Judicial Hubris: Confer

Justice Ginsburg, dissent from the VRA decision:

[T]he Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making... Quite the opposite. Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA.... Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court’s opinion today... The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled.

Justice Scalia, dissent from the DOMA decision:

We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation. The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America. The Court is eager — hungry — to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case.... Some will rejoice in today’s decision, and some will despair at it; that is the nature of a controversy that matters so much to so many. But the Court has cheated both sides, robbing the winners of an honest victory, and the losers of the peace that comes from a fair defeat. We owed both of them better. I dissent.

Uncertainty

A joke making the rounds:

Heisenberg and Schrodinger are on a road trip, when a cop pulls them over. The officer walks up and asks if they know how fast they’re going. Heisenberg replies that they do not, but know with high precision where they are. The cop thinks that’s weird, and begins to search the vehicle.

He opens the trunk and asks, “Did you know you’ve got a dead cat in the trunk?”

Schrodinger says, “Well, *now* we do.”"

Against Progress

John Gray writes another assault on a basic idea of our cosmopolitan world, the idea that people are getting better. This is fundamentally wrong, he writes:

[T]he underlying problem with this humanist impulse is that it is based upon an entirely false view of human nature—which, contrary to the humanist insistence that it is malleable, is immutable and impervious to environmental forces. Indeed, it is the only constant in politics and history. Of course, progress in scientific inquiry and in resulting human comfort is a fact of life, worth recognition and applause. But it does not change the nature of man, any more than it changes the nature of dogs or birds. “Technical progress,” writes Gray, again in Straw Dogs, “leaves only one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is insoluble.”

I've always argued that a claim of moral progress -- as opposed to scientific progress -- was unlikely to be a true claim. It shouldn't be surprising that we see things that look like moral progress, because civilizations that are more distant in time are like civilizations that are more distant in space: we have less in common with them because we are more widely separated. If you travel away from home, people will share your views less and less the further you go. On your return trip, you'll find people are more and more like the way you think people ought to be, because they're more and more like the people you grew up with who think more or less as you do yourself. As La Rochefoucauld said, "We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us."

Of course then we should see things that look like progress as we move from a civilization of a thousand years' distance to one of five hundred years', then two hundred years', then fifty, then ten, and then to our neighbors of last week and this afternoon. Why, those people nearer to us in time are much more like us than our more distant ancestors! They must be better people, because they agree with us.

A clear example of this problem was on display yesterday afternoon on Erick Erickson's radio program, which I was listening to while on the road. He made a claim of exactly this type about the Voting Rights Act: he made an analogy to braces for your teeth, which you need until you get them straight. We needed the VRA in 1965 because we were -- I believe I have the quote right -- "a morally corrupt people." Now that we're all straightened out, we get rid of the braces and make do with more gentle remedies to keep us on the straight and narrow.

That is of course complete nonsense. The people of 1965 weren't morally corrupt compared to us, neither the white people nor the black people of that era. They were more likely to get and stay married. They were more likely to attend church. They were far more likely to keep their families together and fulfill their duties as parents. They dressed better than we do, on average. They had more robust standards of politeness and courtesy and manners. They had no tolerance for pornography in public life.

We disagree with them about race policy -- indeed, many of us disagree with them about the existence of race as a real category. They disagreed with us and with each other vehemently, but look at what they accomplished in their disagreement. We have the world we are pleased to think of as morally superior to theirs precisely because of what they did, not because of what we did. For or against the VRA, no matter to what lengths they went to support or oppose it, they held together a civilization that wrote and enforced a hard law against itself.

It's preposterous to say that we are better than them.

Are we worse? Well, we are different. We're worse in all the ways described above, if indeed it is worse to fail to attend church, or to break up marriages, or to pursue self-interest instead of duty to family. We're worse if it's worse to dress worse, or to be rude in public over trivial matters.

I'd like to believe there is a final standard that could measure progress, but it can't be any human standard. We lack the perspective, and we are too given to self-flattery. If there is an objective standard it must be divine, as Socrates held against Protagoras, and as Aquinas held against us all. By that standard, though, we are an objectively worse people than our ancestors, and getting worse yet all the time.

If you reject that, then there is no reason to believe that we are better or worse at all. Difference is all there is.

Ich bin ein RPI

Not the literal kind, which is a "Registered Provisional Immigrant" as defined under the new comprehensive but incomprehensible Senate proposal to combine open borders with a welfare state.  Nevertheless, I'm one of the new army of workers who can be hired without subjecting my employer to the choice of either providing me with expensive health care coverage or paying a hefty Obamacare fine.  That's because I adopt the quaint old technique of using my own wages to pay for my own health care.  Starting soon, unless the House blows this thing up, many workers formerly known as illegal immigrants will join me in this enviable state and discover its competitive advantage.  Maybe we'll see people renounce their citizenship and come back over the border.

Ted Cruz tried to address this quirk yesterday, but found the subject too hot for inclusion in the floor debate.  From his website:

Nobody in this body wants to see African-American unemployment go up.  Nobody wants to see Hispanic unemployment go up, youth unemployment go up, union household unemployment go up, legal immigrant unemployment go up.  Yet every one of those will happen if this Gang of Eight bill passes without fixing this problem.  If that happens, all 100 members of the U.S. Senate will be accountable to our constituents for explaining why we voted to put a federal penalty on hiring U.S. citizens and hiring legal immigrants.

It's only fair, I guess. They need the jobs more than we do.  Besides, this isn't the first legislative initiative that's been eagerly adopted despite it's inarguable tendency to drive up unemployment.  If more people are thrown out of work, we can buy their votes all the more readily with unemployment benefits.

Way to go!

Chinese postal workers think fast and break the fall of a toddler from an upstairs window.

A blow against prejudice

The Supreme Court rules 5-4 (Roberts, C.J., joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito):

The Fifteenth Amendment is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future.  To serve that purpose, Congress—if it is to divide the States—must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions.

The Court struck down the Voting Rights Act's singling out of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, in addition to a few counties and municipalities in other states, as political units so likely to engage in ruses to prevent blacks from voting that they cannot be permitted to alter even the most trivial aspects of their voting procedures without pre-clearance from the federal Justice Department. This marks an end to pre-empt redistricting proposals and voter i.d. laws in the states the powers-that-be love to hate, though it still will be possible to sue to change procedures after the fact if the procedures can be demonstrated to violate the Voting Rights Act, according to standards that apply equally to all states.

The Court did not directly strike down the "pre-clearance" section (Section 5) but the section that sets out the formula for maintaining the permanent list of enemy states (Section 4).  The Government admitted that the formula was reverse-engineered; it identified the miscreants and then dreamed up a formula that would snag them.  The Court felt that any attempt to identify evil states should be based on current information, not 50-year-old grudges.  Whether or not the Justice Department has noticed, voter registration and voting patterns have reached something very close to parity in the states previously identified as hopelessly racist.

Maybe the Justice Department will have time now to consider the prevalent of racism in other contexts.  Not to mention important issues of transgender discrimination.  Is there room to hope they'll address the abuse of bureaucratic discretion to target the politically unsound?  As long as we're worrying about equal protection under the laws and all that.

Police State, part whatever number I'm up to now:

Radley Balko has an interesting observation on Police culture:

"What Cop T-shirts Tell Us About Police Culture"

When I was a child, you'd never have seen stuff like this.

The Death of Democracy

This article is right about a whole lot.

The post-monopoly world

I'm enjoying Kevin D. Williamson's new book, "The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome," a proposition from the cheerful end of the TEOTWAWKI spectrum.   Williamson begins with these questions:

Why is it that the [iPhone] in my pocket gets better and cheaper every year, but many of our critical institutions grow more expensive and less effective?  Why does the young Bengali immigrant [who served me coffee this morning while using her own iPhone] have access to the same communication technology enjoyed by men of great wealth and power, but at the same time she must send her children to inferior school, receive inferior health care, and age into an inferior retirement?  And how is it that Apple can make these improvements while generating so much profit that one of its most serious corporate challenges is managing its "cash mountain"--about $100 billion at this writing, and headed toward $200 billion by some estimates--whereas government at all levels is running up enormous debts to fund stagnating or declining services?

The author's thesis is that monopolies always crumble, to be replaced by smaller units whose performance improves under competition, and that governments follow this same trajectory.  I'm curious to see if he can make it stick.

The Tragedy Is They'll Never Understand

Via DL Sly, a gaffe. That's what we call this kind of thing these days. But it's not a gaffe, not really. It's a massive philosophical error. It's a failure to understand the facts of the world. I wonder after it. I do.

Political economy

Another from Maggie's Farm: Wow, sugar policy is hard. I think it's about supporting domestic sugar growers so they can make sure we don't suffer a critical shortage in case we're embargoed. But then there's that whole problem of sugar being the white poison. I wonder if we shouldn't take a page out of Pennsylvania's prohibition-era approach, which is to make a nightmare out of the process of buying liquor, and nationalize the sugar industry to the same effect. That way we could subsidize profits to compliant crony capitalists, employ lots of people in secure jobs with good benefits at taxpayer expense, and limit the sugar intake of a vulnerable populace while balancing the federal budget by eliminating obesity and diabetes. We can probably find a way to make cars run on sugar, too, if we make gasoline expensive enough.

The Right and the Wrong Way to Learn About Your Ancestors

Two new works on Medieval sexuality have been brought to my attention in recent days. I'm going to bring them to yours, because they exemplify two very different approaches to understanding the past. One of them is good. One of them is so wrong I almost don't know where to begin explaining why.

Let's start with the bad one: Ogling Ladies: Scopophilia in Medieval German Literature. Here's a description of the approach and findings.

"Successfully applies modern psychoanalytic theory to analysis of medieval texts in a creative way..." The love of looking, or scopophilia, is a common motif among female figures in medieval art and literature where it is usually expressed as a motherly or sexually interested gaze—one sanctioned, the other forbidden. Sandra Summers investigates these two major variants of female voyeurism in exemplary didactic and courtly literature by medieval German authors. Setting the motif against the period’s dominant patriarchal ethos and its almost exclusive pattern of male authorship, Summers argues that the maternal gaze was endorsed as a stabilizing influence while the erotic gaze was condemned as a threat to medieval order.

So we are interpreting what the Medievals were doing according to a completely modern form of analysis, which functions as a kind of meat grinder that produces findings in the shape that the grinder itself is designed to produce. If you apply Freudian analysis to the ancient Greeks, you won't get a picture that looks much like Homer, but you'll get one that looks a lot like Freud.

Unsurprisingly, then, we discover what our modern thinker expected to find: a deep fear of female sexuality, and a forbidding refusal to permit its expression.

Now let's look at the good approach. Why not just translate the poetry and read it?

The poems, many with unprintable names, offer a glimpse into the Middle Ages that has nothing to do with courtly love, warring knights or church teachings. Instead they show cuckolded husbands, randy priests, lusty women—and a fondness for scatological humor....

These racy poems shed light on the lives of regular people in medieval times. "This shows the common people being as down and dirty as you can get. It will change people ideas about the Middle Ages as dark and church-bound and unknowable," says Mr. Bloch....

"The Fisherman of Pont-Sur-Seine," exemplifies the power negotiations between a man and wife, says Mr. Dubin. In the tale, a wife loves having sex with her fisherman husband, but tells her husband otherwise, so as not to seem crass. To prove that his wife is lying, the fisherman happens upon a dead priest in the river and cuts off his genitals. He presents them to his wife as his own, saying that knights attacked him. Furious, the wife readies to leave him. When she reaches into his pocket to take money for her trip, she realizes he's lying and flings her arms around him, happy again. The fisherman is pleased to have made his point.

Both of these books have Medieval sexuality as their subject, but only one of them is really a book about the people of the Middle Ages.

More fun with climate

De hot come go, come go. H/t Maggie's Farm.

Against Catholic Schools

Apparently our President doesn't approve of Catholic education. Well, American public schools produced the Lightworker. What have Catholic schools ever produced to compare with that? Naught but a few saints.

Really, these remarks are incredibly offensive. They are not, however, surprising. The drive to push religion our of the public space, and force it to hide itself inside churches and private homes, has been going on for about fifty years. Nobody much over thirty approves of it, most of them in the Northeast; in the South the ban on prayer in school is about as popular as the IRS (but still more popular than Congress!).

Religious toleration is a great good, but not anti-religious sentiment. The public space needs more saints, not fewer.

PC sex

From Dr. Joy Bliss at Maggie's Farm, about sexual harassment panic in the military:

The PC attitude seems to be to overstimulate children, but to de-sexualize adults.  Or de-sexualize heterosexual adults, anyway.  Does that make sense?

306° NW, 2027 Romeo

So let it be recorded in the Book of the Day.

Tea Party v. IRS

Guns are scary

Ted Cruz recently asked, "Anyone know if President Obama intends to perform background checks on the Syrian rebels before providing them weapons?"

I wonder if there's a way to trace the weapons after we turn them loose in Syria? Some kind of i.d. we could check if we later find them at the scene of a crime.

Olympics Committee announces new gymnastics event

Mental pretzels.  What do you do when the facts contradict your models?

(1)  Create new models that find hypothetical facts hiding in the historical record, now that they can't be measured directly.

(2)  Explain that your model always allowed for the possibility that warming would plateau out; the deniers were just too dumb to see it when they looked at all those smooth, upward curves in the graphs you used to justify hugely expensive political proposals.  (The words "monotonic increase" are starting to show up in comment threads.  Only an unscientific idiot would have expected something so crass and un-nuanced as a monotonic increase.)

(3)  Dream up places the warming could be hiding, because you know it's there somewhere.  Unless it didn't come in in the first place, which is possible, but don't talk about that in front of reporters, who are always looking for the kind of simplistic prediction that is suitable for a news cycle, not to mention for supporting hugely expensive political proposals.

(4)  Explain that, as your understanding of climate increases, it becomes so complex that it's unfair to expect you to make accurate predictions.  Isn't that what always happens when your understanding deepens?  Your ability to predict results goes right down the tubes.

(5)  If all else fails, explain that greenhouse warming is obviously the strongest variable in climate, because what else could possibly explain how much warmer it is on Venus than here?

Wait, isn't Venus closer to a mysterious potential source of thermal energy?  As the soberly intense scientist says in disaster movies:  "This effect can't be explained so easily, Mr. President.  It would have to be coming from something huge -- something approximately the size of our own Sun."

Booze, public and private

This post isn't about discrete drunkenness (like Ron White's complaint when he was accused of public drunkenness:  "I didn't want to be drunk in public.  I wanted to be drunk in a bar.  They threw me into public").  Instead, it's about confusion over the best way to supply customers with the liquor they want (and are legally entitled) to buy and consume.  One way, long the norm in Pennsylvania, is to give the state a monopoly on liquor sales.  That approach avoids the evils of competition and ensures stable jobs for 5,000 public union members.  It also ensures that the number and size of stores will be entirely divorced from public demand, that prices and selection will be lousy, and that there will be a thriving smuggling operation across nearby state lines, which promotes the stability of a lot of jobs for public-union policemen.

So if the main purpose of the liquor-distribution system is to create public jobs, it's going splendidly.  But if the idea is to bring suppliers and consumers of liquor together in a mutually satisfactory way, things aren't so great.  Change is afoot, however:  Pennsylvania's state legislature is dominated by Republicans, who predictably are pushing a scheme to privatize the liquor stores.  Those nutty Republicans!  The idea is that people who want to sell alcohol will get together with people who want to buy it in stores at mutually agreeable prices, with competition among stores to attract interested buyers.  These anarchists want anyone who can get a heavily regulated liquor license to be able to sell any liquor they like to anyone who can prove he's of legal age.  Stores will be able to stock and sell any liquor they like, not just brands on the state's approved list.

The notion that any job losses by union workers would be more than offset by all the new, private liquor stores that would have to start hiring as they start their businesses from scratch and expand to fill the pent-up demand?  That's just crazy talk:

Most of the licenses under Turzai’s plan would go to Walmart, Costco, Target, and other big box and chain stores that would reallocate current shelf space and use their current employees to stock the shelves.  That’s just what happened in other states, and it would happen here.

Every time the private sector expands, it's sucking the life-blood out of the public sector, and besides, those private-sector employers are all about profit, which is the very antithesis of employment.

For those who aren't yet convinced that the Republicans' plan is a job-killer, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union is running an ad pointing out the substantive evils of the capitalist approach:   a 30-second spot that features the sad internal dialogue of a little girl who's just lost her father to a drunk driver.  This isn't as bizarre a line of argument as it sounds, considering the milieu.  According to Wikipedia,

The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) . . . was established in conjunction with the 21st Amendment and the repeal of prohibition.  In 1933, just four days before the sale of alcohol became legal in Pennsylvania, the Board was officially organized.  Upon its creation, Governor Gifford Pinchot stated that the purpose of the Board was to "discourage the purchase of alcoholic beverages by making it as inconvenient and expensive as possible."

The private sector will never be able to match that performance.