Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

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Which is more important, helping the less fortunate, or helping the environment?

Are ethanol subsidies good because they drive the use of a fuel that is ostensibly less polluting than oil, or are they bad because they crowd out poor individuals who would rather use the corn (or the land the corn was planted on) for food?

Are high gas prices (and/or gas taxes) good because they reduce dirty driving and make alternative fuel sources more attractive, or bad because they increase the cost of transportation, which makes up a relatively larger percentage of a low-income family’s budget?

Are cheap cars in India bad because they will increase pollution, or good because they enable wider access to jobs and health care for the poorer segments of that country?

I’m sympathetic to Will’s and Kerry’s take on the FLDS business, but it seems to me that the details matter, and I haven’t seen enough details to be convinced there’s an open-and-shut child abuse case here. I haven’t looked very hard, so I believe they might be there, but they also might not. Which is why we have a judicial process to sort these things out.

That said, I’m extremely uncomfortable with the notion that “brainwashing,” in and of itself, is grounds for state intervention. It may be that the FLDS grown-ups teach their children all sorts of twisted, manipulative things about distrusting outsiders. And this may make them less inclined to explore the world outside their compounds and hear other points of view. But it would be extremely difficult to write laws to distinguish malevolent (and illegal) brainwashing from generically backwards religious views. This is the sort of thing that could only be determined from long-term, up-close observation of the way children are treated, and the state does not have (nor do we want it to have) the ability to spy on families that the authorities regard as creepy.

There appears to be evidence of statutory rape. That’s a relatively easy-to-define and plainly problematic crime that the state can and should prosecute. If there’s evidence that some of the teenage or pre-teen girls have been raped, that would be reasonable grounds for holding all of the girls between the ages of about 10 and 18 for their own protection until the charges can be resolved. But that’s not necessarily sufficient grounds to hold 5-year-old girls, and it’s certainly not sufficient grounds to hold the boys.

If Will and Kerry think the state’s actions in this case are justified, I’d be curious to see them articulate the principle that would govern cases like this. Obviously, as private citizens, we can and should be concerned about tight-knit groups that limit the autonomy of their members. But the state should only act pursuant to objective and clearly articulated legal principles. As much as I’d like to see “brainwashing” banished from the Earth, I certainly can’t think of any definition of brainwashing that wouldn’t sweep in a bunch of kooky but basically harmless forms of eccentricity.

Keep in mind that our foster care system is pretty lousy and over-stressed as it is. The alternative is not between these kids being brainwashed by FLDS or having loving parents. The alternative is probably them being brainwashed by FLDS or living the remainder of their childhoods as wards of the state, with no one in particular caring about their wellbeing. That may be an improvement, but it’s not much of one.

A police officer police officers who inadvertantly shoot unarmed men:

Incidentally, the article says that the incident occurred while the officers were conducting a prostitution sting. Enforcing prostitution laws means sending armed, plainclothes police officers into uncomfortable situations. It inevitably will result in some tragedies of this sort. Is the occasional dead civilian really a price to pay to prevent women from earning a living in a way that many people don’t approve of?

This is pretty funny:

See here for context. Hat tip to Tom

I’m glad to see Cato striking a cautionary note about the use of mercenaries military contractors.

Glenn Greenwald often has interesting and important things to say about national security issues, and I’ve enjoyed reading him for the last few months, but man, does that guy need an editor. I feel like if he made a conscious effort to keep his posts under about 600 words each, he’d be a lot more fun to read. I’m on the verge of de-listing him, not so much because I disagree or don’t enjoy what he has to say, but because when I see a new post, the first thing I do is scroll down the page to see how many pages of material it is. It’s not uncommon for the number to be in the double-digits, and as much as I share Greenwald’s sense of outrage over the Bush administration’s various misdeeds, I don’t have time to read a 2500-word screed on the subject every single day.

Really? Fifty? And no penalty?

Wow.

NRO is focusing on porn. Specifically whether to ban porn sales on military bases. The discussion strikes me as totally nonsensical and disconnected from reality.

For example, K. Lo. says that “pornography is a grave indignity and degradation of the human person.” This makes absolutely no sense to me. I can understand the idea that posing for pornography is a disreputable profession, although I think it’s certainly no more disreputable than a lot of what people do on K Street. But I can’t at all understand the idea that once pornography has been created, it’s somehow degrading for men to look at it. Men like to look at naked women. This is a basic fact of human biology. I’m not going to defend the consumption of pornography as a great virtue, but if it’s a vice, it’s certainly one of the most trivial and harmless of vices.

Even more baffling is the idea that married men looking at porn is somehow a threat to families. Do people really believe that a dog-eared issue of Playboy can cause men to leave their wives? That they’ll spend so much time masturbating that they won’t be able to support their children? And especially in Iraq, where men are often thousands of miles from their families and may face temptations to engage in real-life adultery, I would think pornography would be an ideal aid to help married men avoid temptation without doing anything that might endanger their marriages.

Unfortunately, the discussion seems to take the badness of pornography as a given, so there’s no real discussion of the point. Can anybody explain what the argument is supposed to be?

Incidentally, this post strikes me as spot-on:

These are soldiers. Their job is to kill and destroy. They live with the threat of death. Our citizen-soldiers are the most disciplined, educated, best mannered, and least wanton army that has ever existed. Still, most of them are young men, with all the raging hormones that implies. They are serving in war zones in places where their access to local women, for purposes high or low, is highly restricted and problematic. (Unlike Khe San and the rest of South East Asia, or Europe for that matter.) It is easy to imagine that, in many cases Playboy, put to its traditional use, might prevent worse behavior, that could be even more degrading to the woman involved, or more detrimental to a marriage back home.

This is even more important since the woman involved in the casual sex, or not quite consensual sex, is, these days, likely to be a young American soldier herself. Such would be bad for unit cohesion and general morale. Playboy is cheap compared to the rapes, pregnancies, sex-for-money and dopey entanglements that occur too regularly in our co-ed army.

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Ben (and Sarah) have a good idea: people who search for Expelled really should get some accurate information about the movie.

Having just watched Juno, this is awesome:

Hat tip: PJ

Megan ponders the causes of the bitterness in academia. As she (and Arnold Kling) points out, being a professor is objectively a pretty sweet job, so the observed bitterness (which I should mention I haven’t seen a whole lot of first-hand, but I believe it’s there) is a little mysterious. I think Megan is spot-on that the prevalence of status anxiety is a big part of it, but I think she misses one of the major causes of said status anxiety: in many parts of academia, status-related criteria are the only real yardsticks academics have to measure their self-worth.

This reminds me of one of Paul Graham’s best essays (really, one of the best essays I’ve ever read, period) about status anxiety in Jr. High. The fundamental problem, he said, was that in Jr. High, there was no external standard of excellence:

Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it’s populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don’t think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it’s populated by adults, but that it’s very large, and the things you do have real effects. That’s what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

When the things you do have real effects, it’s no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that’s where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

Each academic discipline (and sub-sub-discipline) tends to form an hermetically sealed community that’s very small, and in which merit is largely judged by the opinions of other people. Sometimes, of course academics produce work that has enormous effects on the broader world, but often these effects take years, if not decades, to percolate into the outside world. In the short run, the only measure of whether your work is good is whether your peers like it.

It seems to me that this also helps explain why the social sciences tend to be more bitter than engineering disciplines. If a computer scientist comes up with a compiler optimization that increases performance by 2 percent, that’s something that can be proven by benchmarks and commercialized. If a mathematician proves a new theorem, that’s at least something that can be verified by anyone with the necessary background. But if a philosopher writes a new paper on Aristotle, there isn’t any sort of external standard by which it can be proven to be superior to previous papers on Aristotle. The only measure of its success is whether it gets a spot in a prominent journal, whether it gets discussed at the next philosophy conference, and so forth. And not surprisingly, when people know their work will be judged primarily by the reactions of their peers, they’re likely to spend more time paying attention to what their peers think.

This, incidentally, is one of the things that made me want to go back to grad school in computer science rather than something like law, political science, or economics. Even if I never end up going into industry, I think the proximity of industry to academic computer science work—the fact that most computer scientists could sell out and get a job in the software industry—seems to help keep the profession grounded. In many parts of computer science, you’re not done until you’ve developed a working prototype of whatever it is you’re theorizing about. I think this might help prevent computer science from falling prey to some of the extreme forms of faddishness that some other disciplines fall prey to.

The New York Times has a good piece that digs into the incestuous relationship among the Pentagon, defense contractors, and the retired generals who are often called upon to provide analysis of military developments on national television. According to the Times, many of these generals have business relationships with firms that rely on the pentagon for their business, and they are given access to senior officials, who brief them on Pentagon talking points. The Times didn’t find a smoking gun, in terms of an explicit quid pro quo relationship, but it’s still worth keeping in mind next time you see a retired general on television analyzing the latest developments in Iraq.

Hat tip: Matt

This is what I call fun:

Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.

I’ll refrain from appending some commentary about the wisdom of public housing projects.

Nikki explains the issue in Saturday’s arrest at the Jefferson Memorial:

this is about the transparent enforcement of a clear rule of law, and the need for easy access to laws. it is becoming increasingly evident they the dancers were allowed to be there, and officers could not cite any type of rule authorizing the arrest. this strongly suggests they either a) didn’t know one or b) didn’t think she needed to know. that is what this is about.

this is about detaining a human being without citing or, as it seems having, just cause. this is moreover about the real possibility that, everywhere around the united states, countless individuals outside the jefferson 1′s socioeconomic status and education level are arrested without being given the “privilege” to ask what they did wrong or be shown the law in writing. and they may not have the resources to fight back. more importantly, they mayn’t feel that they can or even should fight back. that is what this is about.

That girl needs to find herself a working shift key, but other than that she’s spot on. The issue here isn’t whether we can come up with a tortured rationalization for what the police did. The issue is that the police have an obligation to serve and protect, and that includes an obligation to err on the side of not using coercion unless the law clearly authorizes it. “Crimes” like “interfering with an agency function” make a mockery of the rule of law by allowing officers to arrest people for general disobedience, regardless of the justice of their orders.

And as Nikki points out, not everyone is a highly-educated white girl with a politically-connected family and dozens of friends who are journalists and lawyers. Brooke has a support network that will likely ensure she won’t suffer too much from the arrest. When cops show the same kind of belligerent attitude toward people without Brooke’s knowledge and connections, things can turn out much worse. The issue isn’t the dancing, or the details of what the law does or doesn’t allow. The issue is the apparent attitude of the police that when they see someone doing something they don’t understand, their first instinct should be to order them to stop, and their second instinct is to arrest anyone who doesn’t meekly comply. That’s not how police officers behave in a free society.

You get to decide which is which!

…five countries carried out 88 percent of all known executions worldwide: China (470 people), Iran (317), Saudi Arabia (143), Pakistan (135) and the United States (42).

Personally, I’m kind of (happily) surprised the numbers are so low. Though the report makes it clear that the numbers from China are, well, unclear.

How about:

In Iran, for example, a father of two was stoned to death for adultery. An Egyptian national was beheaded in Saudi Arabia for practicing sorcery.

Hmm. I guess it’s good we’re not in that category.

And a factory manager in North Korea was shot by a firing squad because he appointed his children as managers and made international phone calls.

So, in North Korea, if you appoint your kid to an important position and call people in different countries, you get shot? Someone dig up Kim Il Sung, I’ll buy the bullets!

All in all, it seems weird to equate “the death penalty” as a thing separate from the judicial system that implements it. Certainly there are some people who are wholeheartedly against it, no matter the crime, but I think that opposition to it is extremely correlated to the crimes for which it is applied. But if Iran is executing people for adultery, and North Korea for running up phone bills, then “the death penalty” isn’t the problem — if they didn’t execute them, they’d torture or imprison them. And so while I am thankful it’s not as bad as that here, our criminal justice system also needs a great deal of fixing. Currently it seems that there are enough high profile cases of error that we should be extremely sparing in the use of capital punishment — but that doesn’t mean we can say “great, problem solved!” and walk away. These problems go much deeper, and while I hesitate to equate them with the potential death of an innocent prisoner, they have a great deal of impact on all our lives.

I’m in DC for a few weeks, and I’m kicking myself for not going to the libertarian flash mob in recognition of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday that occurred last night at the Jefferson Memorial. They came with iPods and silently danced to music. Of course, if there’s one thing the park police can’t stand, it’s unauthorized celebrations of freedom, so they broke it up. One of the participants, had the temerity to ask the police for an explanation of their order for them to move along, and they responded by arresting her.

The young woman has apparently been released. I wonder if she has any legal recourse. In any event, I’m annoyed at myself for forgetting about it. How many libertarians have the opportunity to get themselves arrested for silently and non-disruptively dancing in honor of our founding fathers?

Update: The video has myseriously disappeared, but you can read about the incident here and here.

Paul Krugman:

Who is John Galt?

And why is a book about him being assigned in university courses? Because businesses are paying schools to teach the wisdom of Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand’s novels of headstrong entrepreneurs’ battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation.

The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged’’ would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.

This blog isn’t really about my personal life, but I’ll make an exception to let folks know I’ve decided to go to grad school at Princeton this fall. I’ll be studying computer science. More details at TLF.

My fiancee, Amanda, has a tendency to give thoughtful, creative gifts, but one of my favorites was Marriage: A History, by Stephanie Coontz, which she gave me for Christmas. This was a particularly fitting choice because we got engaged last October.

Amanda tells me she got the idea from reading Julian write about the book. As Julian says, the striking thing about marriage is how much it has changed. Julian focuses on the fact that the Western conception of one-man-one-woman is far from universal, but I think the far more interesting aspect is the way marriage has changed within the Western tradition. Marriage as it existed even 500 years ago, to say nothing of the way the Greeks and the Romans practiced it, would have revolted modern Westerners, and religious conservatives most of all. Not only was marriage highly patriarchal, but it was also highly materialistic, in the sense that marriage was primarily a system for controlling inheritances and reinforcing the dominance of family elders. Children could only marry with the permission of their parents, and children born outside of marriage were treated to cruel ostracism. Even after marriage, children—especially sons—were expected to have more loyalty to their parents than their spouse.

Most shockingly, to modern sensibilities, the connection between marriage and romantic love is a relatively recent invention. For most of the history of Western civilization, it was considered to be rather unseemly to be too infatuated with your wife; it was far wiser, many Europeans believed, to be infatuated with your mistress. Infatuation with your wife could cloud your judgment and lead you to make foolish economic decisions, or to be overly lenient with her. In one striking letter, a 18th Century uncle wrote to his married nephew upon the occasion of his wife’s going out of town: “I presume that once within these 3 or 4 months you will have a fair old time of whoring as… you are like to have.” When nephew’s wife became ill and he was looking for a maidservant, the uncle wrote: “Because you writ me word that you were in love with Dirty Sluts, I took great care to fit you with a Joan that may be as good as my Lady in the dark.” I find it hard to imagine a letter like that in even the most sexually open-minded modern families.

The point of this, of course, is not that because men used to sleep around without consequence that this behavior is OK. Nor is it that because marriage has changed in the past, we should throw out all the rules of marriage in the future. But it should make us think carefully about claims that the particular form of marriage that dominates today is immutable, or that society will collapse if we tinker with it too much. Modern marriage is just that, a modern invention. It’s an extremely important invention that is worth working to preserve and shore up. But it’s also an invention that might still have room for improvement on the margins. The marriage system as it existed in 1950 is not an immutable constant, any more than the marriage systems of 1850, 1500, or 150 were.

Coontz’s book is excellent, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in marriage, either as a participant or an outside observer.