The Only Winning Move

This editorial in the Washington Post sums up the Duke Rape Case issue nicely. The author starts out by admitting that she was biased against the players when news of the case broke. Her reasoning here is what you would expect. They were rowdy athletes, intoxicated, upset that $800 had only bought them a couple of minutes worth of a show; there was, of course, the email and the (alleged) racial insult, and let’s not forget that some of these boys have pending charges on other past violent incidents. They fit a certain profile, no denying it.

But fitting a profile, as we’re endlessly reminded when it comes to “driving while black” incidents and airport searches of Arab passengers, is not a crime. And this columnist, at least, understands the difference. The overall point of the article is that, despite early damning circumstantial evidence, as facts of the case have come to light it looks increasingly like the charges are false.

What’s interesting is the way the column ends:

In an odd way, I hope Nifong’s proved right, because the alternative — that he began with a dubious case and stuck with it as it became shakier — is so troubling.

I couldn’t disagree more.

Right - the idea that a DA would stick with a shaky case to earn some cheap political points during a primary (Nifong was up for election when the case broke, and the black vote in Durham, which is 60% black, is extremely important) is troubling in the extreme. But this columnist is kidding herself if she thinks this never happens. More to the point - whether or not Nifong’s pursuit of the case is on the up-and-up, that there was political pressure on him to pursue “someone, anyone on the Duke lacrosse team” is beyond dispute. The black community held regular meetings on the matter (some of which Nifong attended), and any number of articles on the subject available on the internet make it crystal clear that a great many people in Durham and elsewhere made up their minds about this case on much less evidence than this columnist presents for her own early bias. Whether or not the charges turn out to be true, this is a deeply disturbing demographic fact. And whether or not Nifong bowed to their pressure, the unsettling fact that pressure was being exerted does not go away.

For an idea of the level of argument on the “they’re guilty, I just know it” side, have a look at this ridiculous blog. Among the “reasons” given why the athletes must be guilty:

Let’s just imagine that this assault took place at a predominately Black university and the victims were white, this would’ve been front page national news. [...] It seems to me that this story has remained local to the North Carolina area.

Is this serious? The story has certainly NOT “remained local to the North Carolina area.” Even at the time of writing (March 29) this was national news!

Cultural masculinity is a sickness that can turn men into monsters, and men in college sports are exposed to more of this virulent stuff than anyone.

“Cultural masculinity is a sickness that can turn men into monsters.” I couldn’t make this crap up. Sure, masculinity has a dark side, and that dark side definitely does involve rape. But masculinity has lots of positives as well: devotion to duty, responsibility, single-minded pursuit of goals, industriousness, material production, etc. Masculinity is not a “cultural sickness,” and femininity is far from above reproach.

The quotation above continues:

Do I excuse these rapists? No, of course not - they are responsible for what they’ve done, and I fervently hope they rot behind bars.

“These rapists,” as though the trial had already taken place. Not only are they guilty, but our omniscient narrator also knows what the sentence should be: “they rot behind bars.” And all this because the police had just (remember, this is March 29) picked up some suspects. Tell me true, is it a healthy civic attitude to assume that whoever the police pick up deserves to have the book thrown at them? I’d say it’s as if these people have never heard of framing before - but of course they have heard of it, and that’s what’s so sick about this kind of reaction. Knowing good and well that innocents are sometimes falsely accused, they want the coviction anyway - for no other reason than that these boys aren’t “their kind of people.”

On a site linked in the entry that purports to be an objective study of media coverage:

Alas, I’m not at all surprised that these two-legged hyenas with dicks for brains are getting a relative pass from the media. Nor would I be surprised if they get away with rape. But one has to wonder what responsibility Duke University will assume for this crime, and what action they will take to reinforce their institutional integrity.

“two-legged hyenas with dicks for brains.” That’s lovely, that is. This for a crime no one has yet proven. A crime that Duke University is supposed to take responsibility for, despite the fact that there hasn’t even been a trial?

Look, people, due process isn’t a trivial thing. It’s a right. There’s a damn good reason that right is enshrined in the Constitution - and it has to do with people like you - people who make up their minds based on surface details and circumstantial evidence for political convenience. It is because abuse of power is real that we need such protections.

I have my own biases in the Duke Rape Case; I’m human, after all. As a white guy who has frequently seen the race card played against his friends and associates for mere convenience, I admit I wouldn’t mind seeing this come out in favor of the players. But I understand that the case has to turn on facts and evidence, and not my personal preferences. If the players are guilty of rape (or even of a lesser violent crime), they should absolutely go to jail. The difference between me and the people I’ve quoted is that I understand that revenge fantasies do not trump reality on the ground.

So in response to Ruth Marcus, I couldn’t disagree more. We don’t know whether the crime really happened, and we won’t know until the case goes to trial (and even then we might not know - let’s face it, guilty parties have gotten off before, and innocents have gone to jail before). What we do know for certain is that there is a highly dangerous and bigoted lobby pushing for a conviction they want to see not because they know for certain that they boys are guilty, but because they want to believe they are - a dangerous and bigoted lobby that in some important sense doesn’t care whether these particular boys are guilty because they have already decided that “masculinity is a cultural poison,” or that white people are automatically privileged, or whatever else. Whether or not they get their way in this case, they will be hanging around for the next one, and the next one, and on and on until they learn the lesson they claim to want to teach others: that fitting a profile is not a crime, and that due process is a guaranteed right in no small part because appearances are often decieving.

If we’re going to indulge in fantasies about how a particular case should or shouldn’t come out, then I think there’s more reason than not to hope the boys are innocent. First, of course, it’s always good to have one less real rape in the world. Second and equally obvious, it’s always good to have a few less criminals in the world. But third, this case is highly publicized, and a lot of bad people have a lot riding on the idea that the boys are guilty for … well, for being white boys on a sports team, frankly. This would be a lot of egg in those people’s faces. And these are people who need egg in their face, I think we can all agree. Left to their own devices, they’re happy to dispense with due process to put people behind bars because they “fit the profile.” That’s a cultural trend that could use a big setback - to the benefit of all of us.

So, today marks the end of Indiana’s (successful?) experiment with Daylight Savings Time. For the first time this year, this state changed clocks with everyone else in the summer, and now we are managing the transition back to “normal” time. There’s a website about it here.

Naturally, certain places like Gary and Evansville have managed to get themselves exempt - on the basis of being close to other places in different time zones. So what we get on this webpage is clocks that say things like “The time in most of Indiana is 5.31am.”

There’s also a national time zone map, though, and it’s obvious that Indiana is far from being the only or even the most dysfunctional state when figuring out what time it is. For example, it might not surprise you to find that Idaho is split between Pacific Time and That Other Time that the Middle of the Country Uses. But it’s weird when you find out where it’s split. Not “everything east of the corridor” turns out to be on Rocky Mountain Time, as you might expect. Rather, the corridor is on Pacific Time and everything in the main part of the state is not. Eh? North Dakota’s even weirder - with the lower left quarter of the state on Rocky Mountain Time for no reason I can figure.

But whatever. Nice to be back on standard time. I can totally use the “extra” hour.

Yesterday’s episode of Battlestar Galactica was a breath of fresh air. I still maintain that we’re not yet out of the woods. The show still suffers from logistical problems, mostly due to character inconsistencies as a result of having abandoned a lot of continuity in the second half of the second season. However, the overall plot direction is showing a return to the complex handling of difficult themes that characterized the show’s early days; this is a welcome (and long-overdue) sign that things are slowly returning to normal.

Let’s start with what was wrong:

1. What’s with Tigh and Adama? I feel like we’ve never been given a good explanation of what’s going on here. Tigh has always been a deeply flawed character, fine - but when the show started Adama had faith in him. Now, it’s not that his decision to promote Lee to Admiral over Tigh to command Pegasus didn’t make sense. Tigh seriously screwed up his shot at command when Adama was incapacitated, and Lee had, on several occasions, proved himself a capable leader. Fine. What’s annoying is that absolutely no screentime whatever was devoted to Tigh’s reaction to this. There’s reason to believe that Tigh wouldn’t actually be all that bitter about it. He’s said several times that he doesn’t want command; mostly he serves Adama, whom he deeply admires. But at the very least Tigh’s wife Helen would have issues with this, and whether or not Tigh respects Adama Sr. and his decisions (which he clearly does), he has personal animosity toward Adama Jr. So I feel a bit cheated that we didn’t get scenes dealing with this involving Tigh, Lee and Helen at the very least. Now we see Tigh sitting on a secret jury which is kidnapping occupation collaborators and spacing them, a fact which he doesn’t mention to Adama? I dunno - maybe we’re supposed to believe that their relationship is sufficiently strained by this point. And logically, I guess that makes sense. Tigh fought the resistance on the ground while Adama (both of them, actually) was still on the Battlestar. This fight cost him his wife. Throw in any buried resentment over Lee’s promotion, and you have a plausible explanation. Only…well, human relations are complex. I need a bit more than plausible to convince me that those old bonds are severed. In the early episodes, Tigh positively worships his commander. However plausible this implied rift, I just don’t feel it, sorry. I’m having trouble stomaching the idea that Tigh sits on this jury and Adama knows nothing about it.
2. Kara’s turning into a comic book cutout. I don’t like what they’re doing with Kara. She’s become one-dimensional - and overnight at that. They were doing so well. What was going on with her and Loeben - that was very interesting and deliciously creepy. That’s the kind of thing that made this show great - pushing things just beyond the comfort level, but remaining iron-clad believable, never gratuitous. Loeben’s psychological games are well-written and thematically interesting. Now, granted, this experience (of being tricked into believing she’d forcibly had a child with someone she hates) is no doubt traumatic for Kara. I completely buy the rethinking of her relationship with Anders, and I absolutely believe that she wants to fight back at something, anything, as she says. Also, the fact that she just charges ahead recklessly - well, that’s nothing if not in character for her. What I don’t like, though, are the pat phrases coming out of her mouth. Kara was always hotheaded, emotional and reckless, but she was never a walking cliche dictophone, nor was she ever this shallow. Inner conflict is compelling when the actor isn’t fully aware of her motivations. But in Kara’s case, it’s clear that she is fully aware of her (not-so-)subconscious motives and knows that they’re destructive, regrets them, and follows them anyway. Hardly the “fuck you” attitude we’ve come to expect! I especially didn’t like her outright explanation to Anders that she was lashing out as a way of working through her problems. Give me a goddam break. People who are lashing out only talk like that in pulp fiction - so there went my suspension of disbelief in a puff of pale blue powder. What we’ve been led to expect from her is a kind of manic cruelty in these situations. We’ve seen it before - and the writers trusted the audience then to know what was really going on. Why not now? What we now get instead is a commentator talking through the mouth of a character. A script plan rather than dialogue. No thanks. Ditto that awful scene at the end with Gaeta where she demands that he beg. Why? Because she needs him to? Fine - but you don’t get prisoners already showing steely resolve to beg by begging them to beg! I mean, I get that she needs Gaeta to suffer as part of that misdirected revenge motive she has that she spelled out to Anders in clinical detail. We’re kosher on that point. What doesn’t work is that she again knows it, doesn’t care, and spouts comic book dialogue rather than real human words. Her whole tirade to Gaeta comes across not as the emotional unwraveling that it would have been in the show’s early days. Rather, it comes across like the plot device that it is. Yes, we get the offhand mention of the dogbowl that saves Gaeta’s life. Check. Oh yeah, and make sure the viewer knows that Kara’s coming unhinged. Check. If that’s “natural” narrative then I’m the funkiest dancer in Harlem.
3. The “fat” theme with Lee is still going nowhere. So Lee is making an effort to control his weight now. Great. And Adama is chiding him for it because he doesn’t seem to quite believe Lee’s sincerity. Fine. What I still don’t get is why any of this is happening at all, what theme or plot thread it serves, and what it’s supposed to mean.
4. So Tom Zarek is President of the Colonies after all. Of course he is legally. He was Baltar’s VP after all. But if that’s the case, then why did we see Laura Roslin sitting in the President’s office on Colonial One sighing relief that things were “back to normal” if that was actually Zarek’s office? When did she start recognizing his presidency? And when did he start issuing executive orders? (Zarek, as it turns out, gave the order for the secret jury that Tigh, Tyrol and (later) Kara are sitting on.)
5. Yet another character no one’s ever met jerking our heartstrings. They could have spared me that garbage about *fill in name, I didn’t bother to learn it* mourning over his son who was “only 7 years old” (was that even the actor talking? Or did they maybe just dub in lines from any of about 5,000 movies?) after Jammer went out the airlock. These writers used to understand that you only get emotions from audiences in this savvy post-structuralist age if you build up to it. William Shatner couldn’t even pull this off (”Kowalsczky! Those Klingon bastards! They killed Lt. Kowalsczky! He was like a son to me! If I have to tear this universe apart star by star…”) in the 60s - what makes them think it flies in 2006?

So that’s my shit list for this week. But I didn’t want to end on that note because as I said above, this episode is a huge improvement overall - a hopeful sign that things are getting back to where they belong. Let me take some time to spell out what they got right:

1. Zarek doesn’t really explain his motives for cedeing authority to President Roslin. Not that I really enjoyed watching her ask him (more of that pat dialogue), but I find what Zarek is doing completely believable. I can’t explain why exactly, but that’s usually a sign of good characterization. In real life people’s motives are often inscruitable, and it takes a talented writer to show you a character acting in logically mysterious ways but have you convinced all the same that it’s exactly what would happen in a similar situation with a similar person in real life. There’s Othello and there’s Hamlet, and in this thread with Tom Zarek, ladies and gentlemen, we are in the presence of Hamlet. Never mind that it doesn’t make logical sense, it makes personal and emotional sense. Good job!
2. Gaeta is back to being Gaeta. There’s no more of the “true believer” about him. He flatly says that “Baltar was president of the colonies. Remember? We all voted for him.” Right. We don’t exactly know who Gaeta voted for personally, but it’s completely in character for that not to matter to him. He does his duty, and that’s exactly what he was doing on New Caprica. Never mind that he didn’t support the policy, and never mind that he didn’t like Baltar. Gaeta does what duty requires. It’s also in character for him to do “what he can” for the resistance, and not to bring up this fact in a pathetic attempt to save his life from vigilantes the way Jammer did. The writers got Gaeta’s character absolutely right in this episode - which I personally really appreciate since, as I have said before, Gaeta is my favorite character. It’s nice to see he’ll be sticking around as himself, and not just as what some writer needed him to be for a couple of minutes (as we saw in the previous episode).
3. Baltar - WOW! Not much to say about Baltar except WELL DONE. We see the actor’s (and the director’s, it must be said) skills tested and certified. Not to mention, the image of him sitting alone in the big room in the giant fleet of Basestars cut off from humanity - well, subtle it ain’t, but as an expression of the emotional pit Baltar has been slowly sinking into throughout series, it really, really works. I also like the mind games they’re playing with him. This is the Cylon enemy we know.
4. In spite of everything, the “secret jury” theme worked. Yes, fine, it’s obvious, not particularly deep commentary on the War on Terror. But it worked, I thought - and this in spite of the campy dialogue noted above. We saw the system abused as Tigh and others manipulated Tyrol emotionally to get convictions they wanted. We saw a completely convincing turn of events that had them almost execute as a traitor the one man (Gaeta) who arguably did more than any other for the resistance. (I am also personally pleased to note that I was wrong about what was going on with Gaeta and Tyrol. I thought Tyrol knew that Gaeta was his inside contact. It’s nice to know he didn’t; that makes that whole exchange in the first episode this season between the two of them believable.) But most importantly, we’re convinced that there’s a real moral grey area here. Zarek’s secret jury, just as he says, can’t easily be dismissed as immoral. It does help Roslin get rid of people who need getting rid of with plausible deniability - and this is something she needs. (I thought they handled her reaction well. She takes advantage of her opportunity to look down on Zarek, but they both know that part of her knows he’s right.)

So the episode was more than just a net positive - it was a decided positive. It was, as the title suggests, a good episode that just happens to be weak on writing. The bare events of the story are all right on - it’s the way they’re dressed that’s a bit lacking. This is especially evident with Kara, but it applies all round, I think. We got a good story poorly written, which I prefer to see as being a good story that happened to suffer from bad writing rather than bad writing that accidentally managed to tell a good story. I would prefer that they let some of these themes build - not try to tackle everything at once. But I also don’t want to complain too much. Things are getting back on track. Here’s hoping it keeps up next week!

Seen by the side of a road:

[Update] This also spotted!

Amen!

There’s a whole photo archive of these things here.

On the Mises Blog there is an article claiming that cars would cost $600 and hamburgers only $0.12 if only the government would hold the money supply fixed - or, more precisely, if only the government had held the money supply fixed from 1959 to the present.

I don’t want to dispute the wisdom of fixed money supply. On that subject, I’m what you might call an agnostic who wants to believe. Not quite Fox Mulder, but definitely not Dana Scully. And if I’m not Mulder, it’s only because I haven’t been “out there” looking for the “truth.” Lots of ink has been spilled on this subject, and I’ve read very little of it, so I’ll hold judgment until I know more.

Certainly the naive common sense view is that a fixed money supply is a good thing. This is because it prevents arbitrary distortion. Ultimately, an economy is just a collection of “useful stuff,” or “utility,” as some prefer to call it. There are things and services out there that people want or need, they are willing to work or produce to get them, and so the engine goes on turning. If money is anything at all, then it’s the grease that keeps this engine running smoothly. Ultimately what people are trading back and forth are goods and services - the aforementioned “useful stuff.” All money does is facilitate this process. So in some sense it shouldn’t matter how many paper dollars there are floating around out there. What changes are the prices, and if there are always the same number of dollars “out there,” then we expect prices to go down as more stuff gets made. It’s another way of saying that stuff gets more affordable. Fine, maybe your salary doesn’t rise, but the amount of “useful stuff” that you can buy with it goes up, and that’s what really matters. So we can do this one of two ways: we can have ever more paper dollars with ever-higher salaries and prices, or we can have the same amount of paper dollars with ever-lower prices and more-or-less fixed salaries. The only reason to prefer one system over the other that I can see is that the fixed-supply system is less dangerous. Since the money supply never changes, there is no opportunity for the government to get its numbers wrong (and, really, when doesn’t the government get its numbers wrong?) and print way more money than we actually have, causing distortions in prices, etc. etc. It’s better to just know that there is only so much in cash floating around and let prices (which are, after all, determined by the people on the ground actually moving the economy, not the people in their ivory tower in Washington running numbers that may or may not have much to do with how much “useful stuff” is actually changing hands) do the work of telling us how well the economy is doing. However, as I said above, I don’t want to commit to saying too much here because I don’t know nearly as much about it as I should. The naive view seems to paint a fixed-supply system in a nice light, but it’s certainly happened to me before that my naive intuitions failed to appreciate subtleties that became apparent on closer examination.

The overall point, though, would seem to be that what matters to people on the ground, ultimately, is not how arbitrarily low or high prices happen to be, but what their individual actual purchasing power is. Whatever creative accounting we do to make the system look one way or another (I guess people respond better to seeing their salary go up than they do to seeing prices go down when all is said and done - though it can amount to the same thing in the end), the economy ultimately boils down to “how much useful stuff do I have and what do I have to do to get more?” And that’s got more to do with earnings-to-price ratios than it does with raw prices and the raw money supply.

This is the point that I think Mark Brandly is glossing over (he wouldn’t be missing it - he’s a trained economist!) in his article. Brandly uses a simplistic formula to show that prices are as much as 34 times higher than they were in 1959 - numbers which are really shocking. This is how he does it. He reasons that the ratio of the 1959 money supply to the money supply in a given year should also be the same as the ratio of 1959 price to price in a given year. Fair enough - that makes a certain amount of sense. Of course, more of product x is probably being produced now than was being produced in 1959 (unless maybe it’s hair curlers or pointy glasses), but this should be reflected in the price. (Remember, in theory a price is expressable as a percentage of the total wealth available.) Brandly admits that this model is simplistic - it’s merely meant to give a rough idea:

For example, if the money supply increased from $100 in period one to $200 in period two, then the price level in the second period would be twice as high as it would have been in the absence of the expansionary monetary policy. Admittedly, the increased money supply may not have this proportional effect on the price level. However, all price indices are arbitrary and imprecise calculations that are often presented to the public as precise numbers. The following calculations are simply estimates of the price level effects of government policies.

On this we surely cannot fault him. It’s clear that these numbers are not meant to be taken as scientific writ (and really, what in Economics ever is?).

So the way this works is that you simply cross multiply. If the money supply in 1959 is to the money supply in 2006 as prices in 1959 are to prices in 2006, then you can multiply prices in 2006 by the money supply in 1959 and divide by the money supply in 2006 to get an estimate of what the price of a given item would be today had the money supply remained fixed since 1959. Makes sense, right?

But here’s where I think the magic comes in. The point is, people’s earnings are not expressed in 1959 dollars, they are expressed in 2006 dollars. So while Brandly is in some sense correct, according to his formula, that a hamburger “should” cost $0.12 and a car “should” cost $600, it’s also true that people like him “shouldn’t” be making anywhere near as much money as he is actually depositing into his bank account every month. Simply saying that a hamburger should cost only $0.12 means nothing to me if I don’t know what that is as a percentage of my income. And here’s where Brandley’s sleight-of-hand really comes into play:

Currently, price inflation is thought of as an increase in the price level above some previous level. However, if we think of price inflation as the increase in the price level over and above what the price level would have been in the absence of the expansionary monetary policies, then this gives us a more accurate picture of the effects of government policies. The estimations provided here show that the price level effects due to government manipulation of the money supply are much larger than indicated by standard price indices.

So that’s right in absolute terms, yes, but in meaningful terms (i.e. in terms of whether my purchasing power has gone up since 1959) not so much. In meaningful terms, the government estimates of how much better off people are today than they were in 1959 are probably not as far off the mark as Brandly claims.

Now, Brandly would no doubt say that he never claimed they weren’t - but I beg to differ. It’s true that nowhere in this post does it specifically say that that if the money supply had remained fixed since 1959 that I would be able to buy 34 Big Macs for the price of one today, but Brandley doesn’t seem to mind people getting that impression. Indeed, that last line in the quote above says to me that he’s actively promoting the misinterpretation, as does the title.

So this is yet another disappointing post from the Mises Blog. The error in persuasion here is different from the one in the Rockwell post that I complained about earlier, though. My complaint about Lew Rockwell was that he was sabotaging support by arguing only in stark and simplistic terms of principle; he would have done better to take the obvious concerns of his readers about drunk driving into account and address them. In the case of this Brandly article, I think the sabotage is more insidious. Superficially, this article is very convincing indeed. It has the numbers to back up its claim, and it promises the reader something that he presumably wants to hear: namely that if we adopt Libertarian economic policies he will be rich in a short amount of time. But the numbers do not actually work out in the way promised, and any intelligent reader will eventually see through this, if maybe not on his first read. So Brandly is just setting himself up to fall. The Democrats and the Republicans can get away with this because nobody honestly expects them to deliver on their elections promises. We’re used to hearing sunny predictions from them while bracing for business as usual. I don’t believe third parties have this luxury. When you propose a radical change in a system and people go along with you, they bank on what you say, and they get petulant when things don’t work out as you promised.

Now, as I said, I haven’t read as much about this as I probably should have, so it’s entirely possible that I’m overlooking something; maybe Brandly’s right that I should be able to buy a fleet of 34 cars for the price of the one I have now. But that just seems wrong. Even if it’s true that Libertarian economic policies in general would have netted us this level of wealth over the last 50 years, surely money supply policies alone would not have! Not that it even seems likely that 50 years of Libertarianism would have turned us all into owners of fleets of vehicles either…though I’m pretty damn certain that we’d all be a lot richer and more comfortable today if instead of embracing the so-called “Great Society” we had turned to the free market to help us spread the wealth around. So I guess I wish that people like Brandly would keep their claims realistic. After all, bottom-line better is bottom-line better - and that we can definitely deliver. When we promise people the moon, we just end up sounding like Lenin in the 20s. It’s not only the government inflating prices here, in other words.

Today on Reason Hit and Run there is a post about homosexuality in the wild. Apparently, there is evidence for it after all, at least according to the BBC report that inspired it.

But the Hit and Run post isn’t so concerned with natural homosexuality as it is with knockin’ on a certain commentator’s opinions of it. Admittedly, this guy says some pretty dumb stuff. In addition to dragging out the tired old argument that homosexuality can’t exist in nature because it would cause the species exhibiting the behavior to go extinct (as though homosexuality would be caused by a single gene that could be selected for, or as though overtly homosexual humans don’t sometimes mate and reproduce anyway), he also wants to say that Norway’s “Homosexuality in Nature” museum exhibit has a “clear political reason” based on the fact that “In some countries, laws are on the books which call homosexuality a crime against nature.” Right, because in some countries women have to wear veils, ergo there is a political motivation behind tittie bars? Whatever - I can’t make this stuff up, go have a look see yourself.

What’s interesting is why this two-bit net troll has attracted the attention of Reason Hit and Run. He seems like pretty small potatoes to me. I’ve certainly never heard of him before. But I suspect I know what’s behind it…

Hit and Run notes:

The BBC also reports that one unnamed American commentator described the exhibit as “propaganda invading the scientific world.” The commentator in question turns out to be one Nathan Tabor, described in his author’s bio as “a conservative political activist based in Kernersville, North Carolina.”

Interesting that they should have stoped the quote there. Here it is in full from his webpage:

Nathan Tabor is a conservative political activist based in Kernersville, North Carolina, where he owns a successful small business and was recently a candidate for Congress. He has his Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Robertson School of Government at Regent University.

Now at the very least, you would have expected them to complete the sentence - you know, fill in the blank all the way to the end of that bit about owning a successful small business. Or at least, that would be the default. But then, we’re lampooning Tabor, and it’s no fun if we have to say nice things about him.

So forgive the soapbox, but why does the stuff that counts against him include the fact that he’s from North Carolina?

I find this stuff really fucking annoying. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but the implication seems to be “see, guys, he’s just another one of those dumb conservative southern rednecks, and we all know how ignorant and closed-minded they are.”

Now, full disclosure: I’m from North Carolina and damn proud of it. I fully intend to move back there after I graduate if at all possible.

That said, I’ve lived 9 of the past 11 years in other places, and I’m not aware that there’s any more opinions of this kind in North Carolina than anywhere else. It’s just like Foxworthy used to say about the South in general: “It’s not that we’re stupider than anyone else, we just can’t keep the dumbest among us from off the television set!”

But I suppose as long as it makes the rest of the country feel better about itself, we’ll keep on executing this feedback loop. I sort of wonder if the Reason post wasn’t actually a (subconscious?) response on the part of its author to this line from the BBC report:

An American commentator said it was an example of “propaganda invading the scientific world”.

Again, seems strange. A BBC report about a museum in Norway needs to quote an (unheard-of) “American commentator” … why exactly? Surely there is someone in Britain who feels the same way … surely. This article about the exhibit on Yahoo! News, for example, notes only that “local church groups” are angry over it. Presumably, “local” means “Norwegian.” And this gay.com article only mentions “evangelical Christians.” Exactly what’s important about Tabor’s being “American” isn’t clear, save that the BBC has the same kind of interest in promoting the “backward Americans” stereotype that Hit and Run has in promoting the “backward Southerners” stereotype. Always comfortable to assume that prejudice comes from somewhere else.

So maybe there’s a cascade effect here. The BBC subtly lays prejudice at Americans’ feet, and Jesse Walker wants to make sure everyone knows it not Americans per se, just those ignorant secessionists down South.

Yeah - spare me. Well, as I said, I might just be reading to much into this. There certainly isn’t any reason why news sources have to cite local opinion exclusively. But I can’t shake the notion that there’s some preconceived thinking going on in Reason’s choice of words, and the BBC’s choice of commentators, all the same.

We’re now into day 15 of the death watch on SourceFilter. Noah has managed 3 posts in the last two days (though nothing over the last week), so it’s looking like the death watch was unwarranted. It will continue for the next two weeks as a formality, of course, but SourceFilter is definitely recovering.

Noah has some interesting news. He has just found out that he does not exist.

More precisely, it’s statistically unlikely that anyone in the US has the name “Noah Silbert.” So it would be fairer to say that he’s just a statistical freak (or a statistics freak), which could have been arrived at by other means. (A grad student who reads for fun?)

The site in question is here.

My own results were:

The interesting thing is that I actually know one of these 111 people. Or, rather, I know of him. In high school I used to get my hair cut from a woman who had another customer named Joshua Herring - and his father’s name also happened to be the same as mine. What are the chances, I ask you?

(No apology has been provided for the shameless imitation of content.)

Noah is a funny guy. He has started a death watch on my other blog because … well, in his words:

Well, it has been some time since he posted to this second blog. In fact, it has been nearly as long as it was between my last post and today’s unexpected flurry of bloggery here at Source-Filter. It is possible, perhaps plausible, that this delay, like the delays in my own posting schedule, indicates that Josh’s secondary blog is terminally ill.

So there you have it folks, Noah admits that his blog is “terminally ill!”

Ok, alright, point taken. This deathwatch is richly deserved. I haven’t posted to Knuth’s Masterwork in a week. If I don’t post today, it will indeed have been every bit as long as it was between posts for Noah when I started the deathwatch on Source Filter.

So - I have some reading to do!

One correction to Noah’s post. The Art of Computer Programming is actually intended to be 7 volumes, not 3. I have only set myself the task of reading 3 because (a) that’s really all the time I have (and if I keep at the pace I’ve been going I won’t even have time for that!) and (b) the first three volumes are the only that were available for many years anyway, so I suppose they are the core of the “foundational book in algorithms” that Noah describes. Knuth started writing this book in 1968 and hasn’t finished it yet. As legend has it, he became frustrated with the typesetting of the second edition, and in 1977 resolved to create an electronic typesetting system of his own to fix the problem. This became TeX, which most people know though the document preparation macros built on top of it called LaTeX. Reading up on this today, I find that Guy Steel - heroic co-creator of the Scheme programming language and therefore friend of all mankind! - was also influential in its development as he just so happened to be visiting Stanford when Knuth started on it. I guess few worlds are as small as computer science was in the 70s.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that the book is intended to be 7 volumes. Knuth got sidetracked mid-project, so for many years only three volumes were available. Sometime in the late 90s, volume 4 came out to much fanfare, and according to Knuth’s website, he will be finished with volume 5 shortly. If you read between the lines on the same site, it seems that prospects are dim for volumes 6 and 7 ever seeing the light of day. Knuth is getting old, and in any case may have crammed everything worth saying into the first 5 volumes in the end.

I only intend to read the first three volumes by the end of the semester. Speaking of which, I should probably crack one now, eh? Before Noah performs last rites (or whatever the Jewish Atheist equivalent is) on my blog…

Samizdata’s abortion thread went strong for 4 days and now is dying down. Discussion in the comments section was remarkably civil given the topic. Since the thread was started in part at my request (I asked another commenter to explain his pro-life views from a Libertarian point of view, in part to rethink my own views on the subject), I thought I would take some time to review some of the thinking I’ve been doing on it.

The position I started with was that human life begins at conception, along with a full right to life. However, the mother’s right to bodily integrity is also an inviolable right, and as no right to life can be exercised that demands the services or sacrifices of another, the mother’s right trumps the child’s right. She may abort for any reason up to actual birth.

The position I ended up with. I went into the debate expected to emerge with an opinion a bit more favorable to the pro-life side. After all, I had asked for a Libertarian justification of the pro-right position (for the record, I don’t accept religious justifiations of political or moral positions). Unfortunately, the person who took up the “rights begin at conception” position was more interested in his self-image as someone who had taken the dispassionate view and reasoned his position from first principles to be bothered with answering questions, so what I got from that end, really, was a caricature of the pro-life position. In short, I’ll need to have another one of these discussions with a less emotional pro-lifer before I can say I’ve honestly buried the position. However, caricatures can be useful too, and it’s larely some reductio ad absurdum views on the pro-life argument that I wanted to discuss.

• The eugenics objection doesn’t work. Ok, I admit it, I’m a sucker for slippery slope arguments. Use them all the time myself. One case you often hear pro-lifers making is that legal abortion is tantamount to an endorsement of eugenics - you know, because in theory it allows people to abort children they simply don’t want because, well, they might be the wrong sex or not likely to be tall enough, or whatever else. Without ever having really thought about it, I had always assumed this to be a decent argument. Not strong enough to overcome the woman’s right to do what she will with her body, of course, but nevertheless a reasonable case. During the course of this debate, though, I had occasion to do some thinking on it, and I realize that it is, in fact, simply ridiculous after all. There is nothing in banning abortion that prevents eugenics, in fact, because once the technology is available we will presumably be able to string DNA together ourselves - no need for sex at all, really, or even direct use of a single sperm cell and single egg for fertilization. That is, given the amount of capital currently thrown at biotechnology, I can easily see “designer DNA” happening in my lifetime. Nothing about life begining at conception prevents this because stringing DNA together is just conception by another name. Fine, perhaps the pro-life position prohibits us from aborting failed such experiments, but it’s hard to see what it would do about a general eugenics program, given about 30 years of advancement in medical technology. This isn’t the sort of outcome my principled look at the matter would have led me to expect. After all, I had assumed that I was in an argument of body rights (those of the woman) versus the overriding sanctity of life (the pro-life position). But I realize now that the reasoned (as opposed to religious - which actually is a “sanctity of life” position) pro-life position is no such thing.
• Development plays a role in legal status. Again, my position had always been fairly divorced from the “messiness” of the issue. I had just assumed that children were full persons at conception, but that the mother’s right to bodily integrity was the overriding concern (i.e. in the legal sense it simply didn’t matter that the child was a “person” - that only became a concern after birth). However, arguing this over the past couple of days I’ve come to see that that’s unsustainable. Development plays a role - it must. This is obvious when we think about things like prohibitions on sexual relations with children. Of course, any bans on sex with children will be based on the notion that children are immature. Sexual relations with them are forbidden because they (a) are not fully sexually developed and (b) are not cognitively mature enough to give legal consent anyway. Granted, the age of consent is an arbitrary line (some people are ready for sex early, others are arguably never emotionally mature enough to handle it), but the point is that the right to give sexual consent is something that one is not born with. And of course I’ve only chosen this particular example because it is so stark. Any number of others would do: the right to make medical decisions for oneself, for example, doesn’t accrue to children. Neither does the right to inherit property or own businesses, etc. etc. Well, then why not a right to life? Why isn’t this a diminished right for a time as well? Indeed, I can think of no good reason why it is not, and several why it is. Contrary to what I had always assumed, the mere existence of combined human DNA is not a sufficient demarcation of when a right to life begins. It would, indeed, be absurd to maintain that it were. See next item.
• DNA alone cannot be afforded legal protection - the thing we value must lie elsewhere. Over the course of the discussion, I presented as an example/thought experiment the idea that scientists have developed the ability to splice DNA together. Suppose these cells are stored in some solution in a container, and one of the scientitsts working on the project accidentally drops the container. I think it is fair to say there isn’t a person on the planet who would charge the poor chap (or girl, I mean! Because we all know women are just as capa… yeah yeah) with manslaughter. It simply isn’t, can not be mere DNA that we value. We can easily imagine manufacturing DNA chemcially, and this just isn’t the same. No, it’s something about the development into a full adult that matters. I didn’t like having to face this because I’m now no longer sure what it is, exactly, that we base our right to life on - but at times in the past in my life I have supported positions that assert that it’s consciousness (with all that that implies - including legal infanticide and wanton euthanasia of coma patients). I will have to consider re-adopting that position, as it seems the only rational one.

There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly wrong with infanticide. Of course, we want to forbid it as a scheme of general respect for human life. Once a child is separate from the mother, the mother’s right to bodily integrity no longer applies, and so there is nothing that trumps the child’s right to life. Ergo, we can’t simply kill it or even let it die of exposure. That should have been done by the mother before term if we were going to do it. However, given all the points I’ve made above, I can’t see infanticide as full murder. Something like voluntary manslaughter, but tailored to this situation so that it does not have to be a crime of passion, would seem to be more appropriate.

Paradoxically, I’ve come out of the debate believing more strongly than before in my “legal life begins at birth” position, but I’m no longer as comfortable with that position as I used to be. This issue is really messy; there don’t seem to be clean answers to be found anywhere. So I guess you could say I’m more pro-choice than ever, but also more willing than ever to listen to new viewpoints. YUCK! Time to go shoot some squirrels before I get the urge to pray to a crystal or tolerate Islam or something.