Am I (and everyone else) going insane?
Medea Benjamin of the anti-war organization CODEPINK posted an open letter to Jon Stewart in which she complained about being labeled as one of the “loud people” who are getting in the way of sane discourse. She thinks Stewart’s point of view is in fact engendering political complacency and “slacktivism.”
So let’s get this straight: people who were so horrified when the U.S. invaded Iraq that they joined millions of others to protest are not sane? We shouldn’t speak out against Wall Street bankers whose greed led to millions of Americans losing their jobs and homes? It’s irrational to be angry when you see the Gulf of Mexico covered in oil because BP cut corners on safety? Don’t get upset when the Supreme Court rules that corporations are people and can pour unlimited funds into our elections? Stewart often roasts the warmakers and corporate fatcats on his show, but he seems to think that his viewers should be content to take out their frustrations with a good belly laugh.
Of course, Benjamin also realizes Stewart’s main criticism is not with the protests themselves, but the method of the protests – such as one where protestors dipped their hands in fake blood. But Benjamin also has a response:
It was because of this insanity that we began to interrupt the war criminals during their public appearances, shouting — yes, shouting — for an end to the madness. It was because of this insanity that we put fake blood on our hands to represent the hundreds of thousands of innocents who died as result of their lies. In our post-9/11 24/7 news cycle, we learned that the more audacious and outrageous the action, the more likely we were to get our anti-war message into the national conversation.
If Benjamin is correct in her diagnosis this points to a sad problem in the impoverished public dialogue. In an atmosphere wanting for “sanity,” it is the insane that get the results. Thus, activists like Benjamin choose what they think is the lesser of two evils – preferring to dress in costume and shout over losing to their political opponents. And in this arms race of extreme discourse, like any arms race, everybody loses in the end.
-Han
Photo by Flickr user @mjb used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Are firemen like doctors?
How deep does the analogy go? Not deep enough to justify universal health care.
At the Washington Post blog, Ezra Klein discusses the parallel between firefighters letting someone’s house burn because he didn’t pay $75 for fire insurance—which happened a few weeks ago in a rural area of Tennessee that doesn’t guarantee fire protection—and letting a person die because they didn’t purchase health care insurance.
When liberals explain why health care needs an individual mandate, the traditional metaphor is firefighting: Everyone needs to buy insurance for the same reason that everyone needs to buy fire protection. But if you leave the market unregulated, some people won’t buy — or won’t be able to afford — fire protection. And we’re not comfortable letting their houses burn down. Similarly, if you leave health coverage to the market, some people won’t buy it, and others won’t be able to afford it, and then, when they get sick and need it, insurers won’t sell it to them. But we’re not comfortable letting them die in the streets. Hence, the health-care law.
Klein argues that fire protection and health care are both “collective goods” which the government must guarantee.
Sam and I discussed a similar question over a year ago, when I attempted to parallel the government’s obligation to protect its citizens against Swine Flu (remember that?) with its obligation to protect citizens against other serious illnesses like cancer.
The parallel between fires and non-epidemic diseases, generally following Sam’s post, does not work perfectly. Fires spread. Non-epidemic diseases, like cancer, do not. If one person isn’t protected against fires, we are all thereby threatened, because those flames can jump from his house to our houses.
When a person is ill with a non-epidemic disease, we are not thereby threatened ourselves, or at least not enough of us to say that the community is endangered. This is why fire insurance is a real “collective good” and health care is not. Health care may be (and I think to a degree is) an individual right, of course, but that’s a different argument.
Blinded by the light
Feeding the national dialogue
“The dialogue is impoverished.” This lament is heard across the political spectrum, echoing between the margins of opinion pages and muttered by graying professors in an air of resignation. It’s the reason this website was created. It’s a statement we all seem to agree on, and one thing we are all trying to fix. This makes it all the more regrettable when an attempt at the solution only adds to the problem.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Professor Peter Berkowitz begins well enough: liberal commentators have been dismissive in their views of the Tea Party movement, and this is wrong. I agree completely with this statement – there are many powerful (and perhaps ultimately correct) reasons to believe in the principles of personal liberty and limited government. These reasons constitute philosophical arguments, and they’re arguments that opponents of the Tea Party should engage with in good faith, clear logic, and intellectual honesty.
Berkowitz, unfortunately, believes the debate should lie elsewhere. Read more
I am shocked and appalled
Fear and loathing in law and politics
Risk-perception expert David Ropeik writes at Project Syndicate that nuclear energy remains controversial in Germany in the wake of Chancellor Merkel’s decision to extend the operating lives of the country’s nuclear plans. A 2006 BBC poll finds that in France some 56% of the public opposes nuclear energy, even though 75% of the country’s electricity comes from it. Apparently it is not always possible for people to be acclimated to things they are just afraid of at a gut level.
According to Ropeik, things that are undetectable, capable of causing great pain, man-made, and associated with distrusted persons tend to amplify fear to an irrational degree. Nuclear power certainly fits the bill. So do drugs and guns (and maybe the internet). These same characteristics can provoke revulsion as well. Ask anyone about organ markets and the likely reaction will be disgust. Psychologists Yoel Inbar and David Pizarro write that revulsion clearly influences moral, social, and legal judgments. But should fear and revulsion have any place in the formation of public policy? Read more
When silly laws benefit no one
ABC News reports that firefighters in the Tennessee city of South Fulton refused to put out a fire because of the family’s failure to pay a $75 annual fee for rural fire protection services (the family lived outside of city limits, so the fee was in place of normal city taxes). The firefighters were obligated by law not to put out the fire absent the payment of the fee. Was this justified?
The argument in favor of user fees is that they eliminate problems of free-riding by attaching costs to services. As Jacqueline Byers of the National Association of Counties put it, “If the city starts fighting fires in the homes of people outside the city who don’t pay, why would anyone pay?”
But because of the way the policy in South Fulton was constructed, a family lost decades’ worth of possessions while the city and fire department were embarrassed nationally. It would have been a simple matter to have surcharged the family after the fact. Many emergency services, such as ambulances, operate on a basis of billing after the fact. In fact, the family offered to pay $500 to fire fighters who arrived to protect a neighbor’s house.
It is not unreasonable to charge people for services; there are, after all, no free lunches. But for firefighters to let a house burn down over a small sum of money makes little sense.
-Charles
Photo by Flickr user latitudes used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Mother always said to tell the truth
But the truth doesn’t always make an interesting story
The biopic The Social Network opened on Friday. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, and people close to him convincingly dismiss the movie as more fiction than fact. Have David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin done us a disservice?
People have always applied artistic license to stories portraying events beyond living memory. Sometimes, fiction turns history completely on its head. Banquo from Shakespeare’s Macbeth was, according to Holinshed’s Chronicles (from which Shakespeare frequently drew inspiration), not Macbeth’s noble adversary but his accomplice in regicide. Read more
Iraqi getaway
The recent news coverage of the three American hikers detained in Iran since 2009 raises important questions about ‘danger tourism’ and its role in foreign policy. The hikers’ trip to mountainous northern Iraq took an unpleasant turn when they wandered into Iran and were promptly accused of espionage by the Iranian government.
Media response to the event has been generally sympathetic to the hikers. But maybe they shouldn’t get off so easily. Consider their vacation destination. Kurdistan has many features that make it attractive for adventure tourism: it’s isolated, unconventional, and thrillingly dangerous. But there are many other destinations that meet similar criteria and are far less politically sensitive.
So why Kurdistan, and why the border region? Is it such a unique and lovely place that the hikers had to go there specifically? It was most likely chosen because of its political instability, not in spite of it. The State Department makes it very clear that travel to Iraq is inherently risky. It’s even reasonable to assume that hiking in Kurdistan is politically dangerous. Considering these travelers were appropriately warned, to what extent is the government obligated to protect them? Read more
Stone cold crazy
The media and reporting on “insane” ideas
In a Washington Post op-ed Michael Gerson lamented the amount of attention Rev. Terry Jones received for his plan to burn Qurans in commemoration of 9/11. While he casts his net wide, Gerson has specific criticisms of the media.
Nearly 100 journalists stood sweltering outside the Dove World Outreach Center, waiting on developments from a man whom his daughter described as having “gone mad.” At one point, a reporter yelled to Jones, “Are you just toying with us to get attention?” — the most blindingly obvious question in recent journalism. Another yelled: “You’re just using us! We should all leave!” Fearing they might miss something, no one left.
Gerson’s obvious assertion is that Jones and his actions are insane, and the media has a responsibility not to report crazy ideas. Is he right? Read more
Hope and change in schooling are sorely needed
Elitism and egalitarianism in education
Courtland Milloy suggests at the Washington Post that D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s vision for the D.C. school system is both inspiring and quixotic.
Milloy quotes Rhee as suggesting that elitism, “reluctance by the city’s haves to share classrooms with the have-nots,” is the single largest obstacle to school reform. Overcoming elitism, Warren Buffet once suggested to Rhee, would simply require the abolition of private schools and assignment of all children to public schools by random lottery. The argument goes that well-to-do parents would force schools to improve if they were denied the choice of where to send their children.
Ironically, elitism would militate against the opposite solution as well. Suppose all public schools were abolished and poor families given vouchers and scholarships to attend private schools like their wealthier peers. Milton Friedman’s solution is the polar opposite of Buffett’s –improve education by giving rather than denying choice to all. But in this case, elites too would have to put up with the prospect of rubbing shoulders with the rabble. If elitism is indeed the major roadblock to reform, then this solution, conceptually just as radical, is practically just as unrealistic. Read more
Natural science?
Stem cell research and moral culpability.
A piece in The National Review commends a US district judge for halting federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Before this ruling the Obama administration drew a distinction between the destruction of human embryos to create stem cell lines and the subsequent use of these stem cells in research. The destruction cannot be federally funded, but the research can. In light of the judge’s opinion that such a distinction was indefensible, the piece asks an interesting question.
On the one hand, it is true that all research on embryonic stem cells was preceded by and is made possible by the destruction of an embryo; the two acts are morally entangled. […] But on the other hand, imagine a young scientist just beginning his career, experimenting on stem cells derived from embryos destroyed years earlier, on the other side of the country, when he was still in junior high. Is he morally culpable for the act of embryo destruction?
Let us first assume that destroying and using human embryos is a morally impermissible act, even weighed against the possible good that stem cell research might produce. While this is an obviously controversial assumption on which philosophy has much to say, I will sidestep it for the sake of argument.
Does the causal link between destroying the embryos and using the stem cells in research produce the relevant “moral entanglement”? Read more
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