Matt Zeitlin

Slate’s Lantern — which examines whether certain behaviors are environmentally sound — takes a look at the manual transmission. Manual transmissions, it turns out, can realize something around 15% mileage efficiency gains, assuming that the drivers are proficient in not letting the revs getting too high and coasting whenever possible. As a manual devotee, I think this is important information to spread, but the benefits of stick shift driving are much more expansive than being more gas-efficient.

The first is, especially as a teenager, the feeling of superiority you feel by driving in a much more sophisticated manner than 90% of drivers. Of the all the drivers at my school, only THREE drive stick shift cars. Ergo, I can feel superior. There’s also the feeling of accomplishment after one learns how to competently drive a manual transmission. The first few attempts are universally awful, with stalling, the clutch making horrible noises and the awful smell of a poorly treated transmission. But once you figure out how to start on a hill without rolling back, you have a real sense of having learned to do something that’s both difficult and useful.

Even more importantly, manuals are just more fun. One has more control of the car, and by controlling the revs and being able to do things like downshifting, freeway driving and passing is just more enjoyable. Though I haven’t seen any statistics, I have to imagine that those who drive manuals are safer.  This is probably for a few reasons.  The most obvious is that people driving manuals are just better drivers, or else they wouldn’t go through the trouble of learning how to drive like a gearhead.  The second more speculative reason is that having to work the clutch makes one more attentive.  When you’re driving stick, you can’t ever space out, you must always be attentive to what gear you’re in and where the revs are, and since its hard to disaggregate driving attention, this leads to being more attentive to what’s actually going on the road.

The final reason stick shifts are sweet is the possibility of achieving a Zen like consilience with your vehicle.  After enough time driving a manual transmission car, you are able to shift at the right time without looking at either the revs or even what gear you’re in.  You can deduce when to do everything by feel and sound.  You feel the car straining too much, you know that when only these two gears are even possible at a certain speed, and thus know when and how to shift.  The best comparison I can think of is Luke is flying into the Death Star at the end of a New Hope, when the ghost of Obi Wan Kenobi tells him to “use the Force.” Luke then turns off his computer targeting program and shoots the proton-torpedoes into the Death Star using only the force as his guide.  Luke Skywalker would have driven a stick.

NOTE: I realize my last paragraph clashes with the one before, but just roll with it.

Megan McArdle says I have too much loyalty to the “system”:

Megan’s making an arguemnt that there are better way to accomplish the goals the appartatus was set up to serve, but there can be no change that does not threaten Zeitlin’s tribe.

Meagn’s arguing means and ends – Zeitlin’s fighting for the survival of his tribal indentity – thus the hysteria.

Sure, I believe that Megan herself probably has the right motives when discussing Social Security (I’m not going to bring education into this debate), but Megan and her gang of well meaning libertarians aren’t really that important in the political debate.

The people who were trying to “destroy Social Security” (by which I mean reducing benefits and radically overhauling the system in response to phony crisis) aren’t so well meaning. When you hear Karl Rove or GroverNorquist talk about Social Security reform, their goals weren’t to give more money to seniors or to reduce the cost of the program, instead they wanted to break the New Deal coalition that is responsible for there being a strong(ish) liberal movement and party in the United States. So while I appreciate folks like Megan and Will Wilkinson saying that their ideas to reform Social Security really will be better for the country, they have no overarching political agenda — of which Social Security reform is a part — that could plausibly be enacted. The GOP, on the other hand, does, and thus the debate should be framed in larger terms than how you build up the program from scratch.

Max Bergman is amazed that many of the reasons the black helicopter crowd opposes LOST are also applicable to the WTO.  So, if the Right is so worked up about sovereignty, they should oppose the WTO, right?

The fact is that the WTO regulates global trade and polices its member’s adherence to WTO regulations. If maintaining all aspects of U.S. sovereignty is the right’s number one priority than they simply can’t support the WTO. And if they don’t support the WTO, than you have to question the right’s commitment to free trade, since the whole purpose of the WTO is to enable free trade. If the right is really so scared about the erosion of U.S. sovereignty than they should join all the left wing anti-globalization activists and protest the WTO.  That would be quite a sight.

Well, Max, sorry to break it to ya, but the populist-nationalist right opposes both the WTO and LOST.  Pat Buchanan isn’t a big WTO fan, nor are Alan Keyes and Phyllis Schlafly.  60 percent of Republicans think free trade has been bad for the economy.  What we have in both the LOST and the WTO/free trade debates in the GOP is a split between the corporate elites and the populist masses.  The corporate wing just wants more markets to sell stuff, and a steady regulatory infrastructure to facilitate the selling of their wares and expansion of their businesses.  Thus, the WTO and LOST.  The populist-nationalist wing is more concerned with America’s sovereignty and generally being incredibly skeptical of anything having to do with foreigners. It’s a very uneasy alliance, and I imagine that big portion of Ron Paul supports comes from the populist-nationalist wing of the party, which overlaps significantly with the anti-Iraq war wing.

If you asked me before the primary got heated up, I would have expected someone like Tom Tancredo to be the Ron Paul like insurgent candidate.  Bashing Romney, Guiliani and Bush as “globalists” who will sell out America to illegal immigrants, international trade and international organizations could probably garner around 10 percent of the primary vote.  Too bad Tancredo is absolutely nuts.  But I assure you that in the coming years, the populist-nationalist wing of the GOP will realize , much like the Religious Right, that it’s the corporate paymasters who ultimately control the GOP and that there isn’t really much of a place for them in the coalition.

Ann Bartow has a long, slightly odd post at Feminist Law Professors castigating Digby, Atrios and a whole host of netroots bloggers for being so strident in putting down Obama effort to attack Hillary by putting forth a plan to address the “actuarial gap” in Social Security:

Big blog bullies Atrios and Digby have declared that anyone who wants to talk about Social Security is not a liberal, and is “increas[ing] the likelihood of something very bad happening.” No pressure there, right? Well guess what, though I agree that any changes the Republicans want to make to Social Security are likely to be counterproductive at best, I also think that Social Security should be more re-distributive of wealth, as others have argued. See, for example, this, this, and this. I also would like to see some of the gender inequities addressed, see e.g. this, this and this. But in the narcissistic, elitist world of the Supposedly Liberal blogs, caring about this makes one “not a liberal,” and either the cause, or (more likely, at least in the blog world, if the bullies decide to make one pay for challenging them, the victim) of “something very bad.” Goddess help anyone with fresh and productive ideas or a taste for social justice in this climate.

I can’t help but think that Bartow as other problems with Atrios and Digby besides their dismissal of the Social Security “crisis”.  The real problem with her argument is that Obama’s rhetoric on Social Security buys into a particular frame — that social security reform is an urgent agenda item — that really serves two purposes: One, to find a large “crises” that the David Broders of the world can blame on both parties and two, to create an enviroment where conservative proposals to destroy Social Security will become acceptable (Garance collected some great quotes to this effect).  If Obama were talking about the problems with Social Security the same way Barstow does — saying that it needs to be redesigned so to distribute income more — than he wouldn’t be taking the same heat.  But saying that Social Security is facing some menacing actuarial gap that needs to addressed NOW NOW NOW isn’t really providing the space for taking the program further to the left.  Obama deserves all the criticism he’s been getting and Barstow seems to be willfully ignoring the pragmatic effects of a Democratic presidential candidate saying that Social Security is in even semi-urgent need of fixing.

Kevin Carey has a very insightful criticism of the US News and World Report College Rankings:

That translates into incentives that virtually guarantee inefficiency and constantly rising costs. If a university were able to figure out how to reduce its costs by, say, 10 percent, while holding quality constant, and it chose to pass those savings along to its customers in the form of a tuition decrease, its U.S. News rankings would go down. If, on the other hand, it became 10 percent less efficient and passed the cost onto customers in the form a tuition increase (not a hard thing to do if you’re a selective college), its ranking would go up. All of this stems from a deficit of reliable, comparable, institution-level measures of quality. Thus we have this crazy higher education market with no value proposition, one where cost and quality are assumed to be the same thing — and in the sense that high-end higher education is a luxury good that primarily serves to signal your exclusive ability to acquire and pay for it, they are the same thing.

There are a whole host of other issues with the rankings, like the ridiculousness of schools limiting class size to 49, so they can boast a higher percentage of classes with “less than 50″ students, which is part of the ranking.  But Carey, Yglesias and many critics of the rankings are missing something.  The point of the rankings isn’t to say what school is most appealing to wonks, but rather to prospective college students.  Now a big part of that is students and parents who desire to go to a prestigious school, which they believe is determined by the rankings (of course, Duke and Wash U aren’t more prestigious than Brown, but that’s neither here nor there).

But at another level, the rankings, especially the input measures that Yglesias and Carey criticize actually say a lot about the school.  As someone who just finished an early application to an undisclosed college and spent a lot of time visiting schools, I can say that those who were clearly spending a lot of money on their students (Emory and Pomona spring to mind) really did seem more appealing.  This poses a problem for Carey, because measures like “damn, how awesome is it that we have this sweet, super technologically advanced computer lab designed by students with huge ass bean bag chairs all over it” (Emory) can’t really be included under “educational outcomes.”

I cut Mickey Kaus more slack than many, mostly because his appearances on bloggingheads are somewhat endearing.  His relentless scandal mongering with Democratic candidates, however, has gotten totally ridiculous.  After realizing that his flogging of the Edwards non-affair non-scandal was getting nowhere, he’s resorted to…well, you have to read it to believe it:

Do you sense there is some large mass of dark matter, an unseen Scandal Star, the gravitational pull of which is warping the coverage of what seems, on the surface, a pretty dull presidential race? I do.

That’s right, we know the Democratic presidential candidates are bad because of the unseen scandal star.  Talk about a rumor that’s impossible to deny.  How do you deny a rumor or scandal when it can’t be seen?

Chris Hayes mentions Alexandre Kojeve, the Russian-French Hegelian who is a key influence on Francis Fukuyama and his End of History thesis. Fukuyama develops the theoretical side of his argument — that liberal democracy is the fulfillment of human governmental evolution — using Kojeve’s idea that, as Chris puts it, “[the]constitutive feature of what it means to be human is the desire for recognition.” Fukuyama contends that liberal democracy allows the most recognition for individuals, and thus is the natural endpoint for capital H History. And while Fukuyama is very persuasive and presents his point well, the methodology always troubled me.

How do we know that humans desire recognition? Sure Kojeve says so, and Fukuyama is able to construct a plausible historiographical extrapolation of that theory, but besides their assertions, there’s no great way to verify their conception of human nature. Hobbes said that humans desire security, Rousseau said that humans are, as Mark Lilla put it, “theotropic” (desiring religion), Marx thought that man was fundamentally productive and so on and so forth. Some political philosophers just sidestep this debate, or at least don’t make a conception of human nature axiomatic the same way, say, Hobbes does. Rawls’ assumptions about human nature is that in his highly abstract veil of ignorance, people will use maximin reasoning. Nozick just starts out with Lockean natural rights and moves on from there.

But putting aside Rawls and Nozick, how do we sort out these competing claims about human nature? We can look at the societies and political systems based on certain conceptions of human nature. This method is rather imprecise, besides telling us that Marx probably was wrong, it’s really hard to say which conception of human nature any given country lends validity to or falsifies. Is the United States evidence for a Lockean, Hobbesian or Rousseaun view? What about Sweden, Canada or Singapore? Clearly, if you’re going to put claims of human nature at the center of your political philosophy, you need to provide a good method to inspect their validity, or at least a traceable claim to show where you got your conception of human nature from. So, how does one do this?

For the time being, it looks like Evolutionary Psychology is the way to go.  So from now on, if you have a political theory that’s based around a specific conception of human nature, you must talk about alleles.  Peter Singer agrees, and Robert Wright has gotten the closest to using evolutionary psychology and theory as a basis for large scale political and social thought.  Kojeve and Fukuyama, haven’t really managed this feat, and so I’m forced to put their theory of politics and history into the “sounds interesting, but not really verifiable in a systemic way” pile.

I don’t watch presidential debates.  They are incredibly boring, irritating and unimportant.  Yet, in the blogosphere, people like talking about them.  So I turn to those I trust to liveblog it for me, so I can pretend to have watched them (yes, I’m blowing my cover).  For professional experience and polish, I read Dana Goldstein, Garance Franke-Ruta and Adele Stan’s running commentary at TAPPED.  For the perspective of someone who’s the closest to me demographically and temperamentally , I turned to Minipundit.

It isn’t clear if they were watching the same debate.  For the TAPPED gang, one of whom is an open Hillary backer (Garance) and another is open to a Hillary candidacy (Dana), much of the liveblog consisted of documenting how much ass Clinton was kicking or how weak the other candidates appeared: “She’s tougher than Rudy, more experienced than Obama, done more for poor folks than Edwards, and smarter than everybody”…”everybody — against Clinton. It makes her look brave for just standing there, this small determined woman being attacked by three men on either side of her, two male moderators, and the entire male Republican field.”…”He [Obama] can be rambling and tentative”…and so on and so forth.

Minipundit, a fervent Obama supporter, saw things a little differently: “Williams gives Obama a big opening to attack Hillary, and he takes it, very explicitly accusing of Hillary of flip-flopping on torture, NAFTA, and Iraq.”…”Wow, Hillary is really dodging the issues. She counters criticism on foreign policy by talking about “standing up for women and children”. WTF?”…”Obama stakes out a strong, unequivocal stance against an attack on Iran, refusing to buy into a Williams hypothetical. I like this. 9:17 – Wow, he’s even talking about Iran joining the WTO. This is fantastic. 9:18 – Hillary is really getting pissed off. She’s not looking good.”…”Obama does what he’s been doing all night: making it totally obvious how he’ll be less belligerent and more humble in his foreign policy than Clinton.”…”10:03 – Russert asks Hillary about her different public and private positions on the FICA cap. She denies there’s a conflict between the two. That’s, um, totally wrong.
10:04 – WOW she’s pissed off. This is not a good night for her.” And finally, “Overall, I think Obama did very well, Hillary had her worst performance.”

Who do I believe?  This is certainly a three blind women, one blind teenage boy and an elephant type of situation.  Maybe I should have watched the thing myself…

When the Great Foreign Policy Community Debate happened this summer, it was often implied by the likes of Glenn Greenwald that many foreign policy thinkers in think tanks and the media weren’t just wrong about Iraq, but also had a key role in enabling Bush and the push for war.  Daniel Drezner often pointed out that the FPC had little role in getting us into Iraq — Bush wanted to invade, and was always going to invade, no matter what the foreign policy cognoscenti had to say.

Iran is looking to be a perfect test to see what the true extent of the Foreign Policy Community’s power and influence is.   Fareed Zakaria, who Eric Alterman (rightly) labels the voice of the establishment, has come out and said the push for war in Iran is crazy.  A Center for American Progress survey of foreign policy wonks indicates that 80% support non military strategies towards Iran (and 92% said the Iraq war was a bad idea).  The Foreign Policy Community has come out pretty strongly against military action against Iran…at least for now.  And yet, there’s a pretty high probability that Bush will launch a strike on Iran before the end of his term.  Of course, the political support necessary for a full scale ground invasion of a country and air strikes on nuclear facilities are different from each other, but the larger point still remains.  Bush is the problem, his foreign policy disasters are primarily his responsibility, not that of the FPC.

Phoebe Maltz laments the alleged triviality of shoe blogging:

The above mention of girl-blogging brings up the altogether pressing issue of why men can blog about sports (which are boring) and still be taken seriously, while one mention of shoes (which are fascinating to no end) defines a woman as silly.

While it’s certainly true that men can tend to get away with blogging about “trivial” matters with their reputation intact more so than women, I don’t think sports blogging are the best analogy for shoes.  To put it simply, do people forge long lasting, emotional relationships with a shoe brand?  I’m sure some do, but do tens of thousands of people from all races and social classes show up for the release of a new line of Jimmy Choos?

Of course, the distinctions between shoes and sports don’t really matter, what matters is how various blogging of issues totally unrelated to (usually) politics is perceived in the blogosphere.  But because sports demand so much national attention, shoes hardly seem to be the best comparison.  A better one would tech blogging. How are men who write about how awesome their google maps enabled iPhone perceived?  The answer is probably the same, women who talk about shoes are silly, while men who talk about tech are just a little quirky, but still totally serious.

Kay Steiger’s reaction to Ricardo Hausman’s post showing encouraging data of how women worldwide are reversing the education gap (inadvertently) demonstrates how success can potentially become an anathema to those movements pushing for change

I’m highly skeptical about this post (via Ezra) that claims women seem to be reversing the gender gap worldwide. Good news! All those feminists can pack up their bags and go home! Inequality doesn’t exist anymore!

Steiger is definitely correct in saying that just because women are becoming more educated, gender inequality isn’t going to become a thing of the past. But Steiger’s (snarky, not totally serious) response is illustrative. Let’s propose for a moment that gender inequality in education, earnings and opportunity totally disappeared. A whole lot of organizations and activists would suddenly become purposeless. Their first response would be to deny that gender inequality had in fact disappeared, and then move on to other, more marginal struggles. This is because those organizations and activists raison d’etre was agitating against gender inequality, and thus they would be incentived to perpetuate the notion that there was a problem, in order to survive.

Let me be very clear, I am not saying that Steiger is exhibiting this tendency, or that feminism or the women’s movement has outlived its uselessness. A better example of this phenomenon is an organization like the Anti Defamation League. When it was founded in 1913 to fight Antisemitism, it made sense. America was rife with Antisemitism, popular anti-Semites like Henry Ford and Father Coughlin were still on the horizon. In short, the ADL had a good reason to exist.

These days, with widespread, damaging anti-Semitism largely a thing of the past, the ADL can’t just pat itself on the back and ride off into the sunset. So while they should be reflecting on how amazing it is that the western world has done a remarkable job in the last 50 years curing itself of one of its most long-lasting and potent afflictions, the ADL has turned into an extension of the Likudnik wing of American politics. It now polices critics of Israeli policy and influence, namely Walt and Mearsheimer, using their (declining) moral authority to label their political enemies as anti-Semites. They also manage to find time to push for genocide denial on Israel’s behalf. For the ADL, antisemitism in America will always be a huge problem. It’s simply impossible for them to conceptualize the world in any other way.

Do any activist groups or movements ever just ride off into the sunset after they accomplish their goals? It’s hard to see a scenario where the incentives would line up to encourage that.

Emanuele Ottolenghi celebrates Israel’s strike on Syria’s alleged nuclear reactors as a useful step in halting proliferation:

Given his track record on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and repeated violations of UN resolutions on the subject, one is hard-pressed to understand why reporting it is better than destroying it. Perhaps so that ElBaradei can engage in years of meaningless negotiations while the Syrians advance their program?

No doubt, diplomacy has its merits. But if the IAEA actually is interested in countering proliferation, ElBaradei should be applauding Israel’s action—at least quietly.

While at a certain point, strikes on a nuclear program can be usueful in countering proliferation, a non-proliferation strategy of ad hoc unilateral strikes is pretty bad. Even the most celebrated instance of Israeli counter-proliferation, Israel’s strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981, is thought by some to be the key catalyst in hastening Iraq’s nuclear program, which was scarily far afoot by 1991.

Bush’s proliferation strategy, which has consisted primarily of invading Iraq despite the incredibly successful UN inspections, withdrawing from the Agreed Framework with North Korea on faulty information and violating the NPT and US law in a desperate effort to provide India with nuclear technology has been a dismal failure. After 6.5 years, we have one country invaded in the name of non-proliferation that had no WMD, Iran (slowly) proliferating, Syria starting a nuclear program, North Korea with more nuclear weapons and a message being sent to the world that the best way to avoid a US invasion is to get a nuke as fast as possible. So maybe ElBaradei is right in not patting the Israelis on the back for a preemptive, unilateral strike in contravention of international norms. It’s a strategy that rarely works.

Megantron makes an odd argument, for her apparently, for a system (single payer) to be desirable in any sense, there has to be NO medical tourism:

If this were actually true, the number of Europeans seeking health care abroad, other than cosmetic procedures, should be zero. If the health care is really every bit as good as what’s available on the private market, they shouldn’t turn to the private market. Americans seeking lower-cost health care abroad does not invalidate the market model; seeking lower cost alternatives through trade is a venerable free-market tradition. On the other hand, Europeans paying their own hard-earned cash in order to exit a system which allegedly provides exactly the same thing, for free, poses a problem for national health care advocates.

This all sounds interesting, but is ultimately irrelevant.  The point is that more people are fleeing the US system, which Megan paints as something in line with the “venerable free-market tradition” than the British system, and that the British system costs a lot less.  So if you think medical tourism is an important indicator for the comparative quality of health care systems, than the US, whose health care system is more than twice as expensive as Britain, is clearly worse.  Ezra Klein has more.

Why do we have the International Space Station?  THe only purpose I can divine is that it’s necessary to keep our shuttle fleet in flight.  Why we need to give our shuttle fleet something to do, I really don’t know.  Especially when the thing is falling apart:

Spacewalking astronauts yesterday found evidence of damage to a crucial part of the International Space Station’s power system.

 The discovery of what appear to be metallic shavings in one of the station’s enormous rotating joint assemblies suggested problems for the orbiting space station that could affect ambitious plans to add two power-hungry laboratories.

And why do we need to add these “power-hungry” laboratories?

Michelle Malkin praises Representative Tom Lantos (D-CA) for saying that to properly oppose the Kafkaequse limbo and flagrant violation of both US and international law at Guantanamo, you must have also opposed the Nazis:

Dutch lawmakers who visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison this week said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat.

The lawmakers said that Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that “Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.”

I know Lantos is Holocaust survivor, but those remarks are just insane. “Europe” isn’t a meaningful entity as far as opposing Auschwitz goes , and those Dutch lawmakers were in all likelihood in no position to be “outraged by Auschwitz” (i.e. they weren’t alive). Does Lantos think that to oppose Guantanamo, one must be a Holocuast survivor, American GI or a former member of the resistance? Setting aside the ridiculousness of the remark, it doesn’t matter why “Europe” or, specifically, the Dutch are outraged at Guantanamo.

The context of this exchange was the Netherlands considering whether or not they should keep their 1,600 strong force in Afghanistan. Since we decided to invade Iraq, we’re hamstrung in Afghanistan, meaning we need multinational and NATO support. Part of having allies is not saying that their opposition to your policies is driven by them being soft on Auschwitz and not saying totally boneheaded things like “You have to help us, because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany.” Lantos’ remarks are also especially offensive considering that the Netherlands, according to Yad Vashem, has the second most “Righteous Among the Nations” — gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Sebastian Mallaby defends Hillary’s record on Iran. Apparently in Mallaby world, supporting the Bush line on Iran is somehow rising above partisanship…

It’s not that Clinton’s rivals believe sanctions are mistaken. It’s that they lack the courage to defy Bush-hating primary voters, who think that lining up with the president on any issue is like becoming a Death Eater. “I learned a clear lesson from the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2002,” says base-pleasing John Edwards, “if you give this president an inch, he will take a mile — and launch a war.” “This is a lesson that I think Senator Clinton and others should have learned,” Obama echoes. “You can’t give this president a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it.”

The truth is that Clinton did not give Bush any sort of “blank check” — if Bush wants to bomb Iran or hit Iranian units inside Iraq, he can do so without a Senate resolution. But Obama and Edwards are so intent on Bush-bashing that they refuse to cut him any slack, even when he advances a policy that they might ordinarily favor. After the administration announced a new package of Iran sanctions on Thursday, Edwards declared that the president and his team had once again “rattled their sabers in their march toward military action.” Bush hatred has driven him to the point where he regards sanctions as a harbinger of war rather than an alternative.

Mallaby destroys the context of Edwards and Obama’s implication that Clinton’s support for “sanctions” (which Mallaby never defines) gave Bush a blank check for war. When Edwards talked about Bush and Cheney “rattling sabers”, he wasn’t discussing vague “sanctions”, which Mallaby’s readers will probably interpret to be the usual mix of economic and travel restrictions, instead Edwards was referring to the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, thus implicitly authorizing all sorts of military actions against Iranian forces in both Iraq and within Iran. This isn’t Edwards and Obama being pacifists, it’s them opposing a move that would give the Bush administration more authority to escalate tensions with Iran, possibly leading to a war. This is a pretty important distinction that Mallaby should spell out, but doesn’t.

If you’re going to defend Clinton support for saber rattling with Iran, you should at least spell out what specifically she is supporting. If you don’t, some may think you’re being a tad dishonest.

Am I the only one that finds it all odd that John Derbyshire, the oddly charming, geeky, borderline bigot National Review columnist, is on Jewcy, is telling us American Jews where we should stand immigration?  He includes his usual rap about how immigration is bad because of negative demograhic and economic effects, but also tells us why, as Jews, we should oppose increased immigration:

My own impression, talking to these people, is that they actually believe it is good for the U.S.A. Indeed, given that most of present-day immigration is of either (a) Muslims, who are antisemitic almost to a man, or (b) Latin Americans, which is to say, people from countries where antisemitism is more common, and more frank, than it ever was in the U.S.A. (where do they think all the old Nazis retired to?)—given that, the persistence of extravagant pro-immigration sentiment among American Jews today is rather astonishing. Perhaps the only explanation can be that Jews have so thoroughly internalized the Good For America justification that it overrides the understanding—which they must surely possess—that it is Bad For The Jews.

Count me as one Jew that is happy that such simplistic and atavistic considerations aren’t part of most American Jews’ calculus in immigration.  Derbyshire’s reasons for why we Jews should, as Jews, oppose immigration are just mind bafflingly dumb.  He wants us to believe that poor Latin Americans are anti-semitic because their governments had liberal immigration policies in the 1940s and 50s, because of which both Nazis and  Jews made their home in Latin America.  Argentina boasts the world’s eight largest Jewish population, with 250,000 of us.  But this is all academic, the point is, it isn’t octo and nonogenarian former Nazis who are coming over the border from Mexico and Guatemala.  Derbyshire, I have to imagine, knows this, but because he has the absurd task of trying to convince the overwhelmingly liberal American Jewish population to go against their political, ethical and religious instincts and prevent the world’s poor from making a better life, he resorts to pulling BS justifications for curtailing immigration out of his ass.  His first implication, that Muslims who immigrate to the United States are “anti-semitic the man” is just another BS assertion that reflects little knowledge of the assimilation patterns and overall state of the American muslim community.

What’s more important about the Derb’s exercise is that it shows how much the American Jewish community has matured.  His attempts to justify a massive clampdown on immigration based purely on what’s Good for the Jews is clearly forced, the real reasons Derb believes are the “national” ones.  That’s because American Jewry knows that the time for looking at every policy by asking what’s Good for the Jews has passed.  We are no longer a despised religious and ethnic minority, huddling in urban ghettos, seeing WASP America as yet another oppressor in a long line going back to Babylon.  We can finally conceptualize polices by not making harried short term calculations, worrying about an imminent pogrom.  Instead, we can confidently express our political and ethical inclinations — both of which lead towards an open, liberal immigration system and say that the resulting polices are good for the Jews and good for America. What’s Good for the Jews and What’s Good for America, contra Derbyshire, are the exact same thing.

George Will tells us that what a candidate thinks about abortion doesn’t really matter:

Nevertheless, it is said that if the Republican Party wants to be competitive in California in presidential politics, it must nominate a pro-choice candidate, of which there is only one — Rudy Giuliani. This is almost certainly true. It certainly is irrational because pro-choice Californians have next to nothing to fear — just as pro-life Californians have next to nothing to hope for — from a right-to-life president. The practical consequences of such a president concerning abortion would not differ significantly from Giuliani’s consequences

On the simple manner, the status of Roe vs Wade doesn’t greatly effect California’s abortion laws.  It would take the election of Skeletor to make California ban abortion.  But, when I vote in the 2008 election, I won’t just be thinking about abortion in California.  And even if I was solely concerned with California abortion rights, Minipundit points out that when Congress can ban an abortion procedure nationwide, while Roe vs Wade is supposedely in full effect, maybe abortion rights aren’t so safe – even in California.

Also, the Hyde amendment, which was passed by Congress in the late 1970s to ban federal funding for abortion, is exactly the type of abortion-rights question that is so blithely skipped over by commentators like George Will and Jeffrey Rosen who champion the “federalist solution” to the abortion question. In Will-World, abortion rights have been guaranteed across the land by Supreme fiat.  On the ground, the story is different. It is very difficult for poor women in conservative states that have a raft of technically legal regulations and nuisances intended to minimize access to abortion, such as Kansas, to actually “choose.” So contra Will, at the national and state levels, our elected representatives have a lot of say over abortion access and rights.  It’s just that in a post-Roe world, it’s poor women who are affected most by federal, state and local abortion regulation.

John Judis sums up why the thought of Rudy being president is very scary:

So it is reasonable to take Giuliani at his word and to imagine his presidency as an extension of his mayoralty. To do that is to contemplate an administration that would challenge many Americans’ conception of their own liberty. It would perpetuate the worst aspects of Bush’s imperial presidency: the contempt for Congress and the press; the encouragement of a polarized politics; the centralization of power in the White House; and the administration of government based upon loyalty rather than competence. That may be something a sizeable chunk of Republican voters want-but it is not something that will appeal to most Americans.

 

…

The centerpiece of Giuliani’s claim, however, is the suggestion that his approach to fighting crime provides a model for conducting foreign policy. In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, he wrote: “I know from personal experience that when security is reliably established in a troubled part of a city, normal life rapidly reestablishes itself: shops open, people move back in, children start playing ball on the sidewalks again, and soon a decent and law-abiding community returns to life. The same is true in world affairs. Disorder in the world’s bad neighborhoods tends to spread. Tolerating bad behavior breeds more bad behavior.”

This is a foolish analogy. In policing the world, the United States cannot claim to be enforcing its own laws; we lack legitimacy to do so, as we found after invading Iraq. When the nypd went into poor neighborhoods, it was not an occupying force; when the U.S. military took over Baghdad, it was, and it suffered the consequences. Some of the “neighborhoods” Giuliani wants to clean up, such as Iran, possess their own armies and can call on other “neighborhoods,” such as Russia and China, to deter an attempt to punish them for bad behavior. In short, the world is not New York writ large, and the trade-offs between authority and liberty look very different from the White House than from Gracie Mansion. But these distinctions seem lost on the man who aspires to be the next mayor of the United States.

Hopefully the idea that because Rudy has some socially liberal tendencies — kinda sorta pro-choice, tolerance for gays, big fan of immigrants (at least when we was in NYC) — combined with conservative economic ideas makes him a Bloomberg/Schwarzenegger moderate will finally be dispelled.  When it comes to foreign policy and civil liberties, as well as temperament, he is by far the most extreme candidate.

Ron Paul is well known for having kooky views that are also held by a wide swath of the paleo/nationalist right. Which runs from basically respectable figures like Pat Buchanan to despicable white nationalists. Well, not surprisingly, those who find themselves in accordance with Paul’s views on the legitimacy of international organizations (they aren’t) or immigration (we should have less of it) or whether the federal government should do much more than protect the borders (they shouldn’t) are donating money to his campaign, and it just so happens that white nationalists/Klanners agree with much of the Paul program (I’m NOT implying that Paul is himself a white nationalist or racist, what I said above is basically uncontroversial). Some of these people are giving Paul money, specifically David Black, owner/operator of Stormfront (not linking to it, if you want, you can google it), which the Lone Star Times indentifies as the “premier English-language racist/hate-site on the Internet.” Should Paul give back Black’s $500? More broadly, is money given by horrible people like Black always have to be returned?

I say no, there isn’t a compelling moral reason why Paul ought to give the money back. If the money were stolen from someone else, Paul would be obligated to return it, not to Black, but to the theft victim. But Black’s $500 was presumably made legitimately and donated legally. It’s hard to see how society benefits if Black is up half a grand, or if Paul loses the money.   The Lone Star times argues that the money should be given to any number of Jewish and Holocaust memorial organizations, and while those are all worthy institutions, it’s unclear why Paul is obligated, in this specific instance to give them money.  If these institutions are deserving of Paul’s money, then he should be obligated to give them $500, or more, no matter who gave him the money originally. Additionally, if Black and his ilk were responsible for a significant percentage of Paul’s donations, then I’d be worried about Paul, but it doesn’t appear if that’s the case. So I don’t think Paul has to do some ritual contrition and publicly denounce all of White Supremacy and return/donate the money.

To use another example, if David Black wants to give me $500, I’ll gladly accept it, and keep it. Better he spends that money on Ron Paul — or me — than, say, buying guns with which to kill blacks and Jews.