Man Bites Blog

This post from Megan McArdle reminds me that we have a tendency to believe that there are no trade-offs.  That if we just do the right thing, things will magically work out for the best, and that doing the wrong thing has some other non-anticpated consequences that make it worthwhile.  McArdle’s post deal with the notion that slavery was not economically viable for Southern plantation owners, anyway, so it was doomed to failure.  Some other examples:

• Torture is intrinsically immoral, and besides, it doesn’t work!
• Abortion is the killing of the unborn child, plus it causes emotional and physical problems for the women who procured it.
• Embryonic stem cell research is immoral; besides, stem cells from other sources are so much more promising!
• The invasion of Iraq was unjust; plus, it made us less secure.
• It is a moral imperative to have a diverse work force; plus, it makes good business sense!

We haven’t been promised that doing the right thing will not involve sacrifice.  It sure is nifty when doing the right thing aligns with our material interests, and it sure would be nice if right behavior was immediately rewarded, but it’s not guaranteed.

Why is this a problem?  Well, if we base our argument against abortion on the notion that it damages the women who pocure them, then all it takes is one counter-example of a woman who had an abortion and is doing fine to debunk it.  Plus, some of these claims whittle away at the credibility of the movement.

Second, it leads us to resist paths that do entail sacrifice.  We (convenientyl) see bad material consequences as a sign that we’re doing the wrong thing.

It sure would be nice if doing the right thing always resulted in good consequences, and doing the wrong thing was immediately punished.  Unfortunately, real life isn’t that easy.

I visited Sam’s Club today, and it didn’t seem to have Grand New Party on available for sale.

Note to same-sex marriage advocates — you are winning, and will likely continue to win.  But you would probably be advised to avoid rhetoric like this from Dana Stevens, which I’ve seen more than enough of recently:

 I honestly think that in a matter of years, this kind of image will look to us like the 1963 photographs of George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door as two black students attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama. Good Lord, we’ll say, can you believe it was just a generation ago that people were debating the pros and cons of institutionalized bigotry and publicly protesting the right of two octogenarian women to love each other?

You see, it’s not enough for Stevens and her side to win.  No, her opposition must be banished to the same place in history as George Wallace, the KKK, and Bull Connor.

As I’ve said before, what people fear is being banished into cultural irrelavancy.  People might accept same sex marriages.  What people will have a harder time accepting is that their opposition to it marks them as bigots who are not worthy of a place in the public conversation.

There are perfectly non-bigoted reasons to oppose same sex marraiges.  Marriage is about relationships rather than people.  Keeping marriage reserved for heterosexual couples means offering greater societal support for heterosexual couples than homosexual couples.  Why would we want to do this?   Because heterosexual couples produce and raise children, and homosexual couples do not.

Now, many developments, including no-fault divorce, contraception, and adoption by same sex couples have blurred these lines, perhaps making this rigid definition of marriage no longer operational.  But it doesn’t make those who believe in traditional marriage the modern day equivalent of George Wallace.

Same sex advocates are winning.  If they would like to win more quickly, they should offer their adversaries defeat with honor.  The impulse to punish those they believe have oppressed them is understandable, but will delay victory, and make the fight uglier.

Melissa Hennenberger apparently didn’t realize that defending principles means defending people you don’t like…

But they have the right to sell only what they feel OK about selling, don’t they? What’s more American than that? Then, alas, I glanced at their Web site, which refers to an “abortoholic babe from NARAL” and calls Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, “the Dictator of the Midwest, Guv ‘Slobodan’ Blagojevich … the totalitarian abortoholic Serb reigning in Springfield, but who much rather prefers the shores of Lake Michigan to the boorish ‘fundies’ downstate as the kook left-wing radicals refer to anyone with Christian beliefs. Now, there’s tolerance!” Where? You guys are on your own. (And really, isn’t that how you want it?)

I didn’t realize that the principles in play were dependent on only feel-good rhetoric coming from those to be defended.  Somebody better tell those fighting for the rights of the Guantanamo Bay inmates.  I’m sure they’ve uttered some offensive things.  Guess they’re on their own as well.

Sometimes I wonder if columnists actually write their columns or if they have some sort of script that responds to news items with certain keywords with a pre-ordained response.

For example, this column leads me to the conclusion that Leonard Pitts has a script set up so that if a story features teenage pregnancy, it triggers a column blaming the Bush Administrations’ abstinence-only sex education policies.

In it, Pitts examines the incident in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and  lays blame at the feet of President Bush.

Now, for us simple folk, this would seem strange.  The story in Gloucester is about girls taking a vow and intentionally becoming pregnant.  The problem was not lack of knowledge or access to contraceptives, but that they sought out to become pregnant.

So how do we get there?  With the mother (no pun intended) of “comes at a time” sentences:

The Gloucester story unfolds in the context of troubling recent news about teen sexuality.

Indeed, if only this story unfolded in the context of encouraging recent news about teen sexuality.  You know, like, I don’t know, there must have been a time somewhere.  I think it was about the same time that a study of public high school students showed that a surprisingly high number of them could do things like recite the Bill of Rights or name the thirteen original colonies.

I’m not sure that abstinence education in public schools is a great idea.  But I’m also quite sure that the Gloucester incident wasn’t caused or even encouraged by abstinence-only education.

I guess I should be gratified that Pitts restrained himself from drawing a line from Bush’s policies to Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter in his basement and raped and impregnated her.  If only she knew about condoms…

There’s something about this post that’s really sticking in my craw, and I can’t quite figure out what.

First, the incident seems an odd time to launch into a case for the death penalty, since one of the key defenses of the death penalty, deterrence, is obviously not in play, since the attacker was not deterred by the credible threat of immediate death.

Second, there’s the cubicle-quarterback bravado on display there and in the comments.  A real man would have stopped him before it got to that point.  Oh, really?  And what were you doing at the time?

Third, there’s the little flourish in the closing line:

And I just don’t care. I’m thinking of the precious little world that ended as a result of his evil. I care about that.

What a bold stand!  Declaring your caring about the innocent infant victim.  Especially now, when it literally does the infant no good.  Man, that takes a lot of guts, there. 

Obviously, anyone who doesn’t agree with the author’s policy perscriptions just doesn’t care about babies that are murdered.  There’s no other possible explanation. 

And don’t give me BS about “calling evil by its name,” etc.  I don’t care how depraved you think our culture is, we were all horrified by this incident. 

Responding to such an event with, “the guy who did this ought to be killed” does not qualify as stunning moral insight.  It may be correct, it may not be.

Finally, I have a knee-jerk negative reaction toward channeling people’s natural rage at atrocities toward questionable policy remedies, with the implication that failing to support those remedies is indicative of not caring enough about the victims of the atrocity.  I think that’s how we got into Iraq.

All that being said, I get the feeling my anger is somewhat out of proportion to the objective offensiveness of the post.  Maybe it’s because last week many of these same people read me out of the pro-life movement for even considering voting for Obama, but now they’re fine with the death penalty, which the Magisterium has been failry clear in opposing, at least as applied in the United States.

A depressing number of discussions I’ve particpated in recently have devolved into pissing matches over who cares more about some group, so I thought I’d link to this five-year-old post as a reminder.

One of the spoonfuls of sugar we use to make the medicine of moral lessons go down is that if you do the right thing, you will feel good.  Sure you might not have the extra change that the cashier mistakenly gave you, but you will have a warm feeling of satsifaction for having done the right thing. 

Now, it’s good for people to know that doing good is it’s own reward, so they don’t expect some material compensation for doing the right thing. 

But this isn’t always true.  Sometimes, doing the right thing still leaves us feeling pretty yucky. 

This causes a problem when we try to use this notion to figure out what the right thing to do.  We have this expectation that what “feels” right = what is right.  When other types of analysis yields a different answer, we resist.

I like the idea of having more family-friendly vacation policies, but I gotta call out this…

On the other hand, companies that already provide paid vacations, sick days, and parental leave wouldn’t mind if their competitors were required to do likewise. And it’s worth noting that many corporations that provide these benefits have grown and thrived

Well, you can’t have it both ways…  either more vacations is a competitive advantage or a competitive disadvantage.  If a company has benefitted from having vacation policies, it wouldn’t be eager to see its less enlightened competitors required to do the same.

• Donaghy: “Games tainted by fraternizing“
• JohnMcG:  Probably not as much as by officials who have money in the game.  But what do I know?
• I look at the tournament theory of extracting the maximum value from all workers in my lastest in Quiblit Magaizine.
• As I mentioned before, officiating bias in NBA games quickly snowballs.  It’s a positive feedback cycle.  Visitors perceive bias in officiating -> visitors play less aggressively -> visitors don’t get to the line as often -> visitors perceive bias in officiating.
• The Lakers were successful in getting to the line tonight; they apparently forgot the second part of that strategy, which is to sink your free throws once you get there.
• The difference between Kobe Bryant and players like Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett is what represent an “off game” for them.  Garnett and Pierce combined for 19 points.  Don’t think you’ll see Bryant go below that number in this game.

I’d like to filter out all items in my RSS feed that contain the word “veep” or “veepstakes.”

An entry to Megan McArdle’s contest.

It has become increasingly apparent that are prisons aren’t working to rehabilitate inmates, on the contrary they have been called graduate schools for criminals. And it has also become increasingly apparent that there are either no good ideas on how to make them so, or there is no political will to implement them.

So, if we drop rehabilitation as a goal of criminal punishment, why exactly is imprisonment superior to whipping?

One obvious answer is the physical cruelty inherent in any kind of corporal punishment. But inmate-on-inmate rape is one of the worst-kept secrets of the prison system, and knowledge of it seems to inspire more snickering and jokes than efforts to confront the problem. Would you rather receive thirty lashes or daily sexual abuse for the next thirty days?

Prison overcrowding and knowledge of the cruelty of prisons also leads to increases in parole and shortening of sentences. Thus, the criminal leaves prison without the sense that he has fully paid his debt to society. A scourging causes no such problem. There will be no practical concerns that would lead to the punishment being interrupted or shortened, and all concerned will leave with the knowledge that the debt to society has been fully repaid.

With the time of the punishment compressed, the criminal has more time to turn his life around and make amends. What, exactly, is someone who has been in prison since age 18 supposed to do for a career once he is released at age 35?

One goal of imprisonment that scourging would not tackle is incapacitation, preventing the criminal from committing other crimes. The prevalence of inmate-on-inmate violence shows that even imprisonment does an incomplete job of this, and new information technology breakthroughs make it increasingly possible for an inmate to impact the outside world as well, so that is falling by the wayside.

With prisons the way they are, and no political will to change them, the whipping post could be a humane alternative to prison .

Noah Millman writes:

I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but Doug Kmiec would do well to admit that he has backed a ticket that will be absolutely uncompromising in its support for abortion rights. There is no chance whatsoever that Obama will make the slightest gesture in the direction of moderation on this question, and there is no chance that any appointments to the court will not be litmus tested on this question. Bank on it. He showed no inclination to do so before, and now he has powerful political reasons to be absolutely doctrinaire on this question. There are other places where he can bend – gun rights is, I think, the most likely and the most important – but not here.

Ross Douthat agrees. 

Now, I agree that it seems unlikely that Obama will represent a departure from Democratic orthodoxy on abortion policy, but does represent a softening in its approach to pro-life people, which is what inspired my hope that an Obama presidency would help thaw the cultural lines enough that the pro-life argument can gain traction.

That being said, Kmiec’s endorsement of Obama, and the public brickbats he has received for that, put Obama is a somewhat awkward position.  I don’t know how much attention Kmiec’s endorsement, and the fallout from it has gotten outside of my Catholic-politics cocoon, but to me, if Obama were to do as Millman suggests, he would be making a very public fool out of someone who has gone out on limb for him, and could attract votes of people who would have never voted Democrat before.  It seems to me that would be something he would not want to do.

Coming from this discussion, here’s one way to think about voting and the election:

Supposed a bus route is proposed that would be a great help to some poor community.  The proposed bus route would also happen to go by an abortion clinic, making it much easier for many people to take advantage of its services, and it is a moral certainty that more people would do so.

What level of moral cooperation does someone who advocates for this bus route, with full knowledge of the incremental abortions, have for them?

As strange as it is to base it on external factors, I think a lot of it has to do with how it is proposed.  If it is named something like “The Planned Parenthood Express” and the inclusion of the abortion clinic is a prominent feature in almost every pitch for it, then it would be hard to justify supporting it.    If the emphasis is on getting folks to their jobs (at locations other than the abortion clinic), then not.

Of course, this opens the door to some mischief.  Advocates of embryonic research always stress the “cure” side of the proposition, not the embryo-destructive side.  Advocates for torture stress saving a major US city, not the infliction of pain.

The difference is that the the good part is dependent on the bad part.  I can’t get cures from embryonic research without destroying embryos.  I can’t save the city without terrorizing the captive.

But my proposed bus route could provide the hoped-for benefit even if nobody ever uses it to procure an abortion.  So I can will that the bus route be established and help folks get to work without willing that there be more abortions.  (Though if the economic viability of the route is dependent on people using it to get to the abortion clinic….)

Part of why I decided I could not vote for the Kerry/Edwards ticket is that they made embryonic research a main issue of their campaign — with Ron Reagan’s convention speech and the “Chris Reeve will walk” nonsense.  It was difficult not to see a vote for them as a vote for more embryo-destructive research.

It will be interesting to see how this campaign develops.

The pro-life’s political strategy is, and has been, as follows:

1. Elect pro-life (i.e. Republican) presidents.
2. Ensure those presidents appoint “strict constructionists” (wink, wink) to the Supreme Court.
3. Hope those justices will overturn Roe v. Wade

So far, this strategy has benefitted the Republican Party more than is has the unborn.  Which is not an indictment in and of itself, so long as it’s not at the expense of the unborn.

But my question is — is there any precedent, positive or negative, for those advocating a change concentrating on the makeup of the Supreme Court?

Other movements have successfully focussed on court battles — the current movement for same-sex marriage is an example; the civil rights movement is another.

But I’m not aware of any movement that had such a strong focus on the makeup of the court.  I don’t recall same sex marriage advocates making judicial appointments a big issue in gubernatorial races, for example.  Indeed, more than half of the justices who established same sex marriage in California and Massachusetts were appointed by Republicans.

What this says to me is that judicial opinions track more with elite opinion than they do with the politics of the person who made the appointments.  The current of elite, if not popular, opinion is in favor of same sex marriage.  In such an environment, it is inevitable that the courts will rule for it, no matter how much whining conservatives do about activist judges.

Some might say this isn’t inevitable.  There are some legal minds who will buck the current conventions, like Antonin Scalia.  Perhaps Republican presidents can find enough of these contrarian thinkers to populate the court and overturn Roe v. Wade.

Maybe.  But such a decision would face a difficult road to acceptance if elite opinion continues to favor a constitutional right to abortion.  Yes, all reversing Roe v. Wade would do is allow states to pass restrictions on abortion, but it wouldn’t be seen that way.

It also seems a bit unsavory.  It would be like the Boston Celtics focussing almost exclusively on influencing who the officials will be in their upcoming series against the Lakers, rather than working on their game and planning for their opponents. 

Yes, the judges play a large role here, and they may have taken a larger role than they should, but I fear that by focussing so much on the judges, we’re forgetting about making our case.

Exercise:

1. Think of five TV shows from the 60’s through the 80’s.
2. Think of five TV showd from the 90’s to today.
3. Try to recall the theme song to each show above.

My suspicion is that you’ll have an easier time with the first list than the second list.  I was born in 1975, and still have an easier time with 1970’s shows than I would today.  Think of The Jeffersons, Hill Street Blues, Cheers, Family Ties, All in the Family, The Love Boat.  What happened?

As much as I love it, I blame Seinfeld.  They got by with their little jazzy snares and bass lines, so everybody else just stopped trying.  Everybody Loves Raymond went with a little piano piece.  CSI outsourced the The Who.  Law & Order has a nondescript instrumental theme.  Most shows go with some vague techno-jazz instrumental thing.

About the only recent show with a memorable opening title sequences is The Sopranos.

Bush’s policies on war and torture caused more harm to respect for human life than Bill Clinton’s policies on abortion.

alastair has a post taking on Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror, and Atwood replies.

Alastair challenges Atwood’s place as an authority on coding, and cites some bold statements Atwood has made on his blog .  Atwood responds that he never claimed to be an authority, and that his bold statements are an example of the SmackDown method of learning, and his desire to hold strong opinions weakly.

The problem is that, for a blogger like Atwood, with thousands of RSS subscribers and daily page views, there is no such thing as holding an opinion weakly (to ape Atwood’s typical style of putting his own opinions in boldface), or at least of expressing an opinion weakly.  A blog post that reaches thousands of readers is by definition strongly holding an opinion strongly.  It inhibits, rather than encourages discussion.

To take an extreme example the Bush Administration couldn’t claim that it was just throwing out the idea that Saddam has WMD as some sort of academic exercise to test their theory and prompt discussion.

In the blogosphere, there is a bit of a conflation between popularity and expertise (ahem), and we forget that what makes a blog popular is completely different from what makes a writer authoritative, particularly in niche fields like programming.    Dennis Forbes makes a good point in a comment on alistair’s post:

It really is irrelevant whether Jeff feels himself an authority figure or not (it is debatable either way). What really matters is whether the community, or a loud enough subsection of it, sets him up as an authority figure.

Exactly.  If, “but Jeff Atwood says PHP sucks” is seen as a winning argument, then it matters what Atwood writes on his blog. 

In essence Atwood’s blog is such a powerful weapon that his initial smackdown ends the fight.  It may be the case that a consensus emerges in the comment thread against Atwood’s original conclusion, and Atwood may even come around to that conclusion, but none of that is featured as prominently as Atwood’s original post.

There’s a fine line between taking a bold stand to provoke discussion and bullying other people with your opinion.  Atwood’s posts often come off as the latter rather than the former.  Perhaps that is all that is possible for a prominent blogger.

• Will peak oil be what breaks Moore’s law?
• A couple comment threads I’ve participated in that may be worth checking out — a few on zippy’s blog about voting an moral evil (by the way, how I long for the day when voting discussions concern discerning among competing goods rather than avoiding cooperation with intrinsic evil, and a discussion at my old stamping grounds at wikifray about gender politics and the Clinton campaign.
• Which reminds, me things like Facebook and FriendFeed have managed to bring together many aspects of my online presence, but it would be nice to bring my blog comments together as well. Since most comment sites require me to log in, this shouldn’t be impossible.
• Google reader recently added a function to add notes to shared items. Right now, my notes don’t appear in the widget on the right-hand side (maybe I’ll write a widget to do that in my copious free time), but you can see my shared comments with my notes of questionable added value here.
• If you’re interested in the new JJ Abrams TV project FringeTV, you can get your fill of info at the linked site.
• I’ve got a bunch of thoughts on what the inevitable redefinition of marriage means to fatherhood. That may end up being either a post or Quiblit article. Stay tuned.
• One late hit — I was ready for the primary race to be over, until I realized it would give way to VP speculation and jockeying.  Ugh. Hey, maybe Hillary still has a chance!

Bill Simmons observes that Kevin Garnett is unable to raise his game for the playoffs; Matt Yglesias objects to “blaiming” Garnett for the Celtics’ lackluster performance in the playoffs so far.

This echoes back to my theme of a few weeks ago of assigning moral weight to sports skills.  “Clutch” performance is perhaps the Holy Grail of this.  Proven clutch performers, Michael Jordan, Robert Horry, Joe Carter, are lauded, and there are few reputations more difficult to shake than failing to come through in the clutch.

Thus, when it is observed that a favorite player fails to come through in the clutch, it will put that players’ fans immediately on the defensive, in a way they would not if say, his shooting ability were criticized.

The further the skill is on the virtuous continuum, the more people’s hackles get up.  For example, sabermetricians observe that Derek Jeter, for most of his career, has been at best an average defensive shortstop, and get flamed.  But observe that Ryan Howard strikes out a lot, and you won’t get nearly as much feedback.

But why should this be?  It’s not as if people think that Garnett isn’t trying hard.  If anything, he may be trying too hard.   And is there any doubt that Garnett is very valuable to the Celtics?  Maybe Robert Horry has hit more clutch shots, but we’re picking sides for a high-pressure game, I’d pick Garnett every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

The problem, such as it is, with Garnett is that the stucture of the league essentailly means that a team can only afford certain amount of resources.  Garnet’s abilities dictate that he be compensated as a superstar, but his inability to raise his game in pressure situations means that Garnett’s team also needs a late-game scorer in order to win a championship.  This person also commands a number of resources, and having your crunch-time scorer be someone different from your superstar can create some team chemistry issues, if not handled extremely delicately.  For the Lakers, where Kobe Bryant is the superstar and the crunch time scorer and everybody knows it, life is a little simpler.

That’s a problem, but not a moral failure on Garnett’s part.

In the Celtics case, it might not matter, as several players recognized the potential for this team to win a championship, and that’s all that matter to them at this point.