovery", not because it is propped up by government deficit spending, but because it's a jobless recovery--asset prices are coming back up--yay Adobe stock--but unemployment remains sky-high at 10%--boo human misery).
Here Manzi makes some proposals without giving an ounce of thought as to their consequences:
we must unwind some recent errors that fail to take account of these circumstances. Most obviously, government ownership of industrial assets is almost a guarantee that the painful decisions required for international competitiveness will not be made. When it comes to the auto industry, for instance, we need to take the loss and move on. As soon as possible, the government should announce a structured program to sell off the equity it holds in GM. Similarly, the federal government should relinquish direct control of banks and insurance companies. Moreover, one virtue of the slow rollout of spending under the stimulus bill is that most of it can be stopped — and should be.
Look. If these were normal times, and GM was going under, you know what? I'd be as solemn as the next guy in saying that it should die a natural death. But these aren't normal times; these are perverse times. Here is what I think happens with folks like Manzi: in normal times, we get accustomed to the idea that markets, among other things, give you information: if the price of apples goes up, that tells you something about the supply and/or demand for apples. If a business goes under, that tells you something about the quality of its products and/or the efficiency of its processes. If an individual or company goes into debt, that tells you something about the financial decisions about that individual or company. In other words, though the market may cause pain--for example, the slow death of the American auto industry--the pain is justifiable, and in the long run it's better for everyone to suffer the pain now and move on so that the overall economy can continue to perform at a high level. And I'm more or less fine with all that. But the thing is, all that's only true in normal times, when markets are functioning. But when the financial crisis and recession hit, markets stopped functioning properly. Prices no longer reflected value; they reflected the fact that everyone was selling in a panic at the same time. Companies started failing, not because their products were of low quality or inefficiently made, but because they could not get the credit they needed to keep their business running. Saving, in normal times a virtue, suddenly became a collective vice, as the force of everyone pulling back spending caused demand to drop and the recession--and unemployment--and the condition of everyone's pocketbooks--to worsen. As Paul Krugman likes to say, we're through the looking glass--markets are no longer giving us good information about the real world.

And so you can't just cut GM off. Because, even if GM deserves to die, surely other car manufacturers with factories in the US like Toyota and Honda don't deserve to die, too. And yet that's exactly what could have happened if GM went under, because of a "supply shock"--the companies that sell parts to GM would have gone under, and the assembly lines of the other companies they sell to would have ground to a halt--which, in the midst of the worse recession since 1928, could have led to scary results indeed. And you can't just unilaterally sever the government's stake in the big financial entities like AIG--because this could trigger a panic and another financial meltdown.

Finally, you can't just revoke the stimulus. Or, if you do, you better tell a damn good story as to where the demand is going to come from that's going to lift this economy back up and bring unemployment back down. Everyone agrees that normally, with a non-zero interest rate, you would lower that rate and induce spending and investment that way. But we're at 0%, and can't cut the interest rate. So rather than inducing demand, we're straightforwardly creating it via federal deficit spending. The spending will roll out over the next couple of years, but, that's okay, because unemployment will remain high for at least that long. So you think this is a bad idea? You think the underlying economic principles are unsound? You think perhaps that stimulus won't have a significant impact, or maybe, alternatively, that the costs of a higher deficit outweight the benefits of stimulus? Fine. But tell us what your argument is.
...

Well, this post is getting out of hand--I think you all get the picture. But let me be quick to reiterate: I don't think Manzi's essay is lacking because I disagree with its conclusions. I think it's lacking because it doesn't offer any arguments against opposing views or explain in any discernible way the rationale for its own views. Hopefully, either Manzi or someone of his ilk will get around to making a case that we can all sink our teeth into.

More on the dubious benefit of financial innovation

2009-12-14T13:53:00.000-08:00

Via Yglesias.

Monkeys! Dogs! Elephants! Holy shit!

2009-12-14T12:03:00.000-08:00

Milo's Last Show: A Parable (Pt. 1)

2009-12-13T21:45:00.000-08:00

It was a few weeks ago that I first saw the boy Milo, as I was hurrying to my reporting assignment at the United Confederation of Planets headquarters in New York. He was easily the most pathetic creature I'd ever seen: not older than ten years old, a face rounded by baby-fat, and a cowed posture that hinted at many years of abuse, if not physical than at least verbal. To make matters worse, we was bound literally by a leash, which seemed uncomfortably snug around his neck. Incensed, I marched straight up to the leash-holder, a burly Italian-looking man with a whimsically large handlebar mustache. The two were standing on a busy street corner, both passing out fliers.

"Just what the hell is this all about?" I said. The anger faded from my voice slightly as I noted that the top of my head came up no further than the rough man's chin.

"Wha?" The bushy eyebrows above his watery eyes arched up as best they could--he looked wounded. "What ees what about, eh? You come to our show?" He handed me the flier:

The Amazing Baldini Presents: the Human Puppet!
THRILL as his every move is predicted!
FRET as you realize that you, too, are no less bound!
$25 at the door; $20 if you bring this flier

I crumpled it up and put it in my pocket. "Why do you have him on a leash like this? Are you his father? Look, it's digging into his throat." I looked down at the boy but he turned away.

"Wha? No, no, no, thees ees Milo, we do tha show. He has no family--I take him from the streets. Here, look." He loosened the leash on Milo. "I'm sorry Milo--you should have said something." Milo didn't speak.

"Look--just, forget about it, " I said, and turned to walk away.

"Hey Mister!" shouted the burly man after me. I turned around. "You an' me--we no different from Milo. We are on a leash. We jus' never met the man who hold the leash." Rolling my eyes, I once again turned around and walked away.

"You come see tha show! You'll see!" he shouted. Breaking into a jog, I made my way quickly to UCP headquarters, putting the disturbing scene behind me and readying myself for two hours of mind-numbing bureaucratic double-talk.

Late night dorm room conversation time: free will

2009-12-13T20:40:00.000-08:00

Seeing these silly posts about free will make me all antsy, because Alex and I totally have it all figured out. It's a pretty sweet package that includes: a conception of time that resolves all time travel paradoxes; a scientific account of free will and how it's compatible with determinism; and cameos by the halting problem, 12 Monkeys, and Being. It blows these childish "we all behave as though we had free will" musings (which don't even involve time travel at all) out of the friggin' water.

Pshh.

Financial "innovation"

2009-12-13T13:28:00.001-08:00

I just finished reading Panic by Micheal Lewis, which is a collection of pieces that track financial panics starting with the 1987 stock market crash and leading all the way up through to today's housing bubble crisis.

I'll have more to say on it later, but one pattern that seemed to repeat itself involves the dubious activity of "financial innovation"--i.e., Wall Street geniuses inventing some complex new financial instrument that supposedly squeezes more efficiency out of investments, creating greater returns--but in reality just does a good job of hiding risk, fueling a speculative bubble. Here is how the pattern plays out:

1. Some Wall Street geniuses invent some new financial instrument.

2. The instrument is so complex that no one can accurately and independently assess its level of risk--and so they take the Wall Street geniuses' word for it that the financial instrument really does offer better returns for the same amount of risk--that it is a true "innovation". I mean, they're geniuses, right? Look how much math they know!

3. As people buy into the financial instrument, its value increases, creating a cycle of self-validation: the higher it rises, the more solid the "evidence" that the geniuses' theory was right, which leads to more investors hopping on board, which raises the value of the financial instrument higher, and so on.

4. The financial instruments take off on what is in reality a speculative bubble, but what is thought to be the fruits of true financial innovation. Everyone gets richer and richer, and increases their leverage to get richer still ("leverage" means borrowing money to invest, so that you can make even more money. For example, suppose I knew that a horse was a sure thing in a race, but I only had $100. If the payout is 2x, the most I could gross would be $200. But if I borrowed $1 million from my rich uncle, I could gross $2 million, pay back the loan, and go home with a cool $1 million. Of course, if I bet on the wrong horse, then I'm horribly screwed: I go home with a whopping debt of $1 million owed to my uncle).

5. Eventually the risk hidden in the financial instrument (the risk that nobody could see because the financial instrument's complexity obscured it) rears its ugly head, and investors get wiped out. But everyone is now so overleveraged, that the demise of the financial instrument causes a domino effect, where everyone suddenly finds themselves in extreme debt (like the debt I owed to my uncle when my horse lost) that they cannot pay, and all their creditors are suddenly not going to get the money back that they lent out. Markets threaten to seize up as no one can raise money to pay off their debts, because there are no buyers, because everyone is selling at the same time. Eventually, Wall Street is bailed out and upbraided by Senators with spectacles slid half-way down their noses, new financial regulations are solemnly put into place, a few CEOs are fired, and Wall Street returns to business as usual.

6. Go to step 1.

Or at least, something like that. But the real point is that what is happening is a kind of manufactured uncertainty is introduced into the market, which becomes the vehicle for a classic speculative bubble--and when the bubble pops, it threatens to take everything down with it.

But this is particularly troubling, because the whole justification of the financial sector is that, supposedly, it does a better job of any system yet conceived of directing capital to the most useful and efficient places--which benefits us all, by giving the world cheaper goods, new inventions, and steady employment. Fair enough. But if Wall Street is spending its energies chasing mirages and throwing huge amounts of capital into one bubble after the next, then it's not doing a good job at all of allocating resources: it's just kind of arbitrarily sloshing them around. So it's like: what's the point?

(By the way, it's worth noting that Matt Yglesias has often pivoted off the inevitability of Wall Street hijinks to make an argument for more redistribution: basically, the grand deal is made that we'll allow Wall Street (and the investor class in general) to be sickeningly rich and we'll suffer its panics when they come and we'll bail it out if need be, but in return, we get to levy high taxes on the rich that pay for universal health care, child care, and education. I think it's pretty reasonable.)

(Photo lifted from this article, which it turns out is definitely worth reading if you found this post at all interesting.)

Motion to reinforce stereotypes passes unanimously

2009-12-11T20:38:00.000-08:00

The real interest rate on your ING account

2009-12-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

If you're an ING customer like me, chances are that you were first drawn to the bank by their absurdly high savings account interest rates (upwards of 4%), but are now disappointed with the paltry 1.3% now being offered.

However, it's good to remember that in order to arrive at the true interest rate, you have to remember to subtract inflation. For example, if you are getting an interest rate of 4% but inflation is also at 4%, then you're really just breaking even--your pile of cash is maintaining the same value over time.

Currently, we're in a period of negative inflation, or deflation, which ~~this month is~~ in October was -0.18%, which means that the true returns on the ING savings account is was 1.3-(-.18)=1.48%. Indeed, if ING's rate were still up around 4%, you would be getting a ridiculous no-risk return of like 5.5%.

Of course, remember that inflation is a rough estimate: it's just an index that tracks a basket of consumer goods. So mileage will vary depending on what you spend your money on. But still, it's worth taking into account when frowning at ING's latest low savings account interest rate.