Flexible fairness
When good policies expire
This is a perfect example of what you could call “freezing difference.” MSNBC explains:
Following an uproar over a policy it said was designed 30 years ago to achieve racial equality, a school district board in a Mississippi town on Friday scrapped a system of student elections where race determined whether a candidate could run for some class positions, including president.
The policy designated on a rotating basis the race of each position. So, for example, one year the class secretary had to be white, the next year black, and so on. There were four total class officer positions up for grabs. The school dropped the policy this year in response to a parent complaint after a 12-year-old girl was considered ineligible to run for one of the officer positions because of her race.
From where we stand, this feels wrong. The story writes itself: “Precocious black student prevented from running for class office due to her race. School stands by 30-year-old policy.”
But take a look at what the district superintendent said when he revoked the policy, making every officer position equal opportunity: Read more
Obama: read this blog
Political consultants ask Obama to do more philosophizing
A lengthy piece in today’s Politico quotes a wide range of political consultants, former high-level White House advisers, and pollsters who all reiterate the same shortcoming about President Obama:
By declining to speak clearly and often about his larger philosophy — and insisting that his actions are guided not by ideology but a results-oriented “pragmatism” — he has bred confusion and disappointment among his allies, and left his agenda and motives vulnerable to distortion by his enemies.
Obama’s predicament highlights an important role for political philosophy that even we here at The Public Philosopher tend to discount: it’s practical capacity to add clarity of vision to the messy business of governing. Read more
Americans are stupid
You may not know this, but, earlier this year, President Obama signed into law the most sweeping overhaul of health care since the 1965 creation of Medicare. It’s the largest piece of social legislation in at least half a century.
I know, I know, I shouldn’t be treating you as if you have your head buried in the sand. Except you do.
According to a recently leaked presentation based on polling and focus groups about the law encourages Democrats to “Let voters know the healthcare [sic] law passed!”
They don’t know? Really?
This raises a depressing question: what’s the point of governing in the Republic of Ignorance?
Most major theories of government make some basic assumptions about human rationality. Some say people are perfectly rational beings capable of deciding their own good. Others take a more moderate stance, suggesting that people are often shaped by their environment and circumstances.
But few if any theories account for complete and total inability to notice life-changing events.
My tone may be humorous, but my humors are melancholy (the bodily ones, anyway).
It’s time to make a choice. Must we radically improve the capacity of our population to understand the basic knowledge it takes to function as a democracy? Or should we radically rethink democracy itself?
In either case, it may be time to do something radical.
-Sam
Image of a lemming used under a Creative Commons attribution license from Flickr user kgleditsch.
A fun tool
A group of social psychologists have built a fun platform to support their research. Visit YourMorals.org to test your beliefs, values, aversions, and other things that play into your morals, choices, and preferences.
Do you care more or less about fairness than the average person? Are you punitive? Do you fear death?
There are a bunch of quizzes with real-time responses. None take particularly long.
-Sam
Image used under a Creative Commons attribution license from Flickr user richardmasoner.
Mosque-ing the the real problem
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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Mainstream media lets us down. Again.
Last night’s Daily Show had its usual fun with the political controversy engulfing plans to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero. We’re going wall-to-wall on this topic here at TPP this week, both because it’s an important debate and because it touches so many basic moral and philosophical questions.
Of many pokes at the mainstream media during this clip, one worth noting in particular is Stewart’s scathing attack on news outlets that seem more concerned with the political fallout of what politicians say about the cultural center than whether building the thing is right or wrong. A New York Times headline from today underscores this media focus: “G.O.P. Seizes on Mosque Issue Ahead of Elections.”
Are there any issues where it is simply wrong to play politics? Read more
When choice doesn’t matter
Charles asks some provocative questions in his post today about the role of government versus the power of the market to lift people out of extreme destitution.
But his approach, which focuses on individual responsibility and government constraint, begs the question by assuming, first, that all government action counts as a constraint on liberty and, second, that all individuals are capable of personal responsibility.
This account is not baseless, but it leaves little space for one reason people may suffer: structural barriers to opportunity and liberty. Read more
End of the Tea Party?
The high price of political participation in America
Few anti-establishment movements have had such swift success as the Tea Party, which has moderate Republicans scrambling, a new breed of conservatives rising, and even a congressional caucus. But the one thing it doesn’t have, according to Politico, is money:
Some leading tea party activists are concerned that their efforts to reshape American politics, starting with the 2010 elections, are being undermined by a shortage of cash that’s partly the result of a deep ambivalence within the movement’s grass roots over the very idea of fundraising and partly attributable to an inability to win over the wealthy donors who fund the conservative establishment.
This is problematic. Notes conservative grassroots leader Ned Ryun: “Without money, nothing quite works like it could.” Read more
The big rethink
The U.S. Senate doesn’t have it easy these days. George Packer’s full-frontal assault on the upper chamber of Congress in last week’s New Yorker has been making the rounds in the national media, and many have been eager to agree with his excruciating portrait of a dysfunctional institution:
The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.
Along these lines, E.J. Dionne makes a radical suggestion in his Washington Post column today:
I’ve reached the point where I’d abolish the Senate if I could. It is more profoundly undemocratic than it was when the Founders created it and less genuinely deliberative — problems compounded by a Republican minority’s strategy of delay and obstruction.
Is it time to rethink the basic structure of our representative democracy? The idea isn’t so crazy. As Packer points out, “The upper chamber of Congress was a constitutional compromise between popular sovereignty and state sovereignty.”
If that compromise is no longer necessary, why do we need a Senate? The United Kingdom’s House of Lords, for example, has very little power. There’s no single correct way to structure a government.
Discussion of abolishing the Senate is unlikely travel far anytime soon, but there’s no reason why that’s the case. Sometimes thinking about our future means rethinking our past.
-Sam
Image used under a Creative Commons attribution license from Flickr user cliff1066.
Fear the quack
Republicans are now stoking fears that Democrats could use the s0-called lame duck period – when defeated incumbents finish out their terms between election day and the next congressional session – to push through key priorities:
As Congress heads home for August, Republicans and conservative activists have a new rallying cry to energize voters: Fear the Lame Duck!
With dark warnings, GOP members of Congress and right-wing media figures are suggesting that the Democratic majority could use a post-election session of Congress to jam through tax increases, cap and trade, immigration reform and legislation making it easier for unions to organize workers.
Whether or not this approach could work, there is a real debate about its legitimacy. On the one hand, it’s within legislative rules. On the other, it flouts the basic democratic values of representation and accountability.
This is true for at least a couple of reasons. First, defeated incumbents arguably no longer represent anyone, despite the fact they remain sitting until the end of session. Second, one of the basic premises of a lame duck legislative approach is that now-defeated incumbents no longer need worry about the political fallout of their votes. But “fallout” is basically a watchword for “answering to voters.”
I guess sometimes it takes ignoring constituents to get things done in a representative democracy.
-Sam
Image used under a Creative Commons attribution license from Flickr user HVargas.
Can you send me a telegram?
My Blackberry is blocked
Most global BlackBerry users are comfortably addicted to their wireless devices, which are email and Internet capable. But for those in the United Arab Emirates, BlackBerrys are about to become obsolete. Not because some better device has come along, but because the government has decided to block online data usage through the devices, which are difficult to monitor.
Civil liberties are a different story in the UAE, but many are concerned that discouraging the use of BlackBerrys could have a negative impact on business. Many commercial BlackBerry users in the UAE seek out the device precisely because it offers a modicum of privacy from government’s prying eyes. A previous attempt to monitor UAE BlackBerry loyalists amusingly failed:
Last year, Etisalat, the U.A.E.’s main state phone company, gave users an upgrade that turned out to allow Etisalat access to all the users’ messages. The upgrade also decreased battery life and made the phone get painfully hot, so people soon stopped taking the upgrade.
While privacy has a different standing in UAE, should global data users worry about sending emails to UAE residents whose smartphones could be monitored? And does the increasingly international flow of information thanks to the Internet impact how its use should be protected? Read more
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