Rust Belt Philosophy

(Seriously, though: when in doubt, pun.)

We've been looking recently into the social environment that has allowed our education system to falter and crumble, but we haven't seen much about the results of that failure. Well, here's one.

"Something must be wrong. My finances are in shambles; mainstream newspapers won't publish my pieces; and, no matter how much I try to convince Fox News that they need male eye candy as well, they just won't give me a show. Then I gaze into the mirror at my alabaster complexion and say, 'What's wrong with this picture? I'll have to address this at the next White People's Meeting.'"

HA HA HAAAAAAA...

So okay, Selwyn Duke isn't exactly the highest-resolution camera in the consumer electronics store.* But this is still worth investigating because he is, probably despite himself, wrong in an educational way.

"The median income of Jewish Americans is approximately twice that of their non-Jewish countrymen. Additionally, while only about 40 percent of high-school graduates attend college, the rate among Jews is 85 percent. Jews also occupy positions of power at a rate greatly in excess of their two percent of the population. Yet should we speak of 'Jewish privilege'? It would be more instructive to note a secret of Jewish people's success: They place great emphasis on education and workplace achievement.

And what about blacks' dominance in mainstream sports? Wouldn't it be ridiculous to talk about 'black athletic privilege'?"

Duke is so close to being onto something here that it's sad to see him still not get it. Speaking from experience, I can say unequivocally that there is such a thing as Jewish privilege (at least in this country). It helps to set high standards, of course, but it sure doesn't hurt to start off with more money or have lots of contacts in well-paying fields. Indeed, even the focus on intellectual achievement can be seen as a privilege: when most African-Americans were still not being the opportunity even to learn to read, let alone to reach any meaningful level of cerebral accomplishment, Jewish kids were being forced to read and to develop intellectual capabilities as a part of their religious heritage (think b'nai mitzvot). It's hard to think of a starker difference than that, and if Duke can't imagine why that sort of historical difference would continue to matter today he needs to think about this much, much harder.

As for the athleticism, it's actually an almost perfect thought experiment for the notion of privilege. On the one hand, Duke could just mean pure, untutored physical ability - speed, strength, endurance, that sort of thing. If this is what he's talking about, the analogy is a false one. Although athleticism can likely be inherited in some genetic sense, that inheritance is a weak one and is at any rate obviously different than the sort of social inheritance that one receives from one's forebears in the form of education, socialization, material goods, and so on. If on the other hand Duke means for us to think of athleticism as the total package - not just 40 yard dash times and bench press weights but overall skill - this too does bad things to his argument. First, and more straightforwardly, it suggests that there probably is something like a social privilege that contributes to the prevalence of African-Americans in professional sports. This meshes well with our observation last week that suburban high schools tend to surpass urban ones athletically: if (to be very crude about it) whiter teams tend to do better at amateur levels but blacker teams tend to do better in the pros, it's intuitive (and accurate) to think that the pure physical difference isn't all that significant. There may be some slight edge one way or the other, but superior athleticism makes up for a surprising amount of inferior coaching, especially at the amateur level; if the sheer physical difference were as great as Duke may be implying, only the absolutely best mostly white teams would win. Should the difference in performance prove not to be a matter just of physicality, however, there must be some other sort of force at work - in essence, a source of privilege.

The second hit that Duke's argument takes when considering total-package athleticism is that we're forced to acknowledge that there are some things that are actually (roughly) inborn (physical capacity, e.g.) but that there are other things - things that contribute greatly to a person's success - that are provided in an uneven way and that are only available socially (coaching, physical training, access to playing equipment, and so on). Even white privilege can be a source of black athletic privilege: almost all of the white kids who play sports in high school won't even try to make it to the pros but will settle instead for a more conventional form of employment, thus removing themselves from the competition for professional sporting jobs. This isn't what we normally think of when we think of a privilege, but I would certainly say that it's in the same general category.

All of this, of course, is well beside the point. Until banks stop targeting black families as likely dupes for their gratuitously predatory loans and junk food companies stop targeting black communities as likely consumers for their gratuitously unhealthy meals, Duke can take his sarcastic self-pity and choke on it. It's clear from word one that he doesn't have the slightest idea what he's talking about, but his ignorance is no excuse for the utter lack of concern he demonstrates towards (to borrow a phrase) the real and serious problems of his fellow citizens and fellow people.

*I try to come up with new variations on this every time I use it. I think I'm running low on images, though...

It's been some time since we learned about fremdscham, so I think the time is right to introduce sippenhaft - though, if I am honest, I don't think it'll go quite as far.

"True, the left is doing its utmost to revive its own deviant version of the old Nazi practice of Sippenhaft (collective punishment, kin liability) in which (to quote Wikipedia), 'relatives of persons accused of crimes against the state were held to share responsibility for their crimes and subject to arrest and sometimes execution.' The difference, of course, is that there is no sympathetic relation whatsoever between Breivik and the conservative authors he alludes to. They may have certain ideas in common — there is nothing strange or unprecedented about that — but differ categorically in the means they adopt, the use of reason, and the kind of society they envision. This indisputable fact is scanted by the left."

David Solway is seen here doing his best to misunderstand what we're trying to tell him, but the straw man is actually the less interesting part of this. According to Solway, one engages in sippenhaft when one wrongly links people on the basis of "certain ideas [they hold] in common" when no "sympathetic relation" exists between those people. In particular, when the two individuals or groups "differ categorically in the means they adopt, the use of reason" - whatever that means - "and the kind of society they envision," we can safely assume that they ought not be linked. Except, well, what's Solway doing here if not committing sippenhaft himself?

Not to state the obvious or anything, but Nazis and modern-day liberals pretty much have nothing in common when it comes to the means they adopt and the kind of society they envision. (Again, I'm not sure what Solway means by "the use of reason," so I'm leaving that out, but you can make your own educated guesses about that one.) They may have certain ideas in common - although, then again, they may not, and if they do those ideas may not be common just to those two groups - but, as Solway himself says, "there is nothing strange or unprecedented about that" and so we shouldn't make anything of it. This is what I find to be somewhat odd about using sippenhaft as an argumentative tool: besides just being a fancy word for "guilt by association," it is in a way self-defeating. Solway can get away with his comparison only if he refrains from making it, and that should tell him something about the standards of debate that he's chosen.

I mean, I've heard that casinos don't like consistent winners. Just sayin'.

This and the next few pictures were taken on the way to the airport. (Don't worry, I promise that I wasn't driving and shooting at the same time.) I think this is my favorite ghost sign in the whole city. Who am I supposed to call? Why would I call them? It's such a compelling mystery.


Yet more stairs.

"Move over moose and cows, dinosaurs are coming to Pittsburgh! Similar to events held in other major cities, such as Chicago's Cows on Parade and Toronto's Moose in the City, Dinomite Days brings 100 decorated dinosaurs to various locations around Pittsburgh."

I sort of find them to be gimmicky and not all that attractive for the most part, but I'll take Harrysaurus any day.

This I took from the airplane. Look at that long, straight road! It's like something out of a video game or a movie or something. Just one more reason I could never live in the midwest - too flat.


I also tried to take some decent pictures of Detroit's airport, but I have to confess that my skills failed me. I mean, these little port thingies were supposed to be decorative. And look at the corrugated ceiling! It was just awful.


Nice sunset, though.



One of the first things I did in Poughkeepsie was to learn how to play mah-jong. If I were forced to describe the game with percentages, I would do so thusly: 70% gin rummy, 25% Chinese concepts that are confusing for westerners, and 5% gratuitous ceremony. It was kinda fun but I don't think I'll be making it a habit.

We also went to a local state park, the Walkway over the Hudson.


It was pretty much what it advertised itself to be.






We also got to peek into a bunch of backyards, like this one:


Our hypothesis was that these people might sit outside and stargaze. Even so, though, I'm not super-comfortable with the idea of encouraging people to step out onto their own roofs like this. (And yeah, I know this is basically just an awning, but still. Not safe.)


Presumably this isn't an anti-suicide fence. Either that or they're willing to fish bodies out of the river but not scrape them off the sidewalk.


And this is just mean. What kind of asshole would do this? Seriously?



And, of course, I thought I was going to get away from the heat by going north. No such luck. On the other hand, at least I didn't see any dogs burst into flames or anything.


The only other major event of note was our trip to Ellenville, NY to see a show.


I've heard Ellenville described as "sleepy." Personally, I would go for the more accurate "soporific." I mean, it's the kind of place that makes you want to walk slow.


Hopefully you can see the hanging sign in the middle - its text is printed normally, which goes to show that I didn't edit this in any way. For whatever reason, these people either chose to print their sign backwards or received a backwards-printed sign and decided to just roll with it.


"..."? It's almost like they're disappointed.




Anybody know if this actually is what it looks like? To me, this clock seems to want me to dial the number 300 in order to reach a (now defunct, probably) drug store. Is that plausible? Was 300 ever actually a working phone number?

...two words of which only one describes the Heritage Foundation.

"As scholar James Q. Wilson has stated, 'The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.' In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker....

Those who are without food or homeless will find no comfort in the fact that their condition is relatively infrequent. Their distress is real and a serious concern.

Nonetheless, wise public policy cannot be based on misinformation or misunderstanding. Anti-poverty policy must be based on an accurate assessment of actual living conditions and the causes of deprivation. In the long term, grossly exaggerating the extent and severity of material deprivation in the U.S. will benefit neither the poor, the economy, nor society as a whole."

This has recently received some attention on The Colbert Report, but I want to pick up on something that Stephen didn't address: the conflation between one's material conditions of living and one's life. In the quote above you can see quite clearly that the Heritage people take themselves to be presenting information about the whole lives of poor people; in particular, they think that they're providing evidence for the idea that the lives of the poor are "better...than [those of] all but the richest persons a hundred years ago." This isn't just an academic point, of course. They want to use this idea to support their policy position, namely, that there is "a substantial misallocation of limited resources for a government that is facing massive future deficits" and that our anti-poverty interventions should be much smaller in scope and more finely tuned in terms of their desired effect.

Part of the problem with this reasoning is that their data is itself rather imprecise. The obvious part of this is the ridiculous lumping of ceiling fans and refrigerators in with Playstations, but there's more to it than that. When they asked about the nutritional status of poor families, for instance, the Heritage people evidently didn't inquire into what it means for a family to say that it has "enough food, but not always the kinds of food we want." One way of understanding this is to posit that poor people would like to eat relatively high-end meals but are stuck with things like sandwiches and pre-made microwave food, but another possibility is that they'd like to eat sandwiches and pre-made microwave food but are stuck with things like bulk ramen noodles and low-grade mystery meat. Although in either case it would be wrong to say that the family is starving or going hungry, there's a major difference in quality of life between those two scenarios. Similarly, they claim that most poor people live in houses that are in "good repair" but don't provide any information about what that means. It's just not easy to know how to interpret these findings when we're left with suggestive language instead of precise, unambiguous knowledge about the actual living conditions of the people in question.

Another, and bigger, part of what's wrong here is that living conditions don't amount to living. Let me give you an example:

"According to the office of Cobb County prosecutor Barry Morgan, [Raquel] Nelson – who had no car at the time – committed vehicular homicide by attempting to cross a five-lane highway with her three kids to get to her apartment, after being let off the bus.

Nelson, 30 and African-American, was convicted on the charge this week by six jurors who were not her peers: All were middle-class whites, and none had ever taken a bus in metro Atlanta. In other words, none had ever been in Nelson’s shoes:

They had never taken two buses to go grocery shopping at Wal-Mart with three kids in tow. They had never missed a transfer on the way home that caused them to wait a full hour-and-a-half with tired and hungry kids for the next bus. They had never been let off at a bus stop on a five-lane speedway, with their apartment in sight across the road, and been asked to drag those three little ones an additional half-mile-plus down the road to the nearest traffic signal and back in order to get home at last.

And they had never lost control of an over-eager four-year-old as they waited on a three-foot median for a car to pass. Nor had they watched helplessly as a driver who had had 'three or four' beers and two painkillers barreled toward their child."

Granted, I have no knowledge of the state of Nelson's house, but it sure looks like she can feed her kids and I have to imagine that she at least has a fridge and a TV. But you'd have to be absolutely nuts to say that she was living better than "all but the richest persons a hundred years ago" even before her son died and she got arrested and convicted. Speaking as a graduate student, I can say from experience that it's not really fun to ride the bus - and I'm not using it to go grocery shopping with my three kids. This doesn't necessarily mean that Nelson was living in a hell on Earth, mind you, but all of this focus on possessions serves to obscure the more subtle challenges associated with living in poverty.

And perhaps this is what the Heritage folks are talking about. They do, after all, recommend reforming anti-poverty policy "based on an accurate assessment of actual living conditions and the causes of deprivation." Perhaps - but this kind of thinking doesn't exactly harmonize with the Heritage Foundation's usual chorus. Just looking at the issue of transportation reveals that the potential solutions are either costly and ongoing, fall squarely under the much-maligned category of social engineering, or both. One can only imagine that this is also true for employment policy, housing policy, education policy, and the rest - having three hundred bucks to spend on a TV is much easier than building a life that offers a chance at fulfillment and a reasonable promise of day-to-day contentment. At any rate, when the Heritage people go on about today's superior living conditions and refer to our government's "limited resources" it doesn't sound like they want better programs for the poor. Instead, it sounds like they want fewer of them. If I'm being unfair to them, great - I'd love to be proven wrong on this one. But if, as it very much seems, they want to introduce substantial cuts to services for the poor without offering any kind of replacement, they need to stop and reconsider what poverty means as a way of life and not merely as a list of appliances.

First, a warm-up, to which I have essentially nothing to add:

"'The recession is deeper because of our president; it's seen an anemic recovery because of our president.' - Mitt Romney, attempting to clear up the confusion over whether Obama has made the economy worse or not, despite the existence of hard data in easy to prove chart form that clearly shows he hasn't.

...Mitt Romney doesn't seem to understand that in even the most anemic of recoveries, the recession doesn't actually get any deeper."

As Bryan Lambert observes, recovering from a recession means making that recession less deep. Saying both that Obama made the recession deeper and provided an anemic (weak, lethargic, insufficient) recovery, then, is explicitly self-contradictory. This, I find, is often a problem for the more straight-laced politicians: when they start to get serious about politics, they find that they are required to be more disingenuous and sneaky than they ever have been and they straight-up stumble. If Romney wants to have a chance with the Republican voters, he's going to have to get a lot better at propagandizing than this.

Now, having been warmed up, we can move on to something a bit more challenging.

"The underlying reason that the Church opposes the IOM’s recommendations is its opposition to the trivialization of sex. At bottom, the Church seeks to preserve the idea that 'sex makes babies.' Such a formulation indicates on its face that there is something unique, even sacred, about sex, and that sex is intrinsically associated with committed adult relationships."

Helen Alvare's article on the Institute of Medicine's recent suggestion that all contraceptives be fully covered by insurance is not unlike the future of the Great Wall of China: long and full of holes. This one is particularly egregious, however. Here she is saying that the goal is to communicate the idea that sex is intrinsically associated with something. Forget for the moment that "committed adult relationships" are hardly natural and so could not possibly be ontologically connected to sex, which is natural. How, I have to ask, can there even be such a thing as an intrinsic association?

Associations in the sense that Alvare is talking about aren't just correlations. She talks about "preserv[ing] idea[s]" and wants to choose among various "formulation[s]" based on what they say "on their face[s]" - this is all thoroughly social, and in the realm of the social there is really very little indeed that is universally sure or stable. Moreover, nothing is intrinsic, let alone intrinsically connected to some other socially constructed thing that also has no intrinsic meaning. Let's demonstrate this one concept at a time. "Sex" could mean penetrative vaginal intercourse between one fertile man and one fertile woman. In that case, it makes some sense to talk about it "mak[ing] babies" (though even then it wouldn't always do so). But "sex" doesn't have to mean that. It could also mean same-sex intercourse, heterosexual intercourse that doesn't involve penetration, intercourse between infertile people, intercourse between fertile people using contraception...and so on. "Committed adult relationships," meanwhile, is basically meaningless on its own. What counts as an adult? For Jews, you used to be an adult at age 13. And what counts as commitment? If two people commit to being sexually exclusive but emotionally open, does that count? What about the other way around? And what sort of relationship are we talking about, anyway? I can commit to having a lifelong fuck buddy, and that's a committed adult relationship yet somehow I doubt it qualifies. If we're talking about social activity and linguistic constructions, we'd be foolish to think that there's any kind of stable connection, let alone an intrinsic one.

The worst part about Alvare's ham-handed foray into the fine art of linguistic manipulation is that it glides right on by a very pertinent fact. If people use contraception correctly, they actually do trivialize sex. Not entirely, mind you - there is still a significant emotional component that usually exists, and of course things like consent are always going to be necessary - but as a matter of biological fact the consequences of sex are trivial when contraception is employed correctly: you get some dead sperm and, well, that's pretty much it. Alvare, meanwhile, appears to think that no such trivialization is happening. This is simply baffling. I would understand completely (although I would also find it tiresome) if she were to go into the emotional stuff, but she goes out of her way to identify only biological consequences, i.e., the very things that are in reality being trivialized. As I say, it would be nice if we could explore this in her writing a little more, but her bizarre reasoning about the "intrinsic" nature of made-up concepts makes it hard to see what she thinks about the more substantive issues. At any rate, though, this is what a good politician's contradiction should look like. It takes some brains to figure out that Alvare's asking for the impossible here. Romney, on the other hand, is just acting like a dolt.

Of all the possible reactions to the terrorist attacks in Oslo, this is one I have to admit that I did not see coming.

"We must now add Norway to the expanding list of unsafe places that includes Columbine, Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center, London, Madrid, Ft. Hood and Virginia Tech...Norway forbids civilians from carrying concealed weapons, or owning an automatic weapon, unless they are gun collectors. As in America, gun laws do not deter criminals who are determined to cause harm with a weapon. What would have deterred Breivik would have been a gun in the hands of a competent person capable of stopping his mass-murdering spree."

So give Cal Thomas at least this much credit: he's creative. But wait, what was that list of "unsafe places," again?

"...Columbine, Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center, London, Madrid, Ft. Hood and Virginia Tech..."

Yes, Ft. Hood, as in, Fort Hood, as in

"one of the largest United States military installations in the world, and is the home of III Corps, 1st Cavalry Division, 13th Sustainment Command, First Army Division West, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, 41st Fires Brigade and many other corps and echelons above corps units."

If one of the unsafe places in the world is a place that is literally filled with soldiers, I just can't take Thomas very seriously when he suggests that all we need is one "competent [armed] person." There's a lot more to go into here - say, the difference between the WTC attacks and the Oslo attacks; the likely consequences of having guns lying around a fucking children's summer camp; statistics on safety and gun ownership; the fact that Israel, which has a compulsory draft and is therefore basically a nation of armed soldiers, still suffers terrorist attacks - but for the time being I just want us to bask in the wild stupidity of what Thomas says here.

Maybe, instead of teaching people famous arguments, we should just teach concepts and let them work the arguments out on their own. In this case, for example, we could have told poor John Goodman about zero-sum games and left him to figure out why medicine isn't actually very much like entrepreneurship.

"Time and again President Obama has told us how he intends to solve our health care problems: spend money on pilot programs and other experiments; find out what works and then go copy it...

Consider Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Sam Walton. If we could discover what they did right, and everyone copied their behavior, then we could all become billionaires. Right? Well, not quite.

Here's the problem: In order for each of us to be a billionaire, we have to each be doing something that produces a billion dollars' worth of goods and services. But if all we're doing is copying action items out of a book, then we are not doing anything special. And if we’re not doing anything special, we are definitely not producing a billions dollars of value added."

There's one initial problem in that those three men all entrepreneured in different industries and so we really shouldn't expect them to have done similar things, but the bigger issue for Goodman is that we can't all be billionaires just because there isn't enough money. At least in theory, the total number of dollars in existence is finite at any given point in time and tends to be relatively stable over short periods. I can't say as I know what that number is, but I'm fairly certain that it's less than 1,000,000,000 * 307,000,000 (i.e., the number of dollars that would have to exist in order for each of us to be a billionaire). Every dollar earned (or otherwise obtained) by one person is one dollar less for someone else - there's just no getting around it. In contrast, it's trivial to improve the quality of health care at one institution without damaging the quality at another; if this weren't the case, most of us would still be stuck with bloodletting.

Nor is it impossible to learn from entrepreneurs (or successful hospital or school systems). Goodman himself admits this, though he tries to hide it:

"Scholars associated with the Brookings Institution identified 10 of the best hospital regions in the country and then tried to identify common characteristics that could be replicated. There were almost none."

In this argument, "almost none" is a consciously slanted way of saying "some" - as in, "there were some common characteristics that can be replicated." And, in fact, even if there were no such characteristics found by the Brookings Institute we might still conclude that the Brookings Institute was looking in the wrong place. For example, Goodman evidently wants these common characteristics to be relatively obvious, easily characterized features, like the method of reimbursement for physicians (e.g. fee-for-service vs. salaries). But just because there aren't relatively obvious, easily characterized common features doesn't mean that none exist. Indeed, if we were willing to settle for the relatively obvious stuff then it's not clear why we would need to spend very much money at all researching it - or why we would expect to learn anything surprising and worthwhile.

There is, of course, some element of uniqueness in medicine as well as some hint of a zero-sum game. The nature of the medical institution, for example, is going to go a fair ways towards determining what sorts of arrangements will make it work best, and every time a good doctor moves to join a better(-paying) hospital that same doctor leaves behind another one. But it doesn't seem like Goodman is saying that Obama's approach is limited or not worth the money; it seems like he's saying that it's doomed, which is an entirely different story and not supported by the evidence (even though Goodman himself picked the evidence). In essence Goodman is asking us to reinvent the wheel with every hospital and school we build, which is a very tall order. You'd think that his argumentation would therefore be equally impressive, but judging by this article he is instead in over his head.

Starting off with the most newsworthy news of the past several days (at least, as judged by most media outlets), I'm sure that almost all of you know about the recent terrorist attacks in Norway. If not, here:

"Today a white thirty-two-year old Norwegian detonated a bomb outside the prime minister’s office. He then traveled forty-five minutes to the island of Utoya to a youth camp for the country’s Labour Party. Dressed as a police officer, he shot indiscriminately, kicking the wounded to check if they were alive before shooting them dead. The slaughter was aimed at symbols of Norwegian governance. Norwegian police said the attack had 'catastrophic dimensions.'"

As Shiva Balaghi goes on to note in that same article, the most newsworthy initial analysis of the attacks (as judged, again, by most media outlets) was that it was another case of the global jihad that we're all supposed to be wetting ourselves about. The first major problem with this is that the global jihad that we're all supposed to be wetting ourselves about is, as this incident tragically demonstrates, insignificant in comparison to all the other kinds of terrorism out there. In the United States, for example, there were more terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2005 of Jewish origin than Islamic origin; in Europe, separatist terrorist groups account for a proportion of terrorism two orders of magnitude greater than the proprtion accounted for by Muslims. For some reason, though, there's so much antipathy towards Muslims that we even get people speculating with a straight face that the native ethnic Norwegian who committed these crimes might be "a Muslim convert whose religious affiliation Norway’s leaders would prefer not to divulge so quickly."

Some people, however, would like to be more level-headed. When Bruce Bawer talks about "legitimate criticism of Islam," for instance, he probably doesn't mean the kind of ridiculous controversies manufactured by war fetishists, wherein a blond European anti-immigration zealot might possibly also be a secret Muslim convert. Speaking on the very same subject, Bawer has this to say:

"When I first heard the news of the explosions at those buildings, my first thought, of course, was that it was a jihadist attack. But it wasn’t: it was a right-wing lunatic. It wasn’t jihad. It was a meaningless killing spree by a madman, like the ones at Columbine and Virginia Tech.

...it is deeply depressing to see this evil, twisted creature become the face of Islam criticism in Norway. Norwegian television journalists who in the first hours of the crisis were palpably uncomfortable about the prospect of having to talk about Islamic terrorism are now eagerly discussing the dangers of 'Islamophobia' and 'conservative ideology' and are drawing connections between the madness and fanaticism of Breivik and the platform of the Progress Party. Yesterday’s events, then, represent a double tragedy for Norway. Not only has it lost almost one hundred people, including dozens of young people, in a senseless rampage of violence. But I fear that legitimate criticism of Islam, which remains a very real threat to freedom in Norway and the West, has been profoundly discredited, in the eyes of many Norwegians, by association with this murderous lunatic."

To his credit - and, after this display, he needs some - in some of his other articles Bawer rightly decries the way that women are often treated by traditional Muslims and the way that some Muslims are actively fighting against the (very reasonable) laws in the countries to which they have emigrated. Whether any of that counts as "a very real threat to freedom in Norway and the West" is an open question, I think, but what's more interesting is to notice which group of people Bawer chooses to identify as the political (as in, not physical) victims here. Andrew Sullivan does a nice enough job of exposing the outward-facing flaws in Bawer's reasoning here and I won't bother to reiterate his points, but think also about what it means for Bawer to seek first to protect Islam's critics.

Bawer, ostensibly, is unhappy with the spread of Islam "in Norway and the West" because he thinks that it's bad for people. Maybe he has a much more abstract idea of politics or morality than this - maybe he thinks, for instance, that one ought not be a Muslim no matter what - but probably he thinks that sharia prohibits free speech and subjugates women and such. In that case, why not express concern for, y'know, women and people who like to speak freely? Why instead think of political critics of Islam? Bawer says that the shooting and bombing has discredited the criticism of Islam, but I rather suspect that the movement has done that to itself - at least, if it's as gratuitously self-interested as Bawer makes it seem. Nor is this any small matter or mere quibble. The most serious victims of conservative Islamic theocratic rule are women, LGBT people, apostates, and the like; in other words, people who the right typically don't care much about. That Bawer seems not to care much about them in this case, then, suggests (rightly or wrongly) that his opposition to Islam is based less on concerns that most of us could support (e.g. human rights) and more about a simple dislike for the religion itself and for its practitioners. As he says, this is certainly a problem - but the problem is that his movement has co-opted legitimate criticism of Islam by being the loudest critics out there. If he wants us to be able to look beyond incidents like this latest one in Oslo, Bawer should start by reassuring us that his position is in no way, shape, or form about Islam as such and by reminding us of the secular reasons why we should refuse e.g. to let Islamic parents circumcise their female infants. Whether he can bring himself to do this, however, is something I doubt very much.

And, to emphasize the point again, Bawer should not be worried just about Islam. Women (and others) are abused regularly in the name of all kinds of gods, even in Europe. (As for child abuse, let's not even get started.) And it's hardly distinctly Muslim to advocate for violence against the non-believers.

"Rabbis Dov Lior and Yacob Yousef had endorsed a highly controversial book, the King's Torah - written by two lesser-known settler rabbis. It attempts to justify killing non-Jews, including those not involved in violence, under certain circumstances.

The fifth chapter, entitled 'Murder of non-Jews in a time of war' has been widely quoted in the Israeli media. The summary states that 'you can kill those who are not supporting or encouraging murder in order to save the lives of Jews.'"

This is only a press summary, mind you, and I've learned not to trust those, but "you can murder people just in case" isn't really the sort of thing you ever want to read.* I'm not going to say that Bawer is obligated to talk about Jews, too, just because this is in the same area as his complaints about Muslims, but I think it's instructive to observe that we can easily disentangle the serious problem here (i.e., the endorsing of murder) from the religion with which it is associated (Judaism). While the problem owes its existence in some respects to the religion and the religion is contributory, it would be a major misstep to allege that the religion itself is the problem.** For one, this would wrongly shift the focus from the (potential) victims to the (potential) perpetrators (in Bawer's case, focusing more on violent or unlawful Muslims than on abused Muslim womena and so on); for another, it wrongly seems to imply that there's something inherent to the religion that necessitates this sort of thing and so that the religion has to be eliminated as a public safety measure. We can take this news seriously - which it deserves; go read the linked article if you don't think that some people are emboldened by this so-called King's Bible - without losing our heads, and we can do the same for Muslim stuff, too. But in order to get anywhere we have to be clear about what we hope to accomplish and how we think we're going to accomplish it. Creating needlessly antagonistic and oppressive laws (like the banning of the burqa) is not a good way to prevent future Muslim terrorism or even future Muslim oppression of women, nor is it a good idea to take to the media and say, simply and without qualification or specification, that Islam is the problem. Maybe Bawer just wants Muslims to leave us white folks alone and just stay in the middle east - but then he owes it to us to say that and not to pretend that he is part of an unfairly maligned movement that only wants to look out for people's rights and safety.

*The most interesting part about this, from a philosophical perspective? That the defense given of this outrageous claim is that "[t]he prohibition 'Thou Shalt Not Murder' applies only 'to a Jew who kills a Jew.'" This, of course, is the same flimsy excuse given by Christian homophobes to explain why they're willing to make queer people into second-class citizens but have no qualms with eating shrimp. Oddly, I don't think any of them expected people to actually take them this seriously about the whole commandments-for-Jews/commandments-for-all thing.
**Please note that this is compatible with saying that the religion is problematic or is a problem. By no means do I intend to let these guys or their holy book off the hook here.

I still haven't found anything terrifically brilliant on the topic, but at least I've found someone who's trying a little harder to elucidate what he means. Philip Bess spends a lot of his time gently dismantling arguments that seem to me like straw men but that are probably held by actual people somewhere (e.g. "Are you saying that one can’t live in sprawl and be moral?"), but towards the end of his two-article stint at The Public Discourse he makes the following analogy as a positive case for the communal-life/new-urbanism deal we looked at yesterday.

"Several years ago, a friend and I went to see an Illinois state high school football quarter-final playoff game that pitted the top-ranked Chicago-city public high school against a suburban-Chicago public high school from the DuPage Valley Conference, which year-in and year-out produces at least one and sometimes as many as three teams that compete in the semi-finals of the big-school divisions, and wins a statistically disproportionate share of state championships. (In contrast, few Chicago public schools have made it past the quarter-finals for several decades.) That night, however, the very best football player on the field was from the Chicago-city public school: a 6’-5”, 245-pound junior defensive end and future Division I star who seemed to spend the entire night in the suburban team’s backfield. He had at least five quarterback sacks, numerous near sacks, and was in on well over half his team’s tackles. He was always around the ball; he played as a man among boys. And yet the suburban team won the game—by five touchdowns. Here is my point: the Chicago-city public school defensive end was clearly and objectively a good football player; nevertheless, the football culture of the DuPage Valley Conference is clearly and objectively more conducive to producing good football teams and good football players than is the football culture of the Chicago public schools...

I hope this analogy helps suggest how, in traditional towns and neighborhoods, the sheer propinquity of both people and communal practices—bearing in mind that communal practices are the greenhouses of moral and intellectual virtue—make such places more conducive to human beings acquiring the virtues we all need for a good life than environments lacking such propinquity of both people and communal practices."

Being a public school product myself, I'm more than familiar with this sort of situation. Our sports teams were pretty good, but we routinely competed at a level clearly below that of many suburban schools in our area. Nor was this true just of sports: we also struggled to keep pace in the arts and, unsurprisingly, in education. Sometimes we were better - I say without any attempt at humility that our musicals were the best in the city and probably even the state - but most of the time we weren't, even if (as in Bess's story) we had the best individuals. The important question here is not, however, who did better. The important question is why.

For Bess, the situation apparently comes down to a difference in culture. "[T]he football culture" of the area that produced the winning team, he says, is superior to the football culture of the one that lost; likewise, I guess, he expects that the culture culture in "traditional towns and neighborhoods" will produce better, happier people than the sort of culture that we tend to see in sprawling cities. I find this to be a little on the question-begging side myself, as Bess presents no evidence whatsoever of the suburban "propinquity of both people and communal practices," either in terms of football or generally, but it turns out that it doesn't even matter. Even if we assume that the sticks are arranged the way he says they are - which, again, I doubt - he's still being overly idealistic in thinking that we can just straightforwardly press that same sort of environment onto our cities.

Because at least one of us should do some real research before mouthing off about this stuff, I went and looked up the demographic structure of the DuPage Valley school district and compared it to the city schools as well as the student demographics for the entire state of Illinois. To my complete and total lack of surprise, it turns out that the DuPage Valley schools aren't even close to being representative of either Chicago or the wider state:

Y'know what's interesting? Whenever a person want to pick on other people in a political context, that person tends to cast them as being rich and spoiled, even if that person is a right-winger and therefore likely to be in the "don't pick on the wealthy job creators" camp. Here, watch:

"The truth is that years ago, before this generation of mothers was even born, our society decided where children rank in the list of important things. When abortion was legalized, we wrote it into law.

Children rank way below college. Below world travel for sure. Below the ability to go out at night at your leisure. Below honing your body at the gym. Below any job you may have or hope to get. In fact, children rate below your desire to sit around and pick your toes, if that is what you want to do. Below everything. Children are the last thing you should ever spend your time doing."

How many world travelers, one cannot help but wonder, does Rachel Jankovic think get abortions? I grant that it's not impossible for a wealthy jetsetter to go get an abortion because she just can't stand to give up her vacation in Monaco, but "[w]omen with incomes below 200% of poverty made up 30% of all women of reproductive age, but accounted for 57% of all women having abortions in 2000." And, quite honestly, Jankovic doesn't know the first thing about the mindset of these women. Her thesis is that we no longer care about children because abortion is legal, but - in another shocking, fact-based twist - "[a]round 61 percent of the women who had an abortion had already given birth to a child or children." Despite all of this, though, Jankovic demonizes women who have abortions on the basis that they are (a) wealthy, image-obsessed, money-grubbing and (b) hate children and the idea of parenting.

The layers of wrongness here are positively Inception-esque. The people who have higher priorities than parenting tend to be wealthy and well-informed enough to procure contraception and so not need abortions; her depiction of the abortion-having crowd as toned, well-traveled people who have nothing better to do than "pick [their] toes" is outrageous. Moreover, having an abortion doesn't say anything about one's attitude towards having kids, any more than neutering one's dog says anything about one's attitude towards puppies. Again, most of these women are already parents, and more will become parents over time. Amazingly enough, even women who've had an abortion can love and want their kids. In fact, this entire line of thought is incapable of recognizing the fact that many women choose to have an abortion out of concern for the fetus. This is obviously going to seem paradoxical to an airhead like Jankovic, but there are plenty of women who rightly perceive that their living situation is one that cannot safely include children. We can have the philosophical argument of whether that premise supports aborting a fetus for its own sake, but it's fantastically corrosive and thoroughly anti-intellectual for Jankovic to accuse these women of not caring when their concern is exactly the thing that motivates their decisions. And, of course, we see here that the notion of "punishing success" is a total fraud. If you're a woman who wants to use your wealth to control your reproductive life - if, that is in this case to say, you're one of the women who has an abortion in order to spend more time enjoying your money and independence - you're not allowed to. In fact, you must sacrifice your wealth for your future child if that's what it takes. Everyone else who's wealthy, meanwhile, doesn't even have to pay their taxes in order to prevent people from, say, dying of easily treatable medical conditions for want of insurance. As I said, a total fraud.

It would be easy to write all of this off under a version of Sturgeon's law that applies to people, but I think the problem goes deeper. Abortion has gotten such a bad rap in (at least) this country that some folks feel like they can comment on the matter apparently without even having the merest scintilla of a clue about what's actually going on. Whatever you think about abortion as a political or moral issue, it should be automatic at this point to say that the rhetoric surrounding the issue, and in particular the rhetoric coming from the right, has gone way too far. Jankovic, frankly, seems like an ignorant sack of shit and probably couldn't be expected to tie her own shoes without somehow falling prey to manipulative, vitriolic political propaganda. But in a sense this is precisely the point: the people who are producing this manipulative, vitriolic political propaganda do so in large part because ignorant sacks of shit are going to fall for it. That's no way to run a country and it's no way for grown adults to behave.

Okay, what?

"In the face of a clearly and unambiguously lethal injury, the physician restrained himself from futile actions—actions that would violate human dignity. This activity—medical practice—was not farming or weaving or pyramid building. Special rules applied. The service that physicians offer, this most personal collaboration, this service so frequently humbled by the prospect of decline and death, is grounded in the service of a human person with special dignity, a dignity that governs the purview of a physician and the scope of a physician’s ethical actions...

The oath concludes with the physician swearing to forego a surgical procedure for which others are better trained, to forego any act of corruption, any act of seduction, or any violation of confidentiality. The obligations specified in this oath follow from a profound respect for the special dignity of the human person."

Worryingly, Donald Landry isn't just another yutz with a PhD - he's a yutz with a PhD and an MD. Doctor doctor Landry is very confused, though, if he thinks this dignity thing is important for medicine.

For a start, I think we can all be happy that Landry isn't a farmer or a weaver or a construction worker. It's great that he (thinks that) he's avoiding corruption and other vices within his medical practice, but I'm pretty fucking certain that other professionals don't get to do whatever they want just because they aren't doctors. And then, coming at it from the other direction, it also doesn't seem like human anything is responsible for things like an obligation to refrain from offering futile medical care. For one, we in fact don't refrain from offering futile medical care, and some of the most vocal and staunch advocates of such care are doctors. So there's that. But, as assisted suicide advocates have frequently observed, many of us refuse to put our pets through this sort of stuff. Is that, perhaps, because my cat has "the special dignity of the human person"? If not, it seems like we have to say one of two things: either we're wrong to think that it's better to do nice things for dying pets or human dignity doesn't have anything to do with it. Since the first one seems like the sort of idea only a sociopath would be able to entertain seriously, I think we should go with the latter.

These issues, of course, are present for Landry whether or not he's capable of addressing the much more complicated and sophisticated problems associated with asserting that all living human organisms have dignity (as is commonly said). Thankfully for his patients, his philosophical bumbling won't (necessarily) make him a worse physician. But this is still a really good case in point of why bioethics is important: without any kind of oversight, people like Landry would be free to act on their kinda crazy ideas. We'd be in enough trouble if just ethicists were in that position; to let doctors (or farmers or tailors or construction workers) do it is just asking for trouble.

Loath though I am to support political projects that appear to use nostalgia as a primary support, I do find that I have some empathy with this sort of view, which unless I am wrong is more or less this "new urbanism" thing.

"[I support] the effort of local villages in Germany to provide their own heat through local renewable resources. And, wonderfully, it stresses that the effort combines the twin achievements of saving money and retaining local cohesion. These two aims – contra most contemporary economists who can only endorse a 'Wal-Mart' model – are not in contradiction."

Patrick Deenan wants more "healthy communal life," where "health" is understood for the most part as a measure of how communal the life is (i.e., the more communal, the better). And, again, it's kinda compelling. Using local, renewable resources instead of fossil fuels is a great idea, although in all honesty I have not a clue how it would contribute to "local cohesion." Either way, there are also people who attribute much more significant benefits to this sort of thing, such as Marc Dunkelman:

"Imagine how you might map an individual's social universe onto a model of the planet Saturn. If the planet itself represents an individual (let's call her Nancy), the surrounding rings would order her acquaintances. The inner rings would represent Nancy's nuclear family and closest friends. The middle rings would comprise the people she counts as familiar, but not particularly intimate. And the outer rings would represent Nancy's more distant acquaintances.

Using that model, the last few decades reveal a sea change in American life. New developments have compelled us to invest more time and attention to the inner and the outer rings, to the detriment of those in the middle. This marks an unprecedented evolution in the social networks of American community and undermines the rhythms of American democracy."

Much like Deenan, Dunkelman wants us to spend more time with "the ladies down the street" and "the mixed membership of the local Kiwanis club."* Whether the alleged benefits of the middle-ring, healthy-communal-life are ecological or political or whatever - and some of these allegations are much more plausible than others - I can't quite bring myself to endorse it.

Part of this is because I just don't think it can do everything. Dunkelman, for instance, is not somebody I can take seriously if he really thinks that we can turn around our politics just by hosting Tupperware parties and playing in neighborhood sports leagues. The connection just makes no sense. But part of my skepticism is also due to facts that I think this sort of argument ignores. There are reasons why old-school small towns acted (and still act) like small towns. For one, the economic structure of the country was different. It was only recently that the majority of our population has lived and worked in cities - do people think that we can just reverse that trend and reestablish the relative dominance of the small-town model? It's not impossible, of course, but that would require a major overhaul of the policies and economic behavior patterns that currently hold in our country, which is not something I've seen anybody talking about.

Then again, maybe we don't need cities to shrink so that the population can disperse and small towns can thrive more. Maybe we can continue to take advantage of the economic (and other) advantages of scale that come with big cities but still install a small-town feeling or culture. Maybe - but if this is the plan, it would be nice to acknowledge that small towns are much more likely to be demographically monochrome than cities are. Connecting to one's neighbors isn't just a matter of doing things with them; otherwise all of us would be good friends with almost all of our coworkers. We tend to gather around and support people who think and act (and, yes, look) like we do. That means having shared rituals, shared schedules, and shared priorities. That doesn't mean that we have to vote in lockstep or anything like that, but if I want to be a rowdy bachelor who doesn't discriminate in his company and my neighbor wants to have a safe, peaceful place in which to raise three small kids then there's probably going to be some tension. All of this is going to be even harder if my local friends and I work in different industries (say, because we live in a city) or if our kids go to different schools (say, because we live in a city) or if we're from different backgrounds (say, because we grew up in a diverse place, like a city). Obviously neighborhoods tend to self-segregate along a few of these lines, but the level of diversity in cities is still orders of magnitude higher than what one would find in a small town. Accomplishing a small-town atmosphere in a city isn't, then, just a matter of using solar power or chatting with the locals at the corner coffee shop: working with or talking to the people around you is only going to result in any kind of meaningful relationship if those people are sufficiently like you, and in the city that's just not as likely.

I feel like there are even more reasons to feel iffy about this, but for now two will suffice. Hopefully I can read more about this and maybe see if anybody has made a more compelling case. In the meantime, though, I want to close by pointing out just one thing: I have no antagonism towards the idea of communal life in the same way that I do towards, say, relying on the private sector to provide health care. This sort of vision was at the center of The Decemberists' latest album, for example, and I thought the lyrics were probably the strongest (i.e., most emotionally compelling) part of that record. There's a lot to be said for a way of life that provides a comfortable daily rhythm and a reliable living, especially if that way of life draws people together in a way that produces the psychological bonds that preclude things like crime. But that way of life doesn't come free or easy, and somebody is going to have to make an ideological compromise in order to get there. Until I see that compromise named and accepted, it's going to be hard to accept this new-urbanism, small-town-revival movement.

*Anybody know what Kiwanis is?

This looks to me like a line that's very similar to the one in Hadley Heath's "I don't want statistical management of health care, I want private insurance" article.

"Regulators rarely are effective. They often slow down progress and always impede freedom. Think of friendly fascism. Bachmann and her tea partyers put their faith in the checks and balances of the Constitution, its separation of powers, its federalism. That is why she is forging ahead and she and the tea partyers are going to be a force to reckon with in this oncoming election."

Again, I sort of want to ask Emmett Tyrrell what he thinks the government is going to do. On what basis does he think we can "put [our] faith in" the government if not to provide regulation? I mean, checks and balances and federalism aren't gonna do anything by themselves. Presumably Tyrrell could say that Bachmann trusts the relatively abstract parts of our government to do things other than the things that regulators are for. The separation of powers won't stop companies from selling me lead toothpaste, for instance, but it might well prevent the president from going to war unilaterally. (It might - but, of course, it might not. See: Libya.) But then why is Tyrrell even talking about regulators at all?

The impression that I get is that he would like us to just forget about the idea of regulation altogether. He doesn't say that, of course, but he does compare it to "friendly fascism." This, together with the subsequent nonsense about checks and balances, makes me wonder if he understands what regulation is in the first place. I mean, is it fascism (friendly or otherwise) to say that you can't run a dogfighting ring for money? Cause that's regulation. Or should we go back to the days when people could sell you cocaine and call it a pregnancy medicine? I dunno - personally, I've never tried cocaine, but it doesn't seem like a great idea to me. So, in the end, I guess it's not really a surprise that Tyrrell is a Bachmann fan. With this much small-government zealotry and sheer ignorance packed together, she's just right for him.

Not a candidate with a legitimate chance to win, mind you, but a legitimate candidate nonetheless.

"Herman Cain said Sunday that Americans should be able to ban Muslims from building mosques in their communities...

'I'm simply saying I owe it to the American people to be cautious because terrorists are trying to kill us,' Cain said, 'so yes I'm going to err on the side of caution rather than on the side of carelessness.'"

I just...I don't even...

Yeah, so as it happens the articles on this blog tend to contain a relatively small number of logical fallacies. Every so often I try to find a different one just to spice things up but, y'know, it's hard - I can only write about what other people have already written. So thanks, Mike Adams, for being just the right kind of stupid.

"Whenever I hear an argument for the rape exception [to anti-abortion laws] I think of my friend Laura. She was adopted and later in life (when she was in her 20s) wanted to locate her birth mother and learn of the circumstances of her adoption. When she did, she learned that she was the product of a rape. I don’t have the audacity to tell her she should have been killed by an abortionist. I leave that to the compassionate liberals who over-simplify the rape issue."

This argument is the result of misunderstanding a negation (as well as a fair quantity of sophistry, I would guess). The claim "it is not wrong to abort a fetus conceived during a rape" is not even close to being the equivalent of the claim "it is obligatory to abort a fetus [etc.]"; in short, "not wrong" doesn't mean "right." In classic right-winger style, then, it's Adams who's oversimplifying the matter and not "the compassionate liberals": the whole premise behind freedom of choice is that the woman's choice is ethically important, which implies pretty directly that the issue is not black-and-white in the way that Adams portrays it to be. It's not that we don't think anybody should've been aborted - Adams would be a good start, I think - we just aren't willing to settle for the caveman-esque understanding of the world that is on display here.

And now, for the entirely predictable climax of the Andy Sullivan "things I learned on the job" compilation...

"The most valuable lessons I remember from picking tomatoes, cucumbers (nasty prickly plants!) and hauling freight from trucks are not how to recognize a ripe tomato (never in the supermarket, not even Wholefoods), but the interactions with my career minimum wage folks. They've taught me why people vote for the Tea Party, why people are racists, sexist and do other completely irrational things. It's not irrational from their - be it limited - perspective...I am lucky to have been in a situation where I could gather my knowledge. Many people have not been. That does not make them stupid. That makes them uneducated, but rarely due to their own failure."

Gee, what have I been saying this whole time? School education may not necessarily help people get jobs - even if, perhaps, it should - but it helps societies run better anyway. Think the Tea Party is a good thing for the country? Then you should be 100% behind the work-as-school idea. Otherwise, maybe give that one a second thought.

And wait! What's this? Yet more confirmation of what I've been saying?

"If we wanted, we could both do the 'next thing' on our respective career paths. She could move to a bigger company. I could freelance more, angle to write for a bigger publications, write a book, hire a publicist, whatever. We could try to make more money. ... But … meh. ... Going further down our respective career paths would likely mean more work, greater responsibilities, higher stress, and less time to lay around the living room with the kids."

Is this the American dream? Not as I know it (even if, perhaps, it should be). This is what happens when some people choose to live better and therefore choose to leave money on the table (to be picked up, ostensibly, by people who have chosen to live worse). Again, is this really what we want? For the money to be very highly concentrated in the hands of people who have rejected the most popular idea of a good life? I think not, because then the most powerful people tend to be those with a social philosophy antipathetic towards ours (people like, say, Rupert Murdoch, who have no particular objections to the idea of hacking into a missing girl's voicemail and deleting her messages if it'll help him turn a profit).*

So how about let's get a grade school system that works and an economy that doesn't hold people out of the middle class until they're willing to show a certain level of apathy towards their own loved ones, shall we? Maybe colleges will become more purely academic as a result or even as a part of that, but the least we can do is to make sure that our heads are still screwed on right when we think about this stuff. The education crisis in this country isn't just a matter of what happens in colleges, and it's not going to help us to pretend otherwise.

*Note also the automatic deference to the powerful evinced later in that link: the non-family people, it is alleged, "constitute a neurotic, ultraproductive minority that drives our economy forward." Evidence? Anything?

...and speaking of people whose names make me suspicious, Barton Hinkle (cf) has this to say about Derek Jeter:*

"For diehard Yankees fans, Jeter may be worth all the money on Earth. But many less ardent enthusiasts probably wonder whether even someone as good as Jeter should be raking in his kind of dough: $51 million for the current three-year contract, plus millions more in endorsement money. Jeter recently paid $7 million to have a house built—a 31,000-square-foot house. That's about the size of a typical Barnes & Noble...

Jeter's millions might be a good deal for the Yankees, but don't they stray from what is often called 'social justice'? What does it say about a society that pays a teacher thousands and a shortstop millions?

At this point it helps to consider Wilt Chamberlain, who was once to basketball what Jeter is to baseball today. In what has become known as the Wilt Chamberlain Hypothetical, the late philosopher Robert Nozick invites us to consider whether Chamberlain is entitled to the fruits of his game-playing labor.

Suppose, Nozick said, that there is a society in which wealth has been distributed ideally, however you want to define 'ideal.' (In this case, let's say everyone has exactly the same amount of money.) Now suppose Chamberlain signs a contract that entitles him to 25 cents out of every admission ticket sale. In the course of a season, 1 million people attend the games to watch him play. At season's end Chamberlain ends up $250,000 richer than anyone else."

Nozick, who you may or may not remember as the author of the experience-machine (or "this is basically just The Marix") argument (see e.g. 1, 2), apparently thinks that this situation could never be unjust. I find that to be an interesting conclusion, because the unimpeachable logical structure of the argument rests on a very questionable premise, namely, that "there is nothing unjust about people freely choosing to spend their money on entertainment." I don't want to approach that topic directly, though. Rather, I think it's worth spending some time elsewhere in Hinkle's article - in particular, here:

"Of course in the real world, the initial distribution of wealth might not be just. Still, people are not forced to pay Chamberlain or Jeter to play games with balls, are they? If they freely choose to do so, then how can we complain about the results?"

It's fairly apparent that Hinkle is just plain skipping over an important part of Nozick's argument. He is, I would say, totally missing a premise without which Nozick's unimpeachable logical structure would become actually quite impeachable: sort of like using Google Maps, you have to give it the right starting place in order for the directions to be right. In other words, there may indeed be absolutely nothing wrong with "people freely choosing to spend their money on entertainment" in and of itself, but even that can be a potential source of injustice when the initial arrangements aren't just. Hinkle, however, just waves his hand at the problem Billy-Flynn-style and expects us to forget that it was ever there in the first place. "Of course," he says, as if to concede the point, money isn't actually justly distributed. But just look at all the pretty, shiny things!

"Some more considerations: Unlike Jeter, whose exploits entertain millions, the typical schoolteacher has an audience of a couple hundred at most. If Jeter gets just 10 cents apiece from 10 million fans, each of whom would pay 10 bucks for the privilege of watching him play, then Jeter might be getting the short end of the deal, even though he earns $1 million. But a teacher earning $50,000 who teaches 100 children in the course of a year is, in effect, charging each of them 500 bucks. Do they find the instruction worth the money? Since they have to attend school and the teacher's salary is set by someone else, it's hard to say."

If this isn't Hinkle pulling out the old razzle-dazzle, I'll eat my hat. What a student would or wouldn't pay for an education is so far from a smart question that it's hard to even take him seriously. Or, at least, it would be if other people weren't out there pushing essentially this exact same line of thought.

"To compare apples with apples, a cheaply made but well-written comedy like the brilliant Office Space may outsell a hugely expensive, carefully researched historical drama like Heaven’s Gate. While those of us on the outside may detect an apparent injustice here, in fact such outcomes are merely the fruit of adults making their own decisions about which products they really want."

The sticky part for John Zmirak is that he claims to have found an insight into what adults "really" want. Because adults (and note that even Zmirak has the good sense to restrict his analysis to grown-ups, which Hinkle fails to do) "really" want this or that, he's saying, there's no problem with letting them have it - at least, not from the perspective of justice. He appears to think that this reasoning hinges on that fact that each of us is "free and morally responsible," but again this seems to me to be besides the point: freedom and moral responsibility are, so far as I can tell, completely compatible with (even self-inflicted) injustice. Take, for example, this thoroughly silly video from some shady outfit called the Fund for American Studes:



The premise, if you can't watch YouTube videos (coughatworkcough) or don't want to waste five minutes listening to wealthy white people praise the free market, is that "you might just be richer than you realize" because you really like the internet. In order to establish that you really like the internet, the TFAS people went to some beach or other and asked teenagers whether they would give up internet access for life for a million dollars, to which all of the teenagers unsurprisingly answered that they would not. (Incidentally, as an aside to the Fund for American Studies: I will take you up on your offer. Please contact me at [larryniven] [at sign] [gmail.com] so that we can meet at a mutually convenient location and draw up a contract.) From this we are supposed to conclude that, (to borrow Zmirak's phrasing) as free and morally responsible individuals, we have chosen to spend money on the internet and that, hey, as it turns out we really know what we're doing! Cause, y'know, none of us pays a million dollars for internet access and yet that's how much it's worth to us. Not coincidentally, this ties in perfectly with Zmirak's contention that "economic value is subjective," as well as with Hinkle's theories about justice and entertainment. But now, I think, we are in a position to better understand just what is wrong with all of this in the first place.

Money spent on internet access is, I say with mixed feelings, not just an entertainment expense. It's becoming increasingly difficult to find or apply for (let alone perform) a job without using the internet in some way, for example, and forget about keeping up any kind of social or family life from offline. The net also helps people find good economic deals, and there may be some products or services that can only be acquired online for people who don't live in or near large cities. You can file your taxes online, renew your driver's license online, change your address online, manage your finances online, and in all likelihood perform a whole slew of other non-entertainment tasks that I've forgotten about because they've become such common online behaviors that I no longer even notice them. In short, if you want to keep up with the world, you're almost certainly going to have to do it online. This isn't to say that you'll die without the 'net, of course, but to categorize it as a freely chosen entertainment expense is phenomenally disingenuous.

This, of course, is only reinforced by the poorly-chosen imagery used by TFAS. In the above video, the argument is made that rich people get ripped off by buying first-run versions of products, like cell phones, which the rest of us can then buy at a vastly reduced price. They use a clip of the original Wall Street movie in which Gordon Gekko, rich asshole, is shouting into one of the old brick-style cell phones on a beach. TFAS focuses the attention on the phone itself (it can't even take pictures or play music, they say with no apparent trace of irony), but they do so at the cost of ignoring what he's shouting into it. Gekko isn't just using the phone for fun - I mean, it can't even play music, right? - he's using it to manage his business life. Not all technologies are like this, of course, but the TFAS people fail to mention that the drawbacks of using a first-run technology like an expensive brick cell phone can be balanced out by the benefits of having (read: being able to afford) that technology before anybody else. I mean, I don't know about all of you, but no prospective employers were ever impressed that I had a cell phone (or, likewise, an email address), and I haven't been able to use it to do anything that the majority of my peers can't do. Gekko, on the other hand, could make business calls at any time or place in an era when his competitors couldn't, and that put him in an advantageous position when it came to protecting and growing the wealth (read: power) that he already had. It would, I believe, be a real stretch to call this arrangement just.

And now we return to the matter of entertainment. Pro baseball, I am perfectly happy to admit, is not really very much like the internet or cell phones. While some people do use it for business purposes (see: box seats), it's as close to pure entertainment as we're going to get. That means both that the rich probably can't get very much out of buying Yankees tickets and that the rest of us probably aren't going to lag behind economically because we aren't out watching the old ball game. But those also aren't the only relevant issues, because justice doesn't apply only to financial matters. We live in a consumer culture, and many of us (myself included) have to spend a certain amount of money on perceived luxuries in order to maintain a good feeling about how our lives are going. Whether that money would be better spent elsewhere - whether, in other words, we "really" want to attend baseball games or buy spinning rims for our cars - is, I think, a real question and not one we can answer just by observing that we do in fact spend the money the way we do. This culture didn't appear out of thin air, though: it was constructed, knowingly or otherwise, largely by those people who gained their wealth unjustly. Moreover, our options for satisfying our consumer drive are limited largely by - can you guess? - those people who gained their wealth unjustly. Whether Wilt or Jeter deserved their money, it's very hard to imagine that a George Steinbrenner (owner of the Yankees during Jeter's start and growth) or a Mark Cuban (owner of the '10-'11 NBA champion Dallas Mavericks) deserved enough to pay that money in the first place. It is, of course, this same class of people who are currently trying to turn the internet into a pay-for-play system and thereby restrict our entertainment (and other purchasing) options even further. None of this, I hope it is needless to say, comports particularly well with justice.

In part, of course, this may just go to show that justice is relatively unimportant. To my mind, if people would actually be incapable of operating without the internet then they're wise to turn down the million bucks, no matter how that incapacity came to be. And if everyone gets what they ("really") want, it's hard for me to say that we should come down on the wealthy just for the sake of rearranging numbers. But let's not be stupid: not everyone is getting what they want. Nor can we blame this on poverty, especially if we want to keep up the pretense that almost everyone in America is in the middle class (as TFAS does in the video). Whether we want to call it justice or not, though, we have to recognize that free, morally responsible adults cannot necessarily be trusted to spend their money (or time or energy or whatever else) in the best - or even in a good - way.  And we must realize, too, that suggesting that this fact is morally irrelevant, as these authors do, is neither honest nor, in fact, just.

*Even though I don't care a whit about the MLB, fuck the Yankees.