McCain's Need for Closure

Apparently John McCain doesn't think the Times Square bomber should be read his rights.

"Obviously that would be a serious mistake...at least until we find out as much information we have...Don't give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it's all about." 

He goes on to suggest the man should probably get the death penalty.

An obvious reason for McCain's bluster is that he's been trying to walk back his moderate image for years.  But he's also simply joining a chorus of conservatives for whom taking the most severly righ-leaning position is de rigeour.

Taking a long view, you could see this as a function of electoral politics. You could say that mid-nineties conservatism was a far-right reaction to moderate liberalism, but to elect Bush Republicans had to move back leftward, who was more moderate in many ways. With the election of Obama, the right is now able to say that Bush wasn’t far enough to the right. All of which would make fertile ground for party discipline/epistemic closure, where every conservative needs to demonstrate his batshit cred.


This dynamic exists on the left, but there has just never been the sort of fealty to a nut base as there is on the right today. The 9/11 Truthers or Haliburton paranoids were never a very big influence on the left. And there is no thought machine on the left like there is on the right. You could say that this is Journalism and Academia, which are overwhelmingly liberal. But that’s absurd – they aren’t institutions like talk radio or Fox news, or the various conservative outlets. There is no ideological power objective – just a bias toward a liberal analytical framework. And built-in mechanisms for objectivity – peer review and journalistic standards – at least attempt to transcend dogma.

The broader conservative movement has moved further and further from an ideological reaction to the actual left, and towards an emotional reaction to its own bastardized view of the left.  McCain doesn't want to avoid reading this guy his rights.  He wants to avoid appearing to sympathize with a notion of the left as soft on crime.  The McCain of the past, along with many other reasonable conservatives, might have found no incongruity between conservatism and an embrace of the rule of law.  But to admit as much in today's conservative climate would be evidence of "siding with the enemy".  There is a freight train bound for glory, and you are either with them, or against them.

Business Rights

The NY Times is reporting that the Labor Department is planning new rules that require businesses to show evidence that they have specific plans to follow existing labor rules.

The effort, aimed in part at reducing the incidence of employers not paying overtime and improperly classifying workers as independent contractors, will require them to document many of their decisions and share that information with their workers and the government.

This raises an interesting question: What right does the government have to treat businesses any different than individuals?  It seems in a way that by requiring businesses to pre-emptively show how they will abide by the law would be like requiring individuals to show plans that they are not going to break the law.  Kind of like the new Arizona law that requires citizens to show proof of residency when asked.

But there is a profound difference here.  In America - at least so far - businesses do not have the same rights as individuals for a variety of reasons.  For starters, business is an activity, not a person.  The activity involves power relationships between people.  There is also an established profit incentive embedded in the activity that regularly depends upon compliance with the law. 

So the onus is on the business to prove all manner of things, if asked.  Because people are depending on an employer for their livelihood, there is an unequal power relationship.  To the extent that the worker is dependent on the employer, they are subject to the employer's moral integrity.  In a "worker's market", this isn't quite as important.  But in tough economic times, or in certain sectors of the market, workers are more vulnerable.  Also, there is an information gap - because most workers are not overseeing operations, they may not be aware of ways in which they are being taken advantage of (something unions have traditionally played a role in addressing).  Businesses must prove that they are not employing children, or that they are disposing of waste properly, keep their kitchens clean, or that they are paying overtime precisely because these are activities that business has an economic incentive to engage in (at least in the short term).

With individuals, it could be argued that there is also a profit incentive to take advantage of others, and break the law.  But because being an individual is not generally a for-profit exercise, there just isn't the intrinsic motivation to bend the rules.  Sure, we can speed in our cars, or steal from stores, or build additions that are not up to code - but these activities are either have a high cost/benefit ratio, or just very infrequent opportunities. 

Also, as individuals we expect certain personal rights to privacy, so as to avoid mass abuses by the state.  Every individual lives in a private residence, while places of business are relatively few, and generally don't hold the same notion of private space - except maybe the boss's office.  So the idea of inspectors entering a business on a whim is much less worrisome than the idea of inspectors being able to do the same to any individual.

The Fightin' Mexicans

A lot of people talk about their desire to see a post-racial, non-multicultural America in which everyone is assimilated into one big nebulous mass that is American.  The obvious problem with this is that America was first founded by relatively recent immigrants, and then took on as its narrative the concept of embracing people from all over the globe's aspirations for a better life.  What this inevitably led to was a diverse range of ethnic populations and communities - from Irish to German to Mexican to Vietnamese, Jewish, etc.  You can then add to this dynamic the Native Americans that were already here and nearly wiped out, and the African Americans that were brought here as slaves.  Multiculturalism isn't just an abstract concept - it is who we are.

It is hard then to find a better explanation for the insistence of the part of so many that all must assimilate to one standard and narrow cultural form than an ugly and selfish impulse to ethnocentrism - that is, white, Christian pride.  This sentiment is on display in the frequent opposition to any celebration of most forms of non-white or non-Christian cultural heritage.  From naming streets after Martin Luther King or Cesar Chavez, to requiring equality-minded mandates on religious expression in public institutions, gay pride parades or multicultural advocacy curriculum in schools.

Defenders of assimilationism argue that "identity politics" - the celebration of and reflection on ethnic differences - ultimately has a negative effect because it is fundamentally divisive.  Yet ironically, the only divisions it really seems to have brought out is between the assimilationist white Christians and everyone else.

However, this claim may be a red-herring to begin with if the real reason behind the opposition comes down to simple ethnic bigotry.  Evidence towards this is the fact that there appears to be little opposition to celebrations of ethnic pride among historically marginalized communities who are white and Christian.  For instance, no one seems concerned when Italian or Irish heritage is trumpeted.  Jews for the most part, although obviously not Christian, have seemed to have escaped assimilationist wrath (although many fundamentalist Christians of course actually view Jews as an integral part of their own apocalyptic scenario). 

Here's a view of Notre Dame's "Fightin' Irish".  Maybe the University of Arizona ought to change their team from the Wildcats to the "Fightin' Mexicans".

The Patient Needs a Damn Doctor!

John McWhorter and Glen Loury did a diavlog recently where both expressed the view that the black community needs to take responsibility for its own failure.  Mc Whorter even went so far as nearly advocating an entire federal pullout of all programmatic help.  The metaphor they both used was one in which a vehicle strikes a pedestrian.  No matter how much the vehicle was in the wrong, at the end of the day the pedestrian needs to want to walk if he is ever actually going to.  The driver can't "make them do it".  Apparently this originated from a book by Amy Waxman that McWhorter praised.
 
I'm not sure how to express how angry this sentiment makes me.

The metaphor is flawed for this reason: social determinism is a fact, and it is very driven by government policy.  Sure, it is of course true that black families are failing and perpetuating poverty.  But it is not as if there is some switch that Cosby, McWhorter or anyone else can throw that can change culture either.  Black families would succeed if they knew how.  The problem is that they lack the human capital.   Wax's argument amounts to "leaving them alone and letting them sort it out for themselves".  

I'm sorry, but as a former teacher of low-income children, that attitude just makes me want to scream.  Sure the pedestrian needs to want to walk, but who doesn't.  It is human nature to want to walk.  Blacks aren't failing because they don't want to succeed.  They are failing because they don't have the ability.  And what is keeping them from gaining that ability stems from the original accident.

If we want to really flesh out the metaphor, in a way that is line with our current understanding of how human development and learning works, we need to start by addressing the reasons for black failure.  We can do this in a general way by looking at statistical correlations between features that align with success.  So, the first is parent education.  The higher the education level of the parent the better they tend to do.  There are reasons for this, but we'll leave it at that for now.  Second is income.  A big part of this is going to be peer grouping in education - poor kids have poor classmates.  Third is intact families.  McWhorter and Loury began with this in the first place!  The reasons for why this matters are also well known.  Fourth is drugs.  Pretty obvious.  From here we can go in any number of directions, from parent incarceration to abuse to environmental toxicity to parenting skills. 

The effects of all of all this do not magical begin when the child turns 18, and becomes an "adult" with so-called free will.  No, they begin at birth - actually in the case of some of them they begin to have an effect in utero.  In the first five years of the child's life, they are completely surrounded in a cocoon of all these risk factors.  Only when they reach Kindergarten do they hopefully have a chance at larger social remelioration.  Of course, by this time they are far behind their non-at-risk peers academically, emotionally and cognitively.  And the process just compounds itself as they labor through the years, suffering a life of routine humiliation that they may not understand but intuit clearly.  And once they reach sexual maturity, they begin having babies, and the cycle repeats. 

That is the accident.  The pedestrian is lying bleeding on the pavement at age... pick one - 6 months, 2 years, 5 years, 16 years, 25 years, 45 years.  They are where they are in life because of who their parents were, what community they came from, what brain they were born with, and beyond that what kind of luck they found.  If "choice" had anything to do with it, you would see a random distribution of success across demographics.  There would be no minority achievement gap or uneven incarceration rate.  To the degree that it persists, it is because we allow it to.  I have had students who were mothers at 16 and let me tell you, if you think their baby has any say in whether they "want" to succeed you are fooling yourself.

Now, maybe there is nothing we can do.  Maybe trying to "help" will only make things worse.  For social determinism to be true it doesn't require that we have the answers.  But fortunately for us, we actually do have the answers.  There are evidence-based programs that work.  It is possible for money to spent on targeted services that provide any child with the human capital needed to succeed.  For some, it may be relatively inexpensive - a few after schools classes here, a summer camp there.  For others it may be very expensive, with nurse home visits and occupational therapy, behavior-modification counseling for the whole family, small class sizes and mentorships.  The problem isn't that the black community isn't choosing to help themselves.  That's at best a meaningless red-herring, and at worst a convenient cop-out.  The problem is that we aren't choosing to help them.

The Case of the Boring Porn

Something that has likely bedeviled couples since, well at least the mass production of photographs, is the fact that women just aren't as interested in pornography as men.  I have yet to meet a man who is not turned on by pornographic imagery.  The statistics for porn consumption certainly backs this up. 

There have been many explanations for why this difference in sexual excitation might exist.  Maybe men are expressing an unconscious misogyny.  Taught to objectify women, they use them as props in their sexual fantasies.  But this analysis is very abstract, and relies heavily on a Freudian interpretation to buttress its political claim of gender oppression.  The popularity of porn consumption by gay men would seem to argue against this theory.  One would have to claim that gay men have internalized misogyny and then incorporated it into their objectification of other males.

Maybe men are just objectifiers by nature, while women are more relationship oriented.  Women tend to prefer the romance of seduction, something difficult to express in pornographic imagery, more suited to the written word.  The extremely graphic nature of most porn - the close-up shots of penetration and thrusting, seem almost clinically devoid of any pretense of emotion aside from carnal lust.  This would make sense from the evolutionary psychology view of men as spatially oriented hunters, and women as relationship oriented mothers and gatherers.

But what if it simply comes down to a feature of biology and culture?  The penis, especially when uncircumsized, is designed for rapid climax during intercourse.  Men typically reach orgasm in 5-10 minutes - much to the dismay of their thus unsatisfied female partners.  Women generally take twice as long.  Of course, this has everything to do with the quality of lovemaking.  Female anatomy makes orgasm via intercourse alone much more difficult because the act of penetration stimulates the male more than the female.  This discrepancy can be overcome, but only through creativity and experience.

So what might the physical anatomy of men and women have to do with porn?  Well, it may have something to do with the anatomy of the brain.  Sexual orgasm is probably the most pleasurable state one can achieve.  It makes sense, then, that the brain would learn to associate that feeling with imagery.  This has been found to be the case with addiction, where images of drugs are associated and with increased desire.  Anyone who has ever stopped smoking will tell you that just being around people who are smoking will trigger cravings.  We are learning that the obesity epidemic may be linked directly to this phenomenon - where an environment of copious consumption, mainly through advertising, is fueling overeating.  Maybe the pleasure response of climax is tied more closely to association in men than women, as the lag in climax time diminishes associative effects. 

In this way the male orgasm is likened to the effects of nicotine, crack, or a cheeseburger, with the associative response triggering cravings in proportion to the immediacy and intensity of the sexual experience.  If the dynamic is extended to the female orgasm, taking twice as long to achieve - if at all, it seems logical that the associative response would not be as powerful.  We know that women can have associations just as powerful as men when addicted to drugs or food.  And we don't generally think of these things as being "objectified", but they in fact are.  But what if women didn't experience the same level of pleasure from those activities as men?  When a men and women both see a billboard for a cheeseburger, they can imagine - on some level - its salty, fatty juices dripping down their gullet.  And they know that in a few minutes that pleasure can be theirs.  But what if women's experience of cheeseburger bliss was something less than guaranteed?

I'm not aware of any study having been done on this.  But I think it would be very interesting.  The hypothesis would be that when stimulated to orgasm with the same degree of consistency and immediacy of men, women should show an increased associative response to pornographic imagery.  Of course, there are other cultural mitigating factors, such as gender identity or sexual narrative.  But it would be interesting to see if there might be a link to this mysterious phenomenon.

Lying About Bailouts

Republicans have made a lot of political hay over the claim that the bank bailouts never posed systemic risk.  They don't spend a lot of time providing an argument for this claim - most likely because it's so indefensible.  They just skip to the logical conclusion that anyone who supports bailouts wants to waste taxpayer money buy giving it to greedy Wall Street.  This also plays into the idea that Democrats don't want anyone to ever fail because they are, well, pansies. 

Of course, TARP was enacted by Bush, but he can be written off as not a "true believer".  The important thing is that future bailouts will never be necessary because there is no such thing as systemic risk.

Jon Chait argues that systemic risk would always require a bailout, and any sane administration - whether Republican or Democrat - wouldn't hesitate to come to the rescue.  Yet by sticking to the dishonest claim that systemic risk can't happen, Republicans get to have their cake and eat it too:

The only answer to the dilemma is to try to prevent systemic failure from happening in the first place, which is the purpose of financial regulation. But this is the genius of the "bailout bill" charge. You can't honestly promise that any regulation, however well-designed, can guarantee that no bailout will ever happen again. And when you try to address the "bailout bill" charge on its own loopy terms, you wind up lending it credence.

This is no different than the Republican tactic on most issues: take a false or dubious premise and run with it.

• Global warming - doesn't exist so Democrats are just trying to scrounge up tax revenue.

• Immigration - it's an existential threat so we need to limit rights and expend vast resources, and Democrats actually favor illegal immigration.

• Supply side economics - cut taxes on the rich and slash spending because the increased growth will ultimately increase tax revenues.

• The stimulus - Keynes who?, Democrats are recklessly spending and that's just what they do.

• The bailouts - institutions didn't pose systemic risk so bailing them out was simply a handout, a socialist takeover of the banking industry even.

So if the bailout was unnecessarily before, it will be in the future. This is an outright lie. And any Republican president in the future will bail an institution out in a heartbeat. But if you pretend there was no systemic threat, you can accuse Democrats of wanting to pay banks billions.

Republicans kind of lucked out on the timing of the crisis. Because TARP happened so close to the inauguration, they managed to sell idiots the lie that Obama was responsible for the bailout. If this had happened even a year earlier, it would have been a lot tougher.

Leadership Issues

When businesses fail - we don't blame the workers, we blame the CEO. 
When the military fails - we don't blame the soldiers,  blame the generals. 
When Governments fail - we don't blame the staff, we blame the representatives.
But when schools fail, who do we blame?  The teachers.

Now, obviously this is simplistic.  The problem with most failing schools is a variety of things.  It includes teachers.  It includes teachers.  Most of all, however it includes parents.  But at the end of the day, a school lives or dies by its leaders.  They set the tone.  They establish culture.  They hold people accountable.  They inspire people.  They work with students, teachers and families alike to develop a sense of genuine purpose and community.

The Quick and the Ed points to a new study that backs this up.  Their take:

Principals affect a range of outcomes, including teacher satisfaction, parents’ perceptions of school quality, and the academic performance of the school. How to ensure a good principal? A principal’s effectiveness depends on their level of experience, their sense of efficacy on certain tasks, and their use of time to manage the range of responsibilities they face. Where are the good principals? Not in poor or poor-performing schools, at least not as a rule. Principals that demonstrate the skills and experience related to effectiveness are less likely to be working in these schools.