Republicans teabag America

Oh man, the Republicans keep getting in deeper:

For those of you in the dark, here is the definition of “teabagging” that Maddow is having a field day with.

Lexicographers take note

The CBC recently announced that they would reduce executive bonuses by 50% next year, to which the Canadian Media Guild members, who face massive layoffs and wage rollbacks in the coming year, replied, “The CBC execs get bonuses?!”

Bonus outrage is officially all the rage these days. Nonetheless, the whole blowup over the AIG bonus debacle–which set this ball rolling in the first place–has its roots in a simple semantic problem. Most people conceive of a bonus as something extra. Business executives conceive of bonuses as a natural extension of their salary, subject to the same contractual obligations and expectations.

When the team of executives hired to fix AIG with the help of $170 billion from the government agreed to work for a salary of $1, it gave the impression to the public that they were taking a huge hit for the good of the world’s financial system. In reality, as people found out a few days ago, they actually agreed to work for a salary of a dollar, plus a million dollar “bonus” at the end of the year, which was just as contractual an obligation as their salary was. The trouble is, when the people who naively conceive of a bonus as being something extra heard that these AIG execs were getting million dollar bonuses, they got outraged, because there was obviously no fiscal success on the part of the company that would justify the distribution of an extra million dollars to each executive at the end of the year.

Of course, the bonus wasn’t extra at all. The executives signed a contract that stipulated they would receive an effective salary of $1 ooo oo1. When Liddy got pressured by Congress to allow clawbacks of %90 of that amount, the execs saw it, rightly, as a clawback of %90 of their salary for that year.

Obviously, in hindsight, calling contractually obligated yearly payments to corporate executives “bonuses” is horribly misleading and disingenuous, especially coupled with the announcement that the AIG bailout team would work for $1 salaries. This was an obvious and flagrant attempt to mislead the public, and it has been ever since the concept of contractual bonuses became the norm in executive retention. Nonetheless, it would be nice if corporate execs just played it straight and called the bonuses “salary,” because at least then we would all be talking about the same thing during discussions of exorbitant executive pay rates.

Get off my lawn! Youth culture and social stigma

The cities of Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster have undertaken a project to build a bike path from the Vancouver waterfront to somewhere in New West, called the Central Valley Greenway. In true government style, the project is so far behind schedule that some of the earlier parts are decaying from lack of use while they plug away slowly at the newer parts, like the bridge near Sperling/Burnaby Lake. At the same time, the path seems like it was poorly advertised, so the parts that are usable only see a couple of travelers every day. For these reasons, much of the path seems forgotten and abandoned, particularly the section near my house, which passes a number of homeless person bush camps, a partially washed out bridge, lots of industrial warehouses and trailer yards, some derelict old buildings, and some train track embankments that are heavily graffitied and covered with trash. Many of these areas would serve as active deterrents to average people who might otherwise find the pathway very useful and enjoyable.

One of these areas is under the overpass where Kensington Avenue crosses Still Creek. When I first walked by here in the early fall, I was suprised to find that some enterprising kids had built an elaborate dirt BMX park under the bridge, with about 8 or 10 jumps of various sizes, as well as some phenomenal graffiti pieces on the massive bridge pylons. The jumps were clearly well-used, as indicated by the bike tracks in the dirt, the empty cans of coke and other detritus scattered on the ground, and the well-worn path crossing the tracks toward the suburban neighbourhood across Lougheed Highway. Unfortunately, when I walked by there again about two weeks ago, the entire park had been bulldozed flat, presumably by the city.

This got me thinking about the attitudes toward youth that are ingrained in the bylaws of cities across North America. For some reason (and there are probably lots of good ones), things that are associated with unchaperoned youth, like skate parks and graffiti, are often put in the same category as halfway houses and brothels when the prospect of their appearance in a gentrified neighbourhood comes up. (Even “txtspk” seems to signal the apocalypse for some people.) I’m sure there are lots of good reasons why adults are scared of youth culture, and they probably boil down in one way or another to the feeling of losing touch with the youth, or coming to no longer understand their actions and communication, which would be an early manifestation of losing control of them altogether and having them take over the world. Some youth are out of control, and lots of youth are insubordinate, spiteful, hateful and even violent toward adults, but I still don’t think this is a good justification for societally repudiating youth culture in general as foreign and dangerous.

Here’s why: it’s been my experience as a youth, and in my observations of other youths, that kids who are really into something are  going to stay out of trouble, for the most part. I was into climbing, for example, and when I was at the climbing gym or up in Squamish five days out of the week, I didn’t have a lot of time to drink and do drugs or whatever else I might have done. I was preoccupied with climbing. Contrary to what seems to be the popular conception of youth culture, things like skateboarding, BMX, snowboarding and graffiti are the same way. If a kid is really into skateboarding, or really into graffiti, they are probably going to be preoccupied with that activity to the degree that it deters them from activities that we should be afraid of, like gang violence, hard drug use, rape, and so on. Sure, kids who are into skateboarding and graffiti are going to smoke pot, and they’re going to have sex, but they’re not going to devote their lives to pot and sex if they have something more compelling that occupies their time

I realize that I’m making a lot of unqualified statements in this post, and that’s why I’m going to put out a call for research. I would greatly like to see some deep, intellectually and empirically rigorous examination of youths to see if there really is any basis for being afraid of youth culture, and for actively deterring kids from participating in it. Let’s analyse a healthy number of kids from across the continent, and see if pot really is a gateway drug, if graffiti really does lead to gang activity, and if text messaging really does lead to illiteracy. Would kids who participate in these activities be more likely to end up in prison or in gangs than kids who don’t? What exactly is the relationship between activities like these, that we seem to be afraid of, and the things we really should be afraid of? I think the results might surprise us. The city of Burnaby made a decision to pay to have that BMX park under the bridge ploughed down, and the graffiti buffed, and I would be very interested to see if there really is any reasonable basis for doing so. And if not, how do we remove the stigma that’s associated with anything youth culture?

Potent Quotables

[T]he pleasure (for me) of dozing in the sun on the grass of a public park is something I can, quite literally, live without, but only because I have a place where I can sleep whenver I choose. We are not speaking of murder or assault here, in which there are (near) total societal bans. Rather we are speaking, in the most fundamental sense, of geography, of a geography in which a local prohibition (against sleeping in public, say) becomes a total prohibition for some people. That is why Jeremy Waldron (1991) understands the promulgation of anti-homeless laws as fundamentally an issue of freedom: they destroy whatever freedom homeless people have, as people, not just to live under conditions at least partially of their own choosing, but to live at all.

Don Mitchell, “Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States”

Compare and contrast

Everyone who reads Feministe will have seen this already, but I wanted to plagiarize it anyway because I like it. It’s very poignant.

The Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003:

And the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009:

Obama’s Blackberry

The New York Times article announcing Obama’s victory in the fight to keep his Blackberry contained this short exchange:

The news was disclosed by Mr. Gibbs at the first White House press briefing, on Thursday afternoon. Several questions about the presidential e-mail, however, were not addressed.

“What’s the address?” Major Garrett from Fox News asked Mr. Gibbs.

Mark Knoller from CBS Radio News said, “None-of-your-business.com.”

Knoller obviously confused “e-mail address” with “URL,” and presumably meant something more like “obama@none-of-your-business.com.”

Interestingly, the victory announced by the NYT is actually a defeat, because the Blackberry Obama is allowed to use is not the Blackberry he wanted to keep. It’s actually this one, known affectionately by some as The Brick:

Not only does he not get to keep his old email address, but all of his contacts have to be pre-approved and briefed by the White House before they can be added to the list. So the original impetus for keeping his Blackberry, which was based on a fear of “losing touch with the struggles that people are going through every day,” has categorically been overruled by the Secret Service. At least there’s still Twitter.

Another Rick Warren post

I guess it’s about time to jump on the anti-Rick Warren bandwagon, except I don’t really plan to hate on Warren as much as I plan to talk about  disagreement. For those of you living in a box (or outside of the States), pastor Rick Warren was recently invited to give the invocation speech at Obama’s inauguration ceremony in January. This invitation is troubling for a lot of people, considering that Rick Warren is an incredibly bigoted and offensive anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-women jerk. I read a wide range of blogs about a wide variety of topics, and a huge number of them came out against this decision; some claim Obama is simply trying to pander to the evangelical wingnut sector, some claim that the hope that Obama ran on is now being dashed, others think that Obama is making an effort to be inclusive and open up dialogue with people he disagrees with, but pastor Warren was still a regrettable choice.

Obama is in an unfortunate situation, like a lot of politicians, in that he has the opportunity to make a huge number of positive changes for the country, but he has to weigh all of his actions against the spectre of popularity and approval. His job is, officially, to do what his employers (the people) want him to do, not necessarily what’s best. If he wants to do something that he thinks would be good for the country, he has to convince the people to support him before he can go ahead and do it, lest he be fired for ignoring the instructions of his employers.

Opening up dialogue with people he disagrees with is one of those things that is good for the country, but that has the risk of upsetting a lot of his employers. I happen to agree with Obama that talking to bigoted assholes is a necessary step toward ameliorating harmful disagreements, just as I think talking to Iran without “preconditions” is an excellent way of coming to a resolution with Iran and other Middle Eastern countries who are justifiably pissed off at the United States. Talking should be the first step; if talking is only undertaken with preconditions, then it becomes coercion, and coercion is toxic to good discussion. I’m happy to see Obama talking with people like Warren, because it means that the first step to bringing those people around has already been taken, or is at least underway. But considering the position that Obama is in, I think Warren was a poor political choice for the purposes of the inauguration, because it is too easy to infer that his invitation was purely a political move designed to make bigots happy at the expense of oppressed minorities.

I read an essay by Sarah J. Cervanak and others this semester about the experience of teaching a course on US Latina feminisms, and I came across a passage where the authors describe students rejecting feminist theory for being “empty intellectualism and Eurocentric elitism.” It reminded me of how common it is for people, especially feminists and other leftists, to ignore people whose ideas are opposed or different to their own, without even engaging in dialogue with the ideas. I asked on our group blog how this is different from natural scientists rejecting the theoretical humanities for being fluff–people in the humanities resent people like Sokal and Morningstar, who criticize postmodernism without reading it first, but we criticize the natural sciences and feminist theory for being “too bourgeois,” too elitist or too positivistic without engaging in any dialogue first. The same thing happens in the blogosphere, too, as we saw with the posts about the female bodybuilders; lots of people were told to shut up before any conversation happened. It is much too common to see people shy away from talking with people who hold disagreeable views in favour of turning around and preaching to the choir–because that way you don’t have bother to manage any conflict.

Assuming Obama is doing this as a legitimate attempt to open up dialogue with homophobic bigots, I applaud him; but at the same time I resent him for legitimizing homophobic bigotry. What a dilemma.

The wealthy wheel gets the grease (and everything else)

Larry Bartels, a Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, published a book this year called Unequal Democracy, and he spent a week  shamelessly plugging it over at Table for One earlier in the year (1,2,3,4,5). Generally speaking, Bartels’s book is about how political power is shared by the citizens of the United States, and more specifically how certain groups of people hold disproportionately large shares of that power. Although we all know this in our hearts to be true, especially radical liberal extremist special interests like my own, Bartels apparently does a great job of actually doing research and substantiating his conclusions with evidence. His aim, he says, was to use “the politics of economic inequality as a starting point for a more general examination of how American democracy really works”; this examination involved in large part looking at how the interactions between a political party and its constituents translated into policy decisions, which constituents had a greater influence on the policy decisions, and why. His conclusion about the economic correlates with ability to affect policy are most interesting to me; in his discussion at Table for One he summarizes one of his conclusions like so:

Insofar as elected officials are responsive to the policy views of their constituents, only the views of affluent and middle-class people really matter. The preferences of millions of low-income citizens (in the bottom third of the income distribution) have no discernible effect on senators’ roll call votes, whether we consider the whole range of issues that come before Congress or specific salient roll call votes focusing on the federal budget, the minimum wage, civil rights, and abortion.

Although we all know this to be true, as I said, the degree to which it has been shown to be true by Bartels is fairly alarming. In a later post, he reiterates the statement that “there is no evidence of any discernible responsiveness to the preferences of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution.” The bottom third! No evidence!

Along a similar line, Associate Professor of Politics Martin Gilens, also at Princeton, published an article in Public Opinion Quarterly in 2005 about the correlation between “democratic responsiveness” and socioeconomic class (full text, PDF). He studied data from nearly 2000 survey questions asked of the American public between 1981 and 2002 with the aim not of determining whether public opinion influenced policy, but rather who out of the survey respondents had the greatest ability to influence policy. By analyzing policies where the opinions of low and high economic classes diverged, Gilens found that rich people had much more ability to affect the outcomes of policy decisions than poor people: “For the 887 policy questions on which well-off and poor Americans disagreed by eight percentage points or more [...], outcomes are fairly strongly related to the preferences of the well-to-do (b = 1.92, p = .000) but wholly unrelated to the preferences of the poor (b = 0.04, p = .92).” He concludes, somewhat pessimistically,

There has never been a democratic society in which citizens’ influence over government policy was unrelated to their financial resources. In this sense, the difference between democracy and plutocracy is one of degree. But by this same token, a government that is democratic in form but is in practice only responsive to its most affluent citizens is a democracy in name only.

This is all quite apalling. And although this problem appears to be worsening, at least since the fifties, there is one small consolation in the election of Obama: according to Bartels, the incomes of the middle class and the working poor have tended (since 1948) to grow much more quickly under Democrat leadership than Republican leadership.

(h/t Henry at Crooked Timber)

The middle way

Tom Preston, a WSU political psychologist, was on The National the other night talking about what the deal is with Stephen Harper. Here’s my transcript of what he said (video is available here):

High complexity people are the people that see the shades of grey; they differentiate a lot in their environment. Less complex people tend to see the world in more absolute terms, more black and white terms. And the upshot of this for leaders is it affects how they set up their advisory systems and it set ups how they use information; so less complex leaders, like Harper, who don’t really have much diversity among their advisers, they tend to be very rigid, ideologically; they tend to surround themselves with people who have similar views; they don’t have–in other words, they just don’t have their antennae up. Leaders like this tend to not recognize some of the potholes, some of the dangers that are lurking ahead because they’re just so focused on what they think is the reality.

Although there are lots of good reasons to be skeptical about the utility of “personality profiles” like high and low complexity, I think it’s safe to assume that Preston’s assertion about Harper’s personality is based not so much on a definition of low complexity people as it is on a career spent observing the personalities of American politicians and how their decisions relate to patterns of personality traits. Harper’s demonstration of what Jim Travers called “a default of extreme partisanship” is characteristic of his tendency toward ideological rigidity–his tendency, in other words, to focus his energy turning discussions back to the issue he wants to discuss rather than considering a variety of options and opinions and picking the most utilitarian one. His constant regression to partisan politics, even outside of the context of an election, is a pertinent reminder of this tendency. It’s been fairly clear over the past two weeks that Harper’s number one priority is not doing what’s best for the Canadian taxpayer, as he repeatedly claims it is, but rather doing whatever he possibly can to stay in office for as long as possible.

In light of his tendency to wear partisan blinders, I’m about to argue that Stephen Harper has no one’s interests in mind but his own. A lot of people were surprised to hear about his announcement yesterday of his intention to appoint 18 people to the senate, despite his adamant desire to reform the senate into an elected body. Rex Murphy aptly expressed what a lot of people must have been thinking:

In the greatest financial chaos since the 30s, with a recession, jobs being lost, companies going bust, is stabilizing the Conservative Party of Canada over Christmas – by the addition of 18 well-connected buddies to the finest lounge in the country – the number one priority of the Prime Minister? [...] Loading the patronage train while the Salvation Army is still ringing bells outside the nation’s stores is not going to charm the public, or convince it that Harper has finally learned his lesson.

Harper’s announcement about the senate was the latest in a long series of partisan decisions that have subordinated the recession on Harper’s list of priorities. First, during the election campaign, he repeated that the country was doing fine and there was no need to take any action, so that he wouldn’t be seen admitting that he might need to run a deficit despite claiming vehemently earlier in the year that he would never do so. Second, shortly after he was elected, he moved to take away the ability of the opposition parties to prepare for an election by cutting their public funding. Third, he decided to shut down parliament rather than face defeat in a confidence vote, which may have otherwise given opposition the opportunity to oust him from office by forming a coalition. Then, fourth, he decided to appoint 18 conservatives to the senate, despite the fact that he won’t even be able to get a Conservative majority in the senate until 2011. And he still hasn’t taken any directed action at addressing the financial crisis.

The interesting thread that ties all these things together in support of my thesis is that his approval ratings are still very high, probably as a result of the opposition parties playing he-said-she-said in the background rather than coming up with any stately, leader-like plans to create a viable alternative to the Conservatives. Considering Harper’s track record over the past couple of weeks, it appears that he is using the ineptness of the opposition parties as an opportunity to fortify his party’s power in the government, because as long as the opposition parties keep dancing around the maypole, so to speak, he doesn’t have to worry for the time being about losing power in a confidence vote or losing votes to the opposition by ignoring the recession.

Doing “what’s right for the taxpayer,” to use his words, would be a lot harder than hoarding his Conservative acorns at this point in time because it would take away valuable resources from his partisan activities. Perhaps John Ralston Saul said it best:

In Buddhism there is a phrase—the middle way—which has always fascinated Westerners dissatisfied with the direction our society has taken. On closer examination that middle way turns out to be extremely arduous.

Obviously the middle way–or any amount of nonpartisanship or cooperation for that matter–is too complex for Harper to handle.

“We are watching Fox”

The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) did a fascinating study on public perceptions of the Iraq War in 2003, with the results published in the Political Science Quarterly. Here is a link to the full text of the article.

The study analyzed the weird disparity between people’s pre-war perceptions of the Iraq situation, such as their beliefs that the evidence of Hussein’s link to Al Qaeda or the evidence of WMDs was insufficient to launch a unilateral attack, and their ultimate support of the president’s decision to go to war. In a series of seven polls from January to September of 2003, they examined the misperceptions that were prevalent among supporters of the war that led them to believe that the war was a good idea despite a lack of supporting evidence, and the possible causes of these misperceptions.

What the actual misperceptions were is not so interesting, especially since it’s been five years since the poll and most of the misperceptions are old hat. The causes of the misperceptions, though, are much more interesting to speculate about. The researchers examined eight factors that they surmised may have influenced people’s misperceptions, and found that a few of them had a strong correlation with the number of misperceptions held by each individual. Incidentally, the two most powerful factors were intention to vote for George W. Bush in the next election (2004), and which station served as the primary source of network news. “Having Fox, CBS, or NPR/PBS as one’s primary news source,” they found, “emerges as the most significant predictor of [...] misperceptions in general”:

Fox is the most consistently significant predictor of misperceptions. Those who primarily watched Fox were 2.0 times more likely to believe that close links to al Qaeda have been found, 1.6 times more likely to believe that WMD had been found, 1.7 times more likely to believe that world public opinion was favorable to the war, and 2.1 times more likely to have at least one misperception. [...]

Those who primarily watched CBS were 1.8 times more likely to believe that close links to al Qaeda have been found, 1.9 times more likely to believe that world public opinion was favorable to the war, and 2.3 times more likely to have at least one misperception. However, they were not significantly different on beliefs about the uncovering of WMD.

On the other hand, those who primarily watched PBS or listened to NPR were 3.5 times less likely to believe that close links to al Qaeda have been found, 5.6 times less likely to believe that world public opinion was favorable to the war, and 3.8 times less likely to have at least one misperception. However, they were not significantly different on the issue of WMD.

But wait, it gets better: they also found that “level of attention to news was not a significant factor overall, with the exception of those who primarily got their news from Fox.” Fox viewers, in other words, were the only ones who were shown to become increasingly misinformed the more they watched the news. Robert Talisse and Scott F. Aikin paraphrase it thusly: “increased attention to the media forms that tend to feature more by way of real time argumentation – namely, television and radio, as opposed to print sources – is positively correlated with political ignorance.”

Talisse and Aikin used the PIPA study to support their concept of what they call a selective straw man fallacy (“Two Forms of the Straw Man.” Argumentation 20.3; full text). This is when a person, A, selects a weak argument against his own argument, refutes that weak argument, and then generalizes from that refutation to all counterarguments that might oppose his own argument. So, for instance, if B, C, and D all have counterarguments to A’s argument, and B’s is the weakest counterargument, A will refute B’s counterargument and then claim that he has refuted all opposition to his own argument. This kind of argumentation is seen all the time in popular political discourse:

The audience is expected to rely upon the author to present the opponent’s view, the author presents what is in fact a more-or-less accurate depiction of what some of the weakest opponents have said, the author easily refutes the opponents, and then explicitly takes himself or herself to have shown that all extant articulations of the opposing view are as easily dismantled.

Talisse and Aikin conclude that

The result is a popular public discourse of heightened passion and outrage that grows increasingly ignorant of what is actually in dispute. Under such conditions, a premium is placed on holding one’s ground without regard to the reasons and arguments of those who disagree; that is, the result is a total undermining of argumentation.

The “total undermining of argumentation,” I would suggest, is what makes Republican talk show hosts so insufferable. But frustration with Republicans aside, the PIPA study is alarming in its demonstration of the relative ease with which the President is able to mobilize support for his policies based on outright falsehoods, and the level of complicity of certain types of media in perpetuating, or at least failing to repudiate these false beliefs. Something to think about next time you’re listening to Sean Hannity.