To be fair, it's the professional journalists who conditioned me to do my own fact-checking. I have no idea whether Pajamas Media is better, worse, or the same on that score.
That said, the questionnaire Haidt used in his research appears to introduce bias by asking questions about issues that appeal only to left-wing or conservative sensibilities. For example, two of the six questions regarding loyalty were about loyalty to one's country, with no corresponding questions aimed at left-wing loyalties (e.g., crossing a picket line). One of the care/harm questions was about how bad it is to harm a defenseless animal, but there was no question about how bad it is to harm a defenseless fetus.
It's been Haidt's schtick for a while now. Leftists value care and fairness, conservatives value loyalty, purity, and authority. Relatively, anyway. The paper I saw showed a difference between extreme leftists and extreme conservatives of no more than one point on a six-point scale for the perceived value of any of the five foundations.
When I read the quote from Pajamas Media about Carbonite's stock price, I immediately stopped reading and looked it up myself. It took about two minutes. It seemed like the obvious thing to do. It wouldn't have occurred to me not to.
It doesn't say good things about our media corps that I have been conditioned to do this.
It's not really a one-drop rule so much as a bias. Colloquially, we classify most half-African, half-European people as black, in part because many of the traits associated with European ancestry are recessive. But if someone looks white, we typically don't consider him to be black, even if we know that his great-grandfather was black.
Of course there's white. It's what we call a person who expresses most of the physical traits associated with European ancestry. This correlates strongly with actual European ancestry.
It's one thing to say that people in wheelchairs should have access to pools. It's another thing entirely to say that every pool has to be wheelchair-accessible. What the government is doing now is essentially levying a tax on everyone who operates or uses a publicly accessible pool and using it to provide a subsidy to handicapped people in the form of a fixed lift at every single one of those pools.
This is very obviously a horribly inefficient solution. Scrap the regulation and compensate for it by increasing SSDI benefits a bit. Those who really want pool access will form the market for wheelchair-accessible pools; others will be better off spending the money on something else.
Sort of. They're private property, but the government has decreed that when you operate your private property as a place of public accomodation--that is, a facilitiy which anyone can just walk (or roll) in off the street and pay to use--you forfeit certain rights.
Yeah, but stuff like this can come from anywhere, right? There's no reason, a priori, to expect the space program to give a better spin-off yield than research into some other field, especially since we've already been doing the space thing for sixty years and picked the low-hanging fruit. So why not direct that money into some other field of inquiry that's just as likely to produce useful spin-offs, and will also lead towards the solution of real problems?
Personally, I'd rather have more tomorrows to dream about than more to dream about tomorrow. All that money would be much better spent ridding humanity of the scourge of aging and other terminal diseases.
Cool, but useless. Traveling to meet them woudl be wildly impractical at best, and any communication at all would be hindered by a lag of decades or more, even putting aside the difficulties with working out a common language. Which pretty much sums up the space program more generally. Cool, useless, wildly impractical.
My initial reaction is that it's almost certainly wrong. I mean, sure, worth it in the sense that it's a better return on our money than paying people to dig holes and fill them in again (on the other hand, think what all that exercise would do for health care costs!), but not compared to spending that money on R&D targeted towards more practical ends.
I don't see any contradiction at all, but I don't really see the contraception issue as an issue of religious freedom, but rather of economic freedom. An employer's money is his own, and it's none of my goddamned business what he chooses to buy or not to buy with it. If he wants to use it to provide his employees with health insurance that covers contraceptives, great. If he wants to use it to provide his employees with health insurance that doesn't cover contraceptives, that's fine, too. Or if he just wants to pay them cash, I have no objection to that, either. It's not my money, so it's not my decision to make.
I don't think we should make an exception for people with strong religious convictions--I just don't think it should be required at all.
So I'm not even tempted to make an exception for people with strong religious convictions when it comes to incontrovertibly necessary medical treatments. You don't get to withhold food from your children, and you don't get to withhold necessary medical treatments, either. If your religion says otherwise, that carries about as much weight as if your religion says you have to ritually sacrifice your children. Which is pretty much what withholding necessary medical treatments is.
I get that the Framers might have wanted to dodge the question, but it seems odd to me that the state governments, in deciding whether to ratify the Constituiton, wouldn't have asked for a clarification on this point.
An alternative argument is that they could have explicitly put in a secession clause and purposely didn’t, so therefore secession was clearly disallowed. That’s a good argument from a standpoint of legal interpretation, so it’s a favorite of lawyers.
I understand that you're not necessarily endorsing this, but this is precisely the sort of reasoning the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were intended to rebuke. The federal government has only the powers explicitly delegated to it, while the states and people retain any rights and powers not explicitly revoked by the Constitution.
Given the enormous amounts of land we have with no conceivable purpose other than growing crops, it's really hard to believe that in the absence of subsidies we would have to rely on imports for our food needs. Especially given that one major effect of those subsidies is to cause a great deal of land to be used for production of corn for ethanol rather than for food.
Aside from that, I agree with Sandefur that the U.S. Constitution does not permit secession. I think it’s very clear on that point right now, and indeed it was clear (although slightly less so) in 1860.
Eh....this looks pretty weak to me. The Guarantee Clause says, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." The obvious interpretation of this is that the US doesn't get to change over to some other form of government, not states shall be barred from seceeding. This is about the obligations of the United States, not the obligations of the individual states.
The argument from the Privileges and Immunities Clause is a bit stronger, in that it's not clearly wrong, but it's not clearly right, either. It's a very weak implication. I think that if it had been intended that secession be disallowed, this would have been spelled out explicitly, as it was in the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.
Really, I find it hard to believe that this didn't come up at all during the Constitutional Convention or the ratification debate. Surely there must be some contemporary commentary on the issue?
The concept of a "dog whistle" is brilliant, because it allows you to accuse someone of being a racist, and his ideas therefore taboo, with no evidence whatsoever.
On “You Have Carbonite Sickness, But Your Sight Will Return Shortly – or, why Limbaugh didn’t really kill Carbonite, and the Left hasn’t really killed Limbaugh”
To be fair, it's the professional journalists who conditioned me to do my own fact-checking. I have no idea whether Pajamas Media is better, worse, or the same on that score.
"
That said, the questionnaire Haidt used in his research appears to introduce bias by asking questions about issues that appeal only to left-wing or conservative sensibilities. For example, two of the six questions regarding loyalty were about loyalty to one's country, with no corresponding questions aimed at left-wing loyalties (e.g., crossing a picket line). One of the care/harm questions was about how bad it is to harm a defenseless animal, but there was no question about how bad it is to harm a defenseless fetus.
"
It's been Haidt's schtick for a while now. Leftists value care and fairness, conservatives value loyalty, purity, and authority. Relatively, anyway. The paper I saw showed a difference between extreme leftists and extreme conservatives of no more than one point on a six-point scale for the perceived value of any of the five foundations.
"
When I read the quote from Pajamas Media about Carbonite's stock price, I immediately stopped reading and looked it up myself. It took about two minutes. It seemed like the obvious thing to do. It wouldn't have occurred to me not to.
It doesn't say good things about our media corps that I have been conditioned to do this.
On “Contraception and Causality; r/K Selection and Population Growth”
It's not really a one-drop rule so much as a bias. Colloquially, we classify most half-African, half-European people as black, in part because many of the traits associated with European ancestry are recessive. But if someone looks white, we typically don't consider him to be black, even if we know that his great-grandfather was black.
"
Of course there's white. It's what we call a person who expresses most of the physical traits associated with European ancestry. This correlates strongly with actual European ancestry.
On “New ADA Guidelines Expose Pool Operators to Private Lawsuits”
Maybe pools will close.
Then nobody can use them. Which is the next best thing to everybody being able to use them.
"
It's one thing to say that people in wheelchairs should have access to pools. It's another thing entirely to say that every pool has to be wheelchair-accessible. What the government is doing now is essentially levying a tax on everyone who operates or uses a publicly accessible pool and using it to provide a subsidy to handicapped people in the form of a fixed lift at every single one of those pools.
This is very obviously a horribly inefficient solution. Scrap the regulation and compensate for it by increasing SSDI benefits a bit. Those who really want pool access will form the market for wheelchair-accessible pools; others will be better off spending the money on something else.
"
Sort of. They're private property, but the government has decreed that when you operate your private property as a place of public accomodation--that is, a facilitiy which anyone can just walk (or roll) in off the street and pay to use--you forfeit certain rights.
On “My Friends, A Conspiracy Is Afoot”
Are we disowning Detroit? I could get behind that.
On “Space”
Give me a prehensile tail, and we'll talk.
"
Yeah, but stuff like this can come from anywhere, right? There's no reason, a priori, to expect the space program to give a better spin-off yield than research into some other field, especially since we've already been doing the space thing for sixty years and picked the low-hanging fruit. So why not direct that money into some other field of inquiry that's just as likely to produce useful spin-offs, and will also lead towards the solution of real problems?
"
Was Ayn Rand a big NASA fan, or is that just a catchphrase?
"
I don't know how that ended up there instead of directyl under the main post.
"
Personally, I'd rather have more tomorrows to dream about than more to dream about tomorrow. All that money would be much better spent ridding humanity of the scourge of aging and other terminal diseases.
"
Cool, but useless. Traveling to meet them woudl be wildly impractical at best, and any communication at all would be hindered by a lag of decades or more, even putting aside the difficulties with working out a common language. Which pretty much sums up the space program more generally. Cool, useless, wildly impractical.
"
My initial reaction is that it's almost certainly wrong. I mean, sure, worth it in the sense that it's a better return on our money than paying people to dig holes and fill them in again (on the other hand, think what all that exercise would do for health care costs!), but not compared to spending that money on R&D targeted towards more practical ends.
On “Religious Rights, Natural Law, and the Imperfect Pragmatic”
I don't see any contradiction at all, but I don't really see the contraception issue as an issue of religious freedom, but rather of economic freedom. An employer's money is his own, and it's none of my goddamned business what he chooses to buy or not to buy with it. If he wants to use it to provide his employees with health insurance that covers contraceptives, great. If he wants to use it to provide his employees with health insurance that doesn't cover contraceptives, that's fine, too. Or if he just wants to pay them cash, I have no objection to that, either. It's not my money, so it's not my decision to make.
I don't think we should make an exception for people with strong religious convictions--I just don't think it should be required at all.
So I'm not even tempted to make an exception for people with strong religious convictions when it comes to incontrovertibly necessary medical treatments. You don't get to withhold food from your children, and you don't get to withhold necessary medical treatments, either. If your religion says otherwise, that carries about as much weight as if your religion says you have to ritually sacrifice your children. Which is pretty much what withholding necessary medical treatments is.
On “Secession, Legal Orders, and Justification”
I get that the Framers might have wanted to dodge the question, but it seems odd to me that the state governments, in deciding whether to ratify the Constituiton, wouldn't have asked for a clarification on this point.
An alternative argument is that they could have explicitly put in a secession clause and purposely didn’t, so therefore secession was clearly disallowed. That’s a good argument from a standpoint of legal interpretation, so it’s a favorite of lawyers.
I understand that you're not necessarily endorsing this, but this is precisely the sort of reasoning the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were intended to rebuke. The federal government has only the powers explicitly delegated to it, while the states and people retain any rights and powers not explicitly revoked by the Constitution.
On “The Importance of Farm Subsidies”
Canola is a modified strain of rapeseed.
"
Given the enormous amounts of land we have with no conceivable purpose other than growing crops, it's really hard to believe that in the absence of subsidies we would have to rely on imports for our food needs. Especially given that one major effect of those subsidies is to cause a great deal of land to be used for production of corn for ethanol rather than for food.
On “Secession, Legal Orders, and Justification”
Aside from that, I agree with Sandefur that the U.S. Constitution does not permit secession. I think it’s very clear on that point right now, and indeed it was clear (although slightly less so) in 1860.
Eh....this looks pretty weak to me. The Guarantee Clause says, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." The obvious interpretation of this is that the US doesn't get to change over to some other form of government, not states shall be barred from seceeding. This is about the obligations of the United States, not the obligations of the individual states.
The argument from the Privileges and Immunities Clause is a bit stronger, in that it's not clearly wrong, but it's not clearly right, either. It's a very weak implication. I think that if it had been intended that secession be disallowed, this would have been spelled out explicitly, as it was in the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.
Really, I find it hard to believe that this didn't come up at all during the Constitutional Convention or the ratification debate. Surely there must be some contemporary commentary on the issue?
On “The More Things Change : Contraception Controversy Edition”
The concept of a "dog whistle" is brilliant, because it allows you to accuse someone of being a racist, and his ideas therefore taboo, with no evidence whatsoever.
"
Am I the only one who found that comment less offensive than inscrutable?
"
...I just realized that I've been spelling WYSIWYG wrong for years.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.