Politics: Va Tech

32 + 1. = 33.

every few days, somewhere in the middle east, some young man, ranging from 16 to 30 in age, straps a bomb on his chest, in his car, in a bag, and walks into a crowd. boom.

we in america watch in the distance, mildly saddened, but tempered by distance. by the certainty that it is baghdad, kabul, jerusalem. then madrid, london, new york.

then finally it becomes irrational. finally there is no more politics. no more agenda. no more cause. just a maniacally depressed young man with two guns and a desire to end lives.

and this we don't understand.

is it fair to call Cho a martyr? no, not to us. just as suicide bombers aren't martyrs to us. but to some other alienated kid out there, someone watching the news and receiving the tapes on a different frequency, who's hearing it in the suburban american version of jihad-dom, there is the martyr's message: hedonism, vodka, sex, U.S.A.

truth is: we don't understand suicide bombers. and, after all the forensics is done, we won't understand suicide shooters. we'll just have to accept that for some, there is a sense of alienation so strong that it must be resisted against by any means necessary. this is durkeimian anomie, the fit of not fitting, a collective subculture of people who hate culture. counter-culture with guns instead of guitars.

he's silent, but he's not alone. there's others out there. and that. that is frightening.

Why I hate out-of-towners

So I never stopped to think about why we New Yorkers are perceived to be rude until today:

I was riding the elevator going up from my building's basement with my basket of laundry. The elevator stops at the first floor, door opens, and a group of four upper middle-aged people step in. Three women, one man.

Door closes.

One of the women looks at me - in casual shirt and shorts - and at my basket of laundry, and says, "Columbia University student doing his laundry."

Now, I'm not sure who the comment was directed towards, and I'm really annoyed (it's a dreary day out anyways), so I retort, "Is this some kind of museum tour?"

To which she answers, "Yes, we're visiting a friend of ours who lives in this building."

Elevator keeps going up. Stops at my floor, thank god, and I get out to leave. "Good luck in college," she says. Now i'm really annoyed. "This is actually a grad school dorm," I say, and leave.

Small episode, but it shows the difference between New Yorkers and everyone else. New Yorkers, getting on an elevator, know to get in, look to the front, and shut up. Now, if there's something really noteworthy - a cute dog, a cute girl - you may have permission to invade the other person's space and start a conversation. If it's a cute dog, the person's asking for it. Same w/ cute girls. And maybe, if there's a MASSIVE rainstorm outside and the person getting in looks drenched, you are allowed to express sympathy. This is good New Yorker manners.

BUT, if there's really NOTHING to build a conversation out of, and you're in an elevator for all of 30 seconds, you shut up and just watch the dials.

What you do not do is invade other people's privacy by random observations. What you REALLY do not do is remark about other people in the elevator to the friends you came in with. We new yorkers like conversation. but we like interesting conversation. we like meaningful conversation. we do not like observations about us that state the perfectly obvious just so you don't have to listen to the sound of the elevator gears for a few seconds.

and what we really don't like is to be regarded as museum objects. Do you ever see us going to Omaha and going "Midwestern farmer riding his tractor down main street?" NO. We keep those thoughts to ourselves. Yet you tourists come, and you feel it necessary to put us into some sort observational box. "Oh look, mommy, there's a Columbia University student... with a Barnard girl... oh god, what're they doing with that cucumber ???" Just shut up and let it go. It's new york. it happens.

Law: NYC bans N-word

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6406625.stm

Can I say just how STUPID I think a law banning the N-word is, even if it has no legal effect? Not only is the Constitutional question looming, this is the work of a ridiculous generational conflict between a prior generation that understood the word as a perjorative and a new generation that sees it as self-referential. Parents can tell their children not to call each other N-----; the government should not have to. The next NYC city ordinances will, if this trend is followed, be "pull up your pants," "wear hats forwards," and "do not rap using any profanity." the ability of people to change words and give them new meaning is precisely cultural evolution at its best: the N-word is being "salvaged," in a way, from its traditional meaning. And 50 year old city councilors should leave it alone.

Law: on the German cannibal

It's argued that the government somehow has an interest in regulating you from activities which you otherwise consent to doing: suicide, not wearing a seatbelt, doing drugs or, having someone else chop you up and store you in a freezer. These are activities which primarily only affect your own person, and, as such, gov't regulation seems like an intrusion into personal autonomy.

Under what principle can the government do this?

One, is it because some of these activities have negative social externalities? That is, they affect other people in their indirect consequences? E.g. not wearing a seatbelt results in more serious injuries and thus more burden on the public health system.

Yet this argument fails insofar as you would then have to weigh the strength of those externalities against the individual's autonomy. For seatbelts, if the person pays for his own health insurance, perhaps the externalities are minimal. Suicide, too, may not be that bad if you had no family to get depressed over you.

Two, alternately, is it because policy makers believe that individuals have limited rationality, and do not know what is in their best interests? Certainly the German cannibalism case, or suicides in general, apply here. But so does doing drugs or not wearing seatbelts. Government here is being paternalistic, perhaps in a good way, in saying that somethings, while pleasurable in the short run, are bad in the long run. And certainly cognitive psychology shows that people are extremely bad at making the "pleasure now versus pain later" cost-benefit calculations.

Or finally, is it just because the gov't, as some sort of guardian of societal mores, finds some activities so morally reprehensible that it feels itself as having a duty to prevent them?

It seems to me a lot of the law on pornography turns on which one of these three explainations you take: Is it bad for society? Bad for the individual consumer? Or just bad in general?

Law: judicial review of legislative spending

given the problem of earmarks and pork-spending, there are two solutions possible:

1. executive check.
2. judicial check.

the solution of an executive check - in the form of a line-item veto - has been tried and struck down as unconstitutional. i wonder now if there is a possibility of using a judicial check.

this might work in the same way as the non-delegation doctrine. delegation occurs when the legislature gives some law making power to an administrative agency. the court articulated a principle that the law had to have an "intelligible principle" governing it, or be ruled impermissibly vague.

we might try something like this with rider bills , which are spending items attached to unrelated items of legislation. the court might try to articulate a standard that any item that has no rational relationship to the stated purposes of the bill be struck down as impermissible.

no idea where the court might find this power... and huge separation of power constitutional issues.

Law: a tax on free speech?

a thought came up as a combination of the con law and the regulation classes that i'm taking: wouldn't it be cool to replace the MPAA's movie rating system with a simple tax on movie violence and obscenity and other undesirable behavior? for instance, smoking in movies and TV encourages teens to smoke in emulation.

for the argument to work, we need to assume that negative TV messages have social externalities. that is, while they may increase a film's sales, they adversely affect public morals.

the current system, to me, has a serious incentive problem. there are four grades of films: G, PG, PG-13, and R. (we'll leave aside M). each of those four ratings has a fair amount of room for maneuver. the rules are fairly reasonable, but by only having four categories, there is inherently a problem that most movie producers will not adjust the content of the films unless the film falls close to the boundary between two ratings.

For instance, if a film uses the F-word 1-3 times, it gets a PG-13. So there is an incentive to lower the usage of the word if there's only 4 instances of it. But, if the character says it more than 3 times, then there is no incentive to cut back. the character can say it 10 times, 20 times, and still keep the same rating. (although the reviewer's discretion may jump in at a certain point).

a similar problem exists that violence usually gets a free pass, whereas sex is heavily censored. and because it goes on behind the scenes, the public doesn't have a good idea of the relative weights of these screen acts.

in contrast, a tax system to obscenity would make film makers internalize the costs of obscenity (with proceeds going to, say, PBS). a filmmaker would have to make a cost-benefit decision on whether each instance of nudity or of violence is worth - artistically speaking - the tax penalities he would have to make for it.

So a system where every instance of the F-word is taxed at (arbitrarily speaking) 0.5% of revenue, filmmakers would limit that word only to those instances where it adds to the storyline. extraneous smoking, sex, and shooting scenes would be taken out, reducing the overall amount of violence while giving the artist the maximum flexibility to preserve the storyline.

is this censorship? well, i want to draw a distinction between movies as commodity and movies as expression. no, it's not a clear line. but one can certainly argue that nowadays, movies are as much a cultural product (along the thinking of the Frankfurt School), made for mass consumption, as they are mediums for expression. to the extent that they exist to make their producers rich, there is not a strong justification to protect them absolutely. and to the extent that the tax system can deter egregious behavior, perhaps it may forestall legislative backlashes that are more restrictive, just as what was proposed in the aftermath of the columbine shootings.

Politics: Obama

Biden on Obama: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Offensive? Not to Obama. Probably to every other Black presidential candidate. But guess what, Biden is just saying what every single political observer is thinking: "Yes, Obama is black, and no, Obama is not that Black."

First, Obama is Black. Duh. He's half white, but in our one-drop culture, half is enough for Blackness unless you pull a Tiger Woods and start finding some native american in that mix.

Second, Obama is not that Black. No, not because his father's African, or because he grew up outside the US, or any of that. He's not that Black because all the usual ways of attacking a Black candidate: as outside the mainstream, as poor and inchoate and rabble-rousing, don't apply here.
Obama, in fact, is pretty invulnerable to those attacks, for one reason and one reason alone. I'll spell it: H-L-S. Obama is part of what I see as a new generation of minority leaders, many of whom are my classmates. These leaders are products of the opening of the American education system to minorities.

They've gone to top schools. They've had professional careers. Most engage in activism as a matter of personal conviction, but most also have other career objectives, other goals. Obama, for instance, was a U Chicago law professor before becoming an activist. Go ahead, pigeonhole that. It's hard to call them radicals, or rabble, or any of the things that lie behind words like "articulate and bright and clean."

So instead, they'll call him "Black, but not that Black"