Plastic Manzikert

So long and thanks for all the comments.

2011-12-11T16:37:00.004-07:00

I started this blog five years ago, late into high school and headed towards Tulane. I originally thought this was going to be about gaming and politics, but I soon found myself writing about race and Unitarianism at least as much as politics, and I wrote about gaming here all of once. I'm going to leave it up, in the grand tradition of nothing on the internet ever really going away, but for now it's done. It remains as an archive of my youthful speculation, with all the warts, rash decisions, embarrassingly naive decisions I wrote here left intact. I am still blogging, now with a narrower focus, over at wordpress.

Thanks for reading. It's been good.

That's All Folks by Scott Campbell from Purple Magazine on Vimeo.

The wars of the future will be the legacy of the austerity of the present

2011-08-30T09:18:00.008-06:00

Half the fun of reading foreign policy wonks is that at times they feel like the hipsters of the commentariot; "Oh, sure, we're still involved in three wars, but c'mon, focusing on what we're doing right now? Sooooo last decade." It is this insistence upon forward-looking that most informed me as I read the following three articles.

The first, and most far-reaching, was John F. Cooper's assessment of the strategic importance Taiwan plays in the grand strategy of the United States. As long as Taiwan remains sovereign and supported by the American navy, then it will remain the primary focus of Chinese military power, much as (to use Cooper's analogy) the independent American Indian nations remained for a century the primary focus of US expansion and campaigning. As Cooper relates, if Taiwan were to fall, China will be able to project her power globally, through a navy that was no longer

“contained” by a proximate chain of islands extending southward from Japan, through the Ryukyu’s, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia."

What's fascinating about Cooper's piece is the emphasis it gives to preparing for and/or safeguarding against great power war as the primary goal for US strategy. Decades ago, this had been a given; throughout the Cold War many smaller wars were fought with the ultimate objective of making the situation favorable to the United States should a great power war break out. But since the fall of the USSR, the United States has had a clear and uncontested global reach but no similar singular focus. Part of Cooper's argument is that this has been possible because our probable global rival has been singularly focused on an enemy just off their shore. The wider implication of Cooper's piece, though, is that our military focus (and, explicitly in the piece, budget priorities) should guarantee our military strength against other great powers.

I read Cooper's article the same day that the New York Times published this editorial, about the experience of NATO in Libya. This was the first war undertaken by NATO where the United States was insistent upon taking a secondary role to the militaries of Canada and Europe. While Qaddafi's regime was ultimately toppled by the NATO-supported Libyan rebels, it was a success more guaranteed by the weakness of the opponent than the prowess of the Western forces involved. The editorial cites ammunition shortfalls and outdated technology as the genuine problems, and suggests more broadly that the combination of austerity measures during the economic downturn has only exacerbated a general trend in Europe of allowing the largess of the Pentagon to substitute for European defense spending. It ends with this condemnation

European leaders need to ask themselves a fundamental question: If it was this hard taking on a ragtag army like Qaddafi’s, what would it be like to have to fight a real enemy?

The nations of Europe, it appears, are unready for any war, and are notably unprepared for a great power war for the first time in centuries.

This is fine if one believes that the coming wars will not be symmetric ones. Such skeptics of major conflicts can point to the aughts most memorable strategist, who has spawned a whole school of thought focused on how big powers fight the little wars. Given the present balance of power, and cognizant of the last half-century of American warfare, this makes sense. But such a narrow focus has limitations. Spencer Ackerman writes

With the wars of the future looking likely to occur in sea, air, space and cyberspace, a generation of Army officers forged in counterinsurgency — critics call it a cult — will be challenged to adjust

The nature of wars that will be fought in the future remain a fortunately-unanswered question. But the defense priorities set now, in a time of austerity for the West, will profoundly shape the warfighting of the next decade and beyond.

Fetishizing the Peasant

2011-06-21T10:13:00.002-06:00

Peasants into Frenchmen is a classic text in a niche field that hits at the very central problem of modernity: how does a nation convert its population from subsistence farmers into modern citizens? This problem is as old as the concept of citizen itself: it is easy to have a collective identity within a city, and urbanites have formed the early core of states since we have had states, and in many cases a dominating city has gone on to found or anchor empires and civilizations. There's a clear urban bent in history, which makes sense given that cities had the wealth and literacy to devote to writing history.

Outside the city, life for most people, throughout most of human history, has been very much the same: live in a village, grow as much as you can, hope the crops don't fail and the taxes aren't too high and that the neighbors don't raid, and then survive to do it all again next year. There is a simplicity to this, a romanticism, that emerges almost exclusively in urbanites at least three generations removed from having to live like this.

It is seemingly without any knowledge of this history and informed by romantic notions filtered through the modern environmental movement that articles like this are written. Subsistence farmers are, in the strictest sense, "locavores," but very rarely are they so by choice. It is, instead, a lifestyle adopted by necessity, or maintained when they are no seen to be no viable alternatives.

Pushing for development away from subsistence farming, maligned here as the specific failing of USAID programs in Afghanistan, has been the whole project of modernization for the last several hundred years. In The Great Transformation, economist Karl Polanyi documents the century of legal changes it took to provoke small-time farmers in England to give up their farms and take jobs elsewhere. The labor-intensive nature of agriculture has traditionally hindered nations in their attempts to pursue any other path of economic development, whether it be the command systems of Soviet Russia and Communist China or market economies of the West. Encouraging development in other directions is not about trying to destroy what is unique in Afghanistan, but is instead about understanding what the term development means.

The Death of an Enemy

2011-05-02T09:19:00.009-06:00

The gestation period for revenge is 9 years, 7 months, 20 days. Or for justice. Or for closure. However you read the death of Osama bin Laden, it took about twice as long as the Manhattan project to go from notion to completion. We messed it up once before - in November 2001, just two months after the attacks of September 11th, we failed to capture him in a battle at Tora Bora. We have kept a military presence in Afghanistan since then, with it escalating over the past several years into counterinsurgency against a resurgent foe. We went chasing other demons abroad, declared that we had found one in Iraq and embroiled ourselves in a regime change there as well. For just shy of a decade, the man who twice bombed the World Trade Center evaded capture, to the point that seven years after 9/11, prioritizing his capture became a presidential campaign promise. It became the stuff of far-ranging speculation (not to discredit these guys - their approach to the problem was both novel and damn close to accurate). And yet, here it is, the death of America's Most Wanted.

Other people have more interesting and informed accounts of what his death mean. Here's my favorite of the facty ones, in ten bullet points. Here's my favorite emotional reaction read, in lots of words. And here's my least favorite spot-on response, in 140 characters: "Recall, this is a huge operation, a huge cost (over $1 trillion since 9/11/01) to get an elderly man on dialysis in a small town in Pakistan"

The 9/11 attacks cost $500,000. That's chump change to pay if the goal, as it was stated in later years, was US bankruptcy. What bin Laden did was unquestionably an act of evil. But it was one that provoked something very much like an allergic reaction - in responding to one threat, the US spent over a trillion. We as a nation failed to adequately respond to the threat. Not that we didn't respond - we did, with excess and paranoia and jingoism and two wars, one relatively justified and one entirely superfluous. We surrendered civil liberties, made air travel a farcical exercise in security theater, and justified torture and indefinite detention of people who we maybe had evidence on. We ignored large swaths of the constitution and made ourselves less safe. The way we responded to 9/11 was all out of proportion. Hunting down the criminal took a year of intelligence work, the cooperation of Pakistan's government, and a strike team consisting of exceptional skilled men in boots on the ground.

What this means going forward comes from the writer at Transitionland with, I think, the best short statement of the impact this will have:

To be clear on Osama bin Laden's death: 1) I wish he had been captured alive. 2) His death isn't a blow to the Taliban, because his life was pretty irrelevant to the post-2001 Taliban. 3) For better or worse, bin Laden's death will be used to cement US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

This isn't really a moment about that future, though. This is a reconciliation with a long overdue past. In late September 2001, my uncle wondered "why are we focusing on getting the messenger, instead of getting the message?" I was 12 when this happened, and never particularly clear on the message we were supposed to get (was it that America must acknowledge bin Laden's demands? was it that we were responsible for generic capitalist unpleasant byproducts in the world at large that turn people against us?).

I like to think it was "maybe the US should stop explicitly supporting autocrats so that radicals direct their frustration with domestic politics outwards at us," which I like to think it was, and we did. It is still supremely satisfying to know that, at the very least, we have reached a moment of closure, if not exactly a moment of justice.

Amidst the immediately jubilant atmosphere of last night, a couple of friends, posting in various places, quoted the same line of scripture, which is especially fitting for the moment. "Rejoice not when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles. Proverbs 24:17"

This is a time of closure, a awareness that this worst moment of the last decade is, finally, over.

One Part Fatigue, Two Parts Snark

2010-07-31T01:10:00.011-06:00

It is apparently really, really hard to be democratic, and impossible to be successful as an elected democratic leader if your last name isn't Roosevelt and the year is anything past 1932. Or at least, that's the impression I get reading Stephen M. Walt's piece "What Hath Obama Wrought?" in which the sitting president's failure is plotted from... well, I'm not sure exactly.

He starts by claiming "[Republicans] will almost certainly pick up a lot of seats in Congress come November, which is the normal mid-term pattern after a big swing the other way." Which is true, but so irrelevant to his point that it risks undermining it. Presidents almost always lose support during midterm elections, barring something tragic that is seen as entirely beyond their control. To label this a failure of Obama's is to set the bar for presidential success during the first 18 months in office at "suffer 9/11, receive benefit of public sympathy." Which is impossible for any president to replicate (Exception: conspiracy theorists, chime in now!) So that's not a loss. That is dull, tried-and-true routine.

The next paragraph hits the Poli-Sci 101 (or AP government) level truism that voters care most about the economy. This is a fact! And he follows with the Poli-Sci 201 truism that "Voters don't care about the disasters-that-might-have-been-but-weren't." Also a fact! Voters have a very, very bad sense of perspective relative to presidents, and tend to punish them for it. Voters are sometimes selfish jerks, but they have to be because otherwise they'd start caring about things like foreign policy. This is why a minority party can, should they so desire, tank efforts of the majority to go as far as they need in rebuilding an economy, and be rewarded for it.

So if the economy isn't something the president can claim credit for (and he can't! avoiding econocolypse by steering the ship of state into recession harbor means you're still not at Candy Island and everyone is tired of how boring the cruise is; at least an iceberg would have spiced things up), what can the president claim? Foreign policy is totally his arena, so let's look at a highly selective list of foreign policy choices that voters might think about. (Side Note: did you know that the US operates embassies and, therefore, foreign policies in a fuckton of nations? Neither do most voters!)

So what foreign policies do voters care about that the president, as head of state, will be judged by? Iraq, Iran, Israel-Palestine, and Afghanistan. Oh, goody.

Iraq

Walt is perfectly right in saying that Iraq is Bush's fault, and Obama doesn't deserve to be blamed for it. But apparently the one Bush success in a steaming pile of everything gone wrong was the surge, and Walt sees that being undone. Perhaps it is! Over at the Atlantic, there's a handy checklist of things the surge has failed to do. Note that of the 4 items on the list, only one is a US action. Which is withdrawal. Which is what the voter cares about most anyway. Also, they throw in that al Qaeda in Iraq has been mostly decapitated, which is about as explicit a US success as you can claim (we needlessly arrived in a hostile environment, watched the country fight through a civil war, decided to start pulling out during a shaky peace, and all the while casually defeated the enemy whose whole existence is built around our destruction, in a nation where they had the potential for ample support? I'm declaring V-aQ-in-Iraq day TOMORROW.) Also, maybe the surge wasn't even the kind of thing that could have success.

Omar Khdhayyir over at gorilla guides says of the surge: "it fit into a series of converging and violent dynamics on the ground, coinciding expediently with a shift in the balance of power. That is what the empirical evidence shows." Maybe this has something to do with the fact that in insurgencies, as Abu Muqawama said, "actions of local actors matter more than those of external forces." Those 3 items on the Atlantic list that show the surge has failed? Those are all Iraqis being unable to reach political settlement, despite the efforts of the US to create a climate in which they can do that. So Obama, here, will get knocked for the internal politics of a foreign nation not lending themselves to compromise. Awesome.

(Sidenote: Walt is upset that we'll leave a "government that is sympathetic to Iran" in Iraq? Iran and Iraq fought the largest conventional war of the last 30 years against each other, and that conflict itself convinced Saddam to go for Kuwait. I think it's safe to say that if they can make friends, the whole stability of the region will be less in jeopardy.)

Iran

I stand by my assertion that, if the 2008 election had gone the other way, US tanks would have rolled towards Tehran during 2009's "Green Revolution." Why do I say this? Call it a fucking hunch.

Honestly, I think Obama can borrow entirely from Woodrow Wilson and campaign on a "he kept us out of the war" platform in 2012, and win.

Israel-Palestine

"Two-States" talk, that perpetual project of US presidents from Nixon onwards, has suffered an awkward pause in dialogue, and this will frustrate voters at home. Probably true, but it's the most predictable of frustrations - talks have halted every single time an election has brought a hardliner into power in one of the relevant countries. This first happened when Nasser accidentally started a war in 1967 because the US and the USSR wouldn't facilitate talks, and has continued onwards as Egypt regained territory but abandoned claims to Gaza, as Begin proclaimed the idea of "Greater Israel," as Jordan lost and then relinquished its claim to the West Bank, as the Palestinian Liberation Organization moved from exiles in Algeria to an old man under house arrest in Ramallah, as Israel elected another former general, as the PLO became the Palestinian Authority, and as Hamas decided to seize power in Gaza after Abbas and Olmert's talks proved fruitless. Really, Netanyahu and the continued existence of Hamas rule in Gaza fit the pattern of slow moves toward progress falling short every other election cycle. Soon enough, after a stalemate here, Israel will elect a moderate who will probably loosen restrictions on Gaza, and Hamas will have to show itself just as capable of compromise as it is of bombastic defiance. But that's an election cycle or two from now.

Obama will get a little bit of heat for this, as the respective Israel and Palestine lobbies are long-suffering. But the staggeringly slow pace of progress here at all times means that this is just a given, and the amount of votes lost nationwide will probably be in the dozens.

Afghanistan

Let me start by saying that the wikileaks information doesn't reveal anything beyond the names of afghans the US has worked with, and the fact that a bureaucracy at war generates paperwork. In 92,000 documents, there is enough evidence to cherry pick every single perspective that can be written on the war. So to claim that the information in it "doesn't matter" and then use it to justify your already established opinion is sheer laziness and shitty journalism.

So what is happening in Afghanistan? Lots. Like the high success rate of embedded 12-man special forces teams in facilitating dispute resolution that doesn't involve adding or using guns. But there is a lot that isn't going well. Karzai protected his office at the expense of ruining elections. This is both a) an act of local agency and b) insanely frustrating. And that's been the biggest failure of Afghanistan since Obama was elected, which is, again, something he doesn't have control over.

But if Obama's commitment to Afghanistan is problematic in the eyes of the American voter (and it is! kind of!), there is no way he could have not committed to fighting the faction that housed al Qaeda without suffering an equally negative blow to his ratings.

Remember the 1990s, when the democrats tried to play humanitarian with the military, got black hawk down, then played cautious, got Rwanda, and then didn't really know what to do in Bosnia and Kosovo so we had cluster bombs in villages missing Serbian tanks and almost risked a war with Russia? That sucked. As the first Democrat commander-in-chief since then, Obama has handled the wars he inherited fairly well. Focusing explicitly on the nation most closely identified with the actual attack on US soil wasn't something he could have chosen not to do.

Does this matter?

Walt seems to think that the cautious approach Obama has pursued in his foreign policy will turn off voters, who will see it as largely unchanged from the second Bush term. That's sheer craziness - voters haven't made a real distinction between the diplomacy of the Bush terms, and still associate him with pre-emption and two long stupid wars we didn't really need to fight. Obama's caution will be seen as distinct from that, and because it is uninteresting to be cautious, voters won't care about it. Which makes the whole article (and, um, this critique) unnecessary. Voters are thinking about other things.

They are thinking that there isn't food on the table and a British company has ruined the gulf for the next 50 years. They'll hate Obama for that.

Fantasy Wargaming: Nuclear Weapons in Videogames

2010-03-04T20:14:00.002-07:00

When I started this blog, I initially wanted to write about gaming. That's the reason for the "plastic" in the title. That my attentions went elsewhere are unsurprising - I play less games than I did before I started college, and I suddenly had all these new exciting things to write about, like Nukes and Iran and elections and rights and things. So I'm really excited to find an intersection between my dorktastic hobby and my dorktastic studies.

Nuclear weapons feature in many, many videogames, and a friend of mine had expressed concern on how their presence in videogames relates to public perception of their effects. Games writ large are too diverse to treat as one mass, so I figured I'd start by breaking down the ways nuclear weapons feature in games.

1. Gameplay mechanic itself

Missile Defense
DEFCON
Balance of Power

In Missile Defense, nuclear war is abstracted to the point that a successful nuclear missile strike leads directly to defeat. Consequences of such a strike don't need to be more descriptive than game loss, because in a game, that's enough. Not being able to play any more is as deadly as the abstraction can get. (I haven't played DEFCON or Balance of Power, but from their description they seem similar.)

2. Narrative Device (Modern warfare, Metal Gear Solid)

Modern Warfare (First Person Shooter, FPS)
Modern Warfare 2 (FPS)
Metal Gear Solid (FPS)
Frontlines: Fuel of War (FPS)
The Ace Combat series (Flight Simulator)
Trinity (Text adventure)
Nuclear Strike (Shooter)
Metal Gear series (FPS)
Tom Clancy's EndWar (RTS)
Warhammer 40,000 (Minature wargame/RTS)
Warzone 2100 (RTS)
Syphon Filter series (3rd person shooter)
Splinter Cell: Conviction (FPS)
others

The size of this category should be unsurprising - since 1945, nuclear weaponry, nuclear strikes, and post-nuclear wastelands have all featured heavily in fiction. Games are, to a large extent, a story-telling medium, and the first-person shooter is a narrative vehicle, as a character follows along and plays through scripted experiences. Plots in these games include nuclear weapons often as a climactic moment in the story, mid-plot twist, or prologue which creates a setting different from the present day but featuring similar weapons. That's commonly done in every medium - Orwell uses a nuclear war as premise for the stalemate society he depicts in 1984. The same needs-of-narrative fuel RTS's, and all of the above have nuclear weapons as plot-points but not in game weapons.

3. Weapon available to the player

Starcraft (RTS)
Empire Earth (RTS)
the Civilization series (Turn-Based Strategy, TBS)
World in Conflict (FPS)
War Front: Turning Point (RTS)
Supreme Commander (RTS)
Spore (RTS, at least for the stages in which players can use nukes)
Mercenaries 2 (FPS)
Metal Gear Solid 3 (FPS)
Rise of Nations (RTS)
Ratchet and Clank (third person shooter)
the Unreal series (FPS)

The games here again are divided between strategy and shooter, and the way they depict Nuclear weapons is different. In Ratchet and Clank, the Unreal series, and Metal Gear Solid 3, a nuclear rifle appears, usually as the games' BFG. This use is both entirely unrealistic and fitting within the nature of these games as fantasy. For Unreal, that fantasy is FPS combat isolated of plot, meaning, or worlds. For Ratchet and Clank, it's a fantasy galaxy, inhabited with nonhuman creatures, where the main characters are a robot and a cat-alien. In Metal Gear Solid 3, the weapon is a doomsday machine that is part of the plot. The nuke rifle is a fantasy allowed by videogames.

In the World in Conflict and Mercenaries 2, tactical nuclear strikes are an unlockable weapon. These games depict small nuclear weapons as not only viable, but as an option that would be similar in usage to a predator drone (to emphasize this effect in Modern Warfare 2 predators are unlockable for much the same purpose).

In the RTS games listed, tactical nuclear weapons are available. In Starcraft, they are the superweapon of the humans against both a horde of buglike aliens and another more advanced alien race. In Empire Earth, nuclear bombers can be built from WWII onwards, and while they are a deadly attack, the area and permanence of the blast is limited in keeping with the aims of game balance. War Front is a science-fictional retelling of WWII, and nuclear weapons are again used within the context of that conflict. In Spore, both city- and planet-destroying nuclear weapons are available. In Supreme Commander, nuclear weapons are fired from silos and deal damage in a smaller area than one would expect. In Rise of Nations, nuclear weapons can be used, though anti-missile lasers can be purchased and a missile defense shield can be researched which protects one's entire territory from nuclear strikes. Rise of Nations also has an Armageddon clock the limits the total number of nuclear weapons that can be fired before the game ends in defeat for everyone. Civilization, though not a real-time strategy game, also offers nuclear weapons that can destroy cities, and with it's more advanced resource system, can slowly have the world die out from after-effects of nuclear weapons.

4. Some combination thereof

Fallout series

The Fallout series is set after a total nuclear war, and cold-war culture is the substance of the games. It also features, in Fallout 3, a tactical nuclear rifle.

~

So what does it mean to have nuclear weapons be part of videogame culture? For the most part, it is no different than having nuclear weapons in fiction, in movies, in comic books, and in song. Sometimes, they will be treated with proper understanding, sometimes they'll be used as a cheap plot accellerant, and more often than not they'll used somewhere between. This is fine, because that's the state of our cultural understanding of nuclear weapons right now.

Games could make a strong statement about tactical nuclear weapons, and on the surface they appear to do so. After all, games, more than any other medium, feature small nuclear strikes. But this isn't really an argument for the use of more nuclear weapons - this is a constraint of game design. When games feature realistic, all-destroying nuclear strikes, they are exclusively plot devices/scripted events, and happen outside the control of the player. When players are given control, nuclear weapons are small, because, and this is important, players will be using these against other players online, and instant-game-ending shots don't make for popular or enjoyable games.

Nuclear weapons could be depicted realistically, but if history has shown us anything, the more powerful a nuclear weapon is, the less likely people are to want it used against themselves. And, in the games-design universe, the certainty that players will use a horribly destructive weapon in a setting where consequences are low translates directly to scaling-down weapons so that they are a balanced component of gameplay. It's not realistic, but it's also very clearly not reality.

The intersection of faith and politics

2009-12-18T04:15:00.002-07:00

Religion and Politics seem to be about where all my interests overlap. I've more experience in church governance than anything else outside of school. At school, I'm most fascinated studying Turkey and Iran, which are both outliers for the role of religion within their government. My advisor has made his work studying Western Europe, and the consensus state that failed tom emerge in 1918 but came about after 1945; a consensus marked clearly by the inclusion of religious parties in many mixed-confessional nations. The role of confessional political parties in post-war Europe is significant enough that a case has been made attributing the rise of fascism to a lack of meaningful participation in politics by the deeply religious. It is an intersection so rich that I go from idle musing to wonkish details in seconds.

In academia, this works out well: comparing the struggles that led Europe to its mostly secular public sphere coexisting with the occasional state-sponsored church is a valuable reference point for understanding similar the church and state relations happening elsewhere in the world today. Very good, but very niche.

The more immediate intersection of religion and politics, and the impetus behind this post, was their role in the politics of the US today. On twitter, many friends of mine, whose opinions I value, argued that if churches take political stances, they should lose their non-profit status. I mentioned that churches can lose tax-exemption for endorsing candidates, but this only slightly dodged the issue. What matters is not so much that a tax-exempt organization doesn't support specific people - it matters that they both get to be tax-exempt and engage so actively in the public sphere.

At the core of my friends' distaste for politically-vocal religion are images like this one:

From Overcompensating: "Here is a picture of a group of Americans who just found out they have successfully denied equal rights to another group of Americans." That is, to put it lightly, disgusting. The categorical denial of rights to a group of people is something abhorrent to the ideals of most Americans'.

It's deplorable activity, for which the correct response is disgust, distaste, and shaming. But these people should never be forcibly excluded from politics. If we exclude them, we exclude the very idea the morality can be based on religious experiences/teachings, and we are left with secularism alone to inform our collective values. There's an argument to be made for that - secularism is the shared values of everyone sans religion, and in a world where multiple religious interpretations exist, removing religion altogether has a lot to say for it. Another large part of the European consensus involves having a forcibly secular public sphere.

But there are problems with that. In France, the secular public sphere has invaded the realm of personal choice and religious practice, where most notably muslim women are forbidden from wearing veils in public. Rather than allowing for a shared society of shared values, that's oppressive. And in England, there has been controversy over the relation between the country's historic legal system and the values of some of its residents. This lead the Archbishop of Canterbury to claim that Shari'a law in the UK will be inevitable, and led a Tory shadow minister to say in response:

"We must ensure people of all backgrounds and religions are treated equally before the law. Freedom under the law allows respect for some religious practices. But let's be clear: all British citizens must be subject to British laws developed through parliament and the courts."

While the debate is framed as between religious law and secular law, the religious context and values that formed and informed british law go unmentioned. What is ostensibly secular law tends to reflect the values of protestants fairly closely. In this case, trying to keep the religious out in the name of secularism is similar to the nativists of the 1890s-1920s trying to keep southern Europeans out of the USA in the name of "Nativism". It can be done, sure, but it's hypocritical, and it assumes as normal a state that was itself the result of centuries of change.

But even more important than the implicit religious values that informed secularism to the inclusion and protection of religious institutions as tax exempt is the role of religious activism. The easy example here is the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, and it's one of the most meaningful as well. Nationwide religious associations motivated and coordinated activists on an issue that was as explicitly political as it was anything else. Religious groups also protested and argued against civil right in the South, too; even my Unitarian church suffered a split thanks to disagreement over the civil rights movement. But the civil rights movement could not have acted as it did, and had the success it did, if it did so without the religious values that enabled it to both challenge the status quo and to call upon the US to live up to its own ideals.

And then there is today, where the appearance of religious activism is of one march to quash rights after another. Certainly, that religious activism is happening, but it is happening because conservative religion is generally about quashing rights anyway, and while I can accept individuals voluntarily taking on religious restrictions on behavior, it will always be hard for me to accept forcing such restrictions on others in the name of religion. But today's religious activism is not exclusively activism on behalf of the right.

Today, at All Souls Church in DC, Mayor Fenty signed into law a bill granting marriage equality to gay and lesbian couples. This is the second-to-last step (a confirmation by the national legislature is next) of a long campaign, spearheaded by the religious community of DC and helped by the Unitarian Universalist Association's Standing on the Side of Love campaign. Here was religion acting inconcert with secular society to better secure the rights of all citizens, and this was the result of seeing marriage equality as not just a secular concern, but as one with a religious mandate behind it. This activism in specific is crucial to the purpose of our nation, and having religious activism as a valid means of expression, as a protected means of expression, is vital the vibrancy of our democracy. And crucial to all of this: we must let religious organizations be invested in this world. If we take that away, if we make it hard for religious groups to engage with the nation in which they exist, we lose the participation of part of the population (itself a problem in democracy), and we lose the ability for religion to remind us of our higher values and nobler virtues.

The problem has nothing to do with the religious being active in politics. The problem has everything to do with *which* religious are active in politics, and I for one prefer the participation of all to the exclusion of any.

Remembrance Day

2009-11-11T18:30:00.004-07:00

Given how much I write about war here, it only feels appropriate to mention Veterans day. Or Remembrance day. Or Armistice Day. It's a tricky holiday, mainly solemn, but with such a strong focus on service and internationalism it's hard to not get lost pondering it.

My initial response to today was to be annoyed at the change that has befallen Armistice Day. This day, 91 years ago, ended the most needless war in human history. It ended for many thoughts of glory in war, and it especially ended (for all but one nation) the notion of glory on the offense. It was a powerful halt. Humanity would give it one more go before throwing out the very idea of actually fighting annihilistic war, but WWI was the first moment when not fighting wars even became a considered idea. Honoring the Armistice is important.

A blogging acquaintance of mine posted today a great, semi-connected series of remembrances. Most striking about her memories and the stories she relays second-hand are their modernity. While very few alive today remember WWI, Europe saw hot war in the past two decades. And we forget so easily in the West that while hot war may be dead at home such peace is a modern anomaly. We forget that many parts of the world suffer lingering effects of where our Cold War was actually fought, or where our abandonment and indifference let senseless war happen again. Rwanda may now be as much a part of history books as WWI, but that's still only 15 years old. Hesitancy to act and memory of the costs of engaging in war must always be measured against the costs of inaction. Remembering only part of it helps no one.

Then there is veterans day. I have only one immediate relative that actually fought in any war - my father and uncles were not part of US action in Vietnam, and my maternal grandfather has been a cyclops since he was six. So the veteran I knew was my paternal grandfather, Alfred Leroy Atherton Jr. I've written about him before, and I have this somewhat mythologized version of his legacy as family history. He was late to WWII, and spent his year or so in the war as the spotter in a plane scouting for an artillery division. It's easy to make metaphors about that - "he saw the totality of war" or "he was removed enough from combat to get the big picture", and it is very tempting to make these part of the myth. I don't actually think his experience as a spotter specifically influenced his life that much, but I never had the chance to ask. What I do know is this: after the war, and after finishing his degree on the GI Bill, he joined the Foreign Service, and his first deployment was in what was becoming West Germany. He became a diplomat, and spent 36 years as an agent of his country working to prevent wars.

It's for this reason, I think, that I tend to link appreciation for diplomats with appreciation for veterans. We respect and honor those who served their countries in times of need. I just support a definition of that service which includes those who did everything they could to keep us out of wars.

Agency: A Case Study

2009-11-01T13:29:00.002-07:00

The latest bit of life-threatening trivia that's seen some major media coverage has been the fear of a link between vaccines and autism. Such a link does not exist. The science is there, is solid, and is not an evil plot. So why does the myth persist? As the linked-to story in Wired says, parents are willing to do anything out of love for their children. They are eager and willing to believe in alternative cures, or in radical measures to save their children. A lot of emphasis has been places on this as a failure of rationale choice: vaccines are inherently safer than the diseases they protect against. A striking visual example is this chart discussing the risk of taking the HPV vaccine versus the risk of not doing so. HPV not in any way associated with Autism, but the case against HPV is similar: well-publicized incident of a side effect gone wrong, or of the potential for a harmful side-effect, with little real coverage of the damage caused by not taking the vaccine. To scientists (and, generally, to rational human beings) this makes no sense: the least risky action is desired, and should be taken.

So why the resistance to vaccinations? Agency.

People see themselves as having control over whether or not to get a vaccination; they are upset at laws about mandatory vaccinations, which to them imposes the risk of side effects. In refusing to be vaccinated or vaccinate their own children, this people are acting against the only risk they perceive: that caused by vaccines themselves.

They are, at the same time, assuming that disease is a factor beyond their control. Getting infected by any of the diseases that a vaccine would protect against is seen as something against which they are powerless (or, more likely, unaware), and so isn't a risk to avoid. They've seen/read/researched the stories about things gone terribly wrong with vaccines. But the renewed outbreak of diseases like measles (basically non-existent for my generation and the one immediately preceding it) doesn't register as a new risk. These people, these parents fearful of autism (or more generally the mercury in all vaccines) are making a terrible assessment of the possible risks, but it's not irrational - they just have no idea of the risks where the balance of risk falls.

Most relevantly, they don't see getting vaccinated as reducing risk. Because exposure to disease isn't something they have control over, but exposure to medicine totally is. It's a major disconnect they've developed between vaccinations and disease. The solution? Coming from my social-sciencey background, I'm inclined to think that the problem can be solved by a reframing of vaccination. Vaccinating is a choice just as much as not vaccinating is, and the positive good caused by vaccines is little publicized, and even more rarely seen as an actual decision.

We humans remember when things go wrong. We have a terrible problem with forgetting when and why things went right.

Support Your Local Papers! Gordon Sisters in the Times-Picayuner

2009-09-30T16:13:00.004-06:00

Here's something genuinely weird: I don't have internet in my apartment, and I just signed up for a month-long subscription to NOLA's local paper (the Times-Picayune). I'll probably get another when that one runs out. Why? Well, the easiest reason is that I like having something disposable to read every morning. A better answer would be that, with my church membership, apartment, and employment(ish) here, I feel committed enough to through down some more shallow roots.

And the best answer? Have some foreshadowing, and check this space again in a week.

Edit 10/5: After my totally unsubtle buildup, the Times-Picayune story on the Gordon Sisters Window. It does a better job of the history than I do (easy access to newspaper records helps with that), and on the whole, I think it's well done. My only qualms are, funny enough, nitpicking with my ministers language - while it's important to emphasize the good that the sisters did, I think there is little gained in excusing them as "products of their time", instead of focusing on them as "flawed people acting on contemporary notions of justice." To me, what is fascinating about them is not the views they held in common with their peers, but instead how they managed to hold those views and do lots of good works despite them. That said, I think the story does justice to the Gordon sisters, and First Unitarian Universalist of New Orleans decision to honor them as flawed humans. The newspaper article gets the nuance down, and for that I am grateful.

Again, my previous post discussing their complicated historical legacy is here.

The Realist goes M.A.D.

2009-09-28T00:37:00.005-06:00

Over the past two days, I've made some fairly bold claims about nuclear power on my twitter account. Here's my claims:

I trust the sanity of people who have the most to gain by not engaging in nuclear war. Being king > being dead. And yes, even Kim Jong Il has more to gain by not nuking, and he's as close to insane as we've got. It's in Kim Jong Il's interest for people to think he is crazy - he (and those in power around him) gain nothing, however, by actually engaging in Nuclear War.
The main argument I've heard for Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) not being stabilizing: Bernard Lewis, who claimed that the Iran govt was apocalyptic, and saw the certain destruction of nuclear war as an inducement, rather than a deterrent. I spent a good part of last year writing a response for my War on Terror class. My core counter argument was, essentially, that while Ahmadejinehad (and Iran proxy) have a lot to gain through nuclear posturing, and even through the possession of nuclear weapons, they are first and foremost a government. And as a government, things are better for them if they both a) stay in power, and b) stay alive. Religious belief may be strong enough to motivate a terrorist to kill himself on behalf of his community, but very few people are genuinely willing to risk initiating the actual death of their community. Altruistic motives fuel suicide terrorism; if you think your death will benefit the community, you may well do it. But it does not extend far enough to risk the entire community, because nothing is gained by that.
M.A.D. works precisely because even if the leader has more to gain in a war, and leaders usually have the most to gain, gains in war become impossible w/nuclear second strikes. Were a nuclear nation to initiate war against another nuclear nation, the damages that resulted would be, well, apocalyptic. You'd get two devastated nations, and the cost + time involved in rehabilitating them is certain to be expensive. Not going to war is, in this day and age, always cheaper and the better economic prospect for a nuclear armed nation. Plus, any government that initiates such a war is sure to either die, be deposed, or be greatly reduced in power within minutes.
Finally: a single person may be irrational (Ahmadejinehad, Kim Jong Il). But a small group of people (say, the rest of the governing bodies in Iran with a special emphasis towards the Supreme Leader, or the bureaucratic elite of the DPRK) errs towards rationality.
Governments of States, as collections of people with a vested interest in preserving the status quo, are going to be more rational and more restrained that the sum of their parts. They might posture, and they may well pursue nuclear weapons as a deterrent, but actually engaging in nuclear war is not in their interest.

That is, more or less, the whole of my argument as regards states. Nonstate actors are generally perceived as less rational. Fortunately, however, nonstate actors can't really produce outright nuclear weapons on their own (dirty bombs being another matter). Nuclear forensics, while not as developed as it should be, mitigates the risk of a nonstate actor obtaining (and therefore using) a nuke. Nuclear forensics, ideally, makes the nation that gives a nuke to a nonstate actor (read: terrorist) responsible for any deaths caused, and therefore vulnerable as though the state itself had launched the weapon. So rather than MAD deterring the use of weapons by nonstate actors, it deters nations unloading nuclear weapons on terrorist groups. And so that makes the governments of all nuclear nations put a premium on tight control, small stockpiles, and encourages nuclear actions to be controlled as a state, rather than enacted by nonstate proxies. Following the thesis of states as rational actors, MAD is an effective deterrent, so long as nuclear war is seen as fundamentally unwinnable.

Qualifiers and Postscripts:

Nuclear forensics is valuable, but it isn't as effective a deterrent as MAD. MAD is purely a "between states" thing, and works on the premise of states as rational actors. Since states have a lot to gain by posturing, posturing through nonstate loose cannons is a fancy little risk in this day and age. That said, nuclear forensics still holds promise of making deterrence continue to be relevant, two decades after the cold war.

Security through proliferation? The topic itself came up because a friend made an aside about how giving everyone nuclear weapons was not the path to peace. Another friend interjected that I "might advocate giving all STATES nuclear weapons. Some silly thing about rational actors." So, I then went out and kind of babbled my way through a rough version of the argument you see above. I genuinely trust states rational actors, and I stand by the value of deterrence in a world with nuclear weapons. What I omitted in the above argument but included in my conversation are two fairly important asides:

The only nation that was nuclear and actively, unilaterally disarmed itself was the apartheid government of South Africa. The reasons for this were multiple - the cold war was ending, South Africa really didn't see a need for itself to be nuclear, and the outgoing government really did not trust the rationality of the people they were handing the reins of power over to. It's an example of disarmament, which is a net win for everyone, through an explicit distrust in the rationality of states, which is probably fair but makes me a sad panda. I'm not sure what relevance this has, beyond being basically a silver bullet counterargument to my stated claims. Seemed worth mentioning, any way.
Having nuclear weapons protects a single nation while increasing the risk to all other nations, resulting in a net lose of security. This is a macro-scale effect of the SUV phenomenon: if you drive an SUV, you yourself are safer, but every SUV on the roads makes the roads less safe. More nuclear weapons among more states doesn't actually provide much in the way of stability to anyone outside the most recently nuclear state, and greater proliferation comes with a greater risk of loose nukes and nonstate actors using them. For this reason, while I don't begrudge a nation like Iran seeking to protect itself with a nuclear deterrent, I'm really not all that fond of greater proliferation. I understand it, and don't see it as leading to the end of the world, but in absolute terms it's not a good thing.

The Gordon Sisters, their Window, and Quiet Little Faults

2009-09-20T16:16:00.006-06:00

Today in my church we dedicated a pair of stained-glass windows. The new set is a beautiful post-Katrina triptych, donated and made by volunteers who made many a trip to the city to rebuild. It's not a subtle piece, but it is very pretty, and hyper-relevant to the building in which it is now housed. It's history, though already pretty elaborate, is nothing compared to the main focus of this morning's service.

At the center of the morning, and at the center of the wall facing the congregation in our sanctuary, is the Gordon Sisters window. It's a piece of stained glass with more history than most towns, and it commemorates two little-known but tremendous figures for social justice, who just so happened to be members of the First Unitarian Church of New Orleans.

The sisters were fascinating people. Childless and never married, they brought sanitary water and sewage to New Orleans, worked to build a "model home-school for the care and vocational education of the mentally handicapped", spent ten years working for children's rights (which resulted in the Child Labor Act of 1906), one of them directed the Louisiana State Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and they "pushed for the state constitution to allow women to vote," where "partial victory was granted and women taxpayers were given the vote, in person or by proxy, on matters relating to taxation." It's about the perfect distillation of late 19th century progressive causes. Reading that, it's a wonder that we don't lionize Kate and Jean Gordon with Susan B. Anthony and Clara Barton.

But there are reasons for this. For all the progressiveness of the Gordon Sisters, there are some quietly omitted flaws. Kate fought for women's' suffrage, but she fought for it through state rights. There's a reason Louisiana only gave the right to vote to women taxpayers - that's a category that is almost exclusively white women, and this was the Jim Crow south. Pursuing suffrage on the state level meant that you could still exclude some as you expanded the franchise. This was intentional. This is a stark contrast to the standard progressive discourse about late 19th century liberation movements. We remember Susie B as an abolitionist and a suffragette - they go together perfectly in the progressive canon. We forget, in praising our forebears, all the murky grey area and disagreeable positions that came before.

Jean, too, falls into the grey area of history. The second hit on her name is a book discussing eugenics in the deep south. At the above-mentioned model home school, Jean Gordon admitted only whites, and then sterilized them so that feebleness could be weeded out of the white race. We, as a church community, honor the fight against hardship and feebleness, but it is hard to look back with fondness on forebears who embraced so overtly racist a policy as eugenics. These are sins of omission, perhaps, but it makes a platonic ideal of what should be an examination of caring but deeply flawed people.

This will emerge into a new light soon, and it was already simmering at the service today. Racist predecessors are hard people to acknowledge. More challenging even than that is reconciling the tangible good they produced (sewage and drainage, child labor laws, and even the murkily reasoned good of expanded suffrage) with ulterior motives we would today find appalling. History is not the kindest of materials to work with, and Unitarian Universalism is not free from it's ill effects.

The window itself is still beautiful, it's figures all full of dignity. They're all white (and a dog), but that doesn't have to diminish from the dignity of the piece. It just requires that we are conscious of the exclusion, and mindful that when we focus on achieving justice, our definition of justice is limited to our experience. One day, history may well judge us for our biases, and it is good that it is done.

I'd worry if progressive meant the same thing after a century later.

Mayoral Quickie

2009-09-15T08:34:00.004-06:00

Having not read the Albuquerque Journal in a while (being out of state can do that), I missed an article about the Mayoral Candidates positions on Albuquerque's water future. Here's what they have to say, in turn, using the same order as my earlier post.

Romero:

Romero said the Mayor's Office should take more interest in the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, which has a voting position reserved on its board for the mayor.
Chávez does not attend water authority meetings but sends his chief administrative officer instead.
"We can't just stomp our feet and say, 'I don't like this authority,' " Romero said.
He said more oversight of the authority from a mayoral administration could help coordinate conservation, growth and acquisition efforts.
Romero supports acquiring new water rights, and said the focus needs to be on conservation. He said the city's water conservation record can be improved in its golf courses, parks and buildings.
"The program (to improve city conservation) needs to be accelerated," he said.

Chavez:
Berry:

Katrina-after-4

2009-08-28T18:58:00.003-06:00

Here's what I've written about New Orleans before on this blog.

I mention that because one never takes a city in all at once, but instead develops a relationship with the place, which is transformed and changed by time. I've spent the better part of two years here, and my feelings are very different than where I started out.

Initially, I came to Tulane because I found the premise of a college committed to rebuilding a city after a natural disaster to be both exciting and refreshing. I have long been eager to be thrown into good works. That hasn't happened as much as I would have liked yet; it is easy to forget the the key component of good works is works. But I've done some, and I've joined a church here. I've also moved into my first apartment, near the campus and still paid for by folk not me, but an actual residence with implied duration. It's small steps, signs of more permanent action.

I've evacuated this city once. Last year, Gustav looked ominous and deadly. It wasn't; the storm got weaker, and they city, having already had it's difficult evacuation, came back together much more smoothly. It was an odd moment, to be a refugee within the US and leaving a city I was only slowly growing into. For me, it was novel. For my co-congregants, it was very close to traumatic. They'd fled Katrina. They had seen the worst that could happen to a city, lived through it, returned, and spent a week anxious that the very worst would happen again. I've no idea how one gets used to that, but apparently it is possible.

There's a lot to say about Katrina, four years later. I've gone from viewing it as a natural disaster to a human one. Sobering, but it means that it was preventable, and the next one is preventable too. There's more to say than that, but I'll leave it to the (hopeful) next First Couple of New Orleans, Melissa Harris-Lacewell and James Perry:

While these grassroots efforts are extraordinary, they have proved insufficient for the herculean task of restoring New Orleans. Despite the spirit and commitment of its people, the city's levee protection is inadequate, its violent crime is soaring, its school system is failing, its local economy is overly dependent on tourism, and its neighborhoods are ravaged by blight. For example, millions of volunteer hours over four years have put more than 2,000 units of housing back into commerce. While noteworthy, the success pales when one considers that more than 80,000 units of housing were damaged.

New Orleans teaches us that individuals and families bear an important responsibility in restoring the city and our nation. New Orleans shows the innovative capacity of civil society and local entrepreneurship. But New Orleans also reveals that recovery is limited without effective, transparent, responsible government action.

There's a lot more here, but I'd be remiss if I didn't include their excellent conclusion:

The lesson from New Orleans is clear: racial injustice and racialized politics too often stand in the way of doing what is best for the whole community. We need both local and national leadership that will stand for fairness for all people while also refusing to misuse historical racial antagonisms for their own purposes.

The survival of New Orleans is no longer just about restoring America's most distinctive city. We are all living in Katrina Nation now. Learning the lessons of New Orleans may just have the power to save all of us.

Four years ago, negligence nearly killed this city. I'd like very much for it's suffering to have not been a death, and for the lessons here to be well learned.

Why UUs Are Political at Church

2009-08-17T17:52:00.004-06:00

Editor's Note: This piece is a rough draft or part of the rough draft of a sermon, intended to be given at either First Unitarian Universalist in New Orleans or First Unitarian in Albuquerque. It is written with that kind of audience in mind, and is also in part a response to Rev. Davidson Loehr's piece on "Why Unitarian Universalism is Dying"

We are a people always on the verge. For many years, it was at the forefront of religious liberalism, that jargon-filled term which we so often use to say we are theologically diverse, and are comfortable being theologically diverse. And for many years, we have prided ourselves on being at the front of many social movements on the political left. For many Unitarian Universalists, there is a tacit agreement that political liberality and religious liberality go hand in hand. After all, if everyone is free to have their innermost religious beliefs, why won't they think just like us?

It is an easy trap to fall into. There is an ever-present vocal minority in our congregations that reminds us of our hypocrisy, constantly chiding us for being overtly political, and being so consistently political one-sided. Remember, we set out to embrace a diversity of beliefs. Politics is filled with division. Why is it that, for so many of us, church has become the place where we are comfortable politically?

A good political scientist would tell you that the last 50 years, and especially the last 25, have seen a rise in the use of religious language in politics, and the explicit use of religious sentiment for political gain. I am not going to say that. Well, I'm not going to say that any more than I already have. We do not need such a cynical perspective for why religion has been involved in politics.

What I will say is this: people care about politics in a religious way. We say that we have faith in our candidates. When we vote, we say we vote our values, and religion does nothing if not help us reaffirm our values. And when our candidates' lose an election, we become apocalyptic. Politics can shape our external world in ways that often seems remote and all-powerful. And this effects us, as religious people.

When we see a piece of discriminatory legislation get passed, that hits us. We take it as a challenge to the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and that is as much a political position as it is a theological one. We feel for it religiously. Environmental legislation affects us because we care so deeply for the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part. And for many UUs, it is hard to see how military action can possible help us be part of a world community with peace and justice for all. These things are not just politically upsetting, they are spiritually disturbing. We are a political people precisely because we are a religious people.

We are not excused for being so one-sided politically. My vision of inherent worth and dignity may include universal healthcare, but another vision may just as easily see the first principle only meaning the equal right to choose to buy insurance. The principles leave a lot unsaid, and that is for the best. For me, and I suspect for at least a few of you, they form a core around which we have built our own beliefs, and while we may share the same core, we are not in any way obliged to share the same body.

That doesn't mean some political action won't shake us all to the core. And it doesn't mean we cannot share in our profound distress just because our bodies of belief are so different. What it means, for me at least, is that rather than replacing religion with politics, we are more honest than most in how closely the two are fused.

Coming in part II: Why our Universalist heritage in particular lends theological weight to a closer religious relationship to politics.

Bonus thought-provoking statement I wish I could write more about: How does the political/religious relationship in Black Liberation Theology serve as a counterpoint to the desire of many for UUism to be apolitical?

Edit # 2: There's been some discussion in the internets! Lots of back-and-forth here, and then some responses here and here.

The Mayoral Race in Albuquerque

2009-08-03T15:13:00.006-06:00

As is my custom, here's a post about an election for an office I care about. Normally, I'd do a separate post for each candidate, but there are only three, so I figured I'd just run them down in one entry. As is also the norm, my commentary is based primarily on the issues page of each candidate.

Starting from the Left:

Richard Romero

Public Safety

It's bare-bones, with a focus on more boots on the street. There is nothing here to object to, but a special mention should be made of Romero's desire to fire the current APD police chief. The current chief is decent, and there is no need to turn the mayor's office into a spoils system. If he thinks the problem is the current approach to policing (which he does, by promising specific change there), then the problem is programmatic and not rooted in leadership.

Education

(Side note: I'm waiting for a detailed analysis of the mayoral candidate's education plans from Scot Key over at Burque Babble; until then, I'm just going to poke the summary)
When he says "cut waste", he does not specify any waste to be cut. Far as I'm concerned, that makes those words empty.
He has generally good ideas - make school more involved in the community, let city resources be more broadly shared.
Attending school for 7 years of No Child Left Behind, I am exceedingly hesitant to see an executive with other duties get involved in education. Romero does not seem to be overstepping - he wants better city/APS integration more than he wants to dictate school policy, but my hesitancy stands.

Ethics and Honest Government

It's a bare-bones section
Yay for ending pay-to-play, yay for being upset about Suncal TIDDS
Ethics and Honest Government requires more than just an audit. If he wants to create ethical government, he should propose some more lasting changes, and create some better, independent policing organs.

Building a Clean and Green Economy. Supporting Small Business

He understand how the internet leads to efficiency! Praise Xenu! But no, seriously, internet-driven efficiency in more of what the city does (provided they keep a well staffed and well paid web team) is a great idea.
The rest of this, about sustainable development and reasonable development fees, is better than I was expecting.
But we really don't need the petty sniping at Marty that fills the discussion of how things are currently done.

Renewable Energy

Interesting plan to start turning over 1/10th of city buildings to exclusively alternative energy, as an inducement for those wanting a market to already exist when developing alt. energy for the city
Beyond that, nothing

Our Once-and-Future Mayor Marty Chavez
(a special note: Marty does not have actually have an issues page; instead, his views are culled from the "Achievements" section of his website. Yeah.)

Public Safety

More cops, and better police coverage. Not inherently bad things
"Through numerous town halls the Mayor, APD, and the FBI have created state of the art software to help fight cyber-stalkers." is an absolutely meaningless line. maybe the city has helped with the development of software, but until we see some data about how the city was a test lab/funded/encouraged/lobbied for the development of this technology, you can know as fact that town hall meetings did not create software.
Genuine "Yay!", though, for the family advocacy center.
These two lines:

The Safe City Strike Force continues to clean up crime-ridden parts of Albuquerque, especially many parts of historic Route 66.

Albuquerque is virtually graffiti and litter free due to Mayor Chavez' strict zero tolerance policies.

Taken together, they read to me as a policy of "we will intimidate and crack down on the homeless, the destitute, and the young", rather than address the problems that these things are symptoms of. Not to say that I endorse the crime along Route 66, graffiti, or litter. I just think that Route 66 is already excessively patrolled (downtown, at least), I think he's using coded language.
I mainly think that problems are more complex than the "more police, faster crackdowns" approach he's advocating.
(And, as disclaimer, my bias is that I don't assume Marty understands youth and instead have felt, as a youth growing up in his Albuquerque, that he sees them as a problem.)

Economic Development

Recession should limit expectations but
Albuquerque sure is on a lot of good lists!
Let's quietly gloss over the fact that some of why we are doing so well now is that we didn't have a real estate boom that could collapse on us. Some lists mention this, and while that is not *bad*, it does mean that Marty deserves perhaps less credit here than he claims.

Transportation

We have buses!
Some of them are pretty fast!
Also, yay for other modes of transportation, like the bike avenue that was the work of many, many advocates. Oh, right, them...

It's not bad for the city or even the Mayor to claim credit on this one. It'd be more powerful to me, as an undecided voter, to see acknowledgment of government working with community activists.

Sustainability

It's a great big list of conferences/ranking/initiatives which all show that either we're really good at green, or we're good at lip service to green. Very hard to figure out which is which, though.
The genuine point worth mentioning is the methane capture system, which seems like a modest step, but one in the right direction.

Amenities

Landscaping! We have it! (And, okay, it is pretty).
Skate parks, and the BMX facility are evidence that Marty doesn't hate all youth. Also, they're pretty great.
The biopark and Isotopes stadiums are all finished now and great!

Qualifier: many of these things were started under mayor Jim Baca, and so it's like Nixon stealing credit from Kennedy for the Apollo missions.

Seniors

Albuquerque does have some pretty functioning senior centers
A lowered age of eligibility for access is a genuinely good thing
Expanded "Meals on Wheels" program shows that this isn't just a middle class thing
I can't find flaws here besides brevity.

Animals

Marty has animals up for adoption at every press conference, which seems oddly genuine for the guy
This is also pretty great when it means an APD officer has to handle Kittens
But what about the big pitbull controversies we've had? Something seems iffy and missing.
On the other hand, this isn't a section he has to have, so that's forgiven.

Education

Marty created a small charter high school that somehow managed to send all it's seniors to college.
There isn't policy here, just vague talk of coordinating local public resources.
If you're going to be involved in local education, say more. If not, say less. This is just awkward right now.

Richard J. Berry
Again, I'm using the issues as defined by the candidate

Immediate and Long-term Job Growth

Initial Shock Moment: the GOP candidate is advocating for a rapid use of funds on hand to help fix our recession
An appropriate economic policy of having the city buy local first, or help create local suppliers instead of relying on out-of-state ones. Isolationist/populisty, but I like the city and am all for it standing on it's own, so those fears are put aside.
More local workforce training, which is always a good idea, but I think it's also parts of most every candidate's plan
New Business Round Table

Pro: "that brings leaders in business, labor,
education, and the environmental and civic communities together" ; yay inclusivity of all community factors! (and minor yay for not feeling a need to specifically mention religion here)
Con: "knock down barriers that are
preventing businesses from starting, growing or relocating to
Albuquerque"; while regulations are not always an inherent good to citizens, "knocking down barriers" could undermine efforts to go green, which paradoxically could also hurt Albuquerque tech-heavy business
Verdict: probably a good idea, and probably not anti-green, esp. given the nature of City Council as a check on the Mayor

Public Safety "Sanctuary City" Policy

Berry wants to end this
"This" is a policy that makes life in Albuquerque easier for illegal immigrants
It will instead merge APD policy with current Bernalillo county policy, which makes illegal immigrant status relevant upon arrest, instead of waiting to see if illegal immigrant status matters specifically to the case at hand
Also: he wants to end the practice of drivers licenses for illegal immigrants
He sees the drivers license policy an enabling crime, and is careful to mention that he voted in favor of anti-profiling laws
I can't figure this one out

I don't know the data on how Marty's policy is specifically intrusive.
I am not sure I like the Bernalillo policy of "immigrant status only on arrest" better than the ABQ policy of "immigrant status only if explicitly necessary", but I like them both better than most things most states do about illegal immigrants in the name of crime prevention
I'm a very big fan of the drivers license program for illegal immigrants - it allows them to report crimes without a fear of themselves being arrested, and that is great, and an anti-crime measure. I do not see where it increases crime (besides, of course, the crime of being here illegally).
I think coherence between Bernalillo and Albuquerque police departments would be good, but I'm not sure they both shouldn't adopt Marty's policy instead.
Despite evidence to the contrary, I don't think this is actually racist. Berry wouldn't have voted for an anti-profiling law if he was, and he'd also be opposed to Bernalillo policy if this was racially motivated, or just about not liking illegal immigrants
Then: I don't know how this benefits safety, and I don't have racism as an easy excuse for a police policy that isn't about safety.
I would really like to see the data that made Berry support this position, because I feel as though something vital is omitted here that would give it all coherence.

Public Safety: Property Crime

My prior biases on this section:

Property crime is inherently a class-biased concern
I'm generally more for saving the lives of people than I am for saving their stuff; if I have to prioritize, that is how I am doing it.
That said, protection of property is what allows for stability, investment, and western civilization.

Proposes actual budget reallocation: away from beautification projects like Tingley and the Trolleys, and permanently to Youth Gang Prevention, Substance Abuse Programs and Neighborhood Deterioration
Acknowledge the economics of the issue by making the selling of stolen property, and the ensuing profits, much more difficult
The plan to cut down on resale of stolen property mainly involves carrying through with persecutions
None of this is inherently bad. Some of it is actually quite good.
Very little of this gets in the way of saving lives when lives need to be saved; in fact, that he sees Substance Abuse programs as linked to property crimes is really, really smart. I think he gets this.

Government transparency

Oooo, online searchable trackable spending of tax dollars. Accountability-lovers dream.
Also, public, online access to "The City’s “Checkbook” and General Ledger Accounts
Contract Amounts and Vendors; Government Salaries; and Study/Program Data." is in no way a bad idea.
There isn't much more, but none of this is bad, and much of it is quite good.

Conclusions

I'm not going to endorse anyone in this race.

I like what Richard Romero has to say about Green Energy and Sustainable Development. I think he has great ideas for education but I worry about involving the mayoral office in education. I also think he feels the need to improve policing and transparency, but I am not convinced he knows a way to do that.

I think that Mayor Marty has done less than he credits himself with, but more than his critics think. I'm genuinely skeptical about his approach to public safety, and what that means for youth in this city. But he's not all bad, and many of his non-development initiatives are things that have improved Albuquerque. I can't really deny that. I don't like that he has been mayor of my city for 3/5s of my life, but he's not incompetent enough to outright disqualify.

I knew nothing about Richard Berry before this post, and I have been genuinely surprised to find a pro-active-government member of the GOP. Perhaps the past decade of neocons and the past years sparking of libertarian activism have thrown off my understanding of what republicans can be, but it's kind of pleasant to discover a sane, pro-business centrist. That said, I'm still not sure I like him. His proposes policy changes concerning illegal immigrants are savvy, and I do not think they are done with malice/hatred/xenophobia or any other excuse that would interfere with his logic. I still can't see what that logic is, however, unless it's a simple belief in the rule of law, and the includes immigration law. To me, immigration law is secondary to the lives of the people residing in Albuquerque, but such a legalistic perspective is at least something I can disagree with reasonably, instead of vehemently oppose. His section on property crime (and, actually, his plan on immediate and long term growth) seems to include a smart reading of behavioral economics (or at least a partial one, to which I say: yay!), and his transparency plans are, simply put, great. My hesitancy on him unrelated to illegal immigrants is that I'm don't see any focus on Albuquerque green and even better for tech. "Green" is never mentioned, and the tech is just assumed. These are not bad things, but they are not great things. I want, in 2009, to have a mayor that is about renewable energy, and about long-lasting renewable energy growth in my desert city. Much as I like his other policies, he doesn't have that little crucial bit.

What does this mean to you, the voter?

Albuquerque has three comprable candidates, none of them bad, none of them stellar. Whoever wins the election, I will disagree with/be skeptical of their Public Safety initiatives. But otherwise, there's some real choice - Romero is aiming Burque green and sustainable, and that's good. Marty is all about making Albuquerque a city that is thriving, and he's done that repeatedly through odd ways (curiously, most of the development that in my mind defines Marty was left out of his list of achievements). And Richard Berry has some good economic policy, and perhaps the transparency plan the Duke City needs. These are not bad choices. They all come with downsides (Romero's education intrusiveness, the person of Marty Chavez, Berry's skepticism about illegal immigrants), so it's a choice to weigh carefully.

Last Word

I mention all of this as a gigantic aside to a future discussion about the Mayoral Race in my second city of New Orleans, where my biases are clear and I'm outright supporting a candidate. Next to the range of possibilities afforded New Orleans, the ABQ race is dull. Be grateful - that dull means it is very, very, very hard for a wrong choice to fuck up and destroy the city.

How to Lose Students and Alienate Community

2009-08-01T12:16:00.004-06:00

In the Albuquerque Journal this morning, there was an article discussing the new smoking bans on the university of New Mexico campus. Here's a map of the designated smoking areas with perhaps the best one-sentence summary of the issue. Initially, it is easy to sympathize with the college - in an ideal world, no one ever dies of lung cancer from second hand smoke, and that's a noble aim. But noble aims go pear shaped all the time.

When I was a high schooler, I helped engineer and pass a ban on smoking at UU youth conferences in my district. I'd lost a grandparent to lung cancer not long before. I was no fan of smoking, and high school conferences had previously had a problem of an exclusive community of smokers existing. That in turn led to people who wanted to spend time with their friends either breathing a lot of second hand smoke or starting smoking themselves, both of which are far from ideal for a religious youth conference. On top of it all, UUs tend to have a high ratio of asthmatics/those with breathing problems, and smoke itself was a hazard for them. So many of us moved to pass a ban by majority vote. We succeeded.

What happened, then, was a lot of destruction. Con-goers who smoked would come with their addiction, but being high schoolers, without the income to have nicotine gum or patches instead of cigarettes. Or they would sneak off to try and calm their addiction so they could be present for community, and we'd ban them from coming back. A few youth, in the middle of high school, just stopped coming to cons outright, feeling unwelcome and hated by their peers. It was against the spirit of the community, and the values of the religion, and the ban remains to this day. It is by far the most lasting decision I had made as part of that community, and it causes harm. What it doesn't do is get people to stop smoking. Our noble aim failed utterly.

The ban didn't actually address any real problems. It was a prohibition, and it attempted to excise a behavior. Had we been concerned about the health of the asthmatics, we would have kept smoking outside and away from entryways. Had we been concerned about the health of smokers, we could have provided nicotine patches for them, and let them still be part of our community. And had we cared for the whole of the community, we would have enacted a policy by a system of consensus, not a majority vote, and certainly not by a handed-down ruling. We did none of this, and instead shifted problems around. We lost people, we made others feel uncomfortable, and we violated our own principles.

The UNM smoking ban is well-intentioned. But it is a frustrating prohibition forced upon legal adults, and it goes beyond necessary restriction (like 30 feet from entryways) to become an obsessive nanny state policy. And it might ultimately have the desired effect, but I still feel that it shows a disregard for the capacity of adults to make personally responsible choices. Part of giving people freedom, and giving people responsibility, is giving room for mistakes. Here, I think, it'd do well to quote Lux Alptraum:

And this is, perhaps, the crux of a progressive discourse: to be able to recognize the reality and rationale of bad decisions, while still pushing forward with an idea of what we all should be doing, of what our best decisions look like. Because it’s only with the knowledge of what we should be doing, and why, that we have the ability to stray safely — to make those mistakes and live to regret them (or not regret them, as the case may be).

In order to be rational people, we have to have that range of decision making. Forcing people's decisions simply doesn't work.

Obama Healthcare Quickie

2009-07-22T18:58:00.002-06:00

Obama just gave a press conference on healthcare, and my thoughts will probably go up here tomorrow. For now, though, here's a redirect to my blog series on healthcare from the beginning of summer.

Equally important: here's an amazing New Yorker article about why paying-per-test is a terrible plan, and why the Mayo Clinic Model is kind of brilliant.

Money is Tinkerbell

2009-07-20T23:15:00.000-06:00

Money, as currently exists, is an entity whose usage is dependent on confidence, and whose value is dependent on interest rates. Interest itself isn't a trait native to money but is dependent upon the agencies responsible for the creation of money itself. In many countries, this is handled by a central bank; The Bank of England, for example, or in Germany the Bundesbank. In the United States, our central bank equivalent is the Federal Reserve, which is frequently attacked for being this shadowy, arbitrary, and impartial conspiracy unto itself. Given the nature of money, I like it for exactly those reasons.

Puzzled? You're not alone. The Nation recently authored a very thorough article discussing how to reform the Federal Reserve for the modern age, and to end the collusion between it and bankers. The article raises many valid points, and I'm still not entirely certain of my opposition to the plan it suggests.

Anyway. Here is my rough contrast between the Fed and Congress as vehicles for Money Generation in this nation.

Congress: explicit money generation (as, notably, stated in the constitution. Article 1, section 8). So what the Fed does (coin money, regulate the value thereof) are congressional powers. The traditional avenue for money expansion (growth through lending) requires that congress borrow money on the Credit of the United States, which itself seems to require a body outside the United States Government. Note: There is nothing here saying congress couldn't set the interest rate or will money into existence. Responsibilities other than money generation: the entire federal budget, as well as tax creation/other sources of federal income. Basically, all that spending that people look upon so unfavorably.

Fed: Somewhat arcane money generation, thanks to it's backroom dealings with bankers and the inherent secrecy of its governing board. Controls interest on the dollar, can release surpluses of money that it wills into existence. There are more steps to the process, but the Fed, as the controller of dollar creation, can spontaneously have $80 billion to distribute into banks. Responsibilities other than money generation: regulation of banks, sort of. Which it has totally failed at. But it still does money generation fine.

On paper, there is no reason congress shouldn't generate money. But since money is confidence-based, and since it's explicit value (interest) is also tied to confidence, I am hesitant to put the money supply directly under congressional control. Congress, as a body, is not terribly confidence inspiring. It's like asking the audience to clap so that Captain Hook can live - it makes just as much sense as clapping for Tinkerbell, but no one likes Captain Hook, and so they'd all just let him die. In that sense, I think, the Fed does wonders. By playing an abstract role at a distance from the rest of government, it gets to appear weird and fickle and impartial. While it's more vulnerable today than it has been at almost any point since existence, the dollar is not being questioned. It is, as arbitrary currencies go, okay. What usually happens with massive injections of newly made money is hyperinflation, as prices go up and dollars become worth less. Right now, it looks like the dollar is deflating. As the fed injects new money, money is actually becoming more valuable. Even though we can see it being conjured into existence. It's strange, and I attribute it to the very obtuseness and arcane workings of the Fed.

This doesn't mean that the Fed is flawless, or that money is itself worthless. But because the value of money is largely dependent upon people thinking it has value, there is something to be said for money generation to be a detached, almost magical process. You've got to convince people to clap, and we'll keep doing it for Tinkerbell.

Obama the Dictator? Part 3: Conclusions

2009-07-16T20:08:00.005-06:00

Note: this series of posts is distilled from a conversation I had online, in which my responses were so over-long and verbose that I realized they'd make better blog posts. Some slight changes have been made to style, but the content is the same.

Obama is not fascist: a mere definitional examination of the term is enough to easily rule that out. Nor is he a dictator: he won in a popular election, as well as in the electoral college. Dictators rarely, if ever, come into power through fair or open elections. And his presidential power is not unique or unprecedented; we just had 8 years of expansion of executive power, so it should come as no surprise that the current president enjoys many of the powers awarded his predecessor. This is all unexpected.

The disappointment in the conclusion, then, is that many similar abuses remain. Some of the targets of these abuses have changed (or, more correctly, some of the perceived victims may have changed), but the power remains, and has not been dismantled. We have a president in the United States with serious power. No surprise there. That some of it is unconstitutional is a bit disappointing, and that's the fun part of being a citizen.

Caring about politics means perpetual stewardship.

Even with the president you wanted, just as much as with the president you didn't. As Americans, with our peculiar form of democracy, we have to constantly work to secure the rights we should already have, to secure the ones we are wrongfully denied, and to make sure that our government accurately reflects us as people. The only things outright damaging to this system are apathy (which allows others more invested to dictate all decisions), and powerlessness/rage (which themselves see the destruction of existing institutions as the only way to freedom). I don't feel that either of those are viable, but they both offer the easy moral shortcut of wiping one's hands clean of this nation. To care, to be invested in this nation, one has to accept the existence some terrible things while one works to make them right. I'm a bit of a statist, so my default position is always that change can come gradually, and can come from within. And partisan though I am, this is true across administrations. Very little will change that, while very little will convince the apathetic/powerless/angry that this is possible.

Obama the Dictator? Part 2: Supporting Arguments Examined, Debunked

2009-07-16T15:45:00.006-06:00

Note: this series of posts is distilled from a conversation I had online, in which my responses were so over-long and verbose that I realized they'd make better blog posts. Some slight changes have been made to style, but the content is the same.

Specific Claim:

1. A controlled media, for example the fact that the press corps is rigged (just one example)

Counter:

1. The press is rigged? The press always shows a bias a) to those in power, and b) to folk that get them good ratings. Bush was an exceedingly popular president in his first term, and I was kind of appalled by how networks could be fawning over him. I'm still appalled by Fox news, but that's because my bias is elsewhere. I don't like MSNBC for it's blatant pandering either, really. And CNN is gimmicky bullshit. I get my news from sources that aren't television. Television is awful. But that fact that it is ratings-minded and lowest-common-denominator doesn't mean that it's rigged. It means that it is flawed.
ALSO - oftentimes, the media is dependent on the White House for the release of important information. In the case of the Iraq War, the Bush administration was free to control most of the flow of information to the media. So it's not good, but it is hardly a unique crime.

Specific Claim

2. The fact that the government is putting in legislation pushed by close friends of the President which will severely limit the civil liberties of some groups (ie Christians, Veterans, and others that have been labeled more dangerous than the Islamic Jihad by Homeland security)

Counter

2. Inside the US, as inside any nation, the biggest threat to domestic stability comes from the armed, unemployed, and disenfranchised. In the US, the relatively small Muslim community is one that largely came here by choice, came with means, and on average is living the American Dream quite well, having a higher income on average than other demographics. Inside the US, Muslims have no reason to be labeled a threat.
However, the last great act of terrorism perpetrated against the US before 9/11, and the largest act of US domestic terrorism, came from a christian and a veteran. It's a damn ugly fact, but the militia movement that arose in the 90s was made because it was a democrat in office, someone to the left of what they wanted. Had this protest been purely ideological, the militia would have been active for the past 8 years resisting Bush. They weren't. This is partisan.
Last summer, an out of work white man opened fire on Unitarians because liberals were ruining this country. Same with the young man who shot up Pittsburgh police. Same with the old Nazi who shot up the DC Holocaust museum. Same with the man who shot George Tiller. This is rightist violence, not anti-authoritarian violence. The DHS didn't label those groups threats because they are political opposition. They labeled them threats because they have, over the past 20 years, consistently proven themselves to be threats when Democrats are in power.
Internationally, Muslim extremists are more of a threat. Domestically, not so much.

Specific Claim

3. His Chicago style elimination of people he sees as a threat ie: Sarah Palin

Counter

3. Palin's role on the national stage as much as anything led to her resignation. That Obama benefits from it is clear. But that he caused it? That's a claim with little supporting evidence beyond her own personal sentiments

Specific Claim

4. His installation of Czars which have no accountability to either the people or the legislature.

Counter

4. We've had Czar's in office since the 1970s (conspiracy theorists note the prominence of Biden's name in this article.) ALL MODERN PRESIDENTS DO THIS. To make an exception for Obama is really to dislike him for other means, and be frustrated that he's making the decisions. If you're upset about the power itself existing, then protest it in every administration since Nixon. Don't single out one guy.

Specific Claim

5. He socialized corporations AND banks

Counter

5. This isn't socializing the banks or any other corporation. That would mean the federal government would assume permanent ownership, or that the public would assume permanent ownership through the government. That isn't happening. The US populace hates it when the government owns anything, and government here isn't set up to run these institutions. The strict capitalist thing to do would be to let them all fail, but that didn't work in the depression, and I'd rather go through temporary stewardship than risk global economic collapse.

Specific Claim

6. He practices misinformation, and has supported hate mongering legislation in congress. Also, he's criminalized Christianity

Counter

6. All governments practice media manipulation. It's the role of the citizenry to hold the media accountable for honesty. There's been no hate mongering legislation, unless you count the president's support of DOMA. Homeland security is an executive branch body, and so doesn't legislate to get its will done. I don't actually know what bills you're referring to, so I can't counter with specifics. Being involved in the economy is what government does, ever since the 1930s, and even before, really. I wouldn't call any of this fascist. I'd call it government.
6b. The groups criminalized are those that urge murder, like the Army of God abortion clinic bombers. That's not a religious group, in the way that al-Qaeda isn't a religious group. Religion is a shared identity, but the purpose is different. That's not criminalizing religion; that's criminalizing terrorism.

Specific Claim

7. I'm sick of "Well we inherited this mess": put on your big boy pants and quit lying to people; or "why are you still blaming the past - if you're in power, can't you fix it?"

Counter

7. And you're right, it's been almost 6 months with Obama in the Whitehouse. He should have done a lot more to dismantle the police state he inherited. But to say that you can fix every thing that went wrong over the past 8 years in 6 months is really just to ask the president to fail. That's unrealistic, and it's absurd.
New Orleans still has fields where in August 2005 it had neighborhoods. It's been almost 4 years, in the richest nation on earth. You'd think we'd have this done by now, but we haven't. Why? Remaking is incredibly hard work. It takes time and sustained effort.
I'm not asking you to pass the buck back to the Bush Administration. I'm just asking you to acknowledge the role they had in making possible this present government you so despise. Obama did not spring into office fully formed from the mind of Keynes. The past *matters*.

Specific Claim

8. Fascists always come in under a different name and there are different types, George Bush was a militarist, Obama's more of a Machiavelli type
8a. Czars are creepy-powerful; I am upset about the Czars, i understand that they've existed but it makes me nervous to watch people being put in charge of huge areas of our day to day life as a nation and being answerable to one person and one person only.

Counter

8. Fascists come in explicitly under the fascist name. Franco was explicit, Hitler was explicit, Mussolini coined the word to describe his party.

8a.And yeah, I don't like it too, but that's a different issue. That's not about the person of Obama; that's about the nature of US government. The difference is important.

Specific Claim

9. I just don't understand how more government is the answer to big government that was promised on the campaign, or how spending more money will get us out of debt.

Counter

9. The reason that we are currently spending more money is because depressions are caused by an absolute lack of spending. The brilliance of Keynesian economics is that the great depression was a perfectly functioning laissez faire state: all savings were invested as capital. The problem is that it was a balance of zero - no savings mean no investment. The way out of the depression, the spending in times of scarcity, is to get money circulating. Ideally, leaving a depression money flows fast enough so that tax revenue on the recovery compensates for spending at the lowest point. Governments are weird, and one of the few institutions that can spend money on the promise that they'll exist to repay it. It's weird, certainly, but it is doable by nations in a way that it isn't by personal finance.

9a. Big government is always a tricky proposition. I certainly enjoy roads, schools, and the presence of law enforcement. I also like that my home is protected militarily. Those are more or less given baselines, rights made possible by government. I would really like the certainty of lifelong healthcare not tied to my employer - that'd be a right and a freedom I could enjoy if we had a public healthcare option or a universal healthcare system. Government would make the possible, and can do it in a much better way than our system currently unfolds. At present, as soon as I graduate college and am off my parent's plan, I have no guarantee of health, and won't until I find stable, salaried employment. If I freelance, my costs for healthcare go way up. If I work part time or in many hourly jobs, I wouldn't have an affordable option for healthcare. So that's a problem that big government can solve, by taking over with universal (unlikely) or introducing a public option. And then there is regulation. I'm pretty happy having not played with lead toys as a kid. I enjoy the safety provided by speed limits. I like that zoning prevents a factory being built next to my house. I'm in favor of requiring minimum standards for how companies treat their workers. And I like that companies have to pay attention to their ... environmental impact, because I enjoy a livable world. That's government that is kind of big, but provides a lot of immediate benefits.
Also, I like that we have a justice department and a state department, to conduct our internal and external affairs with professionalism. Those are large, executive branches that benefit this nation as a whole, but individually its much harder to see. Or the FDA, which though sometimes iffy at least means there is a place that can prevent poison being sold as medicine. Or FEMA, so that when shit hits the fan we have someone to respond or a place for blame. That's all big - we're a nation of 300 million. The only big government I outright have a problem with are things like the department of homeland security, which is a scary police-state apparatus thing. It shouldn't exist, and their are serious problems with the current forms of the CIA and FBI. And, oddly enough, the FCC which let telecommunications companies doing spying work on ordinary ... citizens without warrants. That scares me, because it is big and ignores constitutional rights. That is what I hoped Obama would get rid of, and again, he's lagging on this.

Specific Claim

10. I cannot say with any fibre of my being that Barack Obama sits well with me. I believe our President is morally bankrupt and lacking in any real understand of what's going on.

Counter

10. I have seen nothing in Obama to suggest an immorality - though Chicago breeds fear he's Hawaiian by birth, and that's a very different sort of multicultural upbringing from every US president ever. But that's a different ethnic perspective and national context; that doesn't strike me as ... immoral. And yes, he's admitted this nation is flawed. We certainly are - our constitution declares certain people both less than human and property. That's a flaw, and while we've amended it away, the past does not die with legislation. Things are certainly better now than they ever have been, but that doesn't mean they are perfect or that their isn't work to be done. But again, that's a perspective. That isn't immorality.
As for lacking in real understanding, I was first drawn to Obama because he, of all things, understood the internet. That seemed to me to be relevant understanding, and was something Hillary lacked or didn't care to publicize. And I voted for Obama on the basis of Foreign Policy, because he saw a way for the US to function in the world that was ... still strong but did not require belligerence or demonization. He is willing to try diplomacy first, and I think that shows a profound understanding for the dignity of other nations and for the US's role on the international stage.
As for his economics, I think he gets it. You govern differently in a recession than in a boom time, and he's doing that. But look. I like Obama because his policies resonate well with me. There are many Americans that don't go online, or live in cities, or trust other nations, and to them he may look foolish. While he is many things, incompetent is not one of them.

Obama the Dictator? Part 1: the Claim itself

2009-07-16T13:03:00.005-06:00

Note: this series of posts is distilled from a conversation I had online, in which my responses were so over-long and verbose that I realized they'd make better blog posts. Some slight changes have been made to style, but the content is the same.

Claim: Obama is fascist, or close to it

Rebuttal:

1. Crying "Fascism" is a lazy talking point made by whoever is out of power in US politics.

2. Distinguishing between Obama and Fascists:

2a. Popularity: Obama is charismatic; so were fascists, but the similarities more or less stop there.

2b. Civil Rights violations: I'm a bit disappointed that he hasn't done more immediately for civil rights, but he wasn't in office when Bush and the legislature passed the Patriot Act, from which most rights violations stem. And it was the Bush justice department that allowed for the label of "enemy combatant" to be a loophole out of the law. I believe that current policy is under review, but at any rate it didn't start with Obama (counterpoint: continuing a flawed policy is jsut as bad as creating it)

2c. Involvement in the National Economy is a Fascist Characteristic: Involvement in the national economy, it is no different than that of many, long-standing democratic governments. England, for example, went further and nationalized *as a democracy*. France for decades supported "national champions" on subsidies. But neither of those were fascist moves, in the same way that injecting money into the banks or assuming control of GM isn't fascist. It's statist, but that is the nature of government

3. Defining Fascism
Fascism has a huge component of nationalism and militarism, historically coming from an alliance of the unemployed, veterans, and conservative politically/religiously, and historically all against communist or leftist governments. Obama has no new militarism; he made his name by being anti-war. And while he is certainly on the left, totalitarianism on the left is not fascism; it's communist, it's socialist, or it's totalitarian, but it is decidedly not *fascist*. And most totalitarian features of leftist government are missing here - there have been no nationalizations, and the government is only holding companies temporarily until it can inject taxpayer dollars into stable private institutions. Bush did the same in October, and it's a fundamentally capitalist/centrist move.

4. Being angry about the President when your party is out of power You can disagree with the president. Lord knows every American does it at least half the time. But being charismatic != being fascist, and being the executive does != being a dictator.

Airing my own Dirty Laundry

2009-07-09T23:18:00.002-06:00

I've always been fairly vocal and political, so it is probably unsurprising that some of my teenage opinions found themselves in the local paper and are now online, in a nice sort of permanent-record way. So, in the interest of full online disclosure, here's the article.

Now, I stand by my 16 year old self. I've said many times on this blog that I believe in youth rights, that I think the voting age should be lowered, and that youth free speech matters. And I say this well aware that this is my example of youth free speech:

At the other end of the spectrum is Albuquerque High School junior Kelsey Atherton, who not only refuses to say the pledge, but stands facing the opposite direction. Sometimes he says different words or makes additions to the pledge. When it comes to "under God," Atherton says "under god/s, under goddess/es, or lack there of."
Atherton says he stands backward because he is angry about Bush's re-election and the war in Iraq. "Absurd" is the word he uses to describe the war and the government's handling of Hurricane Katrina. He makes additions to the pledge to focus on what he sees as a narrow interpretation of God. The pledge should have either no religion or more inclusive language, he says. He even goes so far as to compare it to fascist chanting.

There are explanations for all of these; I'll go briefly through each one.

"Under God/s and/or Goddess/es or lack thereof". I'm Unitarian. I have always been aware of a plurality of beliefs and belief systems, so the adoption of a formal procedure in public school to honor a very narrow interpretation of God, perhaps more broad than the Abrahamic Deity but not terribly so, is offensive as it alienates. It excludes the diversity that we as a nation cherish and celebrate, so that's why I tried to be more inclusive with my coverage of religion in the pledge. ALSO - it throws the meter of the pledge way off to say it, which helps highlight the fact that even "under God" throws off the pledges meter. "Under God" is a Cold War edition to the pledge urged by the Knights of Columbus as a way to further distinguish the US from the secular philosophy and government of Communists, specifically the USSR. The Cold War is over; if we are to still have a pledge, we don't need it to contain that.
We don't really need a pledge. It is a weird national ritual, and it seems like the kind of thing we as a nation make kids do because they are too young to question it, and powerless enough to not object to it. While it isn't actually a bad thing to say (I have a copy of the original, pre-"under god" version in my room), I think it is a bad thing to ask people to say when they don't know what it means. That, to me, makes it fascistic - it asks for unquestioning devotion to a symbol of a nation, and then to the nation itself, does so with a divine mandate, and it is as a matter of course done nationally by children who can get in trouble for not joining it. That's disturbing, and it is kind of what kings do. We as a nation were founded on loyalty requiring consent - we left a nation that had abused our loyalty, and we fought a war with them because they were surprised we'd questioned the arrangement. Ritual, unexamined chanting does not have a place in our democracy.
Protesting the Presidency of George W. Bush. I've never denied my partisan identity, and I will stand by my belief that George W. Bush is among the worst presidents this nation has ever had. While I disagreed broadly with most of his policy decisions, Iraq and Katrina stand as failures that go beyond policy approach. The Iraq War has a long litany of problems - foremost in my mind is how destabilizing and unnecessary it was, and how poorly planned it was. As for Katrina, it was the exact kind of natural disaster that we as a nation should have been able to handle. I sincerely think presidential neglect played a part in the destruction, alongside many, many other factors. So that's why I felt the need to have a symbolic protest. But the question will come to my choice of the pledge as forum for protest.
The Pledge in Public schools is almost-tailor-made for petty dissent. It is short, daily, and overtly national. It's done during homeroom, which is a dead time in the academic day anyway. It is done amongst a group of peers. All of these facilitate the use of the pledge as a way to express a political opinion, with a minimum of effort, to one's peers (among whom one's opinion is important), without causing any substantive problems. I did it because I was upset (as many teenagers are), but also because I was upset politically (as I can be), and because I really, really needed to show that I was intellectually not on board with the leadership and actions of my nation. And that hurts, to care about a nation and feel so alienated from it's conduct that even joining in a morning ritual becomes hard. That's a political opinion that matters, and I'm pretty sure that the pledge is as good a forum as any to voice it. It did exactly what I needed a symbolic gesture to do, and it helped me keep my head through the other inanities of high school. That, I think, is reason enough.

And so it's out there and acknowledged. A political young adult was a political teenager. And while I deliberately try to be less aggressive, alienating, and partisan now, I think my actions as a youth were justified, were appropriate, and played a valuable role in shaping my present political identity.

GA Postlude

2009-07-03T02:09:00.001-06:00

I spent today in San Francisco visiting an old friend. She's smart, and a year and a half shy of graduating from a university in Mexico City. We've been in contact for about four years, though we've seen each other hardly at all. In the total of our years of correspondence, we had somehow avoided the topic of religion. This is odd, especially for someone so focused on religion as myself, but today afforded us the opportunity to talk about it for hours. She was all questions, and so the topic became Unitarian Universalism. Within half an hour, she was fascinated. She'd never heard of the religion before outside of myself, and I had a hunch that given the right minister or the right congregation, she might actually have felt comfortable there. It was a highlight for me, to see someone so open to the religion as an entity unto itself, instead of a reaction against past unpleasantness. This, I think, is how we grow - casually, offering pluralistic spiritual fulfillment to all, not just those who have already tried and been burnt by religion.

Walking back from the BART, I was talking one of the friends I was staying with. I mentioned seeing the San Francisco Unitarian Universalist Church, and she mentioned having been UU until she was 10. I asked her why she left, and she said that the church she had belonged to did not believe in background checks for child care workers. This developed into a problem, and the family left the faith because a lofty ideal failed the church so utterly. This is how we shrink, and this is what has kept us small.

UUA GA Quickie #4: Backstory

2009-06-27T00:50:00.005-06:00

Today in conversation with a group of adults from my original church, I was asked to specify why I joined my second church during college, and why I am still in the faith when so many people my age raised UU have left. There is no single factor; here's the list of things I proposed as playing some role:

The Mid-High Guidance Committee. When I was 13, I was upset with the curriculum that year (bible-based), and with the decision to break middle schoolers into a group of 6th-7th graders, and a group of 8th-9th graders. I was in 7th grade; my closest friends were in 8th grade. I wrote a letter to my teachers and the Director of Religious Education expressing my discontent. Within months, the "Mid-High Guidance Comittee" had been created, for the purpose of sustaining community among middle schoolers.
Church Camp, which was the first real place that I was introduced to a broader community of UU peers, and which as always to me been an affirmation of community as a religious discipline. It helps, too, that the camp has involved into a highly generationally integrated setting, with children as young as five, elementary schoolers, middle schoolers, teenagers that run programing, college kids that do behind-the-scenes camp maintence, young adults that steward high school programming, and adult adults that run elementary and middle school curriculum.
Youth Leadership through Church Camp and YRUU. As mentioned in the previous point, high schoolers do a lot of the actual work of church camp. For me, that opportunity to be in a leadership position with other youth helping Unitarian kids from that age of 14 was a tremendous affirmation of the value of community, and the right of everyone involved to shape the circumstances around them. My experience with YRUU was similar. As a new youth, I did not really enjoy Conferences, but I found he business of Cons fascinating and loved the good work of improving our community. In my sophomore year, I was able to serve my home state as the New Mexico Social Action Coordinator. That too was a powerful experience for me, as it connected leadership/community involvement and works towards social justice.
Religious Education Committee. In high school, I was asked to fill a vacancy left by my father leaving the RE committee, and also to accompany a fellow youth. Being able to advocate for those younger than myself, and to strike compromises between the desires of adult teachers and the needs of UU children was valuable. It also let me see the inner workings behind a significant part of my childhood, and realize what adults could be like in decision making, which helped me see myself as just as worthy of having a say.
Worship Committee. In late high school, after leaving the RE committee, I was asked to be on the Worship committee, tasked with lay-leading and planning our services. This was the first leadership opportunity I had that did not involve youth or children as the primary focus, and it was a joy and an affirmation to be part of working for the larger church community. It also put me on stage as a lay leader about once a month, and that meant as a given I was at church at least once a month.
Denominational Affairs Committee. I was asked again to first serve alongside and then replace the friend who had founded the committee.
Youth Worship. Youth Sunday at First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque stands as my favorite worship ever, and for five years I was able to speak at it. First year was with the coming of age sermon, and the next four years were all as part of the youth group. Speaking one's spiritual story is important for many UU's (all, really), and to be able to year after year speak my story as a raised UU with other raised UUs was truly an affirmation of our place within the denomination
Opportunities to speak to the congregation outside of youth worship. I was at 17 asked to give a pulpit editorial for something like stewardship sunday. This was my first time speaking not with oter youth, and I was able to share my experience of church camp and its sacred community. More recently, as a college student I was invited back to contribute a pulpit editorial for Christine's presidential campaign sermon. While having the editorial ready on the day of the sermon fell through, I was able instead to speak to a post-election mindset. As someone away at college studying politics, the ability to share that part of my life with my home congregation was again affirming.
Other programming I've forgotten. OWL, coming of age, my church extended family, the meaning found in my grandfathers memorial service at All Soul's in DC, the ability to use anti-racism training at my high school, the mid-high steered chirstmas pageants, and myriad other examples that have at the moment slipped my mind exist. While all important in their own way, they signify also that I am someone who would have the church be a part of my life as almost a given. Whether or not I am that way now because of any part of programming in my life is debatable, but I think the role played by all the programmign and engagement I have had with this faith makes it undeniable.

When asked by Albuquerque what they did right in raising my UU, I can't answer with anything other than this: they gave me religion that was not just spiritually satisfying, that was not just built around community, that was not just built around work towards social justice, and that was not just handed down to me. It was, instead, the sacred community whose work was justice, and whose rules and governance was malleable by one who felt the need to be involved and to effect change. It was holistic religion.

And it is what enabled me, in the first weeks of my freshmen year of college, to attend First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans. It is the backdrop I had in my mind when I wrote these first impressions of what it was New Orleans UUs did right.

UUA GA Quickie #3: Election

2009-06-26T01:38:00.005-06:00

There is a lot, a lot, a lot to be said about the UUA presidential election. I had at one point considered doing an objective, issue-by-issue analysis of the candidates similar to what I'd done for last years USA presidential election, but by the time I got around to writing it, my decision had been made, by ballot sent in, and my bias/partisanship would have been removed all hope at an objective reality. So for now, I will direct you to Christine's post, where she sums up most of the reasons why I support Peter Morales, and does so with less word-mincing or restraint than I would have used.

My few salient points not covered:

Both candidates are amazingly well qualified, and we as a faith are blessed to have such a choice
This is not the Boomer Woman/Outsider Male POC dichotomy that it superficially appears to be, and we can be greatful for this as well
If I had to stereotype, Hallman's approach is ministerial and Morales approach is technocratic
Given that choice, I feel a technocrat better serves the organization of the UUA, while a focus exclusively on ministry is useful on the congregational level
That said, I think ministry gets the votes, and I'm anticipating a 52/48 Hallman/Morales split based purely on GA presence and the specificity of the audience (existing UU's with the affluence to come to GA)
And, qualified though I think both are (see first bullet point), I really, really, really think that Peter Morales has the ability to lead the UUA as an organization instead of a very large church. Not that being part of the larger fellowship is unimportant, but the UUA must be treated as an organization and not a congregation
Lastly, there is the matter of rhetoric. Hallman writes in the eloquent vague that could almost be called house style for Unitarians, and that's powerful with the Unitarians already present. Morales presents explicit plans, data, and is keenly aware of the nitty-gritty of the tasks he is going to undertake. Specificity allows plans to be attacked with greater ease, but at least he has set out plans

And all that said, the campaign has been only slightly uncomfortable. Cheering at candidate forums + visible candidate identification signs + leading questions all allow for tension, but I think I'm only sensitive to these tensions because of how otherwise aligned I feel with all attendees.

UUA GA Quickie #2: More about Evil

2009-06-26T01:35:00.002-06:00

There is a lot to be said for Bill Sinkford's emphasis on the language of reverence in Unitarian Universalism today. After all, we cannot be a faith that intends to shape the world if we trap ourselves with academic formalities and euphemisms. The life we lead is profoundly affected by religion, by the divine, and if we cannot address the holy as holy, then we have failed in understanding life. And so far at GA I have seen a positive move towards the language of reverence, towards and acknowledgement of that which is divine as divine, and towards the truly meaningful parts of human life as religiously powerful. This is a positive step.

What concerns me, however, is the ease with which we adopt the language of denunciation and evil. To me, the strongest part of our UU heritage, and the most gut-reactionary part of my being, is the abscence of sin as a meaningful concept in human life. This has a lot to do with my personal character - as someone rather political, it does me only harm to assume evil on behalf of my opposition. But I have said my piece here about evil and politics, and this is more than that.

The concept of evil, of sin, of profound wrongness equal to the peaks of reverence all strike me as oppositional to the Unitarian understanding of inherent worth and dignity. More importantly than that, they to me stand in stark contrast to our Universalist heritage. The core tenent of universalism is that God loves all of us too much to ever see us without redemption. And I think the usage of evil in UU discourse removes the possibility of change and redemption for any who finds themselves as oppositional beings.

Not that I am willing to elmininate the usage of evil from our discourse entirely: the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, the US slave trade, the conquest of the Americas, and myriad other actions stand out in my mind as evil. But those are actions not individuals, and while we can deplore them now, denouncing the dead is in no way helpful. For evil to be a useful concept, we have to be able to examine the why of evil; the who is almost meaningless. With a who, we can assign blame. With a why, we can understand how evil happens and has happened in the past, and we can act on that information.

~

It is also important to notice how powerfully alienating "good and evil" are for our humanist and athiest co-religionists. We should be exceptionally careful with the use of "evil" for that reason alone.

UUA GA Quickie #1

2009-06-25T08:09:00.003-06:00

Last night, the opening sermon was given by a young and talented raised UU minister. Her speech was intricate, optimistic, and contained a call for action. It even saw the logic behind "We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person" and transformed that into "we are already holy". Magnificent, moving stuff.

I profoundly disagree with her, however, on the necessity of evil in the systems that oppose us. It goes too strongly against my faith in humanity, and in my understanding of politics. Closest to this sentiment, I think, is James Madison, writing in the Federalist No. 51

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to government, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In forming a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

We are not more holy than any other in creating our governance, and while I do feel that crafting society is sacred work, I do not see the evil inherent in its creation, nor in its creators. If there is evil in the result, it is because humans cannot foresee every problem, and because systems are slow to adapt to change.

But that does not make the opposition evil. It may make it obstructionist, misguided, or harmful. But that doesn't make it evil. That makes it human.

Why I'm still for Team Obama

2009-06-24T14:11:00.002-06:00

As someone who plays with nuance all the time, the actual effect of rhetoric on politics means a lot to me. Specifically, though, it isn't just the content of a speech but the tone that is important; very rarely in US politics will I support a statement that draws its inspiration from anger or an US vs. Them mentality. That was awful during the Bush years and the Clinton years, and does not seem terribly worthwhile now.

Of course, I'm still playing for a team here. Broadly, it's the left, and more specifically it is the policy of a sane left. Not a compromising, mid-90s centrist left, but a left that is both self-assured in the correctness of its view while not being overbearing about it. It is nice to see these sentiments echoed in an analysis of Obama:

Democratic partisans think the enemy is vicious and must be met with uncompromising force. That's exactly how conservative foreign policy hawks feel about the world. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing foreign policy critique of Obama today sounds eerily like the partisan Democratic critique of Obama during the primary...

This is a perfect summation of Obama's strategy. It does not presuppose that his adversaries are people of goodwill who can be reasoned with. Rather, it assumes that, by demonstrating his own goodwill and interest in accord, Obama can win over a portion of his adversaries' constituents as well as third parties. Obama thinks he can move moderate Muslim opinion, pressure bad actors like Iran to negotiate, and, if Iran fails to comply, encourage other countries to isolate it. The strategy works whether or not Iran makes a reasonable agreement.

The full article is here, and is about 10 paragraphs. Well worth reading, and a welcome break from the angry echo chamber that is most politics on the internet.

What to do with all that Anger

2009-06-13T20:52:00.005-06:00

I went to the ABQ pride parade today in my "Dare to Hope. Prepare to be disappointed." shirt. It's more or less my mantra when be excited about politicians, and after Barack's upsetting support for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) on Friday, it seemed the thing to do. A mild protest, sure, but really an acknowledgement that people, especially people in power, will do things we don't like, and we should be ready for this.

That doesn't excuse it. Readiness for suck doesn't negate the suck. But it should get us past the "oh no! why is this suck happening now!" part of the process, and onto something meaningful. Stay angry about it, sure, but then do something with that anger.

You can give to organizations. PFLAG is always worthy of support, as is the ACLU and Lambda Legal. You can sign petitions. Here's a petition calling for the repeal of DOMA, and here is another. And lastly, if you're in NM, Equality New Mexico is pretty fantastic, and has volunteer opportunities.

There's certainly way more that can be done. There are countless other places to start from. The point, though, is to take that anger, and do something with it. Not "fringe violence" something, mind you. But something. Constructive uses for that anger abound.

The work of being an active and concerned citizen never went away - the political climate right now is not great, but it is not explicitly hostile. Obama feels that the legislature is who needs to change DOMA; pressure legislators. (Contact information for Tom Udall, Jeff Bingaman, Martin Heinrich, Harry Teague, and Ben Ray Lujan.) And this is something that can function on the state level, and takes momentum. So. It is work, but it is doable work. Unfavorable presidents haven't stopped it before; why are we afraid that will hold us back now?

Iranian Presidential Election Quickie

2009-06-12T17:43:00.003-06:00

Iran's political system fascinates me; besides actually having a constitutionally enshrined "Supreme Leader", it combines democratic organs with tight controls in the hands of many unelected bodies. It appears to be an almost perfect dystopian entity, with competing policies, shadowy bodies, a "council of Guardians", and a separate military that is the personal arm of the Supreme Leader in the form of the Revolutionary Guards. A great setting for fiction, if ever there was one.

But Iran is also far more realistic and livable than that description gives it credit for. And despite the willingness of people to dismiss Iran as just another dictatorship, it is really too elaborate for that. Iran, though not a democracy, has profound democratic organs, and though those organs are constrained, they perform a valid function in society, and are not controlled so tightly as to make the future the direction of the country inevitable.

This is an elaborate introduction to a post on fivethirtyeight about the Iranian Presidential Election. The whole post is rather short and a good read. The best line is here:

In summary, the Iranian system is slowly maturing, with more a more competitive and multi-candidate system. The candidates are still restricted to the mainstream approved by the Guardian Council, but this is certainly no one-party system.

The Problem of Modern Healthcare, pt 3: Doctors as For-Profit

2009-06-12T13:19:00.004-06:00

As outlined in post 1 of this series, McAllen (in Hidalgo County) manages to have the highest healthcare costs in the country at the same time that it has among the worst care provided. This is in stark contrast with places like the Mayo Clinic, where low cost and high quality healthcare combine. The most obvious and glaring difference between the two systems is the goals of the doctors. In McAllen, they are for-profit and paid for procedure, and they let this focus determine the kind of care they provide. At the Mayo Clinic, doctors are salaried, and so while they are well off, they have no need to order procedures for procedures sake. Instead, Mayo Clinic doctors put the emphasis on effective care, rather than expensive care. And it works.

If this sounds a little socialist, it's because it is, in a way. It is very much a not-for-profit ethos, and it knows that the profit motive here doesn't lead to best care. The US already has a class of people engaged in nonprofit work, as government employees, with 6 figure salaries, who could stand to make a lot more in the private sector but instead function as civil servants. The federal court system is a great example of this - it combines job security, meaningful work, a generous pension, and a 6-figure income to take brilliant and qualified people and employ them appropriately.

The example isn't perfect; the fact that the private practice of law generates millions for the kind of people sought out as public servants limits the candidate pool. And in medicine, it makes the Mayo Clinic model riskier, as doctors are drawn towards the greater wealth accumulation (and accompanying security) of for-profit medicine. But that doesn't' mean a civil-service model for healthcare doesn't exist.

In part 2, I mentioned that the single-payer debate is mostly meaningless as far as the pricing of medicine is concerned. Government can, however, be much more involved in price structuring of medicine, and as the payers of doctors under a single-payer program, they can change medicine from the source of wealth it is to McAllen doctors into a stable, well-paying civil service job. As a corollary, government can also offset the high costs of medical school with loans and debt forgiveness, a power almost unique to government and one that would make the profit-seeking of doctors less vital. This, more than anything else, is the promise I see inherent in any talks of universal healthcare reform. But it doesn't actually require a single payer model to come into being.

The Mayo model came about in a very profit-centric world. It thrived and expanded. Government doesn't need to be in control to allow that kind of success to continue. They just need to stop disincentivizing against it. Providing debt forgiveness for doctors who work in Mayo-model or similar clinics, changing away from a pay-for-procedure model, and providing additional benefits to salaried doctors are all within reach of government legislation.

It just takes effort, observation, and political will.

The Problem of Modern Healthcare, pt. 2: Who Pays is Moot

2009-06-12T13:02:00.005-06:00

From the New Yorker Article mentioned in part 1 of this series, the most crucial three paragraphs:

As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.
Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.
This last point is vital. Activists and policymakers spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about whether the solution to high medical costs is to have government or private insurance companies write the checks. Here’s how this whole debate goes. Advocates of a public option say government financing would save the most money by having leaner administrative costs and forcing doctors and hospitals to take lower payments than they get from private insurance. Opponents say doctors would skimp, quit, or game the system, and make us wait in line for our care; they maintain that private insurers are better at policing doctors. No, the skeptics say: all insurance companies do is reject applicants who need health care and stall on paying their bills. Then we have the economists who say that the people who should pay the doctors are the ones who use them. Have consumers pay with their own dollars, make sure that they have some “skin in the game,” and then they’ll get the care they deserve. These arguments miss the main issue. When it comes to making care better and cheaper, changing who pays the doctor will make no more difference than changing who pays the electrician. The lesson of the high-quality, low-cost communities is that someone has to be accountable for the totality of care.

Emphasis mine. Not that the single-payer/insurance debate isn't a valid one. But it's not a valid one when it comes to absolute cost. That will come from changing the autonomy of doctors, which I discuss in part 3 of this series.

The Problem of Modern Healthcare, pt. 1

2009-06-12T13:00:00.002-06:00

The New Yorker recently had an article examining how healthcare in the US goes wrong. The article is a great read, in-depth and devoid of the classic free-market/single-payer argument that pervades the discussion of healthcare reform in the US today. Notably, the article focused on two separate methods of healthcare practice in the US. Healthcare in McAllen (in Hidalgo County), where average medicaid costs are $15,000/person, and the practices of the Mayo Clinic, which costs medicaid an average of $6,688 per person. McAllen also has some of the poorest health of anywhere in the nation, while the Mayo clinic is a national leader in quality. The fascinating part of the article is that these differences happen within the current free(ish) market for healthcare in the US, and they go against standard logic that more $ = better. Here's my breakdown of the salient points in the article:

The McAllen Model:

high doctor autonomy
doctors paid per service rendered, not salaried
extra tests/medicines incentivized
do the expensive thing by default
reliance upon patients with medicare = almost unlimited pool of money available to patients
patients always choose more services, assuming more = better
the culture of the doctors is very much medicine ==> wealth
as a corollary, doctors make millions and are the major landowners in the county
this is rather justified by the high initial costs of getting into and practising medicine
the other justification for such wealth accumulation, fear of/protection from malpractice lawsuits, isn't really a threat in Texas, where McAllen is located

The Mayo Model

doctors salaried, at a decent pay level
doctors paid in 6 figures
doctors work in concert as medical team, rather than as individuals
preventative medicine is offered more consistently, as doctors have no reason to want to do more expensive things later
wait to see if low-cost methods work before recomending expensive methods
patient-first healthcare considerations are emphasized

While this may seem obvious (profit-incentive for doctors doesn't equal good care for patients), it's a point that renders almost moot the debate over single-payer healthcare. (See part 2 of this post for a full excerpt explaining why).

It does, however, is present a strong case for doctors being civil servants (or quasi-civil servants, which I'll get into in part 3 of this post.

George Will: Wrong on Language

2009-06-07T19:37:00.003-06:00

George Will, it seems, is taken to inaccurate hyperbole about personal pronoun usage by our sitting President. This is really no surprise, since he has frequently overstated cases against our president before, but it is nice that a linguist complaint now joins those raised earlier. The best line?

Now, maybe there's some selection of Obama's interactions where his use of the first person singular pronoun is higher than expected for someone in his circumstances. Alternatively, maybe George F. Will is a bullshitter, who doesn't bother even to ask one of his interns to check whether the alleged "facts" in his columns are true or false. We report, you decide.

Men and Their Wars

2009-05-30T21:53:00.007-06:00

A cousin of mine, when asked what kind of museum she wanted to go to, said "Not one about men and their wars". We're in DC right now - museums are what one does, and so this was rather nontrivial. I am, as you may have guessed, rather interested in War. That said, it's perfectly reasonable to defer to something we all like, like the Natural History Museum, for our DC time. That can be done if one dislikes war, is upset by it, is made uncomfortable or angered or has a hostile reaction. Valid reasons all for not going to a war museum. They are not, in my mind, reasons to skip a history museum. This wasn't about not liking history; this was about 1) treating the whole of history as a series of wars, and 2) treating war as an exclusively male phenomenon.

1. The vast majority of history is the developments, changes, and evolutions in human society, as well as interactions between separate human societies, during peace time. Or times of relative stability - in ages of small-scale and irregular war, it is challenging to classify everything as peace; neighborhoods post-Katrina New Orleans, for example, could be labeled war zones, but that doesn't remove the story of New Orleans from the complicated period of domestic US policy we classify not as an actual war but as the War on Drugs. In order to address the social problems/challenges of such a city, we can't write the violent nature of it's present state off as a discontinuity from the whole prior history of the city; yes, Katrina is a delineating point, but one chaotic force of natural violence isn't the be-all end-all of violence in the area. It is far, far more complicated then that. We don't write the history of New Orleans as a series of unfortunate events beyond human control with no interlude - we write it as catastrophe-survival-adaptation-relaxation-catastrophe. Hurricanes, plagues, and, yes, wars, all serve to mark and identify the end-periods of eras, but the history isn't "this crisis made all this happen". It is "this historic tension, altered by this violence, led to this future, thanks to the actions of these folk". Writing it as a series of crises cheapens the history of the crises and of the city. More than that, though, it is inaccurate - they are bot parts of the coherent whole of human experience. To treat history as nothing but war would be to do chemistry with exactly one element - not just dull and useless, but rather impossible. Treating history as a full range of experiences means that yes, it gets more challenging and complicated, but it also means that you are actually treating the subject as though it has worth.

2. War is not an exclusively male phenomenon. It is a predominately male phenomenon, but exceptions at all levels abound: espionage at all times in history, at the command of warring nations in the form of Hatshepsut, Zenobia and Boudica in antiquity, as well as Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir, and Margret Thatcher in the past century, as well as countless others throughout history. On the field of battle itself, women fought in defense of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, and in many specific instances wonderfully compiled here. History is not devoid of women in military roles. What is interesting, then, is how exceptional all these cases are - war is an incredibly gendered phenomenon. Perpetrating and fighting in war has for so long been an overwhelmingly male phenomenon (and, as corrolary, women have been especially vicitmized by war). But that shouldn't make war an irrelevant area of concern for feminists - the gendered nature of conflict should be especially interesting for that reason, not less so.

My point is this: if one objects to studying history because war is unpleasant and history means covering wars, then one should say so. But don't object to the study of history because war is a gendered phenomenon, because that is exactly why it is relevant to gender studies. And more broadly why it is relevant to people as a collective whole.

I really dislike George Will

2009-05-19T14:06:00.003-06:00

In my own field, George Will gets the very concept of State Capitalism wrong to hate on Obama.

In the field of climate change, George Will gets the very facts wrong, claiming a past global cooling consensus from a paper whose very point is that there was never a global cooling consensus.

And just today, George Will is upset over the very idea of changing transportation within this country, singling out my birth city of Portland, Oregon as this dreaded, unattainable dystopia where people bike to work. Most notably, he hyperbolizes that we will never reach a point where 0.01% of Americans bike to work. However, 0.4% already do, a number "forty times larger than a percentage that Will deems unrealistically utopian." (Edit: wonkette has a nice angry take on the transportation issue as well)

So, dear readers: can you find another example of George Will deliberately getting facts wrong in a field that isn't Keynesian economic policy, global warming, or transportation? Comment with any and every example you can find, hopefully in a "new field, new error" format. It'd be nice to have a comprehensive list of this online.

George Will: Wrong Again

2009-05-19T10:29:00.003-06:00

Editor's Note: This was originally sent in to the Albuquerque Journal as a letter to the editor. They didn't print it, and it is still almost-timely, so I'm posting it here. Relevant links: George Will's article ad-gated at the Journal or free-membership-gated at the Washington Post or in its entirety and with handy visual aids online here . Ian Bremmer's article in Foreign Affairs is paid-subscription-gated, but you can listen to the whole of it as a podcast.

Edit #2: Thanks to commentor ThingsBreak, here's a .pdf of Bremmer's piece. It is really, really good.

On Monday, the Journal published an article by George Will entitled "Too Many 'Free Markets' Belong to the State - Really". Will spends his time misinterpreting Ian Bremmer's article "State Capitalism Comes of Age." Substituting bias for an understanding of the material, Will disputes Bremmer's premise that "the state must eventually retreat" from long-term state control of capital. Will says, instead, that Bremmer is "probably wrong, because he underestimates the pleasure politicians derive from using their nation's wealth as a slush fund for purchasing political advantage." Nowhere in Bremmer's article does Bremmer exhibit an underestimation of political greed - instead, he refers often to the close ties between economic and political leadership in both Russia and China. Will also implies that the new states that have taken ownership of their free markets (Brazil, India, Turkey, and Mexico) have done so out of greed; Bremmer instead explains that they did so because these countries had "a much weaker rule of law than was the case in established free-market democracies".

The country that Bremmer does not feel is at risk for permanent state control is the one that Will writes the most about - the United States. Nowhere in Bremmer's article is there a basis for government in the US becoming "the only agent and the sole arbiter" of American happiness. Instead, Bremmer states correctly that "in the United States and in Europe, the power of the invisible hand remains an article of faith. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic know that to maintain popular support, they must keep their promises to return the banking sector and large enterprises to private hands once they have been restored to health." This is a far cry from the authoritarian USA Will reads into Bremmer's article. Once again, Will cherry-picks the his quotes, and misses the truth.

The Fine Line Between Black Helicopters and Ambulances

2009-05-18T18:57:00.003-06:00

Earlier today (minutes ago, in fact) I wrote a post discussing the challenge posed to the Left by the civil-liberties-affirming Right. In short: when out of power, it was very, very easy for the Democrats to get the votes of those against the police state. When in power, they have to not only stop expanding but actively dismantle police state apparatus (Patriot Act, I'm looking at you) in order to not be the police state party.

There are inherent political challenges in this at any given time: alienating security conservatives, tarnishing the records of prominent Democrats complicit during the Bush years, potentially finding ones hands tied in acting on new information. There are new and exciting challenges that one can add on to this: trying to end it while aiming for National Reconciliation, the very identity of the President making him more prone to crazy domestic violence, and trying to extinguish state power in one arena while expanding it, in, say, the area of healthcare.

The key to expanding the state in one area while retracting it in another is, as I see it, about the framing of rights. The police state violates very clearly defined freedoms: it takes away privacy, autonomy, and presumed innocence. Ending the police state means guaranteeing those freedoms.

Healthcare has to be framed the same. Currently, healthcare means uncertainty, high costs, employment-dependence, and inefficiency. It does not mean, as the most adamant free marketeers will tell you, than procuring health services is a matter of choice and desire. When you need healthcare, you absolutely need it. No amount of bargaining or negotiating or price-comparison will help. Healthcare is a terrible good to have rationed exclusively by the market - it creates a surplus of cosmetic surgeries in the same nation that has 1 in 6 uninsured. So framing the current system as the free market is an impossibility.

Instead, Obama's healthcare plan, and all other universalistic healthcare programs, need to frame the very program as a freedom: freedom from risk, freedom from uncertainty, freedom from impossible costs, freedom to transition between jobs while still being insured. This isn't the state stepping in and forcing a program on people; this is the state removing unfair burdens and affirming the inherent freedom to life.

If people see healthcare as a freedom and not as a government program, and if police state programs are repealed, I think the Obama coalition can last for at least another decade. More importantly, it will both fulfil campaign promises, and give the Left an opportunity to stop being the "big government" party and instead become a political party about freedoms.

How to Dissassemble an Obamic Bomb

2009-05-18T18:05:00.005-06:00

I've mentioned several times on this blog that I think Ron Paul is the new face of the Republican party, and I've also said that I favor a libertarian-minded opposition. I think that an emphasis on checking power and maintaining civil liberties is vital in this nation; it's why I prefer libertarian opposition to, say, religious right opposition. That doesn't mean I actually want libertarian rule; it is my intended least-bad alternative.

I think the libertarians will be competitive in the Mountain West. Former New Mexico Gary Johnson has considered a 2012 presidential run, as a "antiwar, anti-Fed, pro-personal liberties, slash-government-spending candidate"; this is a far cry from the big-government, freedom-restrictionist era of Bush, and it will still satisfy fiscal conservatives the nation over. The challenge for candidates like this nationally is incorporating the religious right/social conservatives, and the general category of security conservatives. Nationally, it may not work in 2012.

The Mountain West plays differently, and New Mexico piles on peculiarities. With it's large catholic and Hispanic voting blocks, NM democrats skew statist center-left. Progressive economically much more so than socially. And the right in New Mexico, while having the standard components of the religious right, economic conservatives, and the very security-minded, has a very, very, very strong libertarian component. (Or at least it can - Jim Scarantino played the paranoid libertarian to Bush, but now plays the generic Rightist to Obama).

It is this climate that produced Gary Johnson. And it is this climate that may allow a bit of national spotlight for Adam Kokesh. Running in NM's 1st congressional (bluest of the blue) districts, Kokesh is anti-statist in the most profound way. He cites the founders, the Bill of Rights, and moral obligations in his call against the current "march towards fascism". His goal is an end to both American imperialism and the police state; 12 months ago, on this alone, he'd be casually grouped with the Democratic left. But now, parties in power have changed, and his tune is consistent.

Much will be made of him in the local media soon. My collegue FBIHOP is already casually dismissing him. I'm hesitant to be so straightforward with that dimissal - support from Ron Paul and viable anti-war cred makes him, this far from the actual campaign, seem competitive. He could well be the local face of the new Libertarian right that I'm anticipating. That's less important than the lesson his very existence has for the Democratic Party:

If the Democrats become the police state party, we have lost the coalition that swept Obama into power. And we've probably lost the Mountain West

Violence is Silence

2009-05-16T22:38:00.002-06:00

“From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this though, despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any US soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice." -- David Faherty

There are few things to me more disturbing then that above sentence. It's a sentiment wholly alien to my being. I like social order. Alienated though my views can be from the general electorate, I think that social order is at least a worthy aim, an understood and accepting thing. For all the fears people built around "Change", change is an incredibly modest, statist word. It isn't arguing for an overthrow. It isn't calling for a sweeping realignment of social organs. It isn't challenging the very notions of statehood. It is, really, a slight adjusting of the rudder. It's not transforming the boat into a helicopter. "Change" likes the general contours f the system, and just hates a lot of the specifics. It's really surprising that people could must up such fervor for as modest a concept, and perhaps the fervor is what was reacted to. And hopefully, once the presidency is well under way, we'll see people calm down and accept it as the modest, statist thing it is.

And hopefully comments like this will stop happening. I mean, fine, private conversation, or choir-preachy websites. Free speech is well and good; I'm not opposed to that, and don't seek to stop it.

But what I would like to see wane, if not disappear, is this notion that the response to something moderately disagreeable is implied murder, or justified violent agrny outbursts. As harmless as that may be intended, it's terrifying. The implication - that members of the US armed forces are universally assumed to prefer the death of a domestic politician they dislike than the death of a man responsible for killing 3,000+ innocents boggles.

And I get that this is an attention-grabbing statement. And that, by acknowledging it, I'm only feeding the problem, giving the guy a larger audience for his soapbox. And this post is probably unnecessary - there will be better and more numerous deconstructions online, and in most media outlets. The statement deserves to be deconstructed, if there is any real sentiment behind it. Because that sentiment is profoundly opposed to social order, and seeks a world of platonic absolutes instead of this messy land of disagreement and compromise. It's the same motivation that fuels international jihadist violence - if the center is undesireable, the center is untenable. And if the center (broadly speaking, functioning democracy) is untenable (say, Pelosi dead), then extremists (the hypothetical US soldier, or bin Laden) get to just go at it, in a violent world of conflicting absolutes. And to get to that point you have to stifle dissent, alienate all those on your side who disagree. You have to not only call for the death of elected leaders, who are inherently moderate beings, having accepted the social order and the system in which they exist, but you have to make it impossible for such moderate leaders to speak against the excessed of their friends and allies. Once that happens, civilization becomes an angry little suicide pact.

The statement itself is only half the reason I'm upset. What bothers me more is that a friend of mine from college, a moderate Republican from Colorado, who was the most diehard supporter of McCain I've ever met, loves this quote. He gives reasons - the detachment of Pelosi's ideals from that of the rest of the US, say, but reasons don't matter. We can't, as a nation, have our ongoing experiment (one of a democracy that doesn't kill itself) if we think calling for the death of elected leaders we disagree with is acceptable. It just doesn't work that way.

There are few things, ever, that chip away at my faith in humanity. My friend's endorsement of this statement was one.

Sustainable vs Winnable Wars

2009-05-11T09:34:00.005-06:00

Recently, I watched the roadshow version of Steven Soderbergh's Che. It is amazing, and I recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity and 5 hours to spend watching a film. The film follows two periods in Che's life in some depth - the Guerrilla campaign in Cuba until Batista flees, and the Bolivian campaign from Che's arrival to his execution. It's a deliberate contrast, and one that serves the story well. It also poses one of the most enduring challenges for students of insurgency: why did Bolivia fail so spectacularly when Cuba had worked so well?

The answer, or at least part of it, is found in Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant piece on underdog strategy. In order for an underdog to win against a superior opponent (a la David v Goliath), they almost always have to play the game differently. The Cuban Revolution is perhaps the textbook example of this; unsurprising, since Che wrote the book. There is a lot that enabled the Davidian triumph in Cuba - a climate that allowed for tenacity and endurance, a public polarized, the aggressive repression of the General Strike making revolution the only viable alternative, and the relative newness of oppression all helped mobilize people against a "goliath". So the traits the Davids in conflicts value (tenacity, moral, and mobility) were all possible, while the goliathian nature of Batista's Cuban Army was rather minimal. That the revolutionaries chose to fight a guerrilla war matters little - victory was impossible without it, and was all but guaranteed fighting that way.

Bolivia, on the other hand, lent itself less well to this style of warfare. Che's best soldiers were Cuban and inexperienced with the region. Che set up far from the politicized masses, and instead operated amongst xenophobic peasants (this limited mobility needed to offset a larger military). US support was offered early and often to Bolivia, making Bolivia's army far better at beign a Goliath than Batista's army was. And it was very, very hard for the kind of tenacity that had enabled success in Cuba to prevail in Bolivia without popular support and mobility. Not that Che didn't try, but whereas in Cuba momentum built and the army was able to both sustain and expand its efforts, in Bolivia the revolutionaries became more and more hindered, forced on the defensive, and unable to ever get momentum going their way. When the final confrontation came, it was between US-trained Rangers, who are as close as goliathian powers get to matched tenacity and mobility against an irregular force. Combined with, in this case, superior weaponry, numbers, and control of the field, Che didn't really have a chance.

The case can be made that because Che was unable to get a guerrilla movement going in Bolivia, he was fighting more conventionally, but with a grossly mismatched force. While that claim holds merit, I think it overlooks the additional hardships forced upon his warband by trying to fight a guerrila war. It's exhausting, and it changes engagements from those forced upon you in defensive positions or actively sought out with superior strength, to the possibility of being engaged at any time. Armies fight conventionally, even when they are grossly mismatched, because it is easier to do. Forts, stable supply lines, brief high-intensity engagements all are less draining on an individual soldier, and on an army, than being active all the time. Fighting battles like that means you have to fight fewer of them. Washington and Vo Nguyen Giap, both noted practioners of Guerilla warfare from their respective eras, were both eager to transition their army from guerilla tactics to conventional - early on, that transition often led itself to a series of defeats (outmatched when playing Goliath's game, after all). But why did they consistently choose it?

Gladwell, using sports as one of his main examples, lets social pressure be what undermines the usage of the David-esque full court press. Well, that, and the sheer difficulty in sustaining the kind of pressure that kind of gameplay requires. Social pressure is a hard factor to argue for war - war, being rather existential, is not the arena where general's care about what the opposing commanders must think of them. So the second explanation must be the one that allows us to understand Washington and Giap. While both could win a guerilla war indefinitely, they had a hard time sustaining it. Fighting conventionally meant putting ones soldiers through a few big battles, rather than existing in a state of constant warfare. Fighting big meant battles with clear-cut results, and the temptation of immediate and significant victories is potent. More meaningful than trophy victories, however, is the nature of what soldiers have to fight. If you are fighting all the time, you need lots of soldiers willing to be immediately ready to press every advantage. Skill is less relevant, as tenacity and endurance are the meaningful quantities. But that's exhausting when it's a 48 minute basketball game, and moreso when it's an actual war. Skill, on the other hand, can be improved at a less breakneck pace, and enable one to win the few engagements one fights in. When Goliath armies beat David armies, it's because they've gone ahead and adapted to Davidian war. But Goliath armies will always, always prefer the Goliath-on-Goliath combat.

The relevance of this (besides the sheer awesomeness that is the Malcolm Gladwell article and the Steven Soderbergh film) is that the US military is, and has been for at least two decades now, the impossible-to-defeat Goliath. In Gulf War I, Iraq had the world's 4th largest military. The war was grossly one-sided, and the United States lost 113 soldiers. When everyone plays by the winners rules, the winner will be incredibly hard to stop.

The wars the US is fighting today do not favor Goliaths. The tenacity of forces in Afghanistan has been demonstrated - the Taliban are back, when by all accounts they were ruled dead by 2002. In order to win, as the US did by aiding Bolivia, they have to make overwhelming force applicable to this kind of combat. There are generals currently doing just that - perhaps most famous is David Petraeus, while the most interesting developments are coming from "The Accidental Guerilla" author David Kilcullen. They are the ones formulating the tactics that will win this.

The challenge, as has often been leveled agaisnt the US, is a willingness to fight the kind of sustained warfare needed. For the Taliban, they don't have a choice - the war is existential. For many factions in Iraq, their survival depends on mastering guerilla conflicts. For the US, we have to be willingly to commit to a war with no set-piece battles. And this calls into question the whole role of war with humanitarian ambitions, or of international police action. Iraq is abhorred by the left because it was unnessecary. It is very much a victim of attention fatigue, and perhaps a worthy victim. Afghanistan, however, is a conflict that the US seems more committed to, without an immediate existential threat. The Taliban are as much foreignners in the country as the Cubans were in Bolivia, and the public longs for stability. The possibility of an eventual US victory is real. The challenge, of course, is sustaining the effort needed. The Taliban have to do it. We don't.

Editor's Note: Since writing this post, a few other examples of the attitude needed towards Afghanistan have come to mind. Over at doubleX, Vanessa M. Gezari has a comprehensive and concise post up about the change in generals for the Afghanistan conflict. From later in the Salon review of Kilcullen's book comes these amazing quotes, which more or less sum up all that is needed, and all that is difficult about the US operating in Afghanistan.

Security is the single overriding need of people living in weak states, and Kilcullen points out that rule of law doesn't fall too far behind that. (It's especially difficult for Westerners who have no cultural memory of living under chaotic conditions with no viable civil authority to grasp just how scary this can be. We tend to fixate on the menace posed by authoritarian tyrants like Saddam Hussein, forgetting that a person killed in a civil war is just as dead as someone killed by a dictator.) One service the Taliban has excelled in providing to Afghans in isolated regions, for example, is dispute resolution. When you're quarreling with your neighbor about who owns those goats, if there isn't some authority, however merciless, to appeal to, things can degenerate into a Hobbesian state pretty quickly. The Taliban first gained power in the 1990s by offering just this sort of adjudication, and they haven't forgotten how well it worked. Unless the West helps the Afghans set up better civil institutions, they'll use it again.

Kilcullen makes it clear that efforts to set up viable governance in places like Iraq and Afghanistan must involve established local power structures (like Iraq's tribes) and customs (like the elaborate Iraq blood-debt resolution ritual known as the "suhl"). The neoconservative pipe dream of making over Iraq and Afghanistan as Western-style democracies has to be set aside. Most difficult of all, homegrown police, politicians, judges and other officials who aren't either corrupt or pursuing a purely sectarian agenda have to be put in place. Kilcullen thinks this can be done, but it will be really difficult and really expensive. And it will take a while. And the result is unlikely to be the sort of government Americans admire.

Privilege in Action

2009-05-05T22:27:00.004-06:00

The subtitle of my blog lists the power dynamics I find most interesting, and it has been far, far to long since I've talked about the third item on that list: Race.

This isn't because I haven't had a lot to say - watching the rise to prominence of Glenn Beck's paranoia, the subtle tones of the Tea Party protests, and my own involvement in a class on Whiteness in US History have all been fertile ground for ideas. And once upon a time I promised a Whiteness Sermon, because I was upset with FUUNO's anti-racist inauguration sermon. It was an unpleasant mediocrity. So I've been thinking about race, spinning it around in my head for months. But neither my visceral reactions to Glenn Beck nor the abstractions of academia have been able to crystallize my thoughts in any meaningful way. With news and school not valid sources of inspiration, it was more or less inevitable that the internet would jump in and save the day.

Today BoingBoing linked to a very interesting presentation about the behavioral economics of cheating. Behavioral economics are, in my mind, the most valuable field in which research is being done, and almost every new development I hear about it convinces me of the flaws inherent in political science. This is to say that the post is good. The post is very, very good, and I'm going to recommend you watch the whole thing. (Yes, it is 18 minutes long. It's worth it, and what I say next won't make any sense unless you've seen it.)

Towards the end of the presentation, the speaker describes a scenario where it is shown that cheating is okay. However, knowing that cheating is okay doesn't change the subjects action. What does change the students reaction, however, is the idenity of the cheater. If the cheater is a student from the same school, then students feel safer about getting away with cheating, and so cheat more. If, however, the cheater is from a rival school, students ignore him, and cheat at the same or reduced levels. The lesson: ingroup/outgroup status determines behavior identification. Seeing that cheating is okay is not enough on it's own; seeing that cheating within one's ingroup is okay is what matters.

This leads me to the second piece, the one about race. It's a post that comes from "Stuff White People Do", which is the appropriate anti-racist corrolary to blogs that just poke fun at whiteness. In it, it describes the murder of a hispanic man by white teenagers, in a predominantly (96%) white community. There was an altercation, punches were thrown all around, sure. But here's the fun trick - the hispanic man died, and the all-white jury sentenced the youths to, at most, 2 years in jail. For killing a man in a fight they provoked him into. For murder. 2 years.

I am not saying that the all-white jury was overtly racist. I'm not saying that the all-white jury was even knowingly racist. After all, the man killed was an illegal, and being against illegal immigration is not the same as being racist (though the venn diagram begins to resemble a circle at that point). But. The youths on trial, teenage white males, were judged by a jury of their peers. The man killed wasn't. And the jury, identifying with the in-group of race, protected the youths.

And this is what is so incredibly challenging about institutionalized racism - it is very, very hard to come up with a law that accounts for jury compostion. And in a town that's 96% white, how can someone argue for reform? And as much faith as I have in the ability of governments to reform themselves to better serve the public good, this issue seems beyond the scope of legislation.

Still, I'm optimistic. Nate Silver, in a presentation (given at TED, like the first link) examines overt racism in determing voting habits. He takes polling data, comparing the number of people who said that race was the msot important factor in deciding their vote, and overlapping that data with neighborhood dynamics. The greater the racial homogeneity of the neighborhood, the more willing a person was to let race be the determining factor for their vote. A myriad of reasons for this exist, like, say race being seen as a useful heuristic, but they all boil down to ingroup identification. However, in neighborhoods less homogenous, race was important for deciding a persons vote. Nate Silver's proposed solution is more walkable, grid neighborhoods (to emphasize diversity always), and he just assumes that a demographic shift will generally lessen these problems.

That said, the problems still exist, and what happened to Luis Ramirez, while perhaps understandable from a behavioral economist perspective, is wholly unjust and a failing of the system. And thats because privilege is allowed to operate. But privilege doesn't always have to operate or get to operate - a more diverse jury would have probably viewed the case differently, and been just as keen on preventing future murders as it was on minimizing the harm caused to the youths involved. And that is the kind of change that will happen with time; over the age of 65, 75% of Americans are white. Under the age of 10, 25% of Americans are. Privilege itself will weaken with the passage of time. And that, that's pretty dang exciting.

Update: here in one shot is another article showcasing privilege. Describing crimes identical except for their victims, we can see how justice is served for the young white woman, and how little effort is put into doing the same for a 55 year old Hispanic man. The problem is not that they went out of their way to solve the first case faster, the problem is that such a discrepancy itself can exist within the same system, and that there is an ability to make such a conscious choice about the extra effort. If all cases required that diligence, there would be no privilege. If such additional efforts weren't possible/legal ever, there would be no privilege. But when such efforts are possible and optional, privilege allows the white victim to matter more. (And this is in Los Angeles, which is no homogeneous white suburb.) Far as I'm concerned, that difference is a failure of the rule of law

Ron Paul as Backdrop

2009-04-26T15:26:00.002-06:00

My friend JR is a big fan of Ron Paul. I expressed my thoughts about Ron Paul once before on this blog, but JR convinced me to give him a look. So I read a speech by Representative Paul, given before the House on the 29th of November, 2001. Here's the link.

It'll take a while to read (an hour, for me). And parts of it ring of conspiracy. But keep reading, because this man is the hopeful godfather of the New Right in this country, and this is where he stands.

I disagree on many points; I don't think that 9/11 was an inside job. I don't think that the UN is an evil plot. I don't support militias. And I think his comments on FDR can go from careful and thoughtful to ideological cheap shots.

However.

He takes his fear of government power and turns it into one of the best defenses of civil liberties ever spoken. It's Brutus level patriotism, and that's partly the problem with it - it seems stuck in a past that cannot be returned to. Ignore that bit, though, because it's really based on restoring the constitution as intended. And a Right mobilized around keeping government in check (not destroying government, and not wishing it away into a taxless oblivion) is the best opposition party that can be hoped for in an "age of Obama". If we can make it to the next century with our civil liberties not only intact but expanded, we will have succeeded as a nation. It may only be possible with the freedom-concerned Right working alongside the freedom-loving left.

Self Censorship

2009-04-26T13:17:00.003-06:00

It strikes me that self-censorship is an impossibility. When a person feels the need to self-censor, what they are really doing is reconsidering their view in light of their audience. That's not censorship, that's decorum. Or at least, it's a situational awareness. People say what they want all over the internet with impunity, because there aren't personal relationships at stake. But all communication involves that interaction, and while I don't think a person should sacrifice one's opinions for the sake of visibility, I think that awareness of the audience is key.

I mention this because I've spent a lot of time lately debating Armenia with Turkish Nationals online. If I used the word genocide, I couldn't have a conversation. But if I dance around the word, play in the gray areas of war, war crimes, ethnic violence, civilian casualties, and unintentional consequences, I can have a meaningful debate. And that, to me, is far more important that a hard, ideological line in the sand. Discourse needs some flexibility to work, and I'm perfectly willing to not expressly attack people to make progress towards resolution.

(Ed Note: Armenia is easy for me to do this way, because I don't have a huge personal stake in it; I'm aware of the flaws in that.)

(My apologies for my absence from this blog; I've had more writing this semester than ever before in my life. But school is almost out, and I should be back to the blogosphere in no time)

Elephant Diaries: PB & J

2009-03-16T17:11:00.005-06:00

Last time I talked about newspapers, I talked about comics, and the contrast between webcomic content (a comic) and webcomic revenue (income from selling t-shirts). Reader Kristil expanded on that, wondering if this sort of divorcing of News Content from News Revenues could work more broadly for journalism. Here's what she has to say, in full:

I've been a while getting back to respond to you, mainly because I was trying to come up with a new business model for online journalism. Ha, kidding. Sort of.

I thought it would be nice to post the link here about some things that newspapers are trying, which I originally sent you on Twitter. By the way, I so want to work for Duo someday.

It seems that The Guardian has hit on a working model of the inkling I was having after I posted here; maybe newspapers can offer another product besides the news. And so now my thought is, “Okay, but what goes with the news better than online dating?” Are dating sites and in-depth coverage truly the next PB&J? Feel free to tell me if that seems snotty.

I heard a piece on NPR recently about new nonprofit and shoestring wire services. While I am loathe to link to that link hog, NPR, I’ll do it anyway. Actually, while looking for that link, I turned up a few other good pieces and blog that I’m definitely going to start reading by Jim Romenesko. I suppose that an endowment is one way to add another news service to the mix, but it should only be one of many tools in the toolkit.

One more thing. I read an article some time last year about Chinese web design that mentioned a Chinese business practice called Quanxi. Sorry, I’ve looked for the link and can’t find it. In a nutshell, it is extensive networking with potential customers and business partners before doing business. The example that was given was an auction site in China that had no plans to charge for its service until late 2009. This reminds me of companies using blogs to contribute to online communities, which in turn brings them “inbound leads.” But if a news site is all blog and no purchase, what then? What is the income generating complement to news content? I hope it’s not advertising, or paid content, because people are resisting those, don’t you think?

So, readers, what do you think? (FWIW I think it's a pretty clever idea, but I'm not sure it's all that different from how newspaper classifieds worked before Craigslist. Maybe the truly national papers like the NYT can do it, but I'm hesitant to say it'll save the local dailies. Awesome t-shirts, on the other hand...)

Placeholders/Mental Gumbo

2009-03-16T15:24:00.003-06:00

I've a lot of ideas that have been stewing for a while. I'd like to write posts on all of them, but I figured I'd go ahead and get the ideas out in a very raw, rough form. Here goes.

1. Youth, Technology, Civics.
I want to write a follow-up to my last post, including a lot of my understanding of Lawrence Lessig and technology as used by the young. I think that being on the internet is formative in many senses to how youth understand government, and that actions online by governments which are viewed as protecting youth or artists are interpreted as obstacles, which itself undermines the rule of law. I'd like to talk about making law relevant to youth, first through sane online policy, but also through new government interactivity.

2. Tower Defense Game as Legislative Process
I really, really wish I was good at programming so I could do this. Tower Defense Games are the kind of perpetual casual gamers' version of a strategy game, and basically consist of paths enemies travel and tiles along the path where one can put towers that shoot. I would like to make one for the UK parliamentary system, which is largely a single straight line with lots of room for towers towards the end, and contrast it was a US system, where the paths are circuitous, there are chokepoints at committees, chambers, merger committees, and a presidential veto all along the line to stop legislation from being passed. For added fun, could make it partisan with different towers being able to attack different bills. The goal could be to prevent any legislation at all from passing. Basically, it's an outgrowth of the idea that veto points are choke points, but I still think it would be fun.

3. War Narratives
Watching Clone Wars on Cartoon Network last night, it struck me that most every war story produced in America is derived solely from our narratives of WWII or Vietnam. All our history of foreign involvement (and our internal conflicts) before or since hasn't really influenced our War Fiction. Iraq stories exist as a sort of corollary to Vietnam, Korea is a hybridized "US wins freedom abroad"/"US war machine limited in power" story that straddles those two wars, especially as MASH popularized in its long run. And it applies to fiction further afield - "300" is the WWII story with Sparta as England and Thermopylae as Dunkirk. I'd guess that more major developments in new war stories have come through adding perspectives not previously considered, instead of creating new war narratives.

I'd like to write about all three of these later. If you have a preference, let me know in the comments.

Remedial Civics Classes

2009-03-06T14:24:00.006-07:00

Proposed Pulpit editorial topic, to deliver at First U of Abq this summer:

"One of my pet peeves is the lack of knowledge our citizenry has of the basic operations of our government (not UUs, of course)...do you have a take on what is needed to ensure that your generation knows such things as how many branches of government we have, their functions, what is contained in the bill of rights, what federalism is, etc., etc.? How can we hope to engender equal rights for all in all circumstances in the face of...well...ignorance concerning what "equal rights" means? Do we need to start remedial Civics classes?"

Rough shape from which the editorial will be carved:

It's fast becoming time for me to step back as the voice of youth. After all, I'm legally an adult, and I've legally been an adult for over two years now, which is half the total time one really gets to be a "youth". This is, then, almost overstepping. I hope you'll indulge me - I have just a little left to say about youth, and at least in this congregation, I've been a bit of a mouthpiece for my generation. Consider this, then, my swan song. Fittingly, it shall be a song of politics - I am nothing if not political. Perhaps more meaningfully, it is about the very edges of politics, that periphery so unfamiliar to talking heads and so prevalent for everyone else.

I'm a theory junky. I love the big picture - it's why I care about politics in the specific, and not justice as a broad category. My mind delights at the machinations across the macro level. I am, you could say, a bit of a wonk. Which is well and fine for me. But it places a tremendous amount of distance between myself and what I'm actually studying. Decisions about politics happen on the macro level, but politics is experienced every day in very personal ways. There are some easy examples of this - Raise your hand if you've ever been to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Okay, you can stop your grumbling and put your hands down. Yeah, I know, right? Awful place. But that, right there, is the end result of about a century of politics figuring out how to combine people and cars. Heck, there's even a school of thought out there which says the government can't make that decision; of course, that's taking me straight back to wonky. And this is about the very, very personal. Going to the DMV is easily one of the most benignly unpleasant experiences of a person's life, and that's the first place youth go to be confirmed in the eyes of the government as having adult competency. The policy, the deliberations, the behind-the-door decisions: "well, okay, we need to do it, but it'll be very expensive. Unless we pay poorly, and then we guarantee our public gets generally mediocre service. Still, I'd rather do that than ask them to pay more taxes - oh, let's just make it suck", that is all irrelevant to the person waiting in an interminable line to fill out lots and lots of forms.

Let's try a different one. Raise your hands if you attended public school. Now keep your hands in the air you ever broke a school rule. Okay, great - some of you are honest. Now, keep your hands in the air if, when you broke a school rule, you were escorted to the principals office by an armed police officer? Ah - so you're the post-columbine generation. Glad to see a few of you here this Sunday.

So that, that's where politics happens. I'll go ahead and say that I think armed cops in schools are a sign of a police state. And I'll make that even creepier by saying it's not all that bad, once you get used to it. I mean, I know it's wrong, but it's something bad that one outgrows. So long as adulthood is less policed than childhood, temporary injustices and inhumanities are tolerated. Of course, it's important to emphasize that "tolerated" and "accepted" aren't synonymous. People can tolerate a lot of bad, but people will accept very little of it as permanent and irreversible.

Last big question - hands up for anyone here who here as ever made something and put it online? Well, congrats yo you all. Any of you used music in a video and had it legally threatened? No? Well, I guess the RIAA is busy these days, so it might have slipped through. I'll speak for myself, then - I'm a little annoyed at all the transfers of rights that happen to me when I put my creative content online. And more than that, I'm kind of terrified at the places where government can take art and hold it up as a threat to commerce. And if you're afraid I'm getting a bit too wonky on this one, it's because the issue necessitates it.

If a youth, in regular civilian life, runs into government-created obstacles, the youth will then do one of a few things. First, circumvent it - the easiest way to interact with the government is to break rules and then be really clever about it. This works out great for the youth, but it undermines the whole "rule of law" principle upon which society is based. The other thing the youth could do is figure out how to make the law work on the periphery. My blog is creative commons licensed, which was a whole area of wonk-i-ness that I had no idea existed until I started caring about internet culture.

And that's what's fascinating about this generation. Yes, we may not inherently know everything we need about our government, but we are, in the words of an anonymous commenter online, "of a generation that values knowing where to find the answer over how to find the answer". We have all the knowledge available to understand our society at our fingertips, and as soon as it becomes useful to us, we'll make great use of it.

And right at our fingertips are where we have the remedial civics classes. No, everyone won't go out of there way to learn even the full set of basics. But on that edge of politics and daily life, that bleeding edge where the two run into each other, people will figure it out. Problems will be found, hypocrisies exposed, and laws either subverted, ignored, or challenged. Where government doesn't make sense, laws will be improvised and new social arrangements will be found until law catches up with society. There's no need for a new, sweeping re-education about what it means to be a citizen in this nation. So long as we treat people, and especially youth, as citizens, they'll figure out what rights are their's. More importantly than that, though, they'll figure out that wonderful little bit about the social contract - we are the mandate of heaven. If our government doesn't act in our best interest, we have both the power and the obligation to
change that. And, and I firmly believe this as almost an article of faith, that so long as the knowledge is out there, we will find it, and so long as we can find it, we will use it.

It is a Unitarian cliche to quote Marget mead and say "Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." There is a lot of truth in that statement - but it overlooks the seachange made possible by an untold number of interested, casually motivated citizens, for whom politics is part of the game, but it is just a part. We are living the civics courses we need. Raised in this church, in the tradition of youth empowerment, there was never any doubt in my mind that politics was a part of life that one is allowed to partake in. Much as I love to pile praise upon this church, last summer's election campaign was the clearest indicator that we aren't the only group that takes youth empowerment and turns it directly into political action.

For all the doubt and skepticism about my generation that abounds today, we're a surprisingly capable bunch. We came of age after a national tragedy, were handed a dead-end war, witnessed the failure of apathy about politics in the form of a little thing named Katrina, and we're faced with "the great recession". And what have we done? Hard to say anything less than rise to the task. We've learned the civics lessons we need, and we are ready for an era of great reforms. I think, to understate the matter, that this bodes well for our nation. The kids today? The kids are alright.

We are Halfway to the Future (a mediation on SB 12)

2009-02-27T11:32:00.002-07:00

(Note - this was originally posted to my page on the Duke City Fix, but I think here may be more appropriate. Also, I owe you all some good blogginess).

Today in my dorm room in New Orleans I watched the live feed of the senate debate on SB 12 (the domestic partnership one). Being a bit of a political junkie, I found the whole thing inherently fascinating, and was especially appreciative of the New Mexico Independent's live feed, and careful moderation of their own chat box (the entirety of which can be found here). That's the future-y part.

I left the chat for class before the actual vote, but what little of the debate I saw was really, really interesting. Cisco McSorely, the sponsor of the bill, explained the mock-up of it that was sitting on everyone's desk. In light of attention to the bill and strong criticism of it as "secretly gay marriage", the bill had been revised to have complete neutral terms, describing only civil law. Words like "widow/widower", which have social role connotations, and "spouse", which has both social role and religious connotations, had been struck from the bill. It was, in my mind, a masterful use of language itself to forge a new contract - "marriage" is an established entity, with a wealth of meaning behind it in religion, family life, tax code, and civil rights. That's part of why it's so hard to legislate around - people have a very fixed schema of marriage, and while some things may be part of it (divorce is incorporated into that schema, I think), it is an existent entity. So trying to create domestic partnerships was ambitious - the language of it was government and civil, and the religious and wider social connotations of marriage were not only untouched, but were protected as separate. It was, in my mind, a very clever compromise. That's future-ish, but more a product of modern pragmatism.

The debate then began, where it was attacked for being gay marriage. The entirety of built up nuance was thrown to the wayside, and lines pulled from Prop 8 support came to the fore. I noticed a reference made earlier in a Scarantino column happen on the senate floor. Disappointing to myself, but interesting, because I tend to underestimate the influence of commentators on political process. Scarantino's article was argued against in many places, but it was the one in the paper, and the one that got used on the floor. It was an interesting play in a democratic legislature, and it allowed people to protect the practice of religion, rather than protect people from religion. I missed the rest of the debate, so I can't offer wonky commentary on that, but this part at least seems classic, normal, business as usual weighing of freedoms against freedoms.

Then there's the voting. The bill failed, with 17 votes for and 25 votes against. If you want to see the list of who voted how, I recommend here. For me at least, it's a disappointing result, but not an insurmountable setback for the future.

For others, it's huge, and to be fair, people there have far more invested in this than I do. Not that I don't sympathize, and not that I'm not upset, but I'm not surprised to find party unity faltering. In theory, with both state houses controlled by democrats, and with a democratic governor, bills labeled progressive should fly through the government and become law/policy/mandate more or less immediately. At least, that's how it works in countries with way, way fewer veto points. To even get this far, the bill had to make it through votes in two separate committees. To get further, it would have had to make it through at least two more stops. Anywhere in this process, a significant blockage can kill the bill. If we had just one choke point, party unity would be essential - with many, it's easy to trade acquiescence in a few spots for forgiven deviations elsewhere. This holds true no matter the composition of the legislative body - if the parties are close to even, unity is stressed, but hard to enforce when cross-aisle votes are sought after. If one party predominates (as was the case here), the party dynamic changes a little, but the calculus is similar. Party unity is the only thing the minority party can really trade on, so it's essential. Within the dominating party, then, you get a split like the one today, where 10 democrats sided with the minority party, and where 17 sided with the main party ideology. Groups split like this all the time. Democrats are pretty uniform in outlook when they are the opposition; is it any wonder that when they are the majority conservative and liberal divisions surface within the party? Being in the majority allows those things to happen, and it allows bills like SB 12 to even be considered. It's also what allows the bill to be destroyed by the party that sponsored it, and that's a rather bitter irony.

Still, I'm optimistic. I was able to pay close attention to the hearing on a senate bill when I'm 1,100+ miles away. There was direct video feed of the senate floor, and the viewing/blogging public was able to see the arguments brought forth on the bill, and call them out on respective flimsiness. This isn't yet the golden age of internet-aware moves by lawmakers, but the tools to change the status quo are more readily available than ever before. (And that's good, because the status is most definitely not quo.) But I'm confident it will be in the future. Alas, the future isn't tonight, but hey, at least we're halfway there.

Getting Humanitarian Intervention Right

2009-02-02T00:16:00.002-07:00

Evan's smart. His latest post, culled from an essay, is about how to do humanitarian intervention. And it is really good. My favorite point?

A majority of the bad reputation that humanitarian intervention has, then, is unearned; it is not the doctrine itself (which is guided by the noble ideal of protecting human life), nor the United Nations as an organization (which is left in the unenviable position of being the impartial mediator) that causes the complaints leveled against humanitarian intervention. It is the member nations themselves who use both the organization and the ideal as an excuse and a scapegoat.

Elephant Diaries: Funny Pages

2009-02-01T14:30:00.006-07:00

(Editor's Note: This is the third filler post I'm writing while I try and figure out my Anti-Racism Sermon post. I hope you don't mind the relatively lighter content)

"Elephant Diaries" is the term John Fleck has been using over on his blog to describe the problem facing print media - it's dying, fewer people are subscribing, and where does that leave journalists? Perhaps just as importantly, where does that leave journalism itself? He's been hitting all the big points himself, and I was certain that what would draw me to write about this was Sarkozy and the State sponsorship of newspapers in France. But no - not even that would bring me into the discussion of print. What could compel me more than french government?

Comics.

Whenever I'm given a newspaper that has them, it's the first thing I read. Childhood habit, nostalgia, early morning brain needing pictures before words, whatever it is, that's where I turn. And I am almost always disappointed. Comics today, as wonderfully satirized by The Comics Curmudgeon, are a mess of slow-progressing story, the trials and tribulations of rich white anglo saxon protestants, jokes that eight-year-olds are sick of, and the unending cancer-rama of Funky Winkerbean.

Sure, there are exceptions, but for every Get Fuzzy there are about seven strips no one would go out of their way to read. And that's the model that has sustained comics for years - hit everyone with a batch of non-offensive stuff, hope they like some of it, and then make sure you never get rid of the comic they liked when they were eight. For some people, and for some length of time, this worked out great. Jim Davis owes his very existence to nostalgia formed in childhood transforming into marketing opportunities instead of dissipating.

But for many people, that market was awful. The comics they wrote were too niche-audience, or too adult, or were mature and sophisticated while not being boring, or characters had things like opinions or politics. These comics creators went online, and if you check back at the early news posts of webcomics starting from 1997 to 2003, there is a lot of hope expressed that the comic could jump from the internet to print. Scott Kurtz of iconic PvP famously campaigned for entrance into the privileged halls of print comics. For his trouble, in 2004 he was mocked by one of the lesser mainstays of print comicdom for being "internet famous" and thus irrelevant to the real world. There's foreshadowing here.

Then, in 2007, webcomic Diesel Sweeties actually made the jump. The creator opted to create a separate print version, so as to keep his main comic and main revenue stream separate from the confines of print. Read that sentence again. This guy, who's job primarily (though certainly not exclusively) consists of making a comic and putting it online, was making more from that than he was going to make from the previous holy-grail of webcartoonists: syndication. And in late 2008, he canceled his print comic. Too much work, his primary income was suffering, he was actually losing money, and it just wasn't worth it to him. That club which Scotty had been kept out of four years prior? Totally not cool anymore.

In the space of their existence online, some webcomics (not all, and certainly not most), managed to flourish and create independent revenue streams. They could appeal to niche audiences, they could address more mature issues, they could afford to be actually interesting, and they were free to do this all without any restrictions placed upon them by a syndicate. And for those who succeeded, they created a successful business model in an environment whose challenges syndicate cartoonists are just now facing.

Jeph Jacques of the fantastic Questionable Content has a great takedown of a newspaper comic writer looking tentatively at the internet, and being afraid to take the plunge. It's fitting that the post being responded to is titled "The End of Alternative Comics" - being alternative comics is what drove webcomics into an awkward sort-of genre. Really, it's the end of comics sold as part of newsprint, and that's a death worth mourning. It overlooks, however, the whole world of comics that exists outside of print. And that world is huge, dynamic, and populated.

Which is really just to say: Print Media may be dying, but comics are going strong. It's not much, but it certainly is something.

Self-Aware Meta Post

2009-01-20T21:17:00.003-07:00

Yeah, I totally squandered inauguration day posting opportunity on something rather light and filler-y. But hey, today was awesome, and I don't have much to add to the moment. But, if you want to read something smart and meaningful without ever dropping the ball, I recommend this post. It isn't a long read, and it says vital things. If you can take a break from frolicking, it is well worth your time.

Oh, and, umm, I'm not the kind of person who cries with joy, but I read his speech (I only saw 6 minutes of the actual inauguration), and I think the emotional impact it had on me was similar. Rhetoric has its limits, but wow. I've always been proud to be American, but it is so nice to have the sentiments behind that echoed, and for my understanding of what being American means to count. There is so much good left to be done, and it is so nice to have a president who asks us to do it.

On Morality

2009-01-20T18:36:00.002-07:00

(Editors Note: I am in the process of writing a trial sermon on anti-racism, for no purpose other than some disappointment over the anti-racism sermon at FUUNO last Sunday. In the meantime, I have this piece, which was a response to a friend asking on Facebook how one would define morality. He asked us to define it in the context of a lecture, but one that did not exceed 500 words. I did this, and realized that Facebook is not the appropriate place for such at-length musings, but my blog is. So, here you go. 500 words on morality.)

Morality is one of those wonderfully vague concepts, nestled somewhere between honor and ethics, under the category of justice and in the general area of human interactions. I'm tempted to quote Confucius, about how everything flows from everything being in proper order and circumstance, but morality isn't a fixed set or rigid code to be applied in all situations. It isn't really rigid in execution - this is not channeling Machiavelli so much as it is acknowledging that, in the whole of human experience, internal principles matter only so long as they can be consistently applied to varying circumstances. Coming from a religious tradition where reason predominates, dogma is shunned, and the genuinely unanswerable is acknowledged as such, morality seems to me to be the exact point at which justice, personal philosophy, and social norms collide. Morality varies from person to person, moreso from culture to culture, and yet it circles around a platonic absolute.

What is that absolute? Far as I can tell, it is the way to interact with an other, and with any other, and with every other, that is not just straightforward but honors notions of inherent dignity and respect. Of course, we have as always the bugbears of outliers to confound everything - how does on respect the inherent dignity of, say, a child molester? The reply that seems most appropriate, that is the easiest best fit, is that one acts with ones inherent dignity, using the capacity as not-a-child-molester to figure out justice for that individual who has broken rules of both society and morality. And yet, that perspective, acting civilized in the face of acts deemed barbaric, is not enough - too much of that is defaulting to an ingroup/outgroup, and us/them, an acceptable/other perspective. That ignores the relational aspects of this - it is Balder being the god of justice, but largely ignored because he has only kindness and no judgment. And this cannot be the reaction of a vigilante - Rorschach, for all his power as a punisher of wrongdoing, has no capacity to act as a righter of wrongs. In this situation, as in every situation, to act with morality is to acknowledge the harm done, and to work towards a future where such harm is not done again. To not just rehabilitate the individual, but to better engineer the structure of the individuals environment, of the environment of all individuals, so that one can move as quickly as humanly possible to rectify a situation while still respecting the rights of all innocents.

I've been talking a lot about justice. It is what I deem the most important constituent part of morality, but it is far from alone. Justice in isolation is how a society regulates it's internal functioning - morality is how individuals within society function together in a manner that respects justice. More importantly, it is the way that individuals interact with one another without the need for society to do any more than be composed of individuals.

Gaza Redux

2009-01-13T21:53:00.004-07:00

(Thanks to Christine at iMinister for the link recommendation)

Last week, I wrote a post on Gaza. In my post, I attempted to do two things - paint the Gazans as innocents, and point to the breakup of negotiation as the key failing, not the Israeli invasion or the firing of rockets. I succeeded in part, but by defending the Gazans so vehemently, I ended up demonizing the Israelis. Part of this is fatigue from a long discussion with an ardent supporter of Israel - heated discussion polarizes, and I as I was unclear of my orignal stance, I ended up playing the opposition to his point. Another part of this is my natural sympathies towards the historic underdog, engendered in part by my identification with the left and in part by my identification with browncoats (no joke). But arguing on behalf of one side is folly - innocent Israelis suffer too, and playing an umbers game doesn't work here. My post fell short of its aspirations.

Fortunately, the infinite typewriters of the blogosphere have come up with a far, far better post and position to take. This position was hinted at by the above-mentioned Christine's post on the inhumanity of it all, but it's true genesis is found elsewhere. That elsewhere happens to be Doug Muders' Weekly Sift blog post. What I like about Doug's post is that he firstly hits upon my main point - if Israel wanted to solve with entirely with violence, they'd act differently and be committing genocide. But he expands from that to the greater political reason behind all of this:

Many of the things done by terrorists (and corresponding anti-terrorist extremists) may look crazy, but they are actually part of a coherent strategy. To understand that strategy you need to grasp one key idea: If you're an extremist, your first enemy isn't the extremist of the opposite side, it's the moderate of your own side. Opposing extremists are actually allies in a battle against the center.

Let me repeat that, because it takes a while to sink in: Opposing extremists are actually allies in a battle against the center. They'll fight each other in the second round, after the center is eliminated.

Now, I'm not saying that opposing extremists actually conspire. They don't need to. But those cycles of attack-and-reprisal that look insane and counterproductive are in fact very productive, if the purpose is to derail any possible compromise and make the center untenable.

(bold italics his; bold on its own emphasis mine).

That, right there, is the heart of the matter. Doug makes the point I couldn't, and does it concisely. I couldn't be happier.

Jim Scarantino/Post-Partisanship

2009-01-12T16:33:00.004-07:00

For those outside of Albuquerque, you have almost certainly not heard of Jim Scarantino. He

presents himself as a brainy and moderate -- if somewhat pompous -- independent "libertarian."

according to Democracy for New Mexico. They have a fantastic piece up as a takedown of Scarantino's latest column about pending Domestic Partnership legislation. My favorite part of the piece, besides the fact-checking (which is always awesome in the blogosphere) is that they don't attack Scarantino so much for his stated partisan allegiance, but that they expose him for misrepresenting a bill in a wretchedly partisan way. It's a 'gotcha', but it's a really good gotcha, and it is exactly what the blogosphere can do best.

Scarantino, presenting himself as rational if disagreeable, attempts to make a broad appeal to the evangelical base of conservative movements, directly borrowing a line touted in defense of Proposition 8. He does this despite claiming that he's "on record supporting this concept", and he then goes on to say that "Every major religion continues to reject homosexual unions." I can't imagine any clear objective in his mind - do religions that support homosexual unions count as minor? Does he, the free and rational thinker he claims to be, think that the silent majority is justified in their fears, especially given that those fears have no real basis in the law? And, most importantly of all, is Jim's column anything more than masturbatory leftist-blaming?

What's a leftist, a moderate, or a genuine libertarian to do in the face of this? Tom Tomorrow of "This Modern World" suggests that we are now in an era of turning a blind eye to such deeds, in the spirit of post-partisanship. It's implied that because the left has been proven right on behalf of our electoral success that we forgive and forget the grievances placed upon us in the past. But post-partisanship isn't about forgetting - the left won with popular support, so it's not like we're forgetting the things we got right. And just because Obama has made a call for national unity and moving beyond party divisions (that'd be the forgiving) doesn't mean that we can't call someone out on blatant, civil-discourse-destroying partisan mud-slinging. Jim Scarantino here has nothing constructive to bring to the table - by advocating an opinion he disagrees with, whose basis in the law is non-existent, he has more or less decided that rather than engaging in a discussion about the boundary between church and state, he will instead claim rightness and hurl vitriol at those he disagrees with. (Really, Jim, fascist as a meaningful insult? This isn't 7th grade, and you are this close to breaking Godwin's Law).

Being post-partisan doesn't mean letting him say whatever he wants in the spirit of discourse (freedom of speech covers that). Being post-partisan means that when someone shows up to the discourse with a pile of unsubstantiated lies and the Cliff's Notes to 1984, we are allowed to ignore them and talk to the actual libertarians in the room. Because at least they are taking the discussion seriously. Because their intent is finding that line between church and state, instead of asserting their line is absolutely and infallibly correct. Because governments and political parties don't deal in infallibility, Jim - that's the realm of the Church.

Gaza

2009-01-10T14:14:00.004-07:00

Christine at iMinister has a much more thoughtful piece up about being a bystander to a conflict that goes against ones values. It's much more diplomatic than my post, and it avoids the word "annihilationist", so please read her post if you think that this one will be unsavory.

My thoughts on Gaza have been scattered in many places across the Internet this week. In an exercise of demonstrating exactly what twitter isn't for, a friend and I have had banter going back and forth all week in 140 character increments. Snappy, but not the space for thoughts to become thoughtful. It was an especially weird conversation because my friend was advocating on behalf of Israel, and I was advocating on behalf of Gazans. My role in that conversation was to distinguish the terrorists from the innocents, and his role was to find the innocents complicit. In the abstract, it was a fascinating thought experiment. In reality, it was among the most unpleasant experiences of political discourse I have engaged in. The stakes in conversation about this are high, and the ability of one to convince another of the rightness of their opinion is very low. Following my advice, I wouldn't have this conversation.

The problem with a conversation treated as a war is that it lingers. It's not a pleasant place to dwell, but like all optimistic Generals, it's easy to look at a fixed row of trenches, aim for a weak spot, and make a push to remove the stalemate. It doesn't work for two reasons. One: while it is incredibly hard for one side to 'win' a conversation like this, it is really easy for someone acting in opposition to restore it to stalemate status. Two: conversations aren't battles, discussion topics aren't wars, and while the metaphors are at times handy, treating this as a tooth-and-nail battle to fight isn't helping.

My discussion on twitter swung in interesting directions in the attempt to break through. My central conceit, which made discussion possible, was that while Israel was justified in the right of response. their response was both unjust and disproportionate. Disproportionate is an interesting word here. In a letter to the editor in Albuquerque's Weekly Alibi, political scientist Brandon Curtis argues that the term itself is meaningless and a cheap shot from people who don't understand the issue. I respectfully disagree, but I think it's easy to understand why the word seems inappropriate.

In October 2001, NATO went to war in Afghanistan in response to a terrorist attack by a group that country hosted. In 2003, the American public (and, more importantly, it's elected officials) felt it was appropriate to overthrow and destroy the government of Iraq based on the possibility that it might be fostering future terrorists, or giving them weapons, or was itself a terrorististic state. Recent memory serves that no degree of force is too little to adequately protect a nation from terrorism. We forget, then, other responses. In October 2000, in response to the bombing of the USS Cole by terrorists, Clinton sent out legal experts to track down and arrest the specific culprits. In October* 1983, the US marine barracks (which also housed French troops) was bombed in Beirut. The response was a small punitive bombing of alleged terrorists by France, followed by a quiet retreat of US forces in February. And, as popularized in the film Munich, it is assumed that Israel responded to the kidnapping and murder of it's Olympic Athletes by hunting down people assumed to be connected.

All these responses, at the time, have been justified as proportionate. Since that list includes everything from abandonment to assassination, and from legal action to pre-emptive war, the field of declaring proportionality is wide open. So, while I think that Israel has a right to respond to attacks against its citizens, I don't think that the method of response (bombing, followed by a ground invasion) is proportionate. Israel is responding to terrorism by treating it as a war, and that greatly complicates the issue.

If this is a war, one has to assume that Hamas itself, as the government of Gaza, is marshaling the terrorists as a formal army. While I'm more toward ambivalent about Hamas belligerance in this conflict, I am inclined to suspect that they have little choice besides acting in control or being seen as even more powerless than they are. In conversation with my friend, I argued disproportionality because, while the terrorists targeted civilians, the correct response of a government is to target terrorists. Yes, this is holding Israel to a higher standard. They are a western democracy, and that means we are allowed to expect better of them. But suppose that Hamas itself is directing the attacks, is responsible for them, feels no qualms over the death of it's own citizens, and that they are fighting this war in the same way that European nations fought WWI. In that case, it makes more sense that Israel is responding with a war of annihilation - it's unjust as all hell, but at the very least it makes sense.

Because if Israel isn't fighting a war of annihilation against another nation that would do the same, they are certainly acting like it. In my conversation over twitter, I argued with the friend that the majority of Gazans are in fact innocents, and not complicit in the attacks. He responded by claiming that if they were not in complicit in the attacks, why weren't they doing anything to stop them. I think they don't have the resources necessary to stop the attacks, and I'm inclined to think that all the former Gazans with resources have left. People with means tend not to remain in ghettoized nations. Hamas, whether or not it actively encouraged the terrorists who started this conflict, has very little choice but to support them now. They are, after all, the ones with the weapons, and despite the relatively calm two-year ceasefire, Hamas is well aware that no Israeli operation in the area would be complete without an attempt to remove Hamas from power. Hamas has had to very quickly move itself into the role of fighting against Israel, because the only thing worse than a government that fails to prevent war is a government that fails to effectively fight it.

And this, here, is the tragedy. Before the conflict broke out, Hamas wanted a new ceasefire. Hamas is an organization whose main appeal is their unequivocal call for the eradication of Israel, and yet by advocating for a new ceasefire they had shown that they were willing to accept the two state solution, at least temporarily. Skeptics can throw this off as an attempt to keep things calm before the war itself broke out, but they are missing the potential inherent in that ceasefire. Hamas wanted, at least temporarily, a ceasefire. This is a militant party that came to power democratically, and whose future as a party of rule depends upon public opinion. Most war-mongering parties in history go to war as soon as they are elected, else the public change its mind and elect others. Hamas didn't want this, and I cannot fathom why the opportunity to forge a slightly less imperfect peace was not seized upon, especially if it is Israel's goal to prevent Palestinian terrorism, rather than to wipe Gaza out.

There are two broad categories of eliminating terrorism, and they are the same broad categories categories people use to deal with crime. One: kill/capture/disable all those who would commit terrorism. Two: make sure other options exist for people who would otherwise turn to terrorism. The first response is the one that militaries can do, to some extent. It was fortunate for the US in the early stages of its operations in Afghanistan that many al Qaeda fighters were willing to straightforwardly fight against the US - that makes the work much, much easier. In Iraq, of course, the terrorists didn't emerge until after the war, and being terrorists, they weren't interested in fighting set-piece battles. Instead, they formed militias (for defensive purposes) and acted anonymously amidst the population when attacking US troops. Iraq is large - with ~ 170,000 square miles and a population of 29 million, it is easy for people to hide and it is hard to kill them all. Gaza, on the other hand, is tiny - 139 square miles, and 1.5 million people in that little area. For a more relevant size comparison, the city of Albuquerque is 181 square miles, and about a third the population of Gaza. Gaza is a place where approach one, kill everyone who might be terrorists, could work.

To even have that on the table is ridiculous. And yet, Israel seeks punitive attacks with overwhelming force against terrorists operating within the area. Not that some attacks wouldn't work, and not that some retaliation doesn't make sense, but the scale and the manner of the tactics, if they aren't annihilationist, are beyond excessive, and if they are annihilationist, then they are patently immoral.

Option two for fighting terrorism is the one that I think has the most promise for Gaza, and had it been adopted as part of a renewed ceasefire, I think it would have eventually had the effect that Israel's attack aims to achieve. When Gazans (and Palestinians more generally) know that they are safe in Palestine, that their rights are respected, and that Israeli invasion is a distant (if not non-existent) possibility, they will be able to concentrate on issues other than injustices visited upon them by Israel.

But I don't think that's what the response to this attack will be, and the time for wishful thinking about ceasefires has passed and is not yet at hand again. Instead, I predict that the same will always happen in Gaza as has tended to happen - punitive strikes by Israel, followed by calm, followed by stagnation and oppression in Gaza, followed by terrorist attacks originating in Gaza, followed by punitive attacks on behalf of Israel, rinse, repeat.

There are two ways out of this mess, out of this most vicious and petty of cycles. The first, the annihilationist war, is patently immoral, and I don't imagine that Israel will actually do it. The second, the long slow development of Gaza into a safe and stable place, with terms negotiated over years that slowly grant better and better conditions for Palestine, is the option I'm holding out for. It's also an option that will take a willingness on behalf of Israel to keep working, even in the face of terrorist attacks. And it will take an effort reciprocated by Gazans, to go from an attitude that, though not complicit, is indifferent to terrorism, towards an attitude that condemns terrorism as much as it condemns injustice visited upon Palestinians. When the people have other options, they will use them. Bombing people into non-existence doesn't do that, and in fact is a very active way of removing options from people.

Our 43rd president intended to make his legacy one of fighting terrorism and of nation building. That's an entirely compatible goal set, but it's impossible to do in a flashy way - people remember wars. People don't remember long, gradual movements towards peace and stability. They just wake up one day and realize how happy they are that they haven't experienced a war in decades. That's the goal, and that's the possibility that existed in Hamas offer of extending the ceasefire. It's a possibility that remains, and its one well worth keeping in mind for the next time.

*Seriously, what is with October showing up so much. Did al qaeda watch Red October, and misinterpret that Americans were scared of October when they were really scared of Reds?

Editor's Note:The easy way to avoid this conversation is to say something like "these issues go back to biblical times, why discuss them?". My other big Internet conversation about this before my post was on facebook, and after someone replied with the 'biblical times' comment, I responded with this:

I think we're terribly mistaken to pass this off as going back to biblical times - the modern conflict isn't Jews versus Palestinians, it started Israelis versus Arabs; the Arabs in question have, post 1968, become Palestinian by virtue of abandonment of by the rest of the Arab world. Israel still sees Palestinian action as an attempt by Arab states to remove Israel from existence, while Palestine is largely on it's own, despite moves by Iran-affiliated Hezbollah in Lebanon and posturing on behalf of other Arab leaders. And now we're even past issues of Israel's right to exist - Hamas at least temporarily accepts a two-state solution. The trick is figuring out modern terms, and how Palestine will negotiate itself into a position less asymmetrical than the one it currently enjoys. The conflict has involved into a very modern form, and while historical legacy plays a role, it's much more recent history than millennial or even centuries old.

So, yeah, no this isn't an old issue. A much better way to avoid the conversation would be to say "lets ride bikes".

Drugs/Drug Culture

2009-01-08T10:27:00.002-07:00

In my head, I've been writing this post since at least May 2007. In that month, I wrote a post about "The Social Norms of Intellectual Dissidents". It's one of my favorite posts, but I spent the whole of it tip-toeing around the main issue in my mind. Since it's relevant here, I'll go ahead and quote the relevant parts in full:

I support decriminalization of marijuana, but I don't and cannot allow myself to smoke it (at all, ever) as while the law is unjust, the illegality of the act is something I feel should be officially overturned, rather than quietly disregarded.

It is here that I have my biggest break with drug culture in its aspirations, and I'm well aware that I may be creating an artificial distinction. My stance and my point seem far more valid in the 1960s US than they do in the present one, and perhaps that's because of the point I made later in that post:

This is the stand of the moderate intelligentsia, and it's saving grace is that their ideas are easier to legitimize than what happens at the fringe. It helps to defy stereotypes and bring people around, and it slowly changes attitudes, usually only slightly (at most a generation or two) ahead of the common perception.

My thinking in that post was that drug culture, from hippies to hipsters to the drug culture of punk rock and now to such phenomena as "urban" crack and rural meth use, was forcibly distinct from mainstream society. Rather than making drug use more common and everyday, drug culture instead served to alienate most people and made demonization of drug users easy. A "War on Drugs" in this country was possible and supported in a way that a "War on Booze" seems impossible today. Of course, this nation once had prohibition of alcohol, but that was overturned in a depression (haha) and after a decade of realizing that people would still consume alcohol legal or illegal. It was also ended under the realization that the social cost of outlawing alcohol, especially the rise of powerful gangs and criminal empires, outweighed the social goods of banning it.

There are many today who call for an end to prohibition on similar accounts - after all, isn't it the common knowledge of the collective American psyche that marijuana is really not a harmful thing at all? (Editor's note - that previous sentence is hyperbole and quite possibly untrue) But there are very interesting distinctions made here - I will advocate completely for the decriminilization, and maybe even for the outright legalization, or marijuana, but I will go to great lengths to say that I don't want this for myself, that I don't ever intend to partake of the drug, and that I think the illegality of the drug is wrong more than I think the drug is right. I do this because I don't want to be associated with the societal images of drug culture, and because I really have little fondness for being smeared with the same revolusion that has motivated US politics agaisnt the far left since the sixties.

The problem with living this fine distinction is that the culture of the US has moved faster than the intellectuals defending it. As of 2001, 77% of US teenagers surveyed admitted to having at the least tried marijuana. That's no minority sentiment - that's an overhelming majority of the population. Not an exclusive majority, and the figures for current use are just under half of the population, but that is still an awful lot of people. Enough to not constitute fringe groups or minorities, beyond the fact that they are teenagers. And that, soon enough, becomes a majority of the population - no one who was a teenager at the time of the survey is a teenager now. Given a generation or two, casual (and perhaps infrequent) drug use will be part of what is officially normal in American society. And it's worth adding to that - for the societal change to take effect, this will require drug users to live into thier forties and fifties, and probably even into old age. That can't be done without responsible, sane drug use, and it probably can't be done with the drugs that have high mortality rates. Our population will self-select what is minimally harmful, what one can use and still function in society, and what is and always will be a bad idea.

Ending prohibition of alcohol came with the realization that some societal woes are to be accepted, but that criminalizing an activity found to be generally accepted and practiced is the better way to go. This is no better exemplified than in the "If-by-whiskey" speech (hat tip NoraReed). Given another decade or so, I imagine that marijuana will become decriminalized more generally, if not legal, and that it will be accepted as both a medicine and a drug than can safely be used in moderation. And my guess is that, as this becomes more and more openly mainstream, drug culture itself will fade into the background, and people's immediate reactions to news about a drug will no longer be based on their disapproval of stereotypes about drug users. (Similarly, I also hope the same for people's reactions to Christianity no longer be based on fear of the religious right, but that's another post.)

Society Isn't Battles

2009-01-06T14:18:00.003-07:00

Today in London and elsewhere, an advertising campaign is running on city buses. The ads are catchy, with Atheist slogans that I would put in the "mildly harmful" section, and not the "completely benign" one. They aren't bad, certainly, and they are at most slightly offensive, but I cannot really say that I'm a fan.

The ad campaign is a response to a previous ad campaign which ran on British buses, linking to a website which discussed Jesus, hellfire, and how non-believers are destined for it. The sources I've found online don't actually say what the bus ads contained (beyond the URL), and so I'm inclined to think that this is more confrontational than it needs to be.

And it's a tricky little thing - I'm all for the acceptance of Atheism, and since I self-identify as agnostic it's not hard for me to agree with their emphasis on being kind to people and living in this world. Those are good things, integral to my understanding of the world. And I'm certainly not in favor of advertising campaigns who go around screaming "Hellfire!" at folk. That's rude, and while it can be motivated by an intense concerning for the spiritual well-being of an individual, it comes across as the opposite of affirming inherent worth and dignity.

But I'm not sure the ad campaign being reacted to was an unpleasant as envisioned, and while I think the Atheist statements are pretty positivistic in intent, it is choir-preaching to say "I don't think there is a God, and I don't need that". It won't convert the uninitiated, and while it may lead more people begrudgingly to tolerance, it doesn't build towards acceptance, which I think is key.

Perhaps I'm over-reacting, and feel free to tell me you think so in the comments. I just - I don't think any side needs to go around claiming exclusive moral superiority, and I don't think that all the denialist and combative elements of Atheism help their cause. The whole thing just strikes me as rather petty.

Edit: saw a new term today, and it hit what I've been trying to get at for a while. Post-Partisan

The Year in Commentary

2008-12-31T17:43:00.002-07:00

This is usually the time when blogs do one of two things - look forward with lists, or look backward with lists. Being faithful to the blogosphere, it seems I owe the world a list post.

I don't have any "best entries" to look at - half my output was for a primary in an election already decided, and you probably already know what of mine you like. So instead I'm going to point you at two sources for commentary on the year which I think were kind of awesome. Yeah, my list post is a list of two.

1. Ironman
This was certainly The Dark Knights year, in terms of almost everything - it was good, it made a lot of money, it had a good performance by a star who died tragically young. In an election year it had a vigilante, a realist of a public servant, and an idealistic politician all tied up in a mess of a situation, and confounded by maliciousness and chaos. It should have been the narrative to accompany election day.

It wasn't. This year, the best commentary about America as an entity was captured in reviews of Iron Man. Iron Man has no politicians. Iron Man, in fact, is rather minimal - inventor + tragedy = mind change + redemption. And all the while, America is still at war in the background. Tony Stark changes himself in a cave, and he comes back to change not Afghanistan, but to re-orient America. In the comics, Iron Man has become the victorious face of a government that killed Captain America, but in the movie Iron Man is America reborn - this isn't a struggle of identity, this is a coming of age. Captain America is the Greatest Generation - he is an eager and patriotic citizen made exemplary, and in his later years he embodied all the promise America had offered, and was more than a tad upset when it collapsed upon itself in a fit of paranoia and police-state antics. It's a good story, but it's an apocalyptic narrative, not the one of rebirth.

The re-birth narrative is all Iron Man. He literally makes himself over, and thanks to American inventiveness and determination, he sets out to undo all the evil he himself did. This is a narrative captured brilliantly in two separate reviews: one by The Ferret, and one at SciFi blog io9. Read both of them - they are as much about comics and film as they are about where America stands today. And that America doesn't include Gotham.

2. Sinfest
Sinfest is the name of a webcomic. A really, really brilliant webcomic. It's been around for a while, and its well-done art (plus decent humor) had kept me reading it on and off. Then the election got underway, and it is the narrative I will hand my children to explain this year. The humor is spot on, the metaphors used all resonate strongly, and it provides the cartoon narrative with the goofy faces and the cutting insights in a year where much has been made of narrative.

This one - the best attempt at turning Dark Knight into a parable for the US.

These three - the first one is Obama campaigning, the second one is Obama elected, and the third one is Obama taking office. All of them get the narrative of the election done beautifully, and they do it in a few panels.

Here we have Sinfest Uncle Sam, using Star Wars to explain how we got to be where we are. It's beautiful

And here we see the economic collapse, told in a wonderfully self-righteous fashion by the symbols of American wealth we have created for ourselves.

If I haven't fan-boyed enough over this comic, here's the years' end:

Pitch Perfect. Have a good night, everyone.

Living the Dialog

2008-12-28T17:44:00.004-07:00

Editors Note: I wrote this piece as a pulpit editorial for delivery today at First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque, where it was delivered for both first and second service. I'm posting it up here because I think it's worthy writing, but keep in mind that it is even more targeted at Unitarians than is usual.

Hello Congregation. I'm Kelsey Atherton, and earlier this fall I was the political advisor to Christine on her inspired if ill-fated presidential campaign.

I meant to write this pulpit editorial about my roommate and me- randomly assigned to live together in college housing, we disagree fundamentally on every political issue that has ever come up. And it was my intent to examine how before the election our interactions were all arguments, and how after the election it's become an oppressive silence. This pulpit editorial, as I envisioned it, was to be a parable of the dangers of partisan living, and a reminder of the strength of the divisions that persist in this nation.

The problem with that idea is that it doesn't really offer anything positive or useful, and I know that I for one don't come to church to feel powerless in the face of bad things. The other problem with that anecdote is that it is more or less the exact opposite of living the dialog - my roommate and I engaged in conversation when the stakes were high, and now that the election has concluded we sit around silently being contemptuous of each other. It's kind of a terrible example of how to live ones values.

There is, however, an essence of living the dialog in that. It's important to know where the dialog can be helpful, and where the dialog will amount to a lot of effort and frustration without any meaningful change. This isn't about "cutting ones losses" or "picking ones' battles" - this is about moving beyond war metaphors because this isn't, you know, war. And I think that's really what I learned from my experiences with my roommate - we treated this as a war, and now that the election is over, we're entrenched in a forced no-man's land, waiting for the next outbreak of hostilities.

That is no way to live. And while the situation with my roommate is looking irreparable, it's motivated me to find better ways to live the dialog with other people in my life. My conversations with friends about political issues are no longer winner-take-all debates, where personal attacks fly furiously, or where I discredit an issue because I doubt a given politicians' intelligence. Much as I'd like to say "your guy is an idiot, and you're an idiot for liking him", that's out of the picture. Talking like that is the exact opposite of productive. Every conversation, I strive to remove the petty from my politics. And yeah, I'm still met with the occasional "secret Muslim" comment. But it becomes rare, and it gets to be irrelevant.

More importantly than the lack of ad hominem attacks is the new found common ground - while I still argue tooth and nail for the right to choose, my pro-life friends and I come close to agreeing on "safe, legal, and rare." While I am sorely disappointed by the passage of proposition 8 in California, I can sympathize with the desire to settle the issue of marriage equality through voting and not judicial fiat. That is to say, in a way that respects "the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within...our society at large". And while I am dismayed at insensitive and intolerant remarks expressed by some religious leaders, I can share with them the common ground of good works and a desire to lead a purpose-driven life.

Christine, in her post election sermon about Living in Purple America, quoted this from my blog: "But that doesn’t entitle us to inflict any of the same scorn and contempt on the losers that we’ve had to suffer through. Because if we do that, then it was all for nothing.". I wrote it hours after an electoral success I'd waited 8 years for, and I wrote it not so much because I needed to know it then, but because I knew I'd need to be reminded of it now. In the coming weeks, as the Christmas spirit wanes and the inauguration looms closer and closer, it's important that we continue the work of living the dialog of Purple America. Without it, we exist as bitterly divided armed camps. With the dialog, and the conscious effort to engage people in serious and rational discussion, we can begin to do away with battles against each other. Because there isn't an enemy here - just fellow Americans. We have to appreciate and understand where they're coming from in order to join them in fellowship.

The piece ends there, but I'd be remiss if I didn't include the following image:
The image comes from the excellent from52to48withlove, which is the site that best informed this pulpit editorial, and my post-election sentiments. The above image I found particularly moving, and while I tried I was unable to include it in my speech before the church. Here it is for you, faithful readers.

Rick Warren, Obama, and the Center in American Politics

2008-12-21T11:53:00.007-07:00

For more or less every person vaguely in the US political blogosphere, and especially for those people who care about social issues, the big looming discontent this week has focused on Barack Obama's selection of Rick Warren as the minister to give the inaugural invocation. And this is good - in our participatory democracy where personal views matter as much as stated policy aims, we as the public, as the pale apparition of new journalism, and even alongside the white elephant of old journalism (a term of endearment, that) have a right and a duty to examine in as much detail the little signifiers which could become the big signifiers.

There's some real grounds for fear here. In the wake of prop 8, and with the side note that the Obama campaign had both "Obama/Yes on 8" and "Obama/No on 8" voters, it seems like the president is not so beholden to the LGBT community as many had hoped. This perceived abandonment is cemented in the minds of many by Rick Warren. After all, he has likened gay marriage to incest and pedophilia. That's more or less an unforgivable offense, right?

Well, yes and no. Which I guess really means no. For many, any nuanced qualifiers (which, if you know me, you know are coming) are not enough. The far left, the progessive left, the left-left, the bleeding-hear-left, social libertarians, and a good many in the moderate left all view this as completely unacceptable. There are almost certainly political scientists right now formulating Obama's political obituary, examining the breakup of the new new deal coalition. First it was the social issues, they'll say. And indeed, I cannot begrudge those who feel betrayed right now, who feel that Obama himself has crossed a line of no return. This is not the first thing to exhaust serious political capital among the left, but it is one of the biggest. And for many, the mere act of the appointment overrides two very important things Obama is doing.

Firstly, Obama himself has a statement of very, very importantly phrased qualifiers. Secondly, Obama is appointing people with far more accepting views to actual meaningful positions.

Here's what I think are Obama's two key points:

• The President-elect disagrees with Pastor Warren on issues that affect the LGBT community. They disagree on other issues as well. But what's important is that they agree on many issues vital to the pursuit of social justice, including poverty relief and moving toward a sustainable planet; and they share a commitment to renewing America's promise by expanding opportunity at home and restoring our moral leadership abroad.

• As he's said again and again, the President-elect is committed to bringing together all sides of the faith discussion in search of common ground. That's the only way we'll be able to unite this country with the resolve and common purpose necessary to solve the challenges we face.

(emphasis mine). Barack Obama's selection of Rev. Rick Warren is not a blanket endorsement of Warren's views and attitudes. It is not even an endorsement of a majority of Rick Warren's views. It is, instead, an endorsement of a few very specific areas of Rick Warren's ministry - Obama says of Rick Warren that "He's devoted his life to performing good works for the poor and leads the evangelical movement in addressing the global HIV/AIDS crisis" (emphasis, again, mine). This is that evangelical movement which, to an outsider like myself, appears to have repeatedly placed itself in opposition to all the issues of social justice I've cared about. No doubt many are attributing the differences in the success of McCain and Bush's presidential campaigns to the evangelical fervor that swung behind Bush, and was more lacking in support of McCain. This is a group I'd more or less written off as "the opposition". Fortunately for me, the political Left, and the United States on the whole, Obama does not see evangelicals that way.

Rick Warren's presence at the inauguration is not the selling out to the religious right that many fear it is. It is instead an acknowledgment of the religious center, which has been missing from our political discourse. Yes, Rick Warren has views which are antithetical to many progressives. But Rick Warren is not alone in that, and while he did speak in favor of proposition 8, and we can disagree with him on that, he does care about global poverty, and he cares about the fight against AIDS. Obama agrees with Rick Warren on those latter terms, and disagrees on the former. This is not a matter of selling out - this is a matter of acknowledging the diversity of our nation. A messy, sometimes frustrating diversity of opinion, but this is a rather vital one. Obama's inauguration will have another minister, a "giant of the civil rights movement" give the benediction. And Obama has made other, more meaningful actions to show support of LGBT people. That list of meaningful actions includes some hesitancy, and it includes some cautious opinions on his part. It also lacks the neat, doctrinaire uniformity that progressives want from their messiah, and we are foolish for wanting this.

This is a nation of diversity, and any leader who adheres so strongly to just one faction is a leader that betrays the core principles of democracy. It does not meant that our voices aren't valid - they are, now, more than ever. But it does mean that the nation isn't monolithic, that the president has to acknowledge that, and that sometimes a nation has to change underneath it's leader to move him in the right direction.

Obama's inclusion of Rick Warren in his inauguration is a sign that being on the left, or holding even center-left views (like an obligation to fight poverty) does not mean one can't express religion. It's a shame and unfortunate that religion in US politics is presently tied to the Religious Right; Rick Warren himself, while an evangelical, can be found much more awkwardly in the center, where his views do not easily align himself to one party - it's an awkward nation where religiously justified condemnation of poverty and religiously explained condemnation of sexual orientation do not share the same ticket, but it's the nation we have been living in. Obama, by including Rick Warren, seeks to bring religion into the discussion on social justice; it's been isolated in issues of social norms for so long that it's hard to remember the more broader applications of Jesus's teachings, the ones that apply out of the bedroom. By including Rick Warren, Obama does not endorse Warren's views on homosexuality - what Obama does do is endorse evangelicals taking an active role in social justice. This is not a move that could be made in a US where a whole side of the spectrum can hold "unforgivable" views. We, as the left, were excited to see on election day that cries of "socialism" and "spread the wealth around", topics for decades off-limits to US politicians, were not run into the ground. Not to say that we should be accepting of Warren's intolerances, but we should open up a dialog where our sound reason can win the day - excluding one side from every discussion because we don't like where they stand on one of them is tragic, and hurts our nation as a collective whole.

If you've made is this far, you've noticed my tip-toeing around the other big issue that upsets the left with Rick Warren's selection. Rick Warren not only actively campaigned against gay marriage, but he is fairly active against a Women's Right to Choose. I've buried this issue, not because I don't think it's relevant, but because it is harder and harder to see the right-to-life (or, if you prefer, anti-choice) side being an overwhelming national movement. The pro-choice fight is more and more of a quiet one -I'm willing to bet that the silent majority is pretty much entrenched on the side of choice in this one. Perhaps they want more qualifiers, refinement in the right, but this is a right that seems to be guaranteed. Not that we shouldn't fight - we kind of have to. But the fight can be won, and noticeable in this election the pro-choice fight had three significant victories - unsurprising in California, welcome in Colorado, and perhaps most profound in South Dakota. Christine over at iMinister made an important note of this in her post-election sermon. Rick Warren is not on the side of history for this one, and while I'm unwilling to say that progress here is irreversible, it is instead in the enviable position of being well defended when even the movement defending it seems to, at times, be on the margin. It's one of the few times I like how effective the silent majority is, and when the silent majority is winnign the battles in the ballot booth, it means the issue is close to safe. Rick Warren's anti-choice actions and opinions do not undermine this progress

There is one last point I have to make here, on this issue. The picture below these words is one of the most heartening signs that progressives will not be lost in this election. That, right there, is New Mexico's congressional delegation for 2009. On the far right (ha ha) is Senior Senator Jeff Bingaman, who has been protecting the interests of progressives nationally and in New Mexico for twenty five years. The remaining men in the picture (L to R, Ben Ray Lujan, Martin Heinrich, Tom Udall, and Harry Teague) are New Mexico's three congressional representatives, with the exception of Tom Udall, New Mexico's new Junior Senator. For all the symbolic angst that may arise about Rick Warren's stands on social issues, these are five reliable votes against those initiatives. For all the doubts about Obama's sincerity to his supporters on the left, these are five votes that will pull him further to where he should be. And for every move made to combat AIDS, and for every move aimed at fighting poverty, these are five votes that will reliably side with progress.

And that dichotomy mentioned above, where people work together on some but not all issues? That's more or less exactly what the Obama administration is about. It isn't an exclusion of hated opponents, a condemnation of outsiders by those in power, or even a takeover of government by the left. It is one of the ironies of this campaign that the Senate's greatest moderate in recent memory campaigned against a candidate identified with a fringe, only to have the roles reversed on the campaign trail. Obama won the election by a majority of voters not because this nation has become the ideological equivalent of San Fransisco, but because Obama's appeals, which endeared him to the left, are fundamentally centrist.

Leftist doctrine has, for the past century and a half, focused on competing interests within a society. Marxism, Labour, and the general confusion of class and nationality have played out over the past century to constitute a left that, while it has some popular appeal, cannot decide what to do when in power. In France in the 1930s, the Left achieved an electoral victory at the exact smae time all of Europe was afraid of both fascism and Stalin, and the left was too divided to let itself act as a party of rule. These divisions, inherent in notions of "class warfare" and echoed in such modern times by John Edwards' "Two Americas" speech, give the left its fighting words, but they also drive it away from being acceptable as a party of rule. Obama, from his very first appearance in the media spotlight, has focused on "One America". His notion of hope comes across as leftist because it involves reconciliation - such strange events have driven our nation to see diplomacy, talking to people we disagree with, and earnest attempts at working together for the benefit of all as leftist fantasies, left over from the 1960s. This misrepresents the left of the sixties and it misrepresents the left of now - both have widely differing views on what government should or shouldn't do, and I'm pleased to say that, 38 years after that decade ended, the left in the United States is able to position itself as a party of rule.

It's taken a long time for this, and it's required that most fundamental of compromises - ideals as a driving impulse, instead of being the straightforward rule of government. This is realism, this is pragmatism, and this is inching towards the Center. The center-left became popularized under Clinton and Tony Blair, but they are not so much leftists as real-mild-rightists. They made being identified with the left acceptable, but for all their strengths they lived scared of being seen as weak, as compromising, and as unfit to rule. Clinton, especially, faced the controversy of moral weakness, and his actions almost certainly added a decade to the lifespan of the religious right in US politics. But he did prove that a democrat, a person on the left, could both have that party and govern from the center.

Obama, as outlined wonderfully by fivethirtyeight, has a progressive agenda, with many items that are near and dear to the left and the far left. "But Kelsey," you thousands of readers clamor, "haven't you been saying Obama is a centrist?" Well, yes, yes I have, and you are all astute observers. So here's the big qualifier - the United States, as is, doesn't have a center. We have two points (or parties), both off center, around which voters tend to congregate. The battle for undecideds is so fierce because there is no party permanently camped out in the center - candidates aiming towards the middle have to moderate their views or open the appeal of their candidate beyond sticking on a certain pole. The battle for the loyal, on the other hand, is about convincing polarized voters that their guy this time is really much closer to the far side of the spectrum than they are to the center. This works, to some extent, for the winner-take-all system that is US politics. In other countries with parliaments and governments of coalitions, however, we see something very different. We see a center party, or center-left and center-right parties, or a center-christian party, and these will almost always be part of the ruling coalitions. Not entirely ideologically pure, but they get the job done, and they have, at their very core, a willingness to incorporate some ideas of others with their broad schemes. McCain, as a Senator, represented a clear example of the "across the aisle" spirit that pervades parties of or around the center.

Obama, alternatively, has made his rhetoric his centrist appeal. And he's done more than that - by inviting Rick Warren to the inauguration, he not only clearly sets himself apart from the left (or at least, those parts of the left that find this unforgivable), he also shows the United States where the center is. It's vague right now, and while it disagrees hugely on some issues (again LGBT and Choice), Obama is trying very clearly to connect the center in US politics to social justice. It's a bold move, and one that Obama has certainly taken flak for, but it has done something almost unthinkable - the evangelicals, the ones that elected W twice, the ones that gave Palin her moment and momentum, have found something to agree on with the President. It's allowed the intersection of religion and politics to not be dominated by the Religious Right, and its made the way possible for more openness in dialog. There are consequences for being in the center - every side gets to take pot-shots, and gets to pick more ideologically pure successors. But the center holds because it is where the voters are, and if Obama can use this almost-unprecedented opportunity for reconciliation (unlike that squandered, post-Civil War attempt), he can create a reliable center in US politics, longer-lived than the New Deal coalition, and he can place that center firmly on the left. It will take skill and careful manuevering. And it will take the inclusion of religious moderates and religious liberals. And it will come dangerously close to betraying that ideological purity we're all so fond of. But its doable, and it is a necessity for this nation.

Godspeed.

Rule of Law

2008-12-18T17:25:00.000-07:00

This post is inspired by three separate occurrences, two of them fairly recent. They are: 1, the riots in Greece following the shooting of a 15 year old. 2, the questionable value of a life sentence for Texas inmate Son Tran. 3, the 11th hour move by the Bush Administration to allow doctors and other healthcare service providers the right to refuse health services (meaning birth control and abortion). These all strike me as diverse symptoms of a situation in which the rule of law is seen less as a desirable practice and more as a totalitarian imposition. To clarify for naysayers: I'm not in any way opposed to the rule of law; I take issue with laws that are unjust, and laws that work against the interest of most everyone involved. I think these are all examples of law falling into the later two categories.

1. I'll start with the latter. Bush's action will be debated constantly in the coming week (with bonus Baby-Jesus-themed comments), and will most likely be opposed and somewhat overturned by the incoming Obama administration. The move represents several things: a "thank you" to longstanding Bush supporters, another play in decades-old culture wars, and a decision made by an unaccountable elected official. For all of these reasons, despite public sentiment, it strikes me as a profoundly undemocratic move. My intellectual-sparring-partner JR will side with me on the specific issue of rights concerning access to birth control and abortion services, but he will argue against the constitutionality of Roe v Wade. Ignoring the actual impact of changing that decision as it concerns personal rights, there's a democratic sentiment behind it that is worth examining. The case of Roe v Wade is implicitly about abortion rights, but it is explicitly about privacy, and states rights. If there is no constitutional right to privacy, than abortion is an issue left to the states. States, when making the decision, varied much more widely than a simple "legal or illegal", and the decision was localized to small constituencies. Say what you will about the potential for denial of rights that this entails (and don't get me wrong - there is some serious loss of rights going on), it does allow for a more democratic decision to be made, and such decisions have a legitimacy that feels undermined by judicial fiat. The reaction we'll be seeing in the media, the blogosphere, and political action listservs is a very real sense of powerlessness, of an invalidity of the decision made, and a general disagreement with the new ordering of the law. And that's because this is not a change made with political legitimacy. It's worth noting, however, that the whole of the national abortion debate feels that way to many folk, and has produced an incredible wariness in the American public to accept such top-down detached legal rulings. Esteemed legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, when faced with the passage of similar culture-warsy Prop 8, says this

But please, let's not try to win this battle by summoning the Supremes. Even if it is right that this Amendment is contrary to the best interpretation of Equal Protection, let us bring the ideals of Equal Protection to life, by getting people to support them.

It's worth noting that a legal scholar, a man whose life has revolved around various interesting and new arenas for legal battles (code and other laws of cyberspace, copyright), is arguing against a straightforward legal solution and is instead pushing for a solution that has democratic legitimacy.

2. Charles Platt's piece on Son Tran is one I'm going to examine in more depth elsewhere (it is part of an in-process post about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). It's a fascinating story (in that weird, bleak way more common in dystopic fiction), and what stands out from all of it is that, no matter the actual crimes committed by the individual (or, indeed, if they were committed), the punishment seems to be something profoundly useless to society. Confounding this situation is the nature of the person who committed the crime - at the time he was sentenced, Son Tran was 17 years old. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling concerning minors sentenced to death, he was moved from death row to life imprisonment. Depending on where you fall with your perspective of redemption, rehabilitation, and the changeable nature of humans, the 40 years he is now serving will make perfect sense, seem too short, or strike you as a gross waste of a human life, to say nothing of human potential. Charles Platt is upset by both this individual waste, and by the intended value of deterrence that sentences like this are supposed to have. He writes:

Let’s start with the concept of deterrence. I’ll ignore the death penalty, since the Supreme Court has already eliminated it for people under 18. Thus, we are left with incarceration. Has any study ever proved that the prospect of forty years without parole is a better deterrent than, say, thirty years, or even twenty years? It seems utterly implausible to me that the actions of a teenager in an inner-city gang will be affected by such a distinction. In fact I don’t believe that deterrence is either the effect or the purpose of the long, mandatory sentences that have become endemic in the United States during the past two decades.

The facts laid out are very few in the favor of Son Tran: gang member, confessed to murder, received a reprieve because of a supreme court ruling, not new evidence in his trial. But the gross failure and abuse of the criminal justice system (especially in Texas) are enough to make one doubt the whole validity of criminal justice in the United States. Platt's post at this point descends into a fairly typical "Reagan + Fear + Power + Money + Scared White People = Gross Human Rights Abuses that Shame America" argument, and it says something that this argument can have a standard form. It also poses a very real challenge to the acceptance of the rule of law in America, and it hits upon it from an entirely different angle that the Bush decision. The Bush decision is very much another move in decisions removed from democratic consensus - Platt's argument is that Son Tran's imprisonment is no social good (as imprisonment weirdly is supposed to be) but is instead the result of a poorly-framed democratic consensus. People have been pushing for politicians to be tougher on crime for at least 20-30 years now; what people haven't realized is that as a consequence of this:

Among the adult population of the United States, 1 person out of every 100 is now behind bars. Thus the unweighted odds of going to jail are greater than the odds of being a crime victim.

One could write a separate essay on how the people pushing for politicians to be tougher on crime are different than the people who are more likely to be persecuted by vigilant police forces (white & wealthy versus the poor, nonwhite, and disenfranchised) - I'm not going to comment on it anymore here than to say that, for a worryingly large percentage of the US population, law is seen either as "something to protect myself imposed on other people" or "illegitimate decisions made beyond my own personal control that will get me anyway, and so have no bearing on how I act." That's a breakdown in the very purpose of the rule of law, and of a democratic construction of society - laws have to apply equally, and laws have to be understood as threatening not just "those people", but everyone - especially the people who advocate for the law to be passed.

3. Lastly, we come to the Greek Riots. Others more skilled and/or better paid than I will make their conclusions about such serious anti-police riots in the birthplace of the World's first great democracy. The riots started as anti-police, but as they have continued they have done what all great riots do - become chaotic, divisive attempts to reinvent a status quo. The rioters are unemployed, upset with corruption, and think that the police forces have gotten out of hand - to express this discontent, they have attacked police and alienated their countrymen by destroying the property and threatening the livelihood of many small shopkeepers and business owners. It has all the hints of simmering class war, and rather than doing the democratic thing and siding with small owners as an upset middle class, the rioters are very much in the classical (or is it archaic?) mode of students, working class, and the unemployed so upset with the higher-ups that they willingly endanger and alienate those less outraged than themselves. This is not so much an issue of the nature of the rule of law as an example of a remarkable collapse. And yet, law itself hasn't entirely collapsed - the police exist, are a visible presence in Greece, and the government still stands. But the police are hesitant to act - one of their own is being tried for murder while on duty (the counterclaim is that he was provoked and responded appropriately), and so we have the potential for the rule of law, the semblance of a rule of law, and either a government or a police force unwilling to impose that law on the citizens it exists to protect. As law collapses on the national level, it re-imposes itself interestingly.

The shooting prompted parents all over the country to examine the liberties they have been permitting their children.
“My 12-year-old daughter has been getting text messages inviting her to join demonstrations,” said Constantine Michalos, president of the Greek chamber of commerce. “One of the messages said, ‘Don’t go to school today. We need to show our power on the street.’ I had to lay down the law.”

The riots will not, as many fear, have the effect of the French riots two centuries prior or the Russian riots all of 90 years ago. What they will do, however, is allow for a reforming of society around the rule of law - laws to protect against some of what inspired the riots (police carelessness and political corruption; it's hard to get laws passed against the economy), as well as against the actions taken by the rioters. Chaos like this is curious for it's ability to reforge society - France's Fifth Republic arose as a center-right forced the imposition of the rule of law over both the military and striking students and workers. And violence like this polarizes - while prior to the riots, many were discontent with the status quo in Greece, the value of the rule of law comes to the fore as people gravitate away from the dangers of the chaos and back towards the assurances of stability, becoming increasingly more willing to overlook injustices inherent in that stability as long as it means they have property, livelihood, and are guaranteed some freedom from molotov cocktails. The trick with any society structured around the rule of law, and especially that of democracies, is to balance freedoms with controls.

Stratis Stratigis, former chairman of the Athens Olympics organising committee, suggested he might have an answer. “Our democracy is destroying itself because it misrepresented the right to liberty and equality,” says an e-mail circulating his friends. “It taught the citizens to regard disrespect as a right, lawlessness as liberty, impertinence as equality and anarchy as enjoyment.”
This is a quote from Socrates, the ancient philosopher who ended up being sentenced to death for voicing truths that nobody wanted to hear.
“It’s funny,” said Stratigis. “Those words have a ring about them today.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

2008-12-10T21:03:00.002-07:00

The UDHR is 60 years old today. Here's my previous post about them, with an awesome video that is worth watching again.

Also, here's the full text of the declaration. Enjoy! (I'll have a more elaborate post about the rights themselves at a time that isn't finals week. For now, enjoy some history of justice. Also, bonus points for UUs who can find all 7 principles hidden in these)

On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories."
PREAMBLE

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
Article 1.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2.

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5.

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6.

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7.

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8.

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10.

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11.

(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13.

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14.

(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15.

(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Article 16.

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 17.

(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 18.

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20.

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21.

(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22.

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23.

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24.

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27.

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28.

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29.

(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30.

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Hitting the nail on the head

2008-12-05T20:23:00.002-07:00

Recently I posted about the double redundancy challenge that faces the US military.

Reading this article, it seems I'm late to the modern military revolution, but that I was headed in the right direction.

Gates also blasts the Pentagon’s bizarre desire to treat the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as inconvenient distractions from a future of conventional warfare, a tendency reflected in the budgetary trick of funding the wars separately from the annual defense budget. “We must not be so preoccupied with preparing for future conventional and strategic conflicts that we neglect to provide all the capabilities necessary to fight and win conflicts such as those the United States is in today,” Gates writes.

I'll have to read Gates article in Foreign Affairs to figure out his stand on nuclear policy, but from what I've just read, it seems like he is well prepared to create and adjust our military to the purposes that will actually be asked of it. And lest people think that this is just a new top-down approach to justfying shiny new technology, Gates is well aware of the complex nature of the wars the US military has been tasked with.

A fundamental argument made by Gates is that military solutions in the war on terrorism — what he describes as “a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign” — are rarely sufficient. “Where possible,” he writes, “what the military calls kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit.”

While acknowledging that war is an unpleasant thing, it looks like we have someone on the job willing to go ahead and assume the difficult responsibility of easing a war into a peace.

UN Quickie

2008-11-30T00:38:00.003-07:00

It seems I've fast reached obsolescence. In my early days as a far-left rabble-rouser, I disseminated a little pamphlet in the halls of my secondary school. After a few issues, I passed the torch to a competent young chap, who I've introduced to you many times. This fellow also shared my fondness for the United Nations (we met through Model UN), and he has written the post about the United Nations I've been meaning to write for years. That post is here, and it's short enough to read in entirety.

Still, I feel obliged to have some actual content. Here's an excerpt:

This is the danger of consensus. If everyone agrees, there is probably something very wrong, especially in an organization like the United Nations, which, by design, includes almost every possible viewpoint on almost every possible subject.

Watch This

2008-11-25T15:42:00.002-07:00

I'm not one to post briefly, but I'm in the library, trying to write an essay about Iran, I can't really think of anything clever and witty to elaborate upon this with.

The video can be found here.

It's good, it's really, really good, and I kind of just want it spread everywhere. Iran is the nation to watch this coming decade, and this video gives me hope. That's about all it needs to do.

Double Redunancy

2008-11-20T13:12:00.002-07:00

This morning I had a very interesting conversation with a fellow who's in both my "History of Islam" class, and my "War on Terror" class. The young man is going into the marines after graduation, and we talked about the nature in which war is waged by this nation.

The United States, he argues, has to be ready for two kinds of war at all times. We have to have the capacity to fight at least one superpower, and so that means a strong airforce, powerful navy, and the really expensive fancy stuff that combine technology with killing power. That's the high-end, worst-case scenario army we've got to have around, for the incredibly bleak "just-in-case" scenario.

The other war we have to be ready for is the kind of war we fight. Counter-insurgency, occupations, humanitarian missions - in these, our technological superiority is a given, so we have to better protect our forces and give them more tools to outmaneuver the enemies we fight.

Of course, the US is always in a process of readying ourselves for these wars - the 1950s saw the US arm itself to fight Russia on the fields of eastern Europe, and the 1980s saw the US readying itself for a massive air war against Russia. But then we fought the other kind of war - Vietnam was initiated with forces designed for the eastern European theater, and the 1990s saw an airforce useless against small bands of gunmen. The US of course adjusted - as the wars dragged on, we readied our military to fight the war it had to fight. But then, when the war was over, we switched from a force that could fight the war to a force that could fight another kind of war. But we had to fight the first kind of war again, and the transition hurt our effectiveness. A specific example - in Vietnam, our army was well-equipped for fighting along rivers, and we had what my classmate termed "a brown-water navy". This navy was then decommissioned and dismantled, leaving us in a position today where we have brown-water military needs (river patrols on the Tigris and Euphrates, fighting piracy on the coast of Somalia), but no brown-water capability.

My classmate argued for double-redundancy. We store the vast reserves of our military resources, and after a war of counter-insurgency, we keep our forces on superpower war alert. The costs here are only in storage and updating equipment - no wheels need reinventing, and we retain the military capacity we need during peacetime.

It's not a bad plan, but then I brought up the nuclear arsenals our country keeps. We discussed this for a while, and then had to part for class before I could make my argument.

I've argued on this blog before that having a nuclear weapon stockpile is a cheaper alternative to fighting big, costly, conventional wars. Of course, the United States still fights conventional wars - Iraq in 1990 is a good example of a recent one. But then, the United States transitions into fighting counter-insurgencies (more or less every other war we've fought over the past fifteen years). With the military's present emphasis on conventional superiority, the conventional war part doesn't last that long, and that's fine. That part sucks. But counter-insurgencies are also unpleasant, and by necessity take much longer. And our emphasis on the conventional aspect of war leaves us in a state of unreadiness when our armed forces switch over to police and counter-insurgents. And this is a problem we repeatedly find ourselves in.

My classmate's solution, as outlined above, is to keep a double redundancy of military forces. This way, we always have what we need, and can switch roles.

But my thinking is this - if the United States gets involved in a superpower war, it will go nuclear. It will go nuclear sooner rather than later, and it will go nuclear as soon as it looks like one side is doing better conventionally. And once the war has gone nuclear, everything else doesn't matter.

And that's well and good - if nuclear war was not the worst of all outcomes, it wouldn't be the strong deterrent that it is today. We need that. We absolutely need that horror waiting as a way of keeping us sane enough to not risk it.

But what we don't need, so much at least, is an army to fight a superpower war. We need some of that force, certainly, and the production capacity to make a conventional military on a large scale when the need arises. But we don't need to be able to fight that kind of war immediately, and I would argue we hardly need any new capacity to fight that war at all.

Nuclear weaponry cannot allow for a cheaper military if it doesn't actually replace anything. Nukes have to be allowed to take the place of a carrier group or two. They have to stand in for divisions and for bomber wings. And they can, provided we are dealing with nations. Nations still act under rules like Mutually Assured Destruction, and cold-war formulations. The situations where people ignore these constraints (terrorists, non-state actors) are the situations where a military aimed at counter-insurgency can flourish.

(Sex) Education

2008-11-20T08:49:00.004-07:00

The Bedford Hillsian has a great little piece up about sex ed. Inspired by a rather frustrating radio show (though the host fact checks, which is awesome), blogger "the unbeatable kid" brings in that most stalwart of sex ed defenders: Dan Savage. I reccomend listening to both Dan Savage's bit, and then the whole radio show. Make sure you have time for the second one; it's rather long (50 minutes).

The debate is the whole abstinence debate, with a decade of implementation and studies to match it.

And it's an interesting conversation, between intelligent concerned adults with different perspectives and different data. What's interesting to is not so much the disagreements, but the agreements with qualifiers. "No parent disagrees with abstinence, they disagree with abstinence only" and "Abstinence programs do teach about condoms; they teach how condoms aren't very effective" are my two favorite qualifiers.

The immediate things that bother me: 1), abstinence programs aren't allowed to encourage condom use, and 2), there is a desire to present information about condoms with an emphasis on the flaws and shortcomings. Regardless of my stand on sex education, my general stand on presenting information to youth is that teachers shouldn't lie to them. For a humorous take on disinformation, here's a cracked.com dressing down of other pieces of disinformation targets at youth.

I had rather unpleasant experiences with abstinence-only sex education in middle school, so I am rather grateful that I was able to partake in a comprehensive sex ed program offered outside my school. The strengths of that program are many - it addresses the emotional and relational issues of sexuality, it isn't exclusively hetero-normative, and it covers STIs and contraceptives with an eye towards accuracy. More than that, however, it does a remarkable thing - it trusts that youth, given accurate information, will be able to make informed decisions about their own lives.

To restate: it trusts that youth, when allowed to, have the capacity for rational decision making.

This is huge, and this is one of the big things missing from sex education in schools, and from the debate over sex education in general. And really, it's missing from education a lot of the time - the PSAs linked to above all trust in fear and trust to force youth into acting appropriately. And frankly, that's undemocratic and unAmerican.

If we want better decisions made, and if we want essential freedoms, we as a people have to do 2 things: make sure that accurate information is provided, available, and encouraged (while making sure that people know how to call "bullshit!" when they see it), and we have to trust people to take that information and act as best they are able.

The Past in Color

2008-11-13T12:09:00.007-07:00

According to the little statcounter in the corner of this blog, my most visited page is the one about Tsarist Russia in color. It's one of my favorite posts, and it is certainly much more in the blogger's tradition of "look at this awesome thing" than it is in mold of "look at my ideas here for you". And the work speaks more profoundly than anything I can really say about it.

Instead, here's another glance at the past as scene in color. The scene below is from about 90 years ago:

It's World War I, and the picture comes from this incredible gallery. (Incidently, I found the gallery via this BoingBoing post). Many of the other pictures are more vibrant than the one I selected. This one, though, I think sells it - the war wasn't as grim and stark as black and white photography makes it appear, but it came surprisingly close.

Fictions

2008-11-11T23:04:00.002-07:00

In discussion with Evan, and inspired by Nora, I've decided to do some alternate history short stories. Speculative fiction, historical imaginings, that sort of a thing. It doesn't fit the tone of this blog, so I'm putting them elsewhere.

My fiction blog is Battles of Isonzo. Besides always thinking that "Battles of Isonzo" is a pretty kick-ass band name, it's one of those incredibly pointless parts of history. Twelve battles were fought on the river in WWI, with between 500,000 and 700,000 soldiers dying there. It seems like an appropriate title for futile reminagings.

If you don't mind speculative fiction that concerns war, have yourself a look! And if you do, know that this blgo won't be changing any.

Who the President Serves

2008-11-06T15:44:00.003-07:00

Ever since I toured college campuses and sat in on political science courses, I've wondered about the advantages and disadvantages of a multiple party system. Voting for a party instead of voting for an individual seemed, to me, to be a much stronger way to get a variety of perspectives into office, and for people to vote ideology instead of personality. This is a compromised benefit when a party that one votes for is left out of a ruling coalition, however; coalition politics themselves are nothing but political machinations removed from the control of voters, and that's almost disenfranchisement. The contrast is strongest in how legislative bodies function: you vote for your party, and if your party (or it's coalition) wins, then they pass everything they want. The losers sit in government, and do very little except growl angrily and wait for the leading coalition to collapse.

This is not the best of things, and while many countries make it work, in the United States we expect our individual congressfolk to serve us. The congress as a whole has a terrible approval rating, but individual congressfolk are well-liked by their constituents. Indeed, working across party lines is often a successful slogan for congress people, as it shows a willingness to deal with the vile forces that ruin everything on behalf of the people the congressmember serves. John McCain made a career of this willingness, and had his campaign been run on that promise, he may well have stood a better chance.

But that didn't happen. And this post isn't really about legislative bodies.

This post is about the presidency. The president has one of the oddest constituencies ever (electors), but really that's just an odd calculation and a stand-in for the American People. Congressfolk all have a very set group they are supposed to serve, and on top of that, they are expected to act in the best interest of the nation. The president has the whole of the nation as his (aware of gender pronoun) constituency, and the president has a base who gets him elected that he is expected to serve especially well.

The fun part about the two-party system is that, contrary to many detractors, it gives the president the largest possible constituency. How so, you ask, my reader? Well, let's have a chart(!):

1 candiate: guaranteed election
2 candidates: requires 50+ percent of the vote
3 candidates: requries 34+ percent of the vote
4 candidates: 26+ percent of the vote
...
100 candidates: requires 1+ percent of the vote

By having a two party system, the president is forced to seek the votes of over half of Americans. This is majority rule, and while that has dangers, it means that a candidate seeking the presidency (or re-election) still has to appeal to more than half of all voters. That's the presidents constituency.

The president serves on behalf of the entire nation, however. Presidents who serve only in the interest of the followings that got them elected tend to alienate and divide the nation (cough *W* cough). So while Obama may be our candidate, and though he is aware of the debt he owes to the new left (are we calling ourselves that yet?), he has to serve the entire nation. And he's damn well aware of that; indeed, a lot of his appeal in this election is that he will serve everybody. And to the left, I just want to say amidst all the exuberance, that we knew this when we picked him. In fact, this is largely why we picked him.

Because if he's to be the president we want him to be, he'll have to act as the nation needs, and not as we want. At the moment, those two points are more aligned than they've been in a goodly while. And that's a relief. And that's to our nation's benefit. I'd say more, but you know the rest. Instead, I will leave you with this:

HolyfuckingshitObamajustwontheUSpresidencythisislikethebestthingever!

What Victory Means

2008-11-05T08:26:00.005-07:00

It's a blessing this morning to wake up with Barack Obama as the President-Elect, and with all five senate and house seats in New Mexico in the hands of Democrats. I was worried about Heinrich for a while, but coattails buoyed him quite nicely. I certainly can't complain about that - almost everything has gone my way so far (Prop 8 and a few others being the outstanding examples).

What is strange is realizing that I don't know what to do about victory.

My first instinct, of course, is to tell the many people who I've seen long suffering in the face of American politics going against them that the good days are here. For my late grandfather Roy (and for Terry Arnold), part of my special appreciation of tonight is for you - we're going to have a sane Foreign Policy again, where we treat other nations like humans and not like playthings. At Roy's funeral I swore, in my idealistic 13 year old way, that I'd do everything within my power to fix the system, take the expanded Presidential powers under Bush and do everything to undo the harm he'd caused. It was a naive, idealistic statement, but it was also aimed at something in 2024. I had no idea that we'd have step one to repairing the damage of the last eight years elected immediately after Bush. I underestimated the nation, and it's reassuring to know that I was wrong.

While I wanted to share the joy of last night with almost everyone I know, the person I singled out to call was my dad. He's never before had an election where he voted for someone a) that he genuinely liked as a candidate, and b) had them win. Or at least, he hadn't before. And this is someone who grew up as a quasi-international citizen, with a wealth of experience in the universality of humans. To consistently have that understanding undermined and thwarted in the name of American interests must have hurt, and election season (starting in 2000) became very much a process of finding silver linings and proof that humans are basically good if misguided. So it's especially nice that my idealism was able to converge with my father's on my first election. There is a real potential for things to get better, and this isn't just the luxury of youth (where time for things to get better is more or less infinite) speaking. This is every failed promise to the baby boomers, and this is a passing of the torch. Things can get better, and they very likely will.

A special nod towards Nora's excellent post about coming of age politically in the Bush Years. She touches on a very important point, and one I want to elaborate on here. She says:

So knowing all that– understanding the only America I’ve known– you know the gravity that comes with the following statement:

I am proud to be an American tonight.

And it's a profound statement. It's not a statement I can really dispute, and it's not a personal experience I want to challenge.

But I'm not sure I feel identically. I've always identified very strongly as American. Well, not so much American as an Albuquerqueno and as a New Mexican. But also as an American - I can't go back a few generations and have relatives who came over by boat. Athertons and Coopers seem to have been rather perpetually American, if New Englanders. And despite being a bit of an anglophile (in the loving england way, not the other one), I really can't imagine any state of being that isn't as an American.

So the last eight years have been interesting. I politically came of age with Bush as President, with the War of Terror on, and with my diplomat grandfather's death, but I also came of age politically in the New Mexico under Richardson, and in a Unitarian Church, and with the changing of the guard in the democratic party. Not that the last eight years were fertile ground for unquestioing patriotism, but they were a challenge we grew into. The brilliance of Barack Obama is not that he's a democrat who won, and not that he's someone on the left who won. The brilliance of Barack Obama is that, for good or bad, he reimagined the left as a concept with mass appeal, and he reimagined the democratic party not as the Clinton's did (where it was the center + the left), but as an ideologically strong unifiying force. Democrats may have been the party of Obama, and they were certainly the people on the ground for him, but his message isn't exclusively for them, and it's never been.

Back to patriotism and the Bush Years. While I never felt like I wasn't a patriot, for those eight years I perpetually felt that my patriotism, which was real, didn't count. As though it was the wrong kind of patriotism, as though caring about the nation enough to see some of what it did was wrong was something like a sin. The Bush Years were, to understate things, devisive. And throughout those years, I felt that active democrats were the scrappy few, pursuing a vision of the nation that was different from the current course of action. And every time we failed, or ran into any obstacle, it felt as though we were through, as though our nation had been co-opted. And it felt as thoguh caring about the nation was a losign battle, one that would have us all drained, spent, and finished, without any real progress.

Waking up today with Barack Obama as the President-elect means that our struggle wasn't in vain, that our vision of America is a valid one, and that our kind of patriotism counts as well. It's a tremendous burden that has been lessened (if not lifted entirely), and that's something we can all be happy about.

I woke up this morning amid the feeling of resignation from those who had backed McCain. And McCain, despite the flaws of his campaign, was incredibly gracious in defeat. We can never forget that, and it is folly to imagine that he did anything but care about his country as best he knew how. His dedication to this country is remarkable, and it is unfortunate that he was the one to carry the republican banner to defeat this year. More importantly than the man himself, however, is the fact that in this nation, in this blue tide (as it were), 55+ million people voted for him. That's one in six americans, and that's 46% of people who voted.

One more detour before concluding. On twitter, some young parent friends of mine:

Last night, in bed, Eck turns to me and says, "Goodnight, my love. Just think - this is our last night as downtrodden liberals." :)

And part of that means that we're vindicated. Part of this is everything we've been waiting for, since, well, ever. And part of that is realizing that there are real people who are now, for the first time in eight years (and, depending on how you see it, for the first time since 1994) on the outs. And partially, this is because their vision isn't the one that fits the present America. But that doesn't entitle us to inflict any of the same bullshit on the losers that we've had to suffer through. Because if we do that, then it's all for not. We crawled through shit, through years of having our loyalty questioned, our values ridiculed, and our sense of patriotism deemed un-American so that no one has to put up with that.

Let's be gracious in victory. And with that, let's be one people again - a people who disagree, but a people. Two armed camps is a terrible stage of existence.

Epilogue: Two Readings

Take courage friends.
The way is often hard, the path is never clear,
and the stakes are very high.
Take courage.
For deep down, there is another truth:
you are not alone
-Wayne B Arnason

If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us an injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good.

Let us endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace.
-Hosea Ballou

Darren White and the Local Press

2008-11-02T14:33:00.002-07:00

Note: This is nothing more than a copy-paste job of two comments I left in this comment thread on the Duke City Fix. The comments are long enough to count as their own posts, so I am putting them up here for safekeeping.

Darren White:

Darren White himself has shown that he's a take charge guy in executive situations. I don't agree with his decisions in many of them, but I can't deny that he made decisions and acted quickly. That's a great trait for an executive. However, he's running for a legislative seat. The duties and roles of that office are very different, and while his hands-on experience is certainly something rather novel in that body, it may be because it's largely irrelevant.

Being on a legislature requires compromising one's singular vision to work with others, even within one's own party, and having to make that compromise is a bare minimum. McCain is an unusual candidate in this election precisely because he's made a record of compromises that aren't strict party, that aren't the ideal version of what he wants, but are in the best interest of the nation, and are better than no solution. That's part of the wealth of experience that legislative experience adds to an individual, and it's helped McCain dodge a good chunk of the harm against the Republican brand. Martin Heinrich, though young, has a wealth of relevant legislative experience. Albuquerque as a city contains more people than many house districts, and governing that populace as part of a legislative body means Heinrich has experience in creating workable solutions, as opposed to pursuing his solitary vision. The streetcar proposal, arguably Heinrich's biggest mistake, was scrapped and abandoned when it was clear that it wasn't in the interest of the electorate, or the city itself, and that's something that had to hurt - as a tech-aware environmentalist from Nob Hill, street cars are all kinds of appealing. But as much as he personally may have wanted it, he knew when to quit, and when to work in the best interest of the entire city. Likewise, the minimum wage increase was first shot down as an overly-ambitious bill, but was re-introduced in such a way as to remove volatile ingredients and replace them with a form that both serves our city and doesn't alienate voters. This is the reputation of a man with ideals, but who understands that ideals have to be tempered with reality and practicality. That's more or less exactly the kind of legislative experience we need in CD3.

But this post isn't about Heinrich; it's about White. White, when working for the governor of New Mexico as head of the department of Public Safety, felt compelled to quit over an ideological opposition to Governor Johnson's support for medical marijuana. Rather than using his position to influence the implementation of any law Johnson signed, White quit over an ideological disagreement. Had he remained in that position (and had the Governor's support turned into a passable bill), White could easily have been in the best position to ensure that the drug is strictly controlled as a medical product, and could have maintained the sharp distinction between medicinal use and illegal personal indulgence. But he didn't, and instead left an office where he could have done much good because he didn't want to be seen as compromising his ideals over an initiative that never came to pass, and was ultimately not a crime issue but a health issue. Much as White touts that experience, it's terrible background for someone we want to reach across the isle, and represent all of us instead of just part of us.

(for more on Darren White, see my Fix post here)

The Local Press

I understand some frustration at the Journal's editorial board for it's endorsement. Always frustrating when those influential disagree with us. Still, this is no need to call for the paper's demise. The Journal, as an organ of the free press, is free to say what it wants until it can't afford to print, and then it can say things it wants online at an absolute minimum of cost. Living away at college and without a regular newspaper, there are some things I miss out on. Yes, I get news, and yes, the blogosphere does a fair bit with news. But what the blogosphere lacks (and the Journal has) is the economic necessity of objective reporting.

Blogs run at the absolute minimum of cost and don't have to appeal to anyone. Newspapers, at the least, have to sell to a large percentage of the city. Now editorial decisions can influence some of that appeal, but that's more background than reality - it's the printed blog entry in print every morning, and it's like eights inches at most. If that is offensive enough to not buy a newspaper, than don't buy the newspaper. It is, however, balanced out by the actual content of the paper, which cannot show bias and which has to care about Albuquerque. Those are both good things, both needed things, and both constraints that new media doesn't have to abide by. For me, that balances out disagreeable editorials (and the god awful content vomit that is the Tuesday editorial page).

Liberal Media Bias?

2008-10-30T09:22:00.004-06:00

Thanks to a recent Pew study, the blogosphere and Fox News will soon both ring with more allegations of "Liberal Media Bias". Now, the petty thing to do here is quote Stephen Colbert with a comment from his White House correspondents dinner. Since I'm feeling slightly petty, and because it's a good quote, here you go:

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality'. And reality has a well-known liberal bias. ... Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's two-thirds empty. There's still some liquid in that glass, is my point. But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.

The more relevant quote come from the blog Politico:

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

Here's a better article, one with journalistic integrity. Better, because it is talking about bias, at most it can only be meta-biased.

Tweet Terror

2008-10-26T20:45:00.004-06:00

Originally, this post was going to be an indignant defense of twitter, inspired by this quote:

"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,... Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives," the report said.

And I think a bit of indignity is warranted - since when are Vegetarians a threat? They are like the opposite of a threat. And what the hell is "political enthusiasts" a euphemism for? This election, I think that term more or less just means people.

But I don't really need to continue my rant. According to Wired, blogging is dead and twitter is the new social medium. The fastest way to make criminalize of something less scary is to make it ubiquitous and prove it to be harmless. Sure, it means that when the gestapo finds us at night that they have an additional charge against us, but it also means that data pool being mined is clogged to the point of uselessness. When security has to look at an over-abundance of data, two options are possible. The first is that they arrest everyone vaguely suspicious, and have to deal with processing a tremendous excess of indignant innocents. That's bad political capital, and leads to outrage and change. The other option is to realize that twitter is a useless place to be looking for terrorists, even if it is a tool they actually use, because the number of false positives renders it obsolete for security purposes.

You can find me on twitter here. Let's clog the tubes!

Speaking in Dystopias

2008-10-25T17:39:00.003-06:00

Science Fiction blog io9 has an interesting post up about the two competing narratives of dystopia in this year's presidential election campaign. The post is a good start, but as we near the very end of a two-year-long campaign about the future of this nation, it's a good idea to take a closer look at our competing worst fears.

The dystopia that is easier for me to imagine is the dystopia of the McCain/Palin administration. Greatly to the disservice of McCain's record in the senate, people fear his government not on his own merits or policies, but on those they see him as a surrogate for. The fears about McCain being the next bush are what inspire the trite labeling of him as "McSame", and again, that's a fear that has everything to do with Bush and nothing to do with McCain. It's a repeat of the dystopia of the first 6 years of this millenium, where a Republican president and a Republican congress waged war, inspired fear, let competitive industries consolidate, undermined freedoms, and challenged the social norms of what was approaching an open and progressive society. The fear with McCain, as is the fear with all conservatives (which is is a stand-in for), is the fear of a regression back into a previous and oppressive state of existence. Reckless wars, failing education systems, and the transition of social norms to the rigidly-clamped down society that spawned first the beat poets and then the hippies are all valid fears, but the big one is not so much a fear of actively going backward as it is a fear of stagnation. Palin especially, with here "drill baby drill", epitomizes the failings of the status quo - not that we can't drill, but we can't do it for much longer, and to continue to rely on solutions which we know will stop working soon seems to be folly. It's another four/eight/sixteen years of watching the United States not so much collapse as go down with the ship. Dystopia here is letting ourselves be blinded by unfailing devotion to a system that worked once when it is obvious that times have changed, reality has changed, and that we need intelligence, innovation, and sacrifice to make the whole thing work. And it's a fear that we'll be blinded by infighting and hobbled by tradition in such a way that we fall behind as a nation, and are unable to maintain our position as the world leader in anything excpet debt.

Contrasted with this is the dystopia envisioned by the Nobama crowd. Obama's promise of government working for people again is views quite skeptically; government by its vary nature is harmful to individuals, and any expansion of government power or responsibility will mean, more or less, the end times. It's wars ended in ignominous retreat and a national debt accumlated by spending tax dollars on the lazy, the illegal, and the undeserviving. It's the loss of freedom to universal programs, and it's being expected to say "thank you" for the infringement on your rights. It's being told that your values are not only not unviersal values, but they are criminal values. It's the fear inherent in every American since we first got self-determination, and it's a fear that focuses on very specific definitions of the self, and of determination. It's knowign that tax dollars will be spent on an act you view as murder. It's a real, genuine, fear for our economic security which sees taxes as the final straw that will break the back of American industry. And it's a genuine fear for America's safety, that we'll be left vulnerable and that our president will not have the strength of resolve to punish those who've attacked us. It's a combination of both the oppressive nanny state at home and embarassing appeasement abroad.

Of course, both fears of dystopia are overblown - if they weren't, they wouldn't be fears about dystopia. The way to get around these statements? Read what the candidates say, about themselves, in positive terms - listen to what they say they are going to do, and ignore all the "gotcha!" moments, as well as the divise and petty partisan jokes. Because no matter what happens on Nov. 4th, change is more or less a given, and it's incredibly hard to imagine that change as anything less than positive.

(To be fair, degree of positive matters a lot. Also, this is assuming Obama, McCain, or even Biden administrations. A Palin administration is closer to the dystopic fears about McCain, and tobe fair she inspires many of them. Even under that worst-case of worst-case scenarios, thoguh, the progress will be measured at zero, and not in negative numbers.)