Category Archives: Random Blogging

It’s the Culture, Stupid!

One of the many ways we might “slice and dice” humanity is to describe the wide gulf between people who understand the importance of systems and those who see the world entirely as a creation of individual actors and actions.

I don’t want to minimize the importance of leadership, because ultimately it is leaders and those they persuade who move the culture, but folklore to the contrary, that kid who stuck his finger in the dyke did not singlehandedly avert the deluge.

I understand the temptation to attribute social ills to personal failures. Saying “that guy is poor because he’s lazy,” is a much more satisfying analysis than one that tries to quantify the role(s) played by an inferior education or economic shifts that made his skills obsolete or bankrupted his employer–let alone public policies with unintended consequences.

There are two possible responses to a recognition of the immense influence of culture and social systems: you can shrug your shoulders, accept the brutal truth that you cannot change the world or even a small portion thereof, and spend your days cultivating your own garden (a la Candide); or you can join with others working for systemic changes, recognizing that life offers no guarantees. If and when change comes, its form will be unpredictable, its trajectory uncertain and its emergence maddeningly slow.

A lot of us struggle with that reality, and that choice, every day.

My garden is pretty appealing….and the magnitude of the cultural change we need is pretty daunting.

Withdrawal is tempting.

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Money money money….

Ignore all the sanctimony in political oratory. The most reliable guide to the real priorities of our elected officials is where they spend our money. Talk is cheap.

War, however, is very expensive.

A new study says the Iraq War has cost the United States $2 trillion. By the time all the veterans’ bills are paid, it will likely cost us up to $6 trillion.

Let that sink in for a moment. Per National Priorities, here’s an estimate of how much money is allocated for various programs in President Obama’s 2015 federal fiscal year budget:

Education: ~ $70 billion
Health: ~ $58 billion
Unemployment and labor: ~ $58 billion
Energy and Environment: ~ $35 billion
International Affairs: ~ $35 billion
Science: ~ $35 billion
Transportation: ~ $23 billion
Food and Agriculture: ~$11 billion

Think about what we could have done with $6 trillion. With a “t”. As in, one thousand billions.

Almost eight years ago David Leonhardt wrote about what $1.2 trillion could have bought, which was the estimated cost of the Iraq War at the time:

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

From City Hall to Washington, D.C., our elected officials have made it very clear where their priorities lie. And it isn’t with veterans’ health care, or education, or public safety or the many  admittedly dull public services that virtually all citizens believe government should provide.

Instead, too many of our lawmakers think they’ve been elected to tell everyone else how to live. At home, that means trying to control women, marginalize gay people and impose their narrow religious beliefs on others. Abroad, it means showing “strength” –which for people like Dick Cheney means spending trillions of dollars on wars of choice, and opting for military “solutions” to any and all problems.

I guess it’s more fun to play soldier than it is to make sure that our children are fed and our bridges don’t fail.

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Why I Think It Matters

Yesterday’s post dealing with privilege generated a number of responses, both here on the blog and on Facebook. One of those was from Doug Masson, who is always thoughtful and balanced: his (fairly lengthy) comment seemed to me to boil down to one very fair question: what does discussion of privilege accomplish? What purpose is served?

My post on the subject was motivated by several articles I’ve recently seen dismissing the notion that “privilege” exists. In each case, the concept itself was mischaracterized–the classic “straw man” technique–in order to justify criticizing or ridiculing it.

But an explanation of what prompted my post doesn’t answer the question about why the discussion matters.

It matters, I think, because reasonable debates over policy, reasonable discussions about our different policy preferences, need to originate from a shared reality.

I’d analogize to the periodic accusations that extending civil rights to GLBT people would be granting them “special” rights.  If someone’s reality doesn’t include an understanding of the ways in which gay people are marginalized, calls for equal treatment may seem like special pleading. (Granted, most of the folks making these accusations probably know better, but some do not.)

Or take global climate change. The people who don’t believe it exists are much more likely to accept the arguments against moving to Green energy sources being made by those with a vested interest in the status quo.

If it has never occurred to a white guy living his life in accordance with the social conventions of his time and place that those conventions confer benefits not available to women and minorities, he’s likely to reject efforts to level the playing field. Once he understands the ways in which social attitudes advantage people who look like him, he may be more open to change.

Or he may not.

It may well be that humans will never really occupy the same reality–it may be that we all have worldviews based upon religion or philosophy or personality that require us to see  realities consistent with those worldviews, and to ignore facts that are inconvenient or disturbing. If that’s the case, however, there’s no point to blogs or other efforts to communicate with each other.

At the end of the day, I use this blog to describe the reality I inhabit, and to generate discussion of appropriate policy responses. When my reality isn’t familiar to those of you reading my posts, I hope you will tell me why. I learn a lot from those who comment here.

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Simple Approaches, Complicated Issues

There is a very robust debate going on between people who defend the behavior of Edward Snowden and (especially) Glenn Greenwald, and those (most recently, Michael Kinsley) who see Greenwald, Snowden et al as dangerously naive.

Martin Longman weighs in on the debate at Political Animal: 

Too often, it seems to me, Greenwald and his strong supporters behave as if the government deserves to be damaged and that our national security ought to suffer, even though all Americans are put at risk as a result. The risk to Americans is not something that can just be shrugged off as if it were indisputable that the country has gained a net-benefit from every single disclosure of classified information.

The reason that Greenwald is getting the better of the argument isn’t because his principles are clearly superior, but because the government lacks credibility. The overall effect of the disclosures has been beneficial, at least so far, because nothing catastrophic has resulted and we now have greater knowledge about what our government has been doing, which is already leading to reforms.

But none of this relieves journalistic enterprises of the responsibility to weigh the risks and benefits of disclosing classified information, nor does it completely vindicate either Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, who both leaked far more information than was necessary to make their points.

There are no heroes here. Not among the government snoops who vastly exceeded what should be permissible in a free and democratic society, and not among the scolds who took it upon themselves to release massive amounts of classified information.

We need credible and effective systemic oversight mechanisms. Otherwise, we are left to depend upon the judgement of self-righteous whistleblowers and their enablers who see the world only as black and white, and who have never considered whether even virtuous  ends justify their chosen means.

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Smart Guns, Stupid People

Nearly 800 children under 14 were killed in gun accidents from 1999 to 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly one in five injury-related deaths in children and adolescents involve firearms.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, homicides, suicides and accidents involving guns cause twice as many deaths in young people as cancer, five times as many as heart disease and 15 times as many as infections.

And that’s just young people.

So it makes no sense at all that the NRA and the rabid pro-gun lobby have violently opposed sales of the so-called “Smart gun.” The gun requires that the shooter–presumably the owner of the weapon–be wearing a wristband. Otherwise, it won’t fire.

Mind you, no one is suggesting that the Smart Gun be mandated. It would simply join the wide array of lethal weapons available to buyers in our not-so-civilized country. Yet gun shop owners who have offered them have gotten massive blowback–including death threats–from self-styled “Second Amendment” purists.

Critics argue that the need to “find a wristband, maybe in the middle of the night” would be too cumbersome in the event of a home break-in. Of course, current safety precautions–some a matter of local law–require keeping guns in a locked box, or even disassembled. Surely the time required to re-assemble a gun, or unlock a box, is equivalent to the time needed to find a wristband.

For that matter, paranoid folks can SLEEP in the damn things.

This hysteria over technology that can make their precious firearms safer is just one more bit of evidence of the mindlessness of today’s gun lobby.

If survey research is to be believed, this craziness isn’t representative of the hunters and sportsmen who make up the bulk of NRA membership. If that’s the case, it’s past time responsible gun owners took back the organization from the wacko fringe.

Giving people the ability to CHOOSE to purchase a safer gun is not a violation of even the paranoid version of the Second Amendment.

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