The Civil War was one of the first to be photographed. The memorable photographs of seemingly endless lines of dead men at Antietam are burned into my brain and it's hard for anyone to look at those photographs and not be shocked and horrified. None less than Robert E. Lee wrote that "It is well that war is so horrible, lest we grow too fond of it."
Seeing these images surely had an effect on the public's morale and appetite for war, just as it did during the Great War, Great War Part II, Korea, and Vietnam. But in the 1860's, one suspects that those photographs got considerably more play in northern newspapers than southern, simply because of access to the photographs and the availability of resources to publish and distribute them. So the home front there got a stiffer dose of visual imagery of the horrors of war than did the home front in the south, which consequently grew less war-weary until the horrors of war were visited within actual eyesight.
I'm not saying I have prof of any of that, just a theory.
1) Hey, I've been known to whore for hits with the scandal du jour myself.
2) This. I'm no prude, but prudes aren't the only ones who possess a modicum of good taste. Which doesn't stop me from smirking at the Congressman's unfortunate name.
3) One nice thing about this facet of our system is that Weiner's constituents will soon get to decide for themselves if this scandal renders his services unacceptably ineffective.
4) Swipe at Weiner's mid-east policy position noted; query if his eventual (imminent?) replacement will be significantly different.
I've heard slavery described as the "taproot issue" of the war and I like that phrase -- everywhere you turn, whether to legalism, Constitutional formalism, economics, culture, western expansion, slavery winds up playing a role. It had become so interwoven into the fabric of life in the south, and so morally abhorrent to the north, that no even halfway plausible subject relating to the war can be honestly discussed without addressing it.
One can reach the same conclusion using a deontological ethical calculus instead of a utilitarian one. TVD is right, though, that an approach from a deontological perspective must eventually confront the fact that it disregards the death toll. Identifying freedom as an inherent good, securing the liberty of others as a moral duty, does require that one say "so be it" when confronted with the inevitable death toll associated with achieving that objective.
The utilitarian is right to say "Think about that carefully before you commit to it." The utilitarian would be wrong, though, to say "A cost of death renders liberty without any utility whatsoever, therefore, spill no blood in pursuit of freedom." That's no more right than bargaining to kill a million people so as to liberate a hundred.
Charting a good ethical course involves balancing intent and effect, which means balancing deontological and utilitarian analysis. It is a mistake to rely on only one or the other mode of thought. "Was it worth it" is a challenging question.
LeBron is not MJ. To his credit, he isn't trying to be MJ anymore. Your problem here is, he isn't Magic, either. Lebron is Lebron, and his book is still partly unwritten.
In fact, Jason Kidd's book isn't done yet, either. A little less hype for that one but still plenty to talk about, including that game.
FWIW, I see a qualitative difference between biochemistry and and liberty in that one involves a substantially greater proportion of objectively-verifiable facts than the other. YMMV.
Good morning, TVD. Love the blues even though I'm a privileged white boy. Elmore James' "Dust My Broom" is on the CD in my Jag as I write, and I hope you guys did Elmore proud.
I'm well aware of the slave trade clause. I don't know if my take on it conforms to the "prevailing narrative" or not. It sure looks to me like there was one faction of framers who wanted to ban the slave trade in 1787 and wanted to write it in to the Constitution. And there was another faction of framers who didn't want it banned at all. And the issue was going to prevent the rest of the Constitution from getting adopted. So they agreed to kick the can to Congress twenty years down the road. So the clause you're referring to was a means of delaying the eventual need to address the issue rather than a confrontation of it.
I'll readily stipulate that lots of slave owners were willing to openly admit that slavery was an evil institution, corrosive to morality and offensive against human rights. They just never got around to doing anything about that moral judgment because the economic pressures and incentives inherent in slavery, and the social conventions of white racial superiority, were powerful enough that they could find excuses to put off behaving in conformity with their avowed morality until some other day that never quite seemed to dawn. E.g., Thomas Jefferson, see also Compromise of 1820.
I never thought about that question (“According to the Constitution, as read in 1860, was slavery unconstitutional?”). I have always thought it clear that the original framers worked hard to dance around directly addressing the issue and quite intentionally left the Constitution silent on that point, and the framers of the twelve subsequent amendments followed suit, because the issue was just too hot politically. And it's probably true that if the Constitution had addressed slavery more explicitly the union would not have formed as it did and independence would have been a serious question. It's precisely because the Constition was silent on the issue that the matter had to be taken up by Congress and the President, and that's why a free-soiler like Lincoln in the White House was so unacceptable to the southern states -- he would have at least forced a confrontation on the issue and they could not take the chance that they would have lost.
Not even close, I'm pleased to report. I note that even if I come from a position of privilege and membership in the socially-favored class (racial or otherwise), those advantages do not diminish my ability to meaningfully contribute to a moral, intellectual, legal, or other similar discussion. If I am from a privileged group and you are from an oppressed group, we should nevertheless stand on an equal intellectual footing in the arena of ideas.
I also concur with the notion that the failures, mistakes, and injustices of Reconstruction and Jim Crow do nothing to excuse the evils of slavery or the treason committed by the Confederates in defense of slavery.
I hope I've misunderstood you. Being white does not mean that one lacks standing to opine on the relative values of freedom and bloodshed.
Lots of white people fought and died in the Civil War for their respective visions of freedom. If a white man from Wisconsin in 1863 could decide that he was willing to give up his own life to help secure the liberty of a black man in Georgia, then it seems to me that it doesn't take membership any particular racial group to opine on the value of freedom as measured in blood, laws, money, economic opportunity, or whatever other metric one might propose, in this or any other context one might propose.
Besides, arguments ought to be evaluated on the basis of their intellectual merit first and foremost. Anyone can offer an opinion on the effect of the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. I remain unconvinced at the end of the exchange, but TVD is hardly coming out of Bizarro World when he defend Foote's proposition that we ought to look at these things as a set piece instead of as discrete historical events.
TVD is an able and good-faith sparring partner; he kept me on my toes for the discussion and offered a good-faith and different way of looking at the issues than mine. I'm still not convinced that Foote is right about this point, and it's not clear that TVD buys the argument himself. But he's certainly allowed to try the idea on for size to see how it fits, and convention dictates no hard feelings afterwards as well as the promise that his arguments (and mine) will be evaluated fairly along the way.
We had a productive exchange today, and race is not relevant to the value of that exchange.
Unions don't need watching the same way corporations do, Freddie? Are they somehow incapable of corruption, of subverting the public interest to their own private benefit? They're magically self-policing and by definition automatically in alignment with enlightened public policy?
We've gotta pay for it, TVD, with real dollars. Whether it's true and MF'ers from everywhere else in the world gravitate here or the bulk of them are home-grown, putting said MF'ers behind bars costs money. Where does that money come from? Every dollar spent on our unconstitutionally-crowded prisons is a dollar not spent repairing all those roads in such awful disrepair I fear for my car's suspension on a daily basis; every dollar spent on high school graduates lucky enough to become prison guards so they can earn $100K a year so they can take bribes to smuggle cell phones in to prison gang bosses and then make the new fish duel in gladitorial combat for their own amusement and then be protected by the CCPOA from any consequences for thus acting is money that could have been devoted to elevating California's educational system to once again outcompete Arkansas and Mississippi for the #45 spot in high school literacy rates. Or even better yet, money just not spent at all and therefore fewer bonds we have to pass.
It's all well and good to have contempt for criminals. They deserve it but expressing that contempt in a thoughtless (as in unthoughtful) way is the foundation of the CCPOA's capture of our body politic. Uncreative thought has allowed our entire penal system to be captured by special interest groups and set us up for statewide bankruptcy. You don't have to like criminals to appreciate that what we're doing to them right now is unsustainable.
Tim, I offer congratulations and big, big props for one of the most thoroughly and persuasively researched pieces of blog I've read almost anywhere at any time. This is impressive work.
Others have made the point that CCPOA is not solely responsible for this political state of affairs, but I think it's more than fair to suggest that CCPOA is a prime mover in creating it, a leader within the coalition of interest groups that has captured the state government of California and uses it like a gardening tool.
Understated in your piece was the fiscal impact all this has on the state. Prisons make up about one-fifth of our state's unsustainably bloated budget. And keeping up with the astonishingly-effective advocates for massive incarceration has resulted in, well, massive incarceration such that SCOTUS has found our entire prison system to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
It didn't have to be this way -- but with the CCPOA and its political allies holding an effective veto so powerful that the Legislature is almost overt in admitting that the best interests of prison guards is the motive force behind not only prison construction and investigation of prison policies but also the very writing and implementation of our criminal laws, it's hard to see how it can change now.
The problem of the CCPOA is surely what Madison had in mind when he wrote of the dangers of faction. The solution to faction, Madison wrote, is setting factions off against one another to compete for legislative attention and favor. But who is the faction arguing for prison system reform? What advocacy group stands for the idea that prisoners can be rehabilitated and reformed rather than simply coralled at public expense? Does the public have any appetite for balancing the perception of public safety with the reality of a state budget not financed by massive debt? Depressingly, the answers appear to be "No one, none, and no." CCPOA and its allies therefore are pulling all the levers because no one cares to, or dares, challenge them.
It is entirely possible, and ultimately not even intellectually contradictory, to be supportive of a Constitutional right and simultaneously repelled by its exercise. To pick an example from another arena, one can strongly support the right of the Nazis to have a parade but be really, really offended by that same parade when it is actually held. Or, supporting the exclusionary rule limiting the way police conduct searches does not mean that one is particularly glad when apparently guilty people do not receive prison sentences for their crimes.
So too with abortion -- one can say, "Yes, a woman has a right to have this procedure, and damn, is it an icky and morally ambiguous procedure to have -- which is why neither I nor the government have the authority to make that awful choice for the woman in question."
In my recent experiences in Italy, I took note of the infrastructure and urban layout of homes and workplaces because, well, that's an interesting thing to observe. Bear in mind that Italy got to rebuild a lot of its cities and infrastructure essentially from scratch after World War II, aided by a lot of Marshall Plan money, and has gone from a marginal economic case pre-war to one of the leading industrial and economic powers of the contemporary world. So unlike us, they got an opportunity to build their cities to suit, although I wouldn't want to have gone through what they did in order to get that opportunity.
A lot of Italy is rural, pastoral, farmland and used as such, with small villages housing the people who service those agricultural areas (not necessarily the owners themselves). A lot of it is rugged hills and mountains, unsuitable for more than tiny villages.
The bulk of the people there live in communes of various sizes, ranging from large villages of a few thousand to world-class cities like Rome and Milan. The larger cities have suburbs and exurbs, perhaps with more famous names than in the USA but suburbs and exurbs all the same. Pistoia was once an object of contention and warfare for the Florentines, but now it's a place where housing is more affordable than in crowded and dense Florence, where a lot of the jobs are.
So there are commuter trains servicing these cities, but there are also a lot of autostrada and superstrada linking these cities to their satellite communities. As here, a lot of people drive to work every day instead of taking public transportation or living near where they work -- in part because there is only so much infrastructure, in part because the infrastructure is not always efficient or convenient, and in part because housing in the central urban areas is significantly more expensive than it is in outlying regions.
Also as here, there is a mix of industrial and service-based jobs, and particularly the industrial jobs are not located so much in the central business districts of a lot of the cities (those are reserved for financial, governmental, and tourism activities either by law or by economic pressure) but generally in the outskirts of the cities and near the infrastructure which supports it.
The result is not the "greenbelted" cities urbanites once dreamed of, but "graybelted" cities with their outer rings being the unattractive heavy and medium industries on the outside, a middle ring of mostly medium-density residential buildings (think apartment blocks or condominiums) and businesses servicing the residential needs of the inhabitants like retail stores and auto repair shops, and a central business district (we'd call them "downtowns") where the more prestigious white-collar jobs as well as the tourism and high-end urban housing can be found. Italy being Italy, the central business districts are as much historical as modern in appearance, but the industrial graybelt and the residential belt, pretty much everything is postwar construction and the bulk of it is from the 1960's or later, when Italy's economy really began to take off.
The most interesting analogue to Trumwill's point, though, is that there are a considerable number of people who will have a job at one point in the outer graybelt, but live in a different part of the residential belt entirely, with little access to public transportation to get from A to B (or A to C, if the spouse works as in most younger families these days). This requires the use of cars instead of busses or urban light rail or commuter rails.
Densely packing jobs into central business districts creates horrendous traffic, both for ingress and egress, and within the CBD itself. Europeans compensate for this by walking around their CBD's more than Americans would, but they also have more restrictions on auto use in their CBD's so it may not be a matter of choice. The cities are older and laid out on traditional lines; only rarely has a city been re-designed with traffic flow as a significant consideration and only the centers of cities seem to follow grids. The historical and cultural reasons for that are fascinating but off point here.
The pricing effect of all this is to push most middle-income earners out of the CBDs and deny them reasonable housing choices near their industrial jobs in the graybelts. The housing that strikes a reasonable balance between quality, price, and proximity to the services that make residential life livable, is all in the middle belt; the closer to the center you get, the more you're going to have to pay and therefore the more out of reach that kind of housing becomes for most people.
Allow me to echo my friend Trumwill: doing what you love is great, if you can pay the bills too. To attain happiness, one must meet at least minimum thresholds in a number of areas (see Maslow's hierarchy) and if you have to live in a crappy apartment and eat Ramen noodles all your life, your happiness quotient is going to top out no matter how intellectually fascinating your career path may be.
For every Spike Lee, how many other film students washed out of the entertainment industry and became insurance adjusters to pay the bills? It's possible to make a very good living and have a lot of success doing the things you love.
The model is professional athletics, Hoop Dreams style: how many kids even get to the level where a dream of being a professional athlete is even realistic to pursue, and of them, how many actually get there?
By all means try out what you really enjoy for a while to see if you're going to be one of those lucky few who has what it takes to make it big. Keep your eyes open and unsentimental about what it really takes to make it big if you're serious about it.
Picking the right path is a balancing act with many factors to balance, and money is one of those factors.
Pragmatism isn't particularly sexy. It involves compromise and intellectual flexibility, accepting unpopular and unpleasant dimensions to policies, and maybe worst of all, admitting that all you can really do about some kinds of problems is ameliorate them because they cannot be "solved."
So when you approach an issue pragmatically, those who have bought in to an ideology will dismiss your pragmatic approach as being from the other tribe, and dismiss you entirely. Ask a conservative -- she will tell you that a "pragmatist" is a "liberal" in disguise and therefore has nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Ask a liberal -- he will tell you that a "pragmatist" is in league with the big corporations and the military, and therefore has nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Ask a libertarian -- she will tell you that a "pragmatist" is really a "statist" and so on and so on and so on.
Ideology gives the amateur political policy interloqutor a set of problems to diagnose, a set of solutions to those problems, and a package of justifications for them. It's prepackaged and easy to use. It contains a promise of coherence and ultimate simplicity. Ideology not only divides the world into US and THEM, it assigns blame for the ongoing problems of X, Y, and Z to THEM, and offers a solution -- THEY should become more like US. This also gives a psychological balm to assure the ideologue's deep insecurities -- I don't want X, Y, or Z to happen to me, and as long as I'm not like THEM, it's less likely they will. Plus, there is more psychological balm that comes from being included in a group. This is part of why ideology is sexy.
My question is, how do you break someone out of this feedback loop? If you are in US, criticism of the unifying ideology or its policy implications will brand you as a traitor and you will be cast out (e.g., Bruce Bartlett); if you are one of THEM (that is, not US), then you will be dismissed as having nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Even a practical demonstration of the failure of an ideologically-motivated policy will be dismissed by the true believer.
The world of law is built upon the infrastructure of the USPS. State-level civil litigation would utterly collapse without the post office; federal-level civil litigation requires the post office for all litigants initially and any litigant who lacks a computer. If the cost of delivery of my work product jumped from $.44 to $5.40 for a two-day FedEx, that would have a significant impact on my bottom line and my clients would whine even more than they do now about my high bills. FedEx is for fixing things when deadlines get missed and I get upset when I have to use it.
On “Pressures from the Home Front”
The Civil War was one of the first to be photographed. The memorable photographs of seemingly endless lines of dead men at Antietam are burned into my brain and it's hard for anyone to look at those photographs and not be shocked and horrified. None less than Robert E. Lee wrote that "It is well that war is so horrible, lest we grow too fond of it."
Seeing these images surely had an effect on the public's morale and appetite for war, just as it did during the Great War, Great War Part II, Korea, and Vietnam. But in the 1860's, one suspects that those photographs got considerably more play in northern newspapers than southern, simply because of access to the photographs and the availability of resources to publish and distribute them. So the home front there got a stiffer dose of visual imagery of the horrors of war than did the home front in the south, which consequently grew less war-weary until the horrors of war were visited within actual eyesight.
I'm not saying I have prof of any of that, just a theory.
On “One more blog, for good measure”
If he is of a mind to contribute, Trumwill would be a wonderful addition. Dude can write.
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I only had them at my own site. I'll set them up to run on the main page too as I just did with my green energy post.
Thanks for the vote of confidence!
On “Scattered thoughts on Weiner”
1) Hey, I've been known to whore for hits with the scandal du jour myself.
2) This. I'm no prude, but prudes aren't the only ones who possess a modicum of good taste. Which doesn't stop me from smirking at the Congressman's unfortunate name.
3) One nice thing about this facet of our system is that Weiner's constituents will soon get to decide for themselves if this scandal renders his services unacceptably ineffective.
4) Swipe at Weiner's mid-east policy position noted; query if his eventual (imminent?) replacement will be significantly different.
On “Of the Devil’s Side (and Knowing It)”
I've heard slavery described as the "taproot issue" of the war and I like that phrase -- everywhere you turn, whether to legalism, Constitutional formalism, economics, culture, western expansion, slavery winds up playing a role. It had become so interwoven into the fabric of life in the south, and so morally abhorrent to the north, that no even halfway plausible subject relating to the war can be honestly discussed without addressing it.
"
One can reach the same conclusion using a deontological ethical calculus instead of a utilitarian one. TVD is right, though, that an approach from a deontological perspective must eventually confront the fact that it disregards the death toll. Identifying freedom as an inherent good, securing the liberty of others as a moral duty, does require that one say "so be it" when confronted with the inevitable death toll associated with achieving that objective.
The utilitarian is right to say "Think about that carefully before you commit to it." The utilitarian would be wrong, though, to say "A cost of death renders liberty without any utility whatsoever, therefore, spill no blood in pursuit of freedom." That's no more right than bargaining to kill a million people so as to liberate a hundred.
Charting a good ethical course involves balancing intent and effect, which means balancing deontological and utilitarian analysis. It is a mistake to rely on only one or the other mode of thought. "Was it worth it" is a challenging question.
On “The Finals”
LeBron is not MJ. To his credit, he isn't trying to be MJ anymore. Your problem here is, he isn't Magic, either. Lebron is Lebron, and his book is still partly unwritten.
In fact, Jason Kidd's book isn't done yet, either. A little less hype for that one but still plenty to talk about, including that game.
On “Of the Devil’s Side (and Knowing It)”
I'm appalled at this comment.
And yet, ever so slightly intrigued...
"
FWIW, I see a qualitative difference between biochemistry and and liberty in that one involves a substantially greater proportion of objectively-verifiable facts than the other. YMMV.
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Good morning, TVD. Love the blues even though I'm a privileged white boy. Elmore James' "Dust My Broom" is on the CD in my Jag as I write, and I hope you guys did Elmore proud.
I'm well aware of the slave trade clause. I don't know if my take on it conforms to the "prevailing narrative" or not. It sure looks to me like there was one faction of framers who wanted to ban the slave trade in 1787 and wanted to write it in to the Constitution. And there was another faction of framers who didn't want it banned at all. And the issue was going to prevent the rest of the Constitution from getting adopted. So they agreed to kick the can to Congress twenty years down the road. So the clause you're referring to was a means of delaying the eventual need to address the issue rather than a confrontation of it.
I'll readily stipulate that lots of slave owners were willing to openly admit that slavery was an evil institution, corrosive to morality and offensive against human rights. They just never got around to doing anything about that moral judgment because the economic pressures and incentives inherent in slavery, and the social conventions of white racial superiority, were powerful enough that they could find excuses to put off behaving in conformity with their avowed morality until some other day that never quite seemed to dawn. E.g., Thomas Jefferson, see also Compromise of 1820.
"
I never thought about that question (“According to the Constitution, as read in 1860, was slavery unconstitutional?”). I have always thought it clear that the original framers worked hard to dance around directly addressing the issue and quite intentionally left the Constitution silent on that point, and the framers of the twelve subsequent amendments followed suit, because the issue was just too hot politically. And it's probably true that if the Constitution had addressed slavery more explicitly the union would not have formed as it did and independence would have been a serious question. It's precisely because the Constition was silent on the issue that the matter had to be taken up by Congress and the President, and that's why a free-soiler like Lincoln in the White House was so unacceptable to the southern states -- he would have at least forced a confrontation on the issue and they could not take the chance that they would have lost.
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Not even close, I'm pleased to report. I note that even if I come from a position of privilege and membership in the socially-favored class (racial or otherwise), those advantages do not diminish my ability to meaningfully contribute to a moral, intellectual, legal, or other similar discussion. If I am from a privileged group and you are from an oppressed group, we should nevertheless stand on an equal intellectual footing in the arena of ideas.
I also concur with the notion that the failures, mistakes, and injustices of Reconstruction and Jim Crow do nothing to excuse the evils of slavery or the treason committed by the Confederates in defense of slavery.
"
I hope I've misunderstood you. Being white does not mean that one lacks standing to opine on the relative values of freedom and bloodshed.
Lots of white people fought and died in the Civil War for their respective visions of freedom. If a white man from Wisconsin in 1863 could decide that he was willing to give up his own life to help secure the liberty of a black man in Georgia, then it seems to me that it doesn't take membership any particular racial group to opine on the value of freedom as measured in blood, laws, money, economic opportunity, or whatever other metric one might propose, in this or any other context one might propose.
Besides, arguments ought to be evaluated on the basis of their intellectual merit first and foremost. Anyone can offer an opinion on the effect of the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. I remain unconvinced at the end of the exchange, but TVD is hardly coming out of Bizarro World when he defend Foote's proposition that we ought to look at these things as a set piece instead of as discrete historical events.
TVD is an able and good-faith sparring partner; he kept me on my toes for the discussion and offered a good-faith and different way of looking at the issues than mine. I'm still not convinced that Foote is right about this point, and it's not clear that TVD buys the argument himself. But he's certainly allowed to try the idea on for size to see how it fits, and convention dictates no hard feelings afterwards as well as the promise that his arguments (and mine) will be evaluated fairly along the way.
We had a productive exchange today, and race is not relevant to the value of that exchange.
"
My best guess is "chartae, sodes".
On “What the hell is going on?”
Now that's bipartisanship in action that I can get behind.
On “The Role of the Prison Guards Union in California’s Troubled Prison System”
Unions don't need watching the same way corporations do, Freddie? Are they somehow incapable of corruption, of subverting the public interest to their own private benefit? They're magically self-policing and by definition automatically in alignment with enlightened public policy?
"
We've gotta pay for it, TVD, with real dollars. Whether it's true and MF'ers from everywhere else in the world gravitate here or the bulk of them are home-grown, putting said MF'ers behind bars costs money. Where does that money come from? Every dollar spent on our unconstitutionally-crowded prisons is a dollar not spent repairing all those roads in such awful disrepair I fear for my car's suspension on a daily basis; every dollar spent on high school graduates lucky enough to become prison guards so they can earn $100K a year so they can take bribes to smuggle cell phones in to prison gang bosses and then make the new fish duel in gladitorial combat for their own amusement and then be protected by the CCPOA from any consequences for thus acting is money that could have been devoted to elevating California's educational system to once again outcompete Arkansas and Mississippi for the #45 spot in high school literacy rates. Or even better yet, money just not spent at all and therefore fewer bonds we have to pass.
It's all well and good to have contempt for criminals. They deserve it but expressing that contempt in a thoughtless (as in unthoughtful) way is the foundation of the CCPOA's capture of our body politic. Uncreative thought has allowed our entire penal system to be captured by special interest groups and set us up for statewide bankruptcy. You don't have to like criminals to appreciate that what we're doing to them right now is unsustainable.
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Tim, I offer congratulations and big, big props for one of the most thoroughly and persuasively researched pieces of blog I've read almost anywhere at any time. This is impressive work.
Others have made the point that CCPOA is not solely responsible for this political state of affairs, but I think it's more than fair to suggest that CCPOA is a prime mover in creating it, a leader within the coalition of interest groups that has captured the state government of California and uses it like a gardening tool.
Understated in your piece was the fiscal impact all this has on the state. Prisons make up about one-fifth of our state's unsustainably bloated budget. And keeping up with the astonishingly-effective advocates for massive incarceration has resulted in, well, massive incarceration such that SCOTUS has found our entire prison system to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
It didn't have to be this way -- but with the CCPOA and its political allies holding an effective veto so powerful that the Legislature is almost overt in admitting that the best interests of prison guards is the motive force behind not only prison construction and investigation of prison policies but also the very writing and implementation of our criminal laws, it's hard to see how it can change now.
The problem of the CCPOA is surely what Madison had in mind when he wrote of the dangers of faction. The solution to faction, Madison wrote, is setting factions off against one another to compete for legislative attention and favor. But who is the faction arguing for prison system reform? What advocacy group stands for the idea that prisoners can be rehabilitated and reformed rather than simply coralled at public expense? Does the public have any appetite for balancing the perception of public safety with the reality of a state budget not financed by massive debt? Depressingly, the answers appear to be "No one, none, and no." CCPOA and its allies therefore are pulling all the levers because no one cares to, or dares, challenge them.
On “Questions about abortion become less complicated as long as you refuse to recognize that they’re complicated”
It is entirely possible, and ultimately not even intellectually contradictory, to be supportive of a Constitutional right and simultaneously repelled by its exercise. To pick an example from another arena, one can strongly support the right of the Nazis to have a parade but be really, really offended by that same parade when it is actually held. Or, supporting the exclusionary rule limiting the way police conduct searches does not mean that one is particularly glad when apparently guilty people do not receive prison sentences for their crimes.
So too with abortion -- one can say, "Yes, a woman has a right to have this procedure, and damn, is it an icky and morally ambiguous procedure to have -- which is why neither I nor the government have the authority to make that awful choice for the woman in question."
On “Lebron James Is Only What You Want Him To Be”
Is LeBron James to the Cleveland Cavaliers as Brett Favre is to the Green Bay Packers? If not, why is the perceived ethical calculus different?
On “The Car & The City”
In my recent experiences in Italy, I took note of the infrastructure and urban layout of homes and workplaces because, well, that's an interesting thing to observe. Bear in mind that Italy got to rebuild a lot of its cities and infrastructure essentially from scratch after World War II, aided by a lot of Marshall Plan money, and has gone from a marginal economic case pre-war to one of the leading industrial and economic powers of the contemporary world. So unlike us, they got an opportunity to build their cities to suit, although I wouldn't want to have gone through what they did in order to get that opportunity.
A lot of Italy is rural, pastoral, farmland and used as such, with small villages housing the people who service those agricultural areas (not necessarily the owners themselves). A lot of it is rugged hills and mountains, unsuitable for more than tiny villages.
The bulk of the people there live in communes of various sizes, ranging from large villages of a few thousand to world-class cities like Rome and Milan. The larger cities have suburbs and exurbs, perhaps with more famous names than in the USA but suburbs and exurbs all the same. Pistoia was once an object of contention and warfare for the Florentines, but now it's a place where housing is more affordable than in crowded and dense Florence, where a lot of the jobs are.
So there are commuter trains servicing these cities, but there are also a lot of autostrada and superstrada linking these cities to their satellite communities. As here, a lot of people drive to work every day instead of taking public transportation or living near where they work -- in part because there is only so much infrastructure, in part because the infrastructure is not always efficient or convenient, and in part because housing in the central urban areas is significantly more expensive than it is in outlying regions.
Also as here, there is a mix of industrial and service-based jobs, and particularly the industrial jobs are not located so much in the central business districts of a lot of the cities (those are reserved for financial, governmental, and tourism activities either by law or by economic pressure) but generally in the outskirts of the cities and near the infrastructure which supports it.
The result is not the "greenbelted" cities urbanites once dreamed of, but "graybelted" cities with their outer rings being the unattractive heavy and medium industries on the outside, a middle ring of mostly medium-density residential buildings (think apartment blocks or condominiums) and businesses servicing the residential needs of the inhabitants like retail stores and auto repair shops, and a central business district (we'd call them "downtowns") where the more prestigious white-collar jobs as well as the tourism and high-end urban housing can be found. Italy being Italy, the central business districts are as much historical as modern in appearance, but the industrial graybelt and the residential belt, pretty much everything is postwar construction and the bulk of it is from the 1960's or later, when Italy's economy really began to take off.
The most interesting analogue to Trumwill's point, though, is that there are a considerable number of people who will have a job at one point in the outer graybelt, but live in a different part of the residential belt entirely, with little access to public transportation to get from A to B (or A to C, if the spouse works as in most younger families these days). This requires the use of cars instead of busses or urban light rail or commuter rails.
Densely packing jobs into central business districts creates horrendous traffic, both for ingress and egress, and within the CBD itself. Europeans compensate for this by walking around their CBD's more than Americans would, but they also have more restrictions on auto use in their CBD's so it may not be a matter of choice. The cities are older and laid out on traditional lines; only rarely has a city been re-designed with traffic flow as a significant consideration and only the centers of cities seem to follow grids. The historical and cultural reasons for that are fascinating but off point here.
The pricing effect of all this is to push most middle-income earners out of the CBDs and deny them reasonable housing choices near their industrial jobs in the graybelts. The housing that strikes a reasonable balance between quality, price, and proximity to the services that make residential life livable, is all in the middle belt; the closer to the center you get, the more you're going to have to pay and therefore the more out of reach that kind of housing becomes for most people.
On “Meanderings on the Liberal Arts Education and Humanities Major”
Allow me to echo my friend Trumwill: doing what you love is great, if you can pay the bills too. To attain happiness, one must meet at least minimum thresholds in a number of areas (see Maslow's hierarchy) and if you have to live in a crappy apartment and eat Ramen noodles all your life, your happiness quotient is going to top out no matter how intellectually fascinating your career path may be.
For every Spike Lee, how many other film students washed out of the entertainment industry and became insurance adjusters to pay the bills? It's possible to make a very good living and have a lot of success doing the things you love.
The model is professional athletics, Hoop Dreams style: how many kids even get to the level where a dream of being a professional athlete is even realistic to pursue, and of them, how many actually get there?
By all means try out what you really enjoy for a while to see if you're going to be one of those lucky few who has what it takes to make it big. Keep your eyes open and unsentimental about what it really takes to make it big if you're serious about it.
Picking the right path is a balancing act with many factors to balance, and money is one of those factors.
On “Somalia and Binary Thinking”
Pragmatism isn't particularly sexy. It involves compromise and intellectual flexibility, accepting unpopular and unpleasant dimensions to policies, and maybe worst of all, admitting that all you can really do about some kinds of problems is ameliorate them because they cannot be "solved."
So when you approach an issue pragmatically, those who have bought in to an ideology will dismiss your pragmatic approach as being from the other tribe, and dismiss you entirely. Ask a conservative -- she will tell you that a "pragmatist" is a "liberal" in disguise and therefore has nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Ask a liberal -- he will tell you that a "pragmatist" is in league with the big corporations and the military, and therefore has nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Ask a libertarian -- she will tell you that a "pragmatist" is really a "statist" and so on and so on and so on.
Ideology gives the amateur political policy interloqutor a set of problems to diagnose, a set of solutions to those problems, and a package of justifications for them. It's prepackaged and easy to use. It contains a promise of coherence and ultimate simplicity. Ideology not only divides the world into US and THEM, it assigns blame for the ongoing problems of X, Y, and Z to THEM, and offers a solution -- THEY should become more like US. This also gives a psychological balm to assure the ideologue's deep insecurities -- I don't want X, Y, or Z to happen to me, and as long as I'm not like THEM, it's less likely they will. Plus, there is more psychological balm that comes from being included in a group. This is part of why ideology is sexy.
My question is, how do you break someone out of this feedback loop? If you are in US, criticism of the unifying ideology or its policy implications will brand you as a traitor and you will be cast out (e.g., Bruce Bartlett); if you are one of THEM (that is, not US), then you will be dismissed as having nothing new or worthwhile to contribute to a discussion about whatever particular issue is on the floor. Even a practical demonstration of the failure of an ideologically-motivated policy will be dismissed by the true believer.
On “The Post Office’s Problems Aren’t Its Employee Costs”
The world of law is built upon the infrastructure of the USPS. State-level civil litigation would utterly collapse without the post office; federal-level civil litigation requires the post office for all litigants initially and any litigant who lacks a computer. If the cost of delivery of my work product jumped from $.44 to $5.40 for a two-day FedEx, that would have a significant impact on my bottom line and my clients would whine even more than they do now about my high bills. FedEx is for fixing things when deadlines get missed and I get upset when I have to use it.
On “The Percentage Sign as a Signaling Device”
I was just trying to have a little light-hearted fun. No offense intended, BlaiseP.