Sick Transit

Ronald Reagan was famously in the habit of saying that if aliens threatened the Earth, the United States and the Soviet Union would put aside their differences to fight the common enemy. It appears from this post by Jan Haugland that gays are the alien life form of religion.

Christopher Hitchens is generally an arrogant blowhard, but he can at least be counted on for sumptuous helpings of entertaining sacrilege, and his latest Slate column is no exception. Under the title Easter Charade: There’s no resurrecting Terri Schiavo, he writes:

I would say “read the whole thing”, but that was actually the best part of the article.

Evangelical site SundaySchoolResources.com has a great way to teach children the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion: the Punishment Sharing Agreement. They explain how it works:

If Christian parents really want to use their kids’ misbehavior to teach them about Christianity, why do they punish their children at all? Hasn’t Jesus already died for the kid’s sins?

Of course, the purpose of punishing kids isn’t to satisfy some kind of cosmic justice; it’s to teach them good habits and disincentivize bad behavior. But that’s exactly the problem with this proposal: it encourages the idea that mistakes need to be atoned for through suffering, and introduces the even worse concept that the atonement can be someone else’s suffering. IOW, there are free-floating amounts of badness and suffering in the world, and they have to balance each other out, so every time you tell a lie, God kills a cute little kitten to even out the scales.

(Okay, yeah, I have issues with Christianity. How did you know?)

I knew that Japanese schools were a lot more high-pressure than American ones… but I didn’t realize they had entrance exams for elementary school. Kids whose parents want them to attend the elite private schools don’t go to preschool or kindergarten–they go to test prep (the article actually calls it “cram school”).

Maybe it’s just my cultural prejudice, but I think that putting that sort of pressure on a five-year-old is barbaric.

Was made by David V. at Left2Right

I find the Washington Monthly blog more than worth reading, but Kevin Drum has enormous blinkers on anything to do with labor. His latest bit of silliness is an assault on PTO:

This is quite simply ridiculous. At my current employer, I receive 5 days of sick time and 10 days of vacation time each year. Although it’s not quite a PTO bank, it’s pretty close in practice, because unused sick rolls over to vacation at the end of the year; and the employer has allowed Vacation time to be used for sick leave in cases of documented medical necessity.

IOW, I have the flexibility to convert my sick time into vacation, and vice-versa, which minimizes the overall chance of my having to take an unpaid day off. How on earth is that a bad thing?

You’ve probably already read about the study that showed that teenagers who signed an abstinence pledge were more likely than their non-pledging peers to try oral and anal sex, less likely to use a condom, and thus more likely to get an STD.

What I found sad but amusing was one of the conservative responses:

Of course, there’s nothing inconsistent about those results. Someone needs to explain to the ‘conservative academics’ that you can’t get pregnant from oral or anal sex (classic jokes aside). I sure wouldn’t call it ‘abstinence’, however.

Continuing the topic of the last couple of days, Eugene Volokh agrees with Mark Kleiman that retribution is the only justification for prosecuting aged Nazis, or Augusto Pinochet, decades after they lost power:

I’m not sure if deterrence is enough of a justification, but I certainly think it’s a stronger one than Volokh and Kleiman suggest. The precedent of Nuremberg is not just that the Nazis were evil. It established the global rule that government officials can be punished for crimes committed under color of national sovereignty.

If the Slobodan Milosevices and Idi Amins of the world know that they can never retire, that they will never be safe from prosecution, that they cannot simply take their ill-gotten gains and flee the country if things get too rough, I do believe that will help deter genocide and other crimes against humanity, at least at the margins. It will also provide a realistic carrot and stick to use when an offer of amnesty is necessary to get a dictator to give up power.

I’ve got to give Volokh credit: he has publicly retracted his support for torturing serial killers to death, at least in practice if not in theory.

Obviously, he is still operating on a different concept of justice than most of the contemporary Western world. But I’ve always thought his pragmatism was one of his greatest virtues, and I’m glad to see it resurface.

Will Wilkinson makes an interesting historical point in this post, but completely misses the boat on his main argument. He writes:

Will doesn’t link to any of the proponents of the ’social insurance’ argument, however, because he is completely misrepresenting that argument. SS is insurance against the risks of income loss and poor investment performance, not against the possibility of living past 65. It is also a way that we as a society insure ourselves against the possibility of people not saving for retirement.

Imagine a couple of scenarios:

1. A 55-year-old factory worker gets laid off. At his age, it makes no economic sense to go back to school and learn a new profession. As manufacturing jobs are scarce, he ends up spending the last 10 years of his working life as a WalMart greeter. By basing his pension on his 35 highest years of income, Social Security insures him against this risk.

2. An office worker invests a third of her 401k in her employer’s stock. (As boneheaded as this is, a lot of people do it. Remember, close to half of all people are below-average investors.) As the employer declares bankruptcy and the stock tanks, a third of her retirement savings go out the window. Because Social Security has a defined rate of return, she is insured against that risk.

Maybe the rate of return on Social Security can be improved. Undoubtedly, we can do more to encourage national savings. But in blithely dismissing the insurance value of Social Security, Will misses the main advantage of the program.

I will readily agree with Eugene Volokh and the commenters that my previous post was emotional. The only effective way to respond to an emotional argument is with countervailing emotion.

Without going into a justification of my entire ethical philosophy, I’ll take a quick stab at identifying the biggest logical flaw in Volokh’s post: it is predicated on a notion of justice whereby a person who causes suffering deserves to suffer. Unless Volokh proposes returning our legal system to ‘eye for an eye’ jurisprudence, his position in this case is inconsistent with his position towards our legal system as a whole.

In the comments, Bob Greene compares the Iranian killer’s execution to self-defense; but self-defense serves an actual preventative effect, whereas Volokh acknowledges that the purpose of the flogging and throttling is the deliberate infliction of pain.

Joe Snuffy, similarily, argues for the preventative effects of the death penalty. But I would have had no objection if Iran had simply executed the man humanely. Again, that’s not what Volokh’s post was about.

Realistically, the impulse to inflict pain in response to pain is part of human nature. But I don’t see how any coherent ethical philosophy can elevate it to the level of justice.

UPDATE: To pre-empt the nitpicks: by ‘coherent ethical philosophy’ I mean not just one that is internally consistent, but one that is at least reasonably consonant with contemporary Western life.

POST-UPDATE: My own view on the matter is rooted in consequentialist, minimization-of-suffering ethics, but Jan Haugland and Matt Yglesias give good responses on pragmatic, slippery-slope grounds.

Eugene Volokh is a far smarter man than I, has much better (and professional) knowledge of law, and is a subtler thinker. So when he posts things like this, I can only shake my head at the different ways that people view the world.

Volokh doesn’t even attempt to logically justify his opinion, other than by an appeal to ‘justice’, that disgustingly noble coating with which nature has covered our instinct for revenge. I challenge anyone to look at this picture and tell me that the Iranians are better people or a better society for punishing a man that way, no matter what his crimes.

In Slate, mathematician and novelist Jordan Ellenberg takes a solid whack at metaphysical interpretations of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem:

The article does somewhat understate the breadth of the theorem, which actually applies not just to arithmetic but to any formal system. Still, formal notions of undecidability and incompleteness have little relevance to our common-sense notions of evidence and proof.

I do find Gödel’s theorem valuable as synecdoche for the larger truth that any deductive system is based on unprovable assumptions. But as Ellenberg writes:

And the same is true of non-formal reasoning as well.

For all of us who take our freedom of blogging for granted in the United States and much of Europe, here is a good site to keep a watch on the freedom of other bloggers through the world: Committee to Protect Bloggers. Their Mission Statement states:

The group’s intention is to be both a clearinghouse of information and a focal point for activism. Definitely a cause worth watching and supporting.

The rules of the news cycle dictate that all the triumphalist coverage of blogs last summer had to be followed by a stream of blog-bashing articles; Jan Haugland links to one of the latest, in the London Times.

At the opposite end of the newspaper influence scale, a columnist in Boise’s own alternative weekly wrote a blog-rant in which he even went so far as to defend Dan Rather. Below is the letter (actually an e-mail, of course) I sent to the editor. It’s considerably more tendentious than my usual style, but I had to make it worthy of the column I was responding to.

I just posted this on Usenet, and thought it was worth reposting:

Meia and I saw The Aviator last night, and I was thinking of the similarities between Howard Hughes (at least as depicted in the movie), George Bush, and entrepreneurs I’ve personally known. (And yes, despite his miserable failures in business, Bush is an entrepreneur.)

An NYT Magazine article called Bush the “the faith-based President” because of his inner certainty, his reliance on intuition, and his apparent stubbornness in the face of facts. It’s fairly common to relate these qualities to Bush’s religious faith. But I think it’s actually closer to business or entrepreneurial faith.

When Leonardo DiCaprio (as Howard Hughes) blithely tells his staff to make the impossible happen, refuses to hear “it can’t be done”, and mortgages his entire holdings on half-a-minute’s consideration, it seems an awful lot like Hollywood cliche. But thinking of entrepreneurs I know, it’s not that far from the truth. A successful business venture requires a wilfull blindness to risk and obstacles, and a determination to reach goals at any cost. That is why thoughtful, analytical types rarely make good entrepreneurs.

The flip side is that most business ventures fail. In business, you can dissolve or sell the company, and if you’re determined and lucky (or have a powerful family), you can eventually start again. If you screw up the foreign policy or Treasury of the United States, it’s a lot harder to fix, and lots of people die in the process.

But perhaps “the CEO President”–what Bush was often called early in his first term–was a better designation than we realized.