2015 NCAA rankings

1) Kentucky 18-0

2) Wisconsin 14-1-1
3) Virginia 15-1
4) Arizona 11-2-1
5) Gonzaga 10-1
6) Utah 8-4
7) Duke 16-3
8) Villanova 15-2

9) Oklahoma 10-8
10) Kansas 15-5

11) Ohio St 7-7
12) North Carolina 10-8
13) Louisville 9-6
13) Iowa St 12-5-1
15) Wichita St 5-3
16) Baylor 11-7

17) Notre Dame 12-4
18) N. Iowa 7-1-1
19) Texas 6-9
20) Michigan St 7-6-2
21) Butler 10-7
22) Georgetown 10-8
23) Xavier 11-7-3

24) Arkansas 10-5
24) West Virginia 8-6
26) San Diego St 6-5-1

Ranked Teams
35) Maryland 10-5
29) SMU 5-5
27) VCU 10-5-1

All records are top 100 opponents only (losses against sub 100 teams are the third number if any). I don't count games outside the top 100 mostly because such teams very rarely win and very rarely play many NCAA tournament games. Florida Gulf Coast won two a couple of years ago, but they were also barely outside the top 100. Such teams are typically 14-16 seeds, so wins are rare.

These rankings aren't a reflection of how good I think each team is, as many have pretty mediocre records or have played very poorly in road games that I wouldn't be confident in their performance.

Kentucky's comfortably above the next tier of teams. I think they should be undefeated going into the NCAA tournament. They're statistically looking like the best team in the last 15 years or so. The closest would be Kansas' national title team (that beat Memphis), and Louisville a couple years ago (also a champion). The "second tier" teams are actually looking a little better than the usual suspects also, but Kentucky looks just that much better. The main key is they have the best defense over that span. Their offense is solid, but not as dominating.

The only "surprise" team in the top 16, (teams that get a favorable early round location usually) would probably be Ohio State (instead of Maryland). They've played really poorly on the road so I would not anticipate them staying up there.

Weakest Teams on the "Bubble"
45) Miami 6-8-1
48) Texas AM 6-7
49) Cincinnati 6-6-3
52) UCLA 5-8-355) Boise St 6-3-4
57) Colorado St 5-2-3
58) Temple 6-6-2
NR) Oregon
NR) Tulsa
I don't track teams that are in the 75-100 range unless they are likely to win a low quality conference, so assume Oregon and Tulsa are roughly ranked 80th.

Best Teams out
30) BYU 3-8 (needs more wins)
34) Florida 2-11-2 (way too many losses)
39) Davidson 5-4-2

Syracuse is ineligible and comes in at 46 (they would barely make it)

So far I'm not sure there's a team that is likely to be screwed by not getting a bid. BYU has a case there, but needs to start winning meaningful games.

Best small conference teams
56) Stephen F Austin
59) Valparaiso
60) Green Bay (same conference as Valpo)
78) Murray St.

There aren't any minor powers that will deserve an at-large bid if they lose a conference tournament right now.

"Quick" hits

1) There was an atheist who killed some Muslims in North Carolina, for what appears to have been a parking dispute. For some reason this became a widely circulated presentation that atheists a) want to kill people or b) want to kill Muslims in particular. I think it may be prudent to investigate other possible motives, but unfortunately human beings often kill one another or seek violent means of resolution over pretty ordinary things. Or at least we often quarrel over very silly things. We may be more prone to do so with violence where the offending parties are "other" in some manner (race, religion, type of music listened to, accent, etc). But I'm not sure this rises to a level of hate crime so much as a general animus that all of us tend to have for people we're not familiar with, and who are engaged with us in something moderately annoying. Muslims are not generally familiar to ordinary Americans. I've pointed this out in various forms, but basically our association is "Middle Eastern, terrorists, oil, hates women, women wear funny clothes", and almost none of those describes the ordinary Muslim on the planet, particularly in the US. More to the point, if we are to pick out 30 American residents at random, the likelihood that even one of them will be a Muslim is small. So most of us know almost nothing anyway. Not enough even that we can form animus toward individuals that we come to interact with on a semi-daily basis. Probably enough that we as a society can form animus toward unknowns.

There are other problems with how this story has circulated. For instance, it follows the usual protocol of "minority group must disavow any knowledge". I, like most people in minority groups, don't presume to have an ideological association that says "it's okay to kill people from some other group for no good apparent reason". Which then makes it pretty strange that most of us should have to disavow anything at all whenever a story like this appears; atheists, Muslims, Catholics, whatever. I rarely make the association that it was this aspect of their character that provided a violent nature. Sometimes it does, but often there are any number of other beliefs and mental schema that could be blamed besides the racial or religious overtones. It reminds me of the shell games that are played over Hitler's religious affiliations and affectations as though this was an essential element of his genocidal plans. People who share passing characteristics are constantly being called upon to deny that they share other characteristics, particularly whenever something bad happens by someone who shares those characteristics and particularly when these characteristics are somewhat rare and therefore unknown. Something that should perhaps be concluded by human beings is that other people are more complicated than the one or two things we know about them to infer reasonably almost anything else about them, much less to do so to dismiss them or remove them from any discourse as we often do. This also applies to the "he is crazy" mantra that describes "deranged lunatics" as a one-off rather than someone who was in any way representative of a belief structure. This also is dismissive. We usually have no evidence suggesting this to be the case other than that several people are now dead. One can assume this is from some variety of mental imbalance, but it's not actually a very safe assumption. People are frequently killed in domestic or friendly disputes that do not require the perpetrator to be a deeply demented and psychopathic character. They usually just require anger and a weapon close at hand, possibly a substance of mind-altering capacity at worst (alcohol most commonly). There can be sometimes detailed evidence of a bizarre or warped psychology provided and there are undoubtedly many Americans who think merely being an atheist is evidence of such, but this is not a given whenever someone kills or plots to kill other human beings.

Second problem: Obama is asked to comment on it, principally by other world leaders. To the extent there may be any civil rights related issue; that it is in any way some variety of "hate crime", fine. That's something the President can comment on and has on occasion given issues like possibly racially motivated police shooting or killing other citizens. That's a clear governmental issue since the problem, whether one agrees with it or not, is agents of the government are in situations that result in the deaths of citizens they are intended to serve and protect and this should be regarded as a failure of government whenever it happens. Even if the shooting was "justified". But there are, apparently unlike in other countries, thousands of murders and other violent crimes in the US every year. Asking and demanding the President take time to comment on all of them seems trivial and stupid versus asking and demanding the President take time to try to implement or push for a societal change that improves safety and security for many more people. Obama's remarks seem mostly framed in the former paragraph design. Which to the extent he should have any remarks at all, would be the only reason to have commented. Except we haven't established there need be any reason to comment yet. Ordinary murders happen all the time.

2) Freakonomics did a podcast on an upcoming anti-terrorism summit. I found several obvious flaws in the comments that were made by the various players they sought comment from.

Levitt makes a case that economists are probably going to be pretty good at thinking up incentives and ways that terrorists could attack in a more "scary" or damaging way to devastate the opposing society. Unlike Levitt, I actually think that makes them more suited to appear at a summit to make up part of a "red team" style approach to thinking through the problems and how we could better prepare as a society. They're more apt to look for vulnerabilities that are overlooked. It also means that they may be better suited to identify the incentives for terrorist cells based on what their financial backers seem to think works as well. For instance, other countries have had several armed gunmen running around causing mayhem at hotels or media establishments as a terrorist attack. This has happened in the US too, but it's typically an ordinary crime by some "random lunatic" rather than some foreign backed attack. Or as we might otherwise call it: "a Saturday night". One reason that say, the DC sniper isn't being replicated at shopping malls or hotels in the US is that these backers and planners may worry about the crime being too ordinary, or be concerned about the notion that there may be some idiot packing a 45 who would stop the whole thing, or whatever. The return on investment is too risky and too low versus bombings or other relatively cheap styles of attack (but not as cheap as arming several people with guns). So they keep trying to hijack or bomb airplanes or something like that instead.

Some of those vulnerabilities are being described as "terrorism" probably more because they may be under-proportioned resource wise by government or society in general, but not because we are at any grave risk of a terrorist actually doing something to us in that way. Bio-terrorism for instance is much more likely to pose a problem as a pandemic or from anti-vaccination pockets or from overuse of antibiotics causing resistant strains and not from biologically engineered viral or bacterial cells by terrorists. Similarly "cyber-terrorism" isn't actually likely from some terrorist cell, but from ordinary hackers taking out identity and credit card information from unsecured points in the business architecture. Neither of these is likely to be part of some ideological attempt to destroy America or meddle with our IR incentives and projects where it appears as a problem in society. But because planting "terrorism" in it makes it sound more important right now, they get tossed in the same boat.

I would tend to agree that terrorism isn't a very likely threat to daily life anywhere in America. It may be somewhat more likely in DC or NYC, but that still doesn't make it a significant concern. I've seen a number of articles complaining about say, 50 Shades of Grey as a major social problem. I'm not inclined to say it is a significant problem either, but if someone is hyperbolically comparing it to ISIS (and some people have), from an American perspective, I don't know that this is actually a significant difference in actual danger and harm being posed. Mis-representing BDSM or generally kinky sex, roleplaying, and the communications and trust involved in these is probably doing a little harm at least for those people who are consuming this as media. ISIS is only doing damage to Americans to the extent that we are still engaging them directly in Iraq and Syria rather than leaving it to regional players like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Turkey to work out how to respond and that our engagement internationally in direct physical combat has costs.

Presumed free

I do not generally subscribe to a natural rights theory of humanity, but the "presumption of liberty" is still a sufficient guideline for most of the examples given that policing powers should be restricted to areas of significant importance because of the actual damage they could maintain. Basic health, safety, fraud, and environmental regulations all can fall into these categories, and likewise we should avoid regulations and laws providing power to governments in areas that are effectively arbitrary, narrowly beneficial/prejudicial (rent seeking or targets of oppression), or, and this is a big objection for me usually, ineffective at achieving the presumed ends.

All of that generally means that if governments want to pass some rule, at any level of governance, it needs to pass two basic tests for me to find it beneficial to have a rule rather than the absence.

1) What goal is this law seeking to achieve, and is that goal a necessary end of the state to police (or can it be done in some other way)? In some cases, I will part from ordinary libertarians on questions of social welfare or social justice because I am not persuaded there are good options available in the society at large for resolving these questions and a large free rider or externality problem. In many cases of legal questions, this differs from the ordinary interpretation (by liberals and conservatives) to say that the idea that we need a law to do X is possibly an illegitimate aim for the state to impose controls over. My guiding assumption is to say that if there isn't a rule saying the government can't do it that isn't a license to say governments can or should do it, and that it needs a very good reason to intercede. This used to be a fairly uncontroversial assumption for how the American government operated from what I could tell that if it wanted to do something limiting individual rights severely, it needed a constitutional amendment (eg, the 18th). Indeed, it seems to have been a basis for passing the 14th amendment in the first place as a fairly radical amendment limiting the scope of government to the protection and guarantee of existing rights such as the freedom of conscience or speech or the protection against unreasonable searches by government agents, and the enforcement of generally applicable laws (eg, murder, theft, fraud, rape, etc). This is no longer the dominant theory governing American politics and the power of the 14th amendment is often much more limited in restraining political (and commercial) authority from doing unreasonable things.

2) Does the proposed rule/law have a good mechanic for achieving that goal? This is typically a big problem. I often see very little evidence that a proposed law will work, or may even be counterproductive, or that it has even much to do with achieving a purported goal and is instead about something else (such as rent seeking behavior in public choice theory).

The danger of Barnett's theory is that courts do not always subscribe to a protection of liberty in the first place and that courts have often expanded radically the scope of government operations to allow things that not only libertarians but many others may find to be illegitimate, ineffective, or inappropriate operations of government. Courts do not have to abide by a limited interpretation of governmental power (at any level) or can choose to defer to legislatures or executives in both the intended premise and the intended execution of a law.

A series of things that are pissing me off

Or at least mildly annoying.

1) Bad metaphors. I have decided that someone should step forward and police the use of terms that have nothing to do with the metaphorical analogies being made. "Double-edged sword" is a term deployed for something that has two dangerous sides to it in its origins. For reasons unknown to me, someone decided it should refer to something that has one good side and one dangerous side, as if it were a sword that cut someone on one side and healed them on the other. This is idiotic. It must stop.

2) Misuse of philosophical terms. "Slippery slope" tends to refer to a set of arguments that are related to one another in some clear but abstract way, and which are clearly a progression of worsening objects. In most cases, this is not however much of a slope that it is being used to describe. Rather, it tends to describe circumstances that aren't clearly related logically (one thing may be worse, but has nothing to do with the other objects), or aren't related in a "sloped" fashion, where one thing isn't clearly worse, but is related. This argument is deployed to say something different; that the person involved thinks or believes that a path is being opened and set upon by the society or group that ultimately leads to something they don't like, but more commonly because the first object on that set is already objectionable to the person involved (eg, gay marriage leading to polygamy if one is a social conservative or various forms of surveillance leading to tyrannical dictatorships if one is a civil libertarian). But. If the first object is objectionable on its own merits, it shouldn't need additional help in dissuading doing it, and if those other things are more objectionable the argument becomes that they are things we should avoid instead, which may be easier and has the effect of doing nothing about the thing one is possibly objecting to.

3) Poorly defined and broadly used terms put forward as talismans in discussions as a statement of one's position rather than a statement of one's position. "Conservative/liberal/socialist/capitalist" "Free speech" "God" "Spirituality" and so on. These are effectively meaningless statements of one's position that one can infer very little. "Free speech" has been taken to mean things other than the political philosophical term of "government does not police speech, until or unless it incites immediate action" in the manner of "I am for free speech but..." with anything from hate speech, blasphemy, micro-aggressions, "swear words", or just plain old "things I don't like to hear" thrown in there as things that should be policed and prevented by the state and its agencies. Rather than things that are maybe annoying particular people and should be responded to with speech (or ignored). It's also been taken to mean not just things that aren't policed by government but also things that other people said about what I said I did not like and said as much in some fashion ("they called me a racist/bigot/homophobe"). If people go through the exercise of defining what they mean by a term, they should gain a better understanding of what that term means to them, and that it doesn't mean that to other people.

A frustration

One of the central dynamics involved in studying economics as it relates to human behavior is that human beings will respond to incentives. And one of the frustrating aspects of political decisions as they relate to economics is that these decisions to implement policy rarely take these into account when they are formed and enacted. Almost nowhere does this appear more evident than the politics surrounding environmentalism.

A variety of problems occur which should be evident and obvious. A law or regulation is passed which mandates higher energy efficiency standards or fuel economy. The result is that people use more energy or drive more. People will often have in mind a relative fixed budget for energy expenses and when they are below it, it is possible that they will seek to consume the rest of that budget than to seek to save it. Or they may also think that their more efficient vehicle or appliances entitles them to use these devices more often because they will be doing so more effectively than their neighbours. While this may be perfectly reasonable from an individual experience, it has rather unpleasant ramifications if it applied at a social level. Wherein it allows us to claim victories on environmental policies without having actually achieved them. This is not unusual where a policy is passed with the explicit claims of victory over some vast social ill, and then very little is done to assure that indeed that policy did achieve those aims. But since environmental policies and responses relating to climate change could have rather more significant consequences than say, abortion policy, we may want to be sure we are getting something useful for our buck and make sure we are getting something at all.

Suppose we mandate that fuel efficiency standards are high. Many people buy more efficient cars as they need a new vehicle. In theory this should reduce energy consumption. In practice, people then drive them more often (on average). This increases traffic and congestion costs for everyone, including the people who have less efficient vehicles. Traffic and congestion are clear costs to productivity and time, but these costs are not paid by the people imposing them. If you are in a traffic jam, you are part of the problem, but it does not seem obvious that this is true because there are hundreds of others also involved in being part of the problem. None of these people will have good incentives to seek to reduce these costs because they can point to all of those people instead. An economic solution would be to impose congestion-adjusted tolls on controlled access roads (highways), which would assure that when there is high volumes of traffic, the costs will be paid by those accessing the road and it may deter people from driving when they otherwise would. This idea is of course unpopular. Or it could instead be the idea to reduce the incentives for housing to be located away from denser urban areas such that fewer people must commute by car and can commute instead by buses or trains (or even walk to work). Again, this is unpopular.

There are a couple of obvious possible reactions to this. 1) The ideas of economists must not very good solutions; otherwise they would be more popular. 2) The reason they are not popular is they are not pushed forward by other elites (scientists or politicians say), and the rather simple story as to why they are more effective than mandating somebody else pay the cost also provides a clear incentive to individual people (use less energy by driving around less, or at different times, and you will pay less). Economic solutions tend not to get very much airplay and explanation for the general public to discuss and digest them, and this is in part because where environmental policies are concerned, economic solutions require individual people, both as businesses and households, to pay something rather than expecting someone else to do all the heavy lifting. Regardless of who does the lifting however, or even if nobody does any lifting, individual people are paying the costs. Be it in the form of increasingly unpleasant weather conditions or traffic congestion or in not recouping long-term investment costs for energy efficient adjustments to a home or property.

Another example. Suppose we encourage individual people through social coercion or some tax incentive to place solar paneling on their homes as part of a way to avoid using carbon based energy to power their homes (not coal or natural gas). What inevitably happens is that many people respond to that social coercion as the incentive rather than the underlying environmentalist demand that created it. That is: they may ostentatiously display these panels by putting them on the side of the home facing a street to show everyone they did it (and yay for me!). And not placing them on the most beneficial side of the home facing the sun during the core part of the day. This also means that a variety of energy efficient modifications that are not visible, but which may have much higher returns than using current solar technology in most parts of the country, are not used. Such as by well-insulating the property or using a variety of heating and cooling design setups and materials when the home is renovated or constructed. Very rarely is this allowing people to obviously demonstrate their environmentalist concerns in a way that a solar panel does, despite the fact that it may have much better benefits for the environment. If we want a coercive social demand or incentive to work, it should target the actual interest that we want to coerce people into doing and do so fairly directly. A carbon tax does this pretty easily as it directly discourages the consumption of energy produced by burning carbon-based fuels. People might then seek to ameliorate this cost, while still consuming a comfortable energy demand for their homes, by placing solar panels up effectively or by adjusting the design of properties under construction or just by properly insulating a building.

Consider a final point about incentives. One thing that is not often taken into consideration is the demand to do something. If there are not restrictions preventing a project (a business or set of homes) from being built anywhere, they will be built somewhere. It would seem logical for environmental policy that we want these projects and homes built in places where it is efficient for people to live in; that is where the climate is relatively stable and reasonably warm, where there is access to sufficient supplies of clean fresh water, and so on. So, we would prefer that most people probably live in portions of the Midwest or along coastal areas and rivers than in the American Southwest (West Texas, Nevada, Arizona, etc) which is hot and dry, and that we accordingly can place projects to encourage people to live and work in those areas. But if we have rules and regulations that only account for the potential environmental damage of a project going into one place, and not where it will be built instead if it is diverted away from that place, we are failing to account for the potential damage and may end up needlessly restricting construction in one way rather than another. A fairly recent example of this is the Keystone XL pipeline. There are potentially very good economic reasons to object to it, and some philosophical arguments relating to property rights and so on that may be quite good at providing objections. But there aren't actually very great environmental reasons not to simply because it seems clear that human beings (or at least Canadians) are intent on supplying and refining the oil from tar sands projects and a pipeline represents a safer and cleaner alternative to transportation of the materials involved than trains or trucks. The actual source of the damage is not the pipeline itself. It's the continued use of oil as a fuel. If we wish to stop that, then the basis point would be to discourage the use of oil as a fuel (through carbon taxes or higher gasoline taxes at least) or provide better alternatives (cleaner fuels).

Meditations on free speech

First off, when discussing free speech, it is necessary to set aside a couple of ground rules.

1) No one is suggesting that the right to say something requires people accord that speech with agreement or enjoyment nor that it precludes the capacity to be offended or annoyed by it. It is equally available to other people to take to their own faculties to complain, cajole, argue, and even ignore the exercise of speech that they find disagreeable.

2) What is being said by the notion of "free speech" is that the government should not punish or preoccupy its limited time and energy and resources by policing the content of speech, whether to discern its offensiveness or quality. What we are talking about is the freedom from government sanctions or persecution to say absurd, offensive, or enlightening things. Not the freedom from any consequence to speech that offends or is absurd. Social consequences of derision, condemnation, or exclusion from participation in "polite" company and conversation are entirely natural and in many cases, are themselves exercises in free speech.

Both of these imply however that should someone say something deeply offensive, and it does not fall into a category of unprotected speech such as a direct and imminent incitement of violence toward or threat to bodily harm of other persons, this entails the speaker a right to the same protections of their person and property as anyone else. No matter how offensive someone is in their speech, that doesn't give people the right to assault, to threaten, or to attempt to kill them, or to deface or destroy businesses or homes of that person (boycotting a business or economically sanctioning it is entirely sensible). Even if that may be a common reaction to the nature of people's insulting or offensive public and private deliberations.

When the subject of offensive hate speech surfaces, this is a category of speech that may be considered identifiable in its contents, typically condemning a group of other persons or subjecting individuals to offensive language and attitudes on the basis of their prospective membership in a group of unpopular persons. What is being argued is not that such speech should be roundly supported by endorsing its content, but that the suppression of such speech by governments is an inherently dangerous and arbitrary power to grant governments the ability to do. That it will rarely or at least highly inconsistently be applied in a rigorous way to decide the fate of offensive and hateful people in a manner that accords with the people who wish it to be so that these powers should exist.

Well-meaning people wishing to provide a force of law and legal sanction to their social opprobrium should recognize a couple of things. First that governments are not composed largely of "well-meaning" people who necessarily agree on the nature of what constitutes offensive speech. Societies are not, so it should not be surprising that democratically elected governments provide a vast array of distinctions on what is and is not offensive or otherwise to be considered dangerous. Speech that suggests support for say, a terrorist organization and its causes, is regulated in part by what governments decide constitutes a terrorist organization as this is defined arbitrarily and politically rather than by reference to any national or international standards (which itself could be arbitrarily and politically determined). Speech that suggests offense by considering difficult empirical questions that may have implications on our strongly held religious or cultural ideologies can likewise vary widely on these policy grounds based on which religious or cultural bodies are well-organized and politically engaged enough to provide cover for their beliefs and ideals to be free of challenge. Second they should be aware that the premise of freedom of speech permits and tacitly endorses a means to push back against speech that is hateful or offensive. That is that people are already provided a power and method to raise awareness that they are under social attack via the devices of speech and expression.

The basis point for presenting hate speech as a type of regulated activity by the government is that these actions are being privately and commonly used against marginal or unpopular groups (typically ethnic or religious minorities), and thus that public social forces alone are insufficient to push back against such well-entrenched biases. As above however, it is not clear that governments will always be able to devise appropriate targets for protection. Indeed, if these are unpopular groups, it is likely that providing an avenue for political protection is just as liable to end up with political maneuvers that target rather than defend in the long run as other groups may petition for protection, and being well-organized may be more likely to attain it. Any number of policing strategies, such as stop and frisk or the NYPD's extensive surveillance of Muslims to the existence of a variety of racial codes in the Jim Crow South or South Africa, should be a warning that the passage of laws is often used as a weapon to continue and extend or entrench further marginalization by amplifying pre-existing biases, not to oppose oppression.

The biggest reason behind not placing the government in charge of making these determinations is that it will shift over time what is considered offensive, or hateful, or otherwise in need of censorship. Societies which are free to make these determinations privately already can decide that a word or a type of expression is no longer in need of careful censorship for all and that those who are offended can make efforts to police or combat such speech on their own rather than require the rest of us to do likewise and thereby paternalise our consumer choices for content and expression. The US in some spheres of society does not have this ability. Television and radio are more regulated to avoid "certain words" or certain content (usually relating to nudity or sex) where instead they should be more monitored the way cable television or to a certain degree movies or music are. There possibly offensive speech or content is labeled voluntarily by the production of that content so as to be avoided by those who deem it necessary to do so, or consumed by those who wish to see it.

What we also find is that those who control the power of the censor will also change who they are in a democratic society. That is elections and appointments (and associated terms of office) will amend what persons select what offenses will be controlled if this power is available. They will have their own opinions and offenses that they will seek out and this will be at odds with by changing or not changing with these alterations in the demands for censorship by the public at large. Providing this power does not guarantee that some particular group's acknowledgements of offensive material will be deemed offensive enough to constrain with laws, or that it will remain so, or that material that is no longer considered offensive will not remain punishable. Leaving it out of the hands of laws to decide what is offensive allows social functions to perform that action and react to all of these changes while protecting people from direct action (or violent reprisal).

If speech is, as in the Paris case, considered blasphemous and insulting to a religious group, that is not the affair of society to say that we should either restrict or promote such speech by using laws. We can indicate our displeasure with the contents. Or promote it if we are pleased by it. And we can argue for the utility of such expressions in challenging religious beliefs or against them in the manner of being against sacred textual laws and thus "offenses against god" (whichever god that was, or how a god is offended by possibly humorous expressions is not generally explained). These are not offenses against legal codes however, nor should they be implied to permit or require religious reprisal (or sanction). Nor are they universally held to be offensive at all times throughout the religion's history or across all of its cultural and ideological adherents anyway that we should regard the offense of an agitated few as a basis point for censorship at large, as we are incapable of providing clear guidelines of what will be out of bounds and what is accepted to frame this as a legal question.

Quick notes on the football

1) Seattle and New England look like the most impressive teams coming in statistically. If I had to bet on it, Seattle repeating wouldn't surprise me. But they're about as good of odds statistically as a typical dominating NCAA title favorite in basketball. So it's not that sure of a thing.

2) Denver has slacked off and Green Bay has a typically mediocre defense to go with their ridiculous offense. Dallas has an even worse defense than Green Bay. Pittsburgh's D is worse than both. I'm not sure I'd go with any of these teams. Don't sleep on Baltimore would be my gut reaction to looking at the rest of the top tier of the field.

3) Arizona and Carolina are the two worst teams in the field. Both are in the bottom third of the league. Arizona at least has a decent D. Actually other than Seattle and Green Bay, nobody looks that great in the NFC. Detroit has a good defense, but not much offense.

4) AFC wise, Cincinnati has the same mediocre offense but also has a mediocre defense to go with it. Indy is in the same boat. This is unlikely to be a good playoff combination.

Why I am a political weirdo

Recent discussions have indicated that lots of people expend a lot of time describing how awful and terrible other people's political beliefs are, and if only more people were like themselves how wonderful the world would be. Or let me rephrase that: ALL people expend their political opinions bloviating about how wonderful their views are and how terrible their opponents are. Or at least how wonderful they imagine their views to be and how terrible they have imagined their opponents to be.

Sometimes, as with the torture debate, it seems fairly clear that there are some awful people on one side. We can imagine, charitably, that they believed they had a good sound motive (protect the nation! national security!) for allowing the programme to go forward, while putting in place incompetent management and poor oversight or safeguards... Actually no. I can't imagine that wasn't on purpose.

In the case of libertarians and expressions therein I very often hear reactions, usually from progressives, as something like one of the following:
1) I can get behind abolishing the drug war/war on terror/police militarization and I'm not fond of all these bombs we are dropping on other countries, but your economic views are horrible.
2) Your economic views are horrible, therefore everything else you say is horrible (and I will disagree with it even if it ordinarily fits my worldview). Also you're probably a racist or some kind of Christian homeschooling nutjob or you have a shrine to Ayn Rand. This is also known as the straw man approach.

There are several possible reactions to this I have found.
1) Continue to pragmatically stress the positions that progressives do find palatable and hope they will work to further legislation diminishing the power of the state in these areas.
2) Bring up economics anyway to annoy people who probably never studied economics.
3) Bash Ayn Rand to demonstrate that you're not "one of those libertarians", whatever that means. Sometimes I get lucky and someone has actually read Adam Smith (rather than claimed to have read it) or heard of JS Mill.
4) Demonstrate that the "Tea Party" factually has almost nothing in common with libertarian philosophy. Also true of most Republicans.

One of the major problems I find is that economics, being a relative soft science is rather more malleable than physics or biology. People mold it to fit their views very often or accept and read studies that reinforce those views. Minimum wage studies are all over the place, both in methodology and conclusion. So it becomes a case of find your own oyster pearls. Economists tend to have much more "libertarian" perspectives than the average Joe/Jane over a variety of issues (they also tend to have much more "liberal" perspectives too), and this is also true of fairly well educated people, people with professional or graduate degrees of almost any type, so while there isn't a universal consensus, the purported experts seem to point in a general direction at least.

Still there isn't actually very strong evidence that markets "work" in all of these cases. There is sometimes good evidence that particular solutions attempted by governments do not work, or that markets will tend to work better than those solutions. But they don't always and inevitably work better than anything a government could try to do. Many libertarians seem to operate from an a priori conclusion that the government will fail, or will screw it up worse than a potential market failure. This is a central insight of the philosophy and psychology of a libertarian that allows us/them to be skeptical of proposed solutions coming from a centrally planned authority or regulator. But "skepticism" isn't the same thing as "denialism". If it works, or it works well enough that it isn't causing a huge fuss and mess of things, there's plenty of low hanging fruit of governments doing incredibly destructive or harmful things to large numbers of human beings for which our attention can be pointed in the meantime before coming back to these more marginal improvements to human freedom and autonomy.

This then brings to the central reasons I think libertarians are unpopular.
1) We spend a lot of time pointing out that something, usually something the state is doing, doesn't work. People don't like naysayers very much rather than more constructive criticisms. There often isn't a good story that can be told about how an open market operates to provide opportunities to people versus "this public official helped me in some way because of this program". Usually instead people have a story about an evil villain CEO working for some (often heavily government backed) corporation taking away their job and sending it overseas, or something in that vein as a basis for how the market has failed.

2) Very often public policies, constructed and conceived by both conservatives or progressives, are based around the assumptions that appearing to do something is important. Appearing to care about something means "we should do something, this is something, let's do it". Without much concern to the question of "hey, does that something actually do anything about your purported concerns for which you proposed doing something in the first place?" Or as a libertarian would object: "is that something actually a problem for which we need a public policy solution, or can we expect that people will eventually figure it out with solutions on their own?" Someone who runs around pointing out not only that some policy doesn't work very well, but also that it's a policy which is designed mostly to make it look like something was done, papering over that something possibly cannot be done, is going to be really, really unpopular.

An an example: I am extremely sensitive to the problems of racial disparities and injustices from studying the criminal justice system and I can go down a list of things that I'd rather see us up end and abolish because of the massive negative impacts they have for the lived experiences and opportunities of minorities or immigrants. But I'm also skeptical that say, affirmative action in college acceptances or job promotions is a good way to help us resolve racial disparities in opportunities. I don't think it's impossible it could be helping, but I'd rather abolish or at least severely limit the drug war or return many economic and political rights to ex-felons, or abolish many occupational licensing requirements, or improve our K-12 inner city educational experiences (including our disciplinary structure), and on and on down the line. Most of those are things I can conceive immediate benefits. They are low-hanging fruit that would probably benefit minorities most of all and they are things for which I've had a long history of supporting us as a country or state or town putting forward some legislative and legal action on suppressing our currently destructive habits of governance. Affirmative action meanwhile has a mixed economic record, doesn't seem to have done much about racial disparity in this country as a whole, and seems to concentrate its benefits among people who are, if not in need of some assistance to overcome a substantial social problem like racism, also may not be that poor or under served in education and other public and private resources. Maybe this is because of poor design, which is a common problem in many social welfare programmes in this country and others. Maybe there's a lot of economic noise that makes it harder to see large scale benefits. Or maybe it's just not that helpful. It isn't an enormous cost to society to try to promote people of a distinct ethnic background, and one can readily understand there may be potential benefits for people to try to do so anyway through intellectual and creative diversity that accrues from the likely diverse life experiences (and the same applies to having women promoted into higher positions of employment). But there's still those other things we are doing which have enormous costs and preclude enormous benefits and it should seem strange to people that we can do this more or less symbolic thing to help and not those things.

Something that should occur to anyone reading though is that actually the questions involved about how best to help the poor or the suffering, the sick, the elderly, how to provide public goods and solve questions of externalities are not generally rejected by libertarians (some do). There's a wide disagreement even amongst libertarians on how to resolve these, or whether they are within the scope of a small state to do, and a wide gulf between that and how the typical person finds it appropriate to do so via the usually larger and more robust state they envision. There are some cartoon libertarians who put forward the "screw the poor" foot. There are people who do not have a firm grasp upon what the term means and apply it because maybe they think it sounds cool. There are people are libertarian-ish (which is probably where I come in), there are left-leaning libertarians (again, also me, where I could describe myself as "a liberal who likes markets"), civil libertarians (again, me) and so on through the litany of woe available for ideological selections.

Generally what divides "libertarians" from "everyone else" is two things:

1) A very strong and often narrow moral preference for providing liberty and autonomy to individuals and thus for removing the state as an oppressive agent (this used to be defined as "liberalism"). This preference is present at turns for other people but isn't as intense, and many people provide exemptions for their pet causes to reduce autonomy or liberty in others (narcotics, abortion, large sodas, tobacco, etc).

In general the libertarian is likely to be libertine about using the power of the state to police our objections in the behavior of others that is not obviously harmful to others in a live and let live manner. So don't pollute your neighbour's property, or kill your neighbour, or steal his things or commit some manner of fraud in your dealings with him, or sexually assault anyone, or we the public will be compelled to act and respond with criminal sanctions via the instrument of the state. But if you want to complain about your neighbour's musical choices or offensive and bigoted statements or dietary habits or sexual promiscuity go right ahead. Just don't expect the rest of us to be compelled to act upon it.

2) A much stronger skepticism that a particular intervention by the state is either needed at all or a means of improving the plight of some particular set of individuals. This is to say, among other varieties of objections: that we are skeptical that either the state can resolve an issue via a proposed and particular means of action, or more generally that the state will contain itself to those proposed means or use those proposed powers only for this approved upon issue. Or as a specific objection, to say that whether or not the state could do something, it's unlikely to work out better and sooner than letting things run their course through the normal operation of markets and thus unnecessary for the state to intercede. This is usually described as "having faith in markets" and often people point to specific instances where markets have failed, but often not engaging that in many of those cases, we were not dealing with free and open markets but strictly controlled and tightly regulated markets where the exercise of state power favored and protected the abusive firms seen as at fault. One way this manifests is to say that libertarians are skeptical that complex and extensive regulatory states will not be captured and used by the entities they mean to control and that they differ widely on the proposed solution to this as a problem being "more regulation" or "more regulators" to be more like simpler and smoother and more transparent regulatory states.

The division is not "we hate poor people" or "we worship rich people". This is an amusing straw man. The division is also not "we'd like there to be total anarchy so that the powerful could establish their own versions of oppression" as is often implied in the "you're a libertarian, why don't you go move to Somalia" idiocy. These divisions are common probably because libertarians aren't very good at story telling in part, relying on a somewhat impersonal process of millions of market based decisions to result in positive outcomes. But they're also common because it's preferable to try to publicly dismiss ideological opponents by providing them the worst possible motives. "They're trying to destroy the country" or "they are bigots". And so on. This preference is mostly lazy thinking. It doesn't require engagement or skepticism about politics. And most of us don't want to put in the engagement or skepticism required to understand carefully complicated issues at hand in most political policy questions anyway. We're much better at taking out our privately held stock of strawmen.

More important things I've written about before, torture version

So there was a report that came out. Not much new was actually learned. I think I could summarize my information from skimming through it and various stories thusly in the following three points.

1) Hummus is for eating, not for anal insertion. I may have to cut back on hummus consumption for a time as I'm actually mildly grossed out by that particular detail. That does not happen easily. The story in Training Day where a suspected thief gets off with a lighter sentence by licking peanut butter off his fingers from a stash of it inside his buttocks was funny (also because there's no way that would happen). This however was depraved. I cannot bring myself to marvel at our capacity of creativity when applied to destructive arts.

2) CIA lied to itself and high public officials. I'm not sure I find this a plausible truth really to accept at face value.

What seems more likely is one of two things happened:
a) the high public officials of both parties and up to and including the President/Vice President and Department of Justice all authorized it and then said "I don't want you to tell me exactly what's going on, so if asked, I don't have to lie". They were then only informed of what was going on around the time the Abu Ghraib story broke, probably because they were mildly alarmed and disgusted about what was going on there and were concerned about what else might come out later when the press got onto the the actual torture story.

b) Another possibility is that high public officials of both parties were informed and are now covering up when they knew what was going on in a sort of "we'll get you for this" treatment, trying to burn the idiots at the CIA who ran the thing without getting caught on fire themselves. Since the Bush team was in office administering the programme, they would get more blame as an added bonus for Democrats to release the story. They can also claim some variety of "bi-partisanship" because John McCain has been an avid anti-torture figure from the right and because several of now President Obama's current officials, including the CIA director, are implicated in the scandal. It's a win-win for them.

3) The main revelation was how the programme was administered and started in practical terms (legal terms we already knew years ago because of the release of the DoJ's and White House memos from Yoo and Bybee). What appears to have happened is the crack team selected to run it was paid a large sum of money and had no previous interrogation experience. Then didn't run any kind of background checks on their guards and interrogators, leading to a number of problems of depraved and sometimes sexual behavior well outside the grounds that were supposedly approved by the legal team. This was in conjunction with a sweep for "terrorists" that not only incarcerated hundreds of totally innocent people but apparently allowed dozens of them to be tortured, one of which to death.

That fact is hardly surprising, but given that again, we were told the use was restricted to high value targets with actionable intelligence (a dubious and questionable choice already), it should be very alarming that there doesn't appear to have been much work done to confirm the identities of the persons held in custody, and their status as potential terrorists with hazardous information. What that suggests, foremost, is that no attempt was even made to conduct regular interrogations on many of these individuals. They went straight to the torture chamber. And this happened without any clear and confirmed association that these might have been persons in possession of immediate information, of the classic 24-style "ticking time bomb" scenario so often depicted in Hollywood films. It is hardly surprising that it should not resemble in the slightest the actual practice. Script writers take pains to define our evil foes, their prospective acts of wanton destruction and to provide moral certainty of our actions by having them succeed in saving the day (there are exceptions). Actual intelligence is messy and uncertain and typically involves a lot of errors and educated guesses.

What most of these facts in #3 align with is not that torture as an approved and sanctioned program was a necessary and proper process with strict controls. But rather that torture was a systematic concept that easily ran amok once allowed into the system of intelligence and national defence at all (as one would predict, and as a reason why it is banned by international treaties to which we are signatories as Americans). It was haphazardly run and overseen. There were complaints from within the infrastructure about the value of information produced and toward the effect of these types of interrogations upon morale and sanity of interrogators themselves. The conduct of such practices quickly and extensively warped beyond the supposedly strict confines of manoeuvres designed to give the veneer of legality, as would be expected once the door was opened to allow it.

It is not relevant in legal terms that we either sought to justify these actions or even that should they have produced anything of value at all. They are strictly banned under any circumstances and for any reason, whether a country was directly assaulted, at war, or not. Which is why for many years public officials involved or defending the practice have taken pains to describe them with the Orwellian (and originally German) descriptor of "enhanced interrogation" rather than applying the title of torture to them as we have done in the past when conducted by others. Presumably less noble others than anointed Americans charged with the defence of freedom and decency (eg, our enemies the Chinese or Vietnamese or Soviets or Nazis, etc). The charge that they produced effective results should be weighted against the costs; which we are seeing now in the charges of international condemnation and public opinion upon the disclosure of these secrets. They can also be weighted against the alternatives of regular and approved forms of interrogation and manipulation of prisoners and suspects. Many of which appear to have been all but ignored in the haste to "break" these captive men.

Torture's primary historical utility is in getting people to tell you what you wanted to hear (ie, propaganda), such that the torture may cease, and not things that you do not already know and wished to learn (ie, intelligence gathering). Thus in any strategic sense, torture has historically offered little or no value to provide information and presents considerable risks and harms to torturers should it be discovered that captives were tortured and abused for intelligence purposes. Particularly when undertaken in a systematic way, under orders or instructions from commanders and leaders, rather than as some kind of one-off scenario that could be "excused" and dealt with (as was done with Abu Ghraib officers and personnel). It is also providing risk and harm when it is not condemned, when people are accepting of the offering of retributive violence against unarmed captives, including innocents who posed us no threat of harm in the first place and all on the pretext of acquiring information. And a risk where the officials involved face no repercussions and indeed are welcomed to offer their opinion freely. Not only to dissemble on this issue of what they had done and for which we might expect them to wish to try to defend themselves but on all manner of other topics as to our foreign relations they are granted respectability and gravitas rather than greeted with deafening silence and indifference where they wish to express themselves; to be shunned and stripped of social rank and titles rather than welcomed. These harms should have been much more carefully considered, in spite of any imagined or perceived threats to the security and serenity of the citizens of the nation, and the whatever propriety hard-earned over the history of the nation as it conducted itself abroad should not have been tossed aside in the need for vengeful assaults on human decency. That our enemies are brutal and presumed to be savage in the destruction of innocent lives is not an excuse for depravity, nor a call to conduct ourselves as savages. Standing back up taller in a moment of weakness should be seen as discouraging attack, by making us appear stronger and more formidable to our allies and enemies alike. Slinking lower to a moral standard makes us appear weaker and desperate, capable of abandoning our standards at the slightest push. Such an approach may win battles, but will lose many wars.

The reason it offers risk and harm for our public and political class to react so to these stories is that it presents the firm possibility that we would do it again, and continue our depraved status as a nation of torturers at risk to any moral standing we have as an ally and friend of those nations in search of establishing justice and peace. If but there were no restraints cast on us by our current leaders, we would do it again is the implicit promise of our reaction. Or that we would cooperate with allies who might do so at our behest rather than condemn such practices universally and unequivocally. It is not enough to place words upon paper and sign them. We have to practice the ideals behind those words. Those ideals carry meaning and value only so long as we wish to uphold them, and they lose value and credibility when we stray grievously from our established acceptable practices. They are not reinforced by pointing to lesser exemplars for their own brutality and abdication of human rights or decency. They are only reinforced by making ourselves strive to be ever stronger examples of such things.

Minor things I've written about before

Daily Show came around to the story about the diner in North Carolina. 

I was unpersuaded by the take of many atheists that this a serious problem, or that the type of problem it presented was in somewhat analogous to much more serious forms of discrimination (such as genocidal practices, or really even hiring and firing decisions of companies based on religious non-belief). One can readily acknowledge that it is discriminatory legally. But given that restaurants practice many types of price discrimination already (for the elderly, for college students, for military or police/fire departments and so on), it is not a particularly egregious outrage that they might effectively overcharge everyone for food and then decide to offer a discount for something religious like praying over the meal. It also appears the diner amended its practices slightly in the wake of criticism to allow for non-religious expressions, whatever that implies.

I do think the Daily Show's piece was unfair in its depiction of FFRF and Barker specifically, but my impression has been that the expressions of the FFRF and Barker aren't always all that flattering anyway. They can do enough work digging the holes without help. What struck me first and foremost about the story when I first was presented with it months ago was that it didn't make sound business sense to offer the discount at all. And not that it demanded a very public and in-your-face response for it to be abolished. There was a cheap and simple and much more private way to handle this, such as a personal phone call or meeting with the owner/manager to determine the contours of the discount, accepted practices for receiving it, training or discretion offered to the crew to provide it, and so on. Such a meeting or call probably would have sufficed to show the owner this was a foolish idea, and at least that it came from a highly privileged Christian majority position and that a more generally inclusive or respectful attitude to the population of potential diners and customers might be wiser. Indeed, my impression and understanding of religious practices was that public displays of religious faith by other Christians might have been frowned upon as discriminatory even before atheists as exclusionary, and that other Christians are commonly allies in pointing out these forms of religious exclusion. The piece and previous reporting did not illuminate if this more subtle and personal approach was tried and failed, and a more public and direct response was then used instead to achieve a more desirable result. The Daily Show piece and previous stories on this issue strongly implies that it was not attempted to mediate and explain, so I would submit this is unlikely.

What seems to have been more important was to attract attention to it as an example of discriminatory practices excluding atheists. Of which there are many and many of which can have considerable impact upon the lives of atheists in this country and others and for which the resources of atheists can be leveled and concentrated upon improving and reducing the barriers and boundaries that a still distrustful modern Western society like that of the United States places upon us. But for something like this, effectively burning the bridge in order to draw attention to it struck me less as a well-calculated solution which educated the local diner operator and more as a Streisand effect, demonstrating to the Christian majority the lengths to which atheists may go to exclude religion from public life and resulting in a portrayal of atheists as "dicks" even by fellow secularists such as the Daily Show writers and correspondents for cheap laughs.

That portrayal, which is sometimes accurate and deserved as it is for any group of humans, is hardly the necessary means to make an approach of acceptance and tolerance in broad society which includes a vast quantity of religious adherents. We atheists don't need to be dicks and neither do we need to be nice and lay down all the time. But we should be pragmatic. We are outnumbered and should pick our fury where it is actually raised and a the thing should not stand without resistance. We should also be willing to say, yes, that behavior on the part of another atheist was inappropriate or ineffective as a means of achieving a general goal of acceptance and promotion of tolerance toward atheists and secularists in society. This happens often with Dawkins and remarks on sexism or feminism as an example. Whether or not he intends them as such, they are often offensive and counterproductive to a cause of atheism and secularism that is too easily and frequently depicted as an all-white-male boys only club which is ill-attuned to the social problems of others owing to race or gender.

As such. It does not offend me deeply as an atheist that I would not receive a modest discount for my breakfast at this location because I could go somewhere else that I might find a more accommodating business practice or better eggs and bacon. It would offend me deeply if I were refused service entirely were I to refuse to pray over my meal. Or if to work at such a location, I were required to adorn myself with some religious symbols of the owner's choice and practice of faith. This distinction of the scale and scope of the offense should be factored into our reply. Discrimination is discrimination, but discrimination of this type, economic discrimination through prices, is not like genocide or racial exclusion laws. It scales. It would be entirely appropriate to boisterously and immediately and publicly complain and to demand restitution if an atheist is not given a raise on that basis of non-religious affiliation, or denied employment or service from a company or public official.

I do not even say it is necessary that we pick our battles and that a scorched earth approach to any and all forms of discrimination by businesses cannot be deployed. And thus that this should have been ignored as a "nice old lady" doing something weird. Rather, I am saying that the way the battle is fought sometimes matters to the outcome of the war. Winning ugly is still winning yes, but it often costs later on. We are in the middle of a very long road still with a large portion of the public expressing views of hate or intolerance, and many more expressing indifference to the problems of atheists in America. Atheists will require allies and compassion from others as a minority status in a Christian dominated society, allies who will help fight on issues of church and state separation and forms of discrimination that afflict atheists, or on science education policy and other matters which interest atheists in particular at times. Potentially alienating such allies is foolish. That should be considered when picking out the weapons of choice and against who they are wielded.