Politics

Andrew Sullivan Doubles Down on Tolerance

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2014-04-07 hounding-of-a-heretic-sd

When I wrote about Brendan Eich being forced out (he resigned, but under duress) from Mozilla one of the sources I leaned on was Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is an interesting voice because he is not only in a homosexual marriage, he was the guy who wrote the very first article in a major, mainstream outlet in support of legalizing gay marriage[ref]Here’s a reprint of the 1989 essay.[/ref] He has had some time to think about his initial response to the controversy and he’s decided “the more I have mulled this over, the more convinced I am that my initial response to this is absolutely the right one.”

Sullivan believes his response is “a vital one to defend at this juncture in the gay rights movement.” I, on the other hand, do not support gay marriage. So why is it that I like his post? It’s not just because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s because Sullivan is actually defending “liberalism” in its original, authentic sense. He’s preaching tolerance. We disagree on gay marriage, but I agree with him on the need for real tolerance:

The ability to work alongside or for people with whom we have a deep political disagreement is not a minor issue in a liberal society. It is a core foundation of toleration. We either develop the ability to tolerate those with whom we deeply disagree, or liberal society is basically impossible. Civil conversation becomes culture war; arguments and reason cede to emotion and anger.

He then goes on to say:

A civil rights movement without toleration is not a civil rights movement; it is a cultural campaign to expunge and destroy its opponents. A moral movement without mercy is not moral; it is, when push comes to shove, cruel.

This all makes me want to cheer. Someone gets it. But is Sullivan in the majority on this one? I do not have any scientific polls, but I have a strong suspicion that he is not, and that perhaps his protests represent some of the last gasps of genuine moral principle in a movement that long since sacrificed principle for expedience in its headlong rush to win by intimidating rather than convincing the skeptics. I think you have to read this entire piece to really understand just how far we’ve come in a few short years, and it’s that rapid transition that makes me think there is too much  momentum to stop the train now.

Burn the (Socially Conservative) Witch

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2014-04-03 brendan-eich-mozilla

Today Brendan Eich, the CEO of the Mozilla Corporation (the guys who make Firefox) resigned. He had been CEO for less than two weeks. Here’s a rough timeline.

March 24, 2014 – Mozilla announced the appointment of Brendan Eich as the new CEO.

The Mozilla Board of Directors has announced that co-founder and current Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich will be appointed to the role of CEO of Mozilla, effective immediately.

March 26, 2014 – News stories begin to break about the angry reaction by Mozilla employees and others in the tech world to Brendan Eich’s promotion. The Silicon Valley Business Journal had one search early example:

Wikipedia Mobile creator Hampton Catlin revealed he would no longer develop apps for the Firefox Web browser.

April 1, 2014 – The angry attacks on Mozilla escalate with OKCupid putting up a full banner ad denying access to anyone attempting to use their site with Firefox and explaining their opposition to Eich, as covered by International Business Times.[ref]For the record, I tried loading the site myself, and this was indeed the message I got.[/ref]

2014-04-03 OK Cupid Message

April 3, 2014 – News about the angry reaction concerns social conservatives. An anonymous article at First Things compares the reaction to “ritual sacrifice.” The excellent article also gave detailed back story on Eich’s history on the issue of gay marriage.

Why, then, the ruckus? Amazingly enough, it is entirely due to the fact that Eich made a $1,000 donation to the campaign urging a ‘yes’ vote on California’s Proposition 8. When this fact first came to light in 2012, after the Internal Revenue Service leaked a copy of the National Organization for Marriage’s 2008 tax return to a gay-advocacy group, Eich, who was then CTO of Mozilla, published a post on his personal blog stating that his donation was not motivated by any sort of animosity towards gays or lesbians, and challenging those who did not believe this to cite any “incident where I displayed hatred, or ever treated someone less than respectfully because of group affinity or individual identity.”

Upon being named CEO last Wednesday, Eich immediately put up another post which among other things pledged in direct terms first that he would ensure Mozilla continued offering health benefits to the same-sex partners of its employees; second that he would allocate additional resources to a project that aims to bring more LGBTQ individuals into the technology world and Mozilla in particular; and third that he would maintain and strengthen Mozilla’s policies against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It’s worth emphasizing that Eich made this statement prior to the storm of outrage which has since erupted, and that with these policies and others Mozilla easily ranks among the most gay-friendly work environments in the United States.

The First Things article also quoted from a very widely-read blog post demanding that Eich (1) stop claiming his support of Prop 8 was a private matter (2) recant his support of Prop 8 (3) swear loyalty to the cause of gay rights in general and gay marriage in particular, and (4) pay reparations to the Human Rights Campaign (or similar). The First Things article noted that:

The remedies demanded (public recantation, propitiatory sacrifice) are of the sort necessitated by ritual defilement, rather than the giving of offense.

April 4, 2014 – Brendan Eich announced his resignation. Here’s one story from the New York Daily news, but it’s been widely covered.

This tale serves to highlight two issues I’ve repeatedly raised on this blog. The first is the extent to which ostensibly secular movements and organization frequently assume distinctly religious behavior. One prominent example of this is global warming, of course, and many folks have pointed out that ardent supporters of policies designed to reduce human greenhouse emissions frequently embrace distinctly religious themes and rhetoric. The witch hunt against Brendan Eich is another example. As the anonymous First Things writer put it:

The key realization is that the howling mob which Thomas has ginned up is only partially an instrument of chastisement. It is also intended to educate. Thomas is in this to save souls.

Sound familiar?

Lots of people react with scorn to the idea that secular institution can be called “religious”. Obviously on one level, they cannot. But the deeper reality is that the human behaviors most closely associated with religion are not in fact derived from any of the supernatural beliefs religions hold. Concepts like ritual, purity, obedience, authority, and tradition don’t depend in any way on belief in gods. Religious institutions throughout history took on the traits and characteristics they did not because of religious belief, but because of human nature. Take away the belief in the supernatural, and all the elements of organized religion that critics decry remain just the same. In fact, it is precisely those who believe that belief in god causes the negative characteristics of organized religion that are most prone to repeating the mistakes of the past.

The second issue is the extent to which those who fail to toe the line concerning gay rights are in store for some very, very tough times to come. I understand that the first reaction from many people might be “serves them right.” There is truth to that. I have stated before that the worst mistake social conservatives ever made on this issue was to rely on animosity and fear in the early years of the gay-rights movement. It is only in the last few years that there have been highly visible examples of leading opponents of gay marriage overtly repudiating their prior practices and embracing a more loving and nuanced opposition to gay marriage. (See examples here and here.)

But, as the old saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right. Andrew Sullivan (“a pioneering crusader for gay marriage” who married his boyfriend in 2007[ref]The Economist[/ref]) said as much on April 3:

The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.

I hope tolerant voices like Sullivan’s win out (and it’s no surprise he went with the headline: The Hounding of a Heretic), but I doubt that they will. To the extent that gay marriage advocates have embraced the rhetoric of civil rights to make their case, there is no way to stop this train. Do opponents of interracial marriage have any kind of legitimate place within our society? No. Would the employees of Mozilla be willing to accept a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan as their CEO? No. Then why, based on the arguments that the proponents of gay marriage have proposed so far, should they be any more willing to put up with an anti-gay bigot like Eich? (And yes, merely donating $1,000 to Prop 8 is enough to qualify for bigot status.)

What makes me the most sad is that a lot of the folks who stand to suffer most in the future are those who have done nothing wrong in the past. I’m thinking of all the young Christian, Jewish, and Muslim kids growing up now, or yet to be born, who will be forced to choose between devotion to their religious faith and family traditions and acceptance within society. Are they guaranteed to follow the political or religious beliefs of their parents? No, of course not, but my fear is that in the not too distant future adherence to traditional religions will be taken (in the absence of explicit denials) as proof positive of anti-gay bigotry. Sound far-fetched? Maybe, but I think a couple of weeks ago the story of what happened to Brendan Eich would have sounded pretty far-fetched too.

All You Need to Know About the Hobby Lobby Case

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2014-03-31 Hobby Lobby

The Washington Post has a couple of great sources if you want to know more about the Hobby Lobby case the Supreme Court is considering right now. In a nutshell, Hobby Lobby is a Christian company that doesn’t want to provide access to certain kinds of birth control that can work as  abortifacients instead of as contraceptives.[ref]The difference is that a contraceptive prevents conception from taking place at all, but abortifacients work after conception has already taken place to prevent implantation. IUDs, for example, do both although their primary mechanism is contraceptive.[/ref]

To get even more of a background in the case, I recommend Jaime Fuller’s Here’s what you need to know about the Hobby Lobby case. For legal analysis of the constitutional issues, I recommend Prof. Michael McConnell’s post at Volokh Conspiracy (which now operates within the WaPo). These two articles will give you a solid understanding of this controversial and well-known court case.

The Symbol of a Lie

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Kevin Williamson at National Review has an article on the “coat hanger” mythology surrounding the abortion debate. Quoting the DC Abortion Fund, Williamson writes,

“The coat hanger is a symbol of the reproductive justice movement because lack of access to abortion causes women to go to desperate lengths to terminate a pregnancy, similar to those undertaken in the pre–Roe vs. Wade era. At that time, consuming Lysol and household poisons was not uncommon to instigate abortion. Nor was inserting knitting needles, Coke bottles, and — yes — wire coat hangers into their cervices.”

As Williamson explains, “That is untrue. It has long been known to be untrue. The wire hanger is indeed a powerful symbol — the symbol of a lie engineered with malice aforethought.”

See why in the full article.

Level 3 Communications Throws Hat in Net Neutrality Ring

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level3

I previously posted about Cogent Communications complaining that Comcast, Verizon, AT&T et al are trying to “unfairly” squeeze more money out of Cogent by holding their own customers hostage from the content those customers ask for and have been told they have access to. Up until recently, Cogent was the only major internet backbone carrier piping up publicly, but now Tier 1 network operator Level 3 is speaking out against major-ISP anti-consumer misbehavior in this blog post by Level 3’s General Counsel of Regulatory Policy Michael Mooney. This is a big deal, because it illustrates just how far-reaching and critical this issue is for the future of the internet and everyone who relies on it. Want to get an idea of how big Level 3 is? You could make a drinking game out of it, but do so at your own peril. Go to your nearest command or terminal window and type tracert (if in Windows) or traceroute (Mac OS X, Linux) and then any random website you go to often, like this:

traceroute www.yahoo.com

Then hit enter, and watch. Whenever you see “l3” or “level3” anywhere in the scrolling results list, take a note. That’s your request being routed through Level 3’s sprawling, expansive network. Enter in some more top-level domains. You’ll see it popping up over and over again.

In the blog post, Michael Mooney takes ISPs to task, criticizing them for utilizing their (oft-ill-gotten and oft-misused) last-mile monopolies to strong-arm content providers into paying for the same service the ISPs’ own customers are already supposed to have paid for. He addresses the ISPs’ counter-claims about the “unbearable” costs of increased bandwidth usage by their customers streaming video and downloading large files by pointing out the inconsistency of such complaints next to the public financial records of these same ISPs showing soaring and growing profits year-by-year. However, instead of using these record revenues to upgrade their infrastructure to provide the level of service their customers are already paying for (oh, yeah, and also being charged increasingly larger fees for, and also being increasingly slapped with data caps over), the ISPs simply let their service degrade and insist the content providers to pick up the tab for upgrades. Mooney claims they have so far refused to negotiate fairly or in good faith. Netflix, for one, has already been forced to cave on the issue with Comcast out of fear of losing droves of customers and for no other reason than Comcast’s customers really, really like using Netflix.

This is not capitalism, or anything like it. It’s rent-seeking, pure and simple, and it’s collusion, not only between ISPs agreeing to not compete with each other but also between ISPs and the governments and politicians that grant them the power and status to play chicken with the welfare of an ever-growing sector of our economy.

More Cronyism, or: How America Won’t Get Broadband

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2014-03-15 No Service

From Newsweek:

After making a big, bold promise to wire every corner of America, the telecom giants are running away from their vow to provide nationwide broadband service by 2020. For almost 20 years, AT&T, Verizon and the other big players have collected hundreds of billions of dollars through rate increases and surcharges to finance that ambitious plan, but after wiring the high-density big cities, they now say it’s too expensive to connect the rest of the country. But they’d like to keep all that money they banked for the project.

Of course they would.

I picked this article because it’s another example of the split between the interests of big business (read: cronyism) and the interests of folks on the right. As we all know, one (slightly oversimplified) way of looking at the political spectrum in American is urban vs. rural, with rural folks being on the conservative end of the spectrum. So it’s these guys who stand to lose the most when big telecoms lobby to get laws rewritten so they won’t have to run high-speed broadband out to smaller, less-dense areas of the country.

Oh, and Chris Christie shows up again:

And this isn’t bad news for just Montana and North Dakota. The Eastern Seaboard is getting smacked as well. Verizon has made a tentative deal with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s administration to stop expanding its FiOS Internet service in that state. The terms would deny access forever to many small businesses and residences. Verizon declined to make anyone available for an interview.

Thanks, Christie, for once again illustrating the difference between cronyism and capitalism. (We covered the Tesla shut-down earlier.)

500+ Economists Against Raising Labor Costs

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Over 500 economists (including three Nobel laureates) have signed a letter to “Federal Policy Makers” arguing that hiking the minimum wage would be damaging to job creation and the economy:*

As economists, we understand the fragile nature of this recovery and the dire financial realities of the nearly 50 million Americans living in poverty. To alleviate these burdens for families and improve our local, regional, and national economies, we need a mix of solutions that encourage employment, business creation, and boost earnings rather than across-the-board mandates that raise the cost of labor. One of the serious consequences of raising the minimum wage is that business owners saddled with a higher cost of labor will need to cut costs, or pass the increase to their consumers in order to make ends meet. Many of the businesses that pay their workers minimum wage operate on extremely tight profit margins, with any increase in the cost of labor threatening this delicate balance…For these reasons, we encourage federal policymakers to examine creative, comprehensive policy solutions that truly help address poverty, boost incomes from work, and increase upward mobility by fostering growth in our nation’s economy.

Check it out.

*Pic from Mark Perry

How Sensitive is Phone Metadata? Very.

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2014-03-14 President Obama

President Obama, assuring people that NSA vacuuming up huge amounts of phone metadata isn’t as creepy as it sounds:

When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls.  That’s not what this program is about.  As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls.  They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.  But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.  If these folks — if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation.

So I want to be very clear — some of the hype that we’ve been hearing over the last day or so — nobody is listening to the content of people’s phone calls.  This program, by the way, is fully overseen not just by Congress, but by the FISA Court — a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them, and that it’s being carried out consistent with the Constitution and rule of law.

And so, not only does that court authorize the initial gathering of data, but — I want to repeat — if anybody in government wanted to go further than just that top-line data and want to, for example, listen to Jackie Calmes’ phone call, they would have to go back to a federal judge and indicate why, in fact, they were doing further probing.

You got that? They are only getting metadata. No big deal, right? If they really want the juicy goods, then they’ve got to go back to a federal judge. This argument rests on the premise that phone metadata is not, in and of itself,  highly sensitive data. Which, when you think about it, is not really a hypothetical or philosophical question. It’s an empirical one. It’s something you could test. So… what kind of info can you glean from a person’s metadata?

The folks at Web Policy set out to answer the question. They used metadata gathered from a small number of volunteers over just a few months to see what they could learn about those volunteers looking only at metadta. Turns out, they could learn quite a lot.

The degree of sensitivity among contacts took us aback. Participants had calls with Alcoholics Anonymous, gun stores, NARAL Pro-Choice, labor unions, divorce lawyers, sexually transmitted disease clinics, a Canadian import pharmacy, strip clubs, and much more. This was not a hypothetical parade of horribles. These were simple inferences, about real phone users, that could trivially be made on a large scale.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of information your government can collect on you without a warrant or notification or really any restriction of any kind. But that’s not all.

  • Participant A communicated with multiple local neurology groups, a specialty pharmacy, a rare condition management service, and a hotline for a pharmaceutical used solely to treat relapsing multiple sclerosis.
  • Participant B spoke at length with cardiologists at a major medical center, talked briefly with a medical laboratory, received calls from a pharmacy, and placed short calls to a home reporting hotline for a medical device used to monitor cardiac arrhythmia.
  • Participant C made a number of calls to a firearm store that specializes in the AR semiautomatic rifle platform. They also spoke at length with customer service for a firearm manufacturer that produces an AR line.
  • In a span of three weeks, Participant D contacted a home improvement store, locksmiths, a hydroponics dealer, and a head shop.
  • Participant E had a long, early morning call with her sister. Two days later, she placed a series of calls to the local Planned Parenthood location. She placed brief additional calls two weeks later, and made a final call a month after.

Nothing to worry about, right? It’s just metadata, after all. It’s not like they’re listening to your calls, or something.

New Jersey Bans Tesla: Capitalism vs. Cronyism

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2014-03-13 Tesla Store

Capitalism and free markets are good. Cronyism is bad. Sometimes trying to explain the difference between the two to people can be hard. The one upside to the state of New Jersey effectively banning Tesla from opening any stores in their state is that at least it makes it easier for people to tell which is which. It’s also helpfully in complete and total violation of your usual expectations for a story about economic liberty:

This is a startling inversion of political stereotypes: Northern Californian capitalists quashed by East Coast Republicans defending the use of government regulations to keep competition out of the marketplace.

In a nutshell, politically powerful car dealers are trying to slam the door on Tesla before Tesla has a chance to show people that buying a car need not be a painful ordeal. Meanwhile car makers, who are often at odds with car dealers, are united to do anything they can to prevent Tesla from changing the whole landscape for car manufacturing in the US. So they are both doubling down on old, outdated laws that gave car dealers geographic monopolies back in the day when car makers had all the power.

And that, in a nutshell, is the curse of government intervention in markets. Even in those cases where it might have been valuable and necessary once upon a time, the laws will still be around decades after their original purpose has been forgotten, and there will be plenty of politically powerful elites ready to pay whatever it takes to keep those laws on the books and in force to protect their business interests. That’s not socialism, but it’s not capitalism either. It’s cronyism. Wired has the rest of the story, by the way, and it’s worth a quick read.

The Man Who Fought Green Imperialism

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There is a great post over at the Newton Blog on RealClearScience about Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who was the Father of the Green Revolution. It demonstrates the difference between the Green Revolution and Green Imperialism. Starting in Mexico, he toiled “for endless hours in the lab and in the fields to breed a wheat plant that was resistant to disease, thick-stemmed, and enormously productive.” Mexico’s wheat yield was six times higher in 1963, sixteen years after Borlaug’s arrival. Ninety-five percent of Mexico’s wheat was of “Borlaug’s dwarf variety.” Developing nations began sowing Borlaug’s crop. The results? “Global yields skyrocketed. Starvation rates decreased. Doom was postponed.”

Yet, environmental lobbyists attempted to block Borlaug’s expansion into Africa. They even convinced the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation to cut funding. While Borlaug was able to boost Ethiopia’s wheat yield to record levels, Africa is still steeped in starvation.

“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists…” he told The Atlantic. “If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

But the post doesn’t stop there. It captures perfectly what is often wrong with environmental debates:

As with most debates, this one comes down to intrinsic values. From our lofty position in the developed world, we have the luxury to value the fallacious image of pristine, untouched nature over feeding ourselves. Hunger simply isn’t something that most of us are familiar with.

“These people have never been around hungry people,” Borlaug says of people like this. “They’re Utopians. They sit and philosophize. They don’t live in the real world.”

Proselytizing is easy. But try doing it when you’re starving.