Just as a supplement to @tod-kelly , and perhaps as a way of clarifying his point (which I completely agree with):
Just because this particular piece has historically been part of their permanent collection and thus on display, doesn't the curator have a right to decide that he doesn't think it appropriate to continue displaying that piece as part of the permanent collection when he has something he thinks is a better fit? I mean....curation itself strikes me as often being no less "art" than the works that get displayed.
In any event, the point is that I think we'd all agree that there's nothing wrong with a curator rotating works in and out of the permanent collection on display. I think we'd also generally agree that there's little wrong with selling a work that is just sitting in a warehouse or for which the museum lacks space.
It seems to me that opposing a sale because the piece is part of the permanent collection is not so much an objection to a violation of some sort of trust as it is an objection to active curating of collections.
That said, I strongly question the factual claim that museum-owned art is held in trust for the public. I don't think this is right at all, except perhaps for publicly owned museums. In the case of privately owned and operated museums such as the Barnes Foundation and MoMA (which is as private as humanly possible - they don't accept any public funding whatsoever), the art pretty clearly is owned outright by the museum. To the extent the museum has any obligations to the public with respect to the pieces it owns, those obligations are a function of their charter documents, which can vary wildly.
In the case of the Barnes Foundation (398 Pa. 458, for those with access to Lexis/Westlaw), the reason that it was ultimately forced to open to the public in 1961 had nothing to do with the notion that the art was held in a public trust. Instead, the issue was two-fold: (1) that the Foundation was set up as a "public charity" for tax purposes; and more importantly, (2) that the Foundation's formative documents implicitly ordered (and arguably expressly ordered) that the gallery be open to the public on at least a limited basis.
The tax issue was important, but didn't answer the ultimate question because the Trustees argued that they could operate as a "public charity" as long as they were providing students with an education. The argument on the tax issue did not assert that "public charity" status meant that the art or galleries were owned by the public, just that the Foundation's status required it be able to prove that it was providing a public service. The Foundation said that its "public service" was education through its private school.
That could have and would have been the end of it if the question was whether being a "public charity" automatically meant that the Foundation had to act as if its gallery was public property - quite clearly, I think, the Foundation would have won on that question and thus would have won the case (assuming it could have proven that it was separately acting as an educational institution, which is actually not clear, but which is irrelevant for our purposes).
Instead, the reason it lost the case was that the court found that the documents that formed the Trust expressly set forth goals that could only be accomplished if the art gallery was open to the public, regardless of any separate "education" the Trust provided.
In other words, the reason the gallery was forced to open, albeit on a limited basis, was that the Trustees were failing to abide by Barnes' personal instructions, not because they were breaching some sort of public trust.
The Detroit Institute of Art issue is quite fascinating, but ultimately it actually stands for the proposition that the intent of a museum's private founders controls the acceptable uses of the collection, rather than the proposition that the collection is held in trust for the public. In that case, the argument (available here: http://www.artlawreport.com/files/2014/05/DIA-Response-to-Motion-re-collection.pdf) to prevent the art from being sold was that the DIA was at least in part founded by a group of private citizens, with a particular charter it needed to abide by, and that it was established as a "private corporation," ("DIA Corp.") albeit one with an explicitly public purpose.
The argument went on to indicate that, because of an adverse court ruling in 1915 against cooperation between the City of Detroit and DIA Corp., DIA Corp. transferred a bunch of its assets to be held in trust for it by the City. The rest of the argument kind of flows from there, but in essence the argument was that the art belonged to DIA Corp., with the City holding it in trust for DIA Corp. (which in turn had a charter dedicating it to serving the public) pursuant to various statutes and agreements.
It's not clear whether the court ultimately would have bought into this line of argument, but at the very least the line of argument seems to have been enough to force a successful settlement. Regardless, the argument wasn't that the artwork was public property, but rather that it was private property of DIA Corp. which DIA Corp. had placed in the City's trust subject to DIA Corp.'s (again, a private non-profit) charter.
In the case of MoMA, it seems pretty clear that it is not holding the Monet in trust for the public, at least as a legal matter. It's a purely private entity, albeit still a non-profit. It can charge what it wishes for admissions fees. Functionally, I have a hard time seeing how it is conceptually much different from a for-profit museum for any reason other than taxes. Unless there is a quirk in New York law I don't know about, it has no legal obligation to even use the proceeds from the sale to obtain new pieces for its collection (moral obligations may be a different story), so long as it abides by its charter of course.
@chris I think it's fairly self-evident, to be honest. Blasphemy is, more or less, defined as an "expression that violates a religious taboo."
To ask someone not to blaspheme is to ask them to speak in accordance with a religious taboo. If the speaker is not of that religion and is not engaging in a personal dialogue with someone from that religion, to ask them to speak in accordance with that religion's taboo is to say that the religion's taboo should guide the speech of the speaker regardless of whether they are of that religion.
That is synonymous with saying that the taboo should be universalized.
Combining eminent domain with a desire to bar the exercise of a specific religion in a particular private area makes it more justified? I have a really hard time swallowing that.
I get the emotional response to the proposal. I don't get turning it into a political matter.
@zic It's my understanding that any finding by a university that a student has engaged in sexual assault has to be put on their permanent academic record. Certainly the Ioffe piece seems to suggest that.
Additionally, to be very clear - what I'm suggesting is not invoking the legal system, certainly not in any meaningful sense that it's not already in place. What I'm suggesting instead is that there be some sort of standing federal body within the Department of Education whose sole responsibility it is to adjudicate expulsion-level offenses. If this sort of procedure exists only in state schools, I'm fine with that as well - there is no due process right to a private education, certainly. Just as long as private adjudications don't wind up being on a student's permanent academic record.
@zic Part of the problem though is that as a practical matter, the mark of "expelled or suspended for sexual assault" acts as a complete bar to attending any other school, yet the level of proof required is merely "preponderance of evidence." While this falls short of criminal punishment, it is incorrect to say that there is no "right" at stake here, particularly when we're talking about public universities. It's equivalent to, say, the now well-recognized rights to continue receiving government benefits or to continue working certain government jobs. Due process is still very much at stake, even if the amount of due process that is necessary is significantly less than what is necessary in a criminal proceeding.*
Regardless, my suggestion is an attempt to address both due process and the need of rape victims to be taken seriously and not put on trial. I'm starting with the assumption that the system isn't working for anyone right now - the lower preponderance of the evidence standard that's now being put in place seems quite clearly to undermine even minimal due process for the accused when it's tapped (e.g., the Ioffe piece), but doesn't seem to do much to encourage proceedings to be instituted (i.e., schools, such as the other UVA stories and the delays in the Jameis Winston case, are still quite obviously being horrible about actually pursuing most cases brought before them). And this is very much what I'm trying to get at - it seems that universities are now either largely sweeping sexual assault cases under the rug or prejudging the accused in the cases that they willingly pursue (often correctly, perhaps, but certainly not anything close to always). There doesn't seem to be much middle ground, wherein the universities take the accusers seriously but diligently pursue the truth in deciding the responsibility of the accused, and I'm trying to understand why.
And I really strongly suspect that it's hard to impossible to be a good ally - ie, one who uncritically listens and supports and asks no questions - while also being a good prosecutor and, in effect, trying to actually represent your interests in an adversary proceeding. To do that, the university has to ask you questions you might not want to have to answer; I assure you that there are few things that make it harder to represent someone in an adversarial proceeding than failing to ask them difficult questions. The only way to do those two things at the same time is to get rid of the adversary proceeding entirely, and just prejudge the case.
It's still incredibly easy, though, to be a terrible ally and a terrible prosecutor and representative of the victim's interests - with or without due process protections.
What I'm trying to figure out is how to put the victim in control of the process as much as possible, in essence, while still ensuring that there's a process. Right now, the schools alone are in charge of the entire process - from support through prosecution and judgment - and I suspect therein lies the problem.
Importantly, my suggestion would not be exclusive to sexual assault cases - I think it's important to use for just about all cases where suspension is at issue, including the case of a student with a history of getting into fights. I apologize if that wasn't clear from my above post.
In terms of your counterexample of someone with a penchant for getting into violent fights, I don't think that I'm treating that any differently. The school still needs to have evidence that the fight occurred. Maybe it just disciplines both parties to the fights, but otherwise, it still needs to find out what exactly happened. Similarly, if a student is disruptive and rude, it still needs to conduct a fair hearing before it can conclude that the disruptive and rude behavior actually occurred. It can't just take the word of a professor and have that be the end of it. To my knowledge, this is how things already work; the only difference from my suggestion is that the adjudicator is not independent. But there's still due process.
*Also note that my suggestion does not prohibit schools from implementing lesser punishments, such as punishments regarding class and dorm assignments, without due process and without regard to any independent tribunal's findings.
@michael-drew Yeah, that's exactly right. @james-hanley Clickbait is definitely not his thing. While I understand why he may give the impression of not considering nuance and reason in his opponents' arguments, I think, as one who got into plenty of arguments with him (probably more than anyone else around here, actually), that he's actually quite excellent at absorbing arguments.
Sometimes he may miss the nuance in an opposing argument, sure, but he's mostly just human in that regard. His vitriol tends to come in two forms, and they're both forms that I fully respect:
1. Where his opponents reject his normative values; and
2. Where his opponents claim to have certain normative values as he, but act in a way he views as inconsistent or counterproductive to those values.
It's group 2 that gets easily the harshest vitriol, and probably why he's perceived as being toughest on neoliberals in general. But there've been plenty of leftists, libertarians, and conservatives who've gotten that treatment as well.
Thing is, that makes him one of the few people who are clear on what their actual principles are, as opposed to what are just positions of convenience masquerading as principles.
Basically, my favorite refrain about how "if you have too many principles, you soon have none" doesn't much seem to apply to him, and if that means he's going to fight with particular vehemence for his principles (which, again, seem to be actual normative principles rather than just policy preferences), then so be it.
@will-truman @aaron-david I don't know how rates of union membership in public sector unions compare in the south. I will say, that at least as of 2001 (when I had a summer job where my sole responsibility was to put together a comprehensive database on this), the South on average gave public safety unions significantly less bargaining power than other states. Virginia and North Carolina were, IIRC, the only two states in the country that outright prohibited public sector unions from engaging in any form of collective bargaining whatsoever.
@chris That's really interesting, on a number of levels. Here's one possibility that randomly occurred to me, but that might explain the distinction - just about every Southern state east of Texas (save Louisiana, which is middle-of-the-pack) has a relatively low percentage of its population in urbanized areas, meaning that its population densities are comparatively evenly distributed. It's not like the Northeastern megalopolis, nor is it even like the western states (plus Texas, depending on whether you consider it part of the West) where the populations tend to be highly concentrated islands surrounded by relatively unpopulated areas.
It may be as simple as less urbanization = fewer random encounters with the police = higher percentage of encounters are where police assistance is explicitly requested. In other words, less urbanization may force the police to respond to trouble rather than look for it.
But that's a lot of conjecture on my part.
Source:
http://www.icip.iastate.edu/tables/population/urban-pct-states
@saul-degraw I'm certainly aware of Staten Island's distinctions from the other boroughs, but working class people have to live somewhere, even in New York. Staten Island is perhaps reliably Republican compared to the other boroughs, but it is still part of NYC, as much as Manhattanites might enjoy holding it up for ridicule, and it is still far less conservative than South Carolina, and not even remotely rural.
Unless the contempt of Manhattanites for Staten Island has reached the level where they no longer view it as a different place from Upstate NY, Appalachia, the South, etc.
Though I will note that in each case referenced, the article uses the word "charged" rather than "indicted," which suggests that SC prosecutors are not taking the grand jury route. But that doesn't explain why SC prosecutors seem so much more willing to take that route. Then again.....we've got a sample size of three, albeit with a comparatively smaller population and presumably fewer officer-involved shootings as a result.
I'm very much wondering that myself. The whole cameras thing seems to help a bit, but in terms of securing charges (as opposed to exposing truth to the public) that help also seems to be of limited value.
I know you're joking around, but I probably should explain that the reason the latter is considered a subset of the former, rather than vice versa, is that the courts "for raising revenue" has been interpreted as meaning that revenue generation is the primary purpose of the bill. Which I think is a pretty reasonable interpretation - it wouldn't have been hard to write "that raises revenue" instead of "for raising revenue."
@michael-drew While he certainly came to the eventual conclusion that the intent could be overcome for purposes of the Constitutionality, the point here is that this was by no means inevitable. In fact, while he's saying that he's willing to rule it a tax in spite of the intent, he's also saying that this is only because there is juuuust enough ambiguity in the expression of that intent to warrant applying a tortured interpretation. I strongly suspect that if the mandate had at all approached the actual cost of health insurance, he'd have found the expressed intent dispositive.
Basically, it looks like he wound up doing a balancing test in which intent was a significant factor, but one just barely outweighed by the combination of the rule of construction that statutes should be interpreted to survive Constitutional muster if at all possible, the fact that the fee was comparatively low, and the fact that it was to be collected by the IRS.*
*Speaking of which, I'd love to know why the word "tax" was considered more important to avoid than the phrase "collected by the IRS."
@james-hanley @michael-drew @kenb That suit does indeed exist, and the plaintiffs did indeed seek to rely heavily on the fact that the mandate was upheld solely as a tax. They lost in the DC Circuit unanimously in July: http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/0DAD4A1E3A868F6385257D24004FA91E/$file/13-5202-1504947.pdf
It's a pretty well-reasoned and explained opinion with quite a bit of precedential support that points out that something that is a tax and something that is a "bill for raising revenue" are not the same. Because of that it didn't reach the issue of whether the bill actually originated in the house.
There's a petition for an en banc re-hearing still pending, but since the panel decision was written by Janice Rogers Brown, it's really hard to see it getting much support from even the most conservative of judges.
@zic A "tax penalty" would be an unconstitutional use of the taxing power - both Roberts' opinion and longstanding precedent (cited in my post linked by Chris above) held that the taxing power does not authorize penalties that take the form of a tax. The mandate fee was held to be a tax (again for the reasons I had predicted) precisely because it was far from punitive, with the key factor being that it was less than the cost of buying health insurance itself. Had it been found to have been an actual "penalty" it would have been an unconstitutional use of the taxing power.
@michael-drew I know we've had this discussion before, so I won't belabor the point, but I think it's a real stretch to say that the intent was either irrelevant or of minimal import just because the mandate was ultimately upheld. By a number of accounts I recall, Roberts was initially of the view that the intent (particularly as expressed in the language of the ACA) was dispositive. It surely would not have taken much for him to have stuck with that view.
Indeed, had he done so and thus voted to overturn the mandate, the portion of the resulting decision rejecting the tax argument would have widely been deemed an afterthought, and almost certainly the least controversial aspect of the decision - it would hardly have been radical to find that calling and structuring something as a penalty makes it a penalty. Roberts even at one point goes so far as to acknowledge that the natural reading of the statute required it to be viewed "as a command rather than a tax." He explicitly skirted this "natural reading," though, saying that it is "only because we have a duty to construe a statute to save it, if fairly possible, that §5000A can be interpreted as a tax."
But more importantly, it's worth mentioning that the only reason the issue of the mandate got anywhere with the court is because the court first - unanimously - found that it was not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act (which, I must emphasize, contains no definition of what constitutes a tax, just like the Constitution).
So while the mandate was ultimately found to be a tax for Constitutional purposes by 5 of the 9 justices (Roberts and the four members of the liberal wing), it was first found unanimously that the clear intent of the mandate was that it not be a tax for other purposes and that this intent controlled.
This is incredibly important for a number of reasons, and not just because it meant that the mandate was saved only because five justices, including the conservative CJ, were willing to adopt a very questionable view that the word "tax" has a different meaning in the Anti-Injunction Act than it has in the Constitution despite an identical lack of definition of the word in either authority.
But maybe the assumption is that Roberts was being purely a political actor in salvaging the mandate and that, despite the language he used, the intent exhibited by the mandate had no impact on his decision as to the mandate's viability whatsoever.
Even if that's true - and I don't think it is - the fact that all five justices who voted to uphold the mandate on tax grounds first concluded that it was not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act had huge effects. Specifically, if those same five judges who considered it a tax for purposes of the Constitution had also been able to find it to be a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, the question of the mandate's Constitutionality would have warranted no further discussion - the Anti-Injunction Act's applicability would have been an absolute bar to any challenges as to the mandate's Constitutionality.
That in turn would have meant that the Court never could have or would have reached the question of whether the commerce clause authorized the mandate at all. And the Court's discussion of the Commerce Clause (and for that matter the necessary and proper clause) was a gamechanger - the most significant limitation of Congress' power in a very long time.
This is a huge effect stemming directly from the fact that Congress and Obama (with little evidence, IMHO) viewed it as politically expedient to avoid calling it a "tax" and bent over backwards to insist that it was not a "tax." And it's not an effect that can be explained away as having been inevitable - again, it wasn't just Roberts and the conservative wing of the court that found it a "penalty" rather than a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, but also all four members of the liberal wing.
I missed your 5:28 comment. Yes, it's possible we're converging here - my point isn't that coalitions are chosen, just that they're more historical accident rather than ideologically pre-ordained. In some regards, maybe it is a nothing burger of a point in this case (though I hope not since it's a theory I've been developing since my senior year of college), but at minimum I think it's useful as a way of checking our assumptions about why we seem to believe what we believe and, as importantly, our assumptions about why people on the "other side" seem to believe what they believe. It's also, I think, useful as a tool for understanding how to maximize political goals and as a caution against activists who would tie their fortunes too tightly to a single coalition.
@michael-drew I don't buy that one who truly prioritizes climate change above all else must of necessity insist on reduced energy usage mandates, prefer subsidies for solar and wind power over subsidies for research into new renewable technologies, etc., etc. You, I think, are on board with that.
I also think that there are many individuals within the movement who hold different views on these topics. So far as I can tell, however - and maybe I'm wrong - those views are largely ignored within the movement.
Think of it this way, though: I think it's safe to say that the movement as a whole, just as any movement, has to push for specific solutions for it to have any relevance. But for any given problem there are going to be a pretty wide array of partial, temporary, and complete solutions, at least to the extent you solely focus on that problem. And since this movement at least nominally exists solely to address the issue of climate change, it should not matter to that movement at the outset what solutions it pushes.
How then does it figure out what remedies to push, and how does it gain support for its overarching goals? That's what I'm concerned with figuring out, and that's what my theory seeks to explain. In my theory, the core interest group looks around at potential and actual fellow travelers and finds solutions that are mutually beneficial, or at least initially appear to be so, and/or ways that their problems overlap. I just don't see much in the way of an alternative theory.
...That only gets me part of the way, but I need to get offline, so let me just address your other two points real quick:
1. You're assuming that the constituencies that make up "right" and "left" are also static, but of course they're not - in some countries, ruralia is on the political left, here it is on the right; in some countries the big cosmopolitan cities are fairly conservative, but here they are decidedly on the left. Here in NJ, until the last 15 years, environmentalism was often more associated with the Right than the Left, with Tom Kean and Christie Whitman. Some of the biggest fights over environmental policy in the '80s and '90s were between Henry Waxman and John Dingell - environmentalists and labor unions are definitively NOT natural allies, nor are environmentalists and social conservatives, especially 2nd Amendment types, natural enemies. And of course, Barry Goldwater himself seems to have had a fair number of positions that would have made him likely to be highly concerned with climate change.
2. On mitigation/adaptation (the latter of which is probably the better word) and technological solutions - I see things like this, and the vitriol involved and it's hard for me to believe that the issue is just that the movement would rather spend resources elsewhere instead of being outright hostile on the whole to such attempts: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2008/03/28/202053/adaptation-trap-and-nonskeptical-deniers-roger-pielke-1/
Things like that tell me that there's more going on here than concern about climate change. A lot more.
While this is all true, I don't think it alters the analogy, and calling the bailey "economically productive" is at least plausibly useful shorthand for what it was actually used for. In some ways, I think the full description of the bailey strengthens the analogy - if you look at my comment above, you'll see that I explicitly relied on the full description of the bailey to extend the analogy a bit.
The bailey was obviously not where the agriculture was performed, but the fact that it was where the lord kept his barracks, smith, and stables (not to mention other workshops and storage buildings) is hardly without economic significance - and in comparison with the motte, it was an absolute whirlwind of economic activity. The blacksmith (and other workshops) was where the lord's military weapons were produced, yes, but also where he would have produced the farming tools, pots, knives, hunting arrows, etc. necessary for making economic use of the lord's surrounding lands. The stables were not just for warhorses, either - the lord surely needed draught horses and riding horses as well to farm and engage other lords. Hell, even the barracks was economically vital - who else was going to keep an eye on the peasantry, protect the lands against raiders, etc.?
The bailey was effectively the 11th century equivalent of a modern industrial/commercial park, except that without the activity taking place in it, the lord had little or no ability to generate income from his lands.
Defensively, it was breached easily enough even though it was the first line of defense. That's essentially how Alexander's analogy refers to it in any event - an argument that stands in for the interlocutor's ulterior goals and motives but that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny compared to the core "motte" arguments.
Wonderful piece, Doc! Good to see you 'round here still with all of your interests and children to fend off!
I'm kind of wondering what the point of the Slate article was - there'd be an interesting and informative piece there if it had just stuck to describing abusive patients and the effect they have on doctors and how doctors put up with them. That some doctors have less than kind lingo for such patients is also not surprising, but what is the point of proudly telling the world what that lingo is and making that lingo the point of such a piece - it'd be one thing if it was a piece on a medical listserv, where its purpose would presumably just be to provide a place to vent, but why write such a piece for public consumption? I just don't see the point, especially if the lingo isn't merely an aside but the entire focus of the piece.
What makes the piece particularly appalling, though, is that it's written by a psychiatrist. Had it been written by a regular ER doc, then you could perhaps understand the lack of empathy and the scorn involved even if you couldn't excuse it; at worst, such a doctor would still be stepping into the role of a veterinarian treating a cat.
But a psychiatrist willing to heap such scorn on abusive patients with obvious mental illnesses? To refer to them as "subhuman pieces of shit" is to effectively deny the patients have a mental illness at all, but instead say that are simply not human and are incapable of receiving psychiatric treatment. It is to sit in judgment of the patient, to define that patient by a bout or bouts of abusive behavior, when the entire point of psychiatry is so often to show the patient that their mental illness shouldn't and doesn't define them, to treat them as people who "have" a mental illness rather than as people who "are" mentally ill.
The equivalent would be treating patients suffering from leprosy as lepers. Viewing such people as persons suffering from a disease is to express a willingness to treat them regardless of whether the disease is curable. A doctor who views them as lepers defined by their illness is a doctor who believes they should just be removed from society and left to die in a colony. A psychiatrist who calls his most difficult patients "subhuman pieces of shit" is a psychiatrist who would have no qualms just locking them in a rubber room for the rest of their lives and then walking away from them.
That link is fascinating to me, not least because it fits in really well with my longstanding theories about political coalitions and how they tend to mistake intra-coalition compromises for principles.
In this case, what we have is the "motte" of climate scientists and environmental activists. This is, for them, honest-to-God principle - the earth is warming, we caused it, the consequences of that are going to be severe, and we need to prevent it from happening to forestall or prevent those consequences.
The problem is that "preventing it from happening" entails political activism, and more importantly coalition building. That means building common cause with people for whom the need to fight climate change is less important than other goals, but which can be achieved under the general umbrella of fighting climate change. In this case, building such a coalition meant attracting anti-nuclear activists, anti-capitalists, wildlife conservationists, producers of existing energy-efficient technologies, etc. Most of these groups already existed roughly on the political left, particularly in this country.
As importantly, though, addressing climate change without stepping on the toes of important elements of that coalition is certainly possible, but severely limits the tools at your disposal. These tools become, in effect, the bailey - the stuff that isn't terribly defensible for purposes of the core principles of fighting climate change, but that you need to maintain your political coalition.
And insisting on a particular set of tools to address your problem is a guaranteed way of turning people who were ambivalent or even potential allies into outright enemies.
To carry the motte-and-bailey analogy past its breaking point, the climate scientists wind up being like a lord who has to hire knights, soldiers, and workers to live in the bailey in order to defend the motte and farm the bailey. Those hired hands - especially the knights - will have their own interests, though, and aren't always going to be happy just getting a cut of whatever the lord earns from the castle. They may want some land of their own or for the lord's blacksmith to build them better weaponry to settle an old score with the guys the lord didn't choose, etc., etc. And this is going to be true no matter who the lord welcomes into his bailey.
So while the lord needs to bring people in to protect himself from raiders and to get any level of production out of the bailey above subsistence levels, doing so is also pretty much guaranteed to make him a bunch of enemies who don't so much care about killing him as they care about killing the people he's invited to live and work in his bailey.
When he inevitably gets attacked as a result, he's got to let his knights retreat with him into the motte, which means that those new enemies aren't going to stop at the bailey - they're going to go after the motte as well, even if they really don't have much of a problem with the lord himself.
I guess what I'm saying is that quite a few of the people who are anti-science climate skeptics aren't skeptics because they hate science but instead because that's the only way they can think of to block the solutions being demanded by the other elements of the climate scientists' coalition.
But the sides didn't necessarily need to be aligned in this specific manner - after all, it wasn't very long ago that Republicans were as or more likely to be environmentalists as Democrats, labor unions were one of the biggest obstacles to environmental protection, and the centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union was creating a lot of the world's worst pollution.
For what it's worth, this was a fantastic comment, @zic . And I think I'm going to steal this:
I have a slightly different take here; it’s that we’ve for far too long done cultural change as crisis reaction instead of future planning;
What's interesting is that you seem to think this problem is more engrained in the left than the right. That seems to be a function of the fact that you had to confront it head-on with respect to the left, but I think you're underestimating the extent to which this is a deeply engrained problem on the right. Based on the circles The Wife and I used to travel in, I can say with certainty that "crisis reaction" has been the bread and butter of conservative activism for a very, very long time, and to an extent that I don't think was the case on the left until perhaps the last couple of years.
On “Museums, Art, and the Public Good: Some Thoughts on Deaccessioning”
Just as a supplement to @tod-kelly , and perhaps as a way of clarifying his point (which I completely agree with):
Just because this particular piece has historically been part of their permanent collection and thus on display, doesn't the curator have a right to decide that he doesn't think it appropriate to continue displaying that piece as part of the permanent collection when he has something he thinks is a better fit? I mean....curation itself strikes me as often being no less "art" than the works that get displayed.
In any event, the point is that I think we'd all agree that there's nothing wrong with a curator rotating works in and out of the permanent collection on display. I think we'd also generally agree that there's little wrong with selling a work that is just sitting in a warehouse or for which the museum lacks space.
It seems to me that opposing a sale because the piece is part of the permanent collection is not so much an objection to a violation of some sort of trust as it is an objection to active curating of collections.
"
Good post. I don't agree, but it's a good post.
That said, I strongly question the factual claim that museum-owned art is held in trust for the public. I don't think this is right at all, except perhaps for publicly owned museums. In the case of privately owned and operated museums such as the Barnes Foundation and MoMA (which is as private as humanly possible - they don't accept any public funding whatsoever), the art pretty clearly is owned outright by the museum. To the extent the museum has any obligations to the public with respect to the pieces it owns, those obligations are a function of their charter documents, which can vary wildly.
In the case of the Barnes Foundation (398 Pa. 458, for those with access to Lexis/Westlaw), the reason that it was ultimately forced to open to the public in 1961 had nothing to do with the notion that the art was held in a public trust. Instead, the issue was two-fold: (1) that the Foundation was set up as a "public charity" for tax purposes; and more importantly, (2) that the Foundation's formative documents implicitly ordered (and arguably expressly ordered) that the gallery be open to the public on at least a limited basis.
The tax issue was important, but didn't answer the ultimate question because the Trustees argued that they could operate as a "public charity" as long as they were providing students with an education. The argument on the tax issue did not assert that "public charity" status meant that the art or galleries were owned by the public, just that the Foundation's status required it be able to prove that it was providing a public service. The Foundation said that its "public service" was education through its private school.
That could have and would have been the end of it if the question was whether being a "public charity" automatically meant that the Foundation had to act as if its gallery was public property - quite clearly, I think, the Foundation would have won on that question and thus would have won the case (assuming it could have proven that it was separately acting as an educational institution, which is actually not clear, but which is irrelevant for our purposes).
Instead, the reason it lost the case was that the court found that the documents that formed the Trust expressly set forth goals that could only be accomplished if the art gallery was open to the public, regardless of any separate "education" the Trust provided.
In other words, the reason the gallery was forced to open, albeit on a limited basis, was that the Trustees were failing to abide by Barnes' personal instructions, not because they were breaching some sort of public trust.
The Detroit Institute of Art issue is quite fascinating, but ultimately it actually stands for the proposition that the intent of a museum's private founders controls the acceptable uses of the collection, rather than the proposition that the collection is held in trust for the public. In that case, the argument (available here: http://www.artlawreport.com/files/2014/05/DIA-Response-to-Motion-re-collection.pdf) to prevent the art from being sold was that the DIA was at least in part founded by a group of private citizens, with a particular charter it needed to abide by, and that it was established as a "private corporation," ("DIA Corp.") albeit one with an explicitly public purpose.
The argument went on to indicate that, because of an adverse court ruling in 1915 against cooperation between the City of Detroit and DIA Corp., DIA Corp. transferred a bunch of its assets to be held in trust for it by the City. The rest of the argument kind of flows from there, but in essence the argument was that the art belonged to DIA Corp., with the City holding it in trust for DIA Corp. (which in turn had a charter dedicating it to serving the public) pursuant to various statutes and agreements.
It's not clear whether the court ultimately would have bought into this line of argument, but at the very least the line of argument seems to have been enough to force a successful settlement. Regardless, the argument wasn't that the artwork was public property, but rather that it was private property of DIA Corp. which DIA Corp. had placed in the City's trust subject to DIA Corp.'s (again, a private non-profit) charter.
In the case of MoMA, it seems pretty clear that it is not holding the Monet in trust for the public, at least as a legal matter. It's a purely private entity, albeit still a non-profit. It can charge what it wishes for admissions fees. Functionally, I have a hard time seeing how it is conceptually much different from a for-profit museum for any reason other than taxes. Unless there is a quirk in New York law I don't know about, it has no legal obligation to even use the proceeds from the sale to obtain new pieces for its collection (moral obligations may be a different story), so long as it abides by its charter of course.
On “Linky Friday #97”
@chris I think it's fairly self-evident, to be honest. Blasphemy is, more or less, defined as an "expression that violates a religious taboo."
To ask someone not to blaspheme is to ask them to speak in accordance with a religious taboo. If the speaker is not of that religion and is not engaging in a personal dialogue with someone from that religion, to ask them to speak in accordance with that religion's taboo is to say that the religion's taboo should guide the speech of the speaker regardless of whether they are of that religion.
That is synonymous with saying that the taboo should be universalized.
On “The Monsters Are Always Due on Maple Street”
Combining eminent domain with a desire to bar the exercise of a specific religion in a particular private area makes it more justified? I have a really hard time swallowing that.
I get the emotional response to the proposal. I don't get turning it into a political matter.
On “Freddie”
@zic It's my understanding that any finding by a university that a student has engaged in sexual assault has to be put on their permanent academic record. Certainly the Ioffe piece seems to suggest that.
Additionally, to be very clear - what I'm suggesting is not invoking the legal system, certainly not in any meaningful sense that it's not already in place. What I'm suggesting instead is that there be some sort of standing federal body within the Department of Education whose sole responsibility it is to adjudicate expulsion-level offenses. If this sort of procedure exists only in state schools, I'm fine with that as well - there is no due process right to a private education, certainly. Just as long as private adjudications don't wind up being on a student's permanent academic record.
"
@zic Part of the problem though is that as a practical matter, the mark of "expelled or suspended for sexual assault" acts as a complete bar to attending any other school, yet the level of proof required is merely "preponderance of evidence." While this falls short of criminal punishment, it is incorrect to say that there is no "right" at stake here, particularly when we're talking about public universities. It's equivalent to, say, the now well-recognized rights to continue receiving government benefits or to continue working certain government jobs. Due process is still very much at stake, even if the amount of due process that is necessary is significantly less than what is necessary in a criminal proceeding.*
Regardless, my suggestion is an attempt to address both due process and the need of rape victims to be taken seriously and not put on trial. I'm starting with the assumption that the system isn't working for anyone right now - the lower preponderance of the evidence standard that's now being put in place seems quite clearly to undermine even minimal due process for the accused when it's tapped (e.g., the Ioffe piece), but doesn't seem to do much to encourage proceedings to be instituted (i.e., schools, such as the other UVA stories and the delays in the Jameis Winston case, are still quite obviously being horrible about actually pursuing most cases brought before them). And this is very much what I'm trying to get at - it seems that universities are now either largely sweeping sexual assault cases under the rug or prejudging the accused in the cases that they willingly pursue (often correctly, perhaps, but certainly not anything close to always). There doesn't seem to be much middle ground, wherein the universities take the accusers seriously but diligently pursue the truth in deciding the responsibility of the accused, and I'm trying to understand why.
And I really strongly suspect that it's hard to impossible to be a good ally - ie, one who uncritically listens and supports and asks no questions - while also being a good prosecutor and, in effect, trying to actually represent your interests in an adversary proceeding. To do that, the university has to ask you questions you might not want to have to answer; I assure you that there are few things that make it harder to represent someone in an adversarial proceeding than failing to ask them difficult questions. The only way to do those two things at the same time is to get rid of the adversary proceeding entirely, and just prejudge the case.
It's still incredibly easy, though, to be a terrible ally and a terrible prosecutor and representative of the victim's interests - with or without due process protections.
What I'm trying to figure out is how to put the victim in control of the process as much as possible, in essence, while still ensuring that there's a process. Right now, the schools alone are in charge of the entire process - from support through prosecution and judgment - and I suspect therein lies the problem.
Importantly, my suggestion would not be exclusive to sexual assault cases - I think it's important to use for just about all cases where suspension is at issue, including the case of a student with a history of getting into fights. I apologize if that wasn't clear from my above post.
In terms of your counterexample of someone with a penchant for getting into violent fights, I don't think that I'm treating that any differently. The school still needs to have evidence that the fight occurred. Maybe it just disciplines both parties to the fights, but otherwise, it still needs to find out what exactly happened. Similarly, if a student is disruptive and rude, it still needs to conduct a fair hearing before it can conclude that the disruptive and rude behavior actually occurred. It can't just take the word of a professor and have that be the end of it. To my knowledge, this is how things already work; the only difference from my suggestion is that the adjudicator is not independent. But there's still due process.
*Also note that my suggestion does not prohibit schools from implementing lesser punishments, such as punishments regarding class and dorm assignments, without due process and without regard to any independent tribunal's findings.
"
@zic Rather than feeding someone who should not be fed, I'm really curious as to what you think about my 3:15 comment below.
On “Did The Internet Kill the New Republic?”
@michael-drew Yeah, that's exactly right. @james-hanley Clickbait is definitely not his thing. While I understand why he may give the impression of not considering nuance and reason in his opponents' arguments, I think, as one who got into plenty of arguments with him (probably more than anyone else around here, actually), that he's actually quite excellent at absorbing arguments.
Sometimes he may miss the nuance in an opposing argument, sure, but he's mostly just human in that regard. His vitriol tends to come in two forms, and they're both forms that I fully respect:
1. Where his opponents reject his normative values; and
2. Where his opponents claim to have certain normative values as he, but act in a way he views as inconsistent or counterproductive to those values.
It's group 2 that gets easily the harshest vitriol, and probably why he's perceived as being toughest on neoliberals in general. But there've been plenty of leftists, libertarians, and conservatives who've gotten that treatment as well.
Thing is, that makes him one of the few people who are clear on what their actual principles are, as opposed to what are just positions of convenience masquerading as principles.
Basically, my favorite refrain about how "if you have too many principles, you soon have none" doesn't much seem to apply to him, and if that means he's going to fight with particular vehemence for his principles (which, again, seem to be actual normative principles rather than just policy preferences), then so be it.
On “Southern Justice”
@will-truman @aaron-david I don't know how rates of union membership in public sector unions compare in the south. I will say, that at least as of 2001 (when I had a summer job where my sole responsibility was to put together a comprehensive database on this), the South on average gave public safety unions significantly less bargaining power than other states. Virginia and North Carolina were, IIRC, the only two states in the country that outright prohibited public sector unions from engaging in any form of collective bargaining whatsoever.
"
@chris That's really interesting, on a number of levels. Here's one possibility that randomly occurred to me, but that might explain the distinction - just about every Southern state east of Texas (save Louisiana, which is middle-of-the-pack) has a relatively low percentage of its population in urbanized areas, meaning that its population densities are comparatively evenly distributed. It's not like the Northeastern megalopolis, nor is it even like the western states (plus Texas, depending on whether you consider it part of the West) where the populations tend to be highly concentrated islands surrounded by relatively unpopulated areas.
It may be as simple as less urbanization = fewer random encounters with the police = higher percentage of encounters are where police assistance is explicitly requested. In other words, less urbanization may force the police to respond to trouble rather than look for it.
But that's a lot of conjecture on my part.
Source:
http://www.icip.iastate.edu/tables/population/urban-pct-states
"
@saul-degraw I'm certainly aware of Staten Island's distinctions from the other boroughs, but working class people have to live somewhere, even in New York. Staten Island is perhaps reliably Republican compared to the other boroughs, but it is still part of NYC, as much as Manhattanites might enjoy holding it up for ridicule, and it is still far less conservative than South Carolina, and not even remotely rural.
Unless the contempt of Manhattanites for Staten Island has reached the level where they no longer view it as a different place from Upstate NY, Appalachia, the South, etc.
"
Though I will note that in each case referenced, the article uses the word "charged" rather than "indicted," which suggests that SC prosecutors are not taking the grand jury route. But that doesn't explain why SC prosecutors seem so much more willing to take that route. Then again.....we've got a sample size of three, albeit with a comparatively smaller population and presumably fewer officer-involved shootings as a result.
"
I'm very much wondering that myself. The whole cameras thing seems to help a bit, but in terms of securing charges (as opposed to exposing truth to the public) that help also seems to be of limited value.
"
The reference was intended as a jab at said reading sophisticates. This is why I don't Twitter.
On “Submitted For Your Approval…”
I know you're joking around, but I probably should explain that the reason the latter is considered a subset of the former, rather than vice versa, is that the courts "for raising revenue" has been interpreted as meaning that revenue generation is the primary purpose of the bill. Which I think is a pretty reasonable interpretation - it wouldn't have been hard to write "that raises revenue" instead of "for raising revenue."
"
@michael-drew While he certainly came to the eventual conclusion that the intent could be overcome for purposes of the Constitutionality, the point here is that this was by no means inevitable. In fact, while he's saying that he's willing to rule it a tax in spite of the intent, he's also saying that this is only because there is juuuust enough ambiguity in the expression of that intent to warrant applying a tortured interpretation. I strongly suspect that if the mandate had at all approached the actual cost of health insurance, he'd have found the expressed intent dispositive.
Basically, it looks like he wound up doing a balancing test in which intent was a significant factor, but one just barely outweighed by the combination of the rule of construction that statutes should be interpreted to survive Constitutional muster if at all possible, the fact that the fee was comparatively low, and the fact that it was to be collected by the IRS.*
*Speaking of which, I'd love to know why the word "tax" was considered more important to avoid than the phrase "collected by the IRS."
"
@james-hanley @michael-drew @kenb That suit does indeed exist, and the plaintiffs did indeed seek to rely heavily on the fact that the mandate was upheld solely as a tax. They lost in the DC Circuit unanimously in July: http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/0DAD4A1E3A868F6385257D24004FA91E/$file/13-5202-1504947.pdf
It's a pretty well-reasoned and explained opinion with quite a bit of precedential support that points out that something that is a tax and something that is a "bill for raising revenue" are not the same. Because of that it didn't reach the issue of whether the bill actually originated in the house.
There's a petition for an en banc re-hearing still pending, but since the panel decision was written by Janice Rogers Brown, it's really hard to see it getting much support from even the most conservative of judges.
"
@zic A "tax penalty" would be an unconstitutional use of the taxing power - both Roberts' opinion and longstanding precedent (cited in my post linked by Chris above) held that the taxing power does not authorize penalties that take the form of a tax. The mandate fee was held to be a tax (again for the reasons I had predicted) precisely because it was far from punitive, with the key factor being that it was less than the cost of buying health insurance itself. Had it been found to have been an actual "penalty" it would have been an unconstitutional use of the taxing power.
@michael-drew I know we've had this discussion before, so I won't belabor the point, but I think it's a real stretch to say that the intent was either irrelevant or of minimal import just because the mandate was ultimately upheld. By a number of accounts I recall, Roberts was initially of the view that the intent (particularly as expressed in the language of the ACA) was dispositive. It surely would not have taken much for him to have stuck with that view.
Indeed, had he done so and thus voted to overturn the mandate, the portion of the resulting decision rejecting the tax argument would have widely been deemed an afterthought, and almost certainly the least controversial aspect of the decision - it would hardly have been radical to find that calling and structuring something as a penalty makes it a penalty. Roberts even at one point goes so far as to acknowledge that the natural reading of the statute required it to be viewed "as a command rather than a tax." He explicitly skirted this "natural reading," though, saying that it is "only because we have a duty to construe a statute to save it, if fairly possible, that §5000A can be interpreted as a tax."
But more importantly, it's worth mentioning that the only reason the issue of the mandate got anywhere with the court is because the court first - unanimously - found that it was not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act (which, I must emphasize, contains no definition of what constitutes a tax, just like the Constitution).
So while the mandate was ultimately found to be a tax for Constitutional purposes by 5 of the 9 justices (Roberts and the four members of the liberal wing), it was first found unanimously that the clear intent of the mandate was that it not be a tax for other purposes and that this intent controlled.
This is incredibly important for a number of reasons, and not just because it meant that the mandate was saved only because five justices, including the conservative CJ, were willing to adopt a very questionable view that the word "tax" has a different meaning in the Anti-Injunction Act than it has in the Constitution despite an identical lack of definition of the word in either authority.
But maybe the assumption is that Roberts was being purely a political actor in salvaging the mandate and that, despite the language he used, the intent exhibited by the mandate had no impact on his decision as to the mandate's viability whatsoever.
Even if that's true - and I don't think it is - the fact that all five justices who voted to uphold the mandate on tax grounds first concluded that it was not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act had huge effects. Specifically, if those same five judges who considered it a tax for purposes of the Constitution had also been able to find it to be a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, the question of the mandate's Constitutionality would have warranted no further discussion - the Anti-Injunction Act's applicability would have been an absolute bar to any challenges as to the mandate's Constitutionality.
That in turn would have meant that the Court never could have or would have reached the question of whether the commerce clause authorized the mandate at all. And the Court's discussion of the Commerce Clause (and for that matter the necessary and proper clause) was a gamechanger - the most significant limitation of Congress' power in a very long time.
This is a huge effect stemming directly from the fact that Congress and Obama (with little evidence, IMHO) viewed it as politically expedient to avoid calling it a "tax" and bent over backwards to insist that it was not a "tax." And it's not an effect that can be explained away as having been inevitable - again, it wasn't just Roberts and the conservative wing of the court that found it a "penalty" rather than a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, but also all four members of the liberal wing.
On “An Example of the Motte and Bailey Doctrine”
I missed your 5:28 comment. Yes, it's possible we're converging here - my point isn't that coalitions are chosen, just that they're more historical accident rather than ideologically pre-ordained. In some regards, maybe it is a nothing burger of a point in this case (though I hope not since it's a theory I've been developing since my senior year of college), but at minimum I think it's useful as a way of checking our assumptions about why we seem to believe what we believe and, as importantly, our assumptions about why people on the "other side" seem to believe what they believe. It's also, I think, useful as a tool for understanding how to maximize political goals and as a caution against activists who would tie their fortunes too tightly to a single coalition.
"
@michael-drew I don't buy that one who truly prioritizes climate change above all else must of necessity insist on reduced energy usage mandates, prefer subsidies for solar and wind power over subsidies for research into new renewable technologies, etc., etc. You, I think, are on board with that.
I also think that there are many individuals within the movement who hold different views on these topics. So far as I can tell, however - and maybe I'm wrong - those views are largely ignored within the movement.
Think of it this way, though: I think it's safe to say that the movement as a whole, just as any movement, has to push for specific solutions for it to have any relevance. But for any given problem there are going to be a pretty wide array of partial, temporary, and complete solutions, at least to the extent you solely focus on that problem. And since this movement at least nominally exists solely to address the issue of climate change, it should not matter to that movement at the outset what solutions it pushes.
How then does it figure out what remedies to push, and how does it gain support for its overarching goals? That's what I'm concerned with figuring out, and that's what my theory seeks to explain. In my theory, the core interest group looks around at potential and actual fellow travelers and finds solutions that are mutually beneficial, or at least initially appear to be so, and/or ways that their problems overlap. I just don't see much in the way of an alternative theory.
...That only gets me part of the way, but I need to get offline, so let me just address your other two points real quick:
1. You're assuming that the constituencies that make up "right" and "left" are also static, but of course they're not - in some countries, ruralia is on the political left, here it is on the right; in some countries the big cosmopolitan cities are fairly conservative, but here they are decidedly on the left. Here in NJ, until the last 15 years, environmentalism was often more associated with the Right than the Left, with Tom Kean and Christie Whitman. Some of the biggest fights over environmental policy in the '80s and '90s were between Henry Waxman and John Dingell - environmentalists and labor unions are definitively NOT natural allies, nor are environmentalists and social conservatives, especially 2nd Amendment types, natural enemies. And of course, Barry Goldwater himself seems to have had a fair number of positions that would have made him likely to be highly concerned with climate change.
2. On mitigation/adaptation (the latter of which is probably the better word) and technological solutions - I see things like this, and the vitriol involved and it's hard for me to believe that the issue is just that the movement would rather spend resources elsewhere instead of being outright hostile on the whole to such attempts: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2008/03/28/202053/adaptation-trap-and-nonskeptical-deniers-roger-pielke-1/
Things like that tell me that there's more going on here than concern about climate change. A lot more.
"
While this is all true, I don't think it alters the analogy, and calling the bailey "economically productive" is at least plausibly useful shorthand for what it was actually used for. In some ways, I think the full description of the bailey strengthens the analogy - if you look at my comment above, you'll see that I explicitly relied on the full description of the bailey to extend the analogy a bit.
The bailey was obviously not where the agriculture was performed, but the fact that it was where the lord kept his barracks, smith, and stables (not to mention other workshops and storage buildings) is hardly without economic significance - and in comparison with the motte, it was an absolute whirlwind of economic activity. The blacksmith (and other workshops) was where the lord's military weapons were produced, yes, but also where he would have produced the farming tools, pots, knives, hunting arrows, etc. necessary for making economic use of the lord's surrounding lands. The stables were not just for warhorses, either - the lord surely needed draught horses and riding horses as well to farm and engage other lords. Hell, even the barracks was economically vital - who else was going to keep an eye on the peasantry, protect the lands against raiders, etc.?
The bailey was effectively the 11th century equivalent of a modern industrial/commercial park, except that without the activity taking place in it, the lord had little or no ability to generate income from his lands.
Defensively, it was breached easily enough even though it was the first line of defense. That's essentially how Alexander's analogy refers to it in any event - an argument that stands in for the interlocutor's ulterior goals and motives but that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny compared to the core "motte" arguments.
On “Good doctors don’t trash-talk their patients”
Wonderful piece, Doc! Good to see you 'round here still with all of your interests and children to fend off!
I'm kind of wondering what the point of the Slate article was - there'd be an interesting and informative piece there if it had just stuck to describing abusive patients and the effect they have on doctors and how doctors put up with them. That some doctors have less than kind lingo for such patients is also not surprising, but what is the point of proudly telling the world what that lingo is and making that lingo the point of such a piece - it'd be one thing if it was a piece on a medical listserv, where its purpose would presumably just be to provide a place to vent, but why write such a piece for public consumption? I just don't see the point, especially if the lingo isn't merely an aside but the entire focus of the piece.
What makes the piece particularly appalling, though, is that it's written by a psychiatrist. Had it been written by a regular ER doc, then you could perhaps understand the lack of empathy and the scorn involved even if you couldn't excuse it; at worst, such a doctor would still be stepping into the role of a veterinarian treating a cat.
But a psychiatrist willing to heap such scorn on abusive patients with obvious mental illnesses? To refer to them as "subhuman pieces of shit" is to effectively deny the patients have a mental illness at all, but instead say that are simply not human and are incapable of receiving psychiatric treatment. It is to sit in judgment of the patient, to define that patient by a bout or bouts of abusive behavior, when the entire point of psychiatry is so often to show the patient that their mental illness shouldn't and doesn't define them, to treat them as people who "have" a mental illness rather than as people who "are" mentally ill.
The equivalent would be treating patients suffering from leprosy as lepers. Viewing such people as persons suffering from a disease is to express a willingness to treat them regardless of whether the disease is curable. A doctor who views them as lepers defined by their illness is a doctor who believes they should just be removed from society and left to die in a colony. A psychiatrist who calls his most difficult patients "subhuman pieces of shit" is a psychiatrist who would have no qualms just locking them in a rubber room for the rest of their lives and then walking away from them.
On “An Example of the Motte and Bailey Doctrine”
Point. Counterpoint: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/11/solution-aversion-can-explain-climate-skeptics.html
That link is fascinating to me, not least because it fits in really well with my longstanding theories about political coalitions and how they tend to mistake intra-coalition compromises for principles.
In this case, what we have is the "motte" of climate scientists and environmental activists. This is, for them, honest-to-God principle - the earth is warming, we caused it, the consequences of that are going to be severe, and we need to prevent it from happening to forestall or prevent those consequences.
The problem is that "preventing it from happening" entails political activism, and more importantly coalition building. That means building common cause with people for whom the need to fight climate change is less important than other goals, but which can be achieved under the general umbrella of fighting climate change. In this case, building such a coalition meant attracting anti-nuclear activists, anti-capitalists, wildlife conservationists, producers of existing energy-efficient technologies, etc. Most of these groups already existed roughly on the political left, particularly in this country.
As importantly, though, addressing climate change without stepping on the toes of important elements of that coalition is certainly possible, but severely limits the tools at your disposal. These tools become, in effect, the bailey - the stuff that isn't terribly defensible for purposes of the core principles of fighting climate change, but that you need to maintain your political coalition.
And insisting on a particular set of tools to address your problem is a guaranteed way of turning people who were ambivalent or even potential allies into outright enemies.
To carry the motte-and-bailey analogy past its breaking point, the climate scientists wind up being like a lord who has to hire knights, soldiers, and workers to live in the bailey in order to defend the motte and farm the bailey. Those hired hands - especially the knights - will have their own interests, though, and aren't always going to be happy just getting a cut of whatever the lord earns from the castle. They may want some land of their own or for the lord's blacksmith to build them better weaponry to settle an old score with the guys the lord didn't choose, etc., etc. And this is going to be true no matter who the lord welcomes into his bailey.
So while the lord needs to bring people in to protect himself from raiders and to get any level of production out of the bailey above subsistence levels, doing so is also pretty much guaranteed to make him a bunch of enemies who don't so much care about killing him as they care about killing the people he's invited to live and work in his bailey.
When he inevitably gets attacked as a result, he's got to let his knights retreat with him into the motte, which means that those new enemies aren't going to stop at the bailey - they're going to go after the motte as well, even if they really don't have much of a problem with the lord himself.
I guess what I'm saying is that quite a few of the people who are anti-science climate skeptics aren't skeptics because they hate science but instead because that's the only way they can think of to block the solutions being demanded by the other elements of the climate scientists' coalition.
But the sides didn't necessarily need to be aligned in this specific manner - after all, it wasn't very long ago that Republicans were as or more likely to be environmentalists as Democrats, labor unions were one of the biggest obstacles to environmental protection, and the centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union was creating a lot of the world's worst pollution.
"
For what it's worth, this was a fantastic comment, @zic . And I think I'm going to steal this:
What's interesting is that you seem to think this problem is more engrained in the left than the right. That seems to be a function of the fact that you had to confront it head-on with respect to the left, but I think you're underestimating the extent to which this is a deeply engrained problem on the right. Based on the circles The Wife and I used to travel in, I can say with certainty that "crisis reaction" has been the bread and butter of conservative activism for a very, very long time, and to an extent that I don't think was the case on the left until perhaps the last couple of years.
On “Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid: “The sky is (not) falling!” Edition”
@michael-drew No, I do not.