Reyes Landing-Spot Analysis

I am not, even remotely, a baseball insider. I can read MLB Trade Rumors as well as the next person, but I have no way to actually know what goes on in any given GM's office. But I want to write a post about likely destinations for free agent Jose Reyes, so I'm going to do it using these principles:

1. A team with a particularly entrenched shortstop, or a shortstop they're invested in, is not going to be interested in Reyes. Not because he wouldn't make their team better, but because they'd be wasting someone, and thus wasting money. Reyes is the best shortstop in baseball.
2. A team with a particularly entrenched leadoff hitter will be an unattractive destination for Reyes. He likes batting leadoff, and he's a free agent now. Is he really going to sign with a team that can't basically say, we can basically promise you that you'll hit first in the order every day in 2012, and after that until you start to suck? I doubt it.
3. Jose is likely to command a salary in the ~$15-20 million range. Teams whose payrolls in 2011 weren't all that much more than that are unlikely to be interested. Teams who weren't paying any of their players appreciably more than $10 million, also not likely players.

So, with that in mind, here's my analysis:

Rasmussen Reports Surrenders

I used to like the polls from Rasmussen Reports. Through the 2008 election cycle, I thought their horse-race numbers were some of the best in the game, and I was willing to tolerate the presence of a bit of right-wing spin on their website. Very quickly after the '08 election, though, I became completely disenchanted with them, very quickly. I believe that the moment when I stopped ever routinely visiting their website was when they introduced this absurd "political class/mainstream America" concept. The idea was that they asked people three questions, which were supposed to identify something about, I dunno, populist versus elitism. The point was that a) those questions actually identified left-wing political opinions, roughly speaking, and b) they attached exceedingly biased labels to the two positions. So then they would use these things to demonstrate, of course, that the left-wing position on some issue was favored only by the "political class" while "mainstream America" had the conservative view. The second they started doing this stuff, I quit looking at their polls.

So I recently discovered that they did a poll on the Occupy Wall Street movement, and while of course they spin the poll as far away from this fact as they can, a plurality of voters (~43%) had a favorable opinion of OWS. What I wanted to see was how those numbers broke down by their political class/mainstream America divide, since you would really think that something calling itself "Occupy Wall Street," or "We Are the 99%," that carried out mass demonstrations against bankers and plutocrats and what-have-you was certainly on the populist side of the isle. I was hoping to find that their numbers showed that positive opinion of OWS was a feature of the political class, which would be a nice little talking point for me to use in demonstrating that their distinction is really just a left/right distinction, with a good label on the right and a bad label on the left. That wasn't what I found. Instead I found that they didn't break their numbers down using those labels. It appears very much like they've abandoned the concept of political class vs. mainstream America. It's about bloody time, whenever it happened.

Not that I'll go back to looking at Rasmussen polls, or anything, though...

The Justification for Statutory Rape Laws

Statutory rape laws strike me as kind of weird. Even if a) the defendant can show that their partner deliberately concealed from them the fact that they were underage, or b) the defendant can show that their partner really, really, really wanted to have sex with them, i.e. it was extremely consensual in standard parlance, the defendant is still guilty. The only plausible rationale for this kind of strict liability is the idea that you don't want to put the burden of having to press charges on a minor, who might be easily intimidated or pressured out of wanting to do so. Some young girl can, for example, be pressured into saying that she consented when it actually was standard-order rape. And, of course, there's the fact that as the age of the minor involved approaches zero, it crosses a threshold at some point beyond which any claim of either a) or b) is just impossible. You can't not know that an eight-year-old is underage, and it's just true that an eight-year-old is not going to meaningfully consent to have sex. You've gotta draw a line somewhere, I guess, though as a matter of real-world psychology I think eighteen is a little too high. Then there's the idea that a teenager can be rather easily manipulated into "consenting" by an older, more experienced predator, and that we don't want to let that predator say "but she said yes!"

But that is not, apparently, anything related to the reason why we have statutory rape laws involving teenagers who might actually naturally want to have sex. The Supreme Court once overturned a statutory rape law that applied only against men who had sex with underage women, and applied even when the man was underage himself. Why did the state have such a law in the first place? Why, to prevent teenage pregnancy, of course! Why did the court strike the law down? Because it held that the unequal treatment of men and women was not even rationally related to the desire to prevent teenage pregnancy. The dissent (by right-wingers) argued that since women have the natural penalty of pregnancy that attaches to sex, but men don't, the law in question just "evened up" the incentives facing each gender.

Can I just say how seriously f@cked up all of that is? The sexual criminal code is not an instrument of social policy like that. The whole point of sex crimes is that they are not really sexual in nature but rather violent in nature, using sex as an instrument of violence. The ideas of statutory rape given above have nothing to do with that basic notion. We're imprisoning people and placing them on sex offender registries because we want to disincentivize teenage pregnancy? If we're so keen on preventing teenage pregnancy, why not require that all youngsters who have sex use some form of birth control? We don't find such laws for adults to be valid, but that's because we don't think the state has a valid interest in preventing people who want to get pregnant, or at least who want to take a reasonable risk of getting pregnant, from doing so, if those people are adults. If we think the state has an interest in preventing teenage pregnancy, in what way is a law against sex using birth control even remotely 'narrowly tailored' or 'minimally invasive'? Why are we even calling the crime in question rape, when it clearly is nothing of the sort?

That was kind of a rant, and I get that in many states the statutory rape laws may be designed to actually combat things like power-differential rape between people of different ages, or sexual abuse of genuine children. But if the best answer we can give for why we need to hold that fifteen-year-olds lack the ability to legitimately want to have sex is that the Council of Elders wishes they wouldn't have sex, because then they might get pregnant and Bad Things would happen, then it seems to me that all we've got is a massively disempowering, puritanical morals code.

Separation of Romance and State

You know how we like to say that separation of church and state is as much for the benefit of church as for the benefit of state? Well, the following quote from someone at a Brown Democrats meeting, discussing the state of marriage equality politics in Rhode Island, reminded me of that idea:

There's nothing romantic about the term 'civil union.'

Yep. Nothing romantic about the term civil union. But, if I may, romance is not a legitimate state interest. I don't say that because I dislike government (if you're reading this blog, you probably know that), but because I'm a huge fan of individual private lives. Romance, it strikes me, is one of the most fundamentally private personal interests I can conceive. The reason I don't want the state trying to foster romance per se is that romance will best be fostered by letting people just commingle amongst themselves and have romantic interactions. There are other things that a government might want to foster, social stability and what-have-you, that are often given as benefits of marriage, all of which could in theory be promoted just as well by a system of civil partnerships conferring certain legal rights, privileges, and obligations, but with no supposed connection to "romance." Then you could let people who had strong romantic feelings about one another go have a big flowery ceremony and start calling themselves married, and maybe lots of those couples would want to get a civil partnership as well.

I don't have an enormous problem with having government do the marriage thing directly, so long as it obeys the good ol' Equal Protection Clause while doing so, but it's just a thought: getting the government out of the romance business would probably be a good thing for romance itself.

Bad, Bad Arguments

To be faithful to our written Constitution, a jurist must recognize and respect the limiting nature of its terms. Granted, what a term such as “due process” requires in a particular circumstance is not always clear. Nevertheless, there should be no question at all about whether a 34-year-old or a naturalized citizen may become President of the United States. That the terms giving rise to most questions of constitutional meaning lie somewhere between inherent ambiguity and mathematical certainty is no excuse from the duty of fidelity to the text. Rather, to be faithful to the written Constitution a jurist must make it his goal to illuminate the meaning of the text as the Framers understood it.

So quoth one of the obnoxious libertarian scholars in my constitutional law/political philosophy reading that I've been doing just now. See what he does there? The first 4.8 sentences, out of 5, are a really strong argument for textual fidelity, including ample respect for the fact that much of the constitution is vague and that this allows a lot of interpretive discretion. But then, at the last minute, he sneaks in "as the Framers understood it." Nothing in the argument in the rest of the paragraph (and none of the argument earlier in the essay, or subsequent) is dedicated to showing or trying to show that "fidelity to the text" means "fidelity to the text as the Framers understood it." My favorite interpretive principle from Steve Calabresi is that people can misunderstand their own rules. So, for instance, in 1868 a bunch of people put the following into the federal Constitution:

No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

At the time, people thought that meant some things, and didn't mean others. Notably, they pretty clearly didn't think that meant schools had to be integrated; they didn't think it meant you had to give women any particular degree of equal protection; and they certainly didn't think it meant that groups like "poor people" or "gay people" had any equal-protection rights. And they were wrong! The phrase above most definitely means that schools must be integrated, and women get equal protection, too, and so do gay people, and probably poor people should as well. That's what the text says. Saying we have to interpret that as the framers understood it is, in fact, to diverge to the text, to apply not the words enacted into the Constitution but rather to apply the particular ideologies of 1868. That ain't fidelity to the text.

Anyway, that was just a really bad argument that pissed me off.

Limited Morality

I'm reading a paper for my philosophy class about "moral luck," the idea that the moral value of things you do can in fact depend on the results and not just on the expected results (in the strict statistical sense). But that's sort of beside the point of this post: early in the essay (which is as far as I've gotten) it uses the parable of a hypothetical person called Gauguin, a "creative artist who turns away from definite and pressing human claims on him in order to live a life in which, as he supposes, he can pursue his art." The author contends that this decision is morally justified iff he succeeds in becoming an artist (however we wish to define that), but is morally unjustified if he fails in that effort. I don't really care about this contention, but what I do care about is the fact that this example shows up in a paper on moral philosophy.

I'm not sure exactly what the other "definite and pressing human claims" on our hypothetical Mr. Gauguin are supposed to be. If the idea is that, by making this choice, he is neglecting to help other people that you can reasonable consider him to have a natural obligation to help, as for instance his family, then that's one thing. But if the idea is just that instead of choosing a life suited for material comforts or a decent standard of living or romance or some other personal good, i.e. a different set of goods for Mr. Gauguin and no one else than the ones he ends up pursuing, then isn't this just not a moral question even remotely? And if it is, then can't we evaluate it without caring whether he turns out as a successful painter? If he's neglecting his duty to care for others by pursuing his painting, that's selfish, and it's no less selfish if he achieves a personal feeling of success as a painter. But if we're not talking about obligations to others that he neglects, but rather the way he chooses to live his own life for himself, then it's not a moral question. This is true because, in slightly excessively economics-y language, the individual has a plenary right to determine his or her own utility function. It's up to him how he wants to live his life, modulo the effects his life has on other people's well-being. If he has regrets about the choice he made, they're not moral regrets, are they? They're strategic regrets. He thinks his prior self was foolishly overestimating the odds of success, or underestimating the suffering incumbent on failure, or underestimating the benefits of the safe, non-creative life. Or something. And he wishes he had chosen differently. But as long as he's wishing that solely because of his own well-being or lack thereof, it's not a moral or ethical concern.

More on Reyes

As I understand it, the common gripe against Reyes' tactics last Wednesday are that "batting titles should be reserved for heroes, not cowards," and that bunting for a base hit his first time up and then taking himself out of the game in order to (in all probability) beat Ryan Braun for the batting championship. So, some problems with this.