Category: Politics

My cousin Clive just forwarded this YouTube video to me. I think the author’s name is Greg Craven ((Here’s another video by him.)); the subject is the question of global warming and rational responses to it:

Now this kind of payoff matrix will be familiar to many, and in fact it’s the basis of the notorious argument for belief in God that we know as Pascal’s Wager. And many people (including me) regard Pascal’s Wager as a bullshit argument. So why isn’t this climate change argument equally bullshit?
The problem with Pascal’s Wager is not the structure of the argument; it’s the epistemic status of the propositions that are used. The payoff matrix is a perfectly reasonable and respectable way of organizing one’s thinking about actions and consequences. Ideally, you want to be able to assign probabilities to the various cells, but even if you can’t do that, it’s still useful. ((It might, for example, help you to decide which areas should be researched in order to develop the data needed to refine your probabilities. Row thinking or column thinking, as the video put it.)) For global warming, all of the contingencies, actions, and consequences represent concrete, real-world phenomena. Temperature goes up X, Y million hectares are inundated, Z million people are displaced. We can argue about the values for X, Y, and Z, but there is no serious debate about whether water, land, and people actually exist, nor about the basic physics of how melting polar ice translates into sea level. Pascal’s Wager, on the other hand, is all about belief in an unsupported fiction, one of many competing and mutually incompatible fictions.
Back to the video. The argument that it makes is sound, and modest; there are plenty of other arguments that could have been factored in. Many of the actions that we should take to address global warming are also needed to cope with the actual or impending shortages in oil, potable water, and other resources. One case which he does not consider – but should – is the “catastrophist” view that global warming is real, it’s inevitable, and no human action can mitigate its effects. If this is true, it would be rationally self-interested to consider a different payoff matrix, comparing the costs of futile response to global warming with the costs of small-group survival in the face of catastrophic collapse. Of course this is no longer a public policy debate…

Over at Talking Points Memo Josh deflects the kind of shrill anti-Clinton stuff we’ve been hearing from Andrew Sullivan et al, and gets the three points about the current Obama-Hillary contest.
First, it isn’t a question of the substance of what’s being said:

[T]here’s very little I’ve seen from the Clinton camp that would seem like anything but garden variety political hardball if it were coming from Hillary or other Clinton surrogates rather than Bill Clinton.
I hear from a lot of Obama supporters that […] Obama is about the ‘new politics’. But this is no different from what Bill Bradley was saying in 2000. And it was as bogus then as it is now. Beyond that there is an undeniable undercurrent in what you hear from Obama supporters that he is too precious a plant — a generational opportunity for a transformative presidency — to be submitted to this sort of knockabout political treatment. That strikes me as silly and arrogant, if for no other reason that the Republicans will not step aside for Obama’s transcendence either.

Second, Obama has to bear a lot of the blame for alienating the older members of the party. I’m not talking about his innocuous references to Reagan, but about…

…an air of arrogance in Obama’s talk of transcendence, reconciliation and unity. I think there are a lot of people who would say, I would have loved to have transcended back in 1995 or 1998 or 2002. But we were spending every ounce on the political battle lines trying to prevent the Republicans from destroying the country. It’s hard for folks like that to hear from someone new that they’re part of the problem, part of the ‘old politics’.

If Obama’s going to take that line, he must expect a backlash. I’m not saying that he shouldn’t do that: every candidate has to decide when to pander to base, and when to tack to the center and piss off the party faithful. ‘Twas ever thus. But let’s not pretend that Obama is “above this” kind of politics.
So if Hillary and Obama are engaging in a legitimate, hard-fought campaign, what’s the problem? It’s Bill. It really is. And the problem is that the person most likely to get hurt is Hillary. Josh again:

With the exception of a few days in early January I’ve gone on the assumption for many months that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. But I think Bill’s actions have greatly diminished her. He has put her back under his shadow where she hasn’t been for years.
For the moment, I doubt either of them is losing much sleep over that. Get through today and then worry about tomorrow. But I think she looks much smaller now. He’s dominating the race. And that makes her look like a weaker figure — something that will not wear well in the general election. And this campaign really suggests this is going to be some sort of co-presidency. When Hillary’s getting knocked around by the folks on the Hill is Bill going to go Larry King to knock her enemies around? Will he be going off to foreign countries on his own little diplomatic missions?
I had assumed he’d remain a step in the background as he has through through most of this decade. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. If the constitution allowed it, I’d happily have Clinton back. I’d happily have Hillary in his place. But I don’t want them both.
The presidency is a singular job. It should stay that way.

I think Hillary realizes this now. Does her husband? Michael Tomansky wonders if they can “do humble”.

On the one hand:

UK astronomers will lose access to two of the world’s finest telescopes in February, as administrators look to plug an £80m hole in their finances.
Observation programmes on the 8.1m telescopes of the Gemini organisation will end abruptly because Britain is cancelling its subscription.

This is a program that the UK has already invested £70m in.
On the other hand…

Estimated cost of operations in 2007–08
11. The Winter Supplementary Estimate estimates the additional costs of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007–08 as £1,315 million in resources and £604 million in capital. These are the net additional costs incurred as a consequence of the operations, not including the costs which would have been incurred regardless, such as wages and salaries.

This is from the Costs of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan: Winter Supplementary Estimate 2007–08 ((Like the Bush Cheney admistration, HMG funds its wars through last-minute supplementary appropriations, rather than doing the honest thing and including the projected expenditures in the main Defence Budget.)) issued by the Commons Defence Committee in November.
In other words, in 2007-2008 the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) £80m shortfall will be just 4.2% of the military expenses for Blair’s ridiculous poodling, or roughly the same as the price tag for two Apache helicopters.

Or perhaps bandit. It’s all in his favourite painting. As Paul Simon put it so succinctly, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

Channel-surfing this evening ((After watching a recording of Aston Villa losing to Manchester United in the F.A.Cup – got to keep my priorities straight! Lovely goal by Wayne Rooney, back from his sick-bed.)) I came across Dan Rather and three middle-aged white journalists discussing the women’s vote in the New Hampshire primary, as well as the possibility of a “Bradley effect” ((The tendency of white voters to overstate their intention to support black candidates.)) in the recent opinion polls. I’m not looking for tokenism, but a little “domain expertise” would be nice…
Meanwhile James Fallows explains why Kristol is full of shit, as well as being a talentless hack. But we already knew that.

Following up on my thoughts yesterday about the wasteful character of the U.S. political system, here’s a nice observation from a BBC piece on the subject:

In the middle of the 19th Century, Walter Bagehot [noted] the distinction between what he described as the “dignified” and the “efficient” elements of the British constitution.
The “dignified” part was, of course, the monarch (with some help from the royal family and the House of Lords). The “efficient” part was the prime minister (along with the cabinet and the House of Commons). No doubt Bagehot over-simplified, but it was an arresting formulation, it has (if anything) become more true since his own time, and it describes a way of doing things which has been widely replicated elsewhere in British life, whereas it is relatively rare in the US.

Over at Orcinus, Sara has some interesting thoughts on the strange state of the Republicans in this election: ((UPDATE: Josh’s comment at TPM: “At this point it seems clear that the big take away from the Republican debate is that these are six pretty tired old guys who can barely get enthusiastic enough to answer the questions.” Another reader wondered “Is it me, or do Thompson and McCain seem like those old guys who sit in the balcony on the Muppets?”))

It’s striking how many of this year’s GOP hopefuls were guys who would have had zero chance, who wouldn’t have even made it through the money primaries, in any other year. The very motliness of the crew is a testament to the fact that the center is no longer holding — because if it were, they wouldn’t be there. A functional Bush regime would have picked a successor, and used the past four years to position him for a win. The fact that that didn’t happen is yet another testament to their looming failure. Nobody’s interested in continuing their policies. Nobody even wanted so much as their blessing.

This got me to thinking about the opposite kind of problem which the Democrats have. In recent years I’ve come to the conclusion that the US system is intrinsically wasteful of talent. Things are arranged so that natural allies are forced into a long drawn-out fight. Because they tend to share policy positions, they are forced to rely on personal denigration, thus guaranteeing that they won’t be able to work together after the primaries.
Back home in the UK, for example, the Democrats would have a dream team, a cabinet ready to take over and govern effectively on all fronts. They’ve got a PM, a Chancellor, a Foreign Secretary, a Home Secretary… But over here, they’re forced through a meat-grinder of a system which pretty much ensures that most of that talent will be wasted. ((And of course the whole toxic mess discourages many talented people from even putting themselves forward.))
Presidents ought to be symbolic leaders, restricting themselves to opening highways, holding garden parties, leading charitable appeals, and giving the eulogies at state funerals for national heroes. If you let them do more than that, they’ll try to become kings or emperors, and that always ends in tears.

Seems like an odd way to pick a candidate… According to the Seattle Times:

Only 4 percent of [Huckabee’s] backers said they wanted a contender with experience, and 2 percent said they were looking for a Republican who can win the White House in November.

Of course the whole Iowa caucus system is a complete nonsense: a throw-back to deeply corrupt 18th and 19th century political practices. To my mind, it has only one virtue: on the Democrat side, it hints at the benefits of a more equitable voting system, such as STV. But even that small idea is drowned out by the cash registers. Hitch points this out (adopting his best Mencken tone); everybody else seems to give it a pass because they’re caught up in the theatre…

When I saw this story:

Thick black smoke billowed from a fire Wednesday in Vice President Dick Cheney’s suite of offices in the historic Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. Cheney’s office was damaged by smoke and water from fire hoses, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

I’m sure I’m not the only person whose first reaction was that one of Cheney’s memos required more than shredding….
UPDATE: Looks like TPM got there ahead of me…