Wednesday, Thursday

Wednesday: ISG says US must engage diplomatically with Syria and Iran to avoid disaster in Iraq.

Thursday: Bush tells Iran and Syria what they must do to earn the privilege of saving us from disaster.

what's wrong with timetables, anyway?

We've heard over and over that setting timetables would be a big mistake, that it would show a lack of resolve, embolden our enemies, etc. In most other situations, the inability to set a timetable shows the exact opposite: either that those presenting the plan aren't committed to it, or that the problem is not, in fact, understood. To say that we can't set a timetable is to say that we don't in fact have a reliable plan, that if our enemies knew even that much about our plans, they could disrupt them. It's an admission of weakness, not of strength.

The hilarious part of this (I laugh myself to sleep thinking about it every night) is that those who argue most strenuously against timetables invoke them regularly. How often have we heard that the next six months are the key? Don't such statements invoke a deadline, a timetable if you will, for dramatic improvement?

refreshed macs with dirty disks

Jacqui relates the amusing story of someone purchased a refreshed mac, only to find the desktop covered with porn links. She's skeptical, and I can appreciate her caution in the face of a story that reeks of urban legend.

In my case, I didn't have a desktop full of porn, but something (presumably my disk) had not been cleaned. The test drive version of Office, for example, is convinced I'm Swedish. The shell is convinced my machine is called "bench3-3", a name I never typed in.

The big problem with this isn't that you might find annoying content on your desktop (though some such content is illegal, and even if you delete it, it might show up in a forensic search), but that returning a failed computer to apple might expose confidential information to whoever eventually gets the disk. This is particularly disturbing because when a customer returns a broken system, they may not have the opportunity to clear the disks themselves.

ethics and objectivity

This bit in Joshua's post caught my eye:

What struck me about the exchange is that I had tied vapid and timid media coverage to Americans' often shocking ignorance about their own political system and said it was perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy. But while he agreed that there was a major problem with the public's political knowledge and participation, he flat-out refused to acknowledge that it had any connection to the rules by which he insisted he had to live.

That, I think, is the essential flaw at the heart of the ethic of objectivity. Ethics aren't merely standards of personal morality, they're rules that allow communities to work and flourish. They exist to support good outcomes. If the ethical code demands objectivity, prohibits those who enforce and maintain the code from caring about results (ie, Mark "I've never voted" Halperin), then the code itself becomes unmoored. Bad results get ignored because the ethicists themselves refuse to judge the outcomes; they merely observe.

This is not the norm in other spheres. Medical ethicists and legal ethicists care predominately about results and revise ethical codes when current codes fail. Judges are required to be objective, but legislatures exist to change the laws when the "objective" interpretation of the law leads to bad results. If the objective norm fails to keep the public well-informed, how can "objective" journalists respond? How can they prevent themselves from being gamed if they refuse to judge the outcomes of their actions?

npr vs lamont and the blogosphere

Yesterday morning, NPR ran a pair of remarkable reports about the Lieberman/Lamont campaign and the DLC, in which they managed to discuss the race in Connecticut without quoting anyone who supports Lamont, and the struggle between the netroots and the DLC without quoting anyone from the netroots.

The first was a report from David Welna, who reported on Clinton's campaign for Lieberman, characterized Lamont only as a "millionaire," quoted Lieberman supporters on the air characterizing Lamont supporters as a "screaming minority," and reduced the race to a single issue: the war on Iraq. There were no quotes or comments from Lamont supporters. It's hard to believe they declined to provide comments, but the only other conclusion is that no comments were sought.

The second, blending almost seamlessly with the first, was about the "debate between the left and center of the Democratic Party." It describes how the DLC is now battling the "netwired, left-wing populists working so hard to defeat Joe Lieberman." The DLC is allowed to characterize itself and tout its accomplishments, but the characterization of the "blogosphere" and the "activist base of the party," is left to Mara Liasson herself. The closest she comes to allowing the base to speak for themselves is to quote Democratic Party official Elaine Kaymark, someone who has "worked with both the DLC and anti-war Democrats."

Perhaps NPR has finally taken the advice of those who've said that journalists should abandon their pose of neutrality and speak with their own voice rather than merely presenting the views of both sides. On the other hand, only one side of the debate was silenced. The "centrists" were given ample time to make their case, only the populist, activist, left was excluded. Lieberman's supporters were allowed to make their case. Lamont's supporters were not.

the myth of the neutral net

While I am sympathetic to the notion that The Net Should Be Neutral, I have a hard time seeing how the recent changes present existential threats to the Net As We Know It. The Net has never been neutral. It is hard to imagine how it could be.

Let's start from the most obvious point, the connection from a server to an ISP. Half the country still connects to the internet via dial-up lines. Since these connections are not always-on, systems behind those lines are not fully part of the Net.

People get around that by subscribing to hosting services. That's great, but hosting services price by the level of service. Anyone who's tried to run a website then had it get too popular (instapounded, atriated, fark'd, slashdot'd, etc.) knows that you have to pay more to reach a wider audience.

More subtly, the Net is not an amorphous blob of bandwidth. It's a series of point-to-point connections. The route from my system to cnn.com has at least 16 hops. It has 80 ms of latency. Yahoo.com has 10 hops and 20ms latency. If I do the same test from our family website, I see 13 hops and 75ms latency to cnn.com, and 11 hops and 80ms latency to yahoo.com. I suspect high-level ISPs already compete with one another to provide the lowest latency and highest bandwidth to the broadest area. The only way to eliminate such biases would be to eliminate competition between ISPs.

In truth, it gets more complicated than that. Some sites are geographically mirrored. Some aren't. Some are cached. Some push content out through dedicated content distribution networks so that the bulk of data is close to the client. All of these approaches require more expertise and money than casual internet users are able or willing to muster, and there's almost nothing that can be done to prevent them.

So if companies start differentiating between their customers, it's not as if they're destroying a level playing field. The field has never been level and won't be until bandwidth, storage, and computing are free.

Such practices may make things marginally worse, but they may also make them marginally better. Improving service today is expensive. If backbones commoditize service priorities, they should be less expensive than the approaches described above. If they're less expensive, they'll be available to a wider range of customers. Upgrading your web hosting service could include upgraded backbone service as part of the package.

I'm not a pollyanna about this (or much else, I guess), but on my potential end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scale, I'd have to give this no more than a 1% Abu Ghraib.

fighting for values

Barack Obama says that Senators shouldn't attempt to filibuster, but should instead convince Americans that their values are at stake, that winning elections is the right way to win these battles, not procedural rules in the Senate. Unfortunately, procedural Senate moves are all we have today. Without those moves, there is no fight, only capitulation.

How can Democrats hope to convince Americans that their values are at stake if Democrats are unwilling to fight for those values? If Alito's nomination is a grave threat to values Democrats and American hold dear, how can Democrats not fight? If Democrats don't fight, only two conclusions can be drawn: either the battle was not important or Democrats can't be trusted with an important fight.

the alito hearings

I'm not and probably never will be a politician, and my instincts on this are probably all wrong, but while knowledgable folk like Kevin look for lines of constitutional inquiry that might have been more effective for the Democrats, I can't help wondering why no one pressed him on his insistence that he had an obligation not to answer meaningful questions. At times he refused to answer on the basis that he couldn't do so without a specific case to evaluate through the judicial process. At times he refused to answer because answering might commit him to judging in a specific way in cases likely to come before the Court.

There are a couple problems with these answers.

First, they're not consistent. If every case is distinct and can only be judged after considering the particulars, expressing opinions on general constitutional principles cannot prejudge any particular case. Until justices go through the judicial process, they presumably don't know which constitutional principles apply and to what extent. Without reference to a particular case, expressing opinions on Constitutional principles is not prejudging and does not commit the judge.

Second, as many have noted, justices express opinions all the time. It's their job. Scalia, Thomas, Sutter, et al have expressed opinions on issues likely to come before the Court many times, and will continue to do so. Alito has done so as an appelate judge. Members of the Court have expressed opinions in speeches, books, and articles. Before he was a judge, Alito expressed opinions as a government lawyer. Yet somehow, we're all supposed to accept that expressing opinions in response to the questions of the judiciary committee would compromise his judicial objectivity. I would like to have heard Alito explain why expressing opinions in public, before the people he will spend the rest of his life judging, prior to becoming a judge, was different.

It's a line of questioning that might not have been easy to deflect. He might, for example, have had a hard time asserting that he can't answer questions and asserting that he can't explain why. I would have enjoyed listening to him explain why only the public has no right to know, or trying to claim that he does not, in fact, have opinions on controversial matters of great public import. I would have enjoyed hearing him explain how the judicial process insulates his future judgements on the Supreme Court from the opinions he's expressed before, but not from opinions he expresses before a Senate committee. I would have enjoyed hearing him explain how keeping the public ignorant of a judge's deeply held views is equivalent to a judge not having deeply held views.

It might not have changed the outcome, but it would have been more edifying than what we had.

In his column on Gore's speech, David Broder writes of assigning malfeasance to the President's decision to go to war:

It is a reach to attempt to make a crime of a policy misjudgment.

Just a policy misjudgement. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Only in politics is fundamental incompetence a reason to keep one's job. The invasion and its aftermath demonstrated a willful pattern of subordinating policy formation to ideology. The adminstration even bragged about it: "We create reality, we don't respond to it." In any other position, such an attitude would put you on the street. If you're the President, the most respected voices in journalism will write the results off as a "policy misjudgement."

Lovely.

torture and national tragedy

Digby writes of torture and says:

At this rather late stage in life, I'm realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable --- torture was one of them.

Everyone knows the world changed on 9/11, but it changed in different ways for different people. For me, 9/11 was the day I saw how weak our commitment to morality really was, how quickly we would sell our freedom, how quickly we would kill to make ourselves feel safer, how little we valued the lives of anyone not like ourselves. I thought back to all the years we'd spent lecturing the world on civil rights, morality, and the rule of law, then watched our government round up thousands of people on the barest of pretexts and hold them indefinitely.

And for what? 9/11 was a shocking event, tragic for all those involved. On a national scale, it was a small event. Our reaction to 9/11 has caused far more damage--political, economic, moral, loss of innocent life--than the event itself. If we were willing to inflict this much damage on ourselves after 3000 dead, how much would we sacrifice for 10,000?

the last abortion clinic

Last night, we watched a split screen TV. On one side of the screen, we watched Frontline on abortion access in the deep south. On the other, we watched election returns trickle in, with a measure restricting abortion starting out ahead before eventually falling behind. When we went to bed, Prop. 73 was behind by the narrowest of margins. It was a bit uncanny to watch the architects of abortion restrictions explain their strategy while watching their latest attempt play out in real time. We woke this morning to find that the measure had been defeated, and to read the comments of the measure's backers predicting that eventual success was inevitable.

I'd heard that access to abortion was difficult in some areas, but the Frontline report drove the point home in a way that mere knowing it did not. The fact that only one clinic in the state still provides second trimester abortions--and that that clinic is in danger of being regulated out of existence--was startling. The notion that Mississippi could have legislated all of its clinics out of existence, all without passing a single law that failed the "undue burden" test, was stunning. Perhaps there's a model there for other constitutional rights that make the majority uncomfortable. Instead of attacking the rights head-on, nibble at the edges with lots of small regulations. Make sure that the individual restrictions are so small that no one could reasonably claim that their elimination would threaten the right, but keep adding one small restriction after another, until the right no longer exists.

george bush, bleeding heart liberal

Apparently, Bush thinks accountability amounts to taking a class. What happened to the good old days? The mans's getting weak.

harrowing fiction

Shakespeare's Sister discusses passages from Scooter Libby's novel, and asks:

What kind of mind comes up with this shit, dreams up scenarios where children are raped by animals to train them in prostitution? Oh, right. A conservative one.

I'm pretty sure that conservatives don't have a monopoly on disturbing sadistic and sexual imagiry in fiction, and I'm pretty sure that the ability to dream up disturbing scenes for disturbing effect doesn't mean that the dreamer is disturbed.

Ignoring fiction for the moment, there is a thread in conservative political rhetoric of sexual and social armageddon, an implicit (or sometimes explicit) assumption that the only thing standing between us and the abyss of degradation is law. You see this when nationally syndicated pundits write that without the Law of the Bible, there would be no reason not to murder, that without tbe moral and legal condemnation of society, men couldn't help being seduced by the hedonism of the gay lifestyle. They say these things with such passion, such conviction, that it suggests personal experience, that they either know or are people for whom only strong, enforced law stands between them and dissolution.

I have talked to street corner evangelists, and heard their stories of being saved from hell in the here and now by adhering to God's Law, how they were weak and following the Law made them strong, and I have wondered about the strength of the desires they wrestled with before they found their source of strength, how strong those desires must still be, and I have seen the rage in their eyes when they see people living happy lives without denying themselves pleasures that the Law forbids. And I wonder how much they still want what they deny themselves, and how much that suppressed desire fuels their rage.

gallagher, revisited

A couple weeks ago, the Volokh Conspiracy hosted Maggie Gallagher, who attacked gay marriage because its recognition would attack generitivity, and claimed that a deep understanding of that fact--not animus towards gays--underlay public opposition to gay marriages. The argument didn't seem to hold together. First, it seemed unlikely to me that public opposition was based on such deep analysis. The rhetoric and expressions of those in opposition seem far too visceral to spring from deep analysis. Second, it seemed that if the defense of generativity (as she saw it) was behind, the program would have to stretch well beyond gay marriage, encompassing abortion, birth control, contraception, and extra-marital sex of all kinds. Otherwise, the fragile generative link whose need she asserted would fail.

Imagine my "surprise" when I learned (via Pandagon) of Leon Kass making just such an argument.

it can't be, but it is

Mark Kleiman observes that maximizing shareholder value can't possibly be an acceptable rule for corporate officers, that the result would be absurd in a moral society. He is, of course, correct, and the results are predictably absurd. Defendants in lead liability cases, for example, are duty bound to avoid paying damages on technicalities, even if that means that the victims of lead poisoning go begging.

incompetent design

Mark Kleiman summarizes a talk by a Catholic priest on the fallacies of "Intelligent Design," and says the time has come for organized pushback. One place to start is the National Center for Science Education.

too much credit

Michael O'Hare buries David Brooks and the President in abuse, but somehow manages to fall short. The two problems with attributing the administration's failures to incompetence are that 1) the failures are so broad that it is difficult to imagine that a gang so incompetent could have been elected in the first place, much less re-elected, and 2) that they are not uniform, that failures occur precisely when the failures don't threaten the rich and powerful. That isn't mere incompetence, it's an active campaign to destroy and discredit government, without regard to those who get hurt in the process.

maggie gallagher at volokh.com

The volokh conspiracy was the first blog I ever read consistently, for reasons having to do in part with being a math major at UCLA around 1980. The more interesting discussions have (for me) long since been diluted, and many of the more interesting conspirators have left. The detour into war-blogging left the lingering impression of a group that simultaneously sought to have their words influence the world (even to the point of starting wars) and to claim an academic privilege to conduct thought experiments without regard to the consequences, as if the discussions were merely "academic." Or maybe the basic premise of my visits (that through intelligent discussion, we could find common ground) fractured in the face of unrelenting ideology.

In any case, while I no longer read frequently, I do visit occasionally and today I happened across Maggie Gallagher's defense of opposition to gay marriage (many more articles than might be reasonably linked, but if you're curious and can't find it, start here). I'm sure there are others who have taken on her arguments point by point, others who probably have the time and interest to do a much better job than I. There are, however, a few broad points that seem worth making.

While I concede the point that there may be people whose opposition to gay marriage is driven primarily by concerns over the deep structure of society, and while I am for the purposes of civil discussion willing to assume that Maggie is one of them, I don't for a moment believe the social movement to oppose gay marriage is primarily driven by such concerns. The people and groups who today oppose gay marriage while claiming no animus against gays are the same ones who have opposed every advance in gay rights and recognition. Mrs. Gallagher asks that we not ignore the radicals on the left who seek to remake society and would sanction gay marriage on the way, then asks that we ignore the relatively mainstream arguments of those who blame catastophic hurricanes on our society's immoral tolerance of gay behavior. She asks a great deal.

In my experience, there's little point in "debating" a group or person when the real issue isn't on the table. Even if it's possible to win the current debate, to defeat the rationalization of the day, the only result will be to generate a fresh rationalization. Perhaps this is short-sighted of me. Perhaps every time a debate is won, a few minds are changed on the underlying issue. I cannot, however, escape the impression that I could refute every detail Maggie presented, and it only change the ground of the debate, not the debate itself. It seems to me far more effective to focus on the broad moral issue of social animus towards gays and bank on demographic trends to erode opposition to the resulting particulars over time.

Still, portions of her argument were interesting and revealing. At its roots, she argues that without marriage, people would have sex without babies and babies would grow up without fathers. That happens today, of course, so preventing the recognition of gay marriage doesn't actually fix the problem. She even identifies the cause: In non-industrial societies, children are an individual investment in the parent's future. In industrial societies, there are more effective ways to make that investment, and children become a net cost to the parents. All industrial societies are experiencing the effects of this change to a greater or lesser degree, and I've never seen evidence that the recognition of gay marriage plays any role (much less a significant one) in either hastening or delaying its effects.

If the failure of generativity is the problem and it's already happening, then opposition to gay marriage is clearly not the solution. At best, it would appear to be a small part of a wide program that would include the abolition of divorce, the elimination of contraception, and the re-criminalization of pre-marital sex. If we're to guarantee that people have and raise children in the proper way, and seek to harness "Eros" to achieve that goal, there seems little point in doing so piece-meal. If social incentives around children have inverted, if it's no longer in people's best interests to have children and raise children but social health requires that they do so, shouldn't we recast social incentives to achieve those aims. Isn't denying sex to those who do not follow generative forms a natural way to incentivize generative sex and therefore generativity? That is the position of the Catholic Church, after all--it's certainly an argument with which Mrs. Gallagher is familiar--and there are certainly social conservatives of all stripes who argue that contraception, divorce, abortion, and pre-marital sex will all contribute to the downfall of Civlization As We Know It. If a return to traditional sexual mores, in all respects, is what we need to maintain our society, perhaps we should have that debate. Shoring up the part of a levee that still stands only makes sense if you plan to restore the levee and drain the floodwaters.

If we're not willing to restore and enforce pre-industrial sexual mores and we wish to solve the problem of generativity, we will simply need to find other ways. Nowhere does Maggie even attempt to prove that other solutions don't exist, even though all of her other arguments are based implicitly on the premise.

On the other hand, perhaps we should ask whether the problem of generativity really needs a solution. We live on a finite planet. One needn't be a Malthusian to believe that exponential population growth can't be sustained forever. If industrialization reduces the incentives for individual procreation, that may be a very good thing. Most long-term population control efforts in the developing world depend on precisely that effect. Unless one believes that population control is itself a social evil, the argument that procreation must be universally maintained seems unfounded.

But perhaps the argument isn't that procreation needs to be universally maintained. Maybe the argument is demographic. As Maggie puts it

I’m quite confident that 200 years from now, we’re not going to be living in a world where gay marriage is the norm.

I’m just not sure of the place of Western civilization in that future world.

If we don't procreate sufficiently, others will and we'll lose the race. We'll still be rich, our society will still be industrial and stable (otherwise the disincentives she fears would evaporate), but we'll be overwhelmed by teeming pre-industrial masses, no doubt the same masses that today assault our southern border, the same masses that in previous decades crossed the seas to enter our seaports and airports.

the other bennett

I popped over to Eschaton to catch the latest gossip, and saw a pointer to Wolf Blitzer's interview of Robert Bennett. Unlike Atrios, I'm not surprised to hear that guests are brought on shows to discuss particular topics, and I don't see any way to conclude from the transcript that questions rather than broad topics are agreed on ahead of time. On the other hand, I conclude from Bennett's response

I mean, I suppose I'll get in trouble by saying that it's well established that men are more violent than women and so maybe if we abort all male babies, we would have a safer world. So I think this is really much ado about nothing.

that I was wrong in my evaluation of why the other Bennett's response had legs. It wasn't that he said blacks are inherently more criminal or violent, but that some people really believed he advocated abortion as a cure for the societal problems that resulted. If his problems stemmed from racism, his "good lawyer" brother wouldn't have defended him by emphasizing that the claim about blacks was factual, would he?

Which makes the responses of Kleiman and DeLong even more puzzling. One would think that if Bennett's problem stemmed from a belief he'd advocated abortion rather than his clear belief in the inherent violence or criminality of blacks, his biggest problem would be with the Republican base. Why DeLong felt it was essential to smooth the waters of Republican discontent is a little beyond me, but I understand the compulsion toward intellectual rigor, even in arguments one would otherwise avoid. Kleiman's response ("Bennett was right on the facts") is simply astounding.

Of course, Atrios also thought R. Bennett's annoyance at the question was more important than his confirmation--and indeed personal claim--of his brother's racism. Clearly, I'm just out of my depth.

DeLong, btw, now sees the racist underpinnings of Bennett's comments as indefensible, and has narrowed his defense to, "Bennett didn't actually propose genocide."

bennett, delong, bush, and kleiman

It's weird watching Bennett reveal himself, DeLong defend him for doing so, and Kleiman proclaim that DeLong's defense of Bennett is somehow more admirable than Bush's denunciation of his words.

Let's start from the top.

Bennett did not advocate genocide. Anyone who believes he did is simply wrong. That fact does not make what Bennett said defensible. His crime was not that (as DeLong put it) reductio ad absurdum arguments don't work on talk radio, but that the implicit assumption underlying his argument (that African-Americans are inherently criminal) is abhorrent. That wasn't an accident. That's a belief. Those beliefs are more than deserving of condemnation.

DeLong's defense of Bennett opens by calling him a fungus ("Your honor, my client is worthless scum"), but that still doesn't quite explain why he would say that Bennett's primary mistake was a poor choice of rhetorical technique. Maybe he'd just returned from a journey to the rhetorical forest he mentioned in another post. If he found the racial characterization abhorrent, why did he focus on the genocide as the point on which Bennett needed defense? Wby did he bother defending Bennett at all? Perhaps he focused so hard on the question of whether Bennett had actually argued for genocide that he failed to notice the problem the genocide might solve.

Kleiman then steps in to admire DeLong's careful parsing of a transcript of a radio conversation. Even assuming that such a careful parsing is deserved (I believe, btw, that charity would be more appropriate than precision in evaluating such a transcript), he also misses the point, again suggesting that the genocide that Bennett didn't propose was the reason Bennett has been criticized. Kleiman, regrettably, takes matters one step further, citing statistics to support Bennett's claim on the inherent criminality of blacks. In DeLong's case, it's possible that he reacted to the wrong part of Bennett's statement. Kleiman can't make that claim.

Garance does good job of describing what makes all of this so skin-crawling. If past history is a predictor, a post describing how this free-thinking is what differentiates academics from the rest of us will soon follow.