Politics

The Gay Marriage / Bestiality Link that ISN’T

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2013-08-23 Byron Rushing with Elizabeth Warren

It’s fun to pass along every sensational tidbit that validates your world view, but it radicalizes debate, shuts down real communication, and erodes the credibility of whatever side you are attempting to support. In fact, the biggest difference between a partisan ideologue and someone with sincere principles may be the ability to scrutinize arguments that come from your own “side”.

That’s the spirit with which I decided to dig deeper into a series of Facebook posts I glimpsed today with headlines like “The First US State to Legalize Same Sex Marriage Now to legalize bestiality, adultery, repeal public morality, and stop teaching children about values and virtues.” Now, let’s be honest, if you have a rule “Never trust a headlines that verbose” you’re actually probably getting off to a great start. Following that up with a rule like “Never trust news sources with over-enthusiastic titles” (this story comes from “Wakeup Call News”) you’re going to end up filtering a lot of this stuff out without having to bother to scrutinize it. Practically speaking: that’s not a bad idea.

But I wanted to dig a little deeper and find out what is going on with a claim like this one. Here’s what I found. 

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The Gay Marriage Bait and Switch

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2013-08-23 Elaine Huguenin

In contrast to the laissez faire rhetoric of the gay rights  movement, one of the concerns raised has been that ultimately legalizing gay marriage (using the prevalent rationales) will infringe on the civil liberties of those who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.

With gay marriage proponents on the cusp of total victory, these fears may be starting to be realized. New Mexico recently ruled that a private photography business violated anti-discrimination law by refusing to take photos of a gay commitment ceremony.

I call this a “bait and switch” because it’s clearly not what the majority of Americans signed on for when they got beyond the libertarian rhetoric of the gay rights movement: “85 percent of Americans support the right of the photographer to say no.”

Which Famous Economist Are You Like?

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This survey uses an interesting definition of “famous” since I had never heard of the economists I was most similar to: Judith Chevalier, Pete Klenow, and Luigi Zingales. At least Zingales has his own Wikipedia page.

2013-08-23 Luigi Zingales

I liked what I read about him, but as I answered more questions about the EU (which I know very little about) I drifted away from him and towards Klenow / Chevalier, going back and forth several times before ending up nearest to Klenow.

2013-08-23 Survey Results

 

Who do you end up closest to?

Race Relations: Global Edition

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RealClearWorld has a recent post that should be instructive to Americans in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case and the racism claims that accompanied it. Though racism certainly exists in America (I’m willing to bet it will always exist everywhere to some extent), to obsessively focus of America’s past and present sins while ignoring the rest of the world is problematic. Here are a few points the RCW article makes:

  • A large number of Hungarian parents will not allow their children to be friends with Jews (46%), Africans (58%), or Roma/Gypsies (68%).
  • Italy’s first black government minister was openly compared to an orangutan by a senator and had bananas thrown at her by a citizen.
  • Dutch politicians exploit racial tensions to advance a particularly anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant agenda.
  • Mexican navy cadets were attacked by some 300 “soccer fans” on a Polish beach.
  • The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party caught 7% of the Greek popular vote in June.
  • The National Front caught nearly 18% of the French vote in the April 2012 first-round presidential elections.
  • The Freedom Party in the Netherlands caused the government to collapse in April 2012.
  • Extremist parties were part of government coalitions in Italy, Switzerland, Austria until recently.
  • Similar parties are gaining momentum in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland and were met with electoral success in the 2009 European Parliament elections in Hungary, the UK, etc.

As the article concludes, “Perhaps those who continue to obsess over American race relations should try reading global news every once in a while.”

New CDC Gun Study: Everyone Looks Foolish

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2013-08-21 Gun Control

If you Google “obama cdc gun study” you get interesting results: a bevy of mainstream pieces from January or February of this year when President Obama overrode Republican obstructionism to fund CDC research into gun violence and then a smattering of much more recent articles from conservative outlets crowing that the first such study proved they were right all along and that it “shreds” Obama’s position.

One of the first appears to be The New American which also links to a draft of the report. It’s mostly a glorified literature review an reinforces statistics gun advocates have long known about, such as the fact that lawful, defensive use of a firearm is more common (500,000 – 3,000,000 / year) than illegal use to commit a violent crime (300,000 / year). The study also found that many gun control laws are not reliably effective and, interestingly, it turns out that if you take California, Illinois, New Jersey, and Washington D.C. out of the national crime statistics, we go from a country that has 20 times the violent gun crime rate of the rest of the developed world to being basically average. These states have the most restrictive gun control laws in the country, and it doesn’t seem to be helping very much.

Good for the conservatives, but here’s the question: if they knew all along that this would be the result, why did they defund the CDC’s investigations to begin with? It’s a little rich to take credit for a report you would never have willingly permitted.

I’m glad more good evidence is out there, but both sides end up looking like fools to me.

Groklaw Follows Lavabit, Shuts Down to Avoid Betraying Users to NSA

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2013-08-20 Groklaw

Gizmodo has a really ominous piece on the recent shutdown of Groklaw. It’s ominous because unlike Lavabit or Silent Cirlce which help users exchange secure emails, Groklaw is not primarily a platform for individual user communication. It is–or it was–“an award-winning website covering legal news of interest to the free and open source software community” (Wikipedia).

There’s no indication that the NSA was gunning for Groklaw in particular. Founder Pamela Jones simply explains that, in a world where emails are not private, there’s no way to carry on the collaborative communication necessary for the site to continue its 10-year tradition. She goes even farther, writing:

My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it’s possible. I’m just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can’t stay online personally without losing my humanness [because] it’s not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7.

An extreme reaction? Maybe. But Jones’s reaction underscores the simple reality that the Internet is first, foremost, and last about communication. The NSA’s snooping could never have been confined to only secure email providers even if that was their intent (not that it was). Shake the foundation, and the whole edifice trembles.

Court employee fired for helping innocent inmate access DNA testing.

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According to the Associated Press:

“A Kansas City man freed from prison three decades after being wrongfully convicted of rape considers Sharon Snyder his ‘angel’ for giving him a public document that showed him how to properly seek DNA tests. A Jackson County Circuit judge considers the 34-year court employee an insubordinate for offering legal advice and being too chatty about courthouse matters.”

The timeline of events is as follows:

  • 1984: Robert Nelson is convicted of rape, forcible sodomy, and first-degree robbery.
  • 2009: Nelson seeks DNA testing that wasn’t available during his original trial. Judge David Byrn denies the request.
  • August 2011: Nelson asks Byrn to reconsider; Byrn rejects Nelson’s motion because it falls short of statute requirements.
  • October 2011: Sharon Snyder give’s Nelson’s sister a copy of a successful (public) motion for DNA testing filed in a different case.
  • February 2012: Nelson uses this document as a basis for his new motion for DNA testing.
  • August 2012: Byrn sustains the motion allowing for DNA testing.
  • June 2013: The Kansas City crime lab concludes Nelson is not the source of the DNA evidence; Nelson is freed. Five days later Snyder is suspended without pay for her involvement in the case.
  • June 27, 2013: Byrn fires Snyder, saying Snyder “violated several court rules by providing assistance to Nelson and talking about aspects of the case, even while under seal, to attorneys not involved in the matter.”

Byrn, Nelson’s attorney, and other court officials declined to comment on the story. Snyder, however, explained, “I lent an ear to his sister, and maybe I did wrong, but if it was my brother, I would go to every resource I could possibly find.”

On the one hand, if court employees broke the rules every time they heard an emotionally compelling story, our system would not run smoothly at all. On the other hand, it seems like a failure of the system that an innocent prisoner did not otherwise have the resources (that is, did not have the knowledge or assistance) to make his case. What do you think? Should Snyder have done what she did?

NSA: We can’t because we can’t

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documents

The NSA hires a lot of smart people, and smart people tend to think they’re smarter than other people because they’re smarter than other people. So it’s not surprising that when Kevin Collier of the Daily Dot asked the NSA under the Freedom of Information Act for his “file,” he was answered that because the “adversaries” of the security of the nation would inevitably monitor any “public request” for data, and the compilation of any and all such requests could result in “grave damage” to national security, they were unable to honor his request.

Catch that?

The NSA has concocted a defensible rationale for why they can’t honor FIA requests for personal data, based upon the fact of their own existence and the existence of their surveillance programs. They are saying, in essence, “we cannot exchange information because the exchange of information alerts enemies which will use the exchange of information to do harm.” The implicit premise is that their information gathering is necessary and justified in the first place, which of course begs the question. We are forced to wonder, if the information didn’t exist, would we be in more or less danger from the enemies of national security? It amounts to a rhetorical tautology, and it’s nonsense.

These are the people we’ve put in charge of our military, our money and our future, folks. Take a good look.

Mad Skillz

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Over at the American Enterprise Institute, James Pethokoukis has an excellent write-up on a new study by Steven Kaplan (University of Chicago Booth School of Business) and Joshua Rauh (Stanford Graduate School of Business) on income inequality and the “1% vs. 99%” war cry. The findings:

  • The increase in pay at the highest income levels has been broad-based, ranging from public and private company executives to pro athletes.[ref]”[C]omputers and advances in information technology may complement skilled labor and substitute for unskilled labor. This seems likely to provide part, or even much, of the explanation for the increase in pay of professional athletes (technology increases their marginal product by allowing them to reach more consumers), Wall Street investors (technology allows them to acquire information and trade large amounts more easily) and executives, as well as the surge in technology entrepreneurs in the Forbes 400″ (Steven N. Kaplan, Joshua Rauh, “It’s the Market: The Broad-Based Rise in the Return to Top Talent,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27:3. Summer 2013: 53).[/ref]
  • Instead of drastically rising, the afer-tax, after-transfer income share of the top 1% is about the same as it was in 1987-1988, 1996, and 2001 (most inequality alarmists cite pre-tax, pre-transfer income).
  • Top earners come less from inherited wealth (which dropped from 60 to 32% between 1982 and 2011) and more from modest households, access to education (the share of those with no college dropped from 17 to 5 percent, with college grads rising from 77 to 87% between ’82 and ’11), and placing their efforts in tech-based industries.

“We believe,” write Kaplan and Rauh,

that the US evidence on income and wealth shares for the top 1 percent is most consistent with a “superstar”-style explanation rooted in the importance of scale and skill-biased technological change. In particular, we interpret the fact that the top 1 percent is spread broadly across a variety of occupations as most consistent with an important role for skill-biased technological change and increased scale. These facts are less consistent with an argument that the gains to the top 1 percent are rooted in greater managerial power or changes in social norms about what managers should earn.[ref]Ibid.: 36.[/ref]

Though globalization “may have contributed to greater scale,” it “cannot drive the increase in inequality at the top levels given the breadth of the phenomenon across the occupations we study.”[ref]Ibid.: 53.[/ref] Funny enough, increasing globalization has actually decreased global inequality over the last few decades.[ref]See Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Maxim Pinkovskiy, “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” VoxEU.org (Jan. 22, 2010); Sala-i-Martin, Pinkovskiy, “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” NBER Working Paper 15433 (Oct. 2009).[/ref]

Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Maxim Pinkovskiy, 2010

So, maybe the superrich aren’t all Gordon Gekkos. Maybe they’ve just got mad skillz in the globalized economy.

This Is Why You Can’t Have Nice Things, NSA

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The Washington Post has a pretty simple graphic explaining one of the really fundamental problems with NSA spying:

2013-08-16 NSA Breaches

The excuses of politicians (both parties) about all the safeguards ring sort of hollow when it’s obvious that the NSA can’t follow it’s own rules. (To say nothing of sharing national defense intelligence with law enforcement agencies…)