Acts and Rules

My way of viewing the world has been greatly influenced by computers. I see computing machines as close analogues of how human minds perform. There is a CPU, various subprocessors, and I/O. The mysterious and fuzzy-bounded consciousness is the ghost in the CPU. Complicated tasks requiring a lot of processing power that need to be performed in real time, such as walking, assembling the input signals into meaningful patterns, using language, or playing an instrument, and basically most habits of thought and behavior, are all offloaded onto dedicated subprocessors, though most reside in the CPU while they are first being learned. Of course, the whole thing is analog, and made out of gelatin rather than printed on silicon chips, and swimming in chemicals that control the relative strength and stability of different algorithmic figures, but in sum the mechanical mind is much like the real thing.

The central question for ethics is always the same for the CPU: what do I do now? If we are good machines, we make good choices. Ethical questions are judgments, but the only one that matters at any given moment is the judgment among alternative actions that one might do. Lots of insights might go into that, but it all comes down to the final choice.

Most of the time the choice is to follow along some default habit, so making the right choice is usually a function of forming the right defaults. Set up the subprocessors so the CPU can run efficiently. Kant called this character. Thomas wrote about it. We can't function without it. There's too much information to sort through, so you have to identify salient patterns, weed out irrelevant distinctions, and generalize like crazy. Deep Blue does it when planning its next move. We need to do it even more.

So from time to time you hear the question put to freshman philosophy students whether you should follow the rules, or decide on an act by act basis what is right. There are tensions here. We generally want people to follow legitimate rules rather than risk their acting according to idiosyncratic criteria that are much less reliable, going so far as to deride carefully customized decisionmaking as "situational ethics." On the other hand, there are bad regimes of rules too. And there are other tensions.

Ultimately, all decisions will be made at some level based on both. An individual's set of internalized general rules will determine whether the ethical choice presents salient features that make it suitable for conscious, individuated decisionmaking. If societal rules are legitimate, it is presumed likely that they will seldom be in tension with the conscience of a good individual, and that when they are, this will trigger attentive choice whether to violate the rule. At least for questions of first impression -- repeated instances will start to follow well-worn mental pathways and fall back into the mechanisms of habit. Of course there are many regimes of rules, but most moral systems likewise have a high degree of overlap.

When a decision must be made where utilitarian, teleological analysis of the particular situation appears to favor a different choice than what "the rules" would prescribe, should the rules be followed? The answer is no, but it is no only provided that the consequences of the rule violation are fully factored into the decision. Violate the rule only if it is worth it. This does not mean only if it can be rationalized, but only if it is really worth it. This would be a non-answer except that there are reasonable criteria on which both sides of the balance can be analyzed.

On one hand, the benefit must be calculated according to principles of good. The following of the rule must cause harm or deny the benefit of the violation, as would be perceived from a neutral perspective without favoritism to the interests of the decider (and compensating for the decider's bias and ignorance of other interests and inability to foresee all effects.)

Likewise, the effect of the violation can be analyzed: what is the likelihood that the violation will become known and be emulated so that the rule is undermined? How is the violation likely to be explained? Is the rule undermined a legitimate one, time tested, and generally sound? A sincere one (as opposed to one honored mostly in the breach)? Is it complicated? Is it important? Is it unassailably secure, or not even viable? Does it approach being universal and absolute or is it widely controverted and full of exceptions? Is the case for the exception generalizable on broad terms, or is it highly anomalous? Is it likely to be seen as an anomaly? Is the violative act prone to being preceived as part of an exception formed on other potential patterns of generalization that run beyond or counter to its actual basis?

The Genesis of the Soul through Reification

I was just thinking the other day:

The Greeks didn't come up with the soul, but from their thinking, one can easily see where the idea comes from.

The ancient philosophers thought that objects acted the way they did in part because it was essential to their nature; events had a material cause in the subjects of the action performing in accordance with a predisposition. Complex materials were explained by Anaxagoras (or maybe it was Anaximander; I get them confused) as mixtures of elements that provided them with their essential properties. Wet matter contained water; the release of the water rendered the matter dry. Earth provided hardness and weight.

This idea continues to pervade lay impressions of the world even though science has largely rejected it. For example, people think it surprising that sodium and chlorine, neither of them a very savory material (a solid that explodes on contact with water, and a corrosive poision gas) unite to form table salt. The fact is that the properties of a substance depend on much more than the properties of components. Look at diamonds versus graphite. Both contain nothing but carbon. It is the arrangement of the atoms into larger structures that gives them their particular properties, not some missing or differing material component from one to another.

If properties and tendencies really belonged to object in material form, then you could take any positive or negative characteristic and, as they say, "bottle it." Sex appeal, money smarts, strength, slipperiness, heat, cold, invisibility: I'll take a liter of each.

There were different words for soul. Anima was the theoretical construct that distinguished living (animate) from unliving (inanimate) matter. You could have another for sentience, and another for conscience, or motion or repiration, or reproduction. If properties stemmed from material components alone, any of these properties would be things that were in living people (many of them in animals as well) and absent from dead people. If they were material, and ceased to be in a body, then they had to either have been destroyed, or suppressed into a potential but inactive or invisible state, or have gone somewhere else, existing as pure essence without the body.

It sometimes makes sense to think of some properties this way, because they truly are conserved. If one billiard ball hits a larger, heavier billiard ball dead on, it will impart its momentum to the second ball. With some loss for friction, momentum is conserved. Speed will not be conserved, because the larger mass will move slower. You can speak of the momentum being transferred. You can think of the speed being potential, with the possibility of coming out if the heavy ball hits a lighter one.

But other properties are pretty much gone. They change form so totally, it is not really useful to talk about them moving or hiding. When the ball falls off the table and hits the ground, it transfers its momentum to the Earth: it has just hit a super-massive billiard ball. Its speed? I'm sorry, but the speed of the billiard ball is dead. You're not going to re-extract that from the ground. Vaporize a painting of the last supper with an A-bomb and see if you can find that last-supperiness somewhere in the radioactive mist. John McCain's chances of being elected president in 2000: gone.

Mass is conserved pretty easily, although little bits of mass are coming and going all the time, changing back and forth into energy. Patterns and arrangements, shapes, structures, information generally, are much more fragile. Processes, once interrupted, may not easily be restarted. Of course the information isn't really gone. But its recoverability into a recognizable form is likely to be so attenuated as to render it the practical equivalent.

In any event, there is no intact, all-together chunk of concentrated image of Jesus and the apostles in the ionized smoke of the atom blast. The information is scattered, diffused, unrecognizable, and no human means can reassemble it. Likewise the motion of the past billiard ball sitting on the floor, or the shape of the ice sculpture that melted, or the softness and slipperiness of the graphite once it has become a diamond. You can't bottle these things. Nor the animate property of living matter. It's gone.

Jim Kimball Gets the Treatment

I heard a story today on the radio concerning a guy in Idaho. Here is a link with broadcast details and how to order. Here is a full article from another source on the guy. I wanted to keep a link to this because it is exactly like what we get here all the time.

This guy, Jim Kimball, is on the sex offender registry because he was charged with a sex offense, which was in fact dismissed. Apparently, in Idaho you can be a registered sex offender without having been convicted of a sex offense, and the burden is on you if you want the record expunged. The offense was an isolated incident of consensual sexual contact about 15 years ago, involving a teenage girl that he flirted with in his early 20s and never actually had intercourse with.

A local news station hyped his story. Some high points:

• They initially failed to report that he was not convicted, or that the allegation was 15 years old, even though these were matters of public record.
  
• They failed to ever seek his side of the story.
  
• They pushed to air in spite of concerns raised by the reporter that this would ruin someone's life and that the details had not yet emerged to justify the story.
  
• They misleadingly illustrated the story by showing children ten years younger than the alleged victim in his case.
  
• They used special effects like washing out the color from his photograph and zooming in slowly on the eyes, to manufacture a sense of menace.
  
• When other news agencies universally decided not to cover the story, because it was not real news in any way, the station used the fact that it had exercised unsound judgment as a selling-point, repeatedly emphasizing that it had an exclusive.
  
• They managed to get him fired; expose him to his nine-year old daughter whom he and his wife had planned to tell when she was older; traumatized is wife; forced him to miss school events for his children; drove away his friends because people were misled into thinking he was a child sexual predator.

I have some doubts about the use of actuarial tests to lock people up, but I do think they have some scientifically proven predictive value. If you were to apply a test like the STATIC-99 to Kimball, I have no doubt he would fall into the lowest risk category. Guys like this tend to be off-the-scale low risk. There is no evidence I know of that they are at any greater risk of offense than the general population.

I do want to correct one assertion from the KCBI report linked to above. It is stated in the report that an offender's recidivism rate rises over time. This is just bullshit. The cumulative likelihood of course rises, by definition, but the annual rate of recidivism decreases steadily. It decreases even more at older ages, and (for serial offenders) after roughly the first six offenses. The only time risk tends to rise over time, is when there has been recent penalty or treatment whose effects are still fresh and are wearing off, which is a small factor in the long term. That's something that would be meaningless in this case. Otherwise, just think: would we feel that a person just released from prison for a sex offense would be the low risk guy, and the guy who's been good for 25 years is the one you have to watch? It runs completely counter to the principle of induction.

On the Proper Place of Torts Among Mechanisms for Ensuring The Public Good

The NYT just had a book review of Thomas Geoghegan’s "See You in Court" which inspired me to note briefly a thought I've had for a long time regarding tort reform.

In any given general problem, there will likely be a heirarchy of potential solutions, ranging from most to least desirable. (Of course,for specific problems, the most desirable solutions are often unavailable forcing a fallback. The best remaining solution may be no solution at all.) There's a lot of truth to O, Superman: "When love is gone, there's always justice; when justice is gone, there's always force." The heirarchy is, people play nice. When they don't, we use the law as a resolution mechanism, and the law is backed by force. Even when the law vanishes or lacks legitimacy, force may be wielded extralegally to fix the problem.

Of course, a fundamental problem of politics (which I've also been thinking about because of events in Venezuela) is to maintain the use of the highest levels of resolution of problems as an alternative to perpetual violence. When institutions fail to bend to demands, they break and the resulting vaccuum of working, legitimate institutions results in a series of failures and inefficiencies that make revolutionary change undesirable except where an injustice is severe and reformist efforts remain unlikely to produce success. (Of course, if you believe this happens fairly frequently, you can share this philosophy and still be free to still call yourself a revolutionary.)

The NYT reviewer, Adam Liptak, contrasts Geoghegan with Philip K. Howard, saying Geoghegan sees the movement away from reliance strong contracts rather than increasing regulation as a cause. This strikes me as a very wierd contrast. I've not read Howard -- could he really believe deregulation prevents lawsuits?

My view, like Geoghegan's, and apparently Howards's, sees a shift in arena as the problem: toward tort from other mechanisms. But like Geoghegan, I believe the problem is not that the ugly ineffecient systems of redress lower on the heirarchy have been promoted so that people forget the better tools available; it is that the better tools have been taken away or become ineffective so that resort is made to something less desirable.

I don't think most people think, why should I talk to my neighbor about their vicious dog when I can just call the police, or why should I call the police when I can just shoot the dog (or the neighbor). Most people are smart enough to know that the better mechanisms should be tried because they are cheaper, easier, generate less pain for both sides or for the public at large, and at times can be more effective. Most of the people I see in my civil law practice undertake tort claims only after they have tried mightily to resolve the matter socially and administratively first. (The criminal defendants tend on the whole to be less resourceful in finding legal means to redress their problems.)

The idea that the decline of contract has led to the rise of tort does not resonate that much with me, though I'm sure there's some truth to it. It would mean more to me if we were talking about contract terms that were regulated. Residential leases are a good example. Lots of terms must be in or out of a lease for them to be valid, which has led to leases being very standard. I see regulation as having a high place in the heirarchy. When some activity creates a risk of harm, you regulate it, whether it's by making it unlawful for an individual to recklessly endanger another's safety with a firearm, or by forcing an industry to market only safer products and services using safer means to conduct their activities. Deregulation represents a choice on the part of government to give the subjects of regulated activities more freedom, leaving nonregulatory mechanisms to address the risk that they will do harm .

Generally, the right favors deregulation because it believes market mechanisms will be sufficient. For example, you start a business making cheap soap in your garage: you will have an incentive that the soap not injure or kill too many people too quickly or tracably, because word would get around, the market for your soap would dry up, and you would lose the income stream from tainted soap and probably go out of business. When you start again, you'll know better. If you don't learn, you'll keep going out of business and face a credit crunch. Hence the market disfavors manufacturers being careless or stupid.

Of course, stupid still happens. You can't deter stupid. There are also deterrents to crime and crime still happens. Most crimes are less vicious than stupid anyway. And our experiences with unregulated markets have also seen many victims. With only the market to protect them, victims would be left with nothing but the meager satisfaction that if they tell their stories and are believed, they can hurt the sales of the soap company. Hardly make whole relief for them. Same for crime victims, and even with tort law, the same fate meets prospective plaintiffs who cannot find a big pocket defendant. Every couple of months, the local news has a story about a local business that went under and left clients in a lurch. A great number of businesses are undrcapitalized, fail, and those with at least some customers relying on them cannot even sue, except to wait in line behind a series of creditors.

So regulate as much as reasonable. Then, have torts as a backup. Having torts as a backup acts as a pressure to self-regulate.

Of course, if you shred regulation and shred tort, what are people left with? Vigilanteism. While there are stories that pop up all the time in the news where some violence can be traced to a grievance that was legally unremediated (and the anger often diverted to some easier target), I think a good example is in divorce cases. Some people exit a relationship with such undigested anger that they do stupid and destructive things. The solution of last resort is to go after these people criminally, like all the deadbeat parents constantly being shamed on the local news, but I don't see this as really deterring anyone, and in most cases provides little relief to the victims. We need to look upstream for better solutions toward the love-justice rather than the justice-force end of the spectrum.

Partisanship

Another very brief entry:

The News Hour tonight had four authors at the table decrying polarization and excessive partisanhsip. I know I will not be alone in my thoughts on this. Basic point: sure. Gotta get along. Can't make everyone the enemy who merely espouses a different viewpoint. Can't follow the model championed by SWMNBN and just kill everyone who disagrees. There have to be some principles of what's fair.

But it disgusts me more than a little bit that:

1) After eight years of Bush and Rove litmus tests, whisper campaigns, personal attacks, using the IRS and leaking classified information to punish opponents, politicizing the whole government, caging voters, stealing elections, calling Democrats traitors, using every tool from gerrymandered redictricting, changing election rules, past-midnight votes where the vote changes after a bribe or a threat is made, changing congressional rules, issuing illegal executive orders and signing statements, ignoring the laws, concealing information from Congress, turning congressional Republicans into a politburo, striving to monopolize K Street donations, and striving to win every vote by 1, with the most extreme possible platform, after all this, suddenly, as the pendulum starts to swing in favor of the erstwhile minority, polarization and partisanship beccomes an issue.

2) No one identifies who is to blame; apparently it is everyone equally, or maybe Joe Lieberman gets some credit for being a closet neocon.

3) No set of principles of fair play is articulated, just vague "try to get along" and "don;t be too partisan" which is so meaningless, it can always be projected to your enemy.

I'm sorry. It's hard for me to concentrate. Karl Rove is on Charlie Rose getting the usual puffball treatment. He just said the Democrats have been unsuccessful this term because they don't show enough respect to their republican peers or compromise enough, and it's sort of making me want to retch.

Horserace

One way of looking at it: Tim Russert and his guests present news about the voters that the candidates need and care about so they can influence the voters. If they covered the candidate's positions, that would be giving voters news that they need and care about concerning the candidates. It fits in with the fact that Tim and crew are much closer to the world of Hillary and Rudy than they are to the general populace of the country.

Meet John Dau

A few nights ago, I went to see an installment of UWM's distinguished lecture series. The speaker was John Bul Dau, billed as an authority on the "lost boys of Sudan." (I think "lost boys" is a media/marketing title that the International Rescue Committee came up with; since most of them were sitting in refugee camps for a decade or so, they were displaced, but not exactly misplaced.) I went at an invitation of a political friend, and expected a political event. Sudan is a political topic these days. The local peace movement has made resolving the civil war afflicting Darfur a major campaign. I don't know much about it, except that I suspect things are not as
one-sided as portrayed. (I also think I was encouraged to go because a previous African speaker, a high government figure, had received almost no audience when he had come to speak, and this was a means of demonstrating respect that was missing before, which suggested a general lack of interest or respect for the continent and its people.)

Dau turned out to be a somewhat celebrated survivor, a former lost boy, who put his story in a book and was the subject of a documentary. Thousands died. John became famous, although not famous enough for me to have ever heard of him. Although I expect most DLS speakers to have a strong academic background from which to speak, I think life experience is an appropriate credential. Rigoberta Menchu has something to say worth listening to, so why not John Dau?

So I listened as John described his tale of trial and triumph surviving war, hunger and disease on a thousand-mile, 14-year journey from his escaping as a boy from an attack on his village, trekking afoot cross-country to sojourns in refugee camps in two neighboring countries. (Some of this is filled in from subsequent inquiry because of missing details in John's account.) It was a compelling story.

But there was absolutely no political context. He said nothing about the current conflict except for a passing mention, and maybe some indirect innuendo. I'm not sure he ever said who was shooting at him in Ethiopia: government soldiers or rebels. The conflict that displaced him was not examined. He appeared uninterested in its being solved.

Let me recant one part of that. He did insert a tiny bit of history, saying that Sudan has had frequent wars from the first century. He did not say what they have been about. Some in the audience clearly believed at the end of the night that Muslim forces were fighting early Christians a thousand years ago, impossible by at least six centuries. There was no distinction made between the international conflicts with Chad or Eritrea, with Pharaonic or Roman, or English, or whomever, or current movements in the East, West, or South in conflict with the central government.

At the end of hislong windup came the pitch: a Bill Cosby sermon about personal responsibility, and a request for money for his foundation. John said that priming the audience for this little bit of homespun ideology was the entire purpose of his narrative.

Now, I am reluctant to attack John. He went through hell. His story is a real one. It's hard to attack someone in that position. I tend not to doubt his honesty and motives for the most part. I think there's some fuzzing and sifting that he's doing to spin his message, but probably that's all. He could be a major fraud but nothing really conclusive to suggest so. It's too easy to see him as nine tenths honest. But the point is not the man himself. It is what he is saying, which is toxic. It may be that if he explained himself further, he could trim the most disagreeable points of his philosophy. Indeed, he explicitly contradicted some of the worst conclusions of this meme. But I want to respond to what he actually presented in all its ramifications, which I think was just horrible, horrible.

The ideology is one I've heard a thousand times before, and it's utterly tiresome to me: All that stands between you and success is the will to achieve it. Don't give up. You can have everything you want if you just believe and try. Some of that is fine. Focus on the future, sure. Practice forgiveness. Concentrate on what you can do for your own future. Help others who have helped you. All good. Perservere. Fine. The problem is not that one has no influence over the course of one's life or should not keep going if one is on the right track. Obviously, there's a basic dumb truth in this message. It's a message like "be proud of yourself" that some need. But...

It's dumb because it's unidirectional, un-nuanced, just plain dumb. Like "eat more": good for anorexics, bad for compulsive eaters. I forgot who said that patriotism was a kind of message that was good for small countries with esteem issues, but bad in places where an existing overdose of nationalism lay at the root of imperialism, aggressive war, or internecine destruction; the same is true here. It's a message that I think selectively targets the people who need it least.

Worst, because it's unnuanced, it logically entails all sorts of bad and evil conclusions. It contends, ultimately, the only thing that affects one's personal outcome is their own ambition. So what does that say about those that reach bad outcomes? What of the thousands of John's travelling companions who fell prey to hunger, thirst, corcodiles, gunfire, or disease? It implicitly blames the victims of misfortune, irrationally discounts the huge effect of luck, and lets the villainous and selfish off the hook. It also puts all its marbles on ambition and resolve rather than on morality, smarts, and unified struggle. Sure, step one is not to give up, but step two has to be something more than marching in the same damn circle. John's message is in the beginning and at the end a fascistic ideological cesspool that breeds abandonment of the needy, rationalization of extreme disparities, and the erosion of comity and ethics. It's a message that stills demands for change, protecting and flattering the privileged, and narcotizes and promotes pathological conduct among the disadvantaged.

John actually said that you can take any rich person, and you will find someone who struggled and achieved. They don't have inheritance in Africa? He actually said he had never gotten vaccinated against any disease, yet has never become sick, due to his own personal will not to fall ill. In other words, he's a walking potential carrier that could infect others, and if they die, it will be their own fault for lacking sufficient willpower to resist. (Nevertheless, he wants to build a clinic in the Sudan. Hopefully it will be a clinic that practices modern medicine and not faith healing.)

I hate this meme. Every get rick quick huckster and phony preacher uses it. It combines an immature animistic view of the power of beliefs, with the idea of a God who guarantees that every fate good or bad is always deserved. John dropped a lot of Christian references, as did members of his audience during the questioning. A church brought him to America and he now lives across the street from that church. The black woman next to me was muttering hallelujah at intervals throughout the ending parts of the talk, by which point its status as a sermon rather than an academic exposition had become clear. I was grateful to get out without a baptism or an Amway distributorship.

Although I have said that I give John the benefit of the doubt that he was being mostly honest, and that he has some decent beliefs and holds his belief in this key meme ignorant of its contradiction of everything good he believes, nevertheless, there were some aspects of the talk that gave me doubts. The main thing was that the message was so predigested and unchallenging. No analysis. No hard concepts. No demands for any ongoing involvement. This fit in with his repeated flattery of the audience that Americans are unbelievably generous, which does not seem to square with either the general facts of the world (other industrialized countries spend much larger portions of their GDPs on humanitarian aid) or with the facts of John's story (where he lived off the largesse of the UN, Sudanese rebels, and two poor host countries before ever seeing an American or any American aid). He created a foundation to help American children before creating one to help Sudan. He even flattered the host forum by instructing students to study hard and give back money to the school. He wore a perfectly crisp white shirt, no jacket, and perfect pressed plants, which was the ideally earnest and nonthreating ensemble. He included just a tiny drop of history and geography. He avoided controversial issues, save for a few flashes of popular conservatism: marriage is for one man and one woman (unlike among traditional Dinka); he asserted that moderate Muslims who did not vociferously denounce extremists at every opportunity ought to be considered just as extreme (though he never breathed a word against Christian extremists). He favored his people assimilating to America, but keeping unthreatening aspects of their original culture, like family cohesion. He dropped the names of Hollywood celebs who are now his friends, while affirming by denial that this was a boast.

By the end, I had started to wonder about parts of his story. What was he leaving out? He was very obscure about his family, leaving the impression they were dead until he suddenly mentioned reuniting with his mother at the end of the night. Why? Did he have reason to feel before this that he had abandoned them? What moral compromises did he make? He said he was put in charge of a thousand kids, then later there are 28,000: was he intentionally leaving the misimpression that his responsibilities had exponentially grown? A story he told about enjoying corporal punishment of his students at a refugee camp seemed a little more ominous in retrospect. Any why does he have so many foundations? Did he really make enough at McDonalds to build a four bedroom house, or did he pay himself at these charity groups?

Anyhow, all the last of this is too speculative. I'll let those thoughts dissipate before I sound too much like one of those right wing bloggers that see conspiracies everywhere. Main point: I came for an analysis of a humanitarian crisis, but got no analysis at all, no clarity, just an insistance that we were already generous enough and a pitch to be endlessly optimistic and push on in all matters without assessment. Bleh!

Waterboarding

There are a bunch of questions. Was Mukasey giving an evasive semantic answer to a substantive question when asked a substantive question whether waterboarding is torture? Is it torture? Does it simulate drowning, or is it drowning?

Mukasey was evasive. He didn't want to say something that would condemn illegal acts on the part of the administration. This was clear from the say-nothing follow up memo. However, the particular response that most people were carping about was correct. Waterboarding, as explaned by Senator Whitehouse, is not per se illegal torture. The description given was not an airtight legal definition. It would include applying what would normally be torture to willing volunteers for training demonstrations, and could possibly include some other applications short of legal torture.

On the other hand, in a vernacular rather than hypertechnical sense, waterboarding, traditionally referred to for hundreds of years as the water torture or the drowning torture, is pretty clearly torture when practiced in the form being discussed. I wish Mukasey had been asked whether the rack, the iron maiden, branding irons, thumbscrews, rape, mock execution, the capucha, flaying, electric shocks, mutilation, or burning were torture. He would have given either legalistic "that depends" answers for those too, which would beg for some elicidation, or not, which would beg the question of why his answer for the drowning torture was different. Either way, you'd put him on the spot.

The definition of waterboarding as a "interrogation technique" is misleading. Traditionally, torture has been practiced not as a means of interrogation specifically, but as a more general form of coersion or punishment. It has been used to force religious recantations or conversions, solicit information, or terrorize a population as a form of collective punishment or deterrence. This was supposedly Dick Cheney's rationale for using torture: not to get information, but to deter people who might not fear death or imprisonment from assisting al Qaeda. Such use of waterboarding is illegal because it fits the definition of terrorism (except in domestic law, wherein actions practiced by the United States against its enemies are excluded from the definition).

NPR said yesterday that to drown was to die of suffocation by water. I could find no source for this. The definitions I found all just said that drowning was suffocation or asphixiation, not necessarily fatal. Waterboarding is drowning.

Is there a law against practices that are not torture but sound like torture? There should be. If one uses dental surgery without anesthetic, or uses a blowtorch, the damage to the image of the U.S. will come from the way that sounds, not whether it meets a technical definition of torture. Keep those things put away. Using them, or waterboarding, in a manner just short of torture, would have may of the negatives of the real thing. And just as little benefit.

Torture is almost always counterproductive and ineffective. It is not without effects, though, and some people want to achieve those effects for their own sake: terror, coersion, and yes, you can get some information. You can pick up tiny clues even from confabulated stories. Is there ever an occasion where torture is the best or only way to get information? I find that highly unlikely. So unlikely, that this is a good place just to draw a hard line and not cross it.

She is Zuul: hear her roar!

A few days ago, something brought to mind the famous quote from the 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters:

Gozer the Traveller will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldronaii the Traveller came as a very large and moving Torb. Then of course in the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants they chose a new form for him, that of a Sloar. Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day I can tell you.

I couldn't remember it precisely, so I looked it up. Some are more into this than I am. (Try Googling Sloar or Sloarism!)

So this has been rolling around in my brain for a few days, something that you'd suspect would be a complete waste of brain. That may in fact be so. Still, some of the thoughts you get can be interesting.

Some context before I go on, for the non-Sloarists out there. Louis Tully, played by Rick Moranis, is the nebbishy accountant neighbor of Dana Barrett, played by Sigourney Weaver. Louis and Dana have each become possessed by the demonic spirits who pave the way for a malevalent Sumerian deity, Gozer, who is coming to purify humankind with fire. Louis is taken over by Vinz Clortho, the "Keymaster," and Dana by the "Gatekeeper." Their conjugal union will allow Gozer to take material form.

I had never caught it before, but the explanation of the Sloar also reveals something of the language of the spirit world. Possessed by the Gatekeeper, Dana says, "I am Zuul. I am the Gatekeeper." I had thought Zuul was a proper name, like Vinz Clortho, which I still assume is a proper name, or at least a title.

But look at this: "Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar..." At first, it made no sense. Zuul again? Is it a name or a noun? Then I got it. Shub=Man, Zuul=Woman. Dana, translated, says, "I am Woman. I am the Gatekeeper."

It's kinda cool. Like triangulating on the meaning of "gulliver" (supposing you are unfamiliar with the Russian "golova") in A Clockwork Orange as recommended in the author's afterword (one is kicked in the gulliver; when a beer is later observed to have a gulliver on it, it becomes clear that gulliver means "head").

Maybe it's still a waste of brain. But it was cool to figure out something, even if it was something useless.

SWMNBN

There are lots of good reasons to despise A--C------. She is either a fascist or ostentatiously pseudofascist in presentation, a felon, and poisonous to the discourse. But the flap about her longing for a world without Jews does not strike me as especially antisemitic. It strikes me as rather logical and ordinary that for adherants of one religion, adherance to another, incompatible religion is at very least misguided. For Christianity and Islam in their robust versions, nonadherants are destined for Hell. Hoping for the conversion of infidels is compassionate, from that point of view.

btw: Judaism doesn't fall in this category but it does something similar (again, at least in versions) in an unusual way: it has moral rules that apply to Gentiles, and sometimes only to Gentiles. Not only must they follow the Noahide Laws, and without the exceptions that Jews might sometimes be compelled to make to honor other commandments, but at least some Rabbis also assert that Gentiles are commanded not to follow the rules intended exclusively for Jews. Hence: have some BBQ Pork! This strikes me as unique and weird, and has a bit of that Christo-Islamic arrogance telling others what to do, but still tolerant, as is widely recognized: at least there is an admission that you can have your covenant and I can have mine, and there is no need for me to convert you.

Pissing Everyone Off

Fete the Dalai Lama and piss off China as you need their support on Burma and Korea. Go to Russia to lecture Putin as you need Russian support on Iran. Issue a resolution to piss off Turkey over the Armenian genocide, as they prepare to invade Iraq. Only 15 months left to alienate everyone else. Well, you always have Eastern Europe and Sarkozy.

Foreclosures

I read this the other day, which I will quote in substantial part below. This gal, Jennifer Fink, whom the local paper engaged as a "community columnist" inspires me to say not-nice things about her, by arguing that in the present foreclosure crisis, "The fault lies with overextended homeowners." That's her title. In explaining her view, it she reveals herself to have been as thoughtless, clueless, and brainless in developing that view, as she appears heartless from her titlular conclusion. I think it's worth comment because I expect this view is not far below the surface of the vast majority of conservatives and others who are not moving to respond to this mess.

I'll skip over her solipsistic little intro in which she explains her own sacrifices to live within her means. What she is setting up very obviously is: I was smart and even noble to suspend my gratification and avoid this fate; hence anyone else who has to suffer it must have fallen into the temptation I avoided because they are simply not be as smart or noble as me, so screw them. I hate this argument. It's a suitable kind of argument for adults to use on children so long as they have all the facts. But to treat another adult with such disrespect based on casual assumptions, that's just lousy.

She lays out the problem starting in the fourth graf:

Metro Milwaukee, like many parts of the country, is experiencing a rash of home
foreclosures. More than 4,000 area homes already have entered foreclosure, and
more are sure to follow. Experts predict that this month will see a tidal wave
of foreclosures...

Okay, so that's the issue: a "rash" and expected "tidal wave" (neither assessment controverted) of people losing their homes, evicted, and sent looking for substitute housing. There are numerous aspects to this she does not mention: some are losing long-term, even multigenerational homes; many will be unable to shift to a new site without substantial loss of personal property stored in their homes; many are innocent children; many are old and infirm; also innocent will be the neighbors, who see their neighborhoods fill with foreclosed board-ups and see their own home values and quality of life crash. So it's not just, I have to relocate to the smaller home I should have had all along. It's more like a hurricane hitting the inner city. Oh yeah, she does not mention that the people she is calling worthless and stupid are largely black.

Continuing:

...as $50 billion worth of adjustable rate mortgages will reset at a new, higher rates.
President Bush waded into the fray in late August with a series of proposals designed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. Among them is an initiative called FHASecure, which will, according to a government Web site, "help people who have good credit but who have not made all of their payments on time because of rising mortgage payments." Bush also vows to strengthen mortgage lending standards because some borrowers were placed in "sophisticated products they could not afford."
True as that may be, the problem, in my opinion, doesn't lie with predatory lenders.

So we get fact number 2: Predatory lenders peddle sophisticated financial products that involve escalating mortgage payments. The mortgages go up because the interest rates adjust. The new products include things like the "Option ARM" an adjustable mortgage that doesn't just kill its host parasitic and usurious rates that blow up bigger and bigger as they consume their victim. This evolutionary offshoot hooks its victim with the lure of low optional payments that do not even cover the monthly interest, so the amount of the loan increases every cycle. Then, when a pre-set limit is attained, the monthly payment suddenly and violently expands. Of course one of the reasons black folks are so readly preyed upon by this invasive species is that the predatory lenders are now engaged in reverse redlining. Instead of denying financing to low income minority neighborhoods for fear that the loan will be too risky, they fish particularly in these waters, recognizing the potential to reap windfalls from foreclosures.

Then we get:

...The problem rests squarely on the shoulders of homeowners who bought homes
beyond their means. It's your job, not the bank's, to make sure you can afford
the house you buy. To check and recheck the numbers. To have a backup plan, just
in case.

So, it's the buyers who did this to themselves in the buying. Except that's not where most of this comes from at all. Many homes are acquired in probate court or in a divorce proceeding, or are financed reasonably when first sold, but get into problems after a refinancing. The refis are often designed to withdraw some of the equity because of an unforeseen crisis, maybe that aforementioned death or divorce, which led to a diminished household income. This may be abetted by an ex-spouse's failure to pay child support or required maintenance, or by legal or medical bills. The largest number of people who lose their homes have some medical issue at least contributing to the loss. But of course, Ms. Fink's stern analysis is drawn from the same ideological greasetrap as George Bush's statement that sick and dying children can always report to an emergency room, so no one really lacks for health care.

How many people "check and recheck the numbers"? How many people know how? Ms. Fink posits an unrealistic ideal world in which capitalism always works, in part because the consumers are always perfectly informed and the cost of becoming so informed is zero. It is absurd to imagine that the best system would actually be one in which the consumer, who engages in these transactions rarely, would have absolute responsibility for his or her choices and should be required to read and understand what are often dozens or scores of pages of legalese, recognize their consequences, and master the market well enough to know when a better deal will be available, as opposed to being entitled to rely on the representations of the other party, who is a sophisticated, repeat player, without discovering later that he or she was misled. The freedom to make necessary decisions without weeks or months of research is simply more important than the freedom of either winner or loser to make grossly unfair deals.

In fact, the law is not buyer beware, but that contracts may be set aside when the consumer is tricked or pressured. Lawyers who deal in this area frequently encounter the octagenarian widow who was tricked into signing onto an unconscionable refinancing arrangement. Her fault, we are to suppose, that she had no back up plan.

But even average consumers make costly mistakes. They don't sell insurance against the inevitable bouts of fleeting stupidity that most of us suffer. But it would be nice if people were protected against making mistakes that were too stupid. In most areas of life we do this and it's for the better. The friends and relatives of stupid people, and those of smart people who experiment with occasional stupidity, are usually thankful that some rules, social or legal, stand in the way of letting their friends injure themselves too badly. It's the friends and loved ones who have to worry, and who are going to be called on to bail out the unfortunate one whose foolishess leads to a loss.

(And in an ARM, what is it that you are supposed to check? Nothing more than the fact that it is an ARM. You sign up at 7% and the increases begin and soon you are at twice that. Rates that were once illegal. There are no numbers to check in the original deal. It is a provision that is bad.)

Then we get to the part where Fink finally says, I'm better than you; you deserve to lose:

...Economic reality isn't always easy to swallow. By all rights, we should be able to buy a nice home in a new subdivision. ...But while we're content to remain in the home we can afford, many people are not. They see nice homes and think they should have one, too. More often than not, home-buyers stretch to reach some unobtainable version of the American dream.
As a nation, our expectations have changed tremendously over the years. We used to need a roof over our heads; now, we need a roof, a media room, a master suite and a three-or four-car garage. The average new home is now 2,459 square feet, up from 1,695 square feet in 1974. Families, meanwhile, have gotten smaller.
Stretch if you want to for your dream home. Just don't come crying to me when the mortgage
turns out to be more than you can afford...

Now in this last turn, the errors of Ms. Fink are finally exposed as being a full-blowin psychotic break. Apparently, she thinks the inner city where the foreclosure crisis is destroying already fragile neighborhoods is populated by people who each made the mistake of building his or her "dream home" in "a new subdivision." I guess then they just woke up a while later and discovered that their "four-car garages" were suddenly in the zip code of Milwaukee with the highest crime rate, surrounded by run-down $50,000 houses.

This isn't about subdivisions or newly built homes. The only new houses in my area were built by Habit for Humanity and they are not too much more than a roof. None have garages. The fact that people who have the money are building larger homes does not say anything about the people near me. All it means is that the as smaller homes in my area get boarded up or burn down, the housing supply shifts in favor of larger homes. The disparity in wealth is increasing, and it is the rich more than the poor who build homes. This trend presses buyers to find something larger than they need because that is what is available. (The alternative, sharing, is just not palatable to or really feasible for a lot of people.)

They are, true, taught to expect better for themselves. They look at their neighbors. They are told incessantly be optimistic. They do not often hear the truth about how limited their expectations should be. And once in a deal they are stuck there.

But it is not so much that those expectations are unrealistic as that prices are. One may think of a person only able to afford a $50,000 home who foolishly buys an $85,000 home. Another way to view this is a person who can afford a $50,000 home, finds what is really a home worth $50,000, but is told that it now costs $85,000 due to a runaway market. Not to worry though, financing is also easier. By the time the person faces foreclosure, they have already strained and sacrificed to pay excessive interest. They are being milked dry. So they have given enough, and the predatory lenders have gained enough. Why is housing overpriced to begin with? Because of speculation, and the fact that lower income people are economically unsophisticated as a class means that it is not economically advantageous for those who could develop the stock of low income housing to actually do so. They can usually be sold something worse and drained the limit of what they will bear anyway.

Anything else I have not covered?

Am I a suspected insurgent? (Only if I get blowed up good.)

I'm just noticing that when people get blown up in Iraq, especially by occupying troops and their air support, they always fall into two categories: "civilians", whose numbers are always comprised of "women" and "children", and "suspected insurgents", comprised of... well, I'm guessing any male older than twelve. Since I am a male over 12, then it follows that if I were killed in Iraq by U.S. forces I would thereby be drafted a member of the non-civilian category.

USA Today on Jena 6

Here. A pretty good summary. Not complete, and falls short of calling for an investigation. But good to see some prominent attention and a much better resume of the facts than Walters was willing to give in the NYT.

And by the way, look at the comments. Yup. People are idiots. Duncan Hunter fersure.

Evidence that as a nation we deserve a Duncan Hunter presidency

The Chicago Sun Times has Barack Obama on his cover, with an interior article and an editorial on, drumroll, please...

His not wearing a flag pin on his lapel.

Also in today's issue:

Giuliani blasts Clinton for wavering in her support for the Yankees.

If it's true that in a democracy, you get the rulers you deserve (evidence the U.S. failure to adopt the metric system), then these are signs of a coming apocalypse: the incipient presidency of Duncan Hunter (or perhaps Tom Tancredo, certainly among the worstest candidates on offer this cycle.)

Iranian President in NYNY.

I'm feeling lazy so I won't even look up how to spell the man's name. Let's just call him A.

Some very quick notes:

1) Have you noticed how just about every other part of the world, from the American South to the Levant to Latin America or the Far East prides themselves on their virtue of hospitality? That is a nice virtue. We were embarassingly bad hosts.

2) Some editorials, as with the local daily here, actually thought this was America's finest hour, because Mr. A was actually able to speak. Let's get over ourselves. We don't have a monopoly over free speech. The fact that we grudgingly offer a hostile forum is not so exemplary.

3) Most of the people calling Mr. A and idiot are themselves idiots. Joe Lieberman said he "literally" had blood on his hands. So, let the man use a washroom, and your problem is solved.

4) Remember when Chavez spoke at the UN last year and insulted Bush? The Democrats rushed to condemn him as a bad guest, and all you heard all over was how Bush may be a bad president, but an insult against him by a foreigner was nevertheless a disrespectful gesture to the whole nation (despite questionable elections). So guess how Iranians will see this?

5) Mr. A loves the press. The only thing that gets more press than efforts to censor are ineffective efforts to censor.

6) Mr. A is not the supreme leader and does not set the policies, so most of the attacks on him that presume otherwise are deeply flawed and, when coming from people who should know better, mostly fraudulent.

7) One cartoon I saw had Mr. A dressed as a Nazi but with sharp jutting teeth, as though to say, Hitler was at least a civilized European gentelman who happened to be evil, while you, Mr. A are a mere animal of the feral third world and not worthy of that comparison.

8) Hitler comparisons were also all over the place. Why? Because we blame Hitler too much for anti-Semitism, and not enough for aggressive war and genocide. That is why it is so wrong to compare Bush to Hitler -- he may have killed his first million now in Iraq, but he likes Jews, so it's okay.

9) Mr. A makes lots of sense in some of his arguments. He's also effed up on other stuff, which makes him bad company and an embarassment for those who would otherwise like to support him, or at least his rights and the good things he says. Nevertheless, outside of the US, these points are often uncontroversial, and even within the US outside of its dominant political class, these arguments would carry some resonance if they reached people. Instead, from the papers you'd think Mr. A's entire speech was about the absence of gays in Iran.

10) Since when have visitors to Ground Zero been vetted for their perceived moral character, and why? If we let Karamov go lay a wreath, we should let almost anyone do so. And what about Giuliani's license to appropriate 9/11 as an omnipresent political backdrop? Can we revoke that? I think secular, public memorials should be treated as neutral ground and not politicized -- anyone who is willing to display the proper decorum should be free to go.

11) Iran's place in the Axis of evil has been promoted by most of the Democrats, who show their distaste for the cruelty of war by constantly lamenting that war prevents America from redirecting its resources to more important and humane matters, like some other war. Iran is currently the most popular other war.

That's all for now.

Jena Prosecutor Walters in the NYT

Reed Walters, the prosecutor of the Jena Six, had an op-ed today in the NYT. Short version: Don't blame me.

Actually, the guy sounds mostly reasonable on the surface, at least if, like most people, you still don't know the facts of the case. He made his job easy by using a layperson speaking out on a legal issue as the representative of all the arguments against him. At least, the easy ones he wanted to respond to. Someone says, why prosecute these kids for assault, and not prosecute the ones who hung the nooses which set off all this racial fighting in the first place? Reed answers, I tried to be fair, but terrorizing and provoking blacks by hanging nooses where they're not wanted is perfectly legal. I had to prosecute the assault because it's my job.

The National Lawyers Guild statement lays out more of the case. Reed leaves out that he has already had to scale back his prosecution because the law would not sustain his original overreaching, charging attempted murder for a series of blows that resulted in no serious injury persisting for more than a few hours. Compounded by the decision he scarcely justifies of charging one of the youths as an adult. He also does not mention his history of similar bias, or his apparent conflict of interest in the matter.

I also disagree with Walters' description of his job (to lay the facts against the statutes and seek justice for victims, he says). The prosecutor's role is to vindicate societal justice by employing the criminal law, not just for victims but for everyone in the jurisdiction.

I find some aspects of his account vague: what was the criminal record of Mr. Bell that he refers to?

I get sick of officials admitting that they made a mistake, but only a PR mistake. The truth is, he did make a PR mistake, and most of the time, a PR mistake is a symptom of a bigger problem.

And he hides behind an African American federal prosecutor to imply that what he did was no different, which is horrendously misleading because most crimes, unless they happen on Indian reservations, cross state lines, or involve the government, are state crimes.

All of this appears dishonest to me. That's five things that look fishy without even starting on his facts. I don;t know the facts, but a good rule of thumb is, when you can catch 'em on what you know, expect them to be twice as dirty with what you don't.

But it's not all his fault. The judge, and lax DOJ Civil Rights apparatus that permitted all this comes in for some blame, as does the community, and the Louisiana Legislature -- can the noose display really not be a crime? Surpringly, that seems very plausible to me, because from what I can see, the criminal code there is a mess. To larger extent than in any of the midwestern states whose criminal laws I've studied, it's a big stack of specific offenses that are semi-random in what they cover.

This just in...

The Senate has just voted against a bill which would have ordered the Pentagon to assure that all U.S. servicemen and servicewomen performing in Iraq have adequate water to function. The bill would have required the armed forces in theater to maintain stores of water, or make plans to obtain water, sufficient to keep all troops there hydrated except when doing so would interfere with the military mission. The defeat of the bill was seen as the latest victory for those in favor of supporting the troops. "The signal this sends to the troops is one of no confidence in their ability to overcome thirst. The best way to bring the troops home faster is to let them win by letting the generals on the ground follow their own best judgment."

Opponents also said the bill was unconstitiutional. The Bush Administration has said that it does not believe the Congress has authority to pass legislation concerning the military, and that it considers the entire Title 50 of the United States Code, dealing with military matters, to be void.

Definition: A Gathering of Eagles

Noun. (1) A support group for the endangered species which continues to back the failed occupation of Iraq; (2) A coming together of members of this group, typically numbering in the single digits, but ranging into hundreds for exceptional occations: A Gathering of Eagles counterprotested the anti-war march.

Completely Heterosexual

It finally makes sense to me; no, wait, I'm still confused.

Larry Craig, like Ted Haggard, is completely heterosexual, although it has not yet inspired a Roy Zimmerman song. For several days, Leno has been pumping a video clip from MSNBC with anthropologist William Leap (identified as a Northwestern) professor, but I find him identified online at American U). Leap states that the Craig bathroom incident does not involve gay sex, just sex between men who are seeking sex with other men, which generates an apparent amount of skeptical laughter from the crowds in Burbank. Dan Savage helps with a CNN appearance, also referred to in his column. Some insight also comes from a seminal 1970 work, recounted, among other places, in this article. (So today, I'm actually giving some links!) Short upshot: guys who seek out sex in mensrooms are nearly all "straight-identified," rejecting the gay label and gay culture, and are disproportionately conservative, Republican men. This goes along with the well established phenomenon that among those who identify as straight, homophobia and homoerotic arousal are strongly correllated. Some experts, apparently including Leap, think Craig is not dishonest in denying he is gay, that the term is not properly applied to the deeply closeted, that it makes more sense in some ways to separate what closeted men do from what we label as gay, and that Craig may be completely sincere, although deluded, in describing himself to others as straight. At some level, he sees himself that way, never having heeded columnists like Savage, who have written a million times that, hey, guess what, if you like sex with other men or other women, that is rest-assured, straight-up, end-of-argument gay.

Should police patrol mensrooms? There're various problems justifying the patrols -- the concerns are overblown and exaggerated by prejudice; policing legitimizes the apprehension, which is counterproductive; the interest in preventing exposure to facts of life that are not inherently harmful is somewhat dubious in an open society, even where those exposed would be children; the actions employed, while not entrapment, tend in that direction; the menace at maximum is small, while most metropolitan police departments have more serious issues to worry about. None of these, save the last, is a knockout.

Is Craig a hypocrite? Not as obviously as most assume, but yes, for the reason Savage notes: he probably would have voted for tough penalties against the very thing he was caught doing. But there is no contradiction between his vile opposition to healthy gay identification and activity, on the one hand, and his inulgence in unhealthy closeted behavior on the other.

Should Craig be investigated if he does not voluntarily resign? Yes. Merely being a pervert or a hypocrite, or using his position for political self-interest are all normal. But: He insists his guilty plea, made under oath, was a perjurious lie. The police account shows an apparent attempt to use his official position to avoid the consequences of the crime. His status as a closeted man active in same-sex hookups raises a concern that he would be exposed to blackmail. Any of these could be a legitimate ground for further examination. Less seriously, he may enjoy a good roasting. Recalling his Meet the Press appearance in 1999, one can almost imagine him saying, "Yes, by all means, investigate me, censure me; I've been a bad boy, a naughty boy. I need to be disciplined."

What is the larger lesson? The conservative majority in the redstate world is not as crazy as it may seem. If you lived in that world you would see the natural appeal of conservative positions. Gay people in blue America go about leading ordinary lives, albeit coping with prejudice. In red America they are more likely to sneak off from the closet to the toilet for anonymous sex. It may seem offensive for Santorum or Scalia to liken gay sex to bestiality, but in red states, there're a lot of farms, and boys do what they will do. It's not just gays, but the risk of animal sex is a lot more present if discipline were to fail. You can see why they may be more preoccupied over there. They also have more crime, more teen pregnancies, more abortions, they draw more of their economy from the public sector, and in general suffer more of the problems that their policies claim to fix. The Republican party and allied institutions are just about the only loci in the nation where unqualified minorities are routinely given positions over better-qualified whites. Look at Clarence Thomas, or a more spectacular laughingstock, Alan Keyes. The redstate right is focused on real problems, they just have not attributed their sorry state to the spectacular failure of these policies, or noticed that these problems are less severe in the civilized world outside their own.

Two Cents on Rove

The best observations I've made and seen others make:

1) He's treated as history making when in fact he made few innovations, had little real power, and made little impact. All the big historical things that happened would have happened, or come very close to happening, if he had not existed. Pre-existing trends, chance events, and a reliably ineffective opposition did the work, while Rove took the credit.

2) He's treated respectfully and asked his views, even as his interviewers wink to him with the knowledge that about 78% of everything he says is a lie.

3) He's regarded as a genius in all probability because he's mastered the art of getting perceived as a genius without ever having to prove it. He has no academic credentials, but drops names and historical references, constantly makes mistakes which people credit for being clever lies or part of a secret strategy, and he travels among the easily impressed.

4) He's very much a product and exemplar of the corrupt and juvenile College Republican milieu, where dirty tricks are virtually all that matter. It is a culture steeped in petty criminality which its practitioners tend to lose only when they move into some part of the real world where crime is looked down upon, or graduate into adult politics and the potential for actual felonies.

5) He's regarded as an ideologue rather than a functionary, but there is precious little evidence that he had any agenda other than accumulating power for himself and his team.

6) The supposedly big idea at the center of his philosophy ultimately reduces to conceiving politics as total war without any ethical limitations: you get away with whatever you can, and that's a lot. You lie because the lies have no adverse consequences. You deny the opposition access to information. You phony up evidence. You create token programs whose effects you can exaggerate. You smear without mercy or restraint. You are absolutely loyal to those with you and seek to destroy those who are not totally loyal in return. You manipulate voting rules, voting machines, districting, use all the arms of government to promote political over policy interests. In short you rely on short attention spans, public impatience with partisan bickering, and the media's tendency to frame every debate as an even and honest one no matter how lopsided and dishonest. You shovel coporate welfare at the money base and an endless stream of empty platitutdes and symbols at the social base, knowing that 50.002% of the voters will not notice.

7) Even as congratulations and applause greet him, it is widely recognized that he is leaving under a cloud, getting while the getting's good.

UPDATE: Hey, I have a comment! Yes, No. 1 is probably overstated. We may find out later that it is terribly wrong. But I thought this was a great observation since the tendency throughout most of the punditocracy has clearly been excessive in the opposite direction, crediting him for nearly every significant political event in the last seven years.

Executive Privilege

Aziz Huq has a bylined editorial in the Nation this fortnight on executive privilege, which is very nice, but it does take him to paragraph 8 to make the point I would put first: what good is it?

The standard explanation is that shielding a communication from inspection is required in order to achieve candor. You can see this in attorney-client or priest-penitent privilege: the attorney or confessor function would be completely frustrated if secrecy could not be guaranteed. You can quickly think of most of the functions that might be considered important enough to make a guarantee of a controlled communications environment: gathering information on the transmission of a communicable disease, or for an individual's diagnosis or treatment, anonymous reporting of crimes, support groups and brainstorming sessions, or when spouses confide in one another.

There are lots of laws shielding eliberations of various bodies: when judges caucus, or jurors especially, or even when job interviewers speak openly to decide whom to hire. Hence it is argued that officers of the executive branch, in order to obtain candid advice, must have blanket secrecy over their internal (and some external) discussions.

Huq questions this, and rightly so. My own immediate thought was what kind of exchange might occur if there were no executive privilege, what Bush and Rove might have been like in a room where the contents of their discussions was subject to general release:

President: So, what ought I to do about this here thing?

Adviser: I, I.. I'd rather not say, Mister President.

President: What's wrong, rover-dover?

Adviser: I, I'm ascared, Mr. President. What if I tell you what I think and then someone finds out and doesn't like what I said? They might make me feel bad.

President: Well, you know, it's like I always say, you don't come here to be popular, you got to stand up for stuff. Just tell me what I should do.

Advisor: I can't. I'm still afraid. I, I just wet myself. Waaaah!

As you can see, eliminating executive privilege would have completely crippled Karl Rove's ability to advise the president, which would have been a loss for us all.

As a caviat, I don't doubt that observing a privilege for executive advice is appropriate in proper circumstances. Executives may also be penitents or spouses or clients or patients. There may be times when effective advice depends on disclosing some matter which is rightly secret for other reasons. And there may be genuine occasions where the value of secrecy outweighs its costs. Maybe an advisor is has a special basis for concern but they're indospensible and no one else can give the advice. Likewise, there are also exceptions going the other way, where a privilege fails: the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, for example: if a client and attorney conspire to break the law, the exchange is not privileged. In any unclear case, a court may have to examine the content of the matter in chambers to decide what is privileged and what is not. That's life.

Applemilk1988 is offline

Perhaps the most lamentable quality of the popular internet is the forum it provides for, and the representatives it attracts from among, people who are just crude and vicious.

The accusation of expressing ignorant, hateful thoughts online has been abused by rightwing pundits as a means of putting down the progressive blogosphere: some of those thin-skinned, delusional pundits can hardly find a political opinion at variance with their own that does not set off their martyr complexes or promote a surge of unexpected solicitude towards a group they had villified only the previous day.

But it occurs quite a lot, either coming from the right, or in politically neutral settings.

Today I opened up youtube and saw that many of my favorite videos were gone. A few months ago I had gotten the account just so that I could favorite a few clips from a girl in South Florida named Emily. She had reminded me, in some superficial ways, of an old friend of mine, and the videos were entertaining in a modest way. Emily's videos have gotten probably a million views (I stopped adding the figures at half that) and have been the object of a lot of hype, fan mail, and -- to the point of this post -- hate mail. I wont compare her to Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick, but for a teen (Her login name is Applemilk1988; I can only guess 1988 is her birth year) just doing these quick simple postings from the local mall or Starbucks or from the couch in her family home, they had a lot of humor and personality. Some were definitely better than others. Her best, an "intense" lesson in the Japanese language which spawned four sequels of varying quality, made me understand why she had fans. In contrast, she had regular posts in an entirely different, more natural and subdued persona, that invited a sense of familiarity and empathy.

At least for me. As I noted, Emily has gotten a lot of hate mail. I know because a huge amount of the hate mail is in the completely public form of open video posts on youtube. I continue to be shocked at the vicious character of some of the writing and posting about Emily. Just to give some idea, there is a lot of abusive language and epithets. I would guess that youtube probably deleted others because of use restrictions; either that, or the vloggers have maximized the hostility while evading those restrictions by design.

Anyhow, I noticed that the videos of hers that I'd saved were gone. Despite being a busy guy, I searched first youtube, which had still had others' videos about Emily, and then the broader web, and discovered that Emily's accounts on youtube and various other services had been hacked, apparently by people who specifically targeted her. This all happened just about a week ago, while Emily was (and maybe is still) in Japan. Their celebratory posts reveling in this attack should not have been surprising. Again, I would guess that use restrictions may have weeded out some that were more threatening or sexually graphic than what I see there, but yes, there are gratuitous references to her speculated sexual practices. They also linked to a (former)boyfriend's site, who included some personal gripes against Emily because, he said, they increased traffic to his account due to her fame. He sounds like a real prince.

Emily is such a minor celebrity, known to a fairly small segment of the public for a few short homemade videos. I don't even know her last name, or what city she's in. Nor do I want to know these, and while her more intimate videos invite some empathy with the events of her daily life, I really have no desire to know what she does in private. And yet, there is a following out there for material attacking her, calling her names, exposing her passwords, exposing her alleged doings offline, alleged failings, intimate matters, and who knows what next. This cottage industry of hate against a young woman whose worst crimes, as far as I can tell, are well within the bounds of small interpersonal matters where none of us are perfect.

This seems to me like an interesting case lesson in the proper bounds of discourse, as well as the perils of fame, and it reminds me of the Don Imus ruckus, but of course Emily's haters have not withdrawn their attacks or apologized, but let them persist and metastasize. They have gone to the point of silencing their enemy by force. And I don't see anyone defending her yet, but I'm not sure whether her fans know what's going on.

Wrecking the bus system

Cutting the bus system is an extremely stupid policy.

I was going through some old newspapers lying about my house when I noticed an article from May when vast cuts to the county bus system were being announced. I saw a detail which I had not noted before, though perhaps this is because I have paid too little attention to the issue. The article stated that the proposed cuts would create a net savings of something over $2 million, but at the cost of 7 million riders per year. I don't know what riders means, but let's assume it means full fare equivalents. Then there would be a gross loss to the system of about $13 million. This is a stunning statistic, and even if my figures are a little off, it would still be stunning, and perhaps moreso.

This is ridiculous from two standpoints. First, from the perspective of the bus system, it means a substantial reduction in service for a comparatively small benefit. The analysts have figured that by dumping unprofitable routes, they can achieve a net gain in strict economic terms. To the extent such a marginal change is a requirement, it may be the best among bad options, but it is still a bad option.

I recall my own experience in business running a small newspaper. The former publisher, deep in debt, had decided to economize by reducing the size, circulation, and use of color in the paper. The result was an immdiate net savings, to be sure, but the paper was locked in a spiral of decline. Ultimately, producing a less attractive, less frequent paper with less in it to read could not have anything good to do for readership, or the value of advertising in the paper. And economies of scale meant that a 50 percent reduction in service only produced, say, a 15 percent reduction in cost. Failure of the paper was palpable when, with a new strategy, the paper was saved.

Finding better ways to cut costs, my staff and I expanded and promoted the paper, with the result that we grew out of our debt. Similarly, a bus system in decline will only continue to decline if the best strategy its leaders can advance is to shrink service. The question that leaps to mind is what other options have been evaluated: Identifying potential efficiencies? Differential pricing of routes? Creative efforts to attract riders? Partnerships with popular
destinations? More effective use of grants and subsidies?

The other standpoint from which the proposal is ridiculous is the public standpoint. Although the bus system, on paper, will be made $2 million more profitable, the loss to citizens would be far greater than the $2 million necessary to maintain the current level of service. The fact that the equation is so lopsided suggests we need much more public investment in the bus system.
The loss of 7 million riders means that some riders will see their access to the city shrink, especially the blind and disabled, and the unlicensed, who are predominantly minorities. They will be forced to forego employment opportunities, opportunities to save on services, and bear the costs of less efficient modes of transportation, such as borrowing rides from friends, or using taxicabs, or simply driving themselves. Inequality and poverty can be safely predicted to increase. Lost employment or consumer transactions will also affect the would-be employers and sellers. Establishments that depend on bus service for customers or employees will be stressed and some may close. Increased auto traffic will increase pollution, traffic congestion, parking congestion (increasing fees for oher drivers), and will increase the number of drivers on
the road who are intoxicated or have suspended or revoked licenses, diminishing public safety. Milwaukee's reputation as a successful modern city with progressive values will be injured, and the loss of a public service will make the city less attractive to tourists, skilled immigrants, students, and businesses that may otherwise wish to locate here.

Did I leave anything out? Probably.

None of these losses will appear on an internal bus system spreadsheet. They will all have a long-term negative effect on the bus system, because the bus system depends on a thriving city and a thriving tax base. But more importantly, these losses will affect the entire public, which should invest in preventing these losses.

Of course, the question is who among the architects of the plan is: (1) actively trying to destroy public services for selfish reasons; (2) merely acting out of ill-considered ideology; (3) duped into following the plan because they have been brainwashed into thinking it is necessary; or (4) actually went through some rational thought process and concluded for a good reason whether it was necessary or not. All four exist. Only (1) and (4) know what they're doing, the former for evil, the latter for good. All that it takes for the (1)s to triumph is for the potential (4)s to become (2)s and (3)s.

Habilus Erectus

I'm back, after a ridiculously long hiatus. Nothing for all of July? Two months gone? Absurd! I promise my estimated 0.06 readers that I will do better.

Lots of ideas have come and gone. Oh, well.

Today's inspiration was a pretty stupid AP story that I saw yesterday in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. It was a science story, and they're always bad. Basic information buried. Phony spin. No context. Oversimplified for idiots in a way that makes the story nearly incomprehensible to anyone with a whit of understanding to begin with.

Here's the deal. There are lots of species (or proposed species, or subspecies) of genus Homo, which includes the species of modern humans, Homo sapiens. For example, H. ergaster, H. neanderthalensis, H. heidelbergensis, H. georgicus, and so on. No one can be completely sure if a piece of skull from here or seven individuals from there is really a distinct species or not, so there could be at least a dozem, or maybe not. The two really old ones that are known, which are common and well established, are Homo erectus and Homo habilis. H. habilis is the oldest known, followed by H. erectus. There's been a longstanding puzzle exactly how the family tree looks for those old days because remains are scarce. Maybe there's more "missing links" to be undug.

The story is that they found a really old erectus -- older than any previously known -- in the same general area as an old habilis of about the same age.

This shows that erectus came about earlier than previously understood, and that it could co-exist with habilis without either species (presumably the newer and better erectus) driving the other out of existence by its superiority in a general competition to survive. This further implies the two species occupied distinct niches, and may have been under evolutionary pressure to dissimilate. The discovery also makes it more plausible that erectus might have existed even earlier than did the newly discovered , and that it could have evolved not from habilis, but from some as-yet undiscovered precursor.

I found that very hard to figure out from the article, which is larded with pseudoscientific garbage about whether human evolution is "linear" or not.

Now, the missing link idea I referenced above is mostly popular mythology. No one who does evolutionary anthropology has thought for a very long time that there was any validity to the idea that humankind evolved up a ladder or across the panel of a newspaper comic, gradually but inexorably growing less hairy and more erect through an orderly progression as though with a target end form in mind. This is so much old-fashioned simplistic magical predestination, nature is good, the world is orderly wishful thinking carried over from a 19th-century religious mindset.

Instead, you have a complicated family tree. Evolution is a natural process with lots of trial and error. Looking back, you can make up a linear progression from primoridial ooze to any modern form of organism you pick by simply ignoring all the side lineages along the way. Such a constructed linear picture, particularly when manipulated to make change appear gradual and homogenous, may be accurate as far as it describes the direct ancestry of an organism, but it carries with it a misleading message to the lay public that evolution is an arrow pointed at a final form.

Yet the news article proceeds from the premise that what is really important about some new Homo bones is that it puts further to rest an image which has long been relegated to the unschooled and those using outdated elementary school textbooks. It is full of stuff about whether erectus and habilis are "sister" species or "mother and daughter," which is itself misleading, since all mother and daughter species are sisters as well -- it's not as though a magic wand could have passed over all the hibiles and turned them into erecti -- the daughter is always a sister for at least some period. Likewise, although the use of the phrase "common ancestor" is scientifically correct, it should be noted that the common ancestor of species A and B might well be one or the other and not necessarily a third: any two species have a comon ancestor if you go far enough back.

I cannot say the article was inaccurate. But it said very little and took a lot of effort to make sense of because it really wanted to tell me things that it thought would have some lay currency, but made me wonder, "scientifically, what is that supposed to mean?" I have the same problem with a lot of legal reporting. If the reporting is not wrong, it's simply confusing. For example, a report will say a judge ruled that Mr. X can stand trial for Y. What does that mean? Was there a motion to declare him incompetent to stand trial? Was there a motion to dismiss? Was there a preliminary hearing? A challenge to jurisdiction? Was Y the only charge? Was there something specific about Y? Even if the report is accurate, I have to question, based on experience, whether it is.

It's frustrating.

Korea Model

I'll admit first off that I have not really looked seriously at what all the hype is with the supposed re-envisioning of the U.S. occupation of Iraq on the so-called Korea model. I've basically assumed there is no there there, that this -- to repackage an old analogy -- is a case of bad-tasting 4-year old wine repackaged into 50-year old bottles and resealed to make it seem both fresh and of good vintage. I mean, haven't they trotted out post-war occupations of Germany, Japan, Korea, and other places every time they wanted to encourage patience? What is there new about this? And at the same time, what is there of any venerability that we can apply? How is this anything like Korea, except that the occupation will strive for high-duration, low-footprint passive vigilence?

Is that a model? A model shows how something was done, not what the result will be. Otherwise, let's pick a better model, like Solonic Athens, or Paradise, or Eden, or one of those Star Trek planets where everything was kept in order by a benign computer or alien caretaker that never made a mistake. Or even a good Japanese car factory. Let's have our "model" be perfection, or at least continuous quality improvement.

Actually, some of those models are not what they once were. Restoring Paradise may require a crusade, and only al Qaida and the Coral Ridge folks want that. Eden was part of pre-Islamic Iraq, and although I would agree with preserving the origins of civilization, this seems to be a minority view, at least in terms of preservation in situ -- I understand that there may be some private collections enjoying a nice steroidal plumping off the work of those odd looters who do not feel compelled to smash every 20,000 year old vase they encounter. And as far as the Star Trek model, I'm sure Bill Gates' preserved head-in-a-vat could appoint a crack team of AIs to run Iraq from Washington state or from an orbital platorm after the required electrical grid is restored sometime in the 23rd century. Until then, few good options.

Actually, what I started out wanting to say is just that the Korea model is an ironic concept to be pushing now. Didn't we have the Korea model under the last administration? Hmmm...

I see the 50s. There's this country divided North-South. We call the North part Iraq and the South part Kuwait. Over time, lots of things happen, in no particular order. The Southern part, divided off and placed under separate leadership, remains subject to greater influence from the "Free World" has a free market and a less-free populace. The north has to be threatened with nukes because it is too independent. It plays both sides of the cold war. It is geographically prone to Communist bloc influence and receives selective support, and the West seeks various means of influence. Eventually, the North invades the South. (Though the hidden history of the war is that the North was lured or provoked because the U.S. wanted the war.) The North is driven from the South and could be crushed and occupied, perhaps, except that the President of the U.S. resists, knowing that this could turn to disaster as the North's more powerful regional allies could use it as a proxy to fight the U.S. By the 90s, the U.S. has a large force permanently garrisoned in the South, whose tasks include enforcing sanctions on the North, and defending the South from renewed attack. The North flirts with building a nuclear capability.

On this analogy, the Korean model went off the rails in 2003, when the U.S. invaded North Korea, destroyed its infrastructure, found no WMDs and is being bled to death by local and foreign-based insurgents, whom we claim are basically pawns of China, against whom we are threatening a broader, and nuclear, war. If this were actually the case in Korea, what would our model be for dialing that down? You'd withdraw as fast as possible to the old North-South line, and rely on China for help in stabilizing the situation, recognizing that its influence would be greatly expanded, and try to minimize that inevitable strategic loss. Am I wrong?

Of course, Iraq turns out to be more complex. Maybe Iraq will be partitioned, although it seems clear that if Iraq is divided into three countries, those countries will probably be called Iran, Syria and Turkey. Just what we wanted all along? Doubtful.

Brownback's Folly

It's been a few days now since Sam Brownback authored this in the New York Times. I would leave it lie with the posts at Hullabaloo and Pharyngula, but I feel let down by their reactions. I mean, Tristero's point is worth acknowledging(although there are other meanings of "materialism" that are also being evoked), and for most of what he says, P. Z. Myers is good as always, but I would comment differently from the good cephalopodist on some of it, so here goes:

Brownback gives us a pile of gas, comfortably vague principles with no controversial application, the standard mealy-mouthed variation of glittering generalities designed to offend no one. He assures us that the issues are complex and nuanced and should not be reduced to a sound-bite or false dichotomy.

He then goes ahead and abandons nuance, rattles off sound-bites, and confronts the reader with a series of false dichotomies.

Nuance is abandoned by his representation of the opposing position in terms that are false, unsubstantiated, or contradictory. Myers covers this well. He catches what I thought was a pretty obvious point, that to believe in evolution, one must believe in randomness ("man is the chance product of random mutations") and also "an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world." And he states with familiarity and authority things that I suspected but could not have argued with assurance (e.g., that Gould's punctuated equlibrium has long established its dominance, and Brownback is stuck in the past).

At the same time, he complains that his own side's view has been oversimplified and mischaracterized:

The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days.

It's worth noting that there is no evidence presented that anyone anywhere has actually accepted or advanced this "premise." But anyway, okay, so it isn't his view. Creation in 144 hours would be too silly. So what is his view? (It must be nearly as ridiculous-sounding, or I think he'd tell us.)

The sound bites consist of maybe half the op-ed, lots of Rodney King-style fluff prasing science and religion and urging them to get along and for each to respect the other's contributions. As Myers notes, none of the contributions of religion are ever made.

He doesn't want an oversimplistic dichotomy:

But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.

Although he never explains what would be wrong with this particular dichotomy. Evolution is a pretty clear-cut idea, and so is creationism.

But of course, he goes ahead and dishes up phony dichotomies.

If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes
over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I
believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an
exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place
for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

Apparently, these are the only choices. And Brownback, you guessed it, believes in small changes within a species. This is kind of like saying, "if believing in Einstein's theory of relativity means accepting that atomic clocks will run faster at high altitudes, then count me in." That is, I accept the theory, but only one small, irrefutable observation in support of it, but none of the conclusions from that and other supportive observations that actually make it a scientific theory, and hence also none of the other predictions that would flow from the theory.

But apart from being a hypocritical wanker, Brownback's real problem is in drawing the line between the appropriate the appropriate realms of religion and science in the wrong place.

Myers is more of an atheist than I am. My profile on the "What kind of atheist are you" quiz is very similar to his, but we part in that he opposes religion, and seems to fault Brownback for saying religion should have any role in the search for truth. I, in contrast, can go along with most of what Brownback says, but I think he's grossly disingenuous when he outlines the value of faith.

People of faith should be rational, using the gift of reason that God has given
us. At the same time, reason itself cannot answer every question.... Faith
supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values,
meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us
understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love.

This is designed to suggest that he accepts a David Hume kind of recognition that questions of "is" and "should" are absolutely independent. Science examines the material world and allows us to understand cause and effect. Moral philosophy helps us identify duties and desiderata. Science allows us to understand the consequences of actions, which is a fundamental factor in their moral evaluation.

It turns out that Brownback suffers from a defect, however, in his faith, one that many of his coreligionists also suffer from. The spiritual world is not real enough to hold their interest, so they have to profane God by basing their faith on what occurs in the physical plane. For Brownback, you cannot have God without certain material consequences that, unfortunately, contradict the scientific evidence.

Many questions raised by evolutionary theory — like whether man has a
unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations —
go beyond empirical science and are better addressed in the realm of philosophy
or theology.

...

It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.

So you see, Brownback has a very reasonable position. Science is okay until it sounds offensive to human dignity, like when that nasty Galileo Galilei and people like Giodorno Bruno showed that "insolent spirit of self-assertion" that required they be sanctioned for the common good.

Don't worry, if history is any guide, Darwin will receive his full pardon sometime around A.D. 2400. By that standard, Brownback is really ahead of his time, even if he's behind most of the industrialized world.