You shouldn't even have to make this argument

I think this Sullivan post is a must-read. One thing it does well, I think, is do away with the Jack-Bauer-inspired cartoon version of torture that I think most passive supporters of "enhanced interrogation methods" have in mind: thumbscrews, beatings, etc., all taking place in the context of the proverbial "ticking time-bomb" scenario. Indeed, torture can be anything that "sustained long and relentlessly enough, can break a human being". That could mean subjecting a prisoner to freezing temperatures for long periods of time; but it could also mean something as mundane as sleep deprivation for several days in a row. Both are torture; both violate core American ethical commitments; both are illegal.

Also, I like his phrase "the pseudo-world-weary". I might have to steal that.

Quick, someone call a philosopher

I think this Andrew Sullivan reader has it wrong:

A reader writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flighty writing

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

Rob Horning bashes Facebook:

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

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

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

Mark Danner opines:

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

My reaction to this was: well, that's very interesting! I especially like the idea of "the Gods of Great Events" coming down from on high to intervene in human affairs. I think that's right.

Torture

Andrew Sullivan is always at his most powerful and eloquent when condemning the use of torture by the United States:

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

In fifty years, people won't remember Katrina or a corrupt Justice Department, and the Iraq War will be a footnote. But the fact that the United States government committed war crimes will be remembered by all as one of the worst moral failures in this nation's history. And it is a fact that I, as an American, am utterly ashamed of.

Yglesias demoted

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

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

On Daschle and healthcare reform:

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

...

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

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

On Lieberman:

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

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

Rahm Emanuel sez:

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

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

...

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

And there you have it.

I stand corrected

Just a few hours ago I said that Andrew Sullivan's criticism of the McCain campaign's request to postpone the debate was bunk. Looks like I was wrong; it appears that the whole thing is a ploy to give Sarah Palin more time to cram for the VP debate:

McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there's no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

In this scenario, the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin would be rescheduled for a date yet to be determined....

The jaw slackens in disbelief.

Now it's personal

All out war has broken out between Andrew Sullivan and the McCain campaign.

Sullivan had been airing questions about whether Trig--the Downs Syndrome baby--is really Sarah Palin's biological son, and even a few weeks ago melodramatically let his blog go dark for a couple of days so that he would be free to do research and "figure it out". Eventually he sent a private correspondence asking the McCain campaign to give a response to his request for proof that Palin really is the mother. The McCain campaign did not respond to Sullivan, but they did divulge the private emails to Howard Kurtz at the Post as part of an effort to marginalize Sullivan and dismiss him as "the biggest one-man ego on the planet".

I hope that the McCain campaign's strategy doesn't work, and that Sullivan keeps his cool and stays hewed to the facts. Already, though, I'm nervous that the personal betrayal--of divulging private communications to the world in order to make him look like an arrogant gossip--has affected his capacity to rationally criticize McCain. For example, he has a post called "The McCain Meltdown" where he points to McCain's request to postpone the Friday debate as evidence that the campaign is in some way melting down. But it seems pretty clear to me either that McCain is telling the truth and needs to focus on the financial crisis instead of cramming for the debates, or that he wants to push the debate to a night that will have a larger TV audience (since the debate will be on foreign policy, one of McCain's alleged strengths). It's a pretty weak attack from Sullivan--an attack for attack's sake that will only cost him credibility on the right (although perhaps the ship has sailed).

In any case, this Washington soap opera stuff is extremely entertaining.

No posts

As Lindsay points out, Andrew Sullivan didn't have any posts today, which is really weird, since I think that blog's been averaging 20 posts a day since I started reading it.

Bush, torture, and McCain

Andrew Sullivan has a must-read.

McCain's "cross in the dirt" story

Andrew Sullivan has a good post expressing skepticism about McCain's anecdote about a prisoner guard who loosened his ropes and explained this gesture of mercy by way of silently drawing a cross in the dirt. It seems that McCain had never mentioned this amazing incident until 1999, when he co-wrote his autobiography The Faith of My Fathers, and that the story bears a striking resemblance to one first told by "evangelical leader and former Watergate crook" Chuck Colson in a book published in 1983.

If I had to bet, I'd wager that the anecdote is false. That said, though, I think that it is an open question as to whether the falsehood was intentional or not. Memory is surprisingly malleable--counter-intuitively so--such that a memory can become fused with other memories or even stories about other people, with its details shifting over the many years and retellings. (In fact, this happened with an anecdote that Josh used to tell: what really happened is that, once upon a time, I contemplated doing something unmentionable involving a bar of soap to get back at someone for throwing a muffin at me mid-shower, but somehow over the years the story turned into that I actually did the unmentionable thing, which is false. It took me quite a while to convince Josh that his memory of the incident was completely fabricated.)

In any case, even if he did make it up, it's not the sort of thing I get very riled up about. However, the more McCain leans on this anecdote--making it the centerpiece of a campaign ad, using it to bolster is Christian bonafides, etc.--the more I want to see someone press him for an explanation of why he didn't mention it until 1999.

A war criminal, according to some

Kind of striking when you realize this is coming not from some MoveOn/Kos type, but a conservative:

Some of the least superficially awful techniques - such as the Gestapo-perfected "stress positions" and "hypothermia" - can actually be the worst in terms of suffering. There is no doubt at this point that the president of the United States is a war criminal. The only question is whether he will ever be brought to justice.

Well, more a libertarian, really. And an Obama-supporting one, at that. So maybe not all that striking.

Re: Flat tax

An email I sent to the Sullivan blog with regards to the flat tax issue. I don't know if anyone will ever read it, but whatevs.

Hi Andrew,

You write that you want government to raise money "as equally as possible", and that you disagree with the idea that "tax policy should really be about redistributing wealth, and engineering substantive economic outcomes." This is all well and good. However, it is not clear to me that nominal equality in the tax code--i.e., everyone being taxed by the same numerical percentage--necessarily translates to the sort of "equality" that you are interested in. Certainly, if minimizing the impact of taxation on society is your goal, you will favor a scheme that imposes as few burdens as possible on society, and imposes them as equally as possible across all members, thereby making the government's presence in our lives as neutral as possible vis-a-vis our situation in life--our level of wealth, our ambitions, etc.. But to speak of a burden is to speak of a subjective state of the individual, a felt cost. Because a flat tax ignores the fact of diminishing returns on income--the fact that my 100,000th dollar earned means less to me, is worth less to me than my 1,000th dollar earned--it thereby imposes a very uneven burden on society, causing there to be a proportionately greater felt cost to the less wealthy.

So the question is: what is the more meaningful interpretation of "equal taxation"? Does it mean taxation that, while nominally equal for everyone, imposes a far greater burden (as subjectively evaluated by the individual) on the less wealthy? Or does it mean taxation that, while not nominally equal for everyone, makes some attempt to equalize the felt cost of taxation across all members of society?

Flat tax

Andrew Sullivan recently mentioned in an offhand way that he favors a flat tax, which I suppose triggered a big reaction, because he has followed it up with a longer post defending his position. He says:

So yes: a flat tax so far as possible for as many as possible and no deductions. That's my goal. How that differentially impacts the lives of citizens should not be government's primary concern.

Government's primary concern is to raise money as efficiently and as leanly and as equally as possible. I'm happy with the government then setting up programs to assist the poor, to provide better education for those at the bottom, safety-net healthcare and better policing. i.e. to gear spending toward social ends that might help the poor the most. These are measurable, practical goods. What I'm not happy with is the assumption that tax policy should really be about redistributing wealth, and engineering substantive economic outcomes. Yes, of course, at lower income levels, a 20 percent flat income tax will be more onerous proportionally than at higher incomes. So what? Why should that even concern a government that is not aiming to socially engineer more substantive equality? and the alternative - skewing taxes to target success - is an absurd set of incentives to put into a growing society.

So Sullivan wants the government to raise money "as equally as possible", and does not want the government to redistribute wealth. But why does a flat tax accomplish this any more than a progressive tax? The law of diminishing returns states that the 100,oooth dollar you earn is less valuable to you than the 10,000th dollar you earn, and that the 10,000th dollar you earn is less valuable to you than the 1,oooth. Given this, it makes sense that the government should tax at the lowest rates for the first dollars you earn and gradually raise that rate for successive dollars earned. Since the same progressive rate is applied to everyone, money is raised "as equally as possible".

Yes, of course, at higher income levels, a progressive tax structure will be nominally higher than at lower incomes. So what? Why should that even concern a government that is not aiming to socially engineer more substantive equality? And the alternative - skewing taxes to target poverty - is an absurd set of arbitrary penalties to put into a fair society.

GTFO

A reader writes into Andrew Sullivan, and somehow it hits me as one of the best little blurbs I've ever read on why the US should withdraw from Iraq immediately.

Conservatism, Bush, and Obama from the--er--gay HIV-positive conservative libertarian Catholic perspective

Andrew Sullivan's views of conservatism, Bush, and Obama in a nutshell:

Conservatism, at its core, is about the frailty of human goodness, the limits of human knowledge, the virtue of self-doubt when that is required, restraint on government executive power, and the correction and admission of error when necessary. What has happened to conservatism under Bush is that it has become a messianic, ruthless, totally certain imposition of ideology (fused even more lethally with theology). Obama is not the answer to this conservative predicament. He is a "progressive" liberal - but his liberalism contains more conservative elements of reason and prudence and restraint than the current Republican party.

I don't think the word "conservative" conjures up a rational and skeptical worldview in the heads of very many Americans, liberal or conservative--which is too bad. We'd all be a lot better off if it did.

Ruling with empathy

This editorial (via Andrew Sullivan) captures a big part of the reason why I'm an Obama supporter: he demonstrates time and again in his rhetoric, positions, and personal interactions an underlying wellspring of empathy that disarms opponents and allows him to effectively lead.