Politics

Green Imperialism

by

Having failed to stem carbon emissions in rich countries or in rapidly industrialising ones, policy makers have focused their attention on the only remaining target: poor countries that do not emit much carbon to begin with.

So begins a recent op-ed in the Financial Times by Roger Pielke (University of Colorado) and Daniel Sarewitz (Arizona State University). The attempt to cap carbon emissions in developing countries has vast consequences for the poor:

A recent report from the non-profit Center for Global Development estimates that $10bn invested in renewable energy projects in sub-Saharan Africa could provide electricity for 30m people. If the same amount of money went into gas-fired generation, it would supply about 90m people – three times as many.

In Nigeria, the UN Development Programme is spending $10m to help “improve the energy efficiency of a series of end-use equipment . . .in residential and public buildings”. As a way of lifting people out of poverty, this is fanciful at best. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter, with vast reserves of natural gas as well. Yet 80m of its people lack access to electricity. Nigerians do not simply need their equipment to be more efficient; they need a copious supply of energy derived from plentiful local sources.

Or consider Pakistan, where energy shortages in a rapidly growing nation of 180m have led to civil unrest – as well as rampant destruction of forests, mostly to provide firewood for cooking and heating. Western development agencies have refused to finance a project to use Pakistan’s Thar coal deposits for low-carbon natural gas production and electricity generation because of concerns over carbon emissions.

This is worth considering, especially on the heels of Nathaniel’s climate science post. Science writer Matt Ridley has compared the policies proposed to address climate change to a tourniquet being used to stop a nosebleed: the bleeding is real, but the solution will do more harm than good. It is actually my acceptance of climate change that drives my support for innovation-based solutions. It strikes me as morally wrong to deny the poor energy consumption (such as a washing machine). As Pielke and Sarewitz write,

…[I]f the rapidly urbanising poor are to have any chance of prosperity, they need access to energy on the same scale as all modern economies. Climate activists warn that the inhabitants of poor countries are especially vulnerable to the future climate changes that our greenhouse gas emissions will cause. Why then, do they simultaneously promote the green imperialism that helps lock in the poverty that makes these countries so vulnerable?

Indeed.

“This is My Credo,” A Media Portrayal of the Ukrainian Protests

by

Oleksandr Muzychko, a radical Ukrainian militant.I’m Israeli with Ukrainian Jewish roots, and my wife is Ukrainian, so naturally the topic of anti-Semitism in Ukraine concerns me. Since I’m also studying journalism, I couldn’t help but notice a recent article from the Russian network RT that has been going around on various social networks.  The article is illustrative of a problematic approach to reporting the Maidan protests in Ukraine. It shows footage of an anti-government protester, Oleksandr Muzychko, waving a Kalashnikov. It claims that Muzychko (AKA Sashko Biliy) is a notorious right-wing Ukrainian extremist and terrorist who as a foreign volunteer in the Chechnyan War was responsible for significant Russian losses in the battle for Grozny. In his book on the Chechnyan War, the journalist Anatol Lieven described Muzychko as

A volunteer from the Ukranian extreme nationalist UNA-UNSO movement… who looked as if he had been born in a cave. He had a massive face with a forehead sloping straight back from his eyebrows, a jutting jaw and a broken nose, and was wearing an American baseball cap turned back to front and a green Islamic headband. He said that he was there to ‘fight against Russian imperialism and help destroy the Russian empire… and then on its ruins, we will build a new, truly great Slavic power, uniting all the Slavs under the leadership of the Ukrainians, the oldest, greatest and purest Slav people.’ I was told some months afterwards that he had been killed in action in Grozny. Biliy was one of perhaps twenty Ukrainian volunteers who fought in Chechnya; I met three of them…[ref]Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power, (Yale University Press 1998), 83-84. The title is as unprophetic as they get.[/ref]

Lieven was wrong, as it turns out. Muzychko was not killed in action. Instead, he returned to Ukraine and was later jailed for several years on a charge of kidnapping. A brief review of UNA-USO activity reveals a markedly ultra-nationalist platform, but so far very little actual violence apart from that committed by volunteers like Muzychko in Chechnya.

Still, in an interview for a documentary produced by REN in 2007, Muzychko declared that “As long as blood flows in my veins, I will fight communists, Jews and Russians. This is my credo.”

Jews are understandably worried. For one, some of the worst atrocities against Jews were historically committed by Ukrainians. At a central location in Kiev there is a prominent memorial to the 17th century Cossack Hetman, Bohdan Khmelnytsky. During Khmelnytsky’s uprising against the Poles (a foundational narrative amongst Ukrainian nationalists) around a fifth to a quarter of the entire Jewish population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth perished.[ref]Bernard D. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland: A Social and Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland from 1100 to 1800, (Jewish Publication Society, 1973) 115.[/ref] In 1919, the armies of Symon Petlyura slaughtered around 17,000 Jews in a serious of vicious pogroms. The Jewish writer Isaac Babel vividly described the aftermath of one of these pogroms in his characteristic terse, laconic style.  The family of David Zis, in their home, the old prophet, naked and barely breathing, the butchered old woman, a child with chopped-off fingers. Many of these people are still breathing, the stench of blood, everything turned topsy-turvy, chaos, a mother over her butchered son, an old woman curled up, four people in one hut, dirt, blood under a black beard, they’re just lying there in their blood…[ref]Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, 279. For a sober, reasonable overview of Petlyura’s involvement, see W. E. D. Allen, The Ukraine: A History, (1940), 309-311.[/ref]

A mere generation later, many Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazi invaders, including the insurrectionist movement OUN before it had a falling out with Germany.[ref]Timothy Snyder provides compelling analysis of the rationale behind Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis in his The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale University Press, 2003), 154-178.[/ref]  The German-raised Ukrainian police was an important instrument for murdering Jews in those years of occupation.[ref]Snyder, The Reconstruction, 159-162. The Germans followed a similar pattern in all occupied areas of the USSR. One of the German policemen in Belorussia was none other than Fyodor Yanukovych, father of the recently-ousted president Viktor Yanukovych. (Russian). Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky, leader of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, opposed the use of Ukrainians in the murder of Jews, and helped many of the later survive by hiding them in his own residence and various monasteries. See the personal recollections in David Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).[/ref]

The anti-communist and anti-Russian sentiment expressed by Muzychko is fairly self-explanatory. In the previous century alone, Russia has pursued policies that have aimed at the suppression (and at times destruction) of the Ukrainian nation.[ref]While the Soviet Union consisted of more than just Russia and Russians, it generally pursued policies of Russification, emphasizing the cultural and moral superiority of Russia. So much so that Gorbachev famously equated the two. “Russia- the Soviet Union, I mean- that is what we call it now, and what it is in fact…”[/ref] There was the artificially-prolonged famine, the Holodomor, which resulted in the deaths of more than 4 million Ukrainians due to starvation.[ref]The Holodomor occurred not only in Ukraine, but also in the Northern Caucasus, part of Russia proper. The population consisted largely of Ukrainians and Cossacks. Malcolm Muggeridge actually travelled to Rostov in order to see for himself what was going on. He hit the nail on the head when he called Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus places of “maximum dissent.” His description of the bureaucratic mindset involved in the Holodomor is chilling.[/ref]  In 1939, the NKVD  instituted a reign of terror in newly-occupied Galicia and Volhynia. The Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church was dissolved by the NKVD in 1946 and its assets and congregations turned over to the politically compliant Russian Orthodox Church.[ref]See Tatiana A. Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy from World War II to the Khrushchev Years, (2002), 42-46. “The Greco-Catholic (Uniate) Church ceased to exist legally in the USSR thanks to the grandiose political measures implemented between 1946 and 1949. During this period, the Moscow Patriarchate brought more than 3,000 churches into its jurisdiction, a fact that undoubtedly helped strengthen its financial status.” As Chumachenko notes, the Greco-Catholic Church was seen as a dangerous accomplice of the Vatican which was engaged in anti-Soviet diplomacy and politics.[/ref]  There was also the systematic repression of the Ukrainian language, for example, no factory in the Soviet Union produced typewriters with the Ukrainian alphabet (it differs somewhat from Russian).[ref]Nadia Diuk and Adrian Karatnycky, The Hidden Nations: The People Challenge the Soviet Union, (Morrow 1990), 75.[/ref]  Even as late as the 1970s and 1980s, Ukrainian poets like Hryhoriy Chubay and Vasil Stus were imprisoned, and an extraordinarily well-loved composer of popular music, Volodymyr Ivasyuk, was kidnapped, beaten, and hanged on a tree. The middle-aged Stus died in a forced labor camp in 1985.[ref]Hidden Nations, 78. See also http://www.ualberta.ca/~ulec/stus/kostash-04.html#1985-09 As a reminder of how this is far from ancient history to Ukrainians, there is footage of Taras Chubay, Hryhoriy’s son, performing Ivasyuk’s signature song, Chervona Ruta, during the Maidan.[/ref]

But even with a long history of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, the question still remains. Why the Jews? Partially because of deep-seated Orthodox anti-Semitism[ref]A Lethal Obsession[/ref], partially because of rhetoric originating in 19th and 20th century Russian circles which painted the Jews first as partners with Freemasons for world domination, and then as the masterminds behind communism, not to mention the prominent involvement of many Jews in the Soviet regimes.[ref]See Michael Kellog, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945, (Cambridge University Press 2008). The most influential example of such propaganda is undoubtedly the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Unfortunately, Savelii Dudakov’s seminal study of the topic, The Story of a Myth (Istoriya Odnovo Mifa), has yet to be translated from Russian into English.[/ref] Compounding the issue, some of the more visible members of Yanukovich’s odious party- such as Dobkin, Kernes, and Tabachnik– are Jewish. Sadly, when members of visible, cohesive minorities behave poorly people tend to assign blame and complicity to the group as a whole.

Yet, surprisingly little anti-Semitic outburst has occurred during the protests. I don’t think that this can be emphasized enough. On February the 23rd there was a fire-bombing of a synagogue in Zaporizhie, one of those Eastern Ukrainian towns which had undergone significant russification. As of today there is still no information released on who might have done it. Even if we assume that Maidan activists are the perpetrators (and they are a minority in Zaporizhie), have any other synagogues been attacked? In the areas where we’d expect them the most, I.E., the areas where nationalist and radical influence is strongest, there have been no such attacks during the course of the protests. Not in the Maidan-controlled parts of Kiev, not in Lviv, stronghold of the ultra-rightwing party Svoboda, and not in Rivne, where different footage shows Oleksandr Muzychko brandishing his Kalashnikov during a municipal meeting. There have been organized Jewish groups participating in the Maidan,[ref]For instance, “Delta,” an IDF veteran. See also Tablet Magazine’s article.[/ref] and the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, president of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine, is also a staunch supporter of the Maidan. The Chabad rabbi in Kiev has closed his schools and called upon Jews to flee, but the chief rabbi since 1990, Yaakov Bleich, long sympathetic to Ukrainian aspirations, has issued no such statements.[ref]http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.575732 and http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/.premium-1.575775. In 1994, Bleich took 60 Minutes to task for distorting what he termed “the beautiful face of freedom.” [/ref] Indeed, Josef Zisels, a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress who monitors the spread of anti-Semitic incidents in the former Soviet Union, noted that there were only two incidents in all of the forty Maidans throughout Ukraine, and both were purely rhetorical.[ref]The interview is in Russian at the Jewish site Booknik.[/ref]

As a knowledgeable friend remarked (we’ll call him Eustace), a certain wave of anti-Russian and anti-Semitic sentiment is to be expected, though how serious remains to be seen.

What the RT article fails to do is pose questions which would allow one to contextualize the information.  What happened to UNA/USO and what precisely is the Praviy Sektor? What role does Muzychko play in the Praviy Sektor, and what role does the Praviy Sektor play in the Maidan? How ideological is the movement? How do Jews rank in importance in Muzychko’s views as opposed to communists and Russians? What do other Maidan leaders think of Muzychko? How powerful is he? Has he ever attacked Jews?

It is unreasonable to expect full, definitive answers in a brief online piece, but none of the questions were even raised. That is the problem. The article is basically saying that here is a protestor, and he is a modern Nazi “aiming for power.” Thus, by extension, the protests are driven by Nazis aiming for power, and everyone knows how bad Nazis are, hence the protests are bad. Timothy Snyder said it best when he said that

If people in the West become caught up in the question of whether they are largely Nazis or not, then they may miss the central issues in the present crisis.[ref]Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine.[/ref]

 

Pious Fraud and Climate Skepticism

by

Pious fraud is the idea that sometimes it’s a good idea to lie to serve a higher good. In religion, it may mean lying about the origins of a sacred text or witnessing a miracle. In science, it may mean lying about a useless medical treatment to try and strengthen the  placebo effect. In Disney movies, it means giving an ordinary feather to Dumbo and telling him that it will magically help him to fly.  The ethics of pious fraud are therefore hotly contested.

The most recent entrant in the long and checkered history of pious fraud is the exaggerated claim that 97% of climate scientists all agree on climate change. The claim started out as a paper (not peer reviewed, btw) and then went on to get lots of airtime. Even President Obama tweeted it:

2014-02-27 Obama Consensus Tweet

There are lots of problems with the original paper and with the way that the paper has been used by others. Before we dig in, however, it’s important to carefully define the terms. The issue that is really at stake is not just a science issue, but a policy issue as well. It has 5 core components. They are:

  1. Climate change is really happening, and will continue to happen. (Implied: human forecasts are accurate.)
  2. The principle cause of climate change is human behavior (e.g. carbon emissions).
  3. The effects of climate change will, on balance, do much more harm than good.
  4. Climate change is largely reversible (e.g. we can do something about it).
  5. The costs of reversing climate change (e.g. with slower economic development for impoverished nations) are outweighed by the benefits.

As it turns out, however, the 97% paper successfully establishes near-universal scientific consensus on exactly none of these issues. Well, maybe on point #1, if you want to be generous. There are several articles out there castigating the authors of the paper for dishonesty and other shenanigans, but by far the strongest evidence of just how fraudulent the paper is comes from Popular Technology.

First, let’s explain how the 97% paper worked. Bjørn Lomborg (as reported in WattsUpWithThat) writes that:

The paper looks at 12,000 papers written in the last 25 years (see here, the paper doesn’t actually specify the numbers, http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/watch-the-pea/). It ditches about 8,000 papers because they don’t take a position.

They put people who agree into three different bins — 1.6% that explicitly endorse global warming with numbers, 23% that explicitly endorse global warming without numbers and then 74% that “implicitly endorse” because they’re looking at other issues with global warming that must mean they agree with human-caused global warming.

Voila, you got about 97% (actually here 98%, but because the authors haven’t released the numbers themselves, we have to rely on other quantitative assessments).

In other words, the 97% paper is based on interpreting the papers of various other climate scientists. So what Popular Technology did is actually quite simple, they asked the original authors if they agreed with how the 97% paper had characterized their articles. As it turns out: they did not. The 97% paper effectively drafted many of the most vocal and outspoken critics into the consensus regardless of their actual feelings. That would be bad enough. But, as the scientists described, the problems only get worse from there.

Let’s start with issue #2. Ostensibly, this should be the most reliable claim of the paper because it’s the whole point of the paper. Other folks, like President Obama, may have subsequently added on points 3-5 (which the paper itself didn’t claim), but surely the paper at least had some accuracy about the main issue it claimed to study? Not really. The problem is that the consensus being defended is what’s called the IPCC consensus (after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), but the IPCC defined anthropic global warming as global warming that is caused 90%-100% by humans. That’s a pretty high bar. The 97% paper, on the other hand, lowered that bar to just 50% and it did so without explaining what they were doing or why. Dr. Scaffeta, who has a PhD in physics and whose paper was used by the 97% paper as evidence of the consensus, explains:

Cook et al. (2013) [the 97% paper] is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.

What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun. [emphasis added]

Please note that it is very important to clarify that the AGW advocated by the IPCC has always claimed that 90-100% of the warming observed since 1900 is due to anthropogenic emissions. While critics like me have always claimed that the data would approximately indicate a 50-50 natural-anthropogenic contribution at most. [emphasis added]

What it is observed right now is utter dishonesty by the IPCC advocates. Instead of apologizing and honestly acknowledging that the AGW theory as advocated by the IPCC is wrong because based on climate models that poorly reconstruct the solar signature and do not reproduce the natural oscillations of the climate (AMO, PDO, NAO etc.) and honestly acknowledging that the truth, as it is emerging, is closer to what claimed by IPCC critics like me since 2005, these people are trying to get the credit.

They are gradually engaging into a metamorphosis process to save face.[emphasis added]

This is why I say that none of the 5 points above are actually substantiated by the 97% paper. Not only do Scaffeta (and many more) reject the characterization of their papers, but they in fact have dissenting views about the causes of global warming. This has profound implications. If (to use Scafetta’s high estimate), 70% of the global warming from 1990 – 2000 is caused by the sun, then this means that the models used by the IPCC consensus are wrong and we can’t trust their forecasts (so much for points 1 and 3). It also means that we have significant reason to doubt whether or not there’s much humans can do about climate change (points 4 and 5).

This is far from the only explosive comment to come from these scientists, however. Dr. Nir J. Shaviv (PhD in astrophysics) was also cited as being a part of the 97% consensus, and also completely rejected that categorization. He wrote:

Nope… it [that the paper was part of the 97% consensus] is not an accurate representation. The paper shows that if cosmic rays are included in empirical climate sensitivity analyses, then one finds that different time scales consistently give a low climate sensitiviity. i.e., it supports the idea that cosmic rays affect the climate and that climate sensitivity is low. This means that part of the 20th century should be attributed to the increased solar activity and that 21st century warming under a business as usual scenario should be low (about 1°C).

I couldn’t write these things more explicitly in the paper because of the refereeing, however, you don’t have to be a genius to reach these conclusions from the paper. [emphasis added]

So, not only does he also find that cosmic rays must factor into some of the warming (and therefore also criticize the forecasts), he also points out that he was unable to express his true opinion because of the peer review process, which was basically censoring (albeit not very well) his true belief. Just as a quick summary of the rest of the findings, here are some additional comments from the scientists who spoke with Popular Technology about how they felt the 97% paper characterized their own work:

  • “It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming.” (Dr. Craig D. Idso, Geography)
  • “I think your data are a load of crap. Why is that a lie? I really think so.” and “I think your sampling strategy is a load of nonsense. How is that a misrepresentation? Did I falsely describe your sample?” (Dr. S. J. Tol, Economics, in a series of tweets to one of the authors of the 97% paper.) [emphasis original to the Popular Technology article]
  • “The paper is strongly against AGW, and documents its absence in the sea level observational facts. Also, it invalidates the mode of sea level handling by the IPCC.” (Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, Quaternary Geography, describing how his own paper is actually against the consensus.)
  • “I am sure that this rating of no position on AGW by CO2 is nowhere accurate nor correct…. I hope my scientific views and conclusions are clear to anyone that will spend time reading our papers. Cook et al. (2013) is not the study to read if you want to find out about what we say and conclude in our own scientific works.” (Dr. Willie Soon, Rocket Science, describing why the categorization of his paper as having “no position” on anthropic global warming was false. He added: “No extra comment on Cook et al. (2013) is necessary as it is not a paper aiming to help anyone understand the science.” [emphasis added])
  • “If Cook et al’s paper classifies my paper, ‘A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change’ as “explicitly endorses AGW but does not quantify or minimize,” nothing could be further from either my intent or the contents of my paper… I would classify my paper in Cook et al’s category (7): Explicit rejection with quantification.” (Dr. Alan Carlin, Economics) [emphasis original to Popular Technology piece]

The Popular Technology article concluded: “The Cook et al. (2013) study is obviously littered with falsely classified papers making its conclusions baseless and its promotion by those in the media misleading.” and added two followup analyses: Cook’s 97% Consensus Study Game Plan Revealed and The Statistical Destruction of the 97% Consensus.

Where does that leave us? The most charitable possible interpretation is that the 97% paper deliberately or negligently inflated consensus on this issue. The reason for doing this is obvious: it’s a policy paper rather than a scientific paper. It is designed to get people to support policies intended to curb global warming without actually proving that these policies are the right decisions to make. It is a pious fraud. When the paper is used by others who tack on issues 3-5 (harm, reversibility, and net-benefit of opposing global warming) they are compounding the same fraud which the paper was deliberately designed to initiate.

This is a very, very bad idea. It is a bad idea because it poisons the entire debate. If scientists are willing to blatantly lie and fabricate to try and win a policy war, how can we (especially we who are non-experts) trust the scientific “consensus”? If the consensus were as low as 33% of scientists but it was transparent and honest and included all 5 points, that would be enough to make the issue quite serious. If it was as high as 67% (with the same conditions) that would be enough to make me seriously consider supporting drastic policies. But to try and trick people into believing there is consensus on all 5 points when there is, at best, exaggerated consensus on just 1 or 2 points throws the entire policy argument into question. Now I know that people are lying to me, and I also know that I have no realistic way of estimating the extent of the fabrications. I have to weigh the uncertain efficacy and uncertain benefits of climate change remedies against their certain costs.

This is not a good position for someone to be in if they are truly worried about climate change. And it’s not a reasonable position to be in if you’re actually confident of the facts. The fact that we are in this position at all is the reason that I, like many other open-minded skeptics, look for other possible explanations to explain the absolutist rhetoric of the climate change alarmists.

Courage and Non-Violent Resistance in Ukraine

by

2014-03-04 Unarmed Ukrainian Soldiers

This photo is of Ukrainian soldiers who had just confronted Russian invaders for several hours outside their base. Note that the Ukrainians are unarmed. Lots of camo, but no guns.

It never occurred to me for a moment that an armed force might consider using *non-violent* resistance, but apparently that’s what the Ukrainian forces in Crimea are doing. Based on alleged communication intercepts, Putin has no idea what to do about it. He sent in thousands of troops with the idea that they would trigger a fight-or-flight response in the Ukrainian army. He wants them to start shooting (and provide justification for a massacre) or surrender. Instead, every single unit so far has refused to do either, and their wives have also demonstrated stunning bravery, standing as human shields between Russian forces and their outnumbered, outgunned, and undersupplied husbands.

If I’m getting this story right, it’s an incredible strategy of courage, nobility, and also genius. But I don’t know how long it can continue.

(Note: I first posted this story to my Facebook wall.)

Gay Rights and Doublethink

by

2013-06-18 gay marriage

Doublethink is a term from  Orwell’s classic novel 1984.  It is “the act of ordinary people simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts.” I’ve heard people try to come up with real-world examples of the term, but so far none have really lived up to the original meaning. But I think we’re really standing on the threshold  now, and it’s the issue of gay rights that threatens to push us over the edge.

Up until recently, one of the key components of the push for gay rights has been that it would take a “live and let live” philosophy. If you don’t like gay marriage: don’t have one. But obviously gay marriage wouldn’t somehow force religious institutions to change their doctrine or allow their buildings to be used, nor would it require religious people to participate in or condone gay marriages. Right? Well, no. Not really.

This became obvious when Arizona tried to pass a bill that would have enacted the principle that “we should not punish people for practicing their religion unless we have a very good reason.” If that doesn’t sound like what the Arizona bill did, that’s no surprise. According to Professor Doug Laycock, who is one of the foremost experts on law and religion, “Arizona’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, was been egregiously misrepresented both before and after the veto.” You should really read his explanation of what the law really did, but the gist of it is simple: Rather than legalize anti-gay discrimination, the law would have simply clarified the context in which these types of cases would be viewed by the courts, who would still be open to determining who won or lost in any given case.

Instead, however, the country was fed the impression that Arizona wanted to legalize anti-gay discrimination. Which would be wrong, right? If a gay couple walks into your bakery and orders a wedding cake, you bake them the cake. Or else.

But what happens when a lesbian wants a haircut from a  Muslim barber who refuses to touch any unrelated woman other than his wife? Or, for that matter, what happens when a gay stylist refuses to give a haircut to someone who doesn’t support gay marriage? In that last case, the stylist gave the following rationale for refusing to cut the governor’s hair:

I think it’s just equality, dignity for everyone. I think everybody should be allowed the right to be together.

In other words, he had a sincere moral conviction and it would violate that moral conviction to force him to use his business, his talents, and literally his body to support someone who was opposed to that moral conviction. Sound familiar?

Ross Douthat pointed out that the no-holds-barred takedown of the Arizona bill was unprecedented, and he understands what that signifies:

What makes this response particularly instructive is that such bills have been seen, in the past, as a way for religious conservatives to negotiate surrender — to accept same-sex marriage’s inevitability while carving out protections for dissent. But now, apparently, the official line is that you bigots don’t get to negotiate anymore.

So this is where we stand today. Either the American people realize that treating religious objections to participation in gay marriage is a legitimate concern (perhaps with the help of examples like those above) and adopt a more nuanced pose. Or, on the other hand, they ignore the examples and press forward. In that brave new world, I fully expect that the right of gay people to refuse service to religious bigots will be enshrined legally, but the right of religious people to refuse to participate in gay weddings will be scorned and derided. And then, ladies and gentlemen, we will have arrived at a real-life example of doublethink in the wild.

The Great Enrichment

by

Economist Deirdre McCloskey presented a paper entitled “The Great Enrichment Came and Comes From Ethics and Rhetoric” at a New Delhi conference for the Centre for Civil Society in January. The following excerpt is, in large part, why I support markets:

Free markets, that is, have not been bad for the poor of the world. The sole reliable good for the poor, on the contrary, has been the liberating and the honoring of market-tested improvement and supply. Private charity and public works, socialism and central planning, by contrast, have often made people worse off. Yet economic growth since 1800 has almost always made them better off, by enormous factors of increase. The enrichment of the poor, that is, has not come from charity or planning or protection or regulation or trade unions, all of which, despite their undoubted first-act popularity among our good friends on the left, merely redistribute a constant or a shrunken pie. The mere arithmetic shows why. If all profits in the American economy were forthwith handed over to the workers, the workers (including some amazingly highly paid “workers,” such as sports and singing stars and big-company CEOs) would be 20 percent or so better off, right now. One time only. The 20 percent is to be compared with a rise in real wages 1800 to the present by a factor of 10 or 30 or (allowing for improved quality of goods) 100, which is to say 900 or 2,900 or 9,900 percent. If we want to make the non-bosses or the poor better off by a significant amount, 9,900 percent beats 20 percent every time. At 5 percent per year market-tested improvement and supply goes beyond the one-time 20 percent in a scant four years, and then cumulates to a quadrupling.

Check it out. The third volume of her trilogy on the Bourgeois Era- (the 2nd of which is pictured above)-The Treasured Bourgeoisie: How Markets and Innovation Became Virtuous, 1600-1848, and Then Suspect–will be out in 2015.

What Do Americans Think About Abortion?

by

Will Saletan, the national correspondent at Slate, is a smart and independent thinker on the abortion issue. He even wrote a controversial but highly regarded book called Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, said that the book “will make activists on both sides of the debate uncomfortable,” and that “there’s no smarter political commentator in Washington today.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, the editor of National Review Rich Lowry, called Saletan “one of America’s shrewdest political writers,” and added “If you care about the issue of abortion, you must read this book.”

So when Saletan weighed in on the question of Do Most Americans Think Most Abortions Should Be Illegal? for the 41st commemoration of Roe v. Wade, I was intrigued to read his perspective.

The statistics on public opinion of abortion are pretty complex and very controversial. Saletan took an immediate dislike to a poll paid for by the National Right to Life Committee that provided unusually granular survey responses to a question about when abortion should be legal.

01 NRLC Poll Results

The poll (above) found that 53% of Americans fell within the broadly pro-life categories of opposing abortion at any time during a pregnancy with exceptions for the life of the mother as well as for rape and incest.

The NRLC also published the results of a poll from Gallup (a poll that they didn’t choose the questions for), and that poll confirmed the findings of the NRLC poll:

03 Gallup Poll Results

Based on these polls, one would conclude that most Americans are against most abortions, but Saletan thinks we should ignore these polls, and instead we should pay attention to a different collection of polls (also from reputable sources) that broke down abortion into the following cases: legal in all cases / legal in most cases / illegal in most cases / illegal in all cases.

02 Meta Results

As you can see, the NRLC and Gallup polls shows Americans opposed to most abortions. The polls provided by Saletan show the opposite. Who to believe?

Saletan argues that we should disregard the NRLC poll, but his reasoning is actually quite poor. According to him, the NRLC stacked the deck by picking 3 questions that are broadly pro-life and 3 that are broadly pro-choice, thus creating the false sense of equality between the two sides. Additionally, he suggests that with so many choice, folks will just opt for the middle.

This argument makes no sense, primary because both the polls Selatan disbelieves and the polls he likes are identical in terms of his alleged shenanigans. Three of the six NRLC options are more or less pro-life, but so are two of the four options in Saletan’s preferred polls. Additionally, it makes no sense to talk about driving people towards the middle when there are six choices. Six is an even number. If there was a strong central tendency for poll responses (Saletan provides no evidence of this assertion, and I couldn’t find any either), then wouldn’t the NRLC have picked five options instead of 6? (Or seven?) And, once again, the polls are identical in this since both have an even number of choices with half being pro-life and half being pro-choice. In short: Saletan has offered zero credible evidence to prefer one set of polls to the other.

The simplest explanation is the most reasonable, both polls are correct. In fact, Saletan implicitly argued for this in a follow-up piece (published the very next day) called The Political Peril of Second-Trimester Abortions. He wrote, “Poll numbers are usually meaningful, even when they don’t mean exactly what the sponsors claim.” In other words: respect that the answers people give to the actual poll questions are the best you’re gonna get, and be suspicious of what people extrapolate from there. That means we should prefer a theory that accommodates both sets of polls rather than one that forces us to try and explain away either set. (This is especially true because the NRLC’s poll is backed by a poll from Gallup and another one from CNN/ORC).

I took the trouble of looking through all of the polls that Saletan compiled to see if I could find a pattern. And I did. I found a very, very strong pattern that Saletan didn’t pick up on, and it is this: poll respondents react very strongly to the way the words “illegal” and “legal” are used. Here’s the Gallup poll that backed up the NRLC results:

Legal under any circumstances 26%
Legal under most circumstances 13%
Legal only in a few circumstances 38%
Illegal in all circumstances 20%


Here’s the CNN/ORC poll (scroll down a bit):

Always legal 25%
Legal in most circumstances 11%
Legal in a few circumstances 42%
Always illegal 20%

Note that the third option doesn’t contain the word “illegal”. That is different from the four options that Saletan mentioned: legal in all cases / legal in most cases / illegal in most cases / illegal in all cases. To see what ones of those examples looks like, take a look at the AP/GfK poll:

Always legal 34%
Legal in most circumstances 19%
Ilegal in most circumstances 13%
Always illegal 29%

Now the third option includes the word “illegal”. That’s it, that’s pretty much the sole difference between both sets of polls. If the pro-life position is described without the word “illegal”, then Americans are pro-life. If the pro-life position is described using the word “illegal”, then Americans are pro-choice. Take a look at those polls again, when the third option uses the word “legal” it is the most popular response (in both polls). When the third option uses the word “illegal” it is the least popular response. The swing is truly enormous: support for the same option drops by about 67% when the word choice shifts from “legal” to “illegal”.

Unlike Saletan’s theory, the observation about the effect of word-choice is actually strongly supported by empirically verified theory and also consistent with all of the results. That’s good. Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually make the answer to the question much more clear. So if you want the simplest answer to the question, it is this: Americans do not know if they want most abortions to be illegal or not.

I’ll go a little farther, however, and make two observations.

First, I’m inclined to think that the NRLC poll is actually the best poll of the bunch because it doesn’t switch between “legal” and “illegal”. It uses only “legal” throughout. (What I’d really like, however, is a comparison to the NRLC poll that asked the exact same questions but rephrased them to use “illegal” throughout”.) My hunch (and I admit it is just an informed hunch), is that this probably takes some of the emphasis off of the emotional punch of the change from “illegal” to “legal” and gets closer to Americans policy preferences.

Second, I think that in some ways the most important finding is being obscured by all this discussion. We may not know exactly what Americans think about abortion, but we do know with certainty that the policy the American people want is a policy that is incompatible with Roe v. Wade. This becomes really clear in Saletan’s second piece (The Political Peril of Second-Trimester Abortions). In it, he used additional data from a poll funded by the Knight of Columbus and found significant erosion of support for abortion rights during the 2nd trimester even among the population that self-identified as strongly pro-choice. The decline in support was constant regardless of how the questions were asked. He concluded:

This doesn’t mean that most Americans think most abortions should be illegal. According to the most recent government data, 92 percent of abortions are performed in the first trimester. Beyond that point, abortions are much rarer and much harder to defend, both morally and politically. Without the protection of the courts, it’s difficult to see how they’d stay legal. [emphasis added]

In other words, the only thing standing between the will of the people and pro-life reform of abortion is the Roe v. Wade decision. This is one of the common themes of the entire abortion debate: Roe v. Wade was such an absolutist ruling that it gave the pro-choice side everything it could possibly have wanted. Despite a thin veneer of moderate rhetoric it is, when combined with the Doe v. Bolton decision handed down the same day, a truly extreme position. As a result of getting everything they could have wanted, the pro-choice side has had nothing to win and everything to lose since 1973.

In contrast to the Roe v. Wade ruling, the American people are anything but extreme and absolutist. It’s clear that any abortion after the first trimester is outside the mainstream of public opinion. Within the first trimester, it’s harder to say where Americans draw the line.

In a sense, though, it doesn’t matter where they draw the line today. Right now that’s an academic question because—until Roe is overturned or modified in some way—there’s no way to touch first-trimester abortions. Or second trimester abortions, for that matter. This makes pro-life strategy obvious: focus on using the unpopularity of 2nd trimester abortions to erode Roe v. Wade. Support for Roe is still deep and strong, but only because so few Americans understand what the ruling actually does. By name? Roe v. Wade is popular. By effect? It’s toxic. The key is to make defenders own the toxicity. (Related: It’s also important to help Americans realize how many of them already oppose abortion, because media bias causes us to significantly over-estimate the popularity of the pro-choice movement.)

And that’s really all you need to know about American opinion on abortion. When they see the facts, Americans still make the right choice. It’s true of Roe today, and I believe one day it will be true of elective abortions, regardless of trimester.

(Note: This post has  been reprinted with permission by Secular Pro-Life and also by LifeSiteNews.)

The European Union (Europe) or Eurasian Union (Moscow): The Ukrainian Protests

by
Protest rally in Maidan square, Kiev, Dec. 2013
Protest rally in Maidan square, Kiev, Dec. 2013

President Viktor Yanu­kovych apparently “signed a deal with opposition leaders to dilute his powers, form a caretaker government and hold early elections” according to The Washington Post. I know it is easy to get behind on international news and politics, so the Post had a wonderful piece that answers some of the most basic questions regarding the Ukrainian situation and the protests involved. The protests revolve around Yanukovych’s rejection of greater economic integration with the European Union. But why? As a recent article in The New York Review of Books explains, this integration was

an aspiration that for many Ukrainians means something like the rule of law, the absence of fear, the end of corruption, the social welfare state, and free markets without intimidation from syndicates controlled by the president.

The course of the protest has very much been influenced by the presence of a rival project, based in Moscow, called the Eurasian Union. This is an international commercial and political union that does not yet exist but that is to come into being in January 2015. The Eurasian Union, unlike the European Union, is not based on the principles of the equality and democracy of member states, the rule of law, or human rights.

On the contrary, it is a hierarchical organization, which by its nature seems unlikely to admit any members that are democracies with the rule of law and human rights.

The most interesting bit, however, was the following about the claim that these protestors are Nazis:

Why exactly do people with such views think they can call other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously? One line of reasoning seems to run like this: the Russians won World War II, and therefore can be trusted to spot Nazis. Much is wrong with this. World War II on the eastern front was fought chiefly in what was then Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, not in Soviet Russia. Five percent of Russia was occupied by the Germans; all of Ukraine was occupied by the Germans. Apart from the Jews, whose suffering was by far the worst, the main victims of Nazi policies were not Russians but Ukrainians and Belarusians. There was no Russian army fighting in World War II, but rather a Soviet Red Army. Its soldiers were disproportionately Ukrainian, since it took so many losses in Ukraine and recruited from the local population. The army group that liberated Auschwitz was called the First Ukrainian Front.

There is much, much more. With Russia’s recent barring of journalist and former Moscow correspondent David Satter just prior to the Sochi Olympics, it might be worth taking a look at this troubled country and the people who suffer because of it.

The Dalai Lama and…Capitalism?

by

The American Enterprise Institute hosted His Holiness the Dalai Lama for an event titled “Happiness, Free Enterprise, and Human Flourishing.” The two panels were “Moral Free Enterprise: Economic Perspectives in Business and Politics” and “Unlocking the Mind and Human Happiness.” The speakers (besides the Dalai Lama) included Arthur C. Brooks (AEI), Jonathan Haidt (New York University), Glenn Hubbard (Columbia University), Daniel S. Loeb (Third Point LLC), Diana Chapman Walsh (MIT), Richard Davidson (University of Wisconsin), Otto Scharmer (MIT), and Arthur Zajonc (Mind & Life Institute). “This is such a wonderful day when a religious leader particularly loved on the left comes to a free market think tank,” said Jonathan Haidt (as quoted in a Yahoo News piece). “It makes me think we can break out of the rut we’ve been in for so many years in our arguments about business and government.”

Check it out.

The CBO Report on Minimum Wage: What You’re Not Hearing

by
2014-02-20 Minimum Wage Photoshoot
Applause for lost jobs and inefficient policy gimmicks!

Yesterday the CBO released an analysis of the President’s proposal to hike minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016, and it was more or less a political disaster for the Obama Administration. Why? Because the report indicated that approximately 500,000 jobs would likely be lost due to the impact of the minimum wage hike, leading to headlines like Minimum-wage hike would help alleviate poverty, but could kill jobs, CBO reports, truly bizarre defenses from Democrats that tried to spin job losses into a positive, and some furious push-back against the non-partisan CBO from the Obama Administration. The pushback is a problem in and of itself because the research the Obama Administration cites is primarily about (1) short run effects of (2) one-off minimum wage hikes. The proposed minimum wage hike would be tied to inflation and so the research on past hikes is probably not relevant even in the short-run, and then there’s the problem of longer-run effects…

But forget all that. Here’s the criticism the Obama Administration isn’t having to defend because the media has failed to bring it up even thought it’s right there in the report:

The increased earnings for low-wage workers resulting from the higher minimum wage would total $31 billion, by CBO’s estimate. However, those earnings would not go only to low-income families, because many low-wage workers are not members of low-income families. Just 19 percent of the $31 billion would accrue to families with earnings below the poverty threshold, whereas 29 percent would accrue to families earning more than three times the poverty threshold, CBO estimates. [emphasis added]

So, not only will the policy cost about a half-billion jobs, but only 20% of the additional earnings would go to families at or below the poverty line. A full 1/3 would go to families that already make at least 3x the poverty level. Current guidelines (for 2013) put the poverty level at $23,550 for a family of 4, so we’re talking about boosting the income for families that make at least $70,650. I’m not saying that’s a terrible idea or anything, but if this is President Obama’s idea of anti-poverty measure he needs a better one. Like, you know, the EITC which is (a) relatively popular with conservatives and (b) actually targeted at boosting the income of the working poor without costing jobs.

The only reasonable conclusion is that the push for minimum wage is a political gimmick rather than a sincere effort to improve the lot of America’s working poor. Better to pick a popular but stupid program than the GOP will oppose than a lesser known but smart program that the GOP would probably go along with. I guess if Americans have to suffer for the Democratic party to score political points, that’s just tough luck for them. Now that’s what I call empathy.