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.
Abortion involves a lot more than merely declining to assume a moral or legal responsibility. It involves the ending of a human life.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
Really big and surprising news: the source behind the recently revealed NSA spying programs has chosen to reveal his identity.
Everything about this story is compelling: his rationale for the leak, the story of how he executed it, his own background, and even his comparison of himself to Bradley Manning. I won’t attempt to summarize. You should just read the whole thing.
I was pretty disgusted to see Mark Sanford’s return to politics from his well-earned disgrace, so I’m impressed that New York Democrats seem a lot less forgiving of Anthony Weiner’s ploy to resurrect his own career, at least according to this article from Politicker. Speaking at a New Kings Democrats candidates forum, Weiner got some incredibly harsh words in the open question period. My favorites came from Jess Strauss, who opened by pointing out that “three candidates in a row–mayoral candidate John Liu, Brooklyn borough president hopeful Eric Adams and Mr. Weiner–had all come to the Democratic club and apologized for something.” Weiner tried to turn the tables on Straus, asking who he supported, but:
Mr. Strauss interjected, arguing that the club’s goal was to bring new people into the political system. “It is very difficult for us to do that when he have politicians out there who are behaving this way,” he said.
Ya think?
The folks who attacked Weiner all support other candidates, but I’m not sure if that really means anything in this case. I mean, if their opinions about Mr. Weiner are perfectly honest, they would support someone else, wouldn’t they? As for Weiner, he seems as arrogant as ever:
“I’m going to win this election, OK, and I’m gonna govern this city really well,” he declared. “If you don’t think I should even be standing here today, I certainly would respect that. I mean, you’re supporting another candidate who’s not gonna win.”
It was really frustrating to watch Sanford win. I’d really love for Weiner to lose. I mean, the American people have got to draw the line somewhere, right?
Flipper soccer has nothing to do with this post, but it came up when I did a Google image search for “crazy people,” and this post is about crazy people taking over politics. By the way, DO NOT do a Google image search for “crazy people”. It was a bad decision on my part.
The Wonkblog piece points out that easy access to information about voting has empowered motivated ideologues to outmaneuver the apathetic (and moderate) masses:
Politics is a niche hobby, not unlike mountain biking or playing the oboe. Only a small number actually follow the proliferation of political news; few send e-mails to members of Congress or volunteer for campaigns. So the opening of U.S. politics, [Stanford University political scientist Morris] Fiorina wrote, “had a perverse consequence: political power and influence were transferred to political activists who were not like most people.”
Fiorina writes that the perverse result of this takeover is that:
Against all natural expectations, Americans liked their government better, trusted their leaders more, and voted in higher numbers in the bad old days when party bosses chose nominees in smoke-filled rooms; when several dozen old white men (mostly Southerners) ran Congress, when big business, big labor and big agriculture dominated the interest group universe; and when politicians didn’t have the tools to figure out what their constituents wanted.
There is one question to raise, however. Were things actually better back then? Or were people just happier because they knew less?
There’s a general assumption among most Americans that democracy is a good thing and that, as a general rule, more democracy is better. With the single exception that we ought to have a Bill of Rights to carve out protections so that the majority cannot persecute the minority, reforms like direct election of Senators (before the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, state legislatures elected national Senators), direct involvement via ballot initiatives, and even reform of the Electoral College to apportion votes equitably with respect to population all seem to strike most people as more or less common sensical. The same general attitude is applied internationally as well, which is why so many Americans were initially supportive of the Arab Spring revolutions that swept the Middle East.
I think this is all wrong. Democracy, in my mind, is overrated. And for clarity, “democracy” means to me “rule by the majority” or even just “rule by the people”.
Let’s start at the beginning with the American Revolution. There’s a widespread urban legend that 1/3 of Americans supported the Revolution, 1/3 were neutral, and 1/3 opposed it. The problem with this view is that it’s not actually accurate. It stems from a letter by John Adams written in 1813 that was actually about American opinions of the French Revolution, although it has been mistakenly quoted by historians dating back to the early 1900’s. The best explanation I’ve found for this issue comes from the Journal of the American Revolution, which addressed the issue directly. According to that piece, no one really knows what the actual breakdown for support of the American Revolution was. In addition to the absence of statistical polling at the time, the issue is complicated by the fact that the American population was growing very rapidly. However (citing the Journal of the American Revolution again), historians like Robert Calhoon estimate that between 40% and 45% of the free population (so African American slaves are not included) or “at most no more than a bare majority” supported the Revolution. So the 1/3-1/3-1/3 quote is erroneous, but the idea that the Revolution was supported by a minority of Americans is reasonable.
This is a controversial claim. Another organization that weighed in on this issue is the Independent Institute, a conservative/libertarian think tank. William F. Marina wrote a piece for them denouncing the “minority myth” as a malicious lie to support elitism and citing “the obvious delight that these writers take, which is, indeed, a major reason they cite it, in the notion that it is a minority that often knows best.” Despite Marina’s foreceful defense of the view that the majority of Americans supported the Revolution, however, the Founders themselves seemed less clear about it. Writing to a friend in 1813, John Adams responded to his friend Thomas McKean’s assertion that the overwhelming majority of Americans had supported the Revolution, Adams demurred. He cited the strength of the Loyalist cause and then wrote (again, Journal of the American Revolution): “Upon the whole, if we allow two thirds of the people to have been with us in the revolution, is not the allowance ample?”
John Adams
So we should take two things from this. The first is that we don’t really know if the majority of Americans supported the Revolution or not, and neither did (at least some of) the Founders. The second is that, to this day, that assertion is hotly contested. Why? Because of an idea that the American political system is founded on the “will of the people” and that–if the Founders did not follow the will of the people–they were “a pretty slippery and hypocritical bunch”, as Marina put it.
I have a different perspective. I think that there is an important distinction between (to use my own terminology) the consent of the governed and the intent of the governed. And I think that when most Americans envision “democracy” they are implicitly assuming that government ought to reflect the intent of the governed. For example, I think that most Americans believe that the purpose of elected representatives is basically practical. We can’t ask Americans for their opinion on every single law, and so we elect representatives, and their job is to go and act as a simple stand-in for their constituents. That is why we passed the 17th Amendment: so that Senators would directly represent their constituents, as opposed to having the state legislature exist as an intermediary. Based on this idea (the intent theory of representative government), not only do legislatures act as stand-ins for their constituents, but the rest of government (the executive and judicial branches) are also simply practical necessities. We have a President because, especially in times of crisis, we need a single person who can act decisively and unambiguously. We have a judicial system purely as a kind of expert legal consultant, although in recent years there has been increasingly a theory that even the Supreme Court ought to reflect the changing mores and attitudes of society. In short: the intent theory is the idea that the entire apparatus of the American political system is an elaborate attempt to enact the will of the American people. In this view, the government (and everyone who works there) is essentially a passive filter that processes the intent of Americans into official law and action.
I believe this is entirely wrong.
First of all, I don’t believe that was the intent of the Founders in creating the system. This is clear from both their actions before and during the Revolution and also from the system that they created. In terms of actions: they acted proactively without waiting for the will of the majority to be clear. John Adams’ letter reflects this. It’s obvious that the will of the people was crucial to their view of governmental legitimacy, but it didn’t serve as the source of government action. In simple terms, the Founders asked for permission from the American people, but didn’t wait for instructions. That’s fundamentally incompatible with the idea that the government merely enacts the intent of the American people. In terms of political structure: the design of the American political system laid down in the Constitution is incompatible with the idea that it is merely a passive filter. After all, the 17th Amendment wasn’t passed until the 20th century. The original intent of the Founders was to intentionally create a layer between national and state government, and have that layer remove the American people a step or two from the process. Since there’s no practical reason for that design decision (it wouldn’t have been significantly more difficult to have popular election for the Senate), it shows that the Founders deliberately chose a less-democratic political system.
Why? Because the Founders were not fools.
The most influential writer on this topic that I’ve read is the modern libertarian scholar Bryan Caplan who wrote The Myth of the Rational Voter. Caplan’s main point, in this book, was to document specific systematic biases common to American voters that lead to poor economic policies. But, along the way, he also pointed out that an important advantage of voter ignorance is that it leaves wiggle room for their representatives to make better decisions that would be unpopular if (biased) American voters knew exactly what was going.
Now I expect that this line of argument is going to raise all kinds of red flags with people, and it should. But the fundamental reality is that elitism has some things going for it. Who do you want to do analysis about global warming, PhD scientists or the man on the street? Who do you want to perform surgery on your kid, a trained and accredited surgeon or a randomly selected poll respondent? Then elitism has a role to play in our society. The government makes policies based on or impacting scientific, strategic, economic, and other matters where expertise is absolutely essential if you want good policies. Then elitism has a role to play in our government.
But obviously the possibility for reliance on elites to be abused is incredibly dangerous. There has to be a counterweight to elitism, and that counterweight is the consent of the governed. Our political system is designed to allow representatives (hopefully representing our elite in the best sense of the word) a wide range of latitude in governance, but to make them ultimately accountable to the people. It is neither populist nor elitist, but a fusion of the two.
So what happens when the balance between populism and elitism is disrupted? Well, take a look at the increasing partisanship and dysfunction in Washington D.C. since the rise of the Internet to get an example. Knowledge is power, and power can be abused. The Internet is, fundamentally, a communication technology that allows for the wide and targeted distribution of information. How much easier is it for activist groups (like the NRA) to micromanage elected representatives and then pass that information directly to their self-selecting constituents who have this information in the absence of any meaningful context. We complain that there’s so little real compromise in Washington, but who can compromise when there are hundreds of single-issue and ideological groups who are literally scoring our legislators on every vote they take?
Again: when I make an argument that says “less informed voters would be better” that ought to send up some red flags. But viewing it as less / more informed isn’t helpful. It’s not just about the amount of information that voters have, but also the kind of information that voters have. I would absolutely love to have voters who are more informed about the nature of our government, what the various branches are responsible for, and so on. I think that a kind of basic citizenship test before voting is a good idea (but not an unproblematic one). But when voters get myopic rankings on hot-button issues without any context: that’s more like noise than information. Voters don’t actually know what votes their representatives cast. They don’t even understand the arcane and complex procedures by which the House and Senate operate. They don’t know when a vote represents a pure capitulation, and when it represents a give-and-take. All they know is that on Position X Candidate Y has a D- from their favorite activist organization. So we’ve got a bunch of elected representatives who have to game the system with their votes in order to stay in office.
And that’s thanks to democracy.
What’s the solution? Well, there’s no silver bullet, but I do believe the first step is a recognition of what the American political system is for. And I don’t think that the American political system was designed or intended to get representatives to either guess what Americans would want if they were asked or merely act out their reactions to poll questions. I think the American political system harnesses the concept of consent of the governed to create accountability by creating healthy incentives. In short, representatives (in the past) have had more incentive to get good outcomes then to react to the preferred ideologies of their constituents. But, since we’ve lost an appreciation for that distinction, we risk reforms that will actually make the problem better rather than worse. Banning single-interest groups or clamping down on their free speech is not, in my mind, a viable solution. Reforming the way we create districts (to restrict gerrymandering), reforming the way we vote (to eliminate strategic voting), and reforming the schedule for primaries (to decrease entrenched special interests) all are.
In short: you have to know how the machine is supposed to work before you can understand how to repair or improve it.
