Bowling Alone and the `culture of death'

From this review on Pandagon.

If you’re succumbing to depression because of the sterile, lonely world you live in, rhetoric that promises, “Join us and your world will be teeming with life,” starts to sound good, no matter how illogical it is. I think most of us can sympathize with this problem. It also goes a long way to explaining how easy it is to freak out members of the religious right with sexual fantasies about all the crazy shit other people are supposedly doing. If you feel isolated from others, it’s much easier to imagine that their behavior is strange and inhuman. Merely knowing some gay people and seeing they don’t have fangs or scales goes a long way towards calming fears stoked by the religious right.

(And, if you don't get the post title.)

I agree with Amanda/her reading of Hedges up to this point. But I find the conclusion they draw from this analysis, frankly, horrifying: `he strongly suggests that people interested in an open society give up the idea that we can have some sort of discourse with people on the religious right'. After all, isn't increasing marginalization and alienation of anyone just going to exacerbate the root cause they've identified here?

Conservatives

I'm continually baffled by conservatives. Right now, conservatives are up in a huff about the Obama Administration bringing back the Fairness Act, which they have no stated intention of doing. They're all lathered up about the fact that Obama's podium during his first press conference said "Office of the President-Elect" when, I guess, there's officially no such thing in the government. That Obama is the Presiden-Elect and has an office is, I guess, not an adequate rebuttal. And now a Republican Congressman is suggesting that President Obama wants to establish his own Gestapo.

I had a conversation with a Republican the other day, and I told him that what I find most frustrating about his party is that there's a non-insignificant portion of his party which is ignorant. He threw up his arms in frustration. Danced about the room as if a great offense had taken place. "No, no, no, Ben! They're not ignorant!" He protested. "They just disagree with you!"

"No," I replied, "on some issues you are right and I'm willing to have an honest disagreement with anyone. Still, on some issues there are a non-insignificant portion of the Republican electorate which is ignorant. And it's not that there aren't ignorant Democrats. 9/11 conspiracy theorists and people who think President Obama is going to pay their mortgage for them are ignorant. The difference is that national politicians like President Obama and the national party, when they run, they run to the center; as far from they crazies as they can get. Republicans run to the right, right into the arms of their crazies, and sometimes elect them to office.

The REAL Problem With "Heroes"

They should have just hired me as the show runner back in Season 1. Seriously, at every staff meeting someone would say, "Hey, but what if X?" to which I would reply, "No, that's dumb." I'm sure the end result would be a much better show.

Review: Role Models

Hilarious.

A superficial explanation of the fundamental difference between supply-side and demand-side economic stimulus theory

Supply-siders believe that economic productivity is driven from the top: that capitalists will take their new tax breaks (or whatever the stimulus mechanism is), invest in expanding their businesses and increasing production. Then, because this generally requires employing more people, unemployment will drop, the middle class will expand, and demand will be increased indirectly. The problem here is that the capitalists will often actually use their increased income to increase their personal spending rather than invest in expanding their firms, ie, the luxury yacht market will do great, but that's about it.

Demand-siders believe that economic productivity is driven from the bottom (or, more accurately, the middle): that the poor and workers will take their new government aid (or whtever the stimulus mechanism is), buy more food, more clothes, better housing, and generally creating more demand. Then, because this generally requires producing more stuff, businesses will have an indirect incentive to expand, and unemployment will drop. The problem here is that putting more money into the hands of consumers causes inflation.

Is racism over?

That depends on what you mean by `racism'. Are there still large numbers of racists -- people who hold racist views? Well, duh. Do they still hold anywhere near as much power today as they did twenty or forty years ago? Obama's election suggests that the answers here is clearly no. And, as much as Obama's presidency will go towards marginalizing those views (and hence, one imagines, decreasing the number of people who hold them), it will not completely eliminate or completely marginalize them. Remember that some people still think of Martin Luther King primarily as a disruptive anarchist/socialist.

But limited-albeit-sweeping progress in these two respects isn't the full picture of race in American society. As brownfemipower recently put it,

I woke up far too early this morning, and thus was incredibly beyond cranky at all the white folks speculating if racism is…could it be…DEAD???? Because, you know, if one black man could make it as a president, Katrina didn’t *really* happen just years ago. And racism only exists in the form of some ancient by-gone problem of the black community not being able to vote, right?

And, to borrow the fantastic phrase of a recent acquaintance, the elimination of racism in American society is not the elimination of structural racial injustice. Poverty, education, disaster relief, crime and punishment, the recession (honestly, the technical definition is just not helpful; let's drop the euphemism already) -- all these and more are experienced differently depending on one's race or ethnicity (and gender, sex, ability and economic class, of course). Even if racist beliefs or intentions no longer play an important role in causing injustice, injustice still has a racial aspect that cannot be ignored.

Prop 8 And Obama

As excited as I am about Obama's victory yesterday, I am really disheartened at the success of Prop 8 in California. I would have thought, as did many I think, that California would be a leader on this issue. Ok, maybe not a leader as in being the first, but as a high populous, liberal state affirming the rights of gays and producing a huge amount of gay marriages which could show the rest of the country that there's nothing to fear. I mean, if Prop 8 can pass while Obama takes 60% of the state's popular vote, well, that just really troubles me.

In fact, I think this issue is going to be tabled nationally for a while. If we can't rely on a big liberal state like California to welcome gay marriages, then it's hard to argue this issue on a national scale. Fighting hard for gay marriage nationally would probably cost Obama a huge amount of political capital and I'm not even sure anymore if he could come out the other side winning the day. Maybe we can get hospital visitation rights, inheritance rights, etc. That wouldn't be nothing, but it's far short of the goal and it's far short of what's right.

This issue will be Obama's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

One Last Thing, Then Bed

Oh, it looks like (looks!) Prop. 8 in California, which would ban gay marriage in the state by Constitutional Amendment, is going to fail. Hooray!

Update: Nope, I was wrong (and I suppose, so was the story I had read online late last night). Prop 8 failed, but Props 1 & 2 passed. Small consolation, but there it is.

Obama Wins

And wow, that was a great acceptance speech. After eight years of rolling my eyes or becoming legitimately afraid every time the President addressed the nation, it was an amazing feeling to be so inspired by a leader.

Yes We Can

Go vote.

Elections In Azeroth

How many electors does Azeroth get? Link.

MSNBC

This last weekend I told my friends about an idea that I had had: That if Obama is elected, MSNBC will be transformed into a respectable news station just as Fox was under the Bush Administration. Before 2001, Fox was a joke. Everyone knew they were just a collection of right wing nutjobs with an insane drive to take down Clinton. With Bush in the Whitehouse, however, suddenly they were getting all kinds of increased access. Fresh talking points came to Fox first. Politically powerful people did interviews on Fox shows. Everyone knew they were still hardcore to the Right, but they were legitimized by the patronage of the powerful.

This, I theorized, is about to happen to MSNBC, which floundered for several years as the poor man's CNN until after 2004, when their primetime programming started drifting leftwards. But in an era of conservative dominance they weren't taken seriously. Keith Olberman was just the angry guy with no ratings. Chris Matthews was (and to some extent remains) a hack with a penchant for man crushes on tough-seeming pols. But it's all about to change, I said. Scoffed at, I was. Difficult to see. Always in motion, the future is. Where was I?

Oh, well now MSNBC is beating FOX in primetime four out of ten days. That's not dominence, but it's not nothing. Oh, and with a week left in the most important election in his lifetime, where is Obama going for an interview? Rachel Maddow.

My Bad Dawgs

I accidentally slept in. We'll get 'em next time though, right? Link.

Who's Elitist Now?

Look, I don't care about gaudy shopping sprees on the Republican contributor's dime. I'm sure a few of them might not like having bought ridiculously expensive clothing for the VP candidate and her humongoid family, but it's just not a big deal to me, personally. But I remember not too long ago we heard all kinds of outrage about Obama buying expensive Burberry suits. Can we at least now get a break from the elitist rap? Of course not...that'd be silly.

The wealthiest, most powerful third-world nation

Two things from this Guardian piece:

In a survey of 120 major cities New York was found to be the ninth most unequal in the world and Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, and Miami had similar inequality levels to those of Nairobi, Kenya and Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Many were above an internationally recognised acceptable 'alert' line used to warn governments.

"In western New York state nearly 40% of the black, Hispanic and mixed-race households earned less than $15,000 compared with 15% of white households. The life expectancy of African-Americans in the US is about the same as that of people living in China and some states of India, despite the fact that the US is far richer than the other two countries," it said.

Obnoxiously, the article provides no information that you can use to actually find and read the report they're summarising. (It's from a `new United Nations report on the urban environment'. Thanks, John Vidal!)

OMFG! Obama campaign and NYT both use the English language!

Truly, truly damning evidence that the NYT is in the tank for Obama: both the Obama campaign talking points and the NYT debate preview

1. quote John McCain!
   
2. mention the economy!
   
3. talk about the McCain campaign's ineffective negative campaigning!
   
4. use punctuation!
   
5. spend lots of time praising Obama's `Rescue Plan for the Middle Class'!
   

Oh, wait, no. Not that last one. The Times doesn't so much as mention Obama's economic policies. Via Pandagon.

David Brooks doesn't believe that he believes the things that he believes

Things like this

In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

would come across as a lot less disingenuous if they weren't written by the guy who said this just over four months ago:

Well, the movement [Obama's primary campaign] hit some natural parameters among highly educated, affluent people, people who live in places like Portland, Oregon. There is a movement, and that movement is still going on. And it's big. It's a big, historic movement, but the magic is not felt by a lot of people. It's not felt, obviously, by a lot of less educated people, downscale people. They just look at Obama, and they don't see anything. And so, Obama's problem is he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who could go into an Applebee's salad bar, and people think he fits in naturally there. And so he's had to change to try to be more like that Applebee's guy, and as he's done that, he's become much more transactional, much more, "I'm going to deliver this, and this, and this for you" on policy.

The Debate

After every debate of the presidential election this year the media has called it a win for McCain/Pailin, and then polls following the debate show that Obama/Biden won all the debates by double digits. You'd think that would have given commentators pause yesterday before saying that McCain beat Obama and gave his best performance, but it didn't and then they were all shocked, *shocked*, when the snap polls showed Obama winning by around 30 points. Link.

Credit

I'm not as hesitant as Erza to withhold credit from John McCain for telling his supporters to back off some of the crazy things they've been saying at his rallys. Yeah, he's really the source for a lot of what his supporters are going around saying. Still, the news is only partially going to be that McCain is being reasonable. Mostly it's going to be that he doesn't think people need to be scared of an Obama presidency and doesn't think Obama is a terrorist. To a certain extent, I think this undercuts his own campaign's ads. Link.

On a related note, I'm absolutely *done* with people talking about how negative "this campaign" has gotten. 100% of McCain's ads lately have been negative against Obama while 33% of Obama's ads have been negative against McCain. That's simply not equivalent, which would justify talking about "the campaign" in general terms applying to both candidates. McCain has gone completely negative and Obama is responding while continuing to put out a positive message.

I'm Back!

Ugh, my laptop, which was running perfectly fine even though it was around four years old, fell a week or so ago and was irreparably damaged. So here I am, blogging on my fancy new desktop computer! Anyway, I'll certainly be around more now.

P.S. I haven't been able to play anything close to modern PC games for a long time, so if anyone has any recommendations, I'm open. I just picked up Sins of a Solar Empire. Noumena, how are you liking Spore? I certainly salivated over that game for a long time.

Feed The Animals

Thanks NPR! I heard about DJ Girl Talk's new mashup album, "Feed The Animals" on, I think, Radio Times the other day. If you're into mashups at all it's worth checking out, particularly as he's distributing the album on a donation basis. But let me say that if this album doesn't make you feel like dancing, or at least bob your head, you have the emotional capacity of Data pre-emotions chip. Link.

The cause of the housing market meltdown, according to libertarians

Conventional wisdom blames the collapse of the housing market -- and, thereby, the broader credit market collapse which appears to be about to drive us into recession -- on the deregulation of the mortgage and financial industry that, first, allowed lenders to offer homeowners ill-advised mortgages and, second, allowed financiers to build complex investment instruments on top of these ill-advised mortgages. Or, as an economist writing for that most infamous of socialist organisations, the Bank for International Settlements (an international organization of central banks), put it (PDF),

Compared with other countries, the United States seems to have: built up a larger overhang of excess housing supply; experienced a greater easing in mortgage lending standards; and ended up with a household sector more vulnerable to falling housing prices.

Since the obvious long-term remedy on this account -- stronger government regulation of the housing market -- is antithetical to libertarian principles, I've been wondering for the past week what libertarians think caused this mess, and what should be done (including nothing because the market will sort itself out, &c.). Not so much that I've bothered to ask any of my libertarian friends. Just an idle curiosity. In particular, after reading Andrew Leonard's schadenfreudisch announcement that deregulation is, essentially, dead, I wandered over to Reason. Where I read this:

Easy money from the Federal Reserve, coupled with easy credit provided indirectly via the Community Reinvestment Act and directly via government-sponsored-enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created an unsustainable housing bubble. By corrupting the standard of value and bullying financial institutions into giving loans to the unqualified, these government actions distorted relative prices and caused generalized errors in economic calculations and investment decisions.

Now, the next paragraph is an argument that the just-passed bailout plan is tantamount to Soviet-style economic planning. And he later misconstrues the bailout as `[a]llowing investment banks to go to the government for a $700 billion line of credit'. So perhaps your sensible intellectual libertarian isn't going to consider this the libertarian analysis of the housing market over the last five years.

But what the hell. Let's take a closer look at the account. If it's right, the housing bubble was created by a confluence of three factors. We'll take them one at a time.

1. `Easy money from the Federal Reserve'
   
   I simply have no idea what this is supposed to mean. The Fed does three things: buy and sell US treasury securities on the open market, make short-term loans to private banks so they can maintain liquidity, and specify the amount of funds banks must keep on hand (ie, not loan out). They don't just give money away.
   
   
2. `easy credit provided indirectly via the Community Reinvestment Act'
   
   The Community Reinvestment Act is a 1977 bill designed to prevent redlining -- offering borrowers worse terms on their mortgages based on their race, ethnicity, or neighbourhood. The idea, I guess, is that requiring banks to offers loans based on quantifiable criteria effectively required them to offer loans that lenders couldn't pay back. I'm far from an expert, but the quotations, paraphrases, and references on this Wikipedia page seem to be telling: there appears to be a great deal of empirical evidence against this claim, and little to none in support of it.
   
   
3. `easy credit provided ... directly via government-sponsored-enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac'
   
   Again, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. `Fannie Mae receives no direct government funding or backing; Fannie Mae securities carry no government guarantee of being repaid. This is explicitly stated in the law that authorizes GSEs [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac], on the securities themselves, and in many public communications issued by Fannie Mae.' So neither is government sponsored. At least in any sense of the term that would imply they receive sponsorship from the government. They also don't provide credit. They buy mortgages in the secondary market, ie, from the lenders that do provide credit. This helps create liquidity, thereby making it easier to get a loan -- not because the loan costs less, but because lenders have more money with which to make loans.
   

So. `The' libertarian account blames the housing market collapse on government interference, in the form of three purported causal factors. Two of which are incoherent on their face, and third that seems to lack empirical support. Maybe I'm missing something, but it's not exactly a compelling laissez-faire alternative to mainstream narrative.

By the way, if you were wondering how our Reason writer would actually fix the mess, he says we need `a more rational conversation about how to remove real barriers to better-functioning markets'. I'm guessing this translates into `talking the markets up' and more deregulation.

Palin wants abortion to be both illegal and legal

From the last part of the Palin-Couric interview:

Couric: But ideally, you think it should be illegal for a girl who was raped or the victim of incest to get an abortion?

Palin: I'm saying that, personally, I would counsel the person to choose life, despite horrific, horrific circumstances that this person would find themselves in. And, um, if you're asking, though, kind of foundationally here, should anyone end up in jail for having an … abortion, absolutely not. That's nothing I would ever support.

To be fair, she never comes out and says that she thinks abortion should be illegal. But the alternative just makes her `pro-life' position vapid rather than incoherent -- which doesn't strike me as a significant improvement.

Google officially opposes Prop. 8

Read the post here.

Prop. 8 is the ballot initiative in California to overrule (if that's the right term) the finding earlier this year that the state's gay marriage ban is (was) unconstitutional. Google have just announced their opposition to Prop. 8. This is interesting to me -- not only as a Californian in exile who happens to also be opposed to Prop. 8 -- but because, a few months ago, Notre Dame switched its student email system to gmail. And, of course, while opposition to gay marriage isn't as big an issue here as abortion, contraception, and premarital (straight) sex, I doubt the conservatives are going to be thrilled with Google. I'll certainly let the one person who reads this blog know of any cranky letters to the editor in the student paper.

Cue uncontrollable giggling fit

Again, from the Couric-Palin interview:

It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border.

Oh noooooes!

Quoi?

Via Shakespeare's Sister, an excerpt from Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin:

Couric [on tape]: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with healthcare, housing, gas, and groceries—allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy—instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

Palin [on tape]: That's why I say, I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bailout. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are [glances down] concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed [glances down] to help shore up our economy. [glances down] Helping the—oh, it's got to be about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So healthcare reform [glances down] and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief [glances down] for Americans, and trade we've—we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, um, scary thing, but 1 in 5 jobs being created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout [is a part of that].

AO Scott on Lee's Do the right thing

Spike Lee's Do the right thing is one of my favourite films of all time, for far too many and far too complex reasons to go into here. I just wanted to point everyone to
this video of AO Scott, film critic for the New York Times, discussing Do the right thing and the state of race relations today. Note that the clips in the video amount to some fairly significant spoilers.

I do not think that word means what you think it means: `Ordinary' edition

Copy from a Facebook ad for Heroes: `Are you the one person on the planet who isn't already a fan? Don't be ordinary. Be extraordinary. Become a fan now.'

I'm not an economist, but I play one on the internets

Paul Krugman (whom, let me be clear, is not the `I' of the title of this post) has been working on a nice series of blog posts commenting on the impending bailout. He gives a nice, rigorous version of the basic liberal problem with the plan in its current form: it's a huge transfer of wealth to the already extraordinarily wealthy people in the finance industry who got themselves (and us) into this mess, with absolutely no guarantee of success.

In the linked post, Krugman breaks the situation down into a cascade of four stages:

1. It all starts with the bursting of the housing bubble. This has led to sharply increased rates of default and foreclosure, which has led to large losses on mortgage-backed securities.

2. The losses in MBS, in turn, have left the financial system undercapitalized — doubly so, because levels of leverage that were previously considered acceptable are no longer OK.

3. The financial system, in its efforts to deleverage, is contracting credit, placing everyone who depends on credit under strain.

4. There’s also, to some extent, a vicious circle of deleveraging: as financial firms try to contract their balance sheets, they drive down the prices of assets, further reducing capital and forcing more deleveraging.

The current Bush administration plan targets stage 4 by attempting to set a sufficiently high floor in the prices of `toxic' assets (that is, mortgages with such egregious terms that the homeowners may not be able to afford to pay them, and derivatives based on those mortgages; isn't it great how the financial difficulties of working class people are being reframed as `toxic' for the wealthy and powerful?). Krugman's points out that, if this floor is too low, it might not do much to help out struggling firms.

As an alternative, he suggests intervention at stage 2. Rather than becoming the buyer of last resort for these `toxic' assets, he wants `public injections of capital, in return for a stake in the upside'. I assume it would work something like this: to deleverage (move the balance sheets from red to black), firms with `toxic' assets would issue more stock (rather than selling those assets), and the US government would be a (or the) major buyer of that new stock. That way the struggling firms get black balance sheets now, and when their stock prices go back up, the government can gradually sell those stocks and get a nice little return on the investment. According to Krugman, compared to the Bush administration plan, this plan is not as risky, is more likely to be successful, and doesn't involve just handing nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer money over to the `geniuses' in the financial industry with no strings attached.

Another possibility -- that I'm surprised to see no-one making at all on the lefty blogs -- is an intervention at stage 1. Rather than bailing out the wealthy idiots who caused this problem, why don't we help out the people who are likely to default on their mortgages? If these mortgages aren't in danger of failing, or failing as dramatically, the assets based on them are no longer toxic, or as toxic.

There are two obvious ways of doing this, corresponding to two radically different ways the government could intervene in the borrower-lender relationship. First, the government could give a direct cash infusion, covering the gap between what the homeowner can pay and what the terms of the mortgage require. Second, the government could change the terms of the mortgage, eg, negotiating a lower rate.

I actually don't like this plan, whichever of the two strategies it adopts. This is because it not only fails to deal with the ultimate underlying problem, but it can actually exacerbate the underlying problem.

Go back and look at stage 1 in Krugman's list. This all started with the housing bubble -- the inflation of housing costs, especially the cost to buy a house, over the past 20-25 years, especially in places like California and large cities (SF, LA, Chicago, the Acela cities, etc.). A wide variety of serious development and environment issues -- the spread of suburbs, the proliferation of single-driver cars, car-based rather than pedestrian-based communities, etc. -- are connected with the housing bubble in various ways, and a contraction in housing prices is, frankly, necessary for addressing most of them in any effective way.

But addressing stage 1 of the current crisis by preventing mortgage failures in pretty much any way is maintaining housing prices at the current inflated level. It's preventing the deflation in home prices that is necessary to get people to move out of the suburbs and back to the cities.

I genuinely feel for the people who have already and will lose their homes due to predatory lending practices. Owning a home is an important part of the ideal of American middleclassness to a lot of people, and, more pragmatically, declaring bankruptcy also completely ruins your ability to get credit. (Although pretty much no-one can get credit at this point -- which is the part of this whole mess that has the wealthy and powerful worried.) But owning a home is, ultimately, not that important, especially when it's owning in a home in a bedroom `community' built on top of a paved-over wetland.

Let me make one final point. Perhaps everyone in the leftist blogosphere has already realised everything I've said in this post. Still, it's something we -- including the leftist blogosphere, but also the citizenry of this country as a whole -- need to be talking about, if for no other reason than it gets us thinking about the nature of the problem. Right now, the mainstream discourse seems to be all about `fixing' the economy. But fixing something requires first having an explicit idea of what the thing is supposed to do, and how it does it. The mainstream discourse doesn't talk about what the economy is supposed to do, much less what we want the economy to do. Do we want it to produce and distribute lots of cheap consumables -- cheap food, cheap clothes, cheap houses, cheap electronics? Or do we want it to go for quality rather than quantity? Simply getting the finance industry `working' the same way it has been for 25 years isn't fixing the industry if it's been radically dysfunctional for that period of time.

Hacking on autism

Evidently, the philosopher of science Ian Hacking has been doing some thinking -- and writing -- about autism as of late. So, via the philosophy blog What Sorts of People, here is a post on Ian Hacking on what do we know about autism?, with an accompanying link to a fascinating book review in the LRB.

More from Latin America: Unions in Colombia

To balance out the anti-Chavez post below, here's an anti-capitalist article in The Guardian, on the literally life-and-death struggle to unionise workers in the Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia:

The Colombian paramilitary groups were spawned in the conflict between the state and revolutionary guerrillas. In 1982, officers under General Landazábal, the defence minister, worked with multinationals and cattle ranchers to organise and fund "defence groups". Ostensibly they were to fight leftwing insurgent groups, but increasingly the paras, as they are known, became entwined with the drug cartels and the army. They formed death squads, attacking and killing anyone considered to support the leftwing guerrillas - basically anyone working in human rights or trade unions. It is a common refrain among the establishment and security forces that the guerrillas and trade unionists are one and the same.

Carlos Castaño, leader of the paras, claimed that 70% of his organisation's funding came from the cocaine industry. But he was also an ardent supporter of neoliberal economic policies and of multinational investment in Colombia - so why shouldn't national and international companies support them? In a newspaper interview, Castaño maintained there was always a reason for the paras' attacks. "Trade unionists, for example. They stop the people from working. That's why we kill them."

[snip]

What was the Coca-Cola Company's response? Its website displays the only public audit by the Coca-Cola Company into their bottlers in Colombia. This was conducted in spring 2005, more than eight years after Isidro Gil was shot dead. Intriguingly, the audit conducted by the Cal Safety Compliance Corporation focuses on compliance issues: the report notes several health and safety breaches, including the absence of a protective guard on a syrup container at one plant, the incorrect number of fire extinguishers at two plants, and incorrect documentation for an employee at one plant. I am happy to report that the appropriate remedial action has been taken to comply with health and safety regulations. To this day the Coca-Cola Company itself has not investigated the alleged links of Colombian bottling plant managers with the paramilitaries.

Oh Venezuela

De Le Monde:

Le gouvernement vénézuélien a expulsé, vendredi 19 septembre, les deux membres d'une délégation de Human Rights Watch (HRW) qui avaient présenté, la veille à Caracas, un rapport accusant le régime du président Hugo Chavez d'avoir "affaibli les institutions démocratiques et les droits de l'homme".

On Thursday, September 19, the Venezuelan government expelled the two members of a Human Rights Watch (HRW) delegation who had presented a report the previous day in Caracas accusing the regime of President Hugo Chavez of ``weakening democratic institutions and human rights''.

Le ministre [vénézuélien des affaires étrangères, Nicolas Maduro] a fustigé "ces groupes qui se font passer pour des défenseurs des droits de l'homme" et qui "sont financés par les Etats-Unis". " Ils suivent, a-t-il dit, une politique visant à attaquer les pays qui construisent de nouveaux modèles économiques." Le 11 septembre, Caracas avait expulsé l'ambassadeur américain, par solidarité avec la Bolivie qui venait d'en faire de même.

The [Venezuelan] minister [of foreign affairs, Nicolas Maduro] thrashed ``these groups that pretend to be defenders of human rights'' and that ``are financed by the United States''. They followed, he said, a political aim of attacking those nations that are constructing new economic models. On September 11, Caracas expelled the American ambassdor, in solidarity with Bolivia, who had just done the same.

(My translations.)

Reason on Palin

Cathy Young, a `contributing editor' of the libertarian magazine Reason, has a piece in said magazine arguing that Sarah Palin is `a feminist hero'. Why? Let's work through the list.

1. While anti-abortion, she belongs to a group called Feminists for Life.
   
   Feminists for Life's feminist credentials are themselves a little sketchy. Not too long ago, FfL's website prominently featured long-since-disproven and dubious claims about, for example, connections between abortion and breast cancer and abortion and depression. They've since removed these claims, but at the very least a sceptical eyebrow should be raised.



2. more representation for feminism across the spectrum of political beliefs is a good thing
   
   This is question-begging. Of course women can and do disagree about all kinds of beliefs. And of course feminists support women making up their own minds. But this doesn't mean that any woman with political beliefs is ipso facto a feminist.
   



3. Palin is a mother of five who resumed an intensive work schedule days after giving birth, and whose husband seems to be a full partner.
   
   Fair enough. But it's one thing for Palin to be a symbol of a successful balance between family and career and another for her policy positions to give other women the same opportunities. And given McCain's opposition to the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (I can't find any solid information on what Palin thinks of Ledbetter), comprehensive sex ed, expanded federal education funding, etc., it's hard to see what policies she could support that would give other women these same opportunities.
   



4. the hypocrisy of feminist liberals who deploy sexist weapons against her
   
   At this point in the piece, Young has apparently decided she'd rather attack `the feminists' than defend Palin. But fine, let's see what these sexist attacks are: Novelist Jane Smiley called Palin `arrogant'. A sex educator/UU minister and the former editor of Cosmopolitan, Glamour, YM and Us Weekly both called her a bad mother. And Gary Kamiya wrote a piece on Salon about Palin titled `The Dominatrix'.
   
   Maybe Young just doesn't understand that there are subtle but important distinctions between feminists, women, and Gary Kamiya?
   



5. The Biden-sponsored VAWA represents a toxic mix of gender-war feminism that treats such crimes as acts of patriarchal oppression rather than individual wrongdoing, and paternalism that sees women as deserving of special protection
   
   This tangent seems to have mutated into a non sequitur.
   



6. Palin represents by far the better version of female empowerment
   
   This is from the penultimate sentence of the piece, which suggests it's something like the thesis. It's hard to see what it has to do with the `Palin is a feminist hero' claim. I guess it's the thesis of the second part of the piece, where Young suddenly starts talking about VAWA and Joe Biden's toxic feminism. Up until that point, we didn't really seem to have anything on the table about contrasting versions of feminism.
   
   On the other hand, she never says anything at all about what Palin thinks about VAWA. So she clearly can't think that the last point was an argument for this one. You can't support a compare-and-contrast thesis without talking about both sides. So maybe the contrast is between the hypocritical sexist attacks used by various non-feminist `feminists' against Palin and the non-hypocritical sexist attacks used by Palin against Clinton earlier this year?

I have no idea. I'm going to go play Spore.

McCain's health care plan is kind of the opposite

Via:

A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.

Maybe the idea is to solve the crisis of the American health care system by getting rid of the American health care system?

`The new colossus', Emma Lazarus, 1883 (inscription in the Statue of Liberty)

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

How much has Palin helped McCain?

According to Gallup, today John McCain is enjoying a slight but not statistically significant lead over Obama, 47-45 percent. Three weeks ago, on 24 August, just before the Democratic convention, McCain was 2 percentage points ahead of Obama, 46-44.

So it appears Palin has given McCain a net boost of 1 percentage point. Why are we paying so much attention to this woman?

Tortured Fingers

A new Obama ad point out several ways in which John McCain is out of touch, including the fact that he doesn't know how to use a computer and can't send email. Clearly, as the charge is that he's out of touch, the point being made is that he isn't cognitively familiar with sending email; that it's not something he understands in the same way that he doesn't understand the economy. He's admitted to this stuff himself.

The response from the right? This is a new low for Obama because John McCain has had trouble typing every since...wait for it...he was tortured as a POW. I never would have imagined that they'd be able to work the POW schtick into every criticism but they find new ways to impress me every day. What's next: "John McCain lost his ability to use diplomacy in the Hanoy Hilton! How dare Obama question his war mongering!"?

Are the media finally pulling their heads out?

Karl Rovean political campaigns rely heavily on certain assumptions about the behavior of talking heads: that they enjoy spreading gossip as news, are obsessed with drugs and sex, and reflexively jerk to the right at the merest hint of the phrase `liberal media bias'. Keep the talking heads talking about artificial scandal and inane innuendo, the thinking goes, and Democrats (and moderate Republicans) won't have a chance to get a policy word in edgewise.

This past week has seen an especially ugly Rovean campaign on the part of John McCain. And it's not just me who thinks so. It's the New York Times:

Mr. Obama has also been accused of distortions, but this week Mr. McCain has found himself under particularly heavy fire for a pair of headline-grabbing attacks. First the McCain campaign twisted Mr. Obama’s words to suggest that he had compared Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, to a pig after Mr. Obama said, in questioning Mr. McCain’s claim to be the change agent in the race, “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” (Mr. McCain once used the same expression to describe Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health plan.)

Note that this isn't a `Senator McCain said ... but the Obama campaign responds that ....' story, the usual pattern these sorts of stories take. McCain is twisting Obama's words, making false claims and incorrect assertions. The truth is identified, not as talking points from the Obama campaign, but as assertions of fact. Even better, the article is accompanied by a graphic in which McCain and Palin's assertions about Obama's policy positions (and the Bridge to Nowhere) are contrasted with nonpartisan analysis of those policy positions.

Are the media finally waking up and realizing that their job in the political process is fact-checker, not stenographer and gossip rag writer? The more -- and more prominently -- stories like this appear, the worse the Rovean campaign tactics will misfire. This NYT piece -- and the fact that it's linked on MSNBC's and US Today's front pages -- are positive signs. As is this piece on Newsweek's front page. On the other hand, CNN and (of course) Fox News have absolutely nothing.

Couple Good Links

Here's a good clip from Rachel Maddow's show. Are she and Olberman the picture of impartiality? Of course not, but then neither if Pat Buchanan and there's room for openly liberal and openly conservative talking heads in the media.

Wasilla, AK made rape victims pay for the rape kits which are essential to prosecute their attackers while Sarah Palin was mayor. In fact, it was the only town in Alaska to do so, but forced the state legislature to pass a law forbidding them to do this. Let's just put it plainly: Under Sarah Palin's stewardship Wasilla charged rape victims thousands of dollars for being raped. Link.

Edit: $50/hr to pick lettuce for a whole season. McCain's offering, but only because you *can't do it*! Link.

Chris Matthews

In case you didn't know, MSNBC, after accusations that they have tilted too far towards Obama, benched Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews as anchors for their election coverage. The spot has been given to David Greggory who isn't bad exactly but isn't exactly exciting.

Anyway, I'm watching Chris Matthews on Rachel Maddow's new show and he looks like somebody kicked him in the gut. Don't get me wrong, I think Matthews is anything but out and out liberal and way too prone to shallow crushes on mostly male politicians. Still, he always had a fire that he brought to his coverage that just seemed drained. Maddow kept trying to get a rouse out of him, but every time he started to get warmed up it was like someone behind the camera told him to take it down a notch. In short, he was just sad.

1337

Good ol' Dan Brottman sent me along to this blog post (I gather it's his friend's blog) arguing that John McCain, and not Barack Obama is the elitist. Yeah, I know, we all know this, but he breaks it down better and more clearly than you often see. It's a good read.

Fringe

Fringe is similar to Tru Blood in some ways. They both deal with a world which is very much like ours with a pretty significant, and oh-so-mysterious, twist. They both obviously have a pretty expansive mythology which will be explored over the course of the series. What Fringe did that Tru Blood didn't in its first episode, however, is manage lay out the hints at the larger plots with tantalizing hooks. It also did a much better job of cutting the drama with humor. All in all, I'll give Tru Blood a couple episodes to pick itself up, but Fringe doesn't need that space. It's good already.

Obama On O'Reilly

Obama did an interview with Bill O'Reilly this last week. Evidently this is just the first of four parts, the rest of which air Monday through Wednesday if you want to keep up on that.

John McCain's campaign won't let Sarah Palin answer so much as a question from reporters and Obama goes into the lion's den in what most certainly could have been an interview stacked with cheap questions and then edited in post production to make him look terrible.

Entourage

Good to have the gang back.

True Blood

Ok, so it's a first episode. First episodes of even the best series can be iffy, and especially a show like this that relies on a mythology that obviously will need some time to flesh out. Still, "Six Feet Under" this is most surely not. Anna Paquin is Rogue, and for that there will always be a special place in my heart. But really, let's be honest, she's never had wicked acting chops. The writing has some intriguing aspects, but sometimes it's downright blunt.

After "John From Cincinnati" tanked, HBO really could use a new hit. Here's hoping this show gets a bit of time to breath before they decide whether it's worth the risk or not. I'll certainly give it a couple episodes.

Incidentally

You want to know the difference between kids' sports movies and adult's sports movies? Kids' movies are all about sportsmanship and enjoying the sport. Adult's sports movies are about winning. Also, I guess it's worth mentioning that I'm watching "The Mighty Ducks" now. I know, I'm super lame.

Give Huckabee A Job

Ok, so I have a bit of a crush on Mike Huckabee. Yeah, some of his positions are straight up crazy. That's fine, I can accept that, but damn, every time I see that guy I can't help but like him. He was just on the Daily Show and, like always, just exuded charisma.

So, my quandary is this: is there any job we can give Huckabee in the next administration which would be simultaneously extremely visible and almost entirely without power? Actually, during the primaries Huckabee got tons of flack for his populist positions, so maybe we can find something that plays up that aspect of his politics and, shall we say, de-emphasizes his social conservatism. Department of Labor? Interior?

The Politics Of Conventions

I might have another post in me that's more specifically about Senator McCain's speech accepting his party's nomination for President, but what struck me most about it was tone. The Democratic Convention had some firey speeches to be sure, but the ones that come to mind the most, John Kerry and Joe Biden, got their fire from tying McCain's positions to the clearly wrong positions of the current President. Everyone admitted that John McCain was a patriot and a decent guy who was simply wrong about just about everything. It wasn't jarring then, when Barack Obama came out and hammered John McCain's positions for being wrong and gave his alternatives.

Last night was jarring. After two nights of smarmy, sarcastic speeches implying all kinds of terrible things about their opponents, John McCain comes out and waves his hands at playing nice before essentially talking about his life story for an hour. Now, out on the campaign trail it's possible to claim that you don't have control over people who aren't in your campaign. If Rudy Giuliani gave an interview where he tore apart Obama like he did two nights ago, John McCain, if he felt he needed to, could legitimately say "I don't employ Rudy, so I can't exactly make him stop, but I sure wish he would because I don't agree with him." Now, as we learned with Swift Boaters, a nominee can disapprove all he wants, but the bile gets out into the discourse anyway. Still, at least there's some separation.

What isn't credible, however, is to have these two perspectives smashed together at the same convention. If John McCain truly respects Barack Obama, what didn't he tell Rudy, or Mitt, or Sarah to tone down their speeches? Why not ask them to focus on Barack's policies that you disagree with rather than making fun of community organizers? Why not present a whole convention with the type of stuff that you yourself to say if you were speaking every night?

The answer is that the few nice things John McCain said about Barack Obama last night aren't what the Republican Party believes. They believe the stuff from the last few nights and John McCain had to have those speeches to mollify his base. And he had to say those nice things about Obama last night to try to attract independent voters. So which night of the convention show what John McCain truly feels? I'm betting whichever one is most likely to get him elected at any given moment.

Swing voters breaking for Obama

From Gallup: `The percentage of voters who are "up for grabs" has declined sharply in the past week, from 30% to 21%, according to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll.' Assuming no-one has gone from being certain to vote from Obama to certain to vote for McCain (or vice-versa) in the past week, of that 9%, 6% went to Obama and 3% to McCain. This gives Obama a 42%-37% advantage over McCain in the popular vote.

Gallup's description of the methodology is unclear, but I think the comparison is based on surveys done last weekend (30-31 August) and yesterday.

Republican Convention: Day 2

Ok, I lasted an hour or so into last night's convention. When they started up the Reagan video talking about what a "maverick" he was, I just had to turn it off. I know, I was weak but it was just garbage. Maybe I've got rose colored glasses about last week's Democratic Convention, but I don't remember them mischaracterizing Republican positions the way the Republicans are doing. Anyway, I decided to try harder tonight.

Just on the surface, Romney, Huckabee, and Giuliani are such better speakers than McCain that it *has* to have made some Republicans at least a little regretful that this is the guy they've ended up with. I'm not suggesting they won't support McCain, but there have to be a few people out there a little wistful for the primaries.

A little below the surface, I'm getting fed up quick. Yes, there have been some good political lines, particularly from Giuliani, but the substance of these speeches has been maddening. They have been fearless in their complete disregard for things Democrats actually believe. See, Democrats say, "Republicans are too aggressive on foreign policy and they support overturning Roe v. Wade" and that's what Republicans actually believe. Republicans obscure the actual positions of their opponents and rely on paeans to non-partisan ideas like patriotism.

Yeah, I know, they do these things because it works. It's also the job of Democrats to push back against the nonsense that comes out of their mouths. But it's sad that this is what national politics has become: a largely fair dealing party constantly pushing back against a party that always fights in bad faith.

I Love Live Mics

Peggy Noonan gets caught. Link.

Sans titre, Francis Bebey, c. 1998

Je suis venu chercher du travail
J'espère qu'il y en aura
je suis venu de mon lointain pays
Pour travailler chez vous

J'ai tout laissé, ma femme, mes amis
Au pays tout là-bas
J'espère les retrouves tous en vie
Le jour de mon retour

Ma pauvre mère était bien désolée
En me voyant partir
Je lui ai dit qu'un jour je reviendrai
Mettre fin à sa misère

J'ai parcouru de long jour de voyage
Pour venir jusqu'ici
Ne m'a-t-on pas assuré d'un acceuil
Qui vaudrait bien ette peine

Regardez-moi, je suis fatigué
D'aller par les chemins
Voici des jour que je n'ai rien mangé
Auriez-vous un peu de pain?

Mon pantalon est tout déchiré
Mais je n'en ai pas d'autre
Ne criez pas, ce n'est pas un scandale
Je suis seulement pauvre

Je suis venu chercher du travail
J'espère qu'il y en aura
Je suis venu de mon lointain pays
Pour travailler chez vous.

Qualified

The issue of who is "qualified" for holding nationwide executive office has come up a lot in this election cycle. John McCain asserts that Barack Obama doesn't have enough experience to be qualified for being president. Various democrats, internet folks, and even a few Republicans argue that Sarah Palin doesn't have enough experience, or perhaps not the "right" experience to be Vice President.

Dictionary.com has several definitions for "qualified," but I like looking at the synonyms better: "able, capable, competent, fitted." The focus isn't on having done anything specific or having any one specific quality, but on being in a position to perform whatever the function is being asked of you with competence. When interviewing for a job, sometimes the successful candidate has extensive experience in the field. Sometimes the successful candidate is a young up-and-comer with interesting new ideas.

I think history has shown pretty well that a long political resume doesn't necessarily equal a good President and being a Washington "outsider" doesn't either. John McCain, with his 30 years in the Senate, is plainly "qualified" to be President. So is Barack Obama, with his four years in the Senate, several in the Illinois state legislature, and his sweeping and exciting plans for reforming the country. Sarah Palin, I don't think, is qualified, or at the very least her qualifications are questionable. 22 months as a governor in a small state which receives incredibly huge amounts of federal largess is not very impressive. Unfortunately for her, she also doesn't, at least not that I've seen, bring much new to the table either politically or charismatically. Does she bring several politically useful features to McCain's campaign? Obviously. Is she qualified to be Vice President or, if something should happen to John McCain, President? I just don't think she is. She may have been a hot Republican prospect for four or eight years, but they pulled her from the farm club too soon and it may destroy her prospects.

One Last Post On Palin Before I Shower

Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall make the most important point: all of this isn't to tear down Sarah Palin as a person, it's about John McCain's presidential campaign. You can pick through all these Palin stories individually and decide whether each impacts Palin's ability to act as an honorable VP, but taken as a whole it's clear that John McCain didn't think that it was important enough to look into Palin's history. He wanted a female VP pick who could be cast as a maverick conservative Washington outsider. There were other, eminently qualified Republican women he could have chosen. Some couldn't be cast as party mavericks. Some couldn't be really called conservatives. Some aren't Washington outsiders. So what he decided to do was go with an unknown quantity in Sarah Palin. She fit what he thought he needed politically, so he gave no thought to whether she would actually make a good VP. Barack Obama chose Joe Biden because he brought some working class cred to the ticket, but also because he demonstrably will help Barack govern better than Barack could have done alone. John McCain put his campaign before the country in his VP pick and that showed a serious lack of judgment.

Edit: Ok, so as to not break my promise of this being the last Palin post for a little while, here's a sneaky edit to point you in the direction of this editorial, which I rather liked.

Rove On Biden

You know, really, calling the opposition a "big blow hard doofus" is certainly rude, but it's not exactly breaking new lows for the party.

Wait...Seriously?

Video of Sarah Palin shooting a honkin' big assault rifle? Not really that big of a deal given that it's a big part of the party platform and it was done visiting the troops in Kuwait.

Embroiled in a scandal where she might have tried to get her abusive brother-in-law fired? Well, as far scandals go, I guess that's not the worst.

Video of Sarah Palin saying she doesn't know what the VP does? Really embarrassing.

17 year old daughter is 5 months pregnant? Well, kids are off limits in politics...kinda, and the base will get a kick out of a kid being "not forced" into carrying a pregnancy to term and marrying the father.

Having been a member of a secessionist group in Alaska? Wait, really? How is she putting country first if she wants to leave the country? I know I live in a bit of a liberal bubble, but it's one thing after another with this VP pick. Are conservatives still excited to have her on the ticket and, if so, are they crazy? (Also, in the video she says "I've always said competition is sooo good." I know this was probably a quickly produced video, but that's just a stupid sounding line.)

Edit: It appears the answer to both questions is "yes."

Edit, the Second: Ok, I was skeptical and it seems to have been born out. That Red State link asserted that "under God" was added because it had been uttered by the founding fathers. According to Wikipedia, and the huge grain of salt that it comes with so I'm ready to be corrected if somebody has better information, the "under God" phrase was taken from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Great as Lincoln was, he wasn't a founding father of the United States. Founding fathers may have put those two words together at some point, but that wasn't where the phrase in the Pledge came from. And given the flippancy of the answer, I'm going to assume that Sarah Palin misunderstood either the question or the history of the Pledge.

Oh Palin...

Sarah Palin really needs a month or four of schooling in the issues of the day. This is stuff you should really really know...Link.

On Teen Mothers

As the whole world knows by now, Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin's 17 year old daughter is pregnant. Evidently she's planning on taking the pregnancy to term and marrying the father. The cynic in me rolls his eyes when considering the chances of a marriage between 17 year olds working out long term, but that's beside the point.

The issue that's come up for Democrats is how to treat this in the campaign. Hilzoy asserts that Palin's child should be off the table, but it's unclear to me what that really means. For instance, Hilzoy states that we shouldn't use this as an example showing that abstinence-only education doesn't work but that it *is* appropriate to discuss how Palin's reaction to this squares with her stated views on abortion.

I just don't see a very bright line distinction there. I mean, we *know* abstinence-only education doesn't work, but Republican's fail to acknowledge that fact based on studies. Just bringing up the topic of abstinence-only education at this point is going to invoke Palin's daughter, so is the whole topic off the table? At some level, this poor girl is going to be in the spotlight no matter what because her mother is running for office. Did the Republicans go overboard with their attacks on Chelsea Clinton? Obviously. Should Democrats do the same thing here? Obviously not. But candidates bring all their baggage with them when they opt to step into the public eye and while there are certain boundaries we should respect vis a vis their families, we also have to recognize that the lives of candidates give rise to legitimate questions of policy. It's unfortunate for this young woman that what would probably be embarrassing in the best of situations is now embarrassing on a national scale, but ultimately politicians have to consider that they're exposing their whole family to public scrutiny when they run for office.

Again, this isn't to say that anything should go, but that a whole host of issues are now sure to make people at least think about how it applies to Gov. Palin's family and that we can't simply avoid those topics in an election year. Ultimately we just have to do our best to stay classy and apologize for any difficulty this may cause a young woman who's already in a bad situation.

Edit: Drew has a much welcomed political post on this up. Link.

Obama's Acceptance Speech

I have no complaints. Pitch freakin' perfect. Yes we can.

For What It's Worth

I just saw a McCain ad where John McCain simply and plainly congratulated Obama on his nomination. Was it politically calculated? Of course. Still, it was still a very small, classy moment in his otherwise crappy campaign. That's the kind of stuff that made me like John McCain back in the early 2000s. Now he was just as conservative back then as he is now, but he did a much better job of not seeming like a total tool back then.

Wow!

Wow, the Democratic Convention got a ton better tonight. The primary speakers from days one and two (Michelle Obama, Teddy Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton) were very good, but the rest of the speakers were pretty bland and lifeless. But Clinton and Biden were both great and Biden's doing very well too.

Barrack Obama, Pragmatist

From the preview of a piece on Obama's economic policies in this weekend's NYT Sunday Magazine:

Some of the confusion stems from Obama’s own strategy of presenting himself as a postpartisan figure. A few weeks ago, I joined him on a flight from Orlando to Chicago and began our conversation by asking about his economic approach. He started to answer, but then interrupted himself. “My core economic theory is pragmatism,” he said, “figuring out what works.”

This, of course, is not the whole story. Invoking pragmatism doesn’t help the average voter much; ideology, though it often gets a bad name, matters, because it offers insight into how a candidate might actually behave as president.

I wonder if Obama's read his share of John Dewey, Jane Addams, and William James. His approach to politics certainly sounds like it.

Pragmatism (by which I mean a particular intellectual movement developed primarily in the US between the Civil War and World War II, and not a willingness to sacrifice principle on the altar of short-term gain), as articulated by Dewey, Addams, and James, is built around two key ideas. First, ideas are tools, not absolute truths. Like tools, ideas will be useful in some situations, and not useful in others, and it is this usefulness by which we evaluate them. Also like tools, ideas can be improved and replaced as better, more effective tools are developed. Second, progress comes from honestly examining the successes and failures of previous attempts. If an idea has worked well in the past, then it's worthwhile to try it again in similar situations. But no idea is perfect, and so it's equally worthwhile to try other possibilities. Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of particular proposals -- whether in philosophy or public policy -- is how we develop new proposals, that enjoy as many of the strengths and as few of the weaknesses of its predecessors as possible. Both components combined lead to an opennesses and respect for ideological opponents -- they're the ones who are best situated to identify flaws with our own proposals -- and a willingness to experiment with radical and untested theories.

And Obama has demonstrated these two features of pragmatism again and again. His willingness to appear at a conservative evangelical megachurch, for example, and seriously and honestly answer their questions shows that he cares about engaging with those who radically disagree with his political views. Similarly, his admission that the Reaganite critique of the bureaucratic welfare state was partly right. He doesn't see conservatives as the enemy, to be ignored and shouted down; rather, a thoughtful exchange between liberals and conservatives helps improve the views of both sides. His market-based government initiatives, such as his health care plan and the auction-based cap-and-trade system, can be viewed as the product of such thoughtful exchanges between liberals and conservatives (or, in these cases, welfare liberals and libertarians), and also as the sort of radical and untested theory with which pragmatists enjoy experimenting.

Foxnewsification

On this, my last morning in California for the summer (since my flight leaves at 6:10 tomorrow morning, I'm not going to count it), I come across an article on the front of the Bay Area section of the San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. Democrats take a sharp turn to the left,

Since this is on the front of a prominent section of a still-respectable paper, you would expect at least a certain minimal level of professionalism: an attempt to distinguish between reporting of facts and editorializing, evidence to support claims, a professional tone, etc. All of these are missing from Heather Knight's piece.

The story is fairly straightforward: Democratic County Central Committee of San Francisco released their endorsements for the November election. The endorsements did not include a number of candidates who self-identify as progressive, and did votes on ballot measures that would decriminalize prostution, opposite JROTC in public schools, and challenge a number of Mayor Gavin Newsom's policies. Compare that summary with Knight's:

The San Francisco Democratic Party has veered dramatically to the left, telling voters that on Nov. 4 they should elect a raft of ultra-liberal supervisorial candidates, decriminalize prostitution, boot JROTC from public schools, embrace public power and reject Mayor Gavin Newsom's special court in the Tenderloin.

What makes this slate a veer, dramatic or otherwise, to the left? We're given no explanation. None of the positions of any of the candidates in the various contests around the city -- either endorsed or not endorsed -- is identified anywhere in the article, except one mention that one candidate (who was not endorsed) is a Green. Similarly, the discussion of the ballot measures is cursory; the additional details given tell me virtually nothing significant I couldn't have guessed from the three-word descriptions. This means the entire article rests on Knight's individual assessment that the slate of endorsements is "ultra-left".

The tone of the writing is also surprising. There are the usual problems of contemporary journalistic writing: run-on sentences, with far too many clauses, used as whole paragraphs; gratuitous adjectives; and paragraphs with no clear structure or point. But Knight also feels free to make use of slang and focus her report on individual reactions, making the whole piece sound more like a report on the student government election campaign in a high school newspaper: "Nathan Ballard, the mayor's press secretary, said the committee's endorsements are out of whack with Democratic values."

Finally, this is the internets, so of course there's a comment function attached to the electronic version of the story. Knight can't be blamed for this, but I was surprised at the red-baiting and racism that pervaded the comments. The inanity and irrelevant rants I expected, of course, but not the way `socialist' and `communist' were tossed around as slurs, much less the way several comments blamed `illegal immigrants' for violent crime (?), prostitution and sex trafficking (??), and panhandling (???).

Short Dark Knight Review

It makes "Batman Begins" look bad by comparison.

Hip And Cool McCain

On my way home from work today I was listening to "All Things Considered" on NPR and they were discussing John McCain's attempt to court young voters away from Obama. He's doing all kinds of things like town hall meetings with the youngins and going on "Meet The Press" for their college episode. They also mentioned a game on his website called "Pork Invaders." Yeah, you know what doesn't make you seem old? Punning on a game that's over 30 years old.

Dr. Horrible (Again)

Just one last reminder that Dr. Horrible is not only awesome, and that now all three parts have been posted, but also that after tomorrow it's going to be pulled down off the web. That's right, after tomorrow you'll have to buy a DVD or something if you want to sing along to the cool-ocity that is Dr. Horrible. Of course, I'm going to be unable to avoid buying this thing on DVD. Man, I wonder what kind of special features they'll have. Link.

What do The Feminists believe?

One of the most ironic anti-feminist tropes -- both in the real world and the internets -- is the charge that feminists are dogmatic. We -- so the anti-feminist will say -- are ideological drones, marching in rigid lockstep and rejecting out of hand any attempt to rationally challenge our preconceptions. We're like the Inquisition and the Secret Police, only armed with vaginas. (At least, some of us. I do chuckle a little when my anti-feminists interlocutors start referring to me using female pronouns.) The caricature is so deeply ingrained -- or, if you prefer a metaphor that literally means exactly the opposite thing but makes the same figurative point, so widely dispersed -- that it was even used against me recently by a Princeton philosophy grad student, the sort of person who you'd think would really know much, much better. (For some bonus irony, notice that the charge of dogmatism was used as an ad hominem to support the claim that I was using an ad hominem.)

I find the charge ironic because I have a great deal of trouble thinking of anything substantive that all feminists believe. After 20 minutes of careful through, and some non-trivial assumptions, I've come up with exactly one:

Most, and possibly all, cultures around the world today are sexist.

Note, for the first, that I haven't defined sexism. This is because I don't believe there's any feminist consensus on what sexism is. While feminists do agree that sexism is a problem, there's no agreement on the nature of the problem, much less on particular policies that will improve things.

With some significant assumptions, it's possible to come up with a second:

There should be some legal guarantee preventing the government from interfering with a woman seeking a voluntary abortion during the first six months of a pregnancy.

But since I know, personally, at least one woman who's a dedicative progressive and devoutly anti-abortion Catholic, the assumptions needed to get consensus around this claim are dubious at best.

Now, it would be easy to come up with many more -- the sky is blue (generally), chocolate tastes good, snow is white, puppies are cute, and other inanities. But none of these is characteristic of feminism or feminists. And in no case do we have clear feminist agreement on whatever policy proposal you don't like and want to blame on `The Feminists'.

Unless I'm leaving something out. Can you come up with anything?

Reconceptualizing underrepresentation

I've spent the past week reading Iris Marion Young's Justice and the politics of difference, and the last day or two thinking about this thread on the underrepresentation of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines. (I should say `some STEM fields' or just give the list -- physics, engineering, computer science, pure mathematics, economics, and philosophy -- but I'm just going to use the easier-to-type version and let you know right here that I'm not talking about biology and chemistry, at least with respect to women.) Putting these two thinkings together, I feel the need to reconsider the basics of underrepresentation: the problem is not what we think it is.

We usually think of underrepresentation as a problem of numbers: STEM fields are `disproportionately' male, or white, or straight, or able-bodied, etc. As evidence, we cite facts about the percentage of tenured faculty who are female or people of colour or queer or disabled, etc. (To cut down on the number of lists like these, I'm going to primarily use the generic `group X'. Substitute in your favourite oppressed social group for the X.)

But such facts are insufficient to establish a claim that group X is underrepresented in STEM. In order to establish this claim, we need the normative claim that the percentage of tenured faculty who are members of group X in a STEM field should be approximately such-and-such, or in the range from here to there. And that should causes problems, because (at least in part) no-one seems to have given much systematic through to how we're going to determine what comes after it, or even whether it's the right sort of claim. Nor is it at all clear what's backing up that normative claim: why should the percentage of group X-tenured faculty in a STEM field should be between a and b?

So, instead, I'd like to suggest another (or a novel) way of understanding underrepresentation. On this approach, underrepresentation is a matter of epistemic injustice (I'm drawing on Miranda Fricker here, too). More formally, underrepresentation is about the way certain groups are deprived of access to certain communities of epistemic and political power and prestige. (Namely, STEM communities.) As I see it, there are two aspects to this deprivation:

1. whether members of group X have the same access to membership in the prestigious community as members of other groups, and
   
2. whether the members of group X are oppressed within the prestigious community.

To put these in terms of the underrepresentation of women within STEM, the first aspect concerns whether women can get into the laboratory -- as a group, do they have opportunities to become scientists, engineers, and mathematicians? The second concerns their status within the laboratory -- does the STEM community treat women justly?

With just this much, we can make some preliminary observations. First, the feminist underrepresentation claim is that women are oppressed within certain STEM disciplines. The corresponding opposition claim is that women are not oppressed within STEM. Second, numbers tell us something, but not everything. This parallels injustice in the broader society: looking at the race and gender of poverty can tell us something, but it doesn't give us a complete understanding of economic, racial, or gender injustice. Third, examining the satisfaction of (Humean) preferences (as John Tierney did in the NYT article that inspired the FPh post) is only relevant to the extent that the satisfaction of (Humean) preferences is significant in the theory of justice we are using to analyse underrepresentation as epistemic injustice. Unless you're a utilitarian, this will be at best only somewhat significant -- again, it won't give us a complete picture.

I mentioned Young's book up in the first paragraph. Young has two major goals in this book: to challenge what she calls the `distributive paradigm' in mainstream political philosophy and theory, and to articulate in its place an alternative paradigm of injustice as oppression. The last paragraph parallels the first task: my observations indicate that a statistical examination of the distribution of resources and positions of power gives an incomplete picture of underrepresentation. This distribution is certainly relevant to issues of epistemic justice, but not the whole story.

Young lays out her alternative approach to justice as a taxonomy of forms of oppression. Borrowing this taxonomy as our background theory of justice, we can re-articulate the feminist claim of underrepresentation as epistemic injustice: women are exploited, marginalized, powerless, and sometimes subject to cultural imperialism and violence within STEM.

1. Women are exploited as research assistants, technicians, instructors, test subjects, secretaries, janitors, and other assistants and support staff to primary investigators and tenured faculty. Their work, both creative and menial, is appropriated by and benefit PIs and tenured faculty. I say `women are exploited as research assistants', for example, and not `research assistants are exploited' because these lower status positions are disproportionately held by women or held by women who are less likely to receive eventual returns on their sacrifices than their male colleagues (the leaky pipeline effect).

2. Women are marginalized and powerless is similar ways. (Young is not, to my mind, entirely clear on the difference between these two.) Assistants and support staff to PIs and tenured faculty have little or no power to make decisions about the research they will participate in or how they will participate in it. They might be able to choose whether or not to participate at all, or suggest new directions, experiments, research strategies, etc., but have no real power to shape the course of research. Similarly, instructors and teaching assistants have little or no discretion over their courses -- they are assigned by their superiors to teach this class or that, on a term-by-term basis, and usually based on the department's need to cover teaching duties perceived as menial or boring by tenured faculty (Physics 101, the early calculus sequence, remedial classes, etc.). The content of these courses is usually dictated by official standards and texts or all the sections of a course being linked to a standardized midterm and final.

3. Cultural imperialism and violence, Young's last two categories of oppression, are less common than the first two (treating marginalization and powerlessness as one category for the moment), but still issues of injustice within STEM than need attention. Cultural imperialism refers to the widespread acceptance of stereotypes and biassed perceptions of marginalized groups. In the context of STEM, this would mean the acceptance of scientific theories with, say, sexist content and implications. Uncontroversial historical examples abound -- Stephen Jay Gould's The mismeasure of man has some jaw-dropping ones. More controversial are contemporary theories of, for example, gender- and race-linked differences in the distribution of IQ and problem-solving abilities and still-prevalent `active male/passive female' models of fertilization. (In this post, I'm going to remain neutral on the question of whether any of these theories was epistemically acceptable in its heyday, or is epistemically acceptable today. Perhaps there are genuine dilemmas of epistemic justice.)

4. Violence is exactly what you would expect. I suspect -- though I could be wrong -- that violence is a pervasive or systematic problem only in medical and pharmacological treatment and research, and not other STEM fields. (Although perhaps medicine and pharmacology should not be classified as STEM fields at all.) Violence in medicine is closely linked with race and class, and with powerlessness: women of colour and living in poverty have been subject to forced sterilization as recently as the 1970s, they are less likely to receive proper medical care and due respect for their autonomy as patients, and so on.

Similar observations apply to racial groups, and of course disability. (I suspect there's a whole thesis to be written on the ways disabled people are the victims of violence within medicine.)

I have one final observation. One especially persistent feminist criticism of STEM fields with underrepresentation problems (I've heard this about philosophy, physics, mathematics, computer science, and economics) is the prevalence of a macho, aggressive, or `duelist' culture (the phrase is Janice Moulton's) that is supposed to drive many women away from these fields. In such a culture, one is supposed to be a vigorous and aggressive defender of one's views in a such argumentative context; the thought is that this creates a great deal of competition, effectively weeding out the weakest (and, presumably, therefore untrue) ideas. Traditional feminine attributes of pleasantness and self-abasement create a catch-22: either women cannot adopt these aggressive norms (they conflict too much with the way they have been taught to behave), or they are punished and disparaged by their male colleagues for being too aggressive.

This is, I think, an extremely important criticism. But I'm not sure where to place it in Young's taxonomy of oppression. Perhaps one side of the dilemma is marginalization -- women who do not adopt the aggressive stance are denied standing within the community -- and the other is cultural imperialism -- the successful imposition of masculine norms of behaviour on women.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Back during the writer's strike, Joss Whedon and his pals were bored. So bored were they that they started coming up with ideas for projects that they'd like to do just for fun. One such project was Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. After the strike ended Joss rounded up some money to do it right and got pals Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion to do some sweet super-powered musicality. It's the awesomest thing since I don't know when. Check it out. Rumor is that after this initial run you won't be able to see it for free anymore.

Also, so you know, new favorite song = "With My Freeze Ray I Will Stop The World".

Update: I can't stop watching this thing. It's so awesome.

Update 2: Neil Patrick Harris should be in everything filmed from now on.

Update 3: Part 2 is out now! Part 3 will be out Saturday.

Darwin

There's an opinion piece over at the NYT today arguing that we should abolish terms based on Darwin's name (Darwinism, Darwinian, etc.). The points made are largely good; mostly that use of terms based on Darwin's name narrows discussions and gives skeptics a 19th century target to attack rather than 21st century data. My only objection is that if my memory is correct it's almost always people who are attacking 21st century science who invoke Darwin's name. In my experience the people who are trying to undermine modern scientific theories/data are the ones who invoke Darwin's name most frequently. The people who would be most likely to be convinced by this piece, and who support the scientific community's evolving understanding of nature, are the ones most likely to already use more accurate terminology. Link.

Review: Hellboy 2

Poor Hellboy. He's such a great character. More pulp detective than super hero, he is almost always in over his head but doing his best to get the job done. And he's so charismatic while doing it! The first movie wasn't exactly art house fare but it knew what it was and seemed to enjoy just being a fun action romp that didn't take itself too seriously. Hellboy was, and is, brought to life pitch perfect by Ron Perlman who showed that he can have an entire movie rest on his shoulders after a career as a character actor.

And the first movie was a success. Not a runaway smash hit, but a success nonetheless. You can almost hear the pre-production meetings as you watch Hellboy 2: "So what we'd like is some of that Pan's Labyrinth art style, but without all that dreary drama and with a lot more wire work and explosions! Don't worry, we'll balance it out with more jokes." Hellboy 2 is inarguably gorgeous. In fact, I think del Torro outdoes Pan's Labyrinth in character design and perhaps even cinematography. Ultimately though, Hellboy 2 suffers from the most common sequel syndrome: more. They decided they were going to take the first movie up a notch to eleven and what was a neat little fun action movie turned into a special effects extravaganza with a fight scene every five minutes broken up by mostly funny but pretty forced humor bits. Ron Pearlman is still great, but Selma Blair gets a bunch more meat to her part and chokes hard. She couldn't be more wooden if she put down roots, but even then she's out acted by the Giving Tree.

It's hard to admit that I'm as disappointed as I am about this movie. It's not what I'd call bad. After all, the plot dragged but it made sense and though the action scenes were done well but were just far too plentiful. Sequels don't have to be the first movie on steroids. It's ok to just tell the next chapter of the character's lives and tell it well. I *want* to hear about Hellboy's continuing adventures but I don't necessarily need to see every slow motion punch he's ever thrown.

Jesse Jackson

I know that by now I should be over this, but I just can't help but be frustrated by the utter lack of honest dealing that conservatives show in discussions on the internet. I'm sure many conservatives, maybe even some of these same conservatives, are completely reasonable in real life, but every time some Democrat says something even mildly objectionable they act like they shock might just knock them down.

Was assuming that he was off the record stupid on Jackson's part? Of course it was. Indeed it was super stupid. Is the phrase "cut his balls off" a phrase that warrants women fainting and men wiping their brows with handkerchiefs? Not unless we're a country of children.

But hey, while we're at it did you hear that McCain thinks killing Iranian civilians with our increasing cigarette exports is a super funny joke? Probably not because some guy who's not running for office used a metaphor when he thought he was off the record. After all, why cover what the candidates say?

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Don't miss Czar's post, which was the newest post until I buried it under a mountain of Wizard World pics, and has a quite funny video imbeded. I'm already trying to think of funny things to do while my girlfriend is sleeping. Also, today is his birthday. Happy birthday Czar!

Review: Doctor Who Season 4

Unfortunately, Russel Davies' swan song season was the worst of the bunch. There are some great episodes in there ("Midnight" is right up there vying for a top 5 episodes of the new series spot) but most of it was pretty rote. And then the finale, oh, the finale. If I didn't like Dr. Who so much and there weren't some great bits of writing in there I'd say this was one of the all time worst offenders of fan-wank-itude of all time. "What's that? Russel's leaving and we're losing the Dalek license? Well let's bring the Dalek's back. Oh, and Davros, because he's a character with great motivation. Oh, and every companion so we can have this big goodbye scene. Again, there were some great bits in the finale, the cast was good, and ultimately I love Doctor Who so I enjoyed myself, but if the scientists could harness the power of my eye rolling the country would be energy independent overnight.

Here's hoping for better things next year after the loooong break.

Wizard World '08

A fine Doctor costume all the way down to the trainers. But he's a sad Doctor because he has no companion, so he's going to commit suicide by using the sonic screwdriver on his face.

Ah, what a fine way to end my Wizard World '08 pictures! Less than a year until Wizard World '09! Hooray!

Wizard World '08

This guy was waiting in line to meet Katie Sackoff (aka Starbuck of Battlestar Galactica). Crossover!

Side note: You *never* see people dressed as Trek character at Wizard World. Weird.

Wizard World '08

Coincidentally the Hellfire Club was meeting in the other wing of the Philly Convention Center on the same day as Wizard World. Emma Frost seems to have gotten lost on her way to the bathroom.

Ugh, two bathroom jokes in one day...