Family values and progressives, news at 11.

I've seen several of these sorts of posts lately

They lean heavily toward the notion that ideological, and especially political, opponents will tend to not recognize why or what causes their opposition to exist in the first place. Since I don't tend to play in political team-building exercises, this helps. And an issue like abortion rights is, admittedly, very hard to debate rationally. Some points are necessary.

1) Pro-lifers are fully aware that lots of people get abortions. This is kind of one of the reasons they're not very happy about abortions being legal and quasi-readily available (and pass laws attempting to restrict access). Pro-choice attempts to say that "everyone gets these", while modestly true in that there's a large minority of women who have had or will have had such a procedure in their lifetimes, aren't exactly helping this fear.

2) What they're not aware of is WHEN most of those abortions are conducted, a fact which most pro-choice advocates are much more aware. 99% are before the 3rd trimester and 98% are before the SECOND. And most of the last 1-2% there is for health reasons (either for the mother or the fetal development). In other words those disgusting pictures about how terrible an abortion is on a fetus, are mostly ignoring that what is being aborted is a collection of cells and is ignoring that the specific circumstances surrounding the most undesirable forms of abortion are precisely the sorts of excuses and exceptions that all but the most ardent anti-abortion advocates say are acceptable (health of the mother for example). More active consideration for WHY people have abortions as opposed to the HOW is kind of important if you want to oppose them effectively. Same arguments I have with anti-terrorism policies, ask why first. Understanding is not and does not have to be the same as condoning or agreeing with the ultimate actions being taken.

3) Metaphysics still enters into it. I've seen some blog posts and forum comments over the years attempting to declare that yes, a fetus is and will almost certainly become a human being so metaphysics doesn't matter. What I'm aware of is evidence that a) human fetal development is actually pretty hard and thus a large portion of pregnancies terminate for entirely natural reasons. Miscarriages and who they happen to and how common they can be are something that probably requires more popularization than abortions do. As this means that scientifically we're likely far more uncertain about the viability of a forming human being in a fetal state, particularly at earlier stages of development (like the first trimester, when abortions are far more common), than claims like these pretend to be. b) That a large portion of opposition to abortions comes from an idea about the dignity and importance of human life. Disagreement on this point has less to do about something like a "culture of death", as pro-life crowds tend to claim, and more to do with a more boring argument about the relative value of already existing human lives versus still forming human lives. That is still essentially a metaphysical question. It's not as exciting as "is this alive", to ask something like "does that matter?", or "does that matter as much as X", but it's still certainly an important philosophical question. If more uncomfortable.

4) A core selling point of the pro-life movement and its main line of effectiveness has been the argument that indeed it does matter. At least enough to say that we should probably want a lot fewer abortions to occur. There's however an unfortunate confluence within the anti-abortion movement with anti-birth control movements to make some of the easiest means to prevent abortions more difficult. We know a healthy percentage of abortions occur within situations where greater access to birth control would have likely prevented unwanted or difficult pregnancies and thus the abortions themselves (teens, poor single women, some who are already mothers, etc). If this concurrent train of thought were abandoned or receded into the background instead existing at the same volume of intensity as anti-abortion, we'd probably see more success on the goal of "have fewer abortions" and thus protection of human life by these arguments.

5) We do not see such decoupling because that is properly not the actual goal. Anti-abortion exists as a rhetorical cover for other sets of values underlying this general movement. Usually having to do with the relative value and role of women in society, and often implying a lack of basic human sexuality, as shown by opposition within these same groups to various forms of sex work (some of which has valid concerns, such as forms of sex slavery sometimes involved in prostitution) and disturbances at the sexualised nature of female pop stars or popular culture more generally. Certainly you can object to any of these things independently and find the "Hollywood" world abhorrent or offensive. I'm personally confused as to how birth control has much of anything to do with this however. Presumably the argument goes that its use encourages sex, but there is no evidence ever shown to demonstrate this and in fact the most comprehensive analysis available shows that societies which use birth control more frequently have roughly the same amount of sex, same level of promiscuity, and by roughly the same times and ages on average as a society like ours which doesn't embrace birth control. I'd have to say that the average beer commercial probably will do more to encourage sex than condoms and pills ever will. But maybe that's just me.

It would probably also do more to encourage more abortions than condoms and pills ever would too.

In other words, opposition to abortion occurs on several different levels, and many of these are entirely legitimate concerns about human life and its importance to... surprise!... other humans. But its most ardent and politically active forms seem to come more from a sort of revulsion to popular culture and sex. Same reason that varieties of religious fanaticism occur among largely the same group of people. Factual assessments of the population of people who actually get abortions aren't likely to be very helpful anymore than any other means of telling them who and what for until they themselves take interest in the question of "why". I'm not sure we should expect people who take to literal religious interpretations of everything to be very interested in asking deep questions of "why" for others. They're likely to tell us instead that it's a "satanic" punishment and that this (legal abortion) is why we get a hurricane or an earthquake.

Which is amusing. But in a sad, stupid kind of way.

Also, in should have kept your day job news

: Steven Seagal

That is all.

Personally he didn't exactly have much of a day job either. Minor celebrity still. But this celebrity sheriff bullshit obviously gets people into some problems.

Especially when you're using a fucking tank to bust a cockfighting ring. Because clearly that's a necessary amount of force. Shooting the dog after all that seems like an afterthought.

But typical.

Alternative medicine

Also known as "medicine". When it actually works.

In this case, not so much.

But it is still an interesting question about what sort, if any, interventions are necessary by government to deal with these ineffectual products (homeopathy, almost literally the same sugar and water of the generic placebo variety) being sold by the millions.

And I'd have to agree, the proper public policy response is basically to put a label on there to warn people that they're being hoodwinked, but let them if they wish to proceed from that to waste their money and time on ineffective (or at best placebo) treatment. It's really only fraud if people are unaware of the benefits and risks of their fiscal transactions. If they're still dumb after being informed that they're reliably going to be wasting their money, I say let them be taken advantage of.

One interesting qualifier would be that there could probably be better or more transparent information about actual medicines and their measurable effectiveness against various ailments. There are plenty of pills out there that can cost a minor fortune and yet have almost zero health impacts relative to placebos. In other words, there's plenty of actual medicine that's barely mediciny.

Crucial distinctions

In other words, libertarians don’t oppose democracy (in the conventional sense) because they hanker after autocracy; they oppose democracy because it is too much like autocracy.

This is a core problem with many critics of libertarianism (and with the anti-Chicago boys from the Friedman-Chile-Pinechot contingent of argument). Basically people who are democracy advocates have a hard time accepting a premise that rather than use government or votes to design social systems the alternative is not we must now use centralised autocratic/technocratic controls. You use nothing at all. No one is in charge or if any government or state policy is involved it is very minimal (think free speech protections, sans FCC style censorship).

One core reason is that even very well-intentioned state interventions tend to end up captured by other powerful agents in the system (church, corporation, unions, etc) because they have very little actual control over the system as a whole and thus the top down regulatory state has very little means to discern the proper levels of control or even the levers that it should use in the first place to create that control. It ends up generally being worse than having a market "rule" as a result.

In any case, being opposed to democracies, or generally finding that majoritarian rule is a poor form of democratic government, is not the same as "I want more dictators!". I don't go around supporting Gaddafi-esque regimes. I of course also don't propose that we bomb them out of office but say we are on a "humanitarian" mission either. If you really wanted them out, say so, design the plan and followup accordingly and come back to us then. Don't say that we're dropping bombs to help people. Because that doesn't help. Sigh. I digress. The statement above is a fair reflection of what we're looking at when we see "democratic" systems. We are seeing autocratic behavior exercised through majority will. As it is, there are plenty enough people that would excise from any and all of us core protected rights (free speech, free press, freedom of religion and conscience, etc) if it were up to them and so unsurprisingly there are a whole range of issues upon which the majority is permitted, by the magical mechanism of voting, to impose its will upon a minority, be they meddling in private behaviors, consensual transactions, business licensing, and so on. Very little of this serves any practical purposes or fosters a free society.

I'd hardly say that this reflects well on "democracy" as conceived of a mandate of collective wills as opposed to "democracy" conceived of a collection of protected rights and core values that comprise a free society and its basic liberties. The latter is more important ultimately.

Further strangeness with Dr Paul

Uh, Mr Paul, history is kind of important to know the basic facts about before you start in on the standard anti-government rants

Since you know, Galveston used to be a relatively large, even cosmopolitan city on the Gulf Coast up until 1900. And now it is noteworthy mostly because of its unique privatized social security setup. But not because it survived and thrived in the face and wake of a massive hurricane, in 1900.

There are legitimate critiques of FEMA versus private charity and local or even national non-governmental responses to major disasters like hurricanes (see: Katrina) without going to the "balls to the wall pretend game" that no disaster was ever very terrible prior to its existence. History is full of counter-examples. And if you pick out 1900 specifically, you should at least be aware of the actual example that occurred in 1900.

This is exactly the sort of thing that gets quoted around to show that you're some sort of weirdo who doesn't know what he's talking about. And with a good deal of justification herein. Maybe the basic point about FEMA's relative uselessness is true. But it certainly isn't true that Galveston did just fine without it and one shouldn't go around claiming that it did as a result because you'll look like you're talking nonsense instead of generating a sensible critique.

Further point: The seawall was built by the Army Corp of Engineers, not by the local people per se. And this was well after the hurricane had already leveled the city. The entire city was raised up when it was rebuilt, a massive civil engineering project itself. Survivors were, for a time, living on US Army surplus equipment (tents mostly for shelters for example). Maybe this is considered all with the absence of government interventions, but it seems rather dramatically not to be the case.

Exhibit A

Also titled: "Civil wars are ugly"

So I'd like to know just how noble and wonderful these people we've been "helping" (ie, by bombing the other side) really are?

More Paulite problems

The usual progressive critiques of libertarians on a few points pop up. For instance, supposedly a bunch of white men don't care about abortion rights for women. Now of course, men actually have more favorable views toward abortion than women do, so I'm not sure how that opinion is reached firstly. More importantly I think there's a split within libertarian camps on how to deal with this issue. I think the other side of that split is wrong (that is: a fetus is a human being, life begins at conception, therefore, abortion should be illegal, with maybe some exceptions. Even if you accept the first two premises, it's not clear that the conclusion follows), but there is at least a legitimate debate within libertarian circles on how to handle this. A debate which is little different from that of the general population. Paul ends up with a rather more extreme position on this than he does on many issues. That is troubling to someone like me, and presumably to progressives generally. What confuses me is what they think someone like him could do about it if elected. He could re-institute the Mexico City resolution... and that's really about it. I suppose he could try to nominate some explicitly anti-Roe/Wade judges to the Supreme Court. But Democratic Senators could easily block such a nomination if it alters the Roe-Wade balance. Realistically there's a whole host of other pro-Paul positions on which progressives (and conservatives for that matter) would probably find his judges to be more disconcerting. Paul's position on abortion is basically boilerplate social conservativism, and more or less what you'd expect from a GOP candidate (with the possible exceptions of Johnson, and maybe, maybe Romney or Huntsman). His position on something like the right of contracts relating to the 14th amendment is likely to be a little more annoying given that it strips out a ton of government regulation on a federal level especially, perhaps state or even local level. But this doesn't come up as often.

Secondly. Speaking now of Paulite supporters rather than Paul himself (somewhat). There's a real impetus behind some elements of neoisolationist strands of thought in this country that has more to do with ostrich in the sand sort of thinking. "Who cares what happens over there?, it's OVER THERE!" They'd say. This is foolish. Even if you tend toward a generally more hands off foreign policy (a realist might also do this, by noting the waste of national resources on non-essential foreign entanglements), it is silly to completely ignore the outside world and pretend it can go away. Paul has a version of this in his rhetoric and it is more noticeable in his overall platform, where it stresses disengagement with multilateral diplomatic institutions (NATO, WTO, UN, etc), strong anti-immigration protections, and general opposition or disinterest to free trade. The stronger version of this carried out by some of his political support is populist protectionism, mercantilism, industrial policy (which Paul may or may not support), and ultimately a general attempt to dismantle the institutions of free trade and mutual support throughout the world. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, no matter how unpopular the UN and other such institutions are. And of course, I see there are tremendous economic and cultural benefits from immigration and trade that such attitudes are explicitly writing off in a foolish attempt to recapture some sort of 1880s or maybe 1950s mentality of America. I like Ike (or Grant and/or Cleveland) too, but there's a whole bunch of stuff that went down in the 50s that I'd want no part of (McCarthyism, trade barriers, top-down regulations, segregation, etc). The 1880s aren't much better on these matters. And a lot of that sort of cultural phenomenon came from these same attitudes (xenophobia, racism, fear of others, etc). Sorry, but as fun as nostalgia must be (I have no nostalgia for the 80s or 90s myself, and certainly none for this last decade), you're going to have just exercise it in your own head and not carry it into political messages. Reminisce. That world is gone. The new world has integrated with the old. It's no longer acceptable to ignore billions of people and presume that their activities can and will have no impact on your life. That's not the way things work. It might be sensible to learn about these people and their activities, and it might be sensible to ask what you or others you can encourage can do in response (to say earthquakes in Pakistan or Japan or famines in Africa, etc), rather than to ask what US military might or maybe even foreign aid can do first. It is not sensible to live ostrich style. Everything now is connected and the world is "flat". So to speak. China or the Middle East aren't just "over there". They're right here too.

On this matter, I can see a lot that anyone should fear a Paul-presidency or nomination.

As I suspected...

This sort of thing is a waste of money and government resources. It establishes a police state in order to deal with something that isn't actually directly the state's problem. Drug addiction IS a state problem because it can increase welfare recipients (not to mention crime or domestic abuse and family monetary strain), but people spending state money on drugs is not. Drug use, as opposed to abuse, is across all sectors of the economy, poor or rich, and in recreational use seems to have no greater impact on general economic success than say, alcohol or tobacco use, both of which are likewise restricted for purchase by recipients of state welfare benefits. Using the cudgel of welfare beneficiaries in order to impose either a) a further useless gesture of anti-drug policy or b) to attach state mandatory conditions that are punishing morally harmless activity and c) more importantly, treating ALL conditional assistants as though they are suspected of such activities (worse still, in the case of Florida the applicants themselves are required to pay for this police state treatment that other people have imposed upon them already by demanding drug tests, most of which will come back negative)

Certainly there are legitimate reasons to attach some conditional support for government or charitable assistance. Drug testing isn't one of them. If you want to deal with drug use or more importantly drug abuse, start by treating it as a medical problem, not an economic problem. The entire architecture strikes me as a policy that only succeeds because we politically have it out for the poor. Or rather, the poor who we think are poor because they're just all doped out, strung out drug addled morons (or that they're all using these drugs out of irresponsibility rather than because they're unable to get proper mental health care and are self-medicating with booze and crack). Apparently not enough voters and politicians know enough poor people.

Further note: the feeble defence offered by the spokesperson does not work at all. I seriously doubt most drug dealers accept food stamps for example. Sure recipients could sell their food stamps for cash, but I see no problem with that by itself. There are lots of things that can be bought with cash (drugs are one such item of course). Many of which might be desirable and even useful. Food's about the only thing you can buy with food stamps. If you don't need/want more food but you do need/want more money, for fuel or bus fare or clothes for interviews or even for drugs, then this is a good option. Better options would be to just do cash transfers instead of payment in kind but apparently we want poor people to adopt only specific choices that we have pre-approved rather than just give them the money and assume they can make their own (rational) choices to satisfy their wants and needs. You know, like normal human beings.

I would note further, the type of people likely to apply for welfare benefits are unlikely to be the strung-out sort. I never saw it even enter Bubbles' head in the Wire to go to the government at any level for some sort of assistance (he was busy running other scams and selling scrap metal and t-shirts or candy, rather industriously if not exactly prosperous) and consequently you probably won't find many heroin or crack addicts wading through forms to fill out the necessary paperwork to apply for welfare benefits. This is an expected outcome: that a problem that doesn't quite exist will be treated with a sledgehammer because the poor are an unpopular political group. A vile and reprehensible condition being poor is, and clearly no decent person would ever be poor. Only a drug addled moron it seems must be poor.

And then there's reality.

Not blind

All that said, I'm not blind to the detracting points against a Paul presidential candidacy in particular from a Progressive-liberal angle, particularly on foreign policy.

Paul's rhetorical and political opposition to multi-lateral diplomacy and liberal international theories does tend to be a bit much neo-isolationism. I have no problem with the UN or WTO or World Bank existence and US participation. The opposition I have is more that these institutions aren't always particularly effective, but they do have uses. One of which would be that it is possible to shunt off the cost of enforcing any global free trade status and other American interests onto other nation-states. That is to say: that they make defence cuts possible by potentially increasing the share of global defence paid by relative allies (or at least, nation-states that share similar interests that can be relied upon to pursue those interests).

Realist critiques of these institutions to me are more effective than the paleo-conservative (ie, Paulite) demand for stronger isolationism. It's fair to say that they're not always well enforced agreements or weak at best and that especially powerful nation-states will and still do pursue their own interests independent of any limitations. It's not fair to say that they shouldn't exist or that we shouldn't bother to participate in them at all. We might as well try to use them to pursue our interests. The cost is minimal and it might save us some other costs down the line (fewer wars of choice, less cost in defence spending, etc).

Some problems with this critique however. Many liberals tend to adhere to a use of liberal internationalism that occasionally strays far too close to the neoconservative behaviors they claim to abhor and for which a dose of Paul's paleo-conservativism would be a lot better to support. We've gotten the interventionism, and generally similarly useless interventions to their hated Iraq or Afghanistan, from them in places like Libya, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Iraq, and in a "better late than never award", Rwanda, and which even continues to support intervention Afghanistan for "humanitarian" reasons. Their distinction is that somehow there's a process of multilateral diplomacy that legitimizes these as opposed to the supposedly un-legitimate use of unilateral force(of course, except in Kosovo and Haiti there was no multilateral legitimizing either).

I have no problem with multilateral or unilateral power uses, but only in pursuit of legitimate state interests. Humanitarian aims shouldn't require using occupational military force to create, or else such things have costs that should be factored in (ie, civilian deaths and property damage caused by military force) and complications in the use of military power for counter-insurgency uses like that. They're not trained for it, and it's really, really, really hard. Liberals should take that into account before blindly supporting such interventions, and take into account that using our military power for these ends, instead of legitimate state business like defending against or deterring wars of aggression, is incompatible with any demands to cut defence spending. The Paul critique might be too high on rhetorical opposition to engagement with the world (protecting the existence of global free trade requires a little more engagement than mere diplomatic offices.. of course, I'm not entirely sure Paul's a major free trade guy either, given his positions on immigration), and that's a serious problem for any liberal-moderate support to be gained by him, but it's a lot longer on asking difficult questions about what the proper use of such force is than his liberal critics have been.

Paul v Johnson

Paul's no libertarian, says the libertarian-leaning

I've long looked at Paul's litany of woes and concluded that he's some different breed. He pushes way, way hard on the immigration button, and in a way that libertarians philosophically would not and do not. He's constantly pushing the gold standard, which is amusing but actually little more than populist drivel disguised as an economic theory. His compromise position on gay rights/gay marriage is actually a little to the left of Obama in theory (Obama position is that marriage is between man and woman, with a carve out for civil unions), but in practice means there's a core of states that won't recognize such rights for decades and will be able to operate in a blatantly discriminatory manner regarding private marriage contracts for all that time, a position which is hardly libertarian (either get the state out of the way entirely or at worst, since marriage recognition isn't going anywhere, involve the state in a less arbitrary way would be the libertarian position). And he's admitted to a quasi-libertarian opposition to the CRA64 bill, which I myself wrote on and concluded that there are legitimate libertarian grounds to object to a specific portion of that bill (property rights and free association), but that these rights were already being systematically denied by state governments and their codified law by enforcing bans in the opposite direction (forcing businesses to segregate services), meaning the bill should be viewed on balance as expanding freedoms rather than abolishing a considerable and meaningful freedom.

All of these are misgivings about the Paul campaign I and other libertarians have observed over the years. It's a reason that I tend toward Gary Johnson instead, who espouses the same opposition to broad foreign entanglements, supports large cuts to the size and scope of the federal government, opposes the drug war and war on terror abuses of civil liberties and, in Johnson's case, has executive experience to show for all of these issues to boot.

What all this looks like is more like Constitutionalism or Federalism at the end of the day for Paul, and something like a pragmatic utilitarian view for Johnson (which tends toward the libertarian in its analysis). The problem is more to do with how civil liberties freaks like me get their support translated come election time. Paul or Johnson are not going to be the GOP nominee, so that's out. The names floated by the Libertarian party itself are a bit of a joke. They've tended to go nuttier and more populist after trying to mainstream it a bit too much with Barr in 2008. The names and policies listed as "Libertarian" on the Ohio ballot in 2010 were completely disheartening for example after having a promising, and amusing, gubernatorial candidate the previous cycle. And all the while Obama has been a complete and utter failure on most of these issues.

These sorts of things should be the central analysis for the determining the Presidency; civil liberties infringements or protections can often come through the format of executive policy and established regulations rather than requiring a good deal of Congressional support and foreign policy is the one arena where Presidents have extremely wide leashes in ways that enacting their domestic agendas do not. And yet I too see a progressive-center left that for the most part would rather swallow hard and vote Obama than support a Johnson or Paul candidacy (they completely ignore the former and the latter is shamed and ridiculed as the "libertarian", when he in fact is far less so than he appears).

Derided as nuts and cranks, libertarians are to be cast out of a now strange alliance that a few years ago we were potentially naturally aligned with (opposing the Bush-Cheney excesses and flawed engagement in Iraq, occupation of Afghanistan, and also being relatively favourable toward Democratic domestic policies like immigration reforms and expansion of gay rights, etc.) Of course, libertarians still voted mostly for McCain rather than Obama, because libertarians, like progressives, don't actually care very much about these issues. Focusing entirely on federal tax policy apparently matters more than supporting free markets and free societies. It does not lend toward the idea that running with these issues matters politically even though it matters a great deal in reality. One should conclude that party loyalties matter far too much still to the left-leaning figures who write and discuss these issues and that punitive votes for candidates who do not support these issues are not forthcoming. This has long been a problem for Democratic politicians and the pro-choice crowd (Democrats will usually get their votes largely because GOP politicians are conceived of as "worse" and not because they actually support pro-choice policies. Equal rights for gays has only recently turned toward actual support).

Apparently it's a problem for defending more explicit rights in the Constitution as well. It's easy enough if you're worried about tax laws to elect GOP politicians to the House and Senate and block attempts to raise taxes. It's not that easy to get a GOP candidate for President who will actually shrink government and support the defence of civil liberties, and we don't have a Democratic politician already in office doing one or the other. People should be able to tell the difference in powers appointed and vote accordingly. They don't (Presidents often get blamed for state or even local and property taxes rising).

I continue to believe this all means we should not encourage more people to vote.