Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

Secret Laws II: It’s just as bad when Obama does it

February 11, 2013 – 10:53 am

Perversely, I wish that the War on Terror would give us a poster child, some cute and innocent victim of government over-reach whose picture we could put on placards and wave as we march through the streets. But for nearly 12 years, under both Bush and Obama, the government has been either too smart or too lucky to provide us with one.

Bad posters. Jose Padilla was an American citizen arrested at O’Hare Airport. Before he was charged with any crime, he spent more than three years in solitary confinement, including sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation. Quite likely he had been driven insane by the time he faced trial. But he was a brown-skinned Chicago street thug who, even if he never actually did any acts of terror (and may never have done anything), was a big talker. And they did eventually manage to convict him on a vague conspiracy charge (after he was mentally unable to either defend himself or trust any lawyer), so he doesn’t generate a lot of public sympathy.

Maher Arar was a Canadian/Syrian dual citizen who didn’t officially enter the U.S. at all. We arrested him during a layover at JFK Airport, held him for two weeks, and then shipped him off to be tortured in Syria for nearly a year. Both Syria and Canada say he was innocent, and he was eventually released. Canada awarded him millions in damages, but the U.S. government so far has avoided avoided any legal repercussions by claiming that it can’t defend against Arar’s lawsuit without revealing state secrets. (The torture happened during the Bush years, but the Obama administration is continuing the state-secrets claim.) But Arar isn’t a good poster child either, because he looks foreign, isn’t an American citizen, and wants to forget his whole ordeal.

Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen who was targeted and killed by an American drone attack in 2011 in Yemen, a country where we are not officially at war. What label to put on his death — casualty, assassination, execution — is debatable. But it is not debatable that he was charged with nothing and never had a trial. He’s also a bad poster child, though, because he supported Al Qaeda and counseled people like the Fort Hood shooter. The government claims he planned terrorist attacks, but no evidence supporting that claim has ever been made public.

These cases show that something is deeply screwed up. But without a sympathetic face to put on a procedural abuse, it’s hard to get anybody excited. If the government could torture Jose Padilla or kill Anwar al-Awlaki without any legal process, it could do same to you or me. Since we refuse to identify with people like Padilla and Awlaki, though, we don’t feel personally threatened.

Martin Niemöller’s “First they came for …” is one of the most widely abused quotes in current American political discourse, but this is the setting where it makes sense: When you let the government violate the rights of people you don’t like or don’t care about, you lose the principle. Someday you may be unpopular too, and then how will you defend yourself?

Secret laws under Bush. One of the worst abuses of the Bush administration didn’t even produce bad poster children, because it was abstract: They used secret legal opinions to justify their other power grabs.

When it took office, the Obama administration seemed to be rejecting that course by releasing nine secret memos from the Office of Legal Counsel. The memos explained why it was legal for the President to violate treaties, wiretap without warrants, and do just about anything he thought national security required. Jack Balkin summed it up like this:

The President, because he is President, may do whatever he thinks is necessary, even in the domestic context, if he acts for military and national security reasons in his capacity as Commander in Chief.

To understand the power of these memos, you need understand the role of the OLC: It’s essentially the executive branch’s version of the Supreme Court. If you work for any department or agency of the federal government and you wonder whether something you’re doing is legal, you ask your office’s lawyers. If they kick the question upstairs, and then the upstairs lawyers kick it further upstairs, eventually it winds up at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department. Somebody at the OLC writes a memo, and that memo is then the official interpretation of the law for the whole federal government — at least until somebody sues and the judicial branch starts weighing in.

So if you as a government official believe that the policy you’re implementing is unconstitutional, that’s not for you to say. If the OLC has blessed it, they’re the experts.

That’s a fine system as long as the OLC does its job in good faith and is accountable for its mistakes. But the Bush OLC wrote opinions to justify whatever the administration wanted to do, regardless of the law or the Constitution; and it avoided accountability by keeping its most egregious memos secret, so that non-administration legal experts could not tell the public (or Congress) how absurd they were. I commented at the time:

You never need to classify the fact that 2+2=4. But if you want the government to operate under the assumption that 2+2=5, then you do have to classify it

There is a role for secrecy at the OLC, but only in so far as the facts of the situation are classified. So, for example, if the Pentagon wanted to know whether a proposed weapons system would violate a treaty, a memo answering that specific question might necessarily include classified facts about the system. But a purely abstract memo explaining how the OLC interprets the language of the treaty — there’s no excuse for classifying stuff like that.

In fact, this kind of secrecy violates the oldest, most basic principle of the rule of law: The law must be public. If, behind the scenes, you can interpret the law away or even reverse it completely, then we don’t have the rule of law.

Targeted killing. The hard questions of law happen when two constitutional principles conflict. For example: I have freedom of the press, but my right to publish can be limited by Congress’ power to establish copyrights. I have freedom of speech, but some speech is libel or treason or fraud or pornography. Questions about where the boundaries fall are why we need people on the Supreme Court rather than machines.

The Constitution gives lots of rights to American citizens accused of crimes. The Sixth Amendment says:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

And the Fourteenth says that this is not a narrow right:

nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

This clause has been interpreted as applying to the federal government as well as the states.

On the other hand, the Constitution also gives the government the power to make war. It doesn’t define war, but it’s hard to imagine any definition that wouldn’t include the power to kill people without trials. When an American citizen enters a battlefield wearing enemy colors — as many did during the Civil War — the government’s power to make war trumps the citizen’s right to a trial or any other kind of due process. That’s never been controversial.

But the War on Terror has fuzzed everything up. The enemy isn’t a country or government. Its soldiers don’t wear uniforms. The conflict often does not take the form of “battles” fought on “battlefields”. No one knows when the war might be over or what conditions could end it.

So the boundary between war-making powers and Sixth-Amendment rights is not so clear any more. If the government thinks you might be a terrorist in league with Al Qaeda, when can it kill you as if you were an enemy soldier on a battlefield, and when does it have to prove its case to a jury?

This ties in with a bunch of your other constitutional rights. Are you free to hang around with people the government thinks are terrorists or to communicate with them frequently? Can you work with them on projects that you believe are unrelated to terrorism? Can you put forward ideas that are not themselves treason, but are congenial to people who might be enemies?

And finally: What’s your protection against being killed by a rogue government official who just doesn’t like you? Can he invent a charge of terrorism against you, or exaggerate your real-but-harmless connections to terrorists?

As unsympathetic as he was in many ways, Anwar al-Awlaki exemplified all those issues. He wasn’t on a traditional battlefield when we blew up his car, and while he undoubtedly had some relationship to Al Qaeda, the government never had to back up its claims that he had an operational role in terrorism. Here’s what I wrote at the time of his death:

Al-Awlaki is dead because the President signed a piece of paper saying that he was a bad man. I suspect he probably was a bad man, so it’s hard to be all that broken up about his death. But in theory, the President (or some future president) could sign a piece of paper saying that I’m a bad man too. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some due process about that?

Secret laws under Obama. You know what the answer to that question is? It’s a secret. There’s an OLC memo describing when the president can order a hit on an American citizen, but it hasn’t been released to the public, or even to Congress. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees just got it, after asking for years. 

So that’s the state of transparency on this issue: The boundary between the government’s war-making power and the citizen’s right to trial is secret.

In a letter to CIA-Director nominee John Brennan, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) says:

I believe that every American has the right to know when the government believes it has the right to kill them. 

The Obama administration disagrees. Wyden has raised another question I hadn’t even considered: Does the government owe a citizen the right to surrender?

Think about it. The process that puts names onto the kill list is secret, so you might not know you’re on it until you se the drones circling. What if you want to turn yourself in? What if you think this is all a big mistake and you want to clear your name? If you’re not actually pointing a weapon at someone at the moment, aren’t you due that much process?

These are not questions about weapons systems or the identities of secret agents. They are abstract questions of law, that could and should be debated in public. If the administration has any reason for dodging that discussion — beyond simple embarrassment at the flimsiness of its justifications — it isn’t telling anybody.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

February 11, 2013 – 6:40 am

The John Brennan confirmation hearings have shamed me into recognizing that a lot of the stuff I hated in the Bush administration has continued under Obama. Not that I didn’t know that, and I even wrote about it from time to time, but I had lost my sense of urgency about it.

It’s the same problem Republicans had during the Bush years: Yes, these powers invite abuse, but I trust Obama not to do the worst possible things with them. So I’m against the powers, but I’ve had a hard time maintaining my outrage. During the campaign, no Democrat challenged Obama, and no Republican  — other than Ron Paul, who I don’t trust and can’t accept for a lot of other reasons — recognized these issues at all. So what was the point of bringing it all up?

That’s the wrong way to think about it. This is supposed a government of laws, not of men. Whatever powers we allow Obama to wield will still be there for the next president, and the one after that. Eventually something really bad is going to happen. So the featured article this week will be “Secret Law II: It’s just as bad when Obama does it”. It still needs work, so it may not appear until almost noon.

The weekly summary will be worth looking at just for the opening quotes. There’s also a great snow photo from Nemo, a few more links on guns, an infectious British bar song that both Occupiers and Tea Partiers should be able to dance to, one more reason not to trust Ron Paul, Bill Maher’s hilarious reprisal in an argument Donald Trump really should have left alone, great responses to that Super Bowl ad about farmers, and more.

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Being Them

February 4, 2013 – 12:38 pm

It’s easy sometimes for the [immigration] discussion to take on a feeling of us versus them. And when that happens, a lot of folks forget that most of us used to be them.

— President Barack Obama (Tuesday)

This week everybody was talking about immigration

The early part of a new presidential term is a magic moment for discussing the country’s real problems and what might be done about them. At the beginning of Obama’s first term we talked about how to stimulate the economy and expand access to healthcare. This time we’re talking about guns, immigration, and (maybe soon) climate change.

There’s no guarantee anything will get done, but isn’t it wonderful to be talking about something real? “Why can’t we do this all the time?” you wonder, and I have no answers.

So this week a bipartisan group of senators presented their immigration framework and President Obama responded by presenting his. (A bipartisan group in the House is still working on its plan.) Each has four parts, and the parts are remarkably similar: border security, a path to citizenship for people currently in the country illegally, and stopping undocumented workers from getting jobs are mentioned in both. Obama talks about “streamlining our legal immigration system” while the senators’ proposal seems a little more specifically business-focused: “admitting future workers to serve our nation’s workforce needs” — but those goals seem compatible.

At this point, both proposals are just lists of principles; there is no actual immigration bill yet. So a lot can still go wrong. Maybe the details will be hard to hash out, or maybe the two sides aren’t as serious as they look. We’ll see.

Republicans and the Hispanic vote. The one lesson Republicans seem to have learned from November is that they need more Hispanic votes. But opinions on how to get them vary.

Some think it will be enough to showcase more Hispanic names and faces. Put Marco Rubio or maybe Ted Cruz on the 2016 ticket, they think, and the Hispanic problem goes away. (The same people thought Sarah Palin would bring Hillary Clinton’s female supporters to John McCain. It didn’t work out.)

Another school believes Republicans just have to change their rhetoric. Stop talking about “sending them all back” or “anchor babies”, stop taking public stands against immigration reform, and presto!

Another faction thinks it’s pointless even to try. National Review promotes the same you-aren’t-good-enough-to-vote-for-us message that worked so well for Mitt Romney:

While many [Hispanics] are in business for themselves, they express hostile attitudes toward free enterprise in polls. They are disproportionately low-income and disproportionately likely to receive some form of government support. More than half of Hispanic births are out of wedlock. Take away the Spanish surname and Latino voters look a great deal like many other Democratic constituencies. Low-income households headed by single mothers and dependent upon some form of welfare are not looking for an excuse to join forces with Paul Ryan and Pat Toomey. Given the growing size of the Hispanic vote, it would help Republicans significantly to lose it by smaller margins than they have recently. But the idea that an amnesty is going to put Latinos squarely in the GOP tent is a fantasy.

Finally, somewhere inside the GOP may lie a faction that genuinely wants to represent Hispanic Americans and solve the nation’s immigration problem. Maybe they will succeed, or maybe the party will be happy just to have a plausible way to blame the Democrats when immigration reform fails yet again. We’ll see.

Guest workers. Most pundits are focusing on border security, but I think the detail most likely to sink the whole plan is how to handle “guest workers” — people we allow to enter the country to do a job, and then send back home without any chance for permanent residency or citizenship.

Guest workers make sense in two circumstances: if our need for workers is genuinely temporary (as it was when so many of our citizens were overseas fighting World War II), or if the workers themselves have no interest in staying. (A young Mexican might want to come north for the tomato harvest or to work in a kitchen for a year or so, and then go home with a little spending money.) But if we’re bringing in workers to fill a long-term need, then it should be up to them whether they want to stay and pursue citizenship. Otherwise we’re just giving the business community an exploitable working class that can’t vote.

The labor market. I am sick of hearing about “jobs Americans won’t do”. This is the only kind of market failure conservatives believe in. I believe that there are many jobs Americans won’t do for a Mexican wage, but there is a market-clearing wage that will get those jobs done in America by Americans.

People who believe in jobs-Americans-won’t-do point to the experience of Georgia and Alabama, where anti-immigrant laws resulted in crops rotting in the fields. To me, this is what would happen in any import-dominated market if imports (in this case, imported workers) were suddenly cut off. If we banned imports of, say, laptop computers, there would be a shortage in the stores until the domestic manufacturers tooled up. But that wouldn’t imply that “there are products American companies won’t make”.

What we found out in Georgia and Alabama is that low-skill work like harvesting vegetables isn’t no-skill work. You can’t take random people out of the unemployment line and expect them to have the required skill and stamina. Again, if you are paying an illegal-immigrant wage and people aren’t sure whether the immigrants will come back or not, native Alabamans and Georgians are not going to invest a lot of effort in improving their harvesting.

If growers had to pay an American wage to get their vegetables harvested, a lot of current arrangements wouldn’t make sense, and it would take a while for the market to adjust. (Maybe there are some crops that it doesn’t make sense to grow in America, or maybe consumers will have to get used to paying higher prices.) But many industries suffer cost shocks of one sort or another, and the market works it out eventually.

That’s exactly what markets are good at, as conservatives ought to know.

If we discover that we are generally short of workers after the market settles on an American wage for jobs currently being done by undocumented immigrants, then we need more documented immigrants who have the option of seeking citizenship, not guest workers.

… and we’re still talking about guns

which is kind of amazing when you think about it. Six weeks after Sandy Hook, the NRA still hasn’t managed to shut this down.

Different this time?

Increasingly, the NRA is having trouble defending itself and its minions, much less achieving its goals. Groups like the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Mayor Bloomberg’s Independence USA PAC, and Mayors Against Illegal Guns (whose SuperPAC also has Mayor Bloomberg’s financial backing) are making politicians pay a price for their NRA A-rating. Here, CSGV goes after Georgia Democratic Congressman John Barrow, using footage from his own pro-gun campaign ad.

IndependenceUSA ran this ad against Debbie Halvorson, a candidate running in a special election congressional primary in Chicago:

In a debate, one of Halvorson’s rivals said, “I got an F (grade) from the NRA, something I’m proud of.”

This doesn’t work all over the country yet, but it doesn’t have to. In recent years, the NRA’s agenda has gotten support from representatives whose constituents lean the other way, just because there has been no perceived price to giving in to the powerful gun lobby. Now there is.

The NRA itself is facing an increasing level of criticism. Long-term, the most damaging charge is probably this one, taken from an article by Tim Dickinson in the current Rolling Stone:

Billing itself as the nation’s “oldest civil rights organization,” the NRA still claims to represent the interests of marksmen, hunters and responsible gun owners. But over the past decade and a half, the NRA has morphed into a front group for the firearms industry, whose profits are increasingly dependent on the sale of military-bred weapons like the assault rifles used in the massacres at Newtown and Aurora, Colorado.

On paper the NRA is governed by its members, but member-power is hard to exercise. NRA members did not, for example, elect their most visible spokesman, CEO Wayne LaPierre, who has served since 1991. He was chosen by a 76-member board. One-third of that board comes up for election each year, when members who have been paying dues for at least five years are presented with a slate of candidates chosen by a 10-member nominating committee (which I think is also chosen by the board). Theoretically it would be possible for the members to change leadership by electing write-in candidates, but in practice it’s hard to imagine. One charismatic reformer in one election couldn’t do it. A reform movement would have to field a slate of candidates over several years, and by the second year gun-industry money would pour into the incumbent campaigns.

Dickinson lays out the money trail, estimating that corporate donors like Ruger, Beretta, Browning, and Remington have given the NRA $52 million in recent years.

Much like elite funders of a major political party, these Golden Ringers enjoy top access to decision-makers at the NRA. Their interests, not the interest of the $35-a-year member, rule the roost. “They’ve got this base of true believers that they mail their magazines out to,” says policy analyst Diaz. “But the NRA is really about serving this elite.”

It’s one thing for a politician to point to an A-grade from the NRA as support from America’s sportsmen. It’ll be a different matter entirely if the public comes to see it as evidence that s/he has been bought by the firearms industry.

This kind of thing — turning an organization’s support into a negative — has happened before: Conservatives did it to the ACLU, most notably in the Dukakis/Bush race of 1988. ACORN was driven out of existence entirely. They’re trying — unsuccessfully, so far — to do the same to Planned Parenthood.

I can’t remember liberals ever pulling this trick off against a conservative organization. But it deserves to happen to anybody, it deserves to happen to the NRA.

Stephen King has written a very interesting piece called “Guns”. It’s available as a Kindle single for 99 cents, or Amazon Prime members can borrow it for free.

The most interesting section is when King discusses his own role in school shootings and what he did about it. As a teen-ager, he wrote a school-shooting novel called Rage. More than one school shooter, King discovered years later, had been reading Rage.

He does not apologize for writing it, because he believes it expresses a certain truth about the teen-boy experience. And he doesn’t believe that his novel “broke” the shooters; rather “they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken.”

Nonetheless he did take Rage off the market, because it’s an “accelerant”, as he puts it.

I didn’t pull Rage from publication because the law demanded it; I was protected under the First Amendment, and the law couldn’t demand it. I pulled it because in my judgment it was hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do.

Ultimately, King’s proposals are similar to President Obama’s: background checks, assault weapon ban, ban on large magazine clips, and so on. But what’s most interesting is how he imagines these changes coming about: Gun owners (like him) need to demand them — in spite of the NRA — because it’s the responsible thing to do.

The Atlantic takes on the argument that the Second Amendment is a defense against tyranny. When people make that claim, they’re usually picturing the Minutemen, who really were a “well-organized militia” accountable to the community. (They also didn’t have much to do with winning the Revolutionary War.) But self-selected gangs of armed civilians are only effective defenders of democracy in fantasies like Red Dawn.

The right parallel in American history isn’t Lexington and Concord in 1776, it’s Bleeding Kansas in 1856-58, when pro- and anti-slavery gunmen traded atrocities.

a citizen uprising at any point in the foreseeable future would probably not involve like-minded constitutionalists taking up arms to defend democracy and liberty. It would more likely be a matter of one aggrieved social group attacking another. And for the most criminal and vicious members of society, the rationale of “protecting” their own rights would be a convenient justification for straight-up looting, robbery, and bloodshed.

The week’s stupidest controversy happened after the New Republic asked President Obama “Have you ever fired a gun?” and Obama replied “Up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time.”

Since this off-hand remark was apparently the most important thing happening in America, conservatives from Fox News to Congress to CNN’s Erin Burnett demanded proof. Even the WaPo’s fact-check column weighed in, as if this were a claim about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction or something.

“If he is a skeet shooter, why have we not heard of this?” asked Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn. “Why have we not seen photos?” — a question that Jon Stewart rephrased as: “Why won’t the black man half the country lives in fear of release a picture of himself with a gun?”

Maybe they were hoping for another Dukakis-in-a-tank photo. But Obama doesn’t look too bad. BagNews (a blog focused on analyzing political imagery) comments:

the critics and conservatives have short-sightedly forced Obama into releasing one of the most advantageous photos of his presidency.

Are they happy now? Or can we expect Donald Trump and Sheriff Arpaio to declare the picture a fake? StoptheACLU.com notes that the photo was posted “after all the uproar” and says that in spite of the White House’s claims  “When this photo was taken is anybody’s guess.” Why didn’t I think of that? Obama must have flown someplace where the leaves are still green so that he could fake a photo to end this damaging “uproar”.

… and you also might be interested in …

Wednesday, the Sift’s most popular post of all time (“The Distress of the Privileged“) got its 200,000th page view.

As the fiscal debate shifts to the defense cuts in the looming sequester, it’s worth taking a look at how our defense spending compares with the rest of the world.

You’ll sometimes see a smaller number — something in the $525 billion range — but that’s just “core” defense spending. It leaves out the cost of the wars we’re fighting, plus defense-oriented spending that appears in the intelligence or energy budgets. Columbia Journalism Review lays out the range of numbers that have some claim to measure “defense spending”. Even the $711 billion pictured above leaves out stuff like military pensions.

If you watched the Super Bowl, maybe you saw an ad for SodaStream, the company that wants you to save money and the environment by carbonating your own water, adding flavorings yourself, and reusing the same bottles many times.

But you didn’t see this cute ad, because CBS censored it, apparently because it directly makes fun of Coke and Pepsi, who are much bigger CBS advertisers.

It was OK for Pepsi to make fun of Coke in past Super Bowl ads, but that’s Goliath-on-Goliath action. In the “free” market (where CBS is “free” to censor ads it doesn’t want to show), Davids have to play by different rules. If you want a marketplace where everybody plays by the same rules … that requires government regulation. And (as we all know) regulation kills “freedom”.

Be careful what “news” articles you share on Facebook; the satire at The Daily Currant is getting harder and harder to separate from real life. I was almost fooled by Lehman Brothers CEO Arrested For Accounting Fraud, and the headlines Ann Coulter Refuses to Board Airplane With Black Pilot and Rush Limbaugh Denied Service at Mexican Restaurant are kinda-sorta plausible (especially if you never liked those two anyway). As you get deeper into the stories, though, you ought to catch on — like when Tim Pawlenty is quoted saying this about the Lehman arrest:

“I don’t mind being tough on crime. But I would prefer if the government stuck to prosecuting black and Latino people for drug offenses.”

But the pastor who stiffed the waitress at Applebee’s — that really happened. And the story just keeps getting worse.

It wasn’t enough for Pastor Alois Bell to cross out the 18% automatic tip that Applebee’s computer generates for large parties. (The $34.93 is Bell’s part of a split check, not the total.) It wasn’t even enough to add “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?” and append “Pastor” to her signature.

When a photo of the ticket went viral on Reddit and the story was picked up by news sites all over the country, Bell had a chance to turn the other cheek, or maybe even treat the waitress to a Triple Chocolate Meltdown and see if they can’t laugh about this together now that it’s in the past. I mean, WWJD?

[OK, Jesus probably wouldn’t stiff a waitress and then brag about tithing in the first place, but WWJD is supposed to apply to all kinds of situations Jesus would never get into.]

We all picture Jesus in our own ways, but I doubt he would call Applebee’s and demand that everyone responsible for the embarrassment be fired, as Bell did. So the $3.50-an-hour waitress who photographed and posted the check (not the stiffed waitress, at least) is out on the street. I’m sure that will solve Bell’s public relations problem.

Fortunately for Pastor Bell, her God is more merciful than she is. A less forgiving deity might demand that everyone responsible for His embarrassment be “fired”.

I don’t watch HBO’s Girls. I tried in Season 1, but I’m not young enough, female enough, or New Yorky enough to get into it.

But Season 2 has sparked some fascinating discussion of Lena Dunham’s nude scenes. Now, naked women on HBO is old news. (Game of Thrones rarely makes it through half an episode without somebody’s breasts getting into the picture somehow.) But unlike the babes of Westeros, Dunham doesn’t have the kind of body you see in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She looks … the way the rest of American 20-somethings look without their clothes.

Apparently that’s a problem for some people. And their problem is an interesting topic for the rest of us. The Independent’s Nat Guest (a woman) writes:

there’s something progressive – almost revolutionary, in fact – about the approach to nudity in Girls. Rather than being sexualised flesh, designed to titillate, this is matter-of-fact flesh; uninhibited flesh that owns its own sexuality, and reminds us that there can be other reasons for nudity other than satisfying the male gaze.

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nahisi Coates (a man) described Girls as

one of the most democratic – and everyhuman – depictions of sex to ever exist in pop culture. The more I thought about this, the more important it became to me.

This head-slapping video demonstrates that we’ve all been using Chinese take-out containers wrong.

What does “white privilege” mean? It means being able to carry a nice TV a few blocks to your friend’s house after dark — without worrying how you’ll look to the police. What does “Christian privilege” mean? Crystal St. Marie Lewis explains:

For Christians in America, religious privilege means boarding an airplane while holding their Bibles in plain view without incurring suspicion. The same isn’t true for people who “look like” Muslims in our country.

Privilege is seldom the kind of thing that makes you strut around thinking, “Damn, I’m privileged.” Usually it’s the stuff that you can do without thinking about it at all — and other people have to be very careful about.

Since I’m unlikely to make it to Kamchatka myself, AirPano watches the erupting volcanoes for me.

Spiegel explains how remarkable this is:

Given that volcano experts don’t believe that the four volcanoes are being fed from the same magma source, the parallel eruptions would seem to be the geological equivalent of winning the lottery.

And finally, can you watch an Oscar-nominated romantic comedy in six and a half minutes? Yes, you can.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

February 4, 2013 – 8:00 am

You know what’s really striking about this week’s political news? We’re talking about stuff we ought to be talking about: Immigration was at the top of the list this week, and the gun discussion keeps gaining momentum. I don’t know if the Right has stopped pushing faux-outrage issues (like Obama’s birth certificate or vote fraud) or if they just can’t get traction.

It’s throwing me off a little. One of the questions that helps me put the Sift together each week is “What should people be paying attention to?” When people are paying attention to many of the things they should, I’m not sure what to do.

So this week’s Sift is about immigration, guns, and a bunch of short notes. I still haven’t figured out what (if anything) deserves to be broken out as a separate article.

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Here On Earth

January 28, 2013 – 1:04 pm

History tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.

— Barack Obama, Second Inaugural Address

This week everybody was talking about the inauguration and the second term

I cover President Obama’s speech itself — the best of his presidency — in President Obama Tells the Progressive Story of America. Short version: There are two ways, fundamentalist and progressive, to turn history into myth. We’re used to hearing the Tea Party tell the story of America as a fundamentalist myth. In the 2nd Inaugural, Obama told it as a progressive myth.

Naturally, conservatives were offended.

… and filibuster reform

which didn’t happen. Or rather, it sort of happened, but not so you’d notice.

There are several problems with the filibuster as it existed in the last Congress.

  • 41 senators could keep 59 senators from accomplishing anything. That hasn’t been changed and wouldn’t have changed even under the Udall/Merkley reform proposals that Reid watered down.
  • Far less than 41 senators could stop 60+ senators from accomplishing things that aren’t worth making a big deal over. The process for ending a filibuster was so cumbersome that (even if the votes were there), the majority leader might decide that it wasn’t worth the Senate’s time. The Reid/McConnell compromise (which passed overwhelmingly), streamlines this process. So the monkey-wrenching power of a handful of senators has gone down.
  • Filibustering had very little political price. Udall/Merkley would have changed this, but Reid/McConnell doesn’t. In the very old-fashioned “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” filibuster, senators had to take the floor and keep speaking. It was an endurance test, but more than that it gave the press something to cover. The majority of the electorate (who often agree with the majority of the Senate being thwarted by the filibuster) could see exactly who was standing in their way. But the more recent version of the filibuster was largely procedural and hence invisible. The press often covered filibusters in the passive voice; bills “were blocked”. Sometimes even the fact of the filibuster wasn’t covered; the press just took for granted that 60 votes were needed to pass anything in the Senate, as if that were in the Constitution.

So we got only the reforms that make the majority leader’s life easier. Harry Reid described the old system this way:

I want to go to it on a Monday, they make me file cloture, that takes till Tuesday. Then it takes two days for the cloture vote to ‘ripen,’ so now it’s Thursday, and even if I get 60 votes, they still have 30 hours to twiddle their thumbs, pick their nose, do whatever they want. So, I’m not on the bill by the weekend, and in reality, that means next Monday or Tuesday.

That’s the part that he thinks he’s fixed.

As if in a political novel, a federal appeals court immediately made it clear why filibuster reform is necessary by throwing out President Obama’s recess appointments of officials whose nominations had been filibustered. In particular, everything the National Labor Relations Board did in 2012 is now suspect, because without the recess appointments it didn’t have a quorum to act.

If the Supreme Court upholds the appeals court ruling, President Obama (and future presidents) will have no recourse if 41 senators decide to obstruct the normal functioning of government using an strategy that had no precedent before the Republicans began using it against Obama.

Throughout American history, the Senate’s constitutional power to “advise and consent” to presidential nominations had been applied individually: On the rare occasions when a nominee was rejected, it was because of a scandal or some other reason unique to that particular person. But Obama’s nominations have been blocked strategically. He can’t get new members appointed to the NRLB or put someone in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because Republicans don’t want those bodies to function. It’s nothing personal; Jesus Christ could not be confirmed as head of the CFPB.

So if you are trying to form a union right now and your company fights you in illegal ways, you don’t have much recourse because we don’t have a valid NLRB you can appeal to. Republicans haven’t and couldn’t raise the votes to repeal our labor laws, but they can monkey-wrench the parts of government that enforce those laws.

This is a tactic that the American people would recognize as illegitimate if it came to their attention, as it would if Republicans had to mount an old-fashioned Mr. Smith filibuster. In that case, some group of senators would have to be the faces of the filibuster, appearing on TV as the people who are making our government not work. Democracy would have a chance to correct the problem.

But even that reform was too much to ask for.

… and Hillary Clinton’s testimony about Benghazi

from which we learned essentially nothing. Neither Republicans nor Democrats showed any interest in figuring out how to prevent future Benghazis. Republicans played to their conspiracy-theory-loving base, and Democrats buttered up a possible future president. Jon Stewart covered the hearing with an appropriate level of disgust.

The most over-the-top statement came from Rand Paul, who called Benghazi “the worst tragedy since 9-11“. Apparently he slept through the entire Iraq War.

Clinton came out untouched. Feministing says her performance was a model of how to deal with mansplaining.

and you also might be interested in …

Here’s where we’ve gotten in the same-sex marriage argument: The lawyers in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Prop 8 are arguing that opposite-sex couples pose a unique threat to society, because they can produce “unplanned and unintended offspring”. According to the LA Times:

they argue that it is reasonable for the law to steer opposite-sex couples toward marriage, including by giving them extra benefits. “It was rational for Congress to draw the line where it did,” Clement said, “because the institution of marriage arose in large measure in response to the unique social difficulty that opposite-sex couples, but not same-sex couples, posed.”

Got that, gays and lesbians? You can’t get the benefits of marriage because your potential promiscuity is less socially disruptive than when straights sleep around. By June we’ll find out whether the Supreme Court finds this argument persuasive.

It looks like the debt ceiling won’t be an issue until the middle of May. Obama stood firm and Boehner blinked.

In last summer’s post “I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To“, points 5 and 6 were “Ryan’s reputation as a deficit hawk is undeserved” and “He’s not as smart as he thinks he is.” Well, his interview with Ezra Klein Wednesday proved both.

Slate’s Richard Hasen thinks the Republican plan to gerrymander the Electoral College won’t come to anything. I want to believe his argument, but it depends on Republicans either (i) deciding that they believe in democracy, or (ii) realizing that the American people do. If they turn out to be both evil and clueless, they’ll go through with it. (At least in Virginia, they’re backing down.)

But they’re bragging about having held onto the House in spite of the voting public. A Republican memo crows about the Party’s gerrymandering prowess:

Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans.

I do agree with one of Hasen’s points: That Republicans are considering this plan at all shows that they realize conservatism is unpopular. They wouldn’t need to plot how to win with a minority if they believed the majority of the American people agree with them.

At his confirmation hearing last week, Secretary of State nominee John Kerry didn’t dodge on climate change.

You want to do business and do well in America? We’ve got to get into the energy race. Other countries are in it… This is a place for us to recognize what other countries are doing and what our states that are growing are doing, which is there’s an extraordinary amount of opportunity in modernizing America’s energy grid.

“Other countries are doing it.” Solar panels over irrigation canals generate power, conserve water (by reducing evaporation), don’t occupy crop land, and create jobs. America could do stuff like this, if we were an advanced country like India.

Occasionally we do stuff here: My wife’s home town is pioneering the smart grid.

Grist thanks Donald Trump for saying such stupid things about global warming that straw men are not necessary.

You know why the climate-denier movement won’t die? Dark money.

TPM founder Josh Marshall doesn’t like the way almost every anti-gun-violence article starts “I’m a gun owner, but …” He doesn’t own a gun, doesn’t want to own a gun, has never shot a gun, and figures that makes him representative of about half the country. Why should that point of view be left out of the discussion?

Last week I talked about how Republicans in Congress turned against their own ideas as soon as Obama proposed them. Now that trend may be reversing in a strange way: Republicans may reclaim their ideas and just refuse to recognize that Obama ever proposed them. If Obama plays along, something might get done.

The test case is immigration reform, where Marco Rubio is proposing something remarkably similar to the plan Obama borrowed from George W. Bush.

Last week I also called your attention to the idea of a “false flag operation”, which is a staple of paranoid conspiracy theories, particularly the ones where the government is conspiring to take our guns.

Well, occasionally liberals believe in false flag operations too: Here’s Rachel Maddow speculating that an anti-Chuck-Hagel ad by anonymous “liberals” is actually a conservative ad in disguise.

I had to get this in before football is over for the year.

And finally, this mystical city appears out of the fog once every hundred years. No, wait, it’s Vancouver.

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President Obama Tells the Progressive Story of America

January 28, 2013 – 10:34 am

What made President Obama’s Second Inaugural the best speech of his presidency was its great theme: He told the story of America as progressives understand it, and connected it with the progressive mission today.

In recent years, liberals have let conservatives own the big-picture story of America. If you hear somebody talking about the Founders and the Constitution, probably it’s Michele Bachmann or Ron Paul or some other hero of the self-styled “patriots” of the Tea Party.

Liberals have been more comfortable talking about peace and justice in the here and now: How are we going to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan? What can we do about levels of inequality last seen in the Gilded Age? How are we going to stop gun violence? How can we make sure that the sick, the old, and the disabled get the care they need? Can we stop profit-privatizing/risk-socializing bankers from crashing the economy again? And so on.

Facts vs. visions. I believe liberals actively shy away from this big-picture mythologizing because of our disgust at how conservatives abuse it: They must talk about their grand vision, because when you get down to the nitty-gritty of facts, they are just plain wrong. Rape causes pregnancy. The globe is warming. The rich are getting all the money. The economy has a demand problem. Taxes are low, spending is not out of control, and the federal government can’t go bankrupt.

Let Glenn Beck spin stories about the last 5,000 years, we’d rather point to things that are actually happening and say, “Look! Look!”

And yet … “Where there is no vision the people perish.” Without some larger context, day-to-day political efforts can seem meaningless. Why waste your energy? Make a nice dinner for your family. See a movie. Get ready for that thing at work. The immediate benefits of those efforts are clear. Politics? Not so much.

If conservatives offer their followers a role in the drama of History and we don’t, we will never match their intensity. Worse, by not offering a larger vision, we can seem to consent to the conservative narrative, in which “socialists” from FDR to LBJ to Obama have usurped the “libertarian” Republic of the Founders.

But progressives have their own story of America, and can offer a different role in the drama of History.

Progressive vs. fundamentalist mythology. In general, there are two main ways — fundamentalist and progressive — to turn history into a motivating myth. The generic Fundamentalist Myth begins with a Golden Age of divinely inspired prophets and larger-than-life heroes. From there, we devolved and corrupted their legacy. But deep inside our fallen shells glows the same spark that burned so brightly in them. So if we stoke fire of greatness and scour away the rust of corruption, we can recreate the world they meant for us to have.

a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night

The Progressive Myth reveres its past in a different way. Our legacy consists not of perfect past to which we should strive to return, but of a vision that has shone through the ages, always just out of reach, and of a journey towards that vision.

The Biblical motif is not the Garden of Eden, the Davidic Kingdom, or the Apostolic Church, but the Israelites wandering through the desert: We were slaves in Egypt when Moses gave us — not Freedom — but a vision of Freedom and the hope of a Promised Land. God is with us not as a once-and-future King, but as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, wordlessly marking the direction of our march. We move forward because the only permanent encampment behind us is Pharaoh’s.

It is not hard to see the Fundamentalist Myth in the Tea Party’s version of American history. The Founders are prophets, and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are scripture.

But the Progressive Myth can also apply to American history. And like so much liberal/conservative disagreement, the progressive version stays closer to the facts.

The Second Inaugural Address. President Obama began his speech with the holiest words in the American canon:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

But that was not the establishment of a Golden Age to which we must return. It was the start of a journey with no turning back.

Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.

That journey has had two pieces: Change that became necessary as circumstances changed, and change that became necessary as we reached a clearer vision of the meaning of our founding principles. And so our journey included the abolition of slavery

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

the construction of modern infrastructure from the Erie Canal to the interstate highways

Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce, schools and colleges to train our workers.

the trust-busting of Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of the SEC and other modern regulatory bodies

Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.

and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.

These are not corruptions or usurpations of the Founders’ dream, but its continuing realization.

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone.

And we are not done yet.

It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law — for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity — until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.

That is our generation’s task — to make these words, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.

Looked at with clear eyes, American history is meaningful only as a place to be from, not a place to go back to. Where would you go? To the slave plantations? To Jim Crow? To the Trail of Tears? To the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory? To Love Canal? To marriages where wives own no property and have rights only through their husbands? To a time when old age and poverty were practically synonymous? Where?

As a nation, we can rightfully take pride in the challenges we have overcome, but not in where we have been. To go back, to give up all that progress, would betray our revolutionary heritage. Our forebears kept moving forward, and so will we.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

January 28, 2013 – 8:16 am

Barack Obama gave the best speech of his presidency last Monday at the Inauguration. He put the Tea Party on notice that they don’t own the Founders or the story of America.

In today’s lead article, I’ll spell out the two main ways to turn history into a motivating myth. The Tea Party tells a fundamentalist myth about the founding of America, full of larger-than-life heroes and prophets whose achievement we have corrupted and degraded. Their program then revolves around repentance for our socialist sins in hopes of returning to the Founders’ Eden.

In the Second Inaugural, Obama told a progressive myth of American history: The Founders left us not a perfect Republic, but a vision that neither they nor anyone since has fully achieved. We are on a centuries-long journey towards that Promised Land, and our journey will not be complete until everyone has the liberty that the Founders managed to guarantee to straight white male Christian property owners.

In the weekly summary, I’ll also describe how the Senate wimped out on filibuster reform, and why that might have very immediate consequences. (That piece is still growing and may turn into its own article.) Also: a strange new legal argument against same-sex marriage, Kerry’s bold testimony on climate change, Republicans might fail to gerrymander the Electoral College, and Bad Lip Reading takes on the NFL.

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TMI

January 21, 2013 – 11:52 am

The informational shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

– Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise (2012)

This week people stopped just talking about guns and started doing things

New York State passed what one legislator described as “the toughest gun law in the nation” and the NRA called “draconian”. It’s the first new gun law since the Newtown massacre.  Meanwhile, President Obama laid out his plan to reduce gun violence.

I saw a lot of commenters use the adjective “bold” to describe Obama’s proposals, but I think that just underlines how frozen the gun-control conversation has been. Limiting magazine size and restoring the ban on assault weapons are popular measures that seem like the least we can do. The rest of his 23 “executive actions” include steps that are surprising only in that they hadn’t been done a long time ago: appointing a permanent ATF director, allowing the CDC to study the public health effects of guns, and so on.

Obama’s actions were commonly misreported as “23 executive orders“. (Actually only three of the actions were orders.) It will be interesting to see whether the panic about the “orders” will continue now that the full blandness of the orders is apparent. Here, for example, a Christian talkradio host and a pro-gun advocate go on at length about possible reactions (rebellion? local refusal to enforce? impeachment?) to an anticipated executive order confiscating guns. The striking thing about this conversation is that it was based on exactly nothing. Obama’s executive orders hadn’t even been written yet, and neither man claimed to have a source inside the White House.

BTW, if you’ve been wondering who needs semi-automatic weapons with 100-round magazines, the answer is obvious: people who are preparing for an apocalypse. There are more of them than you think. When you have to defend your cans of Himalayan salt from the ravening hordes, you’ll need that kind of firepower.

And if you want to plunge deeply into the conspiracy-theory world, google “false flag operation”. A false flag operation is when disguised agents stage an event, so that the organization they really represent can react against it. As in the Reichstag Fire. There are false-flag conspiracy theories about both the Newtown and Aurora massacres, contending that the government staged the events to create an excuse for confiscating guns.

But they also talked about Obama’s second term

Can you believe it’s just now Inauguration Day? Wasn’t the election like a decade ago?

Both liberals and conservatives see a change in President Obama since the first inauguration. He came into the presidency trying to work with Republicans as if they were reasonable people who wanted to solve America’s problems. That was naive.

The iconic example is the stimulus. Obama took office amid a global crash that had even conservative economists calling for a stimulus. Liberals and conservatives mainly disagreed on the size of the stimulus and whether it should be mostly tax cuts or mostly new spending. (“A stimulus is needed without further delay,” Mitt Romney wrote in December 2008, advising Republicans to insist “that tax cuts are part of the solution”.) So Obama proposed a smaller stimulus than liberals wanted and made it 1/3 tax cuts, thinking this was a nice split-the-difference bill that a large majority could get behind. This netted him zero Republican votes in the House and demonization of his “socialist” plan.

Or health care: Rather than the single-payer model liberals favor, Obama based his plan on Romney’s Massachusetts plan (which in turn had been based on work by the conservative Heritage Foundation). Along the way, he dropped the public option and tweaked the plan in a variety of other ways to answer Republican criticism. Result: unanimous Republican opposition.

Again and again, Republicans turned against their own ideas as soon as Obama got on board. John McCain opposed the McCain-Lieberman cap-and-trade plan. When Obama offered John Boehner a deficit-reduction plan structured according to Republican proposals, Boehner walked out. It went on and on.

By the fall campaign Obama clearly realized this had gone far enough. He called Republicans out on their extreme anti-woman and anti-Hispanic positions, as well as their math-challenged tax proposals. Since the election, he has driven a hard bargain on the fiscal cliff and offered nothing in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. (He won.) His common-sense gun-control proposal puts Republicans on the spot: Do they side with the American people or with the NRA?

Ross Douhat imagines an no-fluff second inaugural address that recognizes Republican extremists’ role in their defeat:

Next, a big, big shout-out to my opponents on the right — I really couldn’t have done it without you. … Every time I needed to paint the American right as paranoid and out-of-touch, misogynistic and mindless, you were there for me. Thanks for making Sandra Fluke a martyr, Rush. Thanks for Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, Mr. Ailes. Thanks for everything, Donald Trump. Todd Akin — I love you, man.

Both liberal and conservative pundits see the possibility that Obama’s second term could splinter the Republican Party. John Dickerson:

Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition’s most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.

Conservative Michael Gerson:

Obama must be tempted by a shiny political object: the destruction of the congressional GOP. He knows that Republicans are forced by the momentum of their ideology to take positions on spending that he can easily demagogue. He is in a good position to humiliate them again — to expose their internal divisions and unpopular policy views.

Gerson pre-scolds Obama for choosing that option, but his argument sounds like a wife-beater’s brother saying “Now look what you made him do.” Republicans are forced to take extreme positions, so it’s just not fair for Obama make reasonable and popular proposals they will have to reject. David Brooks sounds like an older battered wife giving advice to a younger one: He lays out in detail how Obama should tip-toe through his second term to avoid setting off Congress’ right-wing lunatics. (Jonathan Chait has been brilliant at calling out this stuff.)

That’s not how it’s going to go. If congressional Republicans can’t control themselves, second-term Obama is going to place a 911 call to the voters and have them taken away.

It’s about time.

… but I wrote about information overload

How Do You Know What You Know? looks at two recent books: Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise and Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s Blur. Each looks at how to deal with information overload, and Silver raises an interesting parallel between the internet revolution and the printing-press revolution: Both led to polarization. The reason is expressed in this week’s quote.

… and you also might be interested in …

If you’re not watching The Abolitionists, you’re missing out. Part III airs tomorrow, but you can catch up by watching I and II on the PBS web site. Even if you think you know this history, it’s stunning to see the interweaving threads of the full tapestry.

If a Whole Foods employee were doing this much damage to the brand, John Mackey would fire him.

I’m developing an affection for the League of Ordinary Gentlemen blog. Their Guns in America symposium is both diverse and rational. If all the positions you are hearing are extreme, read a few articles here.

Glenn Beck is designing his utopia. Laugh if you want, but there’s a more interesting way to look at it: A certain kind of communitarianism has cross-partisan appeal. Like many liberal visions, Beck’s “Independence, USA” has small locally-owned shops rather than WalMart, and walkable streets rather than superhighways and parking decks. It grows its own food instead of trucking it in from big agribusinesses. I’m not sure how Beck imagines maintaining this urban plan without the heavy hand of a central bureaucracy, but let it go; utopias are like that.

Because reading the Weekly Sift should improve your life: 50 Life Hacks to Simplify Your World, most of which left me asking “Why didn’t I think of that?” Here’s #24:

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How do you know what you know?

January 21, 2013 – 10:31 am

why the internet isn’t making us wiser

If you’d never experienced the flood of information that comes from a revolutionary new technology, you might expect it to power growth in everything downstream from information: knowledge, understanding, and even wisdom. If it’s easier to find things out, then people should know more, understand more, and make better choices. You might even expect more consensus. Ignorant people can come to blows debating whether Kansas is north or south of Nebraska, but the more we know and understand about the world we all live in, the more agreement we should find.

Since you’re living through the internet revolution right now, though, you know better. More knowledge? Maybe. Understanding? Hard to say. But wisdom? Surely you jest. And consensus … some days we seem lucky just to avoid civil war.

Nate Silver thinks we could have seen this coming, because the same thing happened in the last information revolution. Eventually Gutenberg’s printing press led to the Enlightenment, democracy, modern science, and the Industrial Revolution. But that light came at the end of a nasty 300-year tunnel of constant strife and near-genocidal religious wars. In the Thirty Years War alone “the male population of the German states was reduced by almost half.”

But why? Nate explains:

The informational shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

Reducing that to a bumpersticker: TMI equals polarization.

Picture it: Before Gutenberg, baptism was baptism. The priest did it, and if we wondered what it meant or why he did it that way, maybe we could ask him and maybe he’d explain by waving in the direction of a Bible that some monk had spent years producing by hand. (You could get your own — in Latin, a language that neither you nor Moses ever spoke — for about the cost of a Mercedes today.)

After Gutenberg, you say babies can be baptized by sprinkling water on them, while I accept only full-submersion adult baptism. We each own pamphlets from our own theologians, quoting passages of scripture that we have each checked in our translated Bibles at home. We each belong to religious communities that agree with us, and our respective church libraries are stocked with many other pamphlets listing the outrages that the opposing community has committed against us and providing reams of evidence proving that the conflict is all their fault.

What can we do but kill each other?

Information is great when you have some reasonable way of processing it. But when you don’t, it’s overwhelming and even threatening. If you try to pay attention to all of it, you’ll freeze. And then the people who didn’t freeze will eat your lunch — or eat you for lunch.

There are two easy ways to deal with information overload:

  • Submit unquestioningly to an authority who decides what’s what.
  • Find a simple worldview that pleasingly organizes the wild flood of facts and interpretations, and then ally with people who subscribe to that worldview.

Both choices are cultish, but the second can seem downright enlightened, at least from the inside. Unlike the unquestioning follower, you’re always learning new facts and interpretations. You’re getting better and better at explaining why your tribe’s view is right and the opposing view is wrong. And you do ask questions, but you’ve learned to ask the right questions — unlike those mindless sheep in the opposing tribe.

In other words, you live inside a tribal bubble that lets pleasing information in and keeps disturbing information out. The information flood actually helps you do this, because the more details, the easier to cherry-pick support for whatever you want to believe.

These delusions are easy to see in other people: conspiracy theorists, global-warming deniers, Birthers, and so on. You can never win an argument against such folks, because there is always more information you haven’t explained, some new micro-analysis that “proves” Obama’s birth certificate is fake or explains why the world is really cooling. You never reach the end of it, precisely because the 21st-century information barrel is bottomless.

That’s why liberals like me — and probably Nate Silver more than anybody — had to love watching Republicans cope with the election returns. Nate had dispassionately put together a prediction model and he faithfully ran new polling data through it every day. It turned out to be down-the-line accurate, but until the votes were actually counted he was vilified by people who wanted to believe Romney would win. And not just ignorantly vilified, vilified with spreadsheets and graphs and detailed explanations of what he must be doing wrong.

It’s rare to run into such a perfect bubble-pricking.

But Silver’s book (published before the election) isn’t about self-congratulation. It’s about why accurate prediction is hard and how to do it better. Each chapter describes a prediction-making community — meteorologists, baseball stat geeks, poker players, etc. — and draws some general lesson from their collective success or failure.

Some of those lessons are technical, but a few general-public themes come through:

  • Foxes beat hedgehogs. People who have one big idea do badly in an information flood, because they can always explain away their failures without changing their big idea. But people who juggle multiple competing ideas can use new data to develop the good ones and discredit the bad ones.
  • Data doesn’t interpret itself. The best predictions don’t come from pure pattern matching, but from a plausible theory that is then proven by experiment. If you just pattern-match, you’ll end up modeling the noise rather than the signal.
  • Make specific predictions so you can recognize your mistakes. Since it always rains eventually, if you aren’t specific about when you expect rain and how much, you’ll always be able to claim you were right — and you won’t learn anything.
  • Be methodical. If you don’t define how you’re going to judge your results, the temptation to cherry-pick will overwhelm you.

Always in the background lies this lesson: Bubbles don’t just happen to other people. It’s a universal human tendency in the face of too much information. If you’re not constantly on guard — and maybe even if you are — you will fall prey to it.

Western civilization came out of the Gutenberg Tunnel when it developed more rigorous collective methods of handling the increased information flow: Science, most obviously, but also market capitalism, journalism, and constitutional democracies that could balance majority rule with tolerance for minority rights. Maybe a similar leap will get us through the Internet Tunnel eventually — better sooner than later.

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have a less sweeping focus: How are you personally going to cope?

If we continue the Gutenberg analogy, there’s a clear analog to the priest and the universal church he represented: the editor and the culture of journalistic objectivity.

Once upon a time, national news outlets were few and were controlled by gatekeepers who told you “the way it is“. Every evening, the remarkably similar news departments of the three major networks told you what you needed to know. If you wanted more detail, you read a daily newspaper or weekly news magazines, but even they wouldn’t give you a fundamentally different worldview.

As I’ve described in more detail elsewhere, this system was both good and bad. (The same could be said of the pre-Gutenberg Catholic Church). The gatekeepers tried to be accurate, and they had the power to hold a story back until they could verify it. So rumors got squashed, hucksters were weeded out, and special-interest groups couldn’t trump up a story out of nothing. And because the gatekeepers defined news by what people should know rather than what they wanted to know, the Vietnam War never vanished from public awareness the way the Afghan War often has.

On the downside, the range of views presented was narrow. Only by staging artificial public events (like Martin Luther King’s March on Washington) could marginalized groups push their message through the editorial bottleneck.

Now that’s all gone. There is no priest, or rather there are too many would-be priests sprinkling dubious holy water in all directions.

In essence, we are all editors now. We used to get a filtered flow of information, pre-tested and pre-sanitized by experts. Now we’re exposed to the raw flood, which we have to test and sanitize for ourselves. So we all need to learn the ways of thought that used to only be taught in journalism school.

That’s what Blur is about.

A lot of Kovach and Rosenstiel’s advice is common sense. Before you react to a news article or factoid, you need to take a step back and judge it like an editor: Where does this information come from? Are the sources in a position to know? Do they have reason to lie? Am I just being told a story, or are there checkable facts here? Has anybody checked them? What is left out of this article? Does it raise obvious questions that are not answered? If the article focuses on only a few characters in the story, would other characters tell it differently? And so on. If you have a critical, analytical mind, the questions aren’t hard to generate once you realize that you need to take a step back and judge.

I found one piece of their analysis very insightful, and I may start using their terminology. They identify three models of journalism: verification, assertion, and affirmation. I don’t like how they present affirmation (probably because they belong to the verification tribe and the Weekly Sift is affirmation journalism), but the distinctions themselves are worthwhile.

Journalism of verification. This is the gatekeeper model of the Cronkite Era and the ideal that you will hear expressed by the editors of publications like the New York Times. (For now let’s leave alone the question of how well they live up to that ideal.) Check everything. Get it right before you publish. Be objective. Be complete. Put a wall between news and opinion.

Journalism of assertion. The model most often seen on CNN. Put newsmakers on camera and see what they say. (If you can only get them on camera by agreeing not to raise certain subjects, fine.) Let viewers judge for themselves whether they’re being lied to. Get information out as quickly as possible, even if you haven’t checked that it’s true. Strive for balance rather than accuracy; let liberals and conservatives alike spin the story for your audience, and then “leave it there” rather than check who’s right.

Journalism of affirmation. The model shared by Fox News, the nighttime line-up of MSNBC, and (mostly) the Weekly Sift. Have a point of view and attract an audience that (mostly) shares that view.

Reading Blur, you will get the idea that verification is the gold standard, while assertion and affirmation are in some way illegitimate. (I was struck by how often Rachel Maddow — who I admire — came up as a bad example.) I’d express this differently: assertion and affirmation journalism are illegitimate if they pretend to be verification journalism.

That is my biggest objection to Fox News — the pretense that they’re “fair and balanced”. If they billed themselves as “interpreting the world through a conservative prism”, I’d respect them more.

Affirmation journalism is legitimate to the extent that it’s honest and tries to serve its audience rather than pander to them so their attention can be sold to advertisers. Like verification journalists, an affirmation journalist should be trying to get it right, and also should provide a verification trail (that’s what the links are for on the Weekly Sift), honestly represent the people s/he quotes, endorse only arguments s/he believes are valid, not intentionally hide facts or points of view from its audience, and so on. (That’s my other problem with Fox. I don’t think they’re just conservative. I think they repeat talking points they know are false and use frames designed to deceive.)

In short, I think affirmation (and assertion too) can be done well. Rachel Maddow isn’t just Sean Hannity’s mirror image.

Tying this back to Nate Silver and the bubble tendency: Part of being honest and doing affirmation journalism well is recognizing the constant danger of winding up in a delusional bubble. Because there is a real world out there, and it will bite you if you turn your back on it, as Fox News viewers discovered on election night.

So serving you as a reader means not pleasing you too well. I could tell you a lot of things that would make you feel good about yourself and say “Hell yes!”. But some of them would set you up for a comeuppance.

And as for the horrors that might still await in the Internet Tunnel: Wishing to be out the other side doesn’t make it so, and affirmation journalism is popular because the priesthood of verification journalism is broken; it doesn’t know how to handle the flood. Maybe someday they will figure it out, or some new information-processing methodology will burst onto the scene the way science did in the 1600s. But for now, all I know how to do is to choose my simplifying assumptions as best I can, revisit them from time to time, and proceed honestly from there.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

January 21, 2013 – 6:55 am

Happy Inauguration Day!

I expect to have all this week’s articles posted before President Obama’s speech, so I won’t say anything about that until next week. This week, I’ll just comment on the more aggressive tone I expect to see in the second term. No more “I Hope you’ll be reasonable so we can Change things.”

Also, this week the post-Newtown talk about guns started turning into action. New York State passed a new law, and the Obama/Biden plan came out. To the great surprise of paranoids from coast to coast, Obama didn’t issue an executive order confiscating all the guns. I guess that will delay the armed rebellion for a few weeks.

But this week’s main article is a double book review wrapped up in commentary. Tentatively titled “How do you know what you know?”, it discusses why the information explosion isn’t leading to more wisdom and consensus. I realize it’s no great revelation to point out that we’re not trending toward wisdom and consensus, but if you’d never seen an information explosion, you might think we should be. If stuff is easier to find out, wouldn’t that lead people to know more, understand more, make wiser choices, and agree on some basic facts? Why isn’t that happening?

Nate Silver starts The Signal and the Noise by looking back at the last info-revolution, Gutenberg’s, and observing that it also led to polarization and strife. You can look at that book and Blur by Kovach and Rosenstiel as training manuals for mitigating the problems that come from information overload.

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