Ayn, Paul, and Me

A year ago, when I posted Why I’m Not a Libertarian, I thought I was done talking about my misspent Objectivist youth. Yes, I read Atlas Shrugged six times, and all of Ayn Rand’s other published works at least twice. Yes, I realize how much I could have learned by investing that effort more wisely. Let’s not dwell on it. What’s done is done.

So in April, when Paul Ryan’s love/hate relationship with the Catholic bishops led me to write Jesus Shrugged — Why Christianity and Ayn Rand Don’t Mix, I left my personal history out of it. Ryan’s policy proposals were the issue then, not his personality or character, so any insight I might gather from our common obsession was beside the point.

It’s not beside the point now. When you start talking about a person as a potential vice president — which necessarily makes him a potential president — character matters as much as policy, maybe more. Paul Ryan may end up leading our country through challenges and crises we cannot foresee. We need to know who he is.

It should go without saying that I can’t give you the final word on Ryan. I’ve never spoken to him. As far as I know, we’ve never been in the same room. But I can tell you what kind of young man is attracted to Rand’s philosophy, how it changes him, where you can see Rand’s influence on Ryan’s thinking today, and what it says that he carries those beliefs into middle age. Along the way, we may learn something about Rand’s influence on the conservative movement in general.

What Rand stood for: selfishness. In a nutshell, Rand’s philosophy is the anti-gospel. She’s explicit about this, as I have previously noted.

In the gospel worldview, people need to choose between selfishly piling up wealth for themselves and virtuously helping others. So Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and money” and advises the rich young man to sell everything he owns and give the proceeds to the poor.

Rand flips that value system upside-down. To her, selfishness is virtue. All good things, even social goods, come from individuals acting selfishly: Thomas Edison wants to be rich and famous, so he invents the light bulb that benefits all of us.

It follows that capitalism is the only moral economic system, because it best expresses selfish virtue. (If you’re having trouble grasping this, combine the theories of trickle-down economics, the invisible hand of the market, and homo economicus — then multiply by a thousand.)

The relationships between Rand’s heroic characters demonstrate how friendship and even love can be re-interpreted as selfish. Some people make the love-is-selfish point cynically, but not Rand: In her mind she’s redeeming friendship and love by attaching them to the selfishness that she believes is the prime virtue.

Tellingly, there are no hero-parents in Rand’s novels, and Rand had no children herself. Also, the relationship-value of her heroes never crashes, so we don’t know how Dominique Francon would react if Howard Roark developed Alzheimer’s.

What Rand stood for: elitism. In Rand’s telling of history, all human progress comes from a tiny creative elite (think Edison’s light bulb again) and they alone deserve the fruits of that progress. In the speech that epitomizes Atlas Shrugged, John Galt says:

If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

Rearden the inventor/industrialist not only owns his innovations, he and his fellow capitalists are the sole heirs of humanity’s technological legacy. Workers inherit nothing from the geniuses of the past, except through their employers’ generosity. (I’ve written about that aspect of Rand’s philosophy here.)

The non-creative masses attach to the Reardens like leeches or barnacles. Christianity, socialism, and other philosophies that make selfishness a vice are tricks by which the “parasites” make the producers feel guilty about claiming what is rightfully theirs. The Fountainhead‘s hero Howard Roark voices the eternal victimhood of the creative elite:

Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. … Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build.

The plot of Atlas Shrugged stands the labor movement upside-down: The job-creators go on strike, vanishing with their wealth (even their inherited wealth) and leaving the parasites to suck each other’s blood. “If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society,” strike-leader John Galt says, “it will be on our moral terms.” Naturally, the economy collapses, and the novel ends with the newly-appreciated strikers preparing to return and reinvigorate the impoverished world with their productive genius.

Why this appeals. Like polio, Randism typically strikes in adolescence — for good reasons.

One of the most frustrating things about adolescence is the way grown-ups use your lack of experience to discount your opinions. So teens are particularly attracted to theories that turn experience inside-out: Adults aren’t experienced, they’re indoctrinated. Our corrupt culture looks at everything backwards, so the longer you have lived in it uncritically, the further you are from reality.

The most attractive teen philosophies are bit-flips: The wrongness of the culture can be summed up in one idea, where the culture says true instead of false or yes instead of no. Once you reverse that single bad decision everything becomes clear, so a college student who has flipped that bit is infinitely wiser than any uncorrected greybeard professor.

Second, in the same way that my-real-parents-are-royal is the characteristic fantasy of childhood, my-unique-potential-is-unappreciated is the characteristic fantasy of adolescence. Tell a teen-age boy that there is a hidden aristocracy of talent, and he will start designing his coat-of-arms. The much higher probability that he was born to be a drudge never registers.

Finally, Rand’s ideas are particularly seductive to boys. I’ve never been clear on the exact socio-biological mechanisms, but boys in general have a harder time learning empathy than girls do. It’s not that we don’t care about others, it’s that seeing their point-of-view is work. It doesn’t come naturally. The boy who happily gobbles down the last donut may be honestly distressed to look up and realize that other people wanted it.

To become mature, men need to discipline themselves to imagine how other people’s legitimate interests might conflict with their own. Until you learn that habit — OK, until I learned that habit — I was constantly running afoul of rules that seemed arbitrary and restrictions that I imagined had been contrived purely to frustrate me.

So my elders told me that selfishness was a vice, but Rand flipped that bit and made it the essence of virtue. What a relief to know that my basic wiring was right all along, and that the only point-of-view I ought consider was my own! All those authority figures lecturing about respect for others were just trying to enmesh me in the culture’s fundamental corruption.

In addition to being male, I was white and healthy, and (though not as well-to-do as Ryan) I grew up with all the opportunities middle-class kids used to take for granted. Liberals might try to call me to account for my privileges — how did I justify them? what social responsibilities did they place on me? — but Rand set all that aside. Instead, I could identify with a victimized upper class of Roark-like geniuses.

Why it fades. Eventually, teens get the life experience their elders faulted them for not having. You meet people of many types, see how they approach life, and how (over time) it works out for them. As I did that, here’s what I noticed:

  • Self-interest is a really crappy model for love and friendship. I force-fit it for a while, but eventually I noticed that the people whose relationships I envied didn’t live that way.
  • Greed is ugly. When I look back on things I did out of greed, I’m rarely proud of myself.
  • Life is complicated. No One Big Idea explains what’s right or wrong with the world.
  • There is no aristocracy of talent — most people are good at something — and while the correlation between wealth and talent or hard work is positive, it’s not that high.

Most of all, as I got into life and began to have my own modest successes, the need to think of myself as special or tortured (like Rand’s mythical discoverer of fire) lost its power. The world will little note nor long remember what I do, but I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been important to me, so I’m content to let other people’s lives be important to them. I don’t need to see others as an undeserving mass trying to usurp the glory that is rightfully mine.

Rand and Ryan. Like me and so many others, Ryan found Rand as a teen-ager. He told the Atlas Society in 2005:

I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.

He tries to play his Randism down when he would rather appear Catholic, but it never really goes away. In 2009 he said:

It doesn’t surprise me that sales of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have surged lately with the Obama administration coming in. Because it’s that kind of thinking, that kind of writing, that is sorely needed right now. And I think a lot of people would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel.

Ryan buys into Rand’s framing of the great fight between individualism and collectivism, and he admires her for laying out “the moral case for capitalism”. That moralism is what makes compromise impossible: Good cannot compromise with Evil. Any compromise between Purity and Corruption is a victory for Corruption.

Rand’s villains never have a legitimate point of view. Some are evil incarnate, while others refuse to understand the truth because of its inconvenience. But always, the truth is readily apparent to anyone who wants to know it.

I can see that mindset working in Ryan in more than just his pro-1% policies. In his Atlas Society talk, Ryan notes that unreformed government spending is projected to grow eventually to 26% of GDP and concludes “Autopilot will get them where they want to go.”

Them? The conspiring collectivists — Dick Gephardt, Nancy Pelosi, and Ted Kennedy. They’re not trying to solve any social problems, they’re just trying to make government bigger for its own sake. So if Medicare costs more, they win.

Similarly, in a 2010 anti-abortion article he says “we cannot go on forever feigning agnosticism” about the full human rights of fertilized eggs. Pro-choicers can’t really doubt the infinite moral value of zygotes or the government’s competence to make that judgment, we’re just “feigning”.

But most of all, Rand is the source of Ryan’s Makers vs. Takers worldview. Like many other Republicans, Ryan has connected two statistics: that about half the population doesn’t owe income tax and half live in a household getting some kind of government assistance to paint a false picture of two fixed and separate classes: those who work and those who mooch.

In reality, the two groups overlap and flow into each other: People who paid into Social Security while they had jobs are now retired and drawing out. The hard-working minimum-wage WalMart clerk needs food stamps to feed her children. In another household, one spouse works while the other collects unemployment, or both work while their college student gets a Pell grant or S-CHIP helps care for their sick toddler. Only in Randist mythology does society divide into Makers and Takers.

Why didn’t it fade for Ryan. This is where I can only speculate. But three explanations make sense to me.

First, even at age 42, Ryan hasn’t had much life experience. He went to Washington as a congressional intern at 21, and he has lived in the conservative echo chamber ever since. During that time, he hasn’t made a product or had a customer. Since 28, when he entered Congress, he hasn’t had a boss.

Second, the company he keeps. One of the most interesting chapters in The Audacity of Hope has senate-candidate Obama riding to a fund-raiser on a private jet. He contemplates how much time he spends raising money from the very wealthy. How much, he wonders, is this constant need to appeal to the rich changing the way he thinks?

I don’t believe Ryan has that level of introspective intelligence. As the Koch brothers’ favorite congressman, Ryan spends more time with richer people than Obama ever could have. Plutocrats love his high-school convictions, so why change?

And finally, in many ways Ryan is living his adolescent dream. He can put out a budget full of holes, with numbers that don’t add up, and read about how brave and brainy he is. He is the ideological leader of the Republican caucus, the true star of the 2012 convention. If he grew up wanting to be Howard Roark, lots of people are telling him he succeeded.

Ryan does remind me of some fictional characters, but not Roark or Galt. To me, Paul Ryan resembles David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel, the middle-aged rockers of Spinal Tap. Probably they were good boys once, but the rock-star life has robbed them of the experiences they needed to grow up. Proclaimed as geniuses at an early age, they enter their 40s believing that the puerile thoughts of their teens are still deep and weighty.

[This article completes my Ryan trilogy: I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To and Paul Ryan: Veteran of the War on Women are the other parts. I hope I can move on now.]

September 3, 2012 – 10:34 am Categories: Articles | Comments (16)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Like last week, this week’s Sift will have only one main article. The rise of Paul Ryan is making me revisit my misspent Objectivist youth in “Ayn, Paul, and Me”.

In the weekly summary, everybody was talking about Clint Eastwood’s empty chair. They were also talking about where Eastwood debated the chair — apparently at some kind of Republican get-together in Tampa. I must have missed it.

Oh yeah — it was the Republican National Convention, where we found out that George W. Bush is an un-person. Eight years of recent American history disappeared down the memory hole. Maybe the Democrats will figure out how to dredge them up this week.

Also, the convention raised the stakes in a brewing conflict between the press and the Romney campaign. Politicians have never been known as truth-tellers, but Romney is lying in a no-apologies fact-check-this way that threatens the foundations of political journalism. Journalists are starting to strike back, but it might be too late.

September 3, 2012 – 9:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Rejection

I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance.

— Rick Santorum on the campaign trail last December

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

— Adam Savage, Mythbusters

This week everybody was still talking about Todd Akin

It won’t die, no matter how much the Republicans would like to kill it. The most entertaining responses have been musical. Like this piece from Taylor Ferrera.

Or this from the Renegade Raging Grannies.

Bria and Chrissie want to thank Akin.

CoochWatch is actually directed at Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, but I can’t help speculating that Akin has something to do with the timing of this piece.

But I decided not to rehash everything I covered last week, so I went looking for a more general lesson to learn. Here’s what I came up with:

Five Pretty Lies and the Ugly Truths They Hide. When implemented, conservative policies cause a lot of ugliness. And when confronted with these ugly consequences, conservatives rarely adopt a more compassionate position. A few brave ones talk about necessary sacrifices and breaking eggs to make omelets, but most just paper over the ugliness with a pretty lie. “Raped women don’t get pregnant” is just the first lie on my list. It hides the ugly truth that they want to force women to have babies for their rapists.

… and you might also find this stuff interesting

Paul Ryan on abortion:

I stand by my pro-life record in Congress. It’s something I’m proud of. But Mitt Romney is the top of the ticket and Mitt Romney will be president and he will set the policy of the Romney administration.

I wonder if Mitt Romney understands that statements like this endanger his life.

People sometimes question why VPs are such yes-men. Well, it’s their job. A VP should NEVER admit a policy difference between himself and the president. If he does, he’s telling all the violent lunatics in the country that they can change government policy with a gun.

A former Congressman writes from Azkaban: “Maybe we shouldn’t have let Lord Voldemort start his own SuperPAC. It just seems like under the old rules, even He-Who-Must-Not Be-Named had to be, you know, named.”

Ezra Klein:

This is where things get tricky. Romney’s welfare ads are not racist. But the evidence suggests that they work particularly well if the viewer is racist, or at least racially resentful. And these are the ads that are working so unexpectedly well that welfare is now the spine of Romney’s 2012 on-air message in the battleground states.

So … I’m not racist, I just focus my campaign on people who are. Yeah, that’s tricky all right. It fits right into the model I put forward last week in How Lies Work.

With the death of Neil Armstrong, we’re down to eight living people who have walked on the Moon. The youngest will turn 77 in a few weeks, so we’re maybe 10-20 years from seeing this human experience recede into the past. “Look on my works, ye Mighty …”

A guy gets one of those obviously bogus many-thousands-of-dollars checks in a direct-mail pitch. It’s marked “non-negotiable” and everything, but on a lark he deposits it at an ATM, certain that any day he’ll get a notice saying the check has bounced. And then nothing happens for a long, long time …

More music. If the rich are going to fight a class war this intensely, maybe the rest of us need to get our act together. “It’s time to clean that guillotine …”

And keeping with the French Revolution musical theme, a full chorus does “One Term More” a la Les Miz.

And then there’s “Romney Girl” (to the tune of “Barbie Girl”), who perfectly illustrates the point National Review was making:

From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama’s vote.

Because really, deep down, aren’t American women just look for a dominant male? Or is that just latent homosexual National Review writers?

Finally, when Romney started editing video of Obama, I don’t think he realized it would lead to this:

Yale history professor Beverley Gage asks an interesting question: Sure there are liberal books, but why isn’t there a liberal canon? You know — a short list of books that everybody in the movement either has read or feels guilty about not having read. Conservatives have Atlas Shrugged, The Road to Serfdom, Free to Choose, and a few others. There really aren’t any liberal books that play the same role.

My opinion: Liberals have a different relationship to texts. We’re not looking for political scripture. To tell the truth, most of us are ambivalent about scripture in general. Christian liberals usually aren’t literal-minded about the Bible either.

But conservatives resonate with the idea that Ultimate Truth got written down years ago. “Here! Read it! It will change your life.”

Speaking of a different relationship to texts, James Martin, author of The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything, writes the gospel the way it would have been if Jesus had been a modern-day conservative. (This gives me a chance to re-plug my corporate rewrite of Genesis.)

When Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson denounced Barack Obama in a Newsweek cover article, the reaction across the internet was: Seriously?

The head-scratching didn’t come from Ferguson opposing Obama; almost half the country is against Obama. But such a distinguished scholar mangling his facts and using obvious rhetorical tricks to hide the weakness of the case he’s making? Doubling down with more deception when he’s caught? What’s up with that? It’s embarrassing. (Newsweek was embarrassed too; it had to admit that it doesn’t fact-check.)

After apologizing to the country on behalf of the Harvard community, alum James Fallows speculated:

I wonder if one of Ferguson’s students will have the panache to turn in a similar paper to see how it fares.

It took Esquire’s Stephen Marche to solve the mystery of the sophomoric professor. He followed the money.

Look at [Ferguson’s] speaking agent’s Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. That number means that the entire economics of Ferguson’s writing career, and many other writing careers, has been permanently altered. Nonfiction writers can and do make vastly more, and more easily, than they could ever make any other way, including by writing bestselling books or being a Harvard professor. Articles and ideas are only as good as the fees you can get for talking about them. They are merely billboards for the messengers.

That number means that Ferguson doesn’t have to please his publishers; he doesn’t have to please his editors; he sure as hell doesn’t have to please scholars. He has to please corporations and high-net-worth individuals, the people who can pay 50 to 75K to hear him talk. That incredibly sloppy article was a way of communicating to them: I am one of you. I can give a great rousing talk about Obama’s failures at any event you want to have me at.

It’s just one more example of the difference between a market economy (where markets set prices) and a market society (where everything is for sale).

One more example: You can hire people to post good reviews of your book on Amazon. If you totally sell out, reviewing is way more lucrative than writing.

August 27, 2012 – 12:11 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Five Pretty Lies and the Ugly Truths They Hide

A week after Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment, we should be long past the “OMG — I can’t believe he said that!” stage. It’s time to take a longer view and ask ourselves what the Akin incident says about the larger picture.

You can find takeaways at many levels. First, contrary to Akin’s personal damage control, he didn’t “misspeak“. He really believes that many pregnant women — like maybe this one — make up their rape stories.

At a slightly more general level, and contrary to Republican damage control, you can observe that Akin is typical of the party. Not only is his no-rape-pregnancy lie common, but Paul Ryan agrees with him about redefining rape, and the official party platform calls for banning abortion with no rape exception. (Mitt Romney claims to support such an exception, but as usual, he’s speaking out of both sides of this mouth. Whose delegates are writing this platform? And if he won’t actively oppose a no-exceptions party platform, what makes you think he’ll veto a no-exceptions bill when Congress sends it to him?)

But here’s what I think is the most important Akin takeaway. When confronted with an ugly consequence of his policies — women forced by law to bear their rapists’ babies — Akin papered it over by telling a pretty lie: It doesn’t happen; the female body doesn’t work that way.

Isn’t that pretty? Wouldn’t the world be nicer if no woman who “really” got raped had to worry about pregnancy? Of course it would.

Akin may not have intended to lie; maybe he believes what he said. But does he believe this bogus biology because it makes sense? Of course not. Because an expert told him? The “expert” is someone he sought out precisely for that purpose; real experts would have told him the opposite.

I have a simpler explanation: Akin believes the lie because it’s pretty. The lie tells him that he’s not a monster. It helps him avoid the ugliness of his beliefs.

That thought pattern makes him absolutely typical of the conservative movement today. When implemented, conservative policies cause a lot of ugliness. And when confronted with these ugly consequences, conservatives rarely adopt a more compassionate position. A few brave ones talk about necessary sacrifices and breaking eggs to make omelets, but most just paper over the ugliness with a pretty lie.

“Raped women don’t get pregnant” is just the first lie on my list. Here are four others:

2. The uninsured can get the medical care they need in the ER.

The lie. As he prepared to veto a 2007 bill providing health insurance to children, President Bush said it very clearly:

People have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.

That’s what Governor Rick Perry meant during his presidential campaign when he said:

Everyone in the state of Texas has access to health care, everyone in America has access to health care.

Mississippi Governor Halley Barbour agreed: “there’s nobody in Mississippi who does not have access to health care”

Why it’s pretty. It’s so distressing to hear statistics like 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. (Texas and Mississippi rank #1 and #2 in percentage of the population uninsured.) But wouldn’t it be nice if that number didn’t really mean anything? if insurance was just a bookkeeping device, and nobody really went without care?

Why you shouldn’t believe it. It’s true that the uninsured can get emergency care. If you’re in a car accident, if you’re having a heart attack, if you’re not breathing when they fish you out of the lake — EMTs and the ER will do their best to save your life even if you can’t pay. But as the Houston Chronicle points out, emergency care can’t replace regular care:

About half of uninsured adults have a chronic disease like cancer, heart disease or diabetes. The lack of regular care for the uninsured is why they have death rates 25 percent higher than those with insurance; more than half of uninsured diabetics go without needed medical care; those with breast and colon cancer have a 35 percent to 50 percent higher chance of dying from their disease; and they are three times more likely to postpone needed care for pregnancy. Clearly, the uninsured don’t get the care they need

What it hides. Lack of health insurance kills people. It kills lots of people — more than car accidents or our recent wars. The technical public-health term is amenable mortality — the number of people who die unnecessarily from treatable conditions. An article in the journal Health Policy says:

If the U.S. had achieved levels of amenable mortality seen in the three best-performing countries—France, Australia, and Italy—84,300 fewer people under age 75 would have died in 2006–2007.

France, Australia, and Italy don’t have smarter doctors or better medical technology, but they do have something conservatives are determined to see that Americans never get: universal health insurance. When a questioner confronted Rick Santorum with these facts, he replied:

I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance.

Of course he does. If he accepted what the public health statistics say, he’d have to admit that his policies condemn tens of thousands of people to death every year. “Pro-life” indeed.

3. Tax cuts pay for themselves.

The lie. The most recent vintage is from the Wall Street Journal’s defense of the Romney tax plan:

Every major marginal rate income tax cut of the last 50 years — 1964, 1981, 1986 and 2003 — was followed by an unexpectedly large increase in tax revenues

Or you could hear it from Mitch McConnell:

That there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.

The claim is pretty widespread on the Right: Cutting taxes stimulates the economy so much that the government ends up collecting more revenue even at the lower rates.

Why it’s pretty. Everybody likes a tax cut, but deep down we all know that taxes pay for important things: roads, schools, defending the country, keeping the poor from dying in the streets, and so on. But wouldn’t it be great if we could pay less tax and pretend that money for all those things will appear by magic?

Why you shouldn’t believe it. This has been tried over and over again. It never works. Pointing out that it didn’t work for Bush is shooting fish in a barrel — nothing worked for Bush — but this didn’t even work when Reagan tried it. The Economist’s “Democracy in America” column looked up the numbers:

The federal government’s receipts for 1981-86, in billions of 2005 dollars:

1981    1,251.1
1982    1,202.6
1983    1,113.4
1984    1,173.9
1985    1,250.5
1986    1,277.2

Do you see the “unexpectedly large increase in tax revenues” resulting from the 1981 marginal rate income tax cut? Me neither! It took five years just to get back to par.

What it hides. A huge transfer of wealth to the rich. This lie is the first move in a cruel shell game: First, cut taxes with the promise that it won’t cause a deficit. Then, when it causes a deficit (as it always does), don’t respond “Oh, we were wrong. Let’s raise taxes back to where they were.” Say: “Government spending is out of control! We have to cut food stamps, education, Medicare …”

Stir the two steps together, and you get a cocktail voters would never have swallowed in one gulp: We’re going to cut programs people rely on so that the rich can have more money.

4. Gays can be cured

The lie. Homosexuality is a choice that results in an addiction, but (like alcoholics and drug addicts) gays can learn to choose differently and become ex-gay.

Why it’s pretty. Suppose you think gays are going to Hell, and then your son turns out to be gay. Or suppose you’ve been brought up to believe gays are evil, and then in junior high you start feeling same-sex attractions yourself. Of course you’re going to want to believe that this situation is fixable.

Why you shouldn’t believe it. It’s almost impossible to 100% prove a negative like “Gays can’t be cured”. But if a well-funded movement to teach people to fly had been running for years, and yet no one actually flew, reasonable people would develop a strong conviction that this wasn’t going to work.

That’s the situation with the ex-gay movement. The extreme lack of success has reached the point where the movement itself has started to splinter. The original ex-gay group, Exodus International, now rejects attempts to “cure” gays and instead focuses on “helping Christians who want to reconcile their own particular religious beliefs with sexual feelings they consider an affront to scripture.” This has caused a schism, with the new group, Restored Hope Network, continuing to promote therapies to cure gays.

What it hides. Pure bigotry is the only reason to discriminate against gays.

As discrimination wanes, it becomes obvious that unrepentant gays can find love, form long-term relationships, raise children who are a credit to the community, and (in short) do all the things that are usually thought of as part of a good life. They can also serve in the military, be good teachers, have productive careers in the private sector, pay taxes, do volunteer work — everything that constitutes good citizenship.

To prop up anti-gay discrimination (and even to try to reinstate it in places where it has been torn down), and to do so even though the people discriminated against didn’t choose to be gay and can’t change it — that’s pretty ugly.

5. Obama’s election proves racism is over.

The lie. John Hawkins put it like this:

So, the moment Obama was elected, people started asking the obvious question, “How serious of a problem can racism still be in the United States if a black man can be elected President?” The honest answer to that question is, “Not very.”

Just this summer, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby reacted the same way to a black man becoming head of the Southern Baptist Convention:

The pervasive racism [Martin Luther King] confronted is primarily a historical memory now, while King himself is in the American pantheon. … America’s racist past is dead and gone.

Why it’s pretty. Pat yourself on the back, white America! You used to have a problem, but you kicked it.

So if any blacks or liberals are still complaining, feel free to ignore them. They just want the government to give them “more free stuff” by taking what you earned, or to use the charge of racism as “their sledgehammer … to keep citizens who don’t share the left’s agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us”. If anybody’s really oppressed these days, it’s whites.

Why you shouldn’t believe it. Barack Obama’s election was definitely a sign of racial progress, just like Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers in 1947, Jesse Owens’ Olympic gold medal in 1936, or Jack Johnson becoming heavyweight champion in 1908. But racism didn’t end in 2008 any more than it ended in 1908.

Let’s start by debunking the logic: In 2008, a year when everything broke wrong for the Republicans, Obama got 53% of the vote. For the sake of argument, let’s say that’s more-or-less what a white Democrat would have polled. Does that prove racism is over? No, it just proves that Republicans already had the racist vote.

Then we get to evidence that points the other way: Trayvon Martin. (Nobody jumps to the defense of black men who shoot unarmed white teen-agers.) Birtherism. (No white president has faced this kind of persistent, baseless accusation.) The racial dog-whistles in the Romney campaign. The racist anti-Obama pictures and cartoons that circulate in viral emails. (But don’t you get it? These are jokes. Like the “Don’t Re-Nig in 2012” bumper sticker. Clever, huh?) The attempt to legalize anti-Hispanic racial profiling in Arizona and other states. I could go on.

It’s not just that 1 in 3 black men will spend time in jail, it’s that this fact isn’t seen as an emergency that requires outside-the-box solutions. If white men were imprisoned at the same rate (no matter what they were imprisoned for), the number of possible explanations and solutions would skyrocket. But black men … that’s just how they are; what can you do?

(For a longer discussion of racism in the Obama era, see Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article in the current Atlantic.)

What it hides. Indifference to human suffering. At a time when poverty is at a level we haven’t seen in decades, the House has passed bills to gut safety-net programs like Medicaid and food stamps.

That can only happen if the white middle class is convinced that the poor are different and deserve their fate. And the best way to accomplish this is through racial stereotyping: The poor are black, and blacks are lazy. Both statements are false, but they work.

How to respond. This is far from an exhaustive list; I just picked the pretty lies I could document and refute fairly quickly, and I didn’t even touch well-covered lies like “Global warming is a hoax.” or “Abstinence-only sex education works.” But I hope the five I’ve listed are varied enough to establish the pattern.

If you have any conservatives friends, relatives, or co-workers, you probably hear pretty lies all the time. (“The poor have it good in America. They’re the lucky duckies who don’t have to work, because the rest of us are paying for their X-boxes and cable TV.”) Probably you’ve already tried to respond by googling up facts and presenting them, so you understand that this never works.

I sympathize with your frustration.

But it’s important take the next step and ask why presenting the facts doesn’t work. It’s simple: Facts are not the source of the belief. Conservatives aren’t mistaken, they’re hiding something.

What they’re usually hiding is cruelty. Conservative policies are cruel, but individual conservatives usually aren’t, or at least they don’t want to see themselves like that. The only way to square that circle is with a lie.

Once the lie is in place, “facts” will be found to support it. A whole industry is devoted to supplying fake facts. And since fake facts are easier to manufacture than to refute, you will never fight your way through the swarm.

I don’t have a foolproof method for converting conservatives, but I can tell you this much: You don’t understand a pretty lie until you’ve seen all the way through to the ugly truth it’s hiding.

That’s where you should be focusing your energy. Don’t just refute the lie. Expose the truth.

August 27, 2012 – 10:39 am Categories: Articles | Comments (16)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week’s Sift will have only one main article, plus the usual collection of short notes. The article is “Five Pretty Lies and the Ugly Truths They Hide”. It’s a little long, but each lie is its own digestible chunk, so I hope it won’t be hard to get through.

“Pretty Lies” is my attempt to learn something from the Todd Akin debacle. When you boil it down, here’s what Akin did: He offered a pretty lie — that “legitimate” rape victims don’t get pregnant — to cover up the ugliness of his policies: He wants the government to force raped women to bear children for their rapists.

Once you have that pattern in mind, you see it all over the conservative movement. Fundamentally, conservative policies are cruel, but conservatives want to think of themselves as nice people. The only way to square that circle is with a lie. So pretty lies pop up whenever conservatives gather together: the uninsured can get health care in the ER, racism ended decades ago, tax cuts pay for themselves, and so on.

When you hear stuff like this, it’s easy to get diverted into an argument about facts. But exposing the lie is only half the battle. You also need to understand why the lie is necessary, so that you can shine a light on the ugly truth it’s hiding.

August 27, 2012 – 7:47 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Rage For the Machine

Paul Ryan’s love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades. … Don’t mistake me, I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta “rage” in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically the only thing he’s not raging against is the privileged elite he’s groveling in front of for campaign contributions.

— Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine

Before getting into what happened this week, I want to look ahead a week, to the Republican Convention. Unless the GOP completely screws up (which is possible; the 1992 “Culture War” convention didn’t do them much good), the Romney-Ryan ticket should get a bounce in the polls. The most likely outcome is that they’ll leave Tampa with a lead.

You shouldn’t lose sleep about that. McCain-Palin had a lead briefly, and we know how that turned out. For that matter, Dukakis came out of the 1988 Democratic Convention with a 17-point lead. This year’s Democratic Convention ends September 6, and maybe a week after that you can start taking polls at face value again. In the meantime, follow Nate Silver. Don’t get worried until Nate does.

This week everybody was still talking about Paul Ryan

Except for the people who are drawing and animating Paul Ryan:

I did almost 2000 words on Ryan last week, but the subject is vast. Most of last week’s article focused on Ryan’s (largely false) image as an anti-deficit guy. But if that’s all we talk about, we’ve fallen into the same Tea Party trap as 2010.

Remember? The Tea Party sold itself as a grass-roots, non-partisan movement narrowly focused on taxes, spending, and the deficit. Then they got power and started forcing ultrasound probes up women’s vaginas.

Paul Ryan is the same kind of guy, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that. Hence this week’s article: Paul Ryan, Veteran of the War on Women.

Two other Ryan stories: So Ryan was totally against the Stimulus program in public, and said many times that it would not create jobs. But he wrote at least four letters requesting stimulus money for his district, including one that says the proposal would “stimulate the local and area economy by creating jobs” — exactly what he was saying in public that the Stimulus couldn’t do.

When asked about this apparent hypocrisy, Ryan has repeatedly claimed he never asked for stimulus funds. Now that the letters have come out, he’s blaming his staff.

The second story is more complicated: Ryan was accused of insider trading. Then the story was debunked. Then it wasn’t. Stay tuned.

… and Medicare

On the surface it seems absurd that any ticket with Paul Ryan on it could claim to be defending Medicare against the dastardly President Obama. But a lot of work has gone into preparing the ground for this kind of propaganda. I examine it in How Lies Work.

… and you might also find this stuff interesting

Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin isn’t concerned about a rape exception to abortion laws, because biology works differently in his world:

If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

After a considerable firestorm, Akin said he “misspoke“, which is hilarious. You can’t “misspeak” an entire pseudo-scientific explanation. Acceptable excuses might include “my abstinence-only sex-education class didn’t tell me how the female body works” or “I was off my meds during that interview”. But “I misspoke” doesn’t cut it.

Lots of airlines lose your luggage, United lost a 10-year-old — and then followed up about as badly as you could imagine. I know I repeat myself, but Corporations Are Sociopaths — they’re fundamentally self-centered and amoral.

When Mitt Romney tells us about his taxes and asks for our trust rather than providing evidence, you need to know that he’s done this before — and lied. When his Massachusetts residency was challenged before his 2002 run for governor, he refused to reveal his tax returns, but said they would show he had filed as a Massachusetts resident. In fact, he hadn’t.

Cracked imagines another scene in its “It Must Have Happened” series. Here, Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard discuss how to monkey-wrench American culture:

A mixed week on voting rights. A Pennsylvania judge refused to block that state’s voter-ID law, but a Florida judge did block a plan to curb early voting, and Ohio’s secretary of state backed off of a plan to allow extended hours for early voting in Republican counties only. The Pennsylvania decision has the most impact, so net advantage to voter suppression.

The Pennsylvania judge faced the same situation as the Supreme Court did in June when it allowed one part of Arizona’s papers-please law to stand: In order to strike down a law before it takes effect, a judge has to determine that it can’t be enforced in a constitutional way. No matter how likely it looks that somebody’s rights will be violated, the judge can’t assume bad faith enforcement. It’s a high bar.

In the wake of a shooting at the Family Research Council, 23 LGBT groups did the honorable thing and denounced it without conditions:

regardless of what emerges as the reason for this shooting, we utterly reject and condemn such violence.

A sidebar to my How Lies Work article: Journalists are actively discussing how to handle the “post-truth campaign” Romney is running. A post on WaPo’s “The Fix” blog seemed to admire the savviness of Romney’s distortions rather than criticize their lack of honesty. And, maybe for the first time, this was roundly condemned within the profession. Jay Rosen’s post is a good entry point to the discussion.

August 20, 2012 – 1:42 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Post a comment

How Lies Work

If you’ve ever seen a five-year-old stand over a broken vase and say, “I didn’t do it”, you might think lying is easy. But as Mark Twain observed: “An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth.”

Effective lying in a political campaign is very hard work. The soil has to be tilled and the lie planted just so. You have to water it over and over again. And then, at just the right moment, you add that special ingredient that makes it sprout and flower.

Let’s look at the most effective lie currently spreading: President Obama is a threat to your Medicare. I live in a swing state (New Hampshire), so I’ve been seeing it in this ad:

At first glance, this looks like a rubber/glue lie: The guy who wants to turn Medicare into a privatized voucher program and then not fund it properly is Paul Ryan. How can the Romney/Ryan campaign turn that around and make themselves the defenders of Medicare?

They’re doing it, and it seems to be working. I can feel the pull of their ad, even though I know it’s false. How does that work? It’s a master class in propaganda.

Start with a kernel of truth. Whether or not you believe that current deficits are necessary to stimulate the economy, you should worry about the rising cost of health care: It’s not just that in the long run Medicare, Medicaid, and veteran’s medical benefits threaten to swamp the federal budget, it’s that health-care spending in general threatens to swamp the economy.

You can get spending growth down in two ways: Reform the system to deliver care more efficiently or deliver less care. The Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) pushes the deliver-more-efficiently approach. Medicare benefits don’t change, but hospitals get reimbursed less for delivering them. (Some of the profit built into hospital payments covers the emergency-room costs of the uninsured. ObamaCare lowers the number of uninsured, so hospitals don’t need to charge the insured as much.) Also, the government curtails Medicare Advantage, a wasteful Republican attempt to build a private option into Medicare. (The private plans cost more, because the private sector is less efficient at things like this. The government has been picking up the difference.)

The result is an estimated $716 billion in savings over ten years.

That’s the kernel of truth: Because of ObamaCare, the government will spend $716 billion less on Medicare.

Till the dirty soil. Bad propaganda boomerangs, because people who recognize your ugly falsehoods resent you for telling them. So you never want to be caught telling a nasty lie.

However … you can’t be blamed for the false information, irrational prejudices, and ugly stereotypes that already sit inside people’s heads, waiting to be exploited. So good propaganda contains only enough false or repulsive information to leverage the ignorance and misinformation that’s already out there.

If you want to convince people that President Obama is sabotaging the Medicare they deserve, you’ve got a lot to work with.

Obama is black. Romney doesn’t say, “You can’t trust Obama because he’s black”, because even whites who don’t trust blacks would be horrified to hear it said out loud. In this post-civil-rights-movement era, it’s rare to meet an open I-hate-niggers racist.

Still, race matters. White America does not give Obama the level of trust or respect a white president of either party would get. (Picture the outrage if a black congressman had interrupted President Bush’s state-of-the-union address by yelling, “You lie!”) And it’s different when blacks do things we accept whites doing. (Picture armed blacks protesting in a Tea-Party-like manner, with signs calling for revolution. Picture a black senate candidate threatening “second amendment solutions” if his side loses the election.)

You till this soil by talking about how “foreign” Obama is, and how someone needs to teach him “how to be an American“. If you just imply “Obama isn’t like you”, many whites will fill in the racist parts for themselves.

Blacks are lazy. They want the government to give them what white people earned. When Newt Gingrich calls Obama “the Food Stamp president”, he’s counting on his audience to fill this in. If they aren’t making the racial connection, Gingrich gives a nudge:

I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.

How did the NAACP get into this? Did they ever say they prefer food stamps to paychecks? No? Then what’s Newt talking about?

Ditto when Rick Santorum said:

I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.

In context, that statement is a complete non sequitur unless the government-gives-white-money-to-blacks idea is sitting your head.

Romney himself has tilled this ground with the Obama-gutted-welfare’s-work-requirement lie, which he dispatched Gingrich to defend.

 

Liberals favor people who don’t work over people who work. They’ve been tilling this one for years. But the weekend, overtime pay, safe workplaces, and Social Security and Medicare themselves — those are liberal ideas. Conservatives were against them every step of the way.

Nobody knows what’s hidden in the Affordable Care Act’s 2000 pages. Of course, if it had been 10 pages critics could say, “Nobody knows how ObamaCare will be implemented, because they left out all the details.” There’s always an angle.

This ground was tilled with Sarah Palin’s “death panel” lie — Politifact’s 2009 Lie of the Year.

As a result, many of the simple things the ACA does are not understood — like getting rid of the donut hole in Medicare prescription drug coverage. (That’s just one of the benefits seniors get from the bill. It isn’t “not for you”.) The pieces of ObamaCare are actually fairly popular, when people find out what they are.

The middle class is vanishing because all the money is going to poor people. In reality, all the money is going to rich people, but that process is complicated. The story that your hard-earned money is being taxed away and given to layabouts is much easier to understand.

A bunch of related misconceptions help out, like “Illegal immigrants steal our jobs.” The common element is that if you’re looking for someone to resent, look down, not up. The rich are heroes, “job creators” — not vultures who made a killing outsourcing everything to China.

Plant. Now look at what the Romney ad says: You (an aging white man) paid into Medicare “every paycheck” (because you worked for a living). But now Obama has siphoned $716 billion of those dollars into ObamaCare, a “massive new government program” which is “not for you”.

So who is it for? People not like you — the young, the non-white, the people who didn’t work.

Years of effort have pushed the idea that ObamaCare is a suspicious program put forward by an illegitimate president in order to give healthcare away to people who don’t work. If you’ve been buying the Republican message so far, you’ve been expecting something like what this ad is telling you.

Supply “independent” verification. Most people are too smart to believe something just because a TV ad says so. Instead, they look for independent verification. So they shrug off the claim that something is “the #1 movie in America” until they find out whether anybody at work has seen it.

But Americans have a lot less direct human contact than they used to. The difference is taken up by voices on the radio or emails from strangers who sound real. Many of them are not real, and conservatives have learned to exploit this avenue of false verification.

Last November, a “brain surgeon” called in to the Mark Levin show to say that ObamaCare would deny brain surgery to anyone over 70. He had the inside scoop, because he’d just come from a American Association of Neuro-Surgeons meeting where the new HHS guidelines document had circulated.

A viral email picked that up, amplified it, and kept people accessing the clip online. A hospital employee heard a doctor repeat it.

It was all fake. There was no meeting; there was no document; the guy who called in wasn’t a brain surgeon. He was just a voice in the ether, telling you something that somebody wanted you to believe.

Now this is going around:

Your Medicare premiums are going to double because of ObamaCare! There it is — the exact numbers! — independently verified by somebody who leaked the information out of BlueCross. But it hasn’t appeared publicly because of Obama’s 2012 campaign!

Except … it’s all fake. BlueCross has nothing to do with it. The numbers are made up.

It’s just something somebody wants you to believe. And it rockets around the country from cousin to co-worker to classmate. Inside information! Conveniently verifying the false thing that Mitt Romney is telling you.

No one knows how many of these fakes are out there, and by the time they get noticed and debunked the deed is done.

Nobody has succeeded in tracing such hoaxes back their sources, other than to note that they are overwhelmingly conservative. But they can’t just happen. No one can accidentally create such well-designed lies.

Don’t underestimate the power of lies. You may see some ad like Romney’s and say, “Nobody’s going to buy that.” But the ad is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the visible piece of a complete propaganda campaign, much of which happens in places you don’t see.

August 20, 2012 – 12:26 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (14)

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Paul Ryan: Veteran of the War on Women

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Right after Paul Ryan was named as Mitt Romney’s VP, I did what every other political blogger in the world did: wrote an article almost entirely about his economic policies. Of course I did and we did. In minds of politics-watchers everywhere, Ryan means the Ryan budget, with its strange combination of bold detail and cowardly vagueness. Just mentioning Ryan’s name launches an argument about taxes and Medicare and long-term deficits.

But a day or two later, I felt a wave of deja vu. Isn’t this exactly what happened in 2009 and 2010?

The Tea Party. Remember? The Tea Party burst onto the scene in April, 2009, billing itself as a non-partisan, grass-roots movement of people fed up with taxes and deficits. Taxed Enough Already — remember? The culture wars could wait; the problems of debt and government spending were too urgent.

An occasional liberal Jeremiah tried to warn us how phony this framing was, but for the most part we let them get away with it.

And then what happened? As soon as the election was over and Republicans (so much for non-partisan) controlled the House in D.C. and the entire state government in places like Wisconsin and Florida, their first priorities turned out to be abortion and all the other “values” issues they had swept under the rug during the campaign.

As the new Congress was settling in, Rep. Mike Pence segued like this:

Our economy is struggling and our national government is awash in a sea of debt. Amidst these struggles, some would have us focus our energies on jobs and spending. … I agree. Let’s start by denying all federal funding for abortion at home and abroad. The largest abortion provider in America should not also be the largest recipient of federal funding under Title X. The time has come to deny any and all federal funding to Planned Parenthood of America.

Annual Planned Parenthood funding under Title X was about $70 million. Take that, trillion-dollar deficit!

Rachel Maddow was one of the early major-media people to sound the alarm, in a series of segments she labelled Really, Really Big Government.

That is the message they campaigned on in November—freedom, liberty, letting people do what they want!

And then they arrived in Washington and immediately started working on putting government in charge of every single pregnancy in America. Even as they slowed the legislative calendar way down, stopped doing much of anything else, they advanced not one, not two, but three super radical bills to restrict abortion rights.

Ryan’s Role. Paul Ryan was co-sponsoring every one of the Religious Right’s “super radical bills”. The National Right to Life Committee says:

Ryan has maintained a 100 percent pro-life voting record on all roll call votes scored by National Right to Life through his entire tenure in the House, which began in 1999.

It’s important to understand just how radical the recent stuff is, because we’re used to the abortion struggle taking place on a fairly small battlefield — Medicaid funding, late-term abortions, parental notification — where the issues really are debatable. But since the Tea Party came into power, we’ve been fighting over issues that used to be on the fringe or completely off the table.

Forced ultrasounds. The general public didn’t catch on to the changing battlelines until women protested the Virginia forced transvaginal ultrasound law this March: In the original version of the bill, women seeking an abortion would be forced to have an ultrasound probe shoved up their vaginas. (Texas already started enforcing a similar law in February.) The legislature had no medical justification; they just figured women who want to abort are too dumb to understand what a fetus is unless the government forces them to look. Or maybe the point is to humiliate women before granting them their constitutional rights.

Maddow and others began calling Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell “Governor Ultrasound” — a nickname that probably pushed him off Romney’s VP short list.

Well, Paul Ryan is Congressman Ultrasound. He co-sponsored the federal Ultrasound Informed Consent Act. Women would be forced to submit to and pay for a medically unnecessary procedure because Paul Ryan believes they’re “uninformed”. (I wonder how he’d feel about making anybody who wants to buy a gun observe the autopsy of a gunshot victim. Don’t they deserve to be “informed” too?)

Rights for single-celled organisms. Another radical addition to the abortion debate are “personhood” laws, which define a fertilized ovum as a human being deserving the full protection of the laws.

Such a law would not only outlaw all abortions, it would also ban any form of birth control that works by interfering with the zygote’s ability to implant in the uterus — like the Pill.

The birth control pill, for example, prevents pregnancy in three ways: The pill thickens the cervical mucus to make it more difficult for sperm to reach the egg; it suppresses ovulation by mimicking pregnancy-level hormones in the body, preventing eggs from being released from the ovaries; and finally, as a fail-safe, the pill makes the lining of the uterus inhospitable to any fertilized egg that might slip through. The time between fertilization and implantation (when a pregnancy becomes medically detectable) usually takes about a week.

In public, advocates of personhood bills deny they’d ban the Pill. But among themselves they sound more like this:

A justly written personhood amendment should ultimately outlaw all abortions  including both the intentionally induced “miscarriages” of the hormonal birth control pill and the blatant infanticide of the partial birth abortion.

Personhood laws would also outlaw in vitro fertilization as currently practiced, because the test-tube zygotes that aren’t implanted must eventually be destroyed. A pro-life article that tries to dispel this “absurdity” actually verifies it:

Couples trying to get pregnant through IVF procedures would have nothing to fear from Personhood legislation unless they consented to the intentional destruction of their embryonic children. [emphasis added]

Who would support such a radical law? Not voters. No personhood referendum has come close to passing, even in Mississippi.

But Paul Ryan is a more radical culture warrior than the average Mississippian. He co-sponsored the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which says:

the Congress declares that … the life of each human being begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent, irrespective of sex, health, function or disability, defect, stage of biological development, or condition of dependency, at which time every human being shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood

Ryan’s defenders sometimes claim this bill merely empowers states to protect the personhood rights of fertilized ova, but it says what it says. If this passed, how long would it take the Thomas More Society to file a class-action suit against birth-control-pill manufacturers on behalf of zygotes?

Employers’ Rights Trump Workers’ Rights. Ryan voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that eliminated a hole in the equal-pay-for-women laws.

Ryan also co-sponsored the Religious Freedom Tax Repeal Act of 2012. Motivated by the concerns trumped up against ObamaCare’s contraception mandate — Wheaton College had to stop covering contraception so that it could join the lawsuit against being forced to cover contraception — Ryan’s bill goes way beyond that case, to prevent the government from enforcing any coverage “if an employer with respect to such plan is opposed to such coverage by reason of adherence to a religious belief or moral conviction.”

So the Christian Science Monitor wouldn’t have to cover any cancer treatment beyond prayer. And what if an employer just has a “moral conviction” against spending money on workers?

In his own voice. Finding Ryan’s name in a list of co-sponsors doesn’t tell you much about his level of commitment or the thinking behind it. For that you have to turn to his writings and speeches.

In September, 2010 (when the Tea Party was playing down culture-war issues) Ryan wrote The Cause of Life Can’t Be Severed From the Cause of Freedom, which explains why “freedom” requires forcing women to obey the tenets of Ryan’s religion.

I recommend reading the entire article, because you will learn a lot about how Ryan’s mind works. No actual pregnant women are mentioned or even imagined. His argument is entirely abstract; the lives and situations of real people carry no weight.

What’s more — and this style is very familiar if (like me and Paul Ryan) you read way too much Ayn Rand in high school — all the important ideas are hidden in the framing, so the argument consists entirely of tautologies. (The third and concluding part of Atlas Shrugged is titled “A is A”, as if something important could be deduced from that.)

So how does Ryan defend the absurd idea that zygotes deserve all the rights of fully-developed human beings? He doesn’t; he just labels them “people” and then defends the rights of people. He compares Roe v Wade to Dred Scott — there being no noteworthy differences between black slaves and single-celled organisms — and concludes:

I cannot believe any official or citizen can still defend the notion that an unborn human being has no rights that an older person is bound to respect. I do know that we cannot go on forever feigning agnosticism about who is human.

Zygotes have rights because “I cannot believe” otherwise. And if you claim not to believe it, or not to be certain enough to use government power to force women to bear their rapists’ babies, you are “feigning”. Ryan knows you agree with him deep down; you’re just pretending not to.

That’s how he thinks.

And if he ever ascends to the presidency, or if he becomes the family-values point man in a Romney administration, that’s the level of public debate we can expect.

August 20, 2012 – 9:47 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week everybody was still talking about Paul Ryan, and the Romney campaign tried to muddy the waters by arguing that President Obama — and not Paul Ryan — is the real threat to Medicare.

If you’re not plugged in to the world of untraceable viral emails and fake people calling in to talk-radio shows, you might not realize just how involved the Romney Medicare deception is or how effective it could be. It’s a real lesson in propaganda that I’ll try to unravel in “How Lies Work”.

This week’s other main article is a follow-up to last week’s I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To, which became the second most popular Sift post of 2012. In capturing the buzz about Ryan, I followed the mainstream pundits into a trap: I ignored Ryan’s record as a radical culture warrior.

That’s the mistake the public made with the Tea Party in 2010; we bought their “Taxed Enough Already” schtick and were surprised when their vision of “small government” included forced transvaginal ultrasounds. So like The Who, I’m praying we don’t get fooled again. That’s why this week’s other main article is “Paul Ryan: Veteran of the War on Women”.

The Ryan article should be up in a few minutes, but “How Lies Work” will take a little bit longer.

August 20, 2012 – 8:26 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

If They Win

To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.

— Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker
(last week, when Ryan was still a long shot VP choice)

This week everybody was talking about Paul Ryan

Saturday, Mitt Romney did what any good CEO would do: His brand was sinking because it lacked any core convictions, so he arranged a merger to acquire some. I don’t have to play pundit here, because so many good observations have already been made that I can just collect the ten best in I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To.

… but I also wrote about terrorism

In particular, what happens when the terrorist looks just like the viewing majority? Well, the media has to explain that away somehow. I named my article after the phrase you’ll never hear on mainstream TV: White Right-wing Christian Terrorist.

… and you might also find this stuff interesting

In Ohio, if you live in a Republican county, you’ll have extended hours for early voting. If you live in a Democratic county, you’ll probably have to take time out of the work day. Remember that if Romney wins the election because he carries Ohio by 500 votes.

Two weeks ago I talked about how transparent markets help producers and consumers, while opaque markets favor middlemen who can build near monopolies.

Thursday’s NYT had an article about a major loss of transparency that is coming to a market near you: Supermarkets can now crunch data about you on the fly, and offer you a different price than the one on the shelves.

Of course, if a retailer can reward you for a buying pattern it likes, it can also punish you for a buying pattern it dislikes. Imagine: “I went to the farmer’s market last week, and now I’m paying full price for everything.”

If you’ve finished all the beach-reading you planned to do this summer, I’ve got a couple more serious recent novels to suggest:

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. The best line about this novel is that it’s “as if Dickens had written The Godfather and placed it in India”. The biography of a Mumbai gangster forms the trellis, but around it climb the vines of a Sikh policeman, a Bollywood star, and dozens of other fascinating people. Along the way it becomes obvious that there’s a Mumbai Dream, and it’s not all that different from one version of the American Dream. People want to go where the bright lights are and become Somebody. But when it works, is that Somebody still you? (As a bonus, you’ll learn how to swear in Hindi like a Mumbai cop.)

A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer Dubois. This has been out just long enough for my local library to get a copy. It’s two stories that converge: a 30-year-old American woman who knows she just has a year or two before the Huntington’s disease that killed her father starts to take her mind away, and a Russian chess-champion-turned-political-dissident who is modeled so closely on Garry Kasparov that some of the specific chess games match up. She knows she can’t beat her disease; he knows he can’t beat Putin — what do you do with that? (The bonus here is Dubois’ way with words. She can evoke a complicated situation with deceptively simple language. At one point, for example, the female narrator notices that a man is “looking at me the way that men looked at me back when men looked at me.”)

Following up on last week’s “The Looming Software Catastrophe“, here’s an NYT article about the impossibility of testing software like the automatic trading program that brought down Knight Capital.

The ultimate success or failure of ObamaCare rests on how effectively it can bring down costs without explicit care-rationing. Just as Massachusetts’ RomneyCare was the model before, its cost-containment program could be the model now.

The Pope will now accept people using condoms to avoid spreading AIDS. But the ridged and flavored ones are still right out.

So a Mennonite minister is on trial for helping an “ex-lesbian” mother kidnap her own child to keep her away from the mother’s former same-sex partner. Naturally, this reminds Focus on the Family’s Bryan Fischer of the underground railroad. He thinks organized kidnapping of children would be a good thing.

You can’t make this stuff up.

The Sift has been way too serious this week. Let’s close with something fun:

August 13, 2012 – 12:17 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Post a comment