It’s trivial to use this incident to support the exact opposite of Greenwald’s conclusion. If bankers are complaining that they haven’t gotten anything in exchange for their political contribution to Democrats, then presumably cash donations do not have much influence on politics. (As for Greenwald’s implication that taxpayers are funding bankers’ ill-gotten bonuses, I refer you to Karl Smith.) To see this as evidence that Obama and Congress have been “bought” by Wall Street strikes me as a very twisted perspective.

But really, my intuition is worth approximately nothing here. As is Greenwald’s. Viewed in isolation, this one data point can be fit into radically opposed narratives. It’s easy to see what you want to see if you look at the world anecdote by anecdote. To determine how much money influences politics it really is necessary to approach the question in a much more careful, methodical manner.

I’m against forced redistribution, even to help the deserving poor.  Still, unless you buy the whole libertarian package, I understand taxing the rich to help the poor.  What I can’t understand is taxing everyone to help everyone.  Means-tested programs like TANF and Medicaid aren’t crazy; they take from Peter to pay Paul.  Universal programs Social Security and Medicare are crazy; they take from Peter to pay Peter. 

Even if you’re not into economics, universal programs should strike you as pointless.  But they’re actually worse: When you tax Peter to pay Peter, you distort Peter’s incentives along the way.  Of course, even means-tested programs require taxation.  But they require much lower taxation than universal programs.

…

Just think about how small government would be if only the bottom decile got full Social Security and Medicare benefits, and these benefits were phrased out over the second decile.  Right now, these programs are about 35% of the budget and growing fast.  With this means-testing formula, they would shrink down to roughly 5% (or even less, since the richer live longer).

Admittedly, if we got to this point, I still wouldn’t be satisfied.  The day we started means-testing all redistribution, I’d furrow my brow and ask, “So charity should be compulsory, but immigration restrictions are OK?”  But I’ll take what I can get.

There is a pragmatic argument to be made for continuing redistribution. As Tyler Cowen put it, “the nation-state will remain the fundamental locus for redistribution. That means helping the poor at home more than abroad; a decision to do otherwise would destroy political equilibrium and make everyone worse off.”. But anyone who supports redistribution at all should advocate open immigration to the greatest extent which is politically feasible.

It should go without saying that all of the sponsors of the pending bill to ban American companies from collaborating with domestic Internet spying in foreign countries — the inspirationally-named Global Online Freedom Act of 2009 — voted in favor of the 2008 bill to legalize what had been the illegal warrantless interception of emails and to immunize telecoms which helped our own government break the law in how it spied on Americans.

I suspect that most of the US Congress really truly fails to see the hypocrisy in this.

A very cute way to make students pay attention: “it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie”.

John Timmer wants to know Why is the news media comfortable with lying about science?

Violinist Joshua Bell plays the DC Metro. Or, rather, he did in 2007. An old article, but I don’t think I’ve linked to it before.

it’s no accident that Hillary Clinton was once an avid Randian (recall her political career started with Barry Goldwater) because Rand is an important feminist. Rand’s portrayal of strong, independent, intelligent women is coming to be recognized as a landmark in fiction but in addition Rand’s attacks on self-sacrifice have special meaning in a culture that has long used the “caring ethic” to bind women to the service of others.

And also Shikha Dalmia:

Rand’s entire project involved liberating the individual from the yoke of collectivism and creating the social, moral, and political conditions in which he could live a fully actualized life. Each individual’s own happiness is his highest purpose, she said, and boldly declared selfishness to be a virtue—contrary to what various religious and non-religious (communist, fascist, communitarian) preachers of the ethics of self-sacrifice had been saying for ages.
For people like myself, laboring under the twin tyrannies of tradition and socialism when I first read Rand in my native India, this is heady, empowering stuff. It supplies you with the moral and intellectual ammunition to stand up to those claiming to own a piece of you—family, community, and state—and take control of your own destiny.

The point that both Dalmia and Tabarrok make is correct as far as it goes, but I think that viewing the “caring ethic” purely as a manifestation of altruism misses something important.

The article on Sudan states that “Women not only tolerate these situations, but regard them as parallel to norms and values of a good wife.”. But why have successive generations of women accepted such values? One possible answer is to say, essentially, that these women have been brainwashed by the patriarchy. While there is undoubtedly some truth to this, it fails to explain why the women in south Sudan have even more regressive views on gender roles than men do.

The article ends by quoting a woman who says “It’s my culture and my duty as a wife to submit to him. We have lived this way for many years, and I haven’t complained even once.”. I want to suggest that this should be read as a boast. The pursuit of virtue is motivated almost entirely by the desire to be well regarded by others — it is a rare person who will follow the dictates of abstract ethics when doing so causes them to be widely condemned by their peers. This particular set of values may look backwards to outsiders, but marrying a high-status man and being a “virtuous wife” is a highly effective way for Sudanese women to attain social status among other Sudanese men and women. Self-interest drives women to adopt the caring ethic.

Sadly, being a “virtuous wife” is also the only status competition available to most most Sudanese women. A major difficulty in opening new social paths for women is that doing so threatens the women who are successful in the established status competition. That is why people like Sabina Dario Lokolong are not embraced by women but instead receive vitriol from both genders.

Needless to say, these dynamics occur outside Sudan as well.

Karx Marx loves capitalism.

Finally, Will Wilson says he is unconvinced by Julian’s reductionism; it’s part of Wilson’s piece that I want to address.

In fact, pace Julian, there exists such a binary property which I would consider to be the only property that matters — in fact I suspect that it’s the one that most of our pragmatic and moral determinations end up piggy-backing off of — namely the property of it being me. Yes, I’m being cute; but I’m also making a serious point.

The problem with postulating being me as a fundamental metaphysical property is that we lack adequate epistemic access to that property. An example will illustrate the problem.

Suppose Alice walks into a hospital and asks the doctor to make a carbon copy of herself (she always wanted a twin). She fills out the paperwork, and then the doc sedates her. Later, as she groggily wakes up, she observes another person who looks exactly like her lying in the next bed over who is also groggily coming out of sedation. At this point the doctor walks into the room, looking very embarrassed, and informs them that due to a clerical mishap, no one is certain which is the original and which is the newly created duplicate.

By hypothesis, there’s no physical way to distinguish the two. Introspectively, each of them thinks “Yes, of course, I am Alice. I remember signing all those forms!”. However, if you maintain that being Alice is an irreducible metaphysical property then one person has it and the other does not. It’s just that neither one has any epistemic access to the being Alice property — intuition and introspection don’t help.

I’m pretty unimpressed by philosophers who posit epistemically inaccessible metaphysical properties, for exactly the same reasons I’m unimpressed by scientists who propose empirically vacuous theories.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented a paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group’s massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain capacity than a cat.

…building a highly accurate simulation of a complex, nondeterministic system doesn’t mean that you’ll immediately understand how that system works—it just means that instead of having one thing you don’t understand (at whatever level of abstraction), you now have two things you don’t understand: the real system, and a simulation of the system that has all of the complexities of the original plus an additional layer of complexity associated with the models implementation in hardware and software.

…

The problem described above doesn’t mean that accurate simulations are worthless, however. You can poke, prod, and dissect a brain simulation without any of the ethical or logistical challenges that arise from doing similar work on a real brain.

I wonder if the Animal Liberation Front people are functionalists.

Matthew Yglesias writes about the current research on birth control and fertility rates (featured in The Economist recently) and how it applies to Afghanistan.

We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. Conservatives hit the panic button on the right-wing noise machine anyway, keeping the delicate ecosystem in balance by creating the false impression that something has changed. We’ve watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of “state secrets.” We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.

This is a very odd scenario. One possible explanation is that Congress, the President, and the media are all puppets of an elusive but far-reaching shadow government. Another possibility is that this is just the sort of thing that happens when you combine representative democracy with freedom of the press. Personally, I’d like to think it’s the shadow-government thingy.

Secondly, Dan of XARK writes in defense of rule breaking generally, and in defense of cyclists breaking traffic laws in particular. I’d sign on to that manifesto even if I had no idea what a bicycle was. Meanwhile, Slate features a more balanced overview of the bicycles-in-traffic issue.

a tribal refusal to criticize one’s own, a gut belief that someone as good and just as Barack Obama couldn’t possibly really be continuing Bush/Cheney policies and complicitly helping to suppress their war crimes

…and he documents just how very, very different the reality is.

My unwillingness to tolerate your intolerance doesn’t make me intolerant.

Ugh. There is a way to interpret that sentence that makes it something other than an analytic falsehood, but it’s still very confusing. The dictionary actually addresses the different meanings of the word quite nicely. One meaning is “the act or capacity of enduring”. Another meaning is “freedom from bigotry”. The dictionary suggests toleration as a synonym for the former meaning while preferring to reserve tolerance for the latter meaning:

Tolerance, toleration agree in allowing the right of something that one does not approve. Tolerance suggests a liberal spirit toward the views and actions of others: tolerance toward religious minorities. Toleration implies the allowance or sufferance of conduct with which one is not in accord: toleration of graft.

Unfortunately, this confusion around tolerance is very common in discussion of bigotry. And even if you the writer understand the difference, many of your readers will inevitably conflate the two concepts. Unless you plan to make a digression to explain all of this, using the word tolerance is not compatible with communicating in a clear and effective manner. Luckily, we have alternatives readily available. Instead of accusing your opponents of intolerance, simply call them illiberal bigots.