The Skeptical Pacifist

Yet Another Hiatus... Sorry!

2009-07-24T11:33:00.001-05:00

I've been unnaturally busy this week, and for the next week I will be in Montana. I will be back August 1 but will have to take some time to read and catch up as I will not be able to keep up with news or really get on the internet much at all during the next week. Thanks for being understanding. FreZno is still around, so bug him on Facebook if you need reading material!

Anti-Immigration, Pro-Invasion?

2009-07-16T11:41:00.002-05:00

Does it strike anyone else as a bit oddly hypocritical that it is the same people who tend to be anti-immigration as tend to be all for the US starting wars of aggression in the "Third World"? Leave aside for the moment that anti-immigration in many cases simply means anti-Mexican. (It is always interesting to subtly steer the loudest immigration opponents into talking about Canadians or white Europeans. The so-called "immigration debate" has become an all-too-convenient way to euphemize and institutionalize racism.) If we were to assume a coherent across-the-board dislike of immigration on principle, then it would be reasonable to say that a person who holds such a belief thinks that the natives of a country have an inherent right to determine who should and should not be allowed in their country. (I take for granted that American exceptionalism is indefensible.)

And yet, all over the world, America has been and continues to be guilty of starting wars, building military bases, and outright invading sovereign countries. More amazing still is that in general, it is people who lean to the so-called "right" of our political spectrum who support both of these things most fully. Right-wing pundits demagogue the immigration issue incessantly for a reason: it fits their target audience. Similarly, right-wing news organizations like Fox tend to be the loudest promoters of any new war.

It is completely obvious which is worse. On the one hand, you have people entering a strongly capitalist country with the desire to become wage-laborers, the most essential parts in any capitalist system, comprising the foundation of its money-making pyramid. What's more, the issue with these laborers in general is that they are willing to work for far less than Americans. While this offends many (especially "middle-class") American laborers, it is absolutely beneficial to the capitalist power structure, since it allows the owners of the means of production to increase their profit margins by lowering their labor (overhead) costs. Meanwhile, we send droves of people to foreign countries to wreck infrastructure and forcibly colonize (that's what building a military base on foreign soil uninvited is, whether you like it or not), all the while not even participating in the local economy. Soldiers, "advisers", and private contractors (the armed forces and their massive entourage, in other words) all work for US companies or the US government. They don't go over there and force soldiers to support themselves by becoming dishwashers in Iraqi restaurants. So isn't this obviously worse? Forced colonization coupled with demolishing infrastructure as opposed to the migration of wage-laborers to a more stable economy (all of which is driven by our capitalist class, not theirs)?

The only way to defend this position is to rest on the dried, withering laurels of American exceptionalism, which is nothing more than an unexamined form of unacceptable moral dualism. This is a blatant double standard which is meaningless at best and totally disingenuous at worst, and repugnant in any case. I defy anyone to assert a meaningful, valid reason for its existence. And considering its application to so many areas of discourse, and its undergirding of so many arguments, that would have to be a damn broad reason.

Wendell Potter

2009-07-15T17:54:00.003-05:00

Update

WENDELL POTTER: You know, I didn't, because for most of the time I was there, I felt that what we were doing was the right thing. And that I was playing on a team that was honorable. I just didn't really get it all that much until toward the end of my tenure at Cigna.

Wendell Potter used to be a really well-paid PR guy/lobbyist for Cigna, one of the largest US healthcare corporations. That is, until he came back home to Tennessee and saw the results of his work.

WENDELL POTTER: I did. I borrowed my dad's car and drove up 50 miles up the road to Wise, Virginia. It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn't know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health-- booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.

But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they'd erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases-- and I've got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.

And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee-- all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.

There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.

There are people like this all over the world. Fighting the wrong fight, busily doing their everyday job without ever considering the terrible consequences of what they do. They go to work for some giant corporate machine, of which they are a happy and well-paid little cog, and they are totally separated from the awful consequences of their corporation's profit margins. Profit is almost always made at the expense of other human beings. Wars, profiteering, Republicans, all these terrible things are the result of dehumanization and total separation of actors and their consequences.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think?

WENDELL POTTER: It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning. It was almost-- what country am I in? I just it just didn't seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States. It was like a lightning bolt had hit me.

Thank you, Bill Moyers, for being one of our country's only functioning journalists. You're truly an American hero and I will truly mourn your passing some day.

Watch the whole thing.

***
UPDATE

WENDELL POTTER: Yeah, it was. You know, certainly, I knew people, and I talked to people who were uninsured. But when you're in the executive offices, when you're getting prepared for a call with an analyst, in the financial medium, what you think about are the numbers. You don't think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you're going to meet Wall Street's expectations. That's what you think about, at that level. And it helps to think that way. That's why you-- that enables you to stay there, if you don't really think that you're talking about and dealing with real human beings.

My point exactly.

Cultural Degradation Starts At The Top

2009-07-15T11:11:00.002-05:00

The US Corporate Media (the only media that really matter because such a huge majority of people get their news from so few corporations) figured out long ago that it can strongly influence public opinion (and therefore, to some extent, political reality) by simply endlessly repeating a claim until it's taken as true. This is especially damaging when the claim is racist or sexist, as so many of the attacks against Sonia Sotomayor have been.

Please take some time to watch the Women's Media Center's new action alert and video regarding the Sotomayor appointment, and so many of the ad hominem attacks that have been hurled in her direction by major news players, including CNN which is all too often touted as one of the top examples of the "Liberal Media" at work.

Read This.

2009-07-12T18:09:00.000-05:00

Just Read It.

The Status is NOT Quo

2009-07-07T10:29:00.002-05:00

From a larger discussion of strategies for opposing war at the grassroots level at ADS:

The House of Representatives is supposed to represent us and yet, on matters of war as on most other things, does not. Why not? Well, many flaws weaken our elections system, but on any given vote three major corrupting factors can usually be pointed to: party, media, and dollars. On an issue like healthcare, as on many issues, these factors should be listed in the opposite order. It is the dollars of corporate interests that do the greatest share of the corrupting. But on matters of war, party is the greatest corruptor. Of course, political parties are the largest funders of campaigns, so money is still right at the top. Members of Congress in both political parties have voted to fund these wars, over the wishes of their constituents, because their party leadership has told them to do so. Parties can promise money, committee memberships, chairmanships, votes on bills and amendments and earmarks, and press events in a member's district with cabinet members and presidents. Parties can threaten to withhold money, back a challenger, block measures from reaching the floor, and withhold chairmanships. It is very difficult and very rare for Congress members to oppose their parties' strong demands. But it is also rare for citizens to press them to do so, in part because many citizens and the groups through which they approach activism also take their orders from political parties.

Political parties are an impediment to real democracy, and especially having only two of them is a corrupting influence on the system. Remember this next time you vote or advocate for a political issue: vote for your strengths, your preferences, because the parties are powerful enough. Voting for a party (rather than supporting an individual candidate's platform, or voting based on an actual issue) is the only real way to "throw your vote away".

Airport Gestapo

2009-07-03T13:34:00.002-05:00

I have often told people that I do not wish to fly on commercial airlines in the US because I resent the TSA and their invasive security. Most people do not understand why this bothers me. I am, first and foremost, a civil libertarian. This is not a "pet peeve" of mine or an annoyance at how much it affects me personally. It is a principle that bothers me to my very core, and a very pressing symbol of a whole host of things wrong with our culture. The TSA is, to my mind, essentially a paramilitary organization. They operate with impunity, enjoying the full support of our federal government, including its massive security apparatus. Knowing how many times the full force and brutality of the police and even the military (usually the National Guard) have been used to quell simple street protests, I cannot imagine anything being "off the table" for resisting the TSA after September 11. Since the "enhanced security measures" we have been enjoying since 9/11 have been implemented (and copied throughout the world), the TSA has been racking up horror stories about destruction of private property and invasive searches. Many airports now feature giant transparent plastic bins that show off all the private property stolen from individuals passing through airports for not following myriad ridiculous elements of bureaucratic policy minutia, such as the totally absurd ban on liquids.

Rather than researching all day and coming up with evidence to support all these claims (which I'm either recalling from reading or, more often, firsthand experience, having flown several times in the last three years), I offer this story, which infuriates me as a classical pianist, of "Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman, who is widely admired for his virtuosic performances and who famously tours with his own custom-altered Steinway" [h/t Arthur Silber]:

Just a week ago, before an appearance in Seattle, Zimerman expressed frustration about the hassle and expense of touring the U.S. with his piano.

Shortly after Sept. 11, his instrument was confiscated at JFK Airport when he landed in New York to give a recital at Carnegie Hall. Thinking the glue smelled funny, the Transportation Security Administration decided to take no chances and destroyed the piano. Since then he has shipped his pianos in parts, which he reassembles by hand after he lands. To get from city to city within the U.S., he hires a driver to take the shell of the piano, and he drives another car that holds the precious custom-designed keys and hammers.

You read that right. They destroyed a CUSTOM FREAKING STEINWAY belonging to a world-class concert pianist because... "the glue smelled funny". (Guitarists should be imagining something akin to one of Les Paul's personal guitars or car enthusiasts one of Carroll Shelby's favorite personal vehicles in order to get the full magnitude of how jaw-droppingly ignorant and infuriating this is to a pianist. A Steinway... custom-designed... belonging to a famous concert pianist on tour...)

This is why I don't understand "small-government" Republicans. They seem to have no objections to this kind of establishment. It's "far-left liberals" and DFHs and progressives like me that object to the hyperactive militaristic security state, which came to full maturity under Republican Hero Bush. (This is not to say that Uber-Progressive Conciliator-in-Chief Obama is doing anything but expanding and cementing the Worst of the Worst Bush practices, of course.) Why isn't this news? Why are voters and citizens so oblivious to this? Is there any sanity left out there?

A Symptom of the Disease

2009-07-01T13:08:00.002-05:00

I like this post over at ATR for a number of reasons. The main one is that I've carefully chosen my news sources to balance my news intake in a certain way, which includes among other things minimizing celebrity content (which is why I don't tend to read things like HuffPo or The Nation). Despite this, I did pick up a few fleeting mentions of MJ's death in my feeds, and this is the best example. It's amazing, insightful, and thought-provoking, quite unlike any celebrity reporting you will encounter elsewhere. It makes me proud of my blogroll.

For his entire adult life, Jackson was ridiculed in public by the best in the business. Think about that for a second. He knew what everybody thought of him--he must've known. At what point did all that weirdness change, from something inside of him, to something caused by all of us? Only he could know, if he ever did, and now he's dead.

Some portion of this ridicule was earned: the compulsive plastic surgery, the persistent whiff of child molestation, the bizarre marriage to Elvis' daughter--these were, if not earth-shattering events, deviations from the norm reasonably worthy of a satirist's attention. But I think anyone not getting paid on a 13-week contract has to admit that at a certain point it became a peculiar kind of public torture. Most of the time that Michael Jackson made the monologue, he hadn't done anything genuinely newsworthy. Yet there he was, the butt of another joke about gayness, or pedophilia, or plastic surgery, or germophobia...I could go on, but there's no point. There never was.

One of the biggest changes in American pop culture has been the demise of humor based on stereotypes (or at least its widespread concealment). This is a good thing, but as the humor of stereotype has waned, other things have had to step in. The things that have filled the void are

a) celebrity humor; and for those intellectuals among us
b) absurdism about "inhuman autopilots"--zombies, pirates, robots, ninjas, etc.

Add in reflexive taboo-busting--sex and drug jokes--and you have described 99% of what passes for comedy in these United States. Most political humor is celebrity humor with a veneer of importance; it comes from no political viewpoint, only comments on behavior. Most of the NPR/New Yorker brand is absurdist autopilot humor, with enough celebrity to satisfy their timeliness fetish.

All that is another post, so I'll leave it and finish this one. Unlike say, Cary Grant, Michael Jackson had the ill fortune to be a celebrity when nightly scrutiny of a pop singer's personal habits became what passed for incisive commentary. Precisely when American power needed all the restraining that satire could throw at it, satire became obsessed with celebrities. Coincidence? Surely not. Part of this was the entertainment industry's self-aggrandizing belief that nobody in the audience knows about anything but entertainment--which, after fifty years, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But even more powerful was simple risk-aversion. Any Jackson joke was risk-free. Since he was both celebrity and inhuman autopilot, the material flooded forth; and in that flood was protection, safety in numbers. That's why it all felt strangely impersonal, as if this "Michael Jackson" we were all laughing at didn't exist as a person. To the extent that anybody I knew spared a thought for the guy, the human being, they decided he deserved it for being so weird. Such is the compassion of the herd. (emphasis original)

I'd recommend reading it, as there's not much more to it. It touches on a theme that's been a subject here at TSP before, which is dehumanization. And for everyone who's absolutely sick of hearing about MJ, here's something that is actually a fitting tribute to a human being, rather than just celebrity-obsessed mourning.

More Private Sector Efficiency

2009-06-27T12:43:00.003-05:00

I wish I'd stumbled across this when I was writing all those posts about private sector efficiency myths or the supposed problems with single-payer:

Those of you who are struggling to pay for your generic medicines or wondering why the doctor is charging you a $5.00 co-pay, give some thought to these facts about how our health care dollars are allocated. At the end of this post, there is a list of 23 health companies I found on Forbes.com, what the CEO was paid in 2005, and the average paid to the CEO in the past five years.

Imagine adding vice presidents, Board of Directors, stock holders and the other 200-300 other companies all cashing in on your health to that total at the bottom...

* United Health Group
CEO: William W McGuire
2005: 124.8 mil
5-year: 342 mil

* Forest Labs
CEO: Howard Solomon
2005: 92.1 mil
5-year: 295 mil

* Caremark Rx
CEO: Edwin M Crawford
2005: 77.9 mil
5-year: 93.6 mil

* Abbott Lab
CEO: Miles White
2005: 26.2 mil
5-year: 25.8 mil

* Aetna
CEO: John Rowe
2005: 22.1 mil
5-year:57.8 mil

* Amgen
CEO: Kevin Sharer
2005:5.7 mil
5-year:59.5 mil

* Bectin-Dickinson
CEO: Edwin Ludwig
2005: 10 mil
5-year:18 mil

* Boston Scientific
CEO:
2005:38.1 mil
5-year:45 mil

* Cardinal Health
CEO: James Tobin
2005:1.1 mil
5-year:33.5 mil

* Cigna
CEO: H. Edward Hanway
2005:13.3 mil
5-year:62.8 mil

* Genzyme
CEO: Henri Termeer
2005: 19 mil
5-year:60.7 mil

* Humana
CEO: Michael McAllister
2005:2.3 mil
5-year:12.9 mil

* Johnson & Johnson
CEO: William Weldon
2005:6.1 mil
5-year:19.7 mil

* Laboratory Corp America
CEO: Thomas MacMahon
2005:7.9 mil
5-year:41.8 mil

* Eli Lilly
CEO: Sidney Taurel
2005:7.2 mil
5-year:37.9 mil

* McKesson
CEO: John Hammergen
2005: 13.4 mil
5-year:31.2 mil

* Medtronic
CEO: Arthur Collins
2005: 4.7 mil
5-year:39 mil

* Merck Raymond Gilmartin
CEO:
2005: 37.8 mil
5-year:49.6 mil

* PacifiCare Health
CEO: Howard Phanstiel
2005: 3.4 mil
5-year: 8.5 mil

* Pfizer
CEO: Henry McKinnell
2005: 14 mil
5-year: 74 mil

* Well Choice
CEO: Michael Stocker
2005: 3.2 mil
5-year: 10.7 mil

* WellPoint
CEO: Larry Glasscock
2005: 23 mil
5-year: 46.8 mil

* Wyeth
CEO: Robert Essner
2005:6.5 mil
5-year: 28.9 mil

TOTAL 2005: 559.8 mil

TOTAL 5-Year: 14.9 billion (emphasis original)

On a totally unrelated note, I just thought of something that could have saved us close to $15 billion over the last five years...

Take Two Wars & Call Me in the Morning

2009-06-27T11:46:00.003-05:00

Jonathan Tepperman, LAT, March 16, 2003 (h/t tristero):

Americans on the left should recognize that even a war fought for the wrong reasons can still wind up contributing to democracy and reducing suffering. If it does, then whatever the real motivation for it, it's worth supporting.

I'm both saddened and speechless. This is the kind of filth constantly spewing from our mainstream media. How unexamined is this thought? If only it were, truly. I fear that this is the product of dehumanization and rationalization so rampant, so culturally ingrained, that its hellish Orwellian qualities (I hate to even use the cliché, but what else can be said here?) have long since rendered themselves invisible to their guarantor.

I'm not even sure if this is a joke or not:

The unfortunate effect of this silence on the left is that American liberals have virtually ceded the case for war, and thus the moral high ground, to the administration. This retreat has left progressives sounding like pacifists, hand-wringers or, worst of all, Europeans.

N.B. "silence" here means failure to make a case for invading Iraq. I'm serious. I'm not exaggerating that at all. It's the whole point of his article. In this distorted worldview, the question is not (and could not possibly be), "Should we deploy our military to force outcomes in this foreign country violently where they don't match the interests of certain influential Americans?" No, it's just, "How should we deploy our military to force outcomes in this foreign country violently where they don't match the interests of certain influential Americans?" The question isn't whether or not we ought to go to war; it's who can make the best case for the war that it's given we should wage. And by not making such a case, by not arguing the best way to violently intervene in another country's affairs -- which is by definition a moral imperative, our duty as the Best Nation Ever™ -- we have "ceded the case for war, and thus the moral high ground, to the [Bush] administration."

By allowing the neoconservative hawks to beat the drums of war by themselves, anti-war progressives have abdicated their primary responsibility -- not to oppose the war, oh no, of course not (what were you thinking?) -- which is to lay out the more moral groundwork for war. It's just common sense that this is how the political continuum works in terms of war. Partisans on the right advocate "mean" wars, and partisans on the left moderate their influence by showing us all how to wage "nice" wars, where we can maintain "the moral high ground" while "contributing to democracy and reducing suffering". Don't you see? Everybody wins. It's all "friendly fire". We're only doing this because we love them. It hurts us more than it hurts them.

UPDATE: As I continued thinking about this, I thought it important to stress even more that this is mainstream. This is not something I pulled off a foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing blog with pictures of Reagan and mangled fetuses all over it. This story ran in the LA Times. Its author still writes for Newsweek, the New York Times, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic. Frighteningly, judging by his résumé, I would guess (though I don't know his work particularly, nor do I have information on how he is generally viewed) that he is considered either liberal or centrist (generally center-left). A good friend of mine in LA once jokingly told me, "I wish the [mainline] Democrats were the far right in this country." How disenfranchised is the true left in this country if this man seriously thinks he speaks for them, and even feels the need to instruct them?

Civic Engagement

2009-06-25T11:16:00.003-05:00

A lot of people ask me, I think only half jokingly, "so when are you going to run for office?" Although I don't have any direct political aspirations, I do spend quite a lot of time thinking about how we might improve society. As I've many times mentioned, I have a near obsession with democracy. I don't mean for this to be as facetious as it will inevitably sound, but I'm fascinated by how it might work if we actually tried it. One of the (many) features of democracy that we're missing here in the states -- and, indeed, I think may be a worldwide problem -- is civic engagement.

A lot of people simply "don't care" about politics. I put that in scare quotes because I don't believe that anyone is apolitical. As hard as someone might try to pay attention to other things, it's just natural to have opinions on the controversial issues of the day. Unfortunately, people who don't pay much attention also tend not to have very developed or informed opinions. This is a big stumbling block for the implementation of real democracy in our (or any) country. In a democracy, everyone is a political leader. That's how it works. So when ordinary citizens shirk their civic responsibility by not being democratically engaged, they are literally not doing their jobs.

Now this isn't exactly the case in America (or anywhere else), because America isn't exactly a democracy (nor is anything else). America is nominally a republic, but there are all sorts of barriers and checks to even the limited democracy our political system employs. Even our democratic elections are buffered by the unaccountable electoral college, chosen in many cases by state political parties and influenced by a host of "delegates" and "superdelegates" that only the most extremely well-connected insiders know anything about. (Challenge: Name anyone that has been a delegate or superdelegate for your state, ever. Or any state. I can name one.)

Part of this is because it's just an outdated system that's remained in place for many years, supported tacitly by our culture. But part of this also has to do with the people in power using this as a method of control. Think about all the cogs in the political machine that no one but politicians and political insiders see: the Rahm Emmanuels, the Jude Wanniskis, the myriad staffers and aides and strategists and campaign organizers. These people pull strings that most of us aren't even aware of, and they're happy to do it, despite the fact that it partially disenfranchises the electorate. We've let our republic go too far and concentrated a lot of power in the hands of the invisible players that support the political party and campaign bureaucracies, and it's watered down our democracy as a result.

Additionally, there is a lot of apathy from people, and understandably so. Being a federal politician is certainly not easy. You have to manage a lot of different things, and no one cares about all of them. A lot of people don't even want to lead. There are passive people who would just as soon someone else make decisions for them (or at least, most decisions). There are people with strong desires or preferences in a couple of areas that cause them to have no interest in others. For these and other various reasons, many of us just aren't interested in managing the country. But that's literally our responsibility living in a democracy. We're (supposedly/should be) in charge.

Something that repeatedly came up as the bank/AIG bailout crisis unfolded was this idea that some banks and institutions are "too big to fail." Many people argued that the answer is thus: too big to fail is simply too big to exist. But how does this argument look when it's fitted to our national government? The US government is certainly too big to fail. It's the power-center of a worldwide military organization and financial distribution complex. When the US housing bubble burst, the entire world economy slipped into disarray. So is it too big to exist?

The reason it is often suggested that entities that are "too big to fail" are "too big to exist" is because they're actually too big to manage. In terms of direct democracy, I think our federal government fits this bill. I'm by no means a small government conservative, but as an advocate of democracy I simply can't imagine being given even a 1/300,000,000th responsibility for the federal bureaucracy as it now sprawls. Can you even imagine if there was direct popular election of the heads and secretaries and undersecretaries and deputy chairs of all the various departments and branches of even just the executive branch? It would be a total nightmare, and that's discounting anything even remotely to do with handling policy.

That's because our society is organized from the top down. We elect an executive (almost like a CEO, frighteningly enough) to manage all these various departments and hire and fire people for us. But shouldn't a democracy theoretically be organized from the bottom up? If the idea is that the power is built on the wide population, it certainly doesn't show much in the United States. Voters don't seem to wield much authority except for one day every couple of years, and even then the authority is in question (judging by voter turnout numbers). Ultimately, as it often does, the problem comes down to incentives. The incentives to be a critically engaged, responsible citizen of a functioning democracy simply are not available. I spend a disproportionate amount of time keeping myself informed and actively engaging in political research, but I feel minimally ready to do the job of managing our government even partly in its current form.

The dreadful thing, it seems to me, is that it's not at all clear how this could change. The people in power (the establishment, if you want to call them that; I'm trying my best not to make this sound like conspiratorial bed-wetting) have no incentive to change it, and as I've just argued the incentives are just not there for the American middle class to suddenly engage in the kind of activism it would take to overturn the status quo. I do think that there are a few things that would go a long way toward re-enfranchising the electorate and empowering American democracy again: abolishing the Electoral College, implementing instant runoff voting, and seriously thinking about campaign finance reform might be a good start.

But most of us are plenty happy with our distractions and don't want to be bothered with the day-to-day affairs of government. I'd like to think that it's possible to have a highly organized, stable society run from the bottom up without tending toward oligarchy or authoritarianism. I can only hope that something like it happens in my lifetime.

...The Solution is Socialism*

2009-06-24T14:38:00.004-05:00

This is a follow-up post to my thoughts on Atul Gawande's widely circulating article from The New Yorker. If you haven't read the original post -- and you might at least need to skim it for this one to make sense -- you can find it here.

To me, one of the really irritating things about "mainstream" political debate in DC is the proliferation of manufactured taboos. The outgrowth of years of wrangling between the two ~~well-oiled, behind-the-curtain marketing and fundraising machines~~ established political parties is a strange set of things that cannot be said or done, despite the will of the electorate, on pain of so-called "political suicide". On many issues, healthcare being but one example, there is a huge gulf between policies popular according to a wide range of public opinion polls and policies that are acceptable to discuss in Washington. In the most infuriating cases (and seemingly also the most common), the very policies that are the most popular are the earliest ones blackballed from the debate.

The DC chattering class tends to be very establishment-minded**. It is a virtual certainty that in any significant debate, critical viewpoints questioning the status quo or pointing to possible institutional deficiencies are going to be marginalized. I suspect a lot of this has to do with the remarkable wealth floating around the top of the system. Overwhelmingly, DC politicians and members of Congress are millionaires. Obama has been steadily getting richer and reported a combined income with his wife of $4.2 million in 2007. That same year, Bush II pulled in nearly a million dollars just from the interest on his investments, while VP Cheney and his wife reported "an adjusted gross income of $3.04 million". Since we're on the subject of 2007, the Clintons made a grand total of more than $22 million that year, mostly courtesy of Bill's speeches, which have accounted for nearly half of the $109 million they raked in since he left office. This is how politics is, and has always been, all the way back to George Washington (who was a wealthy land speculator). [It's worth noting that the presidential salary itself is set at almost $400,000 per year, when the cutoff to join the Wealthiest One Percent is $462,000; and no president reaps his income solely from his presidential salary. Some of this is actually built into the system.]

Combine this with the lavishly paid corporate journalists (or "media stars", as Greenwald so loves to put it), absolute armies of lobbyists, and of course the well-connected corporate elite driving all of it with self-serving investments, and you get a dizzying culture of money where everyone has one thing in common: the system in place is making them all fabulously wealthy. Notice that's not something they have in common with any of us. So, naturally, any time something comes up where there may be a systemic problem, there's a whole lot of pressure from these folks (and who's going to stand up to them?) to make that go away. Not the systemic problem, any mention of it. The healthcare debate is a good example of this happening.

Liberal watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting has been documenting the lack of coverage or discussion of the single-payer healthcare proposal. And that's bad for all of us, because not only is it consistently popular in polls, it's a damn good idea. I want to go back to the Gawande article for a moment and highlight some of the things I didn't pick up on in the last post, primarily related to his treatment of the Mayo Clinic.

Gawande's article provides a neat packaging for using the Mayo Clinic's well-established methods to dismantle the nonsense argument against national health insurance (or "the public option" or whatever you want to call it; you know, that thing the rest of the First World has that we still don't?). Conservatives (and I say conservatives because the opposition to this tends to be from ~~insurance industry flacks on the right~~ Republicans and certain ~~insurance industry flacks on the "left"~~ Democrats, notably Blue Dogs) often bring up the idea of "rationing" care, but that's just a deceptively negative word. Here's the WSJ, that Cornerstone of The Liberal Media, with an article not-at-all-fear-provokingly-titled "BARACK OBAMA WILL RATION YOUR HEALTH CARE! OH GOD, SAVE US ALL!" (Ok, I made that last part up.):

Liberal experts, Mr. Daschle included, believe that America needs to ration new technology and drugs. In his book, Mr. Daschle complains about overuse of new technology and praises the United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), a rationing system that controls government costs. NICE's denial of care is legendary -- from the arthritis drug Abatacept to the lung cancer drug Tarceva. These drugs are effective. It's just that the bureaucrats don't consider them cost effective.

That's right, some bureaucrat with a suit and tie that you'll never see sitting in an office somewhere is going to DENY YOU CARE. And Americans would never put up with that. Right? Right? Ok, give me a break. America is currently served by an unsustainable private health care nightmare with 33% administrative costs owing largely to the massive bureaucracy underwriting its hellish web of complicated codes, rules, and payment structures, all of which exist to maximize profit by denying care. Here's a more realistic picture of "rationing":

Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be. In fact, the four states with the highest levels of spending—Louisiana, Texas, California, and Florida—were near the bottom of the national rankings on the quality of patient care.

In a 2003 study, another Dartmouth team, led by the internist Elliott Fisher, examined the treatment received by a million elderly Americans diagnosed with colon or rectal cancer, a hip fracture, or a heart attack. They found that patients in higher-spending regions received sixty per cent more care than elsewhere. They got more frequent tests and procedures, more visits with specialists, and more frequent admission to hospitals. Yet they did no better than other patients, whether this was measured in terms of survival, their ability to function, or satisfaction with the care they received. If anything, they seemed to do worse.

That’s because nothing in medicine is without risks. Complications can arise from hospital stays, medications, procedures, and tests, and when these things are of marginal value the harm can be greater than the benefits. In recent years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country does anything like as many operations on its citizens. Are we better off for it? No one knows for sure, but it seems highly unlikely. After all, some hundred thousand people die each year from complications of surgery—far more than die in car crashes.

To make matters worse, Fisher found that patients in high-cost areas were actually less likely to receive low-cost preventive services, such as flu and pneumonia vaccines, faced longer waits at doctor and emergency-room visits, and were less likely to have a primary-care physician. They got more of the stuff that cost more, but not more of what they needed.

A more rational person might conclude that rather than "rationing", what will actually tend to happen is something conservatives pretend to love: the effective allocation of resources (although it doesn't seem to be happening by virtue of the magical free market for some reason... hmm...). Rather than patients simply getting the care that generates the most profit for hospitals, insurance companies, and physicians/physician-investors whether they need it or not, patients will simply get the treatment that makes them better or keeps them from getting sick in the first place.

As I noted in the previous post, the problem all comes down to the capitalist incentive structure. High-cost areas seem to be dominated by doctors who view patients as profit centers, or at least de facto treat them as such. Low-cost areas (and correspondingly higher quality areas!) tend to be dominated by non-profit collectives like the Mayo Clinic. Think about the Republican War Cry of Socialized Medicine as you read this description of an organization "which is among the highest-quality, lowest-cost health-care systems in the country," and whose "core tenet... is 'The needs of the patient come first'—not the convenience of the doctors, not their revenues."

The doctors and nurses, and even the janitors, sat in meetings almost weekly, working on ideas to make the service and the care better, not to get more money out of patients. I asked Cortese how the Mayo Clinic made this possible.

“It’s not easy,” he said. But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible.

No one there actually intends to do fewer expensive scans and procedures than is done elsewhere in the country. The aim is to raise quality and to help doctors and other staff members work as a team. But, almost by happenstance, the result has been lower costs.

“When doctors put their heads together in a room, when they share expertise, you get more thinking and less testing,” Cortese told me. (emphasis added)

When the Mayo Clinic began opening new clinics in other states, they faced obstacles. "It was difficult to recruit staff members who would accept a salary and the Mayo’s collaborative way of practicing." (Socialism! Collectivism!) "Leaders were working against the dominant medical culture and incentives." (emphasis added) The article goes on to describe Grand Junction, Colorado, "[o]ne of the lowest-cost markets in the country." What's its secret? Doctors who focus on patient health, rather than profit:

But years ago the doctors agreed among themselves to a system that paid them a similar fee whether they saw Medicare, Medicaid, or private-insurance patients, so that there would be little incentive to cherry-pick patients. They also agreed, at the behest of the main health plan in town, an H.M.O., to meet regularly on small peer-review committees to go over their patient charts together. They focussed on rooting out problems like poor prevention practices, unnecessary back operations, and unusual hospital-complication rates. Problems went down. Quality went up. Then, in 2004, the doctors’ group and the local H.M.O. jointly created a regional information network—a community-wide electronic-record system that shared office notes, test results, and hospital data for patients across the area. Again, problems went down. Quality went up. And costs ended up lower than just about anywhere else in the United States.

And there you have it. More scary sharing of resources (Socialism!) and collaboration among people with a common goal and the means to achieve it more efficiently (Collectivism!). Gawande's analogy describing the warped incentive structure is pure brilliance:

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.

The sad part is that in the article's conclusion, Gawande seems sadly unaware of a policy proposal that would do much to correct the well-documented problems he exposes. Although he does mention single-payer (once, in the third-to-last sentence of his 7,600-word article), Gawande argues that changing "who writes the check" will do little to solve the problems. But this broadly misses the point, given a proposal that I support which I believe is currently dead in committee (of course): Dennis Kucinich's and John Conyers' HR 676 (.pdf). Go ahead, read the whole bill. It's written in very plain English.

Here are some of the highlights. What are we going to do about the profit motive in the aggregate medical business? Title 1, §103 (a) requires all participating institutions (payees) to be either public or non-profit. How will we handle the enormous out-of-pocket expense to consumers and businesses? There will be no cost to businesses, because Medicare will be expanded and made available to "all individuals residing in the United States (including any territory of the United States)". Furthermore, Title 1, §102 prohibits "deductibles, copayments, coinsurance, or other cost-sharing." There's lots more great stuff in the bill. Remember that part of the Mayo Clinic's successful model is "paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income": Title 1, §202 provides for paying physicians either a salary (paid out of a global budget in monthly lump sums to non-profit HMOs or other collectives, the amount of which would be set by negotiations between providers and regional boards) or a fee-for-service payment [for individual providers] based on a "simplified fee schedule" negotiated in much the same way. And everything would just be covered, always. Under this proposal, it would be unlawful for physicians to bill you more than the government paid according to these fee schedules. It also provides for the re-training of people who would lose their jobs from the sudden vanishing of the private insurance bureaucracy. It pretty much covers everything, and as I said it's quite easy to read and understand. I do encourage everyone to check it out and support it in any way they can.

*I'm a little ambivalent on the provocative title of this post, but I'm leaving it. There are quite a few ways that it could be read, some of which I endorse and others of which I do not. I do believe that socialism might be a better system in general than capitalism, but that is not what this series of posts is meant to indicate or even be a specific exmaple of. Nor do I wish to portray Representatives Conyers' and Kucinich's bill as socialist, because this is both factually incorrect and, unfortunately, a fairly damning political indictment of a bill I'd be thrilled to see pass (not that I think anyone important enough for that to matter will read this, but I thought it was worth mentioning). I chose the title primarily for the contrast with the last post, and because of its slightly sardonic fit given the nature of the Right's cries of "Socialism!" as they balk at sensible solutions like single-payer.

**This is a pale, subdued shadow of an understatement.

UPDATE: The other problem is campaign finance reform. Nate Silver of 538 has a depressing analysis on the impact of campaign contributions as they strangle the "public option", and you can watch it have its own little mini-recession in chart form, its Senate stock price plumetting as the big dogs of the insurance industry unleash their coffers on the issue.

The Problem is Capitalism...

2009-06-24T12:12:00.004-05:00

The invaluable James Kwak over at Baseline Scenario has spilled quite a bit of ink over a fascinating article that recently appeared in The New Yorker. I could hardly do better at a nice, succinct introduction to the article than Kwak has already done, so I'll just borrow his:

One of our readers recommended a fascinating and important article on health care economics, “The Cost Conundrum,” in The New Yorker. It’s by Atul Gawande, a surgeon and a professor of public health and surgery at Harvard.

Gawande contrasts McAllen, Texas, which has some of the highest health care costs in the country, with El Paso, Texas, a demographically similar city with moderate health care costs, and with low-cost communities such as Rochester, Minnesota (home of the Mayo Clinic) and Grand Junction, Colorado.

Perfect. Thanks, James. Anyway, the article is an easy read (though it's a full-length magazine feature, so it's slightly lengthy by internet standards) with a fascinating premise. In this post, I discuss my thoughts on Gawande's article, and several of the important points he highlights. Although I feel like I excerpted a ton of it, there's still a lot more packed in its 8 online pages, and I strongly encourage reading the whole thing. In a follow-up post, I will direct my attention toward the solution to this issue, and why I think some very plausible solutions haven't gotten nearly the attention they deserve.

The Gawande article has generated a lot of notice and interest for good reason. Gawande examines McAllen, Texas, "which has the lowest household income in the country," but which simultaneously "is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country."

Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.

This is foreshadowing, and unfortunately not just in the figurative way. Healthcare costs are growing rapidly in relation to GDP, particularly in the United States. And according to CNN quoting the American Journal of Medicine, 62.1% of bankruptcies are related to out-of-pocket medical costs, despite the fact that "three-quarters of the people with a medically-related bankruptcy had health insurance". So back to McAllen:

The explosive trend in American medical costs seems to have occurred here in an especially intense form. Our country’s health care is by far the most expensive in the world. In Washington, the aim of health-care reform is not just to extend medical coverage to everybody but also to bring costs under control. Spending on doctors, hospitals, drugs, and the like now consumes more than one of every six dollars we earn. The financial burden has damaged the global competitiveness of American businesses and bankrupted millions of families, even those with insurance. It’s also devouring our government. “The greatest threat to America’s fiscal health is not Social Security,” President Barack Obama said in a March speech at the White House. “It’s not the investments that we’ve made to rescue our economy during this crisis. By a wide margin, the biggest threat to our nation’s balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care. It’s not even close.”

The question we’re now frantically grappling with is how this came to be, and what can be done about it. McAllen, Texas, the most expensive town in the most expensive country for health care in the world, seemed a good place to look for some answers.(emphasis added)

Almost immediately, Gawande begins empirically discrediting common misconceptions which are sometimes offered as explanations for the healthcare crisis. First, he takes a look at El Paso:

El Paso County, eight hundred miles up the border, has essentially the same demographics. Both counties have a population of roughly seven hundred thousand, similar public-health statistics, and similar percentages of non-English speakers, illegal immigrants, and the unemployed. Yet in 2006 Medicare expenditures (our best approximation of over-all spending patterns) in El Paso were $7,504 per enrollee—half as much as in McAllen. An unhealthy population couldn’t possibly be the reason that McAllen’s health-care costs are so high.(emphasis added)

So no to the folks who think it's those dirty Mexicans pouring over the border to steal our jobs and take advantage of our hospitals. Sorry, racists. And the poor-bashers are out, too. Notice we've already ruled out the unemployed, a.k.a. those lazy bums that think they're too good to work and just need to get a job (and who certainly aren't simply untreated mental patients or mistreated veterans or both). Moving on to quality of care:

And yet there’s no evidence that the treatments and technologies available at McAllen are better than those found elsewhere in the country. The annual reports that hospitals file with Medicare show that those in McAllen and El Paso offer comparable technologies—neonatal intensive-care units, advanced cardiac services, PET scans, and so on. Public statistics show no difference in the supply of doctors. Hidalgo County actually has fewer specialists than the national average.

Nor does the care given in McAllen stand out for its quality. Medicare ranks hospitals on twenty-five metrics of care. On all but two of these, McAllen’s five largest hospitals performed worse, on average, than El Paso’s. McAllen costs Medicare seven thousand dollars more per person each year than does the average city in America. But not, so far as one can tell, because it’s delivering better health care.(emphasis added)

So, as is true of the US in general, McAllen residents are spending more but not getting more. It's a definite feature of the US healthcare system that we spend more than other industrialized nations without getting better health outcomes. In other words, we're not getting what we're paying for. So what are we paying for? Keep reading:

The Medicare payment data provided the most detail. Between 2001 and 2005, critically ill Medicare patients received almost fifty per cent more specialist visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two-thirds more likely to see ten or more specialists in a six-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen received twenty per cent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty per cent more bone-density studies, sixty per cent more stress tests with echocardiography, two hundred per cent more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel syndrome, and five hundred and fifty per cent more urine-flow studies to diagnose prostate troubles. They received one-fifth to two-thirds more gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes. They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents. And Medicare paid for five times as many home-nurse visits. The primary cause of McAllen’s extreme costs was, very simply, the across-the-board overuse of medicine.(emphasis added)

Now, wait! Before you go all Republican on me and start blaming this on the consumer. Patient overuse of medicine is not a plausible story. Although patient attitudes may have some bearing on the overuse of testing and expensive procedures in some cases, ultimately it's the doctor that does the ordering. In many cases, patients are confused and scared, and I think most of us at least like to think the doctors know best. (Even cynics probably don't think they know better than the doctor.) Gawande has a pretty good explanation for why this might be happening. After talking to several people in high places, he realizes that none of them realized McAllen was such an outlier in costs until he had talked to them, or had given really any thought at all to why this was the case:

It was a depressing conversation—not because I thought the executives were being evasive but because they weren’t being evasive. The data on McAllen’s costs were clearly new to them. They were defending McAllen reflexively. But they really didn’t know the big picture of what was happening.

And, I realized, few people in their position do. Local executives for hospitals and clinics and home-health agencies understand their growth rate and their market share; they know whether they are losing money or making money. They know that if their doctors bring in enough business—surgery, imaging, home-nursing referrals—they make money; and if they get the doctors to bring in more, they make more. But they have only the vaguest notion of whether the doctors are making their communities as healthy as they can, or whether they are more or less efficient than their counterparts elsewhere. ... It isn’t what they are responsible or accountable for."

The primary reason driving the overutilization of healthcare is the capitalist incentive structure. James Kwak summarizes this nicely, and it's difficult for me to even excerpt this because it's so well worth reading in full, so here's a long excerpt with my hopes you'll read the whole thing:

Currently, our health care system has high-cost and low-cost areas; the high-cost areas have no better outcomes than the low-cost areas. So theoretically we can solve our health care cost problem by making the high-cost areas behave like the low-cost areas.

However, the market incentives go in the other direction; the economically rational thing for providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.) to do is to run up procedures and thereby costs. It would be better if providers focused more on patient outcomes or organized themselves into accountable care organizations, as Gawande prefers; but there is no economic reason for them to do so. People are not magically going to become more altruistic overnight. Even shame has only a temporary effect on behavior. Here’s Gail Wilensky from a Health Affairs roundtable:

It’s only by being able to offer compelling evidence that it’s the physician that is the outlier relative to his or her peers, that the patients really aren’t different, and in fact they are not having better outcomes, that you are able to pull back physician behavior — although there seems to be a high recidivism rate.

(Emphasis added.)

In some ways McAllen isn’t the aberration; according to the old Chicago economics department, everywhere should be like McAllen.

Remember all the people who said that you can’t blame mortgage brokers and investment bankers for being greedy, because that’s how a capitalist economy works? Well, you could make the same defense for the McAllen doctors. We long ago stopped expecting lawyers and accountants to behave contrary to their economic interests; now we simply expect them to conform to the law and to certain professional codes of conduct, and otherwise make as much money as possible. Why should we expect anything different from doctors?

In a capitalist economy, the thing that is supposed to keep prices in check is the buyers. If someone offers me a product that costs more than it is worth to me, then I won’t buy it. But we can’t count on patients to play this role in health care, because there is no way to make patients internalize all of the costs of their care; they simply don’t have the money. Furthermore, most people don’t understand the health production function (the relationship between treatments and outcomes), so they don’t have the ability to select treatments that provide benefits that are worth their costs. (And, in many cases, it’s not obvious even to professionals that a treatment isn’t worth the cost; it’s only obvious when you look at the data in aggregate.)[italicized emphasis as noted; bold emphasis mine]

It's that simple, and Gawande looks at this same solution in more detail. It's really well worth a read. Among other things, he talks to many people who are in a position to deal with these issues and presumably would be well-informed, but who in every case are hearing about them for the first time, from Gawande. This lends substance to the idea that Gawande was expressing when he said that "they really didn’t know the big picture of what was happening" because "[i]t isn’t what they are responsible or accountable for." It's also what James Kwak was pointing out by saying that "it’s only obvious when you look at the data in aggregate" (read: it's only obvious to economists). He also briefly mentions in a couple of places the extraordinary profits of the hospital industry ("In 2007, [Renaissance Hospital's] profits totalled thirty-four million dollars"; "McAllen Heart Hospital, is owned by Universal Health Services, a for-profit hospital chain with headquarters in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and revenues of five billion dollars last year" [emphasis added]).

Ultimately, he makes a fairly damning assessment of McAllen's doctors: they're businessmen.

“In El Paso, if you took a random doctor and looked at his tax returns eighty-five per cent of his income would come from the usual practice of medicine,” he said. But in McAllen, the administrator thought, that percentage would be a lot less.

He knew of doctors who owned strip malls, orange groves, apartment complexes—or imaging centers, surgery centers, or another part of the hospital they directed patients to. They had “entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. They were innovative and aggressive in finding ways to increase revenues from patient care. “There’s no lack of work ethic,” he said. But he had often seen financial considerations drive the decisions doctors made for patients—the tests they ordered, the doctors and hospitals they recommended—and it bothered him. Several doctors who were unhappy about the direction medicine had taken in McAllen told me the same thing. “It’s a machine, my friend,” one surgeon explained.

...

Then there are the physicians who see their practice primarily as a revenue stream. They instruct their secretary to have patients who call with follow-up questions schedule an appointment, because insurers don’t pay for phone calls, only office visits. They consider providing Botox injections for cash. They take a Doppler ultrasound course, buy a machine, and start doing their patients’ scans themselves, so that the insurance payments go to them rather than to the hospital. They figure out ways to increase their high-margin work and decrease their low-margin work. This is a business, after all.

In every community, you’ll find a mixture of these views among physicians, but one or another tends to predominate. McAllen seems simply to be the community at one extreme.

In a few cases, the hospital executive told me, he’d seen the behavior cross over into what seemed like outright fraud. “I’ve had doctors here come up to me and say, ‘You want me to admit patients to your hospital, you’re going to have to pay me.’ ”

“How much?” I asked.

“The amounts—all of them were over a hundred thousand dollars per year,” he said. The doctors were specific. The most he was asked for was five hundred thousand dollars per year.

He didn’t pay any of them, he said: “I mean, I gotta sleep at night.” And he emphasized that these were just a handful of doctors. But he had never been asked for a kickback before coming to McAllen.

As both Kwak and Gawande realize, this is a function of capitalism, or the profit motive. The drive is for doctors to maximize their income. This is what Kwak dryly refers to as an "economically rational" motive (conveniently cleansed, of course, of any moral or civic considerations). Gawande writes, "the real puzzle of American health care, I realized on the airplane home, is not why McAllen is different from El Paso. It’s why El Paso isn’t like McAllen. Every incentive in the system is an invitation to go the way McAllen has gone." (emphasis added) He notes the differences between McAllen's profit-driven business-first style of medicine and Rochester, Minnesota's famous Mayo Clinic. Unfortunately, Gawande says, "something even more worrisome is going on as well. In the war over the culture of medicine—the war over whether our country’s anchor model will be Mayo or McAllen—the Mayo model is losing."

For All His Lying...

2009-06-22T11:34:00.005-05:00

I don't have a lot of time to post today, so instead I'm just going to cop out and post a couple of reading recommendations. First, a reaction to the Cairo Speech I can actually appreciate (h/t Arthur Silber). On the other hand, at least Obama isn't following Liz Cheney's advice.

If you're still with me and want something interesting to read (I wish we had enough readers/commenters to have an "open thread" on this), check this article by digby out called "Privatizing Death". Needless to say, comments on any of the above welcome.

Umm...

2009-06-19T15:08:00.002-05:00

In the wake of Dr. Tiller's assassination and the killing of a random guard at the Holocaust Museum, there's been a lot of talk about what, if any, culpability is borne by the Darling Demagogues of the right-wing media. This has led reasonable pundits like Glenn Beck to become more instrospective and scale back his inflammatory rhetoric, so as not to incite his misinformed, uneducated audience.

Just kidding. Here's Beck's reaction to the Holocaust Museum shooting (h/t digby; emphasis mine):

The pot is boiling and this is a warning to all Americans of things to come.

It looks like this was the work of a lone gunman, nut-job, who once wrote an article titled "Hitler's Worst Mistake: He Didn't Gas the Jews." But you're going to see a lot of nut-jobs coming out of the woodwork.

Two very important things are happening here: First, the go-go-go mentality of our enemies. Our country is vulnerable; our enemies know it as much as we do and groups like Al Qaeda are even planning to work with white supremacists (which police say this guy might be), coming through our southern border.

...

Second, there's going to be a witch-hunt for two groups: the Jews and conservatives. Two years ago, I spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu and I told him to look out, because Israel is being set up. Iran's goal of nuclear weapons is putting Israel in the crosshairs.

Those who have read history know that when things go bad, the Jews become scapegoats; and it's happening again.

Did you get all that? You might need to read it twice. Sounds to me like Al Qaeda is shipping in neo-nazis from Mexico in order to kill Jews and Republicans, and that all this is somehow tied into Iran's supposed pursuit of nuclear weapons in a WORLDWIDE TERRORIST EXTRAVAGANZA that will lead to the eradication of all Jews (including the elimination of Israel as a nation-state), dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria.

Digby is just as confused as I am:

It doesn't have to make sense, folks. It just has to hit a certain emotional truth. And his audience's "truth" is that al Qaeda is in cahoots with lone nuts to kill Jews and blame it on conservatives --- and they are sneaking in from Mexico with "illegals" to do it. This makes perfect sense to them.

(Read on through digby's commentary to see a few of the crackpot comments Beck's article is attracting.)

More on this later.

PS: I can't stop laughing at the picture FNC chose to display over Beck's article. The subtle irony in its symmetry (a horse's ass on either side of a policeman) is just too much. Also, funny how they pictured the two hate-speech demagogues just below it. Is there a web designer revolting at Faux News?

On "Inefficiency", and The Hidden Message of Privatization

2009-06-18T12:06:00.003-05:00

Before I start this long overdue post, I want to thank everyone who has borne with us during this long, unexpected, and mostly unannounced hiatus. I apologize for the discontinuance of TSP for most of the month of June, which has been due to the fact that FreZno and I have moved into a new apartment together (where we were mishandled by the local cable company who was supposed to get us internet access in a timely fashion), and my grandfather -- the one I posted the picture of here -- suffered a month-long health crisis and finally died this past Sunday. For my part, I have been spending all the time I can catching up with news between whisking family members to and from the airport two hours away or shuttling them around locally, and it is only now that I have found something I can post about that might not be contradicted by more recent news. I am hoping to be fully caught up by this weekend, but as has been the case for nearly the last three weeks, this will depend almost entirely on circumstances beyond my control.

As I was catching up with news today, I stumbled across this post on Hullabaloo, which is a stunning indictment of Reagan-inspired conservatism supported by a veritable gold mine of links. [I would highly recommend reading both the aforementioned post and possibly also this one in full.] I've long planned to devote a post or series of posts to words in our political discourse that have been disingenuously rhetorically hijacked, and this might well have been a segment therein. However, I'm going to go ahead and single out one word that I want to focus on and make a point about today: inefficiency.

Efficiency is a dangerous and toxic word in today's political climate. It is often used by proponents of privatization, who extol the virtues of the private sector and the efficiency of private ownership in comparison with the supposedly mismanaged, laughably inefficient public sector. In effect, this is merely an extension of Grandfather of Modern Conservatism Reagan's platform: "...government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." But, as is the problem with so many "conservative" principles, reality simply doesn't conform to this assumption.

The argument that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector is as simple as it is bizarre and disturbing. Basically, there are two parts to the argument: show that the government is bad, then argue that private businesses are necessarily better and attempt to explain why. Why is the government bad? The PSIRU paper I linked above summarizes nicely: "The political theory of public choice assumes both that all public sector workers and managers are motivated solely by economic greed, which is unrealistic, and also that a desire for re-election is the key driving force for political interference and distortion." On this view, it is our elected officials, not self-interested capitalists, CEOs, multibillionaire bankers -- you know, the private sector* -- who are "motivated solely by economic greed". It's really the politicians who just want to make a buck. Seriously. And what about the big businesses? "In the private sector, success and survival is firmly anchored to the disciplines of making a profit by meeting consumers' needs. The disciplines apply to sole traders, partnerships, and private and public companies alike." Yeah, that's right. Of course they just want to make a buck as well, to maximize their profit, but unlike those silly politicians the magnanimous capitalists know that the only way to do it is to meet consumers' needs.

Now perhaps I've cherry-picked an uncharitable set of sentences to illustrate the privatization position. I freely admit that I struggle to understand the mentality that the private sector is somehow necessarily better than a democratically elected government, however corrupt and disconnected from reality. It's completely at odds with my worldview. But these are real quotes from real arguments. That last one is from a paper entitled "Efficiency and Accountability in the Private Sector: What Can We Learn?", which is a fascinating read for all its touting of unsupported claims about how the private sector is necessarily better and more brilliantly managed than government-owned anything, the magic of the "free" market, and mythical altruistic capitalists. This is borne of the mindset summarized by a champion of supply-side ("Voodoo") economics George Gilder when he wrote, "To help the poor and middle classes, one must cut the taxes of the rich." Yes, people actually think that.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a mountain of reasons why these claims are false on their face. Take health care. There's a monster of a debate going on right now in DC over healthcare reform, since the rising costs of healthcare are outpacing the growth in wages by a factor of eight (.pdf):

[The Congressional Budget Office] projects that, without changes in law, total spending on health care will rise from 16 percent of GDP in 2007 to 25 percent in 2025 and 49 percent in 2082. Federal spending on Medicare (net of beneficiaries’ premiums) and Medicaid would rise from 4 percent of GDP in 2007 to 7 percent in 2025 and 19 percent in 2082.

See that? There's your private sector efficiency, right there. The CBO, whose predictions are usually very conservative (in the non-political sense), estimates that current trends show private health insurance burdening us with costs of half our GDP, while at the same time Medicare rises to only a fifth of GDP. This is under current conditions, which includes Medicare Advantage, a program that forces Medicare to pay private insurers what amounts to a huge handout; that is, it was brought in under the rubric of cutting costs to a public program (i.e., Medicare) by bringing in those necessarily more efficient, beneficent private programs, and now -- according to MedPAC and the CBO -- it ends up costing 10-12% more than what it would cost just using traditional Medicare. That would also include the fact that Medicare is unable to use its massive purchasing power to bargain for lower prices for prescription drugs, despite the fact that it has amazing potential to do so. Even burdened with these private sector "efficiencies", Medicare can't come near the soaring costs of private insurance. Oh, and did I mention that the efficient private sector's administrative costs for health care are a mind-boggling 31% (nearly a third!) of the total costs of healthcare in the US, as opposed to the meager 2-3% overhead of Medicare?

And what about all these wild claims about making a profit by meeting consumers' needs? Take a look at this recent post on Baseline Scenario about the evolution of the credit card and decide for yourself whether the profit model of that business is in any way focused on "meeting consumers' needs". The "Efficiency and Accountability" paper from Bizarroworld goes on to argue that,

"At a higher level, the interest of private firms is aligned with the interests of society as a whole by requiring them to operate without protection or privileges in a competitive environment. Within that framework, their objectives will not be achieved unless they put the customer first and, in doing so, organise themselves to use resources efficiently."

There are myriad examples from all over the business landscape of society that contradict this rosy picture of "competitive" businesses "put[ting] the customer first". Cable and telco giants are putting their customers first by trying to roll out a tiered internet scheme by which they can charge more depending on the content you are trying to access, which they unilaterally decide. They're also working with the giant transnationals in the recording and film industries -- you know, those guys who put their customers first by suing them? -- to put their customers first by creating extralegal courts where they can ban suspected pirates from the internet entirely in a three-strikes-and-you're-out approach. And Wells Fargo and other too-big-to-fail banks were just helping out their customers, particularly the minority ones, when they falsified documents to give them more profitable subprime loans that they probably couldn't pay back, even though they qualified for prime (normal) lending. I could go on and on.

Obviously, my opinions are precisely the opposite of what the "Efficiency and Accountability" paper's author proposes. There is no evidence to show that the private sector is necessarily more efficient than the government. Both are guilty of terrible waste and inefficiency, and I don't think it's a useful metric of comparison. By contrast, the government wins on accountability. I fail to see how the elitist corporate-capitalist culture is accountable to anything besides their own fortunes. Lip service to fiduciary duty is hardly accountability, considering that CEOs pay themselves (being the top shareholders, after all) and their board members obscene salaries, usually set by other CEOs at a level of whatever the compensated CEO requests. (I could do an entire post as long as this one on how this works and cite link after link showing that board rooms are centers of crony capitalism, corporate culture promotes narcissistic and elitist thinking, etc.; maybe later, because it's beyond the scope of this post.) Our government, by contrast, while not nearly democratic enough for my taste, has at least the flavor of democracy to it. Politicians do feel somewhat accountable to their voting base, even if they have a distorted picture of it, and there is some evidence that government responds to public pressure. As politically off-center as I am in America, I feel like there are some representatives in Congress that do more or less represent my interests from time to time, as rare as they might be. I do not suspect that there are members of very many corporate board-rooms that represent my interests in the least.

I can imagine a transparent, democratic government. Businesses are the opposite of transparent and democratic. And this is really the important point that I take from all of this. As I continue to try to work out why some people think privatization and de-unionization and myriad other senseless things that are touted in the name of efficiency are good ideas, I'm left with this thought: is this really about democracy? I'm not sure how much weight to give this idea, but it's very much stuck with me this afternoon in all I've read, and I'll be continuing to think about it. In almost every case, the "efficient" solution being paraded about is the more authoritarian solution. The private sector is all top-down management. A very small group of people makes decisions they think are best for the whole number of workers (far greater) and customers (even greater still). The "inefficient" solution is the Government, usually the Congress, and the inefficiency is almost always blamed on the various political preferences at stake. In other words, it's harder to reach a concensus because the government is more democratic. For another example of this, look at the treatment of unions. I could have used any number of articles from the last week to justify this statement, but I'll use this one (.pdf) from the NYT in 1913 just to show how long this mindset has been with us:

If an enterprise is working with out-of-date machinery, or if its brains are sluggish, it is promised that the facts shall be told. This is in the interest of workingmen, because idle dollars signify idle hands, and idle hands and idle dollars are a menace to general prosperity.

But it is a poor rule which does not work both ways. The nation can no more endure inefficient labor than inefficient capital and the causes of inefficiency should be equally well known in both cases. Capital has been effectively checked in its privileges which enabled it to extort profits which were not earned. There are reasons to believe that labor has enjoyed its unearned increment by enactments of its own, enforced more thoroughly than any statute.

...

And meanwhile, the labor lobby has secured the shortening of hours and the multiplication of jobs, with the result that while dollars have been working overtime men have been idle against their will and consumers have suffered...

...

The men are seeking more pay without offering any return, and without any reason beyond their ability to compel the concession. That is getting something for nothing, and if it works there is no reason why less and less should not be given for the weekly envelope. That is not less unfair to the country than to the railways...

...

Never was there a greater obstacle to reward than the practices of the unions against the best prospects of their members and non-unionists alike. The unions promise soft jobs to the inefficient, rather than efficient workmen to the employers. They promise shorter hours and average pay instead of encouraging effort according to the strength and wants of their members. The nation suffers by the reduction of human efficiency more than the unionists profit by their help to the sub-standard members. (emphases added)

This is as clear an example as there can be of the mentality I am describing. Unions, which are at best (though not always) democratically run organizations, use collective bargaining to secure benefits for their members. (They also indirectly benefit non-members, contrary to the above author's anti-union nonsense; data show that non-unionized employees in heavily unionized sectors tend to make more money and enjoy better benefits.) However, in the author's fantasy world, he knows (naturally) better what the workers want than they could possibly know for themselves. Indeed, the silly unions are bargaining for shorter hours when really their members want to work long, grueling 12-14 hour days ("men have been idle against their will"). What's more, the men know that their responsibility to the company's well-being (read: profits) is first and foremost. What working men and women really care about is maximizing profits by working as hard as they can for as long as they can, not, say, their health or spending time with their families ("The unions promise soft jobs to the inefficient, rather than efficient workmen to the employers").

Ultimately, this seems to me to be yet one more case where people are suspicious of democracy and, for whatever reason, want to believe that a small, authoritarian elite can do better. It's ironic that some of these people are champions of the Reagan "government is the problem" mantra, since the root of the reasoning for that is that individuals can run their own lives better than could be decided for them by someone else. The last 8 years have beautifully demonstrated the folly of Reaganist anarcho-capitalism, i.e. leaving everything to the private sector unchecked and hoping the magical free markets will save us all while the magnanimous rich will let the benefits trickle down to the rest of us peons.

*I know the private sector also includes very small businesses, but while pandering to the middle class (small business = middle-class business) is a very popular form of grandstanding, on the whole the businesses that are politically powerful -- and this is a discussion, ultimately, about a division of political responsibility -- are not small.

We're Still Here!

2009-06-07T15:02:00.002-05:00

Just so everyone knows, TSP is still around. We haven't been very active this week and I feel bad for the few of you who do follow what we're doing here that we haven't posted an explanation. The short answer is that I've been having family issues and FreZno has been busy with the band. We'll get kicking again over the course of the next week, hopefully; especially considering Tuesday we'll finally have internet in the new apartment! Thanks for reading (if you are).

Tiller Update: Wingnut Confirmed

2009-06-01T12:19:00.002-05:00

I can honestly say I had sincerely hoped to be proven wrong on this, but McClatchy has the unsurprising scoop:

The suspect in custody for the slaying of Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller was a member of an anti-government group in the 1990s and a staunch opponent of abortion.

Scott P. Roeder, 51, of Merriam, Kan., a Kansas City suburb, was arrested on Interstate 35 near Gardner in suburban Johnson County, Kan., about three hours after the shooting. Tiller was shot to death around 10 a.m. inside Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita.

In the rear window of the 1993 blue Ford Taurus that he was driving was a red rose, a symbol often used by abortion opponents. On the rear of his car was a Christian fish symbol with the word "Jesus" inside.

Those who know Roeder said he believed that killing abortion doctors was an act of justifiable homicide.

"I know that he believed in justifiable homicide," said Regina Dinwiddie, a Kansas City anti-abortion activist who made headlines in 1995 when she was ordered by a federal judge to stop using a bullhorn within 500 feet of any abortion clinic. "I know he very strongly believed that abortion was murder and that you ought to defend the little ones, both born and unborn."

[...]

Roeder also was a subscriber to Prayer and Action News, a magazine that advocated the justifiable homicide position, said publisher Dave Leach, an anti-abortion activist from Des Moines, Iowa.

"I met him once, and he wrote to me a few times," Leach said. "I remember that he was sympathetic to our cause, but I don't remember any details."

Leach said he met Roeder in Topeka when he went there to visit Shelley Shannon, who was in prison for the 1993 shooting of Tiller.

And yes, this is from McClatchy Newspapers, not The Onion. Yes, we live in a country where magazines called Prayer and Action News advocate politically and religiously motivated homocide, or essentially domestic terrorism. Yes, the murderer of Dr. George Tiller met the publisher of his favorite little Psycho-Christian Terror Rag on a visit to the woman who had previously tried to de-commission Dr. Tiller's work by shooting him in both the arms. It goes on:

Morris Wilson, commander of the Kansas Unorganized Citizens Militia in the mid-1990s, said he knew Roeder fairly well.

"I'd say he's a good ol' boy except he was just so fanatic about abortion," said Wilson, who now lives in western Nebraska. "He was always talking about how awful abortion was. But there's a lot of people who think abortion is awful."

Definitely no far right-wing extremism there. I don't see how anyone could have predicted this guy was a potential domestic terrorist.

In recent years, someone using the name Scott Roeder has posted anti-Tiller comments on various Internet sites. One post, dated Sept. 3, 2007 and placed on a site sponsored by Operation Rescue called chargetiller.com, said that Tiller needed to be "stopped."

"It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the 'lawlessness' which is spoken of in the Bible," it said. "Tiller is the concentration camp 'Mengele' of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation."

On May 19, 2007, a Scott Roeder commented on an invitation by Operation Rescue to join an event being held May 17-20 in Wichita, "the 'Nation's Abortion Capital,' to pray for an end to George R. Tiller's late-term abortion business and for all pre-born babies everywhere to once again come under the protection of law."

The post said: "Bless everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp. Sometime soon, would it be feasible to organize as many people as possible to attend Tillers church (inside, not just outside) to have much more of a presence and possibly ask questions of the Pastor, Deacons, Elders and members while there? Doesn't seem like it would hurt anything but bring more attention to Tiller."

So there you have it. Despite all the hollow condemnations by groups like Operation Rescue, their culpability shines through. This is what happens when you scare people to death and tell them an angry god is going to smite us all if we don't change our sinful ways.

Less babies are not going to die because George Tiller was gunned down at his Sunday worship service. But a family is ruined, a wife bereaved. A church and a community are torn, hurt, and scared. Abortion providers and their families everywhere fear for their lives and their well-being. And hundreds of women in Kansas may go without life-saving treatment. Pro-life, indeed.

When a Terrorist Attacks...

2009-05-31T15:00:00.004-05:00

The scene is a small, rural house of worship: "a modern, red brick facility that seats about 500 people" (1). It is 10 AM, just around the time the weekly morning worship services begin. Although the choir has already begun its singing, a few are still filing in moments late, including an usher -- a 67-year-old local physician renowned for his work in the area -- who had been handing out bulletins to parishioners as they filed in the door moments before. But on this tragic morning, a middle-aged extremist probably motivated by religious fervor gunned the doctor down on his way in, in full view of his wife who was singing in the choir (2).

I left the details intentionally vague for those who are still unaware of this story. I wonder if some readers will think they're reading about a mosque in the Middle East, or simply some tragic crime that they cannot possibly fathom the motivation for. I somehow doubt that anyone reading the passage above would guess that this took place this very morning, at a small Christian church in Wichita, Kansas. The murderer in question is a middle-aged white male, described as 50-60 years old, roughly 6'1", and about 220 lbs (very much a typical Kansan, to my mind). His victim? Dr. George Tiller, one of the few providers of medically necessary late-term abortions in the country, and one of only two in Kansas.

Go and read some of the accounts of violence this man has been through: his clinic bombed, his arms both wounded by gunshots in a previous incident of violence, his life and family continually threatened, his eventual murder in church in front of his wife. I think we can officially stop calling this position "pro-life" now. And, much like matttbastard already beat me to saying, I don't want to hear another damn word about how the DHS report on domestic right-wing extremism (that BUSH solicited, let's remember) was false or overhyped. That nonsense pissed me off more than most of the right-wing hysteria since Obama's election because while I was in LA, I worked raising funds for, among other organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center. If you don't believe there's been a serious rise in hate groups in the last decade or so, go take a look at some of their facts and figures in the Intelligence Report, or just take a gander at this map.

And just in case you haven't stopped reading due to nausea at this point, go ahead and check out what some of the lovely "pro-life" conservatives have to say about this murder, courtesy of a nice little list compiled over at DailyKos.

Citations: (1), (2),

Think Amalek

2009-05-29T09:06:00.002-05:00

One of the things that really drives me crazy about Middle East politics is the one-sidedness of US involvement, which I suspect is based on religious sympathy between the populations. I've been worried for quite some time that we're going to end up at war with Iran because of the machinations of hawk front-groups like "United Against Nuclear Iran". The scary part (from article just linked):

There's little or no likelihood of military action against Iran now, or in the near future, either by the United States or by Israel. But sky-is-falling rhetoric about Iran isn't useful, and it certainly creates the groundwork for future military action.

That was last September. Here's this April:

Sworn in Tuesday as prime minister in the most right-wing government in Israel's history, Benjamin Netanyahu threatened a military strike against Iran and signaled a break with the so-called "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict backed by Washington.

[...]

In an interview with Jonah Goldberg of the Atlantic just before his swearing-in, Netanyahu issued an explicit threat of an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear program, warning that if Washington failed to stop it by means of diplomatic pressure, Israel would take military action.

According to Goldberg, Netanyahu told him that the Obama administration "must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran's nuclear facilities itself."

He described the Iranian government as a "messianic apocalyptic cult" and Iran itself as "a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation." This provocative language is designed to demonize the entire Iranian people and justify mass killing.

Goldberg quoted one of Netanyahu's military advisers as asserting that Israel could act "within months" and was capable of carrying out the attack with or without Washington's approval. "The problem is not military capability, the problem is whether you have the stomach, the political will, to take action," one adviser said.

The Israeli threats were echoed Wednesday by General David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command, who told a congressional committee that "the Israeli government may ultimately see itself so threatened by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon that it would take preemptive military action to derail or delay it."

Usually, here in the US media, the picture of Iran is entirely painted by hawk groups, the powerful and well-connected Israel Lobby, and some combination of ignorant, ill-informed, or Establishment-serving "journalists" who uncritically pass on claims of Zionist war agitators in both the Israeli government and its domestic allies.

The nuclear fear-mongering over Iran is certainly a product of these phenomena. Iran's nuclear program has been a major focus in US media for months. However, there are lots of reasons to be skeptical about whether or not Iran is truly intent on building a bomb. Fareed Zakaria walks us through a few [h/t Obsidian Wings]:

The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What's the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime's founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were "un-Islamic." The country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that "developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam." Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei.

Iran, it should be remembered, signed on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and hasn't launched an aggressive war since 1785. How does that compare to, say, Israel? Well, Israel is already a nuclear-armed nation, possibly in possession of 150 nuclear weapons or more, though they refuse to disclose the true amount. Despite being the only country in the region with a nuclear arsenal, Israel thumbed its nose at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And its last launch of an aggressive war was just this January, when it tore into Gaza with American planes, bombs, tanks, and bulldozers and killed 1,400 civilians in a brazen act of state-sponsored terrorism.

And what about all this claptrap about Ahmadinejad threatening to "wipe Israel off the face of the map"? Well, there's some controversy over whether or not that's the best translation of the comment. Even if it is, Ahmadinejad has gone on record since then as supporting the two-state solution, which Israel's Netanyahu (and even more so, Lieberman) actively opposes. Furthermore, how does the current Israeli government conceptualize Iran? Here's one of Netanyahu's cohorts [from the same Zakaria article, emphasis added]:

One of Netanyahu's advisers said of Iran, "Think Amalek." The Bible says that the Amalekites were dedicated enemies of the Jewish people. In 1 Samuel 15, God says, "Go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." Now, were the president of Iran and his advisers to have cited a religious text that gave divine sanction for the annihilation of an entire race, they would be called, well, messianic.

That sure sounds a hell of a lot like the annhilation implied by Ahmadinejad's alleged comment to me. What is in the best interest of Israel is NOT the same as what is in the best interest of the United States. For that matter, what's in the best interest of Israel (as proposed by its bellicose far-right government) isn't even necessarily what's in the best interest of Israel (meaning its people). But Middle East peace is not an achievable goal as long as the US continues to come down hard on one side of the debate, ignoring facts and problems along the way.

The New Face(book) of TSP

2009-05-28T21:23:00.003-05:00

Although neither of us posted today, that isn't to say that neither of us worked on TSP. Come enjoy the fruits of our labo(u)rs by becoming a fan of The Skeptical Pacifist on Facebook. If you've already hit your Facebook quota for the day, or you just feel like procrastinating, no need to worry. I also put a swanky new link below our Twitter feed on the sidebar.

In other news, we have (and have had all along...) an RSS feed. Surprisingly, not everyone seems to know this. RSS -- for the even more surprising number of people who haven't heard of it -- is Really Simple Syndication. All you have to do to use it is grab a reader or head over to Google's web-based aggregator and start plugging in feeds. Feeds are basically automatic update checkers for websites (like blogs) that update frequently. It saves you the trouble of actually visiting the website (isn't modern convenience great?). If you just found out about this, and you think it sounds cool but you don't know where to start, just check out our list of recommended blogs in the sidebar. All but maybe two of those have RSS feeds, and they range from a couple of posts per week to over a hundred.

Thanks for reading, and wish Ten56 luck in the Battle of the Bands Saturday night! (They're going to win.)

How Do Pacifists Get Their Protein?

2009-05-27T08:48:00.003-05:00

Still very much in the early stages of blogging here at TSP, we don't get a whole lot of comments yet. In fact, most of those we do get come via reposting our articles on Facebook. Hopefully that will change as the blog grows, evolves, and most importantly attracts new readers. Even now, though, we do have a surprising (to me, at least) amount of readers, and people interested in what we're doing. And on Memorial Day, we got our first anonymous comment, a question about pacifism. As the blog expands (and hopefully this will occur), we will presumably get enough comments that they won't merit individual posts in response. However, since they're so few and far between and this one is so general, I decided to answer it with a post. Besides, it's a fairly common question, and I'm sure it's on a lot of readers' minds even if they haven't asked it themselves.

The full comment is as follows:

out of curiousity, from a pacifist's point of view, how would you have handled Hitler during WW2?

Better yet, if you had been FDR, how would you have handled Pearl Harbor?

As a pacifist do you believe any level of military force is justified?

<3

I'm going to start by coming at this from an oblique angle; but stay with me, because I think the example will ultimately prove instructive. In addition to being a pacifist, I am also a vegetarian. [Since people have so many pre-formed opinions about marginalized positions like these, and will likely make assumptions here, sadly I suppose it is relevant to say that the two are wholly unrelated. I became a vegetarian for health reasons, not moral ones.] The above question actually reminds me a lot of a question I get quite frequently as a vegetarian, and one probably as common to vegetarians in general as the WW2 question is to pacifists: How do you get your protein?

While I totally understand the curiosity coming from someone who simply eats a "normal" diet containing large amounts of meat, or who has only heard fleeting references to vegetarianism and is perhaps aware that some vegetarians have to carefully monitor their protein intake, the question is fundamentally misguided. The primary reason for this is obvious: vegetarianism, like most sets of principles, rests along a continuum of sorts. Just because someone self-identifies as a vegetarian is no conclusive reason to believe they don't eat meat. Vegetarians range from those who simply reject "red meat" (yet still eat chicken, fish, eggs, dairy, etc.) to extremely strict vegans who won't even eat refined sugar.* So depending on what type of vegetarian you've actually encountered, the answer to this question might be as simple as, "Chicken!", or as complex as a vegan chef's musings on nuts, beans, lentil, and tofu dishes.

Speaking of nuts, beans, and lentils, that's a perfect example of the other main reason this question is misguided: there is an abundance of non-animal sources of proteins. Depending on how you look at it, there are actually perhaps more non-animal than animal sources (depending on how you classify the variety). But the ignorance of this simple fact that comes from being conditioned not to have to worry about it leads many people to react to vegetarians as if they are following a diet that stands in stark contrast to basic nutrition. (You sometimes get the feeling that saying, "Actually, I'm a vegetarian," is somewhat equivalent to saying, e.g., "Actually, I spend 80% of my time underwater." People say, "How do you get your protein?!" occasionally with the same awe and dumbfoundedness as they might say, in the latter situation, "How do you breathe?!")

This strikes me as a good analogy to the question that the commenter asks wrt pacifism above. As you might have already guessed, I find the question ultimately misguided. I actually think the commenter may have realized this (N.B., "As a pacifist do you believe any level of military force is justified?"), but it's still worth mentioning that there are a lot of different kinds of pacifists and pacifism**. Pacifism, like vegetarianism, exists along a continuum, defined by rejection of levels of violence rather than rejection of animal-derived food products. Pacifists can range from simple "nuclear pacifists" who reject only specific types of weaponry, to full-fledged absolute pacifists who strain their water for fear of accidentally killing small insects and would refuse even to defend themselves from a violent attack. So exactly like above, depending on what type of pacifist you have encountered, the answer might range from a nuclear pacifist's, "Simple, I wouldn't have nuked Japan," to Ghandi's (in)famous suggestion that all the Jews in Europe simply commit mass suicide to draw attention to their plight.

Now that's not an answer to the commenter's question, per se. I'm just pointing out that this question is only relevant to certain kinds of pacifists, and it's a mistake to think that just because someone is a pacifist, they wouldn't have supported WW2. I don't know that the commenter necessarily thinks this, and I tend to think he/she doesn't. However, why go straight for WW2? Notice that questioners of this sort never ask about wars for which are notoriously more difficult to justify. I can't tell you how many times, as a pacifist, I've been asked to put myself in the 1940s and solve the world crisis created by Hitler; but I can tell you how many times I've been asked about Vietnam: 0. You'd think every once in a while someone would throw me a softball and ask me about one of Reagan's numerous secret Latin American interventions in the '80s, at least. But no, it's always straight for Hitler, culturally enshrined as The Most Evil Man Ever, Period™. There's really no reason to think that pacifists can't conceive of their reactions and possible objections to war on a case-by-case basis, so even if you shake a pacifist's commitment to nonviolence wrt WW2, that's all you've done. Even if you were to change one's mind about WW2, or even less successfully give one doubts about there having been a better (non- or less violent) solution available, that's still no reason for either you or them to categorically reject pacifism.

So far in our history, violence seems to be the reflexive answer to just about any number of problems, from the most micro- to the most macro- levels of human interaction. Personal insults can result in bar fights; stress and emotional conflict can result in workplace violence or domestic abuse; political, religious, and theological differences of opinion often erupt into wars. Pacifism -- especially skeptical pacifism, the type advocated most prominently at this blog -- very simply amounts to asking ourselves, "Is this really the best way?" Now, if there were hundreds of organizations with ample funding constantly seeking peaceful solutions to conflict, and they were politically well-connected such that their solutions always got tried first, and yet time and again they kept coming up short and violence kept happening despite our best efforts, that would be one thing. But what kind of fantasy world would that be? Wars erupt quickly, often engender heavy support early on while dissenters get totally trampled (until much later when they're often proven to have been right), and are very frequently far more brutal than anyone thinks is necessary, particularly after the fact. We not only don't make a reasonable effort to avoid violence especially in state-level conflicts; we hardly make any effort at all. Quite frankly, if any solution has been tried time and time again with a dismal success rate, it's war, not peace. Like with the vegetarian's protein, there are ample non-violent methods of conflict resolution, and ignorance of this fact through years of being conditioned to conflate conflict resolution with violence or war (just like meat=protein) doesn't make it go away. Now we could have a debate about whether these non-violent solutions are more or less successful and/or effective than war (or more to the point, more morally justifiable given reasonably equal success rates), but I'd say we'd be hard-pressed to find data points for non-violent conflict resolution at the state-to-state level.

The last point I want to make on this subject is that it's very common to ask people whose positions are sufficiently different from the mainstream to answer extraordinarily difficult questions that really no one (including the mainstream believers) has the answer to, as if that somehow proves they're wrong. If you're an atheist (I'm one of those, too...), you probably often get incredulously asked by believers of various stripes, "Well, how do you explain the origin of the universe?" (Sounds a lot like, "Yeah, so where'd we come from then, smart guy?" Smug believers tend to think they have all the answers to these monumental questions and sometimes get arrogant about how obvious the answer seems to them.) Well, no human really knows the answer to this question, but supposedly just because some of us believe a Supreme Intelligent Creator Thing magically conjured the universe ex nihilo, we all have to be equally convicted in definite answers. Somehow, the rational response of saying, "Well, no one really knows, although some people have guessed, and our best science lends to some theories," never seems satisfying. Well, what do you do when a seemingly intractably evil person decides they want to conquer the world and initiates a genocide against a whole group of people? Particularly when your own population is still climbing out of the Great Depression? And then you get attacked by a foreign power allied to this individual? Does anyone really know? Is anyone really sure that FDR had the exact right response? I think the best a war supporter can do here is really to say, "Well, I'm not sure if it was exact and proportional and all that, but he attacked him [violently], and that's all that matters. Non-violence wouldn't have worked, that's for sure." Is it really? That's just an assumption, plain and simple. The reasoning behind this is at best counterfactual and plagued with hypothetical reasoning (Castles in the air? Anyone?); at worst, this is simply a mockery driven by unexamined prejudice.

I really don't think that most people who are pro-war (or indifferent, or support it by default, or whatever) are mean-spirited, inherently violent people, who just haven't thought through their actions. I just think our minds are primed for this type of response both because of our inherent qualities as human beings and because of the culture we all grow up in, which partly springs from outdated modes of survival. But I'll post more on all that later. For now, a counter-question for all the war supporters out there:

Have you really -- honestly -- sat down and thought about other ways we could resolve international conflict?

* For the curious, I am technically a lacto-ovo-pescetarian, though I never use that word because it's cumbersome and obscure. I drink soy milk, but I make no particular effort to avoid eggs (particularly in batter in restaurants) or dairy-based cheeses and yogurts. And while I don't eat much fish at home, I frequently order seafood in restaurants for lack of other "vegetarian" options.

** I draw this distinction because not all forms of pacifism are actually practiced. Some are purely philosophical constructs, which don't exist outside philosophy debates, classrooms, and journals. Others are strawman arguments put forth by detractors of pacifism. I suppose, though I don't think this is nearly as prevalent as some detractors of pacifism would claim, that there is also a minority of disingenuous pacifism. However, I think there's a strong case to be made that contravening one's beliefs in the face of extreme duress is perfectly understandable, and it's a little insulting to claim that someone's beliefs are wholly disingenuous because this may happen to them in theory or practice.

California's Supreme Court drops the ball in Prop. 8 case

2009-05-26T13:23:00.004-05:00

Sad news today for gay rights advocates: California's Supreme Court has ruled that the majority of the electorate has the right to single out a minority group and deny them equal protection under the law.

The Court declined to overturn Proposition 8, the ballot measure which amended the state constitution to include a ban on same-sex marriage, passing with 52% of the vote back in November 2008. In May 2008, the same Court ruled that a "marriage = one man + one woman" style law (1) denied gay people the right to choose their spouse, and (2) discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation.

The only difference between now and then is that a slim majority of the California electorate voted to enshrine such discrimination in their state's constitution. In essence, the California Supreme Court has declared that a majority of citizens can properly override the principle of equal protection under the law and strip minority groups of the rights otherwise guaranteed to them by the state's highest law... so long as a ballot measure proposing a constitutional amendment carries 52% of the vote.

Many have defended Prop. 8 (and the Court's decision to uphold it) as "the will of the people." These people are unconcerned with the tendency in a democratic society for minority groups to have their rights trampled under the tyranny of the majority. To them, the courts have no place to protect minority interests by overturning a democratically-enacted discriminatory measure.

What's startling is that these same people seem incapable of applying their reasoning, and the California Supreme Court's reasoning today, to other groups.

By their reasoning, how could one object to a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between one white man and one white woman, if it received 52% of the popular vote? By their reasoning, how could one object to a constitutional amendment denying the rights of Libertarians or Greens to speak their political ideas freely, if it received 52% of the popular vote? By their reasoning, how could one object to a constitutional amendment branding Judaism as intolerable heresy and denying Jews their freedom of religion, if it received 52% of the popular vote?

And for that matter, what happens if demographics shift and the majority of today becomes a statistical footnote tomorrow? Try the previous questions again, but replace "white" with "black," "Libertarians or Greens" with "Democrats or Republicans," and "Judaism" with "Mainline Protestant Christianity."

The ruling today in California has left that state's LGBT citizens -- and everyone else who opposes bullshit discrimination -- with no option but to make their appeal to the public again and again until they convince a majority of the electorate to rescind Prop. 8 via a new ballot measure. They've already begun their work. But as others have pointed out before, it's a bit sickening that LGBT people even have to make the case that they deserve the same rights as straight people. Furthermore, I hate to imagine what the Civil Rights Movement would've amounted to if the courts, rather than protecting the equal rights of minorities, had washed their hands of the whole affair and told black people that if they wanted their rights, they'd have to convince a majority of the people to vote in their favor.

There is a bit of good news here, as the Court ruled that the 18,000 or so same-sex marriages that took place between the May 2008 ruling and the November 2008 ballot measure will remain in effect. And with same-sex marriage still legal in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, and Iowa (plus New York, New Jersey, and New Hampshire are all considering bills that would legalize same-sex marriage), I believe the tide is still moving toward equal rights for LGBT people. Proposition 8 and the ruling today are just inevitable bumps in the road.

[Meanwhile, I was going to comment on Obama's choice of Sotomayor to replace Souter on the US Supreme Court... but when you've got Politico out there calling Sotomayor, who has no children, "a Latina single mother," well... I guess I just feel like I don't have the journalistic bona fides to add my two cents, and I should just leave it to the "professionals." BTW, the article has been updated, with the words "single mother" stricken. Politico has not, however, issued a notice of correction or apology for the error.]

Memorial Day

2009-05-25T12:45:00.004-05:00

Just a quick note, while I'm working on a few new posts for this week and watching some very interesting documentaries via Netflix, to say something about Memorial Day:

On Twitter, on Facebook, and on various blogs that I follow, I'm seeing a quite a few posts about honoring fallen U.S. soldiers who lost their lives in war. What I don't understand is that so many of these posts are coming from people who are pro-war... and what's worse, people who are especially supportive of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nevermind the fact that these folks are elevating the value of the life of a U.S. soldier over the life of (1) a U.S. civilian, (2) a foreign soldier, or (3) a foreign civilian -- which is bullshit, because human life is equally valuable regardless of what country you're from or whether you're in the military. If they want to pretend for a day that joining the U.S. military makes your life more important than anyone else's, that's fine... because even in that skewed view of the sanctity of life, it's still nutty to want to send to troops into war and then mourn their deaths; to want to send troops into harm's way and then opine when they suffer harm. It's a bit like insisting that an ice cube be placed outside on a hot, sunny day... then crying when it begins to melt.

From Zach Wamp (R-TN, and 2010 candidate for TN governor) via Twitter: "Memorial Day demonstrates our eternal appreciation for those patriots who gave that "last full measure". Gold Star families sacrificed much."

That's the same Zach Wamp who voted (1) to authorize the invasion of Iraq, (2) to declare the War in Iraq part of the nebulous "War on Terror" with no exit date, (3) not to withdraw troops from Iraq within 90 days (from May 2007), (4) not to investigate impeachment charges against G.W. Bush for bullshitting the country into the Iraq War.

Now, this seems pretty damn obvious to me, but somehow various chickenhawk/Yellow Elephant types don't seem to get it. If you really love the troops so much, if you really are heartbroken by stories of soldiers who die in war, and if you really do want to show your "eternal appreciation"... MAYBE YOU SHOULD STOP VOTING TO SEND THEM TO DIE IN WAR.

The way I feel on Memorial Day is the same way I feel whenever I hear about casualties in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (whether soldier or civilian, whether U.S. or otherwise)... It's a sadness at the pointless loss of human life, that quickly gives in to anger at the politicians who instigated these wars, as well as the zealous pro-war media and the unquestioning citizenry who not only handed hawkish politicians the popular support they needed on a silver platter (and draped in an American flag, no doubt), but also mocked and shouted down any hint of opposition to the senseless march to war.

The Nerve of Those Communists

2009-05-22T19:32:00.002-05:00

From CNN:

Certain remembers how easily his Vietnamese captors justified crossing the line with him. They said American prisoners weren't covered by the Geneva Conventions.

"They said we were not prisoners of war because there was no legal declaration of war," Certain says. "Therefore we were air pirates and they could treat us any way they felt."

In other news, from the same article, Watergate-participant-turned-Bible-salesman Chuck Colson says that torture may occasionally be justifiable "when there is a higher [moral] obligation, such as ignoring a "no trespassing" sign to rescue a drowning man." Well, thanks Chuck. Glad we cleared that up. And if I ever need to know anything else about following the law or making moral judgements, I'll be damned sure to ask you first.

Who gives a fuck if it works?

2009-05-22T16:57:00.005-05:00

Updated below

This doesn't surprise me in the least. I have been saying all along that anyone who supports torture ought to submit to it and re-evaluate their opinion. If you don't know who Mancow is, he's this asshole; a crazy right-wing radio jock who often appears on Fox's much-touted morning show, The Three Stooges. I haven't kept tabs on this guy, but I'm sure he's defended torture at some point. At this point, that's a normal thing to have done for people like him. Unsurprisingly, though, after being tortured for a few seconds, he's not so hot about the whole idea any more.

John Cole:

Not to diminish Mancow’s experience, but if he thought that was torture, think what the real deal must be like. You are snatched out of nowhere, flown across the world, kept awake for days on end in a freezing room with little food, woken every time you fall asleep on your metal bed, thrown against the wall with that lovely procedure known as collaring, slapped, had dogs threatening you, yelled at and beaten, and so on and so forth. That goes on for a couple weeks to soften you up, then you are dragged by multiple burly men and waterboarded repeatedly. You have no dead man’s switch like Hitchens did, you have no “safe” word to stop the process, there are no cameras and friends there to make sure you are alright. These people have been abusing you non-stop for days or weeks, for all you know this is when they finally kill you.

This is exactly on point. The debate at this point has largely centered on waterboarding, primarily because it's so clearly illegal and because the US has prosecuted for it in the past. But there's much more to the torture regime than just that, and it's all torture. It's all unequivocally wrong. None of it should have been done, whether it works or not.

Liberal turned neocon Christopher Hitchens also got waterboarded, and it didn't take him long to conclude that it was awful and torture either. Former POW John McCain and SERE graduate Jesse Ventura both oppose torture as well. Starting to see a pattern here?

We've tortured people who haven't had trials, who have been picked up outside a battlefield and indefinitely detained. We've tortured to obtain evidence against them, and even more sinisterly in order to establish retroactive justification for the Iraq War by "proving" the alleged Iraq/Al Qaeda link that the Cheney Administration so desperately wanted to hear existed. We've risked torturing the innocent by circumventing due process, habeas corpus, and the Geneva Conventions, and we've more than likely done so. We might have even tortured some innocents to death.

I normally write my own close, but I just can't say it better than John Cole already did:

Of course it is torture. I’m sick and tired of having this stupid damned debate.

UPDATE

What do you know? Something tangibly good came of this:

The ThinkProgress article has context for those of you unfamiliar with Hannity's cowardly boast or Olbermann's charitable counter-offer.

Pro-War is not Pro-Family

2009-05-22T16:06:00.005-05:00

I found this picture of my grandfather, a World War II vet, today. On the back, in my grandmother's loopy, wandering cursive, is written:

I love you dear with all my hart an hope you do me to. You don't know how this picture helps me darling to carry on for when I look at you som how it seems to say be brave darling for me

Every politician knows that it is a political gold mine to grandstand about various ways in which they can help middle-class families. To me, the most obvious thing it seems one could do to help middle-class families is stop fighting wars.

Wars are bipartisan, popular, and thoroughly American. They have been responsible for the deaths of millions of our citizens over the last two centuries and countless more "enemies" abroad. Perhaps the greatest irony is how many wars have been started because some other country dared to kill American citizens. The sinking of the Lusitania, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 come readily to mind. And yet, our response is to send hundreds, thousands, millions to their deaths. I suppose we're, what? asserting our right to sovereignty? I guess it's only ok when Americans die on the orders of our politicians, dammit. After all, this is a democracy. We decide who we kill, maim, and endanger, not some foreigners.

Wars don't keep middle-class families safe; they tear them apart. Our Soldiers -- the culturally belovéd and politically unassailable Troops -- are not in danger because of our Enemies. They are in danger because we involve ourselves in war in the first place. My grandmother was lucky: my grandfather returned from that war, and he's still alive today. Lots of her contemporaries did not receive this luxury. Their boyfriends, husbands, brothers, and sons died following the orders of people they would never see, people who would never fight. They died for people who seemingly never wondered if there was another way. Their deaths were glorified by propaganda and mindless patriotism, even as we decried the Nazis -- the National Socialist German Workers' Party (no faux populism propaganda there) -- for the same things.

Good old American exceptionalism. There's a tried-and-true American value if ever I could point to one.

---

Later this evening, I will begin a 4-part series on annoying, disingenuous tropes that repeatedly crop up in political debates. I will update this post as they come out.

Is CA's Special Election a Failure of Direct Democracy?

2009-05-20T09:15:00.005-05:00

I mentioned in my bio that I'm interested in socialism. You may also hear me from time to time say things like, "We certainly don't have what I would call a real democracy here in the US." With my interest in socialism comes a strong interest in the viability of direct democracy. (I'm not sure I'm at all interested in a form of top-down socialism, but I'll address that in another post, perhaps.) A surprising amount of people are willing to express doubts about the efficacy of direct democracy, even in a strongly and proudly democratic country like the United States. Perhaps the even greater oddity, the arguments against democracy largely retain the same flavor as the arguments that were put forward against the limited form of democracy (i.e., representative democracy) that was adopted in the U.S. and codified by its Constitution in 1791. I believe that the authors of The Federalist Papers responded to some of these points, but I will have to verify this. Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is also a fascinating study on this subject, from the perspective of a visiting French aristocrat in 1831.

I don't have the research compiled to do a post right now about all these arguments specifically, including historical instantiations and specific forms. Instead, I want to briefly and generally discuss the points that are normally raised against direct democracy, specifically as related to the turmoil over California's recent special election. [N.B., for more context on the election, you can see a very good breakdown of the six propositions here, including the full text of each.] I'm not sure that it's fair to characterize Michael Finnegan (the journalist who wrote the L.A. Times article I just linked) as in opposition to direct democracy. The headline of the story is "California voters exercise their power -- and that's the problem", [emphasis added, of course] and the piece is categorized as "Analysis". However, journalists often don't choose their headlines, or at least they sometimes use this as an excuse for inflammatory headlines or even entire bad articles. But we can easily be charitable and give him the benefit of the doubt on that. Throughout the article, though, opposition to the will of the voters keeps coming up again and again. The whole piece is viewed through the lens of this headline. Perhaps these biases have simply ingrained themselves in our culture such that this is the orthodox view and Mr. Finnegan never thinks to question it, but it strikes me as decidedly odd that he never offers any solutions one way or the other.

From here on, I want to examine this piece through a different lens. Let's take a more insidious, perhaps, and definitely less charitable reading. What if Mr. Finnegan is just propping up status quo memes with supposedly "expert" opinion while retaining a charade of neutrality using rhetorical flourish, as journalists often do?

The article begins thus [emphasis mine]:

Californians are well known for periodic voter revolts, but on Tuesday they did more than just lash out at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature over the state's fiscal debacle.

By rejecting five budget measures, Californians also brought into stark relief the fact that they, too, share blame for the political dysfunction that has brought California to the brink of insolvency.

Although Mr. Finnegan is careful to note that the public only shares the blame for this state of affairs, he is quick to throw out some very charged words, like "dysfunction" and "insolvency". This may also be the last time a reader gets any sense that voters just share part of the blame for this situation, since basically the entire remainder of the article chastises voters for their unwise decisions, quoting "expert" after "expert" about why they made their bad decisions or how it could have been prevented.

One of the most common criticisms of direct (otherwise known as real) democracy is what I'll call the "mob rule" objection. I sadly term it thus because of the frequency with which the phrase "mob rule" is actually used to describe this state of affairs. The objection here is basically that the people (the electorate) are too stupid, ignorant, or otherwise unqualified to make decisions for themselves, and thus must consolidate power in Our Good Leaders to make decisions for them. (For a good example of both this argument and a great rebuttal, watch Oregon's late firebrand Sen. Wayne L. Morse defend democracy on a black & white Face the Nation. The clip is from Norman Solomon's excellent documentary War Made Easy.) This is perhaps the most common criticism of democracy, and the easiest refutation of it is simply to point out that the U.S. system worked. This specter was raised countless times when the U.S. Constitution was proposed, and the idea was novel to allow the people some self-governance. And yet, it didn't lead to total anarchy, as many suggested it might. On what basis, then, do we suspect that going the extra step and allowing actual democracy would have the same result? Have we simply misidentified the actual catalyst of the slippery slope, or is it entirely fallacious to begin with?

Mr. Finnegan doesn't seem to think so. Indeed, he quotes a whole host of people who believe that the voters exercising their will is totally devastating to state governance. A CSULA history professor who is quoted at length squeals that voters have "emasculated the Legislature"* through what Finnegan calls their "piecemeal decisions since the 1970s" and "fickle commands". The professor goes on to excoriate the public for just "looking for cheap answers" and "deceiv[ing] themselves constantly." The public, he complains, is "not realistic." Of course, one look at the federal government shows that perhaps it is not just the unruly masses who suffer from these delusions. Our previous president's injudicious use of Executive Orders and signing statements also effectively "emasculated the Legislature." Our insanely complex tax codes and copyright laws are the very definitions of "piecemeal decisions" made over the course of decades. And who would argue that our response to climate change has not been marred by "looking for cheap answers"? Has our government, in borrowing trillions of dollars to finance unsustainable wars in Iraq & Afghanistan via accounting tricks and "supplementary" budgets, never deceived itself or been unrealistic? Well, clearly not. Those are Our Highly Trained and Impeccably Credentialed Leaders we're talking about, not a bunch of DFH's voting willy-nilly at the ballot box without ever considering the long-term consequences of their strokes-of-the-pen. This is why a second history professor, this time from Cal State Fullerton, reminds us that "[Californians] pay the legislators to go to Sacramento and figure these things out."

A second extraordinarily common criticism that is perhaps related to the first is that voters are for some reason unable to fully grasp the policies that govern them. For whatever reason (none is usually given), it is assumed that voters are simply less capable than their elected representatives to see all the facets and consequences of potential legislation. If this is the case (and one could make this argument wrt the above criticism as well), I'm not terribly sure why we're allowed to vote for representatives either. This case is usually not the fault of some inherent flaw in the ignorant masses, but rather a lack of information presented to them. All sorts of people from lobbyists to concerned citizens to lawyers to scientists bombard the offices and meeting chambers at every level of government with information. Some of it is factual, some of it is misleading, and some of it is downright bizarre. No such effort is aimed at voters. Voters often rely on television news (which is becoming increasingly profit-centered and thus driven away from independence and factual presentation and toward sensationalism, bias, and hype), and are bombarded by misleading advertisements. In the clip I referenced above, notice that Sen. Morse mentions (unprovoked) a response to this criticism: "I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you'll give them, and my charge against my government is we're not giving the American people the facts!" [emphasis added] If the voters make "piecemeal" decisions, it is only because the effort to allow them to self-govern and give them complete information on the potential ramifications of their actions has been just that: piecemeal.

Several of Finnegan's sources raise this specter throughout the article. This is nowhere more clear than in the introduction of "veteran Sacramento campaign consultant" John Hein, where Finnegan asserts that "the absence of any master vision by voters appears to be a key flaw in the state's recent history with ballot measures" [emphasis added, as usual]. It's not clear to me what this even means. Could Mr. Finnegan be seriously asserting that individual voters went to the ballot box without any ideas in mind about the type of political landscape they would support? This is almost certainly absurd on its face. All the more incredibly, what seems to be expected here is that the public -- comprised as it is of people with diverse backgrounds, conceptual schemas, and levels of confidence -- should have some over-arching political vision common to all. On this reading, the article presents readers with a false dilemma, with the other prong being the actual statement by Hein:

"They kind of take each issue in a microcosm, rather than relate the decision to prior decisions, or future decisions that they might make," he said. "Voters don't think about the consequences of how one thing fits with another."

Notice that intertwined with this criticism especially, though this is a common feature of almost all the quotes chastising the voters, is the idea that they just don't have any idea what they're doing. Presumably all of these "experts" are registered voters. It's probably even a safe bet that they all voted on the propositions in question. But never once does one of them say that we are to blame for the crisis. It's always they -- the uneducated, visionless fools who approach the ballot box just "looking for cheap answers" and a "free lunch" (though perhaps we can attribute that "free lunch" quote to bias, since disgraced former Gov. Gray Davis was driven out of office by a recall election; he does have some reason to hold a bit of animosity toward the will of the voters).

The remainder of the criticisms in the article are far less common objections, and rightly so, because they are completely bizarre. One truly strange question that Mr. Finnegan subtly raises is the odd idea that voters should somehow repudiate themselves. Perhaps this is akin to the mentality that "everyone must sacrifice" during a downturn, where everyone is read to mean mostly middle-class and working-class families (I have the UAW rollbacks before the GM bailout in mind). Twice in the article Mr. Finnegan wonders aloud that voters "declined to unlock funds that they had voted in better financial times to set aside for special purposes." According to him, those funds were for "favorite causes, among them public schools and transportation projects" [emphasis added]. Oh those silly voters with their pet projects and "favorite causes". You know, the problem with government really is all those special-interest groups, after all. Wait, you thought special interest groups were the ones trying to force their will in spite of the will of the electorate? Surely you jest! Special interest groups are those that try to make their will heard over the clamoring for The Right Way To Govern, which is the closely guarded secret of Our Good Leaders, and this includes the electorate itself! Unlike their rulers, the voters of California obviously don't want to "[free] up money that they set aside years ago for mental-health and children's programs." Clearly they don't understand that it's the Legislators and Governors that know how to Properly spend money, not the voters who originally put the constraints on it. You tell 'em, Mike Finnegan!

Only once in the entire article, incredibly in the 19th paragraph, does Mr. Finnegan point out one of the things that really might be causing the problems at the polls [emphasis... oh, you know]:

Adding to the state's difficulties is the complexity of many ballot measures, no doubt a factor in the defeat of the main budget measures that lawmakers put before voters Tuesday.

I'm not sure why this was even included in the article. After all, it's almost impossible to believe that the measures were overly complex for under-informed voters to make reasonable decisions. Since when is anything produced by lawyers and lawmakers complex or difficult for the average person to read over and thoroughly understand? I can see why this was merely included as an afterthought.

Despite his careful attempts at neutrality throughout the article -- voters "rightly or wrongly" making decisions, "whatever the ups and downs of the proposition system" -- Mr. Finnegan tips his hand in the next to last paragraph, saving this choice quote for last [emphasis added]:

"Whatever the ups and downs of the proposition system, California's voters have seen themselves for a full century as "the arbiters of the future of the state," said social historian D.J. Waldie."

Incredibly, the citizens of a democratic state have come largely to view themselves as "the arbiters of the future of the state". Where did they get that silly idea?

*As a side note, I really hate the use of the word emasculated used in this context. Emasculated means, essentially, made less masculine. It can be used as a synonym for castration. It has also been used in the context of cutting off a male's phallus. In this way, the suggestion is that the source of the legislature's power is in its manhood, whatever that means. One would think that today it wouldn't be insinuated that feminizing a legislative body is a bad thing.

The Skeptic's Dilemma

2009-05-19T15:27:00.003-05:00

There's a brilliant post by Debbie Goddard today on CFI's blog. It highlights a type of experience that is quite common in the life of a practiced skeptic*, and which can be extraordinarily frustrating to deal with. I highly recommend reading the quite humorous post in its entirety.

Debbie is a campus organizer for the Center for Inquiry. Not sure what that is? Well here's their explanation:

The Center for Inquiry is a daring new concept. Although modern world civilization is based upon the achievements of science and technology, until this time there has been no authoritative and credible voice defending the scientific outlook in examining religion, human values, and the borderlands of science. If the naturalistic outlook is to supplant the ancient mythological narratives of the past, it needs a new institution devoted to its articulation and dramatization to the public. The Center for Inquiry is that institution.

Our purpose is to promote and defend reason, science, and freedom of inquiry in all areas of human endeavor. We are a transnational nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that encourages evidence-based inquiry into science, pseudoscience, medicine and health, religion, ethics, secularism, and society. We are not affiliated with, nor do we promote, any political party or political ideology.

Through education, research, publishing, and social services, we seek to present affirmative alternatives based on scientific naturalism. We are also interested in providing rational ethical alternatives to the reigning paranormal and religious systems of belief, and in developing communities where like-minded individuals can meet and share experiences.

At a casual social event, Debbie was asked to describe her work (and more generally, the work of CFI) to a curious party-goer. This usually innocuous question can actually be very charged and loaded when presented to someone who works for any organization representing a demonized minority (like atheists, in this example). Innocent intentions here can lead to some very awkward social moments. But Debbie dutifully began to explain:

So, I start in on the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, CFI in Amherst, the international Centers, campus groups, Office of Public Policy, Jesus Project...

I hold a lot of minority viewpoints, and I've worked for grassroots progressive organizations. I know how uncomfortable and weird it can be to discuss atheism or political activism with someone who might not agree with (or worse, fear, shun, or misunderstand) your position. It's certainly not the kind of thing I'd ideally talk to strangers about at parties, particularly if I'm not sure where they stand or I'm trying to keep the engagement happy and friendly. But fortunately, in this case, Debbie seems to have had good results:

[Debbie's interlocutor]: "Wow, that’s awesome! You’re actually doing important stuff. Religions try to force such crazy ideas on people, but you’re actually working to try to make the world a better place!"
[Debbie Goddard]: *ego inflates a little, but playing it cool* "Yeah, it’s a great place to be, and I work with fantastic people."

Lucky her! However, the story starts to take a slight turn as Debbie's interlocutor above apparently got into a discussion with some other folks about astrology, which she seemed to have a more favorable view of than religion's "crazy ideas". In Debbie's version of the tale, she helpfully (and humorously) provides us with some internal monologue to shed some light on how she was really privately reacting to this situation. I want to excerpt a passage (though, I reiterate, the whole post is worth reading) that highlights what I mean, and then explain why I think this is instructive:

As I’m... trying to figure out how to be a good skeptic without alienating new potential friends I’ve known for all of 45 minutes, more people come into the apartment, which ends the conversation on zodiac signs. But that voice inside my head keeps nagging me:

(Brain: Ask her why she believes in astrology! Ask her why she thinks religion is crazy but is willing to think that her birthdate might have something to do with her breakup with Eric! Ask her what she thinks astrology’s mechanism is! C’mon, just one little question!)
(Me: That’s enough, Brain! I warned you. Now I’m just going to have to put more beer in you.)
(Brain: Phooey. You just wait. You won’t be able to hold back for long. Trust me, I know you too well.)
(Me: What? I can’t hear you over the sound of this beer I’m chugging.)
(Brain: Damn it!)

Being a skeptic, by definition, means questioning beliefs regardless of their status. The chances are extraordinarily high that most people you meet on a daily basis, if you're a rigorous skeptic, have unexamined beliefs that you have analyzed and summarily rejected. Maybe you're skeptical of deities, or a naturalist, or just think there's something funny about all these contradictory claims advanced by various religions. Too bad, because a large majority of Americans (around 85%) claim to be religious at least in some sense, and you'll get -- to be optimistic -- mixed reactions if you are very open about this. Or perhaps, like Debbie, you know that astrology (and homeopathy, and dousing, and tarot reading, and on and on) is pseudoscience and doesn't hold up to empirical testing. What do you say when someone directly confronts you with their obvious belief in these subjects? There's a fine line between being intellectually principled and very socially unsuccessful.**

The problem with these situations is that, to the educated skeptical observer, the assertions in question are usually considered absurd. To someone who knows that astrology is unreliable, a person purporting to successfully make major life decisions based on its prognostications sounds little different than someone asserting that pigs can fly and elephants can swim. (Believe me, polite skeptics won't say so out loud in most cases, but in our minds we're all going, "WHAAAAAT?!")

Just the other day, I stopped by a local farmers' market with my mother, who wanted to buy some canteloupe. She struck up a conversation with the lady tending the market about strawberries, discussing how the crop this year had been effected by all the rain. As we were leaving, the woman from the market called after us, "Yeah, I just don't understand what's going on with these strawberries this year. I mean, God wants us to have 'em or they wouldn't have grown, but what's He doin' sending all this rain?" What does one respond to this? My mother (who is religious, but was nonetheless taken aback by this odd statement) and I exchanged stifled puzzled glances, and I think one of us stammered as politely as we could, "I don't know," before piling in the car to discuss the bizarre experience. Did this woman realize how odd she sounded just then? Perhaps not. Perhaps she hasn't stopped to think how strange this must sound to someone whose beliefs differ from her own, or doesn't care. But I wondered later what she would have thought had I said something in response like, "Indeed! Demeter has been behaving rather oddly this year! Is it possible we, as a society, have displeased her through our lack of offerings?" Or perhaps: "I don't suppose we'll ever know the true extent to which Our Alien Masters effect our crop production, or what their reasons for causing the fluxuations are!"

My point here is that there is immense social difficulty in reacting to people who proffer beliefs that are absurd (or, at the least, puzzling) on their face. Part of this is because our society has grown to carefully insulate private beliefs within a sphere of discourse that makes it effectively taboo to question them. While blatantly disregarding easily observable facts makes one a quick target of ridicule (try telling someone "the sky is green" with a straight face and see if they politely move the conversation along!), disregarding observable but relatively more obscure facts is normally easily excused. In most cases, it's not even excused on the basis of ignorance (i.e., "Oh, this person simply isn't aware of X experiment or Y's work on this phenomenon"), so much as defended on the basis of the inviolable sanctity of private belief.

There are complex issues at work here, and these are issues I'd like to address as The Skeptical Pacifist develops. One problem is the ability to discuss things freely and openly. At least in American culture, this is hardly ever as easy as it might be. That's sad, because free and open discussion of beliefs without prejudice, where possible, is often enriching and helpful. Another is the lack of critical thinking. In my personal opinion, I would say that having beliefs that are unchallengeable and unquestionable in any way is probably a bad idea. Humans are, first and foremost, fallible; we have no business having opinions or interpretations of fact that are set in stone. There's also a tendency in strongly individualist cultures like ours to de-value just how interdependent we are, and how collective our knowledge has become. (It's becoming more so every day.)

Hopefully I'll be discussing each of these things more in detail at a later date.

*Unfortunately for myself and FreZno, it's even more common when you live in the South...

**You may have heard these unfortunate Very Socially Unsuccessful people who toe this line derogatorily referred to as "assholes".

TN school districts deny students access to pro-LGBT org sites, allow access to anti-gay sites

2009-05-19T13:57:00.010-05:00

Students in two Tennessee public school districts (Knox County and Metro Nashville) filed suit against their schools today in an attempt to reverse a discriminatory web-filtering policy that prevents students from accessing the websites of various pro-LGBT organizations.

The policy does not, however, block access to anti-gay websites like the Traditional Values Coalition -- a "grassroots church lobby" who declare that homosexuality is an overreported abnormality, that gay people (all of them, since TVC speaks in generalizations) want the right to marry only as a first step in a covert plan to "destroy[] the concept of marriage altogether" and replace it with polygamy/polyamory, and that we should be frightened of a "homosexual/pedophile link" that extends to an alleged coalition between LGBT activists and NAMBLA -- and People Can Change, an organization which suggests "reparative therapy" as a solution to the problem of homosexual desire, which they assert arises from a unmet need for nonsexual "brotherly love" -- the root cause of which is some form of unresolved childhood longing: "...for a father's affirmation, perhaps. Or a mentor's guidance. A peer group's inclusion. Or our own internal sense of just being 'one of the guys'." (Needless to say, these theories of same-sex attraction are concerned bunk by actual psychologists/psychiatrists. And TVC's claims? Mostly just outright lies and/or deceitfully-misrepresented information.)

From the ACLU case profile:

The ACLU LGBT Project, ACLU First Amendment Working Group, and the ACLU of Tennessee have demanded that two Tennessee public school districts stop illegally preventing students from accessing online information about LGBT issues. Knox County Schools and Metro Nashville Public Schools use web filtering software that blocks student access to the websites of many well-known national LGBT organizations, including PFLAG, GLSEN, and HRC. While access to LGBT-positive websites is prevented by the filtering software, students are still able to reach anti-gay sites, including websites that urge LGBT persons to change their sexual orientation or gender identity through so-called “reparative therapy” or “ex-gay” ministries – a practice denounced as dangerous and harmful to young people by such groups as the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

I would argue that there's a problem with a blanket denial of access to any content related to matters of sexual orientation. So, if the schools started blocking the anti-gay sites, I think the policy blocking access to sites like PFLAG and GLSEN would still be unacceptable. However, the fact that pro-gay sites are blocked and anti-gay sites are not spells out the school districts' biases pretty clearly. What's even worse is that, as Knoxville plaintiff Bryanna Shelton points out in a webcam interview you can see on the ACLU case profile site, among the sites blocked are those which provide students with information on how to start a "gay-straight alliance" at their schools.

The school districts' policies make their intent obvious. They don't want students to be able to learn that homosexuality is not a disease, or that LGBT people are fully human, or that you don't have to gay-bash to prove your heterosexuality, or that straight people can (and should) advocate for gay rights just as zealously as LGBT people do. Because ultimately this isn't a "gay issue." It's a human rights issue.

Rumsfeld used the Bible to sell war to GWB? Here's how he should've done it...

2009-05-18T12:54:00.006-05:00

For my first post, I've decided to live up to the blog's name and go with a topic that touches on both Skepticism and Pacifism.

GQ has posted a rather disturbing feature on their website (which I stumbled upon via Pharyngula and a Frank Rich Op-Ed in the New York Times). It seems that Robert Draper has found the coversheets from eleven Worldwide Intelligence Updates, documents prepared for the President and others in 2003 by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Each of these coversheets prominently features a passage from the Bible, accompanied by wartime imagery, designed to sell the war effort to George W. Bush by appealing to his religious convictions.

Draper and Rich have noted the potential threat to national security inherent in producing such documents: when they inevitably leak, they can easily serve as further evidence that the United States is waging a religiously-motivated Crusade against Islam. Bush's GOP, of course, has already sent plenty of mixed signals on that front -- Bush's 16 September 2001 "crusade" gaffe, his later reassurances that the War on Terror was no War on Islam, the party's frequent use of the "Islamofascist" portmanteau to describe the enemy, etc. Maybe this all just feeds back into their apparent modus operandi: agitate militant Muslims until they launch violent attacks against our troops in the Middle East, then cite such attacks as justification for past and future agitation.

But what appeals to my personal interests even more is Rumsfeld's selection of Bible verses. Dwindling in Unbelief has a handy post with each coversheet (unfettered by the Flash bells and whistles in the GQ feature) and links to the passages in the Skeptic's Annotated Bible. My three favorites are:

1. "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? [...] Here I am, Lord. Send me!" Isaiah 6:8; it smacks of irony coming from an administration of chickenhawks.

2. "Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand." Ephesians 6:13; apparently this was the administration's official alternative to flak jackets, AND...

3. "It is God's will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men." 1 Peter 2:15, accompanied by a picture of Saddam Hussein giving a televised address; "doing good" here was interpreted by God's envoy to the White House as "bombing the shit out of Iraq."

Now, you've surely heard the caution against criticizing a course of action if you can't offer a better alternative, right? In that spirit, I've compiled a list of passages that I think would be better suited to selling a preemptive war against a country that posed no threat to our security. Enjoy THE SKEPTICAL PACIFIST'S TOP TEN LIST OF BIBLE PASSAGES RUMSFELD SHOULD'VE USED TO SELL THE IRAQ WAR TO GEORGE W. BUSH:

10. "To me belongeth vengeance and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste." Deuteronomy 32:35. See? Anyone who claims that we shouldn't have given in to our vengeful post-9/11 bloodlust by bombing Afghanistan, and later Iraq (coming soon to Pakistan and Iran?), doesn't understand that vengeance is among the godly virtues.

9. "Behold, the days come, that I will cut off thine arm, and the arm of thy father's house, and [...] consume thine eyes, and to grieve thine heart: and all the increase of thine house shall die in the flower of their age. And this shall be a sign unto thee, that shall come upon thy two sons [...] in one day they shall die both of them." 1 Samuel 2:31-34. God does not, as they say, "fuck around." If you piss Him off, He will cut off your arm, eat your eyes, make you sad, and kill your sons and grandfathers. God's vengeance is way worse than, say, waterboarding... which is totally not torture... but even if it is, we had to do it... because it's effective... because it's torture... no, wait, scratch that last part...

8. "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him." John 3:36. Even in the New Testament, God makes his petty sectarian favoritisms very clear. And all you have to do to realize that Christians are God's favorite True Believers is read the Christian scriptures! Isn't it all so obvious? And anyone who disagrees gets the wrath of God. Or, as Bill Hicks put it, "Eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love. That's the message... Believe or die. Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options!"

7. "So the LORD sent pestilence upon Israel: and there fell of Israel seventy thousand men." 1 Chronicles 21:14. Seriously, guys, don't piss God off. He supports the use of biological warfare on a large scale. (Though, to be fair, 70,000 is still less than the Iraq Body Count Project's estimate of the violent civilian deaths from March 2003 to February 2009 as a result of the Iraq War. That number is somewhere between 91,059 and 99,431.)

6. "And they warred against the Midianites, as the LORD commanded Moses; and they slew all the males [...] And the children of Israel took all the women Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods. And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire. And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and of beasts." Numbers 31:7-11. See, now, this is how you wage war. None of that pussy-footing, Geneva Convention bullshit. Kill all the adult males, burn cities to the ground, take all the women and children as slaves, and take all their property as spoils of war. That's how REAL MEN fight wars. We need to update our military's field manuals.

5. "And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses [...] And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host [...] And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? [...] Now therefore kill ever male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." Numbers 31:12-18. Okay, scratch that. Taking all women and children as slaves? That's for pussies, too. Only female virgins should be left alive. Moses was such a righteous ass-kicker.

4. "When thy Lord inspired the angels, saying: I am with you. So make those who believe stand firm. I will throw fear into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Then smite the necks and smite of them each finger. That is because they opposed God [...] God is severe in punishment. That is the award, so taste it, and know that for disbelievers is the torment of the Fire." Surah 8:12-14. God will smite our heathen enemies and make them cowardly so we can kill them. Then, they'll burn for all eternity. Once again, God is undoubtedly on the side of American Christians, and He can't wait to crush everyone else. Now, if only I could figure out why this particular passage refers to God as "Allah," and why it's placed in its own separate book labeled "Quran"...

3. "Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it." Malachi 2:3. Proof that God (the speaker in this passage) fully endorses fecal-based enhanced interrogation techniques.

2. "But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also... And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise." Luke 6:27-31. Wait, wait, wait. Who let all this hippie-dippie, peaceful, nonviolent, golden rule talk in here? Where's the fire and brimstone? And who the hell is this "Jesus" fellow?!

1. "And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness." 2 Thessalonians 2:11-12. Apparently the GOP really *does* have God's support... at least so far as the Iraq War propaganda campaign is concerned!

Yellow Dog Democrats, Yellow Elephant Republicans?

2009-05-18T08:36:00.003-05:00

I've thought quite a bit about what I wanted to write the debut post on, and I went with what was sort of my original instinct: Operation Yellow Elephant. If for no other reason, this allows me to spend my first few minutes on the new blog talking about Gen. JC Christian, whose blog is an absolute must-read if you're into irreverant humor.

The General launched OYE back in 2005, apparently inspired by a post on Steve Gilliard's blog. In this post, two facts are pointed out that became the basis for OYE (emphasis mine):

We have a volunteer army with fewer and fewer volunteers, and people reenlisting only to save their friends. There is a time limit to their ability to be in combat. They cannot serve forever. They will have to be replaced. And fewer and fewer are willing to replace them,

[...]

Therefore, it is time to stop calling for more troops, or the US to make Iraq safe. We cannot do this and even Americans are refusing to join the fight. It is time to look at your actions and realize, that despite your ideals, you oppose continuing this war. In practical terms, you have decided that this war is not worth your life or anyone you know. And million of Americans have joined you in this decision.

Of course, the American military is all volunteers; there is no draft (right now). What's more, in 2005, there were lots of headlines talking about a so-called recruiting crisis. The General proposed OYE as the solution to the military's woes. From OYE's Tactics, Techniques, & Procedures:

Here's how Operation Yellow Elephant works:

We invite all real Americans concerned about the future of our nation in fighting and Winning the Global War on Terrorism to join Operation Yellow Elephant. If you encounter someone apparently eligible to serve (healthy heterosexuals, especially men, 41 and under) who supports the war, please encourage him to consider volunteering for military service. Please take the initiative and Ask The Question and say, "Be A Man! Enlist!"

Ask those not eligible to serve who support the war to encourage their relatives and friends, their circles of influence, to consider volunteering. You don't have to tell us anything or even give us credit, though both are welcome. America comes first!

Now, clearly, like most of what JC Christian does, this site is steeped in satire (pay attention, conservatives!). However, I wanted to take a somewhat serious look at the idea being proposed here. I think the suggestion to ask war supporters whether or not they have volunteered in the military is brilliant. It would be very revealing to separate the intellectually honest war supporters from mere yellow elephants and chickenhawks (click through for a definition of these terms, if you aren't sure how they're being used). However, since my blogging persona doesn't depend on faux-conservatism and flag-waving, I'm going to stop a little short of OYE's position: I would never recommend that anyone join the military. [I plan on a later post elaborating my reasons. I'll leave it hanging for now.]

I tend to look at the OYE position as a great starting point for a discussion. The tradition of pointing out the logical implications of people's beliefs (particularly the ones they're not aware of) dates all the way back to Socrates. What can a war supporter say to the Yellow Elephant objection (or Chickenhawk objection, dependent upon age, sexual orientation, health, etc.)? If you are not willing to fight the war, then you clearly do not support the war except on paper, and that isn't very much support.

Many of the problems with the military surround the fact that the Pentagon and the Washington Hawks have masterfully capitalized on dehumanization. The main way to dehumanize suffering is to put distance between the actors. The further the inflictor of suffering is from the recipient, the less moral repugnance or cognitive dissonance the inflictor is likely to feel (h/t Stanley Milgram). The Pentagon naturally realizes this, hence their growing reliance on unmanned drone attacks (remote-controlled, of course), research into robotic fighting machines, and air strikes. All of these things serve to separate the killer from his victims, thus reducing his moral sensitivity. This same dehumanization has also been partly accomplished by the sorts of wars we have fought since WWII. By engaging remote countries with very foreign populations (because boy, we Americans sure love foreigners), we appeal to an "Us vs. Them" mentality which diminishes our ability to sympathize with their suffering. This also enables the armchair war supporter (yellow elephants & chickenhawks), allowing them to voice their anti-Them, anti-Other vitriol without lifting a finger to embolden the so-called war effort. Add into this volatile mixture a spate of marketing campaigns, media cheerleading, and political grand-standing designed to elevate The Troops to a sacred level in the discourse, and you end up with a domestic populace primed to grease the wheels of history's biggest war machine.

It seems to me that the best (realistic, viable grassroots) way to resist the American War Machine would be first and foremost to focus on disengaging the populace from this mindset. We certainly don't have what I would call a real democracy here in the US, but our nominally people-powered system does occasionally respond to sufficient public pressure. As much control as they might have, Washington Elites still rightly fear public backlash, or blowback, or whatever the hell they call it these days in the Village. A largescale disengagement of support for the military would be catastrophic to the Empire, and there's probably not much they can do about it, considering even Bush and Rummy feared reinstating the draft. Pointing out the inconsistency in yellow elephant/chickenhawk war support might be a great first step toward this sort of resistance and disengagement, assuming it was done in a meaningful way.

Remember when you're talking to people of opposing views that they're people, and they naturally consider themselves rational. As far removed from your own as their beliefs might be, and as insane as you might consider them, they pretty likely feel that they're justified in them even if they haven't thought much (or at all) about them, and they certainly won't take kindly to accusations that they're stupid for being the way they are. Although some people are truly beyond help, a genuine discussion on this front is badly needed. I don't recommend the implicitly hostile approach put forward by the satirical OYE. Engage your war-supporting or indifferent friends on the subject in a peaceful way; ask them why they support a war they are unwilling to fight. I am willing to bet very few of them won't have some sort of evasive answer to this. In other words, don't expect a lot of bold claims about sending less worthy individuals to die; expect instead a lot of cognitive distortion and hoop-jumping.

The glaring hole in all this is when one inevitably encounters a veteran or volunteer. The comments section of OYE's main pages are full of people proudly trumpeting their military service, either to openly defy the site because it offends them, or just to bolster what they perceive to be their own credentials in disagreeing with its points. As someone who resists the military, I also naturally resist the sanctification of soldiers [which I will also address in a later post on the value of life]. I encourage anyone engaged in these sorts of issues not to allow soldiers to pretend that their lives, their love of country, their beliefs, or anything else for that matter is inherently more valuable because they joined the Armed Forces. By doing so, they have made a public commitment in support of the goals of the American Establishment and its hegemonic string-pullers. Like any belief, this can be questioned, and should be, vigorously. Ask your friends in the Services why they joined: do they honestly support the goals of the war, as they understand them? Is their understanding robust and factually correct? Do they seem to have other, more selfish motivations: capitalizing on military benefits (like free education), desire to have a violent outlet, etc.? Any or all of these questions may lead down legitimate avenues for questioning military service.

We are hurtling headlong into a severe recession, probably a depression, with the looming fear of massive debt caused in no small part by GWB's ludicrously high war spending. And yet, Good Guy Obama is pushing us into a position where we our already-thinly-stretched military may face four simultaneous wars. Think about that. Troops in Iraq aren't really leaving; they're just being re-classified; meanwhile, Obama is busy expanding the GWOT in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even perversely rhetorically blending the two countries together as if they are inseparable (see "AfPak", "porous border", etc.); even with all this, there is pressure in the Beltway to ratchet up our aggressiveness toward Iran, lest Israel launch a pre-emptive strike. And we never miss a chance to back Israel.

What America does affects all of us, and its our responsibility as citizens of a democracy to be engaged and to vigorously question what is being done in our names. It's time we stoped marginalizing resistance to the war. The most important thing in a democracy is that the people have control, and the military has far too long been a symptom of runaway political power in Washington. Most of our overseas engagements (contingency operations?) are done without full knowledge of the American people, often completely in secret. There is substantial pressure and domestic propaganda to conform to any administration view of war, and very little incentive to be clear and up front about the real goals of it. Entire elections are won or lost on the mythical idea of "Supporting The Troops". We've got to start really, honestly tackling some of these questions if we ever want this madness to stop.

Welcome & Overview

2009-05-10T23:08:00.003-05:00

Welcome to the Skeptical Pacifist!

What you're looking at right now is the four walls and a roof over what will eventually house a new blog, so feel free to look around and bear with us as we move in all the furniture and get the plumbing hooked up. This blog is a joint collaboration between two University of Tennessee philosophy grads, palintropos and FreZno.

Our intent is to publish analysis, opinion, and commentary with a focus on US politics and related news. Moreover, we want to focus on tackling these issues with an intentional emphasis on the skeptical, humanist, and pacifist points of view. Even in the liberal blogosphere, these viewpoints can be somewhat underrepresented, particularly so in the case of pacifism. I plan to address that in one of my early posts. This emphasis is hopefully what will allow us to stand out and contribute something useful to the debate. We're well aware of the enormous volume of content on the net, and the need to provide something that people actually want to consume. Hopefully, we'll be able to create something that is not only highly readable, but ultimately fairly useful. Perhaps someday TSP will be an indispensable part of your blogroll or better yet, a recognized and distinct part of the progressive sphere -- we definitely hope so!

Our content won't be limited to what I said above, by any means. After all, we are both philosophers, so at the very least you can expect some posts that are just general observations. I, for instance, plan to write a few posts early on concerning pacifism and skepticism in general, and specifically how they (will) relate to this blog. Two of the early posts I'm planning are going to be called "Pacifism, Atheism, Vegetarianism" and "Pacifism and Idealism as Essentially Human Behavior". (I will update this post with links as soon as I publish them.) I hear that FreZno has some ideas kicking around about a series critiquing some of the points in Zeitgeist. If you stick around long enough, you might even hear more about his band, Ten56.

Meanwhile, as I said, I encourage you to look around. If you're interested in what we're doing, get involved early. We're both on Facebook (me, FreZno), and you can use the link on the side to follow us on the Twitterz. If you're curious enough to want to watch the house get built, then go ahead and sign up for our RSS feed now. You'll probably see us putting up our static pages soon, including a resources page with some useful links; and since everything created on Blogger is essentially just a post, the feed should pick it all up and allow you to watch it as it happens. Otherwise, sit tight: it shouldn't be too long before we'll be publishing content at a hopefully fairly regular pace. I'll be sure to do another meta to keep everyone up to speed on our progress, and let everyone know what to expect (and more importantly, when the RSS feed will actually get interesting to people not interested in watching the site go up).

Thanks for stopping by, and keep half an eye here over the next week. Things are developing fast!

Report Errors

2000-01-01T00:05:00.000-06:00

Please comment here if you find any of the following:

Broken or misdirected links

Spelling or typographical errors

Minor factual errors in old posts or on general site*

Other miscellaneous problems I didn't have the foresight to list

Thanks! : )

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* If you do come across something fairly major relevant to a new article, please use the comment thread of that particular post to address it!

What on earth is a palintropos?

2000-01-01T00:04:00.002-06:00

Technically Pronounced: pahl-EEN-trah-pahs

Americanly Pronounced: Pal-in-TROH-pohs

The word palintropos -- παλιντροπος -- is a Greek word that I've seen variously translated as "backward-turning", "a turning-back structure", and "of opposite tension". I first stumbled across it in a footnote in Curd & McKirahan's Presocratics Reader, reading through the fragments of Heraclitus.

Heraclitus (who is depicted in my avatar) is a mysterious and quite interesting figure from early philosophy. Heraclitus was a contemporary of such famous figures as Pythagoras, Hecataeus, and Xenophanes, and he has been called "the Dark Philosopher" and "the Riddler". He is reported to have written one book, but unfortunately it has not survived. All that remains of his writing are several fragments (.pdf) either quoted or paraphrased by other sources, some of whom had read his book and some of whom had not. Precious little is known about Heraclitus' book or indeed the philosopher himself, and over the years there's been a lot of interesting speculation about the nature of his beliefs, his intentions, and the structure and content of his book.

From the SEP article linked above:

Heraclitus made every effort to break out of the mold of contemporary thought. Although he was influenced in a number of ways by the thought and language of his predecessors, including the epic poets Homer and Hesiod, the poet and philosopher Xenophanes, the historian and antiquarian Hecataeus, the religious guru Pythagoras, the sage Bias of Priene, the poet Archilochus, and the Milesian philosophers, he criticized most of them either explicitly or implicitly, and struck out on his own path. He rejected polumathiê [polymathy] or information-gathering on the grounds that it “does not teach understanding” (B40). He treated the epic poets as fools and called Pythagoras a fraud.

In a very real sense, Heraclitus was way ahead of his time. Although he does give a bit of discourse on cosmology and theology (the traditional playing field of the limited amount of philosophy that had been done up to that point), he was very concerned with humanity itself, and he seemed to think he had stumbled upon a profound truth about the nature of reality which most of us could not comprehend, even if he told us what it is. To a modern reader, Heraclitus might almost read like a postmodernist, both in the way he deliberately manipulates language to layer meaning and especially in the way he revels in contradictions. Arguably his most famous quote, and consequently the one we have the most fragments of, is thus:

You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are flowing in upon you. (Fragment 12; from Arius Didymus from Eusebius)

Heraclitus frequently used simple but compelling examples like this, drawing upon common mundane experience to illustrate profound points about the nature of the world. It is from one of these very beautiful examples that I extracted the word palintropos:

They do not understand how, though at variance with itself, it agrees with itself. It is a backward-turning [i.e., palintropos] attunement like that of the bow and lyre. (Fragment 51; from Hippolytus' Refutation of All Heresies, IX, 9, 2.)

The imagery here is undoubtedly powerful, and it serves to underscore one of Heraclitus' main points about the way the world (nature, φυσις) works. Consider, for a somewhat updated example of the same phenomenon, the vibrations occurring when a violin is played with a bow. The strings of the bow are being dragged perpendicularly across the very different strings of the instrument; and yet, with the strings properly tightened and the lengths properly measured, aesthetically pleasing musical sounds result. This beauty, resulting from what -- all things considered separately -- seems would be chaos, is exactly the sort of thing Heraclitus meant to point out.

Meet palintropos

2000-01-01T00:03:00.002-06:00

Curious where the name came from? Explanation here.

Well, I guess it's my turn. Like FreZno, I'm a lifelong Tennessean who's basically not representative of anything about this state. I have long hair, all my teeth, and no Southern accent; I'm an extremely liberal civil libertarian pacifist with an interest in socialism (I like what Chomsky describes as "libertarian anarchism"), and I don't believe in God, not even a little; I don't own a dog, and I aspire to someday live in DC and maybe work for one of the many fantastic NPOs there, like the ACLU, CREW, or even CAP. I spent a year in grad school at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where I earned a GDip (graduate diploma) in philosophy. I am currently hoping to be in law school somewhere by Fall '10 or '11.

I've had the idea to start a blog for quite some time, but recently everything just started falling into place. I have the niche, the co-contributor, and the time to do it. As I said in the very first post here, I really hope that this will become something useful to people. I realize that's probably a lot to hope for, but stranger things have happened! But hey, I'll just keep on tweeting, blogging, and researching, and we'll see where it goes...

Meet FreZno

2000-01-01T00:02:00.002-06:00

I always feel a bit silly writing these sorts of introductions. But I suppose it must be done...

I was born in Alabama; approximately 48 hours later I left the state, never to return. (Okay, so, that's not quite true. I couldn't resist the dramatic turn of phrase, though. I've since made visits to Alabama... but it's typically an unpleasant experience.) I've lived in Tennessee my entire life. I realize that's nothing to be proud of, and believe me, I'm not. But I still say it's better than most of the South. (Alabama, Mississippi, et al... I'm looking at you.)

Like Kevin, I've got a B.A. in philosophy. I spent about a year and a quarter in law school before deciding that the legal profession just isn't cut out for me. That, and I can't stand most lawyers. I've got future grad school plans in mind, but they've been put on hold indefinitely.

In early 2009 I returned to my alma mater, where two members of the band I'd just joined, Ten56, currently reside. It should be fairly obvious, but I still feel the need to point out that playing bass guitar in a rock band is a significantly more pleasant lifestyle than slaving away in law school. I have a much sunnier disposition these days.

But back to philosophy... My primary interests are in logic and ethics. (Sorry to disappoint any metaphysics-enthusiasts out there in the interwebs.) This probably goes far to explain my eagerness to work with Kevin on this Skeptical Pacifist project. I've seen my free-thinking ways and my anti-war views marginalized since high school; believe me, opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was not a popular sentiment amongst my classmates. Exposure to academia, politics, and the blogosphere (oh, how I loathe that term) has shown that my high school experience was not an outlier, as compared to soicety at large. Skepticism is not widely held to be the grand virtue that it is, and pacifism is so often mocked as nothing more than a weak intellectual's justification for cowardice.

But wouldn't it be nifty if this blog could contribute, in some small way, to reversing those trends?

About TSP

2000-01-01T00:01:00.001-06:00

What is the Skeptical Pacifist?

In the early part of 2009, I (that is, Kevin, a.k.a. palintropos) had been considering starting a blog for quite a while, but for various reasons just hadn't done it. Finally, in May, I decided to give it a go. I'm kind of a political junkie and I read tons of news everyday, so I figured that would be a good place to start as far as content. As the idea evolved, I decided it might be good to find a co-contributor, both to diversify the content and to keep me motivated to post regularly. I looked to a friend and fellow philosophy grad who was still living in the area, and sure enough, he eagerly agreed. That, of course, is Adam -- a.k.a. FreZno -- who is the other regular contributor here. From the beginning, we both knew that we would need to put something out there worth reading if we wanted people to, you know, read it. So, we settled on making ourselves unique by focusing on current issues through the lens of pacifism, since pacifists are such a tiny minority of people and their views are often underrepresented. Since we're both philosophers, and therefore practiced skeptics, we thought we'd throw a bit of that in from time to time as well. The name of the blog is actually taken from philosopher Cheyney C. Ryan's way of looking at pacifism, which is to say that it's a skeptical position. On this view, one questions the use of violence by simply facing violent decisions with a healthy dose of skepticism. In other words, ask yourself, "is being violent really the best option here?" It's an idea that struck both of us as a particularly good way to think about pacifism, perhaps the best either of us had ever run across. We first learned about it here, thanks to this guy.