Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Right and Wrong

  • Martha Nussbaum: Intimacy is not a fusion but a conversation

    Here’s a great mp3 by Martha Nussbaum on desire, passions and Hellenistic philosophy.  An excerpt from the transcript (same link):

    Interviewer: There’s an Epicurean doctrine regarding death which finds perhaps its fullest exposition in Latin in the work of Lucretius. It goes like this, ‘It is irrational to fear that which we will not experience, death being non-existent, cannot in the nature of things be experienced, therefore it is irrational to fear death.’ I have to ask, is this really therapeutic? Are we really meant to be comforted by this?

    Martha Nussbaum: You know, the first thing that Lucretius felt he had to do before he could comfort you, is to prove that there’s no afterlife. So before we get to the argument you’re talking about, there’s a whole long series of proofs of the mortality of the soul, because he thought that what most people are afraid of is being tormented in the afterlife. And so then once we get rid of the afterlife, then we still have people thinking that they fear death, and he thinks he can convince them that this fear is based on an irrational imagining that you are surviving yourself. So he thinks you’re standing there in your mind, watching the dead you and thinking ‘Oh, poor dead you, you’re missing all the good things of life.’ And so he thinks that if you can point out to the person it’s quite irrational, there’s no spectators gonna be there, there’s just nothing at all, then that will take away the fear.

    At that time, people were just as divided as they are now and I’ve had a terrific argument about that recently in our law school at the University of Chicago, because I had a new paper on that topic. And you know, you can see that some people find this argument very appealing. If there’s nothing at all, well then it would be quite irrational to think that that’s a bad that’s happened to you. But because there’s no you there for whom something bad could happen.

    Other people think differently and at the time people thought differently and at the time, people thought differently. Plutarch wrote a whole treatise talking about how bad this argument was. And I think to me, the way of attacking the argument has to be to think about what makes life worthwhile, and I think what makes life worthwhile are activities that have a structure, that persist through time, that go on into the future. And what death does is, it cuts off those activities and so it changes their shape so to speak, it’s like making them empty and vain because they never reach a completion, and it’s for that reason that even though there’s no you, it changes what you were in your life, if you see what I mean.

    That is, suppose you’re in the middle of trying to build some elaborate structure that you attack great importance to you, and then put all your energy into that and put your time into that, you get your friends to help you, and in the middle of that before your thing is complete, you die, well then it’s not just the time after death that’s the bad thing, it’s what it’s done to the life, it cuts it off in the middle. Now I think what that shows is not that every death is bad, but that death would be bad whenever it does that, whenever it cuts off activities that are in the middle and people are still attaching value to their completion.

    Here’s a terrific book review essay Nussbaum wrote about a book on romantic love and sexual politics. (The book being reviewed was Vindication of Love:
    Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century By Cristina Nehring). Let me say that this is one of the most thoughtful (yet devastating )  reviews of a nonfiction title I have ever read. Here’s the meat of her philosophical disagreement (pardon the length):

    But, says Nehring, love thrives on inequality. Here, of course, we have the two-theses problem. The first says, wisely, that real love should be prepared to overcome inequalities of power, class, and station. (That is the plot of more or less every Victorian novel.) The second says, foolishly, that real love requires inequality of power, class, and station. So confused is Nehring at this point that she interprets Pride and Prejudice as confirmation of her second thesis rather than her first: it shows, she says, that people always eroticize class difference and would never love people of similar station. What a trivialization of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy! Their deep moral and intellectual affinity, and their strong romantic attraction, gradually manage to surmount the obstacles imposed by rigid social norms and the internal dispositions (prejudice and pride) that they engender. It is true that there would be no novel without the distance: after all, there has to be a plot. It seems obviously untrue, however, that there would be no love without the distance. Far from social distance being eroticized, it is, until late in the novel, a source of erotic blindness. At this point Nehring’s argument loses all clarity, as, seeking confirmation for her anti-feminist thesis, she begins to treat any qualitative difference at all as “inequality”: the very fact of heterosexuality, she now says, shows that sexual desire thrives on inequality.

    But does passion even require qualitative difference? Here Nehring appears to endorse a view of sexual attraction that Roger Scruton popularized some time ago in his book Sexual Desire. Really valuable sexual passion, Scruton said, requires qualitative differences between the parties, because sexual love, when valuable, involves a kind of risky exploration of strange terrain, and we should think less well of those who stick to the familiar. Scruton could not advance this claim as a descriptive thesis about sexual choices, for nothing is more obvious than that people tend to choose people close to themselves in all sorts of ways–religion, class, education. But he did put it forward as a normative claim, and he used it to argue that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality, because it involves greater adventure and risk. Something like this is probably what Nehring has in mind, although she has no disdain for same-sex passion.

    What should we think of this? Do people who choose qualitatively similar partners really lack courage? The most obvious problem with Scruton’s thesis was that it was capriciously and inconstantly applied: to sexual orientation, but not to romances between adults and children, between Protestants and Catholics, between the virtuous and the immoral. A more subtle problem with his argument is that it is not even clear how it could be assessed: for, as the philosopher Nelson Goodman showed in his great essay “Seven Strictures on Similarity,” the concept of similarity is so slippery that it has basically no content. Any two things are similar and dissimilar to one another in manifold respects.

    But the real problem with Scruton–and Nehring, who speaks, Scruton-like, of the “enigmatic Other”–is that they both mislocate erotic risk. What is risky is not getting in touch with some trait that is dissimilar to some trait of one’s own. It is the whole idea of becoming vulnerable to an inner life that one cannot see and can never control. It is not qualitative difference, but the sheer separateness of the other person, the idea of an independent source of vision and will, that makes real love an adventure in generosity–or, if one is like Proust’s narrator, a source of mad jealousy and destructive projects of domination and control. And this has nothing at all to do with class difference, or gender difference, or even temperamental difference. It has to do only with the fact of human individuation–that minds and bodies never merge, that intimacy is not a fusion but a conversation.

    There is a grain of truth in Nehring’s thesis about personal qualities: it is at least plausible to maintain that loving someone who is complicated, opaque, and in some respects concealed can be of particular interest or value. At any rate, we often think less well of people who are willing to love only people who are altogether obvious and lacking in complexity. Rightly or wrongly, we think that such lovers are refusing some challenge, or lacking in curiosity. And yet an erotic attraction to psychological complexity does not require pursuing class difference, career difference, power difference, or some other obvious kind of difference. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how one could ever pursue a relationship with persons as complicated as some of the artists and writers adduced by Nehring without a context of shared activities, commitments, or aspirations that would generate the kind of friendship and openness that make insight into another person’s complexities possible. The way she tells the stories of those complicated artists and writers, they understood this well.

    I plan to read both Nehring’s book as well as Nussbaum’s book on Hellenistic philosophy and desire. (see a thorough review of it here by John T. Kirby). I definitely will report back.

    As an aside, let me say that Nussbaum’s tone throughout the essay is a tad condescending but still respectful. She seems to be criticizing the author’s naiveté rather than the ideas themselves (as though Nussbaum herself had considered most of those ideas already, but had discarded them.

    That said, I have to admit that Nussbaum’s book has sparked my interest in the two thinkers she criticizes.  I’d heard of Roger Scruton before, and his Sexual desire: a philosophical investigation sounds provocative at the very least. So do his other books: Beauty, Death-Devoted Heart, etc.  (Here’s a website of his published essays. He’s a resident scholar for AEI and has published lots of articles on various online journals and mp3 lectures). 

    I like the idea that thinkers like Scruton and Nussbaum are able to write so generally. Of course, they rest at comfortable academic positions, and that must certainly help. But even tenured professors tend to write about their niche without addressing the world at large. I guess philosophers by definition need to be relevant and comprehensible (and so do writers).  It always is interesting when an academic type tries his hand at a book in a totally different field. With a complex subject like climate change, a generalist approach can render your arguments laughable, but in other fields. the cross-pollination is fruitful. What if a priest wrote a treatise on prestidigitation? Or a surgeon wrote a book about classical dance? Or a comedian wrote about Civil War slave owners?  The outsider can uncover assumptions which were never questioned by those in the field. I think I shall write a book about musicology.

  • Innocent men should not be executed; guilty governors should be impeached

    I am definitely late to this story, but David Grann’s article about the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham suggests how an inadequate justice system cannot be trusted with putting people to death.

    Now it appears that Rick Perry has failed to reappoint some key officials on a science review panel, derailing their report until after the primaries. Grits for Breakfast gives a rundown and so does Chuck Kuffner here and here.

    Glenn W. Smith speculates  that Rick Perry might have violated federal law and may in fact result in Texas losing federal funding. (in Dogcanyon, a new Texas opinion blog).

    The Innocence Project provides a brief summary of the case.

    Here is a report from arson expert Craig Beylor (PDF, p52)

    The investigations of the Willis and Willingham fires did not comport with either the modern standard of care expressed by NFPA 921, or the standard of care expressed by fire investigation texts and papers in the period 1980–1992. The investigators had poor understandings of fire science and failed to acknowledge or apply the contemporaneous understanding of the limitations of fire indicators. Their methodologies did not comport with the scientific method or the process of elimination. A finding of arson could not be sustained based upon the standard of care expressed by NFPA 921, or the standard of care expressed by fire investigation texts and papers in the period 1980–1992.

    I realize that this story is tangled up with Rick Perry’s incompetent leadership, but this mishap only underscores how state criminal systems cannot be trusted to handle capitol murder cases.

    The most amazing thing is that the Board of Pardon and Parole and the governor’s office had received a considerable refutation by a national expert  of the arson testimony before the execution was to take place, and yet they turned a blind eye to it.

    (In the interest of fairness, here is a response from the City of Corsicana’s DA’s office and a response to Corsicana’s response from Grits for Breakfast.

  • Health care reform and medical bankruptcy: Answering the Libertarian Argument

    Nicholas Kristof on how a system based on private health insurance frequently results in spouse impoverishment, sometimes leading to fake divorces. Here are reader comments about the article which turn out to be more interesting than the original article. This argument has not frequently been cited, but it shows how the health care debate has far reaching implications on society. It has already been shown to reduce employer competitiveness, but wrong decisions about health care can also be catastrophic to the financial lives of a person.  Health care reform will introduce its own problems to the system, but it will also limit overall risk and provide a system of public accountability for  health care providers and insurers. Let me say now that these organizations already  use  discretion to decide how much charity care and  discounting to provide to individuals. The people who run these organizations are not beasts. At the same time, we have no guarantees that these organizations will act compassionately or in the public interest. We just don’t know.

    Kristof’s later piece shows that Medicare and VA have generally received passing marks on delivering quality health care. (Comments here).  (Update: The point about VA providing superior care seems to have been debunked).  By the way, health care reform is a great issue where anecdotes matter  (perhaps even more than economic analyses). You really need to read the comment thread on these articles to appreciate the problem. Anecdotes don’t help you to understand the magnitude of the problem, but they help you to understand the nature of it.

    Milt Shook relates some anecdotes which reveal the corrupt/inadequate nature of health insurance. He has been one of the most forceful and articulate proponents of health care reform. Here’s one:

    A 60-year-old woman is diagnosed with gallstones by her HMO plan doctor. That doctor asks the insurance company to approve a specialist, and the insurance company does so. The specialist wants to use shock-wave therapy to break up the gallstones, because it’s far less invasive and dangerous than surgery. The insurance company refuses to cover the procedure, calling it “experimental,” despite the fact that it’s been in use for almost 20 years, and has become a standard procedure when treating kidney stones. She appeals the decision by the insurance company, but during the appeal, she has a gall bladder attack. She lives nowhere near a hospital, so her husband drives her 40 miles and she undergoes emergency surgery to remove the stones and repair her gall bladder. The surgeon who performed the surgery made a mistake, however, which led to a second surgery to repair the damage from the first surgery.

    Two years later, the same woman was diagnosed with cancer. Her physician proceeded to scare the hell out of her, and he told her things about the cancer that were patently untrue. She requested a change of physicians, to someone who actually knew about her cancer, and her insurance company refused. They advised her that she could change her primary care physician during open enrollment, but most of them were full, and that once they assigned a specialist to her case, she was pretty much stuck with that specialist.

    He concludes by attacking the freedom argument used by libertarians to justify the private health insurance plan:

    How free is a society, when an ever-increasing segment of its people can be ruined, financially and otherwise, by illness or injury? How free is a society when health care is seen as a privilege, reserved for those with the cash on hand to pay a doctor? How free is a society in which those who want to start businesses can’t do so, because they can’t afford to pay for its workers’ health insurance, and therefore can’t afford to hire the best workers? How free is a society in which a worker is forced to stay at his current job to keep his current health plan in force, because a change of jobs puts his coverage at risk? And how free is a society in which a person can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars into the health insurance system over the course of 30 years, lose a job, get sick or injured a month later, and be forced into bankruptcy court? How free is a society in which that same worker can continue working, but be denied coverage, should the insurance company decide they don’t wish to continue coverage?

    Shook has correctly identified the problem with the libertarian objection. Even the libertarian has to concede that there is a hierarchy of needs which at some point trumps freedom. Can a completely private system address this?  Here’s how we can counter the libertarian argument.

    1. present cases where individuals are constrained by the current system, showing that the argument for more freedom does not imply keeping the status quo.
    2. present evidence about  how bad choices of certain individuals ends up hurting all participants in the overall system. (i.e., emergency room visits, vs. prevention)
    3. compare dollars and cents. You can say you oppose higher taxes, but if reform results in lower costs, will the libertarian objection to it disappear? Suppose I presented a plan where health care costs would rise 1% per year rather than the current 10% but with comparable success outcomes. (Comparable,  but not superior). If this plan imposed certain limits on freedom (say, limiting the doctors you use), but still had comparable outcomes, I doubt most people would oppose it (never mind the libertarian purists).
    4. Compulsion works if it results in minimal intrusion on people’s lives and applies to everybody. Look at two examples. Requiring that people wear seatbelts  and requiring that people buy auto insurance.  The true libertarian would object to both proposals. But the seatbelt rule just doesn’t intrude on people’s lives that much, and it has an obvious social purpose. The auto insurance is different because you are dealing with finances and also the liability risk for harming someone else. One can argue that society has an interest in making sure that all individuals are prepared for handling liability, so that scofflaws don’t get away with murder. When another person is compelled to buy auto insurance, I benefit because it reduces the possibility that I will have my car damaged without the other driver paying for my harms. Everybody benefits as a result. These are simple cases and health care reform affects many decisions; my point is merely to show that compulsory measures can receive public acceptance if the public regards the intrusion as minimal and beneficial.
    5. The religious/values  argument. Religion can be a bipartisan phenomenon, and very persuasive to members of the Republican Party.   Many religious people don’t care about the nuts and bolts of health care reform; they focus more on moral issues of tangential relevance (like abortion treatments). The Bible teaches compassion and helping your fellow man – a completely different system of values from the freedom-loving individual who wants government off his back. Opposition to health care reform is not inherently Republican (especially to a “Values Republican”). The real opponents are the “free market Republicans”  who believe the private system works better than a public system over the long run.
    6. The When will you compromise argument? Libertarians often adopt an absolutist position which admits no exceptions. You have to be that way, or else you are not being consistent. (Libertarianism is concerned with methods, while paternalism/utilitarian is concerned with outcomes).   The problem is that humans are used to making decisions about individual  people where exceptions are frequently made. The libertarian argument says, sure, anyone can freely choose to buy additional care for those who cannot afford it. But is that the way most people think about social issues?  Ordinarily we like to look at individual cases and then designate one party to provide a solution. That is paternalism…no doubt about it. Take the case of a homeless man with a life-threatening illness (and receiving no medical care).  The libertarian would say that  if individuals or groups become aware of this injustice, they are always free to be part of the solution. But there are no guarantees. But we will never have absolute certainty that these individuals will intervene (or more importantly, to intervene soon enough).
    7. How can you be sure that sufficient information exists for individuals to make intelligent decisions? In the case of the homeless man with the medical problem, perhaps a charitable person exists….but how will the homeless man locate him?  Libertarian solutions  depends on the needy individual being able to find assistance during times of need. It also depends on humans finding good information about the consequences of their action and knowing how to make good decisions? This kind of information and cognitive skill may not exist; it may never exist. To use a trivial example: last month, I realized that my health care provider did not cover 100% of my dentist’s services. It shocked me because I thought I read the insurance policy carefully. It turns out that the health care policy claimed to cover 100% of certain costs for out-of-network dentists, but that 100% only applied for certain procedures. This was not obvious information to me; and I am the kind to be careful about insurance. Just think what would happen if 200 million people had to make financial decisions on the basis of their understanding of health insurance. You’d have miscalculations galore, many of them with serious and devastating consequences.  For the system to work, each individuals would need to hire an independent agent to  counsel the individual about how to make health care decisions. But that is just saying: “I don’t trust a group of bureaucrat to make a bunch of decisions on my behalf; therefore I will hire an individual who can make a bunch of decisions of my behalf.” Those opposed to paternalism may find that individuals will need to rely on advisors to make decisions on their behalf.  In my mind that is not much better than paternalism. (I write about this issue in greater depth in my Free Market Can Be  a Time Sink essay).
    8. The 75,000 deaths argument. I’ve seen statistics quoted estimating that 75,000 additional people die each year as a result of no health care reform. Maybe that figure is an exaggeration, I don’t know. But if a libertarian points to the economic superiority of the private insurance system, all you have to do is to trot out the 20,000 deaths. Most people would say preventing premature deaths is a more persuasive argument than maintaining the efficiency of an economic arrangement.

    See also: Health Insurance and Amenable Mortality (which has some further thoughts about libertarianism at the bottom) and the Free Market is a Time-Sink (where I argue that free advocates often underestimate the value of their time).

    March 2010 Update. Matt Yglesias points out the amazing fact that libertarian  economist Friedrich von Hayek actually supported government intervention in health insurance. Here’s the money quote:

    Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance, where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks, the case for the state helping to organise a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supersede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.

    Quote #2:

    Once it becomes the recognized duty of the public to provide for the extreme needs of old age, unemployment, sickness, etc., irrespective of whether the individuals could and ought to have made provision themselves and particularly once help is assured to such an extent that it is apt to reduce individuals’ efforts, it seems an obvious corollary to compel them to insure (or otherwise provide) against those common hazards of life. The justification in this case is not that people should be coerced to do what is in their individual interest but that, by neglecting to make provision, they would become a charge to the public. Similarly, we require motorists to insure against third-party risks, not in their interest but in the interest of others who might be harmed by their action.

    Finally, once the state requires everybody to make provisions of a kind which only some had made before, it seems reasonable enough that the state should also assist in the development of appropriate institutions . . .

    Up to this point the justification for the whole apparatus of “social security” can probably be accepted by the most consistent defenders of liberty. Though many may think it unwise to go so far, it cannot be said that this would be in conflict with the principles we have stated . . . It is only when the proponents of “social security” go a step further that the crucial issues arise. Even at the beginning state of “social insurance” in Germany in the 1880’s, individuals were not merely required to make provision against those risks which, if they did not, the state would have to provide for, but were compelled to obtain this protection through a unitary organization run by the government.

  • Health Insurance and Amenable Mortality

    Here’s an article by Ellen Norte and C. Martin McKee that tries to compare mortality rates for incidents which might be prevented by health care intervention:

    The concept of amenable mortality was developed in the 1970s to assess the quality and performance of health systems and to track changes over time. For this study, the researchers used data from the World Health Organization on deaths from conditions considered amenable to health care, such as treatable cancers, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

    Between 1997–98 and 2002–03, amenable mortality fell by an average of 16 percent in all countries except the U.S., where the decline was only 4 percent. In 1997–98, the U.S. ranked 15th out of the 19 countries on this measure—ahead of only Finland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Ireland—with a rate of 114.7 deaths per 100,000 people. By 2002–03, the U.S. fell to last place, with 109.7 per 100,000. In the leading countries, mortality rates per 100,000 people were 64.8 in France, 71.2 in Japan, and 71.3 in Australia.

    The largest reductions in amenable mortality were seen in countries with the highest initial levels, including Portugal, Finland, Ireland, and the U.K, but also in some higher-performing countries, like Australia and Italy. In contrast, the U.S. started from a relatively high level of amenable mortality but experienced smaller reductions.

    The researchers estimated the number of lives that could have been saved in 2002 if the U.S. had achieved either the average of all countries analyzed (except the U.S.) or the average of the three top-performing countries. Using this formula, the authors estimated that approximately 75,000 to 101,00 preventable deaths could be averted in the U.S. "[E]ven the more conservative estimate of 75,000 deaths is almost twice the Institute of Medicine’s (lower) estimate of the number of deaths attributable to medical errors in the United States each year," the authors say.

    To restate: everybody’s amenable mortality rate has improved, but USA’s rate of improvement is so small that USA is now dead last in it.

    Ed from Gin and Tacos wonders why conservatives are so satisfied with their health insurance:

    My puzzlement is complete and my question is simple: what insurance do these people have and where can the rest of us sign? What the hell is this fantasy world in which medical decisions are “between patients and doctors” without the interference of panels of dour bean-counters, a labyrinthine and faceless bureaucracy, and actuarial tables? These columnists, screaming protesters, and talk radio audiences apparently live in 1923. Their doctor makes housecalls with his leather bag of Olde Tyme medical instruments and is paid for his services in cash or To Kill a Mockingbird style with bags of apples left on his porch. Or if they do have health insurance, it is a silent and unobtrusive entity that lingers in the background for the sole purpose of shelling out money without question for whatever procedure Chuck Norris desires.

    This isn’t remotely about patients’ rights or the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. It is, as wingnuts so often fail to grasp, about preferences. A panel of government bureaucrats denying coverage for a procedure deemed experimental is an image worthy of pant-shitting rage; a panel of “reviewers” at Cigna or Aetna doing the same is fine. Having to ask an Obama-appointed bureaucrat for permission to recieve certain procedures is unthinkable; that we routinely do the same thing with our HMOs and PPOs is irrelevant. The mental gymnastics of defending the status quo require either dubious reasoning about why Aetna red tape is better than Uncle Sam red tape or, as is the case with so many demagogues, fabrication of their own curious reality in which we are infinitely free to do as we please and in total control of decisions which affect our lives

    Gin and Tacos really nails it about the problem with libertarian philosophy: it depends on reliable information being distributed equally.

    The good libertarian relies on the free market to solve problems on its own. Take a couple of hamburger chains, for instance. The one that makes bad food will go out of business. Customers won’t eat there! Thus the market, left alone, will punish those who fail to provide what people want. How cute. Let’s leave the airline industry alone – bust the unions, abandon all regulation, let the market set whatever wage it will, let the pilots be on for 36 hours at a crack – and let the same process go to work. Markets will force airlines to keep their planes safe, otherwise no one will pay to fly with them!

    In order for the market to punish the backsliders, consumers must be made aware that Airline X is unsafe. Since we don’t have regulations and inspections, how will we know? Well, look up. We will know which airlines shirk on maintenance and safety when we see their planes plunging out of the sky. Here’s where my Mises Institute friends come in.

    As market acolytes, I believe that they should volunteer to be on the plane(s) that serve the purpose of communicating this essential information to all of us. In the airline industry, the market’s way of telling us who is inferior involves a lot of people dying. The system works really well – let airlines be, see who fails, and punish them with one’s wallet – for everyone except the people on the plane.

    See also: Mark Thompson’s takedown of libertarianism with Monty Python quotes.

    Perhaps I’ve never been a full-fledged libertarian, but I’ve always been a free market enthusiast in general. But the last year has really shaken my political beliefs. Namely:

    1. The financial crisis of 2008 shows the extent to which major lenders will game the political system to extract political concessions. (This may not be a criticism of libertarianism per se, but some might say that more aggressive legislation might have prevented the catastrophe).
    2. The science for global warming is established and growing more urgent, and yet a significant portion of the population doesn’t want to face this fact. The problem with libertarianism here is that a)people don’t see proof of climate warning until the effects are upon us, and 2)private lawsuits intended to recoup damages from global warming are unlikely to happen soon enough (especially if it wreaks permanent damage on your habitat).
    3. In health care reform, libertarians refuse to provide a workable alternative to solve the free rider problem and the fact that certain individuals will be discriminated against because of their health condition.
    4. The American media landscape gives a lot of power to certain political viewpoints which  are friendly to  advertising. I see more similarities than differences between CNN and Fox. He-said/she-said journalism makes it easy for corporations to drown out negative news stories….so much that it begins to seem that a captive audience is more likely to see a Swift Boat attack than a news story debunking it.
    5. More importantly, how much ability do corporations  (and their mouthpieces) have to motivate individuals to become politically active?  Bernard Chazelle believes that in the  “A empowers B to elect C to serve A” paradigm, A= corporations, B=individual voters and C=politicians. Even if this is reductive analysis, I can think of many cases where this paradigm did play out; can individuals be persuaded to act on behalf of the corporation’s self-interest even if it goes against their own? At some point, will this misguided passion turn against the corporations that engendered it?  If astroturf campaigns are effective sometimes, does this imply that democracy itself is fundamentally  a sham?

  • “There is just nothing left of her.”

    Karen de Sa reports a heartbreaking story of parental abuse and murder. The criminal father of a young girl received full custody during a divorce and ended up killing her. The method was particularly nefarious. Not only did he sexually abuse her, but he told everyone that the girl had run away.  The mother disagreed and thought something funny was going on, but she was unable to convince the police to investigate. Eventually, they did, and they later found the girl’s body in the backyard. image

    Here are some infuriating things about this story:

    1. the fact that a convicted & violent  criminal would gain full custody seems very scary. I realize that some divorce/custody hearings leave no good options, but this seemed to be a situation that begged for strict oversight. 
    2. Economic disparities played a role. “Allen, a former assembly worker now working for a restaurant, was deemed unfit by the court. She had made a frank admission to feeling depressed after what she described as years of persecution by her children’s father. Prior to Chiarello’s decision, records show, Allen told the court she had fled multiple states to get away from Mesiti and even to Canada, where she and the children stayed in battered women’s shelters." But while Mesiti’s court filings were formal, typed responses from his private attorney, Allen’s pleading letters to judges were hand-written. She reluctantly agreed to sign off on the custody order —in large part, she says, because she could not afford to raise the children without the child support payments Mesiti had been ordered to make.
    3. Lack of follow through about runaways. Apparently this was considered a cold case. The murderer/father claimed he received calls from the girl. (But did anyone look at phone records?). In this day and age, it would seem easier to verify someone’s existence.  Just keep in contact with her 20 best friend on a monthly basis. For heaven’s sake, she had a myspace page. It doesn’t add up that a young person like that would just stop communicating with anybody and never be seen. Everyone at some time or another is going to use a cell phone. That should make it easier to trace “legitimate runaways” and make it easier it identify the truly missing.
    4. Lack of neighbor involvement. From a discussion board: "(The residents in the neighborhood) didn’t even know a girl was missing," Charlton said Friday. That is unsurprising given that the father was allegedly the murderer.  But why not have a rule: if a person is missing in a neighborhood, all people in a 1 mile square radius should be notified?
    5. The ex-wife and mother notified the police repeatedly that the story was fishy. “When Alycia disappeared in 2006, Allen said she never believed the girl had simply run off. "I knew in my heart of hearts that she was gone, but no one would listen to me. I was fighting with police, saying ‘She’s not a runaway, she’s a missing person!’" Allen recalled. "But the police stopped taking my calls. They said, ‘She’ll come home, she’ll come home…’"

    Domestic violence expert Kathleen Krenek comments:

    Mark Mesiti was awarded unsupervised custody in 2005, even though he had a lengthy criminal history including a domestic violence conviction. He violated his probation and was sent to prison. For the seven years previous to gaining custody of his daughter, he amassed a variety of charges. All were red flags. Welfare professionals and Alycia’s mother raised them during the custody battle.

    The father was given custody after it was found that the mother was depressed — often the effect of battering — and therefore unfit to care for her daughter. As an alternative to this deadly decision, couldn’t we have wrapped the mom and her kids in supportive services and allowed them to heal together? Abuse is treatable. Homicide is not. Now healing will never happen for the remainder of this family.

    I’ve worked with domestic violence for 25 years, and I understand the complexity of family law cases. But the errors in this case are too obvious to use complexity as an excuse.

    Victims of domestic violence in family court often present their case without representation, while perpetrators often bring attorneys. The imbalance of power the perpetrators use at home to control the victims follows them into family court. When this imbalance exists, victims may not be able to effectively voice their concerns and articulate their needs. Often we don’t believe them. The myth that they are lying about their abuse to gain the upper hand continues to haunt the system.

    This story is both shocking and outrageous.  I don’t want to sound too mad at the social services people; it’s way too easy to second-guess their decisions after the fact. However, is our society so callous that the disappearance of a young teenager no longer sets off alarm bells?

    Thankfully, here’s a site called Help Find the Missing  that serves as a discussion board for missing people. If you go to the home page, you can see the current cold cases for your state (here is Texas). The problem with these cases is that the most vulnerable don’t get much media coverage unless there is something unusual about it. People die and disappear every day; so what! The people running this site  are amateur sleuths, but it serves a purpose of making it easy for strangers to find out information about this people and cases quickly. In some cases, a missing person may simply have decided to disappear or leave the country. It’s not impossible that the missing person himself or herself could be following the thread to see what the reaction is!  Each case reads like a mystery; unfortunately, the Alycia Mesiti story has a tragic ending. Before the net, it was next to impossible to follow these cold cases; now though a thread can lie dormant for weeks or months and suddenly become active. It’s reassuring to know that for many of the “solved mysteries,” the last page will contain the answer (good or bad).

    On the other hand, there are dangers running such a site. Privacy concerns. It’s easy for outsiders to point the finger at obvious suspect without appreciating the complexity of the cases. (But making guesses in public can be fruitful). Also once these bulletin boards attract the interest of the concerned party, it can start containing leads and nonpublic information (and perhaps even misleading lies)..

    I encourage people to follow missing person reports for their state. I looked at the faces on the Texas page and feel spooked (but glad someone is keeping track of them). You can look at the pages of “found safe” people and memorials,  The most frightening thing about  the Karen De Sa story was how traces of the dead person have disappeared:

    Mesiti was in jail when his daughter’s memorial was held last month in a Cupertino chapel. During the service, a lifetime of classic childhood moments beamed from photos spanning her short decade-and-a-half: Alycia mugging in an oversized T-shirt, stirring a pot of macaroni and cheese and hugging a Snoopy doll. In the last photos, she posed for her 8th grade prom, a fleeting brush with adolescence.

    For her part, Allen tosses endlessly most nights. She tries to stay focused on her last day with Alycia, when she and her daughter ate tuna sandwiches and splashed in a downtown San Jose fountain.

    Their next encounter would be three years later at the Stanislaus County coroner’s office.

    "I couldn’t even pick up her personal effects," Allen lamented. "There was nothing. There’s just nothing left of her.”