“If the bad act is committed by a member of a group you wish to demonize, attribute it to a community or a religion and not to the individual. But if the bad act is committed by someone whose profile, interests and agendas are uncomfortably close to your own, detach the malefactor from everything that is going on or is in the air (he came from nowhere) and characterize him as a one-off, non-generalizable, sui generis phenomenon.”

He is specifically noting how the same people who like to talk about Muslim breeding extremism were quick to distance themselves from a right-wing nut-job like Timothy McVeigh or an anti-Muslim nut-job like the guy who just attacked a NYC cab driver with a knife because the cab driver was Muslim. They believe that bin Ladin speaks for all Muslims in a way that Timothy McVeigh does not speak for all American Libertarians, and give absolutely no thought to the distinctions (large, subtle, or non-existent) between the cases.

But Fish stops there, and doesn’t actually answer that second, more difficult question either: to what extent do large political, religious, and social movements bear responsibility for the extremists actions taken under their names?

And to start, we need to recognize that not all groups are created equal.

At one extreme, you have groups like al Qaeda, who exist for the sole purpose of violent overthrow of the existing world order. When an al Qaeda member blows something up, it is perfectly appropriate to blame the organization he belonged to, because there was a very high likelihood that the organization told him to do it.

A half-step away from them are groups like Hamas, the KKK, or the Provisional IRA. These are groups that have non-violent wings: they run candidates for political office, they provide substantial charitable assistance to their communities, and they encourage their members to be active and productive members within their communities. But they also have no problem bombing children who look, act, or think differently than they do. When a Hamas or IRA terrorist blows up a school, it is perfectly appropriate to blame the organization that trained them how to do it. But we should also keep in mind that there are people who condemn terrorist acts who are helped by those organizations, who respect those organizations, and who are even members of those organizations.

At the other extreme are groups that bear no responsibility for any actions taken by their members. The Quakers and the Girl Scouts, for example, are two organizations that abhor all violent acts and preach tolerance and inclusion. If a Quaker were to shoot up a McDonald’s while shouting racial slurs, it would be plainly obvious that by doing so she was repudiating the values of the organization to which she belonged. (In particular, one of the biggest things that differentiates Quakers from other protestants is that they are zealously pacifist.)

Most groups fall somewhere in the middle, but there are some questions that I believe we can ask about a movement or an organization to determine the culpability of that group:

1) Is the group hierarchical in structure? It is more reasonable to blame a hierarchical organization: after all, Lieutenants do what their Captains tell them to.

2) Is the group concerned with all aspects of the lives of its members, or is is particularly interested in only a small facet of their lives? An organization that has a hand in every facet of it’s members lives, is much more culpable when a member does something wrong than an organization composed of people who all meet together on a regular basis but don’t necessarily know anything about each other.

3) Does the organization or movement believe in non-violence? Moreover, does it actively preach non-violence, or is non-violence merely assumed? If the organization believes that violence is acceptable, under what circumstances does it believe violence should be used–and does it police its own members when they use violence inappropriately?

4) Does the organization preach tolerance and inclusion, or is it set up to make the lives of some people better at the expense of other people? Or, to put it another way, who does it demonize? The NAACP, for instance, does not demonize white people; they demonize racists. Most “white” organizations (like the Council of Conservative Citizens, for instance) claim to be pro-white like the NAACP is pro-black–but they demonize blacks and Jews.

There are probably others that could be asked, but I think that’s a good start.

So, take the case of the stabbed cab driver. The anti-mosque movement is not hierarchical, and is not concerned with the personal lives of its members, but they do demonize all Muslims. They do not preach violence, but they don’t preach against it either (except to blame Muslims for violent acts). I would therefore say that the movement’s culpability is low in this case… but not zero. And I hope that the prominent spokespeople use this act of violence to preach against violence, instead of simply distancing themselves from the attacker.

Finally, I would encourage all of us to look at the organizations and groups that we identify with and ask ourselves: how culpable would that group be if a member committed an act of violent extremism?

The New York Times website has been running a series of “conversations” about current news topics, usually between columnists Gail Collins and David Brooks. This week Stacy Schiff, author of a recently released book on Cleopatra, is filling in for Brooks, and the topic of conversation is feminism and Sarah Palin.

So at one point during an aside, both Collins and Schiff lament the fact that young women see themselves as disconnected from the term “feminism” and from the feminist movement, even though they are in many cases living lives that are the direct result of the progress that the feminist movement made:

Gail Collins: Every time I go on a speaking tour I get questions from sad middle-aged women who want to know why their daughters all insist they aren’t feminists. They might be planning to devote their lives to healing fistula victims in Somalia, but they won’t let anyone call them feminists because they think it means being anti-man, or wearing unattractive shoes.

Stacy Schiff: Partly the word has been deliberately sullied, like “liberal” and “progressive.” It spells man-hating, militant, and, especially, no Manolos.

If it makes you feel better, I just texted my 17-year-old to ask if she considered herself a feminist. “If by feminism, you mean equality,” she answers, “then yes.” It’s not a word that appeals, because her generation thinks the work has been done. They’ve been reading articles about the End of Men. Somehow the news that men who work full-time make on average 23 percent more than women do seems to have escaped them.

Obviously for Collins and Schiff, feminism doesn’t mean “being anti-man”, or thinking that women are better than men. It means demanding equality: equality in the workplace, equality at home, etc.–and they hate that the word has been taken over by those who think that being “feminist” means to believe that women are better than men.

What I found interesting, and perhaps a bit telling, was this comment later on:

Stacy Schiff: And Mama Grizzlies sound so empowering! What woman doesn’t like the ring of that? Moms “do kinda just know when something’s wrong,” as Sarah Palin put it. (Ideally that category includes monitoring unprotected teenage sex under one’s own roof, but I digress, as you would say.) I’m all for saluting the maternal sixth sense, though I’m not sure I want a government run by intuition. We had one of those recently.

So ignoring the not-too-subtle jabs at Palin and George W. Bush, it was the “Moms ‘do kinda just know when something’s wrong’” that jumped out at me.

They just got through talking about the fact that women should demand equal treatment and equal pay, to continue to fight for those things and not take them for granted, and denying that feminists believe that women are better than men… and then they jump right into “women have a special sixth sense about their kids”.

Isn’t that exactly the kind of myth that the feminist movement was supposed to break down–that women are naturally better suited to being good parents, and therefore ought to be spending more time with the kids than men?

If women and men are going to be equal, then we all need to give up on the idea that any group is naturally suited to any given task. Men need to drop those stereotypes that they use to hold women down, certainly. But women also need to stop using those stereotypes too–even when doing so seemingly empowers women in the short-term.

So certainly Collins and Schiff are correct that the term “feminism” has been demonized by the right-wing, at least to some extent. But if they are going to really embrace the ideal behind feminism–true gender equality–and not just the label, then they need to give up on their own stereotypes as well. Those stereotypes would be wrong if I used them, they would be wrong if Pat Robertson used them, they are wrong when Sarah Palin uses them, and they are wrong when self-proclaimed feminists use them.

Alright, now that I have your attention I should take a few steps back and explain what I’m talking about.

Jon Stewart awhile back took Glenn Beck to task for associating all liberal ideas with communism and fascism. He noted that it is absurdly stupid to associate anyone who believes in an idea with anyone else who has believed in a more radical version of that idea. In other words, not everyone who wants to set up a social safety net is a Marxist–any more than everyone who wants to cut taxes or eliminate a regulation is an anarchist.

Now, Beck’s idiocy is on display every evening and is patently obvious to anyone who watches his show with anything approximating an open mind. But his sin–attributing extremist positions to moderates who fall within the same broad category–is shockingly common. It’s the same sin committed by so many racists in the world, that gives us the myth of the “lazy Mexican”, the “black criminal”, and the “money-grubbing Jew”. The sad thing, however, is that the same people who will decry this attitude when used to stereotype races, and who will mock Beck for stereotyping political ideals, will fall back on that attitude when discussing religion.

Take, for instance, the rantings of Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens wrote a popular book couple years ago in which he decried religion as basically evil, in large part because many evils have been perpetrated in the name of religious belief. Of course, Hitchens isn’t the first to use that attack on religion, but it’s a stupid attack. Once again: the actions of a few are taken to represent an entire group of people.

Which brings us back to the ADL. The ADL is one of many groups (including seemingly the entire Republican Party) to decry the construction of an Islamic Cultural Society and mosque a couple blocks away from ground zero. Of course, many like Newt Gingrich have gone off the deep-end when discussing the project, likening it to Nazi propaganda at a holocaust museum. The ADL has tried to take a more subtle line; for instance, here is an excerpt from a piece by Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times that is prominently referenced on the ADL website as indicative of the ADL’s stance: (the original piece requires subscriber access, but you can read most of it for free here)

“While defending Muslim religious freedom unreservedly, the ADL warned that building the mosque at Ground Zero “will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right”. In other words, if the consortium wants to build it, it can build it. But it would be a very bad idea. They should build it somewhere else in Manhattan.”

Later, he says:

“A radical school of it [Islam] views the US as its main enemy. Because that school is amply funded by Arabian oil, there is a standing fear that radicals will capture any large international project involving Islam, no matter how good its original intentions…. The organisers have been unforthcoming about their sources of funding. They are proceeding with the mosque project, even as it produces the very opposite of the inter-religious harmony they claim to seek.”

They try to put pretty language around it. The ADL isn’t saying Islam is the enemy, but many people believe that Islam is the enemy, and we wouldn’t want to offend them! Oh, and by the way, you never can tell where the money for any Islamic project is coming from, even if this project is supposedly moderate, because so many Muslims are radical Islamists with oil wealth shooting out their rear ends!

At least Newt is honest about his stereotyping and xenophobia.

I would find it ironic if it weren’t offensive: this is the same logic that led to a millennium of antisemitism in Europe. Some antisemite doesn’t want a local synagogue built, and the local leaders agree because “well, we’re not racist, but we many people view Jews as Christ-killers, and we understand that belief, and besides, the Jews are rich enough to build it in the next town over!”

So why do I find the anti-mosque viewpoint offensive? Because there is nothing that I hate more than when the zealots and extremists in my own faith (I am an evangelical, protestant, Christian) claim to speak for me. And I find it extremely offensive when ignorant fools outside of my faith humor those zealots and extremists by assuming that they speak for me. No thank you: I get to choose who speaks for me and represents my beliefs to the world, not you. If I were a moderate Muslim, I would be chomping at the bit right now–and as a moderate evangelical, I can sympathize enough to be offended.

But what’s worse is for a group like the ADL to facilitate this kind of stereotyping and ethnic discrimination. Newt, Palin, and the rest of the political talking heads all demonstrated a long time ago that they don’t mind fomenting fear and hatred if it might mean a couple more votes.

But the ADL ought to be better than that. They should be ashamed of themselves.

And the GOP wants to destroy it.

That’s just an off the cuff estimate of what the television ads will look like. Good luck being a Republican candidate trying to fight off the charge of “he wants to gut the amendment that ended slavery”.

Oh, and then there’s this fun fact: what do New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, Nevada, and Colorado all have in common? They are all presidential battleground states whose populations are at least 15% Hispanic. Florida in particular is key, because the Hispanic population is mostly Cuban–and Cubans have historically been much more conservative than the national Hispanic population. But even in those other states, Republicans generally win them by siphoning off a good 35% of the Hispanic vote; if that percentage falls to 20% they get trounced.

Of course, most people within the Hispanic population are not here illegally. But these communities are more likely to be first or second generation immigrants–people who are US citizens because of the 14th Amendment or whose children will be US citizens because of the 14th Amendment. Also, these are groups whose future political power rests on the continued growth of the Hispanic community, and are not likely to look kindly on a political play that hopes to dampen that growth.

And that’s not counting the fact that, eventually, the Republicans are going to decide that they might like to win more than 10% of the black vote–and trust me when I say that the black community will not look kindly on rewriting the amendment that ended slavery.

But of course it is never going to happen, for these reasons. The Democrats will pound the GOP into oblivion if they actually do push amending the 14th Amendment. It might pass a few states, but it won’t come close to getting the support of 2/3 of states. Besides, the GOP leadership doesn’t actually believe it will pass. They are simply trying to raise the specter of amending it, in the hopes that right-wing xenophobes will send them lots of money, and then hope that the Hispanic community won’t actually punish them for it if they don’t actually do anything. It’s a risky, bone-headed move, but when you have people out there like Sarah Palin, doing all she can to make sure that the GOP stays as racially diverse as a celebration of Jefferson Davis’ birthday party, then I suppose something like gutting the 14th Amendment is just “playing to the base.”

Now, putting politics aside for a moment, removing the guarantee of citizenship to all children born on American soil is also poor policy. To see why, let’s imagine a world in which a relatively innocuous rewrite of the 14th amendment passes: that any child is automatically a US citizen if one of the conditions has to be met:
a) at least one parent is a US citizen
b) the child is born on American soil and at least one parent is present on American soil legally at the time of the birth

This amendment would have little to no effect for the vast majority of people. Children of legal immigrants would still be US citizens, even if one of the two parents were here illegally. And yet even here, there are two major problems:

1) Enforcement. It requires a demonstration of parentage and citizenship to prove the citizenship of a new-born child. Identifying the father of a child is extremely difficult; this law would mandate expensive paternity tests for many people–which is a pretty intrusive expansion of government authority into the private lives of individuals, if you think about it. While I don’t condone the behavior, lying to one’s spouse about the paternity of a child is an age-old tradition. Besides, if the paternity of the child is unclear, what do you do then?

But even identifying the mother can be difficult. Children born in hospitals are identified and “lo-jacked” at birth to make sure that no confusion arises. But many children aren’t born in hospitals. What’s to keep mama from giving birth at home, handing the child to Cousin Sue (who has the appropriate paperwork), and having her take the child down to the hospital a few days later claiming to be the mother? Sure, you can do a genetic test, but what do you do with the child once you know that the woman in front of you isn’t the real mother?

Of course, then there are problems with forged citizenship documents. If Mom has forged citizenship papers, the child is marked as a US citizen on their birth certificate, and then ten years later Mom is charged with identity theft, what do you do with the child? Do you revoke his citizenship? What if the mistake wasn’t discovered until twenty years later?

2) A Permanent Underclass. The bigger problem, however, is the creation of a permanent underclass. Illegal immigrants are at the mercy of people who would take advantage of them. They can be virtually enslaved by unscrupulous employers or merciless family or “friends”, and have little or no recourse. They certainly can’t go to the police. But their kids? Their kids are citizens. Their children can get out, because they have every legal right that any other American has. Their children can go to school, go to the hospitals, and when they are in trouble they can go to the police to ask for help.

But not if this amendment is passed. Now those children are here illegally too. Those children, who before might have gone to school, gone to college, and grown up to be productive members of American society, are now outcasts–just like their parents. They now have very little opportunity for advancement. And they are now at the whims of those who would abuse or enslave them–because again, now they can’t go to the police.

Within a few generations, there could be whole neighborhoods of illegals in places like Los Angeles, El Paso, and Santa Fe. People whose great-grandparents fled a poverty-stricken village in Mexico or Central America. These people wouldn’t be American citizens. But they surely aren’t Mexican or Honduran citizens either–any more than most Americans feel connected to Ireland or Germany today. At that point, it’s likely that they wouldn’t even speak Spanish. Oh, and their “home” countries sure as heck aren’t going to want them–why should they take in a poor kid who has never even set foot in their country and can’t speak the language?

The result would be a permanent underclass. These people would be stateless. They would be outside of the normal legal protections of American society. They would feel little or no connection to American society. Their communities would be dens of crime and abuse. And if the police caught them, our only recourse would be permanent imprisonment.

Does that sound like the kind of country you want to live in?

Now, going forward, I don’t expect the decision to survive. I just don’t think that the federal judiciary is ready to step in and nullify every “marriage is only between a man and woman” law in the country, even though I think that the pro-gay marriage crowd has the stronger legal case.

But even so, I think it’s important to realize what the decision means–and what it doesn’t mean. For instance, The New York Times editorial on the matter is entitled “Marriage Is A Constitutional Right“. Even though the editorial goes on to give an accurate (as far as I can tell) description of the ruling, the headline is woefully misleading.

Marriage is not a Constitutional Right, and no where in the opinion (that I can find) does the judge claim that marriage is a Constitutional Right. Instead, the thrust of the matter is that if states are going to grant legal rights to some couples, that they have to have better reasons for denying those rights to other couples than “their sexual organs don’t line up right, and they are incapable of having children.”

States are not obligated to recognize or grant special privileges to anyone’s marriage. The Constitution does not require it, and the ruling does not require it. The Constitution does require that every citizen be equal under the law and be granted the same liberties–which means in this case, that if I get to marry the person that I want to, then so should you. But it does not require that the ability to marry the person of your choosing must be granted by states. States can choose to stop recognizing marriages.

I bring this up because I believe that government in fact has no business being in the marriage business. States should enforce and regulate contracts. But the legal “marriage contract” is not marriage. Marriage is a commitment made between two people, representing the intertwining of their families, and blessed by God. The legal marriage contract is simply an attempt by the state to recognize that commitment. But by taking marriage from the realm of interpersonal relationships and commitment, and into the realm of law, government does more harm than good.

For instance, government has no business granting privileges to people based on who they love–or don’t love. It is absurd to give tax benefits to members of a heterosexual couple and not a homosexual couple–but it is absurd to give tax benefits to someone because they are in a “couple” at all. A couple who hasn’t lived together in years isn’t married, even if they maintain a legal contract that allows them access to a tax break. By creating legal categories of “married” and “single”, that cannot possibly perfectly capture the essence of those relationships, government discriminates against some and rewards others with little rhyme or reason.

So I’m all for this ruling. Because hopefully this ruling is another in a long series of steps that will get government permanently out of our bedrooms and out of our relationships with those that we love.

I find this interesting, because there is some truth in the argument that this does disproportionately impact one racial group in terms of voting. That said, there are two solid arguments against this position, one legal, and one theoretical.

I re-read the 14th amendment, and here’s what section 2 says:

“when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime…

I added the emphasis. The 14th amendment expressly notes crime as an allowable restriction of voting rights. So, I think its hard to argue that preventing criminals from voting is illegal on 14th amendment grounds.

Aside from the legal arguments, there’s another reason that this logic is problematic. Jim Crow laws were designed specifically for the purpose of preventing one group from voting. That is, and should be, illegal. But in this case the purpose of the law is to prevent criminals from electing judges and district attorneys (and other positions) who will fail to uphold the law. (Whether criminals would actually do this is a different question). The racial imbalance is an unfortunate side effect.

By analogy, Hispanics make up only 15% of the total population in the United States, but make up 25% of children under 5. As you can see, a disproportionate number of children under 5 are Hispanic. But we don’t allow children under 5 to vote. While the intention here is to prevent votes for politicians who cater to the later bedtime and more ice cream demographics (although I, for one, would welcome a politician who catered to that demographic…), it does disproportionately impact a particular race.

Nobody would argue that this racial imbalance in voting rights is unfair to Hispanics, and should be overturned under the 14th amendment (note: the 14th amendment has a clause exempting people under 21, but see point 1 above - it also has a clause exempting criminals). But the logic is the same.

We should never allow laws with the intent to adversely impact one group. We should try to avoid creating laws that inadvertently do so. But we also have to acknowledge that given differential demographics of different groups, it will sometimes be unavoidable. Preventing criminals from voting isn’t a throwback to Jim Crow. People worried about racial inequality shouldn’t be focusing on overturning these laws, but on trying to reduce the number of African Americans who go to prison in the first place.

(Note: I’m not sure I’m in favor of preventing people in jail from voting - there seem to be other good reasons for allowing them to be part of the system. But that’s the topic for a different post).

1) As everybody is aware, there was an explosion at an oil rig and catastrophic oil leak at a BP platform, causing great damage to the gulf of Mexico.

2) A ruptured pipeline causes a massive oil spill in a river that leads to lake Michigan, causing environmental damage, and (unless contained) will cause serious problems to one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes.

3) A pipeline explosion in China causes the largest oil spill in history for that country (larger than Exxon Valdez), creating tremendous environmental damage to China’s already polluted water.

4) An oil rig sinks in Nigeria dumping oil into Nigerian waters and killing millions of fish.

5) A Japanese oil tanker is the subject of a mysterious explosion - no other ships, subs or missiles are detected, nobody can explain what happened, and had it been a little bigger, there would have been another massive spill.

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen more than 1 major oil spill in a given year before. So, what explains the sudden prevalence?

1) Random chance. If you flip a coin enough times, eventually you’ll hit a series of 10 heads (approximately once every 1000 flips). Unlikely events do happen on occasion, and we shouldn’t read too much into them. While 5 major oils spills is unlikely, so is five coal mine blasts, 5 volcanic eruptions, 5 airplane crashes, etc. The odds of at least one series of disasters is much higher than the odds of any particular disaster, so it may just be bad luck.

2) A decline in safety standards in recent years. I don’t know if this is the case, but it could be that an increase in accidents is due to fewer measures being taken to prevent them. I’m fairly certain there are investigators looking into this possibility right now, and it will be corrected if it was the case.

3) An increase in oil drilling. The more oil being drilled and shipped, the higher the chance that something goes wrong. So, the increase in accidents is just based on sheer volume of opportunities for disaster. I know that oil consumption has been going up, but the dramatic surge in accidents suggests that it can’t just be this (although maybe in conjunction with explanation #1).

4) Sabotage. I’m not a conspiracy theory person. But one can’t rule out that some group such as Al-Queda trying to weaken the U.S. economy (which is oil dependent) or some eco-terrorist group (trying to hurt oil companies PR and create a push to alternative energy) etc. is deliberately blowing up pipelines. This happens in Iraq all the time. The fact that the Japanese tanker seems to have been the victim of an attack, that the two explosions in China and Michigan are so mysterious, and that the BP alarms were turned off right before the explosion certainly creates enough plausibility that you could base an action thriller on the premise. If it were Al-Queda, targeting our oil infrastructure and hurting the environment would be a clever double whammy for hurting the world (and U.S. economy) and oil pipelines aren’t as well guarded as airplanes - so it would suggests a much more efficient strategy.

5) Reporting bias. There’s always been lots of oil spills, but they happened in places Americans don’t care about, so we never heard of them. With the BP oil spill, Americans are suddenly interested in the topic, so reporters are putting out stories of this wherever they’re happening. In which case, there’s always been a problem, we just only recently are learning about it.

Regardless, the trend is something to keep an eye on.

For most people, it’s a moot concept. For most white collar workers, the free market (in some loose sense) determines how much we get paid, perhaps marked up or down somewhat depending on a person’s negotiation skills. For most blue collar workers, their wages are determined by collectively bargained contracts. For the working poor, their wages are determined by the federal or state imposed minimum wage, or perhaps in some case by a minimum payment necessary to keep the employee fed and motivated.

But there are a lucky few people out there who get to set their own salaries, who don’t have to worry about the vagaries of the free market or collective bargaining. In particular, there are two news stories today that prompted the question I began with.

First, is the story of Bell, CA. Bell is a small city of about 33,000 people just outside of Los Angeles. It’s a poor city, with a median family income of about $40,000 and with about one quarter of it’s population living below the poverty line. The story begins five years ago, when the city council passed a resolution, subsequently passed by a referendum (in which 400 people voted), declaring Bell a “charter city”. So most towns in America are established by charters given out by their respective states, and the towns must conform to certain rules established by those states. In California, cities above a certain population size can declare themselves “charter cities” to free themselves from those state regulations.

The Bell city council responded to this new found freedom, and to the obvious lack of voter oversight, with massive pay increases for themselves and for all of the top city employees. City Council members, who typically make about $20,000 for what is essentially a part-time job in a city that size, were now pulling in over $100,000. The Police Chief was making over $400,000–which is significantly more than the police chief in the City of Los Angeles. The city manager was making over $800,000. Of course, eventually this graft became public, thanks to an L.A. Times investigation, and by now most of those people have taken voluntary pay cuts or have resigned–oh, and the California district attorney is investigating if they broke any laws by giving themselves these pay raises and trying to figure out why it took several years for anyone to figure it out.

The second story about which you should feel free to embrace your righteous anger is the story of BP. You know, that whole oil spill thing. Well, you probably heard that the BP CEO just resigned. What you might have missed is that he is owed an annual pension of upwards of $900,000, and that as part of his resignation deal, he is being given a position on the board of a BP joint venture with a Russian company. If that’s the penalty for resigning in shame for mishandling the aftermath of the greatest ecological disaster since Chernobyl, where do I sign up?

In both the cases of government employees and with the boards of major corporations, there is no free market at work to determine the salaries of these employees. Instead, in both cases the salaries are either self-determined, or are determined by a person’s peers and friends. Of course, a public official’s salary has to at least be able to withstand public scrutiny, which means that a fiasco like Bell, CA can’t happen for too long before someone catches on and votes the bums out of office (and possibly into jail). The only two checks on a CEO’s salary is to a) avoid public embarrassment (which means you just have to be not quite as greedy as the next guy) and b) avoid being too much of a drain on your company’s bottom line (which is pretty easy for the head of a multi-billion dollar corporation).

But while we all like to feel moral outrage about these things, if we want to think about solutions to the problems we are led inexorably towards the question with which I opened this post: how much should a person make? We can all agree that $800,000 is too much for the city manager of a small, poor community, or that $900,000 is too much for a disgraced ex-CEO, but what is the right answer?

Unfortunately, I have no idea. If anyone out there cares to offer an answer, I’m all ears.

Dear friend, you were the source of so much joy in rootbeer floats, hot fudge sundaes, and just on your own (although I tended for mint chip when just getting a single scoop). Know that you will live on in our memories, and that we will honor your memory by continuing to eat copious amounts of ice cream even in your absence. You were a legend, and a classic, and we are honored to have known you.

(P.S. Yes, Leftfielder has an obituary for French Vanilla Ice Cream, but didn’t have one for Senator Byrd. Blame Mike - that sort of thing is clearly his responsibility).

Egan assumes, like many people do, that MAD kept us safe during the Cold War. But he criticizes the Pentagon for continuing to rely on MAD in an era where the greatest threats to United States security are terrorist organizations:

MAD makes sense in a rational world: the Russians or Chinese would never try to wipe us out, because we would then wipe them out. They want to live well and prosper, as do we.

But MAD makes less sense at a time when the enemies of civilization are cave-dwelling religious fanatics who target cartoonists and kill innocent children at soccer telecasts and think, if they die in nuclear Armageddon, a sexual reward awaits them in heaven.

The problem is that MAD doesn’t make sense in a “rational world”–and actually might make more sense when dealing with “cave-dwelling religious fanatics”.

Imagine a man comes home and finds that his neighbor has come into his house while he was gone and brutally raped and murdered his wife and children. The man is likely to want revenge of some kind. This is normal. He very well might want his neighbor to die for his crimes. But is the man going to respond by going sneaking over to his neighbor’s house, and doing the same to the neighbor’s family? Probably not. The neighbor committed an absolutely horrific crime–one that was outside of all standards of rational or reasonable behavior. To respond in kind would be an almost equally horrific act, that again attacks innocent bystanders and does not directly respond to the man who committed the original crime.

But the MAD policy would be like the man saying to his neighbor “if you brutally rape and murder my wife and kids, then I will brutally rape and murder yours”. If you kill millions of my people in an unprovoked attack, then I will kill millions of yours. Both statements are meaningless. Once my wife and kids are dead, I gain nothing by killing your wife and kids. Once my cities are destroyed, I gain nothing by destroying your cities. The threat isn’t credible. Besides, it would take a madman to kill his neighbors family, just like it would take a madman to launch a preemptive nuclear strike–and who is to say how the madman will react to a threat like that.

MAD isn’t a rational policy to deal with rational neighbors, as Egan suggests. MAD amounts to telling your neighbor “I think your crazy, well guess what, I’m crazy too!” MAD didn’t keep us safe during the Cold War. We were kept safe because the USSR and China weren’t ruled by sociopaths intent on global nuclear holocaust.

But here’s the odd thing. Now we are facing a threat from people who are perhaps a bit crazy–or at least willing to sacrifice themselves and countless innocents in order to achieve their aims. And there is an argument to be made that MAD actually does make sense in response to that kind of threat. This argument relies on several assumptions, that may or may not be true:

1) We have accurate enough information about the location of al Qaeda’s top leadership to be able to kill them with nuclear strikes–and the terrain in which they are hiding will not protect them from nuclear strikes.

2) Al Qaeda’s leadership believes that at least some of them must survive in order to continue to push forward their vision.

So imagine that al Qaeda were to get hold of a nuclear weapon, and that both of those assumptions are correct. We haven’t nuked al Qaeda because the of the international fall out for using nuclear weapons. But then al Qaeda sets off their nuke, destroying lower Manhattan. Suddenly using nukes against al Qaeda is on the table–as a retaliatory strike and not a preemptive one. If assumption #1 is correct, then using nukes on al Qaeda will effectively destroy them. Okay, so if al Qaeda’s leadership knows that, and if assumption #2 is correct, then our threat of nuking them might actually deter them from nuking us. Of course, if either of those assumptions are incorrect, then this logic falls apart, and MAD goes back to being just a bad policy.

In other words, Egan is exactly wrong. MAD is an insane policy that has no business in a rational world. But there might be a place for it against a fanatical enemy.