Friday Daddy Blogging

Miriam and Elisha.

Tenure and Equity

Via Berube, Dean Dad uses the fact that a recent Supreme Court decision has been interpreted by lower courts in ways that have undermined the academic freedom of public university professors to...argue against tenure. Now, there are certainly good arguments to be made against the tenure system (especially in high schools, where research generally isn't an issue), but it must be said that Dean Dad doesn't really make them. The idea that the AAUP's positions on academic freedom lead to this position is a transparent non-sequitur, and with respect to DD's silliest argument -- that "[t]he accountability built in to a renewable-contract system would go a long way towards defusing the cheap political shots to which higher ed is now routinely subject" -- Michael shows more restraint that I would have:

I keep trying to imagine Roger Kimball saying, “I used to get all squicky about queer theory, but now that universities have scrapped tenure, bring on the fabulous challenges to heteronormativity.” Or Daniel Pipes saying, “I used to target anyone who didn’t toe the Likud line, but now that universities have scrapped tenure, let a hundred critiques of Israel bloom.” Or my old friend David Horowitz saying, “I used to have a list of dangerous professors, but now that universities have scrapped tenure, Bill Ayers is just all right with me, whoa yeah.” But alas, I have to admit that I’m just not that imaginative.

DD's alternative to tenure is to have (after a 3-year probation) all academics on renewable 5-year contracts that would contain language protecting academic freedom. To expand on one of Michael's other points a little bit, I think we need to return here to a point long ago made by James Madison -- institutional protections tend to be vastly more effective than parchment rights. Tenure protects academic freedom not so much because of contractual language protecting academic freedom but because it places the burden of proof for termination on the institution. Except for academics that exceed a university's standards for re-appointment to such a degree that their academic freedom is unlikely to be a practical problem anyway, proving that the neutral justifications used to justify a non-renewal were actually just pretexts for punishing someone for expressing unpopular views would be exceptionally difficult. Particularly since academics can't be assumed to be sitting on a bankroll sufficient to hire an attorney and fund very complex litigation. I wouldn't say that language protecting academic freedom for all academics would be useless, exactly, but any gain in security would be very marginal.

Perhaps recognizing that his argument that abolishing tenure could actually increase academic freedom is unserious, DD smuggles in a better argument: equity. It is true that a system in which only a quarter of academics are tenure-track is highly unattractive. A central problem here, though, is that DD's response is a classic my-utopia-versus-your-grubby-reality asymmetry. I'm not sure why we should assume that abolishing tenure would lead to everyone on 5-year contracts, rather than people on 5-year contracts existing alongside adjuncts without any security or contractual protections at all. Even if we do, such a system wouldn't necessarily address the more fundamental inequities, with are about money. For many adjuncts, the problem isn't so much finding work as the fact that the work has abysmal pay and benefits -- something that a multi-year contract inherently does nothing to alleviate. (And if we assume this particular can opener, there's no reason that adjunct pay and benefits can't be improved without abolishing tenure, or that more lines can't be made tenure-track again.)

There's a final problem we can see from looking at it in the other direction: what happens when a university (especially one that isn't among the most prestigious and/or in the most desirable locations) wants to attract a strong scholar to help build up a program? Obviously, if you can't offer job security, the only way of doing so is money: large signing bonuses, high salaries, perhaps punitive buyouts for non-renewal. And this money has to come from somewhere. So...I think the idea that abolishing tenure would significantly improve inequities in academic jobs where it counts most is pretty naive.

Track? Mat? Court?

The esteemed Dr. Noon is not the only blogger to be studying Going Rogue in depth. See also Going Commando, who supplies indispensable detail on the naming conventions within the Palin family...

The Christian Values Spokeswoman Competition

I'm assuming that she failed to fulfill all of the duties of the position at the high standard demanded by the National Organization for Marriage, and that the crown will now pass to the first runner-up...

...to be clear, I value this more as an occasion for mocking NOM, and of the various conservative organizations and pundits that undertook the lionization of Ms. Prejean, than of criticizing Prejean personally. I think that she deserves some opprobrium for embracing the most hateful groups in our society, but I also think that she's been dealt a difficult and unfair hand.

Who?

The European Union selected its President and High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy and Vice President for External Affairs. In the classic stereotype of the dull gray bureaucrat, they've selected a couple of relative lightweights (given the nature and stature of the position) whom nobody outside of their jobs, families, and closest work colleagues know anything about. I'll admit to having "fleshed out" my knowledge of the two appointees just this morning.

The President is the Belgian Prime Minister, Herman Van Rompuy. He's only been Belgian Prime Minister since December 30 of last year, and then, he was reluctant to take up the position following the political collapse of the imagined state of Belgium. The King had to cajole him.

The High Representative for a Number of Important Things is Catherine Ashton, life peer since 1999 so commonly referred to as Baroness Ashton of Upholland, or Lady Ashton here in the UK. She has had a proper lefty background, studied Sociology at University, worked for the CND for a couple years, had a stint working with businesses about issues of social inequality, before entering politics. I'll admit to gleaning most of her pre-politics background from her Wiki as well as a couple other sources.

I'll try to imagine some strengths of these appointments before discussing the obvious weaknesses. Van Rompuy has held a country together that by all accounts should not be a country, and nearly ceased being a country in 2007-08, a crisis that I exploited for its humor value early and often in class. By all accounts, his success in holding Belgium together was more than mere competence; he was able to rebuild a modicum of trust between Flanders and Wallonia. These skills should serve him well in trying to keep the 27 member states of the European Union on the same page. Of course, there is fear that Belgium has lost its healer and will once again descend into chaos.

Lady Ashton was the Leader of the House of Lords for a bit over a year, has held the post of EU Trade Commissioner (replacing Peter Mandelson) for a bit over a year, has a reputation for . . . well, hell, I really don't know anything about her.

I wrote about this on Halloween. While my post was primarily a befuddled questioning of Tory tactics on several issues, I had this to say about the positions:

Second, I don't see the value in European leaders wanting a "chairman rather than a chief". A recognizable, public face as the putative leader or figurehead representing the EU will help not only abroad, but within the EU itself. Not noted for its democratic transparency, distrusted by more than just the British, and perceived to be run by faceless Eurocrats in Brussels, such a "president" would help raise the profile of the EU within the EU.

These appointments will help the image or profile of the EU neither abroad nor within. What they do suggest is that the 27 member states, especially the leaders of the large leading countries (e.g. Germany, France, the UK, Spain, and . . . Italy? Poland?) did not want these posts to have a higher profile than they. So, we get a perhaps diplomatically and politically gifted Belgian Prime Minister whom nobody outside of Brussels or Antwerp has really heard of, and a British politician who, as The Guardian argues, is as obscure as she is unelected. Can you even be a politician in a democracy if you've never stood for election?

Critics of the EU will have a field day with this, indeed already are here in the UK. The leader of UKIP (and an MEP), Nigel Farage, argued

We've got the appointment of two political pygmies. In terms of a global voice, the European Union will now be much derided by the rest of the world. Baroness Ashton is ideal for the role. She has never had a proper job and never been elected to public office.

But then we would expect UKIP to say that.

A greater problem will be the legacy that they establish in designing their positions. The descriptions are suitably vague enough that a strong political force could have developed them into something useful vis-a-vis the various heads of government in the EU. However, George Washington they ain't.

Speaking of American Presidents, Obama did claim that these appointments would make the EU an "even stronger partner" to the United States.

Did he say this before, or after, looking them up on wikipedia?

Note: while I may appear to be overly critical of Belgium, I rather love that country, and spent a lot of time in it when I lived in the Netherlands. In fact, one of my top five beer bars on the planet is in Antwerp.

Going Rogue, Chapter 2

The funniest sentence thus far in Going Rogue occurs about a third of the way through the second chapter when our heroine -- speaking through the Palinese translator Lynn Vincent -- declares that "life is too short to hold a grudge." This is a warm piece of advice that Sarah Palin predictably spends much of her time ignoring as she recounts her contentious early years in local and state politics. Few pages are allowed to turn without our deposed governor reminding us of the bêtes noires who interfered with her efforts to bring "common-sense conservatism" -- a phrase she's been loading into the wingnut beer bong for the past few days -- to the people of Wasilla and, soon enough, their fellow Alaskans. As Palin revealed in her first chapter, the first "big word" she learned how to spell was "different." And because different people are sometimes scary -- perhaps not President Black Man Terrorist scary, but scary in that ordinary, non-Negro way -- Palin knows that she'll have to deal with resistance along the road to glory.

Among the roster of liberal fascists, "good ol' boys," and uncooperative, low-level public employees with who find their way into Palin's esurient maw, we find the former Wasilla mayor John Stein, a man whose name Palin admits she can't pronounce and whose terrifying agenda seems to have rested entirely on the well-known communist wedge of building codes and land-use restrictions. Palin, by contrast, envisions Wasilla as a Hayekian paradise, where "laissez-faire principles" might crush liberalism as surely as her husband Todd scotched small woodland creatures with his snowmachine. Though she neglects to mention her campaign's emphasis on gun control, abortion and the cleansing magic of Christ's blood, Palin describes her eventual victory as a mandate for "no more politics-as-usual" -- by which I suppose she means badgering librarians, firing museum directors and police chiefs, and initiating regressive sales taxes to fund a costly sports complex on land for which the city had no clear title (land titles presumably being a big-government conspiracy to deprive The People of their squatters' rights). Along the way, Palin helps to turn her town into the "Honorary Duct Tape Capital of the World," an award bestowed by Wal-Mart in recognition of Wasilla's bone-deep commitment to not paying overbearing, know-it-all liberals to fix your shit. (Wasilla, you see, is an independent-minded place. "No community organizers necessary," she explains. Which is funny, because she's talking about President Barack Fanon Senghor!)

The rest of the chapter proceeds in the manner of skeet shoot, with Palin bitching about nearly everyone she encounters in public service, including her fellow candidates for the lieutenant governor's office in 2002, Frank Murkowski (her predecessor in the Governor's office), fellow commissioners on the oil and gas commission, and an unnamed array of "good ol' boys," corporate lobbyists and fat cats who would forever serve as foils for Palin's simulated populist tirades. Along the way, she wears her contempt for legislators proudly. Brutalizing the English language to convey her disdain, she describes them as people who "scratch disagreeable backs" for a living and who work in an environment where "the trading of favors [seems] to run through the ventilation system as a substitute for air." Indeed, for someone who professes several times in the book to having "Jeffersonian" views of government, she's awfully dismissive of republican institutions; with her belief that only the "lead dog" is able to have a clear view of public affairs, Palin unwittingly reveals herself in this chapter as someone who actually loathes collaborative public service. When fellow officials are unwilling to "get on board," she fires them (as she does in Wasilla) or shits on the floor and goes home (as she does with the oil and gas commission).

Unfortunately for the rest of us, Palin continues to believe that she has an open WATS line to Jesus, and when Chapter 2 ends, she's rocking her latest seedling and yammering away in prayer, asking for a sign from on high that she should return to public life and fuck some more things up.

Words to Make Policy By...

Stephen Walt, following a rundown of ten "scary monsters" of foreign policy:

First, we are often told that international politics is a dangerous business, and that it makes sense to prepare for the worst case. This is nonsense, because there are real costs to exaggerating various potential threats. Not only may this policy lead us to ignore more likely and more legitimate problems and to waste resources addressing fantasies, but it can also lead a country to take active steps that either make minor problems worse or lead to enormous self-inflicted wounds (see under: Iraq). Fixating on scary monsters can leave you ill-prepared when real problems arise.

This point cannot be emphasized enough. In conversation, associating preparation for the worst case with responsibility makes a certain amount of sense. The risk, however, is that the costs of "worst case preparedness" will be ignored. As John Mueller put in in Atomic Obsession, the 1% Doctrine is sensible insofar as in preparing for high cost, low probability events is often a good idea. Unfortunately, we often de-emphasize the low probability in favor of the high cost. We then run the risk of suffering much higher costs than warranted. As Walt notes, paying higher costs isn't even the "worst case" of "worst case thinking"; sometimes, effort to prepare for low probability events actively makes the world more dangerous (invasion of Iraq).

Then, of course, there are the "worst cases" that really aren't that bad at all. I very much doubt that Al Qaeda will attempt to mount some kind of attack on New York during Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's trial, but damn, I hope that they do. There is very little that would make me happier than for the rump Al Qaeda to devote its time, manpower, and resources to attacking the United States at the point of its highest preparedness; indeed, if I really believed that Al Qaeda would try to attack New York because of KSM, I'd be even more heavily in favor of the trials. Terrorist attacks succeed because they're unexpected, and an attack straight into the teeth of the security and intelligence services of the United States is highly likely to result in nothing at all, apart from the death and destruction of whatever remaining assets Al Qaeda can call upon. Let's hope that the rump AQ is as stupid as the average contributor to NRO.

La main de Dieu, for a New Generation

France 1 (1) - 1 (0) Ireland. AET.

France qualify for the 2010 World Cup.

I recall watching the 1986 World Cup on TV, which was a rarity at the time from the United States. I vaguely recall watching the Argentina v England quarter final match as well. However, not being an England fan, and only an 18 year old American at that, the infamous Hand of God goal by Maradona didn't resonate at the time as it did on the island where I now reside. Living six + years here, and being a soccer fan, I quickly learned just how fantastically lame that was. In my mind, the so-called "goal of the century" that Maradona scored a few minutes later didn't absolve him of that central sin. For all of his greatness as a player, his reputation is also blighted for being a cheat.

Thierry Henry's glorious career, likewise, took an unrecoverable turn last night:

(UPDATE: I originally included a clip from youtube, but Sportsfive, who own the rights to the broadcast from the match, have been busy scouring the intertubes for copyright infringements. Or something like that. Did I mention that they are French? Anyway, check out the comments for an active clip).

Granted, it's not a World Cup quarter final, but it was the final few minutes of qualification, and the match looked to be heading ineluctably towards penalties. It also was not the fifth round of the FA Cup in 1999, either.

I was in the pub for this match (technically only the second half). While Henry claims that he did not do it on purpose, I strongly disagree. The first hand ball was incidental -- still a foul, but not purposeful. The second hand ball he appears to direct the ball with intent. Before the replays, we knew something was up: virtually every Republic player had their hands raised, and Shay Given storms out to first the referee, then the linesman, to protest. The replays made the foul plain.

It's difficult to blame the referee for this; in the main he had a good match. The Anelka dive may have led to a penalty against Given, but that was a judgment call; the hand ball was not. The linesman should have spotted it, and either didn't, or didn't believe his eyes. But then he also failed to spot the clear offsides at the same time.

I'm not buying into any of the conspiracy theories -- while FIFA and UEFA have a clear preference for large nations to qualify, they sorted this out in the playoff draw. If there was a conspiracy involving the ref, he would have called that penalty against Given, not waited for a few minutes remaining in stoppage time to ignore a hand ball.

As my English club has always been Arsenal, even before the Wenger years, I should be inclined to give Henry the benefit of the doubt and wax eloquent about how any player would have done the same thing.

But I'm not. That hand ball was intentional, and should be called what it is: cheating. And Henry's legacy will forever be tied to this moment, which is a shame.

UPDATE: The Irish Justice Minister is calling for a replay. I heard rumblings about this on both BBC Radio 4 and 5 Live last night and this morning, which is why I cited the Sheffield United - Arsenal FA Cup Fifth Round tie in the above.

It's not going to happen. How would it? Any such match has to happen soon, but the next international window is months away, so the players would have to be coaxed from their clubs. While FIFA and UEFA can pry players from their clubs during international breaks, to the best of my knowledge they have no leverage outside of international windows. The current French squad play for such clubs as Chelsea, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Arsenal, Manchester United, Lyon . . . when these clubs say no, and they would within a second of receiving the request, the French players have no incentive to challenge the club position: they've already been handed their trip to South Africa (sorry for the dreadful pun, but about half the newspaper headlines today make the obvious easy play).

Truly, academics lead enviable lives.

Proffer theories as to the avocation I undertook presently. You guessed it! I spent the day marking papers, which, means I had, many reminders of why teaching Writingstudents, even at the Universitylevel, can make even the most mild-mannered academic want to JAB IN EYES JAB IN EYES.

Actual posts to recommence when the noises in my head resemble English more than English as she is spoke.

ALSO: Because it's always best to make this plain from the beginning, on the issue of whether my students know what I'm writing:

With the exception of the text adventure, [what I post is] written to be used in class, then repurposed for the blog. I show them videos of Shatner and ask them if that's what they want to sound like; I have them write blog posts (for their course blogs) in which they're required to substitute every noun and verb with suggestions from Microsoft Word's thesaurus, etc. Whenever I write about conversations in the classroom (for example), I ask the students if they're alright with that ... and as I'm typically the butt of those posts, they always are. In fact, by the end of the quarter, they're actually demanding I write up what happened in a given class (for example). Even the most notorious bit of student writing I've parodied was done with the student's consent. (It was years ago, and he wrote me out of the blue to apologize for writing it.)

Smeared By A Murderer

A great catch by Cole, who notes that a new CNN special should remind us that one of the chief witnesses in the extremely thin and frequently illogical witchhunt against Scott Beauchamp, First Sergeant John Hatleywas convicted of killing Iraqi civilians in cold blood:

1SG Hatley and the other NCOs executed these men in March of 2007. Scott Beauchamp wrote Shock Troops in July 2007. Hatley wrote this letter after July of 2007, insisting that Beauchamp was disturbed because he wrote about making fun of someone in a cafeteria or running over a dog. He wrote that letter attacking Beauchamp, knowing that just a few weeks earlier, he and others had taken it upon themselves to put a gun to the back of several detainee’s heads, pull the trigger, and dump their bodies into a canal.

But they would have you believe that no one in their unit would run over a dog.

Or play with bones.

By the way, Scott Beauchamp is still in uniform serving his country honorably. None of the wingnuts who freaked out about him at the Weekly Standard or elsewhere have gotten around to enlisting.

Call me crazy, but I'm not inclined to put a lot of stock into Hatley's evalutions of other people's integrity.

I'd Rather See Keanu Reeves in the Lead Role in Going Rogue

Keanu Reeves is something that should never mix with the 47 Ronin.

On the Bedwetter Caucus

I assume that the fact that the latest ad hoc conservative arguments that following the rule of law is a luxury the United States just can't afford are illogical isn't news to most of you, but Lithwick provides an excellent summary:

Opposition to the Obama administration's plan to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confederates in a federal court in New York City is hardening into two camps. One is concerned that we may be unwittingly playing into the terrorists' hands. The other is incensed that we already have. What both camps share, besides a kind of unhinged logic and complete disregard for the legal process, is an obsessive fascination with the accused. The result is a broad willingness to sacrifice our commitment to legal principles in favor of the symbolic satisfaction of crushing the hopes and dreams of a motley group of criminals.

Of course, the idea that the alleged desires of terrorists should be of paramount importance to our own decisions is a long-running feature of the perpetual bedwetter set.

Going Rogue: The Index

Thought I'd help Dave out a little bit here by noting this...

But She Has 8 ranks in the "Bluff" Skill...

This comment from Dave's thread (also appearing here) deserves the full blog treatment:

First let me say, great blog! Second, let me say I wish I had read it first before buying this book.

I stood in line to get my copy of this book from the local bookstore fearing it might be sold out early. Hot chick on the cover, so far so good. Then I opened it and started reading.

To my chagrin it didn't start out well. I thought well at some point this has to get better. But guess what it doesn't! There's nothing at all about dex rolls, dps builds, searching for traps, sneak attacks, assassins, +4 daggers or anything!

All it is some woman whining about how everyone in her party wouldn't let her make any decisions, about how something called a Couric made her look like a complete idiot (I couldn't find it in the monster manual but, I'm guessing it must be like a Sphinx), and how her group leader McCain wouldn't let her be rogue enough.

Well, I don't even know where to start addressing this stuff. She doesn't even have any daggers! I mean, that's hardly the group leader's fault! She should have loaded out before the quest started!

Plus, on every single page she bemoans her 8 INT build and blames her horrible playing on everyone else! It's her fault for putting all her stat points into Charisma!

To sum up, this book is terrible. It's anti-rogue if anything. If you want a book on how not to be a rogue this has got to be the bible.

I'm going back to the store now to see if I can get my hard earned cash back for this awful drek.

Going Rogue, Chapter 1

I should note at the outset that Going Rogue is substantially worse than even I could have predicted. The opening chapter is clearly supposed to bear several loads, including (1) establishing Palin's geographic and cultural bona fides; and (2) conveying her abiding love for Jeebus, family and Ronald Reagan. In each case, the results are pretty unimpressive.

For starters, Palin's ghost-polished descriptions of Alaska's landscape and cultural peculiarities are delivered with roughly the same verve as I'd expect to find in a mediocre historical novel written by someone who, at most, had visited the state on a cruise ship. We learn for example, the astonishing and widely-underpublicized fact that Alaskan nights are incredibly short during the summertime,

creating a euphoria that runs through our veins. Hour after hour, there is still more time and more daylight to accomplish one more thing. If we told our kids to be home before dark, we wouldn't see them for weeks.

Perhaps I haven't had enough experience with the "euphoria" of "accomplish[ing] one more thing" recently, but there's something really underwhelming about Palin's trek through the list of Generically Oddball Stuff about Alaska. Yes, people up here shoot a lot of megafauna; yes, people up here chop a lot of firewood; yes, people up here can grow gigantic heads of cabbage; yes, people up here are impressed by grazing sheep. But people up here also do tons of meth, beat the shit out of their kids, and half-purposely ram their cars into trees. When you remember that Sarah Palin is earning well over $1 million for this book, it's hard not to feel cheated when she reminds everyone that Alaska has glaciers bigger than Delaware.

Moving beyond the scenic and cultural moorings of chapter 1, we learn a bit -- all of it vaguely detailed -- about the roots of Palin's political beliefs. In a passage whose goofiness resists description, for example, we read about Palin's childhood immersion in the minutia of the Watergate investigation:

It amazed me that the whole country seemed riveted, unified by watching the events unfold. It was the first time since the moon landing that I'd seen that, so I knew Watergate had to be big. When Gerald Ford took over, I knew who he was because I remembered reading about him and seeing him a picture in a scholastic magazine. He'd been America's vice president then, sitting parade-style atop the backseat of a convertible, waving at the crowd. Now he was our president!

I'll concede that Sarah Palin was ten years old when Nixon resigned, but this is a brainless waste of a paragraph. When we consider that Palin traces her awareness of "the skewed priorities of government" to a ticket she received for underage snow-machining, one has to marvel at Sarah Palin's inability to say anything interesting about the most grotesque political conspiracy in the nation's history. She manages to write as if she's responding to a question from Charles Gibson, except that Charles Gibson is nowhere to be found.

Her ode to Reagan is similarly inept, larded with bog-standard wingnuttia like "[he] won the Cold War without firing a shot" and "[he] restored our faith" in America after the Carter interregnum. Reagan, we learn, "radiated confidence and optimism" and "had a steel spine." He believed in "ideas" like "cutting taxes" and "building a strong national defense." It's pretty vacant stuff all around, but I'm sure the second chapter will be a thousand times better.

"In Any Meaningful Sense"

I endorse most of what Gian Gentile says here about the Vietnam War, especially in the context of this quote from George Herring:

…the war could [not] have been ‘won’ in any meaningful sense at a moral or material cost most Americans deemed acceptable.

Gentile is a pretty harsh critic of the COIN turn in the US Army, and is pushing back against some of the more aggressive claims made by COINdistas about how the Vietnam War might have been won with better tactics. This dovetails, of course, with revisionist right wing accounts of the Vietnam War. This, in turn, has the potential to create some odd bedfellows; while COINdistas blame both the Army and the dirty hippies for losing the war (with the bulk of blame, in fairness, falling on the Army), right revisionists prefer to reserve responsibility for perfidy of the flower children. I'm sure that Ralph Peters has an opinion, and I'm sure that I don't want to know what it is.

At the same time, I think it's fair to say that the Vietnam War, like the Iraq War, involved both strategic and tactical errors. Both wars were stupidly conceived and ineptly conducted. The difference between 2007 and 1968, I think, is the disappearance of the Red Army. The need to prepare for war against an actual peer competitor made the "COIN turn" impossible; David Petraeus could not have found purchase in the US Army of the Vietnam era. So, while many of the tactical errors could be resolved in Iraq (even as the strategic error could not be remedied), such was never a possibility in Vietnam.

Incidentally, I just finished Tom Ricks' The Gamble, and he makes a connection that I hadn't previously understood between Petraeus' fitness obsession and his professional success. Ricks argues that Petraeus outstanding performance on the physical indicators helped promotion boards ignore some of the more troubling aspects of his career, such as the overt intellectualism and the focus on COIN.

Not Going Anywhere

I'm guessing that this is going to make it hard to treat the settlements as "bargaining chips."

Gatsby on Madison Avenue

My wife and I started watching Mad Men on DVD about three weeks ago, and are now thoroughly addicted. We're about midway through the second season, and just viewed the episode that features Mr. and Mrs. Donald Draper on a family picnic, during which Don tosses a beer can into the woods and Betsy cleans off the blanket on which they ate by simply tossing all the wrappers, napkins etc. onto the grass.

This scene reminded me of how when I was a child in the late 60s and early 70s there was what in retrospect seems like an intense anti-littering campaign, featuring among other things this famous PSA, that everyone of a certain age remembers.



I don't know anything about the genesis or ultimate efficacy of that campaign, but if a scene from a period piece TV show counts as compelling evidence, it seems to have worked.

Seriously, did lots of Americans -- including privileged people highly conscious of what was considered socially correct upper class public behavior -- just use the outdoors as a wastebasket 50 years ago? Anyone know of any studies of the issue?

Sportswriters Descend to the Level of Political Pundits

Somerby notes the unfortunate parallels:

Undying love of conventional wisdom: Many sports pundits have seemed genuinely angry about the fact that Belichick did something unconventional. (Trent Dilfer, come on down! And take your meds!) In political journalism, the pundit class is often happiest when They All Get To Say The Same Thing. In this case, many sports pundits came unhinged because one of the NFL’s coaches didn’t do The Thoroughly Typical Thing. This reaction seemed quite familiar.

The instant recourse to mind-reading: Many sports pundits instantly turned to mind-reading, thus “explaining” the motive behind Belichick’s unconventional move. (Kill the pig! For one especially foolish example, just click here.) Of course, this is also a common, numb-nutted approach among our political pundits.

The inability to conduct an analysis: Finally, we were struck by how weakly many sports pundits were able to reason about Belichick’s decision. They complained that he didn’t do the conventional thing—and then, they began explaining his motives. But had he done the smart thing—made the right decision? Many pundits showed no sign of knowing how to approach such a question. To them, Belichick’s decision was unusual. Automatically, this made it wrong.

In addition, there seem to be two other major arguments:

• Credentialism is everything, meaning that those stat geeks and their math who probably got cut from their high school football teams should be ridiculed. Hence, sports pundits and mediocre ex-players can be justified in calling a coach with 5 Super Bowl rings an idiot based on no actual evidence.*
  
• The coach's most important job a coach has is not to maximize his team's chances of winning but to "show confidence in his defense." The best way to demonstrate this confidence is to assume that the Colts have a 105% chance of scoring if they get the ball on the Pats' 30.
  

As I've said in comments, I should make clear that -- as with many such tactical decisions -- the percentages are within a range that makes it impossible to know what the best call was there. I think the best evidence carefully considered supports Belichick, but it's close enough that it's possible that in this individual case punting was a slightly better option, and I wouldn't be inclined to criticize him either way. But to say that the decision couldn't have been right is silly.

*To be clear, I don't agree with the credentialism -- Belichick is a great coach, but obviously it's possible for him to do dumb things, and I think his play-calling and clock management leading up to his defensible 4th-and-2 call was shaky. But if your football experience matters more than the evidence, then given that Belichick has vastly superior credentials to the Michael Wilbons and Trent Dilfers of the world we can end the debate immediately.

Wallis: Wrong on the Policy, Wrong on the Politics

It's hard to even know where to begin with what is -- despite some hemming and hawing about "both sides" being at fault that always seems to end up with the pro-choice majority being at fault -- a rousing defense of the Stupak Amendment. [HT, I think, to Dr. Black.] First, on the policy, welcome to non-sequitur theater:

The now-famous Stupak amendment is clearly closer to the pro-life community's understanding of what "neutrality" means than the pro-choice community's. But it is clearly not the caricature it is now being made into by the losing side of the vote, some of whom are now referring to it as "the coat hanger amendment" suggesting that it is designed to push women into back alleys again for illegal abortions by denying them access to legal abortion; it certainly is not.

What it does do is exclude health-care plans in the public option from covering elective abortions; it also disallows any public subsidies from being used for plans in the new exchange which offer elective abortions.

Um, what? I hate to break this to Wallis, but the thing about denying people the money to pay for things is that it denies them access to them if they lack the resources. This is true of his beloved Hyde Amendment, and this is true in a more limited way of the Stupak Amendment. The latter denies women access to legal abortion if they have to buy insurance and couldn't do so without the subsidies. That's why people opposed to abortion rights favor them. You would think that a progressive "pro-lifer" would care that abortion access is being selectively denied for a class of relatively powerless women, but of course Wallis doesn't seem to care at all about such inequities. At any rate, Wallis' argument is like saying that if welfare was abolished, it wouldn't deny many poor people access to adequate sustenance; it would just prevent them from using public money to purchase food. Unless we've suddenly entered a world in which all women have solid middle-class incomes without me noticing, it's a distinction without a difference.

On the politics, he gives the same line anti-choicers fed a credulous Amy Sullivan:

But somewhere along the line, the process broke down. Instead of building on the initial common ground of neutrality and bringing both sides together to hammer out compromises, many pro-life Democrats felt excluded from the conversation about how abortion would be addressed in the bill. Ultimately, they felt they were presented with a final "compromise" on abortion drafted by a predominantly pro-choice committee. Although the Capps Amendment was meant as a good faith effort to find common ground, it was drafted and finalized without enough substantive input from the pro-life community, and it failed to address many pro-life concerns. (In several situations, it even made things worse instead of better.)

So, in other words, 1)opponents of reproductive freedom injected abortion into a debate about health care, 2)the part of the Democratic Party that actually represents the party's core values made some compromises try to get health care passed, and 3)the minority of the party that opposes the party's core principles decided to hold health care hostage until they got the odious language they wanted. And this shows that...pro-choicers injected abortion politics into the health care debate and don't really care about health care reform (because they only way to really care about health care reform is to ensure that it doesn't cover crucial medical procedures for women that Jim Wallis finds icky.) Sure.

Look, I'll make this simple. It was opponents of abortion rights, not supporters, who decided to risk health care reform by introducing a wedge issue. (Note that the leadership didn't try to use health care reform to pursue the salutary goal of getting rid of the Hyde Amendment.) It was Stupak et al. that couldn't abide a bill written by a leadership that actually trued to represent the values of the vast majority of the party and threatened to take their balls and go home. If it fails, it's on them, end of story.

I suppose it should also go without saying that Wallis is also a major proponent of the idea that Democrats could court opponents of abortion rights without any substantive risks. I guess this is the end of that! Although since he seems to define restrictions on access to abortion as not actually being restrictions, maybe he'll keep saying it...

Pierce on Paglia

Seems like as good an explanation as any:

Part The Fifth: Being The Continuing Adventures Of Waldo, The Drunk Security Guard. Amazed at his continued employment at the home offices of Salon, Waldo celebrates by chasing 15 shots of Virginia Gentleman with a six-pack of Piels Real Draft. He sings two choruses of "Twist And Shout" and, while impersonating Ferris Bueller atop a desk, he falls, knocking himself unconscious. While he is out cold, a squirrel hops in through a window, downs the rest of the liquor, and starts tap-dancing on a KEYBOARD. "When as a Yale graduate student I ransacked that great temple, Sterling Library, in search of paradigms for reintegrating literary criticism with history, I found literally nothing in Levi-Strauss that I felt had scholarly solidity." And then I failed to find my ass with both hands and made a career out of it.

Well, I guess it's not very charitable to squirrels...

Time For Another...

...blogger ethics panel.

Shpadoinkle! Sarah Palin endorses cannibalism.

From the NRO's new shrine to Sarah Palin:

If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?

Because He wanted everyone to have a shpadoinkle day? More seriously, Palin is calling Him a rank hypocrite, because He also said "You must not eat bats" and yet he made them out of meat.

Ignorance of the Original Testament hypocrisy is, I admit, the easiest hypocrisy to spot, but it's the least effective to mock on account of its profundity. If someone were to inform Palin that her beloved moose aren't kosher because they weren't properly shekhted and porged, she'd complain about "gotcha journalism" and question your love of America on account of her profound ignorance of the book she claims to live her life by.

Fortunately for semi-professional mockers such as myself, Palin set the standard demonstrably lower by claiming that God intended humans to eat anything made out of meat.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, Editor Extraordinaire!

When you read something like this:

From a $50 NRO Contributor [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Great job NRO. Your holding down the fort until the conservative movement gets its act together.

Contribute to NRO here.

11/16 03:30 PM

It pays to remember that Kathryn Jean Lopez "has been ... praised for her 'editorial daring.'" That sentence slipped through multiple layers of possible editorial intervention, and the person who wrote it (and likely forwarded the link to that post to his or her friends and relatives) is now wincing with embarrassment at the error and wondering why an editor of Lopez's (self-professed) awesomeness couldn't be bothered to make a silent correction. After all, an editor of her talent surely noticed the mistake, but decided to post the email anyway in a deliberate attempt to embarrass its author. He or she must be so happy they paid $50 for the privilege of a public humiliation. I know I'd be.

Not All Bad Policy Is Unconstitutional

Attempts to use Pfzier pulling out of New London to argue that Kelo was wrong rather than using it to argue that the New London and Connecticut governments were involved in stupid public policy really gives away the "conservatives object to same-sex marriage because of teh judicial activism!!!1!1!" show. It's not just that it's obviously a policy argument, but in the vast majority of cases there's really no pretense otherwise.

Another thing to note is that eminent domain is just one instance of large corporate welfare scheme. Even had the development scheme that required eminent domain never gotten off the ground, New London would still be out the tax breaks, subsidies, and giveaways of public land, and the decentralization of economic regulation conservertarians like so much makes this kind of stuff more, not less, likely. The Courts are probably right not to use the commerce clause to stop these stupid subsidies, just as they were probably right in Kelo. Kelo deserves sympathy for having her house appropriated for a stupid project, but she was protected by the takings clause: she got compensation, while New London's other taxpayers weren't. (I do think Marty Lederman had a point that the courts would be better policing eminent domain abuse by ensuring that takings compensation is on the high side.)

Conceding That Abortion Is Icky -- Not An Effective Strategy

Lizardbreath is 100% right about this:

I can't help thinking of the Stupak amendment, prohibiting abortion coverage in any health insurance plan that's paid for in part by federal subsidies under the House health reform bill, as the payoff from all that talk about how pro-choice voters should be more respectful of pro-lifers' beliefs. If we just acknowledged that abortion was always tragic, and always kind of wrong somehow, and that prolifers' total opposition to anyone being able to get an abortion ever was a deeply held moral belief that pro-choice voters shouldn't hold against them, then they'd respect us more in return and abortion would stop being such a hotly contested political issue.

Turns out, no. What happens when you treat pro-life views with solicitous respect and make sure pro-life politicians feel completely welcomed in your big tent party is that sixty-four House Democrats vote for poor women to be unable to get abortions or, most likely, to in at least some cases get late-term rather than early abortions because they can't get the money together in time. Solicitious respect isn't just interpersonal decency that will make political conflict over abortion less intense, it's unilateral political disarmament, and it has real policy consequences.

The logic that by which "emphasizing that abortion is gross and women who get abortions are immoral" actually benefits the pro-choice position has never made any sense, and surely the Stupak amendment settles the question. The idea that anti-choicers don't actually want to legally restrict abortion for poor people but just want Democratic politicians to give them a pat on the head makes no sense in theory and is pretty clearly wrong in practice.

Yoo Defends Arbitrary Torture, Opposes Rule of Law, Makes Self-Refuting Argument

I suppose this is all a dog-bites-man story...

Equalized

Edward Woodward, RIP.

On the Other Hand...

My throwaway intuition notwithstanding, there seems to be good evidence that Belichick was right. [via Neyer.]

...see also Beaudrot. I also think Belichick was right not to concede a touchdown -- whatever your respect for Manning, you can't treat it like a chip-shot field goal.

Update (Paul): I loved Belichick's decision to go for it, which statistically made all kinds of sense, and as Scott points out actually becomes more attractive when you consider the precise details of this situation and not merely the statistics regarding these situations in general (as of course any decent coach always does).

Where he can definitely be faulted is for the playing calling sequence -- if you're going to go for it on fourth down then cross them up with a quick hitting running play on third. Even if you don't make it you force them to use their final time out, which is good in itself and also gives you time to plan the fourth down play. But going for it was a great call, which is confirmed by the universal opprobium pouring forth from the International Guild of Typical Middle-Aged Sportswriters and Washed Up Jocks.

Anyway it's heartening to see Del Rio, Ryan, and Belichick making smart strategic decisions in the face of the incredulity of the Al Michaels' of the world.

The Hideous Slot Parlor Requirement

Matt raises a question I've raised before too -- what possible justification can there be for permitting private casinos but not permitting table games? Making an exception for lotteries, at least, has a plausible profit-maximization rationale (state monopoly, horrible odds.) Certainly, I've never seen a decent justification for this on the merits, and I assume I never will (especially since, as Matt notes, much less labor-intensive electronic gaming undermines economic justifications of legalization.) But even from a standpoint of narrow self-interest, not allowing table games in casinos makes no sense -- the casino operators don't seem to think that having only electronic games is the way to maximize profits. Is the idea that gambling is immoral, so if states have to permit it it should be as unpleasant as possible? I don't get it.

This is teh awesome

From the Jacksonville-Jets game:


"It included a Jets defense trying to allow a touchdown to give Jacksonville the lead and the Jaguars refusing to score it. And it had nothing to do with either team trying to lose.

Jaguars running Maurice Jones-Drew, one of the stars of the game, intentionally dropped to his knee before the end zone after a 9-yard gain to set up the winning field goal.

Mindful of what some fans care about most, Jones-Drew said, “Tell my fantasy owners I’m sorry.”

He did it to run down the clock because the Jets had no timeouts and the Jaguars did not want the Jets to get the ball back after what was to be a 21-yard field goal by Josh Scobee.

Jones-Drew already had one touchdown and 123 rushing yards. Another score by him would have meant valuable points to fans who drafted him for their fantasy leagues.

“I’d rather take a win any day,” Jones-Drew said.

But when he was told not to score, Jones-Drew said he was surprised at first. “I’m like, a knee? What do you mean?” he said. “I took a deep breath and took a knee.”

What made it even stranger was the play before that. On first-and-10 from the Jets’ 14 with two minutes left, Jets Coach Rex Ryan told his defenders to let Jacksonville score. Ryan figured it would give the Jaguars a 6-point lead but leave his team time to take the ensuing kickoff and drive the field for a game-winning touchdown.

Because not all of his defenders got the message, Jones-Drew was tackled at the 10 by Marques Douglas and Sione Pouha after a 4-yard run.

“We couldn’t even get that right,” Ryan said.

That forced Ryan to use his last timeout. Jones-Drew dropped to a knee at the 1-yard line on the next play, and after that quarterback David Garrard knelt on the next two downs to waste more time and set up the winning kick."

Meanwhile in related news professional moron Andy Reid kicks a field goal on fourth and one from the San Diego one while down 14-0, and then another one on fourth and one from the San Diego seven while down 21-6.

UPDATE [by SL]: On the other hand, Belichick's disdain for the conventional wisdom on punting has served him well, but (with all respect for Manning and granting that they got screwed on the call) that seemed to be pushing it to an indefensible extreme.

Sunday Book Review: Hawk and Dove

Nicholas Thompson'sThe Hawk and the Dove is an exceptionally readable dual biography of George Kennan and Paul Nitze. George Kennan is, to some, rather an odd dove; he helped formulate the vision of containment that led to NSC-68 and militarized confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, he was hardly a pacifist; nevertheless, in the way in which debate over national security policy became structured in the Cold War, Kennan most often stood on the "dovish" side. Nitze, the most direct father of NSC-68, as well as Team B, plays the role of "hawk." Nitze is also Nicholas Thompson's grandfather.

Both Kennan and Nitze were privileged and wildly talented. It's true enough that an Ivy League pedigree won an undue degree of influence in the 1940s and the 1950s (a situation which absolutely, positively does not hold today), and Thompson details the manner in which Kennan and Nitze built their social networks and, eventually, their influence within government. Nitze was much better at this than Kennan; whereas Kennan believed that ideas were key to moving the machinery of government, Nitze understood the value of creating, nursing, and maintaining a group of bureaucratic warriors, as well as key connections with other major policymakers. It's hardly surprising that the most prominent neocons found their start with Nitze; he understood that the bureaucracy responds to ideas that are prominent within the social circles of the bureaucracy, rather than to ideas that are popular within the general public or that are well regarded in the academy. Nitze also came to understand that the best approach to seizing influence over foreign policy was bipartisan; to make sure that your people were part of the larger machine of foreign policy, regardless of who happened to control Congress or to sit in the White House at any given time.

Nitze became obsessed with the question of how nuclear weapons could be utilized in an actual war. This isn't because he wanted the nuke the Soviets; he genuinely believed that if the Soviets ever achieved "escalation superiority," which in its essence meant "more megatons than us" that they would be able, by threat of nuclear annihilation, to win serious diplomatic concessions. US "preparedness" prevented both nuclear conflict and inevitable concession to Soviet aggression. Nitze spun out scenarios of nuclear war that were based on pure fantasy; the Soviets would somehow squirrel away the bulk on their population in vast civil defense shelters, then use their larger warheads to deal a devastating first strike to the US, secure in the knowledge that only their cities, infrastructure, and industry would be destroyed by a US counter-strike. The debates became tribal, as all such arguments will; the enemy became pacifist appeasers, and the use of any tactic to defeat this enemy, including accusations of treason and the invention of "facts," became legitimate.

Nitze's greatest failure, and the biggest difference between him and Kennan, was his de facto assumption that Soviet domestic politics didn't exist. For Nitze and his acolytes, the assumption that all of the relevant policymakers in the Soviet Union were incorrigibly and equally hostile was sufficient in order to proceed with analysis. Weapons production was always the result of a nefarious plan formulated in the Kremlin, and never the result of the bureaucratic strength of various faction within the Soviet military. Any modernization, even one required to match US capabilities, was evidence of an evil Soviet plot to acquire escalation dominance. But this was only part of Nitze's trick; by the time Team B was put together, Soviet arms production and capabilities could be inferred from imputed Soviet intentions. This is to say that evidence of Soviet weapons production at time A indicated evil Soviet intent, which then led Nitze and his cohort to estimate future Soviet production based on that indication of evil Soviet intent. The result, of course, was a wild overestimation of Soviet capabilities, and a complete misunderstanding of Soviet intent. Richard Pipes famously declared Team B a success, because it had established that some within the Soviet Union believed that a nuclear war could be won. What Pipes declined to note was that a) a similarly influential group within the United States believed the same thing, and b) the Soviets who believed in the possibility of victory were, like their American counterparts, a minority of the strategic establishment, c) almost to an individual, these Soviets believed that the war would begin with an American nuclear attack, and d) the most hawkish elements in the Soviet Union won bureaucratic victories on the backs of men like Paul Nitze. The products of School Nitze, as it were, would repeat these errors with Iraq, Iran, and China.

Thompson's Kennan is a man who was wrong about many things, but who was right about one big thing. Kennan had frankly bizarre views about a number of subjects, including the value of democracy, race relations within the United States, and the project of modernity. However, he was fundamentally correct to identify the internal politics of the Soviet Union as dysfunctional, and to conclude that the regime had a limited lifespan, even on the time metrics normally associated with empires. The Soviet Empire was not, by his argument, the sort of creature that could survive in the long term, and it certainly could not outlast the Western democracies, however flawed they might be. The Soviet permanent war economy depended on a permanent perception of threat, and as this faded the Soviet experiment became less tenable. Kennan was also correct that Soviet expansion was limited in immediate aims, and that it could be successfully managed. Thus managing the Soviet Union was worthwhile, as it was a foul regime led by awful men, but the task had to be undertaken in a measured fashion.

Oddly enough, Kennan and Nitze interacted only at a few key times during their careers. Kennan made his key contribution before Nitze really found his niche in government, and Nitze gave a particular shape to Kennan's basic framework. Kennan's influence on major policy was minimal after the early 1950s, while Nitze had his hands in some manner on almost every strategic decision until the late 1980s. The two were friends early on in the same sense that all Ivy League cogs in the US foreign policy machine were friends; they were never particularly close, yet they never personalized their disagreements. Personally, I found the Kennan half of the book fascinating, simply for the basic weirdness of its subject; Kennan was an odd duck, with strange ideas. The Nitze sections left me infuriated; Nitze and his clones pursued one big idea, and didn't both to worry overmuch about whether it was right, or at all helpful to the country. It's not quite right to say that Kennan's ideas deserved more credence, as his central argument was extremely influential; however, Nitze's acolytes should have been chased out of government and indeed out of public life. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle should have had to struggle to publish an op-ed in the Dayton Daily News; instead, they were able to repeat their flawed analysis of the Soviet Union on a succession of other states, all to dreadful effect.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower Bowing Hour!

Seems someone forgot to tell Ike what everyone on the right knows (but oddly never cites a source for): the President never ever bows. Because as even a cursory search of the AP Image archive indicates, the man could not stop bowing. Hello there, Pope John XXIII!

Howdy to you, wife of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Gronchi!

Hi again, Archbishop Iakovos of New York, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America!

Long time no see, Charles De Gaulle!

By their logic, I believe that last bow means we have all been French since 2 September 1959. Eisenhower clearly demonstrated by that bow that the American President is a subordinate of the French, which means that for the past 50 years America has been a French territory with pretensions of sovereignty. Mon Dieu!

QOTD

Spackerman responds to Sarah Palin's claims that the United States is too fragile to withstand the rule of law:

What’s an actual insult to the victims of 9/11 is the idea that America is not strong enough to withstand the blatherings of a mass murderer.

Oh Noes, The Gays Are Coming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At least bigotry this undiluted probably isn't as common as it used to be.

That Was A Horrible Period in American History

The Bush administration's allegedly rational and moderate Attorney General asserts that the country needs more arbitrary indefinite detention and less rule of law. Let's just say that I haven't changed my mind.