Category: Public Policy and Politics

Who’s a fraud?

Stephen Marche mounts a spirited attack on a bit of Hollywood folderol, and digs out a more uncomfortable truth:

… antielitism is haunting every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” … Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.

Camus quoted

There are a couple versions of this eminently quotable passage from Albert Camus knocking around online, but I have found none of them that clearly cite the original essay and translator. So let’s rectify that situation, shall we?

This paragraph is from an essay that appeared in the symposium Réflexions sur la peine capitale, by Camus and Arthur Koestler, and published by Calmann-Lévy in 1957. Translated by Justin O’Brien, it appeared as “Reflections on the Guillotine,” and was collected into Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, published by Alfred A. Knopf, in 1961. The collection in English is posthumous, as Camus died on 4 January 1960. Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.

It’s the last three sentences of the paragraph that are most quoted (and most powerful), beginning with “what then is capital punishment…”

Let us leave aside the fact that the law of retaliation is inapplicable and that it would seem just as excessive to punish the incendiary by setting fire to his house as it would be insufficient to punish the thief by deducting from his bank account a sum equal to his theft. Let us admit that it is just and necessary to compensate for the murder of the victim by the death of the murderer. But beheading is not simply death. It is just as different, in essence, from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It is a murder, to be sure, and one that arithmetically pays for the murder committed. But it adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization, in short, which is in itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Hence there is no equivalence. Many laws consider a premeditated crime more serious than a crime of pure violence. But that then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. (p. 199)

(Thanks to The Atlantic for bringing this quotation to my attention.)

Hesitation, doubt, and ambiguity

Bill Keller proposes that the current occupants of the Capitol would benefit from a little poetry:

Poetry is no substitute for courage or competence, but properly applied, it is a challenge to self-certainty, which we currently have in excess. Poetry serves as a spur to creative thinking, a rebuke to dogma and habit, an antidote to the current fashion for pledge signing.

He quotes from William Carlos Williams (somehow I had remembered these lines as coming from Whitman): “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”

His colleague David Orr suggests some works that might serve as antidotes to the paralysis. I think Kay Ryan’s “All You Did” is especially pertinent.

Too bad Reagan didn’t listen in ’81

David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s first budget director, speaks out amidst the clangor of the fiscal and monetary policy debate in Washington. Ever a deficit hawk, these days he starts to sound reasonable:

In attacking the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 percent of taxpayers, the president is only incidentally addressing the deficit. The larger purpose is to assure the vast bulk of Americans left behind that they will be spared higher taxes — even though entitlements make a tax increase unavoidable. Mr. Obama is thus playing the class-war card more aggressively than any Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt….

On the other side, Representative [Paul D.] Ryan fails to recognize that we are not in an era of old-time enterprise capitalism in which the gospel of low tax rates and incentives to create wealth might have had relevance. A quasi-bankrupt nation saddled with rampant casino capitalism on Wall Street and a disemboweled, offshored economy on Main Street requires practical and equitable ways to pay its bills.

His op ed piece relies a bit too much on the the thesaurus (the spirit of William Safire is about). But the message that we will all have to give up something to get along is spot on.

It is obvious that the nation’s desperate fiscal condition requires higher taxes on the middle class, not just the richest 2 percent.

Bits are cheap

And clicking a Like button is too easy.

These are the organizations to which I gave coin, property, and/or effort in 2010. (Some of these were Christmas gifts to family members.)

Healthy Fairfax

Residents of Fairfax County (as well as the municipalities of Fairfax, Falls Church, Clifton, Herndon, and Vienna) are encouraged to complete a one-page anonymous survey prepared by the Partnership for a Healthier Fairfax. What should we do to improve the community’s health? The survey closes November 15, so please help out my friend Marie and fill out a questionnaire today.

Lest we forget

Stephen M. Walt reminds us just how much of a trainwreck on toast was George Bush’s presidency. Making waterboard a household word, Walt’s point #6, was perhaps the most reprehensible.

The United States would have been far better off had George W. Bush never decided to enter politics and instead had spent the last two decades running a baseball team. The former president wasn’t particularly good at that job either, but failure there would have had far fewer consequences for America and for the world.

If we still had such legal recourse, we could have sworn out a writ of de idiota inquirendo, but (alas) the only result of that 17th-century proceeding would be that W’s property would go right back to the King.

(Link via The Morning News.)

Pay up

Since it’s filing deadline day (even though most of us paid most of our federal income taxes months ago), Steve Almond answers the tax whiners with an essay bluntly but effectively titled, “Suck it, Tea Party: I love Tax Day.” To amplify his remarks, I would add a brief list of things for which I’m thankful, paid for by my neighbors and me:

  • Small Tax District #5 (real property taxes) pays for the fabulous Reston Community Center: natatorium and other phys ed facilities, public meeting rooms, and the spiffy CenterStage theater.
  • Income, sales, and personal property taxes paid to the Commonwealth eventually end up paying the salaries of the teachers across the way at Terraset Elementary, Langston Hughes Middle, and South Lakes High Schools.
  • Payroll taxes through the Social Security system are providing nearly all of my mother’s financial support. I’m certainly not planning on Sarah Palin’s kids to do the same for me when I retire.
  • Federal income taxes fund the National Park System. D’you think John Galt would go halvesies with you on a piece of the Blue Ridge?

Pocket change

The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) don’t necessarily kill: they maim, blind, and stunt the world’s poor. It’s estimated that of the world’s bottom billion in poverty, at least everyone is afflicted with at least one of these nasties, from hookworm infection to dengue hemorrhagic fever to lymphatic filariasis. Most of these diseases can be controlled, even eradicated, for as little as 50 cents a person, according to Peter Jay Hotez and the Sabin Vaccine Institute. That’s not 50 cents a day, that’s 50 cents a life.

A turn of phrase

A name from the past: C. Northcote Parkinson has a page at Economist.com, excerpted from Tim Hindle’s guide to management gurus. Looking back, it’s not clear to me that Parkinson was ever serious in his assertion that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”—the sequels that he generated suggest that he had found a moneyspinning idea that he could not drop—but back in high school in the 1970s, at least some of us took him seriously. John Lund was on my debate team, a year or two ahead of me, and John’s politics were substantially righty. He made a specialty of arguing either side of whatever resolution we were working that year—funding secondary education, judicial reform—from the standpoint of Parkinson. Assigned the affirmative position that the federal government should clean up the air and water, John could argue (not necessarily persuasively) that the most effective way to stop pollution is to do nothing about it. As was often the case with counterplan and other gimmick tactics, they often succeeded because the other side had no specific preparation against John and his partner’s preposterous lines of reasoning.

Some links: 35

The occasion of Nature‘s publication of 15 Evolutionary Gems, synopses of recent research from its pages that deepens our understanding of the process of evolution, prompted some pruning and dusting of my bookmark files. So here let us take note of

The papers summarized in the Nature document examine evidence collected by field observation, at the molecular level in the lab, and from the fossil record. Of particular note to “no transitional forms” deniers is the discussion of newly-described specimens found in China.

In the 1980s, deposits from the early Cretaceous period (about 125 million years ago) in the Liaoning Province in northern China vindicated these speculations in the most dramatic fashion, with discoveries of primitive birds in abundance — alongside dinosaurs with feathers, and feather-like plumage. Starting with the discovery of the small theropod Sinosauropteryx by Pei-ji Chen from China’s Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology and his colleagues, a variety of feather-clad forms have been found. Many of these feathered dinosaurs could not possibly have flown, showing that feathers first evolved for reasons other than flight, possibly for sexual display or thermal insulation, for instance. In 2008, Fucheng Zhang and his colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing announced the bizarre creature Epidexipteryx, a small dinosaur clad in downy plumage, and sporting four long plumes from its tail. Palaeontologists are now beginning to think that their speculations weren’t nearly wild enough, and that feathers were indeed quite common in dinosaurs.

The discovery of feathered dinosaurs not only vindicated the idea of transitional forms, but also showed that evolution has a way of coming up with a dazzling variety of solutions when we had no idea that there were even problems. Flight could have been no more than an additional opportunity that presented itself to creatures already clothed in feathers.

On the record

In the latest of the don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass entries, Frank Rich assesses the George W. Bush legacy:

… [Karl] Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: he is once again claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as hifalutin as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short because the president is “not a big reader.”

Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to My Pet Goat than The Stranger.

Although Rich’s assessment of the vocabulary in the document is a bit extreme, it is indeed rather picture-heavy and dominated by bullet points. I think it’s peculiar that the administration wants to take credit for the ridiculous Medicare Part D prescription drug program. At least the authors don’t have the balls to make any claims about George Bush’s dedication to preserving scientific intergrity.