Matthew Yglesias

Going, Going, Gone...

. . . back to NYC for another round with the family, so no posts this afternoon while I'm on the train. . . .

Experiment?

Belle Waring writes:

Now, I'm totally straight, so it's not like I'm scoping all these chicks out in a sexual way (like most girls, I've made out with other girls, but I've never had any interest in having a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend).

[emphasis added]

Then and Now

David Adesnik remarks in re: my theory that the administration's weirdly nonsensical discourse on the Iraq/Qaeda connection is designed to mislead people while protecting them from elite media criticism that it has not, in fact, protected them from such criticism. Rather, his "best guess is that Bush himself (along with Cheney) is deeply in denial. It's the same phenomenon we saw with Reagan. When you believe in something with all your heart and then stake your reputation on it, letting go is the hardest thing to do."

I think that's right. The mislead-and-avoid-elite-criticism strategy is one that used to work quite well during the second half of 2002, and I think it was adopted at the time for the reasons I outlined. Since then, it's ceased to be an effective strategy, since the WMD failures have brought on a more general skepticism about things that people should have been skeptical about in the first place. But they can't really let it go. Sullivan catches Dick Cheney denying that any of the pre-war intelligence was bad, which is laughable, and actually contrary to administration policy (they did, after all, appoint a commission to look into why the intel was so bad) and simply reflects a kind of on the moon attitude toward all this stuff.

Conservatives and Marriage

Michelle Cottle on Rush Limbaugh:

Whatever you think of Rush, this is a fair question. While he clearly knows how to talk the talk in support of the traditional, God-fearing, family-values-oriented America of movement conservatives' dreams, Rush has repeatedly displayed trouble walking the walk. It's not just that he obviously doesn't buy that what-God-has-joined-together-let-no-man-put-asunder marital nonsense.

Off the top of my head, I would think that rightwing moralism seems to encourage people to get married too young leading to more split-ups down the road. Alternatively, it's well known that conservative economic policies (said to promote growth at the expense of equality) have impoverished America's Reddest states and perhaps this just puts too much strain on family life.

VP Stuff

This all goes on for quite a long time without really telling us much. Apparently congressfolks think, sensibly, that Edwards would help congressional candidates more than Gephardt would. I tend to agree. My great fear in all this would be that Kerry avoids Edwards out of a desire not to be out-charismaed by his number two guy.

The legitimate concern with Edwards -- as in the primaries -- is that he's simply too young and inexperienced to be president. This, though, is obviously less of a concern for the number two spot. What's more, by all accounts he's a smart guy interested in substantive issues, which ought to count for a lot. I would also say -- looking at things from a team perspective -- that Kerry has positively tons of public-sector experience and so one could make the case that bringing someone in who's spent most of his adult life in other pursuits has certain merits. Now I love Joe Biden, but it's hard to make the argument that he'd be a huge political asset. I don't really see a political downside, either, and merit should count for something. I've said my piece on Gephardt at this point.

Stab In The Back Watch

The fun spreads to the Secretary of Defense, courtesy of Spencer Ackerman pretending to be Josh Marshall. Meanwhile, if this and this aren't related to the tectonic plates mentioned here then I must be the Iranian spy in the house.

Geneva What?

Jonah Goldberg says that if al-Qaeda doesn't follow the Geneva Conventions (which they don't) then the Conventions shouldn't apply to al-Qaeda detainees. Godwin's Law Alert: These are the principles according to which Hitler conducted the second world war.End Alert.

Leaving this prudential stuff aside, three questions: One, are there no absolute moral standards according to which good people should conduct themselves? Two, knowing what we know about human falibility, isn't "justified" torture likely to slip into pure sadism? Three -- and to me, most important -- if the president doesn't like the laws, shouldn't he have them changed rather than simply deciding that he doesn't need to follow them?

No, Fuck You

Indeed, The Day After Tomorrow really does play the exact same role in my worldview as the story of Noah and the flood does in the Abrahamic religions. Indeed, before the film was released I found myself incapable of making sense of my life and humanity's place in the world. Thank you, thank you so very much, for making that clear.

This and Barone from the LAT in one day -- wtf?

Les Miserables

I forgot to mention something in re: the previously mentioned philosophical movies list (see also Chris Berman. To wit, under the heading "Objectivist/Contextualist versus Absolutist Deontology" the recommendation is "Les Miserables (especially version with Liam Nieson)." Where I come from, his name is "Liam Neeson" and the version in question is known as "the version written by Rafael Yglesias" who, we are told, that while he "makes a host of significant cuts, he manages not only to capture the essence of Les Miserables' key theme -- redemption -- but also to faithfully render the characters as more than one-dimensional condensations of their literary inspirations." Good work! He also really brings out the contextualist versus deontological themes. The Christians, on the other hand, didn't like it so much.

Unions

I mentioned yesterday the surprisingly strong showing for unions in the Mother Jones poll but I had to wait for Ruy Teixeira to note that unions are actually more popular than everything else they asked about except John McCain. That's pretty darn popular and suggests Kerry would do well to publicly embrace unions (and vice-versa) rather than simply use them as a sub rosa source of institutional support.

Blaming The Victims

Eugene Volokh wonders why men are so ugly. Andrew Sullivan responds:

Much of this is true - but only for straight men. And that reveals the real source of male slovenliness: women. If women weren't so damn forgiving of slobbiness, if they weren't prepared to look for the diamond buried in the rough of a man's beer-belly, men might have to shape up a little. The only reason gay men are - on the whole - better turned out than straight men is because they have to appeal to other shallow, beauty-obsessed males to get laid, find a mate, etc. The corollary, of course, are lesbians. Now there are many glamorous lesbiterians, but even the most enthusiastic Sapphic-lover will have to concede that many are not exactly, shall we say, stylish. The reason? They don't have to be to attract other women; and since women find monogamy easier, they also slide into the I'm-married-so-what-the-hell-have-another-pretzel syndrome. When straight women really do insist on only dating hot guys, men will shape up. Until then, it's hopeless.

Nevertheless, since it's being discussed by A-list bloggers it's important that we understand this situation correctly. We have a serious collective action problem here. Free marketers like Sullivan and Volokh are too blinded by ideology to see the compelling need for government intervention. A temporary regulatory solution could help us resolve this mess. For the next five years, say, straight women must "insist on only dating hot guys" (we'll have to empanel a "Federal Hot Guy Commission" consisting of "shallow, beauty-obsessed [gay] males" to rank everyone) and see if the hot guy supply increases in response. After five years you can drop the rule and things should have reached a new, better, equilibrium.

Meetings

As long as Iraq/Qaeda stuff is out there, it's important to note how little the fact that a meeting occurred tells us unless we know what's said. Peter Bergen has met with bin Laden himself and now works as an analyst at CNN and a fellow at the New America Foundation, neither of Bergen's employers, however, are in league with bin Laden. Rather, the meeting was an interview, part of what helped Bergen establish his reputation as a leading analyst and journalist on terrorism issues. People who work on the Hill have meetings with lobbyists and interest groups all the time, sometimes this means Senator X is really a pawn of Industry Y, but sometimes it means that Senator X needs to tell Industry Y that he can't help them out and wants to do it in a respectful way. When Adrianna was meeting with the FBI, that did mean she was in league with the Feds, but it didn't mean that the Soprano family was. Tony met with Johnny Sack a whole bunch of times, sometimes to conspire with him, sometimes to tell him to fuck off. Neville Chamberlain was pursuing an unwise policy during his meetings with Hitler in Munich, but he wasn't in cahoots with Hitler. Don Rumsfeld met with Saddam Hussein in the 80s to collaborate on their common interest in checking Iranian power, but that doesn't mean they were working together in 2003 or 1991.

All of which is just to say that evidence of meetings isn't really evidence of anything. Now if two people meet every Monday morning over a period of years, it seems safe to conclude that they're hatching some kind of scheme, but it still doesn't tell you much about the nature of the scheme or who's working for whom. But scattered contacts? A handshake here, a nod of the head there? That's just life. People have meetings. Give me a dozen years and I'll have met tens of thousands of people vaguely involved in politics and government but we're not all in league with each other.

Ibrahim Jaffari

Looks set to be the main political figure in any post-election Iraq, but Google tells us nothing -- nothing -- of use about the man or his views. Just seven billion stories noting that he was made one of two vice presidents of the interim government. Though it is interesting to wonder whether his position is really as strong as it seems. The CPA poll had him leading in a hypothetical presidential election, but 50 percent of the voters were undecided. And they were only polling Arabs, the Kurds (who are overwhelmingly Sunni) are presumably unlikely to vote for a Shiite Arab Islamist so this sort of thing overstates Dawa's strength.

More to the point are all those undecided voters. Sadr polled higher than Jaffari in the personal trust category, but way lower in the presidential election poll. Since Sistani manifested a similar split, it seems reasonable to conclude that even fans of Sadr and/or Sistani don't think of them as suitable politicians, they respect them as clerics. This is roughly in line with Sistani's view, but it's at odds with Sadr's. But could Sadr turn the public around on this?

Two Articles, Eh?

If I may say so, trying to ram together two different narratives about the 9-11 Commission -- (1) their account of the details of 9-11 planning, (2) their report on Iraq/Qaeda links -- is producing some mighty awkward results. Would it kill the papers to have just arranged for two separate stories? These are, after all, different topics. Alternatively, newspapers could do away with this whole "stories" concept and just write one giant Note-style news summary each day.

See Dick Run

New from me: the case against Gephardt as VP candidate. Obviously, I've never much cared for the man, but I think this is one of those cases where a Kerry-Gephardt ticket would be worse electorally than either a Kerry-X ticket or a Gephardt-X ticket -- Gephardt managed to reinforce Kerry's downsides without bringing anything of note to the table.

UPDATE: Shit. East-coast elitism strikes again as Matt claims that Ohio is next door to Missouri. All those flyover states look the same to me . . . I'll try and get that corrected once folks are in the office.

Philosophy and Film

Via Tyler Cowen a list of philosophical movies. I think it's generally a quite sound guide, though the notion that Minority Report deals with free will in a worthwhile way strikes me as way off. My favorite bit, though, is the inclusion of Cruel Intentions on the "Top Philosophy Movies" list. I love Cruel Intentions but have always been a bit lacking in rationalization for why it should be an acceptable thing to have watched many times. Now I've got it:

Issues: prudent predator/immoralism, value nihilism (not the metaethical theory, but the perverse outlook that the good must be destroyed), egoism, sympathy and moral psychology (specifically, it can be used in conjunction with Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity and questions about motivational rationalism versus sentimentalism).

UPDATE: Wait, wait, that's obvious. Motivational rationalism is the view that our moral behavior is motived by reason (the Korsgaard/Kant view) and sentimentalism (Smith, Hume, Blackburn) is the view that it's just motivated by non-rational sentiments. I think.

Bigots and Such

Josh Chafetz is very upset that anyone might say anything good about the UK Independence Party's relatively strong showing in the Euroelections:

John Quiggin also pronounces himself pleased with UKIP's success. He argues that the vote for UKIP served the clarifying function of showing how widespread the Euroskeptical vote in Britain is (on a related topic, see this very good TNR piece interpreting the European elections as a defeat for Gaullism) and therefore will force both Europhiles and Euroskeptics to address the real problems confronting Europe. That would, I think, be a good argument were UKIP not so thoroughly filled with vile characters. But in this case, it seems to me like arguing that Le Pen's success in 2002 was good because, agree with him or not, it focused attention on the serious problem of failure to assimilate new immigrant populations. Le Pen's success was not a good thing, and neither is UKIP's, for the simple reason that they're bigots who do not deserve the legitimacy conferred by electoral success.

Newt The Book Reviewer

Weird and wacky stuff from my friend Katherine Mangu-Ward at the Standard.

Interesting

There's probably some more important stuff to be found in today's Mother Jones poll (go to their front page, there's links to all kinds of stuff) but I found this result on what people think about unions to be fascinating. Folks aren't enthusiastic about them -- they rate well below 50 percent. On the other hand, folks are uniformly more pro-union than anti-union even in the richest income bracket. This would seem to suggest that there's basically no downside to a future Democratic administration adopting some robust advocacy of unionization, labor law enforcement, and reforms that make it easier to organize. The medium-run political advantage to be gained from a stronger union movement, meanwhile, is obvious.

The East Is Back

I think it's fair to say I'm not the only one who failed to predict that the Pistons would easily beat the Lakers in five (and they really had them beat in that other game, too), but I've rarely been happier to be proven wrong. If Darko somehow turns out not to suck, these guys could be major contenders for quite some time.

UPDATE: Jon Chait's really happy. I'm just glad the odious Phil Jackson comes in for some licks. He will not be missed.

Will The Real Glenn Reynolds Please Stand Up

Post:

I find it hard to respond to these things in terms of cost-benefit. My law school mentor Charles Black once said that of course you can come up with scenarios -- the classic ticking-nuclear-bomb example -- where torture might be justified. And you can be sure that, in those cases, if people think it'll work they'll use it no matter what the rules are. But there's a real value to pretending that there's an absolute rule against it even if we know people will break it in extraordinary circumstances, because it ensures that people won't mistake an ordinary remedy for an extraordinary one.

I also think that the rather transparent effort to use this against Bush -- often by people who think nothing of cozying up to the likes of Castro, for whom torture and murder are essential tools of governance -- has caused the Abu Ghraib issue to be taken less seriously than perhaps it ought to be.

Estate Tax and High School Reunions

Riverdale girl Meghan McArdle replies to my Dalton-based case for the estate tax:

I attended a demographically similar institution somewhat to the north, and while my girlhood memories include recollections of some really repulsive conspicuous consumption, I'm afraid that my classmates offer one of the best cases I've seen for repealing the estate tax. To wit: none of their families seem to have paid any. Since the parents of children in New York City private schools are, without a doubt, the group upon which such a tax should fall, if it falls on anyone, this rather begs the question of which less tax-worthy groups are actually shouldering the burden.

There's also the fact that the estate tax may actually cost the treasury money, by giving parents such a strong incentive to transfer assets to children (who often get taxed at lower rates); and quite certainly costs the economy a great deal of money by a) spawning an entire tax-planning industry, full of people who would otherwise be productively employed b) causing people to shift resources to less valuable (but tax-preferred) uses and c) reducing the incentive of older, experienced workers to work beyond the point where they have accumulated enough assets to live out the remainder of their lives comfortably. (No, I'm sure Warren Buffet wouldn't stop working even if they took it all away. But what about the guy who owns your local convenience store?)

But really, the best argument is the rich, because they don't pay the damn thing. Only half the estate tax revenues come from that 1/10th of 1% who are really fabulously wealthy. The rest comes from schmoes who were careful--and too stupid to pay a planner, or keep their wealth in liquid assets. Is that really the sort of thing we want to tax at 55%?

So, back to Meaghan's case, I just don't know if that stuff is all true, but it sounds to me like she's pointing to problems that could be solved, rather than a good reason to just throw up our hands and give up. One thing that does occur to me, however, is that there doesn't seem to be any good reason to tax estates (i.e., dead people) as opposed to inheretances (i.e., living recipients of dead people's money). After all, I don't have a problem with a billionaire dying and deciding he wants to give $5 to each American citizen, the concern is that he's going to give $1 billion to his son.

At any rate, until I hear this kind of argument being endorsed by folks who don't also believe, as a matter of general principle, that the government spends too much money and that we ought to balance the budget through cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, color me somewhat skeptical of the "no one pays it anyway!" theory.

Kerry, Communion, Etc.

I continue to be baffled by the Kerry communion story. Bracketing the internal Church issues here, it seems that there are two kinds of voters -- Catholics and non-Catholics. For a non-Catholic to change his vote for Kerry according to what some bishop does would be absurd. Among Catholics, we have pro-choice Catholics and pro-life ones. Clearly, pro-choice Catholics aren't going to see their votes swayed if a bishop won't give Kerry the wafer.

So for this to have any political impact at all, we need to postulate the existence of a pro-life Catholic who's willing to overlook Kerry's pro-choice record and vote for him if and only if he continues to get communion. That seems to me like a simply bizarre thing to do. Whether or not Kerry takes communion, it's still quite clear what the hierarchy's position on the choice issue is. So what's the big deal?

New Column

In which I try to make you feel sorry for the GOP. I think it's time for liberals to stop being all whiny, defeatist, defensive, etc. It's time to be haughty, optimistic, and condescending.

Electoral-Vote.com

Back home several family members asked me why I'd taken down my link to the fascinating constantly-updated electoral vote map. The answer is that it was a paid ad, not something I put up or took down. Nevertheless, since folks seemed to like it, here's the link again.

The End of Multilateral Interventionism?

I fear this, by Michael Lind, may be correct.

Geography Is Destiny?

Aha! An opportunity to semi-disagree with Kevin Drum:

I know the conventional wisdom these days says that the single most reliable determinant of voting is church attendance (the more you attend church, the more likely you are to vote Republican), but it's anecdotes like this that continue to convince me that the real divide in America is rural/urban, not secular/religious. Sure, you need to be pretty religious for the Left Behind books to appeal to you in the first place, but even at that its admirers are mostly in small town America. Urban folks, even the most strongly religious of them, are mostly too elite to be anything but embarrassed by this kind of stuff.

Where Have All The Jesus Movies Gone

Interesting Amy Sullivan article about the Left Behind books suggests that crap gains popularity simply because mainstream culture has unaccountably failed to meet market demand for religiously themed products:

America's mainstream entertainment industry has not always been so oblivious to the Christian market. Hollywood studios used to churn out biblical epics at a steady pace, raking in millions of dollars--and, sometimes, Oscars--with predictable crowd-pleasers. Cecil B. DeMille directed a number of biblical movies, including the silent screen classic King of Kings and the 1949 film Samson and Delilah with Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature. Gregory Peck starred in David and Bathsheba, Anthony Quinn headed a star cast in Barabbas, Kirk Douglas was nomiated for Best Actor Oscar for Spartacus, and a pre-political Charlton Heston brought down the house in both The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur. To the extent that any political bias was discernible in the films, it was vaguely liberal, taking on the status quo and the established political power. Around the same time, Christian writers like C.S. Lewis were international superstars, selling millions of copies of The Screwtape Letters, a satirical correspondence between two devils strategizing about the best way to tempt their human target and thus bring him to spiritual ruin.

And then, sometime in the 1960s, religiously-themed entertainment simply disappeared. Why that happened is anyone's guess; a hip disdain for traditional cultural mores, perhaps, or a heightened fear of offending religious minorities. In any event, it was a major, if underappreciated, break. For nearly 2,000 years, the story of Jesus and broader biblical epics had infused the cultural environment of the average Westerner. Now those influences were suddenly nowhere to be seen. In the rare instances that movies did center on religious topics, they took the form of the irreverent (The Life of Brian), the mildly heretical (Jesus Christ Superstar), or the controversial (The Last Temptation of Christ). On television, Linus's recitation from the second chapter of Luke at the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965 was perhaps the last respectful reference to Jesus that Hollywood offered America's children. In general, with the exception of a few bland made-for-television movies, popular culture has limited religion to the rather harmless, generic use of angels as gimmicks--"Touched by an Angel," Angels in the Outfield--or poorly made and under-funded Bible films such as last fall's The Gospel of John, described by one catatonic reviewer as "the longest Sunday School class ever."

More On Airports

This subject seems to be of interest. One commenter alleged that the AirTrain to Newark is, in fact, convenient. This is totally wrong. Unless you happen to live in Penn Station you're talking three trains and two transfers minimum to get from NYC to the Airport. It costs a lot of money and it takes a long time. In a convenient system -- i.e. Paris, London, Washington -- you can do it with one transfer and it's cheap.

Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport was mentioned by several commenters as a good one, and I concur. The airports in Rejkjavik and Helsinki are, I think, the best two I've ever been in, though people over the age of 25 might find IcelandAir's throngs of student bargain-hunters to be somewhat offputting. Tacitus' description of his Moscow experience, meanwhile, astounds me:

Been to Sheremetyev-2, also, back in '95. Ugly, yes, but I got my bags, got through immigration, and got to my ground transport in reasonable order. Which is all I ask, really.

Worst Airport Ever?

More France-bashing from Tacitus:

What is wearisome, though, is the combination of Air France and CDG airport (worst airport ever), neither of which do anything to relieve one's anxiety at flying.

. . .

In fairness to the French, I recall St Louis airport being almost as bad. However, that's not a national showcase.

Stepping back, however, my experiences in Moscow's Sheremetevo Airport make any complaints about facilities in the United States or Western Europe look absurd. Upon arrival I discovered that they had cut the electric lighting by 80 percent as a cost control measure and Russian customs officials took all my cash and several souvenirs as an "exit tax" before letting me leave the country. And let's not even get started on what they did to the young woman I saw carrying a Chinese passport. This was all during the Yeltsin years and perhaps Vladimir Putin's "dictatorship of law" has improved matters, but I doubt they've got things up to first world standards.

Uighurs

Not being a subscriber, I can't read The Weekly Standard's article on the Uighurs, but based on the teaser it seems to me to be saying the right things about this sadly-neglected issue. If anyone who can actually read the thing cares to comment I'd be interested to know what it really says. It's sad that the Hollywood-friendly Tibetans seem to get all the press.