Citizens United's worst impact will be where you can't see it

I've been meaning to write for months that Citizens United will primarily harm democracy below the radar, but Ezra Klein's gone and done it for me:

....even at the end of the [congressional election] campaign, many potential voters will know very little about their congressional candidates. They will be susceptible to ads telling them terrible things. Some of those candidates won’t have the resources to fight back.
No one knows that better than the candidates themselves. Both incumbents and potential challengers realize that a deep-pocketed PAC could decide their race. So when they get a call from that PAC’s director urging them to support this or that, they’re that much likelier to listen. The result, then, isn’t just that moneyed interests can throw congressional elections. It’s that they wield more influence after the election — and they can exercise that power without spending a dollar.

Read the whole thing as they say.  I think state level elections are even more subject to this - don't expect the US Chamber of Commerce to have overlooked that.

Unlimited money from the people who have unlimited money, to make sure the system's rigged to allow them still more unlimited money.  Thanks, US Supreme Court.


UPDATE:  best we can do now is disclosure, although that might also be under threat.  For my fellow Californians, there's the California Disclose Act that would help a great deal if it passes.  Best of luck if you live in a Red state, you'll need it.

A pox on hat-tipping

Saw this blog post via another blog that I'm not linking to:

When I write a post on a study from the Journal of Minutae and Obscurity, though, and later in the day you happen to post on it? I’m suspicious. We need those links. They’re how we build readership and grow.

Spare me.  Say Apu writes a blog post, and Bart writes about Apu's post, and finally Cartman sees Bart's post and decides to write about Apu's original post.  The intellectual contribution from Bart is so small that I see no reason to link to Bart with the unnecessary hat tip. If Cartman's post is also inspired in some substantive way by Bart's riff, that might be different.

I've done hat tips and vias out of sheeplenish in the past, but I plan to stop.  No one needs to do them for me either (just speaking for myself tho, not my cobloggers).

NIH's disingenuous response on chimps and bioethics

I'm mostly a supporter of the mainstream scientific institutions, but I'll take a moment here to bash the National Institute of Health and its decision to play politics with research regarding medical experimentation on chimps.

NIH wants to return "semi-retired" chimps to invasive medical experimentation, a proposal that provoked a response by several Senators demanding first a study "about the merits of continued invasive research using using chimpanzees." NIH said, okay fine, and then sent things southward.

The disingenuity is, as told by Nature, the deliberate decision to remove all ethical aspects of the research from the scope of the study. To claim you're creating an objective response to a research request that only considers the category with potential positive aspects and while excluding the category with the most potential negatives, is to be transparent. In a bad way.

What doesn't help is the argument by animal rights types that there's no medical benefit to this type of research. They're trying to avoid an ethical dilemma by claiming there's no reason to do it at all, and shutting their ears to contrary evidence. NIH isn't any better by refusing to think about ethical dilemmas.

Research defenders don't help their cause by deliberately underplaying what they want to do with the chimps. For example, they say regarding testing a Hepatitis C vaccine on chimps that "As inconveniencing tens of chimpanzees impacts the health of millions of humans, it is unethical not to use the chimp model." They don't say how they plan to examine effectiveness, but from my perspective, contracting Hepatitis C after being deliberately exposed, because a vaccine didn't work, is more than an inconvenience.

An even better example of the dilemma is the proposal to use the chimps to research treatments for Ebola. Someone needs to explain to me a humane way of infecting a chimp with Ebola. It remains a dilemma though, unless someone can explain a reason not to explore an avenue for saving human beings from Ebola.

FWIW, I'm not an animal rights type, I'm a sapientist. I'll pick a human over a chimp in some weird hypothetical matchup, but I'd rather cheat the hypo and pay some additional money so I don't have to sacrifice either. Researchers might jeer at that evasion, but their own answer is less clear cut than they think. Medical research on chimps is expensive, but only because we treat them according to modern coddling standards. Drop back to early 20th Century standards of care and willingness to euthanize unneeded specimens, and you could reach your research goals faster or cheaper. Even people who think they have a clear cut answer are actually making compromises.

Anyway, I'm not completely opposed to invasive research that doesn't hurt, scare, or medically harm chimps. Maybe the effect of public review of this issue will be to let us cheat the hypo, and inject some extra government money so we find a way to solve these medical problems without harming chimps more than we already have.

Weiner and IPCC's Pachauri: both pursued by ankle-biters, both possibly ineffective

(UnAmericans may be unaware of our sexting Congressperson, so here's context.)

Congressman Weiner and the IPCC head Pachauri have both been 1. attacked by people of ill intention 2. for reasons that are only tangentially related to their office, but that doesn't mean that 3. we should root for them to stay in office.

Weiner has displayed astounding stupidity and unethical behavior outside of his political office, but whether that makes him a bad Representative is a different matter. I suppose astounding stupidity could be a disqualifier, but if it hasn't been shown in his work then maybe it doesn't matter. His political ethics should be more important to outsiders than the fact that he's a terrible husband/father-to-be. He burned a lot of friends by lying to them to them and sending them out as media surrogates, but that's not the reason he's being called to resign.

It's a little unfair to group Pachauri with a turdbucket like Weiner, but the conflict of interest charges made against Pachauri and the IPCC by ankle-biters are at least somewhat related to his work and somewhat true. The anklers ignore the fact that Pachauri and all the participating IPCC authors work for free and that Pachauri's home institution paid him 45,000 pounds annually - certainly less than that made by many of the anklers. The IPCC's institutional problem is that it does far too important work to rely on people on top with other jobs. Theyneed to be salaried and cut free from conflicts (or downscale the IPCC, but I think we lose a policy tool that way).

One reason to group Weiner and Pachauri together is on the basis of possibly being ineffective for reasons unrelated to the criticism they've received. Weiner has a reputation of being an ineffective legislator who's used by the Dems to beat up the right in the media (link, June 9 podcast). I disagree that being a lightning rod means he can't do legislating. Ted Kennedy for one thing could do both jobs, and Weiner could've done work behind the scenes and left negotiating to others. If he's not good, then get rid of him.

Pachauri has two jobs at the IPCC: coordinate its internal work, and be its outward face. I know nothing about the former job (probably the more important one), but he's not good at the latter. Lately he's been quiet, which is probably for the best, but someone who can better play the competent scientist role would be an improvement.

My first negative publicity!

Well that's exciting in theory, although reading it might be less gripping. It's about the fact that I both work on environmental advocacy at my day job and serve on the local water district board:

In March, members of the water district board were discussing at a public meeting whether to shift money for environmental restoration of streams to flood control work. Schmidt openly asked if he might have a conflict.

He asked water district counsel Stan Yamamoto for a ruling. He met afterward with Yamamoto's staff. The lawyers issued a memo spelling out when Schmidt should recuse himself from voting.

"Before I even started the campaign last year, I said I wanted to avoid any conflicts between my job as an environmental advocate and the work the water district does," Schmidt said Monday.

Yamamoto declined to be interviewed.

Asked to make the memo public, Schmidt said he could not, because he isn't the client in the attorney-client relationship, the water district is. Instead, he said, he has asked the state Fair Political Practices Commission for a ruling. He declined to comment on whether he supports making the memo public.

Apparently that wasn't exciting enough/informative enough though (choose your preferred description), so it was buried away from the lede paragraphs.

Overall, the article could be worse and more innuendo-ey, so I can't complain too much. I can complain some though! My main complaint is that I gave the reporter a reason why I shouldn't publicly declare whether the memo should be public, which wasn't included in the article: because the memo's about me, I shouldn't be involved in the process of deciding whether it should be released, and that includes publicly lobbying the Water District to release it (or not).

Second complaint is that no one ever releases attorney-client communication (for the reason that it would impair frank communication), and the article declined to mention that. I told the reporter that I considered that an essential part of the information that the public doesn't know, but he didn't.

Kind of ironic that we were in disagreement over what the newspaper is withholding from the public.

*Regarding the header to this post, I guess I've previously received criticism from denialists and Roger Pielke Jr., if one considers such a response to be "negative". (UPDATE: responding to the comment from RPJr below: yes, his criticism wasn't of my politics, it was instead his deceptive response when I pointed out that he was being deceptive.)

Beware pundits selling a new look at some bad people

Brad DeLong on political scientists not behaving well, quoting Mother Jones:

....Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr.... sipped tea for three hours with Muammar Qaddafi. Months later, he penned an elegant description of the chat for The New Republic, reporting that Qaddafi had been interested in discussing "direct democracy." Nye noted that "there is no doubt that" the Libyan autocrat:

acts differently on the world stage today than he did in decades past. And the fact that he took so much time to discuss ideas—including soft power—with a visiting professor suggests that he is actively seeking a new strategy.

The article .... noted that Nye had gone to Libya "at the invitation of the Monitor Group, a consulting company that is helping Libya open itself to the global economy"... [but not that] he [was]... as a paid consultant of the Monitor Group.... And Franklin Foer, then the editor of the magazine, says, "If we had known that he was consulting for a firm paid by the government, we wouldn't have run the piece."...

And Nye wasn't the only one who did this stuff. I'm familiar with my friends at Burson Marsteller and at Hill & Knowlton from when I used to do something useful campaigning for Burma. Looks like this Monitor Group is another firm to watch.

I guess the lesson is to be careful when a pundit says something contrarian, about a powerful bad guy turning over a new leaf....

Teaching appropriate technology to wild chimpanzees

I wrote several years ago about the idea that we could facilitate cultural transmission between chimpanzee groups. Another reason for doing that came to light earlier this fall - some chimps in Guinea have learned how to destroy wildlife snares set by poachers. These wire-loop snares set under tension can accidentally catch chimps by the hands and feet, leading to partial amputations, and some male chimps have learned to break the branch that's used to create the tension.

So the idea would be to teach other chimps hundreds of miles away the same technique. Exactly how to teach them is a little tricky. Maybe the handful of groups that are used to people can be shown a model snare and how to break it, or possibly even shown a video similar to the one at the link, showing other chimps breaking snares. The other trick is getting juvenile female chimps to learn the technique, because males stay with the group they grow up with, while females disperse to new areas and can take their knowledge with them.

I don't know, maybe it's not feasible. But just the fact that we can consider teaching chimps appropriate technology in a manner resembling the way we think human societies can be taught appropriate technology suggests that highly intelligent animals should be considered as having some kind of intrinsic moral value.

UPDATE (slightly related): a psychologist finds that human males are much less aggressive if shown pictures of meat. Chimps are somewhat similar - Jane Goodall wrote that the dominance structure breaks down in the aftermath of a successful kill by chimps that were hunting monkeys, and an otherwise-dominant male will beg for meat from a subordinate but won't attempt to take it away.

The $100,000 Indecent Proposal is causing the most problems for conservatives right now

Rightwingers at Breitbart are offering $100,000 for any one of the 400 members of a moderate-to-liberal, journalist email list to betray their confidentiality pledges and to turn over the archives, with Breitbart guaranteeing anonymity to the source.  We're on day three and nearing day four with no-one having taken the leap yet.  Kind of a pleasant surprise that game theorists would find inexplicable.

So all four hundred members of the list have so far maintained their integrity, but some conservatives are having a little more trouble.  Sad-sack cases like Breitbart and Althouse try to gasbag their way into claiming that selling out and encouraging people to sell out are ethical things to do.  Others like Instapundit and Transterrestrial have transmogrified way beyond such petty ethical concerns.

I expect we'll soon see a conservative blog reminding the 400 listmembers that each person probably cares deeply about 10 or more people, any one of whom could be in deep financial or medical trouble and need that money.  Shouldn't you be able to find the people who are most worthy, she'll wheedle, and you'll only keep what you need rather than some other idiot taking it all for alcohol and prostitutes.  These people will be implicitly saying that your soul isn't really worth more than $100,000, because they're selling out their own just for the joy watching someone else go down the drain.

Someday I expect the archives will be made public, but we'll see how many other conservatives first fail the test that they think is being placed just on the Journolist members.

(Kudos btw to The Corner of all places for acknowledging the ethical problem, if somewhat vaguely.)

In a world where John Hawkins actually makes sense

Via Sadly No, I came across an intramural battle among rightwingers where the semi-famous Debbie Schlussel accuses many other conservative bloggers of being anti-semitic, none of whom seem to belong to the authentic Pat Buchanan branch of conservative anti-semitism.  One of the accused, climate-denying, bet-dodging, completely ridiculous John Hawkins, posted a response that accurately accuses Schlussel of insanity.

I feel like an anthropologist watching two alien cultures fight it out.  Weird.  There have been plenty of dustups on the left, especially during the Democratic primary battles, but they don't seem to be quite this personal.

The other interesting thing is that it seems pretty clear that one side's correct - the non-Schlussel side.  The right has shown zero capacity to see the truth when it comes to science, so it'll be interesting to see if Schlussel proves the right incapable of detecting truth in any controversy.

Strange to read the genius John Hawkins, whom I've been glad to ignore for a few years, and suddenly start agreeing with what he says for more than a half-sentence in a row.

I'll just finish by noting that Sadly No and the commenters there seem to completely miss that there are right and wrong sides in that particular battle.  They could try being a tiny bit less partisan on the left.

Uganda and Dubai

My wife and I took a long vacation to Uganda with a short side trip to Dubai.  In addition to the standard tourist things, we did some volunteer work with Conservation Through Public Health, a Ugandan/US non-profit that protects mountain gorillas and other wildlife by resolving conflicts with humans, particularly disease transmission and family planning issues.

CTPH is exploring a new kind of volunteer vacation experience where it utilizes the professional skills of short-term volunteers, rather than have them do the unskilled work that other volunteer vacations offer.  I highly recommend the experience to anyone who's interested.  We were the guinea pigs, so they're still working it out, and I'd be happy to talk to anyone who's interested.

As for seeing Uganda and the gorillas, I'll steal from Richard Dawkins who said of our California redwoods, "see them before you die."  Same is true with the gorillas.  It's right up there with the chance I had to see orangutans in Borneo in terms of seeing something of ourselves.  We also saw chimps in Uganda, but it's not the incredibly up-close experience that we had with the gorillas.

I've occasionally written about the Great Ape Project and how I distinguish that concept from animal-rights arguments for chickens and other unintelligent animals that I mostly disagree with.  These gorillas we saw were mountain gorillas, only 700 left in the wild, a breeding population much smaller than that, and no reproductive success in captivity.  It would be a tragedy to lose this relative, so I'm hoping for the best for the efforts of CTPH and others.

As for the rest of the tourist experience, Uganda was a great place to visit, people were extremely nice, and it doesn't have the unsafe feel of rampant crime of some other places, like the big cities in Kenya.

Dubai was a strange place, but worth a short visit.  I wonder if human mobility will mean that much of the world will be like it a century, where 90% of the residents in the country are non-citizen expatriates.  I tend to think of a country as being "for" its citizens, while expats on work visas are just in a commercial relationship with the country.  But when the expats are 90% of the people, have been there for decades, and have done at least 90% of the work of building the country, the question of who the country belongs to is a little muddled.  Anyway, if you go, check out the Sheik Mohammed Center for Cultural Understanding and their "cultural breakfasts," where you can eat excellent food, hear a little about the culture, and ask the women who run the program any questions you want about life and religion in Dubai.

The Gingrich Effect

I've stolen the headline from Balloon Juice, and I hope the name sticks to this study: overall divorce rates for couples where one partner is very sick stays at an average level, but only because healthy women are much less likely to divorce a now-sick spouse while healthy men are much more likely to divorce their sick spouse. A healthy man is seven times more likely to divorce a sick spouse than a healthy woman is.

Some interesting comments at Balloon Juice. Someone points out that women often have financial reasons for staying in a marriage that men often don't. OTOH, that doesn't explain why women decrease their divorce rate - a seriously-sick husband is less of a financial advantage than a healthy one.

Other comments highlight how women are conditioned to be caretakers while men are disproportionately unable to handle being around someone sick (obviously, lots of generalizing here). I think it's interesting because it doesn't come close to eliminating the moral flaw, but suggests that women are challenged in an area where they are most prepared to overcome the betrayal temptation, while men are the least ready. Bottom line though: even if you're so ethically weak that you can't take care of your wife, that doesn't require a divorce.

No one raised the Medicaid issue: a divorce might not be a betrayal, but a way to protect the healthy spouse's assets while the sick spouse gets Medicaid assistance, and the relationship continues in an unmarried state following the "paper divorce". Not clear why this would create a gender differential, though. Maybe men have more assets from prior to the marriage that they can protect through divorce?

There may be some partial explanations, but men don't look too good in all this.

And there's always exceptions. A horrible spouse may be richly deserving of divorce papers and that might not change immediately after a cancer diagnosis. I doubt that describes Newt Gingrich's first wife, though.

Unrelated: just watched an old Coen brothers' film, Miller's Crossing. Very good, and very dark. This excellent, spoiler-filled review describes the conflict between ethics and love in the form of two fighting gangs and within the persona of the male lead. I completely disagree with the review as to which side won in the lead's mind.

And with that, I'm travelling for a bit, so there'll be little or no blogging until December.

Chimps like magic

Buzzfeed shows a highly entertaining snippet from Japanese television of a young chimp being given its own magic show. You could easily see the chimp's shocked reaction as some of the tricks blew its mind.

All very entertaining, but also a demonstration of the chimp's intelligence. It's easy to get a surprise reaction in animals by startling them, but I don't think a dog or horse has enough of a mental framework of the universe to notice that something had just gone very wrong in each of the tricks. Also worth noting how young the chimp is - I'd guess about three years old or so, and probably as far away from adult mental development for chimps as a six year old human would be from adult intelligence.

Entertaining and maybe enlightening. I guess I should also wonder though about what happens to the chimps when they're not so small and cute.

More on the Mackey/Whole Foods boycott

I'll start by noting that in contrast to my usual blogging subjects here, I actually have a fair amount of direct personal experience with boycott campaigns. I played a somewhat central role in the successful boycotts that got Columbia Sportswear and Pepsi out of Burma,* was heavily involved in the mostly-unsuccessful boycott of Unocal for its travesties in Burma, and I studied the successful tuna-dolphin boycotts before starting my own activism.

Some thoughts:

1. If Mackey owned Whole Foods instead of working for it, I'd have no problem with a boycott and might have to join it myself.

2. Part of a successful boycott strategy is a coherent goal - so what's the goal here, when the boycott target, Whole Foods, has done nothing wrong? Get it to fire Mackey for his political opinions expressed on his own time? Is that ethical?

3. The ever-nuanced Jonathan Zasloff says what he wants from Mackey is intelligent disagreement, and not to shut him up. Fine, but the demand isn't being made of Mackey, it's being made of Whole Foods.

4. Matt Yglesias says shutting down CEOs from prominence in the public media isn't that bad/unethical anyway as they get undeserved attention to spout off on issues unrelated to their business. So do other people though, like Hollywood liberals. That's life. Anyway, it's Whole Foods that's being punished for something Whole Foods didn't do.

5. Somewhere in the Yglesias comment thread, someone says this isn't about ethics, it's about political maneuvering, and objectors like myself should get off our high horses. Interesting point, but Your "Ends Justifies the Means" Mileage May Vary (maybe I can invent a new Internet acronym, YEJMMMV).

6. Boycotts need both favorable sentiment and an organizer. A "Boycott Whole Foods" group has sprung up, but what they want is unclear. They call for a boycott, but don't say what they want Whole Foods to do. I think a successful boycott requires that the target company know exactly what it needs to do in order to make the problem go away.

7. Boycotts succeed not by turning customers away, but by affecting brand image and taking the time of important people. That's the sole advantage I see here for a boycott, in that Whole Foods relies heavily on its image.

8. The boycott may not be about Whole Foods or Mackey at all, but rather about health reform. That might make it more logical, but I'm not sure if it makes it the right thing to do.

9. Given his past, Mackey seems dumb enough to pull stunts like this again in the future. I remember hearing somewhere that company board members never want to see the company name in the newspaper, unless it's to report on record profits. Either he's really good at what his actual work entails, or the guy will eventually have to go.


*I should qualify these as "tactically" successful. We got the companies to withdraw, but have obviously failed on the broader strategic goal of forcing Burma's dictators to change.

Washington Week in Review doesn't care much about truth as a value

I normally like listening to the Washington Week in Review podcast as a way to catch up on news I might have missed and hear some analysis, but the critique of the mainstream media being morally empty has some application to their May 15th show. First, they were mystified as to why Pelosi and CIA would get in such a bitter public fight over whether she had been misled in the torture briefings. I can help out with that - it's because at least one of the two parties involved is lying, and the other party could be expected to be angry in that situation. I don't know who it is yet, but that circumstance justifies a public fight.

The other issue is Obama's reversal on releasing torture photos. The show participants describe it as a "nick" in his promise of transparency and can't see any reason to release them. It's interesting that the press has so little interest in the truth.

One thing that might help this show is if they encouraged posting comments on their website. Left, Right, and Center is a weekly news review that does exactly that, and I think they do a better job overall - even Tony Blankley on the right has become more accurate over time.

Final thought about Obama and the torture photos - the national security argument he's making has already been rejected by the courts, and he's never described how he could improve it. I think he's counting on the courts to force him to release the photos, so it's not his fault. I don't give a lot of credit to this type of behavior but it's not quite as bad as it could be.

Geese, guts, and gays

Kristof in the NY Times about his childhood on the farm:

Then there were the geese, the most admirable creatures I’ve ever met. We raised Chinese white geese, a common breed, and they have distinctive personalities. They mate for life and adhere to family values that would shame most of those who dine on them.

While one of our geese was sitting on her eggs, her gander would go out foraging for food — and if he found some delicacy, he would rush back to give it to his mate. Sometimes I would offer males a dish of corn to fatten them up — but it was impossible, for they would take it all home to their true loves.

Once a month or so, we would slaughter the geese. When I was 10 years old, my job was to lock the geese in the barn and then rush and grab one. Then I would take it out and hold it by its wings on the chopping block while my Dad or someone else swung the ax.

The 150 geese knew that something dreadful was happening and would cower in a far corner of the barn, and run away in terror as I approached. Then I would grab one and carry it away as it screeched and struggled in my arms.

Very often, one goose would bravely step away from the panicked flock and walk tremulously toward me. It would be the mate of the one I had caught, male or female, and it would step right up to me, protesting pitifully. It would be frightened out of its wits, but still determined to stand with and comfort its lover.

So, no more eating geese for me. The thing about it is, my feeling that it would be wrong to eat an animal that can behave like this, isn't an intellectual determination. By contrast, I can intellectually justify my general rejection of animal rights. I can also justify my acceptance of some level of rights for highly intelligent animals that the Great Ape Project supports, and even my squishy concerns regarding eating smart-but-not-sapient animals like pigs and some other mammals. But my reaction against killing geese is just a gut reaction.

Gut reactions aren't necessarily wrong though - I think any coherent ethical system could be used to justify horrible things, so a gut check is a good thing. On the other hand, I think it's exactly this kind of unthinking gut response that tells other people that gay behavior and gay marriage is bad.

So how do you reconcile gut instinct against intellect? I don't think you can, and I don't think you should really choose one over the other. But knowing that gut instinct can be directed by personal feelings that have nothing to do with morality makes me believe that my reaction to not eating geese is better than others' homophobia, because the consequences of being wrong are very different. If I'm wrong and eating geese is fine, then the world has not been badly damaged. Wrongly choosing to discriminate against a whole class of people, though, is a different ball of wax.

The way to handle the Amernian genocide problem

So Obama is avoiding his campaign statement that he would call the Turkish expulsion and killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians a genocide. Not too surprising. He's an improvement over a regular politician, but he's not the fabled arrival of the Honest Statesman.

Still, I think there's a politically-viable way for America to finally call a genocide a genocide. It would be for the Congress and the president to formally recognize the Armenian genocide and, at the same time, formally recognize that in some cases, the American and colonial treatment of Native Americans also constituted genocide. I think that could help get Turks off their high horse if we're willing to put ourselves in the same category. Obama even came close in his own speech to the Turkish Parliament, when immediately before discussing the "events of 1915" he said "Our country still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of Native Americans."

This recognition of American genocide might be difficult for some Americans (and not every American interaction or war with Native Americans was genocidal; the vast majority weren't). It might then also help those Americans understand the Turkish reluctance. Anyway, having company in acknowledging sin might make it a little easier to do.

The banality of legal academic evils

I'm reading a fair amount of chatter in the legal blogosphere over John Yoo's recently-released legal memo from March 14, 2002 that started the government's infatuation with torture. This post suggests he didn't have the authority to issue the memo that was accepted as the final word over military interrogations. Elsewhere I've read that Yoo issued the memo the day after his supervisor, Jay Bybee (no angel either), had left office. Now people are debating whether Yoo should be removed from his office as a tenured law professor at UC Berkeley.

To be fair I haven't read his memo, but I've read about it. What it reminds me of is my one time where I felt my legal work was entering some sticky ethical ground on a very much smaller scale - a client involved in a larger matter wanted to know if it had the legal authority to do something I considered unethical. The way I handled it was to exhaustively research and document all the ways things could go badly for my client if they took that approach. The law wouldn't allow me to say "no you can't," but there was room in the law to make the approach look unattractive.

Yoo seems to have taken the opposite approach. He wanted to see how far he could push it in terms of what colorable arguments could justify the worst possible torture. A "colorable" argument in legal terms means anything short of frivolous - an argument that is almost but not 100% certainly wrong is "colorable". Then he uses whatever possible tricks to "publish" his view within the government. It's all an academic exercise, I suppose. Maybe that would make him a good teacher in some people's minds, but this is no thought experiment, and he doesn't deserve to be rewarded.

Reviews: The Uplift Universe Trilogies, and "Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution"

David Brin's Uplift Universe trilogies are some of the better "hard science fiction" that I've read, defined as sci-fi that cares about the "sci" part. And unlike most hard sci-fi, the writing's good and the plots move quickly. The two trilogies deal with a universe populated by warring, status-seeking alien species all uplifted to sapience by previous alien species, except for self-uplifted humans who have just genetically enhanced chimps and dolphins. The Earth species navigate through this minefield to survive in a dangerous galaxy cluster.

The ideas are fun, with a decent if speculative grounding in biology, and the first-person perspective for non-human species works well. The chimps in particular are the most engaging characters, with their wisecracking, playful, sporadic heroism. The books would make a great movie, I think.

Downsides are the somewhat repetitive, victory-is-only-achieved-at-a-cost format, and that the best book is The Uplift War, at the end of the first trilogy. I recommend reading the first series, and then if you really liked it, read the second set.

The Uplift Universe's focus on obligations between species influenced how I read the collection of science essays, "Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution," edited by Frans de Waal. The essays are well worth reading, some more than others but you can skip the less interesting ones. I'll write more about it some other time, but I'm very interested in the discussion of chimpanzee culture (p. 248) and how different chimp groups have developed different tools. Chimps in west Africa learned to use stones to open nuts. Nothing stops other chimps from accessing the same food, except geographic barriers stop the spread of knowledge. Similarly, I also saw recently that other chimp groups use tools to extract ground tubers (via Afarensis).

I've argued recently against Denialism Blog that we have a special moral obligation not to harm intelligent species like chimps. Do we have any other obligations? Eli Rabett suggested that we might follow the Uplift Universe path and choose to genetically increase chimp intelligence, in the near future. My spin on all this is that we should, right now, teach wild chimps any tool using technologies currently used by other chimps in separate geographic areas. One could justify this as slightly balancing out all the harm we've done to them by enabling more of them to survive in the decreased habitat available. I don't think that's necessary though - it's justifiable on the basis that it makes their lives better.

What we can do beyond this, I don't know. I don't know if wild chimps could feasibly use or benefit from human-created techniques for improving their lives. Maybe chimps aren't even smart enough so that one group can master all the techniques used by all chimp groups. But then again, maybe they are, or at least can choose the best techniques.

I think this type of uplift is justified.

Republican (and Democratic) hypocrisy on homosexuality

There's an excellent post at the Volokhs on how conservative homosexuals are treated in the Republican party:

First, nearly all the gay Republicans working in Washington or elsewhere are to one degree or another closeted. Second, very few Republican officials care whether someone is gay.

From the top of the party to the bottom, few Republicans personally and viscerally dislike gay people. President Bush has had friends he knew were gay. So has Vice President Cheney. Even the most prominently and vigorously anti-gay Republican, Sen. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum, had a gay spokesperson whom he defended when his homosexuality became known.

The big, open secret in Republican politics is that everyone knows someone gay these days and very few people – excepting some committed anti-gay activists – really care. It’s one of the things that drives religious conservatives crazy because it makes the party look like it’s not really committed to traditional sexual morality.

So to keep religious conservatives happy the party has done two things. First, it has steadfastly resisted efforts to ease anti-gay discrimination in public policy, even when Republican politicians know better. I can’t tell you how many Republican staffers told me, for example, that their bosses privately opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment but would be voting for it anyway.

While the poster denies this is hypocritical, I'd disagree. On the other hand, the same claim could be made about Democratic politician attitudes to gay marriage. They know it should be legal, but won't say it.

The Democrats come out much better than the Republicans on this issue overall - I think the Republicans also, mostly know that gay marriage should be legal, and the Republicans are much worse on all other gay issues. But the Democrats aren't blameless.

For what it's worth, I think Edwards and possibly Obama are leaving the door open to supporting or at least being truly neutral on gay marriage in the near future, possibly before or during their second presidential term if elected. It's something, but it's no guarantee, it'll likely depend on polling, and it's not perfect.

Obama was right on Pakistan, if we're willing to apply the Golden Rule

Obama has been taking a lot of heat for saying that as president, he would take military action against high-level Al Qaeda forces in Pakistan without that government's permission if the Pakistanis failed to act themselves. There's a certain level of irony in that the critics mostly decry Obama's failure to be vague about this, rather than his actual policy, and then they use the fact that he was vague on just what military action he would do to claim he's talking about a full-scale invasion, like the one that the neocons wanted/still want to do with Iran.

Obama isn't an idiot like the neocons; he's talking about covert ops or small-scale military ops (missiles and in-and-out raids). From my perspective, this is fine ethically, as long as we accept the Golden Rule. Here's the hypothetical: suppose Pakistan locates high-value terrorist leaders targeting Pakistan for something terrible, at a location in the United States, and the US refuses to act against them for whatever reason (maybe the Pakistanis trust their intelligence sources while the US doesn't). Pakistan has the same right to move against these people as we have against Al Qaeda in Waziristan. I don't see any part of this hypothetical as being completely impossible, by the way, including Pakistan's ability to act. They can't launch cruise missiles, but they can send some spies with easily-purchased-in-America, modified automatic weapons to shoot up a terrorist meeting, probably with less collateral damage than a cruise missile would bring.

So I don't see a way around this ethically,* although I would love to witness the contortions of American Exceptionalists in order to claim our moral leadership allows us to act in self-defense in ways that are denied to other nations.

Now, ethics is only the first test; the second test is whether it's a beneficial policy to actually follow, and the third test is whether it's beneficial to openly talk about this policy. I don't really have an answer to the second test because I don't know when the benefit of taking out a particular target exceeds the cost to Pakistan's fragile political structure (assuming the action becomes known). I think it would, if it were 100% certain that cruise missile strikes would kill Osama and Zawahiri with 0% chance of collateral casualties, but beyond that scenario, you have to be more of a Pakistan expert than me.

As for the third question of whether one should talk about this policy, I also think that's okay if you acknowledge the Golden Rule. Obama's statements have already caused unrest in Pakistan, but I think some of the edge could be taken off by acknowledging that the shoe could be on the other foot. Obama could quickly add that in fact, covert foreign action in the US would be unnecessary because the US will act against terrorism plotters, and so any such attempt would be wrong and have negative consequences.

Whether any American politician would acknowledge this Golden Rule application, though, is an open question.


*The one potential way around is to say neither we nor the Pakistanis can act ethically in this manner and must use the legal process instead, but that's an outlier position in today's world.