The Letter (Repost)

This is a re-post of my previous entry with the font issues corrected...

As my wonderful long time readers know, I have a certain member of my family that I occasionally get into arguments with about politics. The arguments usually consist of him forwarding me severe right wing junk mail, with headings like "What will Obama do next?" or "Health Care reform will take your medicare away!" and me sending him e-mails back asking him to please stop sending me things like that.

I've been meaning to write a post about this topic for a while, with a good example, but i had to wait a while till he sent me another. Last night he did. For the sake of brevity, I can't go into the whole details of the exchange we've had over the past 24 hours, but I'll give you a run down: It was late (or early if you prefer) when I got home last night, and upon reading the e-mail (example to follow) i sent him a pretty mean response asking why he sends me this stuff, what HIS opinions were, and pretty much what the hell his problem is (note to self: 3 beer e-mail limit) I went to bed and woke up to find he had already responded, with a sincere e-mail about his veiws of health care reform. His arguments were basically that reform should come in the form of waste reduction and lower taxes, so that more people can get a job and get health care. He asked me (again) if I had read the whole House bill, and that there were provisions in there that would be horrible. He also threw in a good "you don't want illegals getting health care do you?" for shits and giggles.

My mental wits about me again after a shower and some food, I sat down and wrote a response. And thus, i publish here an open letter [with edits for anonymity] to opponents of health care reform as currently being proposed in the US Congress..

First, the e-mail he forwarded:

Statement by the President
________________________________________
I read in Snopes that this is partially true. As a Vet with service connected disability I find this very distastful. By the way, I did not volunteer for the army, I was drafted. Those who did volunteer did not volunteer to go to war, they were ordered by the President of the USA, their commander in chief to go to war.
[Relative]
it's unpardonable. He has the freedom to talk this way because of the soldiers who fought and died for the rights of all Americans!
Statement by the President ??
UNBELIEVABLE
THIS HAS GOT TO BE THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS STATEMENT EVER MADE BY A PUBLIC OFFICIAL LET ALONE BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. AND THIS GUY IS OUR "COMMANDER IN CHIEF". HE IS A DISGRACE.
UNBELIEVABLE PRESIDENT???
HERE IS HIS RESPONSE WHEN HE BACKED OFF FROM HIS DECISION TO LET THE MILITARY PAY FOR THEIR WAR INJURIES.
WHAT AN EMPTY HEADED PERSON HE MUST BE....
Bad press, including major mockery of the plan by comedian Jon Stewart, led to President Obama abandoning his proposal to require veterans carry private health insurance to cover the estimated $540 million annual cost to the federal government of treatment for injuries to military personnel received during their tours on active duty.

The President admitted that he was puzzled by the magnitude of the opposition to his proposal.

"Look, it's an all volunteer force," Obama complained. "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice? It doesn't compute.." "I thought these were people who were proud to sacrifice for their country, "Obama continued. "I wasn't asking for blood, just money. With the country facing the worst financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit. I guess I underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow Americans."
Please pass this on to every one including every vet and their families whom you know.
How in the world did a person with this mindset become our leader? I didn't vote for him!!!
REMEMBER THIS STATEMENT... "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice?
If this PERSON thinks he will ever get another vote from an Active Duty, Reserve, National Guard service member or veteran of a military service he ought to think it over. If you or a family member is or has served their country please pass this to them. Please pass this to everyone.
I'm guessing that other than the 20-25 percent hardcore liberals in the US will agree that this is just another example why this is the worst president in American history. Remind everyone over and over how this man thinks, while he bows to the Saudi Arabian king.

WHEW! I think certain cultures would call this treason, especially since there is only one shred of truth to this e-mail...the fact that John Stewart made fun of Obama...
Now, my response:

Dear [Relative],

Thank you for responding to my e-mail so quickly and with your feelings. I want to apologize for the tone of my last email..i was really upset by the junk mail you sent me, and reacted.

Please allow me to respond rationally.

You mention that if the economy was better, then more people would be able to get jobs and therefore health insurance. I think this is exactly the problem with our current system, that our health care is employer based. This creates situations where people hold on to jobs they hate, or work under conditions that they normally wouldn't, just to get health care for their family. You also get situations like now, when during a recession people loose not only their jobs, but also the basic health care services (dental, vaccinations) for their family through no fault of their own. I believe health care should be portable, and completely independent of employer, so that situations like this do not arise, and people feel more free to determine where to work and what to do with their lives. This does not mean that their health care needs to be government run or paid (two different systems mind you). Private insurance that is portable and affordable is fine by me.

This brings me to another point you made. You said that anyone who is sick can go to the emergency room and get care. This is quite true, and a testament to the goodwill of doctors and hospitals. The probelm is, that when (if) that person recovers, they are going to have a bill for multiple tens of thousands of dollars to pay. The price of health care in the US is astronomical, and has no relation to actual costs or work. The reason that those who don't have health care haven't gotten it isn't because they don't want it, but rather it is too expensive for them, or the insurance companies deny them coverage based on pre-existing conditions. If there is one thing that NEEDS to be reformed, its insurace practices of price gouging, denial of service, and revoking coverage when emergencies do happen. The current legislation is designed to do all of these things, regardless of whether we have public or private insurance. I do believe that a strong publicly run insurance agency would do much to help combat abuses by competing with large health insurance companies that often have set up regional monopolies. I also think having the government regulate what hospitals and doctors can charge for service is a good idea: the fact that a person has to pay $170 out of pocket to get his teeth cleaned even when he has insurance (like I did a few years ago) while the dentist is driving a maserati is not only ridiculous, but is at some level immoral (in my eyes). Another way of combating monopolistic behavior by insurance companies would be to induce diversification in the market (similar to what happened to AT&T) and make the health care market much more competitive. To do this, we would STILL need significant government regulation of the health care markets, even if no public plan was offered.

As for the legislation itself, i haven't read the house bill because it makes no sense to read a bill that will be changed (minimum) twice before becoming a law. The various bills being talked about in the Senate are all different than the House bill, and once they get together in committee the final product is going to look completely different than the one you've read. While i think it is important for our legislators to know what they are voting on, I think it is weak to use "Have you read the bill?" as an argument when "the bill" doesn't really exist.

This brings me to my final point, and the one that made (makes) me so upset when you send me these anonymous forwards. I find the general tone of debate in America right now deplorable, and it makes me really sad to see what is happening at the town halls around the country. There is no debate, only screaming, and the people doing the screaming are either misinformed, or afraid and reacting. The organizers of many of the groups have publicly stated that their goal is to disrupt meetings, not to contribute to debate. When someone stands up and begins to scream about the constitution and gun rights (watch this video) during a town hall on health care it gets us nowhere. When people bring firearms and stand outside of meeting places to "demonstrate their rights" it smacks of fascism and intimidation tactics. And when people accuse the president, or members of congress, of being Nazis, i see a sad lack of historical perspective and no chance at a rational conversation about the real issues with health care in America today.

The e-mail you sent me (and the others you have sent me) falls right into this category of fear-mongering and, well, shouting through the ether. First of all, it's an anonymous bulk mail, which claims to quote the president. You said that from Snopes it's partially true, but don't mention WHICH part (is it the part about how John Stewart made fun of the president? 'cause that's his job). I would agree with you and others that if the president said something like this:

"I wasn't asking for blood, just money. With the country facing the worst
financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to
do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit. I guess I
underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow
Americans."
That that would be atrocious. But c'mon, do you really believe that Obama said this? He's not stupid, and even if he THOUGHT these kinds of things (which I do not believe) he would never say something like that on record. "I wasn't asking for blood, just money..." c'mon. These kinds of charges are bogus (see here) and serve to perpetuate lies. There is a similar problem with accusations of "death panels". You were in the insurance buisness for a long time, and certainly know a few things about actuaries. Instead of having private insurance companies make cost effectiveness assessments, the House bill wanted to create a government body that would also serve this function (and would also allow private insurance companies to do their own risk assessments as well) and report of the efficiency of certain health services. Unfortunately, a bunch of screaming about "death panels" got people all riled up and afraid, and now legislators have caved and removed this provision from consideration. This is the tyranny of irrational fear over rational discussion. You mentioned that money could be saved by making the health care system more efficient: its hard to get more efficient if you don't have anyone looking for inefficiencies. Now that this provision has been removed, it will be that much harder to find and isolate effective and cost effective procedures being done across the country.

So, in summary, I believe that the health care system in America is broken and has been for years. I believe that most of the reform needed is in insurance regulation and in making health insurance more portable, affordable, and reliable. Those millions of people that do not have health insurance should have the option to get it at an affordable price, be it private or public insurance. I believe the costs of health care itself, from dental visits to emergency room traumas are obscenely high, and this is due to rampant price gouging and exploitation by hospitals and heath care providers. It's hard to fault them for these profiteering ways, since the system allowed them to get rich this way, but that's why i think the system needs to be changed. There need to be strong controls on what doctors and hospitals can charge. And there need to be protections in the system so that people are not dependent on their employer for family health care.

All of these provisions are in the legislation that is being debated in both houses (see here) and I hope to see some form of these reforms passed...with or without an expansion in government funded (medicare) or run (veterans health care) programs.

Thank you for your thoughts,

Love,

A Fortunate One


Update: sorry about the font issues guys, Blogger is frustrating me...

He makes a good point..

Yglesias again, with a nice point about the way US government works

The Letter

As my wonderful long time readers know, I have a certain member of my family that I occasionally get into arguments with about politics. The arguments usually consist of him forwarding me severe right wing junk mail, with headings like "What will Obama do next?" or "Health Care reform will take your medicare away!" and me sending him e-mails back asking him to please stop sending me things like that.

I've been meaning to write a post about this topic for a while, with a good example, but i had to wait a while till he sent me another. Last night he did. For the sake of brevity, I can't go into the whole details of the exchange we've had over the past 24 hours, but I'll give you a run down: It was late (or early if you prefer) when I got home last night, and upon reading the e-mail (example to follow) i sent him a pretty mean response asking why he sends me this stuff, what HIS opinions were, and pretty much what the hell his problem is (note to self: 3 beer e-mail limit) I went to bed and woke up to find he had already responded, with a sincere e-mail about his veiws of health care reform. His arguments were basically that reform should come in the form of waste reduction and lower taxes, so that more people can get a job and get health care. He asked me (again) if I had read the whole House bill, and that there were provisions in there that would be horrible. He also threw in a good "you don't want illegals getting health care do you?" for shits and giggles.

My mental wits about me again after a shower and some food, I sat down and wrote a response. And thus, i publish here an open letter [with edits for anonymity] to opponents of health care reform as currently being proposed in the US Congress..

First, the e-mail he forwarded:

Statement by the President

---

I read in Snopes that this is partially true. As a Vet with service connected disability I find this very distastful. By the way, I did not volunteer for the army, I was drafted. Those who did volunteer did not volunteer to go to war, they were ordered by the President of the USA, their commander in chief to go to war.

[Relative]

it's unpardonable. He has the freedom to talk this way because of the soldiers who fought and died for the rights of all Americans!

Statement by the President ??

UNBELIEVABLE
THIS HAS GOT TO BE THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS STATEMENT EVER MADE BY A PUBLIC OFFICIAL LET ALONE BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. AND THIS GUY IS OUR "COMMANDER IN CHIEF". HE IS A DISGRACE.
UNBELIEVABLE PRESIDENT???
HERE IS HIS RESPONSE WHEN HE BACKED OFF FROM HIS DECISION TO LET THE MILITARY PAY FOR THEIR WAR INJURIES.
WHAT AN EMPTY HEADED PERSON HE MUST BE....

Bad press, including major mockery of the plan by comedian Jon Stewart, led to President Obama abandoning his proposal to require veterans carry private health insurance to cover the estimated $540 million annual cost to the federal government of treatment for injuries to military personnel received during their tours on active duty.

The President admitted that he was puzzled by the magnitude of the opposition to his proposal.

"Look, it's an all volunteer force," Obama complained. "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice? It doesn't compute.." "I thought these were people who were proud to sacrifice for their country, "Obama continued. "I wasn't asking for blood, just money. With the country facing the worst financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit. I guess I underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow Americans."
Please pass this on to every one including every vet and their families whom you know.
How in the world did a person with this mindset become our leader? I didn't vote for him!!!
REMEMBER THIS STATEMENT... "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice?
If this PERSON thinks he will ever get another vote from an Active Duty, Reserve, National Guard service member or veteran of a military service he ought to think it over. If you or a family member is or has served their country please pass this to them. Please pass this to everyone.
I'm guessing that other than the 20-25 percent hardcore liberals in the US will agree that this is just another example why this is the worst president in American history. Remind everyone over and over how this man thinks, while he bows to the Saudi Arabian king.

WHEW! I think certain cultures would call this treason, especially since there is only one shred of truth to this e-mail...the fact that John Stewart made fun of Obama...

Now, my response:

Dear [Relative],

Thank you for responding to my e-mail so quickly and with your feelings. I want to apologize for the tone of my last email..i was really upset by the junk mail you sent me, and reacted.

Please allow me to respond rationally.

You mention that if the economy was better, then more people would be able to get jobs and therefore health insurance. I think this is exactly the problem with our current system, that our health care is employer based. This creates situations where people hold on to jobs they hate, or work under conditions that they normally wouldn't, just to get health care for their family. You also get situations like now, when during a recession people loose not only their jobs, but also the basic health care services (dental, vaccinations) for their family through no fault of their own. I believe health care should be portable, and completely independent of employer, so that situations like this do not arise, and people feel more free to determine where to work and what to do with their lives. This does not mean that their health care needs to be government run or paid (two different systems mind you). Private insurance that is portable and affordable is fine by me.

This brings me to another point you made. You said that anyone who is sick can go to the emergency room and get care. This is quite true, and a testament to the goodwill of doctors and hospitals. The probelm is, that when (if) that person recovers, they are going to have a bill for multiple tens of thousands of dollars to pay. The price of health care in the US is astronomical, and has no relation to actual costs or work. The reason that those who don't have health care haven't gotten it isn't because they don't want it, but rather it is too expensive for them, or the insurance companies deny them coverage based on pre-existing conditions. If there is one thing that NEEDS to be reformed, its insurace practices of price gouging, denial of service, and revoking coverage when emergencies do happen. The current legislation is designed to do all of these things, regardless of whether we have public or private insurance. I do believe that a strong publicly run insurance agency would do much to help combat abuses by competing with large health insurance companies that often have set up regional monopolies. I also think having the government regulate what hospitals and doctors can charge for service is a good idea: the fact that a person has to pay $170 out of pocket to get his teeth cleaned even when he has insurance (like I did a few years ago) while the dentist is driving a maserati is not only ridiculous, but is at some level immoral (in my eyes). Another way of combating monopolistic behavior by insurance companies would be to induce diversification in the market (similar to what happened to AT&T) and make the health care market much more competitive. To do this, we would STILL need significant government regulation of the health care markets, even if no public plan was offered.

As for the legislation itself, i haven't read the house bill because it makes no sense to read a bill that will be changed (minimum) twice before becoming a law. The various bills being talked about in the Senate are all different than the House bill, and once they get together in committee the final product is going to look completely different than the one you've read. While i think it is important for our legislators to know what they are voting on, I think it is weak to use "Have you read the bill?" as an argument when "the bill" doesn't really exist.

This brings me to my final point, and the one that made (makes) me so upset when you send me these anonymous forwards. I find the general tone of debate in America right now deplorable, and it makes me really sad to see what is happening at the town halls around the country. There is no debate, only screaming, and the people doing the screaming are either misinformed, or afraid and reacting. The organizers of many of the groups have publicly stated that their goal is to disrupt meetings, not to contribute to debate. When someone stands up and begins to scream about the constitution and gun rights (watch this video) during a town hall on health care it gets us nowhere. When people bring firearms and stand outside of meeting places to "demonstrate their rights" it smacks of fascism and intimidation tactics. And when people accuse the president, or members of congress, of being Nazis, i see a sad lack of historical perspective and no chance at a rational conversation about the real issues with health care in America today.

The e-mail you sent me (and the others you have sent me) falls right into this category of fear-mongering and, well, shouting through the ether. First of all, it's an anonymous bulk mail, which claims to quote the president. You said that from Snopes it's partially true, but don't mention WHICH part (is it the part about how John Stewart made fun of the president? 'cause that's his job). I would agree with you and others that if the president said something like this:

"I wasn't asking for blood, just money. With the country facing the worst
financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to
do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit. I guess I
underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow
Americans."

That that would be atrocious. But c'mon, do you really believe that Obama said this? He's not stupid, and even if he THOUGHT these kinds of things (which I do not believe) he would never say something like that on record. "I wasn't asking for blood, just money..." c'mon. These kinds of charges are bogus (see here) and serve to perpetuate lies. There is a similar problem with accusations of "death panels". You were in the insurance buisness for a long time, and certainly know a few things about actuaries. Instead of having private insurance companies make cost effectiveness assessments, the House bill wanted to create a government body that would also serve this function (and would also allow private insurance companies to do their own risk assessments as well) and report of the efficiency of certain health services. Unfortunately, a bunch of screaming about "death panels" got people all riled up and afraid, and now legislators have caved and removed this provision from consideration. This is the tyranny of irrational fear over rational discussion. You mentioned that money could be saved by making the health care system more efficient: its hard to get more efficient if you don't have anyone looking for inefficiencies. Now that this provision has been removed, it will be that much harder to find and isolate effective and cost effective procedures being done across the country.

So, in summary, I believe that the health care system in America is broken and has been for years. I believe that most of the reform needed is in insurance regulation and in making health insurance more portable, affordable, and reliable. Those millions of people that do not have health insurance should have the option to get it at an affordable price, be it private or public insurance. I believe the costs of health care itself, from dental visits to emergency room traumas are obscenely high, and this is due to rampant price gouging and exploitation by hospitals and heath care providers. It's hard to fault them for these profiteering ways, since the system allowed them to get rich this way, but that's why i think the system needs to be changed. There need to be strong controls on what doctors and hospitals can charge. And there need to be protections in the system so that people are not dependent on their employer for family health care.

All of these provisions are in the legislation that is being debated in both houses (see here) and I hope to see some form of these reforms passed...with or without an expansion in government funded (medicare) or run (veterans health care) programs.

Thank you for your thoughts,

Love,

A Fortunate One

Update: sorry about the font issues guys, Blogger is frustrating me...

Sci- fi review

I watched “The Day the Earth Stood Still” yesterday, and I was pleasantly surprised. Sci-fi generally is really cool for IR geeks because it often takes some of our favourite topics (destructive weapons, first encounters, environmental catastrophe, weird political systems, etc) and pushes them beyond our conventional limits. The first of Asimov’s Foundation series is perhaps the best example of this. I don’t really want to bitch about Keanu Reeves (is he always trying to be stoic, or does he not understand the script?), who just does his normal Keanu thing, nor do I want to pick out everything the film got wrong (if you want that, go here). The point of most movies, and probably all science fiction movies, is to show possibility rather than actuality. Still, this movie got some things right and left me with a couple of questions. I’m not going to bother flagging what might spoil the movie for you, so if you haven’t watched it and want to, stop now.

1. The first thing that grabbed me is the alien technology. We tend to build things in a nice linear fashion, like good little engineers. We know exactly how the wheels will turn because of how we affixed them to the axle, which is affixed to the drive shaft, which is affixed to the transmission, which is… It’s all “knee-bone connected to the shin-bone”: sequential, predictable, but difficult to scale beyond a certain level of complexity. The aliens in the movie, however, use technology based on cellular automata: it’s based on very small pieces that reproduce themselves and combine unpredictably to produce the desired results. The alien’s space suit is a biological mass grown over his body. The giant robot-centurion-thing can fragment into little nano-bots that will reproduce themselves and attack (mostly inorganic) stuff. Building working technology that operates on complexity rather than linear, one-thing-after-another principles, can be tricky to control but easy enough to design, and it would offer a lot of other benefits, like being able to respond to unanticipated events. Some would say that we’re just getting started with this kind of technology, pointing to the difference between, say, Encyclopaedia Britannica (composed linearly) to Wikipedia (more like swarm intelligence). I’d say that we’ve been using it for a long time inadvertently with market mechanisms determining the allocation of resources among us, but I do think that super-intelligent aliens would be more likely to use complexity than linearity for many purposes. Kudos screenwriters.

2. The aliens seem to have a kind of Gaia-hypothesis, but they seem to apply it to the universe as a whole. This is evident when the alien says he wants to save the Earth (independent of the humans on it), that life-supporting planets are rare and need to be preserved, and especially when he says (cornily) at the kid’s grave that “nothing in the universe ever dies… it is only transformed” (though he did say the other alien who had been here longer would die). In any event, this idea can be expressed intelligently, and I’m going to assume that the aliens’ understanding wasn’t one of the atavistic ideas that the only way to be ecologically aware is to live according to the principles of some esoteric, apocryphal ‘Earth Mother’ or some such nonsense. If they have such an ontology, though, it would be hard to justify destroying humanity. Kind of like with the complex, non-linear technology, you don’t know what will become of us because humanity doesn’t move in straight lines, much to the dismay of historical materialists. By analogy, if you wanted to reclaim some farmland and make it wild again, it wouldn’t do to just plant a few saplings, wait a few days, and then uproot the saplings and give up because the process wasn’t going in the desired direction. The aliens seem to understand the benefits of creative destruction, but they seem oddly confident about their abilities to induce and direct it.

3. Okay, so the aliens wanted to destroy humanity because we’re ruining the planet, they start the process, kill a whackload of us, but Jennifer Connelly and son of the Fresh Prince manage to convince them to change their minds just before it’s too late. How are we as a society supposed to deal with that? After other genocidal rampages, truth and reconciliation commissions are set up, we have trials, or the victors make the vanquished pay. We don’t have the power to compel the aliens to agree to any of this, and I’m not sure what measures would redress our legitimate grievances (‘You made a mistake? You kill a third of humanity, and you think that ‘my bad’ or ‘oops’ makes it all go away?’). But we would have to come to some agreement, because we would still depend on the aliens not to destroy us while we figure out how to go carbon-neutral. How do you bury that hatchet?

Fun flick. Didn’t change my life, but it was a pleasant distraction for 90 minutes. (Kudos too for making a 90 minute movie. They seem to have been out of style for a while and were sadly missed.)

State of constant revolution

Lexington, the editorial section about the US in the Economist, wrote an article last week about the paranoia in American politics (@ AF1: maybe something for grandpa?). They do a decent job of describing the problem phenomena, but they make no attempt to analyze its causes. Let me synthesize what I’ve heard.

When I was a grad student in London (the English one), one of my professors said that America has never really gotten over its revolutionary mentality. Revolutionary governments often (justifiably) fear incursion by foreigners who preferred the ancien regime, and this often makes them paranoid and likely to lash out. Think revolutionary France (pick one, actually), early Bolshevik Russia, Cuba, and in some places, like Iran and North Korea, this revolutionary defensiveness against foreign incursion is practically official ideology.

I never really bought this in America’s case because a) it’s been quite a while since they faced a credible threat of foreign invasion, b) I don’t think many Americans honestly think very much about foreign invasion and c) America has had long periods of relative isolationism. It does make certain amount of sense, though, applied to the States from the inside. Many people do seem terrified that their government has been hijacked somehow by people hell-bent on ruining their ‘more perfect union’ (sic). This isn’t new, either. It seems to be a recurring theme.

So far, this is just reframing the Economist’s description without providing any of my own explanation. My hare-brained theory, though, has to do with a naive image of god and imposing this image where it doesn’t belong. Think about it. Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’ as if the guys were immaculately conceived. Watch some videos of health care town halls and people ranting about the constitution to get a sense of what I mean. Given that 45% of Americans are young Earth creationists, they must have a very paternalistic and personal view of god. He’s like Geppetto, tinkering away in a workshop for our benefit. They don’t seem to think any less of their founding fathers, ignoring that they were also men of flesh and blood, fallible, political, and vain. Since the first Canadian prime minister once puked in parliament because he was too drunk, we might have a more realistic view of our all too human beginnings as a state.

So I think there might be a swath of Americans worried that their current leaders, whose humanity is obvious by their drinking (GWB), philandering (WJC), smoking (BHO), and admitted drug use (all three) think that the former state of grace and perfection (Eden) has been overtaken by a bunch of frat boys.

I’d love to hear alternative explantions.

This is just gold

Why, oh why, can't we make candy without teaching our children about sex?

Just another reason that the germans are more tolerant that us anglo-saxon puritans..

Whose head belongs on the pike?

The American Justice Dept. has advised reinvestigating some instances of torture, and Slate published an iconoclastic article claiming that restricting the investigation to those who overstepped what the Bush administration deemed legal is almost worse than no investigation at all. I beg to differ.

First, my usual list of caveats: I grant that Obama’s choice not to pursue those who justified and tried to legalize torture by fiat is a move meant to preserve a thinning patina of bipartisanship and his thinning political capital. Clearly, it’s perverse that a leader would have to weigh healthcare reform and torture policy, as if there was a real connection between the two. A world without torture would also be preferable, and we’re not going to get there by protecting those who pushed for it. Protecting the directors of heinous activity also doesn’t set a very good example when trying to cajole Iranian, Burmese, Sudanese, North Korean or other regimes into being more decent to their own citizens and others. Instead, it sends a message of “our country right or wrong”, which is truly a vile form of patriotism that vile people elsewhere are only too eager to copy.

Still, I think that investigating and trying those who overstepped the Bush administration’s own guidelines (and not those who wrote or followed those guidelines) has merit for two reasons and a half reasons.

1. The Bush administration allowed some pretty nasty stuff, including “walling”, “the facial hold”, “wall standing”, sleep deprivation and waterboarding to name a few. Like the techniques used in the medieval inquisitions, many of these techniques are meant to induce whackloads of pain and discomfort without drawing blood or leaving lasting evidence. As I understand it, Holder wants to go after those who exceeded what the White House thought was appropriate, which means these people were doing things I don’t even want to consider. By prosecuting them, you’re at least likely to get the worst of the bunch.

2. The good ol’ Nuremburg defence gets its name because many Nazi war criminals claimed to be “just following orders” at the post-war Nuremburg trials to absolve themselves of guilt. The fourth Nuremburg principle states that this defence won’t fly (#2 could have really interesting implications for this case). Even if you are ordered in a chain of command to commit a crime, it is incumbent on you to refuse and do the right thing. Now, if my superior officer were a conscripted Nazi officer, I’ll grant that he is liable to make mistakes about what is right and wrong. But if the guidelines of right and wrong are coming from the duly appointed Attorney General, Vice President, or the President himself, and if I know that several legislators are aware of these guidelines, can I not assume that they’ve passed a test of legitimacy appropriate to the situation? Investigating and trying those who set the limits also implies that the rules are invalid, and even those who followed the rules are potentially guilty. This totally screws up the distribution of responsibility in a democracy. The intelligence agency isn’t there to make policy, they’re there to execute it. If they can’t trust the guidance coming from their legitimate superiors, where the he!! are they supposed to turn? What then is the proper indicator of acceptable conduct? What responsibility do their duly officiated superiors bear?

2.5 This is only half a reason because it’s instrumental rather than principled. The American armed forces get seemingly immaculate support. Aside from screw ups like My Lai, atrocities get very little press, and the army can do no wrong. “Support the troops” is a very powerful American mantra that can determine whether one is American or (horror!) “unAmerican” (like me, I suppose). The intelligence services, on the other hand, are like the plumbing in your house or the electric system in your car: they work best when you don’t hear about them. Lately, the CIA has taken serious heat for not foreseeing or forestalling terror attacks, for fabricating evidence to support dastardly purposes, and now for using cabinet-sanctioned interrogation techniques. They get beat on for screwing up, but you don’t hear about their successes. Although I disagree with many of the practices and powers of the CIA and their associated institutions, we would have to invest something like it if it didn’t exist. It serves a valuable function that many of us enjoy for next to nothing. Maybe they’d be less keen on throwing strangers into walls and scaring the hell out of people if they got more credit for what they do right.

Leave the garden variety of moral decrepitude alone for now and go after the out and out heinous. There’ll be time for the small-fry later, if there’s still adequate bloodlust to punish them.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Unprecedented Accuracy

The Economist uncharacteristically published a piece about epistemology and method, though they didn’t come out and say so. They review the pros and cons of using ‘instrumental variables’ in statistics. They give the example of years of schooling being able to replace “innate scholastic ability” as a variable to predict potential earnings, which is arguably necessary because it’s very difficult to measure something like innate scholastic ability. If I’m driving home at night, and the guy ahead of me is swerving, I will infer that he’s probably drunk, though I have no way to test that directly: his swerving is my ‘instrumental variable’. The article does indicate several criticisms of using them, but they miss several other bigger points.

First, in political science these are usually called ‘proxy variables’ because they substitute for something we can’t measure. That is, they’re indirect to start with. They make you start your analysis somewhere you didn’t want to be.

Second, the Economist talks about the ability of instrumental variables to increase the control on the relationship of interest; you can add them to your model to make sure that you’ve accounted for everything. Can you? Jim Ray, a political scientist, has argued for years that just cramming control variables into a model actually distorts it. There’s an often repeated “rule of three” saying that a model including more than three independent/control variables is worthless. A far better way, according to Ray (see the first paper on his site), is to run several tests with few variables and compare them: if you have variables A,B,C, and D, and you run 3 tests that indicate their effects on your dependent variables as follows: ABCD, ABDC, ADBC. You would know that A is the most important (because it’s always first), and B is more important than C (because it’s always before C). There are more sophisticated statistical techniques to do this, but this is the logic behind it. Economists don’t like to do this because it’s hard, time consuming, canned software doesn’t do it or not very well, and nobody else is doing it, so there’s fear of nonconformity. (Did you ask yourself why the magic number is three? Me too. The reason seems to be that two is too few and four is too many. Brilliant, huh?)

I think a deeper problem with statistics in economics and the social sciences more generally is that many have illusions about what they can do and how to use them. Statistics can’t show causality. They can only show if the mutual occurrence of values is something that we would expect to see randomly or if it would be odd to see that mutual occurrence. That is, if we say that tall people make a lot of money, what counts as “a lot”? Statistics can tell us that people over 6’6” (2m) should earn X $/year if they were like everybody else, but they earn X+15 000$ a year, and there’s a 1 in Y chance that what we’re seeing is purely accidental. They couldn’t tell us why tall people earn more. With regards to the proper use of statistics, we often cook the books to find what we were looking for from the beginning. Scale a variable here and make an index there until it all fits. That is, we’re hunting after the correlation. The idea should be the opposite. If you find a correlation, try to destroy it. Try to make it disappear. If it stands despite your best efforts to make it go away, it might be worth asking the question why it won’t go away, and that’s going to require a totally different kind of research. But negative results don’t get published, and it’s hard to figure out what counts as a ‘significant’ negative result, so we ignore them and keep hunting for the correlation. Whatever you do, though, statistics will never be able to indicate causality! If you want to get all huffy and talk about statistical tricks to indicate causality better, like ‘Granger causality’ spare me. Adding lags can show a progression through time, but it still does not count as a mechanism!

To moderate my rant against statistics, I’d also like to point out another one of their uses, possibly the best one: counting. We can’t count the fish in the sea (easily), we can’t count the stars in the sky (at all), and we’ll have a hard time counting everybody in the world, but we don’t have to. Just like statistics can answer questions like “what’s big?” or “how many is a lot?” very well, it can also answer the simpler question of “what’s there at all?” if you input a surprisingly small amount of data. Those super-early exit polls are often close to the money, and it is possible to infer a population’s values from those of a small sample using statistics. But those polls will never be able to tell you why any respondent voted or answered as s/he did.

Schadenfreude & Chuckles

The German Bundesliga is three games into the season, and the FC Bayern Munich has 2 of a possible 9 points. It’s their worst season kickoff since 1966! To give you a sense of how I feel about Bayern, there’s a great old joke to describe it: What’s the difference between a clean, white dress shirt and a Bayern fan? – You can be seen anywhere with a white dress shirt. (Sorry Martin.)

In other news, Slate has produced the latest entry in Obama’s Facebook feed. It’s predictably brilliant.

Misery for Misery’s Sake?

The Scottish Justice Secretary has decided to release the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, and many people are predictably unhappy about it. Before I explain why releasing him was the right decision, let me get a few things straight. First, the decision to release him has nothing to do with the hero’s welcome he received on arriving in Libya. Treating him as a hero sets a poor example, it is terribly insensitive to the families of the victims, and I don’t see what honourable purpose it could possibly serve. Second, terrorism is abhorrent, and terrorists ought to be duly pursued and prosecuted. It was right and just that the bomber, al-Meghrahi, was in jail, if jail is the legitimate thing to do with criminals. Caveats aside, why was it a good idea to release him? I can think of four purposes for incarcerating criminals of any kind, and making him spend the last few months of his life in jail would have served none of them. Here they are in the order in which I think they would be most defensible.

1. Rehabilitation: Sending people to jail for rehabilitation assumes that nobody is incorrigible. With the right intervention, you can turn the lowliest knave into a functioning member of society. Al-Meghrahi was made responsible for the deaths of 270 people, although it would be a mistake to think he acted alone. That’s pretty bad, but let’s assume that he could be rehabilitated given the right treatment. If that were true, could he be rehabilitated within the three months or so he has to live? And even if that’s possible, is that the best way to spend scarce rehabilitative resources, or is that a case of throwing your money into the proverbial pit? If he ain’t got there yet, he ain’t gonna, and we got better things to do anyway.
2. Prevention: This is compatible with rehabilitation, and it’s the idea that we need to keep dangerous people out of circulation in order to deny them the opportunity to do more damage. From the pictures I’ve seen of Al-Meghrahi boarding the plane in Scotland and disembarking in Libya, the guy can barely stand. Besides, you can bet that he will be persona non grata or watched like a hawk for his few remaining weeks. I’d be less surprised if the pope turned to terrorism than if this guy used his last weeks to do more damage.
3. Deterrence: This is the idea that being in jail is miserable, and the example of punishing criminals with misery will make others too scared to commit crime. To the extent that this purpose works at all, I’d say it’s already been served. He was caught, he was put somewhere he didn’t want to be and from which he couldn’t escape. Anyone wanting to follow in his footsteps would have to conclude that they’d have a decent chance of going to jail, and that the best way out would be to contract a terminal case of prostate cancer. Okay guys, form an orderly line, you can’t all be terrorists at once.
4. Retribution: This is the notion of victim’s justice, an eye for an eye, and whatnot. I don’t really see the point of this in general (it rights no wrong, and any evil it prevents can be prevented better otherwise), but let’s run with it for a sec. If you wanted this guy to suffer, why let him sit in a Scottish prison where he gets decent food (as decent as any British food gets, I suppose), proper medical treatment, and relative comfort? Why not torture him? I once saw a documentary about a medieval Uzbekh prince who would wrap male traitors up in an old carpet with a decaying, maggoty sheep’s carcass. Why settle for a decent cell when you can inflict real misery? I’m not saying the retribution idea makes any sense, but if it did, there would be much better ways of going about it.

There are reasons to be upset about Lockerbie: that it happened at all, that it all got hung on just one patsy, that Qaddafi will protect anybody else involved until he dies, when his son(s) will likely take over and continue the tradition. Letting a frail and dying man go home costs nobody anything.

The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy…

…is its inefficiency. That’s a quote from Eugene McCarthy, and I always interpreted it as a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek phrase, like Churchill’s quip about democracy being the worst form of government (aside from all the others). I just found a reason to take it literally and be thankful for it.

The CIA has apparently been hiring contract killers on the free market. They had an agreement with Blackwater, everybody’s favourite soldiers of fortune, to locate, capture and kill suspected terrorists since 2001. The saving grace is this line from the article: “Several million dollars were spent on the programme but no militants were caught or captured”. Thank heavens! There are a lot of very big problems with this (beyond the fact that they couldn’t even do it efficiently). Some of the obvious ones:

It’s questionable whether any government has the authority to kill anyone, so how could they have the authority to contract it out? I mean, a government is either the guys with a monopoly on the use of violence, or a collective fiction (sorry, ‘social construct’) we endow with the authority to regulate public goods, turn some private goods (taxes) into public ones (roads, defence, etc.), and manage some resource flows in society. The USA is fortunately (hopefully) in the second category, so how could a collective fiction be entitled to kill? I’m not a never-say-die pacifist (sorry), and I think that killing people can be justified in cases of self-defence, even if that defence is an effort to protect ideas. You wanna curtail my freedoms, I’ll ask you nicely to refrain once, but otherwise it’s gonna get ugly. I even think this can be aggregated up to a collective state level, but then there must be some substantial hurdle, like a fair trial or parliamentary/congressional approval. A government mustn’t, or at least ought not dare, claim the authority to kill people at will. If the government is only barely able, how in tarnation could mercenaries ever pretend to be able.

There’s a less principled and more instrumental reason too. There’s an election in Afghanistan going on as I write this (go guys!). If Afghanistan is to avoid falling back into the barbaric and cruel state of civil war that existed before the US/NATO invasion, we in the West need to sell our system to them. We need to convince them that there are ways to redress grievances and resolve social problems without relying on coercion alone. Part of that is the belief that if someone wrongs you, you can seek redress in an impartial court under the rule of law. If you are accused of wrong, you will be able to defend yourself with exactly the same legal rights as your accuser. This is a great system, despite the lawyers it necessitates (sorry Chris, Chris and Ron). The Afghans have experience with the system of might makes right and summary justice. They’ve practiced it quite a bit. We couldn’t teach them anything about how to make it work, and I sincerely hope that we can say with conviction that our system is the best alternative, it can work, and they should accept no substitutes. Neither should we.

The same applies to Iraq and anywhere else we break, but Afghanistan is just really salient right now.

(Irresistible irony: American republicans are still going apesh!t because of unfounded claims that the democrats’ health care bill(s) will include death panels/death squads to decide who will get treatment and who will die – already ripped apart, you’re welcome. That the CIA had been hiring hitmen since 2001 to kill people without trial could, without much hyperbole, be construed as a republican policy of employing death squads/panels. Hey kettle! Why you gotta be so black?!)

Why I want to live in germany..

I had a long evening, but one of the more interesting conversations was about how "all americans are free" and "americans are so tolerant of different opinions and open to all ideas". This was from a German mind you.

Then I read something like this.
If you don't keep up with the NBA very much, suffice to say that Stephon Marbury is a (former) professional basketball player, who has gotten into the wonders of the web a little too much ..
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And I think, "who's tolerant, where?"

I think I'll stay here thank you...

One man’s pandering is another woman’s good press.

Charli Carpenter over at the Duck apparently disagrees with my disappointment about the NYT article on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. She considers it good for him, and good for political science generally.

It might be good for people who talk about politics, but please be careful invoking the term “political science” in your praise!

The Scientist?

A brilliant polyglot-historian-political-scientist friend of mine (who is, incidentally, as stateless in fact as I am in spirit) brought an article to my attention that requires comment. The New York Times is pitching Bruce Bueno de Mesquita as the Svengali of political prognostication. He doesn’t really need their help, though, ‘cause he’ll do it himself if you give him a stage and mic.

The article briefly describes his agent-based model of political coalition-building (without using scary terms like ‘agent-based’) and sings the praises of his many and illustrious successes in predicting outcomes for various firms and government agencies. Allow me to debunk, if I may.

1. They say in the article that 40% of the papers in the American Political Science Review use ‘modelling’. I’ll buy that, but very little of it is comparable to what Bueno de Mesquita does. His is agent-based, so it doesn’t begin by trying to come up with an equation that will tie all the relevant variables together in a nice curve on a graph. Instead, models like his start with little agents in a computer simulation, and somebody inputs rules for their interaction and their qualities. You let them figure out how to interact on that basis, and you can play with the parameters to simulate different scenarios. I would buy that 40% of APSR’s papers use either statistical/econometric modelling (cramming variables onto a curve) or two-player game analogies, like the prisoner’s dilemma. If you want to see how different agent-based modelling in international politics can be from either of these approaches, check out Lars-Erik Cederman’s earlier work or Armando Geller’s recent work.
2. He’s presented in the article as if he’s some kind of alchemist who’s stumbled across the philosopher’s stone and has privileged access to underlying political truths of the universe. Ever wanted to be an alchemist? Download Netlogo (for free!), spend a day or so doing the tutorial and getting familiar with the software, and you’ll be able to construct models just like his. I’ll grant that the trick was more impressive back in the ‘70s, when you’d probably have had to use punch-cards, but the mechanics of the process are the same. Alchemy for everybody!
3. There’s been loads of criticism directed at the models used by financial firms, economists and regulators lately for ignoring the shaky ground on which they stood. I’ve touched on this tangentially before. The NYT article, though it presents scepticism about Bueno de Mesquita’s approach in the title of the article, spends almost no space engaging with the model’s limits. Sure, the financial and economic models are more analytic (making inferences based on real data), while Bueno de Mesquita’s are more synthetic (trying to simulate something real based on principles), but is there any reason to believe one is more inherently accurate than the other? I don’t see why there would be.
4. If Bueno de Mesquita can model the next big decision in, it would seem, any given context, why does he stop there? I mean, that would give him the input to model the decision after that, which lets him model the next decision, and the next, and so on. Given enough computing power, he would have a crystal ball able to see arbitrarily far into the future. The article doesn’t even mention why this is a problem. (Even assuming his assumptions make sense and we’re all rational actors, if I know that you are using a model like his to make your decisions, I will use a model that includes your use of a model as a parameter. You will then build my model into your model, which I will then build into my model, etc. Eventually, we have expectations of each other’s behaviour of an arbitrarily high order (read the first couple of chapters of that link) and put each other out of the modelling business in the process, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.)
5. One of his customers said his model has “intellectual rigor”. In model-guy-code, this means “I don’t understand it, but I take that to be a sign of its refinement and sophistication! (Just please don’t say I have blind faith).”

When faced with such nonsense back in the ‘90s, oh that hallowed decade, we used to say “Dont believe everything that you breathe
You get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve”

"Buy all the opium in Afghanistan, you say?!"..."Brilliant!"

I once sat on a bus coming back from Strasbourg with a good buddy of mine and we got into a difficult conversation with another American there about the war in Afghanistan. He began his argument with the idea that the US just needed to buy the opium from the farmers in Afghanistan to limit the flow of illicit drug money to the Taliban. So far, so good. It got difficult when he began arguing that the US would then just need to decriminalize opium, could sell it and tax it, thus creating a market for Afghan farmers and funding redevelopment efforts.

An elegant plan, I must say, but one that my friend and I pointed out had a few political hurdles (legalizing opium for one..) and that maybe a more practical plan could be thought of. He was having nothing of it, and insisted that if the US government were to just buy, legalize, and distribute opium, then the war in Afghanistan could be won.

I hadn't thought about this incident for a few months when i came across this article. Seems like there are a few thoughts along the lines of buying the opium from the farmers, and even a pretty good suggestion of what to do with it (hint: not pimping it to Americans). Theres a much more detailed argument here, which also lays out some of the UN hurdles that would have to be jumped if such a plan were to work.

I will say though, that i question the government's ability to control the flow of money between the farmers and the Taliban. Even if we buy the crop the, the Taliban is going to see a percentage of the money we give them as a part of bribery, extortion, and some good old fashioned bullying. Until we can offer the afghan farmers physical protection, i think its going to be hard for them to do business with us legitimately. That being said, it may well be in our interested to buy the opium, accept the inefficiencies and the fact that we're giving the Taliban money, and find a legitimate world market for Afghanistan's major crop.

Conservative opposition to healthcare officially jumps the shark

First it was death commissions (or even death squads). Then it was the administration trying to create a vast blacklist from the e-mail addresses of those who receive government healthcare. Now the Republicans have gone full circle and are opposing policies that THEY suggested.

When will the madness stop?

Ideological Crisis?

Okay, so I’m fairly unabashedly a classical/market liberal ideologically. At least it’s a label I identify with most of the time. Though some of my ideas, like the notion that universal healthcare and education are indispensable in a well-functioning society, would make the folks over at the CATO Institute, who put themselves in the same category, cringe and chase me with pitchforks.

I’m not a big fan of discussions of intellectual purity. Leninists arguing over who suffers from the worst case of false consciousness are missing the point. I do, however, tend to think that it’s prohibitively difficult, if not principally impossible, to engineer society for an optimal result. As a matter of fact, I don’t think that there is such a thing as an ‘optimal result’ for everyone. There are some principles that ought to be upheld or that are worth striving for, like equality of opportunity, peaceful discourse, efficiency and personal freedom, but I think people need to figure it out their own paths to happiness, the good life, or whatever fulfils them.

To hold these kinds of ideas, you need to believe that leaving people to their own devices will also produce tolerably good results. The alternative gives us Hobbes: if people, when left to structure their own lives, make each other miserable or dead, it would be better to give someone the power to make and enforce rules. The tradeoff between security and liberty is an old one, but I usually come down on the side of liberty – strongly. Now, this belief/hope that free interaction will not lead us into perdition has some corollaries, i.e. that there are self-organizing processes in society, these provide us with enough order to get by, and they’re preferable to dictates from above. Markets are a classic example of these self-organizing institutions, and the belief that free markets are the best way to manage production and exchange. This idea has been taking some heavy criticism in the financially dour atmosphere of late.

I’ve argued elsewhere that people expect too much from economics and that this leads them to bet foolishly and misdirect their rage. A red-blooded market liberal would also say that the current crisis is not a crisis of regulation; rather, less regulation would also be fine so long as those who gamble poorly can also lose. This isn’t stupid. I think it’s defensible, but there’s perhaps a deeper problem that I’ve recently noticed, and markets might not be able to solve it efficiently (and I apologize if I’m very late in noticing it). If you think about society cybernetically, as a self-regulating system of inputs, memory, manipulation, and output, you see the potential for lots of equilibrium. It should be possible to balance interests against each other such that society produces tolerable results even if each individual is a selfish SOB. The ability to constrain devils justly is the great attraction of invisible-hand mechanisms and constitutional checks and balances.

I recently found a case where the cybernetic view paints a potentially dark view of the market. I saw a report yesterday in which a lobbyist for some GMO producing agrifirm was being interviewed about why GMO food is a good thing and research should continue. I am ambivalent about GMO: it has strong arguments for and against. Still, the guy’s argument was along the lines of “Look, we’re making what people would want if they understood the issue. If people didn’t want it, we would be banned, so leave us alone.” Tobacco companies and arms manufacturers could easily make the same argument – I know.

The lobbyist gave this interview on a documentary about lobbying. The guy was saying that his firm needed to counterbalance people’s irrational fears about GMO by buying political influence, and this is justified because the people are irrational. He’s admitting to buying market power with the argument that democracy doesn’t work otherwise because people have poor judgement. Market power isn’t always a bad thing. The reason that I can use any given machine in an internet cafe, or drive a rental car I’ve never seen before, is that a few big market players together established how an operating system, or a car’s controls, will look and work. Market power can be a boon. When the lobbyist, however, doesn’t follow demand, but circumvents the market to obtain regulatory benefits, he’s ruining the system. From a cybernetic perspective, demand is the constraint that limits the supply and vice versa; feedback from the one dials down or cranks up the other. Breaking that loop and going through government rather than price tips the system in favour of supply, maybe a cybernetic equivalent of a lag on demand or a gain on supply, causing the system to overshoot its equilibrium.

So I was wrong, the efficient market hypothesis is wrong, and market liberalism wobbles, right? Well, it’s tricky. A big company that has invested in plant, inventory and employees is going to need some predictability in the market in order to do business. One mustn’t forget that “No taxation without representation” implies a responsibility and an entitlement. If I give money to an interest group or political party, I’m also trying to stack the deck in my favour. Lobbying takes many forms, and I don’t know if any are inherently illegitimate, or if they can all be contingently illegitimate if practiced by d0uche bag5.

Nonetheless, the fact that investors can act as influence syndicates and outflank citizen-consumers is troubling. (And there’s a cybernetic side here too: the investors give themselves a competitive advantage, giving them a greater ability to extract rents, and the rents allow them to secure ever larger competitive advantages.) And the democratic problem is clear: there is no higher authority to tell me what I rightfully want. Many people who are entitled to vote scare me to death. I might talk as if they’re nuts (and who’s ruling that out?), but I am absolutely in favour of everyone who understands what voting is to have the vote. If the state has a right to determine aspects of your life, you should bloody well have a say in the state! I’ve been called ‘an intellectual Mongol’ before, and I’d call that a back-handed compliment, but a compliment nonetheless. But just because I think you’re wrong doesn’t imply that I think I deserve extra votes, which is exactly what agriman was arguing.

What happens to liberty if free markets are incompatible, even to a significant degree, with democratic governance? What’s a liberal to do?

What a load of Bull!*

The chairman of the German policemen’s union is begging for 2000 ‘Cybercops’ and has said that “The internet is the biggest crime scene in the world.” Hold the phone! (or the router, as the case may be)

This just can’t be allowed to fly. Saying that the internet is the biggest crime scene in the world is like saying that public land is the biggest crime scene in the world. I’ll grant that many crimes are easier on the internet, like perhaps fraud, and there are others that seem to exist pretty much exclusively by virtue of the internet, like hacking into government computers. Many crimes, some very serious, are very difficult, if not impossible, to perpetrate online. I’m thinking of heinous stuff like murder, rape, assault, human trafficking – sorry, I mean slavery - and the like. Hell, if $1000 is going to be robbed either by a guy with a shotgun and a balaclava in a liquor store or by some faceless organized crime syndicate online, I’d still prefer it to happen online because nobody gets near a shotgun. True, there is almost, kind of such a thing as a cybermurder, but I would still argue that such cases are exceptions that prove the rule (I know of only the one so far).

How the police want to monitor internet communication is unclear, but I don’t see why this issue should be treated any differently than postal communication, whose inviolability is a constitutional right in Germany. The internet is another public space, and it has a (huge) red light district, casinos, pickpocketting rings, and drug labs in addition to all of the stored and shared knowledge and discourse. You can’t have the rose without the thorns, and of course where there are thorns, there are also pricks.

*The German pejorative euphemism for a police officer is “Bulle” (bull), equivalent to the English “pig”, but, you know, more flattering for the cop.

Cynical, Moronic or just Bat-sh!t crazy?

I had lunch with A Fortunate One yesterday, and he described a debate he’s having with a family member about whether a single-payer healthcare bill is desirable practically and morally. (He’s covered this topic already.)

We talked about the ‘death panel’ idea, being spread mostly by American republicans that there will be some group of people convened by the healthcare reform that will decide whether certain treatments will be covered. Although I don’t think it was news to AF1, I pointed out that such things already exist, often in the form of insurance actuaries, and they’ve even been portrayed in pop culture (sorry, I just broke the first two rules). If this seems controversial to you, Slate gives a bit of an explanation.

Sarah Palin has used her facebook status to play up the death panel idea, and this raises a question in my mind. Is she cynical, stupid, or plain ol’ bat-sh!t crazy?

• The cynicism hypothesis is that Palin knows how insurance and legal compensation work, but she invokes terms like ‘death panel’ either to get herself in the headlines or because somebody has paid her. It would make sense because, though she isn’t necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, she has quite a bit of experience. I mean, I wouldn’t call her educated, but she has done stuff. She was mayor of Wasilla, governor of Alaska and VP candidate. I mean, she was even on the evening news for a while. How did she get through her (sadly) illustrious life without picking up a solid thought or two about risk and valuation?
• If she is genuinely stupid, there would probably have to be somebody egging her on. I mean, if she’s not smart enough to understand and accept that everybody’s life has, at least in practical terms, a monetary value, somebody must have explained some corollaries of single-payer healthcare to her and put her up to it. She’s had her moments in the past (see above), so it’s plausible that she was just a cog in some heinous individual’s machine.
• You think it’s impossible for her to have achieved such stature and be a few cans short of a Joe-Six-Pack, read her resignation speech again. She knows what she needs to deflect and what kinds of things she mustn’t say (e.g. “I’m in over my depth”, “Who are we kidding?”, “I shall rule all!”), but her means of misdirection are, well, unconventionally composed.

So what is it? Cynical, moronic, or bat-sh!t crazy?

Oh, and while we’re talking about the ‘intellectually disabled’, I posted recently about hand-wringing in Canada to refer respectfully to descendants-of-people-who-live-in-what-we-now-call-‘Canada’-before-Europeans-arrived and American neglect or ignorance of a problem. It seems that Americans are worried about other problems of nomenclature when it comes to ‘klatschies’, as my special-ed-teaching bro-in-law would call them.

You heard (well, read) it here first.

A couple of weeks ago, I tried to bring some perspective into the Economist's critique of macroeconomics. Well, it turns out that Robert Lucas, the economist who has rebutted their article, broadly agrees with me.

Canada is not Great Britain (But their Flags are similar!

Nice comparison of healthcare systems by Mr. Silver. I'm going to send this one to gramps..

Finally, some talking points: Updated

Yglesias has been my blogger of choice for the past few days and has another post worth linking to today about the "Eightfold Path of Consumer Protection" that the White House is touting. The summary is that there are eight solid goals of Healthcare Reform that don't involve creating any kind of public insurance program but rather how current private insurance companies are regulated. The eight goals are both ambitious and sweeping:

"
1. No Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions
Insurance companies will be prohibited from refusing you coverage because of your medical history.

2. No Exorbitant Out-of-Pocket Expenses, Deductibles or Co-Pay
Insurance companies will have to abide by yearly caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses.

3. No Cost-Sharing for Preventive Care
Insurance companies must fully cover, without charge, regular checkups and tests that help you prevent illness, such as mammograms or eye and foot exams for diabetics.

4. No Dropping of Coverage for Seriously Ill
Insurance companies will be prohibited from dropping or watering down insurance coverage for those who become seriously ill.

5. No Gender Discrimination
Insurance companies will be prohibited from charging you more because of your gender.

6. No Annual or Lifetime Caps on Coverage
Insurance companies will be prevented from placing annual or lifetime caps on the coverage you receive.

7. Extended Coverage for Young Adults
Children would continue to be eligible for family coverage through the age of 26.

8. Guaranteed Insurance Renewal
Insurance companies will be required to renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays their premium in full. Insurance companies won’t be allowed to refuse renewal because someone became sick."

Yglesias makes the point that we should use these goals as benchmarks for any legislation that passes Congress, regardless of whether there is a strong public option or not.

I tend to agree with that statement, although I am fully behind a strong government program and find the whole co-op idea being flown by the Senate Finance Committee to be a misguided enterprise at best. More importantly, this list gives Democrats across the country some solid talking points on some very noticeable problems with our system. Elected Democrats and everyday people should be able to use these kinds of points to argue for Obama's reform efforts and counter the distractions being created by the right. While the White House needs to do everything it can to get these talking points out there, it's also critical for the reform effort that everyday voters hear this kind of stuff. Nobody wants to be denied healtchare, people hate having deductables rise and having to pay for stuff out of pocket, and the insurance companies make a good bad guy (on a related note, why isn't anyone making the connection between the insurance companies and the failing economy (think AIG)). Each individual talking point can be usefully geard towards a specific audience as well, so that if I'm talking to my rabid right-wing grandfather I can emphasize Points 2, 4 and 6. If I'm talking to some guy closer to my age I can underline points 1,3, and 7.

This is the kind of message direction that has been lacking from the Obama Administration up until now. These are concrete goals which would improve the healthcare of the vast majority of Americans and not just the 15% who don't have insurance (and who don't tend to vote). Its pretty hard to argue against accomplishing these things with reform. Now it's just a matter of the amplitude at which the message is blasted through the media at those on the recieving end of the box..and how far the massage gets carried by word of mouth contact.

UPDATE I:

The DNC is getting on board with a national ad-buy

Origins and Names

After a discussion with the brilliant Mrs. Klein, my fervent anti-spiritualism might be toning down somewhat. Still, I ran across this article that gives a brief status report on the idea that religion is the result of biological evolution, like teeth and male nipples. The sides presented are more or less that it is either literally a genetically-conditioned form of social organization evolved to provide competitive advantages on its carriers (like haplodiploidy), or that it is generally helpful, could have spread memetically (like fashion trends), but is really more cultural than genetic. The author tries to give a solomonic solution by calling cultural evolution 'an exaggerated metaphor", and granting that there's more to humanity than our genetic hard- and software.

Have both sides forgotten their Popper? Is a little falsificationism too much to ask? This is a debate about which there is an objective fact of the matter. It's more like asking whether more people have black hair or blond hair than it's like asking why Beethoven is better than Mozart (or vice versa). The way the debate is pitched, both sides are arguing for their own just-so-story. Religion as a biological trait to increase cohesion within the group sounds plausible enough, but if that's so, find the gene(s)! Just because it sounds plausible, doesn't mean it's true.

I have the feeling that scientists trying to make the God-is-a-product-of-biology argument would expect vindication if they could find that gene, as if that would be the final nail in the theist/deist coffin. The natural (I mean 'theological') reply to the question of how that gene got there, would of course be something like "Magic man dunnit". I recently remarked that I couldn't understand how an intelligent person could hold religious faith, and while that might still be true, the faithful as a group are capable of some first rate sophistry. Still, how religion is related to evolution is an empirical question, and I accept no substitutes.

I also saw this kind of travel diary by an 'Indian' who visits 'Indian' casinos. I remember when I was a kid growing up in western Canada, 'Indian' could be used to describe the pre-16th century inhabitants of the Americas and their descendants without denegration. That didn't last long before the term 'native' became more politically correct. (I had a problem with this even in grade-school, because both of my parents are first-generation immigrants to Canada (from different countries), and I was born there, so how were they any more native than I? If the plan was to ship all the colonists home, where was I to go?) Then 'aboriginal' was en vogue. (It's an etymologically interesting term with similarly disturbing connotations for me. 'More original than original', which would leave me, where?, just original?) Now, I think First Nations is the PC nomenclature, which can lead to some pretty awkward sentences ("This First Nations' gentleman has lost his hat! Has anyone seen the First Nations' gentleman's hat?"). My point is that Canada has really torn itself up over relations with First Nations (although we still call the responsible governmental department "The Department of Indian and Northern Affairs"), as one can clearly see from the terminological gymnastics of the last 30 years, but the Americans seem comfortable with good ol' 'Indian'. I wonder why.

My guess is that it has to do with Canada's multiculturalism. In Canada, I think we're pretty happy to call people whatever they please, but more importantly, the social ideal is cultural diversity, and some might need extra measures to stand out in the cacophony of different titles and tongues. We have many wheels, but only the squeaky ones get greased. In the States, there seems to be more of a integrationist, melting pot ideal in which all comers are meant to assimilate. Standing out might be a bad thing, so only the biggest minorities can withstand the resistance that hopping on the euphemism treadmill attracts. If there are costs to standing out, only those strong enough to assert themselves will even try. Hmm?

Small Goverment, No Government

I just read this article on the Beeb about the possibility that protests against the democrats' health care plans might be phoney, staged events put on by "birthers" and bitter republicans. I confess, I don't really care. What did bother me is this line:

...'small government good, big government bad' is the Republican motto.

Are you sure? Lazily, I'm going to take some figures from the Wikipedia to show that this is profoundly misleading. Let's have a look at deficits as a percentage of GDP. Negative numbers indicate surpluses and positive ones indicate new debt. Generally speaking, a number under 3% (the EU's allowable limit) is pretty respectable. Let's eliminate the figures for Roosevelt/Truman because winding down WWII was bound to save a lot of money, and that trend continues through Eisenhower, so let's start with Kennedy/Johnson. The average deficit as percentage of GDP for democratic presidential terms since Kennedy is -5.7, for republicans in the same period, it's 7.0. In recent history, republican presidents lose slightly more money than democrat ones save. If we look at just the most recent two-termers for the most recent trend, we get -4.4 for Bubba and 9.3 for Dubya. You can give Clinton a handicap because he inherited a big deficit from Bush senior that he was able to turn around, whereas GWB inherited a handsome surplus from Clinton that he managed to run into the ground.

The so-called Blue Dogs have been getting a lot of press lately, and their message of fiscal conservatism is music to my liberal ears (though I do support universal health care for fiscal and normative reasons). I would like to submit, though, that even the reddest (as in "most commie") democrat would have a hard time beating a republican in terms of fiscal profligacy. There is an old idea in American foreign policy analysis that republicans can be more dovish because other countries expect them to be the toughest hawks, and democrats have to be more hawkish than they would like, because nobody will take them seriously otherwise, assuming they're a bunch of softies. The same seems to be the case in fiscal policy: people assume republicans will save, so they have the freedom to spend and bloat government. It's perverse. Don't buy it.

Other news that caught my eye (for the anarchically and totalitarian-inclined):
Living human rights advocates in Chechnya are becoming about as common as Aung San Suu Kyi's days at the beach.

There also seems to be a growing movement to have children-free zones in public places in Germany. Thank goodness! There was a smoking law in my hometown for a while that allowed restaurants and bars to admit minors or smokers. Being a childless smoker at the time, I was very satisfied. Even after having quit, I'd still prefer second-hand smoke to first-hand brattiness!