Blog Move

I’m moving to a hosted account. Please be patient while I move over to wordpress.org. 

 

Thanks!

Back to Blogging

I recently entered a post on my other blog. I’m having trouble deciding which of them to keep. The interface here is certainly better, but blogger is more flexible. Please mark your opinion – I’ll be combining the posts, so this is simply a matter of aesthetics.

The Twitter Problem

A plethora of Twitter paeans have been spilling out of conservative blogs everywhere. A recent (quite good) example can be found here.

Twitter is an oddity, and useful way to compress and receive your news from lots of different sites. It also seems to have some real uses for conferences and meetings – when some members are absent, tweets from twits across the hall can fly to keep them informed. Check out the TwitterCamp program for a nice example.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure this really answers the conservative problem. Twitter serves perfectly to net conservatives together, bringing the local knowledge from each and every point on the web to every other quickly. Wonderful – ignorance of their movements has always been a weapon in the progressive warchest. Knowledge can effectively constrain government superfluity, liberal excesses, and Democratic nonsense. We are powerless to contain that which we do not know.

And yet I wonder how much help this can really bring to our cause. David Frum appeared on Jamie Allman’s radio show this morning, and he pointed out that Republicans have a problem of demographics: there simply aren’t that many of us anymore. The conservative coalition that won the Cold War disintigrates before our eyes. The social conservatives have abandoned ship. A recent caller to a political office explained that her priest gave her permission to vote for Obama if abortion was her only concern. The classical liberals, the other half of the Conservative Coalition, are busy pontificating to each other in 140 characters or less about tax cuts. These are not answers.

Twitter is great. It’s cool. But it’s a tool for the conservative base, and the conservative base can’t muster enough votes to pick a conservative in the primaries, much less a national election. We don’t need to energize the base we already have, we need to convince people that we’re right. Those people won’t follow us on Twitter, they won’t listen to Michael Medved or Rush Limbaugh, and they won’t read my blog. These are methods of communication within the circle; we need to reach and convince the folks outside of the circle. They’re not here. They’re out there.

I don’t have answers, if I did I wouldn’t be writing a blog post at two in the morning for free. But I do have ideas of places to look, and none of those places are Twitter.

Long Live the Interstate!

I recently occasioned on another three day stint with my Tory pals, and I have to say that it will likely be my last. I had a nice run, I suppose. They’re not fond of disagreement, and I’m not fond of watching two people out of twenty debate minutiae while the rest of the group masks their embarrassed ignorance with a pose of educated dispassion. Out. Standing.

Today I take issue with one of their favorite complaints – that of the Interstate Highway System. In Toryland, things were better before the mobile society, Wal-Mart, globalization, airplanes, telephones, and electricity. While they do love to beat on Wal-Mart (and who doesn’t), they seem to hold the Interstate Highway System in a special and almost rabid sort of contempt. How dare we make it easier for people to travel from place to place? Worse yet, “haven’t we lost something?”

“Haven’t we lost something?” This from a Georgetown U. professor of political theory. He advocates a return to the agrarian lifestyle, where we lived in small towns in New England, surrounded by nice large trees to keep the world away, and thought about how great it was to live in small towns in New England, where the trees kept everything away.

But have we really lost anything? America, unlike Continental countries, has always been characterized by a nearly inexhaustible supply of land and a shortage of people to use it. Our Fathers had lots of children, and when the land around the Fathers filled with other Fathers, the children pitched their homesteads on the frontier. We are a nation of eternal frontiers – any given piece of land in America was once the frontier. We never stayed indolent and ignorant in our New England villages. That simply isn’t what Americans do. We’re the most mobile society in the world, and have been since Jamestown.

I believe that place is special. I hold a spot in my heart for my hometown that I could never feel for another place. But the suggestion that we lost something by building the Interstate Highway System, that it has altered our culture for the worse, is nothing more than fallacious fuedalist revision.

McCain’s Houses

The Obama spokesman called McCain “out of touch” because he has so many houses.

A perfect opportunity to highlight a difference between Americans and Europeans in general and Republicans and Democrats in particular.

I’m really not bothered by the fact that John McCain has numerous houses. As hard as I try, I can’t find a single iota of ire or seed of self-pity. I actually admire the guy; I want to have lots of houses. I want to live in the Keys in the winter and Wyoming in the summer and travel to Virginia to my house on the ocean. Why would I begrudge McCain what I myself desire?

A corollary describes why taxes on the wealthy are generally unpopular: we want to be wealthy someday. We want to be wealthier than our parents and give our children more than we had. We like promotions. We like responsibility and its associated return. Why would we want to punish people for achieving a dream similar to our own?

A progressive tax code provides incentive to under perform. It raises the return to leisure and discourages people from working to own several houses. Which, naturally, explains its popularity with Democrats: a progressive tax code keeps people poorer by lowering the return to the next hour of labor.

Entrepreneurial people tend to vote Republican. People who aspire to that house on the beach, cigars in the humidor, and Cardinals season tickets. In a box. Behind home plate. People who understand that wealth creates wealth. Economics is not a zero-sum game. Just because Jones wins doesn’t mean Smith loses. And unless Smith is a Democrat, he probably doesn’t want Jones’ taxes to go up either. Someday, he’d like to keep up with Jones.

Iraqi Freedom Part I

While I was undercover among the capital-C Conservatives, I learned that they find themselves in a very unique position: they’re against the war in Iraq.

Without waxing at length, the position seems to be that:

1. the desire of liberty is not a human trait. It is a cultural oddity of the American only.
2. exporting culture by force cannot be defended unless it is the collateral damage of a just war.

I’m not really qualified to debate this position. I can, however, present a compelling argument for its irrelevance.

Let’s say I’m a member of the 82nd Airborne. I just jumped out of a plane… one thousand – two thousand – three thousand – four thousand – oh #@$%! My chute didn’t open! I better go back and get a different one! I had better elect a different rigger to pack my new chute! In fact, it would be best if I had never jumped out of the plane in the first place!

All of those things may be true, without being even remotely relevant. What matters is that I pull my reserve chute in the four seconds I have before I’m doomed to burn into the ground. I can’t go back to the plane. I can’t go back to the chute shed. I can’t go back to St. Louis and drink beer. The only decision that matters is the one on the margin.

In Defense of the Interstate

I spent last week with the real conservatives at ISI. They’re much, much smarter than I am.

But I heard a few very disturbing things while I was there, not the least of which was a chemical dislike of the Interstate Highway System. They berate it for its alleged homogenization of American local culture. Never mind that homogenization is a word borne of a questionable parentage, the real problem here is one of marginal ignorance.

Whatever the cost of the interstate system with regard to local culture, and it doesn’t even matter what the cost was, the correct decision is the decision at the margin. What are the costs of the interstate to local culture now? An infinite number of variables have changed in an infinite number of ways since the interstates were created; we can’t go back there. What matters to this discussion is an assessment of the relative value of the interstates today. Note that this approach doesn’t require the assessment of purely mercenary variables. That is, one can be consistent in caring about local culture and still using an economic approach. Tories are burning Hayek as I speak, but economics isn’t just about money and pleasure. Sorry, gents.

Should we shut down the interstates and keep everyone at home on the farm? Absolutely not. Without the interstate, there would be no local culture. What is unique to Tarkio would disappear; we would reduce to subsistence or abandon the town altogether, and it would begin to look like every single other town in America. Cities would feel no pain; airports are a good substitute for the interstate. But the good people of Tarkio, Fairfax, and Rock Port would leave. Local culture would die.

The real evil here runs throughout the Tory rhetoric. I love tradition as well, but the evils of the day are a sunk cost. Decisions are made at the margin. What can we do now to encourage the good society? Whatever it is, it probably stops short of confining most of America to the local county blacktop.

LSAT Acceptance

I apologize for being out of the loop; I’ve been doing LSAT practice tests.

I’ve heard people, otherwise rational people, complain that the LSAT measures only one’s ability to take tests, and not one’s probability of success at law school.

I heard the same argument about the ACT when I applied to college four years ago, and about state standardized exams and the No Child Left Behind Act, despised by conservatives and liberals alike. And teachers. And students. And janitors. And administrators.

I’ve written elsewhere about using the ACT as a substitute for state-sponsored standardized tests.

The reasoning behind that prescription lies buried within an essential understanding of the incentive structure of college admissions. Why do colleges use standardized exams? Colleges are ranked on the basis of the exam scores that they admit. But this is only part of the incentive. Included as well are the graduating students’ placements, which are determined simultaneously by their talents as students and the perceived quality of the institution.

A college (or law school) wants to place its students as well as possible. It therefore needs a method of determining the quality of those students, and their probability of success, prior to admittance. GPA is useful, but not terribly. GPA depends on a number of factors that are difficult to observe: student quality, teacher quality, course difficulty, relative grade inflation. Unless you can sift the confounding factors, GPA as a tool for determining student quality is limited at best.

Standardized exams do not remove all of the simultaneity. Exam scores are jointly determined as well, by student quality, level of preparation, memory, and breakfast. But then again, as an educational institution, you don’t really care if the factors are confounded. People who eat breakfast and get up early are going to do better at class, too, on average. And they’re going to place better. People who take the time to prepare will also place better.

There is no way to measure a given student’s probability of success in school. The best a college can hope for is to find a suitable instrument, something that maps onto success in school fairly well. For profit maximizing colleges, the choice is “test-taking ability.”

Phyllis Schlafly and Washington University

Washu decided to give Phyllis Schlafly an honorary degree.

Naturally, this raised an uproar. Here she is giving a speech at Depaul, where they’re much more into diversity. We don’t like that kind of thing at WashU, we want everyone to think exactly the same thing.

And here are some excerpts from the Facebook Group (with some 1,100 members):

We view the sexist and anti-intellectual views expressed by Ms. Schlafly as offensive and feel an honorary degree from our university is completely inappropriate. While we support her right to speak her mind we also wish to use our own right to free speech. Regardless of your political convictions, if Ms. Schlafly’s views on the rights of women (especially the status of married women) are completely out of touch with what you believe, then join us in protesting at commencement.
Schlafly claims that intelligent design is unfairly being censored in the classroom. She portrays evolution as a ridiculous theory and evolutionists as backwards people who reject any controversy. These attacks polarize the discussion to a point where the intellectual freedom of both sides is harmed. How is the University’s mission of rational discussion of evidence furthered by the comments of Ms. Schlafly?

Hooray for encouraging diversity on campus. So we’re all supposed to bow to the whims of the feminazis with their brains full of mush?

It seems that Chancellor Wrighton has decided to bow to them. Check out his statement below, sent in an email to all students:

Following the public announcement of the honorary degrees, many in the
University community have called for the University to rescind that offer,
stating that Mrs. Schlafly is associated with some views, opinions and
statements that are inconsistent with the tolerant and inclusive values of
the Washington University community. Personally, I do not endorse her
views or opinions, and in many instances, I strongly disagree with them.

However, after further consultation with members of the University’s Board
of Trustees, the University has concluded that it will fulfill its
commitment to award the degree to Mrs. Schlafly. I apologize for the
anguish this decision has caused to many members of our community.

In bestowing this degree, the University is not endorsing Mrs. Schlafly’s
views or opinions; rather, it is recognizing an alumna of the University
whose life and work have had a broad impact on American life and have
sparked widespread debate and controversies that in many cases have helped
people better formulate and articulate their own views about the values
they hold.

But at least we’re trotting out a member of the diversocrats to award her the degree. This makes everything ok:

At Commencement, Trustee Emerita Margaret Bush Wilson has volunteered to
read the citation to award the degree to Mrs. Schlafly. As the first woman
of color to serve as the national chair of the NAACP, the second woman of
color admitted to practice law in Missouri, and as a prominent St. Louis
civil rights attorney for more than 40 years, she provides a strong voice
for the importance of tolerance and discourse as hallmarks of the
Washington University community.

We’re still trying to get diversity, even if it means making a eunuch of our Chancellor. Thanks for sticking up for diversity, sir.

In the midst of this controversy, I want to affirm my personal and the
University’s institutional commitment to strengthening diversity and
inclusiveness and to improving gender balance. Additionally, I have made a
commitment that the University will review the process for awarding
honorary degrees and will propose appropriate changes.

I’m disgusted by the Chancellor rolling over in the face of a facebook protest by the Buddha of the diversity religion. He doesn’t owe them anything. I don’t owe them anything. And I’m glad that someone at the top of the University had the chutzpah to nominate Mrs. Schlafly for an honorary degree. After all, she graduated WashU back when that meant something.

still matters

I watched the whole debate. A couple of things stick out for me:

1. Buckley clearly wins.
2. Chomsky cherry-picks his history.
3. It’s a disinterested act if: “my attempt to help or your attempt to help a particular nation is in order to spare you a great ordeal in the future which will harm you, your family, etc.”
4. “There is an observable distinction by intelligent men between a country that reaches out and interferes which the affairs of another country because it has reason to believe that a failure to do so will result in universal misery and that country that reaches out and interferes with another country because it wants to establish Coca-Cola plants and Chase National Banks and the like.”
5. “A soldier can be as useful as a bushel of wheat.”

This is all very relevant for today’s war debate. Do you believe that without American interference, the situation in Iraq would have led to universal misery?
Part I:

Part II: