Accidental Blogger

Are votes actually for sale? (prasad)

Here's a question for the 6th of November, now that we've all been through two years of electioneering, but before the actual results influence (corrupt?) intuitions: did Citizen's United actually change anything big? There are many ways of getting at that question, and the answer probably depends on what you value, but my instinctive response is to say no, it didn't matter much, at least in terms of partisan outcomes:

1. If the metric is election outcomes, then I claim the impact has been negligible. Both Romney and Obama raised and spent more money, but it was basically a standoff. They both have demonstrated the ability to raise the ~billion dollars of money needed to wage a campaign.

2. I suspect campaign spending is hitting diminishing returns already in terms of ability to influence outcomes. The recent swings I remember from this election (Clinton's speech, Romney's 47% video, the first debate, Sandy and Christie) all had nothing to do with money. Basically, we've moved to a new equilibrium with ~twice as much spending, but the issues influencing elections *differentially* in favor of one candidate continue to be one or more of:

- pretty low-information: random goof-ups, media controversies and similar tripe

- largely stochastic: economy crash, bin Laden death, Libya, hurricane

- cultural and strongly emotion/values driven, pretty resistant to *monetary* influence: rape/contraception, religion, gays.

3. If you worry about the wastage of a billion odd dollars of money, then sure, this is an issue. I would argue that it doesn't underwrite the amount of panicked/outraged commentary that decision generated. To set a scale, we're *comfortably* in sub-chewing gum territory.

I'm being rather too blunt here; if I spent ten more minutes on this post I'd be able to write down a para on ways that the spending rise (and more importantly, the composition of this rise) has mattered. But it's useful to make zeroth order statements at the outset, and it sure seems like Citizen's United and campaign finance have mattered rather less than people were forecasting back in 2010.

Support the savage (prasad)

There's an ad you can see in New York subway stations, that says "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad." The NY subway authority initially refused to allow the ad, placed by Pamela Geller, saying it was demeaning, but a court ruled that the FIrst Amendment didn't allow them to apply that consideration. The (Muslim, liberal, feminist) columnist Mona Eltahawy didn't like the ad much, and got arrested while spray painting it. I haven't much to say about the speech issues here, or about whether Eltahawy should have been arrested. What I want to get at rather is the nature of her opposition to this ad. As far as I can tell, her objection is that it deems Arabs uncivilized, and uses a word like "savage." 

But here's the selfsame Eltahawy, from just three months ago:

So: Yes, women all over the world have problems; yes, the United States has yet to elect a female president; and yes, women continue to be objectified in many "Western" countries (I live in one of them). That's where the conversation usually ends when you try to discuss why Arab societies hate women.

But let's put aside what the United States does or doesn't do to women. Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt -- including my mother and all but one of her six sisters -- have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions" no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are "good intentions"? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is "not severe" or "directed at the face." What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it's not better than you think. It's much, much worse. Even after these "revolutions," all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian's blessing -- or divorce either.[emphasis added]

 

Civilization metrics aren't unique; there are going to be radical incommensurabilities between my rankings and those produced by someone with a conception of the Good that's at root sharply divergent from mine. I cannot persuade the Salafi Imam that a life of sexual license and debauchery is better than one spent covered in drapes. Plus even people who broadly agree will disagree about the proper situational weighting of different goods. Still, any metric I could endorse for ranking the Israelis and the Arabs today by 'civilization' would almost certainly have to rank one of these rather higher than the other. In fact, Eltahawy endorses explicit rankings herself:

Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women. Neighbors Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance, might be eons apart when it comes to GDP, but only four places separate them on the index, with the kingdom at 131 and Yemen coming in at 135 out of 135 countries. Morocco, often touted for its "progressive" family law (a 2005 report by Western "experts" called it "an example for Muslim countries aiming to integrate into modern society"), ranks 129; according to Morocco's Ministry of Justice, 41,098 girls under age 18 were married there in 2010.

Any metric that'd appeal to an NY subway-goer viewing that ad would have to take some things very seriously indeed: things like religious freedom, the equality of men and women, impersonal but revisable standards for the treatment of people under law, the production and consumption of literature, science, music, art, cinema and mathematics; political freedom and the ability of man to exert some control over his political dispensation, robust and transparent institutions, and the treatment of minorities or outsiders. That last of course covers quite directly the treatment of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis. But it's going to be very hard for Eltahawy to pretend the Israelis aren't more civilized than the people they oppress. She has issued her rankings already; she doesn't get to walk them back out of a simple dislike of Geller's rhetorical purpose in deploying them. Them's the civilizational rankings, and - to quote her - "the hell with political correctness." [Please take such obvious qualifiers as today/currently/contingently/non-essentially for given.]

 

But this situation is extremely common! The history of cultural encounters between the civilized and the "savage" where the former are more powerful, IS very substantially the story of civilized people killing, enslaving, robbing and oppressing their less civilized fellows. Any American who's studied his history should know this viscerally. The important thing is to realize that there are two different valuable commodities here: ethics and culture. As important aspect of the first, we have how decently/fairly/kindly a people treat - and believe they ought to treat - those around them. This is not the only part of ethics - we must consider how they treat each other as Eltahawy v1.0 sees, and the values they espouse for all - but it's an important part. As proxy for the second, we may consider roughly their pedagogical/inspirational value: the books they write, their ideas and music and philosophy and whether they stared at the stars and proved theorems or traveled far and wide to discover wondrous new things and people. These are both important things, and they're not the same thing.

A word like 'civilization' conflates them both, and several things besides. Civilized people believe their intellectual and cultural accomplishments are worthier than those of others (less civilized people often agree with that assessment). They also believe (like all others) that their ethical values are superior. What civilization does is to introduce an extra element of hypocrisy to the mix: V.S. Naipaul gets at something important, about civilization and the lie, in A Bend in the River:

Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were more moral. We didn't lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn't think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did. But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everyone else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.

Civilized people realpolitik fully as coldly as anyone else. The Israeli strategy of placing many of their people in settler pockets is a transparently wicked land-grab. But civilized people don't like thinking such things about about themselves, and try to reorganize the intellectual landscape to suit them. So even though vastly more Palestinians are killed by Israelis each year than vice versa, the violent side is the Palestinians with their Hamas and terrorism. And this frame works because the Israelis are civilized and the Palestinians are not.

Surveying the history of European and American involvement in the Middle East, it would take a pretty brazen sort of person to insist that Middle Easterners aren't vastly more sinned against than sinning. Iran/Saudi Arabia/Yemen/Syria/Libya/Afghanistan haven't been overthrowing democratically elected US governments and bankrolling dictators, or carving out parcels of other peoples' land to compensate their own victims, or deeming the US too irresponsible to keep nukes while having and using their own, or maintaining hundred-to-one kill ratios. But those are the places that are dangerous festering grounds of instability. Because occasionally there is blow back, itself re-framed as hatred of "freedoms", which yes, Al Qaeda despises, but no, not enough to crash planes into buildings for. If Rage Boy were more civilized, he wouldn't be agitating over Muhammad cartoons. One of the more heartless ironies of being uncivilized is you don't even aim your rhetoric right.

Support the savage. Do so proudly; his treatment is shameful. But don't think he'd generate a society you'd like to live in. That's decades away, or more.

Why I Am More Conflicted Than Anna - About The Cartoons

(Note: I am bringing this six year old post to the front in view of the recent events that are unfolding in Egypt, Libya and now Yemen.)

Anna posted her sensible thoughts on the brouhaha over the Danish cartoons which have inflamed passions in the Muslim world.  The result has been protests in several Islamic countries, some of them violent. Danish embassies have been attacked, burnt and Danes and Norwegians (and the EU) have been threatened with kidnappings and other bodily harm. I categorically condemn all violent protests. Muslims are justified in expressing disgust and outrage at these silly cartoons but they are not justified in burning buildings and threatening violence.  Having said that, there is an issue here that has not been adequately addressed in this context.  PZ Myers of the immensely popular science blog "Pharyngula", an unswerving proponent of free speech and unapologetic opponent of religious fundamentalism of all stripes, had two very good posts on this matter. He asked a subtler question than most have asked.  He wondered whether the outrage on both sides (Muslim and non-Muslim, especially in Europe) had only to do with free speech and Muslim overreaction. Or did it to a fair extent, also result from racism and socio economic deprivation of Muslims in Europe and the generally impoverished condition of Muslims in Islamic nations . The comments on both posts ran fast and furious and I would guess that opinions were equally divided on this issue. There was some commentary that I interpreted as  self serving explanations of European sensiblities, openness and secular democratic values clashing with the backward mentality of European Muslims. I posted a comment there regarding this matter - my own take on why European racism is indeed a player in this latest conflagration. My comment addressed primarily the opinions of a Danish reader who in my view, was somewhat disingenuous in his insistence that the Danish society is bending over backwards to accomodate the Muslims among them while also protecting freedom of speech and secular values and that racism had nothing to do with the latest uproar. I am publishing my comments for the readers here. I was a bit angrier in my tone than is my usual style in public.

Ruchira Paul said:

"Freedom of expression is paramount in democratic societies, including the right to criticize, vilify and mock religion - all religions. No contest there. Having said that, so is the wisdom to not waste this freedom in making trivial and predictable points. What did the Danish cartoons accomplish in establishing? That medieval religious fundamentalism permeates Muslim societies much more deeply than any other religious group? That Muslims consider themselves under siege almost to the level of paranoia and are likely to resort to violence for real or perceived threat/insults to their faith? That most Islamic nations curtail freedom of speech in their own countries and want to do the same in others, in the name of religion? Ho hum. Which one of these came as a surprise to anyone? To all the freedom of speech purists here, PZ Myers and Nullifidian have it right this time. Their nuanced take on the issue is not a zero sum game - it is neither anti-free speech nor pro religion. To prove an intellectual point, when the adversary is operating on a purely emotional level, is not only unwise, it is a waste of energy. Islamic fundamentalism (like all others) has to be resisted, attenuated and eventually eliminated. But it will not happen by engaging in juvenile displays of provocation through theological football as Jyllands-Posten was attempting to do. The resistance will have to take place in the realm of universal human rights, rationality and common decency. "My democracy can beat up your prophet" is hardly a strategy that is likely to work. Mr. Lund, don't waste your breath.

While we are discussing fundamentalism, let us not ignore the context of racism which PZ Myers alludes to. It is perhaps worthwhile for most Americans to recognize the prevalent zeitgeist in Europe. Mr. Lund's erudite sophistry notwithstanding, Europeans as a whole, are much more racist and xenophobic than the average American. I say this as a brown skinned person (not Muslim, not uneducated) who has lived in both continents. European secularism and pacifism are results of exhaustion from four hundred years of oppressive colonialism (the Bible in one hand and a riding crop or gun in the other) and two great wars which nearly annihilated the continent. All the calls for assimilation - "you are here - you must be like us" is BS. The non-Europeans are marginalized, ghettoized and the implicit message to them is "stay in your place." In spite of all overt racism in the US, an immigrant can hope to realize professional and social ambitions in the US - not in Europe. Mr. Lund would argue that the Scandinavian countries were not involved in either colonization or warfare. True. But the mindset of these homogeneous countries is not very different when faced with people who are "different". In fact, George Bush's disastrous action in Iraq and the middle east, is at some level, more honest than what the Europeans are up to vis-a-vis their immigrants. Kill a hundred thousand Iraqis to impose your values? Why not? How is that worse than treating minorities within your borders like s--t with the vestigial hauteur of ex-colonists? A much more honest course of action will be to deport all those whom you are not going to assimilate anyway -ever, and go back to the idyllic existence of Hans Christian Andersen, milk, cheese, football and Lego. Why the pretense? Only to feel holier than thou - especially, holier than those unsophisticated cowboy Americans? Mr. Lund's casual crack about dating one of the last ten Parsis notwithstanding, his "secular" countrymen are much less likely to date a Parsi, a Hindu, a Buddhist and god forbid a Muslim than the average "religious" American. 'Nuff said."

 

Mr. Lund characterized my comment as a "rant" but did not address the issue of European racism.

Update: Here is more proof that Mr. Lund (and some other defenders of secular European even handedness) are deluding themselves. See this article in  Guardian UK  - via Leiter Reports. Delicious irony of the "unholy" kind.

Excerpt:

In April 2003, Danish illustrator Christoffer Zieler submitted a series of unsolicited cartoons dealing with the resurrection of Christ to Jyllands-Posten.

Zieler received an email back from the paper's Sunday editor, Jens Kaiser, which said: "I don't think Jyllands-Posten's readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them."

But the Jyllands-Posten editor in question, Mr Kaiser, said that the case was "ridiculous to bring forward now. It has nothing to do with the Muhammad cartoons.

"In the Muhammad drawings case, we asked the illustrators to do it. I did not ask for these cartoons. That's the difference," he said.

"The illustrator thought his cartoons were funny. I did not think so. It would offend some readers, not much but some."

Lilly M. Ledbetter's DNC Speech - Elections 2012 (John Ballard)

By John Ballard

For those who don't know me, I'm a newbie here at Ruchira's generous invitation. More about that later when I have time, but at the moment I want to post a timely video from last night's DNC Convention. I don't have the durability I once had to watch days of speechifying, but I'm good for two or three hours when they're like those last night. I was specifically iterested in two other than that of Michelle Obama: Julian Castro, mayor of San Antonio, one of the party's rising young stars, and Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts, who has had his differences with the party in the past.

Everyone speaking last night was obviously trying to hurry along and the effect struck me as somewhat off-putting becuase live crowds simply don't hurry when they are really fired up. In this day of sound-bites and broadcast journalism, three-, five-, sometimes ten-minute ovations and demonstrations on the convention floor that were once part of the fabric of the national conventions, are as obsolete as rotary phones. But thanks to state-of-the-art jumbo video and sound systems everything that happens on stage has become bigger than life.

So as a Southerner I was especially impressed with Lilly Ledbetter herself. Great movies have been made with actors playing the parts of real people such as Julia Child or Erin Brokovitch. But last night the real Lillie Ledbetter took the stage and delivered one of the best speeches of the evening. 

Labor Day Links

Once again, I can do no better than post links to a few interesting stories I came across.

A terrible political "documentary" by a delusional desi.

Can a doctor do this? Apparently yes, according to the AMA's guidelines.  

Not exactly a Marathon Man.

This was bound to happen sooner or later - it is after all, an independent art form! (the winner below)