Asymmetrical Information

6) Support for mandatory vaccination of girls as young as twelve for HPV.

BLAH!!!!
BLAH!!!

Don't forget agnostic.

Sometimes I get really frustrated with a post and I want to rant, but then I figure you won't know where I am coming from, so what's the freaking point; I mean really, even though it's part of my morality to want people to be healthy and not sacrifice themselves for completely pointless causes, I really can't do anything about it. I can't even get people I know to understand they are actually polluting the environment more when they recycle; it's like don't notice the trucks, the chemical plants, the subsidies, etc... So I know why the guy asked the liberal/dating question: he was asking, "Have you lost your freaking mind?" Of course he was implying that you are a woman when he wrote that, which, of course, is why you wrote this post with such indignation, and now you will skip being a vegetarian and go right to being a vegan just to show him you've got a mind of your own, and we will get to watch you slowly starve to death, and the next time I see video of you you will look like a skeleton and I will cringe and say to myself, damn if only that guy hadn't asked that question, and I will quietly un-subscribe from the feed one day because I can't handle seeing people hurt themselves, but sometime after the astronaut lady, Anna Nicole, and Britney get off the TV, someone will run a story about you. So I will hear about all your pain and suffering anyway- like when you decide to stop eating beans.

Or not.

I'm just curious what your definition of "Liberal" or "The Left" is. Peter Beinart? Dirty Fucking Hippies?

On Amanda Marcotte, people were questioning far more than just her remarks about Catholics. Not only were her remarks about the Duke lacrosse players excesssively nasty and vulgar, they showed a tremendous disregard for the facts of the case. Do rich white boys deserve the right to a fair trial?

You seemed to be trivializing the controversy by pretending that it was only about whether people should be allowed to make fun of Catholics. Perhaps that was the part that you found most interesting, but you still, as far as I know, haven't acknowledged that there was more to the controversy than that.

I can't even get people I know to understand they are actually polluting the environment more when they recycle; it's like don't notice the trucks, the chemical plants, the subsidies, etc...

Could also be that your friends and relations have more common sense than you do.

If all post-consumer material enters the trash truck, then the truck fills up faster and must make more frequent trips to the dumping site. There's no evident loss in sending around a second truck for recyclables, especially since newer models are designed with separated compacting compartments and can maximize their loads through compacting, just like the trash truck does. Fill two trucks, or fill one truck twice as fast -- so what?

In the eastern US (and especially the coast), there's a general shortage of landfill space, so the trash frequently has to be bulk-shipped (by truck, train, or barge) to another location regardless of whether it ends at a landfill or a recylcing facility.

As for the "checmical plants" -- unless people stop eating and buying things, they will exist to produce papers and plastics anyway, regardless of whether they are working with new raw materials or recycling existing materials. The apparent gain there is not self-evident.

The one moderately compelling argument I've heard is against aluminum cans, because the label paint and anticorrosion compounds reportedly emit some rather nasty fumes when burned off in the recycling meltdown, supposedly negating any air quality savings from recycling as opposed to smelting a fresh batch of ore (assuming you don't mind the enviornmental effects of strip mining).

I've had the same opinion on vaccination for a long time: it's one of the few areas where state intervention is a clear moral win. $300,000 per life saved--not even counting the treatment for cervical cancer, which everyone seems to have forgotten involves removing the cervix and possibly rendering young women infertile--is a bargain in America. Nor am I swayed by the "behavioural" arguments, when the behaviour in question is having more than one sexual partner in a lifetime. Most Asmericans do not consider that normal. Contagious disease can be avoided by never leaving the house, but we've rightly decided that that is not in the domain of behaviours we should expect from people--just as we've rightly decided that we *can* expect people to refrain from having thousands of sexual partners whose names they do not know.

Amanda Marcotte is a potty-mouthed ranter who does not come across as particularly bright. Her position on the Duke rape case was idiotic. But it is not a uniquely idiotic position on the left, where she was seeking employment. Believing alleged rape victims long after their credibility has expired is not a particularly admirable feminist fetish, but it has a certain kernel of kindness behind it that makes it hard to put into the same category with denying the Holocaust. I have no doubt that people on the Edwards campaign believe all sorts of things I find idiotic, like "Free trade is bad", and which hurt more, and more vulnerable people.

To make it clear: I would have fired her long before the Edwards campaign did, because she will no doubt hurt them with certain voters. But I don't think it's because she's specially bad; she's about averagely bad for the radical sectors of the blogosphere, which is why I stay out of those precincts.

Take a look at John Cole's comment on the Marcotte/Donohue fight at "Balloon Juice". Summary: Yes, Marcotte can sometimes be a vulgar pain in the ass when she misrepresents the Virgin Birth doctrine in a semi-obscene way; but Donohue, as Ms. McArdle says, has long made a monotonous habit of attacking everybody opposed to even more morally outrageous Pharisaical religious bigotry. (I borrow that term "Pharasaical", by the way, from that very morally persuasive and very smart Christian commentator C.S. Lewis, who regularly used it to describe vicious religious bigotry -- including among self-proclaimed Christians -- masquerading as "morality".)

Maybe 6 is attitude. I don't know anymore how to describe liberal and conservative and that leaves no room for libertarians. For decades most Republicans have been self-described conservatives and many Democrats have been self-described liberals or "progressives" if they are west of the Hudson and East of the Cascades. That's the working definition. Historically, the difference between them has been especially manifested on issues concerning people who are perceived as not quite ordinary Americans.

After nobly and rightly ending slavery while the Democrats supported traitors, the Republicans turned to trashing immigrants such as our own Irish ancestors. Remember James Blaine of Maine the 1884 Republican presidential candidate who ran against "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion"? Then they turned on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Remember the 1924 Immigration Act passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Republican president that established immigration quotas based on national origin? Out of blind devotion to some libertarian ideology, Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act. Karl Rove has played the homophobe card in election after election. The strongest oppositon to Bush from his own party comes on the issue of Mexican immigrants. Bush may see them as a source of cheap labor, but his party's base just does not like people with brown skins who speak a language other than English.

When it comes to economic issues the Democrats are mistaken in thinking that there is a government solution to every economic problem. the worst that can be said about most Democratic economic policies is that they are well-intentioned and driven by compassion, but based on a misunderstanding of how the economy works. The problem the Republicans have is that those who believe that government's role should be limited stay out of politics and leave the field to people who really don't care about someone else's misfortune, especially if that someone else is not a white protestant from a small town.

The bottom line is that unless you are a white, protestant from a small town, most Republicans don't know you and are suspicious of you.

The strongest oppositon to Bush from his own party comes on the issue of Mexican immigrants. Bush may see them as a source of cheap labor, but his party's base just does not like people with brown skins who speak a language other than English.

Uh, do you even live in a region where immigration has run unchecked, in order to see the consequences? You don't have to be some sort of biggotted monoculuralist to think that existing immigration policies, even though they have significant upsides in cheap labor, have practical socio-economic impacts that are less than positive in some cases.

"I don't think it's because she's specially bad; she's about averagely bad for the radical sectors of the blogosphere, which is why I stay out of those precincts."

You choose to stay out of those precincts, yet Edwards seemed to be embracing them for his campaign. Why? Why did Edwards choose someone whose one and only qualification was that she was part of the radical sector of the blogosphere? That's the part that I find odd and troubling, but that you seem to be taking for granted. The fact that she's only 'averagely bad' for her type doesn't explain why he wanted someone of her type, to begin with.

Probably points 3, 4, & 6 (from Thorley). But it is more of how you are framing your arguments now that I am refering to. (And perhaps you always did and I just didn't notice.)

Consider: You shifted your position on the war. Fair enough. I was and still am against the war in Afghanistan and was only for war in Iraq in that Saddam had to go. But you mentioned that the surge had "0.01%" chance of success. That's down right Murtha-sque. Not even one chance in 100, which would be pretty bad odds, but 0.01%.

Consider: You said, "More generally, there is a tendency in some places on the right to..." Yes, and there is a tendency in some places on the left to excuse slavery and the opression of women in cultures today because we did it ourselves 200 years ago. Why only mention the right?

This is a real pissing point with me. Why would you as an intelligent, thinking, liberal (in the good sense) WOMAN begin to excuse this kind of thinking? It is most certainly possible for a person to look at a culture and say that what they are doing is wrong. Be it African, Muslim, or Reagan Fan's sister. FGM is wrong. Slavery is wrong. The whole 'Dhimmi' thing is wrong. Getting married at 9 years old is wrong. Arranged marriages are wrong. Honor killings are wrong. Stoning a woman for talking to a stranger is wrong.

In the old South, whites claimed that blacks were happier as slaves. They couldn't handle the pressures of being free. Does that excuse slavery? No.

I'm all for respect for culture, even if you wanted to put your four year old's penis in your mouth. A Korean woman explained to me that the man walking in front was a sign of respect FROM the man to his wife. (He is protecting her from possible danger.) Those are things that I disagree with, but I am willing to allow that diversity. Believing that a group of people have descended from pig-monkees and should be pushed into the sea might be cultural, but it is still wrong.

Put it this way, how would you feel if Jerry Falwell pushed for a state amendment that advocated custom X? For X, use any of the above issues. Slavery. Burqas. Stoning for WOMEN who talk to strangers. Not making it mandatory, just allowing for people who feel that way to follow that lifestyle in Virginia. If you would have no problem with that, then I'll withdrawl my complaint on this issue.

Global warming and mandatory HPV vaccinations are real issues and should be addressed. There are, however, real questions to both. You seem to go the knee jerk Soviet era socialist response. How come?

Quote from original post: "[I] have gotten greener as the evidence for AGW has gotten worse"

A psychiatrist would see this as a classic case of cognitive dissonance.

"his party's base just does not like people with brown skins who speak a language other than English"

I have nothing against legal immigrants, from Mexico or elsewhere. A big part of my opposition to illegal immigration is because it's unfair to the long lines of people in other countries that are waiting to come in legally.

When I lived in Hong Kong, there was a long line of mostly Filipinos waiting outside the US Consulate every day. How does my concern for those people prove that I don't like "people with brown skins who speak a language other than English"?

7) Profit!

I'm essentially a cultural relativist, in that I think it is not possible to evaluate whether the experience of being in another culture is good or bad.

A cultural relativist is somone who believes that there are no grounds for claiming that one culture is better than another. But who really believes that the culture of Nazi Germany or of Stalin's Russia or of Pol Pot's Cambodia was just as good as the culture of the United States? I doubt Jane really believes that. So why does she call herself a relativist?

There are better and worse societies and there are reasonable standards by which to judge them. North Korea is a sick society with a sick ruler (and there is nothing relative about that judgment). Its people are generally miserable, which is why so many of them risk there lives to escape.

Relativism is muddle-headed and its proponents always end up defending absurdities.

Concerning FGM, here is an interview with a female Egyptian doctor with a practise in Saudi Arabia, specialising in FGM. I found it convincing and horrific.
http://www.ampbreia.com/ampbreia2_054.htm

And absolutists grow up to become dictators.

I've always found it puzzling that it is considered liberal to assert that prisons should be operated as lawful institutions.

Obviously, there is no number six. Duh. And #7 is, of course, No Pooftas!

anony-mous,

People actually pay for aluminum. They do this because they can make a profit. They make a profit because they don't waste resources.
So, in this case, recycling actually makes sense. Think of the fact that poor people will go through your trash for the things as part of the price signal. The price signals that it actually makes sense to recycle aluminum.

If you recycle paper, plastic, etc... the government taxes you, you add an entire new system of processing (including plants and trucks), and you get an end product that cannot replace the original product- so they make something else up and sell it to you to make you feel better about yourself.

I used to believe all this crap too. It really feels good to recycle because it seems like we're saving the planet.
But we're not.
And the landfill shortage? Completely made up crap. By a Reagan era EPA guy. Not a single shred of scientific evidence to back that one up.

Someone please remind me why I'm supposed to be outraged at FGM but not MGM?

I find myself siding with Reagan Fan and Ellipsis and against Ms. McArdle (an event coinciding with the sudden freezing over of Hell and O.J.'s discovery of the real killers) on the subject of Moslem misogyny. Ignoring the clitorectory issue (the Koran, I gather, says it isn't mandatory but doesn't denounce it either), we see a frightening number of cases of women being physically attacked for the crimes of (A) not wearing veils, (B) getting raped, or (C) trying to make a living on their own. Even given the Godawful treatment of women in Christian societes two centuries ago, we never saw anything as extreme as that. We certainly aren't seeing it in such cultures now. Nor are we seeing homosexuality treated as a capital crime in any Jewis or Christian societies today (notwithstanding what a sprinkling of remaining extremists might still like to do if they thought they could get away with it).

Granted that Moslem societies seem to vary tremendously in their tolerance of women. (Back in 2003, humanity passed a milestone; for the first time, over half the human race was living in nations where people are reproducing at BELOW the replacement rate. This included Tunisia and Lebanon -- Saharan Moslem cultures are apparently pretty liberalized in allowing women access to birth control -- but the Earth's population is still rising because there are two places on Earth where women are still being forced to have large numbers of kids: sub-Saharn Africa, and the most reactionary part of the Moslem world, stretching roughly from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia.) I'm also willing to believe that Mohammed, for his time and place, was a women's liberationist -- for instance, the Koran passage often interpreted to require facial veils clearly says nothing of the sort, and merely commands men and women to cover their "private parts" and women their breasts (one liberal Moslem scholar says that breast nudity was common in some pre-Moslem cultures in the area) and for both sexes to "restrain their eyes" (that is, not ogle each other's booty). Much of the nastier misogynistic element in today's Islam (including face-veiling) seems to have been a malignant graft onto the Koran from the more misogynistic area cultures that preceded it. But that graft has not yet been cut off, and a hell of a lot of Moslems still fall for it -- something that can only be eliminated with the soft power of persuasive religious, philosophical and moral argument, but which must nevertheles NOT be allowed to infiltrate Europe.

I do not live in a region that is over run with illegal immigrants, and I agree that there are problems. There are solutions other than sending police into work places, taking productive workers away in handcuffs. Entering the US without a visa or a valid passport may be a crime, but I do not see how it turns one into an evildoer to cross hundreds of miles of desert to take up a job that is waiting for you. Same for all those Filipinos waiting in line at the US consulate. Rather than make them wait in line, we should welcome them in. These people love our country and know that they will find a job here. Why do we want to turn them away?

"the evidence for AGW has gotten worse" nothing like bad evidence to make a convincing case to an economist. (We kid because we love.)

Jim,

Your suggestion that Republicans are a bunch of racists who don't care about or trust anyone but small-town white protestants is offensive and false.

You owe a goodly number of the commenters here a retraction and an apology.

"And absolutists grow up to become dictators."

Not really. If you look closely at Nazi thinking, you will find that they were strongly influenced by the relativism of Heidegger and Nietszche. "If there is no absolute standard of right and wrong," they reasoned, "then we are free to indulge our will to power without restraint."

We will invade Czechoslovakia and Poland; we will commit genocide. Why should we not? In a world with no absolutes, there is no restraint on our desires.

Naziism was the rotten fruit that grew from relativist soil.

Believing alleged rape victims long after their credibility has expired is not a particularly admirable feminist fetish, but it has a certain kernel of kindness behind it that makes it hard to put into the same category with denying the Holocaust.

Gah!

Gah!

No. Marcotte's belief that a crime took place has everything to do with her hatred for the white male Christofascist lacrosse-supremacist patriarchy, and nothing to do with sympathy for the victim, except insofar as she is a symbol of the white male etc.

If tomorrow the accuser were to stand before the TV cameras and confess she'd made the whole thing up in an alcohol-fueled snit, Marcotte would only lament that the dread hand of the Patriarchy had finally intimidated her.

Jim Wrote:

These people love our country and know that they will find a job here. Why do we want to turn them away?

How do you know they love our country? Perhaps they just love our governmental services that allow them to subsist on such low American wages and still live better than back in old country. We can't talk about unskilled workers without also talking about the welfare state. And if we don't enforce immigration laws then more illegal unskilled immigrants come...

"And the last time I did date a liberal, it, if anything, drove me farther from the left. I'm contrary like that."

So...you're dating a conservative?

A lot of us tended to jump to the conclusion that the Duke players were guilty on the basis of Ryan McFadyen's charming (and unquestioned) 3-14-06 E-mail: "tommrrow night, after tonights show, ive decided to have some strippers over to edens 2C. all are welcome...however there will be no nudity. i plan on killing the bitches as soon as the walk in and proceding to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex...all in besides arch and tack please respond". Clearly, innocent or not, the lad is promising serial-killer material, and he bears watching in every sense of the word.

I'm essentially a cultural relativist, in that I think it is not possible to evaluate whether the experience of being in another culture is good or bad. I would hate living in Saudi Arabia. But I am willing to be that most Saudi women are roughly as happy as income, interpersonal relationships, and personality permit; people are like that.

Jane, I'm having trouble reconciling this statement with your earlier post in which you were concerned about the quality of life for farm raised animals. You have enough imagination to know that a pig raised in a stall longs to roam free, but it's "impossible to evaluate" whether women living in Saudi Arabia are better or worse off than women in America?! (Chortle!) Get out of New York. Now. Your critical thinking skills are beginning to atrophy. (I'm kidding about the need to get out of New York, but perhaps, a refresher course or two at the University of Chicago wouldn't be a bad idea.)

Jim Linanne:

It's easy to commit the fallacy of composition when you're talking about immigration. It's possible for each individual immigrant to be a fine person in many ways--hard working, acting in an admirably fashion to make his family better off, positively disposed to this country--and still have bad effects from ten million such immigrants.

I should mention, when I referred in the post above to a female doctor in Saudi Arabia who specialised in Female Genital Mutilation, I meant she specialised in performing FGM, rather than repairing it. Clitoridectomies are routinely performed on all women after childbirth, and she estimates that 25% of Saudi women have received the same, by instruction of the religious police.

U.S. economy leaving record numbers in severe poverty

WASHINGTON - The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen.

Deep down inside, I always knew that purple was a robot. (No real person could be THAT impervious to a reasoned argument.) Apparently, his new program code covers comment-thread spam.

August:

Based on the amount of evidence provided, you seem to have made up that entire post as you went. So, rather than completely hijack the thread with a point-by-point response, I'll simply state that you need an envidence-defended argument if you're hoping to convince Others.

As for your completely unsubstantiated claim about landfill space in the East Coast...I can take your word for it, or I can take the word of the second-generation, owner-operated refuse collection company that I happened to be involved in a conferecne call with last week. (By the way, in the east, landfill dumping fees are usually charged by volume whereas in the west, they are charged by the ton...for this reason among possibly others.)

Back in May 2001, the Washington Post did a 2-parter on the horrendous conditions that have prevailed in American slaughterhouses since the GOP Congress started repealing their regulations during the Clinton years. Part 1 dealt with the deterioration of hygiene and resultant health risks; part 2 dealt with the fact that the actual slaughtering of the animals is now so sloppy that they are frequently not only still alive, but still conscious and crying out as they're being cut up or boiled alive on the slaughterline. Lovely, isn't it? Of course, 9-11 removed any chance that this situation might get any significant attention, but it's still going on. (Thank God we got rid of all those cumbersome, pointless government regulations!)

I haven't seen any leftward tilt on this blog, but I've only been reading y'all since 2001, so what do I know?

I'm glad to here you're off the veggie diet, that stuff will make you crazy.

Jim,

You won't win many arguments by commenting on the behaviors of people in a political party before ANY of us were born, and I'm older than most. Heck, my Grandmother was born after Blaine's nomination...

Racist? My wife would be surprised. Anti-immigrant? I brought my wife here, legally. Anti-catholic? Are you calling me self-hating? Registered Republicans? Both of us. Not because we necessarily subscribe to ANY of their views on morality, but because they are the party which hurts us the least.

Marcotte is unbearable, but no more so than the comments sections as several large conservative blogs I could name.

Jane, do you really think it fair to compare a blogger to a blogger's commenters? It seems like apples and oranges to me, if not apples and eggs. I'm certainly not aware of anyone who's been hired as an official campaign blogger based on their comments on other blogs.

And as others note, this wasn't just Marcotte versus Donohue. It was the general nature of her foul-mouthed screeds and hyper-man-hating-feminism that, in its derangement, is generally only found in "womens' studies" departments.

More generally, there is a tendency in some places on the right to, on the one hand, excuse slavery and the oppression of women as Bad Things We Use to Do Which Do Not Mean that America was a Fundamentally Sick Country, while at the same time evincing similar practices in the Middle East as evidence that Muslims Are Bad.

Again, I think this an unfair comparison. While those things done in the past by our own culture are certainly Bad by modern lights, they were pretty much the standard for the world at the time, and there was little in the way of better examples to follow. We overcame them only through the tireless efforts (and often blood) of farther-sighted people. We have slowly been clawing ourselves up from the barbarity of the past. It kind of reminds me of the latest Geico commercial in which the caveman sarcastically apologizes for "not getting that stuff to you sooner."

Islamists, who in the modern world want to return us all to that medieval world, have no such excuse.

Rob Lyman,

How do the politicians do it? I'm sorry if my remarks have offended anyone or that the media (my own comments) have distorted what I was trying to say.

Seriously, I was generalizing and trying hard not to use the "r" word. Racism is like liberalism or conservatism. It is a word with many definitions that depend on one's point of view. i am really sorry for giving the impression that Republicans are racists. They are not.

I do think that the base of the Republican party is located away from major metropolitan areas. Instead of looking at a map of red and blue states, look at a map of red and blue counties. They are in every state. There you find people who like things the way they are and don't have much daily contact with people of different cultures. For whatever reason, Republican politicians have been able to arouse their base with two policies that I do not understand and find indicative of not trusting people who are 'different'.

One policy is teaching creationism in schools. Why? because everyone at your local church has read it in the bible so it must be true? What about people who do not go to your local church? What about the evidence uncovered by sicence?

Another policy is opposition same sex marriage. Why? because everyone at your local church has been told that marriage should only be between a man and a woman? What about people who sincerely love each other? Are they monsters because they don't follow the teachings of your church?

In my estimation, the Republicans are a little better on national security than some Democrats. The Republicans have somewhat better ideas on the role of government in the economy than many Democrats. A lot of people would support Republicans if the issues were just national security and the economy, but they cannnot be convinced to support a party that is overly fond of branding immigrants as criminals, turning public schools into bible academies, and denying equal rights to other people who are different.

it will be interesting to see how well Rudy Giuliani does, first in Republican primaries, and then in a general election against a strong Democratic candidate (not guaranteed) when he will need a large turnout in red states. If a child of Italian immigrants from Brooklyn who supports reproductive choice without flip-flopping and has actually lived with a Gay couple wins the Republican nomination, then perhaps my potted history of the Republican propensity to run against those who are different from small-town America will be worthless as a guide to the future. That would be great! I'd still vote Democratic if they nominate Hillary Clinton or Bill Richardson, but you never know.

Jim,

I understand that it it easy to accidentally come across the wrong way in comments.

As a product of a little NE liberal arts school, and someone who has lived in suburbia, the city, and rural areas New England, the South and the Left Coast--and been a conservative (if not a Republican) the whole time, my perspective is not one that favors generalizations.

And as it turns out, I think your generalizations are a little weird. People in urban areas don't have a ton of contact with rural culture, and can be very parocial and judgmental. Just because they eat with chopsticks and call themselves cosmopolitan doesn't mean they don't dislike people who are different. They just use a different definition of "different." Some people are delighted to celebrate diversity, unless you're an NRA member BusHitler voter like me, in which case you're more of an outcast than a gay guy at a Virginia gun club.

Disliking "the Other" is a human failing, not a Republican one.

branding immigrants as criminals...

The next time a crack dealer goes to jail I think I'll call it "branding undocumented pharmacists criminals."

Hey, I'd like to change the immigration laws too. But that cause is not advanced by pretending that lawbreakers aren't breaking the law.

I've lived in the Washington area for most of my life and when I go to Borders or anywhere else in this region people look and act towards me like I'm a normal person.

A couple of years ago I took a trip with my friend and his mom to middle Virginia, around the Richmond area. The atmosphere was completely different. The receptionist lady at the Robert E. Lee house-mueseum, and a very nice lady she was, talked to us like we were FOBs (fresh-off-the-boat). "Oh did you know that Washington was the first president of the United States?" was what I remember her saying to my friend's mom who had worked at NIH for the last 20 or so years.

The sad thing was that she was trying to help us understand American history.

Whatever. People everywhere can be condescending at times and I'm not going to hold it against her. But if you asked me whether I would live in a blue country or a red country, I would say "blue country" 100% of the time.

I am always suspect of anyone who accepts an entire political agenda whole cloth. It's why I can't listen to Rush Limbaugh, he accepts a political doctrine and then shills it (he said so himself after the mid-terms).

It's one of the things I've always liked about Jane. She isn't just going to shill for a political doctrine. When I first started reading in early 2003 I used to get a little ticked off that she picked things to discuss that seemed to support her as a Republican or conservative as opposed to an open-minded libertarian, but then she'd come up with interesting analysis that wasn't stuck in the talking-point muck that many bloggers (on both sides) are stuck in. This is why I continued to read. Often a post would be on why she agreed with the Republican administration.

I often didn't agree with Jane but I understood where she was coming from (I think she's often wrong, but that's okay. I am sure she thinks the same thing about me.) and I respected her opinions.

Perhaps because so much of what the current administration has done has failed, there are fewer posts on why Jane agrees with their current actions. In addition I think it is well documented on this site that Jane has a commitment to renewable energy, the reduction of AGW and an interest in vegetarianism.

As for Amanda Marcotte, I used to read Pandagon all them time when Jesse and Ezra were writing it, for similar reasons to why I read this site. I stopped when Erza started his own site and then, soon after Jesse left. Why? Because Amanda Marcotte was an insufferable idiot who followed a specific dogma regardless of whether she was right or wrong or whether reason said otherwise. But I think Donohue's attack was appalling, and he's known for this kind of stuff before and I agree with Jane on the matter.

By the way there are many respected conservative bloggers who have done equally appalling things as Marcotte (Malkin comes to mind) and who are equally sure that the talking points are correct and do not question them. I don't read these bloggers either.

You want a blogger who reinforces your world view and makes you think you are so smart? Find another one. I like my bloggers with opinions and thoughts and concepts and ideas who don’t just follow some doctrinal logic because they are supposed to. I may not agree with what they say or whether they are right but I like that they get me to think about things different ways.

I'm essentially a cultural relativist, in that I think it is not possible to evaluate whether the experience of being in another culture is good or bad.

Nuance is good when it is guided by a keen desire to seek what is right, rather than hue to some libertarian, conservative or liberal "ideal" path. To the extent the author here is thinking through her positions, that is a good thing, and sometimes that evolves evolution in one direction or another.

As for the relativism, I would never find myself making that claim. But I understand the sentiment. That is, when I hear various polititians or people in the public eye refer to the U.S as "the greatest country in the world", I cringe.

Why? It is not because I don't believe we are the greatest (and with some nations, like England or Netherlands coming close). I think this country is awesome and it takes two seconds being in a Mexico or someplace else to realize what is often taken for granted.

But it seems so many people here in this country view the rest of the world through a self absorbed prism. There is no ability to empathize and to try to understand how an event (say, for example, the attainment of nuclear weapons), might feel for those in a different culture.

We look at them and say, "Gosh darn it, from they are crazy, they don't even have good rib joints, and you just know that the minute they get reliable nuclear power they are gonna missile up and kill us all-- they being crazy and without succulent ribs and all".

That is not to say Iranians won't accidentally or deliberately try to kill us all, or that they are not lacking reliable conveniences provided by a vibrant capitalist economy.

The problem remains that we often lack the seeing eye to be able to analyze situations and world problems while at the same time holding in our heads the idea that those we are looking at have legitimate concerns that make their world appealing to them. Ignorance (for them and us) can often be bliss.

So when the writer here implies that she recognizes how others might feel in a culture, I don't think she is automatically saying that "Their life is equal or better" per se, but that within the world they know, they are satisfied, and not merely satisfied by virtue of being crazy or misguided. It is what they know.

By the way there are many respected conservative bloggers who have done equally appalling things as Marcotte (Malkin comes to mind)... - Kate

Kate, I was with you until you equated Marcotte with Malkin. Other than the fact both bloggers are female and have last names beginning with the letter 'M', the two have little in common. Yes, Malkin has a strongly held point of view and she is an articulate advocate for that point of view, but I don't recall her ever being obscene, profane, or wishing her opponents would die. She attacks what she sees as the left's logical fallacies, factual errors, and hypocrisy, but she doesn't fantasize about their suffering torture or some horrible disease. (I don't read Malkin very often, so I may have missed something.) Marcotte did all of these things. I've read even less of her than I have Malkin, but I didn't need to read much of her spew before feeling the need to take a shower. The women is full of hate and her writing is the distillation of that hate.

Like you, I read Jane because I'd rather be enlightened than preached to. Malkin is too preachy for my taste, but that doesn't put her in the same zip code as Marcotte.

But it seems so many people here in this country view the rest of the world through a self absorbed prism.

That's absolutely true. Of course, if you try living abroad, you'll find it to be true elsewhere, too.

Again: a human failing, not an [American/Republican/"Red state"/insert group to be criticized here] one.

Zhong Lu, have you actually LIVED in red country? As opposed to visiting it?

"there are many respected conservative bloggers who have done equally appalling things as Marcotte (Malkin comes to mind)"

And what would you think of a Republican presidential candidate that hired Malkin purely based on her blogging? Would that candidate look moderate and reasonable, or extreme? The issue is not whether Marcotte should be allowed to blog, but whether her blogging qualifies her to be part of a mainstream presidential campaign. If Malkin was made an official part of a campaign, the media would drag out some of her more extreme comments, and those comments would be relevant in judging the candidate's choice of blogger.

Zhong Lu - I heard plenty of similar stories from my Cantonese-speaking Western friends living in Hong Kong. The locals would say incredibly insulting things in front of them, automatically assuming that they wouldn't be able to understand, because they looked foreign. Perhaps the nice lady at the historical museum (OK, house) thought people came to learn about history, and was trying to help. As you said, it happens everywhere.

I grew up in the Midwest and faced a wide range of patronizing questions when I went to college in New York City. In the 1980s, a 'cosmopolitan' boy from Boston asked if we in Missouri had ever heard of the Beetles! (Do they have electricity and radio waves in fly-over country?) When my roommate came out to visit, she looked across miles of corn fields and said "my, they waste so much space out here!"

My experience is that those in urban areas are more likely to think that they know everything, because they know one or two big cities and assume that nothing else matters. People in rural areas also mainly know their own sphere (that's life for most of us, after all) but are much less likely to think that they know 'everything'.

Malkin is more the right-wing equivalent of Kos or Atrios -- she has a fairly narrow point of view and bangs the drum loudly. However, all of these three do produce interesting things from time to time (Malkin's trip to Iraq, for example -- there's a case of literally putting your mouth where your mouth is).

Marcotte apears to be in a class of her own in terms of buttheaded ideaologuism -- Coulteresque, maybe, but with the added turn-off of pooping out the top end with alarming frequency.

Increasingly I see that "Jane" is willing to use government power for coercive purposes...always, of course, for "our own good", or perhaps for "their own good", since I don't see her calling for anyone to coerce her on any issue. There are many names for people willing to use the power of the state, which ultimately rests on men with guns who are willing to use them, but "libertarian" is generally not one of those names.

I see no reason not to take her claim of being a cultural relativist at face value. Of course, this means that she can't protest what the Sudanese tyranny is doing in Darfur, and was doing in the South, nor can she object to the slave market in Sudan where humans have been bought and sold like animals for over 1,000 years. Why? Because all those things must surely be just fine for that culture and even if they are not, since no culture is in any way superior to another, she has no leg to stand on in criticizing Sudan.

Furthermore, she canot logically object anymore to FGM, because it is an embedded part of a culture, and since she's a cultural relativist she can't claim that any culture, or any cultural artifact, is inferior or superior...except, of course, western civilization in general and the US in particular, which are horrid blots upon the history of humanity that urgently need to be wiped out as soon as possible...

Looking back at the last few weeks, I cannot help but wonder if there isn't some personal crisis in one form or another going on in the background of "Jane's" life. It isn't my business, nor anyone else's, but I hope that if something is troubling to her that it is resolved favorably, and soon. I miss the old "Jane Galt" who knew better than to use tu quoque, composition and other logical fallacies as "proof" of anything.

Iso: While the original comment (absolutists become dictators) was incorrect, the Nazis were not exactly relativists, either.

They did, after all, believe in the absolute superiority of the "Aryan", and the absolute inferiority of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and so on.

They did not argue, to my knowledge, that there was no right and wrong and thus they could do as they willed - they argued that what they wanted to do was right (because of the aforementioned belief in their racial superiority) and that the (mythical, invented) wrongs of the "international Jewish financiers" was wrong.

That they were spectacularly wrong in their assumptions and beliefs doesn't make them relativists, just spectacularly wrong.

(I was going to mention the wording of point 2, but I've been beaten to it.

I'm sure Jane meant that the evidence was growing more compelling, but my analysis of the evidence and controversy suggests her actual wording, unintended or not, is more accurate.)

While I don't want to get into a debate about who is worse, Malkin or Marcotte, because I don't read either, I find that the argument that Marcotte is worse because she uses bad words is beside the point. They are equally awful in different ways. I use curse words all the time. It doesn’t offend me. So by pointing that out to me I’m more likely to look at you in a confused fashion then to agree with your point. It’s not how they say something; it’s what they say that bothers me.

I wouldn't vote for a presidential candidate who hired Malkin because by hiring Malkin he (or she) would be demonstrating what his/her core values were, which are not in sink with mine. Malkin is about as far away from my core beliefs as one can get. Marcotte on the other hand, while I find her unreadable and reactionary, I do, on a very general level, agree with her core belief structure. That being said her being hired as a campaign blogger doesn't really bother me. I still wouldn't read the blog however.

Nor would I make any move to have either Ms. Marcotte or Ms. Malkin (were she working as the blogger for a fictional presidential campaign) removed from their posts. Who cares and how will that affect things in the future anyway. It is simply the act of hiring one of these reactionary people that tells me about the candidate. And, in fact, one of these bloggers who swallows party line without question and regardless of what truths are later discovered is actually the perfect person for a political candidate’s blog. Seriously, if John Edwards tells Marcotte the sky is orange she'll post it as gospel (Malkin would do the same thing for her fictional presidential candidate).

But would I make a fuss. No. Should a fuss have been made? No. Should people have called for her firing? No. You don't like it? Good. Don't read the blog and don't vote for the candidate.

For what it's worth, as someone who might be described as a "dirty fucking hippie" with advanced degrees in International Relations and Economics, I know that the occasionally virulent nature of *your* Comments section occasionally makes me wonder why I keep your blog bookmarked. Birds of a feather and all that.

The answer for me, I think, is that in the end I enjoy reading what you write and can always ignore the peanut gallery. I do also think that your demonstrated politics, at least, have shifted increasingly toward my own in the last couple of years.

Increasingly I see that "Jane" is willing to use government power for coercive purposes...always, of course, for "our own good", or perhaps for "their own good", since I don't see her calling for anyone to coerce her on any issue. There are many names for people willing to use the power of the state, which ultimately rests on men with guns who are willing to use them, but "libertarian" is generally not one of those names.

With the possible exception of someone who is an out-and-out anarchist, I think that everyone has a point at which they favor the government using force or the threat of force to coerce people to do things. Even if it is just the police arresting a murderer. Where the different ideologies differ is (a) where they draw the line and (b) why the draw the line at the point(s) that they do. Usually when someone holds themselves out to be a “libertarian,” they draw the line or base the point at which they draw the line on stopping the initiation of force and fraud. Which is why it is perfectly consistent for a limited government libertarian to support things like police, courts, the military, and maybe a few other things.

The reason why I think Jane has been criticized as “drifting to the left” is that she’s called for things like having the government tax the citizenry to pay for all health care expenses over some fixed amount and forcing underage girls to undergo HPV vaccinations. Those two positions really aren’t reconcilable with libertarianism. It represents instead the same sort of mindset that she attributed to the left and decried in an earlier post that “people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from themselves.”

Thorley Winston is correct. I must have written poorly; what I meant to point out was that increasingly, there does not appear to be any limits on state power for "Jane Galt".

Building on Winston's comments, I would like to point out that there are many cultural artifacts that Westerners take for granted, such as reasonably impartial courts, contract enforcement that actually works, and so forth. These are not universal human traits, and they didn't spring up overnight in the West, either. They are hard-won prizes that shouldn't be cast aside lightly. But cultural relativism demands exactly that: there's no logical reason for a cultural relativist to oppose having multiple judicial systems, one for secularists, another for Moslems, a third for someone else, for example. Extend that s step further, and there's really no reason why each community should not have its own separate police force...and firefighters...and militia...and shall we go farther down the road, to see where this leads?

Here is an economic example: a fellow I know married into a family in Thailand. When he went to buy something at the local store, he paid a certain price. His wife's father paid a lower price; he's a blood relative. If I, or any other farang, went there we'd pay a much higher price for all goods. Why? Because that's how business is done in that part of the world; who you are related to determines to a large degree what price you pay for certain goods. Sure, there's some of this everywhere, the legendary brother-in-law who can "get it for you wholesale" still exists. But by and large, in the West, we have prices that are the same no matter who is buying, which makes for economic efficiency. Elsewhere that isn't true, and the difference is cultural. Culture thus matters quite a lot, except to cultural relativists who are at the end of the day, free-riders...

Thorley Winston is correct. I must have written poorly; what I meant to point out was that increasingly, there do not appear to be any limits on state power for "Jane Galt".

Building on Winston's comments, I would like to point out that there are many cultural artifacts that Westerners take for granted, such as reasonably impartial courts, contract enforcement that actually works, and so forth. These are not universal human traits, and they didn't spring up overnight in the West, either. They are hard-won prizes that shouldn't be cast aside lightly. But cultural relativism demands exactly that: there's no logical reason for a cultural relativist to oppose having multiple judicial systems, one for secularists, another for Moslems, a third for someone else, for example. Extend that s step further, and there's really no reason why each community should not have its own separate police force...and firefighters...and militia...and shall we go farther down the road, to see where this leads?

Here is an economic example: a fellow I know married into a family in Thailand. When he went to buy something at the local store, he paid a certain price. His wife's father paid a lower price; he's a blood relative. If I, or any other farang, went there we'd pay a much higher price for all goods. Why? Because that's how business is done in that part of the world; who you are related to determines to a large degree what price you pay for certain goods. Sure, there's some of this everywhere, the legendary brother-in-law who can "get it for you wholesale" still exists. But by and large, in the West, we have prices that are the same no matter who is buying, which makes for economic efficiency. Elsewhere that isn't true, and the difference is cultural. Culture thus matters quite a lot, except to cultural relativists who are at the end of the day, free-riders...

I have read many accounts of the brutality, concubinage, and outright slavery of women in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but nothing as graphic as the interview with the doctor who specializes in FGM linked by Sid Rumpo above.

I had to stop reading a number of times to regain my composure. I want to go throw up now.

I should clarify on my health care plan that for me, it is the alternative to a much-feared nationalisation, not a first-best solution. I don't think a first-best solution is possible at this point; I'm just trying to stave off worse possibilities, which I think it does. Or would, if it were implemented. Which it won't be.

On FGM, I'm not saying it's right; I'm saying it's wrong, and should be stopped. I'm just saying that people who do it aren't *evil*; they're just in the grip of something that everyone is prey to, which is that if enough of your neighbours do something wrong, it is easy to go along with it. I think it's wrong to circumcise male infants as well (though less wrong, since it's less crippling), but I don't think that everyone who has their sons circumcised is evil, or members of a sick culture.

On public health and the environment, I've always been willing to use government coercion to promote genuinely public outcomes (obesity doesn't count); epidemics are a negative externality that are very hard to control except through collective action. Ditto the environment. Spreading disease and altering the climactic conditions under which your neighbours live are classic and to me, obvious violations of the libertarian "your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose". I don't think of HPV as being any different from any other disease; it's easy enough to catch through normal behaviour that over half the population is infected.

On animals, I've held the same basic position for a long, long time. I care about animal suffering; I think that the moral thing to do, if you can possibly afford it, is to buy certified humane meat before you buy a new iPod; likewise, I think the moral thing to do is not flood Bangladesh in 100 years in order to enjoy unnecessary energy uses now. I'm not advocating the state decide these things; I'm thinking about them for my own self, and believe that others should consider them for their own selves. I'm enough of a puritan to believe that a willingness to sincerely consider increasing your own displeasure in order to further moral goals is an integral part of a life well lived.

Dave, if you've ever been on an industrial farm, you'd be pretty sure that, say, the chickens crammed into one foot square cubes with the feces from the birds in the cages above them falling on them and their beaks cut off to prevent them from pecking the other birds to death, are not as happy as birds roaming free. The difference between those birds and Saudi women is that if those birds could see free range birds, it's basically a 100% probability that they'd rather be out there with their beaks on than sitting there in the chickenshit shower. My understanding is that Saudi women, on the other hand, overwhelmingly do not want to be Americans. They may want to have as much money as Americans; they may want the freedom to drive, to vote, or what have you. But they don't want to live here, much less be us. From their perspective, we are licentious, with no connection to family, we have an alien culture, and we worship false idols. Americans need to remember that there is a huge survivor bias in books written by escaped Saudi, etc. women; those are the women who hated the place enough to want to leave. It's as if Europeans talked to the kind of people who deliberately expatriate themselves from America, and concluded from this that all Americans were miserable in their empty consumer culture and longing to escape to somewhere better. And come to think of it, a lot of Europeans do just that.

The State Department warns women thinking about marrying Saudi and other traditional Arab men that possibly the hardest thing for them to accept will be that their daughters will embrace Saudi culture.

What will it be like to raise a daughter? Cultural differences are never greater than when it comes to the role of women, and raising a daughter is a challenge in any Saudi-American marriage. Growing up in the Kingdom, a young girl will naturally look forward to the day when she comes of age and can wear the abaya and cover her hair. She will naturally be very devout. She may be expected to marry a first cousin. While playing a central role in the family, a girl is nevertheless a statutory second-class citizen who needs to be protected and whose word is worth only half of a man's.

For a Saudi girl, this is the natural state of affairs; for an American mother of a Saudi girl, it can be unsettling. Not surprisingly, most of our child custody cases in which a child has been kidnapped from the United States involve a Saudi father "saving" his daughter from a "sinful" society and her "decadent" mother.

Since Saudi women are prohibited from marrying western men, an American mother must expect her daughter to integrate more tightly into Saudi society. This is not necessarily the case with sons who might be encouraged to study in the U.S. (Saudi girls are permitted to study in the U.S. only if they are chaperoned by a family member), who could freely travel to the West, whose business might facilitate travel between the two countries, and who might elect to marry an American woman. Several very liberal Saudi fathers and their American wives have been embarrassed by their more conservative daughters' decisions not to attend school in the United States in deference to the disapproval of their culture.

Kate said in part:

"... And, in fact, one of these bloggers who swallows party line without question and regardless of what truths are later discovered is actually the perfect person for a political candidate’s blog. Seriously, if John Edwards tells Marcotte the sky is orange she'll post it as gospel (Malkin would do the same thing for her fictional presidential candidate)."

I don't know anything about Marcotte but this is not accurate as regards Malkin. Malkin does not slavishly follow a party line, when she disagrees (as with the Miers nomination) she says so.

Malkin does not slavishly follow a party line, when she disagrees (as with the Miers nomination) she says so.

Everyone disagreed with the Miers nomination. That was the party line.

And, just for the record, what I was able to read of "In Defense of Internment" caused my stomach to turn and, it turns out, she got things factually wrong. I think that's a pretty far from main stream view. Don't you?

WOW! Words fail me!

I guess we are going to fall down on opposite sides of this, Jane. I would have never expected this from you.

As best as I can (without being a smartass), here goes:

Since Saudi women are prohibited from marrying western men...

That is their culture. I have no problem with that. It violates a code of honor that I do not begin to comprehend. I realize that there is a difference in our cultures and I will not judge whether they are wrong.

Except...when the penalty is death. That makes it wrong! In fact, it makes it evil. And there are women in Europe who are killed for this very reason.

(Killing a person because they are gay, or switched religions, is also evil, regardless of culture.)

I know that this is not a universal Muslim or Arab action, but it is not a one-off thing, either.

So, how far off are we on this? I know you don't approve of honor killings, but what would you consider acceptable punishment for the poor Saudi girl who marries a Westerner? Disownment? I could live with that as an acceptable, albeit unfortunate, cultural response. What if her brothers just beat her? No. Disownment is about as far as I can go. I don't see how you can legitimize an aspect of the culture and not legitimize the punishment for someone violating it.

(I do agree with your point that those who practice a cultural tradition are not necessarily evil. However, I do feel that the tradition itself (ie, FGM) can be.)

Thanks for responding within the thread. It's good to see that you are reading and thinking about responses.

Jane Galt wrote:
I should clarify on my health care plan that for me, it is the alternative to a much-feared nationalisation, not a first-best solution. I don't think a first-best solution is possible at this point; I'm just trying to stave off worse possibilities, which I think it does. Or would, if it were implemented. Which it won't be.

Thanks very much for the clarification. That gives me, at least, a very different impression than what I had previously.

On FGM, I'm not saying it's right; I'm saying it's wrong, and should be stopped.

As a cultural relativist, you are free to have the opinion that FGM is wrong, but you have no logical reason for demanding that it be stopped, because to do so you would have to take the position that a feature of an Other culture was inferior to that of your own culture.

I'm just saying that people who do it aren't *evil*; they're just in the grip of something that everyone is prey to, which is that if enough of your neighbours do something wrong, it is easy to go along with it.

Oh, my, "everyone else is doing it", that's your logical argument? Well...this appears to me to be yet another version of argumentum ad populum. Let us follow your argument and see where it can lead. How about, oh, 1938? In 1938, in Germany, people were smashing the shop windows of Jews and sending them to concentration camps. In the same year in the USSR, people were sending a lot of their neighbors to labor camps in the arctic, or to execution chambers. They were doing this because that's what their neighbors were doing.

So I guess, by the Jane Galt standards, neither the Holocaust nor the Great Purge were "evil". Thanks for clearing that up...

I don't think of HPV as being any different from any other disease; it's easy enough to catch through normal behaviour that over half the population is infected.

But this in no way justifies forcing 10 year old children into being Phase IV lab rats for Merck, without compensation no less. Honestly, did you even bother to read any of the comments that you got in response to that silly posting?

Thanks for clearing up that you don't want the state to mandate your own preferences in meat and other issues, that hasn't been clear at all for a while.

With regard to the Saudi marriage situation, Jane, it isn't just Saudi law that Moslem women may only marry Moslem men. It's Allah's law, as revealed to Mohammed; it's part of Sharia law, which has been practiced for over 1300 years. As a cultural relativist any objections you raise to the practice are without merit.

Maybe you should reconsider calling yourself a "cultural relativist"? Or at least use Humpty Dumpty's approach, and redefine the term...

PS: I find the practice of chattal slavery to be evil as well. The practice of buying, selling and owning human beings was not de jure outlawed in Saudi Arabia until the mid 1960's (that is not a typo, IIRC the year was 1963

It's Allah's will, apparently, that some should be slaves and some should be masters...

And now, I shall close that bold HTML

Sigh.

Jane,

I apologize for my light tone. It is a serious subject and deserves to be treated seriously.

As it happens, I have been to a factory chicken farm. It was from such a farm that we purchased our first set of chickens when my parents bought a ranch back several (we need not number how many) decades ago. While they did not sit in a "chickenshit shower", (such a condition would lead to disease and would be counter productive) the chickens were in small wire cages. The cages had a bottom that slanted towards the front so any eggs would roll into a trough where they could be collected. Above the egg trough were two troughs for food and water and a small hole in the cage that allowed the hen to reach her food and drink. Pleasant? No. The floor of the building was cleaned regularly and had a fresh covering of wood shavings to catch the birds' droppings. Still, the air stunk and was stifling. As we collected our "new" chickens, I was certain that they would love their new home -- a new coop with nesting boxes, a ladder for a roost, and a fenced-in run where they could eat the grass and grub for bugs.

Most of the chickens did seem to love their new digs. Some, seemed to long for their old situation. They would just sit in the nesting boxes and went on a hunger strike. They would not go to the communal feeder on the floor of the coop nor would they go out into the run to get their share of the "chicken scratch" we threw out by hand each day. You know how the story ends. We hung some cages inside the coop and hung food and water troughs off the front of the them. There those chickens that seemed to prefer the caged life lived for another 2 or three years -- quite contentedly from all appearances.

My point is experience teaches me that much of what is called "cruel" may not seem cruel to the animals involved. If I were a chicken, I know what I'd pick. I'd like the ability to run and scratch in the yard. However, even among humans, we've got a fair share of couch potatoes. Seems chickens might not be too different in that respect.

As for the differences between cultures, I largely agree with you. Given free choice, not everyone would adopt an American lifestyle (whatever that is). Given a free choice, many would rather live under a king than bear the burdens of democracy -- as long as the king could be trusted not to by a tyrant. Even if the king were a tyrant, some might prefer that to a democracy -- as long as the king left them alone. However, the fact that one or more people might make a freewill choice to live in a certain type of society does not mean that another type of society might not be objectively superior to the first. A lot of people might prefer Rocky IV to Citizen Kane, but that does not make it impossible to say which is the better movie. The same is true of cultures and societies. The fact that we cannot get universal agreement on which is the best does not mean that none are better or worse than the others. We are in a cultural war with a portion of the Islamic world. Unless we are willing to state the obvious, Western values are superior, we will be unwilling to do what is necessary to win -- fight for our right to live as we choose. The other side believes their values are superior to our own and are willing to kill us if we do not accept and live their values. I don't think its even a close call to say which society is better.

"Iso: While the original comment (absolutists become dictators) was incorrect, the Nazis were not exactly relativists, either. They did, after all, believe in the absolute superiority of the "Aryan", and the absolute inferiority of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and so on."

Sig, I disagree. I would distiguish between the political propaganda and the actual beliefs of the hierarchy. Surely you don't think the Nazi leadership were always forthright about their views. As Hitler once wrote, "How fortunate it is for their leaders that the masses do not think." He and Goebels were so succesful with their propoaganda because they founded it in "the big lie," as they called it...

If they were absolutists then why did they look to Heidegger, Nietzsche and Machiavelli--all of whom mocked moral absolutes--for intellectual inspiration? Machiavelli, for example, encouraged leaders to behave viciously, since virtue often leads to ruin. And Heidegger argued that the greatest error in all of Western philosophy was the creation of a world of absolutes and permanence, a world of pure being.

Make no mistake, the Nazi leadership had no interest in truth. They believed in "will to power" to use Nietzsche's formulation. They were not interested in whether invading Poland was "morally right." Indeed, they would have scoffed at such a question. To borrow again from Nietzsche, they considered themselves "beyond good and evil."

And another response: I guess by Jane Galt's reasoning, rabid segregationists of the Old South who engaged in lynching of black men weren't *evil*, they were just in the grip of something that everyone else is prey to, which is that if enough of your neighbors do something wrong, it is easy to go along with it.

Shall I continue, or is this sufficient?

Here is a quote that typifies there attitude: above all a worship of power and a disdain for reason and truth.

"The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."
Adolf Hitler

ANyway, my main point is that Naziism shows what can happen when people throw off the constraints that reason puts on us. Once we move away from absolutes then, as Dostoievski warned, "all is permitted." It is no longer possible to condemn eeven the most appalling barbarism.

"By what standard," the Nazis would ask you, "do you judge us, when you have yourself admitted that there are no standards." Relativism leads down a dark and dangerous road.

Speaking of carbon offsets, which at least has some economic content, consider the testimony here:

http://www.cei.org/pdf/5762.pdf

(Non clickable link, note it downloads a pdf).

Excerpt of note:
Under the Kyoto Protocol, for example, companies in the developing world that reduce output of the greenhouse gas HFC-23 are allocated carbon credits representing the amount of carbon dioxide-equivalent that they reduce. In total the amount of credits so allocated are worth about $5.9 billion when sold to countries that want those credits. Yet reducing HFC-23 is actually a simple process, achieved by installing scrubbers at a modest cost. According to a study published in the journal Nature last week, installation of those scrubbers could have been financed by loans or grants at a total cost of about $130 million. Thus almost $6 billion has been diverted away from other uses into the pockets of industry in the developing world. This is a massively inefficient way of achieving modest emissions cuts. Worse, it has now become apparent that China is creating HFCs – with 12,000 times the global warming potential of CO2 – for the purpose of being paid to destroy them under Kyoto. This is what such schemes have always created, from the British in India offering bounties for poisonous cobras – which led to mass breeding of the creatures – to the modern-day version of that ploy.

File that one under "unintended consequences"?

Ellipsis: "Increasingly I see that 'Jane' is willing to use government power for coercive purposes...always, of course, for 'our own good', or perhaps for 'their own good', since I don't see her calling for anyone to coerce her on any issue."

Really? I don't see her excusing herself from mandatory (or, more accurately, semi-mandatory)HPV vaccination for her family, or from paying the taxes for that health-care proposal of hers.

Thorley Winston: "The reason why I think Jane has been criticized as 'drifting to the left' is that she’s called for things like having the government tax the citizenry to pay for all health care expenses over some fixed amount and forcing underage girls to undergo HPV vaccinations. Those two positions really aren’t reconcilable with libertarianism. It represents instead the same sort of mindset that she attributed to the left and decried in an earlier post that 'people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from themselves.' "

Please. I've already noted, as has she, that mandatory vaccination is instead a way of protecting some children from neglect by their parents. (The argument of the American Academy of Pediatrics about this particular vaccine -- that it may be premature to launch a program as huge as Texas is now doing without some addional intermediate-scale tests of its safety -- is entirely separate.) And what anyone who calls for any level whatsoever of government health-care assistance favors is protecting people from the more disastrous consequences of the fact that (A) most of us can't be tycoons and (B) a lot of us can't earn enough money, even by hard work, to make it into the middle class. Are we actually supposed to think that trying to protect people from the hammer-blows of big medical bills that they couldn't help is "protecting them from themselves"?

That being said, I'm thoroughly baffled by Ms. McArdle's sudden retreat into saying that she only proposed that health-care plan to try to fend off further inevitable triumphs by the Evil Statists. That certainly wasn't the impression one got from her original message on the subject back in March 2006 ( www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005736,html ), in which she sounded positively enthusiastic about her scheme(government coverage of all health costs for people at less than twice the poverty level, and coverage for everyone else of all health costs over 15% of their gross income): "Call me a bleeding-heart liberal, but I don't want poor Americans to suffer without basic treatment. It's all very well to say that this is the operation of the free market, but I triple-dog dare you to go tell some old woman who is crippled by a disase she can't afford to treat that you think she needs to lean into the strike zone and take one for the team."

OK. If that really ISN'T the health-care system she wants, what the hell system DOES she herself really want? She's repeatedly made it plain that -- despite that silly pseudonym -- she is most emphatically not an Ayn Randian. How much government-provided health-care assistance for the lower-income segment of the population DOES she actually want?

Incidentally, regarding Ellipsis' earlier arguments against this vaccination program, I see that they consist of:

(1) Saying that the earlier test runs haven't proven that the vaccine is "absolutely safe" -- which isn't the case for any vaccine. What we CAN estimate from test runs is the relative death rates from vaccination versus non-vaccination. (In this particular case, according to the Baltimore Sun, the AAP is calling for a few more tests, while the CDC is saying that the tests have already been adequate and urging vaccination for all girls over 11.)

(2) Questioning whether Gardasil might "harm fertility" -- although it's extremely likely that the crippled virus in the vaccine is going to do less harm to female fertility than the full-strength virus that 80% of women have contracted by the time they're 40.

And if we're going to veer back onto the subject of global warming, I'm interested in hearing what he has to say about my 8-part reply to his arguments back on the "behavioral economics" thread.

Ms. McArdle: "On FGM, I'm not saying it's right; I'm saying it's wrong, and should be stopped. I'm just saying that people who do it aren't *evil*; they're just in the grip of something that everyone is prey to, which is that if enough of your neighbours do something wrong, it is easy to go along with it."

Well, Primo Levi (who survived Auschwitz) pointed out that exactly the same thing was true of Nazism. The most horrifying thing about the Nazis was that they were NOT subhuman fiends; they were perfectly ordinary human beings who just happened -- through the blind chances of history -- to have grown up in a society in which they were bombarded from childhood on with propaganda from the adults around them about the Evil of Jews and the Superiority of the Aryan Race. Of course they tended to believe it, as Southern whites believed in the Evil and Stupidity of Blacks for the same reason. The single most terrifying thing about history is not what it shows about our physical vulnerability to destruction; it's what it shows about the extent to which even our most basic concepts of morality -- our very souls -- are also manipulated by blind historical chance.

That, however, does absolutely nothing to show that Nazism -- or Southern racism, or the more malignant aspects of present-day Islam -- are not evil IDEAS, which must absolutely be resisted. And that distinction is the point that Reagan Fan, Ellipsis, et al are correctly making. (A pity the latter is so consistently lousy on subjects other than cultural relativism.)

Isocrates, have you actually read Machiavelli? Like Edgar Allen Poe, Machiavelli was slandered viciously during and after his life and apparently these slanders remain half a millenium later.

His most renowned book, The Prince, is a treatise on gaining and keeping power. It DOES NOT argue for leaders to behave viciously. That is slander. Instead:

"A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.

... But to come to those who, by their own ability and not through fortune, have risen to be princes, I say that Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and such like are the most excellent examples."

http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince06.htm

In his book, Machiaveilli argues that the best leaders are those that behave virtuously. The best leadres are those that are both "feared and loved." However, what Machiavelli realized is that sometimes princes must behave viciously to maintain their power. If a prince had to choose between fear and love, it is better to be feared because love is a fickle emotion.

Isocrates, please read Machiavelli before you comment about him.

And ellipsis, count to ten and...

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RELAX.

Yup. Read Machiavelli's "Discourses" and it becomes absolutely impossible to regard him as an amoralist -- although a lot of analysts who have read "The Prince" do think that he was trimming his moral views a lot in that book in an attempt to persuade the Medicis to take him on as a political counselor.

Bruce Moomaw, you made some excellent comments. Thank you for your contribution. Bravo!

Kate -

"Should a fuss have been made? No."

But if there had been no fuss, then many of us would not have gained this valuable piece of information about John Edwards. If Marcotte should be allowed to say whatever she wants on her blog, why shouldn't the rest of us be allowed to hear about and consider what she has said? No one forced Edwards to get rid of her - they simply voiced their opinions, and he made his choice.

Here's what Jane seemed to miss in her original post: She seemed to argue that her distrust of the original messenger somehow invalidated the message. Regardless of who brought up the subject originally, the strong reaction wasn't about certain religions deserving a special exemption - it was about the type of person Edwards chose to put on his campaign, and what that said about him.

"...it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity."--Machiavelli

Zhong Lu,

You yourself admit that, "what Machiavelli realized is that sometimes princes must behave viciously to maintain their power. If a prince had to choose between fear and love, it is better to be feared because love is a fickle emotion." And that is precisely what I was saying. Machiavelli argued that sometimes vice is beneficial to a ruler--that he who is to kind or forgiving is bound to come to ruin. Does this sound like a man who believes in moral absolutes--praising Cesare Borgia and couseling a judicious mix of virtue and vice? Clearly not, and only those who have not read him well could consider him a moralist like, say, Thomas Aquinas.

Machiavelli also attacked Plato, the champion of moral absolutes, and his (and Socrates') central contention in The Republic that "it is better to suffer than to do harm." Please read the section on the Ring of Gyges and contrast it with Machiavelli's view.

As Machiavelli wrote, clearly with Plato in mind: "Many have imagined republics and princialities that have never been seen nor are known truly to exist. There is so great a distance between how men live and how they ought to live that he who rejects what men actually do in favor of what they ought to do, brings about his ruin rather than his preservation." So Plato and Socrates tell us to behave virtuously, even when that brings suffering, while Machiavelli tells to be viscious when circumstances call for it, rather than end in ruin.

I'm glad to have had this opportunity to rescue you and Bruce Moonaw from ignorance, but my key point was not about the interpretaton of Machivelli, but rather about the dangers of relativism. I certainly do not mean to "slander" Machiavelli or Nietzsche, two great philosophers, but rather to say what they actually believed and why the national socialists found some of their arguments useful in their own bloody endeavour.

P. S.: I recommend reading Richard III for an implicit critique of Machiavelli's teachings.

A couple more quotes for those here who wish to rank Machiavelli with Jesus, Francis of Asisi and Mother Theresa as a great moralist:

"Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared."-Machiavelli

"For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her."--Machiavelli

Sorry, McArdle, can't bring myself to read your commenters -- it was a very busy day in the market. Ever trade for a living? Try it. It focuses the mind. And holy hannah, what a great day today. The carry trade unwinds -- maybe! Everything lock-limit down! (I exaggerate for effect. Surely you, of all people, sympathize.)

Which brings me to my point: Marcotte, from what I remember, is tiresome. "Unbearable" are those who carry water for capital and put lipstick on that pig, denoting it intellect.

That's you, sweetheart, you.

Get a job, kid, you bother me.

If Hitler interpreted Machiavelli to mean he should invade Russia and declare war on the US, well, that's his and not Machiavelli's fault. In fact, Machiavelli would have counseled Hitler not to invade Russia and not to declare war on the US because these actions would only bring ruin to the Third Reich.

The Nazis misinterepted and misread Machiavelli and Nietzsche. Hence: their demise.

Also, what's the point of being virtuous if you're going to end up dead? Don't you think that's kind of stupid? Virtue should be a means to an end, and not an end itself. If virtue leads to success, than go for it. But otherwise, what's the point?

(I'm not arguing that everyone should act however they want to act. That's not what I'm arguing. And that's not what Machiavelli's arguing either. Behaving virtously has the advantage that others will trust you. If you act like a shisthole all the time, like the Nazis, no one's going to like you, and that's going to fuk you up in the long run. I believe that people be taught when to act virtuously... and when to act otherwise).

Also, Isocrates, Machiavelli believed in the moral absolute of power. According to Machiavelli, how could a Prince do good, if he is powerless?

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The biggest mistake a person can make when reading Machiavelli is to have to narrow a definition of power. Stalin made that mistake when he said: "The Pope? [Him powerful?] And how many tank divisions does he control?"

Stalin underestimated the Pope's reach and influence (and hence power) because Stalin only understood the power of the fist. The Pope has been, continues to be, and will always be powerful as long as he has the loyalty of millions of Catholics worldwide.

Isocrates

I think that you should also read Nietzsche, and not just the titles of his books.

Disinterested Observer,

If only you could know how silly you sound. I have spent countless hours reading Nietzsche--more probably than any other author. His writing is beautful and his thinking is always stimulating. He is in my mind one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived.

And I haven't misrepresented him. One of his chief aims was to mount an attack on Socratic-Platonic absolutes. He asked of Socrates most fundamental aim: "Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?"

He also unambiguously rejected the Platonic "Form of the Good." Instead of a single morality, determined by reason, Nietzsche saw many different moral systems. He distinguished them as master and slave moralities. His thinking is too subtle to summarize here, but one passage which I know almost by heart from Beyod Good and Evil gives some of the flavor of it (and especially his rejection of Christian morality, which he considered a slave morality):

"Every enhancement of the type man has been the work of an aristocratic society-and it will be so again and again... To be sure one should not yield to humanitarian illusions about the origins of an aristocratic society... Human beings whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in posession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races... In the beginning the noble caste was always the barbarian caste... they wer more whole human beings, which also means, at every level, more whole beasts."

While I myself believe that Nietzche would have despised National Socialism as a vulgar mob movement, it isn't hard to see in passages like the one just quoted why the Nazis found much in his thinking to like. And clearly one of his greatest students--Martin Heidegger--freely joined the Nazi Party.

Anyway, if I been able to enlighten some of you about the philosophical roots of National Socialism, I'm glad of it. I'm quite certain I have made my case conclusively.

Just passing through and certainly not an expert, but I notice that comments here, as on most other blogs, seem to share some interesting characteristics.

First, comments tend to be unconvincing. This seems to be related to a secondary characteristic, the absence of substantive content beyond the writer's bare opinions. Third, most comments seem to be excessively self-righteous, always a turnoff.

I'm sure most readers can find additional commonalities. Not sure what the cure for these shortcomings might be. Perhaps a modicum of thinking before one writes?

Isocrates: But who really believes that the culture of Nazi Germany or of Stalin's Russia or of Pol Pot's Cambodia was just as good as the culture of the United States?

Note to Isocrates: Hiter's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and Pol Pot's Cambodia involved the actions of governments, not cultures.

Comparing temporally-limited governments to the semi-permanent feature of culture is like comparing apples to granite.

Bruce Moomaw wrote:
Ellipsis: "Increasingly I see that 'Jane' is willing to use government power for coercive purposes...always, of course, for 'our own good', or perhaps for 'their own good', since I don't see her calling for anyone to coerce her on any issue."

Really? I don't see her excusing herself from mandatory (or, more accurately, semi-mandatory)HPV vaccination for her family, or from paying the taxes for that health-care proposal of hers.

Suppose that some red-state-neck demands "Everyone should own a revolver of .38 caliber or above, and a 4x4 pickup truck". Jane and other New Yorkers might find this to be a bit difficult to live with. But back to the guy making the demand; would you argue that he's "not excusing himself from mandatory state requirements"? Somehow, I'm skeptical. This is the same thing: Jane Galt's demanding that state power enforce things on others that she has no objection about doing herself.

Bruce Moomaw wrote:
Incidentally, regarding Ellipsis' earlier arguments against this vaccination program, I see that they consist of:

(1) Saying that the earlier test runs haven't proven that the vaccine is "absolutely safe" -- which isn't the case for any vaccine.

This claim is false. I have pointed out that no testing has been done on any person younger than 16 years of age, therefore we cannot state that Gardasil is safe for 11 year old girls. I have made the factual observation that what Jane and others want is for millions of girls to serve as unpaid, uncompensated Phase IV test subjects for Merck.

(2) Questioning whether Gardasil might "harm fertility" -- although it's extremely likely that the crippled virus in the vaccine is going to do less harm to female fertility than the full-strength virus that 80% of women have contracted by the time they're 40.

I have asked that question, because the "crippled virus" in question is created via a new genetic modification technique from fragments.

I have also wondered how long Gardasil protection lasts, and have pointed out that women who receive Gardasil still must undergo the same routine exams that the unvaccinated receive, because the tumors that Gardasil is assumed to protect against constitute only 70% of all uterine cancers.

Please be more careful when quoting me. Thank you in advance.