No, That's Not the Right Answer

From the piece on Ezra Klein's Wonkblog about the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation's decision to cease giving money to Planned Parenthood:

Komen said it could not continue to fund Planned Parenthood because it has adopted new guidelines that bar it from funding organizations under congressional investigation.

This is a lie. It's not even a creative lie, although with today's media culture it might be good enough to just get parroted around the world. It's a lie because it presents the new anti-funding-organizations-under-congressional-investigation guideline as the cause. It's not the cause, it's the event. It's one of their own policies! Whose choice was it to impose this policy on the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation? It was their own damn choice! A choice made, moreover, at a time when it would have been obvious to all and sundry that the main upshot of that "guideline" would be defunding Planned Parenthood. They defunded Planned Parenthood because of these guidelines, but they adopted these guidelines because they wanted to defund Planned Parenthood. They have not given an answer to the question of why they wanted to do this, although it's not hard to guess given that the founder and CEO of the Foundation is a long-time Republican donor, about $100,000 to Republicans and right-wing causes since 1987 by my rough summation of the various donations, and apparently a known hard-core "pro-lifer." It's a solid guess that the reason they wanted to defund Planned Parenthood is that the person whose organization this is is enough of a rabid right-winger to just want to crush them for the sin of providing abortions. (With money other than that from Komen, I gather.) That's it. The guidelines are entirely a smokescreen.

Why Do We Like Manufacturing Jobs, Again?

Prompted by President Obama's emphasis on manufacturing in his State of the Union address, Matt Yglesias has been questioning the apparent embrace of manufacturing by left-wingers. If we want generous universal health care, a vastly improved educational system featuring early childhood education, smaller classes in elementary and high schools, and widespread higher education, a better physical infrastructure, and more sustainable/non-factory/organic/local agriculture, then we presumably want people to be working in those fields, none of which are manufacturing, and therefore we clearly don't really want the manufacturing sector to gobble up too many workers. Apparently various other internet liberals are taking some issue with his presentation of these issues; I have not honestly looked at their responses, because what I'm about to write does not really concern any of the specifics of this debate. Rather, it just strikes me that there's no good reason to like manufacturing jobs at all.

Why It's a Good Bet that Reality's Really Real

I just returned from the inaugural meeting of my Perception and the Mind class. Our professor spent a while discussing the concept of perception, including the more-or-less philosophical puzzle about how or whether we can know whether our perceptions tell us anything objective about the real world. Is there any way, she wondered, to be sure we're not in a Matrix-style virtual reality, where our brain is being fed information to simulate an apparent reality that doesn't exist? Well, no, we can't be certain. But I do think that we have good reasons for thinking that it's exceedingly likely reality is real, and not a virtual computer simulation*, for the very simple reason that making such a simulation would be extremely difficult.

The world around me is tremendously detailed. Just sitting on my bed in my dorm room, using only my (admittedly very strong) glasses as a sensory aide, there's already enough to take in. If I chose to acquire the right apparatus, I could see, in addition to everything that's apparent on inspection, the tiny molecular structures of everything around me, their electromagnetic images outside the narrow visual band, etc. The amount of sheer information about this world that appears to surround me is staggering, in other words. A simulated virtual reality would have to pour that information into me, and would have to generate it, all at once, all using the strength of some computing system. That's hard.

On the other hand, all that needs to happen for this information to be there, and for me to perceive it, on the hypothesis that it is the actual world is just for a world to exist, one that's got lots of detail to it, and for beings within it to develop the ability to detect information about that world. That's not very hard. Or, to be more precise, it is very hard, probably a great deal more unlikely from a properly a priori vantage-point than the task facing the designer of a virtual reality that I described above, but these things are also necessary for the virtual reality. This is something like Carl Sagan's observation that if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. In order to have a simulated virtual reality, there must be some real world in which that virtual reality is being simulated, and there must be beings within that world who can detect information about it, and therefore be tricked into thinking they've received information about a world that doesn't exist. All of the complexity, the difficulty, the improbability, and the weirdness of the sheer existence of reality and sentient beings within that reality necessary for me to sit here observing such a wonderfully detailed world are also necessary for that world to be a fake. It's just that, if it is a fake, there's a whole extra layer of complexity, difficulty, improbability, and weirdness, entirely added on top of the original layer.

This doesn't mean, of course, that I do have any way of knowing for sure that this dorm room around me isn't a fake. It just means that, if I don't have any direct evidence on the question one way or another, it's staggeringly unlikely to be a fake. It's a reasonable presumption for me to make, in other words, that reality is really real. I might be wrong, and it might even matter a great deal that I'm wrong (though it might not). But until some Morpheus comes along to give me a reason not to do so, I might as well bet on reality, the less-unlikely possibility.

You've Got It Backwards, Gov. Christie

Of the marriage-equality bill working its way through the New Jersey state legislature, my odious Governor Chris Christie, Republican, said the following:

"I don’t think there’s anything necessarily so special about this particular issue that it must be handled by a Legislature."

This was in the context of arguing for a referendum on gay marriage, rather than just passing the bill outright. But note that this is precisely backwards. Legislatures are not councils of experts upon whose intervention we depend when the issue is too complex or misunderstood or, you know, important to let the people decide it for themselves. Legislatures are the solution to the problems posed by the overwhelming desire of most people not to spend all their time thinking about public policy concerns. They pick a group of people whom they trust (in theory, at least) to study the issues and render informed decisions which reflect the interests of the people themselves, so that most of us can just lead our normal lives. Some people then think that on certain issues of particular importance or centrality, particularly though not exclusively things of constitutional stature, it's not enough just to let the delegated powers of the legislature decide, and that we should ask the people directly. Some people might think it a shame that we allow legislatures to decide these things in the first place, as Rousseau did. But there's no world in which the more important, or "special" in Christie's terminology, an issue is, the more we ought to have it decided by a legislature. The way it works is that issues to be decided by the people are more important than issues to be decided by the legislature, which are in turn more important than issues to be decided by unelected government officials and bureaucracies.

There are a lot of reasons not to like Governor Christie, and not to like this recent statement of his, of which this is a fairly minor one. Still, it reflects a profound lack of understanding of very basic political theory, and that just kind of pisses me off.

Get It Together, President Obama

No, that's not about the economy, jobs, the deficit, gay marriage, dealing with Congressional Republicans, or really anything else for that matter. It's about sloganeering, specifically the apparent frame for his upcoming State of the Union address: "an America built to last." This is, to my mind, another pathetic failure to use "A New Foundation" as the President's catch-phrase. As regular readers know, assuming there are any, I've been advocating for this as the President's catch-phrase for two years come tomorrow. Obama's "Win the Future" line was similarly trying to get at the same idea as "A New Foundation," but did so by sounding incredibly silly and being extremely easy to mock on Twitter. "Built to last" is a car commercial-level slogan. "A New Foundation" is the exact same slogan, except that it doesn't suck! It's the same image of a new, robust version of our country, except instead of sounding like a sleazy auto salesman it's cut from the very same cloth as such progressive agendas as the New Deal, Fair Deal, Square Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society. It's not even really a slogan: while it is a catch-phrase, it's more of a title than a description.

And yet, he continues not to see it. This is a sad day for American rhetorical framing devices.

Gingrich-Obama Debates: Bring 'Em On!

Apparently Republicans, in South Carolina at least, think Newt Gingrich would be a more formidable general-election candidate than Mitt Romney. Their justification for believing so, all objective polling evidence to the contrary, is their belief that Gingrich is such an amazing debater that he'll just destroy Obama in that forum. Partly this is also due to their belief that Obama is just a dimwit who's only ever gotten anywhere through affirmative action. Newt plays to this a whole frickin' lot, with his whole "I'll challenge Obama to a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates" schtick. But here's the thing: this whole idea is massively wrong. Newt can get massive applause lines playing to the insane Republican audience, but he's not actually that brilliant a debater. Obama, on the other hand, is extremely intelligent, and I imagine is currently barely containing his glee at the prospect of getting to debate Newt Gingrich. He'll run rings around him. Newt's just said so many things where the public, including non-crazy non-Republicans, is just so against him, that Obama will have an almost-too-damn-easy time pinning him to them in the fall.

But please, nobody tell the Republicans. Let them keep deluding themselves into thinking that Obama's a pathetic wimp, and that all he needs is a good standing-up-to from Newt to expose him for the fraud he is. Let them believe that just long enough to nominate him.

Giving Rick Santorum a Modicum of Credit Where It's Due

Today's Midday Open Thread on Daily Kos, one of their several daily round-ups of interesting news links, includes this piece about Rick Santorum's comments about how he would counsel against an abortion if one of his daughters were raped. Their headline: "Rick Santorum: a firm believer in a rapist's right to reproduce, even if he's the grandfather." Now, Rick Santorum and I agree on approximately zero political issues, at least within the frame of controversy in modern American politics (I'm pretty sure he's avowedly anti-slavery), but I have to admit that Daily Kos' spin on this statement is a little unfair. There is absolutely zero obligation on a rape victim to abort a pregnancy which results from that rape. People make too damn much of a deal about genetic heritage, in my opinion, and were I in the situation Santorum describes I think an important part of my counsel would be, look, half the DNA comes from a pretty despicable source, but that doesn't actually mean anything about the child.

Now, I'm pretty sure Rick Santorum also believes that abortion should be illegal, including in the case of rape. That's the problem here, not whether he would personally advise his own daughter not to have an abortion in that situation. Politics is about public policy, so let's criticize politicians who want to make bad public policy, not people who might choose as a private course of action something which might be required by bad public policy.