Penn Political Review

New Digs

2010-09-12T14:44:00.002-04:00

Hello Soapbox Readers,

We hope everyone had a wonderful summer! Now that we're all back at Penn, blogging will resume its normal pace, and even - we hope - accelerate a bit. There certainly is lots to talk about.

However, we'll be talking about it all at a new website, so head over to http://pennpoliticalreview.org, where we have not only this blog, but also articles from the latest print edition and various online-only articles as well. Not to mention all our old archives, so you won't lose anything! We'll be setting up a forward from this page shortly, and eventually taking it down. Anyway, everyone, the time has come to update your feeds and bookmarks, and move on to the next phase in PPR's glorious history.

Cheers,
John

2010-09-09T00:02:00.001-04:00

Let me return to my ppr blogging duties with a post on another foreign election, and look out for something on the whole mosque issue fairly soon:

As you may or may not be aware, the Commonwealth of Australia recently held a federal election. The election comes as part of a tumultuous year for Australian politics. (Now former) PM Kevin Rudd, who just a year ago looked untouchable and likely to easily win a second term for his Labor Party government, slid in the polls earlier this year and was ousted by an internal party coup, which resulted in bringing Julia Gillard to the premiership of the country. As a parliamentary state, Australia can replace its PM whenever s/he loses the support of the majority of members of the lower house of the legislature. Once Rudd's Labor Party turned on him, he was powerless to hold on.

Rudd's slump had followed a serious of political reversals for a man once heralded as turning the page of Australian politics and whose first election victory had been protected to leave the right wing in the wilderness for years to come. Most importantly he was forced to back down on almost all his major climate change proposals, a major issue in a country where most of the land is taken up by a big desert.

His biggest obstacle had been that his party lacked a functional majority in the Australian Senate. Early on the conservative opposition, known as the Coalition, an alliance of the National and Liberal parties (a conservative Liberal party is less of an oxymoron outside the US, where it is understood that liberals are much closer to conservatives than they are to socialists, but that is a story for another day...), had a moderate leader who cooperated with Rudd, believing that his party too had to turn the page. But that (to simplify) provoked an internal party uprising, and the installation of Tony Abbott as new opposition leader. Abbott charted a path of rejectionism, and despite a hefty majority of Australians backing most of Rudd's policy goals, Abbott was able to use the Senate to humiliate and weaken the PM.

In an effort to deal with that, Rudd then tried to compromise. But as the Democrats in DC have found, compromise with an unyielding opponent makes nothing better. Your opponent doesn't accept your compromises, and you alienate a lot of your supporters. And so Rudd found his political career torn out from under him.

Gillard at first soared in the polls, but soon floundered when she started taking an even more compromising take than Rudd. Polls showed rapidly rising support for the Green Party, an outlet for disenchanted Labor voters.

When the votes were counted, and Australia's Alternative Vote voting system (a kind of quasi proportional system) makes that a little longer than election junkies might like, Labor and the Coalition pulled even with 72 seats each. 2 small party members and 4 independents held the remaining seats and hence the balance of power.

After a tense period of negotiations, Labor+the one Green MP (like America's FPP voting system, AV discriminates against non-regional 3rd parties, and the Greens one just 1 seat with 11% of the vote) and 3 of the four independents, were able to stitch together an agreement to form a government.

As you may have picked up, there are some parallels with the US situation in there, so here's my takeaways from the story:

1. Never discount a desperate politician. Electoral defeat for an incumbent in any kind of upper-level position is normally the end of the line. For most politicians it means changing your career. Tony Abbott knew that he could afford to lose the government formation negotiations. He's badly bloodied the nose of a government once thought invincible and forced it into an unstable and weak governing arrangement. He's got a good shot at holding on till the next vote and winning there. Julia Gillard on the other hand, having made a huge gamble in ousting Rudd, knew that failure to seal the deal with the independents would have been the end for her. For the 49 year old first female PM of Australia, that was not an attractive option. And so she was likely more willing to fill the demands of the independents. In the US, the question in the final months till November will be: what desperate moves will Democratic politicians make to hold on to their careers?

2. Be careful making deals with people who want your seat. of the 4 Independents, 1, from Tasmania, made his preference for Labor clear early on. The other 3, were representing conservative rural seats. This meant that the National Party, the rural part of the conservative Coalition, whose influence has been corroded for years by the relentless urbanization of Australia, would love to have their seats. I suspect the Nationals dug in deep resisting a deal with the Independents that would have made it hard for National to play for their seats next time around. It mirrors the US situation, where the GOP leadership often seems uninterested in working too much with Blue Dogs, and the Dems struggle to forge ties with Moderate North Eastern Republicans. Because it's hard to build ties with a party that you know would really rather oust you and put their own man in your job.

3. It takes an ego to be an Independent. While not necessarily a bad thing, you have to have a robust self confidence to believe that you alone can do better than the political spectrum in representing an area. This played itself out in the negotiations as well. Another reason apart form 3 why the representatives of conservative rural areas would side with Labor, is that all 3 men are themselves ex-National Party men. The consequence of which is that all 3 have likely left lots of burned bridges behind them in the Coalition, and their egos made it difficult to negotiate with a party they'd spurned.

4. Don't jump until you know you have space to land. If there's one lesson you take from this, its that you shouldn't start making big compromises until you know the other side will even consider them. Kevin Rudd compromised away his career to an opposition that was never going to accept anything he came up with. Gillard made the same mistake. The Democrats here have made the same mistake. Peel back the nonsense filters of the creeping edifice that is US mainstream media, and remember what Obama has done. a Stimulus Bill that was a major compromise, spurned and demonized. a Healthcare Bill that was absent the major desired items of the Left (and was to the Right of the GOP's own proposal in the early 90s, which was of course spearheaded by many of the same people still in congress today who claimed Obamacare was the devil), spurned and demonized. Financial reform, compromised to the point of being full of holes, spurned and demonized. Every major initiative of the Obama administration has involved massive compromises and cavings in to a GOP that has made clear it has NO intention of actually accepting compromises. a GOP that has in no uncertain terms made clear their position: that all elections should produce Center-Right policy. That Policy of the Left is never okay. And that while Democratic obstruction of Right wing policy is tantamount of treason, the GOP's refusal to even countenance positions that in every single other developed country on the planet are FIRMLY right wing and are left-wing here only because any true left in the US has been dead for over 25 years is patriotism. The GOP position is one of keeping America unbalanced, as Bush left it. Even making it more so. That's why they've preventing judge appointments, and have essentially established the de facto rule that only two kinds of appointments for any role are acceptable. Right wing and Moderate. Liberal, let alone true left, are absolutely unacceptable ideologies for anyone working in the bureaucracy or the judiciary to have. We can have that prehistoric monster Scalia on the Supreme Court, but if Goodwin Liu gets on the 9th Circuit, then America is PRACTICALLY OVER.

But now we've gone too far from Australia, and I'd best stop.

Conservatism versus the Mosque?

2010-08-16T16:37:00.004-04:00

President Obama’s steadfast support for the “Ground Zero” mosque, which only a day later turned lukewarm, nationalized an issue that many New Yorkers, including myself, have become familiar with for months on end. What’s fascinating now is how all the big time players from opposite ends of the spectrum- headlined by Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin on the right, and NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Obama to the left- have waded precipitously into the furor over the Park51 Mosque. There’s been such heated rhetoric- to my dismay, particularly from conservatives, such as the aforementioned Gingrich- but from liberal pundits as well who have ignorantly labeled opponents of the mosque bigots.

As for my stance, and this is the first time saying this (and possibly the last as well), I happen to agree with President Obama. The lukewarm, rather than steadfast, President Obama, that is.

And this will probably really rile things up, but I propose that President Obama’s recently clarified stance is a conservative one.

Has time off during the summer made me crazy? I hope not, but for my fellow Republicans, who are up in arms reading this right now, let me elaborate.

There are two important facets of the discussion that we must treat as mutually and necessarily exclusive- the personal aspect versus the constitutional one. With that being said, let me say this forthrightly:

I believe that building a 15 story mosque, just two blocks from the site of the deadliest attack on American soil is wrong, ill-advised, and counter-productive to the professed goal of the mosque’s founders, which are to “bridge the divide” and foster “coexistence and harmony.”

Yet, my own feelings, or anyone else’s, for that matter, play second fiddle to the words of the Constitution. And this is not an opinionated revisionism of history- the support and strength for inserting a Bill of Rights into the Constitution was to assertively and unquestionably embed specific liberties and rights so that future governments, however many years later, could not relinquish them. And if a government sought to relinquish such Constitutional liberties, or entrench others, the founders of our Constitution arranged an arduous and difficult process for doing so- supermajorities in both houses of Congress, and 75% ratification amongst state legislatures. In the words of Patrick Henry, who uttered perhaps the seven most patriotic words during the American Revolution- “give me liberty, or give me death!” the Bill of Rights are needed to “reserve your unalienable rights. You must have the most express stipulation; for, if implication be allowed, you are ousted of those rights. If the people do not think it necessary to reserve them, they will be supposed to be given up.”

Which brings me to the issue of religious freedom, which one can find in the very first amendment of our cherished Bill of Rights; “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof […]”

We can see how distinctly how my personal opinion of this mosque, and my desire that it not be constructed, comes into conflict with the words of our First Amendment.

And, perhaps more so than others, I truly do wish this mosque not be built. I find the leader of the mosque, the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, to be uniquely naïve in refusing to label Hamas a terrorist organization, and uniquely offensive in condemning the United States as an “accessory to the crime” of 9/11.

But my personal disdain for this Imam once again pales in comparison to the rights and liberties afforded by our Constitution. Liberties are entrenched on that document to prevent an activist government from stripping them away.

In this sense, I don’t support the construction of the Cordoba Mosque. But I acknowledge that our system of constitutional governance, which has allowed myself and other Americans since 1790 to live in the freest republic the world has yet seen, precludes the opinion of one, or the objections of a vocal faction. As a pure measure of religious freedom, the mosque has a right to be built at Park51. And it is a right which, despite how others and I may feel, cannot be taken away or uprooted. And it is a liberty that might one day prevent an anti-Semitic government from halting construction of a synagogue near protested grounds.

President Obama was right to vocalize the constitutional right of Muslims to construct a house of worship on private property that was duly purchased.

I wish President Obama had been more forceful in conveying to the leaders of the Cordoba Initiative that constructing a mosque near Ground Zero would only inflame tensions and not build bridges between them. But his no comment on the “wisdom” of constructing a mosque at Ground Zero is a step in the right direction.

As an aside, I wholeheartedly agree with NY gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio on his demands to investigate the fundraising sources for the $100 million mosque. Just as it is a bitter pill to swallow- albeit, the constitutional and lawful one- that this mosque is perfectly allowed to be constructed on this property- the leaders of the Cordoba Initiative should understand that they must be transparent about their donations to raise $100 million. If foreign governments or terrorist organizations are making contributions towards this $100 million, this issue would become one of national security and immediately be prone to different regulations and laws, and depending on the size or scope of such hypothetical fundraising, different constitutional principles as well.

However, if the books for this Park51 mosque are free of eyebrow-raisers and terrorist ties, then any other objection to the construction of the mosque falls deafly flat on its very face.

And if being conservative no longer denotes relying steadfastly on traditional and constitutional principles, then I do not know what does.

Same-Sex Marriage is Marriage: The Argument From the Merits

2010-08-09T21:18:00.002-04:00

I’d like to talk about the arguments for and against same-sex marriage – the so-called “merits” of the case. The legal arguments surrounding Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to strike down proposition 8 are complex and interesting. The political gambles made by Boies and Olson on the plaintiff’s side, and by Walker on the judge’s, are exciting. Nonetheless, the legal aspect of this case has been covered in some depth. Moreover, because of the peculiarities of Walker’s decision, it revolves around whether or not California has proven that it has a reason for the law (other than moral disapproval of homosexuality), not whether it has a good reason. John Holbo has penned a wonderfully lucid exposition of the discussion, made all the better by his not being a lawyer. Read the whole thing, and the post by Orin Kerr that he links to.

Again, however, I’d like to talk a little bit more about whether California has a good reason, not whether it has any reason. And while I think the case against same-sex marriage crumbles wherever you prod at it, the people making that case do understand what the debate is about. As they so often proclaim, we are arguing over the definition – and, by implication, the purpose – of marriage. First, let’s get the “traditional” definition of marriage. According to the lawyers for proposition 8, “the state’s interest in marriage is procreative.” How so? Well, there are two reasons that are usually offered – which I will call the weak and the strong version. The weak version is more common, and we have a cogent statement of it from Nelson Lund:

Only unions between men and women are capable of producing offspring, and every civilization has recognized that responsible procreation is critical to its survival. After the desire for self-preservation, sexual passion is probably the most powerful drive in human nature. Heterosexual intercourse naturally produces children, sometimes unintentionally and only after nine months.

[…]

The fundamental purpose of marriage is to encourage biological parents, especially fathers, to take responsibility for their children. Because this institution responds to a phenomenon uniquely created by heterosexual intercourse, the meaning of marriage has always been inseparable from the problem it addresses.

Because the purpose of marriage is to encourage parents to raise children, the definition of marriage must only include couples who can become parents. Marriage is about babies – promoting their creation, and ensuring their upbringing. If we allow same-sex marriage, according to this argument, we will a) allow couples to marry who don’t fit the logical definition, and b) submit adopted children to inferior or “incorrect” upbringings.

This is not the same view of “traditional marriage” put forward by Ross Douthat yesterday in the New York Times; and by Robert George a year ago, in a memorable WSJ op-ed. Both these writers present the Catholic view of marriage. As Douthat explains, it does maintain a procreative purpose, but the symbolic importance of procreation extends beyond the practice of childrearing. His is “a particular vision of marriage, rooted in a particular tradition, that establishes a particular sexual ideal. This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings…as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship.” It is symbolically and spiritually special because it forms a “microcosm of human civilization.”

The power of marital union, according to this view, inheres in the sexual act itself. As George puts it, “Such acts unite husband and wife at the most fundamental level and thus legally consummate marriage whether or not they are generative in effect, and even when conception is not sought” (emphasis added). This is a much, much bolder statement of the procreative argument. Rather than claim that same-sex couples can’t marry because they make poor parents, or because they can’t be biological parents, George argues that they can’t marry because their sex isn’t the same kind of sex. He even notes that “as a comprehensive sharing of life – an emotional and biological union – marriage has value in itself and not merely as a means to procreation.” Everything is the same for a same-sex couple, except the physical nature of the relationship. To repeat: according to Robert George, gay marriage isn’t marriage because gay sex isn’t sex. He makes the argument explicitly; I think it’s strongly implicit in Douthat’s article.

The harm that gay marriage would create is different in this argument. It has little to do with children. Rather, it would symbolically unravel the foundation of marriage itself. Douthat on the consequences of gay marriage:

But if we just accept this shift, we’re giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.

So these, then, are two “traditional,” procreative versions of marriage. I put “traditional” in quotes, by the way, because it is not clear that a procreative definition of marriage actually is the traditional one. Douthat acknowledges this fact, saying that “What we think of as “traditional marriage” is not universal.” Judge Walker certainly agrees. “Never,” he pronounces, “has the state inquired into procreative capacity or intent before issuing a marriage license; indeed, a marriage license is more than a license to have procreative sexual intercourse. FF 21.” So what does he think constitutes marriage? Here’s a passage from the opinion, which you should all read at least half of:

The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a household. FF 19-20, 34-35. Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage. FF 33.

According to Walker, the “comprehensive sharing of life” George identifies is not limited to opposite-sex couples. Denying same-sex couples marriage would deny them the enjoyment of this benefit on the same level as opposite-sex couples. Allowing same-sex marriage, on the other hand, encourages stable households, while disallowing it removes that possibility for a large fraction of the populace.

For now, then, here are our three definitions of marriage: procreative union for the purposes of childrearing; procreative union, recognized as symbolically important; and the sharing of life in a loving household. The first implies an instrumental purpose: be fruitful and multiply, for the good of the species. The second implies a particular moral vision rooted in the Catholic theory of natural law. The third implies a purpose that is good in itself: the emotional union of human beings. How do we find a definition of marriage that we can agree on?

I reckon there are a lot of people who would agree with Lund’s definition, but not with George’s or Douthat’s, because Lund seems more concrete and practical. Others will side with the Catholics, because they seem more consistent logically. I say, don’t be fooled by either. They have the same core argument, which is an essentialist distinction between male and female, founded on metaphysical conjecture that can form no sound basis for legislation. The belief that the “emotional and biological” bond between man and woman is somehow more special than that shared by a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, comes from a spiritual distinction between male and female, in addition to a physical one. This, I think, is quite obvious. The same logic applies, however, to Lund’s argument: same-sex couples can’t be parents because they weren’t meant to be parents. Or because they make worse parents, which is an empirical question. And as best I can tell, that’s fairly settled the other way.

So what we have is an argument that same-sex couples can’t marry, because they can’t have “real” sex or be “real” parents, because they shouldn’t have gay sex or be gay parents, because they’re not supposed to do those things. Without resorting to openly moral reasoning, of the type “God made us male and female,” these arguments are fatally circular – a painfully obvious fact once you get an inch below the surface. Of course, Douthat does mention repeatedly that his idea of marriage is a “particularly Western understanding, derived from Jewish and Christian beliefs about the order of creation.” Andrew Sullivan’s already made the obvious follow-up to that, asking why he insists his “ideal be enforced as an act of civil exclusion in the secular sphere, even on people who are atheists.” I don’t know what Douthat’s response will be or could be.

And how about the other side? Pretty much every married couple hopes to have a child. Even if we accept that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, why should we reject a procreative or parent-centered definition of marriage in favor of a humanistic one? And why wouldn’t this “new” definition erode the foundations of monogamy? And why, for God’s sake, would there be less of God in one than the other? Insofar as humanism counts as a private moral or religious belief, that is.

The bond formed by marriage is often – should be, in my opinion – so total that it encompasses all possible union. Two people become attached socially, psychologically, physically, and economically. They share themselves fully, and marriage provides a way for the state to treat them as a unit when appropriate, and as individuals when appropriate. It also provides rules for what happens when the union is separated (by whatever means). That, it seems to me, is the legal rationale for marriage, under which childrearing is logically subsumed.

There’s my alternate definition. Why is it less privately moral? Because it assumes less about the motivation for getting married, only noting the tremendous importance that some couples attach to it. And why is this sort of marriage inherently monogamous? Because there’s no way to give yourself fully to a second person while you’ve already given yourself to a first person, in my opinion.

I’ve rambled for too long. My point is this: ostensibly procreative definitions of marriage, which seem to have a pretty reasonable basis, and which seem to rule out non-procreative unions such as same-sex couples, are actually about copulation rather than procreation. Either that, or they are about parenthood. Proposition 8’s supporters allege that same-sex marriage makes a logical and moral leap which will undermine our reasons for having marriage in the first place. If that leap can be made, it has been made already, in defining marriage either as a sexually special union or as a union for the purposes of childrearing. Neither of those things applies specifically to opposite-sex couples, unless you consider “man” and “woman” to be ontologically separate categories established by the Deity. In which case, go ahead and deny the sacrament of marriage to same-sex couples in your church – but stay out of the courtroom, if you would, please.

ACE Forum: Class-Based Affirmative Action, Round 2

2010-08-04T21:27:00.006-04:00

Penn Political Review has joined with other college political publications to form the Alliance of Collegiate Editors (ACE), hoping to generate cross-campus dialogue on political issues. The first topic we will discuss is class-based affirmative action. This is the second entry; for the first one, see Sam Barr’s post at HPR.

Sam suggests that conservatives who oppose race-based affirmative action must necessarily oppose class-based affirmative action, ending his post with a call for conservative opinions on the subject. I don’t like to term myself conservative, but I do fit the label here. So I’ll give a go at explaining why class-based affirmative action is more appealing than race-based affirmative action, but still wrong. (From here on out, AA = Affirmative Action). Books have been written on this subject, so please forgive my incompleteness. I’d really like, for example, to address Sam’s post on the SAT, but I'm already over a thousand words here so I will abstain.

Sam begins by briefly referencing Matt Yglesias’s lament: “The presumption that you can solve any significant problem of social justice in America by fiddling with Ivy League admissions policies is dead wrong.” He inserts it more as a caveat than a substantive point, but I think it gets to the heart of the matter: current thinking about AA muddles up equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Sam describes the liberal argument for AA using the first term:

[Liberals] can get behind class-based affirmative action because they assume that the following things are true:

1. We are very far from achieving anything like true equality of opportunity,

2. It would be a good thing if we came closer to achieving equality of opportunity, and

3. We can do so by giving a leg up in admissions to students from low-income families.

So what is opportunity, and how do we make it equal? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (an invaluable resource) defines equality of opportunity as a social ideal, in which “the assignment of individuals to places in the social hierarchy is determined by some form of competitive process, and all members of society are eligible to compete on equal terms.” That is, there are a range of jobs, some of which are better than others, and applicants to those jobs should be assessed on their qualifications alone. Insofar as those things happen, society has “formal” equality of opportunity.

A further step can be made, to “substantive” equality of opportunity, by addressing the circumstances which produce those qualifications. The example the SEP article gives is nutrition: in a warrior society, all children should be adequately nourished or they will not have equal opportunity to become warriors. This leads from Substantive Equality of Opportunity to Equality of Fair Opportunity – a concept proposed by John Rawls – in which “any individuals who have the same native talent and the same ambition will have the same prospects of success in competitions that determine who gets positions that generate superior benefits for their occupants.” (For a much deeper look at the subject, see the SEP entry. It’s long).

Here, then, is the reason that class-based AA is more appealing than AA based on race. Being poor necessarily interferes with substantive equality of opportunity, but belonging to a certain racial group does not. The primary disadvantage suffered by blacks in the United States has been overt discrimination, in the form of preferential access to jobs for less-qualified whites. The way to end that is to stop giving preferential access to any group other than the qualified. But the poor may not be able to afford the same kinds of educational or other experiences that wealthier parents can afford for their children. Those experiences – a private high school with half the number of students per teacher, traveling sports teams, etc – will benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor, without regard to talent or ambition. Well, perhaps ambition, but perhaps not. In any case, who could oppose giving everyone a level playing field?

Note, however, how far afield Equality of Fair Opportunity has taken us from the simple suggestion that applicants be evaluated on their merits. We have arrived at a social guarantee with far-reaching implications. For example, if rich kids’ parents pay money for them to have private tutors, should the government put up the money for children whose parents can’t afford that expense? There’s an economic problem there, since that level of transfers would destroy any markets in child-related services. But let’s focus on the philosophical issues.

As I’ve said, I think the solution lies in distinguishing opportunity from outcome. Based on the above description, we can define “opportunity” as “access to resources which produce merit.” “Outcome,” on the other hand, is the result of a competitive application process. I think it’s clear that under this definition of equal opportunity, getting into Harvard is both an opportunity and an outcome. In fact, every job you have is an opportunity to succeed in later jobs, and every school you apply to competitively judges applicants in order to award a preferential status. The only pure outcome is your retirement account, and the only pure opportunity is the circumstances of your birth. So how do we separate the two?

I think we should conceive of opportunity as a category of resource, and outcome as the quality of that resource. That is, “college student” refers to a category of educational attainment, whereas “Ivy League” refers to the quality (better, worse, nerdier, jockier, more snobbish, what-have-you). Similarly, filet mignon and ramen noodles are different levels of food quality. CEO and secretary are different levels of employment quality, etc. Why is this crucial? Because a system of social insurance can guarantee that children will receive a high school education, and a postsecondary education if they want one. But it can’t guarantee everyone admission to Harvard or Penn or wherever, because those places aren’t big enough.

So what criteria have to be satisfied for someone to have been afforded “equal” or “fair” opportunity to succeed? What guarantees can the government give? I’m not sure, and nor am I sure how the government should implement them. The point is that the adjustment of inequities should take the form of guarantees, not preferential treatment in competitive situations. I side with what Sam terms the “deontological” view that if we are trying to give people equal access to competitive positions, we shouldn’t give them unequal access. We cannot burn the village to save it. But there’s plenty we can do, so let’s get to work.

Build the Mosque

2010-07-31T11:34:00.003-04:00

I wasn't going to comment on the issue, but apparently it's not going away. Today’s New York Times ran a story on the continuing saga of Córdoba House, known to most of us as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” A new player has entered the debate – the Anti-Defamation League:

The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process. Therefore, under these unique circumstances, we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.

This debate is something that I really, really can’t wrap my head around. We have a principle of religious freedom in this country. We also have a principle of equal protection. Either one of these principles should suffice to prevent us from stopping construction. If a Christian group would be allowed to build a church on that site, then a Muslim group should too. As it turns out, a Muslim group purchased that land (two blocks north of Ground Zero) and it wants to build a mosque there. Sounds good to me! (Caveat: the ADL statement makes insinuations about financial ties that the American Society for Muslim Advancement may have. I haven't heard anything else on the subject, but if they do have close financial ties to terrorists, which I doubt, then that's obviously a serious problem and a whole other discussion, as the ADL acknowledges).

Newt Gingrich has this to say on the matter: “The average American just thinks this is a political statement. It’s not about religion, and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.” As far as I know, most religions build designated spaces of worship – Islam in particular. And there is, in fact, lots of demand for a prayer space in that area. So building a mosque is a logical extension of being a Muslim. Which would lead me to believe that this is, in fact, about religion, and not offensive at all unless you find Islam offensive.

David Frum acknowledges that “If America means anything, it means the freedom to worship as you please, with whom you please, where you please, subject only to the same rules as govern all your neighbors.” Excellent! He also offers “a proposal, raised in the genuine spirit of helpfulness,” suggesting that the mosque planners dispel their “determined disregard of the fact that the 9/11 site exists because of a murderous atrocity by people claiming to act in the name of Islam.” As it turns out, Daisy Khan (the leader of the Muslim group planning the mosque) did say she wanted “to reverse the trend of extremism and the kind of ideology the extremists are spreading.” I think that counts, and I hope Frum does too. In any case, kudos to him for his reasoned approach to a contentious issue. It is (usually) a refreshing exercise to read his brand of conservatism, particularly when contrasted with statements like Gingrich's.

But because the case at hand is so open-and-shut, I think it’s only proper to consider a more extreme version of events. Naturally, I don’t mind seeing a worship center built by people I don’t mind. But what if, instead of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, the mosque were being built by a hardline conservative Muslim group, of the type that might be termed radical? Of the type that might openly proclaim its dislike for the United States of America? That’s a more puzzling question, because it wouldn’t represent progress for the relationship between Islam and the US – it would have no potential to be a feel-good story about how religious dialogue can overcome misunderstanding and tragedy. It would be emotionally difficult for every right-minded American to tolerate.

And that, it turns out, is what toleration is. It means putting up with things, people, and ideas that you just don’t like, and indeed flat-out hate. Living in West Philadelphia, I sometimes see women dressed in full-body veils with only a slit for eyes. I find it difficult to keep my frustration and bewilderment contained. But people can wear what they want, just as they can believe what they want. Some people think we should go back to Jim Crow, and I sincerely hope those people don’t vote. But I’d rather argue with them directly about their wrongheadedness than attempt to shut down their organization through legal means.

So: I think we should encourage the current mosque planners in their efforts - which, contra the ADL, are an integral part of "the healing process." However, if a radical Muslim sect wanted to build a mosque near ground zero, I would still have no legal reason to stop them, nor would I encourage the government to reject their proposal. I might encourage them to find another space to build, but at that point I would have a more substantive disagreement to hash out anyway.

The View From Your Illusion

2010-07-26T20:30:00.008-04:00

[Update: Andrew Sullivan has walked back some of the things I'm responding to below. I don't think that alters my point of view on the matter terribly, but it does remind me that Sullivan is willing to change strongly-held opinions - an admirable quality that he acquired at some cost.]

Like most people who read blogs regularly, I read new posts in reverse chronological order. That means that often I see a blogger's second- or third-stage reaction to the latest news before I see their initial reaction. It can be a fun game to predict the train of thought from its final destination. Earlier today, for example, I saw Andrew Sullivan quote this comment from a reader:

You're right on just about everything you say about Journo-List, with one glaring, rather obnoxious (to me) misstep. You say, "This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen: totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever." While I can't disagree that the media is partisan and lacks any substantive cojones, it's silly to me to call them "liberals."

Which prompted me to say to myself, "Wow! I know Sullivan never liked Journo-List, but this is a new level of hatred!" For comparison, the same man last week:

I'm glad Journo-list is over. It should never have been begun. I know many of its members are good and decent and fair-minded writers. But socialized groupthink is not the answer to what's wrong with the media. It's what's already wrong with the media.

Quite a transition from "good and decent and fair-minded writers" to "totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever." So, what do you imagine the original post was about? What could have prompted the shift in gear? "I bet it's Trig," I said to myself. "Somehow or other, this is about Trig." The reader Andrew quotes does not mention Trig at all in the email (not even a single member of the Palin family). Yet had I a friend next to me, I would have bet real money then and there.

Ladies and gentlemen, "The Partisan Tools at Journo-List and Trig:"

If you want to know why the allegedly liberal media didn't touch - and still won't touch - this story, look no further. It has nothing to do with the facts, and everything to do with their politics. Notice the core modus operandi of the political operative, not the journalist. When dealing with a story: first ask yourself not if it is true but whether the outcome benefits your side. Second, write things in defense of this that you cannot possibly know. Palin a "wonderful mother"? How on earth did Klein know that?

Before we go further, I would like to associate myself with Brad DeLong's opinion on this subject, as well as that of his commenter Anton Sirius. The latter says:

It's kind of hard to avoid noticing that the JournoList kerfuffle didn't generate more than mild harrumphs from Andrew until the subject turned to the Story That Dare Not Speak Its Name... then, suddenly, Ezra Klein is responsible for the death of objective journalism in America, or something.

This is what it means to be a conspiracy theorist, or a fanatic of any sort. The cause takes over not just your opinions on the one issue at hand, but your opinions on completely separate issues, because other people disagree with you on the Main Question.

It is at this point that Sullivan, were he to take note of a flyspeck such as myself, would restate his argument for a closer investigation of Trig's birth. Look at the facts, he would implore. Let me be clear that I have been so uninterested in this story, from the get-go, that I have no idea what his argument or anybody else's is except that it involves airplanes. The facts, here, are not the point: neither for me nor for Sullivan. I am reminded of nothing so much as Sigmund Freud's concept of illusion, as set out in his essay, "The Future of An Illusion:"

Illusions need not necessarily be false - that is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction to reality. For instance, a middle-class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible; and a few such cases have occurred...Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.

The point of believing an illusion is not to be right or wrong, but to feel a certain way, to confirm a certain worldview, to maintain a habit of living. In Sullivan's case, the Trig illusion allows him to feel rage at the "Christianist" right, to confirm his view that "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," and to maintain a strong contrarianism that has fueled not only his career but, I imagine, his spirit.

I have no problems with any of those things in themselves. But in latching onto the Trig Truther story, Sullivan has led himself down a rabbit-hole in which Ezra Klein can be the puppetmaster of hundreds of liberal writers, two steps short of a Machiavellian hack - because he expressed skepticism about the worthiness of a story that everyone has generally passed by anyway. He seizes on the littlest of details ("Palin a 'wonderful mother?' How on earth did Klein know that?") to besmirch the good name of a well-respected writer over a point that is tangential not just to the Journo-List story, but the Trig issue in the first place. How on earth did Klein know that? Why in hell should we care?

I don't like to speculate on the motivations of my interlocutors. But I feel confident in saying that Sullivan would not have blown up about Journo-List if Klein had never mentioned Trig. Time and again, Sullivan has demonstrated his single-minded fanaticism on the Trig issue, and it is increasingly affecting the quality of his writing on other subjects - which I, unlike DeLong, find enjoyable and stimulating. Not only that, but it has caused him to severely overstep the bounds of good conduct - by which I mean not disagreement, not heterodoxy, not even a bit of snark; but a wild shift in mood and tenor and a full-blown assault on another writer's character. That is an untenable way of writing, and an untenable way of thinking.

Gay Marriage in -- Argentina??

2010-07-23T00:45:00.004-04:00

Argentina, a country that is 92% Catholic and, at least outside of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires and Córdoba, quite conservative (by American standards), has done something only 5 of 50 American states have managed to do after years of lobbying and protesting: legalize gay marriage and child adoption.

I've spent most of this summer working with the Ministry of Education in La Rioja, a western Argentinean province near Córdoba and Mendozza. Like many towns in the area, the prettiest (and perhaps tallest) building in sight is the church. Life is "muy tranquilo" as residents profess, and people are ever-willing to invite you in for a drink or help you in any way at all. When I was in the hospital for a few days (not all Argentinean steak is good steak) officials from the Ministry constantly visited me. People I had never met before were coming by and asking me how I was doing. Some brought books/clothes from my hotel to make sure I was comfortable. Indeed, many of them were ones I had been trying to get meetings with for days beforehand. They may not have returned calls or answered emails, but when they heard I was sick, they came quickly and in numbers.

I was quite surprised, after talking to them and other townies, that they were fiercely and unquestionably opposed to gay marriage. From shopkeepers to school teachers, not a soul approved of extending the right to marry to homosexual couples. Adoption? Even more horrific. Although many expressed their acceptance of LGBT individuals, the obviously suppressed gay population here spoke to just how tolerant these areas are.

Yet, despite hundreds of thousands of people marching in opposition to the bill's passage, the Senate voted for it 33-27 (3 abstentions). Exasperated La Riojans blame the "loss" on political corruption. The legislature was voting with its wallet, not its morals, they say. Often referenced is the Roman Catholic Church's Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio: "children need to have the right to be raised and educated by a father and a mother." Apparently, that right has now been stripped.

It made me wonder. Only two decades ago, Argentina saw its first peaceful transition of democratic power between two parties. Less than one decade ago, unemployment was at 25% and the country was in economic and social chaos, accepting billions in International Monetary Fund loans. Abortion remains strictly limited. Cristina Kirchner, the current president, is considered a "diva" by many, her populist politics extremely unpopular. So how on earth did gay marriage get a front ticket on the government's agenda? After all, the United States has been in relative peace far longer than Argentina, giving it more time to focus on social progressivism. "Liberal" institutions that Argentineans would readily reject (such as abortion) are alive and well. Our country is vastly less Catholic (24%) and religious in general.

There were a couple of different answers that came to me. One is that our political systems could be designed to react to such situations differently. Perhaps Argentina is better equipped to protect the rights of a minority over a majority's desire. Conceivably, the majority did support the bill, despite the country's relatively homogeneous and religious composition. Or maybe America is naturally slower to respond to progressive issues like the legalization of gay marriage, despite striking similarities in governmental structure? The Economist offers its own opinion, stating it was a ploy by the Kirchner government to garner short term support from an increasingly hostile voter population.

Either way, it struck me as odd that Argentina would be so vastly more progressive than the United States on a social issue like same-sex marriage. Perhaps America has become complacent without any recent upheavals, crises (non-financial, that is), or dictators. Disorder and disturbance is fresh on the minds of the people here. History is a painful, not-so-distant memory for many. In Buenos Aires, one of the largest avenues (Avenida de Mayo) is constantly shut down due to fierce protests by unions, political lobbies, and other interest groups. There lives a spirit that the population at large in the United States clearly lacks. Perhaps, then, it is this sentiment of movement--of change--that fueled the passage of July 15's bill, and not dirty politics or religious backfire.

I'll continue searching for the answer with the few precious weeks I have left. Until then, I applaud Argentina for its forward-thinking new law.

By Ned Shell
Editor-in-Chief

2010-07-21T15:13:00.000-04:00

By Aaron Ross (C'11),

Barack Obama had me at "no" to the gas tax holiday.

It's true I'd voted for him two months earlier in the New Jersey primary. My rationale at the time seemed sensible enough. Obama had opposed the Iraq war. He called for dialogue with America's adversaries. He wasn't a Clinton or a Bush. And yes, he would be the country's first black president if elected.

But when he dismissed John McCain and Hillary Clinton's call for a gas tax holiday in April 2008 as a cheap political gimmick, I really started to get behind the guy. Here was a politician, who if not immune to occasional pandering, followed common sense (and the expertise of every reputable economist in the country). An intellectual, who if at times too eager to compromise on policy, would at least treat facts as facts, and trust the American people to recognize that.

Silly me.

The evidence of my folly started piling up almost as soon as Obama took the oath of office. The most dramatic examples have concerned his campaign pledges to start prosecuting the war on terror, you know, legally--i.e. restoring habeas corpus and ending wireless wiretaps. Extraordinary rendition, the grotesque Bush-era practice of sending terror suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, has continued as well.

The recent forced resignation of USDA official Shirley Sherrod after she was savagely smeared as a racist by FOXNews and conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart is, if not the most consequential, then surely the most egregious of Obama's retreats from the "common sense" approach to governance he promised during the campaign.

As it turns out, Sherrod is no racist but exactly the kind of person you would want in public service. Her “racist comments,” edited from a 43 minute speech into a seemingly damning two-and-a-half minute clip by Breitbart, were in fact part of rather inspiring tale of racial reconciliation with a white farmer in Georgia, whose farm she helped save over a quarter-century ago. The NAACP, which fell all over itself to condemn her supposedly contemptible remarks on Monday is now urging Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to rehire Sherrod, a call even Glen Beck echoed last night.

The White House, however, is sticking by its guns. On Tuesday, it announced that the president had been briefed on the situation and “fully supported” Vilsack’s decision, for which the Agriculture Secretary offered this half-baked explanation: “For the past 18 months, we have been working to turn the page on the sordid civil rights record at USDA and this controversy could make it more difficult to move forward on correcting injustices.” After outcry over the decision yesterday, Vilsack today said he is now reconsidering the matter.

The bottom line remains the same: a government official’s tale of personal growth and racial redemption gets spun by a bunch of right-wing hacks and the Obama administration capitulates like a scrawny schoolchild to the class bully. How about a “teachable moment” here, Mr. President? If you could trust the American people to understand the folly of a temporary suspension of the gas tax, can you really not trust them to see through this most shameless example of race-baiting?

Unlike many my age, I wasn't left weak at the knees during the ’08 election by visions of hope and change. Unlike many liberals, I didn't expect the dawn of a new New Deal. All I wanted was a president who might just call out a faux racism allegation for the load of crap it is.

I guess that was too much to ask for.

Whew. Now I Can Sleep Soundly in the Knowledge that Hobbes was Wrong About Monarchy

2010-06-27T17:12:00.005-04:00

Most people who have heard of Hobbes, it seems to me, know him only as an advocate of monarchy. They probably also know his famous phrase describing life without government: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Also, they’ve probably made the connection between Hobbes the philosopher and Hobbes the stuffed tiger (the connection being that both are cynical about human motives. Why Calvin was named for John Calvin, I’m still not sure).

But Thomas Hobbes is pretty important in a couple of ways. He was one of the first people to suggest that mind and matter are the same thing, for example. That argument continues to rage, but imagine coming up with the idea in the early 17^th century. Secondly, and more notably, Hobbes essentially founded modern social contract theory – a tradition in which Locke and Rousseau followed, and on which we’ve built much of our modern conception of government.

So it was with some trepidation that I set out to read Leviathan, his English-language masterwork. Presumably I wouldn’t find any ironclad arguments in favor of monarchy, but I might find some troubling ones against democracy, which would be all the more troubling to find in a text that had such an impact, if indirect, on democratic theory.

It turns out that all I really needed to fear was the prose. I’ve slogged through the first quarter or so of the book (through chapter XXI, and I’m not reading more), and the overall argument is interesting and thought-provoking. But the cornerstone of Hobbes’s best-known conclusion, like the cornerstone of Cartesian theology, is weak and incidental to the whole. Here’s the key paragraph:

And to compare monarchy with the other two, we may observe: first, that whosoever beareth the person of the people, or is one of that assembly that bears it, beareth also his own natural person. And though he be careful in his politic person to procure the common interest, yet he is more, or no less, careful to procure the private good of himself, his family, kindred and friends; and for the most part, if the public interest chance to cross the private, he prefers the private: for the passions of men are commonly more potent than their reason. From whence it follows that where the public and private interest are most closely united, there is the public most advanced. Now in monarchy the private interest is the same with the public. The riches, power, and honour of a monarch arise only from the riches, strength, and reputation of his subjects.

That is, whoever we pick as a leader, our good should be their good. Makes sense! In democracy, we do this by electing our leaders so that we can decide whether they’ve done well or poorly by us, and return the favor. In an absolute monarchy, the king or queen tries to advance the prosperity and success of the state, so that he or she can prosper as well.

Now, Hobbes thinks mostly in terms of war and peace (given that he published the book in the middle of the English Civil War, he can be forgiven for this). So, to him, it makes sense to put one person in charge, because if you have multiple leaders they may split into factions. As far as it goes, that’s absolutely true, and you don’t want infighting among your generals. But a monarch’s incentives are not so cleanly aligned with the state’s in times of peace. We don’t really need to look any further than, say, Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong Il to figure that out.

And…it’s that simple! Just like in Descartes, the noted conclusion hinges on a single, ill-supported assumption. In Descartes, it was the assumption that a perfect God would not deceive. Here, it is that “in monarchy the private interest is the same with the public.” That’s just not true, and it’s pretty obviously not true. As long as the monarch can live lavishly, with a minimal chance of rebellion and a decently well-fed and well-run military, they have no interest in the prosperity of the public. To put it lightly, absolute monarchy is not really the greatest idea ever: case closed. As for criticisms of democracy, they don't go much further than the fact that multiple people can disagree about things. I don't find this a troubling argument against democracy, but more like the central problem of philosophy itself.

I don’t mean, by the way, to slight philosophy in general by dismissing two of its greatest authors, or even Hobbes and Descartes in particular. Both people made enormous contributions in multiple fields of thought. And the bulk of Leviathan isn’t even taken up with arguments for monarchy, but arguments about good governance. As I said, Hobbes's main contribution – social contract theory – stands independently of his arguments for monarchy. Those arguments are still interesting and relevant, so I highly suggest you go read them (although by “read them,” I mean selected excerpts).

Are We Still Talking About This?

2010-06-26T10:57:00.003-04:00

Either Matt Yglesias is rehashing points that don't need to be rehashed, or the "national conversation" part of health care reform failed miserably:

After all, it seems to me that one of the big drivers of lack of productivity in the health care sector is the paucity of innovations that take the form of “not quite as good, but way cheaper.”

[...] If you say to yourself “this table’s 90 percent as good as the other one and only half the price, so now I can go take a fun vacation” you’ll feel like you made a savvy life choice. But if you say to your wife “this cancer treatment’s 90 percent as good as the other one and only half the price, so now I can go take a fun vacation” you’re going to be in a world of pain. Because in a lot of ways health care is more about the care than about the health. People don’t want a “good deal” the way they do on household appliances. So by and large we don’t get a good deal.

I've seen this point made lots and lots of times before, especially by Yglesias. It's an excellent point, but I submit that it should now be a point of departure and not a point in itself. Does Yglesias support 90%, low-cost options? Well, yeah. But it's not sufficient to raise the question provocatively anymore. And if it is, that sufficiency is itself a sign of our collective failure to advance the discussion.

Washington Post Does Wrong by Weigel, Readers

2010-06-25T22:07:00.004-04:00

Turns out McChrystal’s is not the only high-profile resignation this week.

The Afghanistan general’s departure is notable for the shocking indiscretion of McChrystal and his staff, and is clearly a tremendous shake-up for the military and political worlds. Dave Weigel’s resignation from the Washington Post doesn’t mean that much to those outside of the blogging world, but it is certainly notable: as undeserved as McChrystal’s was warranted, and a tremendous loss for the paper.

Weigel belonged to a center- to center-left listserv, run by Ezra Klein, called JournoList. Some member of that listserv went through old conversations (and some new ones) and found the most disparaging comments they could about conservatives, including a sarcastic suggestion that Matt Drudge should “set himself on fire.” That person succeeded in blowing up those excerpts into a big story; and for this, Weigel has resigned.

There has been an outpouring – an absolute deluge – of commentary on the event. I’m not going to link to it all. We have everything from a lament on the decline of journalism, aimed at Weigel (by Jeffrey Goldberg), to a cancelled subscription (by Bruce Bartlett). Most commentators seem to agree that the Post “hired Weigel…under the false impression that he’s a conservative.” The ellipsis in my quotation of Ben Smith may hide the appellation, “a liberal,” but the general agreement on that point is that Weigel is actually a left-leaning libertarian. He used to work for Reason, after all. Beyond that, the general agreement is that Weigel covered conservatism fairly and accurately. Not dispassionately: fairly. He defended conservatives from unfair attacks from the left, but he pointed out craziness when he saw it.

Anyway, Fallows makes the obvious connection, and two excellent points:

To say two other things: 1) Why is this different from the recklessness of Gen. McChrystal's associates, which I said couldn't be tolerated? Because there is a difference between the military chain of command and the varied menagerie that is any healthy news organization. 2) Might this episode mark a change in the digital-generation's tragic imagination about the consequences of "living in public" through social media etc? Yes, the emails shouldn't have been leaked, and even when they were the paper shouldn't have gotten rid of Weigel. But until now, many tech viziers have said that the whole idea of discretion and privacy was antique; that when all opinions from everyone were on the permanent record, nothing could prove embarrassing; that everything should hang out. Maybe not.

To the first point I will add, in further defense of Weigel, that he didn’t say anything about his bosses, and that the leaks didn’t demonstrate an appalling deterioration of organizational culture inside his department. And with the second point, Fallows is right on the money. Public and private are different spheres, and although I hope fervently that standards of public acceptability will change (higher in some places, lower in others) I wouldn’t wish to erase the boundary.

Fallows is, in fact, even more on the money than that: following the basic thrust of the narrative – Post thought Weigel was a conservative writing about conservatives, he said something disparaging about conservatives, they fired him - most bloggers have spoken less about the public/private dichotomy than about changing journalistic standards. Like Phil Klein, they point out that Weigel is as apt to make comments supportive of conservatives as disparaging: “I could just as easily report on private conversations in which he's revealed a fondness for Ronald Reagan, a willingness to vote for Bobby Jindal as president, and agreed that Van Jones should have been fired for his 9/11 trutherism.” And beyond that, they note, it’s simply inconceivable that reporters would not form opinions on their subjects. Since there’s no dishonesty on Weigel’s part in concealing his opinions, and he’s done a good job professionally, why fire him?

All the possible answers, it seems to me, hinge on the fact that Weigel made his remarks in a private forum, which later became public. Had he posted mean things about Matt Drudge on his blog, rather than on a private listserv, it would have been a fair moment for the Post to make a statement: we’re not Wonkette, we don’t treat people like that, we uphold higher standards of discourse. I would prefer a thousand flame wars bloom than have only the murky, often-dishonest Post op-ed page to read, but that’s their call. So is it the same thing when it turns out that he wrote those words in private, and they become the talk of the town? I think not. The only ways I can see that Weigel’s emails might discredit his journalism would be if they a) were as ridiculous as Helen Thomas’s statement about Jews, or b) constituted a pattern that they plainly did not. He didn’t go around telling everybody he knew how much he hated Matt Drudge’s guts; he sent an angry email about a specific grievance. That’s embarrassing, sure. But hey, it’s a free country.

Update: the post originally read "Gawker," instead of "Wonkette," for some reason unknown to me. I meant to emphasize respect in terms of civility, not in terms of propriety. Because that went out the window a while ago.

Affirmative Action and the SAT

2010-06-23T21:33:00.003-04:00

Racial diversity is a fascinating subject to me, especially that now (I think) the culture wars of the 90s have simmered down somewhat, and we may be able to discuss the issue with a degree of sanity. If only we could develop that capacity with regard to gender, or sexual orientation…

In any case, Sam Barr over at HPRgument has penned a thoughtful response to a recent Harvard Educational Review article on racial bias in the SAT, and its implications for affirmative action (a sympathetic Washington Post columnist's take here.) Barr concludes that affirmative action “isn’t the privileging of ‘justice’ or ‘compensation’ over ‘merit.’ It’s part of the search for merit…” That phrase – “the search for merit” – has exactly the kind of ring to it that would befit an article title or journalist’s catchphrase. But as with all such phrases, it needs a bit of unpacking before it can do service in an argument.

One might initially imagine the SAT to be neutral with respect to issues of discrimination. It is an attempt to measure, impartially and with minimal uncertainty, the capacity of the test-taker to (for example) process information and use it to perform cognitive tasks. Affirmative action advocates can argue that certain groups are behind because of historic discrimination, and need opportunities to level the playing field – but they can’t say that there aren’t aggregate disparities in whatever it is the test measures. The HER piece, however, casts pretty fundamental doubt on the quality of the tests themselves (in this case, the SAT).

So how does this produce an argument for affirmative action, rather than just against testing? Well, Barr doesn’t make the leap from merit as evaluated by tests to merit as evaluated by, say, hiring committees, but he certainly could. His implicit point seems to be that whatever ways we come up with of evaluating people – tests or otherwise – will, on net, be biased against minority groups. At least, that’s the provocative point that I hope he’s making. And the implication of that would be the following: as long as we live in a “race-conscious society” (to use his words), we need to take race into account when evaluating people, since we can’t avoid bias. I wouldn’t use the word “race-conscious,” but rather just “racial.” That is, we can’t ignore race if it’s a real thing. Indeed, race matters – like institutions and ideas (which also, it turns out, have consequences). Affirmative action, then, is part of the search for real merit, beyond the limitations of our ability to measure it.

And in all of this, I totally support Barr. But I do want to clear a couple things up: most importantly, I think he improperly maligns his opponents’ views. Quoting himself from a month ago, he suggests that, “In order to justify assessments of “merit” where blacks and whites perform differently from one another, you have to assume that they perform differently because they actually are different and immutably so: because blacks are dumber, or less cut-out to be firefighters.” In other words, because the anti-affirmative-action position assumes that tests are impartial, it must therefore believe that certain minorities are intrinsically inferior.

That suggestion is silly. If you assume a fair test, you don’t conclude that black people are inherently less capable than white people, but that the specific black people who took the test are, on average, less capable than the specific white people who took the test. Note that this is a possible outcome whether or not the black and white populations at large have the same aggregate abilities. It’s also possible that circumstances of upbringing or history, rather than the test itself, have produced the difference in outcomes, and therefore (assuming a fair test, and statistical significance) the difference in ability. This explanation is at the core of the traditional liberal argument for affirmative action, which Barr eschews.

His stronger point, which I agree with, is that we should not start with the assumption that the test is fair, but with the assumption that racial groups are inherently equal in their capacities. I contend that the two assumptions are not mutually exclusive, but since I’m unwilling to defend the fairness of the test I won’t belabor myself.

The final point I want to make is this. Barr, quite correctly, asserts that we need to think about race. Colorblindness is, for the time being, unthinkable. But how do we think about race? How do we change our evaluations in light of the possibility that they have bias? The HER article’s methodology was to look at so-called “Differential Item Functioning,” or questions certain groups do significantly better on than other groups. Do we weight the scores of participants in each group toward questions favoring their group (as the author of the original 2003 study suggests)? But what if some individuals are not exposed to whatever factors have influenced their group - do we tailor each individual’s test to him or her? Clearly, that would defeat the purpose of testing. Should we, then, just give disadvantaged groups a boost? Given Barr’s vision of affirmative action as “the search for merit,” I think that’s a pretty crude tool. My personal preference would be to massively de-emphasize standardized testing as an evaluative instrument…but I really doubt that’s going to fly with the general population. So what do we do?

As fun as this discussion is, it hasn’t yet really begun.

The Third Face of Continetti's Janus

2010-06-22T22:14:00.003-04:00

It may be that, at long last, the right wing has begun to take aim at itself, find a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, and attempt to harness productively the tremendous surge in anger and resentment that has propelled it these past two years.

(Note: I realize that the news du jour is Stanley McChrystal. But he may resign in the next 24 hours, so I’m going to wait till tomorrow or so to comment on that debacle).

There were inklings, of course, such as Jim Manzi’s epic takedown of Mark Levin a while back. But that post produced a fairly heated backlash against its author, which broke down along predictable (verging on stale) orthodox/heretic lines. This week, however, noted Sarah Palin defender Matt Continetti takes aim at TV personality Glenn Beck, in a Weekly Standard article entitled “The Two Faces of the Tea Party.” Those two faces are Beck, obviously, and Rick Santelli (he of the anti-mortgage-bailout rant). In a nutshell, Continetti takes the position that both Beck and Santelli channel a popular rage into anti-government arguments – but while Santelli makes reasonable, or at least arguable, economic points, Beck espouses conspiracy theories and nonsensical comparisons of the US left to evil dictatorships. That way, Continetti says, lies ruin, hearkening back to William F. Buckley’s good sense in casting out the Birchers (and the GOP’s bad sense in nominating Barry Goldwater). The best paragraph:

This is nonsense. Whatever you think of Theodore Roosevelt, he was not Lenin. Woodrow Wilson was not Stalin. The philosophical foundations of progressivism may be wrong. The policies that progressivism generates may be counterproductive. Its view of the Constitution may betray the Founders’. Nevertheless, progressivism is a distinctly American tradition that partly came into being as a way to prevent ideologies like communism and fascism from taking root in the United States. And not even the stupidest American liberal shares the morality of the totalitarian monsters whom Beck analogizes to American politics so flippantly.

And the closer:

The Tea Party cannot choose one face over the other; they are both part of the same movement. But the Tea Party can decide which face it puts forward. And in the coming days that decision will be of great consequence. It is the choice between Reagan and Goldwater. Santelli and Beck. Reform and revolution. Common sense and conspiracy. The future and the past. Victory—and defeat.

Continetti notes at the beginning of his piece that he is a “student in the exciting new field of Tea Party Studies.” Enter Dave Weigel, probably the preeminent TPS scholar in the blogosphere, who notes in his take on Continetti that weaning conservatives off “conspiracy theories” is “a tough task, given how they've indulged them so far. It was just this week that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck teamed up for a charity event.”

And there you have it. The hidden third face here is Palin, a curious entity who seems to belong to both camps and to none. (Kevin Drum termed her “sui generis” a couple days ago, which seems about right.) She doesn’t engage in Beck-like histrionics, but she does engage in platitudinous rambling, she is often ill-informed, and she advances highly dubious claims about the Democratic party. She has a dispositional optimism that belies, or tempers, her fundamentally critical political stances. She came from Wasilla, but it was the Republican elite who took her from Juneau. She served as governor of Alaska – but only for two years, before jumping off to join the media circus. She appeals to the Beck-style evangelical population, not the Santelli-esque, fiscal-conservative-social-apathetic crowd. Yet many of those sympathetic to Sarah Palin will find Glenn Beck obnoxious at best (in my limited experience).

Once you’ve drawn the extreme boundaries, the challenge is to fill in the rest. So the first question I have for the Tea Party is this. Mr. Continetti has drawn you his battle lines. Should you accept them, where stands Sarah Palin?

Work AND Life. Not Or.

2010-06-10T22:33:00.002-04:00

New Ordinary Gentleman Lisa Kramer (“gentleman” now being neuter, thankfully) has some advice about the home and work. After pointing out to the Front Porcher crowd that the ideal of self-sufficiency and withdrawal from corporate/consumer culture isn’t realistic for most of us – that we have to work to make a living – she says the following:

Work as a means to an end. Go into work on time, take pride in the task at hand, take the allotted lunch hour, leave at the agreed upon end of the day. Don’t ask for or expect a promotion. Avoid the temptation of the rat race by learning to want less stuff. Use vacation days and spend them at the beach in August, preferably one within driving distance. Spend time with friends; never network. Resist getting a Blackberry, and if that is not possible, turn it off every weekend and evening. Always put family first.

I struggle with the work-life tension. I do. But, while I fully admit that not everyone can have a fulfilling career, combine vocation and avocation, etc, I can’t be the only person who finds this vision depressing. The question we’re answering here, implicitly, is the big one: what is the meaning of life? Dadaist answers like 42 notwithstanding, we can parse out two visions from this paragraph – the one Kramer supports, and the one she (apparently) doesn’t.

The vision Kramer supports endorses interpersonal meaningfulness. Family comes first, followed closely by friends. The best times in life take place around a dinner table with good food and wine, and preferably a nice sunset. We work in order to purchase leisure.

The second vision – the modern, consumer- and corporate-oriented one – endorses social meaningfulness. Humanity comes first. We contribute to humanity by doing our jobs: from managing a large company, to doing nonprofit work with homeless shelters, to negotiating peace treaties, to selling groceries. Every service is used by someone, who almost invariably benefits. Together we advance.

These visions are both pretty compelling separately (IMHO), but we have to remember that they depend on each other. The quality of the time we spend with others has a lot to do with the material advances of the past millennia; to pretend otherwise would be sophistry. And those material advances have come on the backs of trade, the division of labor, and industrial production. Meanwhile, the reason we work so hard has a lot to do with quality-of-life issues. We want to eat good food, much of which (spice, for example) comes from afar as well as from home. We want to read good books, and watch good movies – perhaps to share them with our family and friends. We want to spend our time relatively free of disease and disorder, thanks to medicines which cost a lot of money to develop and manufacture, and doctors who cost a lot of money to train. We want to be educated, by educators who cost a lot of money to train. So on and so forth.

I don’t think I need to convince anybody that the second vision is depressing when taken in isolation. It’s the rat race. But I also find the first vision depressing because, by itself, it has no social purpose. How do I contribute to the human existence? How do I improve the human condition? How can I best use my talents and opportunities? I refuse to see these questions as an empty trap, or a mirage. And I refuse to go to a job that doesn’t answer them. If I have to, I look for a new job.

This is well-trod ground, and Kramer comes closer than most to a reasonably synthetic compromise position. But she still casts her advice as pro-family, anti-work, phrases like “take pride in the task at hand” notwithstanding. Yes, take pride in the task at hand. But don’t “never network.” Don’t not consider professional advancement. If you take pride in your work as a meaningful activity, you will inevitably do those things, because you want to improve. You want to improve yourself, and you want to improve the world – which can’t happen if everyone treats their job as a “pays-the-bills” enterprise, just as surely as it can’t happen if everyone blindly pursues their own wealth.

So here is my plea: can we not put together an aesthetic vision of the good life without begrudging the workplace or shortchanging the household? I am confident that we can.

P.S. I understand that evils have come of modernity. Spare me: there have always been evils. Let’s negotiate the evils of our era without wasting our breath in condemnation of anything other than the evils themselves. (To put it another way: go ahead and hate the player, because the game doesn’t exist without them.)

Links 06-06-2010

2010-06-06T09:39:00.002-04:00

Opinions I enjoyed reading about the real world, outside the philosophick aether:

What if Political Scientists Covered the News? The Monkey Cage links approvingly (and here's a good example of exactly what they're talking about). The short version of this, with respect to the BP spill, at xkcd. Which, incidentally, is why I haven't been following the BP story too closely. Because I'm with Dan Drezner on this one. Obama does not bear much if any responsibility for this. And we should stop pretending that he does.

Speaking of foreign policy, that whole Israel-Gaza-blockade-flotilla thing happened. Them's dangerous waters to tread in, opinion-wise, but what I love about the blogosphere is the utter disrespect for political orthodoxy or the conventions of political speech. So, Dan Drezner again, comparing Israel to North Korea. And Andrew Exum (pretty recent Penn alum!) calling Israel incompetent (operationally, not just with respect to grand strategy). My personal opinion coincides pretty well with Jonathan Chait's (Feel free to skip the first paragraph).

The poll numbers were apparently all kinds of screwed up in Colombia. But that's OK, because there's still a run-off in a few weeks, so they have another shot at it.

The Pill's fiftieth anniversary was this week. I won't link to the Front Porch's response, because I find it so appalling, and so empty. But the League links to it, and there's pretty good discussion in the comments so far. Regardless, the pill has had a bigger impact on us than the internet - and I couldn't say which will have been more important in a century - so it's worth thinking about deeply. Which is just about the only virtue of the FPR piece.

Yglesias responds to the claim that blogging is now an inevitably professional venture.

Descartes is Lame

2010-06-06T00:51:00.004-04:00

I’ve finished the first chapter of my summer reading project. I have read Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, along with several commentary essays on Descartes and on the Meditations particularly (from the Cambridge Companion to Descartes). He wrote widely about all manner of things, from geometry to physics to the existence of God. Fortunately, the Meditations provide a concentrated dose of his philosophical positions, clocking in at 64 pages in the Oxford World’s Classics edition. Even knowing how slowly you have to read philosophy, though, I was surprised by how easily I got bogged down. Anybody who discusses philosophy is familiar with some Cartesian arguments and conclusions, but it still takes dedication to get through the arguments bit-by-bit.

I could scarcely do justice to the foundational work of modern philosophy by cataloging all my impressions, which have no doubt been written elsewhere before (and which I will no doubt encounter all too soon in Hobbes and Locke). But I will note my predominating impression, which has to do with method.

Philosophers usually define philosophy as the attempt to answer certain questions rigorously – timeless, fundamental, in some sense unanswerable questions. It has very well-defined subfields clustered around different kinds of question. The three largest are metaphysics (the investigation of spiritual questions); ethics (the investigation of moral questions); and epistemology (the investigation of the question, how do we know things?) The Meditations, I found, place the three subfields in an interesting and problematic relationship to each other.

Descartes begins the Meditations with a position of extreme skepticism – doubting even the existence of material objects – in order to get to what is really, undeniably true. Thus, his project is epistemological. His most famous dictum is, after all, “I think, therefore I am.” Yet Descartes soon comes to the belief that his attempts at an epistemology depend on the existence of God. He proceeds from the assumption of his own existence, since he cannot prove the existence of anything else. But in order to prove anything else, he must combine that fact with other self-evident truths. And what if our belief in the principles of addition, for example, are just as suspect as our belief in the external world? If God exists, he could make us such that we believed pretty much anything he wanted us to.

I cannot help admitting, that, if indeed [God] wishes to, he can easily bring it about that I should be mistaken, even about matters that I think I intuit with the eye of the mind as evidently as possible

[…]

In order to remove [this doubt], then, at the first opportunity, I must examine whether there is a God, and, if there is, whether he can be a deceiver; since, as long as I remain ignorant of this matter, I seem unable ever to be certain of any other at all.

So Descartes moves from an epistemological question to a metaphysical question. Does God exist, and what is his character? He spends the rest of the Third Meditation developing his proof of God’s existence, which goes more or less as follows. Since all things must have a cause, and the cause must be as real as the thing caused, then our minds must have real causes. Since our minds are thoughts, they must come about from thoughts which are at least as real as they are, and which contain at least the same content (since something cannot come from nothing, the idea of a stone cannot come from a thought that does not have the idea of a stone already in it). Finally, since I am capable of producing the idea of a perfect and infinite God, even though I am neither of those things, it logically follows that such a God exists and caused my mind to come into being. Descartes includes a number of other logical steps which make his argument sound slightly less silly to modern ears, but that’s it in a nutshell. The key point is this: when it comes to establishing not just that God exists, but that he does not deceive us about fundamental logical principles, Descartes simply says that a perfect God would not do such a thing. That’s it; two sentences for the linchpin of Descartes’ whole argument (in my opinion). Here they are:

The whole force of the argument comes down to this, that I recognize that it cannot be that I should exist, with the nature I possess (that is, having the idea of god within myself), unless in reality God also exists – the same God whose idea is within me, that is, the one who possesses all the perfections that I cannot comprehend but can to some extent apprehend in my thinking, and who is subject to no kind of deficiency. From this it is sufficiently clear that he cannot be a deceiver: for all cunning and deception presuppose some shortcoming, as is plain by the natural light.

I find this paragraph utterly amazing. In a work known principally for its radical, pervasive doubt, the central ethical question of what a perfect God would do, and what should be the case in a justly governed universe, is completely glossed over, and the answer assumed a priori. Descartes goes through intellectual contortions to prove God’s existence. He is willing to assume, however tactically, that his most cherished belief is a lie. Yet once he has that proven to his satisfaction, he answers the further question of God’s nature with unexamined moral assumptions.

Leaving aside the impact of that omission on Descartes’ argument, I think its implications for philosophy in general are significant. The glossing-over of ethics in the Meditations is just a particularly striking example of the interdependence of the different philosophical subfields – and the not-always-objectionable practice of assuming one to proceed with the other. In order to make any ethical investigation, for example, you first have to assume some things about what humans are; what human nature is; whether God exists; if so, how he interacts with the world; etc. And in order to make epistemological claims, as Descartes points out, you have to make metaphysical claims.

And in this case, in order to substantiate a metaphysical claim, Descartes has to make certain ethical assumptions. Why would it be wrong to create deceived beings? What is God’s purpose in creating things in the first place? Is there a natural law to which God himself is subject? I find often that religious discussions about the existence of God hinge on exactly this sort of question. Take the old complaint, why does a just God allow evil things to happen? When someone’s belief in God is troubled by the injustices in the world, they probably conceive of God as a king-like figure who rules over the universe justly. That’s who God is, to them, and if you challenge the justness of God – that is, God’s moral responsibility for the state of the universe – then you challenge the existence of God. Because he wouldn’t exist if he weren’t just.

It’s worth remembering that the biggest philosophical question, to most people, is not, “how can I tell if I’m in the Matrix or not?”, but “what is the meaning of life?” In my opinion, we tend to subordinate questions of knowledge and spirituality to questions of ethics. The most common example is above: we assume a just God. That’s not necessarily so, of course; but if it isn’t then life has no meaning (to the people who assume a just God). And if we can’t give life meaning, well…there’s no point in doing anything else. To be fair, Descartes eventually suggests a meaning for life by encouraging us to contemplate the perfection of God. But I think he shortchanges ethical questions a great deal by failing to explain God's perfection - and I think he does so because he is unwilling to challenge his deeply held moral assumptions about the nature of God. For that reason, the Meditations left me with an impression, more than anything else, of hollowness.

In Which I Compare The Drinking Age to Property Qualifications

2010-06-03T22:55:00.005-04:00

OK, so this has nothing to do with Descartes’ Meditations. But while I was pondering the implications of the famous “I think, therefore I am,” I came upon this blurb at Inside Higher Ed, alerting me to this article on a study of drunk driving. As you know if you’ve chanced to talk with me on the subject at all, I feel strongly that the drinking age should be lowered or eliminated. But that doesn’t, of course, stop me from being saddened and bewildered by the thousands of tragedies we go through every year because people make the decision to drive intoxicated.

The study’s main finding is that college students become more likely to drive drunk or ride with drunk drivers as they get older, not less. Importantly, turning 21 seems to have a strong impact on students’ tendency to make those decisions. The first implication, then, is that we have been led “to the erroneous conclusion that existing college alcohol-safety programs are effective,” whereas “If college programs were successful, we should be able to at least prevent an increase in risky drinking and driving during the period the students are at the university.” Not sure I buy that entirely – who’s to say the exposure to positive messages doesn’t have a delayed effect in one’s mid-twenties? And for that matter, I imagine students seek more independent living situations around the time they turn 21 anyway. But if the researchers have found a strong enough effect, and it seems they have, the point is at least valid in part.

I do not think, however, as these researchers do, that this finding puts cold water on the anti-drinking-age position. I’ll let them talk first:

"There were noticeable increases in all three measures of alcohol-related traffic risk -- RWID, DWI and DAD -- when students reached the legal drinking age of 21," said Arria. "Our findings call into question the assertions of some advocates who claim that lowering the drinking age to 18 would be a useful strategy for reducing harm associated with alcohol consumption. The present findings are consistent with numerous prior studies showing that increased availability of alcohol is associated with a greater level of problems especially underage drinking-and-driving fatal crashes."

Both Voas and Arria said these findings support maintaining the minimum legal drinking age at 21. "In fact," said Arria, "lowering the drinking age to 18 would likely result in a surge of alcohol-related traffic problems given that younger students would have even less driving experience."

It is absolutely true that lowering the drinking age would not be “a useful strategy for reducing harm associated with alcohol consumption.” But a), that doesn’t mean it would increase harm, and b), that’s not the point. The researchers postulate that students who reach the drinking age with less driving experience will be more likely to drink and drive, and thus more likely to crash. Maybe, maybe, maybe. They certainly can’t argue that they’ve demonstrated that from their data. Moreover, driving experience is only one factor that goes into drinking behaviors. Cultural expectations and norms surrounding alcohol probably contribute more to drunk driving by increasing the likelihood of excessive drinking in the first place. If parents trained their children to drink in moderation, with meals, this problem might be solved or mitigated before a single person got behind the wheel of a single car.

And in any case, the point of lowering the drinking age is not to reduce harm caused by drunk driving, or even to reduce the harm caused by socially marginalizing the 18-to-21 population. It’s to give adults the right to make adult decisions. I imagine all sorts of harms are caused by 18-to-21-year-olds because they are gaining lots of life experience and responsibility at the same time. We probably vote for the wrong people, we definitely get into more trouble with the law, we screw things up at our jobs, we let food spoil and then get sick from eating it, etc. But everybody does those things. We only do those things a little bit more because we’re learning – in a dangerous world, like it or not. The path to responsibility is the freedom to make mistakes and suffer consequences.

We grant 25-year-olds a great many freedoms that they abuse. In fact, we grant 18-year-olds a similar number of freedoms – suffrage being only the most prominent. We give lots of rights to lots of people we know will abuse them, because that’s what rights are. We let men own guns, for example – even unemployed men under 30 living in urban areas. We let those same men drink. That’s downright criminal, if our goal is to reduce harm. Why shouldn’t your ability to drink and purchase dangerous weapons be conditionally based on your having a job? Better yet, since middle-class people are so much less dangerous than poor people, why don’t we let only employed citizens with a certain net worth buy liquor and guns? Yeah, and since they’re clearly the responsible ones, only they can vote or hold office!

Sounds like a plan to me.

My Summer Plans

2010-06-02T23:55:00.002-04:00

For those of you who are interested, I thought I would give you an outline of what I’m doing with my summer and what my blogging is going to look like.

In lacrosse, they say, “Aim small, miss small” – that is, if you set a difficult goal, falling just short won’t be so bad. I’m going to do something similar in spirit if different in principle. Rather than attempt to do one, specific difficult thing, I will attempt to do several, large difficult things. They are, to wit:

1. Keep up this blog. I’ve gotten my summer pretty well underway now. I’m all moved in and I’ve got a work routine going, so I should return to a regular blogging schedule starting about now.

2. Research and write a history of College Houses at Penn (roughly 1970 to the present). I am being employed by Penn’s office of College Houses and Academic Services for this purpose. It’s pretty cool, and will involve mucking around in the University Archives, as well as a lot of interviews with people around campus. I may contribute to the “history” portions of the House websites (taking DuBois’s as a model), as well as write a broader, philosophical history of the College House idea.

3. Read the basic works of modern Western philosophy, with particular attention to those that have relevance for American philosophy and for political philosophy. The for-sure authors are Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Madison/Hamilton, Mill, and Kant. I have already, thank God, read a little bit of Marx. If I have time, I’ll read Rawls and Nozick, because their names come up all over the place (FYI, I’m taking a class on American thought in the 19^th and 20^th centuries in the fall, hence the skipping of pragmatism). And this is not to mention the secondary materials I’ll have to read to make sense of all of this. For that, I’ll draw largely from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Cambridge Companions, and Oxford Bibliographies Online. Yes, it’s a lot of reading. No one had better tell me I need to read Sein Und Zeit! (I swear it’s funny. Click on it.)

4. Learn French (or start). Yeah, this one’s a bit of a tall order.

You may have gathered that there is positively no way to do all of this stuff at once. Since I’m going to read a lot of philosophy, much of it political, my blogging will change a bit. Rather than blog about whatever comes up in the news (which I’ll still do if it’s relevant), this blog will become a space for me to talk about political philosophy as I embark on my personal reading project. I won’t shoehorn analysis of contemporary events in here just to do it, but I will try to make connections.

Anyway, here is the reason all of these things go together, and the reason that I’m reading all those books outside of class rather than inside. My major is history, with a concentration in intellectual history. [Parenthetical: I often get the question, what is intellectual history? My definition is that the intellectual historian studies how ideas, events, and culture interact. This task is pretty broad – it can range from examining how one philosopher in one ivory tower influenced another philosopher in another ivory tower, to examining how Calvinist thought shaped the institutions of colonial New England.] As an undergraduate, I’m not required to have a particular research interest within intellectual history. But then again, I’m not required to have a concentration in the first place, and I’m not required to write a thesis, but I have to if I want to graduate with honors. And I have to be fairly knowledgeable if I want my thesis proposal to be accepted – hence, the ridiculous reading list. As for languages, if I want to go to grad school for this (and I very well may), I need to learn foreign languages. Multiple. To do modern Western philosophy right, you need English, French, and German. So, if it’s at all possible I’d like to pick up French on the basis of the Spanish I already have, and then take some German classes.

That ties together the blog, the languages, and the philosophy. Where does higher ed come in? In my particular research interests, which are in political philosophy and the marketplace of opinion. Who has had intellectual authority at different times, how did they get it, and what difference did they make to the beliefs and opinions of larger groups of people? To put it the other way, how did cultural trends and historical events change who got listened to, and how did that influence what was said and believed? The ultimate aim of this project could be, for example, to explain why the Tea Party movement seems so incoherent, drawing as it does on libertarian ideas while at the same time espousing nationalist and religious rhetoric. Or why business and government have become the two dominant subjects of public conversation (as opposed to, say, the objects of government themselves…) Or why economics and psychology have become the dominant academic disciplines in the public press. Because, among the many institutions that have shaped intellectual life, the university is one of the foremost. Implicit in our ideas about things like College Houses are also ideas about education more generally – indeed, about the whole project of academia and the life of the mind.

So, that’s my summer, the outline of the rest of my undergraduate career, and intimations of the rest of my life (frightening). I probably won’t talk too much about higher ed on this blog, because that’s pretty specific and I know people get bored easily. But I will talk political philosophy, and hopefully I’ll talk a fair amount of it. Hopefully, you will too.

Grad Schools Probably Shouldn't Have a Lottery

2010-05-25T00:27:00.004-04:00

Update 9:30AM: I forgot to link to this post from earlier in reference to professor Jackson. Mistake corrected. Also, to be clear, the kind of market I refer to at the bottom is a labor market.

Having just started work on an (awesome) research project on the history of College Houses at Penn, my mind seems increasingly drawn to higher ed politics when catching up on my RSS feeds. If such a thing were possible. Don’t worry, this will come back to national politics at the end! Albeit very tenuously.

The residential life of undergraduates – at Penn, at any rate – occupied a great deal of university institutional planning in the late 20^th century (from about 1970). Penn, being a research institution, is the kind of place that might be expected not to care about undergraduates, so its undergraduate development focus probably indicates a larger trend. “Intellectual labor should be seen to merge seamlessly with intellectual life,” proclaimed a commission on undergraduate education in 1989.

Yet the life of the mind has been under some pressure lately, not least from the appearance of William Pannapacker’s infamous Chronicle of Higher Education piece, “The Big Lie.” Accordingly, the higher ed focus has shifted from the mental life of the undergraduate to the career prospects of the PhD.

Among the concerns about PhD programs is their competitiveness – how can a department possibly choose two from among hundreds of applicants? Pannapacker’s answer would be to discourage all but the topflight from applying in the first place. Another popular answer is to institute a lottery. Penn’s own John L. Jackson, Jr (whom you may remember from this panel), is the latest person on the internet to float such an idea. Ironically enough, contradicting Pannapacker, he says there is an increase in the graduate applicant pool as “further credentialization becomes the reasonable response to a decimated job market.”

I’m OK with a lottery in principle. But once you poke at the idea, you find lots of caveats relating specifically to graduate schools in the humanities. First, while applying to grad school is not the same as applying to college, the pressure to spread apps around still holds. I don’t see a responsible way to institute a lottery system of any kind without a high degree of coordination among different universities. If every school has its own lottery, eventually every student will apply to every school. That simple. So the first principle has to be that schools coordinate their lotteries. In fact, every subject would have to coordinate a lottery among its departments in various schools. Because Wharton and Annenberg will be damned if they’re going to let a lesser Ivy League graduate business or communication program poach from their applicant pool just because both universities have good law schools (for example).

So what is the effect on the top tier? In undergraduate education, one can easily get a well-respected degree from 30 schools. If one does not intend to go into a PhD program, 50 schools. But as Brian Leiter notes, you need to go to a very strong PhD program (top ten or fifteen) if you hope to get a tenure-track position afterward. Would a lottery system take place only in these top tiers? If so, how sticky would that make departments’ reputations? How difficult would it be to jump up (or down)?

Maybe, let's say, you don't care about the top tier. Maybe we should resist the kind of reputational gamesmanship that prevails in the top echelons of academia, and just admit that at the far end of the bell curve things look kind of the same. At any rate, how good your department is at what you do may mean more than how good your department is generally. But this brings up a further point: departments have to match the research interests of their applicants with the research interests of their faculty. If you’re into the history of Renaissance Italy, and the big-deal Renaissance Italy professor at Top-Tier History U. just retired, nothing will make that program a good match for you. Ditto if the professor already has a full advising load. Oh, and this same concern means that a top-tier department in one subspecialty may not be top-tier in another.

So: in order to effectively run a PhD program lottery, different departments would have to coordinate lotteries; different tiers of quality would have to be recognized, perhaps down to subspecialties; and students would have to be matched pretty well with the advising capacity of a department. I don’t see how this can happen without a ranking system of some sort (which is what we wanted to avoid). The closest thing we have to a grad school lottery right now, that I know of, is the matching system of MDs to residency programs. That lottery does, in fact, involve a ranking of schools by applicants, and a ranking of applicants by schools. But here we return to the original problem, which is that departments have a hard time ranking applicants. Perhaps students could rank departments, and departments could put students into tiers? Perhaps the program could involve rounds of lotteries at different tiers, looking a little like this scheme?

When a centrally-administered matching system gets this complicated, it may be best just to leave things to an individually-negotiated market. I know markets are unfashionable these days. But I thought I’d throw that out there.

Specter vs Sestak tomorrow!!

2010-05-17T20:50:00.003-04:00

Hey all,

May 18 is the Pennsylvania Democratic primaries featuring Senator Arlen Specter and Congressman Joe Sestak. PPR had the pleasure of doing in-person interviews with both candidates in our past few issues.

If you are unfamiliar with the race, check out this front-page article on Politico.com:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37369.html

Best,

Bob

We're Back!

2010-05-14T21:54:00.002-04:00

Hello everybody! You may have noticed a certain…silence…around here in the last couple weeks. That’s because we were all hiding in the library or our rooms, studying for exams and writing papers. Well, not the whole time. But enough of it that we weren’t blogging, anyway.

But now all that’s over, and we’ve had a couple days to sleep it off. So, without further ado, let the blogging recommence! Here are my links for the last couple of days.

From Radley Balko, about the police raid in Columbia, MO which killed a family’s two dogs in the dead of night over what turned out to be minimal amounts of weed. A reader explains that SWAT raids in Missouri may, in fact, be less-regulated than military raids in Afghanistan.

Erik Voeten of The Monkey Cage explains some things about the Human Rights Council – or, more properly, its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights - based on research he did a few years ago. He seems to take the classic “agree with both sides” stance, but in a way that’s actually quite convincing.

I think Rod Dreher is interesting and you should read what he writes. Here he is talking about this article on the soul concept; and here he is talking about Pat Deneen talking about the humanities. I find that Deneen, as usual, has some excellent things to say mixed with some frustratingly insufferable things. It’s easier to digest via others, particularly via Dreher’s balanced (but not uncertain) takes.

I found those two topics quite fascinating with respect to a class I took this semester, entitled “The Intellectual History of Modern Europe.” The writers we read – and, I would comfortably venture to say, our professor – come down pretty squarely against the soul concept, but pretty squarely for the humanities as a non-positivist, understand-your-limitations approach. Indeed, those two elements formed the core of the class’s perspective. And the authors’ names? Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – the very founders of the postmodern discourse Deneen derides so readily. They don’t fit into boxes, these people. I'd really like to hear our professor - a quite postmodern liberal who is currently researching 20th century French philosophy - discuss the state of higher education with Deneen. (Freud, by the way, certainly did think of himself as a scientist but also argued strongly for the art of interpretation as a component of psychological investigation…so yeah, not a clean fit).

Right. So while we were out, Elena Kagan got nominated to the Supreme Court. Just venture into the internet and whisper her name; you’ll find opinions aplenty, so I’m not going to attempt a roundup. (Like this one!) I’ll just highlight a couple interesting things. Most of her former colleagues have nothing but good to say about her. You’ve probably read Lawrence Lessig’s piece, but here’s Sandy Levinson at Balkinization, and Sasha Volokh (brother of the eponymous Eugene) at the Volokh Conspiracy. Also, this rather interesting anecdote from Jim Lindgren, another VC blogger. Secondly, Andrew Sullivan continues to pressure Kagan to say something about - you know...(I discussed this problem at length a couple weeks ago). Finally, what all of you should do is read Kagan’s letter to the Harvard student body concerning the military recruitment thing (via Sullivan). I say this both because it’s going to be a topic of discussion and you ought to have the facts, and because (as Sullivan says) it’s a pretty good letter.

Yeah, we missed lots of stuff. The oil spill, the Arizona immigration thing, the British elections (actually, we didn't miss those!)…we may come back with some stuff about the past, but the present never moves backward so don’t count on it. But do count on a summer full of discussion – just one word of warning; we’ll be transitioning to WordPress at some point, so look out for that.

Enjoy the weather! Once it stops hailing golf balls outside my window (seriously, hail?!), I'll get back to enjoying it myself.

The Road to Disproportionality

2010-05-02T19:05:00.002-04:00

As i've written earlier, the United Kingdom faces a general election in just under a week (on the 6th of May). With that in mind I thought i'd take a break from my preferred procrastination technique of watching episodes of Friends to post on that again. In particular, I'd like to speak on how the UK election could serve as a harbinger of things to come her in the US. Like the US, the UK uses the First Past the Post electoral system, where geographically defined districts (constituencies in the UK parlance) are won by whichever candidate earns the highest proportion of the vote. The system has vast and obvious opportunities for disproportionality. One example is that because any vote you receive beyond what is necessary to make you first is wasted, the geography of your electoral strength matters more than its size in numbers of people. Consider the US presidential elections, themselves set up on a kind of FPP where whichever candidate wins the most votes in a state carries that state, and the magnitude of victories is considered irrelevant. In 2000, despite the goings on in Florida, this enabled Al Gore to lose the election despite a clear victory in the Popular vote. Similarly in 2004, a few more votes for John Kerry in Ohio would have seen him winning the presidency despite Bush's clear popular vote lead. in 2008, President Obama won what in popular vote terms was a fairly moderate margin of victory, but amounted to a landslide in electoral vote terms.

But so long as the party system boasts only two important parties, this problem is kept largely under control. Despite the potential for abuse, party's popular shares of the vote typically have a strong correlation with their ability to win seats.

The UK demonstrates however what happens when more than two parties are important. If parties have important regional bases, like the Unionist and Nationalist outfits in Northern Ireland, or the Welsh and Scottish Nationalist Parties, then they can do fine under FPP. But if a party lacks a regional control and aspires to true national nature, it can truly mess things up. Observe that just 35% of votes were cast for the british Labour Party in 2005 but that gave them a large majority of the seats in the House of Commons, and enabled a government 2/3rds of Britons had voted against to stay in office. This was made possible by the Liberal Democratic Party, which won 20% of the vote but less than 10% of the seats. If more than 2 important parties run in a seat, then it can be won under FPP with far less than 50% of the vote. As we approach the new election, it seems increasingly likely that the same thing will happen. This time it is the center right Conservative Party that looks likely to get around 35% of the vote and a majority of the seats. 2/3rds of britons will again vote against a party only to see it win power. the Tory leader, David Cameron, justifies this as essential to ensuring strong government, and that a "hung" parliament (one where the seat allocations might actually represent the will of the people) would send the country in crisis. Skeptical observers, including many Lib Dem supporters, are quick to note that the last time the Conservatives had a "strong government" they introduces Neo-Liberal reforms that most of the population loathed and which were possible only because of the FPP system that meant that Lady Thatcher never needed the support of the people to pass them. More importantly, they note that the country's present economic crisis was brought to them by the "strong government" of Labour's hefty parliamentary majority. If he wins this week, David Cameron will no doubt claim a strong right to pass measures that will be deeply unpopular with a majority of the electorate, and even though proportional representation has been put in place in Wales, Scotland and London at the regional level, it is likely that so long as the Tories win a seat majority, they will kill any talk of national reform (their party after all, has a toxic reputation with far too many voters for it to have much shot of getting a true majority any time soon). But eventually UK voters will have to answer the question: Why let governments that won thin pluralities impose their visions on an electorate that overwhelmingly voted for others?

As I watch the ongoing crisis of the Tea Party here, I wonder when another electoral third party will arise. It is not too bizarre a question. in 1992 Bill Clinton was probably let into office by Ross Perot's siphoning of conservatives from Bush Snr. If Perot's supporters had organized at a congressional level, running as a third party in the 90s, they probably would have split the right and eliminated the Republican Revolution of '94 from history. And of course we all remember that it was Ralph Naders siphoning of left wing votes that let Bush win the 2000 election.

How long will it be before a third party arising to impose disproportionality on our own electoral system, making a mockery of its democratic character? And when it does, will we have the good sense to see what more and more Britons are indeed seeing: that FPP is an obsolete system, designed and intended for a pre-modern era long gone, and that in a country where the average congressional district represents hundreds of thousands of people, having a "local representative" is meaningless?

Paralysis and Ill Omens: What next for Iraq?

2010-04-26T15:12:00.002-04:00

After all this time, there is no obvious end in sight for Iraq's post-election wrangling. Faction representatives have sojourned off to Riyadh and Tehran (word is the next trip will be to Ankara), and it seems like everyone is trying to gather support from the neighbors rather than negotiate for Iraq among themselves. With the exception perhaps of Turkey (which wants a strong Baghdad to counter Kurdish ambitions that might stretch into Turkey's vast Kurdish region) none of Iraq's neighbors have an interest in a strong Iraqi state that might threaten themselves. Saddam played bogeyman not just to Iran, but also to Saudi Arabia and even Baathist Syria. None of those countries want a return to a powerful Iraq that can claw back the share of the Middle East power balance that those countries divided up after the First and especially the Second Gulf Wars. All are also probably committed to crushing Democracy in Iraq, as a successful entrenchment of freedom there would be a harsh blow to the regional status quo.

Iran is pushing for a grand coalition of the Shia religious parties with the Kurds and some token Sunnis, essentially the 2005 result, that would leave the Secular Nationalists (who won a plurality in the election) out in the cold and keep Iraq on Iran's side. Riyadh and Damascus likely want national unity governments that put Allawi in charge at the head of a complex government of all sides, that will keep Iraq running but struggle to make decisions. The US for its part wants to push Maliki and Allawi together, claiming the nationalist center and moderating religious power without excluding it.

The longer this process takes, the more time the existing elites have to try to entrench their position. Maliki has successfully pushed the Electoral Commission to recount votes in baghdad in the hope it will give him the slight edge he needs to become the plurality winner (and the negotiating power that would lend). Iraqqiya, largely absent from the bureaucracy and hence any structural support, can do nothing to stop this, or the more serious threat to itself: the return of De-Baathification which threatens to strike a couple Iraqqiya candidates out of their seats AND disqualify their votes entirely (ie: the seats will not be able to pass to other Iraqqiya men). The De-Baathification board remains under the control of INA stalwarts, including Lami and Chalabi, both of whom won pitifully few votes in the election and are mere maniacal ********. Chalabi in particularly likely still loathes Allawi for supplanting him as key Secular opposition leader in the 1990s, that loathing and his own lust for power drove Chalabi to join the otherwise religious INA.

Many factions of the INA now seem to want to disqualify both Maliki AND Allawi as Prime Minister candidates, even though the two won massive personal vote counts in Baghdad and were the clear choices for PM by about 60% of the national electorate and about 75% of Iraq's Arabs. The INA strategy is to tear SOL apart by pushing Maliki out, then push its own man as PM, pulling in some dissident Iraqqiya factions if it can. This outcome would be a travesty for Democracy.

The only, albeit imperfect, alternative is for Maliki and Allawi to join forces. Together they can form a strong majority without even needing Kurdish support (though they could pick off Gorran for a moderating Kurdish presence). Once their alliance is settled it would enable the state machinery to turn against its INA puppet masters. Maliki's ego is clearly astronomical, so the best option is probably to give him the PM's chair while giving Iraqqiya a cabinet majority (and crucially, the Defense and Interior positions) and putting Allawi as either Deputy Prime Minister or President.

Although rumors abound, it seems that possibility remains remote, atleast so long as Allawi and Maliki both cannot set aside their egos.

Read Noah Millman

2010-04-26T15:10:00.002-04:00

Here I am again, writing about political philosophy when I should be writing about early Freudian thought…or possibly about Hindu mythology or family stories…This one is brief, though, and I only include it because I want to pass along something that deserves a really wide readership.

Noah Millman of The American Scene has written some basic “notes toward a new political taxonomy.” Here’s the intro:

It has become clear to me over the years that one of the causes of persistent confusion in our political arguments is the interchangeable use of taxonomic terms that, while they may have a natural affinity, are not actually synonyms.

Three terms that tend to get used interchangeably are:

Left
Liberal
Progressive

Their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum are treated similarly:

Right
Conservative
Reactionary

Millman then draws a left-right line, a liberal-conservative line, and a progressive-reactionary line. They hardly pretend to be completely new, in that most political types have seen these classifications somewhere before, but putting the three axes next to each other makes for really interesting discussion. (For example, Orwell is a “liberal, left-wing reactionary.”)

My response to Noah is simple: when speaking of political discourse, there is one fundamental axis to consider, which lies between those who tend to categorize people according to polarities (that is, place them in groups), and those who tend to categorize people along descriptive axes (that is, according to how well their beliefs fit answers to fundamental questions).

Now, see how much less simple that was than “there’s two kinds of people in the world?” Much less simple. So you can be sure this won’t catch on, but it’s illuminating nonetheless. And I do find it pretty accessible, so kudos to Noah if this starts a conversation.

P.S. hilzoy pops her head into the comments section. Those of you who care know that this is kind of a big deal.

In Which Queer Theory First Appears on This Blog

2010-04-24T01:31:00.005-04:00

This is the sort of topic into which I normally don't like to wade, but in the last couple weeks there have been two flare-ups around a public person's ambiguous sexuality. First, a CBS blogger referred to possible SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan as "openly gay." Since, if she is gay, she is not open, this prompted a harsh response from the White House and a lot of conjecture about her sexuality. Secondly, a conservative activist challenged Lindsay Graham to "come out of that log cabin closet." Which prompted this Colbert segment.

Statements on Kagan's orientation have ranged all the way from Brad DeLong, who opined that "The dominant view is that Elena Kagan is not a lesbian," to Julian Sanchez, who contradictorily said that "it was as unremarkable (and unremarked upon) to hear a reference to Kagan and her girlfriend having been at such-and-such an event as it would be to hear that Antonin Scalia and his wife had been seated across the table." The gap between DeLong and Sanchez may mean little more than ignorance on DeLong's part. But even so, it also indicates a big problem with discussing the matter at all: if they want to keep it private, who are we to speculate? Sanchez takes the position that it doesn't matter until someone has a long-term partner (at least if they're being confirmed by the Senate). That makes sense: mental state = private/subjective, behavior = public/objective.

This post by Jason Kuznicki - an excellent meditation on how gays relate to "ex-gays" similarly to the way straights relate to gays - reaches a similar conclusion (emphasis added):

Being an openly gay man means asking people to credit my inner experience in a way that, in Popperian terms, is not falsifiable. I declare that I’ve always felt this way, that I’ve never sincerely been attracted to women, and that I really, genuinely find intimacy with my husband appealing rather than uninteresting or repulsive. That’s just how I am, I ask you to believe, and I ask for this belief on no evidence whatsoever. And guess what? Most of you believe me!
It seems only fair, then, that I should credit others’ affirmed internal experiences as well, even if I can’t falsify theirs, either.
[...]

Thus: If ex-gays live up to the change that they declare has happened, and if they are happy with themselves, then I have no business doubting
[...]
Consistently crediting everyone’s affirmed internal experiences produces a very different picture of human sexuality from either the gay or the ex-gay conventional wisdom. It suggests not only that our sexual orientations are diverse as to object, but that they are diverse as to mutability, too. It appears that some people can change, and that others probably can’t, at least not by the methods they’ve tried.

The difference between Sanchez's and Kuznicki's positions, of course, is that the former is pragmatic - we should question the sexuality of public figures inasmuch as their sexual behavior applies to their job. Kuznicki gets to the philosophical heart of the matter. We shouldn't doubt another person's mental experience, since we don't have access. Not only does this position suggest that we shouldn't question whether a person's self-description is correct, but it also suggests that we shouldn't even ask for such description.

It is in this context that Sullivan says, "Kagan and Graham need to understand that kinda-ask-sorta-tell can't work anymore. And the choice to clear the air is theirs' if they want to take it." Both Sanchez and Kuznicki would seem to oppose demanding a position from public figures, either since it's none of our concern or because sexuality can be a fluid thing anyway. Sullivan, too, does note that "I remain opposed to outing anyone except the most hardcore hypocrites." So what are the circumstances under which we can ask someone to give us a position on their sexual orientation? Should we only bother when they're up for a seat on the Supreme Court, and then only if they have a long-term partner? Is it just a matter of public interest?

The biggest question is this: Sanchez notes that "some folks (myself included!) would consider it a nice milestone to have the first openly gay justice." The sexuality of our public figures has become intensely political in a time when gay rights are gaining momentum, perhaps permanent momentum. At the same time that this shift has happened, people following (in part) Kuznicki's logic increasingly question the binary opposition of straight and gay. We are all familiar with the acronym LGBT. Recently, the letter Q has begun to appear at the end. More recently still, I saw a use of the acronym LGBTQQIA (ahem: Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered Queer Questioning Intersex Allied). It has gone from an attempt to describe behavior that is deviant, to also including deviant physical descriptions. And the final word, allied, has particular significance, since it expands deviant behavior from the sexual domain to the political. The acronym now means not "people who don't fit the model," but "people who don't agree with the model." Has the gay rights movement transitioned fully from the demand for justice by a marginalized group to a philosophical debate between two radically opposed notions of sexual behavior? And is this transition productive?

If we're still engaged in a struggle for the rights of gay people, then we should think about pressuring public figures to be out and proud. If, however, we're trying to bring down the heteronormative paradigm, being out loses a lot of its meaning, and demanding that someone be out goes against the nature of the project.

Some Things I Enjoyed Reading Recently

2010-04-20T14:58:00.003-04:00

1. Apparently you just can't dig deep enough into Stephen Ambrose's academic misdeeds. According to the Deputy Director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, Ambrose exaggerated the number of hours he spent interviewing the former president...by a factor of at least 100.

2. Every year, we talk about how every year college admissions are more selective. Kevin Carey at the Chronicle of Higher Education tells us to cool it down a little bit, since the trend is probably not an increase in qualified applicants, but in unqualified applicants and qualified applications. Then he dangles the possibility that we'll have to resort to an out-and-out lottery for the more selective institutions, if every qualified applicant applies to all of them anyway.

3. Meanwhile, we have here the first sentence of the DP's Penn Previews coverage: "In the past two weeks, high schoolers descended on Locust Walk, Penn paraphenalia [sic] in hand and parents at their sides, hoping that a campus visit will help them make the most important decision of their lives." I will confess I made it no further than that.

4. Douthat has some fun things to say about conservative intellectualism. Goldman, you catching this? Here's the main thrust:

Think of American conservatism as divided into three spheres: There’s the elite world of pundits and intellectuals...the broader world of “the movement”..., and then the institutional world of the Republican Party.... Obviously these spheres blur into one another: pundits and intellectuals show up on Fox News, politicians become movement celebrities and then transition back to being politicians again, some think tanks look a lot like pressure groups, etc. But I think it’s still a useful way of dividing up a sprawling and diverse ecosystem.

The intellectual right, he says, is perfectly open-minded and has lots of opinion diversity. But the movement does not, and the movement has taken over the institution. Fair enough on that point. But why undermine your argument by mentioning the Weekly Standard as an "intellectual" outlet rather than a movement operation? I mean, it's Bill Kristol we're talking about here. He of the "kill the bill" HillaryCare memo. He of this NYT column. National Review and National Affairs I do get, though, and one of the most amazing facts to me about the US right is that Pat Buchanan publishes an interesting magazine which gives Daniel Larison a job. (Oh, and to everybody: the "epistemic closure" debate is...thick. Wade in at your peril).

5. Wow. The Lower Merion rabbit hole goes deeper. Someday I may write a piece weaving this narrative with the flash mobs narrative, because they're really really interesting. But today is not that day.

6. Here's your 4/20 link. Jason Kuznicki opens by labeling the War on Drugs as "the single worst violation of liberty perpetrated by our government." And he moves forward from there. One of the most frustrating parts of political action is that victory often goes to the side which can summon the most outrage - hence, the impossibility of lowering the drinking age. It's the same deal with drugs, so while I'm not really a fan of outrage, good job Jason for putting together the argument from moral outrage against the drug war.

Why We Need Immigration Reform

2010-04-19T12:31:00.006-04:00

It remains to be seenwhether President Obama will tackle cap-and-trade, immigration reform, or financial reform (most likely) in the coming weeks.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it's immigration reform.

Immigration reform efforts always seem to split along cultural lines, despite it being an issue that transcends such divisions.

Let's look at it in two lights. First, and most importantly, immigration reform is a fiscal issue because of the myriad of implications illegal immigrants have on an economy.

A path to amnesty (something you'll unfortunately rarely hear from the right) is the most logical destination for reform if one wants to give the economy a boost- something we desperately need in a recession.

If we give illegal immigrants a chance to earn their citizenship- which can be done through English tests and other measures- we would raise approximately 44 billion over the next decade. Unlike healthcare reform, that's an easier number to calculate. Why? Because once legalized, immigrants will be subject to the same taxes every American deals with- including social security taxes, income taxes, etc. By adding newly legalized immigrants onto the Social Security rolls, we could theoretically increase the lifeline of Social Security- more people paying taxes, more revenue.

Additionally, enacting reform would prevent corporations and big business from exploiting the illegal workforce for a cheaper salary and abusive hours. Yes, illegal immigrants do take jobs that Americans could fill. Amnesty presents an easy solution to that problem; by giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, we will level the playing field- illegal workers would be subject to a minimum wage, both improving their own livelihood, and giving American workers a more even surface on which to compete for jobs (the idea of cheap, illegal labor would cease to exist).

Then there's the second argument, the moral one, for a road to amnesty. Do we really want to deport millions and millions of people, many of whom have families and jobs and communities? Or do we want to assimilate them into our culture, give them an opportunity to realize the American dream, and allow them to help our country expand into the 21st century?

Immigration reform is not as black and white as it might seem. But with reform comes the idea of border security, which is necessary to our country's protection especially considering the escalating drug cartel violence currently seen on the Texas-Mexican border. It's a multi-faceted issue that could provide our country with a sea of possibilities, economic and cultural, while making our country safer and securer.

Unlike some other reform efforts, this one really and truly makes sense. Immigration reform doesn't require CBO gimmicks, payoffs to lobbyists, or a doctor-fix. It only requires that we realize the opportunity in front of us, that the oftentimes hard-working, family-building class of illegal immigrants came to this country for a reason, and we should work to find a way in which they can transform those reasons into reality.

In Which I Take a Thought by Al Filreis and Run With It

2010-04-19T03:22:00.003-04:00

For those of you who don’t know, noted Penn professor Al Filreis has a blog and it’s really quite good. Among his recurring topics of interest is the changing nature of writing in the 21^st century, particularly the implications for poetry and for education. Go here for his brief “manifesto,” entitled “Planning to Stay.” It’s the most provoking pedagogical musing you’re likely to see anytime soon, and it’s not even exclusively about the classroom.

I’m interested today in some thoughts which are exclusively about the classroom, specifically the seminar room. Filreis sketches out several kinds of “seminar,” ranging from a corporate commercial event, to a series of lectures with a research assignment, to the free-form discussion around a table that most of us associate with the word. The critical element of the seminar (in its academic meaning) is “an expectation that learners will participate in the making of the lesson.”

Filreis then makes a distinction between openness of process and openness of content. “But the so-called Socratic Method,” he notes, “leads learners through a discussion in which freely volunteered answers to questions lead inexorably to the lesson the teacher had in mind from the start…[it is] open by process, closed by content.” That is, many seminars do not really allow the learner to participate as fully as we imagine them to.

I am not sure this means that the seminar “has become the perfect tool of hegemony,” however. It has more to do, I think, with a crisis of purpose that has mixed together different ideas of education, to unclear results, than with the assertion of a hegemonic agenda. Though I will grant you that both could very well be true.

In any case, the ideas being mixed are radically opposed notions of education as the transfer of knowledge, on the one hand, and as a collaborative and open-ended process of discovery, on the other. The former separates research out of the classroom; research is equal to learning in the latter. If we were being very simplistic we might describe the former as facts and the second as skills, but of course that’s not it entirely. A student who does not develop some skills in the course of listening to a professor lecture has not listened very well – or at least, is listening no better than they did at the beginning. Meanwhile, a student who goes through the course of a seminar without absorbing any facts has done an even worse job of learning. A better framework to use is the one Filreis gives: open-content versus closed-content. To teach an open-content class means “to lead a truly open discussion (in which the endpoint topic cannot be predicted at the outset).” To teach a closed-content class means to set goals in advance: what facts, what ideas, what skills the students will gain by the end of the instruction period.

But all classes are closed-content in at least one respect. If I am in a class on the intellectual history of modern Europe (which I am), and we discuss the diplomatic history of ancient China, or the biology of weevils, or the NFL draft, we are not doing a good job unless those things bear on the initial subject. Now, the research paper associated with this class can be very loosely connected to the course description – I am spending a lot of time with the development of academic psychology in the United States, for example – but it does have to be relevant to some aspect of it (in this case, Sigmund Freud).

That, of course, is the weakest claim to be made on behalf of content closure. A stronger claim would be that the professor must acquaint the students with the state of scholarly discussion on the class’s topic. To that extent, the professor will guide discussion so that the students can engage with ideas that have been deemed important. Here we find ourselves halfway between learning-as-fact-absorption and learning-as-research. Students are free to explore the subject, even to push back on the professor’s formulation of it, but the professor gives them a starting point.

So the difference between a strongly closed “Socratic” seminar and a weakly closed one is the nature of the professor’s goals. If the professor sets out to impart facts to the students, the class might as well just be a lecture. If the professor sets out to lead students to a certain conclusion, he or she will in fact be using the seminar as “the perfect tool of hegemony.” If the professor sets out only to keep the discussion focused in the areas where he or she can answer students’ questions, the seminar is closest to a “truly open discussion.” What a professor should do, in my opinion, is a bit stronger: set out to acquaint the students with important questions and with possible ways to ask questions. This is not a particularly novel vision of education, but it’s one that I think has found broad agreement, and it needs to be spelled out more clearly than it has been as the focus of a seminar.

The question I have, then, is whether seminars and lectures should be considered equivalent to each other, credit-wise. Certain introductory classes, notably in philosophy, are often taught as seminars as well as lectures. Should that be the case? We have attempted in most of our introductory classes to mix the two: the professor lectures for two thirds of the week’s time, and graduate students lead discussion for the remainder. Again, does this make sense?

Here we run into something really challenging. Filreis is a partisan against the lecture as an educational tool. I agree with him, and think that the lecture has definitely, definitely outlived its usefulness. Of the things that a class in university can do – impart information, force a student to engage actively with material, help students to work through material, give feedback, provide a forum for discussion – lecture does only one, which can be done just as easily through videotaped lectures and a good reading list. But many courses have the lecture-style goal that students will learn and retain a set of facts or a set of concepts. Many courses are prerequisites for other courses, or for careers in things such as medicine.

We will continue to evaluate students on their retention of information in addition to their analytical skills. But we might, however, stop gathering students together for the purpose of taking in that information. Can we think of seminars as constituting a course in the same way that a lecture does? Probably not. If we get rid of the lecture, what does that do to our conception of the college course? And what does that in turn do to the credit structure of university learning? Finally, do we have to replace lecture with seminar? It would be beyond wasteful to have a college course at a place like Penn which did not involve group activity of some kind. What are the possible in-between kinds of gatherings?

I started this post thinking about how best to run a seminar class, and I’ve ended it with questions about the basic structure of postsecondary education. This train of thought, if nothing else, should convince you of the benefits of “open-content” discussion. The drawbacks are there as well (have I missed something somebody important said on the subject?), but it's certainly worth thinking about. As most ideas are.

Obama Emails

2010-04-18T16:34:00.002-04:00

Has anyone been getting fed up with the Obama for America listserve emails? The volume of the emails doesn't bother me, its the content. They are tailored to be extremely manipulative and represent very complex issues in an extremely simple way. Both sides are guilty of this, I'm sure that if I were on any sort of Republican emailing list i would be saying the same thing. But the fact that these emails assume that we the people have a zero intelligence level and will just lap up whatever rhetoric is floated our way is just a little insulting.

Towards an Upset in the UK?

2010-04-16T15:50:00.003-04:00

With a General Election looming across the Pond, most observers (myself included) have been predicting the return to power of the opposition Conservative (or Tory) Party. Labour, the party of Tony Blair and more recently Gordon Brown, has been held Downing Street since 1997, weathering a fierce contest in 2005 where they won a majority in the House of Commons with just 35% of the vote. This result possible because the UK, like the US, utilizes the First Past the Post plurality district system, but unlike the US has 3 large national parties and several powerful regional ones, meaning that parties can win seats with far less than 50%.

But all eyes have shifted off David Cameron's Conservatives today and onto the Third of those big parties. The Liberal Democrats, currently led by Nick Clegg (pictured). Though they have never been in government, it is wrong to dismiss them so simply. They were formed from a 1988 merger between the Social Democrats (a centrist fragment of the Labour party that broke off in the 1970s believing the hard left had taken over the party) and the Liberal Party. The old Liberal Party has an impressive political pedigree. It was the main party of the Left until the 1920s, introducing under its tenure the initial basics for the welfare state. It led Britain during the First World War, and routinely swapped power with the Conservatives in the 19th century. Left-wingers of the Clinton variety, the historical Liberal party were Free Traders as well as social engineers. The Depression proved fatal to them, as the rising force of Labour consumed the Left and much of the Center. The Liberals seemed at times on the brink of electoral oblivion, clinging on to seats in Parliament more because of their tribal-esque support in some parts of Wales, Scotland and Cornwall, after the English seemed to have abandoned them. In more recent years the Lib Dems have proven a more robust third party, able to reliably call on between 15 and 20% of the vote. Though the plurality based electoral system has not always treated them well.

That may be about to change. Last night the UK held its first ever televised leaders debate. In a coup for the party, Clegg was allowed to compete on equal standing with PM Gordon Bron and David Cameron. By almost all accounts he was a roaring success. The audience and most observers have declared him the winner. He successfully lambasted both the government and the alternatives offers by the Tories. At a time when Britons are deeply disgusted in their political class, the LibDems lack of participation in government for decades seems more a blessing than a curse. His Success actually builds off that of his nominee for Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) who was considered by many observers the winner of an earlier debate among the existing Chancellor and the Lib Dem and Tory candidates.

The question now is whether the Liberal Democrats can translate their sudden burst of popularity into solid gains in the political middle. Some snap polling suggests they may have gained votes, perhaps even putting them within striking distance of Labour. It is unlikely they will win the election. But they have the best chance their party has had in a very long time. If they can make gains at the margin from both Cameron and Brown, they could atleast push themselves into a post-election coalition. The key is for them to start pushing themselves as a credible government. They have to stop branding themselves as a "check on power", as is their habit. People have to start thinking of this election as a three-way contest.

The Conservatives have started attacking Clegg today. This may be a sign they fear his new found powers. Gordon Brown has been more careful, for the moment at least he may be hoping that the problem will go away if ignored.

Civility and Political Debate - A Debate

2010-04-14T01:08:00.003-04:00

Update: Ten minutes after I posted this, the DP posted their article. Pretty straight-ahead coverage.

Penn has some big names and big connections, and it’s always gratifying to see them come together and discuss important things. The names at the David and Lyn Silfen Forum yesterday were Amy Gutmann (moderating), John Jackson, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, John DiIulio, Andrea Mitchell, and Jim Leach. That’s three VERY distinguished professors, a famous TV person (also on the Board), and a former Congressman currently chairing the National Endowment for the Humanities. (Full disclosure: Professor DiIulio has a hand in the funding of Penn Political Review through the Fox Leadership Program.)

What’s more, they said some cool things! In fact, a lot of the conversation ended up being about new media and the internet’s capacity to speed up discussion, to produce echo chambers, etc. One insightful comment came from John Jackson, who runs a blog over at the Chronicle of Higher Education. In a nutshell, he asked whether the tendency of the internet to make public space feel private didn’t extend to other arenas of conversation. I’m not sure what the answer is, but the internet can certainly be a very intimidating and mean place at times. Comment threads do not exemplify the values of civic discourse, to put it lightly.

All the participants at some point brought up the temptation to “fight fire with fire.” We should resist it, they concluded, in favor of the high road – most notably, we should resist the temptation to call out our opponents on deceitfulness because accusations of lying “debase the conversation.” Where the panelists were less clear was on how exactly to do that. DiIulio came down pretty hard on the side that there simply must be individual responsibility and individual honor. But as some others pointed out, and as Gutmann emphasized during the reception afterward, there are important structural incentives toward extremist rhetoric. Mitchell certainly conceded the need to write a good story, for example.

The questions that get asked at these sorts of thing don’t tend to be great, on the whole. But the last question was a particularly good one. A middle-aged African American woman told the panelists how proud and excited she had been for Obama’s inauguration. And yet, mere months later there were posters of Obama as the Joker and Hitler. How, as a grandmother, could she explain this to her grandchildren and help raise them to listen to the news and to be involved politically? Several panelists, notably Leach, suggested that she hold up Barack Obama to them as an example. And here, at the very end, they seized on Obama as the example they’d been looking for of someone who wouldn’t fight fire with fire. Someone who, as DiIulio pointed out, “has not used the White House as an attack machine,” or at least not to the degree that other presidents have.

It’s interesting, because the narrative from the press has been mostly that "Obama is weak" and wouldn’t stand up for his own legislation. The strongest defenses, at least on the internet, were procedural – he was letting Congress do its job. But I do agree that Obama has shown, for the most part, remarkable restraint in the face of remarkable incivility. He has not taken the Alan Grayson, I will match them crazy for crazy, route. He hasn't exactly been getting things done...but I don't think that's for lack of fire. Or at least not rhetorical fire.

The most notable absence from the discussion was of somber declinism. Yes, they made reference to Benjamin Franklin’s “a republic, if you can keep it” line. Yes, they exhorted us not to take democracy for granted. But they did not assume hopelessness, they did not characterize the situation apocalyptically, and they did not adopt a cynical tone. So props to them.

Finally, my one big question. Jamieson, in response to a question about universities, said that they needed to help create a receptive and engaged audience. Jackson had said some good things earlier about how the liberal arts education makes us challenge what we cherish, and both of them advocated a vision of civility based on honest engagement with one’s opponents. So here’s my question: the Ivy League can totally do that. What is the role of community colleges and colleges outside the top 50 or top 100? And even within the Ivy League, what can we do better? Jamieson pointed out that all their examples of inappropriate behavior, with one possible exception, had been college graduates.

The Dangers of Unilateral Partisan Disarmament

2010-04-13T20:29:00.003-04:00

The future makeup of the Supreme Court has been the talk of the blogosphere of late, including here at ppr.

I agree strongly with the idea underpinning my blog-colleague's post. We need desperately to take the political venom out of the Judicial system. I can think of no other developed country where judges are so politicized. Even in a country like South Africa, where there is so much more to be divided about and Judges have similar powers (and more courage, they legalized gay marriage in a country where homophobia is beyond rampant), such politicization is not so advanced.

However I'm also reminded of a blog post I read years ago by one of my favorite bloggers. Addressing the question of whether or not California should adopt an amendment to split it's electoral votes by the state popular vote, he noted that he agreed with the principal but could thought it unfair for California to do such a thing, when say, Texas, does not. Unilateral Partisan Disarmament would merely encourage the other party to avoid making the same concessions.

Under George Bush II the appointment of judges (at all levels, not just the supreme court) was highly partisan, and conservative judges were pushed everywhere possible. To merely reassert the more balanced nature of Clinton era panels, Obama would have to push similarly hard from the left (he is trying, but as in all things, the GOP are throwing up the procedural walls that the Democrats were too cowardly/patriotic to use themselves under Bush). To not push back is to concede the existing highly partisan makeup of the judiciary. Replacing Stevens with a new liberal is not about changing the court, its about keeping it from tilting yet further towards one side.

Similarly I fear that if Obama does make a gesture towards less partisan judicial appointments, then it will simply be snubbed next time a Republican is in office. This is a perfect example of the weak-counter attack approach the left has been accusing Obama of since day 1, namely: If the Republicans push hard for their side whenever they can, and all we do is be conciliatory and make tiny baby steps on non-controversial issues (really compare the NHS to the Affordable Care Act, and you'll see just how tiny those steps were), wont the country be constantly shifting rightward? Until a grand and honored bargain can be struck between both parties to abandon politicization of the judiciary, it is patently unfair and in its own way partisan, to ask Obama to do it.

A more practical approach is possible though. It is to focus on simpler tasks. One, a constitutional amendment to prohibit states from having elected judges. Having your judges face elections is the very definition of politicizing them, and makes a mockery of the judicial process. Second, Obama could strike a non-partisan (NOTE: Non-partisan =/= bi-partisan) tone and appoint a REAL activist to the court, not a strong liberal but rather someone with the cajones to do what the Court is supposed to do but hasn't in a while, really put its boot to the other branches and stop abuses. Maybe then we can break the ludicrous state of affairs where simple policy is demonized as unconstitutional while truly important issues (like, I don't know, the persistent lying, murder and torture of the Cheney Regime) are overlooked because the court doesnt "want to be seen as partisan"

One can dream.

Replacing Justice Stevens

2010-04-12T13:14:00.003-04:00

As most of you have probably heard, Justice John Paul Stevens retired Friday morning, after 34 years on the Supreme Court bench. So the question for the summer now becomes who President Obama will choose to replace Stevens. After that, the debate ensues...

What's most disconcerting about the current state of the Supreme Court is the heavy politicization of our country's most esteemed judicial branch. Let's take a quick history lesson.

When Justice Stevens was confirmed in 1975 (two short years post-Watergate) our country was no less polarized politically speaking; the same cannot be said about the Court.

Justice Stevens was confirmed 98-0, and was not asked one question on Roe v. Wade- which was decided only two years earlier. Could this ever happen within our present sphere of politics?

Seemingly not. Recent nominations for Justices Sonia Sotomayor, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito were all characterized by the same gridlocked, politically laden confirmation process.

The candidate that Obama should nominate would ideally put an end to this ridiculous trend. The only way to do this is by picking someone who straddles the line between activist and conservative and has no history of outlandish opinions or dissents that would raise eyebrows. All-in-all, he needs a safe pick, one that would dissuade the Republicans from mounting a filibuster, and at the same time allow President Obama to progress on other governing priorities. He'd be doing our country a huge favor by sparing us a needling and overwhelming confirmation battle, as well as doing himself a favor by giving himself ample opportunity to pivot to another issue.

I could see why Obama might cave into the demands of the left-wing of his party, and nominate a strong-willed and opinionated activist to the Court. Unfortunately, that would only mitigate the problem, and I hope that Rahm Emanuel is whispering the same ideas in the President's ear before he nominates someone that will eat up this summer's political coverage.

An Excellent Paragraph

2010-04-12T00:19:00.003-04:00

So I'm trying to link to more exciting material from across the internet. Here is a paragraph that I think sheds way more light on health care than most of the paragraphs I've read on the subject in the past year. Not the best, by a long shot, but condensed and really well-focused. Ladies and gentlemen, Will Wilkinson (emphasis added):

Harvard economist Lant Pritchett has been developing what I think are exciting new ideas about the way different modes of providing education fit (or don’t) the evolving structure of advanced economies. And we [libertarians] have some new things to say (or I hope they are new) about the relative advantages and disadvantages of social insurance schemes that (a) picture a country’s population as a big risk pool, externalize responsibility, and depend on massive redistribution across people (the German model) as against social insurance schemes that (b) do not picture the population as a risk pool, internalize responsibility, and depend on redistribution within individual lives, from earlier to later stages (the Singapore model). Without saying what they are, I think a number of important liberal advantages of the Singapore model have been overlooked and undervalued, in part due to the way the solidaristic (and nationalistic) values of the German society-as-risk-pool model have been folded into the dominant liberal self-conception.

Of course, I'm rather anxious to hear what Will thinks are the liberal advantages of the "Singapore model." One plan which may highlight those advantages is the oft-linked Delong Care plan of noted Berkeley economist Brad Delong. It is, as he notes, quite unrealistic. It is also undeniably liberal, but it's modeled after Singapore and it makes consumers cost-conscious. There's been this whole discussion going on around the blogosophere concerning the intersection of left-liberalism and libertarianism, much of it at Wilkinson's blog (I know, circles tangent to each other, right? But not exactly). I think health care focuses that discussion: Delong Care in particular highlights the agreements and disagreements rather well. Forcing people to deposit x% of their income in HSAs? Not particularly libertarian. Giving them the leftovers back? Far more libertarian.

What do y'all think? Really, I like comments.

We Have Every Right to Complain About Fling

2010-04-08T17:04:00.002-04:00

I am not as perturbed about Snoop Dogg's playing Fling as the people who've been inviting you to the "petition to revise selection criteria." But I do think that they have every right to complain. Dennie Zastrow, however, writing in today's DP, takes a slightly different stance. I hope I'm not spoiling the ending by quoting the closing paragraph:

Ultimately, it seems like the best way to solve this problem is to join the process. If the organizers behind the petition care so much about the Fling performers then they should get more involved in the selection process. Unless you’re willing to put time and energy into the selection, I don’t think you have much room to complain.

You can tell from my comment (2nd! And as of right now, last) that I don't agree. The comment's a little half-baked, however, so here are my thoughts at a bit greater length.

The reason that we have committees do things, rather than everybody in one big room, is that we do not have the time to participate in every single decision that gets made. Life, and the hours of the day, are too short. In order to make sure that all the decisions that get made are made by informed people, we designate groups to get things done.

However, those decisions affect everybody, so everybody has a right to care about them. Therefore, the group members need to be selected in a legitimate way. For the purposes of governing a country, we do this by electing a number of people to be in charge, to vote on what the laws are, and to pick all the people we don't even have time to elect. But it seems obvious that I should be allowed to participate in discussions about health care reform even though I am less-informed than a congressman sitting on any of the relevant committees (let's hope I am anyway). I participate by voting on the congressman who votes on the law, not necessarily by participating directly.

So the form that Zastrow's suggestion usually takes in national politics is, "did you vote? If not, stop complaining." I'm uncomfortable even with saying that to fellow citizens, but assuming that the criticism applies to discussions of SPEC's Fling artist selection, it applies to how committee members are chosen, not who participated on the committee.

As it turns out, the agitators with the petition share this focus on procedure, although you wouldn't know it from their Facebook event page. They're trying to get SPEC to do things like allow review of the artist by other groups, or actively solicit the student body's opinion on what constitutes an inappropriate artist.

If we ran Penn Student Government like we run the US Federal Government, the UA would approve the membership of SPEC, or at least of SPEC Exec (and I am not sure how the latter body is chosen, actually). Then there would be a direct chain of people who could fire people starting with the committee members, leading to Exec to the UA to the student body. If that is currently the case, then complain to the UA rather than to SPEC. Also implied by this formulation is that if anybody should be previewing the Fling artist choice, it's the UA.

So, that is my opinion: to the extent that we the students invite artists to Penn based on the moral standing of their art - which it is not immediately clear to me that we should do - we should do it through the Undergraduate Assembly. If you think we should take those moral considerations into account, then you should fight for SPEC to be accountable to an elective body or to be more transparent in its selections, not to "exert increased scrutiny over the messages and behaviors supported by Spring Fling artists."

I'd like to add one tiny little thing - the idea that we should have official "selection criteria" is not one I stand behind. From the petition to SPEC:

Although we, like the University of Pennsylvania, endorse free speech, we believe that there are certain messages that are appropriate to endorse and others that are not.

There's nothing wrong with that statement. Indeed, just yesterday I said the government of Virginia shouldn't endorse slavery by declaring April Confederate History Month. This is pretty much the same thing, except with misogynistic rap lyrics instead of human trafficking (not that I intend to slight the harm done by misogyny). Point is, when we talk about free speech in the United States, we're typically referring to the First Amendment's injunction that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." Thus, it's fine for the government to decline to endorse someone in whatever way. It is, in my opinion (and I'm no constitutional scholar), less fine to write something down that says "we will not invite so-and-so to perform because of what he/she says about X." My two cents on a topic I know little of.

Et Tu, Virginia?

2010-04-06T22:34:00.005-04:00

A week or two ago I wrote about the not-so-great side of my home state of Texas. Now, it is apparently time for Virginia, where I currently reside when not in Philly, to disappoint. And it's really, really disappointing. At first, I was so-so on Bob McDonnell. On the one hand, thirty years ago he said some nasty things about gay people and women. On the other, he plans to privatize liquor sales! But since taking office, he's actually fulfilled people's fears on the gay rights score by taking sexual orientation off the list of discrimination-protected characteristics for state employees. And now...seriously...April is Confederate History Month in Virginia. Seriously. I'm going to quote Yglesias in full on this, because there's little else to say:

It’s important to note that this isn’t simply someone going along with a longstanding abhorrent bit of symbolism that’s traditional in his state. Mark Warner, rightly, broke this tradition and refused to grant wink-nod symbolic affirmation of the idea of unleashing massive violence in defense of the principle that white people should own black people as property. Tim Kaine upheld the new status quo. And now McDonnell’s ondoing it, which is offensive on its own terms and will also raise the political cost to any future governor who wants to do the right thing.

In other news, since the RNC is determined to stick with Michael Steele come what may, I’m sure black people will start loving Republicans soon.

Minus the sniping at the end, I'm totally on board with Yglesias. While the government should not outlaw hateful speech, even speech "in defense of the principle that white people should own black people as property," neither should the government let tacit affirmation of that principle stain its conscience. Allowing someone to say those things does not constitute affirmation; allowing the people who say it a place in your public symbology is. Period.

Oh, and a brief addendum while we're talking about liberty and the places I live. Despite its excitability with respect to flash mobs, the Philadelphia legal establishment apparently has some sense and is going to step down prosecution of small-time marijuana offenses.

Update: Here's the WaPo article on the subject. That there is a political base that would be excited by this news is...offputting.

Updates from Iraq

2010-04-06T21:39:00.002-04:00

The political waters remain murky in Iraq. Everybody seems to be latching onto every conspiracy theory, ever rumor, and inventing them where they dont yet exist.

The facts are that there are no facts. Some of the parties went to Tehran for talks following the election. Allawi was not invited. But despite early momentum they seem not have gone anywhere. The Sadrists aren't backing down on opposing Maliki, though Maliki has been releasing as many Sadrist prisoners as he can to try to change their minds. Allawi's guys are reportedly talking to the Sadrists (who spent months demonizing him as a Ba'athist) and the Kurds (who are likely irreconcilable to his political program and some of the Arab Nationalists in his bloc), the ISCI (really?) and even portions of Maliki's list. It seems everyone is talking to everyone.

Reidar Visser has a good piece on the big fear hanging over the process: another sprawling unity government that will keep all the players happy with pork and fancy titles, but will once more struggle to address any of Iraq's problems. Defenders of this possibility have made claimed that to not have an inclusive national government would mean that parts of the country (read: Kurdistan) may strive to leave Iraq. But the Kurds already enjoy massive autonomy. If the only thing keeping them in Iraq is pork in Baghdad, then one has to wonder why Iraq wants to keep them at all. Offer them independence in return for surrendering claims to Mosul and Kirkuk.

Like Visser, i hope that Maliki and Allawi will eventually swallow their pride and join together. That would create a government capable of dealing with important national issues.

But I am not so foolish to hold my breath over it.

Wow....Really?!

2010-04-05T14:29:00.002-04:00

Hamid Karzi- potential Taliban. Believe it. The embattled Afghani head of state has threatened numerous times that should he continue to come under foreign pressure he would consider joining the Taliban. How is that for gratitude? This kind of petulance is becoming commonplace in the election system in many central asian and arabic nations (i.e. Iraq and Iran), and its implications are disturbing.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36178710/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/

A Stab at Some Solid Linkage

2010-04-04T15:56:00.005-04:00

Hey guys,

So I’m going to start doing things a little bit differently around here. You may notice that other blogs often link to their favorite blogs, not only by having them on a blogroll but by referring to them frequently in their posts. Around here, we are full-time students and don’t necessarily have the time to put out multiple posts a day, but we still want to be part of that big old blogosphere out there. So, in short, I’m going to occasionally post links and brief responses to pieces from around the internet. I’ll still post actual commentary on political events – from flash mobs to foreign coups d’etat, or whatever grabs my interest – but at least one post per week will be a sort of round-up type thing. I encourage you to comment. Of course, there are plenty of blogs that offer both excellent first-order commentary and excellent linkage. Marginal Revolution is one of those, and Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are both full professors at George Mason. But we can’t all be like them. So, without further ado, Some Things I Liked This Week:

My friends will know that I’m fond of using Jonathan Haidt’s moral framework as a starting-point for ethical discussions. This week in Nature, Paul Bloom offered some pushback to that framework (via Andrew Sullivan): “This implies we have little conscious control over our sense of right and wrong. I predict that this theory of morality will be proved wrong in its wholesale rejection of reason. Emotional responses alone cannot explain one of the most interesting aspects of human nature: that morals evolve.” I’m totally on board in theory. My question is, OK, so to what extent do we have control over moral principles, as opposed to moral propositions? We reject certain moral propositions because they don’t satisfy our principles. The principles, I would suggest, have shifted very, very little compared to the specific claims that we make based on them. But Bloom's article is mostly polemical (in a good way) and a push in the right direction for future research.

Riffing off this NYT article and the buzz it’s gotten, Matt Yglesias discusses unpaid internships as a growing and possibly illegal phenomenon. Is it ethical to pay your interns solely in the prestige of association? Are the federal guidelines too strict? Is this more of an I-deserve-pay-for-my-work thing, or a class thing? I’m not sure, and there’s an interesting comment thread on Yglesias’s post around unemployment and minimum wage laws.

The bloggy controversy of the week: Veronique de Rugy’s parsing of the stimulus data generated this response from Nate Silver, who suggests that her conclusion (that Democratic districts get more stimulus money) is an artifact of the data. State capitals tend to be in Democrat-held districts, the money disbursed to the states is coded as money in the capitals’ districts, etc. De Rugy’s somewhat tepid response here, Silver’s reply here. The lefty bloggers have jumped all over De Rugy, and it’s hard to see how she gets out of this one looking better than she did coming in. Update: Nick Gillespie's comment seems germane.

Radley Balko celebrates the release of 10 Rules for Dealing with the Police. Flex Your Rights is a group you should all totally check out. Also, yeah, this Chris Rock video is pretty funny too. But generally, all people have the capacity to be jerks. When one of those people has more authority and access to force than the other...well, that's why I think Radley Balko's reportage is an excellent service to society.

Finally, it turns out that only two states have been awarded Race to the Top money. Competition may actually happen. Cool!

A Friendly Makeover

2010-04-03T15:04:00.003-04:00

They say that if you want to find out who a person really is, you need to take a look at the company they keep. If only the GOP would heed this advice.

Realistically, the Republican Party has positioned itself quite well for November- the House of Representatives looks prime for a majority takeover, and many liberal Senators are facing tough re-election campaigns, even in left-leaning bastions such as California and New York.

Unfortunately, unless the party adopts a principled strategy that deviates from the Bush administration, these gains will be temporary and further damaging to the country’s psyche. If the GOP wishes to retain their prospective majorities come November, they need to break ties with some of their more, shall we say, lively “friends.”

And no, Sarah Palin, I’m not talking about the Republican Party cleansing all of those wacky RINO’s and riding the Tea Party to victory.

I guess I’m referring to you.

The first thing the GOP needs to do is sever ties with the ridiculous neo-conservative wing of the party which really isn’t conservative at all. There’s nothing conservative about expanding prescription drug benefits in the face of Medicare insolvency, manipulating the Constitution as a means to an end, or continuously engaging in foreign entanglements when what this country really needs is domestic nation building. Small-government conservatism lost its way during the Bush administration, but it can and should continue to be a core, bedrock Republican principle. Bye-bye, Dick Cheney.

Secondly, they need to put policy oriented, intelligent individuals at the helm of the party. Viable national candidates should be a priority, expanding the tent of the party should be a primary focus as well. Instead of rehashing tired policies from the 1980's, the GOP needs to embolden the party with innovative reforms and ideas. Hello, Scott Brown and Mitch Daniels.

The notion of revving up the Republican “base” is and has always been utter nonsense. Is the evangelical Republican stronghold going to all of a sudden vote Democratic? Of course not. The base has been satisfied plenty. And can the Republican party really afford to stand behind hate speech and racism? Adios, Jerry Falwell (or your memory, at least) and Pat Robertson.

The country is headed in a rather diverse direction. Studies show that currently 45% of children under 5 belong to a minority group. So play the numbers. Appeal to broader constituencies (read: Hispanics) by pursuing what they want. Beat the Democratic Party in this regard. Sponsor an immigration reform bill. Do something, for crying out loud, because saying no failed on healthcare, and it doesn’t seem to be a long-term viable political strategy.

The New Deal Democratic Party collapsed with the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. What did they proceed to do? Fast forward twelve years: Bill Clinton campaigned on a "New Democrat” platform, emphasized left-center approaches and understood the push towards globalization. All-in-all,they reinvented themselves.

The real shame with the current state of the party is its disdain for "egghead" intellectuals. Yes, William F. Buckley once famously said he'd rather be governed by "the first 2,000 names in the Boston phonebook than by the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty." It's funny though, because some of the greatest conservative thinkers- Milton Friedman, Edmund Burke- were intellectual and professorial people.

The Republican Party has a problem attracting energetic youth support in part because of this foolish contempt for education and intellect. Sarah Palin's assertion that she was qualified to be President because she was not educated in an Ivy League school demonstrates this schism perfectly. How can you be the party of ideas if you don't want the people who have ideas in your crowd?

Ronald Reagan was a fantastic President by enlarging the Republican tent. Yet, the world has changed in inconceivable ways since 1988. It’s time the GOP start looking over at the kids on the other end of the schoolyard, because they need to find new company.

Right Wing Prospects

2010-03-28T22:44:00.003-04:00

Somewhere in a home or apartment in the Capital, a leading conservative ponders changes to established policy. He faces great pressure to offer something new and dynamic. The status quo has run dry and as he squeezes his alabaster hands he longs for an answer. He knows that he must adapt, and his party must to if it is to remain strong. He knows that the population cherishes those parts of the welfare state that they themselves use, even if many people look askance at those areas they don't, such as benefits for the unemployed. The system cannot be thrown away, even if some noisy radicals often encourage him to do so. He knows that despite his personal religious convictions and traditionalist morality, the world is a diverse and complicated place and to try to impress those views across the public space will eventually lead to ruin. In the 21st century, he knows the foolishness of deriding his opponents as radical Marxists, that such rhetoric is best left 50 years in the past. With a sigh, as much of relief as of indignation, he sits down at last to right a program for a new Conservative era. One that prizes national unity above culture-war divisionism, one that balances property rights and economic freedoms against the popular hunger for stability, one that respects his opponents and doesn't pretend democracy is legitimate only when he wins. His will be a big tent movement, holding on to the traditional while bringing in new kinds of voters, and leaving no sector of the population unappealed to.

This seems at first a work of fiction. And if we assume the Capital in question is D.C., and the conservative an American, it is very much a fiction. But it is also something that has happened many times over in recent years across the rest of the Anglosphere. It is a scene that would not be at all out of place in Ottawa, London, Canberra, Wellington or even Pretoria. In these countries, with such close social, historical and cultural ties to the US, the conservative movement has done something it seems highly resistant to doing here. It has accepted modernity and tried to apply conservative principles to the real world in a logical and reasoned way. The US right is a mile away from being able to do that. In the rest of the Anglosphere we have seen the rise of a crop of new, young conservative leaders, Canadian PM Stephen Harper, New Zealand leader John Key, the British and Australian opposition leaders David Cameron and Tony Abbott, and even South Africa's Helen Zille who has succeeded in convincing the very socially conservatively inclined Afrikaaner community to back her in a program that mixes a modern approach to diverse society with core conservative values. These leaders have learned to pick their battles. They don't pick fights where they know that society is abandoning the traditional position, hence their support for Gay rights. They've learned that a radical right economic program alienates people. They seek to reassure traditionalist voters about changing social mores, but also make real (rather than token) gestures to pull in new and diverse voters. They've gone back to the basics of conservativism, the things that once made the movement great and admirable. They campaign as Safe Hands, reliable and careful, the formula that once enabled Republican Patricians to win elections in New England, but which fell apart as the theocons and neocons devoured the party from within. They've cast aside the BS of the 20th century right to assume the mantle of protecting an orderly society and mediating social conflict. For the GOP, an orderly society is one where all the problems and diversity are hidden under the rug or in the closet.

They are the kind of conservatives people like me would be proud to support and associate with. And so long as the GOP remains the party of fear and hate-mongering populists, tea-party radicals, parliamentary obstructionists and reactionary traditionalists, would-be-conservatives like me will continue to look abroad. And hope.

Political Irony is Sweet

2010-03-28T20:48:00.003-04:00

Anyone else catch the nutcase rally over in Arizona? Well, if you missed it here is the essential summary: You all remember good old Sarah Palin, former US vice presidential candidate and acclaimed author of "Going Rogue," about how she did that very thing to the John McCain campaign, some would say dooming whatever chances he had. Well, this week Ms. Palin (yes, Ms. Palin, not Gov. Palin. I'm of the opinion that if you get elected to public office and then quit, you shouldn't be given the courtesy of begin referred to by your title for the rest of your life) and her band of lovable wackos stumped in Arizona for...wait for it: JOHN MCCAIN!!! The political irony is certainly delicious

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36058234/ns/politics/

Flash Mob Hysteria, Linkstravaganza

2010-03-27T18:33:00.003-04:00

I would love to spend all my time researching the ongoing flash mob hysteria – and whether or not it’s a problem, I can’t call the official response anything other than hysteria – but unfortunately I have classes to attend, so my only sources will remain news outlets, and my posts may be less than timely. The important facts: the city is considering taking legal action to reduce the ability of teenagers to have a life, while parents and social workers are agitating for more structure and funding for after-school programs for teenagers. Why, when I put it that way, it sounds positively Orwellian! Which is exactly why I put it that way. 28 teenagers have been convicted of felony rioting.

I might have had the opportunity to check out one of these things on Wednesday, but (as I’m sure you all heard) it never happened, thanks to the highly intelligent decision to close down businesses and obstruct traffic with a heavy police presence. Wonderful use of resources there.

Here are my links:

The Inquirer’s immediate coverage of the nonevent Wednesday.

The DP’s take on same (focused mostly on Penn’s alert system)

The New York Times gets in on the action

Within a day, so does Michelle Malkin’s site (note the lovely rhetorical syle)

The Associated Press wrote it up also

And an Inquirer columnist writes “confessions of a former flash-mobber” in the same style one might expect from a former prostitute. At least she understands that “the term flash mob seems as amorphous as a flash mob itself,” a point she makes well after “confessing,” repenting, and exhorting children not to follow in her ill-defined footsteps.

Speaking of which, some teenagers hosted a forum on the subject.

If you think the racial dimension here is overblown, either check out the comments to the above articles or read this gem of a letter to the editor.

Finally, Philly Daily News informs us today that the DA is going to “take a walk down South Street tonight to send the message that it's still safe to enjoy the city's nightlife.”

Bear in mind that this is all within the two days or so after a flash mob notably didn’t happen.

But I’m actually somewhat enthusiastic about the presence of the national media in this discussion. If you look at the AP and NYT stories, both start off with a reminder that “flash mob” typically means an innocuous gathering arranged to do something creative or wacky, like freeze in place for a minute, and disperse. They share the perspective that this phenomenon is limited and not fully understood, although they are more apprehensive about it than I.

Here’s my favorite quote, from the AP write-up:

"The lion's share of these kids don't have any nefarious intent," said Deputy Police Commissioner Richard Ross, "but if you have a group of 1,000, 2,000 kids and only 25 are disruptive, that's still unacceptable."

Hey what, small groups of people can cause large problems? Which aren’t necessarily the end of the world, and don't necessarily reflect on the whole group? Someone at SP2, hire this man! OK, sarcasm aside, that concept appears to me to be the crux of the issue, and the reason why (as I’ve said before) we need to know a little more about the flash mobs before we start making these global judgments about what they are, who’s doing them and why, and how the city should treat its youth.

The most hopeful sign comes from the title of the NYT piece: “Mobs Are Born as Word Grows by Text Message,” a phrase which actually communicates a fair amount of information, with a degree of nuance, in a compressed space. Contrast with “Cops nab 15 after Flash Mob Rampage.” I guess there’s a reason people still read the Grey Lady after all.

Oh, and by the way, apparently it’s a good thing I didn’t go to check out the nonexistent flash mob on Wednesday. The police might have “shooed me away.” That in itself wouldn’t have been so bad, but I can’t imagine I would have been particularly gracious in my response.

Will Iraq's Election Bring Change?

2010-03-27T12:47:00.002-04:00

The results have finally been released on Iraq's election. The main takeaways are as follows: with a total of 325 seats in parliament, 8 of which are reserved for minority religious faiths (5 seats for Christians, and one each for Yazidis, Shabaks and Mandaeans). Allawi's Iraqqiya has won 91 seats, putting him ahead of Maliki at 89. The INA trails with 70 seats. As i suspected, my own predictions proved to be wrong. I underestimated significantly Allawi's ability to win Sunni votes (he seems to have grabbed around 70% of them), and even his ability to win Shia votes a little. I overestimated Maliki, who received basically no Sunni backing. As a National candidate, Allawi seems to have the best credentials, he dominated voting North and West of Baghdad (accept in Kurdistan, where politics are pretty much entirely separated from the rest of the country), and also managed to win about 15% of seats in the South. Maliki on the other hand, pulled up his margins solely in the Shia south and in Baghdad (where he edged out Allawi by a small margin). Like the INA, most of his votes in the Sunni-majority provinces are probably due to Shia living there, while there are simply not enough Sunnis in many of the Shia southern provinces to explain Allawi's votes there in a purely sectarian manner (and let us not forget, Allawi is Shia!)

There have been allegations of fraud from all sides. The loudest recently have been coming from Maliki, although on early results that showed him comfortably ahead he angrily defended the IHEC before the media. The allegations are fairly silly. Of the top 4 lists competing in the election, Maliki's list, the INA, and the Kurdistan Alliance, have significant access to state resources and state function. Iraqqiya is the only list that is not part of the country government. And while it is true that foreign espionage, and the work of secret-Ba'athists in the IHEC could THEORETICALLY have influenced the result, it seems very unlikely. It is hard to see where the fraud could have taken place. It is clearly true from the anecdotal evidence that Iraqqiya dominated Sunni voting, that he had strong constituencies in Baghdad, and that he had SOME voters in the Shia south. Where does Maliki think the fraud occured? In what province does he believe he should have done better, or Allawi worse?

I doubt Maliki really believes significant fraud occured. But he desperately need to shift the momentum. Under Iraq's constituton the bloc with the most seats in Parliament gets the first shot at forming a coalition and nominating a Prime Minister. Maliki's hope was that that honor would be his, giving him strong momentum. The reason he needs it is because the Sadrists, a component of the INA, have come out with a majority of the INA's seats thanks to the Open List system. The old elites of the INA, the Islamic Council, that might have been friendly to Maliki have been battered. The Sadrists have made clear that while they are willing to ally with Maliki's State of Law, they will not allow Maliki a second term as PM. Maliki needed the leverage of a good win for SoL in the seat allocation in order to build the leverage to hold back this demand. It now seems likely that SoL and INA WILL unify (indeed, they were both the main components of the old UIA in 2005). This is the reason for the fraud allegations, Maliki needs to shore up his stature and build loyalty among the population to try to hold his position. This is also the reason he joined the De-Ba'athification circus and why he brought so many ex-Ba'athists back into the military. He is trying to make himself indispensible, and isn't doing a very good job of it.

The path forward for Allawi is a tough one. The scenario bandied around most often is for him to pry open the INA, bring in the Sadrists (who share his Arab Nationalism and his constituency's dislike of Maliki) and then somehow ally with the Kurds even though in Northern Iraq Iraqqiya fought a broadly anti-Kurdish campaign. This would make him a solidly national figure, with a government with strong backing in all parts of the country. It is also, I'd wager, damn near impossible to pull together. A better option, for Allawi to either offer Maliki the presidency, or swallow his pride and take it himself to let Maliki remain PM of a Iraqqiya cabinet-majority government, seems off the table. That is a shame.

Sadly Iraq's election, for all the change it did bring, for all the voters who went out and rejected sectarianism, the rule of the religious parties, etc... They now look set to get a government very much the same as out of 2005. the old UIA, united with the Kurdistan Alliance, and with some affirmative Action Sunnis, probably drawn from the remains of the Iraqi Islamic Party (which won 6 seats, down from 44 in 2005) or from Iraqqiya defectors. Iraqqiya will hopefully form a stronger opposition than Iraq has had previously, and be able to offer some kind of consistent opposition program.

But Maliki should be concerned. A half-century ago Iraqi governments of religious-traditional and Kurdish politicians battled an Arab-Nationalist opposition. That didn't turn out well for anyone.

PPR Interivews Freddie Mac Chief

2010-03-25T16:31:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone,

Ed Haldeman, CEO of Freddie Mac and Chairman of Dartmouth's Board of Trustees, sat down with several PPR staff members today for an interview. Look for this in the April/May issue of PPR!

Also, if you are interested in joining the interview team, please contact Jess, our Interview Director: jemayer@wharton.upenn.edu

Cheers,

Bob

Why someone who doesn't care about the UA should consider voting

2010-03-24T02:09:00.011-04:00

I am relatively apathetic to student politics. As a freshman, I found the emphasis of most candidates on dining dollars and high-rise elevators rather trite. And as the years went by, I resigned myself to the conclusion that this is the perpetual and pathetic preoccupation of student government. Ergo, lack of interest.

But I'm coming to realize that issues like these and those I view to be of greater social importance don't have to be completely exclusive of one another. Yes, it's alarming that students haven't yet challenged the university on its tuition increases, that we don't demand where the university invests, that we don't question with whom it is collaborating. But is it reasonable to expect that we can be a campus that rallies around these broader causes without being a campus that seriously challenges sector requirements? Political activism, on any issue, can only occur with a strong mechanism in place. That's at least been the strategy of most galvanized communities and states throughout history: Hook people on the bread and butter, and eventually their solidarity will spur them to mobilize around less immediate yet more foundational ideals.

I think the UA elections might give us an opportunity to form that mechanism. If students begin to believe in the importance of choosing someone who will challenge certain issues on their collective behalf, perhaps in fifty years they will begin challenging other issues themselves -- and in unison. In a way, we could view this as a critical step in returning to fifty years ago and the golden age that entailed, where student unity transferred into a credible political coalition. Sure, I might be naively idealistic in professing my nostalgia for a decade I never experienced. But amid our current state of disjointed apathy, can you honestly blame me?

- NV -

Test of Time

2010-03-22T16:11:00.002-04:00

Yesterday's passage of healthcare reform has whipped up both parties in a frenzy- Democrats celebrating what they view as victory over the status quo, and Republicans lamenting the plan as over reaching, vulnerable to repeal, and perhaps constitutionally feeble.

I've written a lot about this bill, and yesterday's narrow margin of passage did little to assuage my underlying fears about the bill.

This concern can be split along one line- the fear of adding another entitlement onto our growing national debt. There's really no arguing the moral cause of healthcare- of course, a country such as ours should do all that it can to ensure that even the poorest of the poor receive adequate treatment. When people paint Republicans as some sort of vicious, super-wealthy contingent of folks who for some reason want to actively prevent people from receiving health coverage, that's misleading and factually incorrect. Both sides put equal energy into mischaracterizing the viewpoint of the opposition.

That being said, the hesitant support for this bill, personally, has to do with the state of our economy and fiscal position- and I believe I speak for a fair amount of Americans.

Yes, I know- the CBO scored this bill with a positive rating- it will supposedly reduce the deficit over the next decade. But let's be fair and rational here- this bill essentially adds another entitlement, the government's third next to Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. And if you look at any pie chart out there, it's pretty clear that the federal government spends most of its revenue fulfilling these entitlements.

It's my distrust of the government's ability to successfully manage expanded healthcare while simultaneously reducing the deficit that fuels my opposition to this bill. Do people really believe that we can somehow expand more coverage while spending less money- what the CBO calls reducing the deficit? Maybe common sense should trump complicated statistics and figures for once. Yes, the CBO scored the bill deficit-positive, but there's a whole bunch of gimmicks in there- such as relying on future Congress' to pass Medicare cuts (and other spending cuts)- but is there anyway we can guarantee that future Congress will have the courage to do what every other Congress hasn't- reform entitlements, aka the Third Rail of politics?

In actuality, only time will solve this issue. Healthcare has passed, and in perhaps a decade we will be able to judge which party had the correct position. But it's in my belief that there is no way this will reduce the deficit; it will only add onto it. And that forms the crux of my ongoing hesitance to this reform.

Finally

2010-03-21T22:17:00.003-04:00

Well it looks like the House will finally be passing the health care reform bill, although after the butchering its been through it can hardly be called revolutionary. The bill will help to provide more healthcare to millions of americans all over the country; however the lack of a public option seriously decreases the number of people that are actually helped by the bill. Oh well, who knows? This could be the first of many it proves to be successful.

Again with the Flash Mobs

2010-03-21T14:15:00.004-04:00

Update: more coverage from the Inquirer here. Past posts from me here and here

Yeah, it happened again. On South Street. Three arrests, no damage or injuries, but it was South Street and therefore a big deal. Is there coverage of this elsewhere? One would like some serious investigative journalism to be done, since I'm personally having difficulty penetrating the Fog of News Media Coverage which picks one or two obvious narratives and runs with them. My questions are, to wit:

1. Are these real flashmobs? That is, how are they organized?
2. Who goes? High school students, college students? Are they the same people each time?
3. Who is disorderly or destructive? Everybody? A few people? If so, which ones?
4. What role has the strongly negative official response played? Is there any sentiment around that? Has the negative coverage, or just the publicity, encouraged more flashmobs?
5. Is this connected to any kind of discontent? Is it just boisterousness?
6. Is this out of the ordinary for major metropolitan areas in the US?
7. Is this even one thing? That is, how are the incidents connected if at all?
8. What is the public opinion?
9. Is there a public opinion? That is, are Philadelphians widely aware of the phenomenon?
10. What is the climate of opinion in the police department?

We are not yet at the point where "inquiring minds want to know." Not least because I am unaware of another inquiring mind that does, beside my own. But soon, perhaps.

The Books That Have Influenced Me Most

2010-03-20T22:42:00.003-04:00

Those of you involved in the wider blogosphere may have noticed a tremendous outpouring of book lists in the last few days. Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, Will Wilkinson, Peter Suderman, E.D. Kain, and Kieran Healy, to name a few, have penned "my most important books" lists. A couple comments, and my list below.

First, holy cow there’s a lot of Ayn Rand on these lists! The book list infection spread primarily through libertarian/econblogger circles, and I knew at some level that many libertarians got started reading Rand in their youth, but…still, that’s incredible. There seems to be this perpetual “getting beyond Rand” thing in the life cycle of a libertarian. (Check out this conversation on the subject at Cato Unbound). That says something…

There’s a whole mess of philosophy in there that I haven’t read. This summer, I am determined to read the basic works of philosophy in the Western tradition. I must do it. And a couple of those 20th century guys as well. I’ve read Nietzsche, I’ve read some Plato, and I get references to the others, but I really haven’t gone beyond bits and pieces, and I ought to.

A number of people wrote something to the effect that “books didn’t influence me; people did.” Ezra Klein even went so far as not to publish a list of books. That’s certainly true, and it holds for me more than for these bloggers since I spent much of my literate life engrossed in thousand-page fantasy novels without much intellectual heft. However, I can’t really tell you a whole ton about my parents, my middle school science teacher, my high school English teacher, the various circles of friends I’ve kept at different points in time, etc. It would be disrespectful of their privacy, for one, and for another it’d be a book in itself. Books, however, can be dealt with in a blog post, being part of “the culture.”

I will confess to a wee bit of presentism in my retelling of the impact these books had on me. But, it can’t be helped, so without further ado, my list (in chronological order):

1. The Bible – if you were raised on this book, you most likely love it or hate it, but in any case you continually return to it (or the idea of it, if you’re in the latter group). Allow me to be more specific: Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, the Gospels. These books are willing to ask difficult questions that a lot of their readers aren’t. But above all, a sense of purpose and of weight animates the Bible: life is important, and worth living well. The conclusion – that you should care about other people – happens to be excellent also.

2. Ender’s Game/Ender’s Shadow – I guess these books are probably my Ayn Rand equivalent. They tell a story about a remarkable individual in a society with a LOT of problems. I read them (and reread them…) in my pseudo-rebellious youth as a middle school student, and while I’ve moved on from the tacit “I’m better than they are” mentality the books engendered, my belief in the importance of individual virtue/competence/leadership didn’t fade.

3. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books – simply awesome. Awesome in the extreme. People are weird, the universe is strange, it has lots of problems, but it is still one awesome place. A shame the last book was such a downer. (Adams agreed, btw – didn’t find the interview but it’s quoted on Wikipedia and I read it myself awhile ago).

4. The Foundation books – I used to read a lot of sci-fi/fantasy, but these books were the ones that actually influenced my thinking overtly. They got me to think about how causality works in a complicated world with lots of people. Individuals matter, institutions matter, ideas matter, economics matters, psychology matters…they all matter. There can be strong determination without “destiny.” (Here we see the presentism at work…but I did think about causes I swear).

5. Other sci-fi/fantasy books I read. And a disclaimer – OK, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and please don’t assault me for my heresy here, but I never actually finished LOTR. Great books, and I don’t know why I didn’t finish them, but I didn’t. I did read the Narnia books, however. A few others include the first several Robert Jordan books, the continuing series A Song of Ice and Fire, Dune, and the David Eddings books. I also include Greek, Norse, and Egyptian mythology, and the Arthurian legends. I credit all of them for endowing me with a belief in imagination and creativity. Read E.D.'s list for another take on the subject. These books are to humanities majors what chemistry sets are to budding chemists, or beautiful sunsets to most people. They bring a sense of wonder.

6. Catch-22 – “We can make you do whatever we can make you do.” Aside from, and in combination with, “that which will persist, will persist,” the most oddly surprising and compelling tautology that you’re likely to find anywhere. The lesson here? Give people power and they’ll try to screw somebody over. If you don’t want to slog through the Federalist papers, give Catch-22 a try. Yes, I’m kidding. But not really.

7. Cat’s Cradle/Slaughterhouse-Five – are people more than animals? Are we doomed, not just by our moral imperfections, but by our mental limits? These were the first books to put that question in my head seriously.

8. Beyond Good and Evil/Don Quijote/Ecclesiastes and Job – I’m putting the Bible books next to these ones, and I’m putting them all together, because I read them at the same time in my senior year of high school. BGE re-asked the questions that Vonnegut did, but the overall effect was to make me think seriously about the concept of purpose, and the question, “why?” (And before you get on my case, I read DQ in Spanish so I spell it with a j instead of an x, thank you).

9. Ficciones – Borges is my favorite author in the Spanish language. Read these stories. Is the universe comprehensible? Do all questions have answers? Do we deceive ourselves when we talk about truth? Yes, many of the same questions as the above books, but put very, very differently. In a certain sense, the way Borges writes made a bigger impression than the content. He exemplifies Spanish-language literature’s capacity/tendency to put really abstract and intellectual ideas in compelling emotional terms (well, compelling for me anyway) while keeping them abstract and intellectual.

10. Here, I will succumb to Ezra-ism and not put a book down. Being At College has been one of the most intellectually transformative experiences of my life. And you’ll notice, on those other lists, that many books are academic or technical books in the writer’s area of specialty. I fully expect some history books to be on my list in a few years (and some already sort of are, except that they’re too recent to make it). Mostly, the actual process of going through a liberal arts education has impressed upon me the central message of the liberal arts education, which I heard repeated often but never fully got. You need different perspectives, you need different people, you need an open mind. Keep exploring, and you will keep finding.

I realize with a cringe that there aren’t any women on my list…Flannery O’Connor gets an honorable mention, to be sure. But there’s still a gap I can’t account for. I will say that the way I think about gender politics has changed mightily while at Penn, and I haven’t included any books I’ve read in college, so that’s my excuse for now.

Leave your books in the comments!

Hello Again!

2010-03-17T14:01:00.002-04:00

Hey there PPR readers, i apologize for my two week hiatus but i've had some serious computer issues that thankfully have been resolves but I'm back and revved up ready to talk about some of the issues that demand our attention and some that don't that are just amusing. Recently, i'm sure you have noticed, there has been a disconcerting number of news stories involving homegrown terrorists that are plotting against the united states from within out very own borders. Now this poses us an interesting set of issues, because while we can patrol our skies rigidly and borders somewhat efficiently weeding out potential threats from home proves far more difficult and, potentially, could have a serious impact on our civil liberties as it is quite possible if not probable that the government will dramatically increase surveillance at home. Worried? I certainly am.

Any thoughts?

This Week, the Lone Star is a Brain Cell

2010-03-17T01:34:00.002-04:00

There are many things to love about Texas: it’s big, you shouldn’t mess with it, and I was born there 20 years ago this month. Let’s even remind ourselves, before we proceed, that a Texan signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

But I tend to get embarrassed when I read anything about the Texas public school textbook procurement system. This time, it doesn’t even have anything to do with evolution! It’s just straight-up (well, in this case rather crooked) United States History. Read this NYT article and this profile by Mariah Blake of the Texas Board of Education's conservative faction (via Sullivan and a few others) and tell me you’re not disgusted. Sure, Blake puts it on a little heavy. And hey, if a teacher can get a child to remember anything about the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, they are a better educator than I. But how can you read quotes like, “This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook,” or, “The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan” without experiencing a strong desire to throw your chair at the wall?

The passage that has, probably with reason, gotten the most attention is the NYT paragraph in which one board member “managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone.” This one is depressing, and it illustrates to me why history is something that must be fought for. One might imagine that the right wing’s advocacy of “originalism” and hero worship of the founding fathers would at least give it a clear view of the nation’s founding fathers and their beliefs. Yet somehow, it can both believe that the US was founded on Christian principles, as an explicitly Christian nation, and be aware of a need to eradicate the coiner of the phrase “separation of church and state” from our history books. Somehow, in fact, David Bradley says, “I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” despite presumably having read the text of the First Amendment at least once. What sort of self-delusion is this?

Yet another example of this stunning and sad state of knowledge, also regrettably from Texas, comes to us via Dana Milbank (h/t Jonathan Chait):

A member of the audience passed a question to the moderator, who read it to Armey: How can the Federalist Papers be an inspiration for the tea party, when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government?”

Historian Armey was flummoxed by this new information. "Widely regarded by whom?" he challenged, suspiciously. "Today's modern ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton."

Alas, for Armey, it was the case. Hamilton favored a national bank, presidents and senators who served for life and state governors appointed by the president.

Repeat after me: Sam Rayburn was from Texas. Sandra Day O’Connor was born there. Walter Cronkite was raised there. Chester Nimitz…

Change Has Arrived

2010-03-16T19:19:00.002-04:00

But it doesn't appear to be the transparent, post-partisan change that President Obama campaigned on. Instead, this transformation is taking the shape of a parliamentary procedure that will allow healthcare to pass- without even a vote.

This idea, pushed by House majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), involves avoiding an up-or-down healthcare debate and instead passing a separate package of "budget reconciliation" amendments- which has already come under intense criticism. Theoretically, after passage, the entire Senate bill, which Speaker Pelosi has found difficulty in garnering support for, would be "deemed passed."

You heard that right- "deemed" passed. But not actually ever voted on.

Passing healthcare reform through reconciliation seemed facetious enough. Yet, Republicans passed the Bush tax cuts through reconciliation, and used the process for welfare overhaul as well. At the very least, reconciliation requires a simple majority for acceptance. Even liberal outlets like The Washington Post called this latest idea "dodgy" and "contrary to Democrats' promise of transparency."

To make matters worse, it's not as if the Democratic majority is advocating on behalf of some sort of widely-held, popular belief. 44% of American's are supportive of the proposed changes- and 51% are in opposition. There are reasons why Americans continue to poll unfavorably for this bill, after months of campaigning and advocacy and debate on the part of President Obama & Co.

It's a bad bill.

Can anyone seriously stress the financial feasibility of expanding entitlements when they continue to account for the source of our deficit? The legislation has gotten by on this misnomer due to a favorable rating from the CBO, but that rating is borne from gimmicks and payouts. We would collect money for 10 years in order to pay for 6 years of healthcare reform. We would be raiding half a trillion from the Medicare rolls without a responsible way to pay for it. And forgive me for being cynical, but equating deficit reduction with healthcare expansion seems quite flimsy.

Couple this with the fact that the Senate bill is rife with immoral, "sweetheart" deals. How can one defend a bill that includes special privileges for certain states just to win a senator's vote? Before public outrage, Ben Nelson (D-NE) succeeded in trading his vote for Medicare advantages and options available only to citizens of his state- since dubbed the "cornhusker kickback." Connecticut (Joe Lieberman) and Louisiana (Mary Landreiu) also swapped their integrity for pork.

Healthcare reform is a serious issue that needs to be addressed with serious solutions. Using the politics of fear to rally the Democratic caucus, awarding back room payments to win Senatorial support, and now trying to ram this bill through (or rather, around) the House, without even the prospect of a vote, makes this legislation reek of Chicago-style political maneuverings when it should instead be transparent and bipartisan in nature.

Change? Yeah, it's here.

Our Closest Ally?

2010-03-15T16:45:00.003-04:00

It is generally taken as an article of faith that the US's closest ally in the Middle East, and one of our closest altogether, is Israel. It cannot be doubted that the US and Israel have longstanding and very close ties. Economic, social, political, ideological and familial bonds join the two countries. A parliamentary Democracy, Israel is in many respects the freest country in the region. Threatened through much of its history by malevolent neighbors, the US has been right to support it, and offer a guarantee to its defense. Before I address the main point of my post I must make the following unequivocably clear, for like any good blogger I know what happens to people who criticize the Israeli government in the media, even on college blogs like this one. The United States should never abandon the cause of Israel. It should always defend the right to exist of the Israeli people in their ancient homeland. It must never allow the standard of annihilation, raised some 60 years ago by an inept Viennese painter and then again by various Arab leaders in 1948, 1967 and 1973, and still offered up on occasion by certain elements across the greater Middle East, to be brought down against the Jewish people.

But the time has come to acknowledge that to defend Israelis, and the nation of Israel, means we must repudiate the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israel lobby, and the incompetent Neocon ideologues, would have us believe that defending Israel means writing checks and not asking questions. Nothing could be further from the truth. The current administration in Israel, a coalition composed mostly of the far right, that includes as Foreign Minister a man reviled across the Arab world (how exactly is he then to be any part of negotiations with Arab states?) is himself a resident of a West Bank settlement (though to be fair, he has said he would be willing to move if the settlement was given over in a peace deal). An ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza has done nothing to weaken the areas control by Hamas, a group who won the Palestinian elections on an anti-corruption platform that emphasised local governance, but which has since dropped such domestic reformism in favor of embattled radicalism as it has been shut out of any real role in Palestine. In The West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority has made an earnest attempt to rebuild and develop those areas it is actually allowed to run, ongoing settler expansion continues to undermine the Fatah leadership and sour Palestinian public opinion. Many of these settlements (including the 'illegal' ones that in reality almost always receive Israeli government support) bisect Palestinian land in a way that makes erecting a viable state largely impossible. They also include blocs deep in the West Bank that no reasonable observer thinks could remain in Israeli hands after a two-state peace deal. Juan Cole has written extensively in recent weeks about the extent of Israeli intransigence, including the shift in policy from building new Israeli suburbs AROUND East Jerusalem, towards building settlements for Jews in the midst of Arab areas. And Jerusalem's arabs continue to live in a legal limbo that leaves them constantly unsure of their rights. And recent provocations against Muslim sensibilities, including plans to build a museum ON TOP OF a centuries old Muslim graveyard, and the decision to classify several West Bank sites of Broad Abrahamic value as Israeli national heritage sites (Palestinians fear this will be a prelude to their annexation into Israel). the list goes on. The main point is that the Israeli government seems intent on destroying the credibility and capacity of the Fatah regime in the West Bank, and therefore rendering a peace deal impossible.

The failure of Fatah in the West Bank would be disastrous. It would almost certainly set off a new campaign of mass violence. This would kill many Israelis as well as Palestinians. It would implode what little relations Israel has with some Muslim nations, especially rising power Turkey, whose government is increasingly turning against its once close ally. It would also wreck the two-state solution. What would arise in the West Bank from the chaos would likely be Hamas, or a Hamas-like entity, that wants all of Mandate Palestine under it's control. This may be exactly what the right wing in Israel wants. An excuse to seize all the lands west of the Jordan river once and for all. But that would be a horrible outcome for Israel. With the Palestinian birthrate higher than the Israeli, and the Israeli at any rate held up by the pacificist Haredi jews who refuse military service and weigh heavy on state social werfare budgets, a single state solution can mean only two outcomes: Apartheid or the end of the Jewish state. Israel is NOT, contrary to some comentators, an Apartheid state. But it will have to become one if it fails to achieve a two state solution. Democracy would empower fast growing Palestinians, and eventually defeat the Jewish numerical majority. It is this realization that drove Ariel Sharon to strive for peace despite his hawkish background. That "Greater Israel" could not be Jewish AND Democratic. That only a limited state could be both. It once seemed that that realization had come to all of the Israeli right, but it now increasingly seems that when Sharon and his followers left Likud to form Kadima, they enabled the intransigents to reassert themselves.

It is not only Israelis that stand to lost from this policy, but the US as well. As General Petraus himself has pointed out in recent times, the Israeli government's refusal to accept any concessions and its insistence on waving the middle finger at the US is destroying US credibility in the Middle East (what little George Bush left us with and Obama has been able to rebuild), and may cost US soldiers their lives at the hands of Islamist terrorists (Bin Laden has always shown strong interest for the Palestinian issue and in particular the cause of Jerusalem, and few things would demolish his remaining popularity among Muslims faster than the creation of a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem). The Israeli government is a threat to everything the US wants to do in the greater ME. It is driving confrontations with Turkey. It will likely bedevil relations with whatever government comes out of the Iraqi elections (even if Washington's pick, Allawi, becomes PM he will still, like most Arab Nationalists, be opposed to Israel). It will continue to leave Washington-aligned Arab leaders wary of democratic reforms that could yield power to Islamists, it gives Tehran's theocrats a sabre to rattle, and the list goes on.

The answer to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis has been clear for some time. A fully sovereign Palestinian state, governing Gaza and the West Bank, roughly but not necessarily exactly on the 1967 borders, and with a capital in East Jerusalem. Shared control of Abrahamic religious sites by both states or by special international authorities. Token gestures of respect to the Palestinian refugee crisis. Every Israeli living on the Palestinian side of those borders should be given the option of adopting Palestinian citizenship (alongside Israeli) and permitted to remain there if they wish, provided arrangements are made in regards to the thousands of palestinians whose land has been seized for settlement building. But the privileges over Arabs they now enjoy must end. They should not be driven out, but they must be as Israeli Arabs are, an ordinary ethnic minority without special rights or powers. Anything less than this is not likely to win Palestinian support, nor to be recognized by important Arab nations, especially by KSA. It would be cruel to offer the Palestinians less. as Mr Cole noted awhile ago Palestinians have as much of a claim to the areas as Israelis. Genetic and Historical evidence suggests that the Palestinian people are the descendants of that bulk of the Jewish population that did NOT (as popular imagination would have it) leave the area under Roman duress two millenia ago. Over time they converted first to Christianity and then (most of them) to Islam. So on what basis are they denied rights to these lands? If it is to be their faith, then that strikes at a particularly pernicious question for Israel: what is it to be Jewish? If religious faith marks a Palestinian from an Israeli, of what nationality are the 20% or So of Israeli Jews who claim not to believe in God?

- Luke

The Day After

2010-03-08T13:51:00.002-05:00

The vote in Iraq yesterday seems to have gone down pretty well. There are reports of some problems, but it generally seems the vote was fair.

While there are no results out yet, we do have turnout figures. Some suggestions of results have turned up, though the good stuff seems to reside in the Arabic language press and thus hard to trac down. A lot of news reports are saying Maliki is clearly ahead in the Shia south, and that Allawi has dominated in the Sunni areas. I did find this which after some amusing google translate errors, seems to be putting forward the point that Allawi has been competitive among Shia. However I'd question just how competitive if, as it seems to be suggested everywhere, Maliki is ahead in Baghdad. Allawi's shia base is predominantly urban middle class, and If he were truly doing well among Shia, I'd think that the urban middle class in Baghdad combined with the Sunni population there would be enough to put him ahead.

The big conclusion we seem to be able to draw at this stage is that Allawi has done much better among Sunnis than analysts, myself included, predicted, the legacy of his role as Interim PM doesnt seem to be poisoning him among Sunnis. The early signs also seem to show that the INA are doing very poorly.

The post-election dynamics are going to be complex, but i'll leave that discussion for another post.

- Luke

Predictions for Iraq

2010-03-06T22:25:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow Iraqis will go the polls to elect a new national assembly. The results of that vote could have seismic impacts for the country and the region. They could also have great impacts on US foreign policy. If the vote goes badly and violence breaks out, it will be hard for the US to continue its' withdraw plan. There are too many variables, and too few good opinion polls, to make a good guess of what the result will be. The issue is further complicated by the fact that the election is likely to be only partly free, and just how any ballot distortions will play out is an unknown. But for what it's worth here is my prediction.

To start with, let us provide some simplifying adjustments. My Predictions will be based on my perception of national political currents, and thus will not account for the specific seat allocations of the various provinces. I will also not specifically account for the reserved seats provided to the small minorities (Assyrians, Yazidis, Turkmen, etc...). As my prediction will largely depend on using a sectarian analysis, I will also adopt the standard 20-60-20 split of the population into Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs and Kurds, which is not backed up by hard census data at this point. Nor will i account for potential differences in turnout patterns. I imagine that Sunni voters are eager to have their voice heard, that Shia voters will be mobilized by the clergy, including even one time democracy opponent Al-Sadr, who have extolled people to vote, and that Kurds will be eager to hold up their claims in Northern Iraq. These may not hold up. Shia turnout plunged in the provincial elections, due to apathy, and the clergy response may be a signal that Shia leaders worry about losing representation if Sunnis vote in high numbers (and Kurds continue to do so)

Based on the 325 seats to be elected, I will further take the assumption that 195 of those will be decided by Shia, and 65 each by Sunnis and Kurds. Again this is a highly simplified analysis.

General National Trends

The first to consider is anti-incumbency. In the provincial elections this became a very clear theme. Iraqis are not happy with the governance they're receiving and want it changed. Thus while PM Maliki's party did well in those elections, it was defeated in the one province it had already been running. In the Shia vote in particular, much will be decided based on who receives more of the blame for the failings of the government, the Prime Minister, whose State of Law alliance has relatively few seats, or the INA, which dominates parliament. On the Sunni side, the "incumbent" are the sectarian religious parties, like the Iraqi Islamic Party, i think they're likely to get crushed. Among Kurds anti-incumbency will be channeled into 3 main opposition movements, One leftist, One Islamist, and the largest a reformist coalition, the "Change List"

The second is the rise of relatively more ideologically coherent political movements. PM Maliki has sketched out a religious nationalist position of some certainty now. Iraqqiya takes a clear stand on Secularism, Anti-federalism and Arab Nationalism. The Kurdish political scene is undergoing upheaval that ought to eventually break the PUK/DPK Duopoly. And in the INA i think a fight is looming between orthodox conservative clerical forces like the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq, with its support for Shia federalism, extremely close ties to Iran and lack of true political platform, and the Sadr-aligned populists. If iraqi democracies makes it, then the Sadrists have a future as the voice of Working Class, Religious Shia. The the Council, i doubt it.

The Kurdish Vote

How will Kurdistan's 65 seats (again, they are not ALLOTED 65 seats, i ASSUME that Kurds will decide roughly 65 seats, based on population %). In last years Kurdistan regional elections, the dominant PUK/DPK alliance one just over 2/3 of the vote, with various opposition parties following. The opposition has been weak since the election, and there is some likelihood the PUK/DPK will interfere with the vote, so I'm going to give them a still dominating 44 seats. The other 21 I'll split 14 for the Change List, and 7 for the smaller Kurdish movements. I assume no Arab party will win significant Kurdish support.

The Sunni Vote

The Sunni vote is hard to categorize. A lot has been written (including by me) about Iraqqiya's opportunities among Kurdish voters. But we should not forget that as interim Prime Minister Allawi presided over the seige of Fallujah, which many Sunnis consider a war crime, and other US military actions that Sunni voters have not forgotten. As such I'd inclined to give them just 45% of the Sunni vote. For some 30 seats. Because his list includes some (mostly tribal) Sunni outfits, and given his potential to manipulate the vote through state institutions, I'm going to be generous to PM Maliki and give him 6 Sunni seats, or a little over 9%. Unity of Iraq, a second nationalist grouping, also has significant Sunni support, I'd give them about 15% based on their profile and membership. for a total of 10 seats. The other 19 Sunni Seats I'll leave to explicitly Sunni partisan outfits.

The Shia

Of course the big game is to be played among the Shia. Starting with Iraqqiya, based on Allawi's support in the Constituent Assembly Elections and then in the 2005 National Assembly elections, and then adjusting for what we might term the "sectarian security "effect" of non-religious voters supporting their sect's party believing they could better protect them, and also avoidign the complicated question of voting patterns among Iraq's now very large diaspora, I'm going to give Iraqqiya Just short of 20% of the Shia vote, some 38 seats. Unity of Iraq i'll give a far more modest 7 seats. Various minor parties i'll give 7 seats. That leaves 73%, or 142 seats to disburse. I'm feeling generous towards PM Maliki, so I'm going to give him the lionshare, though of only 75 seats, thats about 38%. For the INA I'm going to make a bold prediction: that open list voting will enable the Sadrists to gain serious advantage of their erstwise allies. For the Sadrists I'm predicting 38 seats, and 29 for the other INA members, for a total of 67.

That gives us the following total seat numbers:

SoL - 81
Iraqqiya - 68
INA - 67
DUP/PKK - 44
Sunni Sectarians - 19
Unity of Iraq - 17
Change - 14
Others - 15 seats.

Now, lets all wait a little longer to see me embarassingly proven wrong :P

The implictions of an outcome like mine could be significant. but that, shall wait for later.

- Luke

Of Electoral Systems

2010-03-04T13:27:00.003-05:00

Today balloting begins in Iraq, with those unable to vote on the 7th casting early votes. There had been some fear that the folks in charge of De-Baathification would try to pull something new in the final stage of the election, but with as many as a million people likely to vote today, it seems that they've missed their window. As the election draws down upon us I'll try to get a couple posts up, including some final predictions. Today I'd like to start by talking about the electoral system.

Here in the US we don't often discuss the nature of our electoral system. We take it as a given and assume it doesnt have a significant impact on the political results. But nothing could be further from the truth. In my opinion Electoral Systems are THE most important factor in determining political results.

Before addressing Iraq's system, let me quickly outline that used in the US. The system used in Congressional, Presidential and almost all state and local elections is referred to First Past the Past (FPP). It's rules are simple, you set a district size (in the US, at the congressional district or state level) and then whichever candidate gets the most votes in that district win. In some areas run-offs are mandated between the two highest scoring candidates if no one exceeds 50%, but not in most. Thus in 1992, when Ross Perot won large portions of the vote in every state, denying 50% to both Bill Clinton and George Bush Snr in most states, the later two candidates got to walk away with all those votes. Leaving aside the issue of gerrymandering, largely exceptional to the US where politicians are allowed to write the rules to their own game, there are two key problems with this system. These problems have led most developed countries to turn away from systems like FPP, although it remains in use in Canada and the UK (where notably, it is NOT used for local elections, in the Wales or Scotland parliaments, and even at the national level the Prime Minister wants to change to a different system)

These problems are as follows: Firstly, the system allows for strategic wins by candidates or parties that do not carry the popular vote. I don't need to remind anyone of the 2000 Presidential vote. To display the problem, lets conceive of a kind of toy version of the US presidential election system. Say we have 10 states, each with 1 million voters, all of whom show up on election day. Every state is worth 1 electoral vote, for a total of 10. We have two candidates. Candidate A wins 100% of the vote in 4 states, for 4 million votes, and 40% of the vote in the other 6, for a total of 6.4 million votes. Candidate B wins 0% of the vote in 4 states, and 60% in each of the other 6, for a total of 3.6 million votes. Because he carried more of our equally balanced states, Candidate B, who won 36% of the total votes, is now President. Now of course in a real election things would be unlikely to ever be so clear cut, but it is illustrative.

The second problem is exclusion. In order for FPP to be representative, it assumes that political variety is geographically distributed. That any given geographic unit has a relatively uniform political persuasion. Without the assumption, the system is not representative. Since we all plainly can see that it is not true, we can also see that the system is not representative. While FPP can tolerate some diversity, eg: by allowing concentrated ethnic minorities to win representation (though ONLY if they are concentrated), it cannot represent many other kinds of diversity. Green parties, typically followed or capable of being followed by a decent share of the population (evidence from Europe and Australasia would suggest between 4 and 10% of the electorate) usually have relatively diffuse support. Along with many other movements they draw their support from non-concentrated groups of voters across a wide area. They are unlikely to ever win district level elections, especially when the districts are as large as they are the US. The evidence from New Zealand after FPP was replaced with a proportional voting system in 1996 is clear, a massive increase in the representation of groups that had always been popular among the electorate, but were unable to win district elections.

Turning our attention to Iraq, we see a very different system. Iraq's parliament will be elected using what we might call an Open-List Provincial-District Proportional System. It will be easier to explain if I start with how the Iraqi parliament was elected in 2005. Then the system was basically Closed-List National-District Proportionality. This means that voters cast their votes for their chosen list (parties in Iraq typically cluster onto Lists, rather than run as individual parties, these lists generally have some ideological coherence, but can produce some strange bedfellows). The total votes for each list across the whole country are tallied, then various mathematical techniques are applied to produce seat allocations that are broadly proportional. The "Closed-List" element gives the following meaning: each list or party participating in the election produces an ordered list of candidates, and then however many seats they are allocated, the first that number of candidates goes to parliament.

The system in place this year has two crucial differences. One, the proportions of the vote will be calculated at the PROVINCIAL, rather than national level, they will then determine what party/list gets what share of the seats allocated for that province. This will help redress the imbalances of 2005, when Sunnis boycotted the vote. Sunni provinces like Anbar will still return Sunni reps even if few vote, under this system. Secondly, The Open List system means that this time voters will vote for specific candidates ON the party/list lists. This could significantly change the game for the big party lists. Since many of the major national lists have diverse ideological components, voters will no longer be forced to accept the distribution of power as decided by the politicians. One issue I'll be keeping a close eye on in this regard is the results for the Iraqi National Alliance, the traditionally dominant part of the INA, the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq, has never had a good popular base and used the closed list system to its advantage. it is essentially a complete Iranian proxy entity, without an agenda that appeals to Iraqis. I would imagine they'll lost a lot of ground to their main internal rival, the Sadrist movement, which mixes Religious fundamentalism with Nationalism, anti-federalism and working class populism.

- Luke

Which is the Conservative Position?

2010-03-02T20:28:00.003-05:00

I read on ABC.com that the Supreme Court held hearings today in yet another gun control case- this time concerning the local Chicago law that bans handguns and other firearms within the city boundaries.

What's interesting about this case is that I'm split, and not between an activist or conservative judgment, but between two conservative judgements.

On one hand, there is the strict constructionist, in many ways originalist approach- take the 2nd amendment at its word. Thus, the "right of people to bear arms" has been infringed by such local law. Moreover, politically speaking, it is almost always conservative Republicans who seek to protect gun ownership, and liberal Democrats who aspire for gun control.

And yet, if this law is upheld, it will be because of the 10th amendment- the powers not delegated to the federal government are "reserved for the states." Education and law enforcement have always been interpreted as strictly state's rights- and helped effectively strike down federal (not local) gun laws in cases such as Lopez v. United States, for infringing on the state's responsibility to govern law enforcement.

So what's a conservative to do? There is drive to uphold the 2nd amendment, and strike down the Chicago law. This would be considered a huge victory for the NRA, but for almost every Republican as well. Since when has a Republican not derided "gun control"?

And yet, there exists a little concept called federalism- the distinction between a state's sphere of governing within the federal context. It's the foundation our country was conceived on. State's rights are also a cause that Republicans voraciously defend (traditionally, not so much with the neo-conservatie movement, or evangelical movement). But if the Supreme Court were to uphold the Chicago law, it would seem to me as a reinforcement of state's rights- a bedrock conservative principle.

I guess this seems to be a win-win for conservatives. But in my opinion, most Republicans will advocate that the Court strike down the Chicago law.

But to do so would effectively downplay the concern for state's rights, an ideal much more entrenched in conservative thought, (dating back to Burke), than a person's right to be armed.

This might be considered blasphemy in conservative circles, but I'm rooting for the Supreme Court to uphold the law. It would be a clear victory for state's rights, and a push back against the "imperial," activist Court that emerged in the 1970's .

Republicans who cry afoul should not blame the Court, but blame themselves. If that becomes the case, then they haven't understood true conservative principles from the start.

We all want to be a spy at one point or another...

2010-02-28T21:05:00.004-05:00

It seems the January 30th killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh and the recent reports that it might have been a possible Mossad hit is working much like a Bond movie in the US for recruitment into the Isreali spy organization.

Earlier today, Dubai police released even more evidence that they are certain the hit was led by the Mossad. Al-Mabhouh was drugged and suffocated in a manner that would make his death seem as natural as possible, the Deputy Police Chief Khamis al-Mazeina was quoted as saying on the Dubai police website. (Washington Post)

"Dubai authorities have named 26 alleged members of the team that tracked and killed the Palestinian and said they operated in disguise and used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports." (Washington Post)

While around the world this is generating reproach for the Israeli government, it is creating "Mossad Mania" in Israel. The London Times pointed out Saturday that each scintillating detail, including the refusal to accept responsibility or deny action from the Israeli government, is only managing to fuel the fire of excitement from Israeli citizens who are buying up glasses that look like those of suspects and any kind of Mossad focused merchandise they can find. There has also been an influx in applications to join the Mossad.

Sometimes all we need is a reminder that spies still go on exciting missions. For me, an episode of Alias has me imagining sneaking into the back rooms of embassies to steal something vital to the nation, for others, a well publicized hit can do the job. It's too bad an actual person had to be murdered to excite that kind of attention (rather than just another Bond evil mastermind), but it goes to show you, any reminder always gets the youth excited for a job that most of them will probably never end up with.

Success or Failure?

2010-02-27T18:43:00.003-05:00

The polarization of the media landscape has been perhaps no better exemplified than by the recent summit on Healthcare, convened by President Obama.

Since that summit, which brought together both parties to debate healthcare policy, political pundits from each end of the spectrum have declared victory for their respective sides. Weren't we all watching the same event?

And yet, it's truly amazing how two people can come away with reactions that are the complete polar opposite of one another. Peggy Noonan, writing for the Weekend Journal, lambasted the summit as political theatre, speculating that little agreement will arise from it.

E.J. Dionne, another syndicated columnist, drew an utterly different conclusion from the summit. Dionne classified it as a Democratic success, as opposed to a failure as Noonan suggested, and praised Obama for making the "central point of the whole day."

Polarization in Washington is nothing new. Calls for Senatorial reform, including the obliteration of the filibuster, has fallen flat because Congress has always been polarized- sometimes manifesting itself in violence. James Madison conceived this notion over 200 years ago in the Federalist Papers- ambition will counteract competing ambition. That's why, no matter how polarized Congress has always been, the sides seem to come together at opportune times- because politicians want to be successful, driven by ambition, and this ambition wipes out the "factional interests" that Madison warns of.

What's new in the American political arena is the rise of polarized journalists, when that phrase itself is nearly an oxymoron. Biased reporting, talk radio, "opinionated news" (another oxymoron) have all contributed, more so than Congress itself, to the complete and absolute polarization of the American public. Instead of delivering the news, news is now always delivered with "analysts" and "experts" who are merely opinionated figures that "analyze" a story one way or another based on innate personal biases.

The problem isn't politically charged ideologues filibustering laws on the floor of the Senate. The problem is that those who deliver the news can no longer analyze and report on events without being blinded by political preferences.

Extra Iraq Updates

2010-02-26T21:02:00.002-05:00

It seems that in the last day or so, in which I've been without a working computer, some interesting tidbits have been coming out of Iraq.

Radio Liberty reports that the National Dialogue Front, the major Sunni component of Iraqqiya, led by Saleh Al-Mutlaq, has agreed NOT to boycott the election. This is great news. It ends fears of a major Sunni vote boycott. Al-Mutlaq's official line is that constituent pressure forced them to change their decision. But i suspect that the real pressure was American. The US desperately needs a good outcome from this election, or the calculus of President Obama's Iraq policy will be thrown off significantly. PM Maliki has complained in recent weeks of US involvement in the election. Although he is largely making such complaints to drum up votes, he is also almost certainly right. I'd wager the US military and diplomats have been pushing Allawi and Mutlaq to get their stuff sorted.

A second theory is that the pressure was non-american, but still foreign. Allawi has been making a tour of important local sunni countries, including Saudi Arabia (Though he has avoided Syria, still ruled by another branch of the Ba'ath party, and where the biggest emigre Ba'athists probably are.) It is possible that the Saudis, or perhaps the Turks have put pressure on Mutlaq.

The other big item of Iraqi news is a poll, by Iraq's National Media Center, and detailed by Juan Cole, who provided insight on the mostly Arabic language coverage of the results. The poll suggests that SoL will get 30% of the vote, followed by 20% for Iraqqiya, and 17% for the INA, with the Kurdish duopoly getting a mere 10%. The polling was done over the first half of february, so it should still contain some reaction to the De-Baathification crisis.

There are a few things wrong with these results, as Cole points out. The Kurdish parties will almost certainly get more than 10%, even if their votes are offset by support for the Kurdish opposition, believed to be more vigorous this election. It shows almost no support for Sunni groupings. Iraqqiya is popular among Sunnis yes, but it will not scoop them so totally.

Perhaps the most pressing problem might be that the connections between the NMC and Maliki. It is likely that at least a minimal amount of tampering with the results occurred. I might be inclined to see this poll as a kind of push-poll, where you use polling data to force a kind of result. Here I think Maliki is trying to send a message to the INA that they cant survive without him, and perhaps that if they don't bow before him, he'll side with Iraqqiya instead. I personally doubt Maliki will do that much better than the other Shia parties. We shall see.

-Luke

Hypocrisy in Baghdad

2010-02-26T17:52:00.004-05:00

With the election fast approaching, Baghdad has surprised many with its decision to rehire 20,000 officers of Saddam's old army. In the context of the anti-Baathist hysteria, this seems a strange decision. Some will no doubt try to claim that this is evidence that PM Maliki is turning over a new leaf, and trying to stop a slide towards renewed Sunni alienation. Others will say he's trying to blunt the still simmering Sunni Islamist and Neo-Baathist insurgencies, as it is well known that many officers of the old army fill the ranks of these insurgencies.

I fear this arguments give Al-Maliki too much credit. The news only contradicts De-Ba'athification if you believe that the later process is legitimate. If you believe, based on the overwhelming evidence, that it is a cynical sham intended to eliminate political opponents, then there is no contradiction. If anything, this could be considered a sign that Maliki wants to further gain the upper hand in the De-Ba'athification crisis. he wants not only to weaken the Secular Nationalists, but also to reduce the influence within the army of the Shia religious militias, many of them loyal to his rivals. It MAY be a sign that contrary to popular belief, Maliki intends NOT to ally with the other Shia Islamist parties after the election, but is instead trying to prepare the ground for a coalition with heavy Sunni participation.

The CNN article also notes that Al Qaeda In Iraq, a mostly home grown group whose direct organizational connections to Bin Laden's clique are probably few (do not believe the simplifications of Washington talking heads, Al Qaeda has now become virtually a franchise, not a single network) is increasingly carrying out political assasinations and trying to derail the election. They need to do so. If Sunnis show up in large numbers this election and back Secular, Nationalist candidates, the Neo-Ba'athists will cut their ties of convenience with the radicals and the Islamist insurgency will be all but finished.

- Luke

On Religion and Requirements

2010-02-24T11:22:00.005-05:00

There’s an excellent discussion going on at the Harvard Political Review’s blog, HPRgument, about general curriculum requirements, specifically concerning religion. Harvard’s General Education program requires a “Culture and Belief” class, but has no explicit requirement to engage with the study of religion. (I haven't taken the time to look at other school's general requirements, but Penn CAS's at least says nary a word about religion.) Sam Barr starts the discussion with the following:

I fulfilled a science requirement by taking a class on evolution that spent a solid couple of weeks on intelligent design and other religious perspectives on the universe, and we had a great section discussing the relationship between faith and science. I fulfilled a literature requirement by taking a class that included a unit on ancient Roman religion; took a freshman seminar that dealt with the interaction between religion, morality, and law; and am now taking Intro to African American Studies, which of course deals extensively with the role of religion in the lives of African Americans and their ancestors. And now I’m taking a Social Studies tutorial on “Religion and Politics in Modern America.” You can get a decent dose of religion at Harvard without even taking classes that are explicitly or solely about religion.

Kathy Lee (actual name, I can only assume) has this to say:

Simply because students “can get a decent dose of religion at Harvard” (emphasis obviously mine) doesn’t necessitate that they will. Sure, if you’re interested in the study of religion, Harvard offers a host of diverse courses to slake your intellectual thirst. But what about those students without that burning desire? Undoubtedly for some Harvard students, class discussions about religion are probable, if not inevitable. But the fact is, this experience is by no means one shared by the entire student body.

Isn’t it the point of standardized curricula to ensure that students like these don’t fall through the cracks? If religion is as important as we profess it to be, shouldn’t we implement a mechanism such that every student graduates having engaged in religious dialogue?

I think what Sam was getting at – and if he wasn’t, I’ll say it on my own – is not that students “can get a decent dose of religion” at Harvard, but that any decent education at Harvard will give students a dose of religion. The topic, simply put, is unavoidable to anyone seriously engaged with the world, regardless of where they turn.

The same goes for “the past,” engagement with the study of which is apparently also required. And here we have an interesting parallel. Religion falls under the “Culture and Belief” umbrella, but in theory a student assiduously working to avoid religion might (to their detriment) succeed in avoiding it. Yet students are required to take a class that “engages in the Study of the Past,” even though there is no formal history requirement. And why not? Apparently because Harvard thinks eight classes is enough to require, and something had to get cut.

I think there’s an instructive difference between history and religion – and for full disclosure, I’m a history major and therefore have a significant axe to grind. History, the critical study of the human past, is a discipline. That is, it offers a perspective through which to understand phenomena and to answer questions. Religion clearly serves those two functions for many (if not most) people, but in the context of the liberal arts college it is a topic of study, not a paradigm. One might discuss the history of religion, but it would be rather odd to be found in a class titled “the religion of history.” Such a class would ask questions like, “what should the religious perspective be on the study of history? Are there religious principles that should guide our approach to the past? How does the religious belief of historians influence their scholarship?” Etc. And that would be an illuminating conversation at a Bible study, but in a Harvard classroom it would lead only to dissension. History, in what I find a bizarre turn, appears to have been relegated to the same status as religion – that is, the past as a topic rather than History as a paradigm. A remarkable shame, and a remarkable failure of the History department at Harvard. But they salvaged, at least, the past from the ashes of History in the curriculum.

What all sides seem to agree on is the value of encountering religion as a topic of study. What I’ve found anecdotally, in earnest conversations with friends and family, is that those who advocate for mandatory religion in the classroom are typically also advocating for an open-minded engagement with religion as a means to truth. “Culture and Belief” implies the former perspective; “Reason and Faith” implies the latter. There, I think, is the hidden faultline.

Update 2 minutes later: As is my wont, I've left you all without an opinion of mine on the original controversy. As my post implies, I think a History class should be required separately from the other requirements, and a religion class should not be required at all. The latter stems more from my disliking the proliferation of requirements than anything else. Religion could, if necessary, be required as a "topic" class, like the current Study of the Past deal (i.e. one of the eight classes must...). And there should be boatloads of those classes available.

Congress is Broken

2010-02-22T17:55:00.007-05:00

And it's not broken because the Republican's are using the filibuster excessively, or because partisanship has corroded Senatorial courtesy. E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman, and the rest of the liberal media establishment would have you believe that, though.

No, Congress is really and truly broken because of rumors out of the White House today that President Obama would attempt to pass healthcare reform through budget reconciliation- budget what?

Don't be upset if you're as lost as I am. That's due to the fact that budget reconciliation (adopted in 1974) was intended for- obviously- the purpose of reaching important budgetary agreements without the threat of a filibuster. It is important because governmental agencies rely on federal funding, and by eliminating the threat of the filibuster, budget issues can be resolved by a simple majority vote - instead of having agencies essentially frozen for months.

If budget reconciliation was an equally legitimate avenue with which to pursue health care reform, why was it not explored over the summer?

I mean, doesn't that come across as completely logical? If there existed two methods of passage, both valid, wouldn't they have chosen the method that needed 51 votes instead of 60?

However, this past year was spent trying to get 60 votes because that's the legal, procedural, and traditional vehicle for passing major reform bills. Or any law, for that matter.

Now, they are touting reconciliation as the solution, because its politically feasible and in many ways, crucial. In reality, they are employing a procedure that was never intended to pass sweeping healthcare reform- it was meant to hasten budgetary considerations.

Congress is broken. And Democrats on Capitol Hill will have no one to point to but themselves if they try to force feed budget-reconciliation-turned-healthcare-reform down the public's throat.

Democracy in Iraq in serious threat

2010-02-22T13:37:00.003-05:00

As I've written earlier, Iraq's nascent democracy is at threat from the De-Baathification crisis, which has become a way for the current ruling elite to hound challengers over spurious claims of connection to Saddam's regime. Among those banned by the process from participating in the election is noted Secular Nationalist Sunni leader Saleh Al-Mutlaq who had been the principle Sunni leader in the Iraqqiya secular nationalist coalition. Al-Mutlaq, who did not boycott the 2005 votes and lead a rump Secular Sunni movement in parliament, The National Dialogue Front, has now said he will boycott the election. Iraqqiya has opted to go on without him. But the boycott is a serious shock to Iraqqiya and ensures the final wrecking of any chance they had of winning a plurality in the vote. Iraqqiya is now in danger of falling apart. This would be a huge disaster for Iraqi politics. Under Ba'athist rule Iraq was the most secular country Arab country. Saddam did not even allow Shariah courts to operate personal status issues (such as marital law and inheritance rules), something that secular leaders elsewhere in the region all do. This is not to laud Saddam, a brutal monster of a man. Nor is it to demonise islamic political parties. But it is to note that Iraq had developed a substantial Secular tendency under 35 years of Ba'ath rule. Iraqi men drank and shaved their beards, and women were free to go about unveiled. This tendency has been sublimated by the power of the Shia islamist movements (with help from the Sunni Religious Right) who mostly lived abroad in the Saddam years. If a major political movement to represent that Secular Nationalist tendency is not able to establish itself, that would be a great tragedy for Iraq.

All is not yet lost. The boycott by the NDF has so far not spread to other major Sunni movements. Some NDF candidates still seem determined to go ahead with the election, particularly those in Kirkuk, who fear another boycott will advance Kurdish claims to the city. A mass popular boycott is unlikely, as other Nationalist politicians seem determined to go on, and Sunnis have learned the lessons of the 2005 boycott that left them worse than powerless. Further, Because seats in Parliament will be apportioned by Province rather than simply Nationally (as they were in 2005), Sunnis will not see the systemic underrepresentation that resulted from earlier boycotts. Sunni heavy provinces like Anbar will still return Sunni politicians. But mixed provinces, particularly those in the North where Sunnis compete with Kurds for power, are now likely to return more Kurdish delegations (though probably less so than in 2005, when virtually no Sunnis voted, but the swing will be less pronounced now). It also means that Sunni religious sectarian parties, such as the Iraqi Islamic Party, that have been the dominant Sunni group in parliament since 2005, due to the nationalist boycotts, will do a lot better than they ought to.

The Obama administration has placed a lot of its faith in the election as a way to strengthen Iraqi stability and promote political inclusion. Functioning politics in Iraq was after all, the goal of the Surge. That Possibility is now very much at threat. The US has only itself to blame. In the aftermath of the invasion it did everything it could to hand the reins of power to a clique of Iran-trained Shia Islamists, and created the infrastructure by which Iraq's secular non-sectarian political movements are now being dismembered. We must now face the most likely scenario for Iraq: a semi-Democratic state dominated by Shia Islamists, close to Iran, and likely to provide support to groups like Hezbollah. If this development wrecks the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, then that is just one more nail that ought to be hammered into the coffin of the incompetent Neo-Conservative clique that ran Washington for 8 years and did its best to destroy America's reputation for the sake of no great gains. I'm sure Dick Cheney will soon be on the news talking about how this is Obama's fault. Those of us who know the facts know better. This bed was made by Cheney and his friends, and they've now left a President who opposed the war to lie in it.

-Luke

CPAC Keynote

2010-02-22T09:38:00.003-05:00

This weekend had all kinds of exciting things happen. Tiger woods made us all forget the Mayakoba Golf Classic was taking place, the Endeavor came back from it's 130th mission, and CPAC happened. I've been totally excited about CPAC, mostly because this kid, Johnathan Krohn, was scheduled to talk, and he's super adorable. While I haven't gotten around to catching up on his speech yet, the rest of CPAC has been entertaining to various degrees.

Glenn Beck gave the keynote, which can be started here. (I know all the links for all the speeches, because live tv means repeating things can't happen...plus The Right Scoop provides an audio file for listening on the go.) He started out with a "lovely" description of what kind of morning America is still having, continuing, "Now the question is...What is it that has caused the problem, and if you say Obama it's too simple of an answer, because it's not Barak Obama." He instead blamed "progressivism" as the problem our country faces, and garnered "boos" from the audience as he read a note from the turn of the century (the last century), which called for progressive change and claimed the constitution had outlived its usefulness.

That was just part 1 of 6 on youtube, I'll save you my attempts to post-liveblog the other five parts. However, it is worth a listen. He focuses heavily on the fact that both parties are at fault for perceived problems with the country (what's making his rather detailed hung over American morning happen).

Also, heads up, now that CPAC is over and Mike Huckabee is complaining all over the place about CPAC being a failure and why he didn't go, he lost the straw poll with only 4%. I'm not quite sure yet if I want to take Huckabee's accusations of CPAC going libertarian too serioulsy, but Rep. Ron Paul did win the same straw poll at 31%. (I found this out by watching part 2 of Beck's speech, C-Span likes to include information tidbits.)

Once I've caught up with Krohn's speech, I'll post a link and review. There's something far too entertaining about the 14 year old, who's been doing a speech tour with Carrie Prejean.

Apparently They're Not Kidding

2010-02-20T11:02:00.004-05:00

In my post on Wednesday, I dangled the possibility that the Philadelphia Daily News was kidding. They are not, as it turns out, and neither is the mayor, the police chief, or anybody else who's recently gone off his or her respective rocker over Tuesday's snowball fight - excuse me, rampage.

I think the point I want to get across can be handled pretty well by the following two blurbs, put next to each other. First, Ed Rendell quoted in the Inquirer:

Few topics are nearer to Gov. Rendell's heart than the rebirth of Center City, and yesterday he said incidents like Tuesday's teen rampage along Market Street can upset the delicate formula that attracts people downtown or drives them away...

[Rendell] cited a study that he claimed said more people now live in the city's business core than in any city except for New York.

"That's nothing short of incredible," Rendell said, "but that's fragile, and it can go backward."

Next up, Emily Schultheis of Philly Daily News writes these words:

Police officers stationed at each entrance to the mall yesterday served as a reminder of Tuesday's incident, which involved more than 150 students and resulted in 16 arrests and $700 of damage in a nearby Macy's.

Lois Ladd of Edwardsville, Ill., who was visiting Philadelphia for the weekend, said she has never seen so much security at a mall.

"Everybody has security at every door," she said.

Schultheis goes on to describe this incident:

Four students, from Mastery Charter School and the Community College of Philadelphia, said the security guards at one entrance discouraged them from going inside.
"We were trying to get in, and the cops just crossed their arms and shook their heads," said Hanani Brooks, a student at Mastery.

If the city is so concerned with its "delicate balance," perhaps it might consider not stationing police officers at every door at the mall, turning reporters away, or consciously reducing the presence of teenagers? As far as reputational damage to the city of Philadelphia goes, what we have here appears to be a self-fulfilling prophecy for the most part. Let's head on over to the pages of the New York Times, and search for the word "Philadelphia" in articles in the last seven days. As of February 20, 2010 at 11:30 in the AM, I see absolutely nothing about any flash mob (nor when I search for "flashmob" or "flash mob"). Rather, on the first page I see "Ailing Philadelphia Orchestra," "Philadelphia Phillies," and - wait a second - "School Accused of Using Webcam to Photograph Student at Home." (In print, they have this to say on the matter.) Could it be that overreaction by the authorities matters more to the national audience than some snowballs? That a city whose national image right now is heavily colored by the Lower Merion webcam scandal might, in fact, not really want to be stationing police outside the mall to discourage high school and college students from entering?

According to the coverage, this sort of gathering has become more commonplace in the last year or so. This Inquirer article notes that "police have been called to the Gallery for a variety of reasons more than 550 times since January 2009." Leave aside the utter lack of context for that number, and let's assume that the youth have grown restless and destructive. Having been legally a child just a scant two years ago, and still being a child in the eyes of most of my elders, I remember some of the psychology of that age - and I'm fairly sure that the absolute worst way to make a thing like this die down is to legitimate it by making a huge deal. No, really: my very first reaction on reading the Daily News article was, "let's get everybody together and go shopping at Macy's right now." I can't be the only one. Oh, and this vileness doesn't help. I'll have more words for Christine Flowers later, but suffice it to say I'm disgusted that the attitude she displays has not yet been resigned to anachronism.

Penn students: they aren't really talking about us, since most of the reporters' sources attend high school or community college. I'd wager the city perception of Penn students has a little bit more to do with class (a fact that should annoy the city as well as us, given the flashmob coverage). But be aware that this is how the city is talking about children - which is what, in the final analysis, it thinks we are.

Israel Secret Agents, Dubai Police, and a Murder?

2010-02-20T09:08:00.004-05:00

It was recently speculated by the New York Times that the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was committed by Israel Mossad agents in the city of Dubai. Now, this case seems like a straight forward issue of a secret service committing a hit on the grounds of a friendly nation. However, there were several complications including the usage of British passports, which violates Britain's right to monitor its citizenship. Secondly, the chief of police of Dubai was able to unveil almost clear documentation of the murder, with detailed follow up on security cameras. And, finally, to add to the drama its believed that members of Israel's back up system, Sayanim, where lay people are asked to help the intelligence service was also at play.

Not to mention the several international laws broken in this operation, Israel will have to answer for its behavior. Its ties with Britain and Dubai will continue to fray as it keeps exploiting its friends to accomplish its goals. How much longer can Britain take to looking like a tool for Israel? Or Dubai look to the arab world as more of a traitor in the heart of arabia versus the jewel of the kingdoms? These countries cannot take much more abuse from a supposed friend.

The Original Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/world/europe/19britain.html

This could be a really creepy hacker joke...

2010-02-19T14:20:00.001-05:00

Ever feel like someone's watching you when you're sitting there chilling on your computer? Well in the case of 1,800+ Pennsylvania high school students, this occasionally was the case. Lower Merion School District was being cool, they gave out laptops to all students at two of their high schools as part of a program "to create a "seamless' way to collaborate on projects and access school materials." (Jezebel) In getting these free laptops, you do have to accept to some degree that you are going to be monitored...that means no clicking on porn sites boys, or lord forbid a loner looks at an anarchist site. If only this were the limits of the problems this free laptop has now created.

New computers these days almost always come with webcams embedded. It's part of the awesomeness of ever evolving forms of technology that this can be provided these days. For a school computer, this could make doing group work so much easier (no rehearsing that Mercutio scene via phone for English tomorrow). This alone sounds pretty crazy though, useful as it could be for class, potential for problems arise the moment you give adolescents computers and video recording devices.

First scenario that has come to the minds of the people I've presented this to immediately jumps to "Oh no, what did the students do?" I honestly don't want to know what the students did.

Unfortunately the school board did, and, in a diabolical move grabbed from big brother himself, the school station maintained and used remote access to these webcams. Unfortunately, no one but the school system knew about this ability. Families "learned that Big Brother was in their home when an assistant principal told their son that the school district knew he 'was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam". (Courthouse News Service) The boy's parents are taking the school district to court in a class action on behalf of all the students who received the laptops (a pdf of the case can be found on the Courthouse News Service).

The complaint filed states:"Defendants have never disclosed either to the plaintiffs or to the class members that the school district has the ability to capture webcam images from any location in which the personal laptop computer was kept."

While, obviously, there was guaranteed to be a level of Big Brother floating around those computers, this type of access goes above and beyond.

As BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow writes: "If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don't know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I'm getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students' clickstreams and e-mails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying."

I personally can't agree more with Doctorow's sentiment. Especially in light of all the work going on in the nation today to prevent child pornography that has been occurring as a result of technology seemingly permeating every aspect of daily life.

Where goes the Republican Party?

2010-02-18T21:59:00.003-05:00

A lot of cyber ink has been spilled lately on whether or not the Republican party is heading towards a Tea Party-ization, or a Sarah Palin-ization. Namely that the remaining conservative elite factions will be co-opted by Right populism, theocratic conservativism, etc...

Over at the Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan has spent a good deal of time discussing the question and also posing a counter-factual: Whether or not the GOP could ever transition towards the British Conservative Party. Andrew has noted the Conservative Party's gay rights stance, and the election rhetoric of likely future Prime Minister, David Cameron as examples.

The Conservatives in the UK, at least in their modern incarnation, are often characterized by similar surface ideological concerns as the GOP: they want to reinforce the value of the family, they favor more fiscal balance, they want to reform schools, etc... But they are also drastically more modern. They have accepted the welfare state, and are pledging not to cut a healthcare system that is TRULY Socialist*. Their position on gay rights is more advanced than that of the Democrats here, let alone the GOP.

It is tempting to see them as the future for the American Right. But I am skeptical. The Tories have an asset the Republicans lack. The GOP, starting from Nixon, have co-opted populism into their party. In most European countries, and indeed in the US before the 60s, Populism belonged to the Left. Conservative parties in Europe, many of them former aristocratic vehicles, were never in a position to take up the Populist torch. In Europe now many Populists HAVE broken with the left, and fill the ranks of third-rail anti-immigrant populist parties that have upset party systems from Italy to Norway. As the world has progressed the British Conservatives have been free to progress with it, accepting, if gradually, the transformations of the society they live in. In the US, populism has been integrated into the GOP and combined with free market idealism to form a bizarre creature indeed. While the British Left keeps its populist constituencies in line with timely rhetorical attacks on the Rich and the symbolism of class privilege, the US Populist movement has turned away from opposition to economic distribution and towards angry conflict with the symbols of change in their society. The GOP cannot survive electorally without them. They are the base and they will roar louder and louder, until all that is left in the Republican Party is them and their ideals. Until the GOP finds a way to put them back in line, or the Democrats start acting like a real Left wing party and make a serious play at their economic interests, they will act as an immense break on the modernization of the American right. If anything, i expect the GOP to go backwards before it can go forwards again.

*the reform mooted even by the most extreme of Democrats, is not considered a public healthcare system by any sensible foreign observer.

- Luke

You Must Be Kidding Me

2010-02-17T09:20:00.003-05:00

No, seriously, someone at the Philadelphia Daily News must be kidding me. I guess it's Gloria Campisi and David Gambacorta, who are either a) poking some well-deserved fun at Fox News, or b) do not understand the concept of a flash mob. The first line? "A flash mob of 150 teens slammed into Center City yesterday afternoon like a tidal wave of stupidity, flooding the streets with chaos and fear." The "chaos and fear" amounted to...wait for it...$700 dollars worth of damage! And some snowballs. Yes, one person was hospitalized, but fifteen were arrested, which seems to me a mighty high arrest-to-harm ratio. But really, how worked up can we possibly get about this? Allow me to assure you that an actual "stampede" would cause far greater than $700 worth of damage.

Guys, there are flash mobs and then there are flash mobs. For example, the impromptu march on City Hall after Obama's election. People were dancing. Maybe that one wasn't arranged in advance, but still - there was a pillow fight last year also! Yes, it is eminently possible for a mob, arranged in advance on Facebook for the purposes of recreation, to get out of control and cause damage. This one did, apparently. But "mindless miscreants?" What, were there nattering nabobs of negativism in attendance also?

If it turns out these guys actually are joking (ineptly), I take everything back (and redirect it entirely at the Fox segment). But the bottom line is that it's not the '60s anymore, and you don't have to sound like Richard Nixon every time some kids get a little too worked up and cause some commotion. Hell, they weren't even encouraging you to stop killing foreigners or to give people civil rights. Which they easily could have been doing.

Tomato, Tomato

2010-02-16T21:19:00.007-05:00

I have sometimes regretted choosing sleep over other activities -- lectures, parties, exams. (Yes, the last has actually happened.) I remembered those instances this afternoon and thus dragged myself to the suspiciously intriguing yet nonetheless intellectually stimulating Philo Halls for a screening of a slightly renowned debate that occurred in 1971 between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky on human nature, justice and civil disobedience, be it in face of imperialism, capitalism -- essentially, all that jazz which Westernism entails.

You could say, why not just YouTube it? No need to miss those Zs. Aha! This is where the Philos come in handy. They apparently snagged / borrowed it from some Dutch archivist, as the video has never been released in full form. So yah, guess you missed out on something special. Wait, scratch that. Although, I did not feel as special when I saw that one of the more interesting points of the screening -- the debators' choice of drink -- is also in the first few seconds of the clip accessible online. I suppose there are a few other interesting points you may have missed. For example,

- A stylstic point: I have read Foucault and Chomsky separately, but seeing them tackle each other head on drew out a distinct difference in their audience appeal. Both have arguably fringe views, at least among readers/viewers today. And yet Foucault is the typical Frenchman, that is, structuralist and theoretical; Chomsky is the typical American, that is, scientifically systematic and somewhat more coherent. (Chomsky's first sentence: "Well, let me begin in a slightly technical way.") I personally find strengths in both approaches, but I suppose the latter meshes better with the kind of "effective" argumentation our pedagogy instills. Which is why I am surprised as to why Foucault seems to be more popular among American youth. Well, among those who give a damn.

- More substantially: As Prof Breckman underlined, the root of Chomsky and Foucault's differences in political philosophy lies in their conceptions of human nature and how it is shaped. Above all, Chomsky is a linguist who believes the ability to acquire logos is innate and hence universal. In that sense, our nature is innate and can be conceived as, with a bit of willpower, independent from the external pressures brought upon it. This gives us the power to resist unjust governments, wars, economies. Foucault, above all, is a pessimist. Err, historical sociologist. He places his emphasis on the study of past struggles against imperialism and capitalism. And to him, they're simply tomato / tomato. Indeed, as he points out, the human nature conceptualized by Marxists was in many ways predicated upon that conceptualized by the bourgeois. Is this, per chance, why the 1968 strikes in which he was involved were unable to ultimately resist the power structures of France's state? And is this why our 1968 painfully collapsed just over a decade later into the Reaganomics from which not even a wicked bad crisis can dissociate the mainstream?

Chomsky lives on, yet health care does not. In this sense, Foucault is unfortunately the word.

- NV -

Evan Bayh

2010-02-15T16:47:00.002-05:00

Will not seek re-election. This is shocking. Just two years ago Evan Bayh was the extremely popular albeit occasionally dull wonder boy of indiana who was once on Obama's short list of vice presidential candidates. Now here he stands, citing excessive partisanship as his primary reason for not running to hold his office. This puts the democrats in a very tight spot, having already lost senior democrats such as Christopher Dodd and Rep. Patrick Kennedy. It almost seems like everyone is jumping ship on the Obama administration, one can only imagine that it will get worse.

For the love of love

2010-02-14T19:30:00.005-05:00

I was a bit suspicious of what appeared to be The Nation getting all Hallmark on us. Of course, 'twas not the case. Indeed, the articles showcased in this feature indicate an appropriate mix of outward qualms with and closet appreciation for one of society's most divisive holidays. Minus all those others that at some point in history were accompanied by persecution.

I could follow The Nation's lead and make a weak attempt at justifying this: "Just as we'll never stop debating the political, whether we are cynics or romantics, or both, love will never cease to fascinate and inspire us."

Or, I could be real and say this: We are in college. If not this specific day, we ought to enjoy youth (and love) in the general vicinity!

- NV -

Iraq's De-Baathification Crisis

2010-02-14T13:41:00.003-05:00

As Iraq's election loomed, many analysts believed that the changed political circumstances would generate vastly different results. With Security and Nationalism arising last year as important political totems, Prime Minister Maliki was able to separate himself out as a major political figure. As security has improved, two more issues, public services and the economy, have become steadily more important. Some polling suggests the economy had overtaken security as the top issue for Iraqi's at the end of last year. This, combined with the strident drubbing of the most sectarian parties in last year's governorate elections, had many of Iraq's politicians running scared.

But the big Shia parties have found their way back to the hearts of the public. In the shadowy days following the U.S.-led invasion, Paul Bremer, who essentially ran Iraq in the period, made a series of terrible decisions. He disbanded Saddam's army, many of whose members likely walked straight into militia groups. It would not be a stretch to say that, given Saddam's perverse brutality, plenty of Baathist officers would have swallowed their pride and served under U.S. guidance. It also deprived the US of a functional security infrastructure. He also forced out many civil servants, from judges to teachers, crippling government capacity and driving services into oblivion. These were the opening shots in a process of De-Baathification, soon codified in orders of the Coalition Provisional Authority. It was this process, more than foreign invasion itself, that drove Sunnis whole-heartedly into the hands of the insurgency and triggered the widespread Sunni boycotts of Iraq's first set of elections. The idea, pushed hard by Washington's then governing clique of Neo-Conservative incompetents, was to drive the Ba'ath Party completely from Iraqi society. The problem is that the Ba'ath had run Iraq since 1968, and few professional, skilled Iraqi's were not connected to it. Nor was Ba'ath membership a sectarian issue. Despite the calls of sectarian Shia politicians, Iraq was never an Apartheid state, and while Saddam may have shared more than a mustache with dear old Uncle Joe, he was no Hendrik Verwoerd. Plenty of Shia were Ba'ath members, and some prospered significantly under a regime that favored Sunnis strongly but never closed its doors to others. Many Iraqis had joined the party because it was the only way to get ahead in the civil service and in a number of other fields. Many Iraqis including a number of now prominent politicians, joined the party in the optimistic days of the 1970s, before Saddam's assumption of totalitarian power, when it seemed like the Ba'ath were constructing a new model Arab society. Many of these men later left the party to join opposition groups, disillusioned with The Secular-Arab-Socialist-Utopia-that-wasn't. Others simply left the party to live private lives.

But Iraq's government is dominated today by men who lived abroad, as exiles, during much of Ba'ath rule, as well as those (like the Kurdish parties) who never reconciled themselves to Ba'ath rule. They have seized upon another Bremer-era construct, The Justice and Accountability Board to strike out against the changing currents of Iraqi politics. Leading the charge are those most disadvantaged by the new political trends, the INA's federation of hyper-Sectarian Shia, who dominated Iraqi politics after the 2005 election but seemed earlier this year to be on the edge of serious humiliation. They are curiously joined by Ahmed Chalabi, a one time CIA asset who lobbied Washington hard to invade Iraq and who was shown in 2005 to lack any popular constituency. Chalabi is on the Board, and has swallowed his personal secularism to join the INA. The INA controls the board, and is mostly supported by a minority composed of arab-indifferent Kurds and a tiny Sunni Islamist presence. The Board has used its poorly defined powers to reactivate De-Baathification. Issuing bans on hundreds of candidates with only spurious Ba'ath connections. The most prominent is Saleh Al-Mutlaq, a Sunni leader who was a Ba'ath Member in the 70s, but left the party the same year Saddam came to power. He is the secondary leader of the nationalist Iraqqiya grouping, whose leader Ayad Allawi was also a Ba'ath member, but is insulated by his Shia faith and the time he spent as a dissident leader, MI6 asset, and his role in an attempted military coup against Saddam. Although there has been some back and forth, with Iraq's judiciary at one point seeming to save the day by forcing the Electoral Commission to overturn the bans, it now seems that the Board has won out, and most of the 500 or so banned candidates will not be allowed to compete in March.

The impact of this is three-fold. First, it activates concerns among Sunnis that they will again by disenfranchised, which may lead many to boycott the elections. This result would be a tragedy, election boycotts are seldom effective. All a boycott would do is keep Sunni and Secular perspectives shut out of politics for another four years. Sadly Iraqqiya seems to have taken the bait. Suspending their campaign and with Mutlaq talking openly about a boycott. A tragic consequence could be that Iraqqiya becomes perceived as sectarian-Sunni, despite its Shia leader, and its ability to attract Shia votes then collapses. Secondly, It creates an electoral issue that is far more acceptable to the INA. Having a spectacularly terrible governance record and having alienated many Iraqis with excessive religiosity, the INA needed an issue on which they could not be out-competed. Because most Shia loathed Saddam, and the Ba'ath is a term of great abuse among the Shia working class, it has activated intense political reaction. The INA has organized marches and media campaigns claiming that the Ba'ath is trying to sneak back into power, and the reception has been significant. Anecdotal evidence suggests the issue has helped mobilize poor Shia who had intended not to vote previously into entering the campaign. Thirdly, it completes a process undertaken since last year of diverting Maliki's trajectory back into the Shia sectarian stream. This process began with the failure of Maliki's State of Law List to bring in significant Sunni partners, continued with Maliki's decision to nix confrontation with the Kurds in favor of the old Shia Islamist-Kurdish alliance, and has culminated in his embrace of the De-Ba'athification process. He has now organized his own rallies on the issue, and is trying to outdo the INA with his baying for blood. The hunt for secret "Ba'athists" has spread to the provincial level , with the horrifying prospect that once more, badly needed civil servants will be ousted to protect politicians at the center.

The whole matter is a tragedy for Iraqis, who are now being actively diverted by tired politicians away from the concerns that really matter to them. I would love to see Iraqqiya and Maliki refuse to take the bait and play hard on the Services and Security issues. But neither shows any sign of such high-mindedness. Both had fallen into line exactly as the back-room brokers on the Board wanted. This is divide and conquer at it's finest.

The passive partners of Iraqi arab politics, The US and the Kurds, may soon regret their past actions. With shia federalism now a relatively dead issue in Southern Iraq, Kurdish leaders, overwhelmingly Secular and Social Democratic orientated, may soon regret their choice of ally, the Sadrists, ascendant in the INA are fans of a unitary, and deeply religious Shia dominated state. The US, misguided parent to the whole crisis, tried to right the issue years ago, making Allawi an appointed Prime Minister, but by then it was too late. Iraq seems more distant from the dreams of a Democratic Western-esque market state than ever.

*Side note for the curious: In discussion of Iraqi politics the term "Sunni" a religious identifier, is used almost exclusively to describe Sunni Arabs. It is worth noting that most Iraqi Kurds are also Sunnis, but religion has not been a strong identifier for Kurds.

- Luke

Rooting Around is the Best Way to Find Things

2010-02-13T13:23:00.002-05:00

...At least if you're looking for interesting things. I've recently stumbled on (no, not Stumbled Upon) the Fact of the Day: the undergraduate dormitory systems at Brown, Harvard, Yale, and Connecticut College were originally built with money from the same donor: Edward Harkness, Yale class of 1897. Harkness inherited a fortune from his father, who had invested pretty heavily in Standard Oil, and became essentially a professional philanthropist. What a life!

Anyway, the reason this fact is so significant is because our beloved institution, the University of Pennsylvania, has not had that sort of history with respect to its undergraduate residences. We have had it in the Wharton school, thanks to the generosity of Jon Huntsman, Sr (may his name be praised), but not in the residences. The Quad came about when the University moved west of the Schuylkill in the late 19th century. Hill happened in 1958, the High Rises and Dubois in the early 1970s (under separate initiatives)...you get the picture. The residential system has developed piecemeal, and accordingly Penn has very little uniformity in its residential options. The downside is a lack of shared experience across the University, which students get at Harvard and Yale. The upside is a diversity of possible living situations, which seems appropriate for a student body of so much greater size.

Second Fact of the Day: in a not-unrelated incident, Penn's original facilities were not built for the purpose of educating the youth, but for the preaching of George Whitefield (almost a proto-megachurch). Funding and enthusiasm waned, and so Benjamin Franklin, who had been angling to establish an Academy in Pennsylvania for some time, pounced. Similarly, when we built the College House System, we basically slapped a bunch of people-structure onto pre-existing buildings (not to downplay the tremendous benefits of having the College Houses). From the start, Penn has been an incrementalist school, snapping up bits and pieces as it's moved along. Such is the history of any large institution, but it seems to run particularly deep here.