Boneheaded Stupidity

I was at a sort-of DC power lunch yesterday with staffers from the Hill (the first such lunch I’ve ever gone to, and likely to be the last for a while), and the conversation turned to a piece of legislation that’s being pushed hard by lobbyists for big players in the tourism industry, the so-called “Travel Promotion Act”:http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-s1661/text. The Act is supposed to create a $200 million fund to promote tourism, by levying a charge on visitors to the US. The charge is non-trivial – the estimates I heard suggested that in order to raise $10 a head to give to the travel industry’s promotional fund, the government will likely have to impose a total fee of $25 to cover administrative overheads.

This seems to me to be one of the more straightforwardly stupid legislative proposals of the recent past. As someone who used to visit the US a lot before I became a permanent resident, I can testify that I would have found it extremely galling to have to fork over $25 to subsidize glossy brochures for the US tourist industry, and would have likely restricted my travel to the US as a result. For that matter, I’ve heard strong resentment expressed by US citizens who have to pay similar fees when they visit certain countries in Latin America. Even so, it sounds as though the bill has a lot of support – 44 senators are co-sponsoring it already.

This is one of those instances where public choice theory works – a number of big players in the tourist industry (whom, one suspects, will reap the lion’s share of the benefits) are trying to impose costs that will very plausibly hurt travel to the US as a whole, even as it directs more of the tourists who do come in their direction. The major villain in the story is the Disney Corporation – the _Washington Post_ ran a good story a few months ago, “Mickey Goes to Washington”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302837_pf.html, on Disney lobbyists’ involvement in the campaign behind the proposed Act. The Act’s financial consequences are partly obscured because non-US citizens are expected to take a lot of the hit. But I hardly think that it will promote travel.

More generally, there should be some phrase or term for bills or proposals that are likely to have the opposite effect to that which their title suggests – this is hardly an unique phenomenon. Suggestions welcome in comments.

Update: Thanks to “Maurice Meilleur”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/06/24/annals-of-stupid-lawmaking/#comment-244387 in comments, we have a winner. NEGISLATION (n): A legal act which, by design or accident, achieves the opposite effect to that which it purportedly intends. Examples include the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, and the Travel Promotion Act (the Mickey Tax Act) of 2008. See also _negulation_.

Update 2: Title changed to make it punchier

From “Inside Higher Ed”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/11/iraq today

The missteps in Iraq are well documented by now. … Among those success stories is the American University of Iraq, a Western-style institution in the war-torn country’s northern region that promises to “lead the transformation of Iraq into a liberal and democratic society. … The university’s lofty aspirations, as espoused on its Web site, make the selection of its first chancellor all the more puzzling. Owen Cargol, who took the helm at AU-Iraq in 2007 and resigned in late April of this year, had a checkered past that could have been revealed to university organizers with a simple Google search.

… Cargol’s 2001 resignation stemmed from allegations made by a Northern Arizona employee who alleged that Cargol, while naked in a locker room, grabbed the employee’s genitals, the Arizona Republic reported. In a subsequent e-mail to the employee, Cargol described himself as “a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy.” Cargol, who at the time was a married father of two children, went on to say that he was a “sensual kind of guy” who hoped the employee could “feel comfortable enough with me (and others) to reciprocate the same level of playfulness and affection,” the newspaper reported.

I blogged this long ago and somewhere else, but the annual chore of assessing exam scripts has brought it back to mind. “Bill Pollard and Soran Reader at Durham devised this ideal exam”:http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0306&L=philos-l&P=106972&E=1&B=——=_NextPart_000_00C2_01C32DDD.864384A0&T=text/html :

*Philosophy Exam – First Year*

Answer two questions

Two hours

1. Patch together some things you have heard in lectures, in no particular order.

2. Has this question vexed philosophers for centuries?

3. Create an impression of original thought by impassioned scribbling (your answer may be ungrammatical, illegible, or both).

4. Does the answer to this question depend on what you believe?

5. How much irrelevant historical background can you give before addressing this question?

6. Describe two opposing views, then say what you personally feel.

7. Rise above the fumbling efforts of others and speculate freely on an issue of your choice.

8. EITHER

(a) Answer this question by announcing that it really means something different (and much easier to answer).

OR

(b) Write out your answer to last year’s question on this topic.

9. Protest your convictions in the teeth of obvious and overwhelming objections.

10. Keep your reader guessing about what you think until the end. Then don’t tell them.

Via Unfogged. I see an emerging trend:

1. Terrorist Fist Jab.
2. Black Power crypto blink.
3. Tendency to say “A glass of water, appease.”
4. Cracks knuckles-under.
5. “Whitey’s-on-the” moon.

Stephen Hayes was on NPR a few minutes ago complaining about how Scott McClellan wasn’t very interesting, because he was just delivering ‘left wing blogworld talking points.’ This complaint itself, of course, being itself a re-iteration of a “Karl Rove talking point”:http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/05/28/rove_disputes_mcclellan_book.html. The deeper you go in …

(title stolen from “The Poor Man”:http://web.archive.org/web/20070101010304/http://www.thepoorman.net/2005/03/24/all-quiet-on-the-western-front/)

The merchant banker Oliver Kamm has a “vicious little post”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2008/05/miliband-pre-et.html today attacking the memory of the late Ralph Miliband for a paper he published in 1980. Miliband, the father of the current British foreign secretary, was, of course, a Marxist theoretician and a member of the British new left for much of his life. As a member of that left, he authored many papers for journals like the _New Left Review_ and _Socialist Register_. And again, as a member of that new left, he had an ambivalent relationship to the Soviet bloc. On the one hand he lamented the lack of democracy in those countries; on the other he thought they had achieved various social gains. Well he was (largely) wrong about the latter, but 1980 is a long time ago, and, back then he wasn’t alone in that false belief. In fact, he shared it with people for whom Kamm now declares his admiration and support and who then wrote for those same journals. The difference is, of course, that they are alive and he is dead. Miliband cannot reconsider.

Kamm’s post attacks Miliband’s paper “Military Intervention and Socialist Internationalism” (“Socialist Register, 1980”:http://socialistregister.com/node/22 ) on the grounds that he doesn’t think the crimes of Pol Pot were sufficient to justify the Vietnamese invasion. Reading the paper today, it has an odd and stilted feel: Miliband is wrestling with a set of issues and problems that seem deeply alien today. I think Miliband was wrong about that case, and badly so. But I presume (and hope) that he didn’t appreciate how horrific the Pol Pot regime had been, or didn’t believe all the reports. What the casual reader wouldn’t glean from reading Kamm’s nasty little post, though, is that the substance of Miliband’s article was an attack on the idea that the socialist ideal should be advanced by “socialist” states invading other countries. In other words, it was principally _an attack on the idea_ that socialists should support the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Miliband argues, correctly, that all that resulted from such interventions was alienation from the socialist cause, and the installation of weak puppet regimes without popular legitimacy. You’d never gather that from reading Kamm’s blog, though. He presents Miliband’s attack on Soviet tankism as an apologia for massacre. That wasn’t how it would have been read at the time. In fact, it isn’t how a fair-minded person would read it now.

So I’m about 50 minutes into the ABC Pennsylvania debate, and it’s like its being run by some crazed syndicate of Newsmax, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh – stupid talking point question after stupid talking point question, and so far not even a hint of interest in e.g. actual policy debates . All I need is for the moderators to ask _either_ the ‘So, Barack Hussein Osama, do you want to tell the American people about what you REALLY learned in the madrassa,’ or ‘Hillary Clinton, many Americans are concerned that you are secretly a lesbian? What do you have to say to them?’ question and I score the full house. I mean, what the fuck?

Would you like to see a bunch of people argue that calling a black man in his 40s “boy” isn’t racist, and it’s cynical playing of the mythical “race card” to say that it is? Hie thee to the commenters at Matthew Yglesias’. I considered excerpting, but it was like cool-ranch-race-flavored Pringles: once I popped, I couldn’t stop. Just go scroll down in slack-jawed amazement. I used to think he and Ezra Klein were neck-and-neck in the competition for “liberal blogger whose comment section was made most useless by Al-bots and such,” but the tireless efforts of Steve Sailer and “Fred” have put Yggles over the top. Kudos!

UPDATE: Ezra Klein’s commenters have objected that they don’t actually suck. This objection has merit; those guys have reasonably substantive conversations about health policy nowadays. I was really thinking of Ezra’s pre-Prospect blog, which had an Al, the Fred who I think is now Yglesias’, and Captain Toke–it was horrible. So Ygelsias’ blog is more properly considered as being in the running with Kevin Drum’s site, but he nonetheless retains the olive branch.
ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, ὁ δὲ χρυσὸς αἰθόμενον πῦρ
ἅτε διαπρέπει νυκτὶ μεγάνορος ἔξοχα πλούτου:
εἰ δ’ ἄεθλα γαρύεν
ἔλδεαι, φίλον ἦτορ,
μηκέθ’ ἁλίου σκόπει
ἄλλο θαλπνότερον ἐν ἁμέρᾳ φαεννὸν ἄστρον ἐρήμας δι’ αἰθέρος,
μηδ’ Ὀλυμπίας ἀγῶνα φέρτερον αὐδάσομεν…
(Translation here.)

Doug Feith, the “stupidest fucking guy on the face of the planet”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Feith, has a new book out, and the “back cover blurbs”:http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/04/advance_praise_for_war_and_dec.php are … interesting. Says Jean Edward Smith

“The fact that the policy to which he contributed was flawed from the outset in no way diminishes the historical importance of this firsthand account.”

Robert Gallucci, who hired Feith as a professor of practice at my alma mater, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, against “vehement faculty opposition”:http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/25/news/teach.php, is scarcely more enthusiastic.

“Douglas Feith has written what will be a controversial book. It will certainly anger many readers because it takes a different position that most other accounts on the wisdom of going to war in Iraq, on what mistakes were made, and on what made them. But Feith’s is a serious work, well-documented, that presents the best defense to date of the defining policy of the Bush presidency. It is a readable account that deserves to be read and its argument debated.”

Nor is Henry Kissinger precisely fulsome in his praises (and if you’ve lost Henry Kissinger …)

“The fullest and most thoughtful statement of the Pentagon thinking prior to and in the first stages of the Iraq war. Even those, as I, who take issue with some of its conclusions will gain a better perspective from reading this book.”

And these were the blurbs they chose to promote the book …

More generally, consider this an open thread on dubious blurbs and promotional snippets taken from book reviews. My favourite example of the latter being the Irish Times‘ review of Iain Banks’ _The Wasp Factory._ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Iain%20Banks%20the%20Wasp%20Factory, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWasp-Factory-Novel-Iain-Banks%2Fdp%2F0684853159%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1207883741%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 )

It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparallelled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author’s imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it.

How could you possibly, possibly refuse to buy a book with a blurb like that?

For those of you who keep track of Satoshi Kanazawa — evolutionary psychologist, co-author of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, and the Fenimore Cooper of Sociobiology — is now blogging at Psychology Today Magazine. Let’s turn the mike over to him:

Both World War I and World War II lasted for four years. We fought vast empires with organized armies and navies with tanks, airplanes, and submarines, yet it took us only four years to defeat them. … World War III, which began on September 11, 2001, has been going on for nearly seven years now, but there is no end in sight. There are no clear signs that we are winning the war, or even leading in the game. … Why isn’t this a slam dunk? It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire. We are not even allowed to call our enemies for who they are, and must instead use euphemisms like “terrorists.” … Hatred of enemies has always been a proximate emotional motive for war throughout human evolutionary history. Until now.

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

And there you have it.

A year-and-a-half ago, I wrote in anticipation of Eliot Spitzer’s election as governor of New York that I was eager to see how he handled the responsibilities of the position. In the last year, his approval rating tumbled fast, and it appeared that he hadn’t mastered the art of compromise – something that wasn’t as important when he was Attorney General.

Still, I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Last week, I drafted (but didn’t post) an argument that perhaps his feud with Senate leader Joe Bruno was part of a deliberate high-stakes strategy to claim the state Senate for the Democrats. And as of last week, it looked like he might win. Bruno would become just another Senator from upstate, and Spitzer might have a much easier time with the reforms he has championed, even with a lower approval rating. Just two days ago, the NY Times editorialized that one-party state rule, while risky, might allow passage of campaign finance reform, independent redistricting, not to mention other badly needed reforms such as a new lobbying law. Alas, it turns out Spitzer was just irresponsible.

It’s still possible that the Democrats will pick up the Senate seat they need. But if Spitzer resigns, Lieutenant Governor David Paterson will take over and the Lieutenant Governor position will remain unfilled until the election in 2010. Next in line … Joe Bruno (who is himself under federal investigation).

Hilzoy, “rejoicing the departure”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/02/ding-dong-the-w.html of the truly odious William J Haynes II, provides this mind-squirbling story from Haynes’ earlier career.

In this amazing brief, Haynes argued that bombing a nesting site for migratory birds would benefit birdwatchers, since “bird watchers get more enjoyment spotting a rare bird than they do spotting a common one.” Moreover, he added, the birds would benefit as well, since using their nests as a bombing range would minimize “human intrusion”. The judge’s comment on this novel line of argument: “there is absolutely no support in the law for the view that environmentalists should get enjoyment out of the destruction of natural resources because that destruction makes the remaining resources more scarce and therefore more valuable. The Court hopes that the federal government will refrain from making or adopting such frivolous arguments in the future.” (pp. 27-8)”

I once voiced my suspicion that Fafblog had retired because nothing, not even an entity with the godlike powers of the Medium Lobster, could out-lunatic Norman Podhoretz. I was wrong. William J Haynes II could out-lunatic Norman Podhoretz without raising a sweat. Sadly, the Medium Lobster isn’t even in the race.

Or how I can’t resist linking to Lee Siegel complaining on _The Daily Show_ about how the market is making the Internets into teh Stupid.

“Sadly No!”:http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/8788.html links to this Glenn Reynolds “post”:http://instapundit.com/archives2/015333.php arguing that Barack Obama should condemn some anti-Semitic black pastor in Murfreesboro, Tennessee who claims to support Obama, because otherwise

Obama’s big appeal — I’m a black candidate who’s not like Al Sharpton! — will be a fraud

He admits in a later update that the accusation of fraud was a “bit strong.” Indeed. But apart from the very unpleasant implication that black politicians need to be in the business of proving that they’re not Al Sharpton, this kind of ‘you must condemn …’ demand is a well established rhetorical trope. As “John Protevi”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/15/six-degrees-of-louis-farrakhan/#comment-224600 pointed out in the comments to a recent post, this “entry”:http://decentpedia.blogspot.com/2007/08/will-you-condemn-thon.html in the Encyclopedia of Decency provides a nice encapsulation, and should, I suggest, become the standard reference point for this kind of nonsense in future.

Will-You-Condemn-A-Thon
Sporting pursuit

Amusing internet pastime, in which several Decents quiz a pro-fascist, repeatedly demanding denunciation of a vast range of randomly-chosen murders, atrocities, war crimes and military actions in an increasingly hectoring tone.

“I agree, Guantanamo Bay is an affront to democratic ideals. But Will You Condemn Palestinian suicide attacks on Israeli restaurants?…

Yes, well, Do You Condemn Jihadist chlorine-bomb attacks?…

Okay, I knew you would be too sly to openly support such acts, but Will You Condemn terrorist attacks upon the American military?

What about the Battle of Teutoberg Forest, then, Will You Condemn that? …I see.