Bait and Switch

I confess I'm uncertain why University of Chicago faculty are complaining that a Milton Friedman Institute could bolster the perception that the University of Chicago is a conservative institution. Don't they realize just how useful this little misunderstanding is in luring in the sort of smart, unsuspecting young conservatives that might otherwise be heading off to some place like Hillsdale? Instead, they arrive at the University of Chicago, and lulled by all the Plato and Aristotle their first year, they find themselves reconsidering some of their assumptions before they realize they're living in a nest of (gasp!) liberals.

So really, shoring up the reputation of the University of Chicago as a conservative bastion is a good thing, especially since people seem to be catching on to the fact that the reputation is really built on the basis of a few prominent exceptions (hi, Leon Kass) rather than an institutional mindset.

But in all seriousness, what the University of Chicago as an institution does try, and more often than not succeed, at getting right is a general attitude that "liberal" and "conservative" (at least in the narrow, political sense) are not the appropriate labels by which to build a university program, despite efforts from students and faculty on both sides of the political spectrum to convince them otherwise.

I Have No Words

Article Title: Media Charged With Sexism in Clinton Coverage

Picture accompanying article:

Last Spitzer Post, I Promise

So I was going to write something about how despite all the online discussions about whether Silda Wall Spitzer is hot or not, nobody seems to find it relevant that Eliot Spitzer is balding and has features kind of like a gargoyle. Then I came across this New York Times article which is just...well...here:

The latest model is the familial crisis facing Silda Wall Spitzer, corporate lawyer, mother of three daughters and, most pointedly, wife of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after revelations that he had been paying for prostitutes. In conversations and throughout the blogosphere, wives at great remove have imagined what they would do if they were in her shoes, even as they hastened to add that those shoes would never, ever fit.

Except, of course, for those rueful, former Cinderellas who know better.

I love the way that Eliot Spitzer's infidelity turns into Silda Spitzer's familial crisis. It's one of those framings that masquerades as choice and empowerment (now she gets to choose if she stays or leaves) but is really about work. The Times article goes on to describe various strategies for dealing with infidelty, but the common theme is that it's the wife's job to figure out where the marriage is going to go from there. Husbands, the article seems to say, are like kids who break a glass to get out of washing the dishes. "Oops! I broke our vows here, honey. You better take care of the marriage from now on."

Throughout the article, it's the woman who does the forgiving, initiates counseling, explains to the kids what's happening, starts divorce proceedings, and of course, is left caring for the kids alone when the marriage goes belly-up. Which is, of course, only reflecting the division of labor society still universally enforces. Even those outlets with enough reticence to avoid saying it's her fault for failing to keep him satisfied, it's still unquestioningly her mess to clean up.

(And, gotta love the extra dose of fearmongering the Times throws in to the whole brew as well. You may think you man would never cheat, but how can you ever be sure, huh?)

And This is Supposed to be a Defense?

This article in Slate purports to be a defense of Eliot Spitzer, but it nevertheless manages to encapsulate everything I found dubious about his approach. The key quote:

Many of those who ran afoul of Spitzer failed what I call the Parents' Night Test. Even if certain practices are commonly accepted in your industry or circle of friends (like going to strip joints) and are plausibly legal—or clearly illegal but rarely prosecuted (like running an NCAA betting pool in the office)—would describing these practices to your kid's kindergarten teacher embarrass you and your spouse, cause other parents to place junior on the no-play-date list, and spur the headmaster to rue the day he accepted your child?

If someone stood up at a Parent's Night I attended and announced which of the fathers (or mothers - let's not be heteronormative) had been seen in a strip club in the past year, I wouldn't applaud. I'd launch a suburban-style Stop Snitchin' campaign. Spitzer's campaign is not as obviously appalling since corporate privacy means something different than individual privacy, but there are still several issues with Spitzer's approach.

It's one thing to shame people for unethical but not illegal. It's another to use the threat of an expensive lawsuit to extort an expensive settlement for this sort of behavior. Government prosecutors exist to prosecute crimes, not arbitrate reputations.

While it's tempting to applaud Spitzer's hard-edged "we'll bury you under legal bills, even if we don't really think we can win our case" approach when it's aimed at companies like Merrill Lynch, the most common application of this sort of tactic is by large companies against much smaller ones, with chilling effects in areas such as fair use and patent law. I'm highly dubious that normalizing bullying - even if one claims to only bully other bullies - is the best way to help out the rest of us.

Obligatory Comments on Scandal du Jour

Blah blah blah Eliot Spitzer blah prostitute blah scandal blah blah hypocrisy blah blah victimless crime private matter blah blah blah.

All that said, how entitled do you have to be to be to a) frequent high-priced escorts b) as a governor of New York c) whose marquee accomplishment in the office to date has been the acquisition of a number of high profile and powerful enemies d) and who built his career on the public exposure and humiliation of those he opposed e) including others who frequented high-priced escorts and f) engaged in the sort of financial shennanigans he himself used in an attempt to cover up his predilection and g) nevertheless think something this juicy will stay secret?

And, is it incoherent for me to think this says something not particularly flattering about his character that could perhaps be relevant to his qualifications to hold the governorship, even though in an ideal world I think this ought to have remained something for he and his wife to work out, privately? (Of course, in my ideal world, there wouldn't be the stink of hypocrisy about the whole thing since prostitution wouldn't be a matter for the criminal courts in the first place.)

Nullify

I haven't seen the final season of The Wire yet (I watch the TV series as it comes out on DVD) but I've found the first four seasons,besides saying a number of painful things about class in America, present the most compelling argument against our current drug prohibition regime I've ever encountered. And, the show does all this while being fantastic entertainment - a suspenseful police procedural overlaid with pitch-black gallows humor and enough tragic hubris to launch a dozen wailing Greek choruses. Now, the creators of The Wire have come out advocating jury nullification as a weapon to fight against the war on drugs.


While I recognize that jury nullification has had a troubled history (to say the least), I'm still incredibly pleased to see them take this stand. Of course, other commenters have pointed out that jury nullification isn't as simple as refusing to convict...many jurisdictions eliminate potential nullifiers in voire dire and committing perjury goes beyond nullification (though certainly one can argue, and I would agree, that it could still be justified). Nevertheless, even though the article doesn't go as far as suborning perjury, I think it does point out that citizens are not sheep, nor are individual actions meaningless.

Radley Balko suggested that laws making jury nullification explicit are a key first step in the fight against the War on Drugs, but frankly I think we'll see heroin sold by Walgreens before we'll see legislatures endorse jury nullification. While there are certainly more robust theoretical justifications for enforcing and obeying laws with which one disagrees, I believe the most common vulgar rationalization tends to follow a basic line of "I agree to respect the body of laws in its totality because I wish others to follow laws with which they disagree but I support." According to the common understanding, jury nullification violates this basic contract - I certainly believe jury nullification can be just, but I don't see how a legal system that includes the ability to selectively decline to enforce laws with which one disagrees can be perceived as fair by the majority of participants.

Waiting...Hoping...

Endlessly clicking "refresh" on the results page is failing to make the Texas and Ohio vote counting go any faster, so I've collected some of my favorite recent links regarding Obama.

From Edge of the American West, quoting Obama advisor Samantha Power:

He’s acutely conscious of the loss of US standing in the world...and the need to recover it in a hurry, so first acts will be closing Guantanamo, renouncing torture etc., and trying to embed ourselves again back in the international system.

From Timothy Burke:

...this is very much how I understand some of Obama’s emphasis on bipartisanship. Not as centrism, but as a desire to reconstruct processes of consultation, to remove politics as much as possible from those aspects of governance that need to at least strive for neutrality, to firewall off partisan calculation from ordinary administrative work.

From Verbal Privilege

As appalling as our current domestic political shortcomings are, I cannot grant them the same moral weight as the terrible impact of American foreign policy—above all, the war in Iraq and the so-called war on terror—on people who have no voice in the democratic process in this country.

This is the first election I can remember where I've actively rooted for a presidential candidate, rather than simply against one of their opponents. After nearly seven years of feeling helpless and discouraged by the direction our country has taken - our willingness to spy on, lock up, torture, and kill in a misguided quest for security - I finally feel, yes, hopeful that we can change our course, and motivated to go out and fight for that change.

Currently, Obama is barely hanging on to a lead in Texas. Here's hoping it sticks...

Introducing Me

I started my first blog back in 2003. I was in college, then, working (or rather, largely not working) on my senior thesis, and blogging was what I did when I needed a break from taking a break from the thesis. It's fitting, I think, that it would take another absorbing writing project to bring me finally out of my mostly permanent blogging hiatus. I never would have guessed that when I finally figured out how to sit down and write for eight (or twelve) hours a day, I'd want to go home and write some more. Yet, somehow it works that way.

I'm also motivated by the sense that our long national nightmare of pointless and bad-faith arguments about the war in Iraq is finally drawing to a close. I didn't have much to say about it when it started, beyond a general sense that wars were generally better avoided than not. I wish I'd said more at the time, but I'm not a specialist in the Middle East or political science or counterinsurgancy, and I dislike reading uninformed bloviation, so I try to avoid producing it. It didn't really occur to me that that my standards regarding who was qualified to comment on the invasion of Iraq were higher than the administration's standards regarding who was qualified to plan the occupation of Iraq. (That's a cheap political shot. I'm sorry. But not sorry enough to delete it.)

At that point in my life, I identified with the conservative movement, though I never identified as a conservative. Sometimes I'll identify as a libertarian, when I'm feeling energetic enough to explain that no, I don't mean that I'm a conservative but feel that saying "libertarian" means I'm more likely to get laid, nor do I oppose an active federal government because it gets in the way of straight white males exercising their patriarchy-given right to exploit women, children and poor people. When I'm feeling less energetic, I simply let people assume that as an Upper West Side resident who uses words like post-colonial and patriarchal unironically, I must be liberal. It's easiest, and true for the definition of liberal that most people hold.

But to move beyond the question of identification, I believe in the most general sense in a political system that trusts individuals to make decisions that are best for themselves. I dislike what might broadly be termed the welfare state because it so often ties its assistance to asinine attempts to separate out the "deserving" poor from the "undeserving" poor, because it fails to treat individuals with dignity, and because it prefers the judgments of politicians and experts to the judgments of the individuals who have to live with the results. (Obviously, these indignities are preferable to say, mass starvation, but I refuse to believe these are the only two options.)

I also dislike what might broadly be termed the virtue state because it confuses outward displays of conformity with internalized standards of morality and faith. It too is based on a profound distrust of the decisions of ordinary individuals, overlaid with a deeply unappealing stench of hypocracy. (There is just as much casual sex among young conservatives as young liberals. By and large they all seem to find it harmless fun, and eventually go on to get married and have babies. Unlike the young liberals, however, they seem to believe that everyone who is not them must be deeply damaged by and unable to handle the consequences of all of this unregulated pleasure.)

So. Trusting people is good. War is bad. On with the blog.