Nathaniel

Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site. Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children. In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.

The Tea Party Fights The Man

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2013-10-08 Rand Paul

The Tea Party does not have a lot of friends in Washington. Conventional wisdom–the sort of thing you hear on NPR, for example–is that the GOP has redistricted itself to death. By creating solid red districts, they’ve turned over power to the loonies on the fringe. Complementary theories include the notion that the Tea Party consists of a bunch of delusional fools who are shoveling their hard earned life-savings to snake oil selling PACs who have no interest in making real changes, but just want to make a buck off of gullible fools.

Both of these narratives tap into deep political stereotypes, but neither actually make much sense. The problem with the gerrymandering explanation is that it’s the opposite of how gerrymandering actually works. Not that I’m defending redistricting games, but the essence of gerrymandering is called “packing and cracking“, and it means you pack your opposition into dense, homogeneous districts but you crack (spread out) your own supporters as much as possible. Think about it for a minute, if you’ve got 5 districts and the overall population is basically 50/50 Democrat and Republican, do you (as a Republican) want to put all of your voters in one dark red district and leave the Democrats to have 4 very slightly blue districts? No: that’s how you lose an election, not how you win it. The idea that the GOP created a bunch of ultra-conservative districts doesn’t make any sense.

Meanwhile, the idea of the huckster political operative taking grandma and grandpa’s money to go off on a doomed crusade to end Obamacare taps nicely into images of televangelist faith healers (i.e. negative stereotypes of the religious right) and the influential What’s the Matter With Kansas?, but all it really does is expose liberal arrogance. The idea is that conservatives are just too darn stupid to know what’s good for them (i.e. liberal policies) when the reality is that conservatives have different values than liberals. For example, conservatives believe that passing on staggering amounts of debt to their children is morally reprehensible and are willing to sacrifice their own interests to stop it.

But is this just spin? Nope, it turns out there are some pretty hard numbers behind this. I got tipped off to that fact when a Facebook friend posted this Washington Times opinion piece: Tea Party Loosens K Street’s Stranglehold on the GOP. The thesis of the article is pretty simple: before the Tea Party, Republican candidates depended on cash from big business and lobbyists to run their campaigns. But a proliferation of ideological PACs provided an alternative source of funds separate from the interests of big business. Carney, who wrote the piece, concludes that Tea Party candidates are therefore getting their money from small business owners and retirees: individuals.

I don’t think the article backs this up solidly, but the same friend who posted it followed it up with this: 

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Pornography, Children, Vaccines, and Libertarianism

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I used to hang out on Slashdot a lot. (That’s a popular news aggregation site for techies.) I remember one signature from a user that said something like “the root password for the Constitution is ‘think of the children’.” The idea was that you could circumvent constitutional protections on free speech by just citing “the children”.

There are two problems with that. The first is the idea that the baseline for free speech is “anything goes”. Freedom of speech has never been absolute, and it’s incredibly frustrating to live in a society where people seem to believe that the primary purpose of one of our most cherished rights is to make porn readily accessible. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Voltaire had in mind.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire didn't actually say this, and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't agree with it as applied to porn either.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” – Voltaire didn’t actually say this, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t agree with it as applied to porn either.

The second is the assumption that “think of the children” is always an unfounded appeal to hysteria. This is far from true, and two recent articles from the Daily Mail make that painfully clear.

In the first Martin Daubney–former editor of softcore porn magazine Loaded–talks about the research that has convinced him “online porn is the most pernicious threat facing children today.” The gist of it is that new research demonstrates the addictive nature of online porn and so, according to Daubney,

If porn does have the insidious power to be addictive, then letting our children consume it freely via the internet is like leaving heroin lying around the house, or handing out vodka at the school gates.

The second describes how a young boy started viewing porn at age 10 and soon developed an uncontrollable addiction to it. Like any addict, he began searching for harder and harder stuff, until at the age of 13 he was found guilty of accessing child porn and, practically a child himself, he found himself on the Sex Offender Registry. 

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Monday Morning Mormonism: Peter Wiggin as Lucifer

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Peter, Valentine, and Ender Wiggin from the Marvel comics.
Peter, Valentine, and Ender Wiggin from the Marvel comics.

Had a busy day yesterday and wasn’t able to link to my newest post for Times And Seasons, so here it is: Peter Wiggin (that’s Ender’s older brother) as Lucifer.

Perverse Incentives: Government Shutdown Edition

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2013-10-04 ParksShutdownAP

A friend on Facebook posted this quote from Thomas Sowell:

Back in my teaching days, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do?

The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.

He didn’t specify, but he didn’t have to: he’s talking about the political efforts to make the government shut down as painful as possible in order to score points for Democrats. Look: I can’t get all outraged about politicians playing politics. It’s what they do, and we’d be kidding ourselves to think otherwise. But I do think it’s important to try and keep a level head and track what’s really going on.

And here’s the story: in prior government shut downs the parks and memorial services have not been forcibly barred against visitors. Now? They are. The Obama administration is spending more money than would be spent on regular operations to add additional law enforcement and barricades to do things like preventing World War II vets from visiting their own memorial in the hopes that everyone will blame the Republicans. Well: the Republicans sure helped the shutdown along. But during Clinton-era shutdowns the Democratic President didn’t feel the need to spend supposedly non-existent federal dollars to prevent World War II vets from, for example, continuing to give tours at Pearl Harbor. (Daily Caller) 

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Historical Context: Every Previous Gov’t Shutdown in One Article

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2013-10-01 Govt Shutdown

The Washington Post has a rundown of all the past government shutdowns, starting in September of 1976. For each shutdown, the WaPo gives you dates, duration, the President, and which parties controlled each of the House and Senate, along with a basic overview of what caused the shutdown and what resolved it. There have been 17, if you’re curious. My quick breakdown of responsibility is based on looking at who controlled the House and Senate during each shutdown. If both were controlled by one party, I blamed them, otherwise I blamed both.

Democrats: 8, Republicans: 2, Both: 7

I wouldn’t take that too seriously or anything, I’m just pathologically incapable of not doing at least a teensy bit of analysis whenever I see numbers.

Some Unbiased Myth-busting about Obamacare

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Everyone’s talking about Obamacare, but not so many folks are really aware of what the legislation entails. In this Bloomberg piece, Megan McArdle runs down 11 myths. Definitely informative and worth the read.

Lorde and the End of Childhood

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2013-10-01 Lorde

Spotify let me know that Lorde is a spotlight artist whose debut album was just released and told me I should go listen to it. Always keen to hear new music, I queued up her first track. Always interested in who I’m listening to, I searched for her on Wikipedia.

2013-10-01 Lorde 02

So here’s what stands out to me. First of all, Lorde is 16 years old. At 32, I’ve seen the tragic trajectory of enough child stars like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and a gaggle of others to be concerned. Whether it’s Selena Gomez ending up in Spring Breakers or Miley Cyrus twerking (no link needed), the career path always seems to bend towards exploitation as though it were an inescapable black hole. I don’t have any inside knowledge of the record industry, but even from the outside it seems plain that young stars, and especially girls, don’t fare well. We all want to be famous like moths want to be closer to the bug zapper, never paying attention to the burned-out husks below the light.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes her rise:

At the age of 12, she was spotted by A&R scout Scott Maclachlan when he saw her singing in a video of a talent show at her school, Belmont Intermediate. Later, when [she] was 13, Maclachlan signed her to Universal and, at the age of 14, she began working with their songwriters.

Does this make anyone else just a bit queasy? Discovered at 12? Signed at 13? Working with pro-songwriters at 14? She’s the first woman in 17 years to top the alt chart (I would say “girl” with no disrespect intended), and that’s an achievement, but how much of that is a reflection of corporate strategy and marketing? The relationship between artists and publishers is always fraught; how does someone so young hope to avoid becoming the packaged merchandise? There’s something deeply disturbing to me about the worship of youth philosophically and the plight of these starlets practically.

Look, I wish Lorde (real name: Ella Yelich-O’Connor) the best of luck, but at this point I feel like listening to her music is condoning a culture that devours it’s own young.

Ender as Everyman

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2013-09-30 Ender and Bean

Today’s Monday Morning Mormon post is titled Ender as Everyman. It’s the first in a series I will be writing about Ender’s Game. There will be at least 2 more in the coming weeks.

Is American Journalism Dead?

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2013-09-27 Carney
Jay Carney: Just one of many journalists to decide it’s more liberating to cast aside the pretext of impartiality and work for The Man directly.

I think I might be fading into that fabled silent majority of American conservatives. Where I used to get into heated debates with folks in my cohort about their liberal beliefs, I mostly now just shake my head and try to get back to earning a living. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

But I still see stories, now and then, that just irritate me to no end. Here’s a collection. First, there’s all the journalists who jump back and forth between journalism and working for the Obama administration. The Washington Times gives us some numbers: “The current count of press turncoats varies from a low of 15 reported by The Daily Beast to a high of 24 as reported by The Atlantic.” Then there’s old battlehorses like Bob Woodward or, more recently, Seymour Hersh showing up as the only guys willing to go to bad against the Obama administration (short of conservative pundits, of course). Woodward is famous for covering Watergate and Hersh is famous for covering My Lai and Abu Ghraib. Now Hersh says Obama is worse than Bush and castigates the NYT for “carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would.”

Seymour Hersh
Ordinarily truth tellers who uncover not one but *two* major cover ups of military crimes are lionized by the left, but Seymour Hersh is another one of those erstwhile heroes relegated to “crazy uncle” status for turning on President Obama.

And then, to give a specific example, here’s an obscenely bad story from CNN purporting to do some “mythbusting” about the impact of Obamacare.

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