I was a "native", and I'm not so sure this doesn't apply to "natives" as with those who migrated to successfully navigate the social problems of dealing with an intolerant majority or a friend or family member with a particular concern in our affairs. I imagine the problem is amplified for "migrants" of a sort, particularly where their original position was hardened and "xenophobic" as described but it isn't zero for anyone else on this ship either. Lots of social energy is expended on trying to make atheists recant or migrate away on the logic that they should feel bad for "abandoning" other people or their beliefs and that wouldn't it be better to stand with lots of other people. That this is a case for their religion as a social status function might be warranted, but it isn't suddenly a proof for their deity, forms of worship, that other people feel bad because of your lack of subscription to their particular beliefs and systems.
I'm not sure how that warrants the label of "guilt" so much as mutual resentment and animosity that we'd prefer to avoid. Many atheists effectively go underground for this reason to avoid the entire infrastructure where ever possible. I'd say this is a far bigger social problem in the long run than the personal discomforts of families broken apart by faith-related migrations. These individuals bear a measure of social stigma and shame while some others have to deal with divisions in family or social groups. Neither is an acceptable response and individual atheists shouldn't be having to decide which they're more apt to tolerate as a path.
22 January 2014
20 January 2014
Liberalism is dead. Long live Liberalism.
Several high quality points to draw out here:
The point being that too many “liberals” are really conservative apologists for the status quo political order, just as too many “libertarians” are really conservative apologists for the status quo economic order.
- I am no fan of either status quo order, but the "popular" label of libertarian is often a proxy for the latter, agreed. Very few libertarians take up something like a classical liberalism approach (Adam Smith-Friedman) with simple and transparent features to the state just as few modern liberals place many limitations on where that state should justly be operating. Most libertarians take up a defence of meritocracy, which might be fine if we had a system that allowed for it in the first place rather than a structure that is inherently rigged by the current political status quo by powerful agents.
“Liberal” apologists for the actually-existing criminal state spook actual liberals from the practice actual liberalism by insinuating darkly that any doubts about the liberal legitimacy of the security state probably makes you a loathsome, possibly racist Paultard.
- This is ridiculously common. Greenwald is frequently dismissed as insufficiently liberal by various "liberal" commentators. The guy is practically a socialist on some issues and certainly holds "liberal" social politics, he's just really against the state's use of power too, something which used to be a liberal/leftist ideal and seems to have vanished upon election of one of their own. I have a hard time understanding how that doesn't make him "of the left" myself too. Because occasionally agreeing with Ron/Rand Paul is a cardinal sin apparently? There's a persistent strain of liberal argument that decries any deviation to admit that a "libertarian" has a point, a possibly valid point, and thus a point of argument and even agreement with a traditional "liberal" viewpoint as though there's someone running around saying black is white and up is down and must be cast out as a traitor to the cause, making a previously valid point of agreement over say, the fundamentally illiberal security state, or the enormously outsized size and scope of American military power, impossible to advance publicly without scorn and disdain heaped upon ye.
It suggests that liberalism is effectively a corrupt form of statist institutional conservatism, and that the democratic justificatory ethos of mundane liberalism has somehow survived within the ethos of “libertarianism,” even if, as an explicit doctrinal matter, libertarians are generally hostile to the ideas of democracy and the legitimate liberal state. It’s nice that libertarians have kept liberalism alive, but it would be even nicer if it were possible for liberals to espouse liberalism without therefore being confused for libertarians.
This would be fun, but I think it places a bit too much importance on the tribal labeling. The major crux of that issue is that it should not be difficult for libertarians to find issues of agreement with the left, advancing those causes by deconstructing the state in places that it need not be operating, or at least not operating in the way that it does. That can be possible in places where the state's power is inefficient and insufficiently useful to any appropriate policy, where the state is propping up existing status quo economic powers, where the state is unjustly limiting individual freedom or liberty without cause (say, most drug laws), where the state is imposing rather than abolishing discriminatory practices, and so on.
Libertarians often get too little credit for being near or at the forefront of many civil rights issues like racial voting laws or interracial marriage, or same-sex marriage in our time (perhaps because there are libertarians who are spending a lot of time lingering at the rear of those issues and throwing bombs out themselves, though this is not unusual of liberals either). It is not impossible to conceive that these are or were vital and vibrant issues that can be advanced by a seemingly strange coalition of people without the individual pieces of that coalition becoming somehow "corrupted" and worthy of scorn by sharing a cause once in a while.
But apparently this is so.
The point being that too many “liberals” are really conservative apologists for the status quo political order, just as too many “libertarians” are really conservative apologists for the status quo economic order.
- I am no fan of either status quo order, but the "popular" label of libertarian is often a proxy for the latter, agreed. Very few libertarians take up something like a classical liberalism approach (Adam Smith-Friedman) with simple and transparent features to the state just as few modern liberals place many limitations on where that state should justly be operating. Most libertarians take up a defence of meritocracy, which might be fine if we had a system that allowed for it in the first place rather than a structure that is inherently rigged by the current political status quo by powerful agents.
“Liberal” apologists for the actually-existing criminal state spook actual liberals from the practice actual liberalism by insinuating darkly that any doubts about the liberal legitimacy of the security state probably makes you a loathsome, possibly racist Paultard.
- This is ridiculously common. Greenwald is frequently dismissed as insufficiently liberal by various "liberal" commentators. The guy is practically a socialist on some issues and certainly holds "liberal" social politics, he's just really against the state's use of power too, something which used to be a liberal/leftist ideal and seems to have vanished upon election of one of their own. I have a hard time understanding how that doesn't make him "of the left" myself too. Because occasionally agreeing with Ron/Rand Paul is a cardinal sin apparently? There's a persistent strain of liberal argument that decries any deviation to admit that a "libertarian" has a point, a possibly valid point, and thus a point of argument and even agreement with a traditional "liberal" viewpoint as though there's someone running around saying black is white and up is down and must be cast out as a traitor to the cause, making a previously valid point of agreement over say, the fundamentally illiberal security state, or the enormously outsized size and scope of American military power, impossible to advance publicly without scorn and disdain heaped upon ye.
It suggests that liberalism is effectively a corrupt form of statist institutional conservatism, and that the democratic justificatory ethos of mundane liberalism has somehow survived within the ethos of “libertarianism,” even if, as an explicit doctrinal matter, libertarians are generally hostile to the ideas of democracy and the legitimate liberal state. It’s nice that libertarians have kept liberalism alive, but it would be even nicer if it were possible for liberals to espouse liberalism without therefore being confused for libertarians.
This would be fun, but I think it places a bit too much importance on the tribal labeling. The major crux of that issue is that it should not be difficult for libertarians to find issues of agreement with the left, advancing those causes by deconstructing the state in places that it need not be operating, or at least not operating in the way that it does. That can be possible in places where the state's power is inefficient and insufficiently useful to any appropriate policy, where the state is propping up existing status quo economic powers, where the state is unjustly limiting individual freedom or liberty without cause (say, most drug laws), where the state is imposing rather than abolishing discriminatory practices, and so on.
Libertarians often get too little credit for being near or at the forefront of many civil rights issues like racial voting laws or interracial marriage, or same-sex marriage in our time (perhaps because there are libertarians who are spending a lot of time lingering at the rear of those issues and throwing bombs out themselves, though this is not unusual of liberals either). It is not impossible to conceive that these are or were vital and vibrant issues that can be advanced by a seemingly strange coalition of people without the individual pieces of that coalition becoming somehow "corrupted" and worthy of scorn by sharing a cause once in a while.
But apparently this is so.
17 January 2014
A last note, for the NSA
I haven't figured out exactly why this isn't a bigger deal with some people. I suppose most people haven't followed surveillance and security state behavior to see what states tend to do with these powers (hint: it isn't to find and arrest "terrorists", or even spies). And I think it very likely most people see the hassles as minor inconveniences at best when trying to travel or wondering about the privacy of their communications and online behavior. Indeed, many people routinely point to Facebook or Google's habits of gathering information on users as a sacrifice of privacy we've already made in this arena that somehow excuses the behavior of government and amends the Constitution accordingly to surrender the need for specific and individualized warrants for seizure of communications and communication data.
But aside from the questionable legal status of the Smith v Maryland ruling taken to its farthest possible legal interpretation to apply to millions of people instead of a particularized subject of a criminal investigation and from one person's phone records to dozens of other forms of communication, the most pernicious and possibly the dumbest defence of the NSA debate that routinely appears is this one: "I have nothing to hide".
To the people still using this argument, I have two words. Fuck. You.
I'm not making that up out of hatred, but anger and frustration that this persists. So don't take it personal in immediate fact. You might just not know any better. I might come to hate you later anyway. But this is not a good start.
The reason I treat this so harshly requires a bit of explanation.
What this actually says is three things:
First, that "I am a privileged white educated person of modest means. I have nothing to fear from police invading my home. It is even possible I violate no major laws, that I am aware of, that anyone could take issue with my behavior in the first place." Perhaps even that your marriage or family life is stable and solid (and that you also would have nothing to hide from a spouse or children that would not attract government sanction). That is all to the good. Congratulations that you are an upstanding citizen of uprighteous attitudes. You may indeed have nothing to fear from suspicious inquiries made by government officials. Good for you. That does not entitle you to say stupid things without angering people who recognize the limitations of that privileged status.
Consider talking to a stranger, and then having to disclose any or all of the following:
a) your income
b) your job
c) your religious affiliation
d) donations to causes of interest to you
e) associates outside of work
f) who you email and text, in order to validate those associates
Now consider you're a Muslim, and not a Christian. Since most Americans are the latter. Or consider that you have Arabic or Indian features and are trying to get on an airplane. Or consider that you are black, poor, and living in public housing. And that this stranger works for the government. And takes this information without your permission. And then try to tell me that you don't have anything to fear from the government's suspicion of you. Regardless of whether you have done anything wrong or criminally possible, your life will be lived under a microscope, your mundane actions questioned, and loyalty or intentions doubted. It will be possible with relative ease to find something which appears questionable to routine analysis; a charity that somewhere, somehow backs a terrorist group in a far-flung country that has a political or religious agenda that has nothing to do with Americans or the person donating to it, an associate who writes radical political treatises in his spare time or who demonstrates at anti-war rallies and the like, an email to an old high school or college friend who has some sketchy legal habits now, any of which can then be spun out of proportion and control by malicious agencies to invade your privacy further and further, to seek of the content of your emails, the contacts for donation, the political content of religious sermons where you were in attendance, and so on. And most of this is occurring without your knowledge,consent, or notice via warrant.
This is way beyond having to take your shoes off to get on airplane. Much of that is information many of us might rightly regard as private. Some of it is turned over to portions of the government for tax purposes, but not for criminal purposes. Others of it are turned over to private businesses, or our employers and associates obviously have access to some of this by the nature of being trusted colleagues (or merely by being present). The NSA collects a portion of this information itself, and collaborates with other agencies who have access to other portions of it. NYPD follows around Muslims by the thousands, so too to a lesser extent does the FBI. The TSA and various border guards or immigration forces don't just hassle white grandmothers and 6 year old children, despite claims of randomness and fairness.
It's not unusual for such people as I've described not merely to be detained and searched at the airport, but to have their homes entered and searched by police (sometimes at gunpoint with pets killed and families threatened), their possessions confiscated, their religious congregations identified and followed, and so on. Consider that hundreds, if not thousands, of people have been detained without trial for years by our government merely under suspicion of such intentions, without proof or conviction. Many of whom were declared innocent, sometimes even by a trial, and still held for additional years. Some of these people were not merely "detained" and imprisoned but tortured or even killed. Others abroad have been killed by the thousands under similarly sketchy logic that they were insurgents or terrorists drawn from limited and often inaccurate information. It seems unlikely that these actions would not create reasonable fears and suspicions in the minds of people who are then targeted by that same government for investigation and are socially cast with suspicion and doubt of their peaceful and civil intentions.
And this is merely dealing with the variety of information that is likely, at least eventually, not placing someone in a criminal enterprise or as a terrorist mastermind.
Second. Consider now that someone comes into office with much less noble motives as "counterterrorism", in some foolhardy quest to keep the country absolutely secure. This is not a far-fetched probability launched by a tin-foil hatted person. Vast quantities of the FBI's use of PATRIOT act powers, in particular with NSLs, are for anti-drug purposes, often only tenuously or rhetorically tied to terrorism. The Church commission, J. Hoover, and Richard Nixon, are all within the living memory of many Americans. In case it is not known, this was a time when the intelligence organs of the state were often pointed at political rivals, at anti-war or civil rights demonstrators, at people who said or wrote vaguely socialist sounding things, and on and on. The surveillance powers of the state if given full license to operate on such grounds have only grown larger and broader since that time. At this point, you might indeed now have something to hide. Laws can change. Behavior which was once considered criminal (say, sodomy), is considered legally acceptable now, as we are also seeing with particular drugs. This is a good thing. But the switch does not have to ratchet only in this one direction of permissiveness. It is not beyond the pale that something acceptable now could be punished some years from now in our near future, or already is up for debate as a punishable offense. It is even likely that many people could be unaware of this chance given the vast scope of legal sanctions already available to police, prosecutors, and security state empowered agencies and the general public's inability to memorize thousands of legal codes that could impact their lives. Our ignorance of such changes would offer little comfort or protection.
It is telling that apparently one of the more convincing arguments for people when discussing these police powers is whether or not they trust the President elected to head the branch supervising these agencies most directly. Ask a Republican, and they trusted Bush but don't trust Obama. Ask a Democrat (including apparently Obama who has acted as though he hadn't considered this himself), and they trust Obama but do or did not trust Bush. This suggests that people do fear that they will be powers used improperly or against "the wrong people", in some sense of the term, but that they have favored people they'd prefer to use them against (for example "gun nuts" or "tea party types" for the left, and, basically, "brown people" and hippies, for the right).
That last part worries me a great deal. I'm not sure there are people who "should" be favored for such use, but if there are any, they are usually foreign-sourced or tied threats for which the powers and capabilities of the NSA pre 9-11 seem quite adequate to at least identify. There are further problems with the intelligence community at that point in giving warning of immediate danger or communicating subjects of investigation, but those are not resolved by allowing massive surveillance powers or requiring people to take off shoes and jackets to board an airplane in a long and tedious line (that to me represents what should look like a great target to attack by any terrorist, what with the hundreds of people standing around. We should be grateful nobody decided to do so until this year). If we had evidence these powers were necessary for this one explicit purpose, we should have heard of it by now. Reviews of the program keep coming up with flimsy supports at best, if any at all materialize. Meanwhile the attacks we could have prevented, up to and including 9-11 itself, seem to have plenty of evidence available through routine means.
Which brings me to the third problem with this idea that it's okay if you have nothing to hide for someone to root around in your stuff.
If there's nothing to see, why exactly is the NSA looking for it from you in the first place? Wouldn't it be better served looking at people who are identified as probable threats? What probable cause do they have to look at you? Why are they gathering all of this information, when at best it serves no purpose and at worst it is actively harmful by providing piles of data that have to be sifted through once in a while to get to actual problems they could find without having the extra hay on the stack. To me it isn't just the offensive and potentially illegal intrusion of my privacy, without a proper warrant investigating me in particular for some reason, that is a problem here. It is the waste of time and taxpayer dollars doing something useless and ineffective and by declaring it in the name of terrorism, excluding it from public debate of its effectiveness and necessity. It just continues unabated. This is costing us billions of dollars per year in raw terms. Billions more are wasted in the additional security checks and clearances that delay travelers or push them to use less safe and efficient travel like driving their car (and thus increasing traffic delays and fatalities).
We should demand results, not meekly submit to the probability that someone will decide to check up on us once in a while to assure that we do indeed still have nothing to hide while having no discernible impact on terrorism and state security in general.
So yeah. Fuck you. Go fuck yourself with that kind of privileged nonsense. I'm tired of that bullshit. Don't use it. Don't tell me that. Don't tell yourself that. Do yourself a favor and look outside your own world once in a while and you'll understand that this is the worst form of defence of such activities and is patently offensive to the vast majority of people who we will use it against but who are not like you in some small and measurable way and therefore not worthy of the same protective force field of laws and guarantees of privacy and autonomy. It's not personal, but it's tired and stupid and deserves it. Grow up and look around once in a while.
But aside from the questionable legal status of the Smith v Maryland ruling taken to its farthest possible legal interpretation to apply to millions of people instead of a particularized subject of a criminal investigation and from one person's phone records to dozens of other forms of communication, the most pernicious and possibly the dumbest defence of the NSA debate that routinely appears is this one: "I have nothing to hide".
To the people still using this argument, I have two words. Fuck. You.
I'm not making that up out of hatred, but anger and frustration that this persists. So don't take it personal in immediate fact. You might just not know any better. I might come to hate you later anyway. But this is not a good start.
The reason I treat this so harshly requires a bit of explanation.
What this actually says is three things:
First, that "I am a privileged white educated person of modest means. I have nothing to fear from police invading my home. It is even possible I violate no major laws, that I am aware of, that anyone could take issue with my behavior in the first place." Perhaps even that your marriage or family life is stable and solid (and that you also would have nothing to hide from a spouse or children that would not attract government sanction). That is all to the good. Congratulations that you are an upstanding citizen of uprighteous attitudes. You may indeed have nothing to fear from suspicious inquiries made by government officials. Good for you. That does not entitle you to say stupid things without angering people who recognize the limitations of that privileged status.
Consider talking to a stranger, and then having to disclose any or all of the following:
a) your income
b) your job
c) your religious affiliation
d) donations to causes of interest to you
e) associates outside of work
f) who you email and text, in order to validate those associates
Now consider you're a Muslim, and not a Christian. Since most Americans are the latter. Or consider that you have Arabic or Indian features and are trying to get on an airplane. Or consider that you are black, poor, and living in public housing. And that this stranger works for the government. And takes this information without your permission. And then try to tell me that you don't have anything to fear from the government's suspicion of you. Regardless of whether you have done anything wrong or criminally possible, your life will be lived under a microscope, your mundane actions questioned, and loyalty or intentions doubted. It will be possible with relative ease to find something which appears questionable to routine analysis; a charity that somewhere, somehow backs a terrorist group in a far-flung country that has a political or religious agenda that has nothing to do with Americans or the person donating to it, an associate who writes radical political treatises in his spare time or who demonstrates at anti-war rallies and the like, an email to an old high school or college friend who has some sketchy legal habits now, any of which can then be spun out of proportion and control by malicious agencies to invade your privacy further and further, to seek of the content of your emails, the contacts for donation, the political content of religious sermons where you were in attendance, and so on. And most of this is occurring without your knowledge,consent, or notice via warrant.
This is way beyond having to take your shoes off to get on airplane. Much of that is information many of us might rightly regard as private. Some of it is turned over to portions of the government for tax purposes, but not for criminal purposes. Others of it are turned over to private businesses, or our employers and associates obviously have access to some of this by the nature of being trusted colleagues (or merely by being present). The NSA collects a portion of this information itself, and collaborates with other agencies who have access to other portions of it. NYPD follows around Muslims by the thousands, so too to a lesser extent does the FBI. The TSA and various border guards or immigration forces don't just hassle white grandmothers and 6 year old children, despite claims of randomness and fairness.
It's not unusual for such people as I've described not merely to be detained and searched at the airport, but to have their homes entered and searched by police (sometimes at gunpoint with pets killed and families threatened), their possessions confiscated, their religious congregations identified and followed, and so on. Consider that hundreds, if not thousands, of people have been detained without trial for years by our government merely under suspicion of such intentions, without proof or conviction. Many of whom were declared innocent, sometimes even by a trial, and still held for additional years. Some of these people were not merely "detained" and imprisoned but tortured or even killed. Others abroad have been killed by the thousands under similarly sketchy logic that they were insurgents or terrorists drawn from limited and often inaccurate information. It seems unlikely that these actions would not create reasonable fears and suspicions in the minds of people who are then targeted by that same government for investigation and are socially cast with suspicion and doubt of their peaceful and civil intentions.
And this is merely dealing with the variety of information that is likely, at least eventually, not placing someone in a criminal enterprise or as a terrorist mastermind.
Second. Consider now that someone comes into office with much less noble motives as "counterterrorism", in some foolhardy quest to keep the country absolutely secure. This is not a far-fetched probability launched by a tin-foil hatted person. Vast quantities of the FBI's use of PATRIOT act powers, in particular with NSLs, are for anti-drug purposes, often only tenuously or rhetorically tied to terrorism. The Church commission, J. Hoover, and Richard Nixon, are all within the living memory of many Americans. In case it is not known, this was a time when the intelligence organs of the state were often pointed at political rivals, at anti-war or civil rights demonstrators, at people who said or wrote vaguely socialist sounding things, and on and on. The surveillance powers of the state if given full license to operate on such grounds have only grown larger and broader since that time. At this point, you might indeed now have something to hide. Laws can change. Behavior which was once considered criminal (say, sodomy), is considered legally acceptable now, as we are also seeing with particular drugs. This is a good thing. But the switch does not have to ratchet only in this one direction of permissiveness. It is not beyond the pale that something acceptable now could be punished some years from now in our near future, or already is up for debate as a punishable offense. It is even likely that many people could be unaware of this chance given the vast scope of legal sanctions already available to police, prosecutors, and security state empowered agencies and the general public's inability to memorize thousands of legal codes that could impact their lives. Our ignorance of such changes would offer little comfort or protection.
It is telling that apparently one of the more convincing arguments for people when discussing these police powers is whether or not they trust the President elected to head the branch supervising these agencies most directly. Ask a Republican, and they trusted Bush but don't trust Obama. Ask a Democrat (including apparently Obama who has acted as though he hadn't considered this himself), and they trust Obama but do or did not trust Bush. This suggests that people do fear that they will be powers used improperly or against "the wrong people", in some sense of the term, but that they have favored people they'd prefer to use them against (for example "gun nuts" or "tea party types" for the left, and, basically, "brown people" and hippies, for the right).
That last part worries me a great deal. I'm not sure there are people who "should" be favored for such use, but if there are any, they are usually foreign-sourced or tied threats for which the powers and capabilities of the NSA pre 9-11 seem quite adequate to at least identify. There are further problems with the intelligence community at that point in giving warning of immediate danger or communicating subjects of investigation, but those are not resolved by allowing massive surveillance powers or requiring people to take off shoes and jackets to board an airplane in a long and tedious line (that to me represents what should look like a great target to attack by any terrorist, what with the hundreds of people standing around. We should be grateful nobody decided to do so until this year). If we had evidence these powers were necessary for this one explicit purpose, we should have heard of it by now. Reviews of the program keep coming up with flimsy supports at best, if any at all materialize. Meanwhile the attacks we could have prevented, up to and including 9-11 itself, seem to have plenty of evidence available through routine means.
Which brings me to the third problem with this idea that it's okay if you have nothing to hide for someone to root around in your stuff.
If there's nothing to see, why exactly is the NSA looking for it from you in the first place? Wouldn't it be better served looking at people who are identified as probable threats? What probable cause do they have to look at you? Why are they gathering all of this information, when at best it serves no purpose and at worst it is actively harmful by providing piles of data that have to be sifted through once in a while to get to actual problems they could find without having the extra hay on the stack. To me it isn't just the offensive and potentially illegal intrusion of my privacy, without a proper warrant investigating me in particular for some reason, that is a problem here. It is the waste of time and taxpayer dollars doing something useless and ineffective and by declaring it in the name of terrorism, excluding it from public debate of its effectiveness and necessity. It just continues unabated. This is costing us billions of dollars per year in raw terms. Billions more are wasted in the additional security checks and clearances that delay travelers or push them to use less safe and efficient travel like driving their car (and thus increasing traffic delays and fatalities).
We should demand results, not meekly submit to the probability that someone will decide to check up on us once in a while to assure that we do indeed still have nothing to hide while having no discernible impact on terrorism and state security in general.
So yeah. Fuck you. Go fuck yourself with that kind of privileged nonsense. I'm tired of that bullshit. Don't use it. Don't tell me that. Don't tell yourself that. Do yourself a favor and look outside your own world once in a while and you'll understand that this is the worst form of defence of such activities and is patently offensive to the vast majority of people who we will use it against but who are not like you in some small and measurable way and therefore not worthy of the same protective force field of laws and guarantees of privacy and autonomy. It's not personal, but it's tired and stupid and deserves it. Grow up and look around once in a while.
16 January 2014
Torture and the 8th amendment
Most of my qualms with the death penalty have to do with the expense of using it as an extravagance rather than a necessary penalty for even for the most heinous crimes, as this appears to be. Others would be the high probability that we erred in determining guilt and that I'm not persuaded it is a deterrent.
But taking 10-20 minutes to kill someone sounds like an agonizing experience of suffering not just for the convicted criminal, something perhaps some people would be unpersuaded is a problem, but for the people associated with the execution itself who must afflict it as penalty and witness the results. Torture is not merely an affliction upon the tortured, but also the torturer.
This is little different. There are good reasons why torture and cruelty to prisoners is morally wrong and legally wrong, on top of questions of its efficacy. And a very powerful reason is because of what it does to the people who use it, or what it allows of the people who want to use it in the first place. Watching someone die in a horrible way, no matter what that person did before we encountered them, is an unpleasant experience to have to afflict and bear witness to.
I would expect a strong challenge to the 8th amendment that would hold up that this was in fact cruel and unusual and that the state (of Ohio) will at least have to use some other method of injection or some other means of imposing sentences of death.
But taking 10-20 minutes to kill someone sounds like an agonizing experience of suffering not just for the convicted criminal, something perhaps some people would be unpersuaded is a problem, but for the people associated with the execution itself who must afflict it as penalty and witness the results. Torture is not merely an affliction upon the tortured, but also the torturer.
This is little different. There are good reasons why torture and cruelty to prisoners is morally wrong and legally wrong, on top of questions of its efficacy. And a very powerful reason is because of what it does to the people who use it, or what it allows of the people who want to use it in the first place. Watching someone die in a horrible way, no matter what that person did before we encountered them, is an unpleasant experience to have to afflict and bear witness to.
I would expect a strong challenge to the 8th amendment that would hold up that this was in fact cruel and unusual and that the state (of Ohio) will at least have to use some other method of injection or some other means of imposing sentences of death.
NCAA early rankings v2
Top 100 Records after. Losses to non-100 teams are listed after, but not wins.
1) Arizona 8-0
2) Iowa 5-3
3) Wisconsin 8-1
4) Ohio St 6-2
5) Oklahoma St 8-2
6) Michigan St 9-1
7) Creighton 9-2
8) Villanova 9-1
There's a big clump of teams mixed up after Arizona basically.
I'm not persuaded Iowa is the 2nd best team but they're certainly in the top 10.
9) Syracuse 8-0
10) Louisville 1-3
11) Iowa St 7-2
12) Pittsburgh 7-1
13) Kansas 8-4
14) Florida 6-2
15) Duke 5-4
16) Wichita St 6-0
17) Kentucky 5-4
18) Cincinnati 5-2
19) Virginia 5-4-1 (first unranked team)
20) Florida St 5-3-1
21) Michigan 4-3-1
22) UCLA 3-3
23) Xavier 8-3-1
24) Gonzaga 4-3
25) St Louis 3-2
AP Ranked Teams outside 25
29) San Diego St 5-1
45) Baylor 4-3 (should drop further)
30) Massachusetts 8-1
31) Memphis 3-3
40) Colorado 4-3 (best player has ACL injury, so they're going to drop anyway)
44) Oklahoma 5-4
Other than Baylor, who has now lost a couple games in a row, the polls aren't too bad for once. I shudder to think what the RPI looks like though.
1) Arizona 8-0
2) Iowa 5-3
3) Wisconsin 8-1
4) Ohio St 6-2
5) Oklahoma St 8-2
6) Michigan St 9-1
7) Creighton 9-2
8) Villanova 9-1
There's a big clump of teams mixed up after Arizona basically.
I'm not persuaded Iowa is the 2nd best team but they're certainly in the top 10.
9) Syracuse 8-0
10) Louisville 1-3
11) Iowa St 7-2
12) Pittsburgh 7-1
13) Kansas 8-4
14) Florida 6-2
15) Duke 5-4
16) Wichita St 6-0
17) Kentucky 5-4
18) Cincinnati 5-2
19) Virginia 5-4-1 (first unranked team)
20) Florida St 5-3-1
21) Michigan 4-3-1
22) UCLA 3-3
23) Xavier 8-3-1
24) Gonzaga 4-3
25) St Louis 3-2
AP Ranked Teams outside 25
29) San Diego St 5-1
45) Baylor 4-3 (should drop further)
30) Massachusetts 8-1
31) Memphis 3-3
40) Colorado 4-3 (best player has ACL injury, so they're going to drop anyway)
44) Oklahoma 5-4
Other than Baylor, who has now lost a couple games in a row, the polls aren't too bad for once. I shudder to think what the RPI looks like though.
A note on the debate over abortion
A more concise point which occurred to me about the entire "Constitution issue" in stark and frequent debate over the last few weeks is the manner it is used as a talisman for "you can/can't do X" rather than an argument for why X is even a good idea in the first place. Many gun control advocates seem more concerned with the things they can do on the basis that they can maybe get them passed and then maybe upheld in court rulings than whether they're all that effective that we need to pass them either. Similar problems arise in abortion restrictions, or the surveillance state. This practice bothers me perhaps almost as much as people ignoring each other's interpretations of Constitutional law and pretending that they do not exist. Suppose for the sake of argument that certain varieties of gun control laws or various commonly overturned abortion restrictions are really that great of an idea, we should be able to construct cases for amending the Constitution to craft these restrictions upon the people and that whole "it can't be done" debate would be kind of moot, if it is really that great of an idea that is, it could be done anyway.
In some respects this is why the balanced budget amendment idea keeps annoying me. If someone's going to sell me on it, it would help if they explained a) why it's needed, what problem it solves and b) what mechanics they'd use to achieve it from our current disparity in deficits or the long-term deficit problem. Why is it such a good idea in the first place? What effectiveness upon these United States would it achieve or attain that we're currently unable to do? What loopholes would be permitted, if any? And so on. It's a brainless or thoughtless way of expressing concern about a problem without really intending to do anything about it. This arises constantly in politics or political debate that signaling concern is more important than the real world effects, anywhere from minimum wage laws to guns to foreign policy. It's incredibly frustrating to see laws passed without much concern for how they would be used, who they really help/target, and so on.
Abortion debates are little different in this respect.
What is different seems to be a deeply rooted question that is only mediated through metaphysics rather than law. When is a life a human being, a person endowed with unalienable rights? The law, through the inherent subjective sloppiness of metaphysics, usually results in an arbitrary divisor of scientific viability. With the prospect of survival of life as a separate object and person from the being which has nourished and carried its development to that point but this says little about the questions that swirl around in the atmosphere of the debate, or for that matter much about the value and purpose and intention of creating such life in the first place.
What we find is that there are still, despite our legal framework, obvious fictions about that framework that pass by into unexpected or unanticipated places in the haste to deal decisively with objections or supports for the procedure itself and its own basis. In other words, nobody actually wants to talk about abortion itself, nobody wants to talk about miscarriages and other pregnancy related tragedies and mishaps, nobody wants to talk about the difficulties of child raising, nobody wants to talk about women and the value of autonomy and privacy of a large percentage of the human population to the economy, the society. Or, perhaps most absent from the conversation, the women themselves. What instead happens is a lot of talking sideways at these subjects as though they are awkward and untenable conversations.
In this way, it is very much like the gun control debate wherein one side presents arguments for regulation that seem mostly based on fears (somewhat rational, but largely irrationally constructed) and the other presents defences against regulation that range dangerously toward fantastical belief in the interests of a mostly complacent fat and happy and aging populace to rise up against any supposed tyranny. But mostly this one in particular.
Much of the pro-life/anti-choice arguments come off, at least to very pro-choice people like me, as "attacks on women", fundamentally. They represent a number of arguments but most of them seem horribly flawed in their understanding of human behavior and the general society we now inhabit. I would say a more accurate assessment is they represent a war on sex, with female sexuality being a primary problem in how women are interpreted by society.
One major flaw is a belief that sex is for reproduction. For humans, it is not. Sex is about communication, intimacy, love, recreation, reproduction, social status, etc. It is not a simple act we undertake only to produce offspring. In fact, it wasn't even this limited to reproduction before we came up with methods to prevent or reduce the likelihood of pregnancy, which have in advanced societies rendered the question as even more of a side line. Human beings just have sex way too often and without any obvious signs of ovulation to be doing so in order to produce progeny effectively from sexual couplings. We can even have sex in positions and methods rendering it impossible to do so, or can self-stimulate, and so on down the line of ineffective sexual reproduction. The "pill", and the condom before it certainly changed the social appreciation of sex, and certainly reduced the probabilities of sexual consequences in a noticeable way. But for humans the process of "have sex=babies" has never been a straight line even before we could put up some walls in the way. This retrograde idea needs to be simply eliminated from the conversation because it poisons the attitudes toward birth control, women, sex, sexuality, and basically the human condition in general, because it is false. It becomes a problem in this debate because there are many people opposed to abortion on the notion that people who have sex must accept the consequences and risks.
Except that those risks can be mitigated, and for most of us, are very, very small. The risks, not the objects we use to copulate with.
The average ratio of pregnancies from sex is around 1% of all sexual acts result in a live birth in advanced societies. If we assume from falling fertility rates that availability and use of birth control reduced this by a factor of 3 or 4, we're still talking about a very small percentage of human sexual activity being used for reproduction. Even considering post-menopausal women having sex or exclude the infertile more broadly doesn't get us to a more significant percentage of our sexuality for this one purpose. We might argue then whether sex ought to be more focused about reproduction and that its other uses are a social distraction, but this creates the practical question (similar to homosexuality and marriage's legal rights and contracts), of what to do about the aged or infertile. To say nothing of that it isn't a natural state of human societies not to have sex for a variety of purposes and that those purposes are equally useful to a vibrant and functioning society as producing and raising offspring.
That doesn't mean that it might somehow become intolerable to suggest or encourage that human beings should form (mostly) monogamous couples or that human beings be aware of the probabilities of pregnancy, or other risks of sexual behavior, and seek to mitigate them as probable risks, but the idea that "sex is about reproduction" is simply false firstly and secondly says nothing valid about the moral status of a fertilized egg, or a developing human embryo or fetus. Rather, it says something about the behavior and moral status we wish to ascribe to the person carrying said egg, embryo, or fetus.
The basis of this line of argument arises in the format of "women can't get pregnant from rape". It is a series of inaccurate assumptions or beliefs about the nature of pregnancy biologically and the nature of human beings sexually; beliefs such as that miscarriages and other pregnancy related tragedies and mishaps are rarer than they actually are (pro tip: they are about as common than abortions) because they are socially stigmatized and too rarely discussed, and a false dichotomy examining healthy adult sexual behavior, even where it might be limited to strictly "biblical" reproductive sex (and thus, in my view, unhealthy, or at least boring adult sexual behavior) and not recognizing that it includes a huge percentage of actions that don't do anything reproductive and probably never will. As a result a foremost problem with much anti-abortion rhetoric is that it characterizes the women involved inaccurately as killers who think having sex is more important than life essentially rather than women who may already have families, women with health complications, fetuses with health complications (that may not come to term anyway, much less adulthood) and so on.
If the character of the person involved is already questionably defined, then we're not going to understand how to reduce a number of abortions through restrictions or bans, assuming that's a goal that many people share. Most people when asked might say they are pro-choice but would not have an abortion themselves or would not want a significant other to get one except under very particular circumstances. These circumstances are not ideal or commonly conceived but can happen frequently. What happens then is that states have used a variety of methods to decline access or place barriers upon access. Waiting periods, mandatory ultrasound viewings, sometimes invasive procedures, parental or guardian permission, and so on, that often do not pertain to most other health procedures in legal forms, and have little to no effect on reducing the number of people who actually get an abortion who want one. What they can do instead is decrease the availability of well-trained and reasonably safe clinicians who provide them or make it more challenging for the people who do actually really want one for some reason. But they don't actually stop the process either. It simply gets transferred downstream to people who have sketchier clinics, or limited skills, or to people who still have these skills but are in limited supply, requiring trips across several states while encountering these invasive restrictions.
This is a major problem with the entire "judicial activism" argument in the first place. In that the question wasn't "what regime prevented women from even wanting to get an abortion" via a legal restraint on their availability but rather "what regime made it safer for them to do so". It is not an easy decision for most people, even as there are often terse and logical reasons in favor of it, these are not always convincing on matters of doubt and uncertainty surrounding the metaphysics of human life, its origins, and so forth, for many, many people. I suspect one of the reasons the "fetal pain" constraints, or the requirements to carry to term by a hospital (even if the mother is otherwise legally dead), and so on are popular is that people are just not comfortable within these morality questions and would prefer to have simple answers, or failing that, excuses that look like simple answers. There are not simple answers. The best we can do is "an infant could possibly survive and continue to grow after this point detached from the mother physically". That's it. Pain doesn't work because pain is a subjective enterprise for adults anyway and doesn't appear to be a scientifically valid prospect before viability anyway through the development of the nervous system. Dead mothers with near-to-term development and penalties for drug use by prospective mothers likewise suggest that we'd rather put up an easy wall than try to answer these questions. We don't want to punish miscarriages, but legal structures are often attempted to put in place that would or could. The reason that goes on is that both miscarriages and abortions tend to happen around the same time. And again, most people don't know miscarriages are pretty damn common, and don't have to be tied to anything obvious as a cause like drug or alcohol use that we should be punishing people who do use mind-altering chemicals during a pregnancy and policing this with invasive state powers.
I find myself constantly baffled that many pro-life advocates not only believe Roe v Wade was improperly decided, which I suppose is a legal interpretation they are entitled to support even as that notion involves a host of other problems for their privacy and agency as individuals, but that they somehow believe overturning it would matter. When for most people, most women seeking abortions, it does not. Even jurisdictional guidance it provided it would matter only for some women as most states would presumably leave them as legally accessible in some fashion. My estimation for the politics given the indefensible nature of some laws that are passed or attempted to pass that do fail is that they would be screwed as they would have to defend all restrictions they wish to make now plus the more ultimate restriction of none at all. Little or nothing would happen legally to shift the politics and such groups would lose their political viability for advocacy just as "traditional marriage" advocates (whatever that's supposed to mean) have steadily lost ground to gay rights movements.
We're ultimately punishing people for going through circumstances with the misfortune of not being ourselves, with the implication that all people should react to such events with the same exact feeling of joy and merriment and glory onto the universe/jesus/allah/buddha as the case may be. I think what this underscores is that it just isn't that easy for everyone to get pregnant, carry the egg through the stages of development to term, deliver the child, love and care for the child, supply for its basic needs and growth, raise the child, and observe and supervise their actions into adulthood as a moderately successful independent human being. Any one of those steps could be far more difficult for someone else that they'd feel a compelling need to make very different choices instead of the ones that we might prefer that they make. In order to override those choices, we should have to have a very good reason, and make that case to them as individuals. This is essentially all the court ruling said, is that there is a compelling reason at "viability" to make this case more broadly and to require a compelling and extreme basis for a procedure at that point, but not before that. Where we would remain free to choose, and also to coerce and influence (without resorting to violence).
Not everyone reacts to a miscarriage in the same way despite that being what must seem to be a devastating event for a woman to go through. Not everyone reacts to a pregnancy in the same way either. The spectrum between "well shit" and "sunbeams of joy on my every footstep" is real and has real consequences in how things are going to be handled, not just on the question of abortion but on questions of parenting or adoption too. The obligations, however desirable, of parenting are vast and should not be taken as lightly as to demand them for every pregnancy that occurs. Nor do we issue such demands for every child that is born of their parents that they be doting and caring and responsible adults. If we have the autonomy available to us on how to be a parent, we ought to have some respect for whether or when to become one. And if this is so, then seeing as a very large percentage of abortions occur for unplanned pregnancy, it might do to focus on ways to make pregnancy more often a planned effect. However best to achieve that; focuses on marriage to prepare people for collective child raising duties, focuses on proper and comprehensive sexual education to reduce unplanned pregnancy rates versus abstinence, which often has a damaging effect on teen pregnancy rates, or subsidies and otherwise expanded access to birth control, etc.
In so far as pro-life people believe the sole and fundamental argument is "its a human being", that's fine for their purposes. Maybe that's convincing enough for some people too. I'd even say that I admire that they make it even I don't think they have enough support to advance the claim. The biggest problem is that I don't think they make it consistently. Rape and incest exemptions to me smack of hypocritical political expediency rather than a logical argument flowing from this basis of an essential humanity, and bear weight directly on the logic that there are circumstantial elements. They apparently just have to be circumstances we approved of rather than more individually valid or autonomous reasons implying any moral agency. But I think this is all fine for what it is worth as a starting point. The problem is that we live in a world that ascribes this a very different legal basis, out of the necessity of pragmatic objections that policing abortions would intrude onto policing miscarriages, and out of the necessity that making these decisions in some other way invites more controversy (for now). Even for the many people that agree this is the metaphysical grounds, and that abortions are in some sense wrong, people may place them on gradients of "wrongness" that are less on par with murdering a child or another adult person than would be the case if they accepted this as a literal fact of humanity. They're complicated questions about personhood and even identity (and to be fair, even the bible's ancient text seems to have passed on this up even a month after birth, and had nothing direct to say about prenatal circumstances). That's why we don't talk about them, we talk around them or we just assume the answer, provide it for everyone somewhat blithely and condescendingly and move on. Pro-choice advocates don't get out of jail free by being correct that these are unresolved questions empirically or even innately subjective questions by nature of their metaphysical source anymore than pro-life advocates get any points by making up an answer and declaring it correct.
People probably should think much harder about what they are doing, both before they get pregnant or get someone else pregnant and then afterward on what they want to do about. These are not insubstantial societal goals. The question is how they should think about, or what do they focus upon harder. Far too much of the debate is divorced from the practical realities. So viability is at question around 24 weeks. Only 1% or so of abortions are performed after that, typically for medical reasons. Most people can say; that's not me. The "fetal pain" question has an answer sometimes made up at 20 weeks, sometimes made up earlier or later. At 20 weeks, it is only about a half a percent higher than 24. These are statistically tiny quantities of people that are impacted directly, so legal restrictions seem easier to design and support. Roughly speaking, only 10% of all abortions happen after the first trimester at all. And among these, we are still talking mostly about women close to the 13-15 week scenario where there may have been accessibility or affordability questions for the procedures pushing them outside the earlier window rather than some other source of delay.
We're talking about abstractions instead of some thousands of actual women per year when talking in this way. I think this diminishes the problems they have, the problems they experience, and the availability of their options as they see fit to exercise them. But it is also necessary to point out that the vast majority of people involved, to say nothing of the general public when asked, apparently see that this is modestly acceptable and appropriate as a decision to make at one point, but decreasingly so as it progresses in time and that they will have varying reasons for why this is so. It is not simple as saying "at conception", or some other nonsensical metaphysics answer for most people, just as it is unsatisfying to say "at 24 weeks" to others. I am something of an extremist that would say "at live birth", whenever that occurs, but I also don't have a womb over which to exercise the decision making. Men seem to be a little more pro-choice after all. But I also recognize my position is at an extreme. It is not a popular convention to hold to and not a popularly practiced ideal. This applies also to its opposite. A restriction of behavior which is commonly performed and not supported by popular will is liable to be a defunct legal fiction rather than an effective and well-enforced law. I could and would not make or advance a claim that a preferred legal structure might impose abortions on families with too many children or for certain kinds of people by the same notions of impossibilities and the impracticality of control of human behavior versus what people want to do in actual behavior. I suppose people could claim this is more serious a moral violation than traffic laws or narcotics use, and certainly it is rarer per capita than either of those, but it isn't demonstrated that it is in fact more seriously destructive to destroy potential human lives versus actual living and breathing human beings' destructive capacity. It should seem at least vaguely plausible that most women could just as easily produce children at other times in their lives instead of being compelled to produce them at any time we as outsiders require they should and this argument seems to be acceptable enough to most.
A much larger societal effect question surrounds issues like Plan B contraception or (incorrectly called this in most cases) abortifacient drugs. It is unclear to me personally and also scientifically why these are a bigger concern and more controversial publicly than abortions generally, even in the first or early second trimester that, aside from the most ardent pro-life advocates, the general public seems fairly blaise about. It is bizarre that birth control generally is treated as some kind of controlled substance, with constraints to access and a social disdain for many of the more effective forms. IUDs have a troubled US history, but they're quite safe now for example. Hardly anybody uses them in this country and they're often targeted by anti-abortion restrictions to be further restricted alongside. Condoms are locked up in some stores or some parts of the country but not in others. Suggesting the problem isn't theft prevention but rather passing a sentence of moral approbation for the devices and their associated uses by otherwise responsible teenagers and adults. These are highly effective objects at reducing rates of pregnancy used properly, which ought to be an object of considerable interest in reducing things like teen pregnancy rates (which have very high abortion rates), or the rates of abortion in poorer or minority communities, also higher than the general public. But the public seems afraid that somehow admitting this is akin to admitting that sex is okay generally and that sex is probably something their children will do. I suppose this is akin to children admitting their parents and grandparents still have sex too and "oh boy" isn't that uncomfortable to consider. But the fact remains, teenagers will do it anyway despite our efforts, schemes, and plans to prevent it. Some effort should be made to accommodate the problems rather than punish people for these actions. Some states still attempt to punish sexual conduct by minors with extreme penalties (eg, receiving a blowjob as a teenager from another teenager of similar age can land people in jail or as a registered sex offender), even as these laws have been struck down for adults. We're still having an ongoing discourse about what to do with these same children sexting with their phones and spreading photos and video of an explicit nature. Treating this as child pornography and its distribution seems no more appropriate than parents and other elders ignoring it entirely from a moral standpoint, but still the idea that it is by itself worthy of criminal sanction at all seems ludicrously popular.
I suspect it would help if we had a broader and more open conversation about what it means to be sexually active, rather than running around pretending everyone who wants to have sex, particularly women, are just horny or slutty. I do not see that conversation starting anytime soon. Indeed, I see people still running as fast as possible in the other direction.
That leaves us with the unenviable task of trying to explain that large quantities of abortions occur both globally and in this country for reasons that most people find acceptable enough not to object strenuously to, even if they remain uncomfortable with them, and under circumstances that most people are not prepared to object to. And that large quantities of these that do occur could be prevented under circumstances that large percentages of the population already have access to and undertake as precautions and sensible restrictions on their own behavior (proper use of birth control, use of non-reproductive sexual habits in the absence of available birth control, etc). That is not an easy and quick solution to a difficult and controversial problem of course. I tend not to see many easy ways out. Banning the whole thing, or crafting very particular exemptions, isn't politically popular, creates new risks and dangers, and isn't likely to be very effective anyway as a result and naturally so long as there are pro-life advocates, and the issue remains more divisive than gay marriage or marijuana use, it's unlikely to shift significantly that ardent pro-life voters and their more sensible concerns could be, or even should be, ignored. Unfortunately the atmosphere of debate is often clouded by a lot of insensible ranting that has little to do with the problem or becomes counterproductive to this as a central policy goal of reducing the number of abortions to a much lower quantity than is presently done. If in fact those other sources of ire, such as human sexuality or birth control, or female autonomy generally, are more pressing concerns, it does not speak much to the supposed value of human lives that they should be getting in the way.
In some respects this is why the balanced budget amendment idea keeps annoying me. If someone's going to sell me on it, it would help if they explained a) why it's needed, what problem it solves and b) what mechanics they'd use to achieve it from our current disparity in deficits or the long-term deficit problem. Why is it such a good idea in the first place? What effectiveness upon these United States would it achieve or attain that we're currently unable to do? What loopholes would be permitted, if any? And so on. It's a brainless or thoughtless way of expressing concern about a problem without really intending to do anything about it. This arises constantly in politics or political debate that signaling concern is more important than the real world effects, anywhere from minimum wage laws to guns to foreign policy. It's incredibly frustrating to see laws passed without much concern for how they would be used, who they really help/target, and so on.
Abortion debates are little different in this respect.
What is different seems to be a deeply rooted question that is only mediated through metaphysics rather than law. When is a life a human being, a person endowed with unalienable rights? The law, through the inherent subjective sloppiness of metaphysics, usually results in an arbitrary divisor of scientific viability. With the prospect of survival of life as a separate object and person from the being which has nourished and carried its development to that point but this says little about the questions that swirl around in the atmosphere of the debate, or for that matter much about the value and purpose and intention of creating such life in the first place.
What we find is that there are still, despite our legal framework, obvious fictions about that framework that pass by into unexpected or unanticipated places in the haste to deal decisively with objections or supports for the procedure itself and its own basis. In other words, nobody actually wants to talk about abortion itself, nobody wants to talk about miscarriages and other pregnancy related tragedies and mishaps, nobody wants to talk about the difficulties of child raising, nobody wants to talk about women and the value of autonomy and privacy of a large percentage of the human population to the economy, the society. Or, perhaps most absent from the conversation, the women themselves. What instead happens is a lot of talking sideways at these subjects as though they are awkward and untenable conversations.
In this way, it is very much like the gun control debate wherein one side presents arguments for regulation that seem mostly based on fears (somewhat rational, but largely irrationally constructed) and the other presents defences against regulation that range dangerously toward fantastical belief in the interests of a mostly complacent fat and happy and aging populace to rise up against any supposed tyranny. But mostly this one in particular.
Much of the pro-life/anti-choice arguments come off, at least to very pro-choice people like me, as "attacks on women", fundamentally. They represent a number of arguments but most of them seem horribly flawed in their understanding of human behavior and the general society we now inhabit. I would say a more accurate assessment is they represent a war on sex, with female sexuality being a primary problem in how women are interpreted by society.
One major flaw is a belief that sex is for reproduction. For humans, it is not. Sex is about communication, intimacy, love, recreation, reproduction, social status, etc. It is not a simple act we undertake only to produce offspring. In fact, it wasn't even this limited to reproduction before we came up with methods to prevent or reduce the likelihood of pregnancy, which have in advanced societies rendered the question as even more of a side line. Human beings just have sex way too often and without any obvious signs of ovulation to be doing so in order to produce progeny effectively from sexual couplings. We can even have sex in positions and methods rendering it impossible to do so, or can self-stimulate, and so on down the line of ineffective sexual reproduction. The "pill", and the condom before it certainly changed the social appreciation of sex, and certainly reduced the probabilities of sexual consequences in a noticeable way. But for humans the process of "have sex=babies" has never been a straight line even before we could put up some walls in the way. This retrograde idea needs to be simply eliminated from the conversation because it poisons the attitudes toward birth control, women, sex, sexuality, and basically the human condition in general, because it is false. It becomes a problem in this debate because there are many people opposed to abortion on the notion that people who have sex must accept the consequences and risks.
Except that those risks can be mitigated, and for most of us, are very, very small. The risks, not the objects we use to copulate with.
The average ratio of pregnancies from sex is around 1% of all sexual acts result in a live birth in advanced societies. If we assume from falling fertility rates that availability and use of birth control reduced this by a factor of 3 or 4, we're still talking about a very small percentage of human sexual activity being used for reproduction. Even considering post-menopausal women having sex or exclude the infertile more broadly doesn't get us to a more significant percentage of our sexuality for this one purpose. We might argue then whether sex ought to be more focused about reproduction and that its other uses are a social distraction, but this creates the practical question (similar to homosexuality and marriage's legal rights and contracts), of what to do about the aged or infertile. To say nothing of that it isn't a natural state of human societies not to have sex for a variety of purposes and that those purposes are equally useful to a vibrant and functioning society as producing and raising offspring.
That doesn't mean that it might somehow become intolerable to suggest or encourage that human beings should form (mostly) monogamous couples or that human beings be aware of the probabilities of pregnancy, or other risks of sexual behavior, and seek to mitigate them as probable risks, but the idea that "sex is about reproduction" is simply false firstly and secondly says nothing valid about the moral status of a fertilized egg, or a developing human embryo or fetus. Rather, it says something about the behavior and moral status we wish to ascribe to the person carrying said egg, embryo, or fetus.
The basis of this line of argument arises in the format of "women can't get pregnant from rape". It is a series of inaccurate assumptions or beliefs about the nature of pregnancy biologically and the nature of human beings sexually; beliefs such as that miscarriages and other pregnancy related tragedies and mishaps are rarer than they actually are (pro tip: they are about as common than abortions) because they are socially stigmatized and too rarely discussed, and a false dichotomy examining healthy adult sexual behavior, even where it might be limited to strictly "biblical" reproductive sex (and thus, in my view, unhealthy, or at least boring adult sexual behavior) and not recognizing that it includes a huge percentage of actions that don't do anything reproductive and probably never will. As a result a foremost problem with much anti-abortion rhetoric is that it characterizes the women involved inaccurately as killers who think having sex is more important than life essentially rather than women who may already have families, women with health complications, fetuses with health complications (that may not come to term anyway, much less adulthood) and so on.
If the character of the person involved is already questionably defined, then we're not going to understand how to reduce a number of abortions through restrictions or bans, assuming that's a goal that many people share. Most people when asked might say they are pro-choice but would not have an abortion themselves or would not want a significant other to get one except under very particular circumstances. These circumstances are not ideal or commonly conceived but can happen frequently. What happens then is that states have used a variety of methods to decline access or place barriers upon access. Waiting periods, mandatory ultrasound viewings, sometimes invasive procedures, parental or guardian permission, and so on, that often do not pertain to most other health procedures in legal forms, and have little to no effect on reducing the number of people who actually get an abortion who want one. What they can do instead is decrease the availability of well-trained and reasonably safe clinicians who provide them or make it more challenging for the people who do actually really want one for some reason. But they don't actually stop the process either. It simply gets transferred downstream to people who have sketchier clinics, or limited skills, or to people who still have these skills but are in limited supply, requiring trips across several states while encountering these invasive restrictions.
This is a major problem with the entire "judicial activism" argument in the first place. In that the question wasn't "what regime prevented women from even wanting to get an abortion" via a legal restraint on their availability but rather "what regime made it safer for them to do so". It is not an easy decision for most people, even as there are often terse and logical reasons in favor of it, these are not always convincing on matters of doubt and uncertainty surrounding the metaphysics of human life, its origins, and so forth, for many, many people. I suspect one of the reasons the "fetal pain" constraints, or the requirements to carry to term by a hospital (even if the mother is otherwise legally dead), and so on are popular is that people are just not comfortable within these morality questions and would prefer to have simple answers, or failing that, excuses that look like simple answers. There are not simple answers. The best we can do is "an infant could possibly survive and continue to grow after this point detached from the mother physically". That's it. Pain doesn't work because pain is a subjective enterprise for adults anyway and doesn't appear to be a scientifically valid prospect before viability anyway through the development of the nervous system. Dead mothers with near-to-term development and penalties for drug use by prospective mothers likewise suggest that we'd rather put up an easy wall than try to answer these questions. We don't want to punish miscarriages, but legal structures are often attempted to put in place that would or could. The reason that goes on is that both miscarriages and abortions tend to happen around the same time. And again, most people don't know miscarriages are pretty damn common, and don't have to be tied to anything obvious as a cause like drug or alcohol use that we should be punishing people who do use mind-altering chemicals during a pregnancy and policing this with invasive state powers.
I find myself constantly baffled that many pro-life advocates not only believe Roe v Wade was improperly decided, which I suppose is a legal interpretation they are entitled to support even as that notion involves a host of other problems for their privacy and agency as individuals, but that they somehow believe overturning it would matter. When for most people, most women seeking abortions, it does not. Even jurisdictional guidance it provided it would matter only for some women as most states would presumably leave them as legally accessible in some fashion. My estimation for the politics given the indefensible nature of some laws that are passed or attempted to pass that do fail is that they would be screwed as they would have to defend all restrictions they wish to make now plus the more ultimate restriction of none at all. Little or nothing would happen legally to shift the politics and such groups would lose their political viability for advocacy just as "traditional marriage" advocates (whatever that's supposed to mean) have steadily lost ground to gay rights movements.
We're ultimately punishing people for going through circumstances with the misfortune of not being ourselves, with the implication that all people should react to such events with the same exact feeling of joy and merriment and glory onto the universe/jesus/allah/buddha as the case may be. I think what this underscores is that it just isn't that easy for everyone to get pregnant, carry the egg through the stages of development to term, deliver the child, love and care for the child, supply for its basic needs and growth, raise the child, and observe and supervise their actions into adulthood as a moderately successful independent human being. Any one of those steps could be far more difficult for someone else that they'd feel a compelling need to make very different choices instead of the ones that we might prefer that they make. In order to override those choices, we should have to have a very good reason, and make that case to them as individuals. This is essentially all the court ruling said, is that there is a compelling reason at "viability" to make this case more broadly and to require a compelling and extreme basis for a procedure at that point, but not before that. Where we would remain free to choose, and also to coerce and influence (without resorting to violence).
Not everyone reacts to a miscarriage in the same way despite that being what must seem to be a devastating event for a woman to go through. Not everyone reacts to a pregnancy in the same way either. The spectrum between "well shit" and "sunbeams of joy on my every footstep" is real and has real consequences in how things are going to be handled, not just on the question of abortion but on questions of parenting or adoption too. The obligations, however desirable, of parenting are vast and should not be taken as lightly as to demand them for every pregnancy that occurs. Nor do we issue such demands for every child that is born of their parents that they be doting and caring and responsible adults. If we have the autonomy available to us on how to be a parent, we ought to have some respect for whether or when to become one. And if this is so, then seeing as a very large percentage of abortions occur for unplanned pregnancy, it might do to focus on ways to make pregnancy more often a planned effect. However best to achieve that; focuses on marriage to prepare people for collective child raising duties, focuses on proper and comprehensive sexual education to reduce unplanned pregnancy rates versus abstinence, which often has a damaging effect on teen pregnancy rates, or subsidies and otherwise expanded access to birth control, etc.
In so far as pro-life people believe the sole and fundamental argument is "its a human being", that's fine for their purposes. Maybe that's convincing enough for some people too. I'd even say that I admire that they make it even I don't think they have enough support to advance the claim. The biggest problem is that I don't think they make it consistently. Rape and incest exemptions to me smack of hypocritical political expediency rather than a logical argument flowing from this basis of an essential humanity, and bear weight directly on the logic that there are circumstantial elements. They apparently just have to be circumstances we approved of rather than more individually valid or autonomous reasons implying any moral agency. But I think this is all fine for what it is worth as a starting point. The problem is that we live in a world that ascribes this a very different legal basis, out of the necessity of pragmatic objections that policing abortions would intrude onto policing miscarriages, and out of the necessity that making these decisions in some other way invites more controversy (for now). Even for the many people that agree this is the metaphysical grounds, and that abortions are in some sense wrong, people may place them on gradients of "wrongness" that are less on par with murdering a child or another adult person than would be the case if they accepted this as a literal fact of humanity. They're complicated questions about personhood and even identity (and to be fair, even the bible's ancient text seems to have passed on this up even a month after birth, and had nothing direct to say about prenatal circumstances). That's why we don't talk about them, we talk around them or we just assume the answer, provide it for everyone somewhat blithely and condescendingly and move on. Pro-choice advocates don't get out of jail free by being correct that these are unresolved questions empirically or even innately subjective questions by nature of their metaphysical source anymore than pro-life advocates get any points by making up an answer and declaring it correct.
People probably should think much harder about what they are doing, both before they get pregnant or get someone else pregnant and then afterward on what they want to do about. These are not insubstantial societal goals. The question is how they should think about, or what do they focus upon harder. Far too much of the debate is divorced from the practical realities. So viability is at question around 24 weeks. Only 1% or so of abortions are performed after that, typically for medical reasons. Most people can say; that's not me. The "fetal pain" question has an answer sometimes made up at 20 weeks, sometimes made up earlier or later. At 20 weeks, it is only about a half a percent higher than 24. These are statistically tiny quantities of people that are impacted directly, so legal restrictions seem easier to design and support. Roughly speaking, only 10% of all abortions happen after the first trimester at all. And among these, we are still talking mostly about women close to the 13-15 week scenario where there may have been accessibility or affordability questions for the procedures pushing them outside the earlier window rather than some other source of delay.
We're talking about abstractions instead of some thousands of actual women per year when talking in this way. I think this diminishes the problems they have, the problems they experience, and the availability of their options as they see fit to exercise them. But it is also necessary to point out that the vast majority of people involved, to say nothing of the general public when asked, apparently see that this is modestly acceptable and appropriate as a decision to make at one point, but decreasingly so as it progresses in time and that they will have varying reasons for why this is so. It is not simple as saying "at conception", or some other nonsensical metaphysics answer for most people, just as it is unsatisfying to say "at 24 weeks" to others. I am something of an extremist that would say "at live birth", whenever that occurs, but I also don't have a womb over which to exercise the decision making. Men seem to be a little more pro-choice after all. But I also recognize my position is at an extreme. It is not a popular convention to hold to and not a popularly practiced ideal. This applies also to its opposite. A restriction of behavior which is commonly performed and not supported by popular will is liable to be a defunct legal fiction rather than an effective and well-enforced law. I could and would not make or advance a claim that a preferred legal structure might impose abortions on families with too many children or for certain kinds of people by the same notions of impossibilities and the impracticality of control of human behavior versus what people want to do in actual behavior. I suppose people could claim this is more serious a moral violation than traffic laws or narcotics use, and certainly it is rarer per capita than either of those, but it isn't demonstrated that it is in fact more seriously destructive to destroy potential human lives versus actual living and breathing human beings' destructive capacity. It should seem at least vaguely plausible that most women could just as easily produce children at other times in their lives instead of being compelled to produce them at any time we as outsiders require they should and this argument seems to be acceptable enough to most.
A much larger societal effect question surrounds issues like Plan B contraception or (incorrectly called this in most cases) abortifacient drugs. It is unclear to me personally and also scientifically why these are a bigger concern and more controversial publicly than abortions generally, even in the first or early second trimester that, aside from the most ardent pro-life advocates, the general public seems fairly blaise about. It is bizarre that birth control generally is treated as some kind of controlled substance, with constraints to access and a social disdain for many of the more effective forms. IUDs have a troubled US history, but they're quite safe now for example. Hardly anybody uses them in this country and they're often targeted by anti-abortion restrictions to be further restricted alongside. Condoms are locked up in some stores or some parts of the country but not in others. Suggesting the problem isn't theft prevention but rather passing a sentence of moral approbation for the devices and their associated uses by otherwise responsible teenagers and adults. These are highly effective objects at reducing rates of pregnancy used properly, which ought to be an object of considerable interest in reducing things like teen pregnancy rates (which have very high abortion rates), or the rates of abortion in poorer or minority communities, also higher than the general public. But the public seems afraid that somehow admitting this is akin to admitting that sex is okay generally and that sex is probably something their children will do. I suppose this is akin to children admitting their parents and grandparents still have sex too and "oh boy" isn't that uncomfortable to consider. But the fact remains, teenagers will do it anyway despite our efforts, schemes, and plans to prevent it. Some effort should be made to accommodate the problems rather than punish people for these actions. Some states still attempt to punish sexual conduct by minors with extreme penalties (eg, receiving a blowjob as a teenager from another teenager of similar age can land people in jail or as a registered sex offender), even as these laws have been struck down for adults. We're still having an ongoing discourse about what to do with these same children sexting with their phones and spreading photos and video of an explicit nature. Treating this as child pornography and its distribution seems no more appropriate than parents and other elders ignoring it entirely from a moral standpoint, but still the idea that it is by itself worthy of criminal sanction at all seems ludicrously popular.
I suspect it would help if we had a broader and more open conversation about what it means to be sexually active, rather than running around pretending everyone who wants to have sex, particularly women, are just horny or slutty. I do not see that conversation starting anytime soon. Indeed, I see people still running as fast as possible in the other direction.
That leaves us with the unenviable task of trying to explain that large quantities of abortions occur both globally and in this country for reasons that most people find acceptable enough not to object strenuously to, even if they remain uncomfortable with them, and under circumstances that most people are not prepared to object to. And that large quantities of these that do occur could be prevented under circumstances that large percentages of the population already have access to and undertake as precautions and sensible restrictions on their own behavior (proper use of birth control, use of non-reproductive sexual habits in the absence of available birth control, etc). That is not an easy and quick solution to a difficult and controversial problem of course. I tend not to see many easy ways out. Banning the whole thing, or crafting very particular exemptions, isn't politically popular, creates new risks and dangers, and isn't likely to be very effective anyway as a result and naturally so long as there are pro-life advocates, and the issue remains more divisive than gay marriage or marijuana use, it's unlikely to shift significantly that ardent pro-life voters and their more sensible concerns could be, or even should be, ignored. Unfortunately the atmosphere of debate is often clouded by a lot of insensible ranting that has little to do with the problem or becomes counterproductive to this as a central policy goal of reducing the number of abortions to a much lower quantity than is presently done. If in fact those other sources of ire, such as human sexuality or birth control, or female autonomy generally, are more pressing concerns, it does not speak much to the supposed value of human lives that they should be getting in the way.
14 January 2014
Thinking about thought
Most of my own research on subjects of interest relies heavily on the "originals", to see not only the insights we still reserve today for misquoting and attribution debates about what some particular great mind would have thought of something or other, but also what other baggage might have been wrapped up with it, what was broken about it. What often occurs from this account is whether obvious solutions to these fundamental problems are presented in the intervening years (for example, genetics and molecular biology Darwin's case for evolution, neither fields of research which even existed at the time) or whether obvious solutions from the past are now ignored, which lends me to ask why these weren't available to them, or why they're inaccessible to us now. What is it that we overlook? Was it really that hard to see? Why, what were the incentives? What changed? These seem like valuable questions for understanding the weaknesses and strengths of human beings and their institutions and communities in approaching and solving our problems.
I don't understand either why this should be considered a dismissive enterprise as a result.
It sounds essentially like a rejection of the field of history as a viable project beyond its factual accumulations. Maybe that's the natural and inevitable result of teaching history in the manner of its factual accumulations rather than as a method of perspective taking as is its more fundamental philosophical nature, and the natural result of teaching science in a similar fashion with its fundamental basis as a method of skeptical inquiry also mostly neglected, if not rejected.
I don't understand either why this should be considered a dismissive enterprise as a result.
It sounds essentially like a rejection of the field of history as a viable project beyond its factual accumulations. Maybe that's the natural and inevitable result of teaching history in the manner of its factual accumulations rather than as a method of perspective taking as is its more fundamental philosophical nature, and the natural result of teaching science in a similar fashion with its fundamental basis as a method of skeptical inquiry also mostly neglected, if not rejected.
07 January 2014
Very early NCAA rankings
Now that college football season is over (I think), I can start looking at this college basketball season more skeptically. These are very early rankings. I won't include top 100 records until February as most teams haven't played more than 5 or 6 meaningful games yet coming into the start of conference play. So far it looks like the ACC and Big Ten are heavy as usual, and the Pac-12 finally isn't an embarrassment after the last several seasons being subpar (4 top 25 teams and the #1 overall). The schismed Big East-American conference would do pretty well too.
1) Arizona
2) Ohio St (defense is insane, offense, not so much)
3) Louisville
4) Michigan St
5) Wisconsin
6) Oklahoma St
7) Iowa
8) Villanova
9) Iowa St
10) Creighton (first unranked AP team)
11) Duke
12) Syracuse (2nd in polls)
13) Pitt (first unranked in both polls)
14) Kentucky
15) Gonzaga
16) Kansas
17) Wichita St
18) Cincinnati
19) Michigan
20) Oregon
21) Florida
22) Colorado
23) UCLA
24) St Louis
25) Arkansas
Ranked teams outside top 25.
42) Baylor (they're in the top 10 in the polls)
28) San Diego St
30) UMass
41) Illinois
40) Memphis
52) Kansas St
1) Arizona
2) Ohio St (defense is insane, offense, not so much)
3) Louisville
4) Michigan St
5) Wisconsin
6) Oklahoma St
7) Iowa
8) Villanova
9) Iowa St
10) Creighton (first unranked AP team)
11) Duke
12) Syracuse (2nd in polls)
13) Pitt (first unranked in both polls)
14) Kentucky
15) Gonzaga
16) Kansas
17) Wichita St
18) Cincinnati
19) Michigan
20) Oregon
21) Florida
22) Colorado
23) UCLA
24) St Louis
25) Arkansas
Ranked teams outside top 25.
42) Baylor (they're in the top 10 in the polls)
28) San Diego St
30) UMass
41) Illinois
40) Memphis
52) Kansas St
03 January 2014
Another sport related detour
A couple quick comments on the early NBA.
1) Toronto seems legit now. In as far as any middling Eastern conference team is "legit".
This should not be a good sign that two teams have improved after trading away Rudy Gay for his value as an NBA player. They are 8-3 since the trade with wins over the Pacers and Thunder (two losses of the three are to the Spurs, but two wins are over the Knicks and another over the Sixers. Who are basically minor league teams this year).
2) Phoenix seems more legit. I'm not entirely sure how that happened. Dragic and Bledsoe are both playing at very high levels basically and they somehow turned Gerald Green (he of modest slam dunk contest fame and little else) into a quality NBA player who can make threes. Their defense is also passable but not as great as it started off the season. They also haven't played much out East yet to pad their record (6 games).
3) Injuries are really important:
a) Chicago is basically toast between Rose (out for the year) and Deng (out off and on).
b) Brooklyn has had Williams, Lopez, Kirilenko, Terry, and Pierce out for various stretches, and Lopez is now out for the year. So they're hurting even with the win tonight over OKC.
Between these two teams being decimated, there's no competition for Miami and Indiana out East.
c) Horford being out should more or less cancel out Atlanta as a wild card in the East too.
d) Memphis' famous grinding style has imploded for a while with Gasol out to anchor the D. They're ugly on offence as expected, but without the D, they're just ugly.
e) The Lakers would have sucked either way, but Kobe's out.
f) Westbrook being out is really important to the Thunder. They'll still win a lot of games while he's out, but they're not as dynamic offensively.
g) Reddick being out is a huge downgrade for the Clippers. Willie Green?
h) Anthony Davis of unibrow fame being out really hurt the Pelicans.
Also, it's not relevant to the league since they're terrible. But. Milwaukee needs to announce their injuries a little more clearly. Apparently even to the PA guy in the stadium. This was a minor annoyance for fantasy league purposes (Knight was out for a while with an uncertain return, Butler's been in and out, Henson missed a couple games, etc). In another unrelated fantasy note, my league is apparently populated by people who think waiver wire level players are worth trading and are annoyed when I point this out to them.
4) Cleveland and the Knicks somewhat predictably had chemistry issues and aren't very good. Both also appears to have serious coaching issues, but Bynum and Waiters and Bennett are all basically problems to mix in and JR Smith is a complete sentence of disaster inflicted on a basketball team. Added to the artist formerly known as Amare Stoudemire and his contract albatross, and Carmelo's possible departure in the off season and it's a pitiful sight.
5) Golden State shouldn't be that surprising to rip off a few wins in a row. They played a brutal schedule to start the year. Of their last 7 games, 3 have been against the East, and the East is mostly terrible and three others were against the Suns, Lakers, and Nuggets, middling western teams. The Heat win tonight and the Clippers win were the impressive ones. All that said, I'd figure they were due for an easy patch. They still only have 7 games against the East for the year (6-1). All the teams ahead of them in the conference standings (except for the Clippers, who have managed to lose games to the Cavs and Bobcats) have more wins against the East than the Warriors have played games against the East.
Dallas, Minnesota, and even New Orleans have padded their records with mostly inferior competition from a weak conference.
6) Scoring seems like it's a little higher. Mostly this is a pace issue (it's up about 2 possessions per game from last year). I approve of teams playing faster and shooting (and making) threes. They're not scoring at a comparable rate to last year though as it's a little sloppier.
Edit: Spoke early, but CP3 is now out for a month or so on the Clippers too.
1) Toronto seems legit now. In as far as any middling Eastern conference team is "legit".
This should not be a good sign that two teams have improved after trading away Rudy Gay for his value as an NBA player. They are 8-3 since the trade with wins over the Pacers and Thunder (two losses of the three are to the Spurs, but two wins are over the Knicks and another over the Sixers. Who are basically minor league teams this year).
2) Phoenix seems more legit. I'm not entirely sure how that happened. Dragic and Bledsoe are both playing at very high levels basically and they somehow turned Gerald Green (he of modest slam dunk contest fame and little else) into a quality NBA player who can make threes. Their defense is also passable but not as great as it started off the season. They also haven't played much out East yet to pad their record (6 games).
3) Injuries are really important:
a) Chicago is basically toast between Rose (out for the year) and Deng (out off and on).
b) Brooklyn has had Williams, Lopez, Kirilenko, Terry, and Pierce out for various stretches, and Lopez is now out for the year. So they're hurting even with the win tonight over OKC.
Between these two teams being decimated, there's no competition for Miami and Indiana out East.
c) Horford being out should more or less cancel out Atlanta as a wild card in the East too.
d) Memphis' famous grinding style has imploded for a while with Gasol out to anchor the D. They're ugly on offence as expected, but without the D, they're just ugly.
e) The Lakers would have sucked either way, but Kobe's out.
f) Westbrook being out is really important to the Thunder. They'll still win a lot of games while he's out, but they're not as dynamic offensively.
g) Reddick being out is a huge downgrade for the Clippers. Willie Green?
h) Anthony Davis of unibrow fame being out really hurt the Pelicans.
Also, it's not relevant to the league since they're terrible. But. Milwaukee needs to announce their injuries a little more clearly. Apparently even to the PA guy in the stadium. This was a minor annoyance for fantasy league purposes (Knight was out for a while with an uncertain return, Butler's been in and out, Henson missed a couple games, etc). In another unrelated fantasy note, my league is apparently populated by people who think waiver wire level players are worth trading and are annoyed when I point this out to them.
4) Cleveland and the Knicks somewhat predictably had chemistry issues and aren't very good. Both also appears to have serious coaching issues, but Bynum and Waiters and Bennett are all basically problems to mix in and JR Smith is a complete sentence of disaster inflicted on a basketball team. Added to the artist formerly known as Amare Stoudemire and his contract albatross, and Carmelo's possible departure in the off season and it's a pitiful sight.
5) Golden State shouldn't be that surprising to rip off a few wins in a row. They played a brutal schedule to start the year. Of their last 7 games, 3 have been against the East, and the East is mostly terrible and three others were against the Suns, Lakers, and Nuggets, middling western teams. The Heat win tonight and the Clippers win were the impressive ones. All that said, I'd figure they were due for an easy patch. They still only have 7 games against the East for the year (6-1). All the teams ahead of them in the conference standings (except for the Clippers, who have managed to lose games to the Cavs and Bobcats) have more wins against the East than the Warriors have played games against the East.
Dallas, Minnesota, and even New Orleans have padded their records with mostly inferior competition from a weak conference.
6) Scoring seems like it's a little higher. Mostly this is a pace issue (it's up about 2 possessions per game from last year). I approve of teams playing faster and shooting (and making) threes. They're not scoring at a comparable rate to last year though as it's a little sloppier.
Edit: Spoke early, but CP3 is now out for a month or so on the Clippers too.
A detour
I will get to a couple posts on my previous digression (NSA and abortion both come to mind as topics that deserve analysis like that), but the common culture news involved a story that intersected the Great American Waterfowl Hereditary Rulers kerfuffle and the American sport I find most ridiculous and/or boring to watch (football). So I figured I should comment on it.
Again, as with the ducks, people can be disciplined or fired by their employers for saying things the employer finds controversial or unpopular. This includes speech that many, many people agree with (again, as with the ducks, just in the other direction). So for that much, let's move on.
I was vaguely aware of Chris Kluwe as a political dissident of sorts within the NFL ranks. He had a campaign to get a punter into the NFL Hall of Fame (which is self-serving since he's a punter himself), but more notably he was involved in a campaign locally in Minnesota against a proposed law banning gay marriage, which subsequently failed, and indirectly involved in defending a fellow NFL player in Baltimore who expressed similar supportive to LGBT rights views against a local political figure demanding his penalty by the team. I did not find his essay written to the local politician all that constructive, enlightening, or likely persuasive (it included some of the same "I'm for the constitution!" logic that I'm finding I have trouble with on many issues these days as it is not productive to deploy it), even as I agreed with most of its central points on marriage equality and free speech. But it did raise his profile on the issue. Clearly this is among many issues he cares about and wishes to speak freely and plainly about and bravo I say to that.
What is less clear is how that follows into a path that resulted in his dismissal from the team he played on. There are several complicating factors with that path of logic:
1) Punters are essentially an expensive specialty function on a football team. An extravagance rather than a necessity. If I ran one, I would not even have a specialized punter on it. I'd just have someone who could kick (the FG kicker or pretty much anyone marginally coordinated and athletic) occasionally punt when it was necessary and probably not even from a punting formation (and this would not be often since I wouldn't punt most of the time that teams are supposedly "forced" to punt). Paying someone 1.5M+ dollars when someone else could essentially do the same things for a third of the price is absurd, as is paying someone that amount when that's all they do on a football field. Kluwe was good at this one thing, but he was not so good at it that he was distinguished easily from a dozen or so other players who could do the same thing, potentially for less money.
And that one thing isn't typically that important versus other things other players can do. Some statistical evaluators of football count punting as a turnover rather than a useful skill. Kicking a long field is useful because it puts points on the board. Punting is usually just giving the other team the ball hopefully in a less useful place on the field while conceding the attempt to keep the ball for your own uses, an attempt which in many cases would either succeed or not sufficiently damage field position that the punt should matter.
2) His performance appears to have declined enough that he was potentially not worth the premium price a team would pay for it. For a punter, a decline does not have to be very much, or the increase in pay from veteran salary structure very much that they can become expendable. We can see that he probably wasn't all that important to the overall success of the team's special teams unit as it fell all the way from 5th last year to... 6th this season. It's possible any decline or decline versus pay would keep him out of the league on an on-going basis well before the attempt at self-flagellation by dragging his former team through the mud on the suspicion that they fired him for something he said.
I'd note I said something similar about Jason Collins after his announcement of his homosexuality at the end of last season and the possibility of playing in the NBA this season. He's a more clearly marginal player who was older and more obviously on the decline skill wise but the process is similar. It's possible both should be capable enough to play somewhere in their professional leagues, and they're both certainly much better at what they do than many hundreds of millions of people. But for how much would a team have to pay them to do what they can still do?
3) He was coming off an injury/surgery in the off-season to his leg. It's very possible the team didn't communicate over his recovery very well for internal reasons aside from just salary-cost benefit ratios of course (read: they wanted to be rid of his politics) but a punter coming off a leg surgery is potentially a liability worth replacing anyway or at least investigating a replacement option who might be better or cheaper.
4) Ownership of the team was supportive of his statements, at least on that issue of marriage equality and legal recognition of homosexual partnerships (it was not clear from Kluwe's writing that they were supportive of other statements, such as those relating to the ex-Pope say?). If management wasn't supportive, I'd suggest ownership take it up with them to get on the same page therein.
So from these, I am not persuaded he was fired or punished as clearly for the comments he was making in the way that Mr Robertson was by AE (in so far as one considers he was punished at all, which I'd say he was not at this point). I concede it is still very possible that his own narrative is conclusive and correct, but there are enough complicating factors that it is not an open and shut case for causes even with that damning accusation being floated and supported. I am not familiar with NFL labor contracts, but I'd guess the team is allowed to get rid of you for "conduct detrimental to the team", which is basically a vague catch-all phrase that might include this basis and my understanding of his contractual rights on his own contract is that he could be dismissed in the off-season without penalty to the team for basically any reason whatsoever because the NFL's understanding and use of "guaranteed contracts" is a lot fuzzier than MLB or the NBA. So there doesn't appear to be a legal issue here.
Ethically though, it sounds like there are two different problems with the Vikings organisation that were ongoing:
1) There appears to be a sketchy and subject to arbitrary whim system used for player evaluation being disguised as a scientifically useful "metric". If his claims that most of the team's special teams unit players had a "negative rating" in 2012 are accurate, that's a unit that rated in the top 10 in the NFL that year (DVOA has them 5th, they were 6th this year, and 26th Priefer's first year in 2011). Maybe Kluwe personally had a negative rating, or some individuals did, but most of that team unit? Either the system is horribly flawed or the coach is a sadistic bastard who wants his players to think they are terrible at their jobs so they can be replaced easier even if they are quite good at them and is essentially lying to them all season.
If that's the meaning of "details-oriented" coaching, I'm not surprised that many NFL organisations seem to struggle through by recycling coaches and unit coordinators from other teams as it doesn't sound like a data-driven approach helping modify the team psychology and performance as a form of details. It mostly sounds like authoritarian nonsense masquerading as a rigorous scientific approach because there's a quantifiable number being used somewhere in the process and somebody somewhere might have used a computer to look at it rather than potentially more meaningful data.
2) The comments, particularly "the put all the gays on an island and nuke it" one, are abhorrent in any context. Particularly when made aggressively or assertively by an authority figure, but they're far, far worse than Robertson's "homosexuality is a sin" and "vagina is better" statements* and the tone does not sound like these were statements made with some humorous rant intention that might somehow obviate it with sarcasm say. If those statements can be corroborated, I'd seriously doubt he gets the Vikings head coaching position next year, or maybe any other coaching position. He has denied stating them, but there's enough circumstantial evidence (his son's twitter feed for instance) that suggest it's a common occurrence that demands some rigorous investigation if a team does not want to annoy some not-insubstantial percentage of the broader public by elevating him to a higher position within the organisation.
That second problem needs to be cleaned up and addressed. Even if one is an evangelical or fundamentalist Christian and holds homosexuality in very low regard morally, it seems rather worse than blind faith adherence to that moral finding to proceed to advocate for the purposeful destruction of millions of other human beings while in a modestly public setting such as a team clubhouse. It seems also like an unproductive use of his time and energy as a team employee to make such a statement rather than, I don't know, coaching the football team and attempting to enhance the players' on-field abilities with motivation and direction and planning.
In as far as Kluwe quotes the now-ex-head-coach (Frazier) as saying something to the effect of keeping politics and religion out of the locker room (and by extension off one's twitter feed), this might be accurate when one's politics and religion lead one to adopt violent and damaging imagery as a means of describing those views. That doesn't appear to have been a mandate that was applied to Priefer, just Kluwe. Which is a problem of consistency that allows a certain privileged position of gross and destructive intolerance relative immunity while punishing its opposite for the suggestion of moderated tolerance. It also appears to basically have nothing to do with football as a norm anyway; plenty of players advocate for their faith or for political issues that they have some attachment to. Not many advocate against the Pope or for gay marriage rights of course. But it amazed me how popular Tim Tebow was as though he was the only NFL player making such demonstrations and proclamations involving personal faith and he certainly involved himself in political topics, controversial ones at that. He was not the only one to do so; he just seemed like the only one ESPN wanted to talk about because he was polarizing when he did.
I would highly doubt that with a reasonably close-knit group of men living and training in close proximity for months at a time that faith and politics would be abolished as a general rule from off-field discourse. They might be discouraged among some, or things that others do not care about and do not care to talk about or be talked to about. But that's not the same as saying there's some unwritten rule about what you can't talk about in the team clubhouse or post on one's twitter feed in between games as general topics (there undoubtedly are ways of expression and specific topics within faith or politics that can get one in some hot water of course).
The team probably needs to set out some basic "wait... what the fuck did you just say?" rule for both players and coaches as a result rather than pretend that these sorts of comments exist in a non-existent universe where they didn't actually happen. Given that there are other players and coaches who have gotten into penalty mode for saying abusive or absurdly intolerant things on homosexuality in the past couple of years, I'd expect some penalty for the coach (assuming he did actually say some of the things he is accused of saying).
*Robertson has since either said or been dug up saying other repugnant things that are much less commonly held to be acceptable by millions of people, such as potentially encouraging statutory rape (by exhorting men to marry 15-16 year old girls, essentially because they're easier to dominate socially than a 20 year old), or his various comments on the Jim Crow South and race or religion (he has some noted Islamophobia and anti-immigrant views as well). These statements are horrible too, perhaps much worse than his initial homosexuality remarks for the level of bigotry and intolerance suggested in them, but they're still not suggestive that he would prefer to kill millions of people via his disgust for homosexuals either. They're more like the same ignorant nonsense that one might have expected him to say if one were given a stereotypical description of his on-screen character in a reality TV show about a group of Southern hunters in a patriarchal family unit run by an older white guy who grew up in that environment.
Again, as with the ducks, people can be disciplined or fired by their employers for saying things the employer finds controversial or unpopular. This includes speech that many, many people agree with (again, as with the ducks, just in the other direction). So for that much, let's move on.
I was vaguely aware of Chris Kluwe as a political dissident of sorts within the NFL ranks. He had a campaign to get a punter into the NFL Hall of Fame (which is self-serving since he's a punter himself), but more notably he was involved in a campaign locally in Minnesota against a proposed law banning gay marriage, which subsequently failed, and indirectly involved in defending a fellow NFL player in Baltimore who expressed similar supportive to LGBT rights views against a local political figure demanding his penalty by the team. I did not find his essay written to the local politician all that constructive, enlightening, or likely persuasive (it included some of the same "I'm for the constitution!" logic that I'm finding I have trouble with on many issues these days as it is not productive to deploy it), even as I agreed with most of its central points on marriage equality and free speech. But it did raise his profile on the issue. Clearly this is among many issues he cares about and wishes to speak freely and plainly about and bravo I say to that.
What is less clear is how that follows into a path that resulted in his dismissal from the team he played on. There are several complicating factors with that path of logic:
1) Punters are essentially an expensive specialty function on a football team. An extravagance rather than a necessity. If I ran one, I would not even have a specialized punter on it. I'd just have someone who could kick (the FG kicker or pretty much anyone marginally coordinated and athletic) occasionally punt when it was necessary and probably not even from a punting formation (and this would not be often since I wouldn't punt most of the time that teams are supposedly "forced" to punt). Paying someone 1.5M+ dollars when someone else could essentially do the same things for a third of the price is absurd, as is paying someone that amount when that's all they do on a football field. Kluwe was good at this one thing, but he was not so good at it that he was distinguished easily from a dozen or so other players who could do the same thing, potentially for less money.
And that one thing isn't typically that important versus other things other players can do. Some statistical evaluators of football count punting as a turnover rather than a useful skill. Kicking a long field is useful because it puts points on the board. Punting is usually just giving the other team the ball hopefully in a less useful place on the field while conceding the attempt to keep the ball for your own uses, an attempt which in many cases would either succeed or not sufficiently damage field position that the punt should matter.
2) His performance appears to have declined enough that he was potentially not worth the premium price a team would pay for it. For a punter, a decline does not have to be very much, or the increase in pay from veteran salary structure very much that they can become expendable. We can see that he probably wasn't all that important to the overall success of the team's special teams unit as it fell all the way from 5th last year to... 6th this season. It's possible any decline or decline versus pay would keep him out of the league on an on-going basis well before the attempt at self-flagellation by dragging his former team through the mud on the suspicion that they fired him for something he said.
I'd note I said something similar about Jason Collins after his announcement of his homosexuality at the end of last season and the possibility of playing in the NBA this season. He's a more clearly marginal player who was older and more obviously on the decline skill wise but the process is similar. It's possible both should be capable enough to play somewhere in their professional leagues, and they're both certainly much better at what they do than many hundreds of millions of people. But for how much would a team have to pay them to do what they can still do?
3) He was coming off an injury/surgery in the off-season to his leg. It's very possible the team didn't communicate over his recovery very well for internal reasons aside from just salary-cost benefit ratios of course (read: they wanted to be rid of his politics) but a punter coming off a leg surgery is potentially a liability worth replacing anyway or at least investigating a replacement option who might be better or cheaper.
4) Ownership of the team was supportive of his statements, at least on that issue of marriage equality and legal recognition of homosexual partnerships (it was not clear from Kluwe's writing that they were supportive of other statements, such as those relating to the ex-Pope say?). If management wasn't supportive, I'd suggest ownership take it up with them to get on the same page therein.
So from these, I am not persuaded he was fired or punished as clearly for the comments he was making in the way that Mr Robertson was by AE (in so far as one considers he was punished at all, which I'd say he was not at this point). I concede it is still very possible that his own narrative is conclusive and correct, but there are enough complicating factors that it is not an open and shut case for causes even with that damning accusation being floated and supported. I am not familiar with NFL labor contracts, but I'd guess the team is allowed to get rid of you for "conduct detrimental to the team", which is basically a vague catch-all phrase that might include this basis and my understanding of his contractual rights on his own contract is that he could be dismissed in the off-season without penalty to the team for basically any reason whatsoever because the NFL's understanding and use of "guaranteed contracts" is a lot fuzzier than MLB or the NBA. So there doesn't appear to be a legal issue here.
Ethically though, it sounds like there are two different problems with the Vikings organisation that were ongoing:
1) There appears to be a sketchy and subject to arbitrary whim system used for player evaluation being disguised as a scientifically useful "metric". If his claims that most of the team's special teams unit players had a "negative rating" in 2012 are accurate, that's a unit that rated in the top 10 in the NFL that year (DVOA has them 5th, they were 6th this year, and 26th Priefer's first year in 2011). Maybe Kluwe personally had a negative rating, or some individuals did, but most of that team unit? Either the system is horribly flawed or the coach is a sadistic bastard who wants his players to think they are terrible at their jobs so they can be replaced easier even if they are quite good at them and is essentially lying to them all season.
If that's the meaning of "details-oriented" coaching, I'm not surprised that many NFL organisations seem to struggle through by recycling coaches and unit coordinators from other teams as it doesn't sound like a data-driven approach helping modify the team psychology and performance as a form of details. It mostly sounds like authoritarian nonsense masquerading as a rigorous scientific approach because there's a quantifiable number being used somewhere in the process and somebody somewhere might have used a computer to look at it rather than potentially more meaningful data.
2) The comments, particularly "the put all the gays on an island and nuke it" one, are abhorrent in any context. Particularly when made aggressively or assertively by an authority figure, but they're far, far worse than Robertson's "homosexuality is a sin" and "vagina is better" statements* and the tone does not sound like these were statements made with some humorous rant intention that might somehow obviate it with sarcasm say. If those statements can be corroborated, I'd seriously doubt he gets the Vikings head coaching position next year, or maybe any other coaching position. He has denied stating them, but there's enough circumstantial evidence (his son's twitter feed for instance) that suggest it's a common occurrence that demands some rigorous investigation if a team does not want to annoy some not-insubstantial percentage of the broader public by elevating him to a higher position within the organisation.
That second problem needs to be cleaned up and addressed. Even if one is an evangelical or fundamentalist Christian and holds homosexuality in very low regard morally, it seems rather worse than blind faith adherence to that moral finding to proceed to advocate for the purposeful destruction of millions of other human beings while in a modestly public setting such as a team clubhouse. It seems also like an unproductive use of his time and energy as a team employee to make such a statement rather than, I don't know, coaching the football team and attempting to enhance the players' on-field abilities with motivation and direction and planning.
In as far as Kluwe quotes the now-ex-head-coach (Frazier) as saying something to the effect of keeping politics and religion out of the locker room (and by extension off one's twitter feed), this might be accurate when one's politics and religion lead one to adopt violent and damaging imagery as a means of describing those views. That doesn't appear to have been a mandate that was applied to Priefer, just Kluwe. Which is a problem of consistency that allows a certain privileged position of gross and destructive intolerance relative immunity while punishing its opposite for the suggestion of moderated tolerance. It also appears to basically have nothing to do with football as a norm anyway; plenty of players advocate for their faith or for political issues that they have some attachment to. Not many advocate against the Pope or for gay marriage rights of course. But it amazed me how popular Tim Tebow was as though he was the only NFL player making such demonstrations and proclamations involving personal faith and he certainly involved himself in political topics, controversial ones at that. He was not the only one to do so; he just seemed like the only one ESPN wanted to talk about because he was polarizing when he did.
I would highly doubt that with a reasonably close-knit group of men living and training in close proximity for months at a time that faith and politics would be abolished as a general rule from off-field discourse. They might be discouraged among some, or things that others do not care about and do not care to talk about or be talked to about. But that's not the same as saying there's some unwritten rule about what you can't talk about in the team clubhouse or post on one's twitter feed in between games as general topics (there undoubtedly are ways of expression and specific topics within faith or politics that can get one in some hot water of course).
The team probably needs to set out some basic "wait... what the fuck did you just say?" rule for both players and coaches as a result rather than pretend that these sorts of comments exist in a non-existent universe where they didn't actually happen. Given that there are other players and coaches who have gotten into penalty mode for saying abusive or absurdly intolerant things on homosexuality in the past couple of years, I'd expect some penalty for the coach (assuming he did actually say some of the things he is accused of saying).
*Robertson has since either said or been dug up saying other repugnant things that are much less commonly held to be acceptable by millions of people, such as potentially encouraging statutory rape (by exhorting men to marry 15-16 year old girls, essentially because they're easier to dominate socially than a 20 year old), or his various comments on the Jim Crow South and race or religion (he has some noted Islamophobia and anti-immigrant views as well). These statements are horrible too, perhaps much worse than his initial homosexuality remarks for the level of bigotry and intolerance suggested in them, but they're still not suggestive that he would prefer to kill millions of people via his disgust for homosexuals either. They're more like the same ignorant nonsense that one might have expected him to say if one were given a stereotypical description of his on-screen character in a reality TV show about a group of Southern hunters in a patriarchal family unit run by an older white guy who grew up in that environment.
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