Politics

The Economist on True Progressivism

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2013-06-18 True Progressivism

I’m not with this article from The Economist 100%, but I feel like they are identifying the issues precisely:

Modern politics needs to undergo a similar reinvention—to come up with ways of mitigating inequality without hurting economic growth. That dilemma is already at the centre of political debate, but it mostly produces heat, not light. Thus, on America’s campaign trail, the left attacks Mitt Romney as a robber baron and the right derides Barack Obama as a class warrior. In some European countries politicians have simply given in to the mob: witness François Hollande’s proposed 75% income-tax rate. In much of the emerging world leaders would rather sweep the issue of inequality under the carpet: witness China’s nervous embarrassment about the excesses of Ferrari-driving princelings, or India’s refusal to tackle corruption.

At the core, there is a failure of ideas. The right is still not convinced that inequality matters. The left’s default position is to raise income-tax rates for the wealthy and to increase spending still further—unwise when sluggish economies need to attract entrepreneurs and when governments, already far bigger than Roosevelt or Lloyd George could have imagined, are overburdened with promises of future largesse. A far more dramatic rethink is needed: call it True Progressivism.

My chief skepticism, as someone coming from the right, is the idea that answers come from the top. This is partly because of my own peculiar brand of anti-authoritarianism. It’s a theme in my religious commentary (I think Mormons depend on their leaders too much) and also my political outlook. It’s also a belief that searching for solutions from the top because the problem itself, and more attempts to solve inequality through top-down policies are just going to dig the hole deeper. I think that poverty and inequality are primarily social and not economic phenomena, and what we need are indirect policies that lay the groundwork for a healthy society. Simple example: no-fault divorce leads to higher divorce leads to weakening marriages leads to more kids without a father which is probably the single-greatest detriment in our society. Would repealing no-fault divorce improve GDP this year? Of course not, but it’s the kind of quiet, indirect policy that I believe would–over time–have a huge impact.

I’m not against short-term programs, but I’m dubious they amount to much more than bailing out a ship with hole in it.

The Institution of Marriage: Gay, Lesbian, and Straight

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2013-06-18 gay marriage

So I said a while ago that I was going to write a long post about gay marriage. This is not that post, but it’s related to that post.

Two of the most common arguments in favor of gay marriage I see are:

  1. If Britney Spears can get married for 55 hours and that’s just fine, then obviously heterosexual marriage isn’t so sacred after all.
  2. Allowing same-sex marriage will have no impact on your specific heterosexual marriage.

The problem with these arguments is that they appear to be responding to concerns of those who oppose gay marriage, but they do not. First of all: I don’t know of anyone who is concerned about gay marriage who thinks that it would be the first attack on an otherwise perfect institution. As a society, the traditional family is already in serious trouble from two factors: divorce and absent fathers. I will say that that gay marriage debate has certainly put a renewed focus on what families mean to society, and that’s been the most positive aspect of the debate. I don’t think it’s politically viable just yet, but I’ve seen an increasing number of those who oppose gay marriage also start to question prior “reforms” like no-fault divorce. No-fault divorce was heralded as a way to end domestic abuse and unhappy marriages by making it easier for couples to divorce. It succeeded in making divorce easier–so divorce rates skyrocketed, taking a terrible toll on the innocence of childhood–but it completely failed to increase marital happiness or reduce domestic abuse rates. This is because the appearance of an “easy out” puts additional strain on even healthy marriages in times of stress. It’s one of those initially counter-intuitive findings that actually make a lot of sense once you see the evidence and think through the logic carefully.

As for the second: the idea has never been that if the gay couple down the street is allowed to get married it will somehow have a direct causal impact on my relationship with my wife. That is, of course, absurd. The idea is rather that what marriage means to society as an institution is heavily influenced by how we define it. Traditional marriage proponents have long believed that homosexual relationships are not really interchangeable with heterosexual ones, and it’s vital to note that this doesn’t necessarily imply any judgment of superiority.

I’m not going to pretend that traditional marriage proponents don’t add judgment in quite frequently, but it’s not necessitated by the logic at all. In fact, one reason that I’m skeptical of gay marriage arguments is that they seem to assume that what’s good for straight couples is automatically good for gay couples, and that doesn’t seem like a fair assumption to gay couples. Marriage is an institution that has evolved in a straight world where homosexuality was largely repressed and persecuted. Why does it make sense to assume that such an institution would serve the interests of gays and lesbians? I’m afraid that in an interest to seek dignity and equality for homosexuals (very important goals), same-sex marriage has been swept up in the movement without really thinking it through.

But is this just speculation, or do we have solid, hard sociological evidence to suggest that gay relationships are different than straight relationships? It turns out, we do. Mark Regnerus, writing for the Witherspoon Institute, outlines some of the findings: 

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Anyone Else Worried About Syria?

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Syrian rebels waving an Al Qaeda flag over a government helicopter at a captured airbase.
Syrian rebels waving an Al Qaeda flag over a government helicopter at a captured airbase.

The usual caveat about foreign policy applies: this is not my field. But I find two stories disconcerting:

  1. Iran to send 4,000 troops to aid President Assad forces in Syria
  2. US troops on Syria border as Obama arms rebels

So, President Obama issued a red-line warning some time ago against Syrian forces using chemical weapons. Which they’ve done. Now that the we either hurt our credibility by revealing that we were bluffing, or we react. The problem is that reacting seems tricky given that not only Iran but also Russia support the Assad regime. To say nothing of the fact that the opponents of the Assad regime (e.g. “freedom fighters”) seem to have an unfortunate tendency to swear loyalty to Al Qaeda (which, you know, has boots on the ground assisting them).

I don’t mean to sound callous to the unspeakable horror and loss of innocent life this war has caused, but what are our good options here? This feels like Vietnam 2.0, but worse. And yes: much worse than Iraq or Afghanistan. Afghanistan was at least plausibly a legitimate target and had no major allies or entanglements. Iraq was probably not a legitimate military target (no WMD), but was another isolated regime with no real allies. But the Syrian civil war is an ethnic, religious, and geopolitical quagmire.

I’m not saying an intervention would be impossible, but it looks like the US is getting dragged in against our will without a real plan, and I’m starting to wonder if there’s even going to be an end to the deployment of our young men and women to fight unwinnable wars in the Middle East.

Feminist Faults Forced Fatherhood

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In a provocatively timed New York Times Opinionator post (just before Father’s Day), Laurie Shirage argues that fatherhood ought to be optional. The kernel of her argument comes from 2005 paper in the Journal of Applied Philosophy:

If women’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a fetus, then men’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a resulting child.

The logic is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go very far.

  1. Abortion involves a lot more than merely declining to assume a moral or legal responsibility. It involves the ending of a human life.
  2. Having a child isn’t like acquiring a pet. Children are human beings who have their own rights. Among these rights is–or ought to be–a right to support from their parents.
  3. The position ignores the social and psychological implications of human biological dimorphism and assumes that women and men are equivalent participants in sex, each gaining, receiving, and perceiving exactly the same things from copulation.

So the position is logically consistent, it’s just totally divorced from reality. Which, all things considered, is about what I’d expect from “the Journal of Applied Philosophy.”

2013-06-16 Journal of Applied Philosophy

Cheerios and a Model of American Political Stupidity

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2013-06-14 Cheeriogate Family
The adorable family at the heart of Cheeriogate. Note: only an inhuman monster would have a problem with this level of cute.

Let’s call it Cheerio-gate. It starts with a simple commercial by Cheerios featuring a cute little girl and her parents: a black man and a white woman. Next thing you know, ugly and racist comments are being made on YouTube, General Mills has to shut comments off of the video, and now everyone on the Internet is referring to the “controversy”. Think I’m exagerating? Google it. I’ve even seen several Facebook friends angrily state that anyone who has a problem should just defriend them now, and so forth and so on. The anger is justified, of course, but do these people really believe that there is even a significant minority of Americans out there who have a visceral antipathy to mixed-race families? I want to be clear at the outset that this is not a post that argues that everything is perfectly fine in America as far as race goes. That’s so obviously not true it should go without saying, but I said it just in case. Instead, I just want to do my best to try and dissect what is really happening here, and why–overtime–it is a perfect model for American political stupidity.

I’ll proceed in phases. 

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Health Insurance vs. Food Insurance

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Imagine if grocery shopping worked like health insurance.  Let’s call it “food insurance”.

First of all, you’d better hope that you’re not self-employed or unemployed. You see, way back in World War II the United States created strict wage controls as part of the Stabilization Act of 1942. Since employers still wanted to compete for the best employees–even in wartime–they had to get creative. Instead of offering higher salaries (which was now illegal), they began to offer fringe benefits. The most important of these was healthcare insurance. Let’s pretend that food insurance started in the same way. That would mean that, today, if you get your food insurance through an employer-provided plan you not only get a nice tax advantage on your own premiums, but you can also rely on the employer to pay some of your costs as a matter of traditional expectations. But if you’re self-employed, you not only lose the tax-advantage, but also the ability to get the lower rates that come with buying insurance for bigger groups.

Now let’s imagine what actually shopping for groceries would look like.

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Does the NSA Use Backblaze Storage Pods? And Other Oddities…

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There’s more information about government surveillance coming out of the woodwork than I can keep up with. One of the most interesting stories I’ve read since the news broke last week is a blog post from Backblaze about whether or not the NSA is using Backblaze storage pods to keep all that data they’re snooping. Backblaze is an online backup company offering unlimited, low-cost data backup. They keep costs down by building their own storage racks. They don’t sell the racks, but they do open-source all the designs. Version is 3.0 which stores 180TB of data for less than $2,000.

The post makes a very solid case that the NSA might be building their own Backblaze storage pods. There’s a lot of extra information about the intersection of IT and national intelligence that’s interesting as well, such as the fact that the NSA might be interested in the Backblaze pods because they are open-source, which makes it easier to keep the purchases secret.

2013-06-10 Backblaze Storage Pod 3.0

Other interesting stores: 

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The Mainstream Media and Obama

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2013-06-10 Obama

There has definitely been a different tone in mainstream media coverage of the Obama administration since the current wave of scandals hit the headlines. Has the news media finally decided to vet President Obama?

To some extent: yes. I think that the news of the Department of Justice’s monitoring of the AP press pool in particular had an impact in how the press views the White House. And there are only but so many times you can listen to Jay Carney blatantly and obviously lie to you before that starts to get annoying, I would think.

On the other hand, Breitbart is quick to point out that not a single one of the scandals was actually broken by the American press. Now, Breitbart being Breitbart, the site has a definite bias and really reaches to actually make their case, but I think the fundamental reality–that the press doesn’t really pursue the Obama administration they way it has others–is true. The Daily Caller points out that the initial New York Times opinion piece critical of the Obama administration (President Obama’s Dragnet) was quietly edited to dampen the initial criticism of President Obama. Initially, it stated that the Obama administration “has lost all credibility”, but within a few hours this had been qualified to read “administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.” (emphasis added by Daily Caller).

From where I’m standing, it looks like the American journalistic establishment feels a lot less obligated to carry President Obama now that he has secured a second term. Their work, in a sense, is done. There’s therefore a lot more freedom to criticize the President, but not much appetite for it. All the criticism to date is indirect if it refers to President Obama at all. If it were not for international press and the right-wing alternative media, I don’t think we would know as much today as we currently do.

So Your Government Is Spying On You, Now What?

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The Onion's take is also spot-on, as per usual.
The Onion’s take is spot-on, as per usual.

So last week we found out that the government has been routinely collecting all of the metadata from cell phone calls virtually all Americans make for years. Then we learned that the NSA has the capability to tap directly into the databases of Internet giants like Google, Microsoft, and Apple to collect search history, emails, file transfer history, and even live chats of individual users. Big news, eh? (Guardian, NYT)

Not to bestselling author and major blogger John Scalzi, who wrote about the revelations:

Apparently I was the only person in the US who assumed the government was already doing something very much like this? Because it was doing it under Bush, and if Obama had gotten around to stopping doing it, his administration would have made a big deal about it, no? And since the Obama Administration never said a single word about it that I can recall, it was probably still going on? So I guess what I would say is, yeah, seems not surprising in the least…

Scalzi’s attitude is refreshing next to all the faux shock and muted outrage from the Left–who would have screamed bloody murder if this were going on under Bush–and the sudden remembrance of civil liberties from the Right–who notably didn’t make a fuss under Bush. In that spirit, I want to try and talk about the program itself: what it really entails in terms of privacy and civil liberties and what it really offers in terms of safety. FWIW, I’m a skeptic of the more extreme claims of the privacy movement (who often strike me as 21st century Luddites) and also of a lot of security measures in the wake of 9/11 (which are often best described as “security theater“).

Let’s start with the successes of the government program, such as they are, which is codenamed Stellar Wind.

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