Alex Jacobson 3.0

This week is the Jewish holiday of Passover. Passover is intended to help Jews remember that they were once slaves in the land of Egypt and God got us released, redeemed us, delivered us from danger into freedom, and put us on the way back to the land of Israel (it would take a generation before we actually did, but that is another story).

In any case, central to observance of this holiday is the concept of God having redeemed us. In other words, God payed a price to buy our freedom and perhaps we now have some obligation towards him. Two major components of the holiday are the recitation of the plagues Egypt suffered because of its failure to be just. With each plague, Jews spill some wine to acknowledge that we all bear cost for this action even as it helped us gain freedom. Another is “the pour out thy wrath” section where Jews open the front door and ask God to pour out his wrath on people who commit major injustice. So part of the price is that we need and demand that the people who do evil must be punished. SImple compassion is not enough. I feel that part of the obligation is a pay-it-forward obligation to help others achieve justice. It is not entirely surprising that many neo-cons are Jews. The idea that we have an obligation to free people from oppression is deeply embedded in our psyche.

An interesting side point is that, while the Jewish God delivered redemption from unjust slavery, the Christians God redeemed them from punishment for their sins. A side-effect of this is that the obligation of Jews is to honor God and alleviate injustice, the obligation of Christians is to help people find Jesus so they can participate in redemption for their original sin. I never really understood this before.

Wretchard quotes the Observer

Fifteen consecutive opinion polls during April have confirmed that the ‘no’ vote in the French referendum on the Constitutional Treaty stands at some 53 per cent …. An improbable alliance of right and left is tapping the mood that French travails in general, and unemployment in particular, are because France cannot be true to an idea of France. France has been locked in quasi economic stagnation for more than a decade; unemployment is 10 per cent and youth unemployment even higher.

So economic stagnation is increasing the power of the far right (Le Pen) and far left (anti-market) against the center. This echos a prior European era in which war was “obsolete”. I bet Le Pen is stronger than the communists. The situation does not make me comfortable.

See this great site for economic data. Note this is despite the huge growth in the use of computers, air conditioners, etc. Note that our population is still growing so overall electricity usage is increasing.

If she is considred a lost cause. Are her organs available for use by others? Certainly starving her will cause them to be less useful than otherwisae. Ugh.

People who oppose the death penalty should also be opposing Schiavo. She suffered from incompetent lawyering in the court case that established “facts” inimical to her interest (as frequently happens in criminal cases where the defendant can’t afford a good lawyer). All subsequent cases were simply about the question of whether proper procedure was followed in the first case (and it was). Now she has been sentenced to die in a cruel and unusal manner.

From Yahoo:

“Siding with the GOP when you live in the bluest state around is almost like wearing a Boston Red Sox jersey at a New York Yankees’ home game,” says Zipp in the April issue of PLAYGIRL. “I cannot tell you how many times a person assumed I voted for John Kerry in 2004. Most of the time, I don’t have the heart to tell them, or the energy to discuss my reasons for going red this election year. But this is PLAYGIRL magazine so it’s about time I was the one who bared what’s underneath.”

Now according to a letter she sent to Druge, she’s been relieved of her duties:

“After your coverage of my article about coming out and voting Republican, I did receive many letters of support from fellow Republican voters, but it was not without repercussions. Criticism from the liberal left ensued. A few days after the onslaught of liberal backlash, I was released from my duties at Playgirl magazine.

“After underlings expressed their disinterest of working for an outed Republican editor, I have a strong suspicion that my position was no longer valued by Playgirl executives. I also received a phone call from a leading official from Playgirl magazine, in which he stated with a laugh, “I wouldn’t have hired you if I knew you were a Republican.

Over the las election cycle, I had lefty friends treating me extremely poorly simply because of my politics. It is pathetic that self proclaimed “liberals” have sunk to this point. However, as a Republican in daily contact with them, it is also unpleasant. Nothing justifies this.

Many blue staters like to characterize Republicans as the party of the rich and Democrats as the party of the downtrodden. Michael Barone notes that trustfunders my a huge margin vote Democrat, live in urban areas, etc.. I would add that in the last election the Democrats were the party of the billionaires including Kerry and his wife, George Soros, Warren Buffet, etc.

Barone characterizes these rich people as exerting power without responsibility. I think they are voting their self interest. In particular, they expect their future income to be a small fraction of their asset base and enjoy their status as having the largest asset bases around. As such they prefer that income rather than wealth be taxed heavily and largely Democrats are the party of higher taxes. They also prefer relative economic stagnation as that preserves their elite status and makes asset protection easier and that is what Democrat’s increased regulatory approach provides.

They have the same interest as the landed aristocracy of old and it is not surprising that they have converted the Democrats to a politics that looks very similar to the conservative politics of old. The Republicans are the party of classical liberalism. John Stuart Mill would understand our politics completely if he were alive today.

Last week I attended the OReilly Emerging Technology Conference in San DIego and got into a hour long debate in the hallway with James Surowiecki author of The Wisdom Of Crowds. It started because in his talk, he argued that overly strong ties created feedback loops that led to a loss of information. I suggested that perhaps the risk was reduced because smart players would know that they could influence these loops to their own advantage and that therefore there would be a market equilibrium of suspicion that would prevent loops from getting out of hand. From this point we drifted into a discussion of the politization of the blogosphere. If I am recalling the converation correctly, he was dubious about this point and used as an example the fact that the rightwing blogosphere went after Eason Jordan full force without bothering to check whether his allegations were true or not. I was tired and observed somewhat inarticulately that the issue was more what Eason Jordan had said rather than whether it was true. Absent a copy of the video, there was no point in arguing truth/falsity. And the refusal ever to request a video was sufficient for conviction.

The discussion then flowed to the general question of which side of the blogosphere was more open to discussion from the other side. I argued that right wing media was inherently structured as oppositional to MSM and that since the MSM was liberal, rightwing readers spent much more time processing both sides of arguments (initiated in the liberal MSM). He argued that the MSM was non-partisan and that perhaps oppositionalism generated more heat than light. The substance of his claim that the NYTimes was non-partisan was that Jeff Gerth had vigorously gone after Clinton about Whitewater and that Judith Miller had been given a lot of space to repeat the “lies” of Ahmed Chalabi. He didn’t want to talk about the more recent behavior of CBS or about the NYTimes coverage of the 2004. I made the much more moderate claim that the blogosphere bloomed in the past year during an election cycle in which the MSM was substantially liberal and vigorously pro-Kerry. He argued that the left was also exposed to the right direct from the whitehouse. I suggested that there is a substantial difference between Bush taking an explicitly right wing position and NYTimes coverage that claims not to be biased but clearly is; that it gives liberal readers the false sense that they are accessing the truth rather than just another viewpoint.
[Update: Catching up with recent news, it appears that the left spin is that the right is going after the free and independent press while the left goes after conservative activitsts; begging the question of whether or not the "free and independent press" they view as targets are not more reasonably viewed as left activists and missing the fact that the attacks have been on factual accuracy and not politics per se]

I further argued that the left and right prefer very different conversational models. In particular the left prefers comments and discussion boards in which everyone participates equally and there is no differentiation in the interface between cranks and legitimate and approved viewpoints. In contrast, the right prefers blogs with an author in full control and links that function as judgements on related material. The result is much more extremist noise accepted as truth in the left blogosphere as opposed to the right and a substantial dirft to madness. Links in the rightwing blogosphere function as a sanity check. He argued that there are lots of smart lefty blogs. I pointed out that if you look at traffic, the left blogosphere is much more dominated by discussion forums like Daily Kos and Democratic Underground than the right is by the Free Republic; that right traffic revolves much more around popular infividual bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Powerline who link out to others. We both agreed that Glenn Reynolds is a pretty unique institution and I mused on the possibility that Glenn’s mad linking is what MADE the right wing blogosphere and saved us from madness. Scary thought.

On reflection, I think it more likely that community forums are much more acceptable on the left and blog ownership and control are much more acceptable on the right with the result that absent Glenn the politics would have converged in the way it has, but I am not entirely sure.

On saturday I was invited to attend a party promoted as follows:

Under our current administration’s culture of fear, civil liberties and personal expression are under attack. But true Americanvisionaries have always been outlaws. Thus our party’s motto: When fun is outlawed, only outlaws have fun.

Come dressed as your favorite outlaw. Costume ideas range from Abbie Hoffman, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie & Clyde, James Dean,Angela Davis and Lenny Bruce to groups like the Black Panthers, Hell’s Angels, the Weathermen and our most recent freedom-fighters, the RNC protesters.

I don’t particularly agree that civil liberaties and persosonal expression are particularly under attack today as opposed to under prior administrations, but that would not have been enough to put me off joining my friends at this party. What did put me off was the romanticization and glorification of people who are simply evil and bad e.g. the Weatherman, the BlackPanthers, and Angela Davis. From googling “weathermen”, found this:

The first national action of the Weather Underground occurred on October 8, 1969 in Chicago, in a four day protest against the Vietnam War known as the “Days of Rage”. Hundreds of members used clubs and chains to vandalize shops and cars in Chicago’s business district. After the melee, six members had been shot, and sixty-eight arrested.[...]In December of 1969, the national membership met for the last time in Flint, Michigan. Hung around the room were pictures of Communist dictators whom members sought to emulate; the dictators were Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevera, and Fidel Castro. It was then that the group formulated their terrorist strategies; they had deserted the possibility of a popular movement (Raynor 70).
[...]
in May of 1970, the Weather Underground issued a “declaration of war”: “Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of American justice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown, and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people. The group’s declaration proved to be true, as they soon bombed the headquarters of the New York Police Department and the barber shop at the U.S. Capitol Building. Twenty more bombings occurred between 1970 and 1975″ (Raynor 71).
[...]
The shocking, unofficial ending of the Weather Underground came in 1981, with the robbery of a Brinks’ Armored Car, a robbery in which Kathy Boudin was a participant. Boudin had joined the “Family”, most of whom were members of the Black Liberation Army, an extremely radical and violent group that was an offshoot of the Black Panthers. The Family had committed various armed robberies throughout the tri-state area (allegedly to fund their plans for the liberation of blacks in America), but the robbery of the Brinks’ truck at the Nanuet Mall branch of the Nanuet National Bank in Nanuet, New York was their biggest heist ever. $1,585,000 was taken from the armored car and put in a van, transferred to a U-Haul, and driven down Route 59 towards Nyack (Castellucci 18). When the group reached a roadblock at the Nyack entrance of the New York State Thruway, violence ensued. Certain Family members (presumably Chui Ferguson and Sam “Solomon Bouines” Brown), with the exception of Boudin, shot and killed two Nyack police officers, and wounded another. Boudin’s failed escape marked the end of her career; an off-duty corrections officer tackled her to the ground, demanding to know who she was. Boudin only responded “I didn’t shoot him; he did” (Castellucci 9).

Gross and pathetic.

I assume most people went because they didn’t know any better. I didn’t because I did. And I assume the organizers did as well.
”
Update: My friends who told me about and attended thinks that I should not assume the organizers knew anything about the “outlaws” they named in the invitation. Fair point. I shouldn’t assume and have since emailed the organizer. I will update when I have more information. I had told him my reason for not attending when he invited me. In his email to me he notes:

me personally, i went because the night’s plans had changed and were now “let’s have an adventure” with these strange people…and i didn’t feel
strongly enough about the cause of the event one way or the other. also, for what it’s worth, the party itself was not politicized in any way that i saw. people in a cramped place with a dj and a band and some costumes.

On some level, a party is just a party. So, no I don’t hold the attendees particularly accountable for the theme and I’m glad everyone had fun. I just wish it was under a different banner. Although I am curious about what people actually chose as their costumes.

Last night I went to a debate on the question of whether a woman’s place is in the home. The debate content itself left me unfulfilled, but it did get me thinking about the need for children. If no one chose to have children and everyone retired, the real value of any retirement savings would drop to zero as the supply of goods and services on which to spend those funds also dropped to zero. The value of retirement savings is directly proportional to the productivity of the next generation. As the supply of good and services increase (because of population) the price goes down and the retirement dollars go further.

Having children is expensive but necessary. People who fail to have children but plan to retire are free riders on those that do have children. We as a society should tax the retirement savings of people who fail to have children at a substantially higher rate than those who do. The plan is simple. You can exit from Roth IRA’s and 401k’s tax free if you had children before your retirement. Your social security payments get taxed heavily if you failed to have children before you retired. We probably need a way of qualifying the quality of offspring but this would be a good start!