The Ethical Werewolf

Going to Thailand

2008-07-22T06:15:00.003-04:00

Tonight I'm flying off to Bangkok. Among the attractions of the area I'll be staying in are: the National Gallery and National Museum, the 16m tall 45m long reclining Buddha, and a clandestine meeting with a special agent whose identity can be guessed at only by loyal readers with RSS feeds.

An Important Event In the History of This Blog

2008-07-20T03:18:00.007-04:00

This is the view outside my office window. The tree is a coconut tree -- those fruits are unripe coconuts. Ripe coconuts are the brown shelly things that you're more likely to see in the supermarket. In their unripe stages (when they're called young coconuts or green coconuts), they don't contain the yummy hard white pulp. But they have more water in them, and it's good to drink.

Since the last post, many good things have happened. I've gone to a conference in Australia, where I hung out with lots of awesome local philosophers and danced in the usual crazy way in front of David Chalmers and Tim Crane -- see the penultimate picture here. David had been distributing "Possible Girls" to the ANU folk and lots of them thought I was a metaphysician. I also delivered a paper on how Humeans should respond to Korsgaard's stuff on the error constraint, which went quite well, and spent more than an hour talking with Michael Smith the next day about topics of common Humean interest. And I finally met utilitarian hero Jack Smart, who is still attending conferences in his late 80s.

But the event of greatest blog-related importance is that I've finally bought a decent camera phone (a Sony Ericsson P1i, with wi-fi and a 3.2 megapixel camera), which was used to take the picture above. Many more pictures of exotic tropical locales should be forthcoming -- including Thailand, which I'm visiting next week!

Malaysian politics is INSANE

2008-07-05T02:35:00.002-04:00

Checking in from my office in Singapore, where the news from neighboring Malaysia is like nothing I've ever heard before.

Soon after his party's victory in the March 8 elections, Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has been accused of forcibly sodomizing a 23-year-old male staffer. This isn't new for Anwar, who also was the subject of sodomy allegations 10 years ago. In the prior case, the sodomy was alleged (among other things) to have happened in a building that hadn't been constructed at the time. So to most Malaysians, it looks like the ruling party is just going back to its old strategy -- when Anwar gets too powerful, falsely accuse him of sodomizing somebody. The fact that the young staffer went to Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak's residence before the police report was filed doesn't help matters.

But that's not the worst. In 2006, beautiful Mongolian national Altantuya Shaariibuu was shot and then blown to bits with C4. They had to identify her body from bone fragments. Her ex-lover (ruling party defense analyst Abdul Razak Baginda) and two special police from current Deputy Prime Minister Najib's office have been charged in the murder. A few days ago, a private investigator who worked for Abdul Razak Baginda has put forward detailed allegations that DPM Najib and the murdered woman also had a sexual relationship. (And yes, this is yet another Malaysian scandal involving anal sex.) The next day, the private investigator retracted the allegations entirely, claiming that he had made them under duress. Draw what conclusions you will.

I'm flying off to a conference in Australia tomorrow. I imagine that politics there are a little less insane. In any event, probably no more political blogging from me for a week.

Deontic flavorings of Singapore

2008-07-02T05:28:00.001-04:00

The ingredients list on my bottle of wintermelon tea (I never had wintermelon before and mmmmmm...) goes as follows:

Water, cane sugar, winter melon juice, permitted flavouring and
caramel.

This is the first time I've seen 'permitted flavouring' on an ingredients list. I'm wondering what other deontic flavorings obtain in Singapore. Obligatory flavoring? Forbidden flavoring?

Duty Free

2008-06-29T21:18:00.003-04:00

Just picked up a liter (I guess around here it's a litre) of Bombay Sapphire for $18.58 at the Duty Free store here in Hong Kong. Building my liquor cabinet through international travel will be part of the game plan for the next couple years.

Singapore!

2008-06-29T01:38:00.003-04:00

I'm leaving for my new job at the National University of Singapore in a couple hours. Wooooo!

Things I've posted on Cogitamus lately

2008-06-29T01:33:00.002-04:00

If Obama wins the election, who will replace him? Let's hope the Governor of Illinois picks Jan Schakowsky.

John Edwards polls better in Ohio than the Governor of Ohio. And with economic worries getting more intense, he's the sort of VP pick you need.

I can NBA-blog too! Here I talk about how Michael Beasley really is the best player in the draft.

Photo of blonde helicopter pilot paralyzes Yglesias comment thread

2008-06-26T03:58:00.002-04:00

The post was about Afghanistan policy. It was kind of funny to watch.

Sadly, The Name 'Moral Hazard' Is Already Taken

2008-06-22T20:07:00.001-04:00

Lindsay Beyerstein and Amanda Marcotte introduce me to a kind of market failure I hadn't heard of before. Compucredit VISA "cut credit lines if consumers used their cards at certain places. Among them: tire and retreading shops, massage parlors, bars, billiard halls, and marriage counseling offices."

As Amanda says, the idea is that these things correlate with future credit problems. If you're getting your tires retreaded, it's probably because you don't have enough money to buy new tires, which is a sign that you may have financial problems down the road. If you're going for marriage counseling, you're more likely than average to have a messy and financially difficult divorce in your future. Never mind that marriage counseling may help you keep your marriage together and avoid these problems. Useful attempts to remedy a problem correlate with problems, so the bean counters will regard you as a problem if they see you taking them.

Taken to an extreme, this sort of thing can prevent you from taking useful steps to get your life in order. If you're having marital problems that require some counseling, don't get counseling or the credit card company will get antsy and take away your credit! So now we're in a situation where the forces of the market give people reasons to avoid helping themselves.

Telecom immunity

2008-06-22T17:52:00.001-04:00

So the new big controversial thing I've written is a post on how the new telecom immunity legislation, though bad, isn't quite the disaster that people have made it out to be. There's good discussion in comments.

Veepery

2008-06-21T00:32:00.002-04:00

Two VP-pick related posts at the CogBlog today: One on Barney Frank putting his foot down against the Sam Nunn VP ridiculousness, and one on why picking Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty doesn't deliver Minnesota to McCain.

Taking It To The Max

2008-06-20T17:16:00.001-04:00

I've been very interested to read Ezra's posts on Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, an oft-disappointing Senator who's crucial in reforming health care. Yglesias details how Baucus helped Bush pass his tax cuts for the rich and takes tons of money from health care and insurance interests. I remember Baucus as the only Dem to vote against giving DC a vote in Congress, on the ridiculous grounds that it would dilute Montana's voting power. But Ezra lays out some reasons for optimism that he's taking health care seriously and says in comments:

Baucus is the chair of the relevant committee for health care reform. If you care about the issue, you have to watch him closely, try to figure out what he's doing, and try to figure out what his incentives are and how to shape them.

This is one instance of a big question that I generally don't know how to answer: How do you, as an ordinary citizen, get an influential Senator from another state to do what you want? I know only two ways to push on a Senator -- direct contact through letters and phone calls, and primary challenges. The former only works if you live in the state, and the latter probably isn't feasible in the case of a red-state Democrat who works his evil magic behind closed doors in the Senate, not out in the open on cable TV like that idiot from Connecticut who got kicked out of the party in 2006.

All that comes to mind is buying BlogAds on Left in the West to explain to our Montana progressive brethren that the fate of American health care is on their shoulders, and we'll buy them all the beer they want if they organize really good letter-writing campaigns. Is that the appropriate move here?

Home of the Whopper

2008-06-19T01:38:00.002-04:00

The LA Times caught up with "Curveball", the guy who told the CIA all the bullshit about WMD in Iraq. I'd always thought he was a top scientist or something. Turns out that he left Iraq after his shampoo business failed (he was cheating his partners), his cosmetics business failed (he was cheating his suppliers) and he lost his job at a TV company (he was selling their equipment on the black market). He was working at a Burger King in Germany when we were deciding whether to invade Iraq:

In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein's regime.

They couldn't decide if he was dangerous or crazy.

"During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said."

His fellow Burger King employees knew he lying. (I imagine that the guy who gave him the codename 'Curveball' had an inkling too. I'm waiting for it to be revealed that the CIA's other informants were codenamed 'Play-action' and 'Headfake'). But he said what Bush wanted to hear, and the CIA bought it.

If only a Burger King employee had been president instead of George W. Bush.

Did Anybody Watch That 70's Show?

2008-06-18T09:56:00.002-04:00

I see that a lot of the folks over at The Next Right like attacking Barack Obama by tying him to Jimmy Carter. One of the foremost problems with this is that half of today's voters are too young to get the reference. The median voter is 46 years old, meaning that they were 17 when Carter left office, and presumably not paying too much attention to macroeconomic phenomena.

And the late 70s weren't all that bad for ordinary folks -- the unemployment rate during the Carter years was well below the worst numbers of the Reagan era. Of course, the combination of stagnant asset values and inflation made it a terrible time to be an investor, so tying Obama to Carter will probably resonate with the voter who had a large stock portfolio during the Carter days. McCain is welcome to make those folks the focus of his messaging, just as I'm sure he'll be welcome to visit Barack Obama in the White House next year.

Instant Identities! Just Add Water!

2008-06-15T07:22:00.000-04:00

Kevin and Ezra are making fun of the post where Jim Geraghty tries to attack Barack Obama for not wanting to live the life of a suburban commuter who works a 9-to-5 job. Geraghty tells us that "there's a fine line between rejecting that life and looking down at that life. Because some people are just fine with jobs that require them to take the New Rochelle train... Never mind the small towners who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment." Obama didn't want to be a suburban commuter." It's a half-assed attempt to gin up something like a new anti-suburban-commuter Bittergate. Or something.

Right-wingers have coveted the power of left-wing identity politics for some time. They don't, however, have a good idea of why gender and racial solidarity are politically powerful. When some group has a common interest, you can get them to band together behind it. Defeating racism and sexism definitely count. But what are suburban commuters up against? Lousy train service? Unless Republicans are going to go after Ryan Avent and David Alpert with box cutters and somehow hijack the mass transit movement, they're just not going to succeed in stirring up an anti-Obama suburban commuter voting bloc.

Why don't Republicans get this? In part, it's because a lot of them think racism and sexism are over. So they think that Democratic voting blocs are still hanging together in the absence of any common interest. And if identity politics is that easy, turning Italian-Americans, or suburban commuters, or anyone else into a cohesive anti-Democratic group will be simple. But actually, there are good reasons why voting blocs hang together.

The Big Obama/Edwards post

2008-06-08T23:43:00.001-04:00

I forgot to link my favorite post as a guestblogger for Kevin Drum. It's the big one in which I lay out 10 good reasons for an Obama/Edwards ticket.

Edwards is denying VP interest a little more intensely than VP candidates usually do. Given that an Obama/Edwards ticket seems to be electorally invincible (check out reason #2 from Minnesota) and Edwards is the guy I'd most want as VP and president (check out most of my blogging for the past 3 years) his protestations of disinterest aren't enough to deter me. My guess is that if Obama told Edwards he'd have a somewhat looser leash than he did in the '04 Kerry days, he'd be a lot more receptive.

Another post, at Cogitamus, about the possible end of ridiculously good media coverage for John McCain is here.

More Pelosi!

2008-06-04T16:46:00.002-04:00

I've got a big love note to Nancy Pelosi at the Washington Monthly.

Foresight

2008-06-01T20:03:00.002-04:00

Now at the Washington Monthly's site: my big post on how Barack Obama is completely awesome.

Flint

2008-06-01T02:58:00.002-04:00

Tonight, my friends drove me up to Flint, MI, and I drank two pitchers of Killian's. It wasn't the chosen drink of any of my compatriots, so I had to drink them by myself. My head is spinning like... uh, I'm looking for some kind of economically depressed Rust Belt analogy, preferably involving things unionized workers in the automotive sector would attend to, but it's escaping me.

I hope all of you had a similarly wonderful Saturday night.

Mmmm... Veepsteaks!

2008-05-24T16:36:00.001-04:00

I'm currently in the happy and exciting position of guestblogging for Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly! He gets over 30,000 readers a day, so it's an awesome gig.

I decided to start off by doing some Veepstakesblogging, since your average political junkie likes talking about that. So I produced a post discussing some general considerations for who would make a good VP, and then a post discussing specific candidates. The arguments for John Edwards in the second post seem to be impressing lots of people.

Six Reasons Why Clinton Shouldn't Be Obama's VP

2008-05-18T02:00:00.001-04:00

I liked Hillary Clinton a lot back in my teenage political junkie years, and she won big points with me when she copied John Edwards' health care plan. Even though I've become an Obama guy lately, I was excited to see her stick it to him on domestic policy issues -- her one clear area of superiority -- during the Texas debate. But an Obama/Clinton ticket is a match made in a place with lots of brimstone for making matches. So let me tell you why she clearly won't be the best VP choice for Barack Obama.

6. We'll have party unity regardless.
Over at Shakesville, PortlyDyke wants a unity ticket, regardless of who the nominee is, because a unified party is important. Of course it is! But after a Democratic convention where everybody in the party including Clinton talks up Obama and a couple months of campaigning against a warmongering GOP nominee with a 0% NARAL rating who doesn't care about working people, Obama will consolidate Democratic support.

We're moving through the stage in the process where there's maximal bitterness between the candidates' supporters. (I remember this from 2004, except it happened a lot earlier in the year.) But sure as Dean people fell behind the once-hated Kerry and people who care about each other make up after a fight, you'll see the vast majority of Clinton people cast a vote against McCain. And looking at the numbers, Hillary-Obama animosity is pretty tame by historical standards, with 1/5 of Obama people saying they won't vote for Hillary and 1/4 of Hillary people saying they won't vote for Obama. You know what percentage of McCain supporters said they wouldn't vote Bush in March 2000? 51%.

5. Just look at her favorability / unfavorability numbers.

When I want to see how people think of a candidate (and therefore, whether they'll make a ticket more or less likely to win), I don't rely on my own subjective impressions. My youthful fantasies of being the young White House intern Hillary would use for post-Monica revenge, for example, shouldn't have led me to believe that everybody liked her the way I did. Instead, I should look at favorability ratings and other poll numbers.

Even at the end of a brutal general election campaign, I don't think a non-Clinton VP nominee will end up with fav/unfav numbers worse than Clinton's now. If you ask the question the way Gallup does, both her favorables and unfavorables have been stuck between the mid-40s and the low 50s for a long time now. To give you an example of what a more standard VP choice's numbers would look like, John Edwards ended the 2004 campaign at 48-37. Those were his worst numbers of '04 -- he usually had favorables in the 50s and unfavorables at 30 or less.

4. I don't trust the consultants in Hillaryland to play well with an Obama campaign.
Some of this depends on whether the disastrous Mark Penn really has been replaced -- word is that he retains his access, but not his official stature. But even if he is gone, I don't trust Harold Ickes, Terry McAuliffe, and Howard Wolfson -- all of whom came into this with the confidence that they'd be running the next Democratic general election campaign, and probably the next Democratic administration -- to take orders from Plouffe/Axelrod and fit their candidate into the role that Obama's folks want them to play. There's a huge potential for organizational dysfunction here, one that's much smaller with any other VP candidate. Hillary herself strikes me as less problematic -- if she really wants the VP slot, she'll adapt to it. But a lot of people under her won't be content with less than they expected, and they may make trouble.

3. I want to see the Republican Party's 15-year investment in smearing her come up absolutely worthless.
Over the years, the Republican Party has spent a gargantuan amount of money and effort smearing Hillary Clinton. Right-winger Lisa Schiffren's post is one of my favorites:

Let's say last night really did indicate that Hillary's negatives will keep her off the ticket. (Or keep her from winning if she's on it.) You know what? Deep in my psyche, in the place that kind of misses the toothache I've been prodding at with my tongue, I am having a tiny little pang of missing Hillary. Not her, but hating her. Hating Hillary has been such a central political impulse for so long now — 15 years — and I have had to work so hard to keep it up as she became more appealling looking, less shrill, more human — I don't really know what I will do with that newly freed strand of energy.

Imagine all that well-tended right-wing fury... gone to nothing. What a pleasure it'll be to say, in January 2009: "Guess how much that enormous anti-Hillary investment was worth? $0. We had another great candidate -- the smart black guy who will make sure that American foreign policy won't ever be done your way again. His army of young followers will be voting Democrats into office for the rest of their long lives."

2. We need a clear antiwar message.
Bill Clinton's presidency made the economy a Democratic issue. Obama's big promise is that he'll do the same with foreign policy, and advance a view of the issue that will serve the Democratic Party and America well for the next several years. For VP, he needs somebody who can reinforce that message -- either a Democrat who never supported the war, or one who has totally renounced his/her support and rejects the war with the zeal of a convert. Hillary could've -- and should've -- come out against the war full-force during or before the primary. As it stands, it'll be a grand shame if we accept a candidate who's tied into Kerryesque knots on this central issue, and whose impulses for how to do foreign policy and how to strategically position yourself on the issue are so far inferior to Obama's.

1. We've got a whole heck of a lot to choose from.
Stephen cites the polls showing that 60% Democrats think Obama should choose Hillary. But this data is most likely the product of low name recognition for any of the other contenders. Most Americans, for example, have no idea who Kathleen Sebelius is. John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Jim Webb probably didn't come before most respondents' minds at the time, as they weren't mentioned as options. (Hillary was the only option named.)

One of the pleasures of all this Veepstakes talk is that it gives people a chance to learn about a bunch of Democrats who have accomplished great things for the party. And in fact, we have some excellent people to choose from. I'm going to be talking up Sebelius (who accomplished some truly amazing things in Kansas), Edwards (probably the ultimate in-office VP pick), Brian Schweitzer (the badass governor of Montana) and my favorite dark horse -- domestic policy Senate superstar Sherrod Brown of Ohio -- over the next couple weeks. I'll read more on Napolitano, too, and see if there really is as much of a case for Jim Webb as some people seem to think. Stay tuned.

California Supreme Court Legalizes Gay Marriage

2008-05-15T17:51:00.001-04:00

I don't have many original things to say about this, so I'll express my feelings by animated gif.

Those of you who have interesting things to say are encouraged to post them in the comments.

Night Of The Links To Female Bloggers Better Than Me

2008-05-13T02:48:00.001-04:00

After the GOP convention chairman resigned due to his having lobbied for the vicious rulers of Myanmar, Hilzoy has a typically awesome post looking at all the dictators that McCain's top advisor, Charlie Black, has worked for. Best quote is probably this one: "Black has represented a more than usually repellent group of dictators. Two of Transparency International's top three kleptocrats in recent history (Marcos and Mobutu); a self-proclaimed God; torturers, murderers, and even someone who deliberately destroys reservoirs in arid country, so people will die of thirst."

Someday I'll be bouncing a little granddaughter (with a last name like McBabubaum, no doubt) on my lap and I'll say, "I once blogged for Ezra Klein, and one of my blogmates, just for a little while, was Kathy Geier!" And she'll say, "Wow! Was that when she wrote her post that told you everything you need to know about the minimum wage and employment?" And I'll say, "No, that's after she moved to Crooked Timber. But I linked it!" And she'll shrug, because all her friends, who will be precocious children with weird ethnic fusion names, will have linked it too.

Name Fusions For Nuclear Families

2008-05-11T13:46:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Michael and Diana Bijon, who got the ACLU's help in overturning the California law barring men from taking their wives' names when they marry. From older news coverage, I recall that Michael had a bad relationship with his father, and was very close to his wife's family, and thus wanted to take her name. I don't know exactly what we should call his old name now -- "maiden name" isn't appropriate. Bachelor name, I suppose?

My preference is for both spouses to keep their names, and to invent clever name fusions for their offspring. So if I were to marry a woman named, say, Von Argebargebruger, the kids would be Sinhabargebrugers or Von Sinhas or Argebargebabus or something, depending on how many extra syllables of adversity we wanted them to overcome.

Philosophers Steven Yablo and Sally Haslanger call their clan the 'Yablangers', which always sounded kind of nifty to me. Definitely for academics and other people whose names show up in bibliographies, having people retain their names seems the way to go. You don't want people thinking, "Whatever happened to that book that Von Argebargebruger said she was going to write?" or "Why didn't Baroness Sinhababu publish anything until she got tenure?"

How To Help People In Burma

2008-05-10T00:22:00.001-04:00

The basic outlines of the situation are laid out here. Tens of thousands of people have already died, and the ruling dictatorship (they're the ones who renamed the country Myanmar) believes that letting outside aidworkers care for the people would destabilize their rule and let outside organizations that don't like them gain a foothold in the country. So they're hardly permitting any aid in at all, and many thousands more people may die from the diseases that result when flooding mixes sewage and clean water. This is why dictatorship isn't the best form of government.

I've been communicating with a friend who works in an NGO in Vietnam, who knows a guy who works in Burma, to ask for aid advice. She writes:

I did get another brief email last night from this guy in-country, but the only thing of note that he really said was: "Things in Yangon are improving rapidly. Obviously that's not the case in the delta. But to be honest, here in the city, the recovery has been faster than in nola."

Still, the situation in nola was so terrible that saying the recovery is faster than nola isn't saying much...also, the situation in the delta is the real disaster. He also says that "save the children seems to be the best organized INGO on the ground right now". But maybe the network of monks can deliver supplies in areas where save the children can't (?)

About 500 aidworkers with Save the Children are in the country. You can donate here to help the people in Burma!

The aforementioned 'network of monks' is a group that MoveOn is directing people to, which I asked her about. In ordinary situations, I'd go through the big international NGOs which I'm familiar with. But the monks may be able to get aid into the country to the places where it's needed through their own networks of monasteries. Here's what MoveOn said in an email:

Humanitarian relief is urgently needed, but Burma's government could easily delay, divert or misuse any aid. Today the International Burmese Monks Organization, including many leaders of the democracy protests last fall, launched a new effort to provide relief through Burma's powerful grass roots network of monasteries--the most trusted institutions in the country and currently the only source of housing and support in many devastated communities. Click below to help the Burmese people with a donation and see a video appeal to Avaaz from a leader of the monks:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/burma_cyclone/77.php

Giving to the monks is a smart, fast way to get aid directly to Burma's people. Governments and international aid organizations are important, but face challenges--they may not be allowed into Burma, or they may be forced to provide aid according to the junta's rules. And most will have to spend large amounts of money just setting up operations in the country. The monks are already on the front lines of the aid effort--housing, feeding, and supporting the victims of the cyclone since the day it struck. The International Burmese Monks Organization will send money directly to each monastery through their own networks, bypassing regime controls.

Says my friend, "I would imagine this claim about established networks of monks is true, though I'm not sure how one would be able to really verify it..." If anybody knows anything else about these monks, please do tell. They're firmly opposed to the military dictatorship, and have staged protests against it, so if you're looking for people who are likely to bring aid into the country without government approval, they're probably the people to turn to. I'm thinking that I'll be donating through them and Save The Children, unless someone can tell me about a better way.