Politblogo

Another spam cleanout, at long last!

Go me!  I cleaned out more spam!  I'm paying TypePad 9USD a month simply to prevent link-rot and keep the option of coming back here open for some future time. I can be found at various other internet haunts, on some of which I even have posting privileges, but this will still be my name-link and home base.  I suppose one day I should clean the link-rot in the blogroll, and actually put in the blogs I do read... 

I still get hits primarily from my "(Not) Without My Daughter" post series, which remains controversial to this very day.  I suppose people are still teaching the book at universities, etc.  I hardly ever encounter it in popular culture anymore, and even when I wrote those posts it had, I think, already gotten stale.  Conflict with Iran, however, isn't stale, more's the pity.  But the update, for those who weren't paying attention, is that Moody Mahmoody died not long ago without ever seeing his daughter, and it looks like his daughter never wanted to see him, as far as we can tell. We have no idea whether she has even seen his version of the story in "Without His Daughter" or what she might think about it.  I leave it to the reader to decide what it all means.  Let me just say: until there is a widespread acknowledgement of the West's involvement and ulterior motives in pre-Revolutionary Iran, it will remain very easy to cast doubt on things like "Not Without My Daughter" and the motives of its author, fair or not. 

Other than that, life is mostly good.  This blog header is kind of out of date, in a sense, because I no longer live in the USA or Canada, though that may be temporary.  I have come to feel that it is necessary to live in a country to understand its politics, whereas before living in the USA I might have said otherwise.   So we'll see how long it takes me to lose touch with the "tempo" of the USA...

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled bloggy neglect!

A bad bill as political laxative for US health care

Ian Welsh kindly posted a link to my previous post on his blog as a separate post of his own, but rather than come here, most of his commentariat decided to respond over there.  Since I promised not to respond directly on this issue on his site, I am going to make a GREAT SACRIFICE and break my promise to forget this moribund joint and respond to some common threads in his comments here, in a new post.  (I responded to Paul Lukasiak who kindly commented in the previous thread, and I'll respond to Helena if this post doesn't manage to cover her objections.)

It appears at this point that the Senate bill is likely to pass.  For all that it is full of FAIL, I haven't made any secret of the idea that I'm mostly convinced that it is a good thing.  The underlying motivation of the table of outcomes in the last post is the sense that, on health care, the US political system is like a highly constipated patient.  We want it to poop out the golden brick of a Canadian-style single-payer system, but for many electoral cycles, now, it has been completely unable to poop out anything at all.  The reasons for this are the usual: money and media and money-in-media. 

Those are big problems, and they are the reason why the bill is so failtastic.  But until the surgical suite is ready to fix these problems---a long project---the patient still needs a laxative.  The Senate bill has the potential to be that laxative.

With that, here are some of the major classes of objections:

Objection #1: Failure to pass a bill would leave the door open for better bill

I responded to this one in the comments to the previous post.  Very briefly, regardless of what Obama wants, failing to pass a bill means that Congress is simply not going to try again any time soon.  The official narrative is already ready: no one has done it before, and it's too hard.  Clinton failed.  The official narrative is part and parcel of the political constipation problem.  So, no, failure to pass a bill would mean/have meant that the effort is dead for another electoral cycle or two.  There's no evidence to believe that single-payer is going to happen at that point either.

Objection #2: Bad bills never lead to better legislation later on

My first reaction to this idea was a certain amount of incredulity.  So I'll farm this one out to Cogitamus, first and foremost.

More importantly, though, American progressives seem not to have learned something that the American right has known for a long time: that apart from actual policy, rhetorical metavictories actually have real, long-term value.  For example: even when they can't actually destroy Social Security or other progressive programs and priorities, they can create an overall cultural milieu in which "entitlements" are perceived to eat the future earnings of our descendants.  

This bill has the potential to create the perception, once again, that health care reform is both possible and desirable as a matter of conventional wisdom.  It may not, but passing no bill doesn't even try.

Objection #3: The public will hate the individual mandate

I can hardly argue that a public-option-less mandate is a great idea for controlling consumer-end costs.  This is by far the strongest argument against the Senate bill.  But my response is roughly the same.  Alright, let's say that it is unpopular.  Than the worst-case scenario is that a Republican Congress and President repeals it, leaving the USA back where it was before, roughly.  One way or another, if the systemic breakdown of the existing health care arrangement is reaching catastrophic proportions, the only question is time; and this bill could either speed it up or slow it down by a small amount---at worst.

Objection #4: Adopting this bill is a failure to negotiate effectively

This is one of Ian's favorite themes, and it depends on some assumptions, including who the negotiating partner actually is.  The negotiating partner is the insurance industry, and what is being negotiated in any health care reform package that might actually be serious is the very existence of a large chunk of that industry if not all of it as we know it.  So, they have no incentive to negotiate.

If you doubt that the negotiating partner is the insurance industry, consider the very fact that a public-optionless Senate bill with mandates is likely to pass.  With 60 votes.  Even with Bernie Sanders (I-VT), regardless of how he really feels.

In conclusion

Progressives from Markos to Jane Hamsher to Ian Welsh have quite well articulated the reasons why the Senate bill is terrible and does not lead in itself to a signficantly improved health care system.  This is probably all true.  What it does is open a door.  The cost to not opening that door at all isn't pretty.  Opening that door may not be pretty either.  But at least there is a chance of movement.  A slim one, but a chance.

One thing I have not so far seen is an account of how and when a better health care system would be instituted for the USA on hypothetical failure of this bill---aside from Objection #1, which I've dealt with.  It's really easy to sit around running a creepy drive-by psychoanalysis of Jacob Hacker, and another to explain a political plan given current conditions for accomplishing something via the legislative system.  One of these is more fun, I guess.

Otherwise, the best thing to do is to let the bill pass and then claim a rhetorical metavictory---because the meta in all of this is actually important until you have a plan to get yourself to the clean, ideal politics in which good policy is honestly debated.

Freedom is slavery, health is insurance: the metabenefits of a bad bill

(To my "regular" "readers": I am writing this blog post in response to multiple brous-haha around the interwebs into which I may have dipped more than just my little tippy-toe on the matter of health care.  It was written at the suggestion of ex cob logger Ian Welsh as a substitute for taking my frustrations out on his impudent commentariat. Don't expect this blog to stop going Billmon after this any time soon, especially since the Noo Typepad now suXX0rz.  Next time you see me blog, it will be on Wordpress or something non-annoying that does not make my browser cry bitter Javascript tears.  But at least thunderpants will be happy that I've satisfied his demand.)

I thought I'd write a long song-and-dance about my opinion on the US health care reform effort, but then I realized that not only would it be highly susceptible to the worst sort of nitpickulation, it would also be better summarized as a table.  Well, at this point in time, there are two legislative options: no bill, or a bad bill.  Here's my assessment of the relative likelihood of good, bad, and ugly outcomes of both options:

	Long-term outcome likelihood
	Good	Bad	Ugly
No bill	Nonexistent	Reasonable	High
Bad bill	Very Low	Reasonable	High

So, as you can see, I've done the math and I think it's better to pass a bad bill rather than no bill. A bad bill has a chance of defeating at least one pernicious meme: that no Congress or administration can alter US health care delivery systems, which are wholly broken. 

I will not get into Nate Silverian attempts at defending anything about the bill as it stands.  It's a terrible bill.  It is completely bone-headed not to simply expropriate the "health" "insurance" "industry" wholesale and immediately institute a Canuckistani single-payer system.  Anything that doesn't lead to this outcome is a lie.  However, if I had a dollar for all the political lies and terrible ideas we have to tolerate, I'd be Warren Buffett.  Am I Warren Buffett?

Nevertheless, the bill should pass.  The only condition under which I would take this statement back is if there is any chance that there are legislators who are willing to scuttle this turkey who also have the wherewithal to bring about a better bill---one that eventually eliminates the desurance industry.  Since this has a hellball's chance in snow, it's better for all the other people who think that they'd rather have no bill to fix that problem---that they have no effective progressive representation in Congress, or that they have no leverage either way---than engage in perverse quests to leave the effort with nothing.

De-front-paged Corrente post: Compounding their error; or, I do indeed enjoy shooting fish in a barrel

The following is a post I wrote at Corrente which continues an ongoing bit of flamewar whose context may be a bit mysterious to my usual readership. Corrente's owner decided it was too flamewar-y for the front page his blog, but I meant to say what I meant to say, because it illustrated the point I wanted to make. I believe those with Corrente accounts can still read it, but I intended to put it on the open Internet and here it is. I mean, it has a high snark level, and I can understand why someone may not want to encourage that level on their site.

The overall context is that while I think that Obama was a somewhat bigger campaign risk than Hillary Clinton, I do believe she lost due to a small number of misapprehensions about why the Obama campaign took off the way it did. And that some of these misapprehensions are reflected in the PUMA movement---which I believe to be real, and reflecting a consequential reality---in a different way.

The specific context is a series of posts about the mortgage meltdown which reveals the kinds of poor ideological and political judgement that mars the PUMA movement. However, the owners of the Confluence blog decided to compound the error with a very interesting set of circumlocutions, which I proceed to take down.

Well! You may recall my recent scathing critique of a Confluence post on the mortgage meltdown that I thought was at best buying into tedious old right-wing saws about anti-discriminatory measures. I am flattered to report that, despite her disagreement with me over the admittedly trolly bit at the end, Anglachel has seen fit to cite my post approvingly in one of her own.

Well, this finally provoked the "Conflucian"* response. And it has appeared as a pair of posts by riverdaughter and by dakinikat (who wrote the post I originally objected to). Needless to say, these are awesome circumlocutions from start to finish. For example:

However, it is the case that sometimes reality is reality and people in the news of all races, class, status, color, gender, you name it, do things that make them look bad. This is an unavoidable fact of like. It is also the case that sometimes programs and federal funds that are created for very good purposes are exploited by people who happen to be of all races, class, color, gender, you name it, who *are*, after all, imperfect humans. Greed and bad behavior is not restricted to Republicans. We have seen that some Democrats are quite capable of it.

Amazing. So, astonishingly, all kinds of people are bad. This is what we have discovered. And thus we are invited to ignore the context of what dakinikat actually said in her post. Bad person is bad.

The comments, oh the comments. They could fill and entire blog's worth of deconstruction. Like the blog posts that precede them, they studiously avoid discussing how exactly we got here. For starters.

And as for dakinikat, it is so tempting to quote the "my black friend" she pulls near the end---it would be like shooting a tuna balanced on a wet thimble. Or the appeal to "peer-review" authority, as though peer reviewed journals do not continuously contradict each other even in real science**. But that's not the important bit. The important bit is right at the beginning, where she reasserts the very article that's at issue, the Liebowitz article that buries a very charged set of ideological claims under an ultimately quite irrelevant discussion and analysis of mortgage typology. And she does so not merely apparently oblivious to the objection, but also forgetting why the objection was raised: an claim about the Congressional Black Caucus.

So, as I recall, commenter Valhalla admonished me in the last post that I did not attempt to engage with them. While I felt I had good reason to critique them from Corrente rather than from their comments, I attempted to correct this by posting the following brief but substantive response to dakinikat:

*BOOP*

Dakinikat insists on repeating the Liebowitz business, which I made the very focus of my own post to which Anglachel links. Its entire purpose is to do one of three things, and probably all:

* Discredit the idea that mortgage approval discrimination exists against minorities (while ignoring subsequent evidence and argument to the contrary).

* Blame the foolishness of mortgage lenders on *gasp* an anti-racist policy, when it's been amply shown that this is not the case.

* Blame the allegedly impending economic collapse on mortgage qualification liberalisation, deflecting it from the actual cause, which was allowing these segments of the credit apparatus to be overleveraged.

These three things are interconnected by ideology, and they bear a number of ideological fruits. One of these begins with "r". Oh no!

Yes, it is sharp and critical, and yes, it is somewhat snarky. But, unlike nearly anything else on either Confluence response posts or their comments, it addresses the point being made directly. What Liebowitz is saying is basic and well-known glibertarian cant (which is sometimes popular with economist-types). But it is an ideological claim no matter which way his data actually falls out. Because economics doesn't really tell us half us much as it claims to do, about the facts, but it sometimes gives us a language to talk about ideology.

And I happen to believe that the predictable result of this type of glibertarianism is a racist result. I'm sorry if this hurts anyone's feelings.

However, I am known there as a "crazed Obama-loon", and my substantive response was quite predictably deleted, and quickly. And the moderator decided to respond with:

fuck off mandos.

Oh, woe is me. But: at least Valhalla should now know why I didn't try the first time.

So, the point is not that PUMAs are burning crosses on their front lawns, or aren't perfectly nice people who wouldn't go out of their way to give a brown guy a break, or don't have dark pigmentation themselves. It doesn't even mean they have no legitimate complaint, or that their complaints are entirely motivated by nefarious intent. Far from it. It is merely that the PUMA movement, at least as represented by quite a proportion of Confluence regulars, has allowed defensiveness and anger over Obama campaign strategy to severely blunt their political judgement, even so far as misunderstanding the actual tactic the Obama campaign used. And, for that reason, we should hope beyond hope that this poor judgement is not loudly echoed in the wider political sphere.

*They apparently have a web radio show called "Conflucians Say". Uhm. I really couldn't resist, sorry.

**Economics is dressed-up moral argument at best, well before it is science, and the Liebowitz paper at issue is no exception.

What follows is a comment thread that I think is also interesting in itself, but I'm still working out what/how to refer to things for which I've written a response comment.

Got inner turmoil?

skdadl at pogge reminds us that certain parties regularly get away with spinning their regular wrongitude into a larger, more noble narrative of rightness.  And that those who were right never get the credit for it.

Look: the point is that Iggy and company may have been wrong in the observable, normal universe---what you or I might call "reality"---but they were wrong in a noble, beautiful way.  The kind of wrongness to which they fell victim is the kind of wrongness that allows one to cover ones eyes with the back of one's hand, stretch out the other hand, and sigh, "Ah, me!" 

On the other hand, those who were right are, as Krugman points out, DFHs.  They may have been right in the observable universe, but they weren't right in an ennobling way.  They were right in a childish, "I told you so" way, which only highlights their fundamental unseriousness.  It was easy for them to be right.  When DFHs are right, they are right in a dirty $@#$ing way.

You see, the real distinction between being right and being wrong is not one of verifiability.  It is one of aesthetics.  Was it difficult for you to come to your conclusion?  Did you suffer for it?  Was it dramatic?  Did you sit leaning forward, chin on fist, in pensive repose like that cliché thinker sculpture, only with more clothes?  It's the inner turmoil, and the hard decisions about other people's lives (whether they will live or not) that makes you a Serious Person.

But if the answer was obvious to you, plain as day, well, that's a pretty ugly way to come to the right conclusion.  No drama, no suffering, no inner turmoil.  You didn't even have an interesting pose.  There was nothing tragic about it.  You may as well have been at the grocery store or driving home or doing whatever it is that unserious, unimportant people do.

If you come to conclusions based on evidence, and if you see what obviously is unfolding before your eyes, and you do not have a Deep, Difficult Choice to make to sacrifice the lives of thousands, you are unserious and Serious People should ignore you.  Actually, the choice to sacrifice thousands of lives would prove that you were a Serious Person, because you certainly felt inner turmoil as you did so.

And the inner turmoil is what matters.

Bad ideas in the world of Canadian criminal law

It is universally entertaining to discuss abstract and hypothetical situations, the life-and-deathier the better.  For instance, many people apparently find it extremely entertaining to discuss the possibility of a terrorist parachuting into, oh, Round Top, Texas and detonating a neutron bomb or something, and whether we should prevent it by anaestheticlessly removing the fingernails of every Swedish grandmother or Palestinian-sympathizing penguin or whatever figures in their imagination.

One of my favorites is the one about "when does life begin?"  After all, all sorts of things come into the picture there.  Ensoulment, individuation, the meaning of life, 42, all those wonderful issues we get to debate.  It's an awesome thing to do when you're high on Mountain Dew. 

But when it comes to any actual law related to the concept, the simple question becomes this: even if you do have an opinion on the deep philosophical question of when life "begins": at what point  are you willing to tie up and intubate a woman who wants to terminate her pregnancy in order to prevent her from doing so?  Because, you see, that's what it takes.  If you're like me, you'll recoil from the concept.  That recoil keeps the debate safely in the hypothetical realm, the world of fun and innocent lunchroom philosophical debates that everyone ought to have.  If you don't recoil from the idea, then you'll be very happy to base laws on the severe restriction of women's freedom on your lunchtime hypothetical musings about the origin of human existence.  There are, in fact, people like that.  For what it's worth.

I am willing, however, to take a crazed chainsaw murderer from a horror movie and, in fact, restrain him or her until I can figure out what to do with this person.  That is why I support the existence of laws on the prosecution or prevention of murder in some form or another.

Why are these two situations different for me?  First and foremost, there is an emotive one.  I am unashamed to say that I do judge some moral situations on an instinctive inner evaluation of relative suffering.  I know that I have to inflict months of torture on some women in order to prevent them from having abortions.  Unless we play silly semantic games with the concept of "suffering," I don't have to do this in the case of the crazed chainsaw murderer.  Even if I did, I would be saving large numbers of people---beyond the mere victims---from a potentially great deal of suffering.  My inner emotive evaluation of suffering forces me to see these things differently.

Even the debate-club ethical discussion forces me to take a position distinguishing these two situations.  In the case of the pregnant woman, she is facing a situation in which her very being and personal existence may be altered by carrying the pregnancy through.  To put it metaphorically, the very weight of her existence and consciousness is an order of magnitude greater than that of any fetus.  We cannot easily say this for the chainsaw murderer or his/her victims. 

Of course, I realize that this is the argument that abortion criminalizers are least moved by.  But the correct and honest response is to persuade us that their debate-club notions of life, the universe, and everything should be used as a basis for law.  Unfortunately, they have recently embarked on a strategy in Canada to circumvent that.   This strategy may very familiar to my American readers.  It is to consider the harming of a fetus during a violent act as a crime separate from that of harming the woman during that act.  I am not saying that this is a stealthy end-run around the distinction between the abortion-seeking woman and the chainsaw murderer.  I'm saying that it is a direct and open end-run around that, and extremely transparent to boot, which exploits the suffering of a small number of victims to enshrine in law a certain kind of debate-club ethics.

I don't normally write about this issue, as I have no personal direct or indirect experience of the matter.  But I thought I would do so this once, as it vaguely appears that it might have a chance to pass in Canada, which would be a bad idea for the same reason that it is a bad idea to enshrine in law anything that has so obviously not made it out of the high-school debating club level of thought* and for the same idea that it's a bad idea to allow any party to get around an up-front discussion of their political motivations.  It also connects a lot of other issues together.  Like why it's wrong to torture Swedish grandmothers or suspected members of the man-penguin armies, or anyone else for that matter.

*No offense to high-school debaters.  I was one too, and I enjoy that sort of thing.  Well, actually, some offense intended.  I think the formats are highly artificial and weird and possibly adversely affect the public discourse when debate-club graduates actually start careers without getting it out of their systems.

The scientist as actor

My Canadian readers may be familiar with this common phenomenon: I have a few American readers of this blog, and even among them, it is not uncommon to hear frustrated expressions of desire to become Canadian when their politics adds another razor-wire loop to the loopiness that it is.  My Canadian readers will also be familiar with the both the feeling of flattery tinged with a small amount of guilt: justified guilt that it is not deserved.

Via ReWind.it at Bread'n'Roses, we find this charming bit of news in the Notional Pest:

Until now, Environment Canada has been one of most open and accessible departments in the federal government, which the executive committee says is a problem that needs to be remedied.

It says all media queries must now be routed through Ottawa where "media relations will work with individual staff to decide how to best handle the call; this could include: Asking the program expert to respond with approved lines; having media relations respond; referring the call to the minister's office; referring the call to another department," the presentation says.

Gregory Jack, acting director of Environment Canada's ministerial and executive services, says scientists and "subject matter experts" will still be made available to speak to the media "on complex and technical issues." He would not explain how "approved lines" are being written and who is approving them.

This sort of thing will be no surprise to anyone following the saga of the frankly excellent Linda Keen, the Canadian nuclear regulator who stood up to a Canadian government presently dominated by an unadulterated Bushian neocon.  (Her total smackdown testimony linked from here.) And by dint of that, these tactics should be highly familiar to American readers, as they were learned from You Know Where.