This week there’s no avoiding the surveillance issue and the revelations of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. There are three parts to this story: First, just getting the facts straight. Then, how do we think about this? And then, what can we do? I’ll take my first shot at those questions in “PRISM and Privacy”. (Short version: I’m normally a use-the-ordinary-political-process guy, but this issue might call for monkey-wrenching if we can figure out how.)
Another newsy story is the report the College Republicans put out last Monday about how the GOP can appeal to voters born since 1980 — because eventually all voters will have been born since 1980. I’m not a big fan of the College Republicans, but the insight-to-propaganda ratio in this report is pretty high. (I doubt, though, that they will be able to influence their headstrong elders. And I can’t decide whether I think that’s good or bad.) I’ll summarize in an article called “Smart Kids”.
Those two topical stories have crowded out an article I promised last week: a review of Gar Alperovitz’s new book What They Must We Do? That will have to wait until next week, and I’ll probably also be ready to comment on David Graeber’s The Democracy Project by then.
In the short-notes part of the weekly summary, some articles worth staring into space about. Notably, Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls what a bad high school student he was and tries to imagine a message that would have moved him, and college professor Ben Warner writes about the complex emotions that arose when one of his students emerged as a notorious white supremacist — there’s no hope for converting the intolerant without exposing them to human kindness, but sometimes that feels wrong too.
The College Republican article will appear in the next hour or so, and I hope to have the PRISM article posted by noon (EDT).
Fox’s Greta Van Susteren wasn’t directly stereotyped (because her bio doesn’t mention any children), but she wasn’t buying it either:
Have these men lost their minds? (and these are my colleagues??!! oh brother… maybe I need to have a little chat with them) (next thing they will have a segment to discuss eliminating women’s right to vote?)
But rather than poke fun at Fox-pundit ignorance, I’d rather ask one of my favorite questions: Why are we having this discussion?
I think it’s because Pew threw together groups of people whose combination produces a big eye-catching number and a scary graph, but who really don’t belong together. Pew then gave its new category a catchy-but-inaccurate name that contributed to the term becoming a stereotype.
The media then had an ignorant, stereotype-driven discussion because what else could it do? Pundits who paid attention to the full diversity of the category and restricted themselves to true statements — they had nothing interesting to say.
and “court packing”
The D. C. Court of Appeals is the second-most-important American court after the Supreme Court. It had a conservative majority until President Obama finally got a nominee Sri Srinivasan confirmed last month. Now it’s 4-4. But there are three other vacancies, and rumor has it that the administration is planning to submit three nominations at once — a strategy Jonathan Chait calls “obstruct this“. If Senate Republicans try to block all three, that would make a clear case for the Senate to end the filibuster on presidential nominations once and for all.
Hilariously, Senator Grassley referred to this possibility as “packing the court” a phrase that points back to an FDR proposal to change the Constitution. Somehow, a president using his constitutional power to nominate candidates to fill vacancies is equivalent to a constitutional amendment.
The longer version of the Republican argument is that the D.C. Appeals Court’s workload doesn’t justify full staffing. But the Constitution provides a proper way to address that concern: Congress establishes all courts inferior to the Supreme Court and can change their size if it so chooses. But of course, you need a majority to do something like that, and Republicans don’t have one. This is one more example of their anti-democracy, rule-from-the-minority tactics.
Dylan Matthews provides everything you need to know about the situation.
and saving the world by making lots of money
Dylan Matthews’ Join Wall Street, Save the World started a lot of discussion. The article describes the earn-to-give path, where young people aim for high-paying careers, with the goal of living simply and giving a lot of money to organizations that save lives.
I’ve got a whole range of short reactions:
I’m not going to criticize anybody who is making a serious attempt to save the world.
The argument about whether this path is better or worse than choosing a career that helps people directly is misguided. People should do what they’re good at and what makes sense to them. Anything else invites frustration and burnout.
A related path is the one I’m on: Make money to fund yourself doing something you think needs doing. My two main talents are in mathematics and writing. I saved a lot of the money I made as a mathematician so I could retire early and try to raise the public consciousness through writing.
Praiseworthy as it is, charity is no substitute for social justice. Charity mitigates the injustice of the system, but doesn’t change the system. Tolstoy’s What Then Must We Do? begins with his attempt to use his income as a Russian aristocrat to help the poor of one Moscow neighborhood. But his failures convince him that the underlying structure of the Russian economy is too corrupt for this to work. Our situation is different, but the challenge he raises deserves attention.
If you’re going to join the corporate power structure to do good, you need to be careful that you don’t do more evil in your job than your money can undo. If you make your money writing climate-denial propaganda, I don’t care who you give it to.
Earn-to-give is a tough path to follow, because of the constant temptation to spend the money on yourself. I’m curious what the young people in the article will do if they have kids; it’s very hard to say no to the put-my-kid-on-the-path-to-Harvard temptation, which can eat as much money as you can throw at it.
If you’re going to pull this off, you’ll need a high degree of self-awareness and a well-tuned bullshit detector, because you’re always one rationalization away from screwing it all up.
But I wrote about how to route your money around corporations
Not perfectly, of course. The economy is so dominated by corporations that you really can’t avoid them if you’re going to lead anything like a normal life. But probably you can avoid them a lot better than you do. I list my suggestions in Starve the Corporate Beast.
He identified himself as an anarchist, and then defined anarchism like this: “It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. … And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just.”
He differentiates anarchism from libertarianism: “what’s called libertarian in the United States … permits a very high level of authority and domination but in the hands of private power: so private power should be unleashed to do whatever it likes. The assumption is that by some kind of magic, concentrated private power will lead to a more free and just society.”
“commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.”
the United States government disclosed this week that a strain of genetically engineered wheat that was never approved for sale was found growing in an Oregon field.
The wheat itself is probably no big deal in public-health terms. (Monsanto engineered it to resist its Roundup herbicide, and we’re already growing and consuming vast amounts of Roundup-ready corn and soybeans. So most likely it’s either harmless or the harm has already been done.)
The disturbing aspect of this story is that Monsanto says it stopped testing this wheat strain in 2004. So how did it wind up in an open field? Where else is it growing? And if that seed escaped the laboratory and got into the wild, what else could escape?
This event raises a worry that even Monsanto, the U.S. government, and other GMOs-are-harmless believers have to take seriously: If laboratory strains can’t be controlled, U.S. grain exports in general could become suspect.
Two Oregon bakeries assert that their Christian values won’t let them make wedding cakes for same-sex couples, and that it violates their religious freedom to make them serve that part of the public. But a local news organization had its reporters call in to order cakes for other kinds of celebrations — for divorces, out-of-wedlock births, and so on. Strangely, Christian values didn’t come into play.
Pro Publica puts some context around the IRS scandal.
One of the background themes of The Weekly Sift is that profit-making corporations are dangerous, because they have no morals. I don’t mean that as an insult and I’m not trolling. I just mean that, as a point of fact, corporations have no morals. Their goal is to maximize profit. If they can profit by curing cancer, they will, but if they can profit by giving people cancer, they’ll do that too. It makes no difference to them.*
Especially since Citizens United, you need to understand that any dollar you give to a profit-making corporation is likely to be used against you. Sometimes the assault is obvious, like Chick-fil-A funding anti-gay organizations; if you’re gay and you eat at Chick-fil-A, you’re funding efforts to take away your rights. Other cases are more subtle, like UPS having a seat on the board of ALEC. I’m sure union members ship via UPS all the time without realizing that they’re conspiring in their own destruction.
But what can you do? I don’t care for Verizon’s lobbying on net neutrality, but they have the only cell network that covers all the places I go. If I want an iPad, I can’t get an equivalent product from some tinkerer’s booth at the farmers’ market. And I’m sure my gas purchases have funded plenty of climate-denial propaganda, but my town is set up for cars.
If you try to be a purist about these kinds of things, you’ll end up living in a Unabomber cabin someplace. So the better question is: What’s the low-hanging fruit? You probably can’t (or don’t want to) disentangle yourself from corporate octopus completely, but how much of your money can you route around it without joining a hippie commune or something?
The answers below are not exhaustive and follow a few simple themes: Join co-ops, which are owned by their customers. Deal with local businesses that are owned by individuals or families. If you have to deal with a corporation (and often you do), pick smaller ones over bigger ones — and look for the occasional corporation that is owned by its employees.
Financial services. The no-brainer here is bank at a credit union. You won’t just pull your money away from the bankers who crashed the economy, you’ll get a better deal. This week my credit union gave me an .85% interest rate on an 11-month CD. The best a local profit-making bank would give me was .4% if I stretched it out to 14 months. Whether you’re looking for checking, savings, car loans, or low-interest-rate credit cards, your best bet is probably a credit union.
Like all co-ops, a credit union is owned by its members, who elect its board. So your money is not going to pay outrageous CEO bonuses or get lost gambling on derivatives or building some temple-of-finance edifice. The stock-holders are the customers like you. So the credit union will pay more on your savings and charge less on your loans.
Years ago, you could only join a credit union if you worked at a place that had one, or had some other special connection. But the rules got loosened in 1998, and now there are local credit unions that accept anyone who lives in a particular area. For example, anybody who lives in New Hampshire can join Granite State Credit Union.
Mutual insurance companies are also member-owned, but you need to be careful: Some companies retain “mutual” in their names for historical reasons, but their structure is more complicated. If your policy doesn’t come with voting rights, you’re not really a member-owner.
For more complicated financial services, you might have several other member-owned options.
If you are (or were) in the military, or one of your parents is a USAA member, you can join USAA and get a full range of financial services: brokerage, insurance, whatever.
If you work for an educational institution or some other non-profit, probably not-for-profit TIAA-CREF is one of your retirement-plan options. (I’ve had a TIAA-CREF 401(k) for 29 years.) In addition to 401(k)s, they offer life insurance and individual investment products like mutual funds and brokerage accounts. Possibly anybody can go to their web site and open an individual account, but I haven’t found a FAQ that says that.
But even if you don’t have a military or non-profit connection, Vanguard has brokerage and mutual fund services available to the general public. Like USAA and TIAA-CREF, Vanguard isn’t exactly a co-op, but it is organized in a creative way that avoids Wall Street: It is owned by the mutual funds it manages, and those funds are owned by their investors.
Finally: You can cut the Visa/Mastercard oligopoly out of a transaction by paying cash. Usually you don’t see the difference, but the merchant pays something like 2-3% — which is how some cards can give you 1% cash back on your charges. This is a judgment call. I’ll pocket my 1% if the merchant is another big corporation like Exxon-Mobil. But I’ve started paying cash to local merchants. More of my money stays in the community.
Groceries. The easiest way to reduce the amount of your grocery budget that goes to profit-making corporations is to join a food co-op, if your area has one. More and more of them are springing up. (In my state, one has just opened in Keene, and I’ve pre-joined one that is trying to open in Manchester.)
A food co-op looks just like a grocery store and anybody can shop there, but it’s member-owned. So if you join you can vote and you’ll get a dividend if the store makes money. Because members vote, a food co-op can manifest values other than cost. For example, it can favor local farms or organic agriculture, or whatever the member think is important. Probably some things will be cheaper at Walmart, even after your dividend, but you won’t be mistreating your workers and none of your money will support a right-wing political agenda. This article includes links to help you find food co-ops near you.
Another option is a farmers’ market, where you can buy directly from the local producers. On summer weekends I can see one out my window, but if you don’t know where the nearest one is, check the Local Harvest website.
In community-sponsored agriculture, you buy a share of a local farmer’s output. It helps if you have some way to store the excess and are creative enough in the kitchen to adjust your menu to what’s in season. But if you fit that description, a CSA share isn’t just socially responsible, it will save you money.
Finally, one of the big supermarket chains in the rural Midwest is employee-owned: HyVee.
Retail. Depending on where you live, you might have all kinds of unexpected co-op options. For example, the Black Star brew pub in Austin is a co-op. It’s owned by 3,000 beer-drinkers and managed by its workers. I’ll bet it will never have a Friday’s-style drink-watering scandal.
Book co-ops show up here and there. When I was a graduate student in Chicago, I joined the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, which has expanded since I left. Back in the 80s, I paid $10 for a membership, and when I left town a few years later they bought my share back for $13.
This week I rejoined for $30. The share buy-back provision still applies. You can order books online or get e-books from their partner Kobo. Prices are generally below list, but I suspect not as low as Amazon — for now. Personally, I worry what Amazon will do after it drives Barnes&Noble out of business, as it probably will. In general, we seem to be headed for a retail world of Amazon vs. Walmart, with everyone else reduced to bit players. Maybe avoiding that future is worth paying slightly higher prices now.
Clothing co-op stores exist, but tend to be high end: REI is a co-op. Patagonia is a B-corporation, a relatively new type of company whose structure makes it less purely profit-driven.
Avoid chain restaurants. It should be obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people just don’t think about it. A local restaurant isn’t just less corporate, it keeps money in your community. It’s not just that the owner lives nearby, but the business also probably has a local accountant, a local lawyer, and so on.
Chains aren’t even necessary on car trips any more. Yelp will find you local restaurants wherever you happen to be. And my personal research says that if an interstate exit has a Denny’s, a McDonalds, and some local diner, the diner is pretty good. (The best fried chicken I’ve ever had came from just such a place: the Jubilee Cafe off I-74 in Kickapoo, IL.)
Use the post office. That speaks for itself, I guess.
Utilities. You’re more-or-less stuck with the utilities that serve your home, but the next time you move you might look for an area with municipally owned utilities.
Cable TV probably should have been a municipal utility, but most places took the short-cut of granting a monopoly to a private company. Now a handful of conglomerates dominate the business. But depending on what you watch, you may be able to fire your cable company.
Software/internet. Open-source software is free to use and has gotten pretty good. The Open Source Alternative website lets you specify the commercial software you want to replace, and tells you what your open source options are.
Lately I’ve been using Duck Duck Go as an alternative to Google or Bing. It’s also commercial, but claims not to collect data on users and profile them. I still revert to Google for a few things, but for the most part DDG does what I want with less annoyance.
Some of those suggestions will save you money, while some will raise your costs a little. But none require you to adopt a completely different lifestyle. I find that I feel less trapped when I route some of my money away from the corporate power structure. And if we can get a lot of people to do it, some larger changes become possible. I’ll cover that next week when I review Gar Alperovitz’s new book What Then Must We Do?.
In the meantime, use the comments to tell me what I left out.
* I’m sure it does make a difference to many of the people who work in corporations, and even to some CEOs. But if their moral values consistently reduce profit, they’ll be replaced.
Tuesday I had never heard the term “breadwinner mom”, but by Wednesday afternoon everybody seemed to have an opinion about it — and a reaction to everybody else’s opinions. By Thursday, the reactions to the reactions were the story, and the conversation stopped having much to do with the underlying study.
And that’s too bad, because an important point needs to be made: breadwinner mom is an act of statistical malpractice. The term is badly defined and should never have been attached to a hard statistic like “40% of American homes with children under 18”.
The study that defined it generated so much bad discussion because it couldn’t possibly have generated good discussion; virtually none of the statements you might make about the entire 40% are both true and interesting. You can turn breadwinner mom into a stereotype or you can leave it alone, but you can’t talk about it intelligently.
To see why, let’s start at the beginning. Wednesday, Pew Research released a study. It begins with a statement that (as I’ll explain below) is not entirely true:
A record 40% of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family.
A few paragraphs later we get the definition:
These “breadwinner moms” are made up of two very different groups: 5.1 million (37%) are married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands, and 8.6 million (63%) are single mothers.
You have to be careful when you create a category “made up of very different groups”. Because once you’ve done that, it’s easy to forget how diverse the category is and talk about it as if it were a unified phenomenon.
For example, we might define a category called “minorities” that combines blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, and homosexuals. That would get us a big number — probably almost as big as the 40% Pew claims for breadwinner moms — but at the cost of making the category too cumbersome to say much about. All “minorities” have some reason to feel out of the mainstream and can point to various kinds of discrimination, but it’s hard to find any single issue that cuts across the entire collection. If we started throwing the term around, probably the big number would stick in people’s heads, but the definition would get replaced by a stereotype — poor, dark-skinned people who live in urban ghettos — which would apply to many of the blacks and Hispanics, but would misrepresent most of the Asians, Jews, and homosexuals.
Now imagine being a professional-class suburban Jew who finds himself called to account for the problems “minorities” cause in the urban ghetto.
You might think two groups wouldn’t be hard to keep straight, but under examination, both “single mothers” and “married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands” dissolve into a variety of dissimilar groups.
In a footnote, Pew says:
Single mothers include mothers who are never married, divorced, widowed, separated, or married but the spouse is not in the household.
So some of our “single mothers” are married, and some are not breadwinners. Another footnote says that Pew won’t count single mothers who live with their parents, but think about the range of women still included:
A high-school dropout juggles a fast-food job and a baby, and gets food stamps and some money from her parents, but no help from the baby’s father.
A professional-class mother (whose youngest child is 17) recently divorced. She plans to restart her career soon, but for now lives on a combination of alimony, child support, and the cash settlement from the divorce.
A widow with children has a part-time job, but couldn’t get by without the pension and/or life insurance settlement from her deceased husband.
A Murphy Brown type gave up on finding Mr. Right, but has enough money and enough support from friends and family to raise her child well.
A lesbian can’t marry in her state, but shares child-raising with a long-term partner.
Couples where the wife out-earns the husband are also diverse:
The husband is a good-for-nothing who neither works nor helps around the house.
The husband doesn’t have a paying job, but takes care of the house and kids.
The wife temporarily supports her husband while he finishes a degree or starts a business.
The husband is disabled.
The household lives off the income from the wife’s inherited wealth.
Two professionals both make good salaries, but the wife’s is slightly higher.
Both spouses have successful careers, but the husband’s is in a less lucrative field.
The husband is older and has retired before the kids are out of the house.
Two unskilled workers struggle to find minimum-wage jobs; this year the wife got more hours.
Now lump all those households together, give the new category a catchy name, and then post this graph about how it’s growing.
What have you accomplished, really? Well, mainly you’ve created a monster, a Rorschach Test onto which people can project all their fears about social change. What you haven’t done is raise a worthwhile topic for discussion, because what true statement can anyone make about all those households?
Deep in those numbers somewhere is a phenomenon that’s actually disturbing: children born to never-married women who are too young and too poor and too uneducated to give them a decent shot at success, especially without help from a spouse. That’s nowhere near 40% of households, but it easily becomes the stereotype for the whole group.
That stereotype is what Fox Business Channel’s Juan Williams was reacting to when he said that this trend “is tearing apart minority communities even more than white communities”. Are minority communities being torn apart by women who get high-paying jobs? Of course not. But they might get torn apart by households that don’t have either the personal or monetary resources necessary to give their children a shot at success. A study of that trend would be useful — is that number growing? I’d really like to know — but it wouldn’t have a big headline statistic like 40% of American households.
It’s no wonder a high-achieving mom like Fox News’ Megyn Kelly lashed back at the male Fox pundits who stereotyped her.
But you know who also should be offended? Dads. By lumping single moms together with primary-provider moms, Pew is saying that the two situations are similar. In other words, a man who can’t out-earn his wife might as well not be there at all.
Think about it. John McCain and John Kerry are out-earned by their wives. Michelle Obama has a book out. What if it became such a wild best-seller that her income went higher than Barack’s? Would it then make sense to lump the President in with men who got a girl pregnant and vanished?
Two featured articles this week. First, “Category Error: what’s wrong with the ‘breadwinner mom’ study” focuses on the new Pew Research report that got so much attention — not so much the flap over the crazy reactions to it from the war-on-women types, the report itself. I don’t see what Pew was thinking when it defined the category. The women in it are so diverse that I have a hard time making any true statement about all of them. (For example, they aren’t all breadwinners.) Just about the only thing you can do with the term “breadwinner mom” is turn it into a stereotype; no wonder that’s what pundits did.
The second article “Starve the Corporate Beast” discusses how to keep your money from going through the corporate system by using co-ops, local businesses, and employee-owned businesses. Most of us don’t want to live completely off the grid — I know I don’t — but what simple changes can you make to avoid supporting corporate power?
In the weekly summary, people were talking about Obama’s nefarious scheme to “pack” the D. C. Appeals Court — by nominating people to fill the vacant positions, like the Constitution says a president is supposed to do. Also: the earn-to-give path, where you pursue a high-paying career with the idea of living simply and giving most of the money away.
Other stuff worth your attention: I found a couple interesting interviews. In one, Noam Chomsky talks about anarchism, and in the other theologian Peter Rollins describes how most churches have turned God into yet another idol. (You can tell you’re worshipping an idol, he says, if it gives you certainty and security. In the presence of a real God you feel uncertain and insecure, but you learn to be OK with it.)
The breadwinner-mom article should come out in the next hour or so, and I expect the others to be out by noon, east coast time.
We must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America. … As our fight enters a new phase, America’s legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be the end of the discussion. To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power — or risk abusing it.
This week everybody was talking about the Oklahoma tornado
I assume you already know the basics, which have gotten 24/7 coverage.
A side issue is whether or not we can blame global warming. In general, as the planet warms there is more heat in the ocean and more moisture in the atmosphere, creating the potential for more violent storms. However, from year-to-year or even decade-to-decade, the tornadoes in one particular area are subject to a lot of other factors.
So, for example, the U.S. had unusually few tornadoes in 2012, probably because of the drought in Tornado Alley. Did climate change cause the altered precipitation patterns that created the drought? Maybe, but we’re getting a little speculative now. (I’m always suspicious when both too much and too little of something — i.e., tornadoes — produce the same explanation.)
the science on tornadoes and climate change isn’t clear enough to OMFG about it just yet.
Here’s my rule of thumb: Am I willing to accept the validity of this measurement if it turns against my favored theory in the future? In other words: If for the next year or two the number and severity of tornadoes in Oklahoma goes down again, will I feel like global warming is refuted? My answer is no, which means I shouldn’t put too much stock in the global-warming/tornado connection now.
On the other hand, I would reconsider if the Earth had a genuinely cold year — colder than the 100-year average — with no obvious event like a major volcano to explain it. So when April turned out to be the 338th consecutive month with an average global temperature above the 20th-century average, I thought that was significant. In other words: If you’re 28 or younger, you’ve never experienced a globally cool month.
and President Obama’s speech
Thursday at the National Defense University, President Obama recognized that American democracy can’t survive an endless global war. I summarize in “This War Must End”.
and the IRS
As no trail to the White House emerges and the scandal hinges on how the regulations define 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s, you have to wonder: What Happens to a Scandal With Boring Details? Prediction: The mainstream media will lose interest, but the conservative media will invent whatever exciting details it needs to keep its audience aroused.
and the I-5 bridge collapse in Washington
The cartoon is actually a reaction to the 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, but nothing has really changed. Which bridge will go down next? New York Magazine suggests that it could be one of the busiest bridges in the Northeast: the Tappan Zee.
Since no one died this time, I don’t think I can be accused of “politicizing the tragedy” to point out that President Obama’s American Jobs Act of 2011 included $50 billion for infrastructure improvements. It could not overcome a Republican filibuster. The proposal has been back every year since, and is now part of Obama’s 2014 budget proposal.
It’s entirely legit for Republicans to wonder how the necessary work will be paid for, but it’s not legit to just block Obama’s proposal. If Republicans don’t offer an alternative infrastructure plan, then their plan is to keep watching our bridges fall down.
and atheism
I can’t remember a week where atheism popped up in so many stories.
The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!
Then Father Thomas Rosica — quoted on CNN’s Belief Blog as a “Vatican spokesman” in a post that countless other articles linked to — seemed to take it all back, saying that Pope Francis’ homilies speak to the typical Catholic as a “pastor and preacher”, not “in the context of a theological faculty or academy”, and that the Pope had “no intention of provoking a theological debate on the nature of salvation”. Rosica reiterated that
Catholics believe that it is only in Jesus Christ that this salvation is conferred, and through Christianity and the one Church that it must be mediated to all people.
Fine, except … Rosica wasn’t writing as a Vatican spokesman and didn’t claim to be. He was an official spokesman during the transition from Benedict to Francis, but Wikipedia says “He completed his service upon the election and inauguration of Petrine Ministry of Pope Francis.” So although Rosica probably understands the Pope’s mind far better than I do, in this case his opinion is just his opinion. [BTW: Need I mention how disappointed I am that CNN didn’t get this right? It’s not hard.]
I would like to ask that you not bow your heads. I would like to ask that you take a moment to look around the room at all of the men and women here, in this moment, sharing together this extraordinary experience of being alive and of dedicating ourselves to working toward improving the lives of the people in our state.
Wednesday, another legislator said, “That’s not a prayer” and led the legislature in a second daily Christian prayer as “repentance” for the previous day. That display of Christian supremacism led third member to object:
I want to remind the House and my colleagues and everybody here that several of us here are not Christianized. I’m a traditional Navajo, so I stand here every day and participate in prayers … This is the United States, this is America, and we all represent different people … and you need to respect that. Your God is no more powerful than my God. We all come from the same creator.
Most striking of all was the viral video where CNN’s Wolf Blitzer described Rebecca Vitsmun (an Oklahoma tornado survivor) as “blessed” and pushed her to “thank the Lord” for her and her baby escaping harm, prompting her to confess “I’m actually an atheist.” She was very gracious and dignified about it: “I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord.”
Blitzer’s clumsy interview points out the amount of religious propaganda we take for granted whenever natural disaster strikes. (Funny how nobody on TV ever says, “The randomness of this destruction reinforces my belief that sometimes stuff just happens and you can’t take it personally.”) Slate’s Mark Joseph Stein called out the tunnel vision in ABC’s reporting of the “miracle ending” at Briarwood school, where no children died.
The families and friends of the seven children who died at Plaza Towers would not consider this ending really all that miraculous.
God’s mercies are curiously selective. Toplady, the author of “Rock of Ages,” moved from one vicarage to another; a week after the move, the vicarage he had formerly occupied burnt down, with great loss to the new vicar. Thereupon Toplady thanked God; but what the new vicar did is not known.
and you also might be interested in …
Last week I talked about how Jonathan Karl’s dishonest journalism on Benghazi briefly made it look like there really was a White House cover-up. It turns out we should have seen that coming. Two years ago, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) had him pegged as a “right-wing mole at ABC News“. He comes out of the same conservative program that gave us Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry and Laura Ingraham.
Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook testified to a Senate committee about the tricks that allow his company to make many billions of dollars and pay very little tax in the U.S. or anywhere else. The business-news blog Quartz has a good summary of the problems in corporate tax law and how Apple abuses them.
Corporations and their political sock puppets often make the case for a “tax holiday” that would allow companies to bring overseas profits to the U.S. at a lower tax rate. It’s worth noting that a lot of this money is “overseas” only in some theoretical tax-law sense. Quartz reports: “Most of the $102 billion Apple is keeping ‘overseas’ is in US banks.”
Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that’s not “terrorism”, but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism? … Once you declare that the “entire globe is a battlefield” (which includes London) and that any “combatant” (defined as broadly as possible) is fair game to be killed – as the US has done – then how can the killing of a solider of a nation engaged in that war, horrific though it is, possibly be “terrorism”?
The issues on which President Obama has most disappointed liberals (and strayed farthest from his 2008 campaign rhetoric) have centered on the War on Terror. Yes, he got our combat troops out of Iraq (slowly) and is winding down the Afghan War (finally). He did renounce torture as an interrogation technique. But rather than reverse Bush administration’s expansion of presidential power and paint it as a one-time over-reaction to an emergency (like the Japanese internment camps of World War II), Obama has largely ratified Bush’s power-grab, and in some cases even grabbed more. As many of us feared at the time, it is hard for a president to cut back his own power, even if that’s what his principles say he should do.
Thursday, in a major speech at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, President Obama sounded a lot more like Candidate Obama in two ways: He took civil liberties issues more seriously than he has in some while, and he talked to us as if we were adults who can think about complex issues. In that second sense, it was his best speech since his campaign speech about race.
To put a few of my own words in Obama’s mouth: War is bad for democracy. A government at war needs to keep secrets, and it needs to favor security over freedom. The bigger the war, the worse for democracy.
Modeling the threat as a “Global War on Terror” amalgamates every little extremist group and home-grown terrorist into one giant enemy that justifies fighting one giant war. Maybe there was some justification for that framing immediately after 9-11, when Al Qaeda had a unified leadership that seemed to be able to direct multiple efforts all over the world. But:
Today, the core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the path to defeat. Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us. They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston. They’ve not carried out a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11.
Instead, what we’ve seen is the emergence of various al Qaeda affiliates. From Yemen to Iraq, from Somalia to North Africa, the threat today is more diffuse … Unrest in the Arab world has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria. But here, too, there are differences from 9/11. In some cases, we continue to confront state-sponsored networks like Hezbollah that engage in acts of terror to achieve political goals. Other of these groups are simply collections of local militias or extremists interested in seizing territory. And while we are vigilant for signs that these groups may pose a transnational threat, most are focused on operating in the countries and regions where they are based. And that means we’ll face more localized threats like what we saw in Benghazi, or the BP oil facility in Algeria
What we face now, in other words, are a lot of little threats, not one big threat like Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda of 2001.
the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11. [my italics] … if dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11. … Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.
And he recognizes that he can’t promise a perfect defense against those threats.
Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society. But what we can do — what we must do — is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger to us, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all the while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend.
I read this as a rebuke of President Bush’s sweeping statement three days after 9-11: “our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”
If that’s our goal, then we are never done and we have never gone far enough. But if we have a more manageable goal (say, to reduce the risk of terrorism to below the level of many other risks we live with), then democracy might have a chance to survive.
The rest of the speech is more specific and tactical.
Drones. Obama defends drone strikes as “effective” (“measured against the history of putting American troops in distant lands among hostile populations”) and “legal” (i.e., in accordance with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress after 9-11), but admits the discussion can’t end there.
America’s legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be the end of the discussion. To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power — or risk abusing it.
Obama claims that “clear guidelines, oversight and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance that I signed yesterday” embodies that needed discipline. (I haven’t studied those guidelines — which he partially outlines — but I doubt I’m going to buy their sufficiency, given how easily Obama or some future president could change them or just ignore them. He later mentions options for moving some oversight outside the executive branch, but doesn’t commit himself.)
He specifically defends the targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen:
when a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens, and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot, his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team.
“Force alone cannot make us safe.” Obama says we need to increase foreign aid, and that we should support transitions to democracy in places like Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya “because the peaceful realization of individual aspirations will serve as a rebuke to violent extremists.”
In this country, we should “work with the Muslim-American community” to “prevent violent extremism inspired by violent jihadists”. Speaking in my own words: The guy who is a committed member of a American Muslim community mosque is not going to blow himself up, any more than a Baptist deacon is going to blow up an abortion clinic. In any religion, the people to worry about are the alienated loners who want to go from loser to hero in one big step.
Civil liberties. Even after the Boston bombings, Obama says, “we do not deport someone or throw somebody in prison in the absence of evidence.” He also says we need “careful constraints on the tools the government uses to protect sensitive information, such as the state secrets doctrine.”
His defense of press freedom, calling for a shield law for journalists and saying “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs” in some ways misses the point. The targets of the AP investigations are leakers, not journalists. But a journalist’s ability to investigate the government is compromised if sources suspect their communications are going to be intercepted.
Repeal the AUMF. The AUMF was a very sweeping grant of power that Congress gave President Bush after 9-11. It didn’t have a time limit, but maybe its mission has been accomplished.
I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.
Close Guantanamo. Finally, he discusses closing Guantanamo, which was one of the first things he pledged to do after taking office. In asking Congress to cooperate with him this time, he invokes the judgment of history.
Imagine a future — 10 years from now or 20 years from now — when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not part of our country. Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are being held on a hunger strike. … Is this who we are? Is that something our Founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave our children? Our sense of justice is stronger than that.
And that may be the best reason to hope that President Obama is serious this time, and that he might really start to disassemble the wartime presidency that Bush built. As he gets closer to leaving office, the temptation to shore up presidential power should wane, and the judgment of history may start to weigh on his mind.
The IRS scandal is starting to look like one of those movies with a cool title and a heart-pounding trailer that ends up delivering two hours of excruciating boredom.
The initial headline “IRS Targeted Tea Party Groups” promised conspiracy, duplicity, and suspense. Surely we’d find a bloody trail leading towards the White House. Investigating that trail would lead to a series of exciting confrontations, where ever-higher-level members of the administration would face the choice of flipping on their bosses or falling on their swords. Eventually, the story might culminate in a presidential resignation (like Nixon) or impeachment (like Clinton).
Nobody has found any trail pointing towards the White House. More and more it looks like bureaucrats broke the rules for the same reason bureaucrats usually break rules — to make their tedious jobs easier. Like cops profiling black teens, IRS agents profiled conservative groups because (i) from their (possibly biased) point of view, that’s who they expected to be cheating, and (ii) it was simpler than thinking up legal ways to generate suspects.
If you want to take viewers deeper than that, you’ll need describe how the regulations define and treat 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations differently from 527 organizations. You’ll have to send cameras to the offices of victimized Tea Party groups and re-enact them filling out unnecessary forms. I’m sure people will be glued to their TVs.
Thursday on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word, Chris Hayes explained how he looks at this as a TV host:
My feeling is that as it comes out — as the media is forced to cover what is essentially a somewhat boring story of bureaucratic malfeasance or overwhelmedness or bureaucratic incompetencies or just bureaucratic bureaucraticness — it becomes less interesting. I’m genuinely curious the degree to which this can have legs. … I have hopes that just from a sheer I-have-to-produce-a-television-show-every-day level, is this interesting? Like, it’s not. … I think the actual details of it end up not sustaining the drama. … What was in the headline was dramatic. … The third through 15th paragraphs are not dramatic.
But Nate Silver makes a different prediction. His model recognizes that a scandal “having legs” involves more than just whether the charges are important or true. He judges a scandal’s potential by (i) whether the accusation is easier to describe than the defense; (ii) how well the story fits or contradicts some pre-existing narrative; (iii) whether the opposition can push the scandal without getting tarred by it; and (iv) whether the media has anything shinier to pay attention to.
By that measure, the IRS scandal looks to have a future: Again, it’s got that great initial headline. It fits two standard conservative narratives: that conservatives are persecuted, and that government is out of control. It figures in the duel between liberal and conservative narratives about Obama: Is Obama basically a good guy doing his best in a difficult job, or is he a ruthless Chicago politician? Since Republicans don’t have their own IRS, this can’t backfire on them the way the Clinton adultery scandal did. And finally, 2012 is over and 2016 is a long way off, so political reporters are looking for excitement like bored 8-year-olds at the end of summer vacation.
How can we reconcile these two conflicting predictions? I think they describe two different universes: For the general public, the IRS scandal will strangle on its own tedium, as Hayes predicts. But it will reach its full scandalous potential inside the conservative media bubble, where the exciting details necessary to keep it going will be invented from whole cloth.
The best insight into the conservative media comes from a series of posts by Tod Kelly on the League of Ordinary Gentlemen blog. His theme has been: “America’s conservative media machine is slowly but surely killing America’s conservative party.”
In the late 90s through the early and mid 00s, the GOP found that it could increase both number of voters and voter passion by aligning itself with a media machine that was initially created to build ratings from shock value. … An inherent flaw with this type of model is that while it leads to quick ratings and advertising profits, it can be difficult to sustain. If you spend one week calling the President a liar and an idiot, it’s not going to be long before calling him a lying idiot isn’t really all that shocking. You have to continually push just a little bit more as you go, or risk being irrelevant in the shock-media world.
… Somewhere along the line, however, this model has to break down – partly because you eventually reach a ceiling where the base that believes the ever-increasingly shocking claims is small enough to make the party you’re backing politically irrelevant, and partly because to those that aren’t part of the machine or the base you begin to look increasingly out of touch. Birtherism is a fairly good example of this ceiling being reached, as are the Death Panels and Obama/Hitler youth programs. Unfortunately for the Right, however, once you tie yourself and your success so inexorably to the machine it becomes almost impossible to untangle yourself from it.
Republican politicians initially thought they would define a narrative that their media machine would trumpet to the world. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the rest would serve their governing agenda and help them win elections.
But the ratings are good — because media companies don’t need a majority, they just need a small core of dedicated viewers and listeners. (Glenn Beck’s subscribers pay $100 per year; a tiny fraction of the voting public can make him very rich.)
Kelly outlined how the primacy of ratings shaped four bogus stories leading up to the 2012 election.
the story that the President order[ed] his own people be abandoned in Benghazi, the story that the president started Operation Fast & Furious to overturn the second amendment, the story that UN forces will soon be entering the United States to collect the guns of private citizens, and the story that once reelected, the President is set to enact some kind of national Sharia law.
Each of these started as real stories about actions taken by the current administration. As we will see, however, in each case a pattern begins to emerge:
1. The original story, while absolutely showing a potential miscalculation by the White House, isn’t really damning as initially reported (usually by FOX).
2. The story is then taken by bloggers, talk radio show hosts, and FOX “expert” commentators and reworked to better fit the narrative of Obama as evil usurper. The facts are changed entirely, but no real journalism is used to gather new information; instead, the media machine relies on self-referencing its own continually shifting commentaries on the original story until a very different and far more nefarious sounding story emerges.
3. The huge whirlwind of the media machine is assumed to itself be indicative of “unreported” news, and thus the original reporting source (again, usually FOX) re-reports the story with the new “facts.” (Reminding one of that moment in the children’s game Telephone when the original child announces what their starting phrase has morphed into).
4. The media machine and its audience point to the mainstream media’s ignoring of the new, factually dubious story as “proof” that the new story is true.
It’s not hard to apply that model to the IRS story. Tedium will not be a problem for Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity any more than it is for Stephen King. Boredom is never a problem if you let the story generate its own facts.
Republican politicians — even if they know better — will feel that they have no choice other than to pander to the invented story, even if it sounds crazy to most voters. They may even find themselves believing it, until confronted with reality, as Mitt Romney was in the presidential debates.
So even if the trail the White House remains totally bloodless and cold, we may well see impeachment hearings. Beating the drum for impeachment is great for ratings, and what Republican politician is in a position to say no?
Two main articles this week: One covering President Obama’s surprisingly thoughtful speech about the future of the War on Terror, and the other wondering what happens to the IRS scandal now that boring details are starting to emerge. (Prediction: Mainstream media will get bored and move on. Fox News and talk radio will manufacture the exciting details they need to keep their audiences entertained.) The IRS article will be out momentarily, and the War on Terror article a couple hours later.
In the weekly summary: the Oklahoma tornado, the I-5 bridge collapse, a strange coincidence of stories involving atheism, good news for ObamaCare, and a solar airplane.
[This is coming out two days late due to a glitch I still don’t understand.]
I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We’re still just a child creature, we’re still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We’re growing up, we’re moving into adolescence now. When we grow up – man, we’re going to be something!
This week everybody was talking about scandals and pseudo-scandals
As the week went on, though, the scandals mostly fell apart — particularly after it came out that Republicans had faked the “White House emails” that led to ABC’s big scoop.
I summarize the current state of the Benghazi, IRS, and AP stories — and explain why Republicans feel compelled to manufacture these pseudo-scandals — in Blow Smoke, Yell Fire.
If you’d told me last week that Angelina Jolie’s breasts would be front-page news, I’d have pictured a very different scenario. But Tuesday she announced in the New York Times that she had chosen to have a preventive double mastectomy, replacing both of her (apparently healthy) breasts with implants to reduce her risk of breast cancer.
Jolie’s situation is unusual: Her mother died of ovarian cancer at 56, and genetic tests showed a defective BRCA1 gene that is associated with high risk of both breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Still, her decision was a Rorschach test that produced strong reactions of all types, especially among women. (A good collection of links is here.)
Many were strongly supportive and appreciated the fact that Jolie had put a public face on a difficult issue. I was reminded of Magic Johnson’s announcement in 1991 that he had HIV. It’s easy to either ignore a medical problem or demonize the people who have it, until it hits someone you know. Celebrities play the role of someone-you-know for an entire society.
Now I know why patients are so mad at us. This is supposed to be patient-centered care. But it feels more like system-centered care: the medical equivalent of a car wash. I’m told incomplete and inaccurate information to shuttle me toward surgery; and I’m not being listened to.
I came to discuss nutrition, exercise and close follow-up.
I’m told to get my breasts removed—the sooner the better.
The other issue this cast a light on is gene patents: Even if you think you might be in Jolie’s situation, getting the genetic test will probably cost about $3000, and insurance often doesn’t cover it. Why is it so expensive? Because Myriad Genetics “owns” the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes. It doesn’t just own the testing procedure; it has a patent on the genes themselves. Even a company that came up with a different test couldn’t market it. If that seems weird, that’s probably because it is weird. The Supreme Court is supposed to hear a case about that soon, though it’s hard to imagine the Roberts Court ruling against any form of property.
[Full disclosure: My wife is a breast cancer survivor whose mother died of breast cancer. She recently had the same genetic test as Jolie, which our insurance covered. If it had come out badly — it didn’t — she would have faced a similar choice.]
and the new Star Trek movie
OK, maybe my definition of “everybody” is skewed. Still, lots of people who ordinarily write about other things were writing about Into Darkness, the second step in the J. J. Abrams reboot of the Trek movie franchise. I haven’t seen it yet, but the reactions from people who have center on two themes:
It’s interesting that the serious-fan discontent is coalescing around Abrams’ second film, but I think I know why: For the first, fans were just glad the reboot was happening. They/we wanted the original characters back, but the original actors were too old to carry on. Plus, the reboot’s plot necessarily was about how to get the band back together without trapping them in a narrative universe where all possible suspense is killed by what we already know about the Federation’s future. Mission accomplished well enough to justify a new series of movies. Fine.
But the second movie has to answer the question: What are you going to do with the freedom the new timeline grants? All the challenges faced in the old timeline — Klingons, Romulans, Q, the Borg, the Ferengi, etc. — are still out there somewhere. That invites a long background meditation on fate: What has to turn out the way it did the first time, and what could change? Or we could forget all that and have a lot of starship chase scenes and shoot-outs with phasers.
Which raises the question: What is Star Trek about, really?Matt Yglesias (who usually doesn’t write about this kind of thing) sees the heart of the franchise in the optimistic liberal values of the mid-20th century: envisioning a future where humanity gets past its tribal struggles, overcomes scarcity, and devotes its most powerful starship to seeking knowledge and helping other species rather than aggrandizing its wealth and power. Star Trek celebrates the kind of courage you need to hang in an uncertain situation and not shoot, while waiting for a peaceful solution to emerge.
At its best [Star Trek] was a deeply thoughtful mythology about ourselves and our conflicts, an allegory of our modern problems and flaws of humanity—war, greed, bigotry, narcissism—and how we overcome them, told as science fiction. That’s why we’re still telling these stories nearly 50 years later.
it’s hard to emerge from “Into Darkness” without a feeling of disappointment, even betrayal. Maybe it is too late to lament the militarization of “Star Trek,” but in his pursuit of blockbuster currency, Mr. Abrams has sacrificed a lot of its idiosyncrasy and, worse, the large-spirited humanism that sustained it.
Atlantic’s Christopher Orr sees the surrender of Star Trek’s “deliberative, technology-obsessed, and science fictive” values to “visceral, imbued with mysticism, and space operatic” Star Wars values. (Abrams is the current custodian of both movie franchises.)
Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir recalls Abrams complaining that previous Star Treks were “too philosophical” and accounts for Into Darkness like this:
the Abrams “Star Trek” movies feel as if they didn’t just depict an alternate universe but were created in one – a universe in which the original “Star Trek” was an action-adventure Marvel Comics title rather than a geeky, Enlightenment-saturated 1960s TV series. … There’s absolutely nothing wrong with “Star Trek Into Darkness” – once you understand it as a generic comic-book-style summer flick faintly inspired by some half-forgotten boomer culture thing.
He fantasizes “that those in charge of the ‘Star Trek’ universe could have entrusted its rebirth to someone who actually liked it.”
But hey, Into Darkness will probably make money, and that’s what counts. I think the Ferengi have a rule about that.
Japan’s national debt is approaching 245% of GDP, more than double the U.S. ratio and considerably higher than even the famous bad example of Greece. The government has announced its intention to create inflation; it’s goal is 2% per year, reversing the current deflation. To do that it is prepared to double the money supply.
If the deficit hawks know anything about how the world works, Japan should crash and burn. Conversely, if it doesn’t, the Paul Ryans know nothing about how the world works.
Filibuster reform is being discussed again, as Harry Reid is admitting privately that he made a mistake in not pushing it harder at the beginning of this Congress.
It isn’t just the unprecedented number of filibusters that is causing this, but the broader ambitions behind them. In the past, both parties have at times filibustered nominees that they had some personal objection to: the nominee was too extreme, too acerbic, or had some scandal in his or her past.
During the Obama years, though, Republicans have been using the filibuster as part of a global strategy to monkey-wrench parts of the government they don’t like. No one has ever done that before.
For example, Republicans have blocked Richard Cordray’s nomination as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — not because they have uncovered something questionable about him, but because they don’t think the CFPB should exist. As a post on Senator Shelby’s web site put it in 2011: “44 Republican U.S. Senators today sent a letter to President Obama stating that they will not confirm any nominee, regardless of party affiliation, to be the Director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) absent structural changes”. The stalemate has continued ever since.
Now the monkey-wrenching threatens to shut down the National Labor Relations Board. Legally, the NLRB can’t function without a quorum, and unless some of Obama’s nominees are confirmed it won’t have one when the next member’s term expires in August. So come August, it will be open season on workers’ rights, because the federal government will be out of the picture. You don’t have to change the law if you can shut down the enforcement agency.
People are often unaware of their own ignorance (Kruger & Dunning, 1999), they seek out information that supports their current preferences (Nickerson, 1998), they process new information in biased ways that strengthen their current preferences (Lord, Ross & Lepper, 1979), they affiliate with other people having similar preferences (Lazarsfeld & Merton, 1954), and they assume that others’ views are as extreme as their own (Van Boven, Judd, & Sherman, 2012).
Then they did a series of experiments and found that people’s certainty about policy proposals goes up after they’re asked to give reasons why they hold their position, but goes down after they’re asked to explain how the underlying proposals are supposed to work.
Across three studies we show that people have unjustified confidence in their mechanistic understanding of policies. Attempting to generate a mechanistic explanation undermines this illusion of understanding and leads to more moderate positions.
And they suggest:
that political debate might be more productive if partisans first engage in substantive and mechanistic discussion of policies before engaging in the more customary discussion of preferences and positions.
This matches my experience during 29 years of marriage: We’re more likely to come to consensus on where to take a vacation if we first imagine what we would do in a variety of places, and only later express preferences.
To follow up on last week’s discussion of Syria, I found this map at Wikipedia. Red is Assad/Alawite/Shia controlled. Green is rebel/Sunni. Beige is Kurdish.
Since we’re already talking Star Trek, here’s a polarizing graphic:
The Weekly Sift 
