I side with

isidewith was an interesting attempt started back in 2012 to get some members of the public to think more about matching their policy interests and goals with political candidates who might better support those. I'm rather skeptical that this project is likely to have much fruitful action in and of itself, for reasons that have to do with how most people vote and why not having very much at all to do with policy goals, particularly in a polarized voting environment. But it was a laudable project at the time to try to get people to think about third parties and more rigorously evaluate their policy visions and compare them to something like the actual positions of candidates.

I'm less sure of its current development still fulfilling that mission, but I have other uses for it all the same.

*I don't really have a positive opinion of some of the methods of matching being used, and the site seems to have taken a somewhat more distinguishably liberal tone to some of its questions and answers rather than being more obviously neutral (I say this as someone who on many issues regards Democratic candidates as illiberal squishes rather than anyone invoking a liberal political and policy tradition). A further problem may be the online sampling is likely to skew younger than the overall population. This has implications on a variety of issues more likely to be popular among younger voters than older voters (note these are not necessarily predictable. Support for entitlement reform for instance tends to be greater among older voters than young people). What that may be suggesting is that some of these issues that are closer in appearance here may be possible for reform, but not for several more years as demographics shift to have fewer of the existing older voters still alive.

But there's still some interesting results in looking at the poll results on specific questions that I wanted to pull apart more.

Issues with general agreement of some kind across parties that might actually get something done in the next few years (and not totally annoy me). 

Welfare-work requirements: Pretty popular with both parties. About 3/4 of Democrats and 80% of Republicans are in favor. I think this would make a possible case for an expansion and better tax incidence smoothing of the EITC and other social welfare programs. But not something like a negative income tax (my favored solution instead of min wages and smoothing out transfer payments by eliminating many programs and consolidating them as a cash transfer.)

Paid family/sick leave: Popular with both parties (60-40 Republicans, 90-10 Democrats). I would prefer this be implemented by having the government pay for it, in a way that it operates like disability insurance of a sort, rather than risk providing distorted incentives for employers to fire or not hire people who are more likely to get sick or avoid hiring or promoting fertile aged women capable of reproducing. It is however an issue on which there appears to be some possibility for reforms, which is rare.

Universal background checks for guns: This gets almost 90% support from either party. One caveat to this is that the support for "more gun regulations" is highly split (80-20).

Euthanasia: There's a gap here, but both Republicans (55-45) and Democrats (90-10) supported this as an option.

Issues with odd divides or near uniformity that annoy me:
ISIS - declaration of war ends up being mostly pro. Democrats were split about 35-65. I could see some number of people suggesting a legal procedural problem of allowing the military and President to conduct a conflict without the input of a Congressional vote but this wasn't offered as a legitimizing feature in the "more options" categories. A very similar partisan split occurred in using "ground troops" however, suggesting that if there is some sort of legal procedural voting bloc, it isn't very big.

"Decrease the military budget" - Republicans were almost united in opposing any decrease, but even Democrats were about evenly split. This was utterly horrifying to me given how much money we expend on defense budgets annually and what little return we receive for it (even in reference to what the defense department receives, this is less than clear it is getting what it asked for in exchange for the money allocated).

Foreign aid - reliably, everyone hates this (across both parties). Also reliably, I expect pretty much no one knows how much we are spending and on what.

GMO labels. The only political group that opposed these in substantial numbers is libertarians (and then it was still about 50-50). Both Democrats and Republicans were at 80-20 margins.

Drug testing welfare recipients. Despite considerable evidence this is either unconstitutional or totally ineffective, both parties supported this. Republicans do so to an absurd degree (93-7). But Democrats do themselves no favors (58-42).

Farm subsidies: There's not much of a divide here. Democrats are marginally more supportive of them. Republicans are about 50/50. Again, libertarians were the only political group that opposed these in substantial numbers. There hasn't been a good economic case for these since the Progressive Era under Hoover. Which is to say there is not one.

Prosecuting bankers for the 2008 financial crisis attracted bipartisan support (more from Democrats, but it's about 60-40 from Republicans). I am unclear what good this would do and tends to be pretty hard to do.

Marijuana legalisation: Still pretty opposed by Republicans (60-40). Democrats are up to about 90-10 in favor. I'm constantly annoyed this has not translated at the elite level very much at all. Few Democratic candidates are openly in favor. Drug decriminalisation more broadly (potentially including say, cocaine) has a similar split of around 70-30.

Patriot Act/NSA reforms, not supported very highly by either party. Republicans are more apt to back the existing architecture of the national security state. Libertarians of course hate these powers. The Apple-FBI fight has a similar split in support of demanding Apple hack phones for the government.

Social security. Both parties tended to have about 70-30 opposition to raising the retirement age for Social Security. I had other ideas on how best to fix the problems here (means test the benefits). Others would prefer raising the tax limit for it. But I can't really see a basis for leaving the age where it is either.

Term limits. Both parties support this at nearly 90%. I've never seen a good argument in favor of this idea. It's entirely populist nonsense. Fortunately nobody in office will do anything about it.

Campaign finance laws: both parties oppose the current Citizens United framework. I think the case against this is pretty weak and that greater funding transparency would be of sufficient fix for now. It misdiagnoses the problem as election laws rather than lobbying.

Voter ID laws: Both parties support these. Republicans are at extremely high rates but Democrats are still at around 2/3s. I find there's little or no basis for this form of voter fraud protection and that methods of suppressing or preventing individuals from voting are really poor ideas (even though I think many voters are poorly informed at best, and misinformed at worst).

Death penalty: Supported by both parties. Democrats around 2/3s. Republicans at 90-10. I can conceive of a moral case for killing certain people based on the severity of crimes and the possibility of rehabilitation, but the amount of burden of proof and expense, and the civil libertarian moral case for not killing people who might be innocent or may be otherwise "redeemable", and that there does not appear to be an effect of deterrence for the sort of crimes that we use it for, and the case that we are often using it for racist reasons, all weigh heavily against this being still a good and necessary idea in a modern state.

Issues with odd divides or near uniformity that may annoy partisan elites:

Cuba - There's a partisan split here but it's an odd one for the way Republican elites have been talking about it. Democrats almost universally support this change (95-5), while Republicans come out as almost a 50-50 split. I'm not sure there's much of a cohort available to them to pander toward (neoconservatives?) that it would actually be beneficial to reverse course on this policy trend toward normalizing relations with Cuba. It probably seems pretty clear to almost everyone what we were doing wasn't working.

Global Warming - big partisan split here too, but there's a cohort of Republicans that still favor doing things (about a third). Democrats are almost universally in support of doing something, but almost none of them favor taxing carbon emissions. Which is really disheartening. I think it's probably one of the simplest methods of attacking the problem.

TPP - Both parties voters were about 60-40 against. I have mixed impressions of this because of intellectual property rights law intersecting with the treaty in a way I find undesirable (strengthening and expanding the protections rather than reducing them to be more sensible).

NSA metadata collection - both parties seem to have about a 60-40 opposition to these programs. Further reform to squash them may be possible.

Issues with large partisan divides (things that we should expect to come up in the elections)

Syrian Refugees (accept or not) - For the record I answered this with "we should accept many more than 10k". I'm about as pro-refugee and asylum as someone gets, particularly given all the restrictions and system of checks involved in accepting such people as we already have making it difficult to accept and integrate as many people as we should.

This comes out as a near 50-50 split. But on partisan grounds both parties ended up closer to 80-20 or 20-80 splits. It's likely to be a sore point over which partisans will argue, but no middle ground can occur.

There isn't a cohort that broadly supports overthrowing Assad or preventing Russian support of Assad through their airstrikes. This seems to be a big disconnect between the public, particularly the conservative public, and most of their candidates (Voldemort seems to have tapped into this best, though it isn't a focal point of his blustery word salad presented as a campaign).

Iran - There's a big partisan split over attacking Iran though. Republicans favor airstrikes on nuclear facilities by an 80-20 margin. The polling there is older, but I doubt it has shifted very much since. (For the record, I wouldn't favor airstrikes even if I thought they were building a bomb. Which I do not think is or has been the case for some years now anyway).

College loans/college debt. There's a big partisan split over how to fund these. Sanders plan of a Wall St tax or raising taxes on rich people to fund colleges is very popular among Democrats and liberals. But nobody else likes it.

Immigration: Democrats on virtually any immigration question favored much broader admittance and acceptance. Republicans did not. There was a huge split over whether local law enforcement should detain people based on minor crimes (like traffic violations or other misdemeanors). This is likely because this is believed to be used (and has been shown to be used) for racial profiling purposes rather than immigration enforcement. There was another 80-20 split over birthright citizenship and over the restriction of Muslim immigrants. There was also a gap between Democrats (50-50) and Republicans (96-4) over "border security".

There was no real divide over "immigrants should be required to learn English". Which in practice makes sense, but in terms of the legal system does not.

Unions were regarded negatively by Republicans (70-30) and positively by Democrats (80-20). Which probably explains min wage discussions. Speaking of which, minimum wage increases were along a similar split (80-20 each).

Obamacare: huge partisan divide here. Democrats favored 85-15, Republicans 95-5 against. This essentially forecloses the ability to do either a) reforms to the existing system that make it work better or b) any substantive discussion of further liberal policy choices. It also limits the prospect of conservative policies being put forward instead as the existing system is essentially one put in place by moderate conservatives (Mitt Romney for instance).

Abortion: Remains a pretty strong partisan split. Republicans are "only" coming in at 70-30 "pro-life". Democrats at 90-10 pro-choice. Planned Parenthood funding achieves similar results as a proxy fight in this issue.

Gay marriage: Republicans come in 70-30 against still (Democrats are nearly universally in support).

Not so quick hits

Hacking Ashley Madison

I'm not terribly sympathetic toward the people whose privacy is threatened here, but then legal cases and rights are typically bounded by cases that don't involve very sympathetic people. We shouldn't expect to be that sympathetic of other people's privacy when it is their privacy at stake rather than our own, but should work to be to a modest degree. The thing that seems less clear to me is why, if the beef is with the company/website, the hack intended to release the private information of possibly millions of customers (or former customers). Who would, by the logic of going after the site itself as some form of scam or immoral business (the motives are not entirely clear to me), be more like victims in this. It would seem to me that exposing that the site is not terrific at protecting identity theft or disclosure would be sufficient to discourage its use if that was the goal (to put it out of business). But this has already been done with other technical problems in the website's design. And yet it remains.

Which to me leads to some questions about the function of a website designed for people to have flings and affairs. Clearly there must be some amount of market for this, to at least look, or such a site wouldn't have sprang up. There have usually been gray markets of a sort designed to meet needs or desires of individuals that are not illegal (adultery is not illegal in the US), but which aren't exactly looked kindly upon for social reasons. People have been able to make private arrangements for affairs and sexual infidelities for centuries. This is not a new thing. The difference is the implied discretion of the internet overarching these arrangements or the easier manner with which the internet allows for arrangements (lowers transaction costs of searching for partners willing to indulge in an affair, etc).

But. This is the implied problem of such a site from a moral or social perspective: the idea is to do something in secret, without the consent of a monogamous partner (typically), for whom ordinarily someone has granted a great deal of trust, communication, and affection at some point. The purpose of discretion isn't so much to conceal that someone is a slimier character from others unknown, the usual character of the internet commerce, but from parties closely and intimately known. This is or should be troubling. It did not start with Ashley Madison, so blaming such a setup seems unlikely to produce much change in social conventions and intimate arrangements of human sexuality and expression. But the existence and sudden highlighting of such a convention, and the scope and scale with which it had expanded should indicate that some of these conversations and conventions of human sexuality are already being altered, or maybe have always been altered and simply weren't known to the degree by which they were.

I think in some sense, there was an unspoken degree by which marriage as an institution allowed for some amounts of infidelity, in secret, and without disclosing socially the amounts of people engaging in extramarital sex or relationships. What this variety of hack would disclose is that there are a fairly large number of people who are willing or desire to look for such activities. Since this seems to be the case anyway, I would propose these should be the social goals we should want to strive for.

1) Social disclosure is less important. It is not important to tell all of your friends and family you are having an affair. This kind of disclosure is not as essential to the underlying relationships or the social cache that is placed upon marriages. Our sexual histories or intentions thereof aren't usually objects we wish or need to be socially informed (to have others advise us on them) and socially disclosed (to make others aware of them).

2) Intimate disclosure, with any regular and typically monogamous or monogamous-desiring partner is vital. If people are going to be having or seeking to have affairs, they should communicate these desires to potential or current partners. It may be possible to head off some number of affairs by modifying or repairing (or ending) an existing relationship, by communicating and working through problems of say, sexual excitement and variety, or by simply being up front about this as a possible sexual interest that other people would be able to say they think they are okay with or not. One of the problems of consent discourse is that if a person is having multiple close emotional and sexual relationships this is not typically done openly with the consent of other partners. People probably don't need to communicate every one-night stand they do while dating. But they should communicate if they are having problems, or are jealous, or are otherwise troubled while married or engaged or in what are otherwise exclusive relationships where both partners are intent on remaining with this other person rather than seeking other partners at the same time.

3) All of that includes the other parties who should also be aware of what is going on as these other people will be human beings complete with their own emotional or physical interests and needs and not simply objects used for sexual gratification. There is some advantage in this setup through a website designed around the idea of helping people cheat on their spouse or other intimate partner in that the third party person can reasonably conclude they are with someone who is actually married, or who is actually engaged in extramarital sex or relations with them.

4) If some people are going to be in more open marriages, or other polyamorous arrangements, this is not in and of itself that troubling to me. It might be troubling to the parties involved that they attempt this and find it is not that easy to do (which it wouldn't be), or isn't as fun or satisfying as they expected it to be. There's probably some number of people who are willing to fantasize about a spouse being with another person, or themselves fantasizing about being with another person. Transferring this from the realm of sexual fantasies to a reality involves more messy human emotions and attachments (or detachments) than many people can deal with at one time. This is worth acknowledging. Indeed, it's one of the reasons I would suggest we move toward more open communication as many people in proceeding with an intent to have an affair may find that the consequences and any enjoyment of doing so are less desirable than they may have believed. They may find also it is perfectly enjoyable or fulfills some need or demand. But given that our ordinary monogamous sexual relationships are often hit or miss on our enjoyment, or complete with other varieties of work and management to maintain them, adding more such relationships may be too much for many people to handle adequately without risking damage to other partners that they hold in some esteem.

5) If you are in a relationship, or considering one, and the other party to it expresses interest in a more open or polyamorous arrangement, you can push back against this to reject it but persist in the relationship on a more monogamous framework, you can leave on the understanding that this other person is not someone whom you believe you could form or sustain a stable relationship, or you can go along with it and re-visit or place strict rules of communication and transparency. Simply providing some assent to this in theory is very different than approving of all its possible particulars. Just as consenting to any sexual act is not the same as consenting to have, say, anal sex as well, this is something that needs to be negotiated and examined throughout as a given consent rather than a blanket "sure, go ahead".

Drug testing welfare

I've written about this some before, but it's something I'd rather not have to, so this is one of these "I'll write something so I don't have to for a long time". This comes up periodically as different states or governments propose doing it. There are, unfortunately in my mind, broad bipartisan supports for this as an idea. Conservatives love the idea as it feeds into a notion of persistent poverty as caused by cultural artifacts of lazy stoned people. Meanwhile every state it has actually been tried it hasn't ensnared a lot of drugged up poor people to be kicked off of welfare, has been declared illegal (for reasons that will be examined in a moment), or just otherwise hasn't justified the intrusiveness and fiscal costs by materializing in substantial savings.

Here are the problems with it in theory and in practice

1) It includes an assumption of guilt before innocence, which offends our standard model of justice. People may object that this applies to random job drug testing as well. I would agree. I don't think that is a substantial moral objective in most professions that drug test presently either. For performance or safety reasons, I could conceive of a basis for drug testing. For most jobs that presently drug test randomly, I could not see this as a common problem however. Roughly a third of working people have to take such tests. These are themselves largely clustered in occupations that are lower working class (with a few exceptions), just as people who are on welfare might find as options instead of being on welfare.

2) It relies principally on a gross underestimate of how many people are on welfare programs (almost 40-50M, many of whom are children or otherwise not adults), who is on such programs, and how many poorer people use drugs regularly or addicts (and who are able to apply for social assistance programs), what restrictions already exist that are designed to delink drug use from welfare. Estimates made by people of the proportion of drug use among welfare recipients largely focus on observational evidence rather than rigorous study. It's very easy to see visible people who are not working strolling through a neighbourhood (not all of such people qualify for or are on welfare of course). It is not easy to see the many millions of people who are working (sometimes two jobs) and still qualify for many welfare programs. Because those people are at work.

In addition, there are constraints for housing assistance that are intended to prevent people who have drug convictions from getting it. This is at least punishing people who have been convicted of a criminal act (whether or not it should have been a criminal act is a different question), but it tends toward the notional penalties people are wishing to see applied here already in a more efficient and less intrusive manner. If the intention is to break drug use from welfare, the goal of a successful policy should be to do so as efficiently and unintrusively as possible.

3) It discards as appropriate other forms of tax assistance and subsidy that middle class and richer people receive. "My" money is fine but I don't want to give money to "those people" is what this sounds like as an argument. Medicare is effectively subsidized by poorer, younger, working people to pay for older, richer non-working people's health care. This looks very similar to welfare in some respects (taking money from other people to give to others who are "not contributing"), except the beneficiaries are seen as sympathetic. So few people complain. This also applies to housing subsidies in the form of mortgage interest deductions which largely favor banks, realtors, and wealthy people and inflate housing prices such that poorer people are priced out of some areas to try to live in.

From a moral and ethical standpoint, using taxes to be taking money from poorer people to give it to richer people should be seen as far more problematic than taking money from richer people and giving it to poorer people via taxation.

4) This also relies on a perception that poorer people are spending their money unwisely, on drugs and big screen TVs say, rather than on sensible things like education, food, clothing, and housing. On average, the average poorer person spends way more on food and housing as a percentage of their consumption habits than a middle class person. Something like 75% of spending is on basic needs, where this is much, much lower for someone of modest means, closer to 40-50%. And even lower for an upper middle class professional. They are not generally wastefully spending money in this way. There are other wasteful signaling problems in poorer communities, but this is not one of them. This basic sense of paternalism may have been useful if people were actually wasting money and not obtaining food and shelter as part of their basic needs. They are however getting precisely that.

5) Many of the complaints seem aimed more at the existence of the welfare state in the first place rather than the need to administer some form of tie-in to drug policy. There are many possible flaws in the existing programs that could be pointed out, or a preference for cash instead of transfer payments, or a general philosophical belief that safety nets could be provided in some other way besides taxation (this seems very unlikely, charities don't do that much that can be scaleable on a societal level). But this demand for a tie-in to drug consumption and addiction seems rather low on the rank of problems in any event. It is unlikely to substantially shrink the size of the welfare state, and would do so by adding new layers of bureaucracy and interference, growing the size of government. If the goal is to decrease the footprint of government, or reduce or abolish the welfare state, this is not the road to do so.

6) Other complaints, perhaps from more liberal perspectives, might be focusing on the efficiency of the program being in some way improved if people are more surely spending public money on food or housing instead of drugs. Or this in some way being an efficient way to curtail drug addiction and abuse/use of illegal narcotic substances. Neither seems likely to be true however. The cost of administering such programs to monitor and test drug use will in some way achieve some combination of the following: the state will be adding more bureaucracy and cost to existing welfare programs because not many people will be caught (this in part relies on some very flawed concepts of what constitutes "drug addiction" as well), some number of people will not be able to afford the additional upfront costs (even if they would be reimbursed) to apply for these programs and will not apply in the first place thus reducing the number of people who are aided by social welfare programs rather than increasing efficiency, some (additional) number of drug addicts or regular drug users would not apply for these programs and be further socially isolated and removed from possible sources of intervention or assistance beyond the legal system. Which the legal system is probably the least efficient means of dealing with the social problem of drug addiction of the available alternatives. None of this looks optimal as a way of improving either drug policy or the welfare state.

Charity to rivals

Some nice things to say about people I will tend to disagree with.

1) Conservatives
 - Abortion- Many ardent pro-life persons actually do seem motivated by a genuine belief and desire to protect the lives of the unborn as a basis for argument, rather than some innate hatred of women. Indeed I don't begrudge those few who seem willing to state that they oppose exemptions even for rape and incest, simply because their priority is on the as yet unborn life in a consistent moral argument. While those making carve-outs are effectively ceding the battleground on which they are fighting to the "I don't like your reasons for an abortion, while mine are perfectly fine" position on which most people are contending with this issue.

My disagreement is whether these prospective lives of the unborn tend to justify the variety of policies put in place to police the activities of women and doctors, whether these are from a moral or ethical standard actual lives or not (in many cases, I would argue not, at least in the legal sense that we could design any practical policy to enforce and protect them that would not also punish or provide investigatory powers for common natural events like miscarriages). And then in many cases, either the tactics or laws pursued are either trivially annoying and ineffective or outright counterproductive to their purported goals. I don't not believe their motives as real in many cases (some perhaps are opportunistic or patriarchal) despite the inability to match up policies they would support with actual results.

- Drug Warriors - Are in fact motivated to combat a potential social problem, drug addiction (or general irresponsible drug use as a secondary issue). They have chosen the worst possible methods I can imagine (police and force instead of doctors and social work). But there is at least the existence of a problem they are choosing to fight using the social tools available to them.

- Police more broadly - I'm sympathetic to the problem of having to enforce a myriad of laws and social mores and directives, with a changing set of political agendas hovering over all of this. I feel the easier solution is less to provide more tools and weapons and aggression for the command of authority to rule the day but for fewer things to be resolved by police and laws, and to allow police to do things on which they are more suited to enforce and investigate (eg, not worrying about vice laws or drug crimes, and more of a focus on preventing murder or theft). Police are not social workers in the broad sense on which we have often deployed them to deal with parenting questions, mental ailments and issues, endemic poverty, race relations and so on. To expect all of that to go swimmingly by using force through the police is to expect something that isn't possible.

- Religious conservatives generally - While I have all manner of theological and atomistic reasons to think religion (any religion) is silly, a great many people seem to extract a sensible set of value from participating in their religious traditions. Tradition in and of itself isn't interesting to me, but it often can contain kernels of wise council about our actions. A broader sense of community isn't interesting to me, but for many people provides purpose and a camaraderie that they enjoy. Metaphysics generally isn't interesting to me at all, but for many people, answering "life's big questions" with a set of prepared answers (whether or not those answers make any sense) is a satisfying practice. Occasionally religious entities even do useful and good things; helping the poor or indigent or providing aid and shelter after a disaster.

There are downsides to the "community" aspects of religion, namely the in-group/out-group dynamics are extremely strong (perhaps rivaled only by nationalist fervor in the modern context), such that outsiders can easily be viewed with suspicion or hatred. And bothering people who don't have much interest in being part of these communities gets really annoying.

- Neoconservatives - Do at least seem to be trying to pay attention to the international community by observing the rise and fall of potential threats. They've often overblown how dramatic the threats are, or have no idea what methods would best resolve the threat before it becomes a real danger. But it's a starting point relative to many who utterly ignore the affairs of other countries, governments, and the people and associations they form, complete with their own interests and goals, in other lands.

This bleeds into security state defenders (strong/invasive NSA policies), where I would agree these are people generally motivated by an interest in protecting people from harm, but who have crafted policies that either fail to do so, fail to do so at the cost, or which are more harmful than beneficial (because others have less noble ends in mind, such as prosecuting the drug war).

- Nationalism - Does form originally from ardent patriotism in most cases. Which would be productive. I don't have anything else good to say about it though so I should probably stop talking. (this is probably one of the worst modern "sins" I can conceive of people having endorsed is to place nationalism ahead of patriotism, or humanism, or their faith, or basically any value set whatsoever would be superior).

2) Libertarians

- Ayn Rand fans - I appreciate that these are people who are starting to grapple with a wide set of public policy questions and issues. The lens used for examination is problematic, but it's a start and people need to start somewhere. Most people rarely study public policy questions with any degree of seriousness, with no eye for coherent ideologies or practical effects. Political philosophy is probably an even rarer source of investigation for most people. Her's isn't much of a philosophy as it is a guideline, but again, baby steps.

- Ron Paul fans - paleo-conservativism has its uses in moderating many of neoconservatism's worst impulses (IR aggression or the security state as examples). I still question the motivations pushing for much of any anti-globalism or anti-trade or anti-immigration notions that sometimes arise in these far fields of political conservatism. But tamping down the worst excesses of another political structure's intentions by offering an alternative interpretation (even if often straying way out into paranoia), is a vital enterprise for public policy.

- Gold bugs/end the Fed types - The average person spends almost zero time observing monetary policy, seeing it as opaque and insignificant. These are people who seem to focus on almost nothing else. I'd hope for a more happy medium from both the public and government officials in the amount of attention and less fussing over precious metals as though that would somehow resolve our financial position ("strong" currencies, of the type usually favored by gold specie demands are meaningless because they can be potentially damaging or self-correcting to economic prospects and provide no additional stability that isn't created by moderately competent central banking).

3) Liberals/Progressives

- Economic views - Seem to be largely concerned about concentrations of wealth or the condition of the poor. I'm ambivalent about the first being a huge problem in and of itself, but the latter certainly is a powerful and concerning issue. Often don't seem to grasp effective solutions and causes very easily. This isn't a critique of progressives or liberals specifically however as most people do not (conservatives are often just as bad on economic policies that they want to put forward).

- Environmentalism - Most people seem to accept a genuine concern for the natural world as a sensible motivation. Activities or positions taken on some issues (nuclear power or fracking for example) are alarmist and counterproductive. There's a real danger in environmentalist positions and movements of the same variety of closed-minded-closed ranks behavior that conservatives have tended toward, where adherence to a set of positions on issues supersedes evidence of actual risks involved in those issues, or adherence to rigid policy outcomes while disregarding any path to them (that isn't an absolute drop/change).

A way to summarize most of these disagreements would be as follows:
"I believe you are well-motivated and have identified what you feel is a problem. But your actual positions and motions to do something about it are misguided, ineffective, or totally symbolic rather than meaningful and productive. Stop being symbolic and do some real work to think carefully about what you want to achieve and whether what you are asking can be done, or can be done in this way."

ALS and ice

I've been trying to form some opinions on this for a while. It seems a complicated issue to talk about, for reasons that I wasn't quite sure of. I believe I figured out why people are annoyed to have an adult conversation about it, so I will say a few words.

I don't mind that people are suddenly giving money to this as a cause. I would think other causes will be trying to adapt it and will catch up. They will learn how to make viral and invasive messages about their own serious matters too. This was just one of the first to make it that way in the internet age (Susan Komen and others with the colored ribbons would be one of the first to make it that way in the pre-internet age).

I'm a little disturbed that it is inefficient. The utilitarian calculator in me is really annoyed that there are dozens of other things that would be less wasteful as a display of viral contests. Dumping clean water and ice on your head is a pretty obvious "first world" thing to do, and screams "look at me!", I care about X and will do something silly to prove it. That's a little irritating but not so much so that I find it necessary to object to it out of hand. It feels more like an itch brought on by extroverts and their need for attention and overt displays than actual narcissism.

There are also causes more likely to produce a considerable net positive social and global good by giving to them (malaria research, basic genetic research, clean water, or general cash donations to the poor). I think this is the general feeling of a lot of people who are mildly annoyed by this "contest" or challenge or whatever is an offense against other causes is being caused. And it is true that some, perhaps even most of the money is exclusive rather than freshly produced charity. Meaning that some other very worthy causes won't be getting as much money for research of cures or prevention or treatment of the sick, the infirm, or the otherwise at risk.

That point of view however has been expressed rather poorly and reacted to with enormous vitriol. As though anyone who says it is a) completely unaware and unconcerned of the suffering imposed by ALS or b) doesn't want it to be cured. If I thought these donations would reduce the suffering imposed by leading to a cure or prevention/treatment method, we'd be in some major hot water there. It's possible they will, but not very likely. It's much more likely giving someone in a third world country 100 dollars in start up capital will do something, or a 100 dollars of water or water cleaning research or technology to a town in Central Asia or Africa, etc. So I would rather do that.

I don't know why that PoV complaint should matter. If people, like me, are applying some utilitarian logic and are actually annoyed the money is going to ALS instead of something else conceived of as more productive, give the money to something else, and ask others to do the same. We are not required to obey to give money only to this one thing. This is the part that seems to be missing from commentary on the subject. If dumping ice on each other's heads is the transmission vector, dump ice on your head for some other reason and try to use what's working now for that cause instead. This isn't a legally binding requirement that once challenged, our money is locked into this donation. It's a blank check. Treat it as such.

Charitable giving and "awareness" generally are not inherently bad objects. It is desirable that we should be concerned with the suffering of others, even those unknown to us, and attempt to help them in indirect ways if necessary. We should avoid criticizing people for doing this, which I believe is one reason people are annoyed with anyone saying "eh" at their giving to ALS now is a perception of criticism.

Giving is often an excuse to do wasteful or immodest or even immoral things elsewhere in one's life though. Philanthropy isn't necessarily something corporations or the wealthy do simply to "be good". These actions are reputational adjustments they can point to when people complain about something else they are doing (which may actually be worse). Altruism isn't really a big thing for most of us. It is usually more important to be seen caring about something than to produce an effect on the problem we are proclaiming loudly to care about. This is what I think most pro-life/anti-choice people are doing, as an example, trying to express concern about abortion without working to make it less likely to occur. Because that would be too hard and require listening. This as a cause isn't quite in the same category. It isn't necessarily doing damage to us as a society to loudly express concern in this way about this thing instead of something else of deeper and more significant damage to our own society and well-being (say, the war on drugs, or expanding birth control accessibility, or dealing with miscarriages, or diabetes, and so on down our litany of woes). A few million dollars for this instead of a few other charities isn't a big deal in the scheme of things.

But it's in the same variety of action and could be twisted quickly to something that could be damaging. Which is a little worrisome. One of the biggest problems is that the point many use to justify is "awareness". Awareness is useful if it can be combined with something that we can do to mitigate. Awareness and understanding of depression is, for example, something we can act upon as an individual to be attentive and listen to others, or otherwise be present. Awareness of AIDs is something that allows us to try to prevent it from spreading and afflicting others. Awareness of police brutality or violence allows us to gather together to try to reform our system of oversight so that it might be punished accordingly or at least transparently. Awareness of ALS would be kind of like awareness of an impending alien invasion. There's not a whole lot we can do about it right now and it's been worked on for decades. Maybe these donations will have long term impact. I hope they do and I think most everyone involved hopes they do. They aren't being malicious by giving. But "raising awareness" isn't really a way to deal with a long-term problem like this. The reason is that once people feel "aware" of a problem, and maybe do something like dump ice buckets on their heads, they may feel they have absolved themselves of the responsibility to do much else about it, and passed it on to others to act. They have met their "I care" quota for the day and can let something slide. I have very little "I care" as a quota to go around, so I find that dispensing it in this way is not very effective in actually demonstrating whether I care about something or not. This is a serious problem. It deserves serious attention. It is difficult to do much about it though, so I find it is a better use of time and money and energy to go "care" about something else instead.

I find it curious that other people don't recognize that, but I don't think it is necessary to judge them for this decision. And I think much of the commentary has come off as a judgment that they are doing something wrongful by acting in this way. Which should justly make people mad.

Missouri

I have consumed a large quantity of analysis and footage and news concerning the protests, riots, looting, shooting(s), and on and on down the litany of civil libertarian woe. My main reaction, which is typical to me, is to summon my cynicism. Not much appears likely to change. The police don't appear ready to dial down their rhetoric, equipment, or tactics. Even or perhaps especially in front of media. The public appears broadly indifferent outside of groups that were already closely following these kinds of issues (police militarization, racial profiling, police brutality/aggressiveness) with what does not appear to be a major shift beyond the slow drift away from paranoia that dominated the previous three decades.

Some thoughts.

1) It is not relevant empirically that the police killed this person instead of some other person (or some other person who was killed by police elsewhere). People should be outraged and demand transparent methods of evaluating the actions where ever police are involved in the death of a "civilian". We, the public, should view that as a failure. Even if, and I wish this were more obvious than it appears to be, the person killed was accused of or witnessed committing a crime. It's possible that the death may be later justified in self-defence, but it should always be transparently investigated. Preferably by a third party agency rather than the police itself. I would also press for this in cases of non-lethal violence (assaults, tasings, deployment of tear gas or pepper spray). Police generally are poorly trained in marksmanship, use of non-lethal weapons and tactics, and in the de-escalation of force from the evidence of these cases of death and injury, and one reason for this is the lack of a proper and transparent accountability to the public that is served by policing.

2) People complaining about these actions in Ferguson and elsewhere are not being "anti-cop" or "anti-police". Most people making such complaints, even the civil libertarian wing who has monitored the growth of militarized police forces and the expansive use of procedures like no-knock raids, asset forfeiture, and stop and frisk searches, mostly upon disfavored minorities, would acknowledge a role for police to serve the community in the pursuit of justice and law and order. The complaint is that the tactics, strategies, training, and activities of police are often inappropriate, possibly unconstitutional and certainly not respective and protective of individual civilian rights regardless of whether they are violating those rights, often well beyond the minimum level of force required to carry out their duties, and have developed legal structures and protections that make them both individually and as a whole unaccountable to the communities involved. And all the while the victims of these actions have limited voice to make a strong defense of their innocence, or the disproportionate nature of such activities.

The major change that makes this issue apparent, one hopes, isn't that our police have become more violent and hazardous to communities, but that our communities have more tools to realize and become aware that police are trying to avoid accountability and transparency (camera phones, video surveillance, body cameras on the cops themselves or in their squad cars, etc). The worry is that the problem is more endemic to the recruiting and training of police procedures, and that brutality and violence are as a result a preferred means of affecting law enforcement for some, if not many police officers. Removing such officers from the force will be increasingly difficult the more widespread the problem is. If it is cultural rather than "bad apples".

3) We do not have currently good transparent data to evaluate whether it is cultural or bad apples. Police do not generally disclose their use of aggressive search warrant tactics, the discharging of firearms, even the deaths or assaults of citizens or civilians caused by police actions (whether justified or not) are not well documented. No one keeps track of this data. Very few states require the collection and documentation of it and federal data collection is voluntary and relies upon self-reporting. Worse still, it is often difficult to document or track the "bad apples", if that is the problem, as they can shift between departments, or between districts and jurisdictions of large urban areas, without being disciplined, charged, or otherwise interfered with in the problems they are causing.

In Ferguson several years ago, there was a severe beating of an innocent man in police custody (arrested because his first and last name matched a warrant, but with a different middle name and social security number), evidence of a purported assault on an officer for which this beating supposedly occurred was destroyed or conveniently missing, and the police attempted to have him charged with "destruction of property" for bleeding on uniforms. A charge which they later retracted that had even occurred. No one was disciplined, and without there having been a legal deposition (during which they may have admitted to having offered false testimony to gain the charge in the first place), there would be no official record of who these officers were.

One possible option would be to start to use Yelp! style public reputation models for rating police interactions, such that "bad apples" who have a poor reputation in the community, whether from violence or other inappropriate actions, would be at least moderately easy to identify. I have myself mostly encountered police during traffic stops. And some of these were polite and efficient, if otherwise unpleasant, and others were unpleasant and borderline abusive. I would emphasize nothing as yet untoward has occurred to me (other than perhaps getting a ticket or two when I might have gotten off with a warning from a different cop). But there was a clear difference in the interactions that some were coming from a more authoritarian world than should be the case for police to seek to maintain while others recognized their duties to enforce the law with a minimum of disruption. If such a system were widely available, I would rate those second variety more highly and positively, and rate the former negatively.

4) One of the largest problems with policing isn't the heavy duty toys provided by the Pentagon. It is that the system of accountability makes it difficult to first recognize "bad apples" and second to properly or appropriately discipline them. The Pepper Spray cop, Lt John Pike, was found to be cleared of wrongful actions by the police's own investigation, which took months (during which time he was still being paid). Independent investigation documented insubordination (disobeying orders not to deploy with riot gear), lack of training on equipment selected for use (said riot gear, in particular the pepper spray, was not adequately trained with), escalation (showing up to a peaceful protest in riot gear), and brutal force (the actual spraying of pepper spray, incorrectly and indiscriminately), in much less time. He was only fired over the objections of the police investigation. Without the independent investigation and worldwide distribution of video documenting part of his activities, it is very likely he would still be an officer of the law today. Various other officers have committed similar actions, often on video, and remain employed and patrolling the streets of some city or town today. The FBI's internal investigations have found zero unjustified shootings out of the last 150, demonstrating that the problem of accountability may not be simply a local force and lower professional standards as causes.

These problems are not limited to use of force. Wrongful arrests, such as for people taking video or photographs of police activity, are a violation of basic civil rights. Such events typically can cost a city thousands of dollars in lawsuits and settlements. But most of the time nothing happens to the officers who actually created these violations.

5) Police militarization has occurred in large part through the war on drugs and war on terror formulations, whereupon large quantities of military hardware were gifted to police forces, large and small, urban and rural. The logic behind this is typically to proclaim a need for high value intervention forces, like SWAT teams. Most of the towns and cities which are receiving this, a) haven't had assaults, much less murders of police officers in decades if ever, and b) haven't even had many murders and shootings of "ordinary citizens" in decades. Violent crime rates have been falling, in some places fast, and in others barely, for over 20 years. You would not know this to hear it from police officers who speak of "war zones", and general danger and fear of the communities they police and work in. To be sure, they have a risky job which involves occasionally a very high danger to their personal safety. But the actual danger to police, the risk of death or injury, from assault or gunfire from suspected criminals, is extremely low. As is the actual danger in most instances of terrorism, or for mass shooting events and hostage scenarios. And almost none of these individual events requires that we arm police with sniper rifles, automatic machine guns, and armored personnel carriers. Very little of this equipment has been well trained with, or the personnel selected for advanced training rather than simply being a part of a small rural or suburban assault team.

6) The main use for these tactics and equipment is to conduct no-knock drug raids upon non-violent, mostly poor, mostly minority residents and property owners. The reason is fairly simple; in many cases the police can make seizures of a variety of assets during a drug bust, assuming the drug bust is of the correct home and finds drug paraphernalia. The incentives for doing what we would regard as ordinary police work are skewed by the "investigation" of vice crimes like drug distribution.

Taken altogether, as with many of my observations of the society around me I wonder something strange, one could wonder why there aren't people in the streets fighting with police more often in protest and/or riot formats. None of these are positive trends, and there is limited impetus to shift policy on virtually any of these designs (with the possible exception of legalizing marijuana).

One main reason: mostly these forms of mobile oppression are mostly imposed upon the poor and lower status minorities or immigrant communities. Middle class white people are then left mostly alone and see very little of these activities as commonplace. Further, they support these tactics even more when told who they are being used against. A large portion of the injustice of anti-terrorism surveillance is the singling out of Arab-American and Muslim-American communities and individuals. With little or nothing to show for it and at great expense to the taxpayer. People not only don't mind this, but prefer it. Ditto for criminal enforcement of African-American communities or their imprisonment, no matter how petty the legal infringements. Inconveniences of oppression are imagined to be much less inconvenient when they are imposed upon people "we" want oppressed anyway. Finally, most middle class white Americans do not know anyone who is of some minority, even to the extent of knowing few non-Christians. Which limits the knowledge and perspective such people might offer on the subject.

All of that means
1) Most Americans do not see a reason to be upset enough to demonstrate.
2) Most Americans see demonstrations as unusual and in need of repression rather than legitimate airing of grievances.
3) Which in turn means there's a social custom against demonstration, on this subject in particular.

It would be nice if there were more mainstream protests and movements to reform the conduct and supervision of police, or the legal incentives available to persecute, investigate, or detain and harass people for non-violent and especially consensual criminal acts like those involved in vice crime. But we're not there yet. I have been following these issues for several years with an increasing degree of annoyance. Posting about it feels at this point like a flat and useless "I told you so", but it seems no less important to keep talking about in the hope that there will be people listening.

More words, in furious languor.

There appears to be much going on signifying sound and fury in the world of late. But it is mostly empty.

We have an "immigration" crisis. Except we've had an immigration problem that needed to be addressed for 90 years. Ever since we started closing off our borders to foreign populations and placing onerous restrictions on how and when someone may become a citizen if they wished to live here and raise a family and do the things that human beings tend to do when they live and work and play in a place for a long time. They want to call it home. Like some relentless wheel, this just cycles around again and again as a new crop of nativist biases that either do not make a coherent philosophical point or are factually wrong. Fortunately, it appears there isn't actually a strong support for kicking millions of people out of the country who want to stay here somehow. Unfortunately nobody in Congress appears to be paying attention to that because there's a very loud and politically active group of people wandering around pretending we are being invaded and who does want to kick people out, and which nobody else wants to antagonize but doesn't want to be seen talking to either. Which leaves us within a middle ground position that even fewer people want (things like guest worker programmes).

All this tells me is that we haven't bothered to fix the existing immigration system, and what bills have been proposed primarily don't either. They focus entirely too much on borders and how people get in. That's not the "problem". The issue is how people can stay, if they would like to, and how difficult or onerous we make it to become a citizen, a problem for which I have seen no bill address in a serious way. Huge numbers of people who are residents illegally in the country came here in a perfectly legal way, as students, tourists, or workers and no amount of "border control" is likely to create an environment which catches them and restricts their presence. Large numbers more of people abroad probably would come here and stay if we had a simple system for allowing people to emigrate from their homes. The demands for armed troops on the borders have little resemblance to a solution to the problem. If anything that only amplifies the humanitarian problems by increasing the price and danger of migration across borders, and makes it more difficult for people to leave when they do come here for a temporary basis, thus further discouraging such behavior as say, seasonal labourers who migrate across borders following available work.

I am not all that impressed with liberal solutions either. They can't do very much without Congress acting, but I keep hearing "decriminalizing drugs" coming up. The likely reason for that term is that there's little or no public support for the legalisation of drugs other than marijuana. Decriminalizing, say, heroin does not destroy black markets of the drug, as a major flaw in this arrangement. That does construct the legal arrangement so the users of drugs are not punished (or sellers with small quantities), or at least are not sent to jail and prison, which is a great social victory in its own right. But it does nothing about the establishing of legal markets where sellers of these products can use the legal system for protection of property rights and to arbitrate grievances peacefully through the courts and other forms of mediation. Without that option, the violence remains a significant and sometimes essential component of the existing black markets for goods that are merely "decriminalized". Decriminalization would be better than arresting thousands of people for consensual vices, but it would not solve this problem of an illicit market with artificially inflated profit margins and through which there are considerable issues of gang violence in foreign countries (like the countries the current wave of children are fleeing). Legalisation of marijuana likewise may help some, if it occurs on a broader scale, but will not remove the problem. Consider that some clever Central American drug cartels have branched out into protection rackets for farms, for ordinary domestic crops as limes or avocados and this becomes an even more elaborate problem to disentangle than how our legal system treats the recreational ingestion of mind-altering chemicals as a means to reduce the violence.

And now for something completely different.
A brief digression to rant about (other) silly things.
- This would all be much easier, apparently, if we publicly expended time discussing genital naming conventions from 90 years ago. Fortunately, "Jerry" had already taken on a somewhat darker turn from a cheeky British affiliation as a nickname for evil Nazis or we could be at risk of a wave of named phallic features, similar to the wave of names from characters of popular fantasy novels (Khaleesi, Katniss, etc). Let's just move on. Penis jokes are not too hard.

- If someone else makes a movie about how humans only use 10% of their brains, we may want to consider an investigation if this is an actual problem that there are people employed in Hollywood who somehow only use 10% of their brains. I like science fiction, but the prospect of someone getting suddenly smarter relies on some tricks about consciousness that we don't yet have solid neuroscience to explain, or a mental disorder that is treated (depression being a common example). Honestly all being able to access 100% would mean (probably) isn't that someone would get instantly superhuman powers, but that they'd be aware of ordinarily sub-conscious processes like breathing or sensory perceptions that we filter out most of the time. Maybe memory recall would be better. And that in turn risks a lot of solipsism rather than someone running amok with god-like powers. I realize that people with superior mental recall and eidetic memories are perceived as "superhuman", or that people with very good perceptive abilities (excellent eyesight or distinguishing palettes for foods) are. But we don't need to make a superhero/supervillain movie to sell those and it probably isn't because they "use more of their brain."

A note on writing
- All writers are writing about themselves. A very good writer is writing in such a way that, while their reader will know this, has constructed an imaginative reality in which the reader may escape, or clever and well-supported arguments in which they may engage and nod or shake the head vigorously in agreement or anger. But writers are really writing to put down the words about themselves. What I believe a very good writer possesses is not necessarily a command of the language in which they compose words (though the well-placed 5 dollar word helps at times). Instead it is a command of perspective-taking that is possessed. Writers see things as best they can as someone else, be they a character or an interlocutor, and can better convince us that these others are the ones speaking to us on the page and not the man behind the curtains.

This is not the same as "If I were in his/her place". That's a weak sauce to pour over the question of what someone else would or should think. Anyone can do that and it requires no imagination. It is "If I were them in his/her place" that we're after. Assuming a new identity for a brief while, not presuming an identity for ourselves. History as a field of study requires this practice when done properly. It is this skill that it should instruct and impart and not the memorization of trivial dates and names assembled into the proper order.

Levity

I've never been a huge fan of the tea party as a political movement. Despite the media's insistence that they are a collective band of libertarian crazy people, being as I actually am a libertarian crazy person (but usually referred to as a strangely sane libertarian crazy person) my views of them suggested otherwise. It's always looked like a rebranding effort by arch conservatives with a side function as a costume party as a means of selling colonial era hats and attire.

Since Americans seem quite fond of pretending that their political movements represent the views of ancient and deceased political philosophers, lawyers, inventors, and wealthy plantation owners (who owned property that included other human beings) who conveniently are longer alive to represent their views to us and be vilified for having the temerity to disagree with our own preferred version of their views, I have decided to embrace this method acting presentation and declare a new political movement:

The Whiskey Rebellion.

Its political view: government's main function is to drive the citizens of a nation to drink and it will do whatever it can to service this function by being frustratingly busy at things it needs not do and frustratingly inactive at things it need occupy itself at effectively and efficiently.

And also the reason for this as a "rebellion": the main function of citizens appears to be to drive other citizens to drink. We need to rebel against that government by the people and for the people by consuming more alcohol

(except apparently consuming more alcohol makes people more conservative in their voting outlooks, so only up to a point required for social lubrication to be achieved and a position which watches over the inanities of our fellow man more serenely is at work.)

PSH death.

Argument I have a hard time understanding in the wake of PSH death: 

Heroin is somehow used because it is considered "cool". 

If we discount the (common) prospect of people who become addicted to opiate painkillers who moved up the ladder to heroin, the overwhelming percentage of any substance abuse is out of self-management of sometimes very serious mental disorders and the associated social problems. Since heroin has an addiction potential that's roughly that of nicotine (eg, very high relative to many other drugs), and since it is illegal and thus difficult to get in a pure and reasonably safe unadulterated form, it's really hard to imagine people rationally deciding one day "yes that sounds good, let's try that" as a large base of its use. 

Not to mention that there are almost zero positive cultural references to it. 
Consider the following movies and TV shows. 
Pulp Fiction - famous OD sequence. 
Trainspotting - famous for dead baby. Famous for toilet diving sequence
Requiem for a Dream - famous for sex sequence involving public sex and a double dildo
The Wire - Various homeless or near homeless characters are the only users depicted, dealers/bystanders being shot or shot at, several overdoses, hot shot with poison involved
American Gangster - gang war, police corruption, main character selling goes to prison
Traffic - police corruption, daughter becomes addict, steals jewelry, trades sex for drugs

Ray might be the closest heroin comes to getting a "this is okay", and even there, someone ODs and Ray is using for a basis other than creative potential in musical style and has to clean up his addiction both for legal and personal reasons. 

Compare this to cocaine, which may be used by sketchier characters certainly but seems to have very few negative consequences of these types (both in movies and to some extent, in reality). Sherlock Holmes used cocaine. Jordan Belfort uses cocaine and a bunch of other stuff. Raoul Duke does cocaine and most of pharmacy. Malcolm X does cocaine. Scarface has a huge pile of the stuff. And so on down the list. Sometimes this has negative effects to the plot, sometimes it just establishes the character as a bit edgy or strange. Rarely is it "someone OD'd on cocaine" or "someone does something totally absurd", as is common with a marijuana or alcohol reference. 

Hoffman like many artists in a now stereotypical description sounds like he was somehow troubled personally in order to create and hone his craft. There's some correlation with artists, which skilled non-Tom Cruise actors are, and various forms of depression, mania, anxiety, and so on through the litany of mental woes and abuses that we may inflict upon ourselves with our minds. I imagine for actors or actresses it is particularly likely as the skill set for concealing depression from our friends or loved ones while in public is essentially the same as acting. Better practiced perhaps, but similar. This doesn't mean that people in Hollywood use drugs or have drug problems because it's cool and awesome. It suggests that people in Hollywood use drugs or have drug problems for much the same reasons people elsewhere do but that the concentration of creative people means a couple problems emerge.

1) It's more readily available because some of these people are earning a lot of money and could "afford" a drug habit
2) It's more readily available because there are more people with such problems in one place and who co-mingle to work together. 
3) It's less likely to be seen as an impediment to the work than the underlying conditions that they're using it for. 

That last is possibly true for people in other professions as well, those are just more often professions that will drug test employees and fire them over negative test results. If we understand drug abuse, and addiction as a portion or a symptom of larger mental health issues, it's harder to stigmatize the depression or bipolar disorder or any of various social anxieties and perhaps easier to send people off for healthier ways to manage these concerns rather than they remain unacknowledged. 

SoTU

"One measure of a truly free society is the vigor with which it protects the liberties of its individual citizens. As technology has advanced in America, it has increasingly encroached on one of those liberties—what I term the right of personal privacy. Modern information systems, data banks, credit records, mailing list abuses, electronic snooping, the collection of personal data for one purpose that may be used for another—all these have left millions of Americans deeply concerned by the privacy they cherish.

And the time has come, therefore, for a major initiative to define the nature and extent of the basic rights of privacy and to erect new safeguards to ensure that those rights are respected.

I shall launch such an effort this year at the highest levels of the Administration, and I look forward again to working with this Congress in establishing a new set of standards that respect the legitimate needs of society, but that also recognize personal privacy as a cardinal principle of American liberty." 

- Richard Nixon 1974 (note: Nixon also talked more about health care in that speech than Obama did last night). 

It's great that Obama keeps saying he's going to reform the surveillance state, but unless he actually starts doing things that don't remind me of Richard Nixon, then he's just as full of shit as Tricky Dick was. Mostly I found his brief mention of the surveillance debate to be highly misleading. He's spent most of the time explicitly rejecting the recommendations of his own executive branch critics, to say nothing of civil libertarian objections and Congressional opposition and general popular confusion and disdain. 

The same deal applies to the comments on drones and the general IR agenda. He talked about things happening... but didn't outline a general responsible approach for his administration that could be easily and clearly implemented. It was not encouraging that a Libya repeat isn't in the cards. And probably the biggest thing going on overseas that might be a cause for concern for Americans (other than negotiations with Iran maybe, nobody cares about Syrians fighting) is the China-Japan spat over some rocks in the Pacific carrying out the argument with ships in close proximity at times. I don't think that was mentioned at all. 

And how about that Drug War, Mr President? Nice of you to mention there's some problem with it in passing a week ago and ignore it here in the context of remarks broadly in favor of taking executive action without consulting Congress. Which the drug war is somewhat firmly an executive project already (President can change the schedule status of drugs with some leeway, can pardon and reduce sentences, issue directives to the DoJ not to enforce or pursue minimum sentencing statutes, etc). 

About the only things I liked in the speech:

1) Iran. It's probable that I'm far closer to Obama than most of Congress on this issue, in that I really don't see the point of further sanctions when sanctions have "worked" to bring about the prospect of an agreement on nuclear proliferation issues. Actually, I do see the point of such sanctions, in that they're intended to prevent negotiation and haste the prospect of an attack. But since I think an attack is counterproductive and likely to be ineffective at advancing our goal and interests here, I don't follow the point. Talking and side actions are more likely to be useful than attempting to change the government of Iran by external means of force. 

2) Mention of climate change was encouraging. I'm not sure there's much agreement between Obama and someone like me on what we should do about it, but it's at least good it comes up as a topic. It's a little more pressing than what kind of health care plan I could buy, although I'm certainly not that pleased with that either. I'd prefer more debate ongoing here but Republicans seem... less useful. It might help though if every time there's this thing called "winter", so many people didn't run around saying "what global warming?". Yes. Still cold out there. I get it. Still winter. I remember a March with 90 degree temperatures here in Ohio not that long ago and a summer that was persistently near or over 100 degrees. I think that's a little more prominent than whether or not there is snow and ice on the ground in January. There's supposed to be snow and ice on the ground in January; that's the climate here in the Great Lakes/Rust Belt region of the country. The climate isn't supposed to be setting record high temperatures for weeks in a row. One of these things is not like the other. 

3) Immigration. I'd favor them doing something on this, but by "something" I would mean "open the border already", rather than "put in billions of dollars of defence contractor pork for border security", which mostly won't work anyway. I am not optimistic that in an off-year election anything will be passed on this even if Boehner thinks something will and Obama wants something to sign. But if something is, it will take a form much too similar to the bill that was proposed and eventually died last year with such handouts and excessive fortifications as a key selling point. It will have to. Too much of the Republican (and Democratic) base is opposed not just to a more open borders society with large amounts of migration as an option, but even to the relatively free and open borders we have right now for anything else to be passed. 

The general focus on inequality is nice, but mostly it seems was inaccurate. The causes and factors and vectors here are much more complicated than "let's raise the minimum wage", which is almost entirely useless for that project, or "increase the set of intellectual property rights", which is mostly a boon to existing infrastructure rather than a job creation system (indeed, it's probably an economic suppressor rather than a necessary protection of innovation). 

Gun control

This is the section on guns from the previous post. There's a section on abortion coming if you wish to be reassured or pissed off by that instead.

For gun control, I am perfectly happy to have conversations over the possible effectiveness of various proposals in a theoretical debate. I find that most proposals don't have much regulatory value to the actual problems in our gun culture and all its associated carnage in public and private violence. I'm also perfectly happy to point out that, despite the elegant plans often drawn up, we have a second amendment. And while I'm not necessarily happy about it, there are legal scholars and court rulings which say it is kind of a big deal. In the haste to say we need gun control, it's rather important to acknowledge this exists.

It is not sufficient to begin arguments as "you don't need..." when talking about regulations that would impact constitutionally guaranteed liberties as a basis for why a particular regulation is required. "You don't need" isn't a determination that I am often convinced is well established is correct in the first place. It's more like "I don't want you to...". Which is fine as a motivation, but it often goes unacknowledged in the debate. I'm not comfortable around guns either (outside of video games and violent movies). But I'm aware this is often why I might not be all that happy about someone else having one and not out of some dubious understanding of their needs that I'd be comfortable making into a law preventing them from attaining those needs. Their needs might include an enjoyment of owning and using firearms for some particular sport, for self-defence, for traditional value, and so on. These are not necessarily convincing "needs", or entirely accurate determinations that they made themselves either. But they do exist. They can often make for adequate grounds against for eliminating accessibility to particular kinds of firearms (on their own), or for many weapons accessories (most extended clips, flash suppressors, silencers, etc). As a result, gun control advocates advancing questions of "need" will tend to ignore that "need" is not a very salient point in the debate as it is subjective what that "need" is, and is rather immaterial in any regard if one concurs with a general proscription that the object whose need is being measured is a protected class of good via a constitutional amendment. (Note: I would argue many more things than firearms fall into this category as protected private actions and forms of property, including most of our vice crimes like narcotics or various forms of sexual services, but firearms were at least mentioned in the constitution and for whatever reason the public often subscribes to a legal theory that if the government isn't expressly limited or prevented from doing something, it can do it).

On the one case where there seems to be an actual restriction, automatic machine guns, even that restriction comes out of a sort of circular basis. Machine guns are illegal effectively because it's not likely a civilian would have one. But civilians would not likely have one because they were made illegal decades ago during the height of Prohibition. There's a great deal of absurdity in comparing automatic machine guns designed to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, often high powered rounds at long range at that, and semi-automatic rifles that are often called "machine guns" based on their similar appearance. One is clearly more lethal and dangerous than the other. So. There's a better reason available for why a machine gun is illegal of course, in the same way that a civilian can't get a rocket launcher, artillery rounds, tanks, or gunships for private use. Namely it serves little purpose other than intimidation and destruction via violence or the threat of it and constitutes a significant danger to the peace and tranquility of a community. This is still true of other firearms to a degree, but making a functional distinction about actual military grade equipment has a way of pointing out that some, if not all or most, of that equipment is designed expressly for killing other human beings easily and in large numbers and this is a significant threat that ownership would likely only be for offensive purpose against other human beings and is often too impractical for use in other needs. For other fire arms it is more often appropriate or sufficient to say "you can have that, but don't walk around with it and start pointing it at your neighbours when talking to them" or "firing it without defensive cause in the town", and to some extent to provide legal restrictions like "we do not trust you to have that because you have committed violent acts in the past for which you have been arrested and convicted of." Although our restrictions over gun ownership via felonies leads to ridiculous problems in many states because of what is classified as a felony in the first place, and who gets convicted of such, there's some reasonable basis in making these specific distinctions where there's less of a clear basis in attacking "need" more broadly.

That ultimately all becomes more an argument over use instead of need. Rather than arguments over need, I think the much stronger case for gun control is made by establishing that we have a gun culture problem that generates an unreasonable amount of gun-related violence. Some of that violence, in some places quite a lot of it, is generated by other factors than the mere existence of the weapons being used. Gang violence resulting from black market disputes over market share in illicit goods or services for example. That has little to do with guns in the abstract and more to do with other dubious legal pursuits of the state (usually narcotics). In examining this as an actual problem within our midst, we might also become aware of the gun problem in suicides; in that suicide by gun is far more common and far more deadly than murder or assault by gun. This too is a trail of carnage. When this is understood to be an actual and very large/complicated problem, what we find is that there might still be appropriate, even legally accessible, state reactions, but they probably won't have as much to do with regulating "assault weapons" or flash suppressors. Which are at best cosmetic ways of firing pellets of metal at high speed into living tissue rather than a significant contributing factor to the violence and blood spilled. They might have more to do with why people are using these weapons aggressively in the first place.

We might instead modify the way we prosecute, arrest, and impound property in the form of illicit vices. We might increase the availability of and augment the way we treat mental illness and disturbances. I'd be very cautious about tying gun ownership rights to said illness and treatments, most likely because the result would be fewer people with guns or who want guns getting treatment. Here I don't think either the NRA or liberals opposing them have any idea what they're talking about. We might increase or establish federal or state taxes on mind-altering substances; alcohol especially or through decriminalised or legal markets for narcotics. We might find ways to encourage weapon safety through offering basic training courses in exchange for registration or manufacturing companies could be installing or providing security features on weapons. We might work to reduce crime in areas that people no longer feel a "need" to be armed in the first place and would not purchase a weapon for that purpose of self-defence and in time decrease the cultural reverence attached to them. We might talk more about why we have a cultural medium that is more comfortable with violence than with saying certain words or with nudity. I think all three have a place in culture and cultural depiction, but the current comfort with violence relative to sexuality is absurdly puritanical. Why, we might ask, is it that we ourselves are so inclined to consume that media? Again, I'm not convinced it is a problem that we do so, but it does us little good to point fingers in a taxing blame game rather than look in the mirror once in a while and re-evaluate.

These are all complicated ways of getting at the problem. But all of them are likely to have much larger impacts on gun related violence than restricting "assault weapons", and various other proposals based upon "need".

We might also acknowledge that the largest cause of violence by choice of weapon, even among mass shooting events for which we often find gun control a topic de jour, is easily concealed handguns; a variety of guns so prolific in this country that there are at least half as many as there are citizens. Any legislative attempt to restrict these runs into some practical problems. First, there's so many available that it would take decades or hundreds of billions of dollars to reduce that number to a manageable level that it would even be possible to track or be reasonably certain who possesses or desires the possession of such weapons rather than through a grey market as now. Second, restricting handguns in some way is incredibly unpopular with the public (and even less popular after a major shooting event, even if a handgun was the primary weapon used). Third, it appears that home or local manufacture of weapons might be a near-term possibility via 3D printing and other assembler technologies that are decreasing in cost, making the regulation and control of weapons even less likely to be a centrally controlled matter. Some of these arguments apply equally to the question of restricting large capacity magazines, a popular state level restriction adopted in the wake of mass shootings.

And then, finally, the point of this exercise. It's unlikely to stand up to a Supreme Court challenge to make most varieties of restrictions upon handguns in particular a legal method of regulation. Because there's a pretty good case out there being made that such types of restrictions violate the Constitution and that case has won at the Supreme Court level already.

While I'm quite happy to have the conversations about efficacy and effectiveness, I'm not sure how people get past the "it's illegal for the government to do X" problem. Even good or well-intentioned ideas are restricted by these barriers, at least intended to be so restricted at any rate. And in this case, there are recent federal rulings and some not-so-recent that point away from the argument that many varieties of proposed restrictions could be legally interpreted in a manner that allows them to be used. And this is a major flaw in much liberal hand-wringing about firearms in that it often supposes the legal interpretation that the 2nd amendment is largely a device about tyranny and state militias, and thus a mostly quaint artifact of the 18th and 19th centuries perhaps, is the correct and only interpretation available and in wide use amongst legal scholars or the general public. I am disposed by some level of personal disgust to agree that this is a mostly correct legal and historical interpretation and that the historical capacity of the public to overthrow its government is much diminished in an aging country of 300 million citizens to be laughably improbable as an event worth considering in laying out our legal boundaries anyway.

But. I do not find my disgust to be informative about what the legal and moral rights of others shall be either and do not find it persuasive that these other interpretations must be wrong or inherently flawed by this particular variety of gun-clinging culture or some such with only that objection to raise. I do think it is sufficient to be questioning of that culture, curious of it, and if possible to act coercively in a private manner to encourage others to avoid the "need" or want of firearms. That's a process largely consisting of conversation or unwritten rules enforced by socially binding norms; norms which we have done little to create or foster amongst people who are not inclined to find guns discomforting and by the failure to do so have rendered many attempts at the federal or state level to adopt what may be perceived publicly or broadly as reasonable restrictions on weapons sales to be futile and abandoned.

Without talking to such people in the language of their adopted views on these issues, and abandoning the questions of need in a legal sense before having made the cultural argument, I would be very skeptical that any meaningful advances will be made on the social problem of violence and could easily see that what cosmetic methods are passed to deal with it will be either ineffective, overturned, or do more harm than good making these efforts rather pointless wastes of political energy.

There is naturally some contradiction in conservative claims on gun control as well, in that they advance an "originalist" logic to the documents but are often dismissive of that fact the documents have had to evolve based on changes in technology and social pressures that did not exist in the 18th century. Guns and human settlement were very different objects over 200 years ago in the same way that phones were very different 35 years ago. We should expect that any such regulations or restrictions that may have existed or were deemed appropriate in that time would be less so now.

We do not now have a culture that is likely to need to overthrow its government by force, nor a population broadly inclined to do so or to support movements to do so. Secession by states or cities is not a heavily backed item on the political agenda even in the various Southern states that still seem by rhetoric to want to fight the Civil War again. In Texas petitions to this effect received less than 1% of the state's population. While polls misleadingly portray a more robust population in favor than this, they still receive a small plurality (less than a quarter of those polled typically). Violent revolution, or even peaceful revolt, is even less supported. Various fringe to mainstream political groups agitating for radical adjustments in current policies such as the Free State Movement, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, Greenpeace, and so on do not attract broader popular support and indeed, are often perceived or portrayed as annoying and incoherent political brands rather than substantive responses to the actual political problems concerning the average person/voter. As a result, I do not think the notion that somehow we are about to fight a war against our own government(s) is a compelling reason, though nor is it a necessary one, to prevent various laws to be adopted. I do think it is a sufficient reason to question the arsenals that the government has deployed or made available to local and state police forces, and why it is that they require and receive heavy machine guns or armored vehicles in small towns dotting the country. But that's a somewhat different question than what sort of gun a person may purchase, or what requirements we would have placed upon them to do so.

That conservatives or the NRA can rush to this argument; that some crucial number of home-owning men with rifles is all that stands between America as a free country and the imposition of a tyrannical dictatorship is a flag-waving piece of nonsense that does little to aid their cause in the debate either. It provides the misguided impression that we live in a far more dangerous country than we actually do. Most of the people pushing for gun rights do not live in dangerous neighborhoods beset by violence (some do) and we are so vanishingly unlikely to be attacked by foreign powers directly that such a well-armed public would be an asset rather than the current liability it is often seen as. It provides the impression that only these rights relating to weapons ownership are worth standing up for and fighting against attempts to oppress them. While other rights such as the freedom from unreasonable searches, rights to a trial by jury, or the capacity to speak freely or worship freely (or not) are often sought to be suppressed or abandoned by the same groups of people along with "lesser" rights like access to voting or the hiring and firing decisions of business owners vis a vis immigrants and migrant workers. There are certainly Constitutionally or morally consistent conservatives who will readily defend the right of say, a Muslim to attend a mosque, an atheist to agitate peacefully, or blacks or Latino citizens access to vote, and also to not be detained and harassed without reasonable suspicion (read: more than just it's a young darker skinned male) by police and other security forces.

But these are not the people they send to office to enact policy. And by that process it presents a position that looks very much like a cultural island where so long as gun ownership as a basic right is preserved, other freedoms may be freely eliminated by the state. And indeed may be enthusiastically eviscerated along the way. It would be trivial for a tyrant to co-opt such armed bands into whatever mobile oppression system they would desire to rule with and to be used against whomever they wished to use it against. Indeed, one could argue that's what we are already doing with police forces being armed to the teeth, ostensibly for counter-terrorism, but really to make aggressive raids over compliance with often petty regulations and conduct shake-downs in grey-zone regulation or against otherwise non-violent citizens. Whether the appropriate response to a well-armed government is to demand a well-armed citizenry seems ludicrous given the propensity for violence against the state being so low and the dangers still quite real. The appropriate response is most likely to call for a less-well-armed government.

Whatever we are left with at the end of this is not necessarily great and wise policy. Maybe we could restrict sales at certain third party access points or require certain information in background checks. Maybe we would restrict the sale of video games (also hasn't held up in court rulings though). Maybe we would restrict the size of magazines one could use for ammunition. Maybe we would do none of those things. And so on.

For me though, the only good and relevant outcome of all of that would be there might be a pause in the volume of screaming people do about how holy they are about some legal right granted and guaranteed them hundreds of years before their birth and how awful their opponents are for supposedly attacking that right, for this or that reason.

Both of you have no idea what you sound like.

And it's something like this.