Linky Friday #103: Fear & Guns Edition
Armaments:
[A1] From Mad Rocket Scientist: The cost of actively hunting for submarines is dropping faster than the ability to stay hidden is improving.
[A2] From Marchmaine: Coming to a police force near you, Lethal-lite: “Less than Lethal” attachment to Police firearm – Ferguson Police are to be early adopters.
[A3] A new directive in Sweden is that police guarding synagogues need automatic weapons.
[A4] VoA looks at weapons in the animal kingdom and what they tell us about human weapons.
[A5] This is one bad-arse archer.
[A6] Utah is one of the most conservative states in the country. But between its homeless policies and now its approach to police militarization, it is marches to the tune of its own trumpet.
American Fear:
[F1] An effort to give Vermont a Latin motto has run into some resistance because immigration… or something.
[F2] H1B visas are supposed to go to jobs that can’t be filled by Americans, but some employees of Southern California Edison are irate because they’re being assigned to train their H1B replacements.
[F3] Dave Schuler argues that we have no existential threats to the US… except ourselves.
[F4] Are there aliens behind our currency?
[F5] American exceptionalism at work! We are exceptional at creating fear and acting on said fear. And we can’t even blame the lawyers! They’re certainly not responsible for hospitals refusing to name New Years babies for fear of kidnapping.
Education:
[Ed1] From Marchmaine: The rise of homeschooling among Black Families
[Ed2] Adam Mansbach, of “Go The F* To Sleep” fame, announces his college syllabus. Salon, which seems to be self-parody sometimes, actually does a decent job with real parody.
[Ed3] A veteran teacher shadowed students for two days, and learned a lot about modern education.
[Ed4] Germans do apprenticeships in a way that we don’t. The Atlantic looks at their system, and ours. It even confronts the “tracking” question.
[Ed5] Over at Hit Coffee, I tell universities how they should name themselves.
Energy:
[En1] Michael Booth argues that the Nordic nations are not utopias. They do stand to be the losers of the low oil prices.
[En2] How the US oil industry is poised to come out a winner in collapsing oil prices, while Russia looks the loser. That might not be the easiest sell to North Dakotans if they get laid off.
[En3] The Economist looks at what’s gone wrong with Germany’s energy policy.
[En4] Four years after Fukishima, nuclear is making a comeback in Japan.
[En5] Nafeez Ahmed argues that solar power will destroy fossil fuels by 2030. Though I hope I’d lose, I would take the other side of that bet.
[En6] In order to avert global warming, some experts argue we need to ramp up nuclear power in a big way.
[En7] Wind turbines negatively affect housing prices. Seems to me that means we should put them in the costlier locations, perhaps applying some housing price equilibrium. Right?
Healthcare:
[H1] A doctor in Massachusetts is no longer accepting patients that are obese. Or any patients over 200 pounds, apparently.
[H2] Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry laments that Americans are refusing to learn from international methods of health care delivery.
[H3] Thirty Americans die every day from the organ shortages. Keith Humphreys and Sally Satel discuss what effect compensating organ donors might have.
[H4] Physicians are apparently like congressmen. People don’t have a lot of confidence in them, but like their own.
Culture:
[C1] Over at Hit Coffee, Gabriel Conroy writes of humility, the usable past, and the keeping history relevant.
[C2] Haruki Murakami has an advice column, and now there are English translations.
[C3] Professional porn industry is in something of a death spiral, thanks in large part to piracy. Grant Stoddard says that the future may be in custom porn.
[C4] There’s something especially cool about buying a car with 900,000 miles on it, even if it is a luxury car.
[C5] From Mad Rocket Scientist: If you don’t recall BusyTown, this won’t be quite as funny.
[C6] Megan Garber writes a eulogy for clip-art.
[F1] Friends and I laughed and lamented that one all day when we saw it last week. This country…
[C3]: That’s not the future of porn, it’s the present. It would have gone this way even without piracy.Report
[f4] little bit more than contrast going on there!
[c6] first clip art; next allowing anyone who can’t pass a test the ability to choose fonts other than garamond. then the kingdom of god will be at hand.
oh and removing prezi from the internet and requiring a credit card and breathalyzer test before using powerpoint/keynote.
and then the kingdom of god will be at hand.Report
Why are you running interference for the aliens?Report
if that’s the best the aliens can bring, they too shall feel the wrath of the lord.
the primary thing is design. everything else is secondary detail.Report
One of the reasons I use Firefox is because the preferences let me force the use of my fonts and sizes. I suppose I miss an occasional page laid out brilliantly with some other fonts; I know that I render a bunch of disastrously bad pages into something that can at least be read.
On the screen, Garamond (both Microsoft and Apple’s versions) has too much vertical spacing for my taste; I’ve usually ended up going back to Georgia. Lately I’ve been trying Domine.Report
I, for one, will miss clip art.Report
A5: A dissent on the Danish Archer
http://geekdad.com/2015/01/danish-archer/
A6: Conservative Utah needed the help of the ACLU and Maryland Democrats to reign in police militarization. Way to bury the lede 🙂
F3: “The closest thing we have to a geopolitical challenge is internal. Basically, Schumpeter was right. What we have to fear is our own professional, intellectual, and political classes, all of which are busily undermining the very economy, society, and politics on which they depend for their survival.”
This quote can be extremely left-wing, extremely right-wing, or both. It is also largely meaningless because he doesn’t really give any examples and comes at the end of the post. Jamelle Bouie had a an article in Slate about how Jon Stewart was bad for liberals. He talked about it more on the Slate culture fest and one thing he pointed out was about how horrible it is to think in a kind of “If we can only stop yelling at each other and get along things, will get done” instead of realizing that we are yelling at each other because we really disagree about the problems are and/or what the solutions are. Is Political a swipe against Liberals, Conservatives, or both? Is professional going against trial lawyers, CEOs/Koch, or both? Intellectual is usually just a swipe at liberals.
I am always constantly amazed that people are gob-smacked when people disagree with them. This quote was real Tin Foil, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones nuttery. I am kind of surprised you included it.
Ed2: Links to a story in the Guardian about a woman who was devastated when her on-line boyfriend came out of the closet in Dragon Age.
Ed6: I’ve generally noticed that University of City tend to be Jesuit. University of San Francisco, University of Portland, University of Scranton, University of Seattle, University of San Diego are all Jesuit. University of Chicago is an exception. Many private universities are named after their founders and/or first big benefactors: Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Vassar, Duke, etc.
C2: Awesome
C3: So porn will have a bunch of Medicis?Report
Ed2 fixed.
Ed6: Sometimes, but a fair number of public schools do that, too: Pittsburgh, Louisville, Cincinnati, Houston, Memphis, Toledo, Akron.Report
Saul’s got Dayton. Richmond is a draw: private, but not Catholic.
And let’s not forget College of Charleston!Report
Miami also a draw. I thought it was a public school for the longest time.Report
Relatedly, I used to think Marshall and Temple were private.Report
I knew too many Marshall students to think it was private.Report
Marshall is a better name than the University of West West Virginia.Report
When I was at Kentucky, the bars in Huntington were a.) college bars, and b.) 18 and up (unlike the Lexington bars, which were 21 and up), so it was not uncommon for us to take a Thursday road trip just across the border into the great state of West Fucking Virginia (that’s the name on the seal, look it up). So we partied with a lot of Marshall students. Good times.Report
How did you end up at Kentucky instead of Tennessee? Scholarship? A great program that you had to cross lines for?Report
Louisville was established 67 years before the University of Kentucky, which sort of confirms that we always lead the way.Report
Nah. It was a combination of them giving me a scholarship, the school I wanted to go to (Wash U in St Louis) giving me a basically a half scholarship (with one semester of the other half being pretty close to 3 semesters of non-scholarship tuition at Kentucky), the other school I was serious about not giving me any financial aid (UVA), and me wanting to get the hell away from that small town and my ‘rents.
Small towns are like black holes, and Knoxville was just too close to mine’s gravitational pull.Report
@chris My college selection came down to two schools. One that was about thirty minutes down the road (sans traffic) and another about eight hours away. Location ended up making the difference. The latter school has a slightly (but undeserved, IMBO) better reputation, and more of “the college experience”… but I sort of recoiled at the notion of being so far away.Report
For people who don’t regularly read Schuler, F3 may lack context. He’s not particularly far to the right or the left. He believes, and makes some pretty good arguments over time, that our system is really good at proliferating income and wealth to its upper classes with public money devoted to the privileged of public and private sectors.Report
@will-truman
I still think that is a rather vague charge so it can have truth but also spend on what you consider money and how it should be spent. He had another post that seemed to go against social security, medicare, medicaid, and was some old-fashioned Calvinist (sorry Gabriel) save, save, save, and damn the welfare state kind of stuff.
I do agree that we can do better at routing out corruption with stuff like road construction, military contracts, and other government contracts but I still believe in public goods including the welfare state and roads and bridges and stuff. I would abolish the private prison and criminal justice industries.
This sort of ranting against “elites” is vague and meaningless because it doesn’t acknowledge how complicated creating policy is, how complicated the world is, how difficult balancing between equal but different priorities and interests can be. It simply imaging that there is a shadowy “elite” that is different and evil from the rest of humanity and once we get rid of them, everything will be shiny and happy utopia.
Bull fucking shit.Report
@saul-degraw
Did you actually read the post? He makes pretty clear what he means.Report
Nice link to the take down on the archer. The video did make me want to dig out my bow, but of course my bow is a modern compound, which could never be used for tricks like that unless I had lats big enough to be mistaken for wings.Report
I was thinking about trying that technique out with my recurve, minus the trampolines and what not. It seemed like it might be applicable for bow fishing which typically requires fast shots.Report
It’s like Point-Shooting, it’s quick, it’s showy, but it’s not something I would rely on in a pinch.Report
A2-Lethal-lite (and the proper spelling should be light) is going to make police even more trigger happy. What we need is less trigger happy police officers, not police officers with less-lethal ways to shoot people. It would be better to make meditation and yoga classes compulsory and try to select for police officers that are naturally calm and not excitable.
Ed4-I have a feeling that every party involved is not going to like doing what is necessary for bringing German-style apprenticeship to the United States. Union supporters might be an exception because German-style apprenticeship requires a unionized environment and it give labor a big boost. Employees aren’t going to like this because training apprentices are going to be expensive for them, especially at the set up of the program. American corporations seem to favor short term profits over anything else. They want fully trained employees.
En1-This article had very little to do with energy. There is an argument that the Scandinavian system requires a good deal of cultural homogeneity to work or at least set up initial. People have no problem with a generous welfare state when everybody its helping is like you but in more diverse societies, it starts to flay because of humanities’ innate tribalism. According to other blogs I read, welfare queen like arguments are starting to turn up in Scandinavian blogs with some frequency now.Report
Actually, the big problem with Lethal-Lite is that being able to use it requires training & habits that are completely counter to current training. Current training is to shoot center of mass as many times as needed to stop the threat. Using this device would require police having the time to decide the threat is low enough that they have the time to mount the device, use it at the very short distances it will be effective at, and then have the time to evaluate if it was effective before following up with additional, lethal shots. And that assumes that any other officers on hand don’t hear a gun shot & immediately follow up with supporting fire, not realizing a non-lethal round was fired.
Something like this would be useful in situations like what recently happened in Pasco, WA, but then, so are shotgun bean bag rounds.
No, a cop who wants to deploy less-than-lethal rounds on the fly needs to have a magazine full of such rounds in his gun, with his second & third mags loaded with lethal rounds.Report
Similar to my thoughts… I was wondering what the official police training might be with regards “double-tap to center mass” would that second shot be too hard to unlearn, or are they very well trained on a round by round basis. Anecdotally, it seems that once the first shot is fired there are an awful lot of shots fired – and they seem to be contagious with other officers in the area. But, I haven’t really looked at any meaningful data on that point.
Hard to tell from the video what the exact stopping power might be… they say it is equivalent to being hit by a baseball bat… but the videos didn’t make me think it would be a reliable drop. And then we’re right back to the lethal second round. That said, I could potentially see it working in some situations with the right training.Report
It would require a concerted effort to unlearn it, especially in high stress situations. Once the adrenaline gets going, there is a reflex to pull the trigger more than once, which is why I said the whole magazine has to be less than lethal.
I wonder how effective a round like this would be as a less-than-lethal alternative, especially if the powder charge was reduced quite a bit. I can imagine getting hit with a magazine of a low power variant of these would be quite entangling.Report
Oops, sorry, forgot the link
http://www.mibullet.com/Works.htmlReport
Yeah, this sounds like the perfect storm of terrible: Focus needs to be on getting cops to shoot less, while this will encourage them to shoot more–and the device’s design basically encourages lethal follow-up.
The fact that The Ferguson PD is so eager to explore this option just makes it clear that they still have no understanding of the problems within their department.Report
H3: Well any movement towards sanity on organ donation compensation is a good one. I’m astonished that so many people would prefer that the sick wither and die rather than give money to poor people.
En3&4: Well I’m delighted to see sanity come creeping back. I wonder how long before the Germans get real and flip their plants back on. Amazingly it’s really hard to power an entire grid on sunbeams and unicorn farts. Who’da thunk.Report
Everybody knows unicorn farts release methane into the environment and contribute to global warming.Report
There goes my unicorn manure business.Report
You just need to find a state with the right regulatory environment.Report
The great thing about the unicorn business is that since girls like them, you can get people to pay to work for you. You just set it up as a kid’s activity like Little League and collect the money from the parents.Report
an entire grid on sunbeams
Where do you think oil came from? 🙂Report
Aye, but if we go to that level of meta then both “solar” and wind is simply nuclear power. If you want non nuclear power you’re stuck with tidal or geothermal.Report
I just found it funny you pointed to an actual source of energy and derided it as not a source of energy.
I’m pretty happy with solar. I’ve been looking at solar leases for ages.
But I live in sunny Houston, where A/C is a huge power draw. A huge power draw on bright, sunny days. Honestly, it makes fiscal sense right now (either purchase or lease) — I just haven’t pulled the plug because I’m due for a new roof soon, and would prefer to get that done first.Report
I derided it as a baseload power source and now I’m going to deride it again. You can’t run an industrial power grid on solar, unicorn farts and good intentions.Report
I’d no more suggest sustaining a power grid on solar alone than Germany would. Solar accounts for less than 7% of Germany’s power. The actual amount of baseline load from solar is much lower, as only for actual plants.
Indeed, their actual grid troubles with this are enlightening — as energy production becomes more distributed (and cheap solar makes that a no-brainer. It’s happening everywhere in the first world and will continue to do so. Sunlight is an increasingly cheap source of energy. Moreover, once the panels are in place your price-per-watt is highly predictable over the lifetime of the panel) old-style grids aren’t really built to handle it.
Germany’s not trying to create it’s baseline on pure solar. Why on earth would you think that?Report
My primary scorn was that they have turned off their nuclear base load and instead are running on coal and oil as a replacements. The environmental lift there is stunning- especially considering that Germany, a geologically stable, non-tsunami susceptible, cold, water rich region is pretty much an ideal place to operate traditional nuclear power plants.Report
Then your primary scorn is misplaced. They didn’t ‘turn off their nuclear base load’. They had plants scheduled for retirement due to age and retired them. Nuclear power is still close to 12% of their production.
The problem in Germany is, as usual, a lot more complex than the sound bites that get passed around in other countries — generally to help someone grind their favorite axe.
As I understand the situation, Germany has been trying to phase out their nuke plants since 2000. Because they’re German, and thus not crazed idealists with no idea of the practicalities of engineering, they went with “We will just let nuclear plants retire on schedule as they reach the end of their operating lifespan, which gives us two decades or so to replace them”.
And, because Germany is an actual nation of people and businesses and not some dictatorship, this was immediately lobbied against by the folks building and running their nuke plants. (Who, quite reasonably, preferred being in business than not). This led to a lot of flip-flops on the program, as multiple attempts to resurrect the nuclear program or extend it (against the will of voters who, you know, technically are supposed to be in charge) happened.
So the nuke plants were back, then gone, then extended for a decade, then gone again. Their problem was not power (in fact, their biggest problem is grid instability, which has happened as far back as 2006 before any solar buildout OR nuke retirement)
Right now, they’ve still got well over a dozen nuke plants running and plant to run through the early 2020s. They’ve always been huge coal users, but they’re pushing to switch more to NG in the interim.
I think their long-term renewable goal is 80% in 2050 or so.
Germany’s problems with nuke are, basically, a great deal of political infighting rather than technical. Because, you know, they STILL have nuke plants running. And oil. And coal. And NG. And they plan to keep running them for a very long time, although their environmental controls get more and more strict to deal with emissions.
But by the time it filters over HERE people get the weird idea that Germanys decided to pull the switch on all their nuke plants after Japan (um, no) and that apparently Germans are a nation of luddite environmentalists.Report
The actual link itself does a pretty good job of running down how Germany ended up either the problems it has. Anti-nuclear doesn’t seem to shoulder much blame, but attempts to transition to green energy doesn’t seem so relatively blameless.Report
I’d have honestly been shocked if such a large changeover had actually gone smoothly.
Germany’s the one out on the edge, dealing with all the problems that crop up trying to do something new. Of course it’s going to run into troubles, big and small.
Anyone making big changes — well, anyone being the first one to make such changes — runs into that problem, in anything. Which is why I don’t get the sneering.
Of course things have gone wrong. of course there’s been problems. How could it be otherwise? With anything? Trailblazers reap rewards, but “this is the easy path” isn’t one of them.
In the end, someone’s gotta be first. And what they start is popping up over here. Solar’s pretty attractive in an age of volatile energy costs, because it’s gotten really cheap to install and because that cost-per-watt stays static. Which is not a small thing, in business, to have highly predictable costs in one area.
Especially if you’re hedging against the possibility of carbon taxes or other such things — oil is cheap today — will it be next year? Same with NG? And what happens when they start cracking down even further on emissions? (Whether a carbon tax or just emissions controls). Will it stay cheap?
We’re not seeing a Germany-style buildout on solar here, but we’re still seeing large jumps in solar and wind installations. The price is quite competitive, and only going to fall. (Inputs — sunlight — are fixed, and costs go down as the # of units goes up and technology matures).Report
“H3: Well any movement towards sanity on organ donation compensation is a good one. I’m astonished that so many people would prefer that the sick wither and die rather than give money to poor people. ”
The assumption is that poor people will be exploited by unscrupulous organ brokers…or just have their organs stolen outright (that joke about waking up in a motel bathtub with no kidneys wouldn’t be a joke anymore.)Report
The latter would only occur in a completely open market, which very few people advocate. The former is a mild concern, but a decent regulatory regime should keep it to a minimum.Report
Basically what Will said. No one except the nuttiest of fruitcake libertarians are advocating a wide open market in organs.Report
[discards plans for liver vending machine, to be installed in bars where the cigarettes used to be; the dang things were always getting stuck in the prototype, anyway]Report
You could try moving to a state with a friendlier regulatory environment.Report
glyph, your business plans are always going to fail until you decide to put your heart into them.Report
I have a silent partner – a forensic psychiatrist of Lithuanian extraction who is a real snappy dresser – but I think he keeps eating into my profits.Report
I just filled out the FASFA for probably the last time, and I’m just as glad I didn’t have to list my kidneys as assets.Report
Yet.Report
” a forensic psychiatrist of Lithuanian extraction who is a real snappy dresser ”
I think I saw a writeup of him on CNBC. Quirky management style; he’s good at keeping all the big productivity sinks out of the firm, but deliberately makes sure each employee has at least one ongoing petty grievance, because he’s says he ‘likes [his] workers with a little whine’.Report
I met that guy once, Word of advice:he does not appreciate elephant jokes.Report
At least we agree about John Stossel and the Chicago boys.Report
@north
“I’m astonished that so many people would prefer that the sick wither and die rather than give money to poor people.
Of course its astonishing, since no one is actually advocating that. Just like I’m astonished you want to harvest poor Irish children for their meat.
Really, organ donor compensation is being argued in the name of the poor? For their benefit, solely?
Why is it that advocates of the poor (and I include my fellow leftists) never seem to trust poor people to speak on their own behalf about what they really want?
If you got a bunch of poor people together and had them write a list of their top desires and concerns, would organ sales, unpasteurized milk, or an anarcho-syndicalist collective make the cut?
If you just culled out the people who were so poor that selling their kidney was an attractive option, wouldn’t it seem more plausible that they would favor oh, I don’t know, maybe direct food and rental assistance, or maybe a state-supported college education, unionized job, and single payer health care?
Maybe there are some people who are fully enfranchised and financially stable, who for reasons of their own are capable of fully exchanging an organ for money. Given the existence of a robust regulatory apparatus to ensure non-coercion yadda yadda, sure, I could see that being a just solution.
But I’m just not buying this stuff about how this is “for the poor”.Report
You’re pummeling a position I don’t hold. I most certainly don’t advocate the payment of organ donors as a some form of program for the benefit of the poor; not what so ever or in any form nor do most advocates of compensation for organ donation. Their, and my, point is that allowing compensation would very likely eliminate organ shortages entirely to the enormous net benefit of everyone who ever may be in need of a donor organ (in other words all people including the poor and wealthy alike).
Yes, in theory, a poor person might sell their spare organ for money, an organ which might end up donated to a wealthy recipient (note that in such a program the organ would statistically be more likely to end up saving the life of a poor or middle class recipient). I consider this neither a feature nor a bug- merely a fact. Critics of the proposal object that this is unacceptable. They do not wish for the poor to have the option of selling their organ. They would prefer that donor organ recipients suffer for lack of donor organs than run the risk that a poor recipient be given money for an organ that ends up in a wealthy recipient.
I find this annoying and intellectually stunted, thus my pithy statement. I think the poor are capable of deciding on their own whether to donate an organ in exchange for some form of compensation. I see a whole lot of knee jerk ick factor and some really thick skulled class warfare blocking a policy that would improve the health of everyone (including the poor). I think that’s unfortunate.Report
OK, so we have established that this isn’t for the benefit of the poor donors, but the benefit of the recipient.
But are we don’t want poor people, and only poor people to have this option? No one is saying that, of course.
So it remains that the only donors, functionally, are going to be those who are so desperate as to do it.
What I am saying is that before we allow this choice, lets remove that desperation, and let the poor make their choice on the same level playing field as the rest of us.Report
An empty suggestion; before we institute food safety standards let’s make sure everyone has enough food to eat while we’re at it yes?
I dare say no small number of young middle class people would be interested if the value shakes out as has been theorized but I am getting the inkling that you have the standard poor organs will go to the rich objection. Fair enough if so but you could just come out and say it; in which case we’re back to stating that it’s preferable that people do not have the option of giving up their organs for compensation and that everyone, poor rich and middle class alike, should suffer for lack of organ donations rather than making a policy change that could eliminate that privation. All this because poor people apparently can’t be trusted to make their own decisions.Report
You want the poor to eat unsafe GMO foods?Report
No, the poor can eat cake.Report
If we should trust the poor to make their own decisions, should it be illegal for them to sell themselves into slavery?Report
Here is my argument against selling oneself into slavery, even voluntarily:
(I wrote it a million years ago)
You have the right to sell yourself into short-duration slavery (that is, for a year, or for two weeks with a perpetual option to renew the contract, or whathave you) but to do it in perpetuity is to sell your future self down the river.
When I was 15, I was someone very different than when I was 25. When I was 25, I was someone very different than when I was 35. If I sold myself into slavery at age 15, I’d be actively harming my 25 year-old self and positively destroying my 35 year-old self.
If, however, I was willing to sell myself, on a limited basis, for 3.75/hr… most libertarians would be fine with that. They might even be okay with a contract of up to a year or so… I can’t see them being okay with much longer than that.
Your future self is someone else entirely. Treat him gently.Report
If you sell your kidney now, you’re depriving future self of it as well.Report
As much as I am in love with the whole “Eff You, I’ve Got Mine” argument, I do think that the fact that we have two kidneys mitigates the imperative to be selfish somewhat and allow for spares to be sold as needed. One hopes that someone who helped out with a kidney in the past would be near the front of the line if/when they need one in the future (and there will be many more who will not need one in the future than who will).Report
@north
We’ve already established that it isn’t the poor who are the constituents here. They aren’t asking to sell their organs, it isn’t of benefit to them, they are just the red herring being tossed around.
Nor is it the middle class. I don’t see any middle class people agitating for the right to sell their organs.
No, what we are talking about is the welfare and constituency of the recipients. And I agree it is a difficult decision, whether to allow them to pay so as to increase the number of willing donors. I’m not opposed to it implacably.
I just think the present circumstances of inequality and lack of safeguards makes it extremely likely that the benefit (lives extended) will not be worth the cost of an entire society that reduces its members to economic units stripped of human dignity.
I don’t think there are any easy villains or victims here. The cause of saving human life is of course a powerful compelling interest. So compelling, I use it to justify the various nanny state infringements on liberty.
But I believe the cause of human dignity and the sanctity of the human body is equally compelling. Its what justifies the prohibition against torture and cruel and unusual punishment.
Again, it could turn out that after a careful evaluation and the institution of proper safeguards it could be justified.
But the waving of the bloody shirt of agency of the donors is nonsense.Report
the cost of an entire society that reduces its members to economic units stripped of human dignity.
That’s not an actual argument. This is just you saying stuff.that sounds vaguely ominous if you don’t subject it to any actual scrutiny.Report
“All this because poor people apparently can’t be trusted to make their own decisions.”
Actually, it’s more that for the most part, humans make a lot of bad decisions, but poor people face the worst consequences for making bad decisions.
But, I guess that’s the difference between liberals/social democrats and neoliberals/libertarians is that you see a poor person donating a kidney or more out of desperation and think it’s a good thing and I don’t.Report
“is that you see a poor person donating a kidney or more out of desperation and think it’s a good thing and I don’t.”
That’s not is at all. For many of us it’s the simple case that “intervention” is a violation of our basic freedoms and that that intervention comes with serious strings attached, strings we want no part of.Report
Also, can we stop with this “to the rich” silliness? There’s this thing called insurance that makes it possible for people of modest means to pay for expensive health care procedures. Given that kidney disease tends to skew towards the low end of the economic spectrum, I suspect that the rich would be underrepresented among kidney transplant recipients.Report
@jaybird : Here is my argument against selling oneself into slavery, even voluntarily:
(I wrote it a million years ago)
You have the right to sell yourself into short-duration slavery…
That’s almost a nice try, JB. The problem is that it only works by redefining the very concept of slavery from what it actually is, the literal ownership of one person by another, into a kind of rental contract.
When you are a slave in a society that recognizes slavery as a legitimate institution you have the same legal status as a farm animal. You may be bought and sold, rented out to another and made to perform any labor. You may be beaten and abused with no more legal repercussion to the owner than someone accused of cruelty to animals, because that’s what you are.
You can be slaughtered for meat. Which I will cheerfully admit could positively address the shortage of organs for transplantation but which also would seem to render the “limited duration” element of your proposal moot.
Assuming you survive that long you also run into the problem of enforcing the limited duration clause of the contract. As a slave you cease to be a legal person. So if your temporary owner decides unilaterally to extend the “contract” indefinitely against your wishes, you have no more legal standing to challenge that action than would a dog, a toaster, or a tree.
Of course that also presents an interesting legal dilemma for the putative owner since it would seem that the instant the contract takes effect your counter-party legally ceases to exist. You can’t very well sue your horse for fleeing the barn, can you?
In the end what you’re describing is nothing more than an employment contract with perhaps some rather onerous conditions. But whatever it is isn’t actual slavery.
As to the issue of binding your future self… well we do that quite routinely. You may have done it yourself. It’s called a “mortgage” which I understand to derive from the French and translates literally into “death contract.” It seems to me that your 45-year old self that still has ten years of payments ahead is a lot different person than the 25 year old you that signed the contract. (And let’s not even get into the whole marriage thing. Until death do us part. Oy vey!)Report
If we define “ownership” within the confines of “what will the other people in society do if you (whatever)”, slavery is one thing. If we define “ownership” as a more nebulous relationship that can exist between two moral agents, it’s another (and if the only thing that can be owned are in the set of “things” (as opposed to “moral agents”), we’ve got yet another (one which precludes slavery)).
The definition of slavery you’re using seems to preclude the ability to sell oneself. Which is fair enough.
But it seems like the question Schilling was asking was asking something to the effect of “using your own premises, why couldn’t someone sell themselves into slavery” and my answer was of the form “using my own premises, here’s my answer”. Jumping from there to “HA! USING MY PREMISES, YOUR ANSWER DOESN’T WORK!” gets a response of “well, of course my answer wouldn’t work using your premises. My assumption was that I was going to be using mine.”Report
@LWA If I were advocating a straight up free market for organs I think your position would be stronger (inadequate in my biased view but stronger) but, if you follow the link, the discussion is of something considerably more constricted than a free market for organs. We’re discussing compensation of various forms whereas currently the organ donor is pretty much the -only- person in the organ transplant chain that isn’t getting compensated. I suppose I am to a degree waving the bloody shirt of agency but I’m primarily doing far worse- brandishing the bloodless ledger of utility. People in need of transplants suffer enormously and consume massive quantities of medical care. One can compensate an organ donor very generously and still come out miles ahead in both suffering and costs avoided by obtaining a donor organ.
Certainly I would be appalled and opposed if the outcome had any serious likelihood of turning into Mike’s example of people being forced to count their own organs as asserts etc. We don’t do that with plasma or hair, both of which have commercial value, and I would be entirely in favor of strong barriers against allowing such a cold inhumane enumeration with donatable organs.
Jesse, the link/discussion at hand primarily addresses your objection by making the compensation that the donors receive less immediately liquid. Payment into a retirement account or similar deferred benefits would make organ donation an unappealing option for desperate poor people. Note, also, that the requirement of matching comparability also makes organ donation a ineffectual quick cash option for the desperate. This is something you’d have to put a lot of time into doing.Report
F1: Oh geez… Reporting on Twitter posts is one step above reporting what people write on bathroom walls.Report
Sort of. Facebook rather than twitter, which means people commenting under their identities. What I find depressing about it is that they’re showing blocks of comments, rather than cherrypicking one here and one there.Report
Ahh, you’re right. I’ll amend that to two or three steps above bathroom walls.Report
H1: Sizism is the last acceptable prejudice.
I had a math teacher who bragged about how everybody in her AP course got 3s or better. When I took the AP course, I got a 3 (hurray!) but couldn’t help but notice that, halfway through the class, she kicked out half of her students.
Reading that article made me remember that, for some reason.Report
My math teacher just had a private meeting with each student and informed them of where she predicted they’d score based on classroom results, and made a recommendation as to whether to take it. The choice was up to the student.
Then again, she basically pushed the math AP program and personally revamped the math program from K-12 in order to get the school from ‘a handful of people taking the Cal I AP test’ to ‘multiple classes taking the Cal I and II (BC) test’ over about ten years.
I don’t think she had to worry about pass percentages or pad her resume, since there were across the board improvements in math scores and a much larger % of the school taking the higher level math classes.Report
The Koch Brothers and the ACLU are joining forces and creating the Coalition of Public Safety to advance Criminal Justice Reform.
Am I the only one who heard the name and thought of the Committee for Public Safety during the French Revolution?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/02/coalition_for_public_safety_do_republicans_and_democrats_really_see_eye.htmlReport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Public_SafetyReport
More danger. Sharing the same name clearly indicates shared purpose and intention.Report
Well at least here they are trying to defang the state security apparatus, instead of granting it more power.Report
And isn’t the ACLU the organization that supported Nazis?Report
All that said, I am encouraged to hear that there is another state trying to at least pull SWAT usage into the light, and make it a bit tougher to deploy.Report
There was one during the Paris Commune too.Report
From the linky:
But critics say that underlying the promise of accord lurks a serious danger—that the beliefs and values attracting Republicans and Democrats to this cause are so different that, when it comes to actually passing legislation, the two sides will not be able to arrive at solutions capable of bringing about meaningful change.
Danger, Will Robinson!! Danger!!!
Better to not even try than give this guy the opportunity to say “I told ya so!”.Report
It would be the height of foolishness to try to pass a law in conservative Utah that liberals in Maryland would support.Report
Is it Utah or Montana that’s trying to pass a law allowing loaded drunks to have loaded guns in bars?Report
Better to just call the whole thing off RIGHT NOW. Nothing good could possibly come of it.Report
ACIS,
Tennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia, that recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. (Eighteen other states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol.) The new measures in Tennessee and the three other states come after two landmark Supreme Court rulings that citizens have an individual right — not just in connection with a well-regulated militia — to keep a loaded handgun for home defense.
That quote is from a NYT article in 2010. What’s interesting is that the laws are based on the SC ruling that citizens have the right to handguns for defense of their homes. Justifying possession of handguns in bars is a very weird extension of the SC decision, no?Report
Suppoe you spend more time in bars than at home.Report
Yeah….”suppose”.Report
Calfiornia is having an amazingly mild winter because of epic megadrought. Last weekend I was able to wear a t-shirt and no jacket it was hot enough to justify getting ice cream.
Meanwhile Boston is being smashed into submission by blizzard after blizzard and will have a lot of flooding come springtime.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/opinion/bostons-winter-from-hell.html?_r=0Report
Denver gets the best of both worlds this month: a few days with temps in the low 70s earlier, up to 15″ of snow forecast for this weekend with Sunday’s high around 18. Fairly routine winter along the Front Range…Report
This is how I always picture Denver, even in the summer:
Nah, I was just in Denver in shirtsleeves.
Then it dumped snow the day after we left.
You’re thinking of Minneapolis.Report
Meanwhile Minneapolis suffers the cold like always but otherwise business as usual.Report
Glyph, ahem. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-miracle-of-minneapolis/384975/Report
Nah, I was just in Denver in shirtsleeves.
When you get up in the morning in Denver, you check to see what the forecast says and you get dressed. But you still know that at some point in the day, you’ll be either over-dressed or under-dressed for the actual weather. Often both. Sometimes within an hour or so of each other.Report
The sane solution would be for a suspension of normal rules and flooding of federal government money and resources into Boston once it becomes possible. Essentially, the federal government should pick up the tab for the rents from the Boston area so people don’t lose their homes and businesses and provide resources and money for repairing damaged infrastructure in the Boston area. Considering how difficult it was to great relief for Sandy in the the New York area, this is not likely to happen.
I do predict that the areas of the South that are being affected by frost and epic Winter weather for them will get also sorts of pork though.Report
it was hot enough to justify getting ice cream.
So, more than 10 degrees Kelvin?Report
Last weekend I was able to wear a t-shirt and no jacket it was hot enough to justify getting ice cream.
In San Francisco, isn’t winter in July?Report
A1 is like an article that was translated into another language, then yet another language, then back into English. Not the writing per se, it’s fine enough (though a bit effusive towards friends), it’s just the ideas it presents are all scrambled up and not quite right.Report
They’re probably right about underwater drones though.
Drone swarms are the future of air combat and close air support, and I’d say that predicting drone swarms as the future of undersea warfare is much the same.
Why risk expensive and hard to replace crew and very expensive material when there’s a better, cheaper, more effective option?
I don’t care how good a pilot you are — three or four drones will each your lunch, and you’ll be lucky to take one with you. Us fleshy creatures have always been a big limiting factor in more subs and fighter/bombers. Too much life support requirements. Too little tolerance for pressure, g-forces, environmental changes…
ECM, jamming, and hacking would be more your defense than missiles or guns.
Bet the US doesn’t really change until someone’s cheap drone swarm wolf-packs a few expensive planes out of the air.Report
Also it’s the very common refrain about how Chinese/Russian super-technology is going to destroy America’s technological edge and they’ll be ruling the planet within our lifetimes and our only hope is to [author’s favorite idea, which is incredibly expensive and only works as a thought experiment].
I mean, “satellites tracking submarines by their wake” has been a technothriller plot element since the 1980s (it even showed up in a James Bond movie.)Report
I don’t think that either of those countries has intentions to take over the world; OTOH, I’m sure they’re very interested in being able to make things painful enough for the US military that it will confine itself to the Western Hemisphere.Report
@kolohe
Are you unclear on something specific in the article?
@morat20
Drone warfare is the future, especially as drones get better AI. I expect in the next 20 years, the REMO’s won’t be piloting the drones as much as being the non-linear thinking machine that attempts to get inside the oppositions OODA loop.Report
Yep. Now broad-scale jammers can be a problem, but frequency hopping can generally get around that. It’d be hard, but not impossible, to prevent drones from coordinating or receiving commands from base. (You’d still fall back to each drone’s own internal systems, like target prioritization and fallback procedures for loss of communication)
Shooting down the GPS system would probably be easier.
In any case, I see the future battlefields starting with swarms of drones, working wolf-pack fashion, to first clear the skies then remove critical battlefield elements (artillery, anti-air capability so the slower, heavier loaded anti-ground drones can fly safely, ECM stations whatever), before human troops set foot there.
And human troops will be taking to a battlefield that’s been mapped down to the centimeter, with enemy troops and equipment positions updated in real time, with dedicated scout drones and CAS flying right overhead.
I don’t think sea warfare is going to be much different. Carriers will be smaller and cheaper, fielding drones, and their escorts are going to be dealing with air and sea drones as well.
Skilled, trained, experience technicians, soldiers, and pilots are far more of a limiting factor than material.
Of course, this will probably keep the status quo much like it is — the US military able to stomp anyone without nukes into submission with hardly any effort or loss of US life — and utterly lacking in the soldiers, training, and technique to police or otherwise rebuild after.
Great at war, crappy at occupation.Report
@morat20
Concur.Report
@mad-rocket-scientist the author was a perfectly clear communicator, it’s just the stuff he ingested then regurgitated is missing some things and emphasizes the wrong things.
trying not to give away any trade secrets,
1) The A2AD problem (from the US point of view) for the Persian Gulf and the Western Pacific are significantly different, and each is substantially different than the problem of strategic defense survivability (i.e. boomers able to boom before getting boomed themselves)
2) It’s not processing power and models that are the recent (and potential near future) game changers – though they’re a factor – it’s distributed sensors. (of which smallish autonomous vehicles aerial & surface are a good part of).
3) UUVs have a bandwidth problem. As you know, good ol’ H2O greatly attenuates the EM spectrum below the frequencies where it serves as a carrier signal for a decent baud rate information signal. (frequencies that are carriers for a low baud rate information signals penetrate the water just fine, but we’re not going to be fighting a war against AOL compact discs)
And both those last two things said, the biggest thing everybody seems to miss is that all our current efforts with drones have been in permissive environments, and, almost always, with local government support. Nobody in the world yet has experience with flying or driving a significant force of autonomous and/or remote operated vehicles against a peer or near peer competitor.
(and all that said, let me be clear that Bryan Clark does know what he’s talking about)Report
@kolohe
OK, so you understand everything just fine.Report
“Nobody in the world yet has experience with flying or driving a significant force of autonomous and/or remote operated vehicles against a peer or near peer competitor. ”
Guided bombs and missiles are UAVs, actually, and we have a fair amount of experience with how you get those through an advanced air-defense network. I don’t think it’s as far out there as people imagine.
It’s sort of like how everyone used to think that there were Phone Calls and Internet Connections, and we’re starting to realize that those are basically just different flavors of the same stream.Report
I agree that TLAMs are Predators that didn’t book a round-trip ticket*, and that there are more differences in degree than differences in kind when you trace the evolution back from the V-1/V-2 to the present day. The thing with that ‘fair amount of experience’ in penetrating IADS networks hasn’t been at peer competitors, and it’s a stretch to call those we have used them against as ‘near-peer’ competitors – namely, Iraq (twice**), Libya***, and Afghanistan. Also, the key element in OIF, OEF, Odyssey Dawn was surprise (but completely ignoring the Pope). The air campaign started at a time of our choosing, we took out the air defense systems, then sortied the rest of the combined air forces with impunity and complete tactical air superiority. There has not yet been a Coral Sea type battle of the drones.
I am unfamiliar with how Russia used air power against Georgia, and how the Ukraine v Russia battle is being fought in the air (except for that one big famous incident), so there may be examples in those conflicts of using UAVs in a non-permissive environment (successfully or unsuccessfully)
*and esp now the Echo ‘tactical’ variant that has increased loitering and, moreover, in flight re-programing for the first time – but it hasn’t been around all that long, i.e. we didn’t have it in service when OIF kicked off.
**or more, if you count the little strikes in the 90s to enforce no-fly zones, like Desert Fox.
***this would have been twice two, but the TLAM shooter in ’86 (the first time it would have been used) went out of service and was not in position in time to conduct the attack.Report
@chris and @glyph bait
One sad thing about the Internet is the death of the local music poster advertising gigs. I don’t think I have ever seen any examples except for shows that happened way before old enough to attend concerts.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/02/20/austin_music_history_music_posters_from_the_1960s_and_1970s.htmlReport
A bunch of the posters from that era are still up at the two Threadgills. I think the founder of Threadgills was either a partial owner of Armadillo World Headquarters or close to the owners, and when the Armadillo went under, he got a lot of their stuff. Also, the chicken fried steak is pretty good.
I’ve actually seen some great posters for local shows recently, but it’s so easy to make them now that I don’t think you can make a lot of money making them for one market.Report
I don’t see why they’ll die – in fact, more of them than ever will be preserved for view on the ‘net, and people will still make them, to put up at/near the venue, to sell at the merch table, etc. (not to mention, the art itself will still be displayed on a website advertising the gig).
As long as there are dorm room walls there will be gig posters. At least until we go full Black Mirror and make every surface a touchscreen.Report
@glyph
I mean modern ones are not really being made anymore. I have never been walking down the street and saw cool posters advertising shows.Report
Huh. I still see them at venues, so I am pretty sure they are still being made.
If you don’t see them on the streets, that may be less “internet” and more “post no handbills” laws?Report
I still see them on campus, but not as much as I did 10 years ago. Mostly I just see them at or near venues.Report
Both my hometown and my current city have special poster hanging infrastructure – in my hometown, they’re these very phallic posts about 6′ high and 2′ round; in my current city there are similar but somehow less phallic posts, and walls about 7′ high by 10′ long, with an overhanging roof so you can stand out of the rain while reading the posters. They’re always thick with posters, half an inch deep or more. Theatre, music, public meetings, etc.
And yet I never seem to get the information about the specific shows I go to from those posters.Report
Come to Seattle and visit Capitol Hill. Every single telephone pole is rife with ’em.Report
Why does Seattle have a Capitol Hill? The capital is Olympia.Report
It’s a combination of the developer in the early 20th century who created the area renaming it to try to draw the Washington state government to Seattle & in honor of the developer’s home neighborhood of Capitol Hill in Denver.Report
Having the state capital in Seattle would be silly. It should be in Ellensburg. (Though Olympia is okay.)Report
re: ed3:
(((What follows is one of those things that’s not only anecdotal, but based on my memory of how things were when I was a high school student in the early 1990s. Anecdote is not data. And memory is not really what happened. Be forewarned.)))
From the linked-to article:
I had a very different experience. Beginning in my junior year, I worked a part time job. Friday evenings, Saturdays, and Aundays during the 1990-1991 school year, and an extra weekday (or more, if I got called in) during my senior year. (The latter was my senior year.) I had a very different take on the “sitting all the time” aspect of education. I saw it as a rest from work, as leisure activity. I had my job where I had to stand all throughout my shift, and now I was the consumer who got to sit while someone else (my teachers) had to stand. It gave me a sense that education was leisure. And a luxury. And it was something I enjoyed. A lot.
Again, this is anecdote, and my experiences are not that teacher’s experiences, nor are they the experiences of her students, or of my own fellow students from when I was in high school, especially because I enjoyed school and that was my aptitude. But what I want to say is, sitting down was a luxury.Report
@gabriel-conroy
This speaks to the great variability amongst humans — including (GASP!) children and young people — and the probably with a standardized approach to education. Some folks do their best learning sitting and attending for extended periods. Others find it torturous. Yet far too many schools and classrooms use essentially the exact same model and have for decades despite all that we’ve learned about the diversity of learning styles and the like.Report
@kazzy
I agree. And I certainly knew many, very intelligent people in high school, and what worked for me didn’t for some of them.
Also, this,
might have been written better. Maybe I should’ve paid more attention in class? 🙂Report
En2: Any piece that starts off with “the IEA forecasts” and doesn’t immediately start laughing is subject to doubt. Over the last 15 years, the IEA has an abysmal forecasting record. 15 years ago, they said that: (a) ten years out world production/consumption of oil would be past 125 million barrels per day, (b) it would all be conventional oil, tar sands and fracking and bio-fuels were unaffordable and not needed, and (c) prices would never go past $40/barrel and would be dropping back into the $20s before now.
It’s worth noting that the IEA is reasonably upfront about their modeling approach. Their political masters tell them what global economic growth rate is acceptable, typically 2.5 to 2.7%. They run that growth rate through their model that tells them how much oil has been historically required to deliver that. They assign those production levels to various sources, both real and potential. Over time, the gap between what known sources can produce and what they forecast is needed to support the economic growth rate has been “filled” by various things: Brazil; Iraq; the Arctic Ocean. Currently they use “efficiency gains” at rates the world has never managed to reach.
Will does well to point out the employment thing in North Dakota. We have enough data now to know that half of the operators in ND need $80/bbl to break even; none of those are going to even think about drilling at today’s prices. The corresponding figure for Texas drillers is about $60/bbl — they’re not losing as much money, but it’s still ugly. Citi Group is the biggest cheerleader right now — a number of analysts have suggested that Citi has bet heavily on oil prices continuing to drop, and if that doesn’t happen, Citi is bankrupt. Since it’s all derivatives that don’t have to be reported, no one will know unless/until the day comes when their creditors sue.Report
It’s good to see that big finance has learned their lesson from the collapse of 2008.Report
I understand some of them are already moving in on car loans. If you can slice and dice mortgages to get Triple-A, you can do it with a car! And even more people own cars than houses.
No, not kidding.Report
Hence the Ninga loan: no income, no garage.Report
@mike-schilling
You mean the lesson that they can screw up as big as they like and the government will bail them out?Report
The lesson that diversified portfolios are for suckers.Report
Given that the upper limit of the possible value of a typical car is its retail price, I don’t think we have too much to worry about a car bubble popping and taking out the financial system.Report
Given that the upper limit of the possible value of a typical car is its retail price, I don’t think we have too much to worry about a car bubble popping and taking out the financial system.
I think you glossed over the biggest part of the Great Recession.
What froze the credit market was what amounted to uncertainty. Once it became clear that “triple-A” rated CDOs…weren’t….everyone who held them froze, because nobody knew if what they had was good, bad, or in between.
Nobody could unpack the mess — the slicing and dicing process wasn’t one-way, theoretically you could trace it all back — but in practicality you couldn’t. Even if you could find the note, you couldn’t be sure it was up-to-date (notes were traded willy nilly, and as often as not the transfer was not properly recorded with the state), you certainly couldn’t trust the valuations or the claims about borrowers.
There was little market to buy the things except at massive fire-sale prices, but if you sold you took the loss immediately.
Doing it with car loans (which is a HUGE business) has the same problem, except on top of that cars depreciate in value from the get-go. Also, you can at least FIND the house. Cars move around.
The fact that anybody is considering it is simple proof that you don’t have to be smart to work in high finance. You can, apparently, be the king of morons.Report
But this time they couldn’t mix things like zero-down-payment loans on new Ferraris taken out by fast-food workers into the AAA tranche, because …
Oh, and the car prices wouldn’t start to rise once more and easier financing is available, because …
OK, now I’m starting to get scared.Report
A1: Low freq. sonar has been around for a while. The US navy uses it to protect the carrier task forces. It’s very good at finding subs. But this development doesn’t surprise me. The current tech seems pretty mature.
A2: Ferguson early adopting strikes me as PR. Not sure of the value of this tool, especially since tazers and other less than lethal rounds are avail and this is pretty much a one shot and done tool.
A3: Those reasons could be applied to anything to justify this here as well. I NEED a fully auto weapon to protect my family! :p
F1: Lol…dumb asses. Still not as good as forcing someone to resign for saying “niggardly” claiming it was a racial insult.
F4: Our alien overlords are exposed! All hail or new masters! How much worse than the current idiots can they be?
H1: This is of course, the fault of Obama care. :p
H3; Blah blah. Wait..give me the logic between “it’s my body and I’ll have an abortion if I want” and “no it’s not your body and you can’t sell your organs”. Ofc this would also allow women who wanted abortions to sell the product of their medical procedure rather than the doctors and researchers solely benefiting.
C3: Wait 7 to 14 days for my custom porn?! I want it NOW!Report
Silly man! Choice is for pregnant women!Report
Yep, gotta love the hypocrisy.Report
Hypocrisy? Well, let’s see…
Permitting a woman choice in taking a pregnancy to term seems categorically different than permitting a person to sell their organs. I mean, if you trivially reduce the two things to the relationship between an individual and government, then sure, you can find some analogues. But most people don’t view things that way, yes? So it’s not hypocritical on their parts to think that only one action ought to be permitted. Given that, ya’lls claim that those folks are hypocritical doesn’t even make any sense.
Now, if there were in fact no distinctions between terminating a pregnancy and selling organs, then you would have a point. But I don’t see how you could do that, myself. For example, it seems clear to me that a person could consistently maintain that abortion ought to be illegal while organ sales ought be allowed. So I don’t see how you could sustain the charge of hypocrisy without begging the question by asserting that the only relevant similarity between the two is the role government plays in all this.Report
Actually the hypocrisy is in the comments I wrote about “it’s my body and I’ll have an abortion if I want”. If it’s “her body” as all “right thinking” folks do, then how is it not applicable to me selling a kidney. After all, “it’s my body”.
It’s not the act that generates the hypocrisy, it’s the claim of ownership.Report
Even then, it’s not as simple as what you’re claiming. Selling a kidney involves a transaction with (amongst other things) other moral agents. Terminating a pregnancy doesn’t, especially if undertaken within the first Xish weeks. Alsotoo, permitting selling organs can create perverse incentives which presumably (but especially for pro-choicers) don’t exist in the case of permissible abortion. So even the “it’s my body and I’ll do what I want to” argument isn’t analogous in the relevant respects. Seems to me, anyway.Report
I think @stillwater has you here, @damon . I mean, no one argues, “It’s my body, I can kill you with it.” It is not the claim of autonomy and agency over one’s self that is inconsistent from situation to situation but the ripple effects beyond the individual that must be weighed.
That said, I support regulated access to abortion and a regulated market for organ transactions.Report
If the issue is about drawing an analogy between selling organs for cash and having an abortion based on the premise that people ought to be able to do what they want with their bodies (“It’s my body and I’ll do what I want to”….) then the more perfect analogy would require that women a) get paid for having abortions because b) there is a market for terminating pregnancies. Short of that, the motives, outcomes and utility-increasing measures are radically distinct between the two cases.
Of course, prototypical libertarian logic requires doubling down on the presumptive dubiousness of certain assumptions, in this case that women shouldn’t be paid to have abortions! So that’s another ball we have to juggle without letting drop! Well ….
Even if that were included in the debate, the moral properties of the two policy positions strike me as disanalogous.Report
“Women have a right to their own body” is a rhetorical club, like its opposite number “It’s a child, not a choice”. In either case, of course you can try to drill into the details and find conditions and nuance and trade-offs, but it’s also easy enough to find people shouting these slogans as if they were sufficient and unassailable arguments for the rightness of the given opinion.
Damon is clearly referring to the way it’s usually deployed and is pointing out its deficiencies as a self-contained argument and engaging in a bit of mocking of the people who use it that way. I doubt he’s suggesting that there’s no way to come up with a notion of self-ownership that’s contingent rather than absolute. The best response IMO is to acknowledge that it’s over-simplistic, like most statements that appear on placards and bumper-stickers.Report
kenB,
I’d agree, except for the fact that pro-choicers have been fighting an uphill battle attain the status that a woman actually does have a right to her own body. IF the starting point was neutrality, then I’d agree with you. But it wasn’t. And in some sense it still isn’t. So what you call “sloganeering” is actually more than a club. It’s an attempt to gain some freedom – some autonomy – by expressing the goal in political shorthand. Nothing wrong with that, just so long as we remember where these “movements” start from. In my view anyway.Report
The state will force people to donate organs. I should have the right not to do so.
There, now we have the proper analogy.Report
Maybe women should have the right to sell their kidneys?Report
@kazzy It is not the claim of autonomy and agency over one’s self that is inconsistent from situation to situation but the ripple effects beyond the individual that must be weighed.
But there are no legitimate externalities. At least with abortion, you can talk about the effect on the fetus, if you ignore the fact that a fetus’s CNS isn’t developed to the point where it has any plausible moral significance. If you sell your kidney, it doesn’t harm anyone but you, and if you get paid enough that you’re willing to do it voluntarily, it’s still a net benefit.
If we’re going to treat hand-wavy nonsense about “commodification” as an externality, then we can ban anything we want. If we allow women to terminate their pregnancies, that cheapens life, and next thing you know, we’ll have gladiatorial combat on pay-per-view TV*. There’s a whole cottage industry around making fake-externality arguments against gay marriage.
*I was just trying to make up something silly, but in retrospect I think that’s an actual argument(oid) that’s been made.Report
H2 is much better than your blurb makes it sound, though in retrospect I guess I shouldn’t have expected an article you linked to to be “Ra ra France! Ra ra socialism!” boilerplate.Report
@brandon-berg
Down here-
Since the phrase “economic units stripped of human dignity” is used often by people on my side of the fence, I thought it a good idea to flesh it out a bit more.
The phrase springs from religious social justice theory, mostly Catholic, but widely adopted by most Christian denominations.
The basic premise is that economic activity and property rights are means to an end, the end being the fulfillment of the human person.
The other premise is that the human person itself- our bodies- are sacred things.
Both of these premises contain the idea that possession of rights isn’t a binary state where you either have it or not.
Instead its based on the “bundle of sticks” theory, where our claim over property and our bodies is partial, bounded, and never total.
So asserting marketplace logic over the human body is an error- it places economic activity as a higher moral value than the respect for the human person. We become economic units, rather than persons with a fundamental dignity.Report
“Economic units stripped of human dignity” assumes that there is a higher human purpose than profit maximization. Which is crazy talk.Report
@brandon-berg
(DOWN HERE!)
If we are talking about a single organ sale transaction, sure, the ripple effects are minimal if non-existent. But by creating a market, all sorts of other things happen. Let’s suppose that the creation of a market leads to organ donations ceasing as those willing to part with theirs realize they can make a buck. Now organ recipients are limited to those who can pay market rate, which may be well into the 5 or even 6 figures. That is an consequences that effects many many people and quite negatively. Are we okay with that? Maybe you are. I’d have some discomfort there. Such consequences do not exist with abortions, whether we are talking about one or one million.
Which isn’t to say we can devise a system wherein those willing to part with their organs are compensated in some way. I just personally think we’d want to put some regulations in place to avoid some of the grosser negative outcomes of a completely free market.
The reality is, all sides leverage the “It’s my body and I can do what I want” argument when it is convenient to their position. And while I believe that the goal should be to maximize individual autonomy and agency, we must balance this against the effects of exercising said autonomy and agency. Think back to ‘The Simpsons’ where Bart and Lisa walk towards each other, one punching empty air and one kicking empty air and both insisting that if the other comes to occupy that air, it’s their own fault. Actions have consequences.
There are myriad examples of all sides being inconsistent hypocrites. In our lifetime we’ve had real or proposed laws which banned certain sex acts, gay marriage, drug use, trans fats, big sodas, organ sales, abortion, driving too fast, not vaccinating your children, and riding a motorcycle without a helmet. All of these impose constraints on individual autonomy and agency. Some of these were/are probably good laws and some of them were awful laws.
As a general rule, I think invoking the “It is my body and I’ll do what I want with it” argument is weak tea. Stated as such it is simply not one we can apply with any serious. As someone else stated above, the main reason that argument became so common among the pro-choice crowd was because the first part of it — the idea that women’s bodies were their own — was not universally recognized. So a hyperbolic position was necessary in order to correct for that.
If we could trust that all parties in the abortion debate genuinely accept the premise that a woman’s body is her own in the exact same manner in which a man’s body is his own, I’d be comfortable banning that particular slogan. Unfortunately, I don’t think we can say that. I think there is too much evidence that *some segment* of pro-lifers think women’s bodies or women’s agency and autonomy is less their own then men’s.Report
What was the original suggestion, that there should be a free market in organ donation, or that organ donors should be compensated somehow? Because it seems to me that these are two very different things with only a very small area of potential overlap.
Allowing the recipient, or their insurance, or the state, to provide anew attractive measure of financial compensation should be a non-issue except to those who are irrationally hung up on the giving aspect. For living donors, there is a very limited number of ways they can donate (kidneys, skin, bone marrow, blood, plasma, perhaps a few others ) but most such donations are very unpleasant for the donor & uncertain (you can’t just donate a kidney at the local kidney bank when the bills are due).
However, a compensation scheme that would make payments to education or retirement accounts, or to the estate of a deceased donor, would potentially attract more people to register as donors and get screened for match markers.Report
@mad-rocket-scientist
I’ll confess that I’m not sure what the original contention was. I jumped in mid-debate.
I will say that my not-fully-thought-through plan for encouraging organ donation involves myriad shifts, some minor (e.g., making organ donation via automobile licensure opt-out instead of opt-in) and some major (e.g., methods of compensating organ donors both living and deceased). A little creativity in this area could save untold number of lives and a bit of thoughtfulness will mitigate most potential downsides.Report
@kazzy Again, insurance. A kidney transplant already costs about a quarter million dollars. Compensating the donor might add $100,000 tops, including cash and lifetime insurance against any associated medical costs. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the number of people who self-insure for whom the difference between $250,000 and $350,000 is a deal-breaker is roughly zero.
Also, I count the end of uncompensated donations as a plus. I’ve heard stories from people who were pressured by their families to donate a kidney, and it sounds like a terrible situation. Opponents of organ sales talk about “exploitation,” but they apparently have no problem with the exploitation that’s going on now, where donors are guilted into giving up a kidney and get nothing in exchange.
The only people who have a leg to stand on when objecting to kidney sales are those who have personally donated a kidney. All the rest deserve to experience the joys of end-stage renal failure for themselves.Report
@brandon-berg
You’ll see I never used the word exploited in my argument. Again, I’m in favor of compensating organ donors. I’m for whatever increases the number of available organs. I just think there are better and worse ways to do that. Craig’s List and eBay are poor models. Having not thought it through fully, I’d rather there exist a central clearing house wherein organs are gathered and distributed than individuals brokering with strangers. But I’m open to being convinced otherwise.
If the question is about saving 100 rich people or 50 regular/poor people (yes, yes, false dilemma), I’d take the former every day of the week and twice on Sundays. But I’d prefer a third path where we can get those hundred organs and have a distribution model based on something other than ability to pay.
You and I, I believe, are on the same side of the fence and arguing details.Report
Part of the issue with compensating organ donors is that taking someone’s kidney after they’re dead starts to look like taking their wallet, and volunteering to be an organ donor gets a lot more complicated than just ticking a box on the driver’s licence renewal form.Report
Yeah, so EVERYBODY who’s involved in the transplant process/industry gets to earn a buck but the guy/estate who gives it up gets squat. Who’s the exploited? The donors. Everyone else is making money off of them.
Time to fix it. Besides, with the ACA coming into effect medical costs are going to come down, so this worry about cost is just a red herring, isn’t it?Report