Ramesh Ponnuru:

Hillary Clinton on McCain: “In 2008, he still thinks it’s okay when women don’t earn equal pay for equal work.” Right: Opposing the Lily Ledbetter Act means approving of unequal pay for women. What a disgusting comment.

But what’s disgusting about it, from a conservative perspective? She seems to be making a point of being scrupulously accurate. In this context, saying ‘it’s okay’ amounts to saying that the thing in question is maybe a little bad, but it doesn’t matter much, so you needn’t – therefore shouldn’t – do anything about it. As in: ‘do you need a band-aid for that?’ ‘No, it’s ok.’ A sense that unequal pay for women ‘is ok’, in this sense, is precisely the reason one would oppose the Lily Ledbetter Act. It’s an attempt to solve a non-problem. There will be costs associated with the legislation, in the form of lawsuits. And there will be no significant benefits. This does indeed seem to be the position, at least at the Corner. Reading up and down: [click to continue…]

Things have gone better than expected (certainly better than I expected) in Iraq over the past year[1]. On the other hand, things are going very badly in Afghanistan. For those, like me (and most at CT I think), who have supported the war in Afghanistan and opposed the war in Iraq, this raises some points to consider.

Most obviously, war is inherently unpredictable and dangerous, and there is no necessary correlation between the justness of a cause and its military success. That means, among other things, that launching a war (or revolution) on the basis of a cause that seems justified to those starting it, but which has little or no hope of success (indeed without strong grounds for expecting a good outcome after the inevitable loss of life on all sides is taken into account), is not glorious but criminally reckless.

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Some time back, I mentioned in passing that living in Los Angeles has never been my life’s dream. As of last week, I’ve lived here for a full year, and I’m glad to report I’ve mellowed on it a bit. Well, just the decision to put less energy into disliking it helped.

On another CT post of mine today, commenters geo and Delicious Pundit gently point out that it’s silly to hate on a relatively decent place like L.A. I agree. There are worse places to be dragged to by your job. It’s several months since I felt a true twinge of jealousy of a friend whose work took her to Astana for a few years (turns out they have quite good skiing nearby). L.A. has quite a few good things. Among them, Delicious Pundit exhorts me to “come to the Sunday Farmers’ Market in Hollywood and get some avocados and strawberries (Gaviotas, the kind that don’t ship), some tamales, and maybe some watermelon lemonade from the nice people who come down from Solvang.” Which sounds very nice indeed.

The best thing about L.A. is of course the weather. Nuff said. The first moderately ok thing about L.A. actually reminds me of Brussels: it’s a bit crap until you get used to it, but there are lots of good day trips and weekend trips to be made nearby in the meantime. So far, I’ve driven to Ensenada in Baja Mexico, Joshua Tree National Park, a couple of presidential libraries (both Reagan and Nixon are well worth a visit, whatever your political preferences), San Juan Capestrano, Santa Barbara and Solvang, and down the coast to L.A. from San Francisco. There’s no shortage of places to go from L.A., and they tide you over while you wait to find the city less soul-destroyingly ugly. Now that I’ve become indifferent to the strip malls and freeways, I’ve begun to like some of the nicer bits.

Good things about L.A.: many, many outdoor things, 5k and 10k runs every weekend that let joggers explore the city, some good cinemas and lots of cultural stuff scattered around a 30 mile radius. Life for me picked up an awful lot when I got a car and moved away from the office.

Bad things: well, let’s not focus too much on those, but I was surprised at how dirty the sea water is, and it’s a bit sad that so many good, independent book shops seem to be closing down at the moment. (Oh god, reading this back it sounds so Stuff White People Like, I’m mortified.)

I’m drawing a blank, but am sure there are plenty more good things, right?

This is the sort of information request that should be easily searchable, but any search terms I’ve thought to use have yielded a load of dross. So I’m turning to the collective brainpower of CT’s readers.

My beneficent employer, ICANN, has just opened an office in Washington D.C. (I’m still based in L.A., mope, boo, hiss). I’m here for a few days and just realised I don’t know what the authoritative source is for D.C. organizations is. Strikes me it’s the sort of thing we should have around the office.

When I worked in Brussels, it was easy enough to find comprehensive directories of trade associations, member state delegations, lobbyists, NGOs and the rest of the ragtag of organizations that gather around centres of political power. Does anyone know of a publication, ideally paper-based, with this info for Washington-based organisations? And where I might purchase such a tome?

K. Lo, at the Corner: “Conversations with random liberal strangers in New York City often descent into anger, bitterness, and crazy theories that cannot be argued with.” Yeah, I can see how that might be the case.

This is a follow-up to this post from Chris B., about “wanting not to get what you want”. I want to consider the converse (inverse, whatever it is) per my title. A paragraph from the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry for “Punishment”:

“To seek to be punished because one likes it, is pathological, a perversion of the normal response, which is to shun or endure one’s punishment as one might other pains, burdens, deprivations, and discomforts. (Only among the Raskolnikovs of the world is one’s deserved punishment welcomed as a penance.) To try to punish another without first establishing control over the would-be punishee is doomed to failure. But the power to punish — as distinct from merely inflicting harm on others – cannot be adventitious; it must be authoritative and institutionalized under the prevailing political regime.” [click to continue…]

From Powerline: “Being consumed by hate is damaging to your sense of humor.” Well, I have to admit it. I didn’t get the joke myself. Go ahead and read hindrocket’s original post and his somewhat petulant (so it seems to me) update.

I’m trying to figure out the joke’s nub or ‘cracker’ (I’m using humor lingo here!), the necktie-house analogy – which the author now claims was obviously supposed to poke fun at “how weird it seems, to us non-rich people, for someone not to know off the top of his head how many houses he owns” – can simultaneously obviously function by poking fun at the very idea that it seems weird not to know off the top of your head how many houses you own. This is some superfine complex irony conservative minds can parse with ease, which is lost on the plain people of liberalism, e.g. me.

But seriously, folks. I can at least analyze what properties the joke must have, even if I don’t get it: it is some sort of superpositional quantum irony, which depends for its appreciation on a given proposition P – in this case, P = it’s weird not to know how many houses you have – being self-evidently true and absurd at the same time. This superposition can only be maintained so long as the joke is unobserved (except by its author, who does not count as conscious – otherwise why would he have written such a thing?) Once conscious observers, e.g. liberals, took a look-in to see what was going on, the superpositional irony was bound to collapse into a state of grievance. And bob’s your uncle.

I have been obliged to invent a new blog category to cover this circumstance. I apologize for the complication this entails, but the universe is a rich, strange place.

UPDATE: Hey, categories aren’t showing any more, are they? (Am I missing something? Kieran?) Anyway, the category was supposed to be: ‘the water pitcher is both broken and unbroken.’ Get the picture?

Obama’s VP Candidate will be, presumably, announced today. On political grounds I’d prefer the candidate to be Kathleen Sebelius, but on historical grounds I sort of hope it will be Brian Schweitzer. Since Obama is “finishing his pre-convention tour in Montana”:http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/after_springfield.php, it might be too. Here’s why I’d prefer it on historical grounds.

In the lower 48 states of the US, there are four time zones, dividing the country up into roughly equal areas from east to west. In the early years of the country pretty much all of its population lived in the two easternmost time zones, the Eastern and the Central. (Actually in the very early years there probably weren’t such things as time zones, but the people lived in what are now the Eastern and Central time zones.) Even today, if “this information”:http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=714986 is correct, about 77% of the population live in those two time zones. So you might expect that the Democratic Party would have taken a fair time to have someone run on its Presidential ticket who was either born outside those time zones, or lived outside those time zones.

The first Democratic candidate (for either President or Vice-President) to be born outside the two easternmost time zones was Adlai Stevenson (1952, 1956), who was born in Los Angeles. Barring a major surprise, Barack Obama will be the second.

The first Democratic candidate (for either President or Vice-President) to be living outside those two time zones when they are nominated is, I believe, yet to be determined, because there haven’t been any yet. [click to continue…]

At present I’m in a part of Ireland where internet access is about as common as sunshine and clear skies. This means I have only belatedly come across Matt Yglesias’s call for technical assistance from my wife, in her capacity as a trained professional mereologist, to help resolve the thorny question of whether John McCain’s luxury double-condo in Phoenix counts as one house or two. My understanding is that mereological relations are somewhat flexible, and it’s quite acceptable for the same material object to be two condos and one home. Nevertheless, I am a mereologist by marriage only, so my views should not be taken as representing the opinions of a trained and licensed professional. I do think that this issue opens up the possibility of a new kind of political philosophy, though.

David Weisbach and Cass Sunstein (h/t Nicholas Gruen) have written a piece for the AEI Center for Regulatory and Market Studies[1] weighing into the debate about climate change and discounting, promising “A Guide for the Perplexed”. But their treatment of the topic is only like to add to the perplexity of anyone interested in resolving the issues.

Shorter Weisbach-Sunstein: If ethical considerations suggest that the most appropriate discount rate is 1.4 per cent, but the market rate of return is 5.5 per cent, it’s best to use the 5.5 per cent rate in evaluating climate change policies.

As a hypothetical statement this is broadly correct. Weisbach and Sunstein illustrate the point by considering someone choosing between an investment yielding a 10 per cent increase in value over 2 years and the alternative of putting money in the bank at 6 per cent, which is clearly superior.

The problems arise for the reader who tries to plug in real numbers. According to today’s New York Times the rate of interest on 10-year Treasury bonds is 3.84 per cent. Assuming (optimistically) that the Fed manages to hold inflation at 2.5 per cent over the next years, that’s a real rate of 1.34 per cent, almost exactly equal the rate quoted as justified on ethical grounds.

So to restate Weisbach and Sunstein with real numbers:If ethical considerations suggest that the most appropriate discount rate is 1.4 per cent, but the market rate of return is 1.3 per cent, it doesn’t matter which one you choose.

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“Clive Crook”:http://clivecrook.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/friedman_and_ignatius_on_georg.php has a post riffing on two columns by Thomas Friedman and David Ignatius which seems to me to get things wrong (or at the least, my interpretation of the relevant history is rather different).

Friedman concentrates on the error of Nato expansion, and the consequent humiliation of Russia, which has now come back to bite us. … The risks of humiliating Russia after the Wall came down were perhaps given too little weight. The dilemma was certainly understood by advocates of Nato enlargement, and there were attempts at outreach through various forms of partnership between Russia and and the alliance, though perhaps this seemed like adding insult to injury. But bear two other points in mind. One, Nato was not enlarged all the way, out of concern for Russia’s reaction: Ukraine and Georgia have been sort of promised membership, but with no timetable. Two, the question was, what were we to say to Poland, Hungary, and then-Czechoslovakia, desperate for release from Russo-Soviet imperium and for the protection of the West? Remember also that the success of their post-socialist transition to market economics was very much in doubt. This was a finely balanced argument.

The real mistake, to my mind, was in taking too long to admit the Eastern Europeans to the European Union–and that in turn owed everything to the fact (a grave mistake in its own right) that the EU had deepened its political integration too fast and too far. A shallower economic union, rather than a United States of Europe in progress, would have been able to embrace Poland and the others more eagerly. As it was, the only fast-acting institutional support for the East European reformers was Nato, a military alliance explicitly created to confront the Soviet Union, and implicitly still aimed at Russia. Friedman accuses the Clinton and Bush foreign-policy teams of “rank short-sightedness” in all this. He makes a good point, but the error was not as clear-cut as he says.

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Man, what if McCain gets elected? (Also, I listened to a Jonah Goldberg bloggingheads thing and it was terrible.) Oh, but I a had great idea for a superhero duo. There’s a terrible accident – a tornado rips through a trailer park – and this is, for some strange reason, the origin story for Double-wide (he’s a bruiser type) and Airstream (his sexy, flying partner). They fight crime in a small town in Georgia. Who should their arch-enemy be?

Right. The Dark Knight. My Valve colleague, Bill B., points me to David Bordwell grousing about superhero films, and generally saying smart things. Oddly enough, given my love of superheroes, I agree almost right down the line. Oh, I enjoyed Dark Knight well enough. But the ending was dumb, the Harvey Dent subplot handled clumsily. The only reason it made sense to me that he was Two-Face was that he was clearly named Harvey Dent and had half his face melted off. Other than that, I didn’t see the resemblance. Ledger’s Joker was, as all sensitive souls agree, vastly entertaining. I would have watched him read the phonebook. Well, for a few minutes anyway. But, while I doubt anyone else would have been better for the role, I don’t actually think it was such a tremendously impressive outing. it isn’t that hard to prance around in clown make-up, barking mad. Insane clowns could be the new Rain Man prestige role. Oh, it takes physical presence and a certain bone structure and face-to-lip ratio. I’m glad someone finally decided to put Frank Miller’s joker up there on the screen. And, of course, the Dark Knight is Miller’s, too.

Everyone knows that. But certain things follow which, it seems to me, have not been noted. First, the praise of Nolan has been a bit off-target. [click to continue…]

Hilzoy “comments”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/08/advisors-claim.html on David Brooks’ latest “column”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/opinion/19brooks.html?ref=opinion about how John McCain is a decent man being forced by the sad realities of the American political system to run a negative campaign.

Compelled? No choice? I don’t think so. For one thing, there are lots of ways in which McCain could campaign without lying or impugning his opponent’s patriotism. Some of them might even win. If McCain’s advisors can’t think of a single one of them, that shows only their limited imaginations.

But let’s pretend, just for the sake of argument, that they are right to say that the only way to win, this year, is by taking the low road. Would that mean that they have to take it? Of course not. That means you have a choice between honor and ambition; between running a decent campaign and a sordid one; between being a candidate the country can be proud of and being a candidate who contributes to the degradation and trivialization of political discourse.

You would have no choice only if you assumed that your own ambitions were more important than your honor.

To enlarge on this point a little: isn’t it _particularly_ incongruous for a self-described conservative pundit to invoke the “Gee Officer Krupke”:http://www.westsidestory.com/site/level2/lyrics/krupke.html defence? You know, all that honor and integrity stuff – how the choices we make reflect our innate character rather than our environment and all that. I imagine that if we saw an actual principled conservative assessment of some of the tactics that have been used by McCain in the last several weeks (flat out lies, claims that his opponent cares more about winning the election than the lives of American troops and so on), it would arrive at rather different conclusions …

Anyone who thinks male and female professors are treated equally by students is clueless. Just recently I came across a couple of examples that are very illustrative of this point. A friend of mine told me that her undergraduate advisees gave her a photo of themselves in a picture frame that says: “I love my Mommy”. (Apologies for the pathetic illustration accompanying this post, but given the time I put into it, I’m posting it.) Then just a few days later, I came across the following note on Twitter:

A friend of mine just bought this (as a gag) for her diss. director http://bit.ly/11LSdW.

Yes, click on the link. I’ll tell you where it leads, but you’ll appreciate it better if you see the image. The link is to a children’s book called “My Beautiful Mommy”. Raise your hand if you’re a male professor and students have given you similar gifts “as a gag”. No one? Shocking.

I can see the comments already: “If female profs are more caring then what’s wrong with students expressing their appreciation for that?”

First of all, students demand much more emotional work from female professors than they do of male profs. If the women don’t provide it, they are often viewed as cold bitchy profs that don’t care about students. Although I don’t know of any systematic studies of what types of topics students bring up during interactions with professors by gender, I have heard plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that female profs get approached much more by students wanting to talk about life issues than male profs. (More generally speaking, there is literature on how gender influences teaching evaluations, here are some older references.)

Second, there are plenty of ways to express appreciation that don’t involve putting the female prof in a mothering role, a role that certainly isn’t emphasizing her academic strengths and credentials. As my friend noted, a gift of this sort makes her feel as though her only contribution to the students’ success was in shepherding them through their projects and not in providing intellectual stimulation, helping them professionally, or contributing to the creation of new well-trained researchers. Maybe, just maybe, she’d like to be recognized for her intellectual contributions and the part of mentoring that involves the research aspects of her job. And while it would be neat if mothering was equated with all of those things, don’t kid yourself. Of course there is nothing wrong with being compassionate and caring, but it’s not what tends to be rewarded professionally in academia.