"It's a cowardly refusal to answer."

Ok ok. I don't want to bash The New Republic all the time but I just want to point out that we should just stop referring to it as a liberal magazine. It's not. That's not necessarily a bad thing. You can be a resepectable non-ideolgical mag or even a respected neo-con-for-libs mag. But in addition to it's history of hiring, publishing, and fostering plain-old vanilla conservatives, there's this from the co-owner and Editor-in-Chief, Martin Peretz:

HH: Do you want the Democrats to win majorities in the House or the Senate, Martin Peretz?

MP: I'm...I'm appalled by some of the people who would become head of Congressional committees.

HH: Is that a no?

MP: Uh, but I'm also appalled by some of the shenanigans...

HH: But is that...I've got five seconds. Is that a no, Martin Peretz?

MP: It's a cowardly refusal to answer.

HH: (laughing) Okay. We'll carry it on, later. Martin Peretz, thanks.

Ok, when you can't make up your mind over who he wants to win congress, you aren't a liberal. I know that Martin Peretz is a crazy who only gets printed becuase he bought the magazine, but seriously how can people get worked up over the monetary ties of a voluntary advertising ring run by Kos when we have a real-life crazy man officially holding his writers' livelihoods in his hands? How can we not pause before cracking open those pages knowing that the decision of what it means to be "a good liberal" is being made not by a reader ratings system but by a guy who holds some clearly racsist views about Arabs?

Ok, but they do publish some good things in The New Republic. I read it. I'm just saying I'm not going to refer to it as a liberal or left-of-center publication anymore.

The insidious plot to accurately study things

Calling yourself a libertarian doesn't mean much anymore. You could be a respectable conservative who doesn't hate gays, a civil liberties advocate, a torture supporter, a simple corporate whore, a Universal Health-Care supporting liberal partisan, or even – god bless them – a real-life philosophical libertarian weaned on Ayn Rand and the one true faith of every-free-market-is-an-efficient-one-ism.

The really wondrous thing about the last group is how fervently they reject any kind of social responsibility. I read Hit and Run, the libertarian blog because I get to see people like Jacob Sullum display the wonders of purse ideological reasoning:

USA Today reports with alarm that researchers have found cotinine, a nicotine metabolite, in the urine and hair of babies who live with smokers—even when their parents did not smoke in their presence. It seems components of tobacco smoke cling to smokers and to household surfaces and get picked up by babies who come into contact with these intermediaries, a phenomenon "some doctors are calling 'thirdhand' smoke." Even something as seemingly benign as a mother's hug may be passing along deadly toxins and carcinogens!

Not until the second-to-last paragraph do we get this caveat, courtesy of "Brett Singer, a scientist at California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory": "The million-dollar question is: How dangerous is this?...We can't say for sure this is a health hazard."

A person unfamiliar with libertarianism might not predict where this is heading. A regular person might think something like “Ok, babies might be in trouble, we should really study this more” or “Good thing we did this study. I wouldn’t want to accidentally hurt my child or someone elses.” You might think something like that, but apparently, according to Sullum, you’d be missing the point:

Notice where the logic of "thirdhand smoke" leads us. Not only are parents who smoke around their children, or in the same house as their children, or even outside that house, guilty of child abuse; anyone who smokes is potentially guilty as well, since the contaminants may be passed along via residue in a room later occupied by children, physical contact with children, or physical contact with some third party who later interacts with children (although that would be "fourthhand smoke," I guess). To err on the side of caution—which is where we always should err when it comes to the welfare of children, of course—everyone should just stop smoking right now. Then there won't be any need to call the cops.

As liberal I think personal autonomy is great, but certain personal actions do negatively affect others and this leads to moral obligations. Furthermore, if the negative effect is great enough, I think a valid state interest is created and laws should be passed. Obviously we’d prefer not to, but it’s better than the alternative.

To the libertarians at Hit and Run however, the real problem isn’t sick babies. No, it’s involuntary legal obligations. I think that says it all right there.

You know, if someone was actually trying to ban all smoking based on this Sollum would have half a point. Since that’s not the case it’s pretty clear that he’s just kind of crazy.

Rape and incest and abortion, oh my!

For some reason I can't stop musing over the rhetorical strategies common to the abortion debate, in large part because abortion is such an unimportant, narrow-reaching issue, yet it's such a salient political wedge.

My bone to pick today is how frequently rape and incest are used to justify keeping abortion legal. "You don't believe a woman has a right to abort her fetus? Well, what if she was the victim of rape or incest?!" It's the pro-choice camp's analog to the "yo momma" retort. There really isn't a good comeback to that, but nor is it a very good comeback itself.

Very few abortions are prompted by rape and incest. The prevailing estimate attributes about one percent of abortions to R&I.* Because these data are self-reported by the would-be mothers, the number is probably higher; shame and fear most likely cause many victims to keep mum about their true motivations. But even if the number were three or five percent, R&I would still represent a tiny slice of abortions.

So why do pro-choicers cling to rape and incest as their rhetorical side-kick?

First, it's a handy conversation stopper when debating with a pro-lifer. Rape and incest are less funny than cancer and Carrot Top combined, and only a truly dedicated anti-abortion advocate would get tangled in this argumentative net. Pro-choicers can bank on the fact that anyone who thinks that a woman should be forced to give birth to her rapist's baby will look like a raging asshole.

Second, I think it's emotionally and politically difficult for many pro-choicers to admit that they think abortion is okay in any circumstances. No one wants to concede that he thinks it's acceptable for a woman to subject herself to an emotionally scarring and potentially dangerous procedure that also, incidentally, sometimes terminates the existence of a blob of tissue that kinda looks like a real person. Whether or not you think a fetus constitutes a life, it takes a lot of conviction to dismiss abortion as no more serious than trimming a fingernail.

It's uncomfortable to say that, yes, it's better for both the would-be mom and the would-be baby that this pregnancy be ended than that an unwanted child is introduced to this world. It has a socially Darwinian ring to it, even if that's not the pro-choicer's true feelings, and in such an emotionally-charged debate, you can't afford to give your opposition any ground to stand on.

Thus, understandably, pro-choicers fall back on the rape and incest argument, and one percent of abortions are used to justify the other ninety-nine percent.

This debate--any political debate--would progress much more efficiently if everyone argued honestly rather than strategically.

* Coincidentally, about the same proportion of abortions occur in the third trimester as are attributed to R&I. So-called "late-term" abortions are often used by the pro-life camp as an argument against any legally available abortion, so the red-herringry works on both sides.

Making Illinois Feel Better About Its Governor's Name

The biggest story of the Lieberman-Lamont battle? Connecticut's Secretary of State's lousy website. A fun game to play - Which takes longer: finding the election results, or figuring out how to pronounce "Bysiewicz"?

Update: Lamont wins and Lieberman will form a new party with the terrible name "Team Connecticut". Can't say I'm too worked up about his 3rd party run - there's clearly an ego problem, but it's not obvious to me that he doesn't really believe that he's the preferred choice of the voters of Connecticut. Bad for the Democratic party and most brands of liberalism, but it's hard to see why Lieberman can't just say that such problems aren't the unfortunate, but short-term, costs of democracy. We're talking more Ross Perot than Ralph Nader.

Interesting wrinkle - what will Harry Reid do?

Lets bias the press!

I'm so tired of a politically neutral press corps.

It is, first of all, unworkable. We come into this world politically neutral. Soon afterwards, society, friends, parents, teachers, and the rest of the world inflicts a series of unconscious and conscious biases and heuristics onto us. Of course we're politically biased. And those biases inevitably influence article choice, word choice, phrase choice, and selection of facts. As the depiction of the world found in a news article is inevitably incomplete, it will be skewed. Legions of stupid bloggers have found their reason to breathe in the constant cataloging of journalistic deviations from some imagined neutral land.

But who gives a shit? Who cares if a paper or news station is biased? It's a free country. The news can do whatever they like, write whatever they choose. No one has to buy the end result, and increasingly, no one does. I recognize that many people cling to a model of journalism amusingly called 'the fourth estate,' where the news occupies some vital civic function that requires a level of neutrality. Such that the unthinking masses must receive carefully grey news to become proper citizens.

I call bullshit on this. It doesn't matter one bit on a civic level whether or not the news is unbiased. First, it is biased, inevitably. Second, consciously unbiased news is boring, and boring news is easily avoidable. As a tedious assembly of facts in a pyramid, constrained style, it holds no candle to the fiery rhetorical weight and fun wordgames of unconstrained biased writing. Look at England, where London supports masses of fun, free papers with real personality and passion. Somehow, the Polis survives. Third, the current model isn't working. Unbiased papers and stations are fading and dying. If we want any fourth estate at all, we need a new, better model that can compete with the Daily Show and Fox News. Fourth, the idea that consumers will be ill-informed because most get their news from only one source is a fading concept. Younger readers rarely if ever read one outlet -- I probably read nine-ten.

Finally, we can already see what the world will look like once papers and stations feel free to be biased. And it's not bad at all. As in England, we can expect news outlets to divide themselves along a political spectrum, roughly equivalent to the market share of those opinions. As with everything else in american politics, they will cluster around the center, with a few outliers. The resulting outpour of news will be generally the same, with the few disputed political facts sharply visible by the divide between papers and the struggle in the surrounding blogs.

More people will read news because it'll be more interesting -- the Fox News effect. Newspapers will find their true calling by contextualizing the news, repackaging the same facts for consumption. And, most importantly of all, we will no longer waste time and effort critiquing the news for some mythical level of neutrality. The only possible critique will be on the factual correctness of the news, and how it works in the wider political sphere.

Of course, my real goal with all of this is to kill off the horrible, small-minded bloggers that relentlessly look for bias in every headline. But I'll accept a smarter, less hypocritical news sphere as a side bonus.

Awesome

Via The Poor Man:

Relativism Run Amok

Since when did libertarians get so wishy-washy?

Creationists, after all, are just as sure that they are right about Darwin as evolutionists think themselves to be.

Of course, in education, Darwin is just the beginning: Is phonics-based instruction the right or wrong way to teach reading? Should American history be taught in a “traditional” way that focuses on the nation’s great achievements, or is it right to focus on the country’s flaws? What amount of time should students spend studying fine art instead of, say, physics? Is it wrong for a student newspaper to run an article critical of the school’s principal? And so on…

Clearly, when it comes to countless disputes in education, what is truly right or truly wrong is very difficult to know. With that in mind, we must answer the question: Is it better that government impose one idea of what’s right on all children, or that parents be able to seek freely what they think is right for their own kids?

Phonics-based instruction is controversial because the data are mixed. Evolution is controversial because some people reject the fundamental premises of scientific inquiry.

Now, parents can, if they so choose, pull their children out of the public school system and impose upon them any manner of ridiculous notions by sticking them in alternative educational environments. The government, however, has no obligation to subsidize such behavior. This is particularly true in the case of the evolution controversy, as the only reasons to reject evolution are religious.

But really, it's the relativism that's the problem - you just can't take it seriously. I, after all, am just as sure that I am right about school choice as libertarians think themselves to be. Is it better that the government impose one idea of what's right - in this case, school choice - on all children? It cuts both ways.

Well, actually, it doesn't cut at all.

P.S. - Why all these references to Darwin? The debate isn't about Darwin, it's about evolution. Darwin was a man; evolution is a set of ideas. Darwin contributed many of those ideas, but the only reason I can think of to frame the debate as about him is that you don't want to engage the actual ideas.

Maybe my job isn't so bad after all

This started as a comment in response to Paul's post, but it got out of hand, so I'm giving it its own post.

Since when did the government stop giving teachers (albeit loosely-defined) lesson plans? That's what NCLB and district curriculum standards are all about, Charlie Brown. At my job right now I'm the process of proofreading thirty teacher-written essays about leadership, nearly all of which touch upon the conflict between educators' desire to create new and presumably more effective and creative curricula and the government's insistence that students learn a prescribed set of skills. Obviously this conflict originates more from the state's testing requirements than content requirements, but the two are tightly linked. The problem isn't the state's lack of guidance but their failure to provide it in a useful way.

I don't think any one of your three hypotheses is correct. First, it's not the public's (i.e., the state's) obligation or business to create specific curricula or lesson plans. The government isn't famous for being good at specialization. That's what experts, usually in the academic or private sectors, are for. (As the benefactors of public education, however, the state is entitled to create minimum educational requirements akin to AYPs, provided that, unlike AYPs, they are developed by and for educators and not to sate an uninformed public who has been falsely convinced that teachers aren't doing their job; and provided that, also unlike AYPs, the state provides schools the resources necessary to meet those requirements.)

Second, teachers as a group aren't more likely to be want to be independent than the general public. In fact, in my experience, they're more likely to work collaboratively with their colleagues across sites than, for example, computer programmers (probably because lesson plans aren't proprietary [yet], whereas software is). Teachers LOVE to share and collaborate, even if they can be defensive about their time-tested techniques.

Third, along the lines of my first argument, we should be wary of the government dictating lesson plans. When you refer to the push for teachers to be more autonomous, who is doing the pushing? The state? If teachers are feeling alienated, it's probably because of and not in spite of government dictation of education.

I think the lack of widely-utilized lesson plans is more logistical than deliberate. For one, there aren't many national or regional networks of teachers who can work collaboratively to share ideas and classroom tools. Teachers are notoriously slow to adopt new technology, and many haven't picked up on the idea of chat rooms or blogs where they could formally or informally exchange lesson plans.

Further, many teachers probably believe—with good reason—that one teacher's lessons won't directly apply to her classroom. Demographics, geography, rural v. urban setting, gifted v. special needs students ... any of these factors might render a generic lesson plan useless or unadaptable. It's natural to think, "That plan worked for Miss Brown's class, but all her students' parents are upper middle class, and my audience is working class." We lack a wide-spread networking system that connects teachers of similar backgrounds together, so inter-professional commiseration is hard to find.

Lastly, what constitutes good pedagogy is always changing. More research yields more (and presumably better) ideas, so lesson plans (like software) quickly become outdated and appear naïve to future users. Certainly some principles transcend generations, but there's an understandable desire to always have the newest (read: best) information.

If the problem is logistical, so must be the solution. My employer, the National Writing Project, is just one of the aforementioned national networks that acts as a community wherein teachers can exchange ideas and lesson plans. NWP focuses on both providing the technological infrastructure for this exchange and on encouraging teachers to utilize this technology. They connect teachers with similar geographic and demographic constituencies through national and regional programs. Their teachers-teaching-teachers model makes would-be defensive educators receptive to new ideas because their instructors are peers, not distant legislators. But NWP is just one little group, and, while they are federally-funded, the government's NCLB standards make NWP's job as difficult as humanly possible. (Oddly enough, in spite of NWP teachers' tendency to dismiss the value of NCLB, NWP-influenced students do better on state-mandated testing.)

If the NWP model could be replicated on a larger scale, if it could be not just endorsed but facilitated by the state, then indeed the government could remedy this continual reinventing of the wheel. Rather than enlist bumbling and uniformed U.S. senators to do the job, though, the structure and content would have to be generated by teachers themselves. If the state could magically replicate the ease and resourcefulness of a private company—to harness the brilliance of that teacher who sold her lesson plans on teacherspayteachers.com—rather than futz and stall the way governments like to do, we might have a pretty amazing system on our hands.

And yes, for the record, a raging liberal did just suggest that the government try harder to emulate the private sector. Ha!

Death Values

Is it morally okay for me to value one person's life more then another? Especially in International Affairs?

I was brought to this by thinking about the Israel/Lebanon conflict. Most Israel/Palestine/Lebanon talks I've encountered focus on who is RIGHT. And that leads to a wealth of issues -- ancient rights to the land, territorial aggression, long-term considerations like birth rate & availability of weapons, broader regional concerns, the morality of technological imbalance.

I can't sort it all out. Nor can you. That can lead to one of two conclusions, I think. The first is that you base the RIGHTNESS of a conflict on a heuristic of incomplete information and news reports. There's nothing wrong with this, we do it with everything.

But the other is that you don't care about, in close calls, who has the absolute rightness of the situation. I call this the Football Side. Now, I have family in Israel, soon. My Fiancee has an Israeli father. And I have a lot more in common with Israel's western, modern culture then anything in Palestine or Lebanon. So while it's not quite 'My Country, Right or Wrong,' it's certainly 'Israel until undeniably proven otherwise.'

And even should Israel mess up horribly, chances are I'll still see the issue from Israel's side -- as a failure among the political/military elite, rather then an indictment of the country. Just as I would see something similar in America, viz Guantanamo.

This being the case, is it inevitable that I'm valuing Israeli lives more highly then Lebanese lives? And if so, is that morally respectable?

Even if we don't have enough information -- if we ever could! -- to judge the rightness of a situation, we do have body counts. If I'm not bothering to figure out who is right, I can at least count corpses. Regardless, I am on Israel's side. And, honestly, I feel it more strongly when someone is killed in Tiberias, where I've been, then when distant Lebanese are killed. Is this just a normal part of human experience -- no one would question it if I felt more strongly for a friend then a stranger -- or mere cultural prejudice, a demonstration of bigotry based on nothing more then national borders?

Buying the Wheel

From the LA Times:

As a young teacher, Kristen Bowers toiled night after night, struggling to grade tests and come up with innovative teaching materials for her English courses at South Hills High School in West Covina.

"I remember thinking, 'Can somebody just invent something so I can have a life?' " said the 32-year old San Dimas resident.

...

Since posting her guides on TeachersPayTeachers.com, a new, EBay-like website that allows educators to post their work online, Bowers has seen her course materials fly off the site.

Indeed, my impression has always been that teachers have to - or, at least, good teachers will - dedicate altogether too much time to making sure they've got good plans for the next day's lessons. And while my experience is also that teachers tend to like to control their own curriculum - there are a lot of Type A personalities in the field of education - there seems to be an enormous potential for increased efficiency here.

I've always found it totally appalling to see teachers designing curriculum from scratch, since the implication of that activity must be that either 1) in decades and decades of teaching, really good curriculum has yet to be developed for a particular purpose or 2) there's really good curriculum out there, but teachers don't know how to acquire it. I mean, sure, teachers will always want an element of flexibility - but are we really so hard-pressed for educational resources that we often have to start from the ground floor?

This being a political site, my political question is this: is the state of affairs that this new online store for lesson plans aims to rectify the result of public failure to devote adequate resources to supporting teachers, or is it that teachers, as a rule, just prefer to make up their own lesson plans? Or, a third option I can think of - is a lack of widely utilized lesson plans an unintended consequence of pushes for increased teacher autonomy? Are we just too wary of the government getting involved in our classrooms?

weird formatting

I'm hosting all the formatting files for Bajillion on my company's site. That site just went down for a little while so the site will look crappy till it comes back up.

Update: Fixed.

Public Financing for California

Most of the stuff we talk about here at Bajillion has to do with far-away political issues and races we have no say in. That's why I'm happy to find a local issue I can get very excited about: Public financing for California elections. Kevin Drum links to a LA Times article on it's progress:

CLEAN MONEY...There was some good news for California Democrats today:

Defying some of his strongest supporters in the race for governor, state Treasurer Phil Angelides on Thursday threw his support behind a November initiative that would use taxpayer money to fund campaigns and would markedly restrict political donations to candidates.

....Big corporate donors and major unions — such as the California Teachers Assn., one of Angelides' biggest backers — oppose the campaign finance overhaul.

....But [Angelides] characterized Proposition 89 as nothing less than protecting democracy and creating a system "where it's not how much money you can raise, but the power of your ideas."

"It has become a dialing-for-dollars democracy, with the unjust influence of the special interests silencing the voices of Californians," Angelides said at a rally at the nurses union headquarters in Oakland.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, unsurprisingly, opposes the measure. Too European, he says. Plus it raises taxes by 0.2%.

One of liberals' greatest weakness has been a the corruption and stagnation of state Democratic parties. For lack of innovation California really does stand out. Passing this prop would change the playing field in a way that would give regular citizens a greater voice and hopefully will lead to fresh-blood in the local Democratic party.

I don't where I have to go to volunteerer for this but wherever it is I'm going to find out.

On Forming Coalitions

Aaron wrote something in the Plan B thread that really got me thinking:

...isn't the abortion debate a really weird proxy for all sorts of more fundamental debates, about the prevalence of sex ed and policy to deal with unwanted children, for instance?

Indeed it is. Here are a couple possible explanations:

1. The anti-abortion movement is a diverse coalition of groups. Large subsets may have homogenous views on the “prevalence of sex ed” or “policy to deal with unwanted children” but they have decided to focus on their common goal first.
2. The anti-abortion movement really isn’t all that diverse. They actually do push for those other issues, but they get the most attention for abortion.
3. The anti-abortion movement isn’t diverse and they aren’t really pushing hard for those other things because it’ll upset the conservative political coalition.

I think I put my money on a combination of 2 and 3 but I think it would be clearer if we threw in auxiliary issues like “opposition to birth control” and “a woman’s place in society”. I’ve never had a political conversation with a staunch pro-life person that didn’t devolve into other much wackier issues like that. But while the rest of the Republican coalition seems comfortable working with people who want to stop abortions and may even share a shallow commitment to the pro-life cause, they probably don’t feel the same way about those other issues.

I guess what I’m saying is that “shallow” support is important to an interest group. Or failing that, an interest group at least needs to be “respectable”. If it isn’t it won’t be able to form coalitions and it will find itself shut out from power. Example: The number of people who actively oppose building a wind-farm of Nantucket Sound is probably smaller than the number of Neo-Nazis in this country. But one is a respectable position (even if I happen to disagree) the other is not. I’ll happily accept and work with an anti-Wind-Farmer Democrat but I wouldn’t ever attend the same meetings as a Neo-Nazi or work with one for a common goal*.

That’s really I think one of the key ways in which the battle for “hearts-and-minds” translates into winning elections. Few hard-core supporters ever actually change their minds. The best you can manage is to convince everyone to stop politley ignoring the issue.

*Except maybe ridding the world of alien invaders from outer space… first things first.

In which I (Partially) Agree with PZ Myers

PZ Myers had a post yesterday that I thought took a good point and went too far with it. Plus, my objection ties in very conveniently with something I was trying to express in the comments to this post from Kevin.

Myers wants to "dash some cold water on any sense of triumphalism on the pro-science side" that might result from creationists losing their majority on the Kansas State Board of Education. Myers says:

Elections and courts are stop-gaps. They are ways to temporarily block trends from becoming entrenched in our social institutions, but as I tell everyone, all we have to do is lose one and we're screwed. We are on the losing side as long as our response consists of throwing up more and more sandbags in the face of a rising flood—we need to get to the source of our problems and work there, and if we put all our efforts into these legalisms and desperately close elections, we're being distracted from the work that's really essential.

But then Myers conspicuously fails to describe what, exactly, the "really essential" work is, except to say that

[I]n the long term, the elections don't matter. What counts are the thoughts of 15 year old kids right now, and how their minds are being shaped, and I guarantee you that there are damn few of them who even knew there was a school board election going on. What are they reading? What are they being taught in school? What are their parents telling them, and what will they tell their kids 10-20 years from now? How will they vote when they're franchised in a few years?

My concern here is that when you say that the important thing isn't political victory, but winning over hearts and minds, it's easy to forget that political victories are good ways to win over hearts and minds. After all, how do you convince the 15-year-olds of today to reject bad science in the future if not by teaching them to embrace sound science now? And how do you teach them sound science now? One of the first steps I can think of is to make sure that people who appreciate sound science are the ones making decisions about large-scale education policy.

It's absolutely true, of course, that people's beliefs and convictions influence the way they impact public policy, but the causation works in both directions.

My guess is that there's some tendency to think of politics as somehow inherently cynical or dirty; the worlds of ideas or hands-on intervention are more admirable because they're closer to being "really essential". That's a topic for another post, maybe.

Update: At the Panda's Thumb, Reed Cartwright has an example of what I mean.

You tell me the morning after

The big news in uteruses everywhere is that the FDA is considering approving OTC sale of emergency contraceptives (e.g., Plan B) for 18-year-old women. Amusingly, most media coverage of this story focuses on the suspicious timing of this announcement right before the Senate confirmation hearing of Andrew von Eschenbach as permanent head of the FDA rather than on the controversy surrounding the morning after pill itself. Apparently questioning someone's integrity is more interesting than whether women have the right to prevent zygote implantation without doctor approval. It's a relief not reading to the same predictable pro-life/pro-choice debate every time reproductive choice is a topic in the news.

But why do I find that incessant debate so pointless and boring to begin with? I realized that it's not the content of the controversy that puts me to sleep; in fact, considering the legal relationship between the state, women, and their fetuses is fanscinating. Rather, what bores me to tears about the abortion debate is that the prevailing arguments used on either side are so rhetorically useless.

None of the names assigned by a side's opponents-- pro-abortion, anti-choice, and so on--is actually true, and none of the self-assigned terms--pro-life, pro-choice, and so on--is unique to that side.

Honestly, do "pro-abortion" supporters actually round up women, put them on a shuttle to the nearest Planned Parenthood, and encourage them to get abortions? Do members of the "anti-choice" camp intervene when someone is waffling between a latte and a mocha, insisting that she isn't allowed to choose? Alternately, since when do "pro-lifers" have the monopoly on thinking that death is a bad thing? I'm obligated, of course, to bring up the irony of how the "pro-life" constituency usually also supports war the death penalty, and vice versa.

When pro-choicers accuse their adversaries of being universally sexist and ignorant of basic scientific fact, do they really mean that? More ridiculously, when pro-lifers claim that "abortionists" (as if it were an ideology) are murderers with no regard for human life, have they bothered to look up "murder" first? Why are phrases like "unborn child," which is oxymoronic, even allowed into the debate?

This disregard for semantic accuracy is as effective as calling George W. Bush a terrorist. Yes, we get it; W. is a horrible human being. But he's not literally a terrorist, and calling him one accomplishes nothing.

Making exaggerated claims with overblown or inaccurate terminology clouds the real argument about the legal and ethical grounds that need to be considered when granting women access to abortion. It's much easier, of course, to call Planned Parenthood a Nazi-like death machine than to actually argue about why fetuses should be granted certain legal protections. But it doesn't get us anywhere. I'm more swayed by science and rhetoric than picket signs and name-calling.

Science is especially important when considering drugs like Plan B. Knowing exactly what emergency contraceptives do and being able to clearly identify why your do or do not oppose these medical processes makes arguments on the topic so much more productive and interesting.

This could be my bias as a coathanger-weilding pro-abortionist, but I think the pro-life side has a larger arsenal of meaningless phrases and groundless invective than does the pro-choice side.

Blogging is stupid (but journalism can be stupid too)

Brad Delong writes something which I think speaks to Kevin's post. After listing four examples of journalistic malpractice he writes:

Jay Rosen might say that all four of these--Beinart, Abramowitz, Harris, and Ricks--believe that they are performing in front of an audience rather than participating in a conversation. They believe that they are engaged in a one-to-many one-way transmission of information and misinformation, rather than a many-to-many conversation. Beinart and company know that what they printed was not what Renehan wrote, but don't see that as a point of vulnerability. Harris knows that there were those of us in the spring of 2005 who were disappointed that Gingrich was of no help on Mexico but elated that Gingrich's vaunted advocacy of poorly-drafted balanced-budget amendments was all show and no substance, but doesn't think it poses a problem for his story of Gingrich Ascendant. Ricks sees Washington Post readers at the end of 2003 as having no right to learn then of his judgments then that Paul Wolfowitz was a dangerous fool and that Raymond Odierno's division was losing the war, and no right to complain later that he misinformed them. And Michael Abramowitz--rolling on the floor in hapless fits of laughter is the only sane response one can have to somebody who writes that "perhaps" the "neoconservative cause" has "not been helped" by the fact that the occupation of Iraq has "not gone as smoothly" as "some have predicted."

Am I wrong in seeing a common thread here? In all four cases there seems, to me at least, to be a particular default assumption: each of the four seems to believe that he can misrepresent stuff in ways he finds convenient because nobody who knows about it--not John Renehan; not Washington Post readers in late 2003; not those who worked for, with, and against Gingrich in early 1995; not those who have even a shadow of a clue about Iraq--will be able to answer him with as big a megaphone as he has.

Even if the vast majority of blogging output is as stupid as mine a valuable watch-dog function is being added to public discourse that wasn't there before.

Netroots mind-control

Over at the party line Aaron takes the position that Netroots don't stand for anything supporting his argument with the observation that they aren't single (or multi) issue groups (like the Sierra Club). He also points out that statments about Netroots principals are notoriously vauge, something which even the fence-sitters have to admit (see also this response). Instead of accomplishing certain policy goals then, he posits that net groups like DailyKos and MyDD exist mostly to empower their owners and get them a seat at the political table. This is a bit plausiable but then, why are people so eager to help Kos and MyDD? After all, I certainly want to empower myself and get a seat at the tables of power, but most people don't really care to help me achieve that goal. What do Kos and MyDD offer their membership?

Many detractors claim that Kos earns his large following through Rasputin like powers of propaganda. David brooks explains that Kos "The Keyboard Kingpin, aka Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way". Apparently Kos has some kind of mind-control device hidden in his html. But while simple propaganda can explain why a misguided youth would join Jim Jones, it's not really enough to explain why so many intelligent people appreciate "netroots".

Mark Schmitt doesn't blog much, but whenever he types it pays to listen. Here he provides an explination that doesn't rely on magic mind-control powers:

They aren't looking for the party to be more liberal on traditional dimensions. They'’re looking for it to be more of a party. They want to put issues on the table that don'’t have an interest group behind them - like Lieberman'’s support for the bankruptcy bill -- because they are part of a broader vision. And I think that'’s what blows the mind of the traditional Dems. They can handle a challenge from the left, on predictable, narrow-constituency terms. But where do these other issues come from? These are "“elitist insurgents,"” as Broder puts it - since when do they care about bankruptcy? What if all of a sudden you couldn't count on Democratic women just because you said that right things about choice - what if they started to vote on the whole range of issues that affect women's economic and personal opportunities?

This explains what we are seeing in Conetticut far better than brain-wave manipulation: liberals are tired of being represented by single-issue groups which sell out all the small liberal issues for one or two big ones. And it's no wonder that an Iraq-war supporter like Aaron* would be afraid of something like this: in the world of single-issue advocacy groups a project like the Iraq-war (which has strong proponents amongst a small circle of "liberal" pundits) is a reasonably powerful interest group in the Democratic tent. In the world of liberal voter opinion on the other hand, Iraq-war supporters have just enough adherents to comfortably fit around TNR's conference table.

Now, I don't know if the netroots are going to be successful in this goal or how true to their vision they will stay. God know the movement often seems short on brain-cells and high on emotion and some of their views on political strategy really are dumb. On the other hand liberals need to admit that the single-issue organizations of the past are no longer working. A solution has to be found, even if this isn't it.

*To be fair his position is not entirely clear. I think it currently stands at "There was no right answer to the Iraq question". Certainly he's not willing to asert that invading Iraq was a mistake even in retrospect.

Conservative Nanny Blog

Dean Baker the guy who wrote the Conservative Nanny state (reviewed by me previously) has a new blog at The American Prospect. Check it out.

Compare and Contrast

Before I head back to work tomorrow for the first time since July 7th - if you don't count an I-wouldn't-call-it-working field trip to Boomers - I thought I'd do a little compare-and-contrast between the styles of our own local political character Mayor Newsom and my home state of Illinois's own unfortunately-named Governor Blagojevich.

Today was the official unveiling of SF Connect, Gavin Newsom's expansion of the remarkably popular Homeless Connect program. The idea, very broadly, is to create a system that can encourage voluntarism and then coordinate volunteers to meet particular needs in the city of San Francisco. My thinking on this sort of micro policy is that it's a good way to get little things done at the margin, but doesn't stand much of a chance of creating the sort of sweeping changes Newsom implies it could.

But what really struck me was the controversy - not about the substance of the program, about which there appears to be little, or even about the apparent impropriety of Newsom setting up a non-profit organization to accept private donations essentially without limit. No, the controversial element I liked was this one:

Newsom's director of community development sits on the seven-member board of directors. And Newsom's picture is featured prominently on the SF Connect Web site, which also features a podcast by him.

Kayhan, however, said SF Connect is "apolitical."

"Anytime an elected official tries to do anything innovative or that makes a big splash, it's looked upon as trying to be for his next campaign," he said. "I wouldn't have taken this job if it was driven by a campaign or politics."

One of Newsom's political rivals, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, jokingly called the mayor's volunteer program "SF Re-election Connect."

Funny line...but is there anything to the complaint? My initial reaction was "no" - Newsom's a big feature of the project because he's the mayor, right?

But the whole thing reminded me of a similar controversy in Illinois recently, as Governor Blagojevich seemingly tried to take all of the credit for "open-road tolling" (i.e.: being able to pay tolls with an electronic box in your car instead of stopping at a booth).

Nobody in an oversight position at the Illinois tollway or the governor's office knew about plans to spend nearly a half-million dollars on the big blue signs that advertise Gov. Rod Blagojevich's name to thousands of motorists a day on Chicago-area toll roads, the toll authority's chairman says.

...

The signs, the first of which were erected last year, cost the tollway $15,000 apiece, $480,000 for the total order of 32 signs. They do not provide directions, information about how open-road tolling works or how motorists can subscribe to I-PASS. The signs say in large letters: "Open Road Tolling. Rod R. Blagojevich, Governor."

Now, I know what you're thinking: "How do you pronounce 'Blagojevich'?" (Answer: blah-GOY-ah-vitch) Also, you might be thinking what my dad and I thought when we looked at the signs: "Ha! Look at that! Blagojevich is pretending he invented electronic tolling!" By the same token, though, Mayor Newsom didn't exactly invent volunteering. Newsom's maybe just a little more savvy about getting himself in the spotlight.

So are we supposed to get all in a tizzy about elected officials linking themselves to these sorts of public initiatives? Does it depend on how they do it? Or if they're taking credit for something in a dishonest way? It probably depends on a great many things, but after some hemming and hawing, I think my initial reaction to Newsom's grandstanding holds up pretty well.

Yes, there's something shameless about taking what is really a good idea in its own right and making it about yourself. I think it's important to remember, however, that these ideas we're talking about really are good ones, and it would seem a little perverse to deny our elected officials an incentive to implement good policies. Once Blagojevich gets his name plastered over the tollways in the Chicago area, you had better believe he's got a big incentive to make sure the whole enterprise works.

So I say give the politicians their photo-ops; if they like taking credit for good ideas and solid implementation, maybe we'll get more good ideas and solid implementation.

I was wondering why I find Democratic leadership so obnoxious ...

... and this might be part of the answer.