Ignoring Radicalism

At the main Times Square New Year's festivities this past year, the last few minutes before the stroke of midnight were spent having Cee Lo Green, a hip-hop-ish singer of some repute, singing the song "Imagine," by John Lennon. All very well and good, although it was a mediocre-at-best performance and felt kind of random. But in singing Imagine, Mr. Green changed the line "Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too" to "Nothing to kill or die for, and all religions true." Now, the new version is in the first place deeply offensive to anyone who even remotely shares the convictions on this issue of John Lennon; Imagine is one of the most famous anti-religious songs, and changing that particular lyric in that particular way feels simply violative. Moreover, the new line is gibberish, even from a pro-religion perspective: different religions make differing factual claims about the world, which cannot all be true.

I Just Don't Get It

A certain New Hampshire primary voter, on why she chose Gov. Jon Huntsman:

"He seems to be straightforward and he wants to rebuild the trust, and that's lacking all over," she said. She had briefly considered Rick Santorum because she liked his emphasis on family values, but decided that the trust issue was bigger.

"No one trusts Washington anymore," she said.

....
Seriously? Okay, before I launch into my tirade I should mention that there's a non-zero chance that this woman was talking in code about electability, that she was debating whether the "trust" message or the "family values" message would play better in the general election. But let's assume that this is not the case, and instead she was trying to decide which of these people she herself would most like to be President. If that's the question, then everything she just mentioned is meaningless. What on earth does "rebuild the trust" mean, as a campaign platform? Well, it kind of suggests something reform-y, but there are lots of reforms that various people have favored. And she doesn't exactly seem to be talking about reform. Rather, she just notices that no one trusts Washington anymore, and hears Huntsman echoing this concern, and therefore likes him. As for Santorum, well, we don't know from this article whether this woman is actually a rabid bigot like Santorum, but there's no reason to think so. More likely she just knows that she likes families, and Santorum talks a lot about how important families are.

Do I really need to explain in detail how irrelevant all of this stuff is to what actually happens once someone gets elected? The simple fact that this woman is on the fence between Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman, for god's sake, is enough to make that perfectly clear. Santorum is probably the craziest, most viciously right-wing person in the Republican field, with a special emphasis on the bigotry and hate, whereas Huntsman, while conservative, is a more-or-less reasonable, sane type, with a particular lack of emphasis on social conservativism. Huntsman supports civil unions, for crying out loud, while Santorum thinks gay parents are worse than no parents! If people were thinking about actual substantive issue positions, the Santorum/Huntsman swing voter would not exist. This woman is casting her vote on an utterly meaningless basis.

The Sense in Which Republicans Do Favor Equality of Opportunity

Paul Krugman has a great column out today about how there's zero evidence that Mitt Romney actually does favor "equality of opportunity," and less than zero evidence that Congressional Republicans do. The main thrust of his case is that we have extravagantly unequal opportunity in this country, as seen in things like malnutrition among poor children (not to mention the hideously inegalitarian educational system). But there is a Republican response to make, along the lines of my post on this subject a little over a year ago. (Note that I don't think it's a good response, just a response.) The government programs Krugman is advocating, they might say, aren't about equality of opportunity, but rather about ensuring equal outcomes. WIC and other food-stamp programs aim at ensuring that poor people, equally with rich people, have enough to eat. That's an outcome, right? If we really want to focus exclusively on opportunity, then we should provide everyone with the opportunity to achieve the outcome "has enough to eat."

Now as I said, this is not a good response. The first enormous problem with it is that making sure everyone has enough to eat ought to have priority, purely on its own terms, over any kind of esoteric concern with "opportunity" versus "outcomes." Failing to accord it such demonstrates that right-wingers who would make the above statement are, to put it mildly, callous bastards. But as I mention in my previous post, there's another problem, at the esoteric philosophy level. Even if we concede that the right-wing vision provides "equality of opportunity" at the level of "do I have enough material goods to sustain myself?", it entirely annihilates anything resembling such equality when it comes to the higher reaches of human aspiration. No one will, for instance, become President if they have to spend their whole life working multiple minimum-wage jobs just to feed themselves and find shelter. If we actually cared about the democratic egalitarian notion that "anyone can grow up to be President," we should need to guarantee a sizable amount of outcome-equality at the "lower," more formative levels of life and society. Otherwise our society would become, in a sense, a series of competitions, arranged from "basic necessities" to "highest aspirations," where at every step along the way only the winners of one game would get to even play the next one. That might suit Mitt Romney just fine, since he's one of the people who has won at every stage of the game, but it doesn't really sound very much like equality of opportunity, in the truest sense, to me.

Rick Santorum, Theocrat

Okay, I know that the Republican Party is basically committed to a more-or-less theocratic ideology in many ways, but at least some of them have the sense to be subtle about it most of the time. Not Rick Santorum:

 “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. ... Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Also he apparently said something about how great the Crusades were, and how American wars in the Middle East were a continuation of the great work of those Crusades, and "onward American soldiers." Seriously. The man's a theocrat, plain and simple. At least he's honest about it, if that's a good thing.

The Question is not, "Can they do moral philosophy?"

So apparently some woman in New York is trying to get punitive damages for pain suffered by her dog because of deficient care by the store that sold it to her. Basically the case rests upon convincing the Law to recognize the dog as a Being rather than as Property, although her lawyer has been throwing around the word "soul" in a way that does no one any good. Out of curiosity I checked out the Huffington Post comment thread, and while most of the commenters said things like, "well I'm sympathetic, but c'mon, you can't even prove that humans have souls," one person said something like, "well perhaps animals have souls, but they don't have rights. They have no ability to understand complex moral issues." He then went on to insult animal rights advocates, blah blah blah. Can I just say, this is entirely the wrong way to look at things? Yes, John Rawls' framework makes a lot of use of the fact that the citizens of his desired just society are rational, moral, autonomous beings, which is how he manages to exclude non-human animals. As a matter of political theory the fact that animals cannot communicate is deeply relevant, and probably does mean that we shouldn't even try to give animals political participation rights.

But the entire point of a so-called human right is that you have it not by virtue of any particular characteristic or, you know, virtue, like the ability to understand complex moral concepts, but because you are a human being and you exist. My right not to be murdered does not stem from my ability to participate in a long-term cooperative scheme among rational moral beings treated as free and equal citizens. Rather it stems from the fact that being murdered is pretty much the ultimate evil that can befall me (in both the etymological and modern sense of the word!), and so if we care about my welfare at all then we'll care pretty strongly that I not get murdered. We can see that this is what's going on because we don't withdraw basic rights against violence from people who demonstrate, say, an utter lack of ability to understand complex moral issues. There are many members of the species Homo sapiens who cannot understand such concepts; I think the commenter to whose "arguments" I am responding may be one of them. As Peter Singer has been known to point out, some human beings have neurological impairments that prevent such understanding. We don't say that these people are not beings, do not have rights. They retain a full complement of human rights, because they are still humans.

So what is it, exactly, about humans that makes us so damn special? It clearly is not our ability to do moral philosophy, although that's a useful skill. Perhaps there's some sort of religious philosophy that describes violence against human beings as a "sin," just because, and thereby dodges the question of why it's a bad thing. But I think in general our sense that violence against humans is wrong derives from our understanding that such violence inflicts tremendous suffering on the victim (among others), and that it is therefore almost always a bad thing. And we do tend to express the wicked nature of violence in rights terminology: I do have a right against your shooting me through the heart. I have this right simply because I am a human being who would suffer rather tremendously (infinitely, one might say) if you did so. It comes with a corresponding obligation on you not to shoot me through the heart, again just because it would cause lots of suffering. If you concede that non-human animals can suffer, can feel pain, can feel pleasure, can just plain feel, then what's left of the case against basic animal rights?

Ron Paul is not Progressive, not even about wars or drugs

Ron Paul is a nasty, old, bigoted, angry white man. This much, I think, the majority of left-wingers will readily grant, at this point in history anyway. Between the newsletters and the opposition to anything the federal government ever wants to do that's, you know, good, and the failing to be pro-choice and the monetary crankery and the opposition to anything resembling civil rights laws, it's a pretty clear picture. But some of them, even while admitting that in general he's not a very nice guy, will nonetheless insist on spending a fairly large amount of time and effort talking up his supposedly progressive views on foreign and drug policy. The basic argument is that we should like Ron Paul's foreign and drug policies because he is opposed to the Wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and on Drugs. He deserves some amount of credit, these people say, for having the right position on some issues, even if he's very very wrong on most issues.

And I suppose he does, in a way. After all, his fellow-competitors in the Republican primary are as wrong as he is on most issues, give or take, and much more wrong on these two. But I think it's worth emphasizing that Ron Paul does not have a progressive foreign policy. Nor is his anti-War on Drugs stance the result of some latent liberaltarianist streak. In both cases what we see is the result of his universal opposition to anything the federal government ever does. I've always thought he's not so much a libertarian as he is an antifederalist. As best I can tell, his own personal preferences for proper public policy would criminalize abortion (and embryonic stem cell research on embryos that would be discarded anyway), have government schools teaching children religious doctrines, and would subsidize private religious schools. He may or may not be in favor of criminalizing most common currently-illegal drugs and establishing a system of ID cards. His big point is that he doesn't want the federal government doing any of these things. He's basically an anti-federalist, plus some lack-of-understanding on economics and some bigotry.

Obama's Recess Appointment and Media Interpretation

Today, President Barack Obama decided to make a recess appointment of Richard Cordray to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans have been blocking this nomination for months, not because they mind Cordray as CFPB chief but because they mind the CFPB itself. This would all be the normal course of things, were it not for the fact that the Senate is not technically in recess. They've remained in pro forma session, though of course all 100 Senators are out of town and no work is getting done. The Associated Press story covering the appointment described things thusly:

He [Obama] is essentially declaring the Senate's short off-and-on legislative sessions a sham intended to block his appointments.

See, this is just false. Obama is not declaring that; he's declaring that, because those "sessions" are, as everyone knows, a sham intended to block his appointments, they are invalid and the Senate counts as being in recess anyway. (Incidentally, I think that's a perfectly reasonable interpretation: if every Senator has gone home for an extended period of time, and no Senate work is being done, it counts as a constitutional recess no matter what they decide to call it.) It's just true, and to the best of my knowledge undisputed, that these "sessions" are a sham intended to deprive Obama of his constitutional recess-appointment power. Instead of saying so, though, the AP presents this factually true statement as something Obama is "claiming." As in, implicitly, "and Republicans claim this to be false, and we can't/won't tell you who's right." C'mon, people.