Undying Legacies

Did I die?

— Jon Stewart, 2-11-2015

This week’s featured article “When Hate Stays in the Closet” is my attempt to answer some of the more well-intentioned arguments against same-sex marriage.

This week everybody was talking about war

Once in a while, it’s instructive to take the long view and consider how different the world is from the one the Founders envisioned. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but made the the President commander-in-chief. Today, that separation of powers tilts in the President’s direction. But originally it tilted towards Congress.

In the Founders’ vision, the United States wouldn’t have much of a peacetime military. State and local militias would handle smaller-scale stuff like Indian raids, slave uprisings, and criminal gangs — that’s what the 2nd amendment was really about* — while the federal military would only come into play in the event of a war with a distant power like Britain, France, or Spain. Wars on that scale took a long time to develop, so as long as we had an officers corps to build a larger force around, a big standing army wouldn’t be necessary.

Most of the time, then, the President would be commander of not very much. To move towards war, he’d have to ask Congress for a larger military appropriation or to federalize the state militias (a power that Article I, Section 8 assigns to Congress). Probably it would probably say no unless it was ready to declare war.

That’s all turned around now. There’s huge standing military establishment, which the President needs to be able to put into action instantaneously, without waiting for Congress. (During the Cold War, the Soviet Union could have destroyed most of the country by the time Congress could assemble.) And once hostilities begin, Congress has a hard time refusing to support a war the President has already committed forces to.

So we wind up with after-the-fact debates like the current one about whether Congress should authorize the ongoing air war against ISIL. President Obama has been fighting that war since September, under the authority that he claims was granted by the AUMF Congress passed immediately after 9-11, against

those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

That’s kind of a stretch, since ISIL didn’t exist in 2001, but might be considered a successor of Al Qaeda. President Obama says he’d ultimately like Congress to repeal that open-ended AUMF and replace it with a narrower authorization. This week he proposed a more specific ISIL authorization, which would include a repeal of the 2002 authorization to use force in Iraq.

Obama’s proposal has some good features that I hope will be in any future AUMFs: It’s time-limited, for example, so Congress would need to re-authorize it (or not) in three years. But it may still be too broad. Politico has a good discussion of the issues involved.

* The 2nd amendment starts “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State …” The NRA thinks that means that  in order to maintain their freedom, the People need to have the weapons necessary to rebel against an oppressive central government. But originally it just meant that locally-controlled militias would eliminate the need for a large peacetime army that might tempt a President (or some general) to start a military coup, as Rome’s Praetorian Guard often had.

and news anchors, real and otherwise

Jon Stewart announced he is leaving The Daily Show later this year. That inspired a number of tributes and summaries of his 17-year run, prompting Stewart to ask, “Did I die?”

Meanwhile, Brian Williams has been suspended for six months by NBC News, following the revelation that his account of being on a helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq in 2003 was not true. Subsequently, questions are being raised about his claims that he flew with Seal Team 6, that he was present when the Berlin Wall came down, and that he saw a dead body float by in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Except for the Katrina piece (which seems unlikely, but is not obviously untrue), the questions are not about his news reporting, but about exaggerated accounts of his experiences that he gave later. (His original report of the RPG incident appears to have been accurate: He was in a copter that was behind the one that was hit.) So given what we know so far, NBC’s response seems to be based on a Caesar’s-wife principle: The public ought to be able to trust everything that NBC’s news anchor says, no matter where he says it.

Humorist P. J. O’Rourke was a little less outraged, and observed that all correspondents tell tall tales about the dangers they’ve faced.

Welcome, Brian Williams, to the International Association of Guys Who’ve Been to War – And Lied About It Later in the Bar. (I.A.G.W.B2W. — L.A.I.L.) Membership includes everybody who’s been to war or near a war or in rough proximity to something that is remotely comparable to the dangers and hazards of war, such a being a teenage volunteer fireman who saved puppies from a smoky building.

A more biting response came from Scott Long at Mondoweiss:

What I don’t get is why this is an issue. Williams made up a story. But he was in the middle of the most fantastic made-up story in American history. The Iraq war, written by Bush with a little help from Tony Blair and Micronesia and Poland, was a gigantic fiction, as beautifully told and expressive of the moment’s cultural mythology as The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, or A Million Little Pieces, or Three Cups of Tea. The reasons were fake, the goals were fake, the triumph was fake. Nothing was true except the dead people, who aren’t talking. The war countered imaginary threats and villainies with imaginary victories and valor. Williams added his embroidery in the spirit of invention. Why are the other tale-spinners turning on him now?

Or, as Jon Stewart put it:

I am happy. Finally, someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq War. Finally. Now, it might not necessarily be the first person you’d want held accountable on that list. But never again will Brian Williams mislead this great nation about being shot at in a war we probably wouldn’t have ended up in if the media had applied this level of scrutiny to the actual f–king war.

What will we do without you, Jon?

This is a good time to look back at Atlantic‘s discussion of why there’s no conservative Jon Stewart. It’s a little more complicated than just the observable fact that conservatives aren’t funny, but not a lot more complicated.

and a government shutdown

When the 2014 elections completed the Republican takeover of Congress, a lot of ink was spilled about governing responsibly and not playing chicken with government shutdowns.

Well, now John Boehner is starting to talk about shutting down the government. Not the whole thing, just the part that keeps us safe.

and you also might be interested in …

Not all of us in New England are as happy about the weather as the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore was when he recorded thundersnow — or as happy as the toddler who watched him do it.

Science is still too suspicious an activity for a Republican presidential candidate to associate himself with. Asked if he believed in the theory of evolution, Scott Walker replied “I’m going to punt on that one.”

Here’s a question I’d like to ask every candidate who courts the Religious Right: “Do you believe we are in the end times described in the Book of Revelation?” And if the answer is yes, follow up with: “How will that affect your foreign policy? In particular, if events in the Middle East seemed headed towards the Battle of Armageddon that heralds the return of Christ, would you regard that as a good thing or a bad thing?”

Bad Astronomy explains why the adjustments scientists make to temperature data are just good science, and not the “scandal” that global-warming deniers claim.

Authorities are still trying to figure out whether the murder of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, NC was a hate crime or not. The alleged shooter’s alleged Facebook page is full of anti-religious stuff, but a quick scan didn’t reveal anything uglier than what comes across my news feed every day from people who don’t seem particularly dangerous. I didn’t see any threats of violence or Muslims-must-die messages. Neither did atheist blogger Michael Nugent, who has done a more thorough search.

Still, the idea of an self-described “anti-theist” turning violent has captured the dark side of the public imagination (and promoted some introspection among atheists). For example, what happens if someone takes literally a text cherry-picked from, say, Sam Harris’ The End of Faith:

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

(The quote is really there, but the link argues — I’m not sure how convincingly — that it isn’t nearly so bad in its larger context.)

Secularist groups (including a local one I have spoken to and am a not-terribly-active member of) have been debating whether to issue a statement denouncing hate crimes against believers, or whether such statements might cement the public’s speculative interpretation that this really was an atheist hate crime. On the flip side, I’m not aware of any atheist group that has endorsed the murders. (I’m sure that would make headlines, so I’ll go out on a limb and say it hasn’t happened.)

Whatever the facts turn out to be, one lesson to draw from this is that there are violent people in every religious and/or political movement. If you yourself are non-violent and see the essence of your movement as non-violent, it stings to suddenly feel like the public is picking out that one lunatic to be the poster boy who represents you.

If you’ve ever had that experience, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The next time somebody from a different religious/political group does something horrible, don’t hold everybody from that group responsible — or cherry-pick the movement’s favorite texts to find justifications.

Meanwhile, somebody burned down a Muslim school in Houston.

TPM’s Ed Kilgore sees the religious-right’s freak-out over President Obama’s prayer breakfast remarks as an attack on liberal Christianity in general.

and let’s close with something amazing

Linsey Pollack shows TedxSydney how to turn a carrot into a clarinet. (Why do I think this is harder than he makes it look?)

February 16, 2015 – 10:52 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

When Hate Stays in the Closet

answering the most sympathetic and reasonable arguments against same-sex marriage

I found the Marriage Conservation Facebook page when one of my FB friends linked to something “hateful” posted there. And it’s true, you don’t have to read very far to find nasty comments cloaked in self-righteousness.

But that’s not what I found interesting.

In general, I try to discourage my friends from winding themselves up by seeking out other people’s bile. Once in a while I run into some blessedly innocent person who doesn’t understand the depth of irrational hatred in the world, and who (sadly) needs to be disillusioned a little. But I believe that for most of us, the idea that there are crazy, nasty, ugly people on the other side comes to mind far too easily.

What’s harder to hold in mind is all the good, decent, well-meaning people who are trying their best to do the right thing, but happen to believe something different than I do or you do.

There always are such people, and they often form the majority of the opposition. This is true even if you are 100% right. Human beings are fallible, we’re loath to discard familiar attitudes, and the opportunities for rationalization to derail clear thinking are innumerable. (That’s true for me and the people who agree with me, too.) So recognizing the fundamental humanity of your opponents doesn’t mean you have to compromise with them or pretend that their points have more validity than you think they really do.

Failing to see the well-intentioned people on the other side is also counter-productive. Because the more an argument becomes dominated by hate and angry condemnations of hate, the more convinced the well-meaning people will be that they must be right. After all, if the points they find convincing were answerable, surely people would be answering them, rather than tarring them by association with the bigots or the self-righteous types whose best argument is something like “I just talked to God and He agrees with me.”

So let’s consider some of the points that the more reasonable folks who post to Marriage Conservation find compelling. There are basically two types: testimonies and statistics.

Testimony. One kind of article that has been showing up more and more often lately is the testimony of a young adult raised by same-sex parents. Marriage-equality advocates been using such testimonies effectively for some time, and Justice Kennedy (who is likely to be the deciding vote when the Supreme Court rules on this issue later this year) has said:

There are some 40,000 children in California, according to the Red Brief, that live with same-sex parents, and they want their parents to have full recognition and full status. The voice of those children is important in this case, don’t you think?

So naturally, the other side has found its own testimonies: Not every child raised by a same-sex couple believes in marriage equality. A good example is Katy Faust’s “Dear Justice Kennedy: An Open Letter from the Child of a Loving Gay Parent“.

I write because I am one of many children with gay parents who believe we should protect marriage. … I’d like to explain why I think redefining marriage would actually serve to strip these children of their most fundamental rights.

Faust goes on to say that she loves her mother and her mother’s partner, but the debate about marriage shouldn’t hinge on “lessening emotional suffering within the homosexual community”

This debate, at its core, is about one thing. It’s about children.

“There is no difference between the value and worth of heterosexual and homosexual persons,” Faust writes.

However, when it comes to procreation and child-rearing, same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples are wholly unequal and should be treated differently for the sake of the children.

When two adults who cannot procreate want to raise children together, where do those babies come from? Each child is conceived by a mother and a father to whom that child has a natural right.

She then talks about “the missing parent”. In her case she was raised by two mothers, but her parents’ divorce distanced her from her father. The authenticity of that yearning is what gives her testimony its emotional punch. I’m sure that when same-sex-marriage opponents read her article, they come away with a strong desire to protect children like Katy.

But … what does her testimony have to do with same-sex marriage? The problem here is divorce, not gay or lesbian relationships. Children of divorce often miss their non-custodial parent. It’s a sad situation, whether the custodial parent stays single or re-marries someone of either gender.

If you follow Faust’s argument where it logically goes, rather than just to the place that’s politically expedient, you’ll pay no attention to same-sex marriage and instead work to make it much harder for parents to divorce, and to force men to marry women they get pregnant. That would really enforce a child’s “natural right” to both biological parents.

But no one is pushing either of those proposals, probably because you couldn’t even get support for them in religious-right churches (where divorce rates are higher than among, say, atheists) or in Bible-belt states like Louisiana and Mississippi (which have the highest birth-out-of-wedlock rates in the country).

Lying behind Faust’s argument (and many others like it) is an idealistic view of sex and child-bearing that is beautiful in its way: In the ideal world, there would be no unwanted pregnancies. Every conception would result from an act of love between two people committed to each other and to the life they might bring into the world. The parents would be mature enough and self-aware enough to make that commitment and see it through, and Life or God or Fate would cooperate by letting them live long enough to do it.

Unfortunately, though, that vision is disconnected from the world where we actually live — disconnected, in fact, from any world where anyone has ever lived. Selectively imposing pieces of that vision on gay and lesbian couples because they are an unpopular minority is unfair.

It also would be ineffective; there is no reason to believe that banning same-sex marriage would move the children of America closer to that vision in any way. In a world where no one had ever heard of same-sex marriage, Katy Faust’s parents would still get divorced and she would still grow up without her “natural right” to live with her father. And nothing Justice Kennedy does or avoids doing will fix that for future Katy Fausts.

Who redefined marriage? I keep going back to what Dan Savage told Chris Hayes a few years ago: It isn’t that gay people want to redefine marriage, it’s that straight people have already redefined marriage in such a way that there’s no longer any coherent argument for keeping gay couples on the outside.

I am one of those straight people. My wife and I have been married for 30 years, but (though we dearly love some of our friends’ children), we decided not to have a child of our own. For us, as for many childless-by-choice couples, marriage has been about forming a life-long partnership. A strong marriage partnership is indeed a good setting to raise children; but these days, whether a married couple will raise children or not is a separate decision.

Among straights, child-raising has not been the defining characteristic of marriage for at least a generation. To make it the defining characteristic again only when we consider same-sex couples is unfair.

Maybe you want to roll marriage back to the 1960s, before Governor Reagan signed California’s no-fault divorce law (or even to the 1800s, when wives couldn’t own property). If so, be honest about it and go after the people who are really responsible for the changing expectations about marriage: divorced or never-married straights with children, and married straights without children. Try using the law to impose your will on them. See for yourself how popular that would be.

Statistics. Just in time for the Supreme Court’s consideration comes a statistical study comparing children raised by same-sex and opposite-sex parents: “Emotional Problems among Children with Same-Sex Parents: Difference by Definition” by Donald Paul Sullins, a Catholic priest and a sociology professor at the Catholic University of America (the same institution from which he received his masters and doctorate).

Sullins looks at data collected by the National Health Interview Study between 1997 and 2013. His sample includes 207,007 children, of whom 512 came from households where the adults in the household were same-sex couples. (The study has no data on whether the couples were married. Given the legal situation during most of the period in question, the vast majority of them probably weren’t.) He finds that

Emotional problems were over twice as prevalent … for children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents.

Mark Regnerus — author of a similar study a few years ago — interprets Sullins’ results to say “Kids do best with Mom and Dad.” In other words, “biology matters”; the more biological parents a child lives with, the better (on average). And since a same-sex couple at best contains only one of a child’s biological parents, it starts out at a disadvantage.

There are, of course, a number of studies that say the opposite: that all other things being equal, children raised by same-sex couples on average do as well or better than those raised by opposite-sex couples.

What the debate ultimately comes down to is what it means for all other things to be equal, because they seldom are in any literal sense. We live in a society where biological parents get the first shot at raising a child. If they are a committed couple who are willing and able to do the job, no one can stop them or even wants to stop them. So when you study children being raised by someone other than both biological parents, you are often looking at a child for whom something has gone wrong. There may have been a divorce, a death, a desertion, a parent in prison, abuse, a series of foster homes, or an involved custody battle — maybe several of those things.

If you are looking at the emotional well-being of those children as a measure of the the quality of the parenting they are receiving in their current homes, you need to compare them to similar children in other homes. If, say, my wife and I were to adopt a six-year-old from an orphanage in Indonesia, a few years later it might be fair to compare our child to other children adopted at a similar age from similar orphanages — but not to children raised from birth by American parents.

Most studies of same-sex parenting do some similar kind of data-normalization, so that, say, children of divorce are compared to other children of divorce, and so on. But Regnerus argues explicitly for not adjusting the raw data to make apples-to-apples comparisons.

You can make the children of same-sex households appear to fare fine (if not better), on average, if you control for a series of documented factors more apt to plague same-sex relationships and households: relationship instability, residential instability, health and emotional challenges, greater economic struggle (among female couples), and—perhaps most significantly—the lack of two biological connections to the child. If you control for these, you will indeed find “no differences” left over. Doing this gives the impression that “the kids are fine” at a time when it is politically expedient to do so.

This analytic tendency reflects a common pattern in social science research to search for ‘‘independent’’ effects of variables, thereby overlooking—or perhaps ignoring—the pathways that explain how social phenomena actually operate in the real world.

What he is arguing, in other words, is that same-sex couples who are raising children ought to be held responsible for how their children got into this situation, whether they had anything to do with it or not.

For example, suppose a husband deserts his wife and children for another woman, and the wife later finds a committed partner who is female. Regnerus and Sullins would assign the emotional baggage of the desertion to the wife who stayed and the woman who took on the challenge of helping her, not to the opposite-sex household of the man who actually deserted. The impact of bigotry on the same-sex household (which might have something to do with why lesbian couples on average make less money than couples that include a man) is also their responsibility, not the responsibility of those who discriminate against them.

I suspect it wouldn’t be hard to do a Sullins-type study about the emotional problems and developmental difficulties faced by children raised by black parents. Blacks parents, on average, are poorer than white parents. They have lower academic achievement, are more likely to live in neighborhoods with bad schools, and so on. Maybe those factors shouldn’t be normalized out of the statistics by which we judge black parents, because they are “the pathways that explain how social phenomena actually operate in the real world.” Maybe they should instead be arguments for not letting blacks raise children at all, or not letting them get married. Maybe solidly middle-class black couples with good educations should be considered suspect because of the statistics associated with their race.

Or not. Maybe if two men find a willing surrogate mother to bear a child for them, and then raise that child from birth to adulthood in a loving household, they shouldn’t have to answer for statistics shaped by divorce and desertion — as Regnerus and Sullins would have them do.

Magic. Lying behind the Sullins and Regnerus studies is the same kind of magical thinking that Katy Faust demonstrates: If only we made same-sex relationships more arduous, then opposite-sex relationships would miraculously improve. Through some benevolent act of God, there wouldn’t be any more unwed mothers or divorces or households so toxic that the state had to intervene. Those things are all the fault of homosexuals, so of course we shouldn’t factor them out of the statistics when we judge the children they are raising.

I’ve never met Sullins or Regnerus or talked to anybody who has, so I have no idea what motivates a person to devote his career to constructing such studies. But the people who are impressed with those studies and quote them to others, I suspect, are mostly well-intentioned folks. And if Faust is some kind of hater, she hides it really well. I can easily sympathize with her wish that her mother and father had done a better job with their marriage, so that Faust need never have gone through the disruption of their divorce.

But the problems of opposite-sex relationships belong to opposite-sex couples. Making life harder for gay people won’t solve them.

And whether it would happen in your ideal world or not, same-sex couples are raising children. Some are adopting children whose biological parents can’t or won’t raise them. Some are working with doctors and friends to conceive children that they will raise from birth. And some are keeping faith with the children they had in a previous opposite-sex relationship that failed.

In the vast majority of those cases, if they gave those children up something worse would happen to them. And if you make life harder for those couples, you can’t avoid making life harder for their children. Who would that benefit?

If you think someone would benefit, I don’t automatically see you as a hate-filled bigot. But I can’t figure out who you’re picturing. It can’t be Katy Faust, or any of the other victims of failed opposite-sex relationships. And if not them, then who?

February 16, 2015 – 8:25 am Categories: Articles | Comments (16)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week I spent some time looking around on the anti-gay-marriage Facebook page Marriage Conservation to see what kinds of arguments motivate the people who seemed most thoughtful and reasonable (i.e., not the ones who express a blind hatred for all things gay). My response to those arguments will be in “When Hate Stays in the Closet”, which I think will be out around 8 EST.

I don’t know if this post will convince anyone, but I hope it will at least explain why the rest of us don’t find these points as obvious and compelling as the “marriage conservationists” do. (Feel free to forward it to that aunt or cousin who keeps sending you anti-gay stuff.)

The weekly summary will discuss President Obama’s proposed Congressional authorization for the war against ISIL, Brian Williams, Jon Stewart, the Chapel Hill murders, and a few other things, before closing with a short video demonstrating how to make a clarinet out of a carrot. (Hard to believe Bugs Bunny never thought of that.)

February 16, 2015 – 6:45 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Sanctifying Power

Christianity did not “cause” slavery, anymore than Christianity “caused” the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion’s share of American history.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates,
“The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama’s Prayer Breakfast Speech” (2-6-2015)

This week’s featured post is “The Individual and the Herd“.

This week everybody was talking about vaccinations

The week was a lesson in the unpredictability of presidential campaigns. When Chris Christie planned his trip to London, it probably never occurred to him that the headline would be his comments on vaccinations, or that before it was all said and done, just about all the other Republican hopefuls would have to respond.

In “The Individual and the Herd” I discuss what I think is really behind this argument: Many Republicans want to use an extremist rhetoric of individual freedom without being willing to go where it leads. In particular, you can’t understand public health without looking at things from the point of view of society and the public good. If all you can see are individual trees, any discussion about the health of the forest is going to go over your head.

But, politics of the issue aside, there really is a measles problem developing. We had this disease beaten, and now we don’t.

And let’s face it: To the extent that we are unable to come to terms with public-health and public-good problems like this, we’re uncivilized. The rest of the world sees this clearly.

and Christian/Muslim history

Thursday, at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama gave a wonderful talk that I recommend everyone read. You can skip past the loosening-the-room-up humor to where he starts to get serious: “And certainly for me, this is always a chance to reflect on my own faith journey.”

Several times (most recently two weeks ago) I’ve focused on the difference between liberal religion and fundamentalist religion. One aspect of that difference is summed up in a quote often attributed to President Lincoln:

My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side.

In fundamentalism, it’s obvious which side is God’s: It’s all spelled out very clearly in a “literal” interpretation of scripture. So there’s no problem problem going to extremes, because you begin with 100% certainty.

But in liberal religion, how to bring the spirit of your faith into the nitty-gritty of human experience is always a bit mysterious, and you constantly have to re-examine your actions and motives to be sure you’re still getting it right. That’s what Obama is talking about:

We should start with some basic humility.  I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt — not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.

He goes on in that vein, in a way that I find beautiful.

But you’d never know that from the public discussion of his talk, which focused on this small excerpt, one that comes right after Obama has criticized ISIL and “those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends”:

Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

That statement is entirely accurate historically. But Christian-good/Muslim-bad is a central tenet of American conservatism these days, so this response from former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore was far too typical:

The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime. He has offended every believing Christian in the United States. This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.

Apparently one value Gilmore thinks “we all share” is to regard whatever story makes us feel good as “history”, no matter what actually happened. And he’s right: Obama doesn’t believe in that. But neither do I or a lot of other Americans … or even a lot of “believing Christians”.

The theory that Islam is an inherently violent religion runs head-on into a study showing that the murder rates in Muslim countries are much lower than in non-Muslim countries.

Some secularists segued from Obama’s criticism of Christianity to a denunciation of religion in general: They all have been used to justify wars and atrocities at one time or another, so they should all be done away with.

This is where I think the Ta-Nehisi Coates quote at the top of this post fits in: People seeking power or exercising power are always going to justify what they do in whatever way things get justified in their culture. (Stalinists used to describe their version of Marxism as “scientific” and make reference to the “laws of History” rather than the will of God.) For most of history, that’s meant justification in religious terms. But getting rid of religion wouldn’t change the underlying dynamic. Rationalization will use whatever tools are at hand.

And religiously-justified atrocities are never going to convince ordinary people stop practicing religion. It’s like drinking alcohol: If you regularly enjoy a glass of wine at dinner without it ever leading to anything horrible, hearing about drunk drivers who kill innocent children or alcoholics who wreck their own lives isn’t going to persuade you to stop. Your own positive experiences are always going to trump horror stories about somebody else.

and the budget

From the news coverage, you’d never know that President Obama has proposed a budget for the next fiscal year. It fleshes out some of the ideas he floated in the State of the Union, like free community college and a middle-class tax break. Given that Republicans control Congress, the Obama budget probably isn’t going anywhere. But Paul Ryan’s budgets have also been doomed the last few years, and they got quite a bit of coverage.

The Dealbook blog at the NYT highlights Obama’s corporate tax reform proposal, and explains why no corporate tax reform is likely to be passed, no matter how much each party calls for it.

The basic idea of corporate tax reform is simple: Compared to other countries we have a high nominal corporate tax rate, but the tax code also has so many special breaks in it that few corporations (and really few large corporations) pay anything like the nominal rate. (According to Citizens for Tax Justice, when you aggregate the years 2008-2012, General Electric, Verizon, and Boeing paid a negative tax rate on their very large profits.) In theory, American business in general would benefit if we could lower the nominal rate while getting rid of loopholes.

The problem is, neither party really wants to do that. Democrats mainly want to reverse the long-term slide in the percentage of revenue the government gets from corporations, while Republicans want revenue to slide further. The corporations whose campaign contributions call the tune in Congress just want to pay less tax; preferably they’d get lower tax rates and more loopholes. Or maybe the loopholes could go away temporarily and then get put right back in.

and you also might be interested in …

Rick Perry’s case for becoming president rests on his record in Texas, which he says created 1/3 of all the new jobs in America during his tenure, and claims as proof that his keep-taxes-low and get-government-out-of-the-way policies work. Another view, though, is that he was governor of an oil state during a time of high oil prices. Now oil prices have fallen, so it will be interesting to see if the Texas “miracle” continues.

The collapse of oil prices is happening on his successor’s watch, though, so Perry may be able to avoid blame for the consequences. But Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal is not so lucky. He’s still governor, his state is still largely dependent on oil, and it faces a projected $1.6 billion deficit in the coming year, caused partly by the big tax cuts he pushed through during the boom part of the boom-and-bust cycle. Jindal’s presidential prospects will end if he raises taxes, and Louisiana already ranks near the bottom of all states in per capita education and health-care spending (and in results; the people of Louisiana are relatively unhealthy and uneducated, compared to other states), so it will be interesting to see what he does.

It looks like that Oregon bakery is going to have to pay damages to the same-sex couple it refused to make a wedding cake for. (The amount is still to be determined.) Salon‘s Gabriel Arana is not sympathetic.

At heart, what the religious right is asking for with its “religious liberty” campaign is to rewrite our secular code to allow the practice of refusing service to members of society for no substantive reason other than to express moral disapproval. They are unlikely to succeed. That’s because this is a debate we’ve already had and settled. … As a society, we decided, after more than a century of wrangling, that our civic code required citizens to treat each other equally in the arenas of commerce, housing and public accommodations—even if your religion says you don’t have to, or that you shouldn’t.

… The problem with these [anti-gay religious liberty] bills is that it’s impossible to write them in a way that doesn’t also uphold the right to discriminate against people on the basis of race; you either have to use broad language to write the bill so it can’t be construed as singling out gay people, or specify that all other forms of discrimination are bad except discrimination against gays.

These attempts to write prejudice into our civic code will fail. We long ago decided the mantle of religion does not override our basic duty to be decent to one another.

and let’s close with something creative

Steven Benedict did a smash-up of lines from Coen brothers movies to create a conversation. As he describes it:

The characters talk to one another across the films so we can more clearly hear the Coens’ dominant concerns: identity, miscommunication and morality. Taken as a trinity, these elements indicate that the Coens’ true subject is the search for value in a random and amoral universe.

February 9, 2015 – 11:35 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (7)

The Individual and the Herd

How the rhetoric of freedom can lead us astray.

The question Governor Chris Christie was asked seemed simple enough:

There’s a debate going on right now in the United States, the measles outbreak that’s been caused in part by people not vaccinating their kids. Do you think Americans should vaccinate their kids? Is the measles vaccine safe?

He could have just said: “The measles vaccine is safe and parents should get their kids vaccinated.” That appears to be what he believes, and the question required nothing more. But instead he decided to expand the context and give a more complex answer:

All I can say is that we vaccinated ours. That’s the best expression I can give you of my opinion. It’s much more important, I think, what you think as a parent than what you think as a public official. And that’s what we do. But I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.

In response to follow-up questions, he explained that vaccines for different diseases have different risks and benefits (which is true), so the government should be careful about which ones it mandates and which ones it leaves up to parents (which hardly anyone disputes). “I didn’t say I’m leaving people the option,” he protested. And when asked again whether vaccines were dangerous, he responded: “I didn’t say that.” But he also stopped short of saying: “The measles vaccine is safe.”

In short, if you parse Christie’s words very carefully and give him just a little benefit of the doubt, he didn’t say anything all that objectionable. But the question lingers: Why did he go there in the first place? Why not just give the simple answer, if that’s what he believes? After all, that’s the image Christie works so hard to project: a man who bluntly says what he thinks without a lot of political doubletalk. Why couldn’t “Is the measles vaccine safe?” get a “yes” answer, rather than a long-winded discussion followed by a denial that he was saying it was dangerous?

The obvious implication was that (as he progresses towards an as-yet-unannounced presidential campaign) Christie was trying not to offend some bloc of Republican voters. And many then jumped to the conclusion that the bloc in question is the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, who believe the scientifically groundless theory that vaccines cause autism.

The controversy Christie’s remarks started might have died out quickly, if rival presidential hopeful Senator Rand Paul hadn’t jumped in and said explicitly what Christie was accused of implying:

I’ve heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.

(He later backed off, claiming that after just means that vaccines and mental disorders are “temporally related”, not that one causes the other. So I’m sure he won’t mind if the media publishes a slew of stories of the form: So-and-so did something horrible after listening to Rand Paul. Or maybe a headline like “ISIS Beheads Hostage After Paul Speech”.)

But here’s the problem with the pandering-to-Republican-anti-vaxxers theory: First, there just aren’t that many anti-vaxxers. [See endnote 1]  And second, they aren’t all Republicans. There’s a liberal version of anti-vax that focuses the conspiracy theory on drug companies rather than government. [2]

So the theory that a Republican primary might be decided by anti-vaxxers casting a single-issue vote is a little sketchy. That’s why as soon as their position got labelled as pandering to anti-vaxxers, other potential candidates took the opposite side of the argument [3] and both Christie and Paul had to back down to a certain extent.

So who were they pandering to? The Libertarian/Theocrat side of my model in “The Four Flavors of Republican“.

Again Paul was the more explicit:

The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own their children. [4]

In other words, decisions about vaccinations shouldn’t be made by the American people as a whole through the democratic process, or by the medical experts that the people delegate those decisions to. Libertarians believe those issues should be decided by sovereign individuals, and Theocrats want them decided by the fathers that God made sovereign over their households.

When you look at the world through either one of those lenses, vaccinations aren’t the point, they just symbolize larger issues about authority. So sure, I’m going to vaccinate my kids, but the decision should be up to me. “It’s an issue of freedom,” Paul said, and when the CNBC interviewer pressed him, he got sarcastic. “I guess being for freedom would be really unusual.”

This ties vaccinations to other “freedom” issues, like your freedom to go without health insurance rather than accept ObamaCare, your freedom to let your kids grow up ignorant rather than send them to a government-approved school (or report their home-schooling progress to an education bureaucrat), or your freedom to take the low wages and poor working conditions an employer offers rather than negotiate through a union. Newly elected North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis defended the freedom of food-sellers to set their own hygiene standards rather than be bound by government regulations:

“I was having a discussion with someone, and we were at a Starbucks in my district, and we were talking about certain regulations where I felt like ‘maybe you should allow businesses to opt out,'” the senator said.

Tillis said his interlocutor was in disbelief, and asked whether he thought businesses should be allowed to “opt out” of requiring employees to wash their hands after using the restroom.

The senator said he’d be fine with it, so long as businesses made this clear in “advertising” and “employment literature.”

“I said: ‘I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says “We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom,” Tillis said.

“The market will take care of that,” he added, to laughter from the audience. [5]

So in Tillis’ ideal republic, you would have to study the diverse hygiene practices of all the places you eat, so that you can make an informed decision about whether it’s safe to eat there. Because freedom.

Taken to its logical extreme, the freedom agenda says that you should be free to drive on the left side of the interstate. You wouldn’t, of course, because it’s dangerous and you’re not stupid. At least, you wouldn’t most of the time. Most people wouldn’t, most of the time.

But it wouldn’t take many to screw everything up. What if, of all the drivers who would be traveling north during your next trip south down the interstate, you knew that only one would be using his freedom to drive on the left side and come straight at you? How would that change your driving experience?

Here’s what it boils down to: Human beings are simultaneously individuals and members of society, not fundamentally one or the other. Some issues (like free speech) are easier to understand from the individual point of view, while others (like traffic) require a  social point of view. [6]

Public health is fundamentally social. Germs pay no attention to your individuality; they just spread through the herd. You personally may do everything right, but whether or not you get sick also depends on social things like the quality of the sewage system, whether other infected individuals have access to health care or paid sick leave, how well your city controls rats and other vermin, whether restaurant workers wash their hands, and what percentage of people get vaccinated. In extreme cases, it depends on really draconian government interventions like quarantines and travel restrictions.

No matter what kind of intellectual contortions you do, you can’t square all that with a pure individual-freedom agenda. What if a free individual exposed to Ebola doesn’t want to be quarantined in a treatment facility? (Maybe he has his own theory about diseases and doesn’t believe all this germ-and-virus nonsense. Or maybe he was only probably exposed, and he’s willing to risk it.) If your ideology limits you to looking at everything from the individual-freedom viewpoint, your thinking about public health is going to be crippled.

So that’s who Christie and Paul were pandering to this week: people whose thinking about public health has been crippled by individualist ideology. If either becomes president, he may continue to pander to them.

[1] Anti-vaxxers only dangerous because it doesn’t take many to screw up herd immunity, which protects people who can’t use the vaccine. (In other words: Even if you can’t be vaccinated or haven’t been vaccinated yet, you’ll be safe because you are unlikely to come into contact with sick people.) According to the World Health Organization, as reproduced in Wikipedia, the herd immunity threshold for measles is 83-94% vaccinated, so as few as 6% in a local community might be enough to make that community vulnerable to an outbreak.

If you think of this in terms of the free-rider problem, the herd immunity threshold measures how many free riders the vaccination system can stand before it starts breaking down.

[2] Anti-vaccine liberals are sometimes used to prove that in their own way Democrats are just as much at war with science as Republicans who deny climate change or evolution. But here’s the clear difference: Anti-science liberals are on the fringe of the Democratic Party, and elected officials seldom pay much attention to them. Conversely, climate-change denial is a core position of the conservative base, so virtually every elected Republican has gotten in line.

[3] Marco Rubio demonstrated that a Republican presidential contender can give the simple, direct answer: “There is absolutely no medical science or data whatsoever that links those vaccinations to onset of autism or anything of that nature. And by the way, if enough people are not vaccinated, you put at risk infants that are three months of age or younger and have not been vaccinated and you put at risk immune-suppressed children that are not able to get those vaccinations. So absolutely, all children in American should be vaccinated.”

Also Ted Cruz: “On the question of whether kids should be vaccinated, the answer is obvious, and there’s widespread agreement: of course they should.”

But both avoided a direct endorsement of mandatory vaccinations, like Ben Carson’s.

[4] Rekha Basu of the Des Moines Register had the right response:

No, we don’t own our children. From slavery to child sexual abuse, the notion of owning another human has led to nothing good. Legally, we’re responsible for our kids and their care, feeding and safety until they’re old enough to take care of themselves. But they are autonomous human beings, which is why, unlike property, there are laws and standards governing what we can and can’t do to them.

[5] We’ve seen this two-step before. The same politicians who say that a well-informed public can sort things out without government help will also oppose any regulations that inform the public. Today, Tillis says he’d make Starbucks post that sign, but when the time came to vote on it he actually wouldn’t, for exactly the same reason: The market can sort out whether businesses should have to post their hygiene policies.

[6] It’s like the wave/particle thing with light, if that analogy makes sense to you. If not, forget I mentioned it.

February 9, 2015 – 8:52 am Categories: Articles | Comments (16)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week was a lesson in the unpredictability of presidential campaigns. Who knew Republican candidates would be talking about the measles vaccine? Maybe next week they’ll argue about whether cities should have fire departments or some other issue no one is thinking about now. (BTW: This has been an example of why I haven’t been taking Rand Paul’s candidacy seriously: He has never figured out how to downplay his loonier views, so if he ever becomes the focus of the campaign, the other candidates will maneuver him into spending a week talking about eliminating public schools or something.)

If you’ve been listening to the vaccination debate and wondering “Why are we talking about this?”, this week’s featured article will take it back to its roots in “The Individual and the Herd”. It should be out by 9 EST.

The weekly summary will say more about the measles outbreak, then talk about the wonderful talk President Obama gave at the National Prayer Breakfast — and the fevered response to the two lines in which he pointed out that Christianity is open to abuse just like Islam is.

I’ll also mention some of the minor matters that got lost in all the sturm und drang about measles and the Crusades, like next year’s federal budget, and state budgets whose main purpose is to promote the governor’s shot at the Republican presidential nomination.

The summary will close with a very creative smash-up that turns the Coen brothers’ movies into one big conversation. Expect that by noon.

And in case you’re wondering: It’s still snowing. If Shakespeare had set “Twelfth Night” in New England, Feste would sing, “The snow, it snoweth every day.”

February 9, 2015 – 7:10 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Drive It Home

When teetotalers are the only ones willing to say “maybe you’ve had one too many,” because your friends are worried about sounding like abstemious scolds, the advice is a lot easier to dismiss. Which is fine until it’s time to drive home.

— Julian Sanchez, “Chait Speech“

This week’s featured post is “The Liberal-on-Liberal Debate Over Political Correctness“.

If you’re in the area, you can hear me speak next Sunday at First Parish Church in Billerica, Massachusetts. I’ll be talking more about religion than politics, but some of you may find it interesting.

This week everybody was talking about political correctness

Jonathan Chait’s “Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say” should be written up in textbooks as an example of how to make yourself the center of an argument on the internet. It’s simple:

  • Start with a controversial topic, preferably one centering on a buzzword that different people use differently.
  • Take a position your usual friends will hate and your usual enemies will love.
  • Don’t do a particularly good job, so that the people who hate what you say have a lot to work with.
  • Make sure there’s a legitimate point somewhere in the background, so that the people who agree with that point will have to come rescue it, even if they don’t want to rescue you.

I am in awe of the master. And I collect some of the best points people made (and at least one bad one) in “The Liberal-on-Liberal Debate Over Political Correctness“.

and in Europe, Greece was the word

A quote that’s been attributed to various people at various times goes something like this:

If I owe a million dollars and can’t pay, I am lost. If I owe a billion dollars and can’t pay, the banker is lost.

That’s usually when some government steps in with a bail-out. It may look like the debtor is getting bailed out, but really the rescue helicopter is coming for the banker.

The illusion that the debtor is the beneficiary, though, is usually used to get some concessions out of him. But if the conditions of the bail-out are too harsh, eventually the debtor starts asking, “What exactly am I getting out of this?”

That’s more-or-less what happened in the recent Greek elections, where the left-wing party Syriza won, making its leader, Alexis Tsipras the new prime minister. The new government is giving hints in both directions, saying sometimes that its creditors will just have to write off some of its debt, and at others that it will pay everything off.

An even more interesting question is whether the revolt of voters in debt-ridden countries against the bankers will spread to larger European countries like, say, Spain, where the local left-wing party held this demonstration:

and 2016

As recently as last week, I was making fun of people who wanted to talk about 2016 already. But now Republicans are out there in front of real audiences of activists and donors, trying out their stump speeches and seeing if they can raise some interest.

The conservative activists were at the Iowa Freedom Summit. You can watch the YouTubes of the speeches. I thought Ted Cruz did  a good job staking his claim as the true leader of the anti-Obama movement. Scott Walker impressed a lot of people, and is rumored to be the first choice of establishment donors who want a new face rather than, say, Jeb Bush. I thought Rick Perry did surprising well. Maybe his problem in 2011 really was that medication for his back made him ditzy. (What’s Sarah Palin’s explanation for her disjointed speech? The model Jonathan Korman presented in 2013, using the Orwellian term duckspeak, seems to work better and better all the time.)

Meanwhile, the Koch Brothers were putting on the invitation-only Freedom Partners candidate forum to help its network of donors decide who to support. It was mostly behind closed doors, but the discussion among Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul was public (transcript). And if you want to see the full influence of big-money donors on today’s politics, watch Rubio, Cruz, and Paul tiptoe around the idea that big-money donors might have too much influence.

We even have a poll out of Iowa now, showing Scott Walker in the lead with an I-guess-that’s-formidible 15%. And Marco Rubio won the straw poll at the Koch event.

And finally, Mitt called it quits on a third run for the presidency, which started a rush to claim his donors, most of whom are believed to be shifting to Jeb Bush. Among my friends, I hear people starting to panic about a third Bush presidency. But I remember how inevitable Rick Perry seemed for a brief moment in 2011. Money matters, but performance on the campaign trail also matters. There’s a long way to go.

and the weather

Well over two feet of snow here, and more falling as I type. I loved this tweet from Ringo Starr.

and you also might be interested in …

Is it wrong for me to enjoy watching Bill O’Reilly and Sarah Palin snipe at each other?

As a New Englander and a Patriots fan, it’s best I say as little as possible about the Super Bowl. But Matt Yglesias has a plausible explanation of what Pete Carroll was thinking when he called that pass.

And you don’t have to be a football fan at all to appreciate the night Malcolm Butler had. Beginning the year as an undrafted rookie (i.e., a player nobody really wanted), he was first the victim of one of the craziest bounces in Super Bowl history, and then (two plays later) the guy who won the game.

Last year in “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean?” I recalled a a series of examples to illustrate this claim:

There’s a type of faux scandal that’s been happening … well, I haven’t exactly kept track, but it seems like there’s a new one every month or two. They all fit this pattern: President Obama does something that symbolically asserts his status as president, and the right-wing press gets outraged by how he’s “disrespecting” something-or-other related to the presidency.

Well, this week we had another one: The flap over Michelle not covering her head at King Abdullah’s funeral. Nobody much cared when Laura Bush left her head uncovered in the conservative Muslim kingdom.

Guillotine bait: A guy who got rich shorting subprime mortgages says

America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence.

Naturally, he doesn’t mean himself. His own five mansions aren’t going anywhere.

Vox does one of its 3-minute explanations about what’s wrong with American Sniper.

and let’s close with the best school-cancellation announcement ever

The Moses Brown School of Providence, Rhode Island, did a parody of Frozen‘s “Let it Go”. If you’re a kid with an unexpected day off school, the cold never bothered you anyway.

February 2, 2015 – 11:14 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

The Liberal-on-Liberal Debate Over Political Correctness

A fascinating argument was touched off when Jonathan Chait, a writer I usually like, posted “Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say: how the language police are perverting liberalism” on the New York magazine site.

Chait began by recounting an incident that really is objectionable: A Muslim man at the University of Michigan wrote a column for the campus conservative newspaper of the sort that campus conservatives think is clever, a spoof of someone from a marginalized group looking for things to be offended by. Not my cup of tea (or probably Chait’s either, for that matter) but what upset Chait was the reaction: Four people littered the steps of the student’s apartment building with copies of his column written over with insulting and hostile messages.

Up to that point, Chait was on firm ground; that kind of intimidation isn’t an appropriate response. But from there he segued into a stream of conservative tropes:

Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.

Naturally, conservative writers loved watching liberals argue about this. The Federalist‘s Robert Tracinski wrote:

I have observed several times before that the actual essence of the Obama era’s “post-racial” politics is: white people calling other white people racist. The true icons of racial politics in our era are not a fiery Jeremiah Wright or Jesse Jackson or even Al Sharpton, taking the white man to task for keep black folk down. No, it is the average Obama voter—a left-leaning, college-educated white person like, well, like Jonathan Chait, who uses his support for Obama and the Democrats’ agenda as evidence of his enlightenment, which in his mind makes him superior to Obama’s critics, who must be motivated by insidious, secret racism. … So you can see Chait’s dismay at seeing good white “liberals” have their Not Racist credentials challenged by those who are farther out on the left. Don’t they know how the system is supposed to work?

Because that whole “racism” thing is such a scam in the post-Jim-Crow era, when we all have equal opportunities and are treated the same wherever we go.

I thought about writing my own Chait-response article, but other liberals — mostly people Jonathan Korman linked to on Facebook (thanks!) — have been doing a better job than the first ideas that occurred to me, so I’ll mostly just link to them and decide at the end whether I have anything worth adding.

My problem with Chait is simple: As long as we’re not talking vandalism or violence or physical intimidation — and we’re not, in almost all of the cases he mentions other than that first one — saying that somebody’s view is “bigoted and illegitimate” is just as much an exercise of free speech as whatever that person said in the first place.

But wait, Belle Waring said it better:

People like Chait also don’t merely want to be allowed to say whatever they wish about whomever they wish for the sake of debate itself. Because he can already say whatever he damn well pleases! Look at him go! What he wants is the right to both say things which are offensive to some people and remain a liberal in good standing once he has said them. This is a stupid right which no one should have. … Chait wants to say offensive things and not be criticized.

And for Chait to write off such objections as “political correctness” … doesn’t that label represent the same kind of de-legitimization he is objecting to? But Vox‘s Amanda Taub has that covered:

First things first: there’s no such thing as “political correctness.” The term’s in wide use, certainly, but has no actual fixed or specific meaning. What defines it is not what it describes but how it’s used: as a way to dismiss a concern or demand as a frivolous grievance rather than a real issue.

Chait identifies a long list of disputes that he describes as examples of “p.c.” demands that are hurting mainstream liberalism. But calling these concerns “political correctness” is another way of saying that they aren’t important enough to be addressed on their merits. And all that really means is that they’re not important to Jonathan Chait.

Because it’s up to white men (like me and Chait) to decide whether your concerns deserve attention, or if you’re just being too sensitive. We’ll let you know what we decide, but until then try to keep the noise down so that you don’t disturb the neighbors.

Anti-war activist Fredrik deBoer offered a more nuanced opinion: Chait may be full of it, but that doesn’t mean there’s no problem in left-wing discourse. He described a series of situations where he’s seen left-wing groups chase away potential young recruits by coming down way too hard on them the first time they say something that offends a marginalized group — which is bound to happen, because marginalized groups have been marginalized; if you don’t belong to the group, you probably have never been taught how to consider their point of view, and you won’t figure it out until you go through a certain amount of well-intentioned trial and error. In the long run, might it be more productive to point out and correct those errors in a nicer way?

I don’t want these kids to be more like Jon Chait. I sure as hell don’t want them to be less left-wing. I want them to be more left-wing. I want a left that can win, and there’s no way I can have that when the actually-existing left sheds potential allies at an impossible rate. But the prohibition against ever telling anyone to be friendlier and more forgiving is so powerful and calcified it’s a permanent feature of today’s progressivism. And I’m left as this sad old 33 year old teacher who no longer has the slightest fucking idea what to say to the many brilliant, passionate young people whose only crime is not already being perfect.

An interesting detail: In deBoer’s examples, the people coming down hard on the newcomers are themselves from privileged backgrounds, which suggests that a cycle-of-abuse thing might be going on: I got hazed when I joined the movement, so I’ll be damned if I let you get away with anything.

Like deBoer, Julian What’s-He-Doing-At-the-Cato-Institute Sanchez starts with an accurate critique of Chait:

For people accustomed to seeing their opinions greeted with everything from dismissive condescension to harassment and death threats, a successful writer complaining from a perch at New York magazine about his friends being “bludgeoned… into despondent silence”—because people are mean on social media—simply sounded whiny.  Chait also moves a bit too seamlessly from real, honest-to-God censorship by public institutions to more informal social pressure in a way that makes it sound like he’s conflating them—claiming that criticism is somehow tantamount to censorship or repression.

But then he goes deeper. Every movement, Sanchez says, needs to watch out for a certain discussion-constraining dynamic: When the group’s extreme fringe takes its good ideas too far, it’s a thankless job for anyone within the movement to say, “Hey, wait a minute.” So instead, that criticism winds up being made by opponents, who just want to shut the group down. And once that starts happening, any insider who raises a similar point is siding with the enemy, and implicitly endorsing the whole ream of bogus criticisms enemies raise.

When teetotalers are the only ones willing to say “maybe you’ve had one too many,” because your friends are worried about sounding like abstemious scolds, the advice is a lot easier to dismiss. Which is fine until it’s time to drive home.

You see this dynamic, in fact, with the response to Chait’s essay: Progressives who think maybe he’s kinda-sorta got a point quickly move on, ceding the field to those who want to revoke his ally card and conservatives eager to welcome him, at least for the next ten seconds, to “their” side. … And this makes it still easier to conclude that nothing interesting or valuable is lost by any self-censorship that may be occurring. We know what the counterargument looks like, after all: It’s the garbage those assholes are spouting. Discourse gets increasingly polarized and, in the process, stupider. Which, again, seems like a bad outcome even if you don’t particularly care whether Jon Chait gets his feelings hurt.

So, do I have anything to add to that? Maybe I’ll just kibbitz a little to resolve the apparent contradiction between two people I think are both right: Taub saying PC doesn’t exist and Waring talking about it as a real thing that has positive value.

Let’s start with the definition I gave in “A Conservative-to-English Lexicon“:

Political correctness. The bizarre liberal belief that whites, men, straights, Christians, the rich, and other Americans in positions of privilege should treat less privileged people with respect, even though such people have no power to force them to.

Removing the snark: political correctness is the attempt to extend to powerless people the same kind of courtesy that powerful people can take for granted.

Just as an example, suppose you work for a large corporation and somehow find yourself talking to the Big Boss. Maybe you’re on an elevator together or standing in line next to him at the cafeteria, hard as that is to imagine. Naturally, the wheels in your head are spinning as you try to imagine his point of view, so that nothing you say or do will accidentally offend him. But if you were in a similar situation with a janitor or some other person of low rank, you probably wouldn’t work your empathy nearly so hard.

Maybe you should. Or maybe you should at least work your empathy harder than most of us usually do.

Extend that to groups. When you belong to a powerful group — say, men or whites or straights or something similarly normative in our culture — you can take for granted that nearly everyone you run into has a general appreciation of your point of view and knows better than to piss you off in obvious ways. Members of marginalized groups can’t assume that. They’re constantly being jostled or hassled or put on the spot; occasionally by haters, but more often by ordinary folks who can’t be bothered to think too hard about them. PC is the attempt to raise the overall level of consideration to the level that powerful groups take for granted.

That, I think, is the PC that Waring sees value in.

Taub, on the other hand, is talking not about PC as it would be defined by its practitioners, but about the undefined negative label that gets thrown around by critics. And she’s right: The most common usage of “political correctness” in the media is to label some issue as beneath my concern, because the people being offended or victimized or insulted aren’t people I care about, and aren’t powerful enough to make me care.

I think maybe I should add that usage to the Lexicon.

February 2, 2015 – 9:24 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

With two feet of Winter Storm Juno snow still on the ground, this morning I’m watching Nashua get a second blanket from Linus. (You don’t often get an opportunity for a pun like that; I couldn’t resist.) But the blogosphere has no snow days, here we go.

This week’s featured article collects what I see as the highlights of an interesting argument, the one touched off by Jonathan Chait’s article on political correctness. And by the way, what is political correctness anyway? Is it a real thing, or just an insult that conservatives throw around? (People I agree with argue both positions.)

In the weekly summary, I finally have to admit that the 2016 presidential campaign has started, at least on the Republican side. Suddenly, it isn’t just pundits speculating about whether possible candidates will announce that they are thinking about forming committees to study whether they should start raising money for a run. With the Iowa Freedom Summit and the Freedom Partners candidate forum now in the past, we have seen undeclared-but-really-running candidates trying out their stump speeches in front of real audiences, and putting the results on YouTube where we can all watch. And there was also that weird ramble by Sarah Palin, which I’m not really qualified to comment on since I’m not a psychiatrist.

But we won’t have Mitt Romney to kick around this year. We liberals who don’t have a quarter of a billion dollars will just have to pick another victim for our politics of envy. (The official Weekly Sift program of the 2016 race will appear next week.)

Also, the EU is trying to figure out what Greece’s turn to the left means, and whether the fever will spread to Spain. And there was another one of those nobody-cared-about-this-stuff-when-the-First-Family-was-white pseudo-scandals about Michelle not wearing a scarf to King Abdullah’s funeral. Texans demonstrated against the pending Muslim takeover of their state, and a bunch of other strange stuff happened.

And snow. There’s been lots and lots of snow. (Did I mention that already?)

The political correctness article should be out by 9 EST, and the summary by noon.

February 2, 2015 – 7:58 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

Prosperity Rises

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

— William Jennings Bryan, “Cross of Gold” (1896)

This week’s featured post is “Liberal Islam: Is it real? Is it Islam?”

This week everybody was talking about the State of the Union

This was the first SOTU of what I’ve been calling the Aw-Fukkit Phase of the Obama presidency, when he might as well say what he thinks because there are no more elections to position himself for.

If you  haven’t seen the speech, the best place to watch is on the White House web site, where you get supporting slides like the one on the right. Also, for the first time in history the White House openly leaked the text of their own speech, so you could read along with the President if you wanted.

“Tonight we turn the page” was a polite way of saying: “I’ve finally cleaned up enough of Bush’s mess that there’s room for me to have my own vision.” Obama supported that view by telling the story of his administration’s mess-cleaning-up accomplishments: unemployment is finally lower than before the 2008 financial crisis; troop levels in Iraq/Afghanistan are down from 180K to 15K; high-school graduation rates are up; oil imports and the price of gas are down (a wrinkle there: gas prices are down from their pre-crisis levels; during the crisis the price got down to $1.61 because nobody was buying); and deficits are down.

State of the Union addresses always have an element of symbolism. This time, Obama framed his speech around a letter he got from a woman in Minnesota, whose family went through hard times during the Great Recession, but stuck together, worked hard, studied hard, and bounced back. Opponents like to imply that Obama only represents unemployed inner-city black single mothers or irresponsible sluts who need abortions so that they can stay promiscuous and child-free, so it was artful to frame the speech around a Midwestern white couple working two jobs and raising kids born in wedlock.

We are a strong, tight-knit family who has made it through some very, very hard times. America, Rebekah and Ben’s story is our story. They represent the millions who have worked hard, and scrimped, and sacrificed, and retooled.

He referred to his policies as “middle-class economics”, implying a contrast with Republican trickle-down economics, which he did not name.

At every step, we were told our goals were misguided or too ambitious; that we would crush jobs and explode deficits. Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health care inflation at its lowest rate in fifty years. So the verdict is clear. Middle-class economics works.

The speech alluded to specific proposals but deferred the details, which started rolling out later in the week. They include proposals to promote and subsidize child care for working parents, to make two years of community college free, to give new tax breaks to middle-class families, and to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.

Probably Congress will ignore all these proposals. But they will put Republicans on the spot, at a time when some of them seemed to expect Obama to ask, “How high do you want me to jump?”

and “no-go zones”

Inside the conservative news bubble, lots of nonsense goes unchallenged, like ObamaCare’s “death panels”, or the “stand down order” that supposedly prevented a rescue mission to Benghazi. So I was not particularly shocked when I heard that Fox News was helping spread the bizarre dystopian fantasy that there were “no-go zones” in Europe that non-Muslims have to stay out of, including the entire city of Birmingham, England, and certain well-delineated neighborhoods of Paris.

There is, of course, nothing to support any of this. British Prime Minister David Cameron treated the claims with the disdain they deserve:

I thought it must be April Fools Day. This guy is clearly a complete idiot.

and the Mayor of Paris is threatening to sue. But that didn’t prevent Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal repeating those claims at a speech in London:

It is startling to think that any country would allow, even unofficially, for a so-called ‘no-go zone.’ The idea that a free country would allow for specific areas of its country to operate in an autonomous way that is not free and is in direct opposition to its laws is hard to fathom.

and then blamed “the liberal media” for pointing out that he was just making stuff up.

For once, Fox News apologized for its “error”. (Personally, I don’t think Fox actually tries to get the news right, so wouldn’t call it an “error”, though I believe they do feel bad about getting caught.) The apology (and not the original claim) shocked Jon Stewart, who asked:

What did they say that was so much wronger than usual?

The tiny kernel of truth behind the Shariah-in-the-UK claim is outlined in this BBC article. If all parties agree, civil cases can be tried before Sharia councils. Similar to binding mediation in this country, the system is voluntary and does not apply to criminal cases.

and abortion

This abortion-and-rape thing, it’s a constant problem for the GOP. The pro-life base believes that a newly fertilized ovum has a soul (which isn’t Biblical, and on its Protestant side is a purely political doctrine that has no theological history at all), so a fetus conceived by rape has as much right to life as anybody else. But in front of the general public, passing a law that makes rape a viable male reproductive strategy is political suicide. So anti-abortion laws need some kind of rape exception.

But that raises the question: What kind of rape? And what kind of evidence should a woman claiming the exception need to present? If just saying you were raped is good enough, then we’re back to abortion on demand, because, you know, bitches be lyin’ about stuff like that. Ask Bill Cosby.

So this week the new Republican Congress was all set to pass a nationwide ban on abortions after 20 weeks (on the pseudo-scientific theory that 20 weeks is the threshold for a fetus feeling pain). But the supporting coalition ruptured on the exact wording of the rape exception: To claim it, a woman would have to have previously reported the rape to the police. Congresswoman Renee Ellmers objected to that requirement enough to remove herself as a sponsor. Reportedly, other Republican congresswomen also objected, and the House leadership was not willing to pass the bill without sufficient female cover.

The pro-life crowd then went apeshit, abusing Ellmers (previously a far-right-winger in good standing, one of Sarah Palin’s “Momma grizzlies“) in such misogynistic terms that even a liberal like Joan Walsh felt obligated to defend her.

Senator Lindsey Graham then told the Family Research Council that “I’m going to need your help to find a way out of this definitional problem of rape.” But the whole point of “defining” rape is so that anti-abortion bureaucrats can tell a woman that she’s wrong about having been raped. I don’t see any nice way to do that.

but I wish more people were talking about addiction

Johann Hari has a fascinating article up at Huffington Post, “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think.” Most theories of addiction blame either the addictive nature of the drugs themselves, biological propensities in the addicts, or moral weakness.

Some early experiments put a rat in a cage with two choices of water, a pure source and one laced with an addictive drug like cocaine. Most of the tested rats became addicts, and some killed themselves with overdoses. Eventually, though, researcher Bruce Alexander wondered whether the problem wasn’t the drug so much as being alone in a cage. So he created Rat Park, as utopian a rat community as he could imagine, except for the fact that it also has one pure and one drug-tainted water source.

The happy rats of Rat Park consumed about 1/4th as much of the drug as the bored and lonely rats, and none of them OD’d. What’s more, moving addicted rats from isolation to Rat Park often enabled them to kick the habit.

Hari compares this experiment to the real-life experience of American G.I.s, many of whom were heroin addicts in Vietnam, but didn’t bring their addiction home. Professor Alexander argues: “It’s not you, it’s your cage.”

and you also might be interested in …

If you’re wondering why the price of gas is suddenly so low, Daniel Yergin’s analysis is as convincing as any.

The only people who should be talking about 2016 this early are the comedians who make fun of people talking about 2016 this early. Andy Borowitz posted to Facebook:

Mental Health Professionals Report Alarming Increase in People Who Believe They Could Be President

And Jon Stewart commented on Mitt Romney’s hints that he might run again.

Quit being a nomination hog, Mitt. There’s a lot of people who deserve the chance to lose a presidential race.

Gun rights for black people continue to be mostly theoretical. Tuesday, a 62-year-old black man with a concealed-carry permit was tackled as he entered a WalMart by a white man yelling “He’s got a gun!” Afterward, a police spokesman cautioned vigilantes to “make sure there’s a good reason” before tackling gun owners. Just seeing an armed black man turns out not to be a good enough reason.

A few weeks ago I used torture as an example of how conservatives will intentionally break a word they don’t like through intentional misuse. Well, now they’re working on breaking theocracy. How else to interpret this exchange between Mike Huckabee and televangelist James Robison?

HUCKABEE: Now I’m not saying that a person should run [for president] and say, “Let’s have a theocracy”, because I don’t think we should.

ROBISON: It’s ridiculous.

HUCKABEE: No, that’s not what even our [garbled] want.

ROBISON: We have a theocracy right now. It’s a secular theocracy.

HUCKABEE: That’s it. It’s a humanistic, secular, atheistic [theocracy], even antagonistic toward Christian faith.

Yep, secular theocracy is the new liberal fascism. If the common usage of theocracy can be stretched to include “humanistic, secular, atheistic” versions, then for all practical purposes the word will stop meaning anything at all. And that would suit Robison and Huckabee just fine.

and let’s close with something amusing

It’s another year’s worth of Bad Lip Reading the NFL.

January 26, 2015 – 10:12 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)