Earlier today, Barack Obama gave a speech in which he said that: Congressional leaders from both parties are close to a deal to avert the so-called "fiscal cliff;" that deal has not yet been reached; it is the Republicans' fault that the deal is not being reached; and the Republicans are not going to get their preferred solution to this whole situation. Rumor has it that House Republicans have been seriously pissed off at this speech, and are basically refusing to vote on anything tonight because Obama said mean things about them. What I'm wondering is whether that sequence of events might've been deliberate on Obama's part. It's been obvious all along that the fundamental logic of the deal-making favors Democratic policy results if we go over the cliff into the new year: Obama can then say to Republicans, okay, here's the Obama tax cut, and in exchange for my letting you pass it, which will be giving me what I want anyway, I'll make you give me a bunch of other stuff that I want. Republicans would be in a very difficult position to resist that tactic. So it makes sense for Obama to want to go over the cliff for a day or two. But, as has been usual for the last two years, it's quite important for him to make sure people blame Republicans for it. So making a very public display of having been working on a deal until the last minute, and getting House Republicans to sabotage any potential deal because they felt personally offended by Obama, is arguably the best of all relevant worlds. People keep doubting that Obama is incorporating the craziness of the Republicans into his strategy, which he would typically have been doing by offering more in deals than he actually wanted to give up, secure in the knowledge that House Republicans can't take yes for an answer. But I think that this time, it might well be the truth: Obama had a big noisy press conference because he wanted to throw the House Republican caucus into a hissy-fit, delivering him a more advantageous tactical situation while squarely delivering them the blame.
Happy New Year?
Monday, December 31, 2012
Saturday, December 22, 2012
He did it!
The Doctor saved us!!!
(Okay, given my earlier post about time zones and all, maybe I have to wait another few hours before December 21st, 2012 has good and truly bitten the dust across all of planet earth. Whatever.)
(Okay, given my earlier post about time zones and all, maybe I have to wait another few hours before December 21st, 2012 has good and truly bitten the dust across all of planet earth. Whatever.)
Friday, December 21, 2012
It's Always the End of the World as We Know It
(NOTE: If you haven't seen through the end of Season 7, Part I of Doctor Who, it's possible you won't want to read this post. I think the quote I use isn't particularly spoilerish, but still.)
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Time Zones and Doomsday
I just got done reading this rather thorough take-down of the idea that this Friday, December 21st, will be a "doomsday" because a certain cycle of a certain Mayan calendar ends on it on Slate's new really cool astronomy blog. Accordingly, because I need some way of procrastinating on my constitutional-theory paper that's due, well, on doomsday itself, I thought I'd share a thought I recently had about doomsday predictions. If you forecast that the end will fall on a certain calendar date, which time zone do you mean that in? Is it December 21st, Eastern Standard Time? Or Greenwich Mean Time? (In Doctor Who it does tend to be London time, as far as I can tell, though it's usually only relevant for Christmas specials.) Tokyo time? What? Does it happen at the first instant that it's December 21st anywhere on earth, or at the one brief moment, twenty-four hours later, when it's December 21st everywhere on earth? Or just at some point during the day that's December 21st, 2012 for the location of the Mayan civilization? Whenever it happens, it'll be nighttime for half the planet, and while the day is a nice naturally-occurring measurement unit, the placement of the dividing-line between one day and the next is a wee bit arbitrary. Astronomers tend to consider a day as lasting from noon to noon, for instance.
Now, this is certainly not the biggest problem with doomsday prophesies by any stretch of the imagination. Still, worth keeping in mind that there isn't even a uniform date across the whole planet, let alone a uniform time. And if we're talking about a fated planet-wide Armageddon, you'd think it would have some slightly more eternal reference-frame than just the dating conventions of twenty-first century human civilization. Just a thought.
Now, this is certainly not the biggest problem with doomsday prophesies by any stretch of the imagination. Still, worth keeping in mind that there isn't even a uniform date across the whole planet, let alone a uniform time. And if we're talking about a fated planet-wide Armageddon, you'd think it would have some slightly more eternal reference-frame than just the dating conventions of twenty-first century human civilization. Just a thought.
Friday, December 14, 2012
The Fundamental Logic of Not Making Trades
Time to distract myself from national tragedy with... the probable impending trade of the New York Mets' best and most awesome player! ...oh well, it's something, at least.
Trades are weird. You'd kind of think trades wouldn't happen People talk about two teams "agreeing" to a trade, but really, what happens in a trade is a disagreement. Team X thinks that Player Package A is superior to Player Package B, while Team Y thinks that B is superior to A. So they swap, and everyone's happy. Perforce, this involves either teams disagreeing on the "absolute" values, so to speak, of the players involved or teams giving different "relative" values to different types of player. The impending negotiations between the Mets and the Blue Jays regarding R.A. Dickey are a marvelous case study.
Trades are weird. You'd kind of think trades wouldn't happen People talk about two teams "agreeing" to a trade, but really, what happens in a trade is a disagreement. Team X thinks that Player Package A is superior to Player Package B, while Team Y thinks that B is superior to A. So they swap, and everyone's happy. Perforce, this involves either teams disagreeing on the "absolute" values, so to speak, of the players involved or teams giving different "relative" values to different types of player. The impending negotiations between the Mets and the Blue Jays regarding R.A. Dickey are a marvelous case study.
The Intent of a Gun is to Destroy
'Tis the season for arguing about guns, apparently, because some homicidal maniac decided to make it so.
One of the many, many arguments against meaningful gun control that really pisses me off is the idea that other things beside guns also kill people. This can take the form of, as in the really bizarre Fox News segment a few days ago that was featured, and annihilated, by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, coming up with all the other creative ways that someone who committed murder with a gun could've committed the same murder without a gun.* Or it can involve the simple observation that most people don't die from being shot with a gun, and not even most people who die the kind of death where you suffer some kind of violent physical trauma are killed with guns. Cars, for instance, kill lots of people, and knives can be very effective as an alternate means of murdering someone. But you don't see anyone proposing to ban cars or knives, do you?
This argument entirely misses what I would call the intentions of an object. The intention of a car, for instance, is to transport a person over a moderate distance at a moderately high speed. That's why cars exist, it's what they're meant to do. In the course of being used to do the thing they're intended to do, when they're used wrong, people sometimes get killed, but killing is not the intention. Likewise with, say, heavy-duty kitchen knives: their intention is to cut cooking ingredients. They can be used in a non-intended way, to cut living human flesh, but again, killing is not the intention of the object. To kill someone with a knife, a human needs to add intent to kill. For a car to kill someone, a human needs to use it wrongly, though not necessarily with any ill intent.
Now, admittedly, one might protest my fairly obvious next point by saying that the intention of a gun is not to kill either. Setting this question as phrased aside for the moment, I will simply assert that the intention of a gun is destruction. Knives and cars and baseball bats and airplanes, though they can all be turned into highly effective weapons, are first and foremost designed for creative uses: cooking and driving and playing and flying. There is, on the other hand, nothing creative that a gun wants to be used for. You can use a gun in a work of art, I suppose, but people don't make guns to make art with them. They make guns to efficiently destroy things. The intended target might be a piece of marked paper on a wall, or a helpless defensive animal in the woods, or a tyrannical Brit (think 1770s), or a home invader bent on rape and pillage, and these acts of destruction we might want to condone. Well, some of us might, anyway. But the simple fact remains that all a gun wants to do is destroy stuff. Guns will sometimes just kill people because they feel like killing people, as when they misfire during cleaning or whatever. A society with a lot of guns in it is a society filled with tiny little objects filled with malice for whatever lies in their sights, and no wish other than to destroy.
Not only does this make guns an inherently violent object in a way that baseball bats or cars or even knives are not, it speaks to the logic of eradicating them. What do we lose if we get rid of guns? We lose nothing creative, for guns are not creative objects. If we eradicate knives, we lose the ability to prepare food efficiently, and to open packages. If we eradicate cars, we lose the ability to transport people efficiently throughout society. If we eradicate guns? I contend that we lose nothing of value, nothing except destruction. As a society we must eternally struggle with the fact that knives and cars and baseball bats can become instruments of destruction, for we have substantial reason to desire the continued existence of these things. There is, however, no logic telling us that we must struggle with the innate desire of firearms to become instruments of destruction. We have simply chosen to tolerate it, because some of us enjoy destroying the right kind of thing.
One of the many, many arguments against meaningful gun control that really pisses me off is the idea that other things beside guns also kill people. This can take the form of, as in the really bizarre Fox News segment a few days ago that was featured, and annihilated, by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, coming up with all the other creative ways that someone who committed murder with a gun could've committed the same murder without a gun.* Or it can involve the simple observation that most people don't die from being shot with a gun, and not even most people who die the kind of death where you suffer some kind of violent physical trauma are killed with guns. Cars, for instance, kill lots of people, and knives can be very effective as an alternate means of murdering someone. But you don't see anyone proposing to ban cars or knives, do you?
This argument entirely misses what I would call the intentions of an object. The intention of a car, for instance, is to transport a person over a moderate distance at a moderately high speed. That's why cars exist, it's what they're meant to do. In the course of being used to do the thing they're intended to do, when they're used wrong, people sometimes get killed, but killing is not the intention. Likewise with, say, heavy-duty kitchen knives: their intention is to cut cooking ingredients. They can be used in a non-intended way, to cut living human flesh, but again, killing is not the intention of the object. To kill someone with a knife, a human needs to add intent to kill. For a car to kill someone, a human needs to use it wrongly, though not necessarily with any ill intent.
Now, admittedly, one might protest my fairly obvious next point by saying that the intention of a gun is not to kill either. Setting this question as phrased aside for the moment, I will simply assert that the intention of a gun is destruction. Knives and cars and baseball bats and airplanes, though they can all be turned into highly effective weapons, are first and foremost designed for creative uses: cooking and driving and playing and flying. There is, on the other hand, nothing creative that a gun wants to be used for. You can use a gun in a work of art, I suppose, but people don't make guns to make art with them. They make guns to efficiently destroy things. The intended target might be a piece of marked paper on a wall, or a helpless defensive animal in the woods, or a tyrannical Brit (think 1770s), or a home invader bent on rape and pillage, and these acts of destruction we might want to condone. Well, some of us might, anyway. But the simple fact remains that all a gun wants to do is destroy stuff. Guns will sometimes just kill people because they feel like killing people, as when they misfire during cleaning or whatever. A society with a lot of guns in it is a society filled with tiny little objects filled with malice for whatever lies in their sights, and no wish other than to destroy.
Not only does this make guns an inherently violent object in a way that baseball bats or cars or even knives are not, it speaks to the logic of eradicating them. What do we lose if we get rid of guns? We lose nothing creative, for guns are not creative objects. If we eradicate knives, we lose the ability to prepare food efficiently, and to open packages. If we eradicate cars, we lose the ability to transport people efficiently throughout society. If we eradicate guns? I contend that we lose nothing of value, nothing except destruction. As a society we must eternally struggle with the fact that knives and cars and baseball bats can become instruments of destruction, for we have substantial reason to desire the continued existence of these things. There is, however, no logic telling us that we must struggle with the innate desire of firearms to become instruments of destruction. We have simply chosen to tolerate it, because some of us enjoy destroying the right kind of thing.
Why Today Is Not The Day For Gun Control
In the wake of yet another one of these stupid bloody mass shootings, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said this:
This is one of those subjects where there's just an absolute consensus that nothing will ever be done about it. Climate change is another, although I have somewhat more hope there that Republicans can be made to realize that a carbon tax is a sensible, market-based conservative solution to a genuine national problem. ("Somewhat more" does not mean "a lot," just "more than zero.") But the fact that this consensus is right as long as there are 218 Republicans in the House of Representatives only underscores the importance of making there not be 218 House Republicans anymore. Presidents are supposed to get slaughtered in their six-year midterms. It's very important that 2014 buck that trend. Today is just one more tragic reason why. Republican control of the House makes it impossible to get the national government to do anything to solve national problems, or to make the lives of the American polity better or to prevent tragedies. Republican control of the House must, therefore, end.
"There is, I am sure -- will be, rather -- a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I do not think today is that day."A whole lot of people on the left are getting understandably pissed off about this. The rule that we can never discuss gun policy when the costs of America's absurd, wicked gun policy are most apparent is one that serves to eternally prejudice the debate in favor of the pro-gun side, and it legitimately sucks to hear a Democratic Administration endorsing it. But I think the reason why they keep saying this is readily apparent, and can be expressed in three words: Speaker John Boehner. Calls for Congress to pass new anti-gun legislation face an inescapable problem in the fact that Republicans control the House of Representatives, and that we can predict with pretty high certainty that any anti-gun measure will garner exactly 0 votes from House Republicans. Those two facts together make it absolutely impossible that Congress will enact any new legislation on the subject for the next two years. That sucks, but it's true, and there's very little anyone can do (except perhaps to shoot a bunch of Republican Congressmen, which, for the record, I am not advocating!) to make it stop being true. And, this being the case, I can understand why the White House feels that there's no point starting an argument that will only cost them political capital when there's absolutely zero potential to get anything out of it.
This is one of those subjects where there's just an absolute consensus that nothing will ever be done about it. Climate change is another, although I have somewhat more hope there that Republicans can be made to realize that a carbon tax is a sensible, market-based conservative solution to a genuine national problem. ("Somewhat more" does not mean "a lot," just "more than zero.") But the fact that this consensus is right as long as there are 218 Republicans in the House of Representatives only underscores the importance of making there not be 218 House Republicans anymore. Presidents are supposed to get slaughtered in their six-year midterms. It's very important that 2014 buck that trend. Today is just one more tragic reason why. Republican control of the House makes it impossible to get the national government to do anything to solve national problems, or to make the lives of the American polity better or to prevent tragedies. Republican control of the House must, therefore, end.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)