Monthly Archive for March, 2010

There has been a lot of astonishing tone-deafness in the media response to the increasing evidence that the pope personally presided over the systematic coverup of child molestation and rape. And do let’s call it by its name; don’t allow people to get away with euphemizing or dissembling by referring to it as “abuse” or “impropriety” or “sexual misconduct”. That last is the term employed by the odious Reverend Lawrence C. Murphy, who molested, raped, and tortured as many as 200 children—some while inside the confessional—at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin. In 1998, the good reverend appealed for mercy directly to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the grounds that he was in ill-health, and that the canonical statute of limitations for his crime had long run out. See, church proceedings to defrock a priest can only be brought within one month of the alleged instance of abuse. Of course the one-month limit is preposterous, because Father Murphy, and his fellow priestly pederasts, demanded vows of silence from their victims, who let us not forget were scared, confused, traumatized children; in Murphy’s case, he intimidated them into keeping quiet under the “sacrament of confession.” Murphy’s victims were also deaf, and they had much trouble alerting church authorities to their abuse. No matter, his case was eventually dismissed and he died a full priest. Maybe he’ll be beatified some day for his resilience in the face of such personal adversity.

Ross Douthat, conservative New York Times columnist and practicing Catholic, wondered in his Sunday column which side of the culture war is more to blame for the scandal:

In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church’s conservative instincts — the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics — that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished.

This attempt at even-handedness is absurd. You might think, for instance, that the church’s “conservative instincts” would lead it to conclude that child rape should not be a countenanced church activity. And anyway, perhaps there is something wrong with a “conservative instinct” that says the only thing worse than child rape is the disclosure of child rape. But Ross is probably right: my anti-child rape, pro-disclosure position could just be the wild-eyed liberal in me talking.

In a follow-up blog post, Douthat presents a chart showing a big spike in reported cases of molestation in the 1960′s and 1970′s. Ross at least wonders whether the comparatively low number of reported abuse from the 1950′s is simply because fewer victims have come forward from that era. Ross admits that we can’t know for sure, but then presents evidence that he says argues against that possibility. But in order to argue that the liberal sexual mores of the ’60s and ’70s contributed to the uptick in abuse, Ross is forced to make an absurd moral distinction between “‘short term’ incidents — cases where the priest’s abusive behavior reportedly lasted less than a year” — and longer-term abuse, lasting over a year. See, short-term cases of molestation remain constant across the decades: from the good ol’ repressed 1950s through the hippy “silly season” as Ross calls it, and on through the 2000s. Whereas longer-term reported cases increase in the ’60s and ’70s in line with the overall pattern.

So, under this ridiculous distinction, the molestation of a minor in 1950 over a period of say, 10 months, only proves that the priest in question is a bad dude. But if the same priest, in 1968, engaged in binge of rape lasting, say, 14 months, then Ross finds that a strong indication the priest was under the crazy spell of the prevailing “permissive sexual culture”. Ross concludes ominously that “it’s hard to deny that something changed in the 1960s, and not for the better.”

Ross is a very smart guy. But what absolute crap.

First, the data in his chart are from reported cases of abuse, not the total actual instances of abuse. We’ll never know the true grisly scope of this divine crime ring. But do we think that it’s possible that the same consistent pattern of “short term incidents” extends well before 1950? For instance, how many church sex victims were there in, say, 1835? How about 1535? Certainly more than zero. And if there was a spike in abuse reports in 1535, would Ross attribute it to the prevailing permissive culture ushered in by the 1534 publication of Rabelais’ baudy and sexually-charged satires Gargantua and Pantagruel?

And as commenters to his blog post point out, Ross is probably right that something did change in the 1960s, but for the better. It is far more likely that the sexual revolution loosened the code of silence and culture of shame surrounding sex, giving victims more courage to come forward and speak of their abuse. And is it such a leap of logic to imagine that prior to the modern media era, the church was just much more successful at suppressing and otherwise ignoring allegations of abuse? If Ross thinks this lovely pre-modern era of pervasive sexual shame, repression, and persecution is something to be nostalgic for, well that’s his problem. Let him keep his bizarre reactionarism between he and his (hopfully well-adjusted) priest, and off the pages of the New York Times.

Ross ends his Sunday column with a tepid demand for justice:

Popes do not resign. But a pope can clean house. And a pope can show contrition, on his own behalf and on behalf of an entire generation of bishops, for what was done and left undone in one of Catholicism’s darkest eras.

This is Holy Week, when the first pope, Peter, broke faith with Christ and wept for shame. There is no better time for repentance.

Complicity in enabling the perpetuation of child rape is a CRIME. Repentance and contrition don’t cut it here in the earthly domain. Let these facilitators and harborers, including Mr. Ratzinger, be hounded in every civic jurisdiction they show up in for the rest of their lives. They can make their peace with their god from the ascetic comfort of a jail cell.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this fascinating TED talk by Sam Harris, on the ability of science to discern objective human values and answer seemingly qualitative moral questions of right and wrong:

I’ve also been thinking a lot about this essay by Freddie DeBoer, in response to Sam:

if we are indeed a cosmic accident, the result of the directionless and random process of evolution, then it makes little sense to imagine that we are capable of ordering the world around us, beyond the limited perspective of our individual, subjective selves. This has always been to me the simplest step in the world, from the first two beliefs to the third, from the collapse of geocentrism and creationism to the collapse of objective knowing. Yet I find that it is one many people not only refuse to make, but one that they react against violently. This is the skepticism that is refused, and this refusal is the last dogma.

I find that “simplest step” to be a non-sequitur. Why can’t a process of directionless and random evolution create beings that are capable of objective knowing? DeBoer doesn’t like this argument, but his statement is self-refuting: If geocentrism and biblical creationism are objectively false, how on earth could that lead to a conclusion that there is no such thing as objective truth or falsehood?

A belief in objective knowledge does not crowd out the possibility of the numinous or the transcendent, nor I think does it dampen the beauty or mystery of such experiences. Perhaps science will one day discern the neurological basis for these types of experiences, and perhaps not. Maybe we know with exact precision the chemical composition of stars and galaxies and the mundane laws that govern their movement and their lifespan; does that take away from the beauty of the images captured by the Hubble Telescope? And perhaps we have mapped out with stunning accuracy the region of the brain responsible for music; but does that make this any less ridiculously awesome?

DeBoer goes on to say:

But suppose my intuition is wrong. Suppose there is, actually, a transcendent morality, a right and wrong that is capital-t True, that is non-contingent, not temporal, that applies to each and every person and situation: then totalitarianism must become the truth of man. If Sam Harris emerges from his lab with his beaker and his chart of what is right and what is wrong– cast the human question onto the fire. There could be no difference, no diversity. Say goodbye individualism, say hello to the jackboot, and knowing that it is all the worse for being objectively true.

But as Sam says, plenty of people have emerged from their labs and declared what is right and wrong in the context of human well-being. And just as we do in the concrete sciences, we are indeed able to adjudicate such truth claims based on evidence. Jefferson and Madison once presented a list of truth claims. And 200 years later the Taliban did. Are we able to sit here today and discern which truth claims represent a peak and which a valley on the moral landscape? Freddie refuses to say that the Taliban’s moral system is objectively contrary to the goals of human well-being. He condemns the Taliban only because his individual moral framework seems to lead him to that conclusion. I admit that this sort of perspectivism is deeply unsettling to me, and perhaps my visceral discomfort with it distorts my critique. But I simply disagree that accepting the validity of truth claims about human well-being is some slippery slope to totalitarianism. And I disagree that science has no role to play in adjudicating competing claims. Sam made a point, with his chess example, to say that there will never be a totalizing truth that applies “to each and every person and situation.” But does admitting there is indeed a right answer to the above question come anywhere close to “cast[ing] the human question onto the fire”?

As I wrote last week, even if one believes that science is capable of unfurling the great mysteries and vagaries of human life, it says nothing about the desirability of imposing those insights on mankind, and it does not necessarily encroach on “the space for people to live their strange, idiosyncratic lives.” Here I must quote Dostoevsky some more, who has presaged DeBoer’s worry about Sam and his beaker and his charts that will detail what is right and what is wrong:

But I repeat for the hundredth time that there is one case, and only one, when a man can consciously and purposely desire for himself what is positively harmful and stupid, even the very height of stupidity, and that is when he claims the right to desire even the height of stupidity and not be bound by the obligation of wanting only what is sensible. After all, this height of stupidity, this whim, may be for us, gentlemen, the greatest benefit on earth, especially in some cases. And in particular it may be the greatest of all benefits even when it does us obvious harm and contradicts our reason’s soundest conclusions on the subject of what is beneficial—because it does at any rate preserve what is dear and extremely important to us, that is our personality and our individuality.

Look, I am clearly sympathetic to Freddie’s fealty to empirical skepticism (it was just three days ago that I wrote this) (and I am, after all, currently slogging through the essays of Montaigne, who is one of the most insightful and engaging empirical skeptics in human history). And there is a limit to the extent to which I’m comfortable presuming the path to well-being for other people. Like Sam says, there most certainly are many peaks on the moral landscape, and many equivalent ways to thrive. (Though here Sam slips up. He says,

I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat. There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food. But there is nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison.

There is, of course, no such clear distinction. Are peanuts food or poison?)

And we must always be mindful of Dostoevsky’s point (again, from Notes From Underground; really, go buy it) that could just as easily apply to ourselves as to our competing truth claimants:

But man is so partial to systems and abstract deduction that in order to justify his logic he is prepared to distort the truth intentionally.

These are all just provisional thoughts and I will probably have more to say after mining my bookshelf for a few more hours or years or decades.

Clearly the Six-Party-Talk members are avid readers of PoliticsInVivo:

Experts from South Korea, the U.S. and China will meet in China next month to share information on North Korea, assess possible contingencies in the country, and consider ways to cooperate in case of an emergency situation. [...]

Gen. Walter Sharp, the top U.S. commander in South Korea, says the possibility of turmoil in the North is of real concern, citing the country’s economic weakness, malnourishment in both the military and general population, and its nuclear weapons.

"The possibility of a sudden leadership change in the North could be destabilizing and unpredictable," he said in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee hearing earlier this week.

South Korean media have reported that Seoul has drawn up a military operations plan with the United States to cope with possible emergencies in the North.

Ok, good to know.

I actually have 57 page views from South Korea this month. No doubt the good general is among them.  

Megan McArdle claimed that Republicans had "pursuaded the country that they don’t want this bill" and she argued that that should have been reason enough to kill the whole thing. Luckily nobody listened to Megan, because it seems that passing the bill has pursuaded the country that they, in fact, do want this bill. This is a very preliminary poll, and we’ll see in the next few weeks what the real trend is. But 49% of people think that Congress passing the bill was a good thing. And 40% think it’s bad. A few weeks ago, it was 45%-48% against passage. That’s a 12-point swing. According to Megan’s theory of governance, is this a new mandate to immediately enact even more sweeping reforms?

Of course not. This new data shouldn’t be dispositive either, and lord knows where the numbers will be in six months, or in three years. But that’s the point. The public likes success and toughness. So does the media. A month ago the Republicans looked successful and tough. Now the Democrats do. It goes to show that we should all be very thankful that Rasmussen and Gallup do not govern this country. To argue otherwise is to argue for the worst kind of mob rule.

In addition to the mandate/insurance regulation/subsidies, there’s a lot of other stuff packed into the health care law (calling it a law rather than a bill or a proposal is gonna take some getting used to). Much of it has to do with transparency and prevention.

For instance, via Ezra Klein, menu labeling:

One of the bill’s provisions is a menu labeling proposal for chain restaurants with more than 20 locations. The proposal requires chains to post the caloric content of each item (and the total calories of combo meals) next to its listing on the menu, the menu board, and even the drive-through menu kiosk.

Another potent criticism of the health bill is that it doesn’t do enough to tackle the real problem: spiraling costs. And despite the CBO estimate that the bill will cut the national deficit by $143 billion in the first ten years, and $1.2 trillion in the next ten, it seems to be a common critique to either deny outright that this is part of the CBO estimate, or to dismiss the CBO as biased and its estimate as impossible or impractical. Now, I agree it would be absolutely absurd to spend much time defending anyone’s estimate on what will happen twenty years from now. Nonetheless, Ezra Klein deftly refuted some of these CBO criticisms the other day:

It’s true that the CBO’s estimates of the health-care reform bill are uncertain. But that cuts both ways. A lot of very respected health-care economists and experts think the CBO is being way too conservative in how much the bill’s payment reforms will save. Historically, CBO has frequently underestimated the savings from health-care reform legislation. To use one example, they heavily overestimated the cost of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. More examples here.[…]

[…] The role of CBO isn’t to offer perfect estimates. Predictions are hard. Its role is to offer the best guess anyone can reasonably offer. The most common criticism of the agency is not that it is too generous to untested legislation, but too conservative. That’s a byproduct of needing evidence to build models but also needing to evaluate policies that have never really been tried before. But it’s okay. We probably want our scorekeeper to be a bit on the conservative side.

What we can say about the CBO score the Democrats got is that it could be overestimating or underestimating the savings that health-care reform will deliver, but in any case, this is the best guess from the town’s most rigorous guesser.

Leave it to Rep. Mike Pence to take these legitimate concerns about cost to a shockingly stupid place. During his floor speech yesterday, Mike Pence showed off a favorite one-liner: “Only in Washington can you spend a trillion dollars and say you’re gonna save the taxpayers’ money!”  Har har. Either Mr. Pence thinks his constituency is made up only of third graders, or else he has actually never heard of the practice in which a business, in a crazy scheme to turn a profit, might invest in new efficiencies in order to save money in the long run. If I was a business owner in Pence’s eastern Indiana district, I’d be rather worried that my congressman didn’t understand this basic concept. “Only in Washington” is Mike Pence considered some kind of future intellectual star of a major political party.

Anyway, Ezra lists the five most promising cost control measures in the bill. The measures strike me as promising because, in aggregate, they begin to implement a new set of structural incentives at several different places within the system. Currently, everyone has a bizarre incentive to spend as much as possible on health care. The providers get paid more when they do more tests; your employer’s insurance costs are tax exempt, and they just take it out of your wages anyway; Insurers don’t care about costs because they’ll just raise your premium 30% a year for the rest of your life until you lurch exhaustedly over the Medicare finish line; And you don’t much care about cost because most likely you are shielded from the vast majority of the expense.

The bill starts the essential work of realigning these perverse incentives a little bit. This should be championed by conservatives and liberals alike. As Ezra says, the various cost control mechanisms compliment each other, and institute a framework in which future reforms and tweaks and innovations are encouraged. And I think it’s safe to say that future reforms and tweaks and innovations will be desperately needed.

A pretty decent criticism of the health bill is that it doesn’t do much for a whole lot of people, and it doesn’t accomplish much of anything for several more years. To the first criticism: while it’s true that after ten years, about 90% of Americans will have seen no difference whatsoever in their insurance situation, we cannot know for sure who will comprise the other 10%; and it really takes a very small imaginative leap to see how your circumstances could one day change such that you need the protections that this bill provides. Unfortunately we are terrible at imagining our circumstances changing, and this fact has been a very strong impediment to those making the case for improving the system.

And although it’s true that the real meat of the bill doesn’t take effect for a few more years, there are a number of things this legislation does either immediately or in the first year. Here’s the full list of them (via Ezra).

As you can see, a few broad categories: new insurance regulations (bans lifetime caps on coverage, ends recission, bans denial of children with pre-existing conditions, lets kids stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26); subsidies to help cover people (tax credits for small businesses, temporary high-risk pool for people with pre-existing conditions, extra help for some Medicare recipients and early retirees who are 55-64); and structural changes (new investment to train more primary care docs, expansion of Community Health Centers, requires insurance companies to spend 80%-85% of the premiums they collect on actual medical services for their customers).

Some of these are downpayments on larger initiatives that will expand over time, and some of them are temporary measures until the exchanges are up and running and the subsidy regime is really kicking.

The weather’s so nice out today, I figure what better way to celebrate it than to go on a whirlwind virtual tour of the few remaining totalitarian hell-holes left on the planet. Libya? North Korea? I’m looking at you.

I find I have an abiding morbid fascination with these sorts of societies. How does such deep, entrenched military, political, and ideological capture occur? What do the denizens of these societies really think of the place? What do they do for work and recreation? How can such squalor and oppression last for so damn long? These are awfully complicated questions, so here’s some recent stuff written about each country that I found fascinating. First, North Korea.

Christopher Hitchens wrote about his trip to North Korea several years ago in Vanity Fair. I can’t find the piece online, but it’s in his excellent essay anthology, Love, Poverty, and War. In it, he addresses the burning question of all closed societies: do the slaves really love their chains? Do North Koreans really believe the maniacal propaganda spoon-fed them from birth? Do they actually worship Kim Jong-il and his father, Kim Il-Sung, who "eternally" holds the title of president of the country even though he died in 1994? Do they really think that North Korea is the envy of the entire world?

I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a cafe makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men’s room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it’s almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn’t like that.

Echoing the perceptions of Czeslaw Milosz in his incisive and terrifying book, The Captive Mind, Hitch then gets to the totalitarian essense:

It’s an "as if" society. Uniformed female traffic cops do pirouettes at intersections, though there are no cars. Newspapers come out, though they contain no news. Restaurants produce menus of non-existent dishes. At the airport, there are barely any planes. In the national art gallery—they understand that you have to have a national art gallery—almost all the paintings are of the same two people.

In a recent article in Slate, Hitchens reviews a new book by B.R. Meyers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. In it, Meyers argues that understanding North Korea’s ideology as some mongrel fusion of Eastern bloc Communism and patriarchial Confucianism is misplaced. Instead, we should "regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia." Hitchens concludes his review:

Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

Well next to that bit of sunshine, Libya’s own brand of autocratic misery looks like a spa retreat.

A new essay by Michael Moynihan in Reason Magazine describes his recent visit to "the world’s only Islamo-socialist personality cult." Unlike North Korea, Libya and its monomaniacal dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, have been making tentative steps in recent years to open the society and reengage the international community. Moynihan doesn’t see much hope for success:

Tripoli, Libya—Perhaps I overestimated the bien-pensant British understanding of “modernity.” When the BBC reported that “at Tripoli’s ultra-modern airport…you could be almost anywhere in the world,” I expected at bare minimum a Starbucks, a fake Irish pub, and (this is the ultra bit) a bank of vending machines dispensing iPods and noise-canceling headphones.

Well, perhaps we came through Libya’s spillover airport, its Midway or Stansted, because this is “anywhere in the world” only in some mad, dystopian-novel sense. Available for purchase are Egyptian gum, cheap watches celebrating 40 years of the Libyan revolution, and glossy magazines with Hugo Chavez on the cover. Sinister men in baggy uniforms, all puffing Marlboros, shout at each other and disappear with my passport. I later find out this bit of theater was required because I possess a passport stamp from Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. After some discussion, my personal government apparatchik informs the entire staff of Libyan customs that, on orders from high, this particular learned elder of Zion can be allowed through. […]

[…] Remove the oil economy, and it isn’t entirely clear what Libyans do for money. The only shops I spot are selling either vegetables or cigarettes, sometimes both. There are markets trading in all manner of junk: old sewing machines, toilets, fake perfume (Hugo Boos seems particularly popular). The most frequently promoted product (aside from the ubiquitous face of Qaddafi staring down from countless billboards) is, inexplicably, corn oil. After decades of crippling trade sanctions under an aging and increasingly batty dictator, and with no tourism industry to speak of, Libya’s economy is a shambles. In their latest Index of Economic Freedom, the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal rank the country 171st out of 179, only slightly edging out the Union of the Comoros and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Whereas Hitchens found no hint of cracks in the facade that encases Kim Jong-il and his vile regime, Moynihan sees evidence everywhere in Libya of a society that has left its decrepit leadership behind, ideologically and culturally, many years ago:

No matter how hard governments try, though, it is increasingly difficult to close a country to all malignant Western cultural influences. The tighter the controls, the more pedestrian the content that sneaks through. Libyan teenagers have scrawled “50 Cent” and “Tupac” throughout Tripoli’s largest souk. On a crumbling yellow wall outside a bootleg DVD shop, someone was inspired—doubtless by a contraband hip-hop CD—to scribble “fuck yo” in defiance of nothing much at all. Inside the DVD shop, the Hollywood film Fat Albert is available for a few dollars—popular, presumably, because the title character, like most Libyans, lives in a junk yard.

Indepedent journalist, travel writer, and war correspondent Michael Totten visited Libya a few years ago, and wrote a wonderful dispatch of his experience, complete with fantastic photos (including the amazing Berber ruins in the Sahara). He too found plenty of evidence that the beseiged and beaten residents of Libya do not for a second buy into the corrupt and defunct ideology cult of their ruler. Totten spoke to a shopkeeper in Tripoli, asking him his opinion of Qaddafi; and in a country where one person in six works for the secret police, Totten tried to assure the man that he was a foreigner and it was safe to talk candidly:

He thought about that. For a long drawn-out moment, he calculated the odds and weighed the consequences. Then the dam burst.

"We hate that fucking bastard, we have nothing to do with him. Nothing. We keep our heads down and our mouths shut. We do our jobs, we go home. If I talk, they will take me out of my house in the night and put me in prison.

"Qaddafi steals," he told me. "He steals from us." He spoke rapidly now, twice as fast as before, as though he had been holding back all his life. He wiped sweat off his forehead with trembling hands. "The oil money goes to his friends. Tunisians next door are richer and they don’t even have any oil."

"I know," I said. "I’m sorry."

Totten assessed the city’s brutal aesthetic:

Now that I knew the layout of the city, I decided to return to Green Square alone. I wanted to know what the real Tripoli, the not-touristed Tripoli, looked like. It was worse on foot than by car, and exactly what I expected: all right angles and concrete. Almost everyone in this part of town lived in a low barrackslike compound or a Stalinist tower. Landscaping didn’t exist. There were no smooth edges, no soft sights, nothing to sigh at. Tripoli’s aesthetic brutality hurt me. I walked parts of the city hardly any foreigners ever bothered to see. It looked post-apocalyptic, as if it had been evacuated in war or hit with a neutron bomb.

Like Moynihan, Totten also found much of Tripoli to be a lifeless junkyard:

The main drag along the sea into the city was one straw short of a freeway. There were no houses, businesses, restaurants or shops along the way — only clusters of vertical human-storage units surrounded by empty lots the size of a Wal-Mart.

Trash was smeared on the sidewalks. It clogged all the street gutters. Almost every available blank space (and, oh, were there plenty of those) was a dumpsite.

There’s no heartening moral at the end of any of this. The suffering and death wrought by these two men is, in the end, unimaginable to us.

Well, wherever you are tonight, the least you can do is to remember to take a long, languid stroll, and be forever humbled and thankful that the purely random accident of your birth did not land you in such circumstances.