On Free Speech, the First Amendment, Facebook and Twitter, etc.

There is a conflation that often occurs in free speech discussions, i.e., legal free speech protection vs. the value of free speech in general. This is central to the recent discussions of the rights and obligations of social media platforms like Twitter, reddit, youtube and Facebook to police the speech of those participating on the platform.

Let's start by noting that the first amendment (1A) does not compel these platforms to publish anything. These are private companies. The 1A protects a citizen's right to make statements and hold opinions, it does not compel any other entities to use their resources to support such statements. If anything, the 1A simply protects these companies from being compelled to support such statements on their sites.

Nonetheless, insofar as these platforms have become the de facto public square, people should be concerned about the extent to which such platforms police speech. The arguments for the importance and utility of the 1A for a thriving democracy apply to some extent to these major internet platforms. If a free and open exchange of ideas is important in the public square, there is some value to ensuring that a free and open exchange of ideas can occur in what has become the central place in which ideas can be exchanged. Furthermore, there is a legitimate concern in insisting or allowing that agents at a major company become the actual arbiters of what one can legitimately say in the public square.  This is not because the 1A compels them to allow any and all speech, but because we think that open exchange of ideas is useful and/or because we do not want people policing central speech platforms to be driven by obligations to shareholders rather than general democratic obligations.

These issues become conflated. So it is worth underscoring that appeals to free speech on social media platforms are not refuted by the simple observation that the 1A does not apply to them. One may want to minimize the policing of speech on social media platforms without believing or assuming that the 1A compels us to do so.

The simplest solution is to simply dig in our heels and argue that whatever is protected by the 1A should be allowed on these major platforms. But this does not work very well in practice for one simple reason, internet anonymity. Anonymity results in people making statements not necessarily because they believe they are true and stand behind them, but for a whole range of other reasons, personal vendettas, the thrill of generating a reaction, boredom or whatever. The reasons for supporting free speech don't clearly apply to anonymous speech. We support free speech, presumably, because we see value in keeping the parameters of discussion open so that we don't shut out useful and important ideas. But preserving anonymity does little to encourage the open exchange of ideas, it degrades discussion into personal attacks and outrageous unsupportable claims, most of which do almost nothing to keeping the parameters of discussion open and are more than likely actually antithetical to realizing this.

However, even setting anonymity aside, I do not think that these private companies should be compelled to allow all speech protected by the first amendment. It is fairly clear that blatant hate speech and utterly false claims are not useful contributions in the free and open exchange of ideas even if making them fully illegal is impractical or otherwise undesirable.  I suspect there are some things we can do to protect robust speech on these platforms without simply entrusting to Facebook the difficult task of dictating what people can legitimately say, a few guiding principles:

• Make the guidelines for legitimate speech on any platform clear and ensure they are consistently applied. If hate speech is illegal, all hate speech is illegal and articulate clear examples of what counts as hate speech, including a full range of edge cases. Publicize these, make it clear to people what kinds of speech they will not be hearing or articulating on the platform.
• Have independent arbiters make the decisions as to what does and does not count as legitimate speech. These should be truly independent arbiters, paid by some independent organization. How does this get funded? I don't know, possibly via taxes, but every attempt should be made that it's maximally independent from both the companies and government officials. 
• Allow for tighter or looser controls based on the degree of anonymity under which a user is operating and one's history of operating in good faith. A person putting their name and reputation on the line legitimately gets a lot more latitude in making offensive and controversial statements than does @Trump4Ever4550 with 3 followers and a one day old account.

Washington Post launches contradictory attacks on Sanders presidential run

The Washington Post reveals two distinct lines of attack running simultaneously on Sanders now that HRC is pushing the panic button (1) He's just telling voters what they want to hear but can't deliver (link)  (2) he's unelectable because his ideas are so radical that voters will find them repugnant. (link)

Those two lines of attack are obviously in some tension, although I guess, to be fair, the first is being applied to Democratic primary voters and the second to the general electorate. Still, the argument that his policies are shiny attractive baubles for the Democratic base and utterly repugnant to the portion of the electorate that would be in play for deciding the election strikes me as an implausible claim.

Mini Reviews

Some TV series and movies stuff I've watched recently w/ mini-reviews:

Goon: A slapstick hockey movie, not unlike "Slapshot". It was surprisingly good, imo, and not entirely farcical. Probably more interesting/fun to watch if you're Canadian and/or a hockey fan. (3.5/5)

The Drop: Great NY low level organized crime drama. Great late career performance from James Gandolfini, with some interesting twists. (4/5)

Making a Murderer: I was disappointed in this, (one of a very few, apparently), an okay documentary with some sensationalizing, but not great. I made it through 3 episodes and then just googled the rest of the story. (2.5/5)

The Following: It started out interesting, but too much killing and too implausible as a story about a psychopath, and there is such a thing as overdoing the surprising plot twists. That point comes when the viewer begins to assume that everyone is actually a bad guy.

Happy Valley: A really great BBC series about a frumpy strong but troubled police sergeant and a kidnapping. (4.5/5)

Thoughts on that clerk in Kentucky (oh, and that dentist who killed Cecil)

According to my Facebook and Twitter feed, this county clerk in Kentucky is the worst bigot to walk the earth in some time. Of course, just ten years ago, 60%+ of Americans shared her views on gay marriage. Obviously I don't agree at all with what this woman was/is doing but I find this worldwide sanctimonious pile on of one single person far more troubling than the actions that precipitated it. Same goes for all that (far less justifiable) demonization of the dentist who killed the lion a few weeks back.

The reactions are somewhat hypocritical and incredibly mean-spirited. If some low level clerk failed to carry out state or federal law on the death penalty or issue a permit for fracking or some such, I suspect that I and many of those demonizing this woman would be celebrating the acts of civil disobedience. At the very least we wouldn't be attacking the bureaucrat with personal attacks or digging into obscure details of her past or noting how unattractive she is or stupid crap like that. So, it's not as if we have some general principle that says, "government bureaucrats who refuse to carry out government policy despite personal objections don't deserve to be part of society and are beneath contempt." This is less about the evil of her not doing her job and more about her position on gay marriage. But her position on gay marriage is one that many of her opponents and large portions of society shared recently. It's a bit much to argue that taking a position that we seem to have been okay with for an awfully long time is now worthy of the most utmost contempt we can muster. I assume, after all, that the victims of her bigotry have recourse and will, I'm sure, be able to obtain a license fairly soon (even today, it seems). This isn't to trivialize her bigotry or her refusal to recognize the rights of those who want to marry - it must end and we can't let it stand -  so, throw her in jail if she's in contempt but enough with all the other bullshit.

(The hypocrisy in the case of the lion killer is far more pronounced and contemptible. How many of these lion lovers happily munch on veal or chicken or steak that involved subjecting animals to far more cruelty than that suffered by Cecil the lion? )

In the new social media age we seem to have found a way to very effectively, and capriciously, destroy lives for acts of this sort. I mean acts that weren't outrageously evil and utterly depraved compared to any number of acts committed anywhere in the world/country that day. However, for reasons having less to do with the morality of the act itself and much to do with the current zeitgest or capriciousness of the news cycles or other factors (lions are pretty!). they somehow caught the world's attention. These kinds of nasty vicious pile-ons really seem to me like something we expect to see in a novel about some dystopian Orwellian state, not an enlightened civilization encouraging diversity and freedom of thought and expression. We don't realize the pile-on power that Facebook and Twitter have to exaggerate and magnify and thereby destroy lives for screw ups or for taking unpopular positions or for failing to do one's job appropriately or even for being a total asshole. 

The Environmental Impact of the State Department's Keystone Environmental Impact Review

Last year the State Department completed a review of the Keystone pipeline proposal which made the dubious claim that the pipeline would have low environmental impact. (NY Times link) The basis for their argument was not that tar sands oil extraction is ecologically sound but that that oil is going to be extracted from the tar sands regardless of whether the pipeline exists or not. That strikes me as an incredibly tortured interpretation of what it means to do an environmental impact review. As an ethical justification this is like arguing that it's okay to drive the getaway car from a bank robbery because "hey, those bank robbers are going to rob that bank regardless of who's driving them away." Or try that as a response to a question of whether your participation in the getaway drive contributed negatively to the overall crime rate in the city. If your doing X facilitates the performance of P and that is the intention of X, then surely any rational agent concurs that assessing the impact of X must also involve assessing the impact of P.

In fact, this isn't just an abstract moral argument, but I think there's a very clear practical reason to worry that this very argument creates an incentive to extract oil that might not otherwise have been extracted.

Consider that the review is becoming relevant again because the the review writers acknowledged that there is a scenario in which their denial of impact foundered. If the price of oil is so low that it's not economical to extract unless there's a pipeline to transport it away, then even the State Department's denial of environmental impact falls apart. In that case the willingness to supply a pipeline becomes a prerequisite to the continued extraction and the refusal to create the pipeline has a hugely positive environmental impact. So, in that case, arguably the current state, not even the State Department can argue that Keystone has no environmental impact. It does, it makes the tar sands extraction economically viable and without it, they'd stop pumping.

But, let's consider the original argument again, i.e., that if we have reason to think the oil production would continue with or without Keystone then we can ignore the effects of oil production when assessing the impact of Keystone. Consider what effect that has. It provides an incentive for oil producers to continue extracting oil from the tar sands regardless of the price. If they do that, then even in a low price scenario the State Department can invoke the original argument and say that oil production will occur regardless, so now we're again justified in arguing that the Keystone has minimal environmental impact.  So, in effect, the State Department has removed an important economic disincentive to tar sands extraction. The State Department's report itself with its specious moral reasoning may well have or may have had a negative environmental impact by creating an incentive to continue pumping oil.

Investigation of Darren Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown

At one point during the Darren Wilson proceedings I was assured that I'd become convinced of Wilson's innocence as I learned more of the facts. Instead, the proceedings and emerging facts have raised all kinds of questions about fairness and legality of the investigation into Wilson's shooting of  Michael Brown. Here are a few of the issues:

• The handling of evidence immediately after the incident -- Wilson washed blood from his hands and packaged his own evidence. No measurements were taken at the scene. (link)
• There was a failure to record interviews with Wilson (link)
• During the grand jury, when they were allegedly showing the evidence that a crime had been committed, prosecutors failed to cross examine Wilson despite obvious tensions in his stories or questionable claims that he had made (link (see end of article), link 2). These inconsistencies included his claims that he was near death or being fully incapacitated after two punches while the hospital gave him a clean bill of health.  Wilson also used dehumanizing, and arguably racist, language in describing Brown, all without any sort of response or objection or concern from the alleged prosecutors. (link) 
• Lawyers were far more aggressive about chasing down prima facie tensions from witnesses presenting testimony damaging to Wilson, acting as Wilson's defense team rather than prosecutors (link, NY Times link, Vox link)
• An assistant DA distributed a copy of an obsolete and unconstitutional statute that indicated that police officers were justified in using any necessary force in preventing a suspect from fleeing during an arrest. (link (video)) This obsolete discarded law indicated that Wilson was justified in shooting Brown simply for attempting to flee. Of course, this wasn't true, but during Wilson's testimony the grand jury had reason to believe it was true and it's not clear to what extent that misunderstanding was cleared up.
• McCulloch, the prosecutor, abused the grand jury process. It was questionable whether a grand jury was the right avenue by which to pursue an indictment in this case, but worse than that, McCulloch seems to have been using the grand jury process not to establish whether there was reason to move forward with a trial but rather as an ill-suited process to establish Wilson's innocence. (link, Vox link) Note that grand juries almost never fail to indict when asked to do so by a prosecutor. (link) That they did so in this case may well have had more to do with a lack of clear set of options from the prosecutor and a deliberate (and inappropriate) attempt to provide exculpatory evidence. Note that McCulloch has a history of not prosecuting police officers involved in shootings despite many opportunities to do so. (link)
• Witnesses were nearly unanimous in their assertion that Brown's hands were up when he was shot (link) and yet the grand jury seems to have embraced Wilson's claim that they were not.
• That we've been consistently misled about Brown's distance from the police SUV when he died. (link) This matters because the (untrue but oft repeated) claim that Brown was only 35 feet from Wilson's SUV rather than 150 would be far more plausible in light of the claim that Brown was in some angry rage ready to attack. If he had run that far it seems more like he was attempting to flee and turning only to give up.
• Oh, and now it turns out that McCulloch intentionally allowed witnesses to testify even when he knew they were lying in violation of professional ethics and state law and, arguably, of suborning perjury. (link) (update added 2014/12/19)

Before Canadians hurt themselves patting each other on the back ...

A few things about the attacks in Canada this week underscored positive features or trends about Canadian society.  (i) Canada's CBC deserved commendation forits careful, balanced news coverage (link), (ii) Some news media attempted to deviate from the typical US news media's obsession with identifying and discussing personal details of the killer (link, Rex Murphy on youtube) and (iii) evidence of unwillingness to mistreat Muslims as a result of the attacks (links):

That said, there are important respects in which Canada's response has not only failed to exceed the standard set by the US but has been worse.  In particular, it seems significant free speech limitations are envisioned (link):

 “Sources suggest the government is likely to bring in new hate speech legislation that would make it illegal to claim terrorist acts are justified online.

The Prime Minister told the House of Commons on Thursday that Canada’s law and policing powers need to be strengthened in the areas of surveillance, detention and arrest. “

Amazing, we're going to make it illegal to voice an opinion (in addtion to increasing surveillance, detention and arrest?)?  Aside from this being just an obvious violations of the most basic forms of free speech protection that any democracy should embrace, there's a deeper problem. The whole notion of 'terrorism' is one that is often used to simply stifle debate or pave over any nuanced discussion of what may have motivated it. (see a recent article by Tomas Kapitan on this: link.). Furthermore, its sense isn't entirely clear. What should count as terrorism? In many instances it ends up being most anything done against one's own country while being defined in such a way so that the action of US (or Canadian) combatants cannot be terrorism, no matter on whom it is practiced.  Finally, the last thing to consider before praising ourselves for being so much more enlightened than Americans in responding to a perceived terrorist attack, note this particularly ominous quotation from Peter Mackay this week (link): 

"We're looking ... to see if there is a way in fact to improve or build on those elements of the criminal code that allow for pre-emptive actions. ...." [emphasis added]

Hey, Canada is going all Minority Report.  Remember the Precrime department? 

On Greenwald's Comments on the Attack in Canada

I'm usually a big fan of Glenn Greenwald's and appreciate his incisive analysis but I think his recent comments (link) on the attack in Canada earlier this week are a little off.

I think the causal links he claims between Canada's participation in the WOT(tm) and this week's earlier attack is highly speculative at best and probably wrong. I suspect that the causal forces here have a lot more to do with alienated disturbed men looking to lash out at a society in which they failed to find a place. (One of the guys was asked to leave a mosque, so it would be nice if we could also avoid the blaming of Islam here too, okay, Bill Maher?)  In fact, I'm frustrated with the government's eagerness to jump to the conclusion that it is terrorism, but one understands why they might.  All the better to use the attack to justify rollbacks of civil liberties.

If these guys did have any real links with terrorist groups overseas, it serves only to suggest that these terrorist groups are pretty ineffectual. "Hey, take a car and drive into people." "Find an old crappy hunting rifle and start shooting people." Hardly the stuff of devious Bondian super criminals. But that aside, I'll also say that I think he's setting up something of a strawman here. The people eager to call this a terrorist attack aren't really bewildered as to why terrorists might attack Canada. Few people are under the impression that Canada has had no involvement in the WOT. 

Greenwald \conflates the notion of shock and amazement at extraordinary events with inability to give any sorts of causal explanation for the atypical event. If a tree falls on my house, it wouldn't be bizarre for me to freak out and yell and scream and say "wow, that was really freaky and scary, I can't believe what just happened, a tree fell on my house and killed my dog. One minute we were watching TV, the next my dog was dead and my house was in ruins.". Suppose you were to respond, "oh, actually, I can give a causal explanation. Your house was near a tree, the tree was old and it was really windy, we can give a clear causal explanation for the tree falling", That would be to just totally misunderstand the surprise/amazement I'd been expressing about the tree falling. Expressing surprise/awe/amazement at atypical negative events isn't the same thing as expressing ignorance about the cause of those events.

None of this is to downplay or ignore Canada's role in the war on terror (although to its credit, Canada at least stayed out of Iraq), just noting that I'm skeptical of the linkage claimed here and the extent to which Canada's would be baflled about why actual terrorists might want to attack.

My Ten (or so) Sticky Books

I was tagged me for this "list ten books that have stuck with you" Facebook meme. I tried to do that, list books that have stuck with me. These are books that I still think about from time to time or had some influence and affected what I did or how I've lived in one way or another. Some of these are really great books, but a number of them aren't but, for whatever reasons, best met the "stuck with you" criterion as I understood it.

Godel's Proof - Ernest Nagel: A splendid little book that helped me get started in wrapping my head around the Godel Incompleteness proofs, the most important achievement of the twentieth century.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined - Steven Pinker - This book stuck with me because it manages to pore through and present reams of data, explore large numbers of research articles and develop various arguments on a fascinating  subject in an extremely engaging manner. It's an encouraging book that convincingly argues that the world is, by leaps and bounds, becoming a much much better place. (of course, it will all be destroyed soon by climate change but that's another story)

The Wounded Healer - Henri Nouwen - I really appreciated Nouwen's writings in general but especially wrt his sincere and non-patronizing love of and respect for people with profound intellectual disabilities. I picked this book as representative.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig - This isn't a great book at all, but somehow it managed to stick with me and even affect me and the way I lived.

The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoyevsky - The last novel ever written. oh, wow, what a book. "Dostoevsky is a full meal with a vitamin pill and extra wheat germ"

Computability and Logic - George Boolos - The last textbook ever written.

Shadows of the Mind - Roger Penrose - I know people love to disparage this book and Penrose's sympathy for the Lucas argument but this book motivated me to spend a lot of time on the Lucas argument. And while I believe Penrose (and Lucas) is wrong, I spent an awful  lot of time thinking and writing about why it wasn't for the reason(s) most of his critics gave.

Empirical Methods for Artificial Intelligence - Paul Cohen - This is the book that every Intro Stats prof should use (and read)

James Herriot series of veterinary books - I'm not an Anglophile or even atypically obsessed with animals. but I think I read this series five or six times when I was quite young. They delighted me to no end and I still remember many of the anecdotes to this day.

Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture - Jeremy Rifkin - I stopped eating meat by about the beginning of Chapter 3

The World According to Garp - John Irving - I've read most of the books Irving has written and enjoyed most of them. But this and "A Prayer for Owen Meany" were by far my favourites. I'll pick Garp because it was a bit quirkier and because I still vividly remember reading the pivotal scene

The Secret History - Donna Tartt  - I just finished this after reading and thoroughly enjoying "the Goldfinch". Wow, this was even better, so much better even (and darker). Like "A Separate Peace", but interesting. I so want some masterful script writer and director to  turn this into an amazing movie.

Towards A Just Society: The Trudeau Years, Lloyd Axworthy, Pierre Trudeau - A somewhat academic book about and/or partially written by Pierre Eliot Trudeau. This book greatly changed my views on Trudeau, made me more forgiving of his FLQ blunders and caused me to persistenly long for the day when societies return to wanting, if not a philosopher king, at least a person who has given a lot of thought about what it is to govern and what a society should be. 

Why Edward Snowden is the story.

I keep reading commentaries about the NSA leaks that stress that "Edward Snowden is not the story", e.g., "Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is." Of course, I agree that when the story broke there was far too much distraction about his upbringing, his girlfriend and things that he's alleged to have posted in obscure chat rooms five years ago. But I disagree that Edward Snowden is not the story. One obvious point, there's no reason there has to be only one story. But more importantly, the fate of Edward Snowden is a key part of this story because his fate is a telling sign of how his revelations are being perceived and the effect they're having.

For one thing, if he's prosecuted and convicted and receives a lengthy jail sentence, then this will have an obvious chilling effect in terms of possibly preventing people from making such revelations in the future. But beyond what effect this case has on future attempts at whistleblowing, the fate of Edward Snowden will tell us whether his actions are being perceived as whistleblowing. Imagine his revelations effecting steps being taken to scale back the secret surveillance and to assure the world that US internet companies can once again be trusted -- it almost happened last week. Were that to occur, it would be hard to see that as anything but a vindication of Snowden's actions. And if his actions were to be vindicated in that manner, wouldn't it become difficult to severely punish Snowden? The extent to which he has committed a wrongdoing is inversely proportional to the extent to which what he has revealed were wrongdoings.  And therefore, the extent to which the US thinks they can go in attempting to punish and convict Snowden is an indicator of what kind of effect his revelations have had. In this sense, the fate of Edward Snowden remains a central part of this story.

Trayvon Martin case

I'm not sure if the jury, the crazy legislation, the prosecution or some combination is responsible for the travesty that is the Trayvon Martin case. If it's just the legislation, I wonder if George Zimmerman is going to be able to rest easy knowing that he now lives in a place where armed men may confront people in the street, armed or unarmed, guilty of nothing other than walking home from the store, shoot them and then place the burden of proof on the prosecution to prove that it wasn't self defense. If this doesn't in fact make him (and all Floridians) incredibly anxious about his (their) security, that's also pretty clear evidence that this is just as much about racism as it is bad legislation. 

Owning a gun isn't morally equivalent to robbing a bank

During the recent gun control debates I've seen a number of versions of this claim and response:

Gun rights advocate: "It's senseless to put gun laws/universal background checks in place because criminals won't obey them anyway. They'll evade the laws/checks and get guns anyway."

Gun control advocate: "That's a stupid argument. We know that criminals will ignore laws about murder, bank robbery, burglary, etc., but that doesn't stop us from passing legislation on those matters."

This is shoddy reasoning on the part of the gun control advocate. There's an important disanalogy between gun laws and laws against theft. The latter laws address things that are inherently immoral, i.e., it is clearly morally wrong to rob a bank and such robberies have a deleterious effect on society. The act itself is worthy of prevention. There's nothing wrong, inherently, with owning a gun. We regulate guns because we're concerned about their being used to commit crimes, not because any and all gun ownership is immoral and has societal harmful effects. That guns have a potential to increase violent crime is a legitimate reason for regulation but it's also an important difference when assessing the legitimacy of legislation. If our ultimate goal is to prevent the implementation of guns for bad ends rather than simply preventing gun ownership itself, it's reasonable to consider whether the legislation will work to prevent the instances of gun ownership most likely to have the effects about which we're most concerned. That's why it's reasonable to assess gun control measure on the basis of whether or not it affects those who are most likely to misuse guns.

None of this is to argue against gun control. I think that as a matter of fact controlling guns is entirely legitimate and prudent, mostly because I think gun control does in fact help decrease gun ownership amongst criminals as well. My point here is to note that gun control advocate are performing flawed reasoning when they assess gun control legislation in the same way that they assess legislation against things more directly immoral and/or having a direct negative consequence on society. The right response to the argument "If we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns" should be to ensure that that's not the case, not deem such considerations irrelevant to the question of whether or not we should try to outlaw guns as the argument above seems to do.

On Portman, Conservatives and Empathy

As we all now know, Rob Portman has changed his view on gay marriage after learning that his son is gay. Similarly, Dick Cheney parts way with the GOP on this matter because, presumably, he has a  daughter who is a lesbian. And speaking of conservatives changing positions, Rick Scott, Florida governor, recently changed his views on accepting Obamacare in large part, apparently, because his mother had recently died.

Portman is to be commended for being willing to reconsider and change his position and do right by his son. The key mark of a decent person, to my mind, is the willingness to acknowledge and try to rectify mistakes.  Another key decency marker is loyalty and protection of one's children, so bully for Portman on both counts. But it does make me wonder. Who comes to a position on these matters without having first performed exactly the thought experiment that Portman has now participated in IRL? Before taking a position on gay marriage doesn't one at least pause and think, "What would my position on this be if I were gay or if one of my children were gay?" Did Portman really make such important legislative decisions without having given that possibility serious thought? Similarly, regarding health care legislation,  are people actually taking positions on these matters, let alone legislating on them, without trying to consider what sort of state of affairs they'd want actualized were they or their parents ever in a position to require substantial health care and lacking the means to pay for it?

It leads me to wonder if perhaps the key difference between liberals and conservatives is not so much that one values freedom more and/or trusts government less or that they have fundamentally different views on the importance of tradition values. Rather, the fundamental difference may be that conservatives simply lack, whether because of cognitive differences or laziness, the ability or inclination to empathize when making decisions. Perhaps liberals aren't more predisposed to trusting governments, distrusting markets, and don't value individual freedom any less than conservatives do. Perhaps it's simply the case that the biggest difference in the decision making process is that left-leaners are more likely, for whatever reasons, to involve a good faith effort to put oneself in the place of those most likely to be affected by the legislation. Arguably it's what Kant was prescribing when he counseled us to "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law"

How Not Not to Fix Climate Change

I'm trying to make some sense of Joe Nocera's climate change article in today's NYT. Here's the meat of his argument, I think:

so long as the demand is there, energy producers are going to search for new supplies of fossil fuel — many of them using unconventional means like tar sands extraction. “With growing global demand, the economic pressure to develop unconventional resources is enormous and not going away,” he said. “Can environmental groups expect to win a series of fights for decades to come, when the economic forces are aligned very strongly against them in each round?” The answer is obvious: no. The emphasis should be on demand, not supply. If the U.S. stopped consuming so much of the world’s oil, the economic need for the tar sands would evaporate.

If I'm understanding correctly, Nocera believes that it's futile to try to prevent the production and distribution of tar sands oil because demand is so high. But why? History is full of examples of governments enacting and enforcing environmental protection standards to inhibit or slow production not just in spite of but in response to high demand for some product. That is because the very fact that there's high demand necessitates the enforcement of constraints so as to ensure that its production doesn't come at the cost of ecological damage. It would be nonsensical to attempt to implement limits on production only for things for which there was no demand. And in fact if we effectively forbid or constrain the production of tar sands oil the demand is mitigated exactly because we've increased the costs to reflect actual costs to society.

Nocera then goes on to attack the notion of a carbon tax: "He [James E. Hansen] told me he would like to see oil companies pay a fee, which would rise annually, based on carbon emissions. He said that such a tax could reduce emissions by 30 percent within 10 years. Well, maybe. But it would also likely make the expensive tar sands oil more viable."

But why would it? Production of tar sands oil generates more emissions, so, in fact, a carbon tax doesn't make tar sand oil more viable. Relative to other energy sources it would be affected more heavily by a carbon tax.

Finally, Nocera argue, " If you really want to eliminate expensive new fossil fuel sources, the best way is to lower the price of oil, which would render them uneconomical." Setting aside the question of how we go about lowering the price of oil without opening up new supplies like the tar sands, the problem with this suggestion is that it increases demand and emissions while decreasing the oil supply. This, of course, will force us to look more quickly to alternate sources, like the tar sands.  The solution to a problem caused by the overconsumption of oil can't be steps that are likely to further increase the consumption of oil.

Anti-Semitism and those NRA Hitler arguments

A few articles I've seen in recent days have been trying to refute the arguments of the NRA and its ilk that Hitler's tyranny was facilitated by gun restrictions on the citizenry. See, for example, The Hitler gun control lie  or Was Hitler really a fan of gun control or The Myth of Hitler's Gun Ban. I'm not going to try to address the soundness or validity of the NRA argument that Hitler used gun control to establish tyranny and the Holocaust. But I think it's worth noting even if Hitler and Stalin had exploited gun control to establish tyranny, (and it's not clear to me that they did), it would be wrong to assume that the second amendment is the only or even the most efficacious way to prevent tyranny.

But setting that aside, a common point in these refutations is arguing that Hitler's 1938 gun law in fact loosened gun control.  There are two things wrong with this as a refutation of attempts to prove that gun control had anything to do with tyranny and the Holocaust. First, gun rights advocates are correct to observe that Hitler's regime was preceded by the establishment of a gun registry in 1928. This wasn't Hitler's doing, as at least one of these articles stresses, but isn't that entirely beside the point? The argument, presumably, is that gun control can facilitate tyranny, not a less interesting historical argument about whether or not Hitler established the gun registry. Secondly, and more importantly, in my opinion, the argument is  just wrong about the law being pro-gun rights.  Hitler's 1938 gun law (wikipedia link) apparently did loosen gun laws for *some* people, but it didn't do away with a registry, only removed rifles from the list. However, the '38 gun law *completely forbade* Jews from owning guns. Arguments that Hitler wasn't really a gun control proponent must dismiss or trivialize this fact, but that's a pretty important fact to trivialize or dismiss. The line of argument strikes me as anti-semitic. To interpret it as pro-gun rights we have to assume that the rights of Jewish people are irrelevant or not particularly relevant to the overall rights question.

Suppose that someone were trying to persuade us that some dictator actually wasn't an opponent of democracy and to demonstrate that s/he pointed to some legislation the dictator's administration implemented that made it slightly easier for white males to vote but stripped away that right from all women. Wouldn't we argue that that actually didn't show the dictator was pro-democracy at all, but only that the historian was quite sexist?

GOP, Change your policies because they're wrong, not because you lost

E.J. Dionne's latest article in the WaPo involves a line of argument that I've heard a number of times since the election. That line of thinking goes something like this: Insofar as the Republicans haven't changed their positions since the election they're at worst failing their obligations as politicians and at best being thickheaded, unwise or imprudent. Because they lost they should change their minds and positions; even Ann Coulter is saying it. I should say up front that I find most of the GOP platform odious and I wish they'd change their positions on many things -- I think their policies and intransigence on the environment, (particularly global warming), taxation, government spending, foreign policy and civil liberties are dangerous and hurting America. But the reason they should change their policies isn't because they lost the election, it's because they're bad policies. Whether or not policies get you elected should be largely beside the point. We want our politicians to win because they've convinced people of the rightness of their positions, not win because they've simply adopted the positions they think people want to hear. We have a word for the latter, it's called pandering,  but pandering is exactly what people seem to expect the GOP to now do.

The obligation of someone running for office is to present his/her ideas to the electorate. If the candidate isn't elected we can conclude that the voters rejected those ideas or that the candidate failed to explain them clearly enough or that the voters didn't trust the candidate or some combination of these options. But it's not the case that it would also behoove the candidate to change his/her positions *because* the voters were disinclined to vote for them. In fact, wouldn't this be the most despicable candidate of all, i.e., the candidate who cares more about victory than principles? But the GOP and their critics are being remarkably transparent as to what they perceive as their obligations. For example, we suddenly see the GOP saying that they need to have a more tolerant policy on immigration. Not because their last one was morally repugnant or ill-conceived or economically counterproductive, but because they need to suck up to Latinos to get votes from them.

To be clear, none of this is to argue that the GOP has been a principled party coming into the election and that should remain on the high road. My only contention here is with the unspoken assumption  that a politician's first obligation isn't to have defensible ideals and a commitment to carefully thought out principles, but rather to winning and to rejecting any and all policies and practices that are unlikely to increase the odds of that.

Ohio (with deepest apologies to Neil Young)

 Refreshing Marshall's Poll Tracker
Best app on my phone
This autumn I'm so distracted
Four up in Ohio

Gotta get off my laptop
Bloggers are cutting me down
Shoulda been at work by now
What's with Florida
How can we be 6 points down?
And what's Joe Scarborough know

10:30, still watching Maddow
Romney, that witless clown
This autumn I keep repeatin
Four up in Ohio
Four up in Ohio
Four up in Ohio ...

On Obama and the popular vote

The events surrounding Hurricane Sandy increase the chances of a scenario in which Obama wins the presidency but loses the popular vote. Many argue that that would undermine the legitimacy of an Obama win and the nature of his mandate. I found those arguments unpersuasive when posed against Bush and I find them unpersuasive now. Candidates and the voters behave in response to the parameters of the election. The fact that Obama is likely to win California and New York while Romney is likely to win Texas affects turnout in those states. Why go to the polls if you know your guy is going to win or lose? Similarly, it affects the way candidates campaign. If winning the popular vote were the relevant consideration, candidates wouldn't be spending all this time in Ohio at the price of their other sources of potential supporters.

Measuring candidates by popular vote when they've been aiming for electoral college votes is like changing the baseball criterion for success to net runs over the season after teams having been simply pursuing wins. Teams would object that had they been told that net runs had been the relevant criterion they would have followed much different strategies in games in which they were far ahead or far behind. We can't define success by one criterion and then measure success by a very different one particularly when the metric's definition has such a direct effect on the nature of performance.

On garbage pickup fees and universal health care

Some years ago I had a discussion with a friend about the prudence of a municipality charging a nominal fee (~$1) for each bag of garbage it picked up. I argued in favour of the policy as I thought it would discourage waste and, I argued, my friend should also support it based on his support for the principles of free market economics. Surely a $1 fee in which users are forced to recognize and absorb some of the cost of moving garbage was preferable to one in which the government absorbed all costs and the user of the system was almost completely insulated from actual cost of the service. His argument was that the public's interest in making it maximally easy for people to keep their homes and yards clean and tidy far outstripped such considerations. In other words, the government should absorb all the costs because it was funding a key  public good and keeping it cheap / free greatly enhanced the value of that public good.

I've been thinking about that argument recently because the town in which I live recently made it much easier to get rid of all sorts of household waste, yard waste, etc. It used to be the case that getting rid of non-standard garbage required a call to the city and required paying a substantial fee after a household's quota was exceeded. Now the town simply picks up all forms of garbage on every garbage disposal day. I realize that it has actually made us a lot more ambitious about doing yard, basement and shed cleanup. We no longer wait until we have a significant amount of potential waste before underaking a cleanup project and it has indeed resulted in a much tidier yard and shed. (the basement, well ...) So, I'm going to acknowledge that my friend was right. It certainly hasn't increased our consumption or wastefulness, just our cleaning efforts.

An article by Sarah Kliff in today's Washington Post reminds  me that there's a version of the "free garbage pickup" argument in support of providing affordable (free?) universal health care. Kliff summarizes a study observing that as health insurance costs for workers rise, productivity drops. Unsurprisingly, making it difficult to go to the doctor results in people going to the doctor less, being or becoming less healthy and, as a result, being less productive on the job. For the same reason that it makes good sense from a productivity perspective for employers to give their employees free flu shots, it makes bad sense from a productivity perspective for employers to make it expensive to go to the doctor. Similarly, data indicate that concerns about maintaining health insurance coverage are a huge disincentive to people contemplating kicking off a business start up. (In fact, there's a heavily disproportionate number of people of Medicare age who participate in startups because they don't share the worry about need a health care plan backup.) Or consider how the high costs of funding private health insurance act as a significant disincentive to global companies considering the possibility of starting a business in the US.

Perhaps the health care debate needs to focus on such things to bring the free-marketeers onside for a universal health care system. There's not just an obvious moral argument for doing so, there's an excellent economic reason for doing so. The introduction of a universal health care system may well pay for itself in terms of increased economic productivity, innovation and competitiveness. A single payer system may not in itself be a manifestation of pure free market ideology, but it's well worth it because of all the grease it gives to the turning of the cogs in an effective market economy. 

NCAA PSU sanctions

I'm no defender of PSU or Joe Paterno, but the  "vacating of wins" announced in the NCAA's penalty to PSU over the Sandusky child abuse doesn't make much sense to me. I'm glad they've pulled down Paterno's statue and I wouldn't have minded if they'd simply shut down the program (of course, I wouldn't mind if they'd just shut down all Div. 1 athletics), but unless there's reason to think that the misdeeds contributed to the PSU victories in some meaningful way, I don't understand how we can reasonably try to claim that those wins didn't occur. Does the guy who now has the record for most football wins think that this somehow proves he actually coached more football wins than Paterno did? He presumably is a better human being than Paterno was, but seems to me that the "number of wins" metric still records what it always seemed to recorder regardless of what we know about Paterno's willingness to cover up child abuse. "Number of wins" is, to my mind, a simple metric, not a reward that the NCAA can somehow grant and retract.