Volokh challenges his readers:
The comments are priceless.
I’ve disagreed with Eugene Volokh plenty of times in the past, but I feel the deepest admiration for anyone who is willing to go on the O’Reilly Factor to defend Ward Churchill’s constitutional right to promote the murder of army officers.
I hope someone posts a clip on the web, because I have got to see (or at least hear) this.
P.S. I should hope this goes without saying, but just to be perfectly clear–I believe that Ward Churchill’s statements are vile and ridiculous. My admiration for Volokh stems from his willingness to uphold the principle of Free Speech in a situation that is so ripe for demagoguery, and on a show that is notorious for demagoguery.
Via Alex Barnett, the highly amusing Google Song (flash, sound).
But Chris Nolan doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about (link via Drum):
Oh really?
Let’s review what actually happened today. The Supreme Court denied a motion for summary judgment. The Grokster case still has to go back to the District Court for trial, a very lengthy process.
In the meantime, tools like BitTorrent–even more decentralized than Grokster–are already in wide use. And unlike Grokster, there’s no for-profit company involved to sue on the basis of a marketing campaign. And even commercial endeavors have quite a bit of leeway under the Court’s decision, as long as they avoid explicit inducement.
I’m not involved enough in p2p to know what’s next on the horizon. But how many years will it take for the next round of lawsuits against the next business/technology model to percolate up to the Supreme Court? And by the time that finally happens, what further progress will have been made in software and in bandwidth?
Of course, there are things that can short-circuit this process–DRM, legislation, and lawsuits against individual users, among others. But law and practice eventually give way to the economic realities of technological change; it’s been happening in the U.S. for the past 150 years.
And despite what Chris Nolan says, the fight is not about whether content-creators deserve to be paid. From medieval patronage to ASCAP fees to flat-rate servies like Rhapsody, artists have found a way to get paid; a stable economic equilibrium demands it. The real question is what the business models for content provision will look like. I sure as hell don’t know (although I will guess that it will be service-rather than product-oriented); but I do know it won’t resemble the record model of the 1970’s, which is what the distribution companies are still trying to preserve.
Yes, I know that the whole ‘corporate pensions’ story is so last-month. Still, I just found this week-old comment at TPMCafe, and it deserves a lot more attention.
As is usually the case, there’s a lot more to the story than the basic ‘corporations are greedy’ morality play. The whole comment is worth reading, but here are the commenter’s suggestions for improving the system:
2) Allow some overfunding of pension plans—say to the level where they are fully funded in 90% of scenarios. Explicitly tell the IRS to stop treating pension plans as probable tax shelters.
3) Allow the PBGC to charge premiums based on financial strength—currently they are the same for all companies.
4) Define termination benefits to be based on expected final salary, rather than present salary; this again would make plans more expensive, but would share the pain in terminations more fairly.
I still believe that the best solution is a changeover to defined-contribution plans. But for companies that are stuck with defined-benefit, those changes sound very sensible to me (with the possible exception of #1, which I’m not quite sure of the rationale for).
Amanda Marcotte tells the disturbing story of an obstetrician who is leaving her hospital post because she was being pressured to perform more C-sections.
What’s odd is the conclusion that Amanda draws:
If healthcare were provided by a government agency, with a fixed budget, that agency would still need to make financial decisions that impacted care. They might not be the same as the decisions made by a for-profit hospital, but they’d still impact patients.
At least with a privatized system, however, the obstetrician can go to another hospital, or even open a private clinic. With government-controlled medicine, however, her only options would be to comply, give up her practice, or perhaps work in the private medical sector, where her talents would only be available to the wealthy.
Why does Amanda think this would be an improvement?
Scott Lemieux argues that Kelo was rightly decided because he cannot distinguish between ‘use’ and ‘interest’:
If the question was whether or not the taking was in the “public interest”, that would be a clear political matter, and out of the jurisdiction of the courts. But the issue here is a textual and definitional question: what is meant by the term “public use”? That is a legal question, just as the meanings of “due process”, “cruel and unusual”, “establishing a religion”, etc. are legal questions.
Relatedly, Eugene Volokh points out that:
And therefore argues that:
This seemingly perverse incentive, however, is exactly what give the Takings Clause its force. Local governments are very unlikely to enter the shopping mall business for the sole purpose of extending their rights of eminent domain. The need to put seized properties to a genuine public use discourages governments from seizing property arbitrarily. (By which I mean, merely because they want it put to a different use.)
Whether or not the government ought to be in the shopping mall business is a political decision. If a government chooses to do so, a court cannot block it from seizing property for that purpose. But even if the public wants and needs a shopping mall, the city cannot (except as part of a larger plan) redistribute private property to provide it. That’s the difference between a ‘public interest’ test and a ‘public use’ test.
According to the old joke, a statesman is a politician who’s too old to be a threat. A perfect example is this NYT Op-ed by former Republican Senator John Danforth. Danforth is an Episcopal minister, and he writes movingly of the need for tolerance and humility when bringing religious values to bear on politics.
But with no disrespect meant to Mr. Danforth, I can’t help wondering whether he would write a similar column if he were still active in politics. It’s easy to decry “the collapse of bipartisan collegiality” and “the meanness we see in today’s politics” when you’re no longer in the fray. But would Danforth have had the huevos to stand up and criticize the extremists of his own party if he still had to sit in caucus with them, and fund-raise with them?
Perhaps my quibble is a bit unfair. The Senator make a well-written and valuable point. But there’s something distasteful about the tone of Olympian moralizing, even when I agree with it.
Amidst long-term demographic and cultural explanations for the rise of mega-churches, and even speculations about another ‘Great Awakening’, Big Brass Blog suggests a much simpler explanation: religion is a business.
Now, it seems plain that although there may have been a movement at the core of the New Age phenomenon, for the most part it was just a consumer trend.
…
The Green Knight wonders whether this is also true of the corporate Christianity we’re seeing today, with its megachurch malls, its specialized music, its gimmicky toys, its bookstore chains. It too is often spoken of as a movement, and surely there is a movement of true believers at its core, but how much of it is also a consumer trend? In fact, how many of its consumers are the same people who made the New Age so profitable a few years ago, who have moved on in order to seek a perspective more suited to the current cultural mood?
I doubt that the overlap is substantial. New Age and megachurches differ on substantial psychological issues, most obviously their attitude towards sex. (Although that may relate to the recent study finding that women tend to shift Republican as they get married and have kids; both of those life events tend to affect one’s view of sex.) As parallel phenomena in different cultural spheres, however, the similarities are very strong.
One could object that the increasing religious conservatism of the US is part of a larger cultural movement that dates back to the 70’s. But that’s equally true of New Age, which was clearly rooted in 60’s hippiedom. But both hippiedom and fundamentalist Christianity, despite their prevalence in some areas, remained countercultural movements to the nation as a whole. They only entered the mainstream through their mass-market manifestations.
And that’s where the good news comes in:
Hallelujah.
Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon engages in her usual level of flame-throwing discourse on the subject of hate crimes legislation:
The idea that legislators “tacitly support” illegal activity merely because they fail to pass laws stiffening the penalties is patently ridiculous. It’s exactly the sort of discourse that Marcotte would be outraged to hear coming from the mouth of a ‘tough-on-crime’ conservative. But it’s only to be expected, since Amanda is actually agreeing with an argument from Freep, albeit reaching the opposite conclusion.
The Freep/Marcotte argument is that if hate crime legislation is unnecessary, then so was anti-lynching legislation, since murder was already illegal, even in the days of Jim Crow. Marcotte concludes that hate crime legislation is therefore necessary; Freep concludes, in typical reactionary fashion, that Congress was actually right not to pass anti-lynching legislation.
But both of them miss the main reason why anti-lynching legislation was necessary: because the communities where it occurred would usually not prosecute it. Federal legislation would have enabled US Attorneys to prosecute crimes that the state neglected, and to do so in Federal Court, where there would be less local bias.
Unless there is pervasive evidence of states failing to prosecute anti-gay violence, the rationale for Federal hate crimes legislation is simply not there.
I think it’s entirely appropriate that the Senate apologized today for its failure to pass anti-lynching legislation for six straight decades. But I believe that Rep. John Lewis could use a bit of a history lesson. He said:
Perhaps he’s never heard of the Thirteenth Amendment.
William Saletan has an extremely perceptive point in an article about NARAL’s latest campaign:
Obviously, women should get proper medical advice on a procedure as serious as abortion. And if a woman is married or in a committed relationship, I would certainly hope that she would discuss the decision with her SO, and if possible come to a joint decision.
But if Saletan’s reading of the polling is correct, it sounds like many people–at least at a gut level–are uncomfortable with women making the decision to terminate the pregnancy without the input of an authority figure. That’s troubling.
On a lighter note, playing with robo-censors is one of the oldest games on the ‘net. Boing-Boing has some fun with MSN Spaces.
Warning: adult language. (Fuckin’ duh.)
It seems like this is my weekend to post depressing news. This e-mail at OxBlog is a brief and well-written first-hand perspective from a visit to Bangladesh:
The writer is optimistic about the effect of the televisions:
I hope that’s the case, rather than providing another channel for manipulation by mass political movements, Islamic or otherwise.
I’d definitely advise reading the whole e-mail.
Via Pandagon comes the story of Zach, a gay 16-year-old from Tennessee. After knowing for 3 years that he was gay, Matt decided to tell his parents. Their response was to send him to him to a program called Camp Refuge. Here are some of the rules of the program, which sounds like an odd hybrid of boot camp, rehab, a government bureacracy, and a cult indoctrination center:
Refuge clients must be in phase at all times, whether indoors or out of doors. A client is “in phase” when he or she is with two or more other clients (whether Refuge or residential,) one of whom must have been in the program for at least eight weeks.
Clients may have no contact with anyone who has left the program prior to graduating without the blessing of the staff to do so. Clients may address off-limit persons they inadvertently encounter with a polite “hello” only.
All new Refuge clients will be placed into Safekeeping for the initial two to three days of their program. A client on safekeeping may not communicate verbally, or by using hand gestures or eye contact, with any other clients, staff members, or his/her parents or guardians. In case of a practical need, Safekeeping clients may write down their question or request and show it to another client, staff member, or their parent or guardian. Writing may only be used when absolutely necessary. Parents and guardians must enforce their child’s safekeeping status at home or in their temporary lodging.
Refuge clients must be accompanied by a parent during any trip to a public restroom.
Refuge clients are allowed a one-time 15-minute maximum closed bathroom door time for shower/grooming purposes. The only other closed-door alone time allowed is for using the restroom.
Refuge clients must keep their bedroom doors open at all times, day or night.
Your client is not allowed to talk to anyone outside of your home including friends or family. Do not tell client who has called for them or who is asking about them. Keep the thoughts of the client focused on his/her treatment.
Zach is presumably about half-way through the two-week program right now. My thoughts are with him, and all the other kids who are subjected to this attempted brainwashing.
Via Committee to Protect Bloggers, an Iranian blogger living in Toronto is going home for a visit. The scary part, of course, is the risk of arrest:
He’s timed his trip to minimize the risk of arrest, and I’m sure that by raising awareness in advance of the trip, he’s also doing his best to avoid problems. Still, it’s a risk, and I admire him for taking it.
Why does Tyler Cowen think that aliens would have to “[trick] us into producing malevolent self-replicating spawn”? We seem to do that quite well on our own, thank you very much.
Matthew Yglesias decides to try his hand at spouting cliches. The result is painful to read–a hyperintelligent person’s idea of how to sound normal and down-to-earth.
Still, he’s got a lot of good ideas. In the hands of a competent speechwriter (or maybe even Matt, if he put his mind to it), it would be a great speech for a third-way Democrat, appealing to moral concerns without Liebermanian sanctimony.
Just a side-note on one of the issues Matt raises: the main reason why ‘a la carte cable’ hasn’t taken off yet is that it doesn’t make much economic sense. Once a cable company has a cable laid to your house, it doesn’t cost them a dime to throw in the extra channels. So if you pay, say, $30 a month for basic cable, and you actually only wanted Disney and ESPN, the cable company could give that to you for maybe $25. Few people would give up several dozen channels just to save $5 a month.
So the real target of the plan isn’t people who want to save money, but people who specifically do not want to receive Bravo or IFC or VH1; people for whom reducing their entertainment choices is actually a benefit. But then why should the cable companies charge less to give these people an increase in value? And yet, charging extra to remove channels would be too hard to explain from a marketing standpoint. Plus, I’d guess that if push came to shove, few households other than a handful of the ultra-religious would actually want to give up their channels.
Still, it’s exactly the sort of mass-appeal, useless proposal that works great in campaigns.
In his frustration over the outcome of Raich, conservative David Bernstein tears Scalia a new one (in measured scholarly language, of course) over at the Volokh Conspiracy:
Well said, David.
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This is not the site of journalist and author Daniel Glick. His website is at danielglick.net
Sick Transit: A directionless train of thought. Sic transit cogitationes Danis.