Conservative PC and the "Cordoba House"

Frankly, I just don’t care about "public opinion" in this case. And, I don’t think that the Cordoba Foundation should. Why is it that people do not want it built there? Because it's an Islamic organization? So what? Now 1.57 billion people in the world are representative of a terrorist plot? Or the 5.78 million American Muslims (of whom there are "more than a couple relatives of the deceased", btw). The Cordoba foundation raised the money, they are not a terrorist organization, it doesn't support terrorism, and the very premise of our separation-of-powers and federalist system is to prevent the tyranny of a majority from infringing on one's Constitutionally guaranteed rights, especially one stoked by the delusions of demagogues (Federalist #10). Traditionally, "conservatism" supposedly stood for exactly these principles. Now, it's simply Palin and Gingrich's ilk who use an inverse application of the liberal conception of political correctness. But, now we have to worry about the xenophobes and social conservatives' sensibilities instead of some hippie's. I'm sorry, but if you want to be offended by the construction of buildings in reaction to 9/11, then take a look at this map and the perpetually bloated state of the security-industrial complex before you complain about one moderate group's plans to build essentially a YMCA.

Explaining Patriotism Through Baseball

Explaining patriotism through the Yankees and Orioles, by Louis Menand and Roger Wilkins (2003):  

LOUIS MENAND: Well, let me answer the question [of what is patriotism] as an English professor would, in a roundabout and oblique way. [laughter] I grew up in New England. And when I was 21 I moved to New York City. So I've lived in New York City for 40 years. But I’ve always been a Red Sox fan. [applause] I take no credit for this, as you’ll see shortly. So I know what it's like to be an illegal alien [laughter] in a hegemonic power. And this is what it's like. You talk to New Yorkers about the Yankees, and they act as though they have something to do, personally, with the Yankees' success. And what you want to say to them is, "You just happened to be born in New York. That's all you have to do with the Yankees." It's owned by a rich guy. He goes out and buys the best player to bring to New York. They become New Yorkers, please, really, it doesn’t have to do with New York. And then you feel loyal to the Yankees. So what I want to suggest is this. Patriotism depends a little bit on a fiction. And the fiction is that we've chosen to be Americans. Now, some of us in this room, and some of us on the panel, have chosen to be Americans when they had other choices. But most of us just happened to be born here. So I want to suggest that patriotism, or love of country, a healthy way to think of it is to think this: when you're born, you're handed certain things. You’re handed your parents, you're handed the color of your skin, you're handed your gender. And you're handed the place you were born, New York City or the United States of America. Those are things that you can do something with. You can do something with those things. And virtue and character comes from choosing to do something with them rather than simply taking credit for something you had nothing to do with. That's patriotism. 

ROGER WILKINS: Well, I hate to disagree with a professor of English. Let’s talk about choice for a minute. I was handed the New York Yankees when I was nine years old, and I lived across the river from Yankee Stadium. And I was a Yankee fan for 41 years until I could no longer stand Steinbrenner. So I resigned as a Yankee fan in an op ed piece in the New York Times. And I declared myself to be a fan of the well managed, well owned Baltimore Orioles. The hardest thing I ever did was to wean myself off the Yankees. But I exercised choice, which is the essence of democracy, right? And I was exercising free will.  

The Baltimore Orioles are now owned by a worse owner than Steinbrenner, and he's destroying the team. So democracy is getting up off the ground after you've made some bad choices and believing that what you do can make the place where you live, and the people around you, a place a little better, the people a little better nurtured. And to keep on going despite getting knocked down sometimes by your choices, sometimes by fate, sometimes by politics. But always exercising the choice to make things better. 

The Angry Mob as Jilted Lovers

You belong - you belong - you belong to me
Tell her you were fooling
Tell her she don't even know you
Tell her you were fooling
I know you from a long time ago, baby
Don't leave me to go to her now
You belong to me.

Helluva Snowjob, Foxxie!

Fox genuinely values Michael "Helluva job" Brown's opinion? I mean, really? This is a legitimate opinion?

When the "Free Market" is nothing but a plutarchy...

This is what we get for putting a Randian disciple in charge of our monetary system.

MimeoMimeo Reviews Abearica

A spot-on write-up of Abearica. If you're interested, for a limited edition copy, email me and I'll see what I can do.

The 5 Comment Theory of the Political Blogosphere

I have a 5-comment theory on political internet chatter. The theory goes that (once commenters start a post-article dialogue) somewhere after the first to the fifth comment, the line of argument will either have gone completely off-course or will have devolved into pure id-driven rage or eroticism.

The latter usually happens when commenters can remain anonymous. the former just usually happens.

So, I say, why bother? You won't convince someone to change their core beliefs in an online conversation. So, all you can do is give them the information that you think is important and let them absorb it over time. Eventually, even if you were the catalyst, they will convince themselves over time that this is their own idea or belief and consistent with their past thoughts. And they will also be convinced that any change was completely self-driven and rational, given a propensity of evidence to which they've been exposed.

Here is a network analytic picture of the right/left blogosphere and their connections (via links) to other political sights. As you see, there really isn't a lot of cross-polination going on, or an open debate of ideas. We are all "guilty" of this phenomenon. Daily Kos and Salon are not exactly tapping ideas from Reason or Commentary magazines.

We aren't apt to expose ourselves to information that counters the causal theories of our core moral attitudes and beliefs. And if we do, we need a propensity of evidence and gentle prodding to recognize the validity of it.

I don't propose an end to debate, of course. What I propose is that everyone stop taking their side so seriously without being prepared to defend their arguments in a formally structured debate format.

BP and the Blame Game

When and if there is agency loss, who's to blame--(1) the principal who hires the agent to work in its interest, (2) the agent who may be incentivized to simultaneously increase its own profits while decreasing costs to the principal, or (3) the government who regulates these transactions to prevent negative externalities?

Happy Anni-vers-a-ry, Mis-ter Pres-i-dent!

Happy anniversary, Mr. President!

We've only confirmed just over half of your appointees, disabling your management capacity, and then blame everything on you for not solving our collective action problems (at least those of us who didn't already blame you from day one). Mwwwaaahhh!

ps- Don't worry, you needn't manage. We've left corporate interests to run your bureaucracy though complex contracting schemes anyway! And as Harold Seidman points out, the public bureaucracy's parallel private bureaucracy--businesses that perform contract work for government--are heavily interested in maintaining the status quo. For the politically astute (but not policy-astute), using private companies also helps reduce the number of civil servants on the public payroll, as Clinton was well aware. Yet as Paul Light has shown, it exponentially increases the number of total workers on the payroll indirectly. The tangible and measurable number of total federal workers is an important consideration for presidents who need to pursue policy under conditions of anti-public-service sentiment from the public. The downside to these arrangements is, of course, loss of accountability and the resistance of private firms to changes in the public bureaucracy. So, good luck with all that, Mr. President!

Brown in MA... whatever.

Dems deserve what they got. An incompetent and complacent campaign lets the Repubs give Obama a male stripper for his anniversary! How nice.


"I'm Scott Brown. And this is my truck."

Can't argue with that platform! :)

And then there's the whole "terror, terror, everwherror" mantra!

Fear and loathing wins every time.

Opening the Healthcare Debate: Why Obama Didn't "Lie" as much as Told a Constitutionally Uneducated Public What They Wanted to Hear

I think it's curious that anyone would expect these healthcare reform deliberations to be public. I have never seen a bill written from floor debate, have you? I have seen plenty of symbolic, ceremonial, and non-substantive crap come out on the floor though. The idea that Obama has any control over the way our legislature deliberates is a serious misinterpretation of our separation of powers. He can promise he will demand openness in Congress until he's blue in the face. Unless we choose to rewrite the Constitution, there's nothing he can do about it. The problem with most of the media debate is not whether they argue for or against open debate in Congress. It's that they all seem to place the blame on the president as to what Congress chooses to do. This is at least an underestimation of the homogeneity of Democrat preferences, to think they would all congeal to the president's prerogative and ignore their own reelection incentives by engaging in ugly open deliberation. But more importantly, it seems to be a vast misinterpretation of our Constitution. Obama did, in fact, campaign on openness in government. And, in comparison to Bush, he has certainly made executive branch operations more transparent. In my opinion, however, not enough so. His campaign promise to open deliberations on the healthcare debate in Congress, however, is as ludicrous as the fact that anyone thinks he could do anything about it. Finally, and back to my original point, candor and dealmaking is what democracy is all about. Compromise is often ugly. The sausage is not fun to watch being made. No one ends up looking good, except those whose best incentive is to obstruct compromise in the name of a status quo. They would love to open the process to expand conflict to the point of killing compromise. And, that, more than anything is why this criticism is getting so much traction from propagandists like Brietbart.