In the Mouth of Madison

Stalinist Democracy

2005-11-09T16:13:00.000-08:00

I don't really have time to comment on this, but I finally got around to scanning a fascinating pamphlet I found at the Memorial Library's annual booksale a few weeks back. Not to be confused with the never-to-see-the-light-of-day, Guns N Roses album Chinese Democracy, I present to you, Soviet Democracy, a booklet written by Harry F. Ward. It was published in 1947 by a magazine called Soviet Russia Today, a sample issue of which is available here. The link to the book I scanned in full, making for a PDF of 25 pages, is here, or in OCR'ed Word here.

A Harry Potter satire that's "off the chain!"

2005-10-13T01:27:00.000-07:00

Normally, satires are supposed to be funny. It's typically a pre-condition. I guess it's possible to just have a bad satire, or a satire that does humorously mock itself, if only unintentionally.

Anyway, what I have for you today is Hairy Polarity, a Harry Potter satire from a fundamentalist Christian website. It's a comic book. Alas, unlike Chick tracts, it only provides you the first 8 pages, but that's plenty to give you the gist. We're told that it is "a creatively crafted fictional comic book story," revealing "the very real dangers of sorcery and witchcraft contained within the Harry Potter series!"

What I loved about it was that at first, I thought for sure it was mocking anti-Harry Potter Christians. The artwork was too professional (compared to Chick), and it was way too stereotypical - the caring Christian parents who try the art of gentle persuasion to reach their wayward son, the I-was-once-involved-in-that-too-before-I-found-Jesus trope, the kid walking into an obvious evil, and the ominous warning asteriks pointing to Bible verses. It even uses Chick-like stabs at kid's slang - it's the "wack" world of magic, "phat" story ideas that are "slammin" or "off the chain!" "No diggity," indeed.

Though like Titus 1:12, it poses a paradox. On page 3, Ari says to his friend Minnie, "Then again, Mom says just reading about witchcraft is how she got into that too - and that I shouldn't fill my mind with this stuff!" This comes, of course, in a comic book about the dangers of witchcraft... so we shouldn't read that either? But we wouldn't have gotten that advice unless we read about witchcraft in the first place. It's totally Titus 1:12! Or maybe Deuteronomy 25:19, which encourages the Israelites to wipe out all memory of Amalek - thus preserving the memory of Amalek in the Bible, forever.

Anyway, check out the rest of the site too. They also have stuff on rock music (a comic about a Satanic rocker named Madonna Dahmer), evolution, homosexuality, and of course, safe sex and abortion. It's sweet.

Hat tip - SpottyLogic.

Oh, and in a related note, it seems that Harry Potter's name might've been pilfered outright from a bad 80's horror film called Troll starring Sonny Bono, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, June (Lassie, Lost in Space) Lockhart, and The Neverending Story's Noah Hathaway as... Harry Potter, who finds himself in danger from magic, wizards and witches. I kid not.

UPDATE: It seems that Jerry Falwell has praised Hairy Polarity: "The unique format of Hairy Polarity and the Sinister Sorcery Satire grabs young people's attention with the biblical truths that will transform their lives."

Maureen Dowd, Nihilist

2005-09-25T11:38:00.000-07:00

Some people have observed that the New York Times editorial pages are unbalanced, staffed almost entirely with liberals, save for the milquetoast centrist Republican David Brooks (admired by no conservative I know), and William Safire's libertarian replacement, John Tierney. But this is too hasty - the various columnists do have different areas of emphasis, and some ideological variation between them. The Times, after all, also has a token nihilist - Maureen Dowd.

Maureen Dowd has to be one of the most intellectually vapid people to ever get a gig as a columnist. That she was hired by a paper with the prestige of the New York Times says a great deal more about that newspaper than about her own merit.

This all struck me about her this morning on Meet the Press. Tim Russert asks her, "Maureen Dowd, be counterintuitive here. Karl Rove calls you up and said, "Maureen, I've been reading your column for the last couple years. Give us advice. What should we do in the second term?"

Dowd answers with this sterling sage piece of policy advice: "Well, I think, you know, given what David said, people have talked about whether the Bushes are racist, and I don't think they're racist, but their problem is about class, because they never have understood that when they have this story arc where they go down to Texas and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that that is--they think that's a true pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. They didn't accept the fact that they always have Daddy's friends to help them. And until they can see reality, then--you know, Bush's--say he's a good third- or fourth-quarter player, after Katrina. Well, that's not good enough for people who don't have Daddy's friends to help. And until he accepts that about himself, you know, he can't move on, I don't think."

Umm... what? Yes, Maureen, I realize that you have this weird obsession with all things Freudian, and that you've made half your career trying to read pathological stuff into people's ideological and policy stances. But what about your own ideas? What, exactly, would you do? (Russert, frustratingly, let Dowd's answer slide, turning to Brooks to ask him another question. What I would've given if he could've said the above).

Her answer reveals all you really need to know about her methodology. She has no specific proposals, no specific ideas of her own. She can sort of parrot a standard narrative about personalities, e.g. that Bush doesn't care about poor or black people (see Kayne West). But it has little to do with substantial political ideas, because she has none. This is why she was able to transition so easily from being a Clinton critic, Kenneth Starr critic, then anti-Bush critic. Someone, I recall, once called Maureen Dowd the political "mean girl." I think that's it in a nutshell. She is a social metaphysician of the highest order, and lacks either the acumen or interest in substantial political issues to actually have an opinion on them. And that is why she had no answer on what, exactly, a person in Bush's position should do, beyond making another character attack.

Nihilistic? You bet. But then, what else would one expect from a mean girl, possessed by an insatiable envy for power?

The Politics and Patterns of Blame

2005-09-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

May I say that I've found it thoroughly distasteful the way that so many have tried to make ideological hay out of the Katrina disaster. But as I've been discovering, there's no shortage of that hay-making to go around.

Mainly what irks me about is something Madbard identified. How many of these critics actually know anything about how to run a government response to a category 5 hurricane and a city the size of New Orleans submerged under so much water? And when rescue workers are being shot at?

Naturally, the anti-Bushies are piling on in a giant cluster ~~fuck~~bomb. But I realized they're not the only ones, and that there's a certain pattern emerging - from Anti-Bush/Anti-War Activists, enviromentalists, civil rights activists, Muslim clerics, welfare-statist liberals, and Christian fundamentalists. Note that these are hardly discrete categories - likely, many people are members of two ro three on this group.

Surveying these commentaries, we're given several candidates over who or what we are to blame:

1. Christian Fundamentalists

In an echo of Jerry Falwell's post-9/11 commentary, we find something called Repent America:

"We must help and pray for those ravaged by this disaster, but let us not forget that the citizens of New Orleans tolerated and welcomed the wickedness in their city for so long," [Repent America director Michael] Marcavage said. "May this act of God cause us all to think about what we tolerate in our city limits, and bring us trembling before the throne of Almighty God," Marcavage concluded.

In essence, blame goes to the moral decay of New Orleans, and in particular, of all the gay people who were about to celebrate Southern Decadence. (A Hit & Run commentor noted, interestingly enough, that this is a strange way for God to repay Louisiana for banning gay marriage).

2. Civil Rights Activists

Several merit mentioning. According to Rev. Lewis E. Logan II, "[I]t is no a coincidence that it is exactly 50 years from the time of [Emmett Till's] lynching and murder. That it is not a coincidence that the storm's name is a sister. Katrina. For she represents the collective cries of mothers who have lost their sons to the brutality and the murderous grip of this racist white supremacist American culture." (Jesse Walker notes, though, that Sister Katrina picked a really odd target, considering New Orleans is 70% black).

And it's not just people as obscure as the Rev. Logan. Jesse Jackson and rapper Kayne West couldn't wait to jump in. See this on Jackson's charges that the media and government are focussing too much on looters and thugs instead of on people who are just suffering, see this from Interdictor (who is holed up in New Orleans and seeing everything for himself), and this on the supposed media bias of looting photo captions.

3. Environmentalists

Well, there's RFK Jr. To name but one. But quite a number of people are trying to tie the hurricane to global warming, or the US's refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocols. RFK thinks Haley Barbour deserves special attention.

Says RFK Jr, "Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which [Mississippi Governor Haley] Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and--now--Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children."

Note RFK's religious metaphor - a striking parallel with our friends in #1 & #2. James Glassman gives a thorough fisking to RFK Jr & friends at Tech Central Station.

4. Anti-War/Anti-Bush Activists

So far, I haven't seen anyone come right out and claim that American military involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan actually created the storm. (Stay tuned!) But the extent of the devestation, these people think, can directly be attributed to military equipment, resources and personal that should have all been stationed in Louisiana. See Michael Moore for yet another brilliant example of why he's the Ann Coulter of the Left. And see this piece by a guy who thinks Bush is guilty of "murder, murder, murder."

Actually, Mikey, it doesn't appear that equipment or manpower was an issue. Moore, as always, sets things up in his arguments such that whatever Bush does, it's wrong. If he goes there in person and helps out, he's showboating for political gain. If he stays away, he doesn't care and he's a heartless human being.

5. Muslim clerics

Then we have Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, director of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowment's research center. Says al-Mlaifi, Katrina is "a wind of torment and evil that Allah has sent to this American empire. Out of my absolute belief in the truth of the words of the Prophet Muhammad, this wind is the fruit of the planning [of Allah], as is stated in the text of the Hadith of the Prophet."

And he adds, "But how strange it is that after all the tremendous American achievements for the sake of humanity, these mighty winds come and evilly rip [America's] cities to shreds? Have the storms have joined the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization?"

6. Leftist/Statist Types.

To read some critics, you'd think the real culprit here was libertarianism, or at the very least, a government too small to hand the difficulty. See the Daily ~~Kook~~Kos's political cartoon posting, for example, or The New Republic, or EJ Dionne. Worth noting, of course, is that it was the government that designed and built those levees - and they were not designed to handle anything worse than a Category 3 storm.

The People for the American Way tried to use the disaster as an excuse to target the repeal of the death tax. David Corn tried the same trick at the Nation.

Julian Sanchez has it right on this: This is all profoundly stupid. There is no deep overarching ideological point here, because for pretty much everyone short of the anarchists, preventing the collapse of civilization into a huge Hobbesian clusterfuck makes the list—whether yours is short or long—of things governments are supposed to do—state governments when feasible (assuming adequate preparation on the ground is better than airlifts later), federal government when it isn't. Funding, Sanchez notes, doesn't seem to have been an issue here.

Lew Rockwell, with whom I disagree on many issues, retorts with the opposite, that if anything, too much government bureaucracy undermined the safety of New Orleans. See also Interdictor's post, in which he writes, And another thing to think about when we start pointing fingers is this. The government is never equipped to handle a crisis like this. There's too much bureaucracy -- initiative-stifling bureaucracy which prevents swift, effective action. ... The nature of that bureaucracy is such that you have very specific guidelines to follow for even the most minute tasks. You need approval for just about everything, and the person you need approval from usually needs approval to give you the approval. It's not as easy as say rounding up 4 of your co-workers and saying, "We've got someone at such and such an address, let's go grab her and get her out of there." Now add a destroyed or disabled command and control center to that bureaucracy and you've got a total and complete mess. You (as a civilian) don't need "Approved" stamped on 3 different forms before you can run into your neighbor's house and pull them out. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, I'm sure there's been human error in this catastrophe. How could there not be? But what I'm saying is that I've come to expect poor decision making and a total lack of initiative from government. They can't even balance a budget, at the federal, state, or local levels. I could balance my checkbook and spend within my means when I was a teenager. But I'm not gonna point fingers and get into the blame game. If you want me to blame something besides the storm herself, I blame the nature of government in the first place. It's too big, it's too slow, it's too inefficient, it's too bloated, and it's too intiative-stifling to be effective in normal circumstances, much less in a disaster. It's a systemic issue, more than an issue of individual people in government.

So, let's recap. Who do we blame for the disaster?
1. Christian fundamentalists: Sexual sin, especially of the homosexual variety, and government's willingness to tolerate it. God's the agent, but this is the fault of sinners.
2. Civil rights activists: Racism against blacks. This takes the form of a) God punishing America for its racism,
b) Racist government not caring about the fates of New Orleans' poor blacks until it was too late.
3. Environmentalists: Pollution enabled by Bush's environmental policies, spuring global warming, spuring increased hurricane activity.
4. Anti-War/Anti-Bush types: Government resources being tangled up in rebuilding Iraq. The War in Iraq, and Bush's drive for Empire in the Middle East can be blamed for the government's inablity to deal with the disaster.
5. Muslim clerics: Punishment by Allah for US foreign policy in Iraq & Afghanistan - and perhaps for US support of Israel.
6. Leftist/Statist Types: Government made too small, too unfunded, by Grover Norquist-led Republican conspiracy.

So am I wrong to see a pattern here? In essence, people from all of these groups blame the disaster on something they already hated and were aggitated enough against to fight. It's as if their beliefs systems had so directly identified Bush/polluters/sinners/infidels/etc. as the Devil Figure, that when something as catastrophic as Hurricane Katrina comes along, they need to draw a connection between their Devil Figure and the horror of Katrina's aftermath. Is this predictable? I hope not - but what I'm seeing so far is sad. It's such an immature response - something bad happens, therefore, it's the fault of who or what I already dislike. And I suspect that part of what I found so persuasive about Lew Rockwell was that I, too, may be falling prey to this mentality. I don't see what's wrong about his argument, or about Interdictor's, but I wonder nonetheless.

Just to be clear, we should never lose sight of one thing - that Katrina was (at least initially) a natural disaster, worsed by the collapse of levees designed in the mid-1960's to handle Category 3 hurricanes. Two causes of the disaster: Katrina herself, and levees too weak to handle her. The aftermath of the disaster, in which 1) law and order collapsed and New Orleans descended into a Hobbesian nightmare, 2) Superdome and Convention Center survivors were ill-equipped with food, security, and sanitation, and 3) Other survivors in their homes, schools, etc. were not rescued with satisfactory timeliness. Ben Stein, writing for the American Spectator, makes a few more important observations of facts to keep in mind.

To sort out any human responsiblity here, it will require knowning a lot of facts, and what facts we have now are murky. There will most certainly be a Congressional investigation or two, and I'm guessing the MoveOn and Moore-on types will have investigations of their own, and conservative groups will probably launch investigations in the other direction. There is a question about how much FEMA, Louisiana state officials, and New Orleans should have known about the intensity of the storm, and what precautions they should have taken against the possiblity of storms more intense than Category 3 ravaging the levees.

We will also need a pre-Katrina account of who was responsible for what in the run-up to the storm. How much went wrong that was within the normal pervue of the President? Or of FEMA? What about local and state officials? Was it Governor Blanco (D-LA)'s responsiblity to ask for federal aid action before it could be given? Especially in regards to National Guard deployments. Did indecisiveness lead to her stonewalling when the President wanted to move forward immediately? I'm especially curious about the Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D-New Orleans). What was his role in all of this? Was an ill-equiped Superdome his idea? Why didn't he mobilize the city's buses, seen useless and submerged here, to pick up all the poor, elderly, etc. who couldn't leave the city? Did it make sense for a "mandatory" evacuation to even have a Superdome option? How did the Convention Center disaster happen? Which agency first proposed that people relocate there? Etc. And again, as valid as all of these questions are, we should not lose site of just how unique, how outside the range of our normal experience, this event was. Even if one could predict that the levees would not survive Katrina, there is the shock of actually seeing it all unfold, one agonizing event after another, as the magnitude of this disaster spun out of control. I agree with Madbard - to even begin to know where to start or what to do is mind-boggling, and hindsight is a truly wonderful thing indeed.

I should add one other thing - I don't know if this affects the case for responsiblity for any party or another, but just as a personal thing. I remember initially thinking the storm hadn't been all that bad. I recall the media reporting that with the movement of dry air from Louisiana to the Gulf, the eye of the storm moved east, focusing most of Katrina's force against Mississippi, and hitting New Orleans in a relatively favorable way - with the winds and rain coming from land rather than sea. The Superdome lost a piece of its roof, but only a small piece, with no serious threat to its structural integrity. I believe as late as Monday, thinking that Katrina hadn't been such a big deal, that the doomsayers had been wrong once again.

I wonder - was this a common perception? Regardless of the forecasts and predictions, was it shared by people in the government - local, state, and federal? Or was it simply the case that no one could really believe that something like this could happen? I close with that question.

Smokefree - Subverted

2005-08-11T15:30:00.000-07:00

I had some downtime at work, so in about 10, 15 minutes, I whipped up this letter to my city council. It's incredibly easy now that this well-funded, well-organized cabal of anti-smoking activists is starting to worry that support for the recently enacted smoking ban is evaporating. They provided this web portal that automatically faxes all 15 council members, the Mayor, and a few other parties. Man, this was fun to write, and get off my chest. I wonder if it will be persuasive? I'm already wishing I had been more specific, naming the studies (and court decisions!) that have thrown out virtually all the studies people cite to justify banning smoking on the grounds of a supposed link between second-hand smoke and disease.

For a short time, my letter was posted with all the others they've received here. But it's already been taken down, I noticed. So out of the 196 letters in support they've received (mostly from templates and talking points), I wonder how many other opponents of the smoking ban have done what I did?

Sir/Madam,

I am a graduate student that University of Wisconsin. Madison has been my home now for more than two years, and I will probably live here for a minimum of another four. (With any luck, UW will hire me when I finish my degree, so I can stay in this beautiful city for even longer.)

Recently, the Madison City Council made a horrible mistake. It gambled with the city's economic prosperity on the basis of shoddy science and an ideology of paternalism by passing a smoking ban. Without reviewing the most recent studies, which demonstrate that the risks of second hand smoke to customers and workers is negliable, or even studying the possible economic effects to bar-owners, it unwisely passed this law restricting private property rights and the freedom of peaceful assembly.

You have by now already heard of some of the effects. Bowling alleys have lost entire league memberships to bowling alleys in subburbs, and those bars and taverns not in the inner city have seen their customer base relocate to subburbs. The littering of cigarette butts has increased, and some have already raised the question of what environmental effects could be caused by countless many butts finding their way to lake runoff.

While the economic impacts of this law should be sufficient enough to warrent a reconsideration of this law, the most fundamental reason to repeal the ban is liberty. At the end of the day, all laws and regulations must protect and enhance the liberty of the individual, and any law, no matter what its economic impacts, is unjust when it trespasses upon the individual. Smoking, though an unhealty activity, is still legal, and in bars, would be a protectable freedom of assembly.

This should not matter, but for what it is worth, I am a non-smoker. While I occasionally have visited smoking bars with friends who smoke, I enjoy going to places that have practiced voluntary bans, like Dotty Dumpling's, the Crave and the Ratheskellar in the Union. Without a smoking ban, those places lose their niche appeal, so if anything else, you might also consider the economic impact toward places that no longer have anything to distinguish themselves from their competition.

I urge a repeal of the ban. In its place, you may consider instead a ban of smoking in places where children could be present. If your concern is worker health and safety, you may consider establishing an anonymous complaint phone line, that could tip off inspectors to visit specific locations and issue citations for insufficient ventilation. Most people who work in bars, if not themselves smokers, at least have no problem with it, which is why they work in the one sub-sub-category of the hospitality industry that allows it on the job. I believe you find very few complaints, even without any supposed stigma from complaining about second hand smoke. (I can't speak to the motives of council members who supported the ban, but I find it suspicious that if the real concern here was the effect on worker health caused by second hand smoke, that _smokeless_ tobacco was also banned.)

Just as drinking is a risky, unhealthy activity that falls within one's personal liberty, so too is smoking. Given that the science does not support the public health justification of the ban, what's left is the liberty of the individual - which the Council has a moral obligation to respect. Please do the right thing.

Cheers,

A Tyranny A Day Keeps the Doctor Away

2005-08-11T15:25:00.000-07:00

Good god - could the Madison City Council be any more anti-capitalist? Scarsely even a month after the Council ~~anally raped~~ clobbered the bars and restaurants with a smoking ban (that also banned smokeless tobacco and cigars in cigar bars), they are now contemplating mandating paid sick leave for all employees in Madison.

Not so surprisingly, many of the same arguments we heard with the smoking ban are here too. This would make healthier workplace, we're told, because sick employees wouldn't feel pressured to work. (How this is reconciled with the fact that most diseases are contagious before one has symptoms, or when symptoms are barely manifested, I do not know). If anything, we're told, this would be great for business, because they'd save so much money in the long run from having healthier, more productive employees. Once again, people sitting on a city council, most of whom have never worked in industry much less actually owned or managed a business, somehow know more about how to run a business than people who actually do. And once again, public health is the justification for abridging economic and personal liberty.

And again, the same paternalism we heard before. The smoking ban, likewise, was supposed to actually be good for business, since all of these people who hated to go to smoky bars would return. Naturally, that hasn't happened either. So forgive me for being suspicious that the Council knows more about business than actual business people.

And I wish this guy was my alder:

Ald. Zach Brandon, 7th District, who runs a laundry business near UW- Madison, blasted the proposal ... "What bothers me is, the same people who continually bring up these issues are the same people who fight all the economic development issues. They're always wanting to talk about how we re-cut the pie, but they're never there on how do we expand the pie."

NARAL's Daisy Girl Revisited

2005-08-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

My post on NARAL was a bit longish, and still, I didn't quite make the point I wanted to make. Succinctly - the point of the slanderous Roberts ad was not to uncover a truth about Roberts we should all know - that much is obvious. The point is, as I maintained, to obtain free advertising as people discuss the ad more and more (see the 1964 anti-Goldwater Daisy Girl ad for the beginnings of that template). It's about setting the terms of the debate. As long as this ad is out there, outraging some, embarrassing others, and defended by still others, notice what we're talking about - Roberts and his position on abortion. Roberts' champions are put on the defensive, and we're now talking not only about abortion, but about pro-life extremism evocative of terrorism - instead of, say, Roberts' actual qualifications for the job. It's insidious - and very clever. NARAL doesn't have anything substantial with which to damn Roberts, so instead, they can set the terms of our "national dialog," and raise doubts in the minds of the Senators (and the supporters of those Senators) they need to persuade - primarily, the 14 members of the filibuster compromise, the moderate Democrats and RINO's who might object to a filibuster so much with these doubts in place.

NARAL and the Price of Obsession

2005-08-10T15:28:00.000-07:00

I think NARAL has recently been cribbing its notes about how to run a political campaign from the NAACP.

For those who don't know - NARAL has recently produced an ad, to run on CNN and elsewhere, that more or less claims that John Roberts supports abortion clinic bombing.

WTF?, you find yourself asking? Has NARAL discovered the smoking gun, the dark secret in Roberts' past that demonstrates his unsuitablity for the high court? Or are they lying? Well, Fact Check.org claims it's more the latter.

But NARAL is smart enough to know that getting sued for libel and slander sucks, so claim isn't entirely made out of thin air. Roberts once worked as general counsel for the Bush 41 administration, and during the Supreme Court case Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic (1993), argued the administration's position (which was later affirmed by a 6-3 majority).
Surprisingly enough, the Bush 41 administration did not argue that they supported clinic bombing or baracading the entrance. Rather, they argued against the clinics' attempt to federalize this case by sueing the defendants under a provision of an 1871 anti-Ku Klux Klan law, which federalized the crime of conspiring to deprive civil rights.

We studied this case in my Legal History seminar. The issue turned on whether the pro-lifers, some of whom bombed clinics and others, I think, baracaded clinics, were guilty of a Klan-like conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights. And plainly, whatever the abortion protesters were guilty of, it wasn't that. For one thing, the law had racial oppression in mind, and at best, this was gender discrimination. For another, this wasn't gender discrimination. The clinics and victims were not targeted for being women, but for being either patients or providers of abortion. While all patients were women, the providers and workers equally targeted were men as well as women. They were victims in virtue of their relationship with abortion, not in virtue of their gender. (The KKK victims, in 1871, were victims in virtue of their race.) I also remember wondering how this exactly qualified as a conspiracy - if it was a conspiracy, it was one in plain sight, where the leaders and participants didn't wear masks and sheets and remained public figures.

Why would this distinction even be meaningful? In ordinary circumstances, it's not. The police powers vested in the states mean that the criminals in this case were liable under state law, and if memory serves, there was no evidence presented to the Court that the states wouldn't be prosecuting to the full extent of their laws. This of course, was the problem that led to the original 1871 law - the KKK was able to operate without fear of state prosecutions, as they enjoyed popular support in the areas of the South where they operated. The law was needed only insofar as the States weren't doing their jobs.

In essence, this was the position that Roberts defended to the Court (again, on behalf of his real client, the Bush 41 administration - he never worked for the bombers, calling them "criminals" in his brief). NARAL would have you believe, in this ad, that this position amounts to filing briefs supporting abortion clinic bombing. And to think, in my first year at UW, I attended meetings of UW's NARAL chapter. *sigh*... This reminds me of the antiwar movement. I sort of leaned against going to war against Iraq, but the antiwar movement was so deadset against my values that I couldn't support them. I'm pro-choice, but I think it would be humiliating to be associated with these people.

Remember - the point of this ad is most certainly not to get out the truth about Roberts, and it's sure as hell not about presenting a balanced portrait. Like the NAACP ad, there is only one purely partisan goal that all other interests, including especially the truth, are subordinated under - in this case, to defeat Republicans at all costs. They don't have to be right or factual. They just have to scare enough voters, and the Senators who are supported by them, to eek out a filibuster. And even if they fail to persuade anyone outright, they get a victory out of all the free publicity that the ad will get the more the media discusses, and if they at least raise doubts. The news consuming audience, broadly, has enough of a bullshit detector to know that Roberts doesn't support violence. But, NARAL succeeds as a long they raise doubts about Roberts. This is much more about poisoning the well then about actually presenting facts. Which is what makes this so despicable.

But why? Even if somehow they convinced Democrats to abandon the filibuster compromise, and Roberts were to be successfully Borked, surely they know that Bush will just nominate another conservative, possibly one even more dangerous to their agenda.

There are two possiblities that I can see. One, they may hope for a repeat of what happened with Bork - after Bork went down, a cowed Reagan administration nominated Anthony Kennedy in his place. Kennedy leans more to the liberal side of the Court, so this would be a happy outcome for these activists. Two, they realize that Bush 43 has learned the lessons of the Bork ordeal, so they know that Bush won't just give up and give them another Anthony Kennedy. But they are also looking at the clock - Bush only has another 3 years of his presidency left, and even more ominiously, mid-term elections are nary a year away.

My suspicion is that even now, even this far away from the next election, NARAL and its allies hope that they can run down the clock on Bush. Their hope is that by 2006, Democrats will make a turn around in mid term elections, Bush will be in full lame duck mode, and as of 2008, a Democrat (let's call her, for convenience's sake, "Hillary") will emerge triumphant. So regardless of how many nominees Bush has gone through, the 2006 opinion polls (and looming real polls) will effectively force Bush to nominate another Kennedy. And any other retirees in 2006 or later will get so held up by Democrats unless Bush also replaces them with Kennedy's.

So more than anything else, I think this is a matter of delay and forestall as long as possible. The longer they do that, the less likely it is that Bush will get who and what he wants on the Court.

Is their hope reasonable? I don't know - I'm inclined to think not. For all the troubles the Bushies are having these days in the polls, it hasn't really, that I can see, translated into any increased popularity for Democrats. And more to the case in point, especially after the disclosure that Roberts has also worked pro bono on behalf of gay rights groups, I can't help but think this will actually cause a net loss in support and crediblity for NARAL. They demonstrated not only rank dishonesty in this case, but even political stupidity in trying to paint a man who supports gay rights as a religious ideologue who supports violence against women. They would do well to remember the fate of the boy who cried wolf.

Rove-ing Reporter

2005-07-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

Since I've been in NY all week, I haven't been able to follow the news as much as I normally do, so I should acknowledge that my understanding of where things stand with the Valerie Plame/Karl Rove "scandal" is weak. So I'll just ask a question in the form of a hypothetical. Suppose it's true that Robert Novak told Karl Rove (not the other way around, as was originally suspected) that Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative and that it was she who arranged for her husband to be sent to Niger. Novak tells Rove that his next column will mention this fact. So Rove mentions to Judith Miller and the-other-reporter-who's-name-I-can't-remember, "You know, Novak's about to publish a piece saying it was Plame, who used her status as a CIA employee, to get Wilson the job." If this is really what happened, did Rove do anything wrong?

I'm not so sure. I guess one thing it would depend upon is whether Rove used his prestige and position within the government to support the veracity of Novak's claim, and certainly whether Rove intentionally broke laws to do what Wilson and MoveOn.org have claimed, which is to silence internal critics by putting them in danger. I'm dubious of this latter possiblity, but the investigation may find something to back it up. Who knows. But it does seem that Rove's actions were what we might call "epiphenomenal." Which is to say that Rove didn't actually make a difference here. Even if Rove kept his mouth shut, Novak still would have published the column, and there would have been the same investigation into the leak, and Wilson would have still said to the media that he wanted Novak to be "frog-marched" out of the White House into a squad car. So Rove played no essential causal role here.

Even if this doesn't necessarily absolve him from blame, it does place what he did in context. Had Novak not told him of his intent to publish that column, Rove could say that he wouldn't have said anything that wasn't going to be public anyway. The Valerie Plame story wasn't even really overdetermined, if Rove's discussion was, itself, causally dependent upon Novak's plans. No causal role - no foul - no crime?

Flow My Tears, the Senator Said

2005-06-22T21:10:00.000-07:00

Alright, I'm getting over my perfectionism to return to this blog. I'm putting forward political opinions here that aren't perfect, that haven't been entirely rigorously researched to the letter, that haven't canvased the full spectrum of positions out there in the blogosphere. Because that's okay for a blog.

Anyway, here goes. About this Durbin thing, and subsequent tearful apology. It really comes down to simple issue - the man is guilty of a Godwin violation par excellance. One can only roll one's eyes when certain early 20th century German political movements get raised in political discourse these days. As for the situation at hand, I don't think I need to belabor what was wrong about the comparison to Nazis, Soviets and the Khmer Rouge - innocent people brutally tortured and murdered by the millions vs. a handful of bloodthirsty religious zealots abused in captivity. Nor is it necessary to say that the latter is wrong, or why it is. What's at issue is the ability to tell the difference.

In any event, Durbin is not only guilty of a Godwin, he's also a coward. He's worried enough about his public image to offer a quasi-apology. But he doesn't actually regret what he said – he just doesn't want people to hate him for it. So offers this “apology:”

Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line. To them, I extend my heartfelt apologies ... I'm sorry if anything that I said caused any offense or pain to those who have such bitter memories of the Holocaust, the greatest moral tragedy of our time. Nothing, nothing should ever be said to demean or diminish that moral tragedy. I'm also sorry if anything I said in any way cast a negative light on our fine men and women in the military.

Note that he doesn't actually take back anything he said. He's very precise with his word choice here. He only apologies insofar as you were offended by what he said, not for what he actually said. If somebody calls you a douchebag, and then apologizes if you felt bad for being called a douchebag, you haven't actually received an apology. You've received only a further insult. If Durbin had any real courage, he'd either offer a real apology taking back that idiotic analogy, or stand by his words. Such a typical politician.

For those inclined to defend Durbin, perhaps out of a concern that any Gitmo abuses are being whitewashed in all of this or because certain Republicans did it too, I'd point out that it is Durbin, not the right-wingers with whom I'm reluctantly siding here, who are discrediting the cause. Durbin's behavior only provides the ammunition to make critics of Gitmo behavior look like fanatics. There are few faster ways to lose credibility as a voice of moral conscious than by not being able to tell the difference between Auschwitz and Gitmo.

See here for a comparison between basic training and Gitmo. I wonder – can it be that soldiers who engage in abusive behavior do so, judging from their own personal experience of military training? If that's the frame of reference for how it is proper to treat a soldier, even affording the Gitmo detainees formal POW status could still make such harsh treatment acceptable. Still, I suppose there's an argument that the American solider voluntarily joins, and while there are obviously “soldiers” of sorts locked up in Gitmo, part of what gives me pause is the real possibility that some people currently in Gitmo were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Then there was the report about Christina Aguilera music - eek. Dear god, how far have we descended? (People who know me, and know about my musical tastes, know that this question is not sarcastic, but is quite sincere.)

Liberal Social Harmony, "Aren't You Glad You Used Dial?" Edition

2005-02-21T17:29:00.000-08:00

Wow... Rarely does one ever see the utter hostility and contempt that motivates the anti-consumerists among the Left displayed so nakedly as in this piece, which appeared in today's Daily Cardinal (the inferior, liberal-oriented, "official" school paper).

Ostensibly, Breezy Willis' target here is none other than the worst consumerist offenders of all - UW alums who attend hockey games. I kid not: After taking a seat at the Kohl Center, one has only to glance quickly around to get a good look at one of the thousands of red-clad consumption machines who are more commonly known as upper-middle-class Wisconsin alumni. They are easy to identify. Usually they attend games with their kind-looking, but submissive and clueless wives clinging to their arms, or with their stoic, spare-tire-sporting husbands standing at their sides and staring off into space during time outs.

Red-clad consumtion machines! I love it!

But the piece quickly loses whatever coherence it hoped for, and turns into a rant about the wretchedness of people who like to drive cars and who weigh more than the author thinks they should. It'd be very hard for me to pick out what I love most about this piece, but this part is priceless:

Typically, they [alums] are overly clean, and smell of laundry detergent, deodorant, cologne, perfume, lipstick, soap, hair dye, Rogaine, Viagra, blush and aftershave. Their hair is always neatly trimmed, and the men's faces are always scraped clean with razors on a daily basis, while the women's are painted unnatural Revlon hues.

Hmm... this is an odd thing to complain about. Something tells me that Breezy Willis, if I were to meet her (him?), likely goes without these things. Unshaved, messed up hair (maybe in white-boy dreads, at least?), and worst of all - no deordorant. Breezy, I take it, is never overly clean! If I meet Breezy, I need to buy her a T-shirt that says "Avoid Being Overly Clean." Of course, that would only be more consumerism, so he'd probably hate it. Can't please everyone, I guess.

And what, exactly, are Rogaine and Viagra supposed to smell like? Wait... don't answer that question.

Then there's the classic economic fallacy that undergirds egalitarianism in all its guises: "In a world with limited resources, one person consuming more means other people are consuming less. The evidence is everywhere; some starve while others grow obese, some live in massive, suburban homes while others patch together huts out of mud and sticks. Not only is the life that the unaware, materialist zombie leads unrewarding, but it is also cruel and thoughtless, since it directly impinges on the rights of other human beings to possess the basic necessities of life. One could probably buy food for a poor family for a year just by pawning the goods that could be stripped off a Kohl Center-going pair of alumni."

If universities across the nation intend to force incoming freshmen to take seminars on multiculturalism and all manner of PC nonsense, I wish they'd also require some basic economics as well. Just one essay by Julian Simon? Would that be too much to ask? Anyway, not only is the above literally the exact opposite of truth (people everywhere have more with increased consumption), it trades on a fallacious economic concept, the fixed pie of a zero-sum game. And what gives this piece such strong shades of totalitarianism, beyond its undisguised visceral hatred of middle class and overweight people, is that when you start talking about a pie, you have to start talking about who, and how, that pie will be divied up. Which is precisely, of course, the role our friend Breezy might want someday. Of course, maybe Breezy isn't that ambitious. Maybe she'd prefer to organize little groups of fellow "not overly clean" activists - they could all wear plain red, or brown, shirts, and they could mug some of these middle class alum as they exit games at the Kohl Center, pawning their stuff and redistributing the goods to poor people. Sounds like a winner to me. And it sounds like a great way to thank all those overly clean and well-groomed UW alums who graciously donate huge chunks of their over-taxed paychecks to make it possible for Breezy to major in International Studies and write a column for the "official" UW paper.

The thing is, this reads like a self-parody - like a really piss-drunk Peter Singer. If UW had a decent parody newspaper (not The Onion - something about local & college news), I'd expect a piece like this to run there. Unreal. God, I love Madison!

Revolutionary Communists of Madison, Unite!

2005-02-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I discovered this political tract in my box. Wow. I didn't even know there was something called the "Revolutionary Communist Party." Did they splinter off from the Communist Party, USA, as the Workers World Party splintered from the Socialist Workers Party? Aside from their own website, the only real info I bothered to look up on them came from here. This "Bob Avakian" fellow seems to be the author of the pamplet I received, and that he's referred to as "Chairman Avakian" everywhere is just a wee bit creepy.

Anyway, what I wonder is, who distributed this pamphlet to all the boxes in the department? My department is certainly oriented to the left (with me and a tiny handful as exceptions), but hardly to the Marxist left. I don't think anyone, grad student or prof, is a Marxist. (The one guy I'm not certain about is more of an anarchist, and he wouldn't distribute propaganda). The Marxists tend to go into other places that don't demand as much rigor, like English departments.

Whoever these people are, I realized that they didn't just target my department: these pamphlets proliferated in Memorial Union as well. Weird, wild stuff. God, I love Madison!

Return from the brink

2005-02-07T19:19:00.000-08:00

Yes, I'm alive, as readers of my LJ can attest. I haven't really had time for posting news commentary here in quite some time. Even my Xmas break wasn't really a break, between grading, incompletes, and temp jobs occupying most of my time.

For the time being, though, I just wanted to direct attention to a piece that just appeared in the LA Times about George Bush's new budget. Initially, I was pleased to hear that for once, Bush was going to do something about runaway spending. After all, what buzz I had read and heard on NPR and elsewhere seemed to indicate that it angered and annoyed all the right people. (Rule of thumb - with the possible exception of some social morality issues, if it pisses Jack Beatty off, it's probably a good thing). But this piece, if accurate, means that my initial hopes were misplaced. The era of big government is back with a vengence. God help us.

This is one thing that makes life so much better for Democrats than libertarians. They can lick their 2004 election wounds and put their hopes in 2006 and 2008 (though perhaps not if Hillary runs...). Who do we libertarians have? None of the prospective Republican presidential candidates are even vaguely close to libertarian - Bill Frist? Rudy Guiliani? John McCain? Newt Gingrich? Condi Rice? (Maybe Rice is, not counting foreign policy, but I speak in hopeful ignorance here...)

I suppose that's the trade-off for Election Nights that aren't nearly as depressing for us as for Dems.

How the Left Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Federalism

2004-11-23T05:49:00.000-08:00

It's all in a New York Times Magazine article here, though this has been a long time coming, and not just on gay marriage. Similar role-reversals occurred during the 2000 election fracas in Florida and over federal opposition to state medical marijuana laws. And more recently, John Ashcroft tried to go after doctors in assisted suicide cases in Oregan, where state law makes it legal.

I have to think, though, that the Left's newfound love of federalism is nothing short of opportunistic. Had Congress and the Presidency both been in their hands, I have no doubt that states' rights would have all the same stigma it did for them ten years ago. Nietzsche would have a field day analyzing this, at least in this regard: is not the push for federalism an expression of relative powerlessness in our political system? The Democrats know that aside from the occasional filibuster, there's very little they can actually accomplish on the federal level. Hence, federalism. Nice switch if they can pull it off.

The Morality Play of God, Guns, and Gays: How Democrats (May Have) Lost By Playing It Safe, and What They Can Do About It

2004-11-12T16:16:00.000-08:00

A fundamental reason why John Kerry lost is the perception, by many voters, that he is an indecisive flip-flopper who will say different things to different groups to garner their favor. He will pose as antiwar when the audience is Howard Dean supporters, but will revert to hawk when the audience consists of Midwestern moderates. One wonders if the photo-op of his duck hunt, the Dukakis tank moment of his campaign if there was one, is something that would have happened had he simply been running for reelection to the Senate in Massachusetts. Kerry, as Reason's Tim Cavanaugh put it was, "neither hot nor cold, [so] America spewed him out."

No more was this on display than with Kerry's position(s) on gay marriage. He opposed it. But he also opposed a constitutional amendment that would have enshrined his position on the issue, as well as ballot initiatives that would have forbidden courts from recognizing gay marriage. Lacking the courage of his convictions, the best he could argue was that such initiatives were divisive. We should just move on to more worthwhile topics closer to Kerry's heart, and pay no attention to the elephant under the rug.

But this isn't limited to Kerry. Here in Wisconsin, Governor Doyle takes issue with the Republican Legislature's policies, not on the basis that they are necessarily wrong, but that they are "divisive." The Legislature, Doyle has said, should focus on his priorities, which are the typical Democratic priorities of using government programs to play with the economy. The Republican obsession with "God, gays and guns" is wrong for the state. Like Kerry, he does not explicitly come and argue that the Republican positions are wrong, merely that they are divisive.

Had Democrats been in control of the Legislature in Wisconsin, and had they proceeded to pass stronger gun control legislation and gay rights measures, I somehow doubt Doyle would fault them for making "divisive" social policies. Similarly with Kerry, I doubt very seriously that if the Supreme Court mandated gay marriage under a Kerry presidency that he would have objected, and certainly not on the basis of the Court's being “divisive.”

So am I going to argue that Democrats, and Kerry, could have won last week if they had merely taken stronger, more decisive stands on these issues, especially given that they might have ended up on the losing side of the argument? No, but I do wonder if they would have at least earned more respect from voters as decisive people who don't fear taking controversial stands on issues. (Bush, for his part, didn't have that fear, even when he took positions that weren't in line with the majority. You may not like the guy, but you have to respect him for that.) Instead of Monday morning quarterbacking, I will instead offer an alternative strategy that Democrats who are skittish about gay marriage may find useful in 2006 and 2008.

Democrats need to understand that one man's “divisiveness” is another man's “decisiveness.” Strategic ambiguity may be useful in currying favor with both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, but with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, it generally doesn't win elections. (Clinton also won both presidential terms with Ross Perot Naderizing Republicans both times around. It's hard to call a 43% plurality an enthusiastic mandate of the people. And maybe it'd be more apt to say that Nader Perotized Democrats in 2000.)

Democrats are at a fork in the road now. They have three or four options, though they probably only see two of them. One is to continue with their strategy of whining that the “God, guns, gays” of the Republicans is divisive, and that they'd rather talk about some other issue that doesn't put them in the minority or require them to flip-flop. (One that they will not consider, for various reasons, is to march lock-step with the Republicans. I will not consider the merits of that possibility here.) Another option is embrace the more forthright approach of Howard Dean, and grow more radical. This option solves one horn of the dilemma – Democrats would have an unambiguous, decisive platform to run on, but it would run the risk of further alienating the blue collar types that Kerry tried to win over with his official opposition to gay marriage and his duck hunt.

I suspect that Democrats will take one or the other strategy, and suffer the disadvantages accordingly. The third option that, if they want to win, that they should take is to innovate, and confound Republicans with positions that are strong and decisive, yet which break the mold of the issue and make it impossible to be pigeon-holed into a liberal extremist stereotype. This requires creativity, something the Democratic Party hasn't shown much of since deciding that they could only run the same welfare statism that worked for FDR and (sort of) for Kennedy. Even Clinton's meager success came by winning back a few Reagan Democrats by running as a “New Democrat.”

I'll even give the Democrats a huge favor and outline what their strategy should be on gay marriage. It just so happens to be my own position on the issue, coincidentally enough. Republicans could also embrace it to their advantage, though I suspect that with their victory, they may not be as worried as Democrats about coming up with new, innovative approaches to issues to change the political landscape.

I've written out my position on this issue elsewhere. But to recap the essentials here, my suggestion is that Democrats form a larger agenda aimed at removing the government from people's bedrooms and family life by removing its role in marriage altogether. That is, no local, state or federal government agency should recognize marriage – they should be blind to marital status, in the way that they are supposed to be blind to racial status. (The gay marriage issue, which exposes the limitations of a single definition of marriage, is analogous to a similar problem in affirmative action, which is the tricky question of how to define a disadvantaged minority racial group. As race is an arbitrary cultural and political designation, so too is marital status).

Much has been made of the problem Democrats have had in taking the concerns and issues of middle America seriously. And I don't disagree – it's hard to want to vote for someone who thinks you're a bigot or an idiot for believing and living the way that you do. This approach is one of the best ways that Democrats could take middle America's concerns seriously. Democrats should explain to middle America that they are right – no judge should define a cultural institution like marriage for everyone else, and certainly not giving the idea enough time to gain enough popularity to be properly approved by standard political means on its own. But we only have this problem because marriage, like reproductive health before it, was deemed at some point as the legitimate business of government. Removing government recognition of marriage levels the playing field, making everyone and every family equal in the eyes of the law. No longer is it one-size-fits-all; marriage becomes more personal. It is something that exists between you, your family, your community, and your conception of God, if you have one. No more marriage penalties, no more special treatment for the married over the unmarried. Government is kicked out of the bedroom, and Democrats can run as the party of small, unintrusive government (at least, on this one issue).

This preserves the right of Billy Graham to deny recognizing RuPaul and his girlfriend as a married couple like any other, while not granting to married heterosexuals any special privileges denied to gays and lesbians. The 14th Amendment's Privileges and Immunities Clause is given its proper due, and religious conservatives aren't dealt a blow in the cultural wars – the government, in essence, refused to take a stand. It's a separation between state and marriage. The law would only involved insofar as it facilitates affidavits, contracts, pre-nups and wills, as it already does for gays and lesbians who wish to “marry” without legal recognition.

This would go a long way to actually giving something new for Democrats to run on, instead of the same tired script they've run on for decades. Innovation goes a long way with Americans, however “conservative” (in the traditional sense of the term) their reputation may suggest. Democrats could sell this particular innovation to gay marriage opponents as a way to protect marriage once and for all from the clutches of an unelected judiciary – it would, in effect, remove their jurisdiction entirely, placing it squarely in the hands of God alone. What could Republicans possibly say in response – that an institution ordained by God demands involvement and approval from Caesar?

I should say, I don't have any confidence that this particular approach on this particular issue would win any new votes for Democrats. There's a good chance, but I could be wrong. Given how many people voted both for Democrats and for anti-gay marriage referendum both, it may be people are happy enough with the status quo to shy away from innovation on this issue. But this is the kind of innovation Democrats need to come up with to gain traction. If people keep rejecting what you're selling, the thing to do is not to curse your customers for being too foolish to see the beauty of your product (especially when your chief selling point is how rotten the other guy's product is). Nor should you whine that your opponent's product is too “divisive.” Rather, the thing to do is go back to the drawing board, and give them something fresh.

David Brooks and My Good Graces

2004-11-06T11:57:00.000-08:00

I've said before that I've never really cared for Brooks, in that he's obnoxious, represents the anti-libertarian wing of conservativism, and a host of other reasons. That said, I'm very surprised to find myself in agreement with him for once. Mark the date.

This is from his autopsy of the election.

Much of the misinterpretation of this election derives from a poorly worded question in the exit polls. When asked about the issue that most influenced their vote, voters were given the option of saying "moral values." But that phrase can mean anything - or nothing. Who doesn't vote on moral values? If you ask an inept question, you get a misleading result.

The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums.

He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as president. Fifty-eight percent of them trust Bush to fight terrorism. They had roughly equal confidence in Bush and Kerry to handle the economy. Most approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Most see it as part of the war on terror.

The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That's policy, not fundamentalism.

This dovetails very nicely with boffo's theory about why the election turned out the way it did:

The conventional wisdom that is beginning to coalesce around the election is that Bush won by firing up his base on social issues, especially gay marriage. I'm skeptical of this explanation, because it smacks of the media/left saying "We lost because the evil people were being evil."

I tend to think that Bush won for two reasons:

1. People didn't think they could trust Kerry on national security, which both swung moderates and fired up the base.
2. The noxious behavior of many of those on the left turned off moderate liberals and fired up the conservative base.

I have my own little analysis, and proposal for Democrats, that I'm working on now, and should have posted here soon.

Morning in America

2004-11-02T16:36:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, barring another recount mess, we will have a president-elect. I can't tell you his name, but I can tell you a few things about him. He wanted George Bush to have the authority to launch a war in Iraq, and he probably would have invaded whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction there. He thinks the Federal Election Commission should strictly regulate political speech, and he thinks the Federal Communications Commission should strictly regulate non-political speech. He supported the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, and the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, and he will not be parsimonious with the public purse. He's a child of privilege who acquired great wealth without earning it in the marketplace. And I didn't vote for him.

Thought for election day from Jesse Walker of Reason Magazine.

Iraq as a Mirror

2004-11-02T00:47:00.000-08:00

I've been sitting on this for nearly a month. Given the proximity of the election, I decided it was now or never. I cleaned up the end a bit, so it should feel more like it has a proper conclusion now...

I've actually been meaning to write this up for quite some time, but I've been ultra busy, so it's been on the back burner. Briefly – I've found myself dissatisfied with the debate over how well things are going in Iraq.

If I may indulge my literary license to exaggerate just a tad for dramatic effect: On one side, you've got people convinced that Iraq is teetering over the edge of chaos, that it is an utter Hobbesian basketcase, and lest we forget, It's All Bush's Fault ©. We shouldn't have even gone there, the Iraqis would've been much better off with Saddam still in power. On the other side, people argue that things in Iraq are just peachy, what with new schools and roads and public works being constructed left and right, an election that will duly take place in January, and that aside from a few bumps on the road, the Iraqis are on the verge of a Jeffersonian democracy.

Like I said, that's an exaggeration of the cluster of opinions you find on this very polarizing issue, though if you listen to how the two sides characterize each other, you'd think that this was, in fact, the nature of the debate. Like many issues, the Iraq War is subject to profound misunderstandings of the other side, and what is worse, partisans on both sides wearing blinders to alternative opinions that do not neatly fit into this either-or perspective. There is an emotional investment here too. Pro-War partisans invested a great deal in their (sincere, I believe, all the way up to Bush himself) desire to see freedom triumph in the Middle East, not only out of the same concern Americans typically feel for oppressed peoples, but also out of the hope that a free Iraq would generate counter-memes to the Islamist fundamentalism meme that proliferates throughout the region. This investment, unfortunately, makes it difficult to process the real difficulties of their adventure. It's one thing to keep one's eyes on the prize; it's quite another to ignore the stumbling blocks.

Anti-War partisans, likewise, have an investment in seeing the failure of the enterprise. Many, I suspect, would love to be proved wrong about their opposition to the war, but I think far more comb the headlines looking for vindication of their views. It's not that they consciously want to see failures in the forms of causalities, beheadings, and bombings, but rather something more basic to many of us, regardless of ideology – confirmation that they were right all along. What news out of Iraq conforms to that picture is what they take to be the essence of the current situation, just as the pro-war partisans mostly see what news conforms to their pre-formed views. I'm thinking of something very Kantian here, where the partisans on both sides process their perceptions according to how their minds are wired before the war ever happened, rather than for what the situation actually is in itself.

I don't think this is a very controversial overview of that debate, at least, among people who aren't really committed to either sides of the pole, who are just observing the debate as one would observe the back and forth of a tennis match. But the question remains – how are things really going in Iraq? What's my perspective?

One of the factors creating so much ill-informed opinion and debate about this issue is that the partisans lack perspective. And by that, I mean something a little more profound than it probably sounds at first glance. Judgments of “good” and “bad” are relational judgments at their most basic. If I hang out with midgets, I will be judged “tall.” If I hang out with the Houston Rockets, I will be judged “short.” Such a judgment depends on the frame of reference. And for something like “good” and “bad,” we would need some criteria by which to judge the success or failure of the war, as well as some theory of value. By what standard do we judge the war's success or failure?

And this is one reason why this debate gets divisive and polarizing. Although some common ground is shared between partisans on both sides, my sense is that there are very different standards of value that frame the evaluations of the war. On one hand, one can value peace as an end in itself, or at the very least as a value instrumental to other important values like safety. On the other, one can hold that tyranny is never to be tolerated, and that war can be a potent force for good when it challenges the perpetuators of tyranny. Thus, the capture and imprisonment of Saddam Hussein becomes thrilling news to pro-war partisans, to be celebrated. The same event illicits reactions ranging from shrugs of indifference (as in the case of Howard Dean) to bitter cynicism on the other side, which sees only a corrupt President using images of a humiliated, unnecessary foe to his own political gain.

Although this may ostensibly cast the anti-war partisans in a negative light, given that their pessimism can be traced to the same “peace at all costs” mentality that guided this century's pro-war whipping boy, Neville Chamberlain, there is a sense in which this casts both the pro-war partisans and the Bush Administration itself in a very bad light. Of course, people may have opposed involvement in World War II for any number of ideological reasons – sympathy for the Nazis, belief in appeasement, America-First-ism (at least, before Pearl Harbor). So you'd expect a similar breakdown along ideological lines on whether the war is going well or badly. But with World War II, there is a sense in which one could put ideology aside and look at the basic tally of who is winning which battles, and track the progress of the Axis and Allied powers in gaining and losing ground. Once France was fully liberated from the Nazis, and the Battle of the Bulge turned back, even anti-war partisans would have to concede that the war was going well for the Allies. They might bemoan what they'd characterize as unnecessary carnage and loss of life on both sides, but judgment could be rendered on non-ideological lines in terms of who was winning.

The thing I find troubling about the Iraq War is that there is no simple way to gauge the war's progress in such non-ideological terms. On one level, you could argue this puts the pro- and anti-war partisans on an equal footing, but on another, this creates a special challenge to the pro-war side in the same way that people who affirmatively propose new policies or changes have the burden of proof that their plans will work. It is a distinct disadvantage of the Iraq War as a pursuit that there are no obvious, decisive standards by which to judge whether the US, Great Britain and their allies are winning in Iraq, which leads to the conclusion that the ends and goals of the war were poorly thought out. I can grant the argument that everyone was fooled into thinking Saddam had WMD – hell, I recall quite distinctly even many anti-war partisans using that “fact” as reason to not go to war, because those WMD could be used against our troops. But with the absence of WMD, whomever's fault that whole mistake was, one major standard of measurement and evaluation is now gone. We can't gauge our success by how many WMD's we find and destroy.

Against the anti-war partisans, it should be noted that pointing to a given terrorist action or a beheading also fails to offer any coherent standard by which the war should be judged. This is what I will call the “Timothy McVeigh Factor.” A foreigner could easily look at the United States during the 1990's, and judge that between the Rodney King riots in LA, the Columbine shootings, the Unabomber's campaign and the Oklahoma City bombing, things in the United States were rapidly going downhill. Such a judgment would be incorrect by most standards. Crime rapidly declined in the 90's, and by and large most people were far safer walking the streets of LA or New York in 2000 than in 1990.

A similar principle is in effect with judging how well things are going in Iraq, with holistic judgments about the well-being of Iraqis across the entire country being obscured by the sensationalistic, symbolic acts of a tiny few. Those few, it should also be noted, understand the implications of this principle, which is largely why they do it. They lack the means and support to pull off a large scale attack against US forces, or to undertake any actions that would make it remotely conceivable that they could seize control of the country. So instead, they go for the small scale stuff that inspires massive media attention, and get far more bang for their buck by driving support for the war down, increasing the likelihood of a pull-out, creating the perception of a worsening, hopeless situation, even while their material support and military prowess are laughable.

I think there are standards, ultimately, that pro- and anti-war partisans can point to to justify their opinions. But the whole discourse, to the extent there really is one and not just a bunch of people talking past each other and living in their own worlds, is impoverished precisely by the lack of such a standard. And this standard needs to be made explicit. I have to wonder if this isn't at least a strong part of the reason why when writers, intellectuals and leaders within both parties actually visit Iraq, they return with a more nuanced, better understanding of Iraq, but almost never do I hear of anyone changing their mind. Sean Penn did not suddenly drop his opposition, realizing that the Iraqis were happy that Saddam was finally gone. Likewise, Christopher Hitchens post-visit is just as pro-war as ever, even if it is a more informed pro-war stance. This is why I think the Iraq debate is 95% framed by people who look at Iraq and see what they want to see. One's stances on how well the war is going will probably tell you far more about that person than about how well the war is actually going.

The Spanish Prisoner

2004-11-01T18:42:00.000-08:00

Apparently early translations of the new Osama bin Laden missed this threat to Bush-supporting states. Perhaps Osama has become quite the Michael Moore fan, deciding Moore was right when he wrote, on September 12, "If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted against Bush!"

Here is the meat of the article, which includes the translated text:

The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera [1] on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to "each U.S. state," designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words "ay wilaya" (which means "each U.S. state") [2] to mean a "country" or "nation" other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state. This suggests some knowledge by bin Laden of the U.S. electoral college system. In a section of his speech in which he harshly criticized George W. Bush, bin Laden stated: "Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security." All here.

And it should go without saying - this shouldn't really make a difference in how you vote. Voting for Bush in order to defy Osama is just as much allowing him to influence you as it would be to vote for Kerry out of fear. The same would've been true for the Spanish voter, though I admit it's troubling that al-Qaeda and other Islamists view that election as a sort of victory for them. Still, remember the old story about the non-conformist who is every bit the slave to fashion and the opinions of others as the supposed conformist. An analogous principle applies here.

Would it be inconsistent, I wonder, for me to admit that it would bring me much joy to deny bin Laden and Moore their dream outcome?

Donnie Darko, Michael Badnarik, and Democratic Party Shenanigans

2004-10-28T00:05:00.000-07:00

It's been so long since I've made a proper blog entry that wasn't just a link to something else. And to be honest, I should be grading right now, or else my students in tomorrow's sections could revolt.

But I wanted to mention that not only did I randomly happen to bump into Jake Gyllenhaal, who was here at UW to campaign for John Kerry (surprise, surprise), that I helped to organize and of course see a Michael Badnarik visit.

The first was a random thing. I was out putting Badnarik flyers up, and there was a large group (20-30) of students all encircled around someone with camera crews and the whole bit in front of the Memorial Union. He looked familiar – at first, I thought he was one of my students. But then I realized that none of my students would have camera crews follow them and autograph-seeking fans, and then I realized who he was.

That I got to talk with him at all was sheer luck. I snapped two photos of him, and managed to get an autograph out of him for Diane Court. What was truly ironic was that I didn't have anything really handy for him to sign... except for the Badnarik flyers. So folding one in half, I handed it to him, asking him to make it out to Laura. I doubt he even noticed what was printed on the other side. He asked me if I was going to vote, urging that I join the waiting Democrat van. (That van, decked out with Kerry, Feingold, and Tammy Baldwin signs, has been busing students to the city clerk's office, where you can vote early.) I told him that I had class in 20 minutes, and he was dismayed by this excuse. I explained then that I was the TA, and it would be bad form for me not to be there. He accepted this. (To clarify – it wasn't clear that he was actually going over with the Democrats and would-be voters. It might've been worth it if he was.)

I probably should have told him that I'd go, but I'd be voting for Badnarik, and show him the sign. I wonder how he would've reacted – like a Republican who hears that someone is supporting Nader, I wonder? Or with dismay that I wasn't supporting Kerry outright? But he was an awfully nice guy, and I didn't want to engage in a confrontation. The whole thing sort of reminded me of the time when my friend Sam Dangremond, the then-editor of the Primary Source, met Al Gore at a Tufts speaking engagement, and offered the ex-VP a Source to sign, which he did. Only after he signed it did he realize it was a conservative publication, got this flushed, annoyed look on his face, and rolled it up tightly before returning it to Sam.

Would that poor Michael Badnarik, an actual candidate, get half the attention of Jake Gyllenhaal. True, Jake was sort of the advance guard for Kerry, who will be speaking here tomorrow with none other than Dave Grohl and Bruce Springsteen at his side. (Speaking of which, the man won't be here until tomorrow, but they already have huge segments of Washington Ave, one of the chief arteries out of the isthmus, blocked off. Nothing too good for His Imperial Majesty).

I should also mention, as an aside, that the Democrats here in Madison are really pushing the envelope of the law. Diane Court and her friend Amanda arrived on campus in time to hang out with Badnarik, assorted Libs, and myself, only to be accosted by the same Democrat activists that Jake was hanging out with earlier. They tried to get both Diane and Amanda to get into the van with them to vote. You'd think that Amanda informing them that she resides and votes in another state, and that Diane lives in another county, would be enough to tell them to move on to other prey. You'd be wrong. They insisted that it would be alright if the two of them voted here today, and strongly implied that they could get them both registered here in Madison.

Amanda's boyfriend actually works for the Kerry campaign here in Madison. We met up with him after the Badnarik talk, and he arranged for the two of them to get better tickets for Kerry's talk tomorrow. (I was offered, but declined because I'll probably still be grading.) He mentioned that he had already voted, just this morning. Not a big deal, until you consider that her boyfriend actually lives in Texas. It's appallingly easy to register to vote in Wisconsin, and if it's same-day registration, all you need is a drivers' license or utility bill with your name on it to register. I suspect her boyfriend and many other party activists are becoming temporary Wisconsin voters.

Keep in mind, this was all stuff out in the open. I have to wonder what happens and what is said behind closed doors, of either party.

Anyway, Badnarik. His talk wasn't until 3:00PM, so he hanged out with me, Diane, Amanda, and several other assorted Libertarians in the Ratheskeller. After meeting him again in person (I first met him when I was still living in Austin back in 2000), I was reminded brutally of his greatest strength and his greatest weaknesses. Badnarik is passionate and consistent (in a way) about his ideals, and why he's running for President. But what could be persuasive in some audiences won't be in others. While we were hanging out, an unearthily young 40 year old theatre grad student, who had the mistaken notion that somehow Libertarians were kind of like socialists sat at our table and chatted with Michael.

It's refreshing that Michael doesn't equivocate the way politicians do, but Jesus, there's also the fine art of diplomacy. He came close to insulting our poor deluded theatre socialist, at one point saying that Donald Trump was smarter than he was because Trump had so much more money than he did. Michael also really likes talking about guns, and about how whenever someone attempts to degrade his liberty, he will respond with his 44. The theatre guy finally left, appalled, though he stayed a lot longer than I thought he would – maybe close to an hour? Michael's way of breaking issues down was a bit disconcerting to me, largely because so much of his rhetoric confirms the worst stereotypes people have about Libertarians. It didn't help matters that Diane and Amanda are both dyed-in-the-wool liberals who voted for Nader in 2000, though they are breaking for Kerry this time around. It was all they could do, they both told me, to bite their tongues.

(Before that exchange, he also told me that he used to belong to a philosophy reading club, which basically became for all purposes an Ayn Rand club. Rand, he said, taught him to think in terms of essentials, and that everything could be traced back to philosophical routes. So far so good. But he also compared himself to a brain surgeon, saying that what he does, by “lighting the fire of liberty one heart at a time” is analogous to a brain surgeon's cutting away damaged tissue. You have to be careful, he said, because if you do it wrong you can do a lot of damage. I was both impressed, and aghast, that he considers himself a philosopher.)

The talk that he actually gave in the reserved room was a lot better, at least at the beginning. As far as stump speeches go, it was easily on par with the best that Bush or Kerry muster, going into substantial reasoning instead of remaining mired in typical political spin and hyperbole. Not that there was none of that: he said, for example that the Patriot Act was the most anti-Constitutional law passed since the 1798 Alien & Sedition Acts (really? worse than the Japanese internment camps?), and violated the Godwin proviso during Q&A. (The actual argument, I believe, was that just as Hitler passed laws allowing him to put people into ovens, our government frequently passes any number of laws allowing them to do whatever they want).

I regret that I didn't actually take notes. Indeed, I felt weird being at a talk where I wasn't trying to get everything down. But there wasn't a whole lot that I could've missed. One student, who apparently knew something about Badnarik, asked him about why he refused to get a drivers' license, and Badnarik gave a surprisingly good answer by my lights, though it didn't pass muster with Diane's BS detector. I still think that although a libertarian society will ultimately not have drivers' licenses, in 2004, in this universe, it's such a trivial problem. Bigger fish to fry abound, and he has to make such an issue of this, to the exclusion of far more weighty struggles.

I asked him about the divided government argument, why one should vote, say, Democrat for President and Republican for Congress. He gave me an answer I didn't find terribly satisfactory – something about driving halfway over a canyon, and that by doing so, you'd still fall in. I had hoped to push him on his Constitutional prowess, pointing out that many Founders imagined that there would be factions and disputes, and that the best way to secure liberty from their stratagems would be to divided their power and influence so that they effectively cancel each other out. (I'm not convinced that this argument is worthy a Kerry vote – perhaps if the candidate were Joe Lieberman or a properly medicated Zell Miller or a Democrat who actually cared about civil liberties, it'd be different – but it's a respectable reason to vote major party for a libertarian.) But instead, I get a weird analogy about driving off a cliff.

I don't mean to obscure the good points he made, but the negative parts sort of stick out. The last thing we need, as libertarians, is someone who makes us sound crazy. I worry Badnarik does just that, far better than any of libertarianism's detractors. Still, all in all, I'm going to vote for him, and even put a sign up for him in my apartment, because absent some major moral problem, the candidate who gets my vote is almost always whichever candidate shares the most positions with me. Of course that's almost always the Libertarian, though I made an exception in 2002 for a Republican, Mitt Romney, the now-Governor of Massachusetts. The divided government argument made sense then, and Carla Howell, God bless her, was proving to be sort of embarrassing as a Libertarian.

Diane Court observed that Badnarik's talk revealed him to be very, very angry. So I had thought that perhaps Badnarik is the Libertarian Howard Dean. A pity that we didn't nominate Gary Nolan...

Good for the Goose, Good for the Gander

2004-10-19T15:34:00.000-07:00

I wonder: Will all the people who blamed Fox News and the Bush administration for the widespread belief that Saddam Hussein had a role in 9/11 also blame MTV and the Kerry campaign for the widespread belief that George Bush wants to revive the draft?

Dirth of Blogging Time, the Hell of October, and Did Kerry Break the Debate Rules?

2004-10-03T23:31:00.000-07:00

If you've kept up with my blog this far, you've probably noticed that the regularity of my posts has dropped significantly. I can't even keep up with comments half the time - Majikthese and Thad made some well-placed objections to a post I made a few weeks back, and if I had just a little more free time, I'd be able to give them answers worthy their remarks. But for the meantime, my blogging time will be taking a serious crunch for several reasons I've already mentioned - two graduate seminars, one TA-ship (with responsiblity for 80 students and 4 discussion sections), a part time job of 20-25 hours a week. And a girlfriend. :)

But the month of October, and possibly November, may be even worse. Although with the election, there will be tons of stuff I'd love to comment about, I'll be taking on the additional burden of beginning, crafting and completing a term paper on Philosophy of Mind, so as to complete an incomplete that should've been taken care of ages ago. If you believe in the supernatural or a deity of any flavor, please pray for me, and apologize to that deity on my behalf for my lack of belief. And check here maybe once a week - that's probably about how often I'll post. And if you know my other more personal blog, check there more often, since that's updated more frequently with slice of life kind of stuff.

Before I crashed tonight, I wanted to comment briefly on a new brouhaha developing about Thursday's debate between Kerry & Bush. If the charges are true, Kerry is guilty of breaking the debate rules by using a prepared notecard to guide his speeches during the debate. See the video here.

For the sake of the argument, let's assume the charges are 100% true. (I'm not actually committed yet. It looks bad from the evidence that I've seen, but that could be because I'm seeing what my mind wants to see - the way people see Jesus or the Virgin Mary in tortillas. I also find it hard to believe Kerry would be dumb enough to pull something like that knowing that a huge national audience was watching him, scrutinizing every detail for something they could blog about. How long ago was Rathergate?)

I would advise Republicans to stay away from this charge, basically. It's small potatoes. It goes back to the same rule of thumb that I would've insisted for Republicans and Democrats alike months ago when various inconsequential, stupid controversies dating back to the Vietnam War arose: "Even if the charges are true, do they really matter in whether we should vote for this person?"

To flesh this out: if Kerry lied about his experiences in Vietnam so as to qualify for medals that he didn't really earn, that might've made him a bastard back in the day, but in 2004, the two things that should matter most are 1) his record, and 2) his positions on the issues, and how close they come to mine. Yes, as conservatives argue, character does matter, but character is demonstrated primarily by one's record, judgment, and one's leadership, or lack thereof, so character fits under #1.

One could argue correctly that Kerry's misadventures speak poorly of his character. Fair enough, but we're considering Kerry 2004, not Kerry 1971. Character is holistic, and it would be myopic to pick one event from so long ago and make it definitive over everything else he's done. One caveat here - the degree of the wrong the candidate committed could outweigh the passage of time. If Kerry or Bush were guilty of murder or war crimes, for example - if Kerry participated in Genghis Khan-type atrocities against civilians - then the issue would only be evidence, not relevency.

And needless to say, this same rule of thumb would cover the Bush National Guard controversy. Let it be true (I'm actually quite skeptical on that count, forged documents or not) - presumably the best reasons to vote for or against him would be record we have of his tenure as President, and platform he's put forward as the agenda he offers to implement if reelected. Even if true, the charges against Bush are about as relevent as Bill Clinton's draft dodging as a disqualifer from the Presidency. Liberals who supported Clinton and yet think Bush's National Guard controversy should play a meaningful role in the election are in a deep case of bad faith.

Back to the broken debate rules. Applying this same rule of thumb to the debate, let it be true that Kerry broke the rules. There comes a point where even if someone's guilty of something, making a big deal about it makes you look even worse than the guilty party. If, say, I take a cheap ball-point pen from the supply closet in my office that's worth 10 cents without getting permission, and a co-worker alerts my boss, the co-worker looks far more petty than I would look bad.

While breaking the debate rules would be far more serious than the pen example, a similar principle would be in effect. Right or wrong, Kerry is popularly perceived as the winner of the debate on Thursday. (I agree with this assessment, though it was a victory more of default and performance than of superior ideas). If Bush's camp, or even loosely affliated allies, try to make a big deal of this, Bush will look petty, guilty of sour grapes over his lost debate. Even the bloggers that broke story aptly point out they'd prefer not to "hyperventilate and claim that this violation influenced the outcome of the first debate, but it's certainly reasonable to request that the rules are followed by the Kerry Campaign and enforced by the Debate Commission for the remaining two contests."

Instead, Bush should lick his wounds, maybe take a moment to feel better about his loss knowing that Kerry's strength, at least in part, came from a violation of the rules, and put in more work on his own weaknesses. A) Drink some coffee before the debate if he's such an early to bed/early to rise kind of guy. Coffee is the Nectar of the Gods, I would assure him. I know from experience. B) Get an hour and a half worth of material instead of the 30-40 minutes he had to stretch out. Yes, perhaps Bush and Rove had a method to their madness, thinking "less is more" works better for middle America, and that repeatition plays a huge role in persuasion. And maybe it's only that I'm a former debate nerd and aspiring philosopher that this technique bothered me. But from the look of things, I wasn't the only one who thought this repetition looked like crap.

Otherwise, the only other thing I'll say about the debate is that it depressed me me about as much as the 2000 debates and the 1996 debates. Where, dear god, is the candidate I can root for? This time, I think he was across the street, debating David Cobb, languishing in obscurity and irrelevence, and even wrong himself about the issue he's making the centerpiece of his campaign. Given that politics are usually so depressing, I don't know why I bother sometimes...

Anyway. If you've read this far, I'll end by assuring you that by Wednesday, I should have something about my take on the "Iraq is wretched vs Iraq is peachy" debate, and why both sides are wrong.

Yet Another Strategic Blunder From Kerry

2004-09-24T15:33:00.000-07:00

Quick note, and speaking only strategically:

Kerry's strategy to basically project gloom & doom about Iraq and other issues strikes me as myopic, more something born of desperation than inspiration. It's okay to criticize things where you see problems, especially if you were more like Howard Dean, and opposed this whole thing from the beginning. Kerry would probably find more success if he were to acknowledge the successes in Iraq as well as the failures, and focus more on a sunny, preferable (and halfway coherent) alternative that he can offer. It's a question of emphasis and attitude. I don't think voters are going to be all that enthusiastic about about a candidate who projects hopelessness and despair. They will be, though, about a candidate who is optimistic, or at least halfway confident. Again, it's not a question of policies - it's a question of emphasis. You'd think Kerry might have learned a few lessons from the Kennedy campaign of 1960 (Eisenhower did a few good things, but here's how things could be even better), and Carter vs Reagan in 1980 - hope vs pessimism personified.

PS - I was just finishing writing this, and noticed Boffo aka Nifty McNiftington made a similar observation. He puts it a lot more humorously and directly than I do.

Apocalypse Wow...

2004-09-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

This is utterly, utterly brilliant. I've seen some great stuff written about the Presidential race this year. But nothing, nothing comes close to the sheer brilliance of this piece. You'll laugh. You'll cry. Well, you'll mostly cry tears of laughter, but it's all good.

Go there, now! Peer into the heart of darkness of this year's campaign.

Anti-Capitalism and Pharmaceutical Companies

2004-09-16T17:34:00.000-07:00

Egad, this is what I get for listening to NPR. "On Point" with Tom Ashbrook is interviewing Marcia Angell, who just wrote a tome claiming that the industry by and large rips off the American consumer. Am I completely off point to observe a contradiction in her argument?

First, she complains that the drug industry doesn't actually do much real research or innovation. Most of that, she claims, is actually done by government-funded and university research. The drug industry actually parasitically pumps out mere "copy-cat" drugs that bring them far more profits than other industries. They spend more on marketting (and we know how immoral that is) than on research.

But another major complaint she lobbies forth is that the drug companies too strictly monitor and control research that universities perform on drugs, leading to research bias.

So I don't get it! Are drug companies bad because they don't actually research and innovate enough, or are they bad because they do it too much by tangling up and controlling all the channels of research? Argh...

Rock over London, Rock on Chicago

2004-09-04T08:25:00.000-07:00

I'll return to full blogging mode when I return from Chicago in a few days. Soon, I'll be posting - "Party Like It's 1996", why this election is more and more resembling 1996, something related to an article I'm writing about the ineffeciacy of street protests, and something about the future of gay rights in the GOP, and why it just might not be bad faith for gays and supporters of gay rights to support the GOP. (Not that they should, mind you, just that it wouldn't be bad faith if they did). Anyway. All this in the coming days.

David Brooks, Libertarianism, Media Bias and All That Jazz

2004-09-02T16:47:00.000-07:00

I was flabbergasted a moment ago to hear David Brooks on PBS's convention coverage. I've never really liked him, I should say, and I don't know anyone either conservative or libertarian who does.

But this was too much. Paraphrased, regarding Bush's challenge tonight: "He's got to come out and say he's not Barry Goldwater, that he's not a libertarian. He's got to say that he recognizes that government can do great things, and that he has the best ideas for the good things government can do in people's lives." Look, I knew neither he nor Bush are libertarians, and I know that the last gasps of Goldwater's greatness mostly died with Reagan. But to have it so explicitly put out there was heartbreaking.

This points to one of the things that makes me skeptical that ANY major news outlet, from NPR to Fox News, actually provides fair coverage of the plenthora of political viewpoints. My sense is that most (though not all) mainstream news outlets lean left - but even when they don't, they just provide the standard left/moderate/right axis. Sometimes, you see a substantive debate about liberty vs power over a single issue, like over the conflict between free speech and campaign finance law, and the gun control issue. But it stays schizophrenic at best, with the token leftist and token conservative switching sides about the efficacy of government force. Then the nature of force gets lost entirely in other issues, like over stem-cell research, abortion, and education. Thus, a decision not to fund becomes a "ban", and pro-"choice" advocates push for coercively-obtained tax money to fund abortion and birth control, and not providing a "moment of silence" in public schools becomes "supressing" religious freedom.

Maybe this is just what you get when libertarian views are such a minority. Ralph Nader gets far more publicity than any libertarian will, but he's probably also quite frustrated to see commentary from the "Democrat" facing off the "Republican." Nevertheless, it doesn't mean that I can't complain about it. :-)

Where's Mary?

2004-09-01T21:43:00.000-07:00

I really, really hope there's a good reason why Mary Cheney didn't appear with the rest of her family at the end of Dick Cheney's speech at the Convention tonight. I may not vote for the guy, but I've admired his chutzpah and sincerity thus far. Please, Dick, don't give me a reason to hate you, that the Alan Keyes of the party played any role in this. Please, please tell me she just had a stomach flu or something.

Republicans of New York, or, Militant Leftists vs Militant Pro-Lifers

2004-08-28T21:44:00.000-07:00

There are some indications that local "progressive" organizations in New York are actively planning on being downright uncivil toward visiting Republicans. A few anarchists are even openly discussing violence. To lefties in NYC, might I offer a small suggestion? A rule of thumb, if you will? Your ediquette and strategy vs. the conventioneers should only will those maxims that fall under this principle:

"Treat Republicans in precisely the same way that you would have militant pro-life organizations treat patients at abortion clinics."

Coincidentally, it turns out that to help solidify my analogy, some leftists are having prayer vigils. Well, they're actually called "cloudbusters", but they seem to have the same social function as anti-abortion churches gathering to pray for the end of abortion, for the souls of the unborn, and all the like.

Billionaires and Communists finally have it out

2004-08-26T19:39:00.000-07:00

It's easy to get annoyed at an outfit like Billionaires for Bush. It'd be one thing if they were right - that "everything" was being privatized, instead of (for example) even traditional Republican targets like the federal Department of Education ballooning to levels that even the Clintonistas never dreamed possible. It'd also be one thing if they were just ignorant about basic economics - lots of people are - but they have to point attention to it with lame, uncreative satire hardly worth the name. If you're going to be a satire group, however misguided you may be ideologically, at least be halfway funny instead of using tired anti-rich humor that had grown stale generations ago.

I suggest, however, that there's more reason to be amused than be annoyed. After all, if there can be Billionaires for Bush, why not play up the opposite stereotype with Communists for Kerry? The Communists, in this case, at least have grains of truth behind their satire. See also here. And if what I've read lately is any indication, the Billionaires don't even have that anymore, if they ever did. While there are Communists actively supporting Kerry, billionaires aren't that wild about Bush.

All in all, the Communists for Kerry website has now replaced johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com as my favorite Kerry website. But my favorite slogan on either side this year still remains: "John Kerry: Why the long face?"

Libertarianism and Objectivism - the old saw

2004-08-20T23:04:00.000-07:00

Also written (mostly) at work today:

I had a thought today regarding one of the oldest debates in Objectivism, being fought anew at Diana Hsieh's blog, amongst other places: the relationship with Libertarianism.

As I understand it, Rand's own intellectual development didn't start from grasping the axioms, going through metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, ironing those all out. If anything, she started with politics. And if you notice, that was how her novels progressed. We the Living was primarily political, though ethics were certainly there in the background. The Fountainhead was primarily ethical. It wasn't until Atlas Shrugged that she began to formulate her metaphysical and epistemological system, so arguably she didn't deal politics in the philosophically systematic method ARI partisans champion today.

So turning to Libertarians. Given Rand's own intellectual development, wouldn't it be more fair and accurate to view them at more or less the same stage as Rand herself in the late 30's? At that time, to the extent that she had a fleshed out system informing her politics, it was a thoroughly Nietzschean ethics.

Yes, there are Libertarians out there who either regard philosophy as unimportant or derive their libertarianism from whacked-out irrational foundations. But there are many who are where Rand was in the 30's, and even closer to what Objectivism ultimately became. Moreover, if there is a father to Libertarianism, it's not, as Peter Schwartz contends, Murray Rothbard. For every one Rothbardian Libertarian, there are easily ten or twenty times as many who perhaps just read Atlas Shrugged or other Rand novels, and never studied philosophy further. It seems to me that if Objectivists want to make headway as a cultural and political movement, they've got to start somewhere. And Libertarians are the logical place to start.

Two other brief observations.

1. It's been argued that the subjectivist, postmodernist, and religionist Libertarians are not really Libertarians. Objectivism, according to this argument, is Libertarianism, and it's the anti-Objectivist branches that fail to offer the rigorous defense of liberty that Objectivism alone offers.

2. Imagine if you will - something like a Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance. Yes, I know, dreadful example, but work with me. Imagine some differences from Rawls - you get a choice of where you want to be born, and you're already an Objectivist. So, in this Pre-Existence, where do you want to go? One could look at the USA, Switzerland and New Zealand - purportedly the freest countries on Earth - and point out all the deficiencies. Mixed economies, compromised civil liberties, and irrational tendencies in the cultures. So... where else do you go? Russia? France? China?

The point could probably be put more eloquently, but the idea here is that we have a set context. We have to work with what we have. It would be self-defeating, I contend, to drop out entirely like the Jehovah's Witnesses, shunning any political activism. The Libertarians offer a place to start. And it is a starting place, so it would be surprising if it wasn't going to be a gradual project. But Objectivists are up to challenge. And it should prove far simpler than trying to turn Republicans away from religion, or Democrats away from the equally narcotic statism.

Michelle Malkin: Fascist? Too Harsh a Term?

2004-08-20T22:54:00.000-07:00

Written earlier today, while at work:

Michelle Malkin is a fascist. Well, at least in one regard. Her book, In Defense of Internment, is primarily based on the premise that the US is in peril if it prioritizes "political correctness" over national security and sovereignty. Malkin is utterly wrong on this point. First, there's a world of difference between PC and, oh, I don't know, liberty? And equality under the law? The inalienable rights of human rights aren't a matter of, as Malkin suggests, "hurt feelings."

Does this make her a fascist? Well, I don't know that she's necessarily a nationalist who favors an expansionist one-party dictatorship, but the values she says should be prioritized are in line with fascism, and in that regard, the term fits. Conservatives, at least, those who claim to champion the Constitution and to understand the primacy of liberty, associate with her writings at their intellectual peril.

I worry though - "fascist" as an epithet is horribly over- and misused, and here I go, using it here. The term is in danger of losing its meaning, and here I go, perpetuating it... but for the life of me, I know of no other way to classify someone who puts "safety" ahead of freedom, thereby ensuring we have neither (as Franklin famously said), and who argues that the internment of innocent Japanese-Americans in WWII was justified.

(Oh - and regarding her treatment by Chris Matthews. She has insane views, but it's only going to make her look good to act as boarish as Matthews a few nights ago. I heard the audio from her visit to the show, and it's pretty much as she recounts at her blog.)

Why I haven't posted in a while, and when I will return

2004-08-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

This will likely be my last posts for a while (well, until Monday), as I am currently trying to study up for the Metaphysics Comp Exam. This exam is, without a doubt, the most difficult test I've ever had to take, and I need to make up for lack of studying all summer. I also may never get another opportunity to take this exam, which will mean that I won't actually get my MA. I've got to do well. But circumstances won't be too bad this time around - I don't have other academic work competing for my attention, just my job, and my pool questions come on Friday, giving me the weekend before the big day on Monday.

So. I'm off to study. I should be back to speed, blogging to my heart's content, come next Monday.

Lengthy Response to Diana Hsieh

2004-08-09T22:42:00.000-07:00

I wrote this reply to Diana Hsieh's posting about TOC's upcoming debate about objectivism vs subjectivism as it relates to libertarianism, and whether it's appropriate to associate with subjectivist libertarians for purposes of a debate. It's a bit too lengthy for a comment section, so I'm parking it here for people who might find the topic (or my pontification) of interest.

----

Diana,

If I misunderstood your claims, I'm sorry, though I remain unclear on how I did so.

In your reply to my post, you wrote: “He said "I don't see why you take issue with the idea of debating with non-Objectivist libertarians." I never said that; my objection was to debating an explicit subjectivist skeptical libertarian, particularly under the banner of "we're all friends of liberty here." Nor did I say or imply that to debate someone is to make common cause with them, another view which Kraorh attributes to me; whether a debate constitutes sanction depends upon certain critical details.”

Here is what you said that led me to believe that your claim was that, in fact, such debate should be discouraged, in part because engaging in such debates is tantamount to making common cause with non-Objectivists: “Just remember folks, we're all "friends of liberty"! And we all "agree on the goals of individual liberty, free markets and limited governments in a society in which individuals deal with one another based on mutual consent rather than the initiation of force." We just want to know on what moral grounds we can defend liberty. Sheesh. What ever happened to the idea of not making common cause with the so-called "subjectivist wing" of the libertarian movement?!?”

Your sarcasm, above, perhaps obscured your real point. As I understand the terms, there are no differences in terms of actual political platform between the libertarian and the Objectivist. It all reads basically the same: pro-choice, pro-gun rights, pro-liberty all around. So in that sense, it is literally true that plain jane libertarians, even subjectivists, are all “friends of liberty,” in the same way that all socialists are friends of socialism.

But not all friends are alike, and many would-be friends are actually very bad, undesirable friends. In this context, that is because mere platform is not the same as ideology, which all of us – you, me, David Kelley, Will Thomas and (I assume) Ed Hudgins all agree. You claim here, in your reply, that a debate is not necessarily an instance of making “common cause.” You allow that the “critical details” could make a difference here whether it was “common cause” or not, but as a prima facie matter, I would assume that such a debate wouldn't even happen unless there was some very important difference of opinion that you sought to highlight contra your opponent. Such a debate could hold the potential not only to sway other minds with reason and well-articulated facts, but even on a more basic level to earn publicity for one's ideas.

Returning then to the substance of your clarification, you state that your objection is to debating an explicit subjectivist libertarian, particularly under the banner of “we're all friends here.” You don't state why it would be wrong for an Objectivist to debate such a libertarian, though why debating other libertarians may be alright. As for “we're all friends here,” I'm assuming, first, that as a general matter any formal debate should be held in a spirit of cordiality and friendliness. This is just good manners. It doesn't mean that we have to kiss anyone's ass, or feign chumminess a la Kerry & Edwards. But cordiality should be the order of the day unless you have some damn good evidence that the person is immoral, beyond hope of being redeemed, and that acting badly to them really is in your best interest, because it often isn't, even when those other conditions have been filled.

Finally, you also write, “And nor did I deny, either implicitly or explicitly, as Kraorh claims I did, "the possibility of winning converts to Objectivism from non-modernist cultural backgrounds"; my claim was that, contra Kelley, such people cannot be "allies or converts" to the *political* cause of liberty without a radical change of worldview.”

The claim that this is “contra” Kelley is false, unless you have something other than this quotation from the “Party of Modernity.” You had to read that position into a paragraph where he makes the opposite claim – that modernist values are the “natural” home of liberty. Allies and converts to Objectivism are, of course, most likely to be found amongst modernist thinkers. As for the hypothetical non-modernist libertarian, presumably one could not become a convert or ally to Objectivism from a non-modernist background without a “radical change” of worldview – the same thing I said before (and that I experienced personally on my gradual conversion to Objectivism). Presumably, one wouldn't even have such a debate unless the issue under consideration was a) important and b) divisive. But such a debate, in this context, is likely intended to lay the groundwork for the “radical change of worldview” you mention.

Will it be effective? I don't know, and I certainly have my reservations. Even if it isn't, it would hardly be a failure of morality, and certainly not a “new low” for TOC. There is a difference, after all, between the well-motivated attempt to persuade people about the importance of principle, and the blase indifference to principle that is the hallmark of most political movements, built as they are on arbitrary marriages of convience. Give TOC credit for at least taking a stab at making the libertarians exceptions to that rule.

I have the perception that we are largely talking past one another, which is a shame, because I'm not sure that you and I really disagree about the more fundamental issue of the necessary role of philosophical foundation in political discourse. But as I understand your position, you are wrong that a) TOC, Kelley or Hudgins have abandoned that position, or that b) debating a subjectivist libertarian is a compromise of that position. At the very least, you haven't supported that claim here.

That's Not (my) Bush!

2004-08-05T15:53:00.000-07:00

With apologies to SNL, I present, for your approval...

That's Not Bush

Husband ... Kevin Nealon
Wife ... Julia Sweeney
Announcer ... Phil Hartman

Husband: [eating a cup of yogurt, looking over the newspaper] Mmm. Honey, this is a great candidate.

Wife: That's Not Bush.

Husband: Not Bush? Come on, he sure takes most of Bush's positions.

Wife: That's Not Bush.

Husband: No. Come on, read this position paper on Iraq. Mmm ... Not Bush?

Wife: No, Honey, look ... [holds up campaign literature] That's Not Bush.

Husband: [puzzled] Hmm ... Then, who is he?

Announcer: I'll tell you one thing - That's Not Bush!

Husband: Well, if it isn't Bush, then what did I just vote for?

Announcer: Wouldn't you like to know!

Husband: Yeah. I would.

Announcer: Well ... That's Not Bush!

Husband: Look, I understand that. But what is he? Is he, like, some sort of liberal Democrat? Is he, like, a moderate? A Reagan Democrat?

Announcer: That's Not Bush!

Wife: No, seriously ... my husband has moral objections to certain political positions ... so he really sort of needs to know exactly for what he's voting.

Announcer: Sorry. But all we can tell you is - That's Not Bush!

Husband: Look, I have a right to know what I just voted for!

Announcer: It drives people crazy, trying to figure out the secret to the great That's Not Bush campaign. It's smooth, slick, vague, vitriolic, irrational and at times deceptive ... with a perfectly incoherent and obscure agenda, just like the real Bush. Only, That's Not Bush!

Husband: Alright, come on.. what is he?

Announcer: Actually ... it is Bush.

Husband: [joyful] Really.

Announcer: No. That's Not Bush! That's Not Bush! You'll swear you're voting for Bush, but you're not. He's something else.

Female Voiceover: From the makers of Those Aren't Principles, and That's Not A Constitution.

Liberals vs. Michael Moore

2004-08-03T05:08:00.000-07:00

Read all about Michael Moore, the puppet, here.

As I had hoped, many liberals, not just Christopher Hitchens, are now seeing that Michael Moore does for liberalism what Ann Coulter and Michael Savage do for conservativism.

Examples:

NPR's Scott Simon: "Michael Moore has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and may win an Oscar for the kind of work that got Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Jack Kelly fired."
- "When Punchline Trumps Honesty"
There's more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore.
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Wall Street Journal

(There's a great remark about the Scott Simon piece here that also notes that while NPR is certainly leftist, they are nevertheless an invaluable and praiseworthy source of news. I agree.) Alas, as Scott Simon notes, even liberal lions such as the ever confused Paul Krugman are drinking Moore's kool-aide.

A new petition and blog, Democrats United Against Michael Moore: "We firmly believe that, should the Democratic leadership continue to embrace Michael Moore or fail to unequivocally condemn his tactics, it could very well be at the peril of John Kerry in the November election. We must not allow our vehement opposition to President Bush and his policies to blind us from truth. We must not abandon reason in favor of political expediency."
from Democrats United Against Michael Moore

My Mind on My Money, and My Money on My Mind

2004-08-02T19:35:00.000-07:00

One of the oddest twists of this entire campaign has to do with Kerry and Edwards' attitude toward wealth. Neither of them ever earned a dime of their wealth through their own work legitimately, nor do either actually know how to earn such wealth even if they were so inclined. Kerry acquired his wealth (so much wealth that Bush looks middle class in comparison) through inheritance and by marrying an heiress. Legal and morally okay, but hardly by the sweat of his brow. Edwards acquired his through force - by skillfully manipulating a badly compromised tort system to extort his millions from real producers. Isn't it fitting, therefore, that a keystone of their campaign is that the people they despise the most are the actual producers who did create their wealth legitimately through their own work?

It wouldn't be such a big deal if the tax system went after static wealth rather than income. But as it is, the non-productive rich, like Kerry, the Kennedys, et al, pay relatively little in taxes (save what they earn on investments and savings), whereas the productive rich who dynamically create wealth and keep the economy afloat are those who are soaked the most. That, I think, is what I find most offensive about Kerry and Edwards. Their anti-rich "Two Americas" rhetoric makes more sense about themselves than the productive corporate tycoons they envy. And their policies indicate that they don't understand how their wealth was created in the first place, and what are sound policies to ensure that others may, by their own effort, earn wealth of their own.

It offends me deeply, to my core.

Near-Racism on Talk Radio

2004-08-02T18:15:00.000-07:00

As someone who actually listens to right wing talk radio, who appreciates much of the humor even while I may disagree with the hosts occasionally, I'm usually one of the first people to defend talk radio from the litany of charges it frequently receives - it's racist, sexist, homophobic, part of a vast brain-washing conspiracy by Clear Channel to make you vote for Bush, etc. Depending on the show, it's no more, and no less, thought-provoking than what you hear on National Propaganda Radio (which I also listen to religiously), but the biases are acknowledged here, so you know what you're getting.

That said, there are some talk show hosts who actually do fit the standard litany of charges, such as Michael Savage and Jay Severin. Last week, I had the misfortunate of discovering more of the same. I listen, on earbud headphones, to radio over the internet while I do mindless data entry. I recently checked out 950 AM KPRC, a station out of Houston. I had heard of Glenn Beck, but never listened to him before, and aside from knowing that he was conservative, really didn't know what to expect. I don't know if this will apply to him personally, but the two people who sat in for him had to be some of the most bigotted assholes I've ever heard on the radio.

Their names are "John and Ken," and apparently they have a regular show that airs in the Los Angeles market. I listened for over an hour, and Jesus, I wish I had that hour back. All I got was a litany about how horrible it is for the Mexicans to be crossing the border, coming to America, and how easy it would be for Arab terrorists to blend in with them to cause us harm. ('Cause, you know, when it comes down to it, all brown people are alike...) They spoke highly of efforts of militia groups to stop Mexicans from coming, arresting CEO's of companies than hired "illegals," and basically took Mexican immigration to be the single biggest security issue we, as Americans, face. I wanted to hurl by the time I finally found something else to listen to. Someone pointed out that it would actually be much easier for terrorists to cross through Canada than through Mexico, and they laughed at that idea, again appealing to the idea that Arabs and Mexicans look so much alike, and that coyotes would easily assist any Arab who paid them to take them across.

Ugh... I don't even know if I should dignify their ignorance by refuting their claims. I'll just say that the strange thing about Mexicans is that they, like most people, just want to earn an honest living, and that the economic freedom America offers makes that possible here in a way that it will never be in Mexico, so long as their government remains corrupt and statist. They enrich our economy, like immmigrants always have since the country's founding, and most of them wouldn't come here if wasn't for the fact that they like the American way of life and the American dream, and wanted to pursue it.

The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that what they say about teeming Mexican hordes on the border, aiding and abetting al-Qaeda and other Middle Eastern terrorists, is virtually indistinguishable from what people used to say a century ago about the teeming hordes of Europe. Xenophobes then, too, feared terrorism - anarchist terrorism, which claimed the life of a US President and countless scores in riots and other outbreaks of violence. (Nothing quite on the level of 9/11, nor anything to compare with weapons of mass destruction, but between the assassination of a President and the cumulative total of dead from riots, I can't imagine the state of fear stoked native-born Americans was much different).

And they believed that the immigrating Europeans were bringing their anarchist and Marxist terrorism with them. I wonder how deep these parallels go, but I imagine that they are ominous enough. All we need now is a Mexican Sacco & Vanetti...

Convention Highlights (circa 1976, 1980)

2004-07-27T22:36:00.000-07:00

Rather than subject myself to the banalities of the 2004 conventions, I've managed to catch some of C-SPAN2's coverage of past conventions. I really want to see the 1964 Republican Convention, where I can see my hero Barry Goldwater in action, though since they're already up to 1980, I'm guessing I missed it.

If you haven't already seen it, you should read Gerald Ford's acceptance speech in 1976. The parallels to 2004 are eerie - all of this talk about partisan division and rancor, about Democrats making the country's defense system weaker, crowing about recent economic success, and pushing for new tax cuts. About 80-90% of this talk could be recycled for 2004, and a good portion could even be used by Kerry.

In 1980, I noticed that as Reagan spoke, Bush 41 and his wife, were, naturally, seated nearby, watching Reagan speak. To my amusement, I noticed the 43rd president and his wife sitting behind him, both looking quite young with stylishly 70's hairdos. Bush 43 looked like Sonny from The Godfather. He and Laura were seated at such an angle that you wouldn't actually notice them unless you knew to look for them, but they are directly behind Bush 41 and Barbarba.

Can't Keep a Good Quasi-Union Down

2004-07-20T22:46:00.000-07:00

The brave graduate proletariats at Tufts aren't going quietly into the sunset, though I have it on good authority that there's "no chance" that the Tufts administration will recognize or negotiate with ASET, especially not now that the NLRB is saying they don't have to. Perhaps some good can come of this, and ASET members will return to graduate government, and try more non-coercive forms of persuasion.

But perhaps not. Here's what they wrote. Note that it's barely rewritten from Columbia's GSEU's statement on the ruling, with just the final paragraph changed. Same set of talking points from the UAW?

Another observation: why is it always "partisanship" when it says one is wrong, but it's "political courage" when it's narrowly decided in one's favor? As if it makes you right or wrong either way...

Subject: NLRB rules Grad Students not Employees
From: Grad Student
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 22:24:36 -0700 (PDT)
To: asetufts@yahoo.com

On July 15, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that graduate student employees at Brown University are not protected by the National Labor Relations Act. The Board ruled that graduate students are not employees and are not entitled to join a union and exercise collective bargaining rights.

This recent decision, breaking 3-2 along party lines, overrules the unanimous bi-partisan 2000 NYU decision granting graduate student employees in the private sector collective bargaining protections. The Republican appointees of the Board found that graduate students working as Teaching Assistants, Research Assistants, and Proctors are not employees because their relationship to the university is primarily educational rather than economic. In its decision, the Republican majority rejected the precedent set in the NYU case and the decisions reached by multiple Regional Labor Board Directors. Instead, it pointed to outdated decisions from the 1970s, ignoring the realities of academia today.

In a forceful dissent, the remaining two Board members challenge the assertion that the 25 year old precedents invoked by the majority, despite being out of touch with the current realities of the academy, are appropriate guideposts to this new decision. Pointing to it’s radical departure in policy, the dissenting opinion notes that “until today, the Board has never held that graduate teaching assistants are not employees under the Act and therefore should not be allowed to form bargaining units of their own.” The dissenting opinion goes on to argue that “the majority’s approach, minimizing the economic relationship between graduate assistants and their universities, is unsound. It rests on fundamental misunderstandings of contemporary higher education, which reflects our colleagues’ unwillingness to take a close look at the academic world.”

It’s deplorable that the Labor Board, after a 2 year delay in coming to a decision, should issue such a clearly political decision in the middle of summer, when most graduate employees affected are away from campus. Now, thanks to Tuft’s appeal, we join hundreds of thousands of other workers in this country whose rights are being whittled away and denied by the Bush appointed Labor Board. Despite this recent ruling, we must continue to fight for our rights to democratically join a union. As the dissenting opinion observes, “the developments that brought graduate students to the Board will not go away, but they will have to be addressed elsewhere.” With or without the NLRB, there’s nothing to stop Tufts from bargaining over those issues, including wages, benefits, and workload, that are important to us as graduate student employees.

We urge you to read the decision at http://www.nlrb.gov/nlrb/shared_files/decisions/342/342-42.pdf

In the coming weeks, you will be hearing more about how we can move forward to reach our goal of collective bargaining for Teaching Assistants, Research Assistants, and Graders at Tufts.

ASET/UAW
www.tuftsgrads.org
the union for graduate student employees at tufts

Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!

The "Pro-Sodomy" Candidate

2004-07-20T18:15:00.000-07:00

Awesome... apparently Michael Peroutka's campaign (he's the Constitution Party candidate, and a raving fundamentalist) is upset that Michael Badnarik is winning one of those useless online polls. This email showed me that I'm actually supporting the "pro-sodomy" candidate. Sweet! Badnarik should adapt that as a campaign slogan. Pro-Choice, Pro-Capitalism, Pro-Sodomy: Michael Badnarik.

Peroutka 2004 wrote:

8028 Ritchie Highway
Suite # 303
Pasadena, MD 21122
(877) MAP-2004
Contact Us | Unsubscribe

July 20, 2004

Dear Friends of the Constitutional Republic,

Please visit www.BusinessReform.com right now and take the poll, "Who will you most likely be voting for this election?" The pro-sodomy Michael Badnarik is winning the poll conducted by this Christian magazine. Please make your voices heard by participating in this poll and sending this email around to others who will vote for Michael A. Peroutka.

Thank you.

For God, Family, & the Republic,

Scott T. Whiteman

More on the State of the Union

2004-07-16T21:37:00.000-07:00

Still no word from ASET (the Tufts Unionistas), their website looking undisturbed since December last year, and the Brown proto-union's webpage is now given over to, I kid you not, a page of porn links. There's just the Columbia proto union page I already linked, so far as I know.

Yet if you see the UAW press release about this ruling, you'd think grad students were up in arms nationwide, agitating for their God-given right to a compulsory labor union. As the press release has it: “We’re more determined than ever to organize, to improve teaching and learning conditions on campus.” said [Sheyda] Jahanbani, a PhD candidate at Brown who has worked as a teaching assistant in the University’s history department. Yes, so determined to that we've let the website die and suffer the ignoble fate of becoming a page full of links to porn.

The union movements at many of the affected schools are dormant, if not dead entirely. The Tufts union, ASET, had so little support from the student body that the only major action they could organize after the election was a futile phone-call campaign, in which primarily union activists unaffiliated with Tufts called President Bacow for a three-hour period, demanding he drop the now-successful NLRB appeal.

Second, the UAW press release, like most of the other pro-union propaganda, gives one the impression that it's an us-vs.-them, graduate proletariat-vs.-administration bourgeois struggle out there in academia. The reality is that many grads want no part of a union, and the propriety of such a union for academia is not made any more real whether a majority of those who show up to vote see it or not. A very likely scenario is that, say, 1000 grads may find themselves mandatory members (or more precisely, mandatory donors - you don't have to "join," but either way you are required to pay the membership fee) of an organization they find repugnant to their values, just because 250 (of 450 who were there to vote) voted yes in a union election held years before their arrival at that particular school. But it's not any better even if the election is reheld every few years, and even if a clear majority prefers the union. It's the minority who would prefer to study and work without the interference of the United Auto Workers whose academic freedoms, freedom of association and freedom of contract are imperiled by mandatory unionization, with its one-size-fits-all contracts. To name only one example, here at UW, I would've liked to have had the choice to get almost $15,000 in pay for TA work instead of only 2/3 of that, plus health insurance that I will rarely, if ever, need. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, indeed.

I hate to make this personal, but then, this is a blog, so that's probably par for the course. But one that that really rubs me the wrong way is the utter groupthink that unions inspire. Maybe that's what's needed in isolated economic contexts, e.g., in a small town with only one factory to offer jobs, in the early stages of capitalism, where the social pressure to conform is the only force holding together a strike that means the difference between enough pay to feed a family and wanton starvation. But it's certainly not appropriate for academia, where no one is starving and very few even have families. (And I won't even get into whether it's responsible to start a family if one's only means of support is a TA income, where some people get off thinking that such irresponsiblity imposes a burden on other grad students...)

It bothered me immensely to see ordinarily rational people so gung ho about the recent strike at UW, or at least willing to submit to the judgment of the collective over their own personal objections. Where was the independent thought, and the courage to stand up for what one thinks is right? Where did this Bush-like "You're with us or against us" attitude come from? It's okay if you disagree - just offer me something resembling an informed argument. With some notable exceptions, I found very little.

If there is any more damning problem of unions in graduate school, I do not know it - that the social atmosphere of unions is utterly inconsistent with the cultural climate of individual freedom of expression and thought that makes a graduate education possible.

More pro-union reaction from AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, is here in pdf form. He says fairly predictable things about the travesty of "workers" being denied a basic human right to unionize, evading the real issue the ruling answered about whether graduate students actually qualify as employees in the sense of the 1935 Labor-Relations Act. There's some stereotypical Bush-bashing too. Why does all the evil in the world seem to emanate from George W. Bush to these people? I'd think the NLRB board members themselves had a much larger direct hand to play in the final decision than anyone else. (To continue this tangent - I don't remember conservatives trying to link all the evil in the world to Bill Clinton. Once in a while, you'd see people linking a Janet Reno blunder to Clinton, but in general, people were held accountable for their own actions and words. Joyceline Elders was crucified for her own unpopular ideas; she wasn't held up as "yet another example of the Clinton administration's disregard of the American people," or some such.)

NLRB looks beyond the union label

2004-07-15T22:49:00.000-07:00

Before hitting the sack tonight, I wanted to note, in passing, the NLRB's ruling that graduate students, at private universities, have no right to unionize under the 1935 Labor-Relations Act.

While I take this as good news, and certainly realize that this was the only position possible for the NLRB, I find myself somewhat disappointed in this outcome. I think I would have been far more satisfied had the votes been counted, and the UAW found itself roundly defeated at Tufts, Brown, and Columbia. But then, the law is the law, despite what “living constitution” and legal realist-types believe. Even if the UAW had found itself so crushingly defeated, their precedent would have allowed them to try again and again, as union activists have at Yale and the University of Minnesota.

So all in all, this is fabulous news. The NLRB ruled on the precise principle I argued all along - that graduate students are essentially students, not employees (in the sense the 1935 Act implies), and that their relationship with their university is primarily educational, not economic. (Can you name another job where the vast majority of work done is for one's own education, where far more time is spent learning than working for others, and where the term of "employment" is limited until one receives the degree they applied to receive in the first place? Where one applies to be accepted into a program, but doesn't submit a resume for a job interview?)

I've yet to hear anything back from Tufts by way of a reaction, either from anti-union people or the Unionistas themselves, but Columbia's proto-union has a website that has apparently been updated since December, and they already have a reaction up. They sound fit to be tied. And fortunately for me, they also have up a copy of the actual ruling (albeit only in PDF), which is quite nice indeed.

I wonder – was the 2000 decision, which was actually on the regional, not national, level – agreed upon across party affiliation? Watch me be wrong on this, but I think that by 2000, after eight years of Clinton appointees, they were able to be unanimous about a lot of issues because they were all Democrats by then.

Labor Board Says Graduate Students at Private Universities Have No Right to Unionize
New York Times - July 16, 2004

National Labor Board Strikes Blow for Academic Freedom by Disallowing the Forced Unionization of Grad Students: NLRB returns to long-standing precedent preserving First Amendment freedom of association of university teaching assistants
National Right to Work Press Release - July 15, 2004

I agree! Sorta!

2004-07-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

I agree with the bulk, and spirit, of this piece on the differences between Kerry and Bush. My only disagreement here is that the Bush-Haters annoy me far more than Bush himself, so in that sense, I sort of lean closer to Bush. I'm also not nearly so negative on Iraq, although I was never really a supporter of the war, and I'm more reluctant to blame Bush for Abu Ghraib. Then again, I agree with this comment from the piece too (thank God for third party candidates like Badnarik, relieving me of the difficulty of having to choose!):

Kerry doesn't owe anything to the religious right, and you can't blame him for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Other than that, he's not much of an improvement. Yet I find myself hoping the guy wins. Not because I'm sure he'll be better than the current executive, but because the incumbent so richly deserves to be punished at the polls. Making me root for a sanctimonious statist blowhard like Kerry isn't the worst thing Bush has done to the country. But it's the offense that I take most personally.

- from "Ten Reasons to Fire George W. Bush: And nine reasons why Kerry won't be much better", by Jesse Walker, Reason Online, July 13, 2004 - linked here.

If you haven't already heard...

2004-07-03T12:58:00.000-07:00

I'm in Vancouver from June 30-July 10, for the objectivist's Summer Seminar and Advanced Seminar. Because I'll be very busy every day, and because internet access here is tricky at best (or just too damned expensive), I won't be terribly super-connected until I return to Madison.

Hopefully, I'll be able to post my observations about this place when I get back. So far, my main impression is just that it's a weird, wacky place. It'd be different if I were in Germany, where you expect things to be very different. Canada is deceptively similar to the US - aside from the Canadian flags everywhere and the Canadian money, on the surface it looks the same. In some ways, it really is. But it's just similar enough to where when a difference arises, that difference feels disproportionately freaky. I don't know that I can quite explain it just yet.

I'll respond to my comments hopefully soon, though don't be surprised if it's not until over a week from now.

You have been Leftinated

2004-06-24T10:41:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder why many leftists online seem sort of... predictable? Ever wanted to be a leftist, yet not know how to generate leftist diatribes worthy of The Nation or Salon.com? Well, now you can see the secret behind it all - from the fine folks who brought you the Chomskybot, it's the Leftinator!

Some examples of randomly generated leftist cant:

Presumably, the deal between the Department of Defense and Halliburton unit Kellogg, Brown & Root is determined by capitalist interests which lead to the predatory imperialist aims outlined by the crypto-fascist Project for a New American Century. Clearly, the Pax Americana of the future leads our attention to the end of any possibility of social justice in a reactionary state. For one thing, the pro-Sharon neoconservative cabal represents the repudiation of international law in order to bring about a McCarthyism which threatens everything we hold dear. It is not heartening that the unstated purpose of this war can be seen in the light of the apparent fabrications which lead to the police state which has come to pass.

More? Here are two more:

Perhaps for the first time since the late 1940s, Donald Rumsfeld's worldview brings forth a humanitarian disaster of unimaginable scale. Clearly, the deal between the Department of Defense and Halliburton unit Kellogg, Brown & Root is determined by capitalist interests which lead to the predatory imperialist aims outlined by the crypto-fascist Project for a New American Century. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American state, with its unelected president, venal Supreme Court, silent Congress, gutted Bill of Rights and compliant media represents the repudiation of international law in order to bring about the theocrat Ashcroft's suspension of our civil rights. This suggests that Bush’s argument for war can be seen in the light of the apparent fabrications which lead to the flagrant lies promulgated by the political donor class.

And yet again:

For one thing, Colin Powell's parade of lies brings about this calamity brought to us by a horrific onslaught, known as Shock and Awe. Nevertheless, the deal between the Department of Defense and Halliburton unit Kellogg, Brown & Root leads our attention to a humanitarian disaster of unimaginable scale. This suggests that the Pax Americana of the future represents the crushing of internal dissent in order to propagate the predatory imperialist aims outlined by the crypto-fascist Project for a New American Century. It appears that the unstated purpose of this war is determined by capitalist interests which lead to the essential Western imperial interests.

Sweet. Writing libertarian diatribes will get me nowhere, I fear, but this tool might just be my ticket into the elite intellectual class...

Cassandra, and the Persistence of Deja Vu

2004-06-24T00:42:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I was looking for some article I wrote for the Primary Source back in the day, and I stumbled onto this. (Yes, the title is a Gwar reference).

"Saddam-a-Go-Go?"
The Primary Source (Tufts University)
September 11, 2002

It's funny to read it today - I was apparently right about a lot.

But I was wrong about a lot too. I really thought that if the war happened, it would be an utter bloodbath. Even with all the renewed violence over the last few months, I scarsely would have believed that we'd only lose 600 people in the first month, much less the first year. Things turned out a lot better than I would have dreamed. I alluded to Vietnam, and I had it the other way around - Iraq is patty cake compared to Vietnam.

Not that it's great. Not that we should have gone in to begin with. (Over a year later, I'm still conflicted - yes we, and anyone for that matter, had the right; yes it should have been done; but it should have been both strategically and ideologically rethought). That said, I also cannot stomach the thought that others have had, that it would be better to still have Saddam in power today.

1) Because we didn't have the legal right to remove him when we did. I wish we had waited until we had time to build an international coalition with the express purpose of regime change for human rights.

"No legal right to remove"? Since when do dictators have rights? No dictator or tyrant has a right to power. Perhaps if you define "legal" in terms of what their own countries allow, sure, but moral rights supercede legal rights. Besides, laws have their legitimacy only insofar as they protect liberty. If they undermine liberty, as no sane person would deny that Saddam's laws did, then they can be ignored. And that's not even getting into what binding treaties and agreements Saddam violated...

2) We can't pursue (1) above until we reach a global consensus as to whether it is morally or legally acceptable to pursue regime change for human rights. This discussion will be time consuming, and I wish Saddam Hussein had stayed in power long enough for us to have it.

A "global consensus" is necessary before we can talk about stopping tyranny? Great. I'll wait until the boot is smashing your face, and then we'll all get together as a global community and talk about our feelings, if we really like the idea of someone's face being smashing by a boot. Please. Perhaps the Sudanese chaired-UN Human Rights Committee could do a study...

3) I wish Saddam Hussein was running a secular state and maintaining law and order while we made up our minds.

Saddam's regime offered secularism, and law and order? We may as well compliment the fact that the trains ran on time. Oh, wait. No, they didn't run on time in Iraq. Nothing ran right, and the only sense of "law and order" that existed was that Saddam's gang happened to have the most guns and inspire the most fear. By that standard, if the Bloods or the Crypts took over part of South Central LA, there'd be something advantageous about letting them stay to keep the other gangs in check. And for the record, Saddam's regime was becoming less secular every year to win support of Islamists... Not that secularism means less tyranny. Ask anyone who lived under Stalin or Mao.

4) I wish Saddam Hussein was still in power because we might yet be able to remove him without looking like Iran dupe.

Don't care about Iran, or what other people think of us. Popularity contests are for high school. All that matters is that the right thing be done (how is another issue...). Besides, in a perverse twist, America is probably more popular amongst Iranian youth than any other country in the Middle East, aside from Israel.

5) I wish Saddam Hussein was still in power while we figured out how to create a secular democracy, or even to protect the basic infrastructure of Iraq in the wake of our invasion.

Trade-off... let's see... eletrodes on my genitals, my arms and tongue chopped off, my family raped and murdered before my very eyes OR some damaged infrastructure that Islamist radicals occasionally try to sabotage... hmmm, which would I prefer...

Besides, 1 year isn't bad for the creation of a secular democracy compared to the 6-10 years it took for Japan.

6) I wish Saddam Hussein were in power long enough for us to afford a war.

Actually, there is something to this point - this war could have been done a lot cheaper if my strategy had been followed. But I suspect that critics of the war wouldn't have liked the CIA capturing/assassinating Saddam and his sons, forming and aiding rebel Kurdish, (some) Shia, willing Sunni and possibly some exile militias forment an internal rebellion. But this is a question of how. I'm not comfortable putting a price tag on liberty. It should be framed more like - "Well, we don't have the funds or resources to topple every tyrant, and some are more pressing threats than others, so what can we do with what we have?"

7) I wish Saddam Hussein were still in power because then we could hold a fair US presidential election, which would grant the winner legitimate authority to command our armed forces and make foreign policy.

I hate to break it to you, but like it or not, legitimate Constitutional authority over foreign policy and the military belongs has belonged to George W. Bush since January 2001. We may not like what he does with it, but he has it. And even if he didn't, I don't think the victims who were spared from the previous regime mind so much. I do wish, btw, that as the Constitution provides, he received a formal declaration of war from Congress. But that's par for the course since 1945, alas ...

WTF?! Veepstakes, Part III

2004-06-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

I was predicting that Kerry's pick would be Gephardt. Then the DNC made it clear they wanted Edwards. Now, of all people, Ralph Nader is urging Kerry to pick Edwards. WTF?!

Nader Urges Kerry to Pick Edwards for VP

And now, comes news that Kerry had a secret meeting with Edwards. I maintain if Kerry had his way, the VP would be Gephardt. But if the DNC has more power over the campaign than Kerry himself does, this it will be Edwards. And based on this, the latter scenario is looking a lot more likely.

Kerry Has Secretive Meeting With Edwards

Finally - A Cute Campaign Ad

2004-06-22T19:02:00.000-07:00

I stick by what I said about Michael Badnarik - he's underwhelming as a Libertarian candidate, and I wish they had nominated Gary Nolan instead. Plus, he's almost as much as a loose cannon as Aaron Russo.

Nevertheless, I will almost certainly be voting for him in November. And while this isn't terribly deep or intellectually rigorous, it's cute, and it's more accurate than 99% of ads I've seen from any of the other campaigns.

After Being Dumped By Satan, Saddam Takes A New Lover, Osama

2004-06-20T01:24:00.000-07:00

My good friend Lindsay and I have debating whether Bush ever, as was assumed by several major media outlets, claimed that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. You can read our discourse on her blog, linked here. I finished my latest entry tonight, when I was getting bleary-eyed and sleepy, so it's probably not my best work, but I know I got a few good points in. Enjoy. :)

Reagan's flying kung fu kick displaces Wellstone's sonic sumo slap

2004-06-15T22:46:00.000-07:00

This was all originally posted here.

How goes? Well, I hope. Anyway, since you mentioned me in your blog post but you don't have comments on yer own blog, I guess we might as well resume our discussion here.

Hey Darcy, good to hear from you. Is NY being good to you?

Sorry about my blog not having a comments section – as soon as I figure out how to add one, or if Blogspot even supports them, I'll add it. In the meantime, either on Lindsay's site or my LJ is cool with me.

First, I think by focussing only on the content of Dick Cheney's speech, you are missing the larger picture. It it seriously your contention that the death of Ronald Reagan hasn't been politicized by the right? If you click on the this article? Indeed, are there any pundits on the right who have not been peddling the "Bush is the heir to Reagan's legacy, so help W. win one for the gipper" line this week? Cheney doesn't have to make that that point explicitly during the memorial service because his surrogates have been making it for him all week. Why do you think we even have this drawn-out, week-long Reagapalooza in the first place? (For comparison purposes, I note that JFK was in the ground within three days.)

There are several different issues you raise here, and I was only discussing one of them. What interested me the issue of the Wellstone/Reagan memorials is the nature of taste, and what can be defended as non-subjectively tasteful within the context of given ceremonies. Similar questions, I'm sure, could be posed about weddings, e.g. are shows like “Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire?” tasteful within the confines of what is appropriate for a wedding. My contention was that if the event is a memorial service, then Reagan's was handled tastefully and appropriately, while Wellstone's was handled inappropriately.

The issue of how “the right” or the media have reacted to the Reagan death is a separate political question, and there I'm a little more conflicted. Perhaps too much time was spent between Reagan's death and his actual burial, but I could see a good case made that, given how many people wanted to pay tribute and how many were turned away, that there was justifiable cause for the time that passed.

(I don't know that Kennedy's funeral had a component where the public were allowed to walk up to and pass the flag-draped coffin. Had his funeral featured something like that, say, a day or two in DC and another day or two in Boston, it probably would have taken the same five days Reagan's burial took.)

The issue of how the punditocracy handled the Reagan death is a compelling one, but it seems to me that there's more latitude there. As I wrote in my original posting, no one would've cared if Mondale led a rally as a separate event in which people chanted, “We will win” or “Win it for Paul!” If that follows, I don't think it would necessarily be improper for Republicans to do the same with Reagan, though I could see how even then, you can overdo it. It goes back to the purpose of events in the first place. The purpose of a rally is to energize the attendees and get them excited about their cause. The purpose of the memorial is to pay tribute to the memory of a person's life and character.

Parenthetically, I don't know that it would help the GOP that much to evoke Reagan, because Bush 43 doesn't look too well in contrast. (They still might, but it might backfire). See this 1975 interview with Reagan from Reason magazine – Reagan knows his libertarian economists and philosophers. I doubt Bush 43 even knows who those people are. Still, I guess on balance Reagan's memory is better for Bush than for Kerry ideologically, but even that's debatable. Speaking as someone who admires (with some reservations) Reagan's presidency, I tend to think he makes both Bush and Kerry look bad in comparison.

Inside Ronald Reagan: A Reason Interview
Reason Magazine, July 1975

I also think you have an incredibly distorted view of what actually went on at the Wellstone memorial. If I recall correctly, you said at the time that you did not actually watch the memorial on television, only a few isolated clips. (You can watch the whole thing here though the link isn't Mac-friendly.) I know the conventional wisdom is that it was more pep rally than memorial, but frankly the conventional wisdom is bullshit. There were eight eulogies, all given by close friends and family, all tributes to Wellstone the man.

You're right, I hadn't watched the memorial in its entirety (it's over 2 hours – my time's not really worth it). But I don't think I need to in order to establish my point.

Consider this example. Suppose you attend a funeral that lasts all day. The ceremony lasts forever, but every step is done right – with a solemn air of respect, not a single misstep. But in the remaining ten minutes, the priest interrupts the service and takes out a portable TV and turns out a Red Sox game, eager to catch up on the scores. Now, would it be necessary to watch the entire service to determine whether this was an inappropriate action? I'd say no, you wouldn't. Had you attended and seen the entire service, the thing that would stick out most in your mind would be the priest taking out the TV for the game. And you'd be able to judge it as inappropriate, regardless of how much of the rest of the service you saw, because you have an idea of what is acceptable within the context of a funeral service.

Now, for the record, I did know that a goodly chunk of the service was non-partisan. When I found the link I provided to audio of all the speeches, and I noticed that all the people who died in the crash had separate eulogies, and I remembered that it was only Rick Kahn, Wellstone's son and Sen. Harkin who were quoted. Still, as with the analogy above, I don't think that changes anything. If I do something inappropriate during a ceremony, the appropriateness of the rest of the ceremony doesn't make it any less inappropriate. And it wasn't just what Kahn, Wellstone and Harkin said – it was the booing at people who attended, it was having the camera pan to Mondale whenever they talked about carrying on Wellstone's fight, the chants of “Fritz! Fritz! Fritz!,” etc.

It's true that Rick Kahn -- Wellstone's best friend in life -- did close his eulogy with a political call to arms. But that was maybe three minutes out of a three-hour ceremony.

I believe the quotation was: “We can redeem the sacrifice of his life if you help us win this election for Paul Wellstone.” Absolutely inappropriate, even as a throw-away line. I can't even begin to imagine the outcry if Cheney said, just as an aside, “We can redeem the sacrifice of his life if you help us win this election for Ronald Reagan.”

It's also true that at one point, Paul's son Mark led the crowd in a chant of "We will win!" But to me, it seemed like he was referring not to the upcoming Senate race, but to the greater victory of Wellstone's liberal ideals -- principles that were more important to him than anything else, principles he fought for all his life.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But even so, whoever heard of chanting a rallying cry, even if was about these ideals, at a memorial? Rallying cries belong at rallies.

(You're not going to tell me that no one has used the death of Reagan to call for an expansion of Reagan's political legacy, are you? Paging Grover Norquist...)

I am, actually. As I mentioned above, I distinguish between what one does at a memorial, and what one does at a rally. I even said that no one would have cared if Mondale himself invoked the memory of Wellstone to win votes. Which he did, by the way – see the dutifully archived Mondale for Senate webpages:

Mondale for Senate - Nov. 1st, 2002
Mondale for Senate - Nov. 3rd, 2002
Mondale for Senate - Nov. 17th, 2002 (unchanged since Election Day).

Also note that on the post-death Wellstone.org, there is a link provided for the Minnesota DFL Party, and the suggestion about how to carry on Wellstone's work. This is relatively trivial – the blurb isn't even the major focus of the site. (Still, I wonder how people might've reacted if the Reagan Library's site had a blurb about carrying on Reagan's work and linked to the GOP's webpage).

Wellstone.org circa November 6, 2002

My other point at the time was that even if you found some of Mark Wellstone's remarks inappropriate, that it took some serious fucking chutzpah for Paul Wellstone's political opponents to go around reaming out his son, who had just days before lost his father, mother and sister in a plane crash, about precisely how he chose to eulogize his father. If you're seriously concerned about matters of taste, don't you agree it's in rather bad taste for people like Rush Limbaugh and Peggy Noonan to rake Mark Wellstone over the coals so soon after half his immediate family was suddenly wiped out?

Had I been a pundit at the time (ha, me, being taken seriously by either the right or left-wing media...), I certainly would've given Mark Wellstone much more benefit of the doubt, given what had just happened to his family. There's a difference between observing that a certain action is wrong or distasteful, and giving the person who committed some slack because you know the context of that person's act. That certainly wouldn't let Kahn or Harkin off the hook, though, or the idiots who booed Lott when he arrived. They knew what they were doing. But this is just a question of proper emphasis, not of kind.

And I don't think one's status as a family member gives one a moral carte blanche to do whatever one wants at a memorial service, particularly when the service is for a public figure and is highly televised. Going back to the Red Sox example, or the Gameboy example, or any other example you can think of, being a family member doesn't make the action any more acceptable. I'd have to re-read the Noonan piece (I just recall the gimmick, of it being a letter from Heaven, being kind of stupid, obscuring whatever good points she might have had).

Finally, while I obviously dispute your claim that Reagan's memorial proceedings have been a model of decorum, restraint, and bipartisan goodwill, and that the Wellstone's memorial was nothing but a crass anti-Republican hate-fest, even if both those claims

What's wrong with anything that was done at the Reagan memorial itself? Were any Democrats booed when they walked in? Was Kerry asked to drop the partisanship and work to get Bush reelected? Besides, I didn't say "nothing but" a hatefest - I never used those words - but the Memorial is known for the startling partisanship.

were true, I don't really see what's wrong with the "politicization" of the the death of political figures. Paul Wellstone and Ronald Reagan both spent the better part of their lives fighting for their respective political ideals, so I guess I don't really understand why you think it's somehow inappropriate to mention those ideals when they pass on. I mean, I don't have a transcript of the eulogies given at MLK's memorial in front of me, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that at some point, someone might have mentioned Dr. King's work in the civil rights movement, and suggested that fighting for the continuation of his political legacy would be a suitable way to memorialize the man.

I never said that one couldn't mention it, or that one had to pretend that it was unimportant. But there are tasteful, and distasteful ways to do it. I could point to the Reagan memorial as a way to tastefully recall their political ideals, and the Wellstone memorial as how not to do it. They remembered Reagan as one of the prime movers hastened the fall of Communism, who did good things for the economy, etc. For example, Bush 43 noted in his talk:

“And then he spoke of communist rulers as slavemasters, of a government in Washington that had far overstepped its proper limits, of a time for choosing that was drawing near. In the space of a few years, he took ideas and principles that were mainly found in journals and books, and turned them into a broad, hopeful movement ready to govern.”

Not very kind to Communists, I guess, but nothing in the talk that directly disparaged Democrats or said, “Reelect me!” I didn't care for the God talk, but then, given that all the parties involved are religious, and upwards of 80-85% of US citizens are, that's probably unavoidable. Wellstone's likewise could have been done in way that left little doubt about his work as a politician, or his progressive ideals, without being obnoxious, less than somber, or rude to colleagues and friends from the other side of the aisle.

Battle Royale: Reagan and Wellstone finally have it out

2004-06-10T21:37:00.000-07:00

I had an argument about the Wellstone funeral shortly after that debacle with the boyfriend of a good friend of mine. He defended the funeral as well within the spirit of Wellstone as a leader and a man, and probably what he would've wanted.

My argument was fine as it was, but with the eulogy to Ronald Reagan that Dick Cheney provided the other night, I think I see what I was missing: a broader philosophical point.

At the time I just argued that even if it was true that the funeral/rally was precisely what Wellstone would've wanted, it wouldn't necessarily have made it right. If I wanted an orgy to occur on my grave during the ceremony, the living wouldn't necessarily have an obligation to provide such a service.

But with Dick Cheney's eulogy to provide contrast, I see now that it's more basic than that. It's an issue of taste. Although taste certainly provides some subjective give and take, there are basic standards of what is proper that, defended contextually, can give rise to objective judgments. (I wrote a paper on this topic and how it relates to art, David Hume and Ayn Rand, but didn't see the connection to this case until tonight.)

So to revive an argument nearing two years in age: When Wellstone himself entertained the possibility of a presidential run in 2000, he compared himself to Barry Goldwater, and yes, Ronald Reagan. He said that even if Gore's victory in the primary was a foregone conclusion, or that any run against a more mainstream candidate from the Republicans would end in disaster, he could lay the groundwork for a leftist counterpart to Reagan to bring the Democrats to victory. From this self-characterization, for purposes of this discussion, I'll say Wellstone is as much of a liberal within the Democratic Party as Reagan was a conservative within the Republican Party.

With that in mind, and with Wellstone's funeral in mind, take note of what Cheney's eulogy lacks. He does not breath a word here about the difference between Republicans and Democrats, or anything about how conservative Reagan was, or how important it is that we go out and defeat the liberal Democrats. He does not lead the crowd in an angry chant of “We will win!” that sounds like something out of a Leni Riefenstahl film. He does not ask the Democrats to show proper respect to the deceased Reagan by dropping all campaigning until Election Day, and thereby conceding the race to Reagan's heir (or the closest equivalent thereof), Bush 43. Instead of reducing Reagan down to his political causes, Cheney eulogizes Reagan as a man. Wellstone's followers eulogized him as as a cause, and crassly, cynically, used the occasion of a funeral (the proper function of which is to memorialize a person's character) to try to win a few more votes for Wellstone's heir, Walter Mondale.

And I think this is why the Wellstone memorial backfired, and if anything, drove more votes to Norm Coleman. (I think it was David Letterman who said after Election Day: “Call me sentimental, but wasn't it great to see Mondale come out of retirement for one last ass-whoopin'?”).

One of the ways taste functions, as I've alluded above, is it reflects the perception that things are put in their proper places and functions. Things belong in particular contexts, and not in others. A funeral's function is to memorialize a man or woman's character. It can either be a solemn occasion, or it can be tastefully done with levity, as in an Irish wake or a New Orleans grave dancer.

But one does not go to a funeral to pick up women; one does not play a Gameboy while someone is speaking, one does not express glee that the person is now deceased and one stands to inherit considerably. It's one thing to note that a person was a politician or a Democrat, and that their respective cause was very dear to them. It's another thing entirely to do something other than memorize the person, as in the above examples, and hold a political rally in leau of a memorial service to an audience expecting the latter. One reason is that rarely is someone's character reducible to their political opinions (and if it is, the person is a truly sad human being). Another, more particular to this case, was that trying to exploit the free media coverage here is even more immature than the political statements celebrities often make at awards shows.

I noticed that even one of the Wellstone Memorial's defenders acknowledged something like this point, that one mistake was that the partisan and non-partisan aspects of the Memorial should have been distinct events, and I couldn't agree more. No one would have cared if Mondale's people chanted "Win this for Wellstone!" at a rally or a march. The place and context here were all wrong.

There are at least two other sources I could find that made the comparison between the Wellstone and Reagan memorials. National Review Online's Corner Blog brought it up Sunday – according to Drudge (so take with a grain of salt), someone in the Clinton camp was already starting to complain that the Reagan funeral would be mere Republican grandstanding, so Katherine Jean Lopez suggests that they bring out the tape of the Wellstone memorial. This is what made me first start wondering how the Republicans would handle this, and to what extent the Wellstone comparisons would be justified.

Rush Limbaugh also explicitly made the same comparison on his show today. There are some audio links here that compare the two speeches, and as much as I disagree with Limbaugh with other issues, it's beautiful that he juxtaposes the two events here so well. Fortunately, Limbaugh's staff also has the transcript here, if you'd rather not mess with the audio. Limbaugh, of course, forgot about the most obnoxious part of the Wellstone memorial, where Wellstone's manager asked the Republicans to drop their entire campaign and allow Mondale Wellstone's Senate seat without a fight. Imagine if Cheney asked Kerry to do that for Reagan...

In case the Limbaugh links don't work, try also this page with audio and video from the Wellstone Memorial. If memory serves, the last three of the audio links are the obnoxiously partisan speeches that closed the memorial.

See also...

No Contest
Paul Wellstone's memorial service turns into a pep rally.
By William Saletan
http://slate.msn.com/id/2073324/

CNN: Tone of Wellstone memorial generates anger
http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/30/elec02.memorial.fallout/

Time: Fallout from a Memorial
Did the memorial service for Paul Wellstone cost Democrats the election?
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,388903,00.html

Dialogue with my Union Stewart 1

2004-04-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

Subject: Re: The Strike Is On
From: my@emailaddress.com
Date:Wed, 28 Apr 2004 18:30:13 -0500
To: My Department's Steward

I hope things went smoothly for you today. As you suggested, I entered through the garage, and met with Prof. Soll to discuss my term paper, and I exited the same way.

> First, the complaint you expressed about the decision making process seems misguided. The criticism you raise seems one that could apply
> to any democratic decision in which the voting turnout is not 100%.
> How else could a volunteer, democratic organization make decisions
> besides holding general meetings at which these decisions may be
> discussed and voted on? Over half of the philosophy dept attended.

No, no, that's not what I meant. What I meant was that the TAA's demand that NO ONE, undergrad, faculty, non-TAA grads, etc., enter buildings, was undemocratic. The TAA does not represent these people, so it has no moral authority over anyone who was not a voluntary member. As you say, decisions of organizations (and governments), even in the most democratic of circumstances, should not depend on 100% turn-out (aside, perhaps, from some circumstances that could have a mandated quorum).

> By the way, at any point, you could have joined the TAA and tried to
> influence the decision by presenting arguments at one of these
> meetings. So as I said, this criticism seems misguided to me. And

But there's the rub. I do not support this strike. I think the TAA's been completely wrong-headed from the beginning. As a member, I could exercise a small amount of power in my ability to vote, attend meetings, speak, and the like. But membership is a double-edged sword. Since I doubt very seriously that I could persuade others to my way of thinking, my impact would be negligible. But even worse, as a member, I would be bound by whatever decisions the TAA made, including striking, even when they violate my values. So why join, when it would only obligate me to accept the authority of decisions that I will almost certainly disagree with?

> what is the relevance of the fact that 40,000 undergrads did not get
> to vote? This is irrelevant. They are not members of the
> organization (though they can join as associate members, actually).
> So yes, this is democracy.

No, that was precisely my point. They could not vote, so the TAA lacks any authority to tell them that they can't attend their own classes. The TAA only has authority over its own members (yes, whether they make it to meetings or not).

> Second, one of the purposes of a picket line is to stop the functionality of the workplace. The workplace in question is a place
> of education. Thus, to be wholly effective, our picket line would

Why is this the case? Not speaking of UW and the TAA specifically, but in general about unions. It seems to me that the thing that gives rise to this idea is that by picketing certain businesses, a union's "stopping the functionality of the workplace" costs an employer money. A union may thereby increase the costs of not acceding to the union's demands, hitting the employer "in the pocket book," thus giving the employer enormous incentive to back down.

Now, how exactly does this situation map on the plight of grad students at UW? UW is a non-profit, state university. By walking out and pressuring everyone, all non-TAA people who may otherwise attend, how does this provide an incentive for the State's bargaining committee or the State Legislature to cave in to TAA demands? If anything, and judging from what politicians have said about the strike, it sounds like it only provides fresh ammo for people who may push for policies that the TAA would likely oppose.

> stop all instruction and other work within the buildings picketed.
> Yes, the primary purpose is to prevent graduate employees from
> performing their tasks. But a secondary purpose is to dissuade
> undergrads, faculty, staff, and non-TAA member grad students from
> entering and participating in the business of the building. When
> people cross the picket line, it does not weaken the strike in the
> sense of letting the state know numbers of people who crossed. Instead, when people cross the line, they contribute to the
> functionality of the workplace, which is what we are trying to stop.

As I indicated above, it's not clear how the functionality of the "workplace" makes a difference for the TAA in negotiation, aside from undermining community and political support, alienating potential allies and empowering opponents.

> If the workplaces are functional without us, we clearly are not
> essential to them. But if our striking shuts the workplace down
> completely, then we gain leverage at the bargaining table. I hope
> this is clear now. By the way - for the reasons stated above, your

What you say here may apply to the grade strike (though I'm not certain even about that), but I'm not sure that the same is true of the walk-out. The thing that troubles me is that if anything, grads appeared decidedly _inessential_. Most classes continued after all - many people just met in the Rathskeller or outside for their course, and I just entered HCW through the garage instead of the front. But then, because the University still functioned more or less like it was supposed to, you certainly only had symbolic impact, and as one person expressed to me, "not even good symbolism," given that it made grad students look petty and unconcerned with the educational welfare of their students. Even if we both know that's not the reality, perception is what matters if you're aiming for a symbolic victory.

I still don't see what me crossing a picket line to attend a seminar or meet with my professor, none of which involves graduate employment, plays a role in the TAA's prospects at the bargaining table. Had Prof. Soll met with me on State Street, or held the seminar there, the University would have been just as functional, and as I argued above, the TAA doesn't even have a symbolic victory.

> crossing the picket line would hurt grad student interests. And even

More than the strike itself already has?

> if you choose to cross, you will not receive verbal abuse (if by that
> you mean swearing, screaming, etc). Instead, you would experience

I didn't expect that kind of thing from the philosophers, but there were reports of such activity, and I knew that philosophers wouldn't be the only ones at the picket line.

> your fellow graduate students pleading with you not to enter, and
> then their disappointed looks when you refuse to honor our line. As
> I said, however, the most important thing is for grad student
> employees not to work. Your crossing would hurt our cause, but to a lesser extent than if you were crossing to work.

This is only way that I could see it having an impact, I suppose. As you articulated to me today at HCW, it might have hurt the morale of strikers to see a graduate student like myself enter the building. But if that's the case, it's only because that's the emotional value that strikers put upon that action, because that action played no causal role for the TAA one way or the other.

And it should be said - this also cuts both ways. I may only be one person, but what emotion do you think I felt when I saw the strikers blocking the entrance? Disappointment and sadness would sum it up pretty well. But does where I'm coming from make sense here? The picket line created a situation where people with different values or different understandings of how to apply those values had to choose between doing what they felt was right and disappointing their friends. It was a conflict of the TAA's own devising, and one that didn't need to be there.

> Thank you for your understanding.

Ditto. :)

BTW - judging from your emails up until Monday, you clearly didn't want this strike to happen either, so I'm sorry if any of the points above were just preaching to the choir.

Cheers,

Left Behind: the Movie, the Phenomenon, the Way of Life... and Christian Hotties

2004-04-16T18:20:00.000-07:00

The biggest difference between Left Behind and The Omega Code is probably reducible to a single word: Rapture. Even though Hal Lindsay believes in the Rapture, there's no rapture in The Omega Code. Just as well – given the other elements of the plot, it would have only complicated matters unnecessarily.

What is the rapture, you may be asking? Certain varieties of fundamentalism hold, in addition to the standard stories about every person taking the Mark of the Beast, the Anti-Christ taking over and rebuilding the Solomon's Temple, and the like, that faithful Christians (and often children) will all be raptured. For Christians, the notion of “rapture ” is a relatively new one, first surfacing in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. It's never explicitly stated in the New Testament, but based on interpretations of 1 Corinthians 15:51-52, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, and Philippians 3:20-21, the idea is that after a failed Russian attempt to invade Israel, the End Times will begin in earnest when all faithful Christians and children literally disappear. God snatches them all up, body and soul, leaving behind their clothes and personal affects. In this way, believers are literally reunited with Jesus in the sky, while the rest of us will face the End Times on our own. That's when the whole rise of the Anti-Christ thing happens, and by the end of seven years, the Battle of Armageddon begins.

(A thought here: wouldn't it be embarrassing if, perhaps, to be a good Christian having godly sex with your lawfully wedded spouse, and the rapture happened right then? Yes, I'm being somewhat flippant, but I should note in passing that this was one of the main justifications for Shakerism, a well-known and influential religious movement in America during the 19th Century).

Since I have too little time to read books like the Left Behind series (it's, you know, kind of big, and I've been wanting to catch up on Dostoyevsky instead...), I can't comment about how much the movie departs from the book. The movie opens with Kirk Cameron, a well-known reporter for a CNN-like news network, reporting on the agricultural breakthroughs of an Israeli scientist named Chaim Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig's discoveries will allow for more food to be grown than ever before, even in the most arid of climates. But as Kirk interviews Rosenzweig, the sky darkens, and the fakest looking fleet of aircraft seen in film since Plan 9 From Outer Space's paper plates appears, bombing the holy heck out of Rosenzweig's crops and everything else in sight. But just as mysterious as the planes themselves, somehow the attack is thwarted, and the movie more or less claims later that it was God who halted the attack, saving the Israeli Air Force the trouble. (You know a movie is going to be bad when you have a Deus Ex Machina in the first five minutes!). The movie never explains what fallout occurs from this attack, and I only know that the attackers were Russian because I've read reviews of the books. (Indeed, the movie implausibly insinuates that the attackers were Arabs, and we're shown footage of fake airplanes flying over Iraq. Maybe Saddam gave the WMD to the Russians to use against Israel some day?) The negative consequences for Russia, or why they even attacked, is never explained. What role did the Arabs or Palestinians play? The movie immediately moves on, as if it was sort of duty-bound to present this little story along the way as character-development or back story or something.

Then we're introduced to a Chicago-based pilot named Rayford Steele, played by former Marlboro Man Brad Johnson. Steele is growing unhappy in his marriage, and is contemplating an affair with stewardess named Hattie. (Another trivia point – the actress playing Hattie starred on “Growing Pains” with Kirk Cameron. In real life, she's his wife, and an older woman, by six years.) Instead of sticking around for his son's birthday and his wife's nagging, he happily agrees to an extra flight to London. It's during this flight that the Rapture occurs, and turns the world upside down.

On the plane, like half the people on board vanish, leaving their clothes, glasses, dentures, and pacemakers. (This strikes me as so odd: if God has to take their physical bodies too, why not just take their clothes while He's at it? Why be so, no pun-intended, cheeky so as to nab them in the nude? Is He just trying to save people on funeral costs? That's awfully nice of Him, but I think if I were raptured, I'd either want my clothes or to just leave my body behind. There are other metaphysical oddities about this – Heaven, I would have thought, would be a purely spiritual place, so these physical bodies are kind of unnecessary. A physical heaven would be more like Mormonism's Planet Kolob, a far more physicalist conception than traditional varieties of Christianity. If Heaven is a physical place, why don't all people, Rapture or no Rapture, just have their bodies vanish when they die, like Yoda and Obi-Won Kenobi in Star Wars?).

Chloe Steele, played by Janaya Stephens, is supposed to be a 20-year-old college student, but she's actually 30. However old she is, she's a hottie.

Before the Rapture, Kirk Cameron seems to be a c)-type non-believer. We're never given any indication that Steele ever explicitly rejected faith, so he's an e)-type non-believer. Hattie is, I think, also an e)-type, though it's never really said what she thinks about religion. (Though dark clouds are on her horizon; somehow, she moves from her job as a stewardess to working for the United Nations, directly under Carpathia as he becomes Secretary-General.) We're also introduced to Steele's hottie, college-aged daughter Chloe. Oddly, it's her who chided him for not spending enough time with the family, though when the Rapture hits, she's left behind too. I'm guessing she's a c)-type non-believer; I'm guessing that, as a college-student, some Darwinian and atheist professors got to her. Maybe she also has shades of e)-type, because she's young, and college-aged students are supposed to be rebellious. Again, the book is probably more clear about this; books have a much easier time revealing motivations and internal thoughts than movies. Rosenzweig is obviously a d)-type non-believer, though as with Hattie, we don't get a clearer idea of what his motivations are.

The plane erupts in a panic as half the people on board vanish, and it's all Steele and Hattie can do to keep everyone seated and calm. Highway accidents and plane crashes occur world-wide as people vanish. It's never said whether the President was raptured, only that Air Force One crashed when its pilots crash. By the time Steele returns his home in Chicago (he decides to return the plane rather than continue to London), he finds his son and wife are gone. The country is placed under martial law. Kirk, who was on Steele's plane, can't make it to New York or London, so he is stranded at Steele's place as news reports pile up. Kirk Cameron has inside information about Carpathia that he suspects might have something to do with the disappearances.

Carpathia, with Kirk Cameron at his side, before he kills the crooked bankers: “No, really, I am the Anti-Christ! See how threatening I look? My vaguely Eastern European accent makes me extra creepy, no?”

About Carpathia. He's very young, in his early 30's, I think. (I seem to remember him being referred to as 33 – the age of Jesus at his crucifixion). He's kind of charismatic, I guess, but it's not explained how he acquires such a public stature so soon. Carpathia does have a cabal of bankers behind him, but compare this to the Omega Code's Michael York. York is a tycoon and philanthropist, and he's much older, in his 50's or 60's. You could see him as a Michael Bloomburg-type, or perhaps someone in the model of Rupert Murdoch, or more likely, Ted Turner. Carpathia, in contrast, just comes from out of obscurity. He's a popular political leader in Romania, we know this much. But shortly after the Rapture, he comes out with this ludicrous theory of radiation from nuclear weapons causing the mass disappearances. All the more reason, he says, that we have to get rid of our nukes now, and usher in a new era of world peace. No wonder Creationism remains popular in so many quarters! If fundamentalists think modern science is like this, I guess I can't blame them for their own crackpot ideas. But even crazier, Carpathia's popularity skyrockets, and he's named Secretary-General. (As in the Omega Code, the emblem of the United Nations is altered a bit here, and it looks more like a pentagram. Hmm... )

But if Carpathia's popularity is unexplained, as a villain, the movie at least doesn't make it obvious he's the Anti-Christ. At least, not at first. You know almost from the moment you see him that Michael York is the villain of the OC. I only knew Carpathia was the Anti-Christ because I've glanced at the books of this series. The movie initially gives you the idea that Carpathia is an utter tool, used by this cabal of bankers who have this conspiracy to gain control of the world's food supply. When Carpathia figures it out, he kills the two main guys behind it all in cold blood, in front of 10 of the world's top leaders, plus Rosenzweig, Hattie and Kirk Cameron. (Carpathia has some power of hypnotic suggestion – only Kirk Cameron, who just asked Jesus into his life, remembers the killing, but everyone else remembers what Carpathia told them to remember: that the two men killed each other after Kirk Cameron revealed the conspiracy.)

Rosenzweig and Kirk Cameron: “I'm not a Jew, but I play one on TV. And in good form, I work for the Anti-Christ!”

And that's really about it. Steele meets up with his preacher (who was left behind because he didn't really have faith – he does now), who explains that it was God who took everyone. Given the heavy literature on the rapture, I would've thought it'd be obvious. As Kirk Cameron finally finds a way to return to New York for the fateful meeting with Carpathia, he and pilot speculate on what all the people taken had in common – or what those who were left behind had in common. Look, I don't think it would've taken a rocket scientist to observe that 90% of Alabama vanished, while the populations of Europe, China, India and the Middle East were left mostly intact. Wouldn't the fact that every adult taken was a faithful Christian be, you know, just a small clue?

I realized there's actually a paradox at the heart, not only of this movie, but in the heart of Rapture eschatology. What happened to the fetuses? The movie does not say. The children are gone. But were the fetuses raptured as well? If they were left behind, this would be a devastating outcome for pro-life Christians, as the fetuses therefore wouldn't have souls. If they don't have souls that required salvation, then the doctrine of ensoulment at conception is bunk, and abortion would apparently be completely morally acceptable. If the fetuses were raptured, that would still be weird, though possibly a little easier to explain. But it would still be odd. Wouldn't that make God guilty of artificially interrupting pregnancies? In other words, wouldn't that make God an... abortionist? Or guilty of the new federal Violence Against Fetuses Act? It wouldn't be the first time that God played by a different set of rules than what he lays down for us. There's the Kierkegaard point about Abraham, so perhaps this is simply part of that same playbook. But more problematic might be the question of how much of the fetus God snatches. Does God take the zygotes? Does He also take the placentas and umbilical cords? What about fertilized eggs frozen in vitro? Are those taken too? And do these pregnant women just wake up non-pregnant? Or do their bodies still experience the hormones and other oddities of pregnancy as they would after an abortion?

As it happens, I do know what the book says about this: the fetuses do, in fact, disappear. As I explained above, this only increases the oddity of it all, and creates the real dilemma that God is an abortionist. (So would abortion be okay if he was...?) You could say, I suppose, that it's not abortion anymore than the Rapture murders the faithful Christians who were snatched up. The thing is, I recall Andrea Yates saying something strikingly similar. The world had grown sinful, she said, so she killed her five children that they may return to Heaven and not face the temptations of this corrupt world. And no Christians that I know of went on a limb to defend her actions as logical or moral. But if God does this, it's okay? In any event, God did bring an end to the life of every person on Earth, and ended the unborn lives of the fetuses. This would, I contend, make God the biggest mass murderer in history. Even if you want to argue that he was merely saving them all from a horrible fate of life under this dorky Romanian and his United Nations, he did end their lives on Earth. Perhaps God is a Benthamite Utilitarian, after all. Or since they all have immortal souls, maybe God didn't “kill” them all, strictly speaking. That would still make God guilty of mass kidnapping, at least of the children, who didn't have the option of choosing God's protection from the End Times.

Final Verdict

All in all, this is a delightfully bad movie, that is worth your time. Caveats: 1) Schmaltzy Christian rock, rap, and r'n'b. I cringed like few movies outside of Red Zone Cuba have been able to make me cringe when that came on. Keep to the standard movie orchestration, people! 2) Speaking of schmaltz, have you people ever heard of subtlety? The scenes where people gave themselves to Christ were so over the top that they made “Seventh Heaven” look like David Lynch. Contrast this with Tolkien. Christians trip over themselves to heap praise on Lord of the Rings for its supposedly Christian values and all, but note that not a single character prays or makes reference to deities of any kind. Left Behind would've benefited from that lesson.

And this isn't as bad as Michelle Greenberg at Salon makes it look. First, she overestimates how seriously this may be taken by the “right wing” – perhaps good chunks of the Religious Right, but the right wing includes a fair number of secular folks too. And Catholics, Jews, and a good number of sane Protestants too. She poisons the well to make it look like if they take the pro-Israel position on foreign policy, for example, they do for reasons laid out in these books.

So. See it. Enjoy the schmaltz, if you can bear it.

2004-03-27T18:28:00.000-08:00

Wearing the Union Label

I also tried to go to the TAA's (Teaching Assistant Association – the graduate student labor union at UW, organized under the banner of the AFT) general membership meeting Thursday evening. It was well-attended from what I could tell. But one kind of obvious thing should have gotten my attention about the premise of the meeting – that it was a members meeting. People were lined up outside, and a woman tried to bring order to chaos by having us line up in two groups, according to our last names. That's when I realized. I asked the woman point blank about this, and she said that yes, you had to be a member to attend. But if I just got in this other line, I could sign up right then and there. I just barely overheard her say that as I walked away, eventually going home.

Why didn't I sign up, you ask? Two reasons. First, there are weird technicalities about whether I can join now, because I'm not actually in the bargaining unit until next fall. Until then, although I get some benefits like subsidized health care, I can only be a kind of proxy member. I didn't want to mess with that, or the membership fee I'd have to pay. But the second reason was more substantive, and has largely been vindicated by the TAA's behavior of late.

You might think that, given that I will soon (starting this fall) have to pay the same membership fee full members pay anyway, that I might as well join. The TAA, like all grad student unions, operates as a union-shop. In compliance with the Taft-Hartley Act, they cannot compel membership or “closed” shops. But the law allows them to have it written into the contract that all employees, members and non-members alike, pay the membership fee. The reasoning is, well, the union still acts on behalf of the non-members, and the non-members get certain benefits from the TAA's actions. “It's just as justifiable as compulsory taxation!,” they argue. (Hmm...) This also helps the TAA to encourage people to become full members when they might not otherwise bother; I received TAA propaganda making this very argument when I first arrived here. “You already pay the fee, so why not join, and play a role in decision making?” Obnoxious.

But aside from being obnoxious, why not join? Simple – I don't want to participate in illegal strikes, or be castigated by the Unionistas for choosing not to participate in one. And if there is something compelling about the TAA's claims that joining symbolizes solidarity and the like, then there is an equally compelling argument that joining morally sanctions the TAA's existence and nature. I don't necessarily object to the idea of, say, graduate students organizing on an ad hoc basis to pressure regents or other authority figures for specific grievances. But public choice theory (and personal experience) says a lot about established organizations operating in political contexts; they do not serve a purpose and “whither away,” like Marx's post-Communist State, they only demand more in terms of power and money. The TAA, in effect, operates as a permanently established special interest. But what makes it worse than that is that it's motivated by almost undiluted Marxist ideology; membership would give it extra power to wreck havoc in my professional life, and to a large extent, in my educational and personal life. I won't sanction such an organization with my voluntary membership. They can force me to pay for them, but they can't force me to like them or support them morally.

To be sure, I have thought about joining from time to time, in hopes of being a voice of reason that could moderate the TAA and make them less Marxist, and more rational. But based on events of the last few weeks, that would be futile, self-defeating gesture. I don't want to play the martyr, or get actively involved with this. Besides, the leadership cabal of the TAA has already decided they want to mount their illegal strike. Today, I saw some of the minutes from the meeting, and it looks they're planning to hold the big vote in a few weeks. I'm betting it will pass. The minutes handed out at the meeting, true to form, only contained material about why striking was a good idea, and why it was imperative to plan it, and why the negative consequences were easy to mitigate. (Here's what their website says about their meeting.) I don't get the sense that they want an open debate. They want to strike, and will serve as the vanguard of the graduate student proletariat, leading us into the strike they think will shake the regents and state government to its knees.

For what, you are probably asking? What abuses could motivate such a reaction? No, UW hasn't violated any contracts, and there are no abuses of “graduate workers” I've seen cited anywhere. You see, the leadership doesn't like the new contract the State offered them. It only increases pay by a modest 1% instead of the 5% the TAA wants, and even worse, the State wants graduates to pay (I think) $9 a month for their health insurance, instead of getting it for free, as they do now. If it's such a bad contract, why not pass it on to the members to vote down? Instead, they've decided it's worse-case scenario time, and they want to strike. Please. $9 a month is nothing when you consider how much the cost of health care is increasing for everyone. I wouldn't be surprised if the State is actually paying significantly more for this contract than it is for the previous contract, even with the extra $9. We do get free tuition, after all, and that has to cost the State something substantial considering how the price of that is going up. I'm still unclear on why graduate students should retain free health care when everyone else's costs are skyrocketing – what makes us so special so as to be free from basic economic laws? Oh, that's right – to each according to their need.

So yeah. That's why I'm not joining. Even if it's kind of useless to stop the abuses its framers wanted to stop, I suppose Taft-Hartley is better than nothing. At least this way, I can cross picket lines with greater ease, as a non-member. I only hope that the Unionistas remember their distinction between members who don't go along with the strike, and non-members who don't go a long with the union. If they treat us as scabs, I'll only be more vindicated in my decision.

2004-03-22T23:34:00.000-08:00

Foreign Leaders for Kerry

Crude, not terribly subtle, but Kerry brought it upon himself. Quite silly and humorous.
http://www.foreignleaders4kerry.com/

2004-03-22T00:11:00.000-08:00

He Who Lives By The Sword...

Sheik Ahmed Yassin, an advocate of mass murder of innocent people, is introduced to his maker. Yes, in an ideal world, the Palestinians would have allowed Israeli police to arrest him and put him on trial for war crimes. But given the situation, this was probably the only viable alternative open to the Israelis. The reaction of the Palestinian Authority, as well as most political entities in the Middle East, reveals much about how much they truly revere human life. Arafat, for his part, is calling for several days of mourning for the loss of a "prophet-martyr." Truly disgusting.

2004-03-20T01:32:00.000-08:00

A Pet Peeve About National Review Online...

As a libertarian, I know what to expect when I surf over to National Review Online. I'll see weird stuff about gays and religion, but otherwise I'll often find well-written and insightful commentary about politics and economics. Derbyshire's homophobia is grating, and Jonah Goldberg can be an ass, particularly when he addresses libertarian ideas he can't refute, but the thing that bothers me more than anything else is Meghan Cox Gurdon's Fever Swamp column. Archive of Fever Swamp here, the most recent Fever Swamp is here.

Mind you, I rarely read it – and when I do, it's with the same fascination people have with auto accidents. For those who don't know, Fever Swamp is little more than than Ms. Gurdon's stories about life at home, raising her little kids. She's a stay-at-home mom – nothing wrong with that. But I think what's weird is this idea that Gurdon, and NRO, think that their readers would actually care about what little Timmy did at his school play, or what cute thing little Suzy said the other day.

Yes, NRO is free, so I'm getting what I paid for. Yes, I don't have to read it, so NRO is hardly ripping me or anyone else off. But I'm thinking that they could easily have another column in the place of Fever Swamp that would actually address topics that NRO is supposed to be covering. You know, like politics and economics. Sometimes arts and culture.

I suspect that that what's behind Fever Swamp is this glorification of the stay-at-home mom and her misadventures. I postulate here, contrary to cultural conservatives and feminists, that there is nothing superior or inferior about the choice to be a stay-at-home mom. My own mom was one. But this entails that being a stay-at-home mom is about as valuable as any other vocation. So why does NRO not feature a column written by, say, an architect about interesting things he does at work? Or from a lawyer, about interesting adventures she faces as she litigates a lawsuit? Hell, why not something from a politician, even someone as lowly as a state representative?

No, of all vocations, they choose the stay-at-home mom, who rarely writes anything even remotely witty or interesting, unless you're the type who loves “America's Funniest Home Videos,” “Kids Say The Darnest Things,” or Anne Geddes photography. And I think this is why – in their eyes, the stay-at-home mom is a kind of moral ideal for women, far above the architect, attorney or scientist. So these stories she writes, for them, carry a significance and meaning above these other forms of work – at least for women. (Mere speculation here – take it only as such – but it's almost like the implicit message here is, “Us men (and the occasional exception like Kathryn Jean Lopez) do politics, economics and sometimes culture. You women do that child-rearing and caretaking thing, so this should appeal more to you.”)

This is what NRO says about Gurdon: Meghan Cox Gurdon is an NRO columnist. Gurdon lives in Washington, D.C. and writes as much as her young family will permit. Her NRO column, "The Fever Swamp" appears weekly.

Anyway. Perhaps this is merely the same knee-jerk reaction I have against things that are so cute they are disgusting, like the aforementioned Geddes. But Geddes photography is something you have to seek out. I think I wouldn't give a tinker's dam were it not for the fact that Gurdon's column is in an inappropriate place - an online journal of ideas.

2004-03-18T12:42:00.000-08:00

One of my leftist friends (she's an artist) in Boston just sent me this:

> OK. I'm sending this out far and wide, knowing it will annoy some, and interest many. I wanna do something about this, and I think it's time to figure out what. Another exhibition? Performances at the DNC this summer convenient for many of us here in Boston? Ideas?
>
> Am working on idea for a new show-- will send that and more substantial update before April Fools.
>
> As for the video, This is too good and it's true. Pass it on.
>
> Peace,
>
> http://www.moveon.org/censure/caughtonvideo/

Here's what I wrote:

Maybe I should be emailing MoveOn.org, instead of you, but honestly, this is kind of weak. The first citation from Rummy is an expression of uncertainty, which was pretty accurate for the time it was uttered - there was a perceived threat. Some dismissed it out of hand, and others like Rummy thought there was enough to consider it within the realm of possiblity - 5-7 years down the road.

The second quotation is potentionally more troublesome, but there it's a comparative claim. Of nations on the Earth, he claimed Iraq was a more imminant threat than any other; not that it was an imminent threat simpliciter. Indeed, in the run-up before the war, Bush actually specifically said that the threat from Iraq was not imminent, and that we should go to war with them before the threat became imminent. (If you'd like, I could track that quotation down). I think the logic was basically - hit them now, pre-emptively, while it's still a cakewalk, instead of waiting 5-10 years when Iraq turns into an intractable Middle Eastern North Korea.

That said, Rummy was a little off - I'd consider North Korea more dangerous, but then, he probably could have argued that the Koreans could be contained, and that they hadn't engaged in violence since 1953. They had more potential for trouble, but they were more predictable than Iraq. I don't think I would've agreed, but there was certainly a lot of ground for that kind of argument.

So I think MoveOn needs a little sense of proportion. Using those quotations to justify "censuring", much less "impeachment," is totally myopic. Worse of all, it undermines the impact of more level-headed analyses that would argue that, on balance, the war wasn't such a hot idea. (And this is probably an issue of taste, but I was mildly offended that they ended the clip right before Rummy had a chance to explain himself. I would've liked to have seen what he said.) I mean, I have ideological issues about the role of gov't, and whether it should play Superman whenever a tin-pot dictator arises somewhere, but I have to give the people behind this war credit - I expected a bloodbath, but they handled this way better than I considered possible.

Anyway. All that said, I'd still love to see what you and your partners in crime craft in response. If any photos or anything from your proposed show end up online, please let me know.

2004-03-17T08:48:00.000-08:00

I'll post something more substantial here soon. In the meantime, for posterity, I thought I'd inject some traditional Biblical wisdom on the contentious topic of marriage. Yes, I know I'm not the first to do this, but I'm doing it anyway.

The Bible on Marriage
“Marriage shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women.”
Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5

“Marriage shall not impede a man’s right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives.”
II Sam 5:13; Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21

“A Marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed.”
Deut 22:13-21

“Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden.”
Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30

“Since marriage is for life, no government or law shall be able to permit divorce.”
Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9

“If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother’s widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law.”
Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10

2004-03-09T09:52:00.000-08:00

But Cthulhu Didn't Die For Your Sins...

Just when I thought the classic Cthulhu/Chick parody was gone forever, it's back on the web, but only until Chick's lawyers are tipped off that it's still up. Why was it removed in the first place? See here for Howard Hallis's story. (Hallis was the artist who created the parody.)

I think Hallis should have stuck to his guns and defended his fair-use rights, but I don't blame him for deciding it wasn't worth it. Here's what happened to someone else who ran into trouble with Chickie lawyers.

I think it really comes down to several points, all of which Chick fails. One, it's not like this is so propriety that he's not putting it online. If that were the case, (like if this were artwork from an issue of "Sandman"), Chick might have been worried that someone would have enjoyed the artwork without buying his tract. That's kind of absurd in a case like this - if we want to "enjoy" his artwork, we can do so for free on his own website.

The other relevant question is, would Hallis have received financial benefits from publishing Chick's artwork? I don't see how. If this were like the sort of case that motivated the original copyright laws, like if he was selling his own pirated copies of Chick's original tract or one of his own with Chick's artwork appropriated for the task, then Chick would be well within his rights to demand Hallis stop. But Hallis's parody was only available on the web, and not for pay. I can't see how its existence in any way would have affected Chick's bottom line.

In short, no harm, no foul.

2004-03-09T08:13:00.000-08:00

The Sun Goes Down, and the World Goes Dancing

Well, except for the kids, anyway...

Couple Tie Up 1-Year-Old Child So They Can Go Out Dancing...
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/8138612.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

2004-03-06T23:07:00.000-08:00

Supporters of campaign finance reform, take note.

RNC tells TV stations not to run anti-Bush ads
GOP committee says MoveOn.org's spots are illegally financed
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/03/07/moveon.ads/index.html

You see, this is why those of us who opposed your proposed campaign reforms argued that these laws would violate freedom of speech. Do you understand what we meant, now? And what we meant when we argued that this would only strengthen incumbents and make it harder for those who want to defeat them?

The thing is, I agree with Ed Gillepsie here. McCain-Feingold absolutely makes MoveOn.org's funding of these ads illegal. I suspect the next logical step for the campaign finance reformers is to mastermind some mechanism for either having the government pay for MoveOn.org-type advertising, or to force TV stations to provide airtime for such ads for free. Stranger has happened.

2004-02-14T15:14:00.000-08:00

Very first post. This is just a test at this point.