Friday, May 16, 2008Here, in two paragraphs, is why I will be voting for McCain this November. Taken from his remarks to the NRA:Senator Obama has said, if elected, he will withdraw Americans from Iraq quickly no matter what the situation on the ground is and no matter what U.S. military commanders advise. But if we withdraw prematurely from Iraq, al Qaeda in Iraq will survive, proclaim victory and continue to provoke sectarian tensions that, while they have been subdued by the success of the surge, still exist, and are ripe for provocation by al Qaeda. Civil war in Iraq could easily descend into genocide, and destabilize the entire region as neighboring powers come to the aid of their favored factions. A reckless and premature withdrawal would be a terrible defeat for our security interests and our values. Iran will view it as a victory, and the biggest state supporter of terrorists, a country with nuclear ambitions and a stated desire to destroy the Sta te of Israel, will see its influence in the Middle East grow significantly. The consequences of our defeat would threaten us for years, and those who argue for premature withdrawal, as both Senators Obama and Clinton do, are arguing for a course that would eventually draw us into a wider and more difficult war that would entail far greater dangers and sacrifices than we have suffered to date. Thanks to the counterinsurgency instigated by General Petreaus, after four years of terribly costly mistakes, we have a realistic chance to succeed in helping the forces of political reconciliation prevail in Iraq, and the democratically elected Iraqi Government, with a professional and competent Iraqi army, impose its authority throughout the country and defend its borders. We have a realistic chance of denying al Qaeda any sanctuary in Iraq. We have a realistic chance of leaving behind in Iraq a force for stability and peace in the region, and not a cause for a wider and far more dangerous war. I do not argue against withdrawal because I am indifferent to war and the suffering it inflicts on too many American families. I hold my position because I hate war, and I know very well and very personally how grievous its wages are. But I know, too, that we must sometimes pay those wages to avoid paying even higher ones later. I want our soldiers home, too, just as quickly as we can bring them back without risking everything they suffered for, and burdening them with greater sacrifices in the years ahead. That I will not do. I have spent my life in service to my country, and I will never, never, never risk her security for the sake of my own ambitions. I will defend her, and all her freedoms, so help me God. And I ask you to help me in that good cause. Thank you, and God bless you. McCain experienced the horrors of war firsthand, but knows that we must do what we must do to preserve our great nation.Obama thinks the horrors of war consist in having to wear a flag pin just because people who didn't edit the Harvard Review are dying overseas to keep your scrawny ass safe in the homeland. And it's too much for him to bear! I've never been a fan of McCain, and I'm sure I'll have plenty to bitch about under a President McCain. But come November, I'll have no trouble picking my candidate. 
posted by gbarto at 7:20 PM
Wednesday, May 14, 2008AOL Home page Headline:Edwards Makes His Choice He Supports a Former Rival I'm just wondering how often a former presidential candidate has managed to support someone who wasn't a former rival. Did someone think he'd endorse Ron Paul? Of course, with all the acrimony in the Democrat party these days, maybe it is something novel for one Democrat to support another. :P The story is here, but with a different headline.
posted by gbarto at 6:30 PM
Tuesday, May 13, 2008Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, there's an interesting post on "science studies," postmodernism, etc. The comments are interesting too. The crux of it comes from a reprint of Norman Leavitt, of which I think this is the nut:[Professor el Hajj's] ideas are at the least heavily tinctured with what, for want of a better term, is usually called "postmodernism." This incorporates the attitude that knowledge claims are, perforce, political claims, that "objective knowledge" is an oxymoron, and that modern science, in particular, is a repressive ideological edifice designed to bolster the hegemony of western capitalist patriarchal societies, not least by demeaning and displacing the "alternative ways of knowing" that are embedded in non-western cultures or are simply more appropriate to marginalized sub-populations (women for instance!)A few thoughts: When I was in grad school, I ran across Postmodernism, Post-modernism and postmodernism. I don't remember which was which, but one of them, drawing on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, simply argued that 1) the observer does affect the observed, 2) the position of observation affects what is observed and 3) as a result, knowledge has inherent in it a certain amount of instability. This was a counterpoint to the view of "moderns" that if we did enough science and studies, eventually, we'd decode the whole universe and know everything we might want to know. Another variant worried about the power inherent in knowledge claims and decided that most knowledge was suspect, but seemed vaguely aware that in asserting this it was biting its own tail. The third variety said that power over knowledge was tyrannical and seemed to finish by claiming that only the powerless could therefore exercise untainted knowledge. It is the third school that the most outrageous postmoderns belong to, and that critics of postmodernism like to criticize the most. For what it's worth, I'm borderline postmodern - I do think knowledge is unstable. History makes this pretty clear. And while science seems to go on steady marches toward ever-refined truth, it seems to me that every time it gets too close to solving all the riddles, we stumble on something new that blows all the old stuff out of the water. No matter how well you peel the onion, there's always another layer. However, science is not truth - it's knowing. And to the extent that science helps us reliably predict the future based on past experimentation, it's real. Even to the extent that it helps us consistently explain the past - i.e. evolution and astronomy - it's worth doing. In other words, I don't think science will ever solve the ultimate question of the universe, much less find it to be something as simple as 42. But it will solve a lot of other questions that can help us both better understand our world and get a better sense of what our options really are before we're forced to rely on intuition or faith for the final judgment. Where do I stand on "science studies"? They raise real questions, but the answers should be in the practical realist vein (just because ultimate truth is unknowable doesn't mean we can't find some pretty good provisional truth and work with that unless and until we find something that works better). Some fit this bill, but many are illogical cranks who use their status as marginalized - a marginalization owing to their daftness and petulance - to assert that they have the truest, or maybe truthiest, truth. It is true that scientists will find what they're looking for. Not only did Israeli archaeologists find proof that their narrative of history was borne out, but physicists keep finding proof of an ordered universe that makes sense and is explainable by physics, at least until something new comes along and they're sent back to the drawing board. To their credit, though, they go back to the drawing board, as opposed to arguing that they're being oppressed. The problems come when provisional knowledge is conflated with ultimate truth. The evolutionists and creationists conceivably could find common ground if the evolutionists admitted that they don't really have proof or understanding of how non-life became life and therefore can't rule out God while the creationists admitted that if testing drugs on a rat tells us if they'll be fatal to humans then an evolutionary model that says we have things in common with monkeys - far more similar to humans at a glance - is worth using to think about how life works. One issue though, with reference to one of the comments: Whenever I find myself in agreement with JFThomas, I have to do a reality check--but I agree with his point about the influence of "science studies" folk. They may affect the victims studies/various ethnic studies programs, but I don't think they will be designing and socially constructed bridges for the rest of us to drive on any time soon.That sounds good as far as it goes and marginalizes (there's that word again!) the importance of the debate. But it ignores that while the "science studies" folks aren't designing bridges, their brethren are undermining our belief in standardized tests and the metrics used by education systems and certification organizations such that they may get a greater say in who does design bridges, perform surgeries, etc. than we'd be comfortable with.
posted by gbarto at 11:15 AM
Sunday, May 11, 2008Over at Michael Totten's blog, there's a Tony Badran post on the Obama campaign's response to events in Lebanon. According to the Obama campaign:It's time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.The poster notes that according to the Obamanians: Yes, the problem with Lebanon is not the militia backed by Damascus and Tehran who have squared off against almost every US ally in the Middle East. No, in the Obama worldview, the issue is about “the corrupt patronage system.”Unfortunately, this isn't simply about Obama's naïveté about foreign policy. This is about Obama's naïveté about the whole world. Ask yourself, does this not sound exactly like Obama's explanation for the thinking of rural Pennsylvanians? We're not dealing with an aw-shucks Jimmy Carter type here. We're dealing with a full-blown Marxist materialist who sees the whole world as being nothing more than the interplay of politico-economic structures and an unconscious proletariat in need of his guidance to effectuate its self-liberation. Which leads to the question: If the rural Pennsylvanians who cling to Gods and guns decided to break away from the U.S. government and form their own country in a country, would Obama send the Secretary of State or the National Guard?
posted by gbarto at 12:26 PM
Monday, May 05, 2008Reports InsideHigherEd (via Instapundit):In an effort to increase access to higher education, the government has been lavishing financial aid on students. The largest of these subsidies are the loan programs (primarily the federal direct and guaranteed loan programs, Perkins and PLUS), which accounted for just under 70 percent of all federal financial aid last year, according to the College Board. But there is reason to believe that these subsidies do not achieve their goal due to an unintended consequence, specifically, the incentive the subsidies give to colleges to increase their tuition.Instapundit, for his part, notes: I suspect that runups in higher education costs have been underwritten by the availability of easy credit to students and parents, and I wonder if colleges and universities won't meet a lot more market resistance if that credit dries up even partially.What I'm wondering is whether this is in any meaningful way different from the housing mess. Or the S&L mess. When I took economics a hundred years ago, we learned all about supply and demand, and then we learned about intervention at the macro level by the government. What struck me at the time is that while the mechanics of markets finding a price level were quite clear, figuring out how the government could best make adjustments at the macro level is really quite tricky. The real problem is not how, but why? And I think we've lost our way with the why. The problem we face today is that the government has been tampering with the economy so long that we don't really know what's underneath. What's housing demand? Between the breaks for home ownership, the encouragement for lending, the push to lend to minorities, incentives at the local level to construct housing, etc, nobody knows what people are really prepared to pay to put a roof over their heads, or to take ownership of the house as opposed to renting. What we have instead is a system where it's assumed that you'll put some kind of roof over your head, but there are government restrictions on how you can build your house that push up the cost, followed by government incentives to make up for the fact that houses are too expensive, followed by prices going up because screwed up credit rules to encourage home ownership increase the credit available to purchase homes and, for that matter, to speculate in them. By the way, how do we know that houses are too expensive? Because politicians pitching to the middle class think that expanding home ownership will all them to claim that their policies are allowing more people access to the American dream. The same goes for higher education, only it's worse because while owning a house at least keeps out the rain, what a college degree does for you is more nebulous these days. What's striking in all this is that while we complain plenty about how the government taxes us to give our own money back, we don't give nearly as much thought to how much government paternalism costs us by screwing up the markets in which we must participate to draw out our living and acquire the things we need and want in life. Reagan used to say that when a politician starts talking about how he's going to help you, you'd better keep your hand on your wallet. But on the tail end of years of the government driving economic expansion as much as possible, whenever possible, while avoiding putting on the brakes - that's no fun - but never just leaving the economy alone, it's time to expand the maxim: If a politician is in Washington and he's breathing, hang onto your wallet. Because the question isn't whether it's going to cost you - only when and how much, and, of course, whether you'll even realize it. What to do then? I'm inclined to say, "as little as possible." The one thing that creates a bigger mess than the government simply acting is the government acting to set right what it's screwed up before.
posted by gbarto at 10:53 PM
Wednesday, April 30, 2008What if whole economy is made up?Instapundit flags Tom Friedman talking about Hillary and McCain's pandering on the gas tax. The quote from Friedman: We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.In the last few weeks, there's been a lot written about libertarian paternalism. See this post on libertarian paternalism and choice architectures, for example. Main point: “Choice architectures” and “libertarian paternalism” are just fancy ways of saying that authorities make it more expensive (in the broad sense of money, time, convenience, etc.) to make some choices rather than others.Here's the thing, and it's why McCain and Hillary are right to pander, and Friedman and Obama are wrong for their seemingly sensible positions: The libertarian paternalists, when they latch on to a cause, are quick to assume that all they need to do is lock in one of these choice architectures and the system will automatically correct. There are three questionable assumptions here: 1) The paternalists know what needs to be done when everyone else has failed to understand. 2) The effects will be limited to correcting what is need of correction and the effects on other things will be marginal. 3) The people who have been acting contrary to what the paternalists desire are irrational actors who need to be corrected in their actions, not rational actors responding to the environment they inhabit. Often, libertarian paternalist proposals are tantamount to flooding a village for a new hydroelectric dam - those leading the charge are too caught up in their idealized vision for the future to understand the consequences of their actions on the ground or see those affected as other than benighted obstacles to progress. The conservative assumption that things are the way they are needs to be taken into consideration here. It may be that what brought us to where we are is not right or rational, but that doesn't mean that the people acting within the pre-existing choice architectures were irrational. Au contraire, the reason even questionable systems hold is precisely because rational actors have made rational adaptations for them so that they are no longer so inherently irrational, but instead make sense within the rules of the game as it is played. Consequently, choice architectures should be modified only incrementally so that as old rules change, people have time to make the necessary adaptations. This is especially the case in a world where government tampering with the economy means that simply following economic logic as understood by the classical economists and without reacting to the artificial incentives and discouragements of government is not just challenging but economically suicidal. Let us consider the savings and loan crisis in the late '80s: the lending rules for the S&Ls and the tax policies that prompted their exploitation for the construction of buildings that probably didn't need to be built were irrational, perhaps. But the people who took advantage of this were not irrational. They made rational decisions based on the facts on the ground. When we made the system more "rational" by changing the tax code, we pulled the rug out from under a lot of people who had previously been told that building houses of cards was a perfectly reasonable thing to do because the topsy-turvy rules of before made it a better investment than doing things the old fashioned way. You can argue that there were thieves and fools involved in the S&L crisis, and that the way of doing business in those days needed to change. But the actual crisis was brought on by government action that suddenly punished behavior that was previously awarded. For people who had money on the table for than a few months, it was the economic equivalent of outlawing some form of behavior and then rounding up everyone who'd engaged in it during the decade before the law was passed. We're seeing the same thing with the credit card industry. In the past, the rules for credit cards may have been ridiculous, and designed to keep people forever in debt. But both the credit card companies and a lot of their users had found a way to artificially prop up credit card profits on the one hand and struggle through life with access to at least limited credit lines on the other hand. A few years back, they made the credit card companies double minimum payments so people would pay off their debt. It sounded like a good and noble idea, but ignored the fact that both the banks and the consumers had been making decisions based on the old rules for a decade or more. Now borrowers are defaulting and banks are writing loans down. Citigroup and Bank of America are in a heap of trouble. A change in the choice architecture, intended to make things better in the long run, screwed over both banks and consumers caught in the mid-term adjustment to new rules. Then there's the housing mess. In order to promote home ownership, governments at all levels are forever pushing one proposal after another to make it easier to buy a home. To discourage discrimination, rules were put in place to make it harder to deny minority applicants. To encourage people to invest in a home, rules about lending were relaxed. In order to encourage people to buy homes, the tax code has been manipulated willy-nilly. And, of course, housing prices have gone up artificially because the number of potential buyers has been artificially inflated. Again, we're looking not at direct government action, but the creation of choice architectures to encourage people to do what those who know best thought they should: buy homes. That hasn't worked so well either, it's now becoming clear. Tom Friedman wants to discourage people from driving cars by pushing up the gas tax. But for the past fifty years, the taxpayers have paid mightily to build a transportation infrastructure for cars. For the past fifty years, the same elite that talks up public transportation has commuted from the suburbs or lived in neighborhoods most couldn't afford while their unwillingness to confront corrupt city government, inner city crime and recalcitrant teachers' unions have let the cities they want us to live in fall into decay. For decades, artificial bolstering of unions and on-again, off-again trade policies have militated against America putting her best foot forward in developing new transportation options. People don't own cars because they're pollution-loving, mother-earth hating monsters with a reckless desire to prop up the Saudis. They do it because the existing choice architectures made it the rational thing to do. And, as always happens, if you try to radically readjust the choice architecture for one goal without considering all the pre-existing choice architectures that made us come to do things the way we do them today, people are going to get squashed. McCain and Hillary are right to pander on the gas tax. Given our economic situation and the toll that transportation costs are taking on our economy, the last thing we need to do is to also encourage everyone to sit at home and watch the grass grow just as we head into tourist season. What we need right now is short term efforts to help people weather the other idiocies that well-intentioned governments at all levels have already injected into our economic system so that as we incrementally improve our response to the energy situation, people can afford to make the necessary adjustments. What we don't need is to put the college kids who wait tables and deliver pizzas out of work during the tourist season when they save up for the next semester so that Tom Friedman can feel like we're doing something. What we don't need is to have people put their tax rebate back into gas taxes so Obama can prove he loves the earth more than Hillary. What we don't need is to park the tractor trailers because transportation costs make goods too expensive to buy, even if you feel like spending the money to put gas in the car to drive to the nearest shopping center. We've spent millenia creating the global warming thing, to the small if even existent extent that it's anthropogenic, if it exists. We've spent more than a hundred years creating the energy driven economy and more than fifty years watching the connected Middle East mess unfold. What we need to do now is to hurry up and wait till we have a more coherent idea where we go from here, rather than implementing a few new choice architectures that history will show were well intended but had consequences far beyond what the market socialists who created them had thought through. As well-intentioned but ill considered ideas whose consequences may not be fully understood go, Hillary and McCain's gas tax pandering looks like the safest bet out there. We've been down this road before and have some idea what usually happens. They might help a little in the short run, may do a little damage in the long run, but they beat the hell out of what the supposedly responsible people are talking about, if only because they're pandering instead of trying to remake the world in their own image of good sense.
posted by gbarto at 10:17 AM
Saturday, April 26, 2008Over at PajamasMedia, Michael Weiss has a piece on the arrogance of Obama's latest strategy - acting like he's already won the nomination. What I like best about Obama, though, is the quality of his supporters. For example, there's this from commenter Karen, who is either a troll or the epitome of Obama's troubles. Says Karen:Why doesn’t anyone talk about how college educated people tend to lean towards Obama? You know, people who read and don’t just let the media tell them what to think. Intelligent people.This should go about as far as explaining that Pat Robertson would have done better in his presidential run if the American people weren't a bunch of Jesus-hating, godless hypocrites: You're free to feel that way, of course, but if you try to bring people to your cause by explaining that they'd see things you're way if they were better people doesn't usually go so well. what a strange election year! Who'd have ever thought that not only would McCain get to lead the GOP ticket, but that he'd also be the humbler of the national candidates, and his opponents the ones to be tarred as self-righteous and sanctimonious!
posted by gbarto at 4:08 PM
Monday, April 21, 2008Last week, Stephen Green did an update on where he sees the electoral college playing out. In the post, he notes:OK, here’s the thing. Current polls — and the primary votes already held — show Obama does best in states he has virtually no shot at winning in November. (Maybe the red states are so red because the local blue voters are even further to the left than blue state voters. Just a thought; I’ve got nothing to back that up.)Coming from Michigan - Red west, Blue southeast, I can't speak to the question of how whole states work out. But the local Democrats in the decidedly red area where I lived wore their leftism as a badge of honor and probably went further left for fear of showing any weakness at all on the part of the county Democratic party. In college, where I roomed with the chair of the Campus Democrats, I saw much the same thing (while the campus was leftish, the general area was the home turf of Republican Governor John Engler). Coming from the other side, in both the Bay Area and during my time at Michigan State, I saw many Republicans - at least those who openly acknowledged themselves as Republicans, sitting further to the right than the Republicans from my old hometown where being a Republican put you in the mainstream, as opposed to differentiating you from the larger community. One of the tricky elements in this is that I don't know how many moderate Democrats lived in my hometown and kept their mouths shut about politics, nor how many people I know in the Bay Area who are Republicans but, being moderate, keep quiet since it doesn't seem worth the effort to proselytize. This puts me in mind of a Volokh post about preference falsification that ran earlier today. But can this take place in a microcosm too? That is, can Obama's strong showing at caucuses relate not just to a reverse Bradley effect - fear of appearing racist causes Obama support in public - but also a preference falsification effect - with all those people trying not to appear racist, still others go along because that's where things seem to be headed anyway? If the reverse Bradley effect and the leftish tendencies of the caucuses converged, you'd have a great setup for people who prefer Hillary in private but not that much to go along to get along because nobody else they know is speaking up for Hillary so why should they be the party pooper. This is especially relevant today because with Hillary starting to come back and Obama stumbling both in the polls and because his foot is in his mouth, the Democrats may have already created too many barriers for Hillary to overcome even as it looks like she's their better candidate in the general. One thing about it: This is definitely a funny election season. Most Republicans I know have gone from saying "Anybody but McCain" to crossing their fingers that he can pull off winning the election. The Democrats, meanwhile, have lined things up so that it looks increasingly like Hillary Clinton is their most qualified candidate for president. God help us all.
posted by gbarto at 5:11 PM
Instapundit points to this Reason article, Adieu to the Avant-Garde. I think part of what we're seeing here is the same fragmentation that's happening across media and politics. First, cable television broadened entertainment choices, which meant that not only were there more choices for news than the big 3 networks but also that if you wanted to watch something other than the news from 6:00-7:00, you could. In other words, it was not just harder for the media to impose a storyline, it was possible for people to drop out of the news cycle altogether. The fax allowed the business class - and especially the small business class - to start swapping jokes and build an alternative narrative that the papers weren't giving, less through news than in the attitudes of those jokes. Then talk radio took off, cable went from 20 channels to 200 and the internet dawned. If you look in the link bar, you'll notice two art links: Quent Cordair Studio and the Susan St. Thomas gallery. Quent Cordair Studio offers pretty traditional fair - pretty girls, pretty landscapes, and mostly in a realist/romantic vein. Susan St. Thomas does new age-ish paintings. The two have little in common, but they appeal to me for their own reasons. And they're both part of the art world. And, I would add, they're both on the internet. Which made me smile when I came across this, from David Ross of the Whitney: Ross expresses great skepticism of the contemporary Realists. "That sort of hackneyed academic painting takes an enormous amount of talent and work," he says. "But to go back to copying Leonardo is not art."I would note that most of Europe's great art was focused on classical themes, religious themes and social scenes dreamier than what event the nobility actually lived - not the plagues, religious wars, etc. I think of Watteau's Embarkment for the Isle of Cythera, Dégas' dancers, DaVinci's Last Supper, etc. As one of my favorite professors used to say, the purpose of art is to create something beautiful that transcends the cares of everyday life and elevates the soul. Which is why I'm not investing my time or attention too much on what goes on at the Whitney these days. But what brings a smile is that a lot of other people aren't. David Ross had the impression that being in charge of the Whitney meant he got to decide what art is. But what he's actually decided is that a lot of people like me, in a fragmented culture where institutions no longer carry the weight they used to, would look not to his authority to find out we didn't know what art is but to our own authority to decide that the Whitney had lost its way.
posted by gbarto at 10:17 AM
Sunday, April 13, 2008Over at the Commentary blog, commenter Karen Braun nicely summarizes what's wrong with Obama's view of the world:Obama said that bitter middle Americans cling to guns or religion. What that acutally means is that most Americans erroneously rely on themselves or their God to provide and protect them and not the collective state. And they do so not out of bitterness, but from a foundational belief that “We the People” form a more perfect union, not “We the State” form a more perfect people.Yup.
posted by gbarto at 10:21 AM
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