Author: Tony

Prove it.

Senator Clinton makes a bold claim:

Blasting “companies shamelessly turning their backs on Americans” by shipping jobs overseas and railing that “it is wrong that somebody who makes $50 million on Wall Street pays a lower tax rate than somebody who makes $50,000 a year,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton increasingly sounds like one of her old Democratic rivals, former senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

The first half of her statement is boring rhetoric. Corporations are evil, blah blah blah. Empty talking points. Whatever.

The second half of her statement is absurd. She needs to prove it. Show me one Wall Street executive who pays a lower tax rate than somebody who makes $50,000 per year.

No matter what, I will take no solace. If she could fine one, her solution would be to raise the rate on the individual making $50 million. She’d never imagine that she could (ask Congress to) lower rates or simplify the entire tax code.

**********

It’s interesting that the first screen a visitor encounters at her campaign website is a place to give her your information, accompanied by a big red SUBMIT button. Freudian, anyone?

Senator Obama does the same, but he doesn’t ask for first or last name and invites the visitor to LEARN MORE. I won’t pretend that the result isn’t nearly identical, when mentality meets policy, but the marketing difference explains a lot.

The issue is always individual rights.

Three circumcision topics, in order from past to present.

First, author Susie Bright wrote the following based on a discussion in her podcast from 2005:

The problem is, it’s one thing to decide for the newborn… and it’s another to deal with the adult men around you who already had the choice made for them a long time ago. So often people think they’re talking about “babies,” when they’re really talking about themselves.

I’m not deluded into thinking the foundational basis for my advocating against circumcision isn’t my complete dissatisfaction with being circumcised. I hate it. I have been and always will be upfront about that. But, that’s not where my thinking is on why infant circumcision as practiced in the United States is wrong. What is broken can’t be fixed; I’m not trying to fix it. Nor do I need to resolve any phantom psychological problems some imagine I suffer. I’m only making the basic human rights (and common sense) argument I wish someone had made before I was born.

In other words, it’s only about me when someone else makes it about me. That involves assuming something I haven’t said, or ignoring what I have said. You like being circumcised? Good for you. I’m not trying to convince you otherwise. You think your preference permits you to impose it permanently on a healthy child? Only there do we have a problem.

Next, from a blogger who self-identifies as a (paleoconservative) libertarian, this argument pointing to Time’s ranking of voluntary, adult circumcision as a way to reduce the risk of female-to-male HIV infection:

So much for Penn & Teller’s anti-circumcision show [sic]

I’ve seen the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode on circumcision, which its producers describe thusly:

In episode 301, the third season premiere, the mischievous magicians examine the historical, religious, medical and ethical arguments associated with circumcision.

How many of those has the blogger, Josh, ignored? There’s the obvious medical argument against circumcising healthy infants, that we don’t routinely perform surgery on healthy children that corrects no malady. However, I’m only interested in challenging the direct flaw in pretending that X scientific assertion (reduced female-to-male HIV risk) demands Y response (circumcising healthy infants). X doesn’t demand Y. Aside from the easy medical dismissal, the beginning of the ethical analysis informs us that the HIV angle on voluntary, adult male circumcision suggests nothing about forcing infant circumcision on healthy infants, the topic of the circumcision episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.

Finally, for parents who claim a First Amendment right to circumcise their children, consider:

Forty-four percent of Americans have either switched their religious affiliation since childhood or dropped out of any formal religious group, according to the largest recent survey on American religious identification.

The obvious shortcoming is that it’s a survey with insufficient detail. It can’t specifically rebut any rights claim.

Yet, it demonstrates the valid individual rights counter-argument to the invalid group rights claim such parents make. Freedom of religion is an individual right. Parents have only the individual right to practice their own religion. They may raise their children in that religion, but that is a concession to practicality and reason, not a separate guaranteed right. There must be limits that protect the child’s individual rights. That includes his individual right to be free from religion by rejecting his parents’ religion. Modifying his body permanently revokes his right. That can never be legitimate.

More of the same. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

George Will writes in today’s Washington Post on potential running mates for John McCain:

Three two-term governors might help McCain, including Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, 60. He has two things McCain lacks — impeccable conservative credentials and a genial disposition. He was conspicuously competent in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. …

Conspicuously competent? How about conspicuously unethical (link via).

Many Mississippians have benefited from Governor Haley Barbour’s efforts to rebuild the state’s devastated Gulf Coast in the two years since Hurricane Katrina. The $15 billion or more in federal aid the former Republican national chairman attracted has reopened casinos and helped residents move to new or repaired homes.

Among the beneficiaries are Barbour’s own family and friends, who have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from hurricane-related business. A nephew, one of two who are lobbyists, saw his fees more than double in the year after his uncle appointed him to a special reconstruction panel. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in June raided a company owned by the wife of a third nephew, which maintained federal emergency- management trailers.

Meanwhile, the governor’s own former lobbying firm, which he says is still making payments to him, has represented at least four clients with business linked to the recovery.

No evidence has surfaced that Barbour violated the law; at the same time, the pattern that emerges from public records and interviews raises “many red flags,” said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a watchdog group in Falls Church, Virginia, that investigates the investments of government officials. “At the minimum, the public is entitled to a full explanation of the facts,” he said.

It gets worse from there.

I already have a low opinion of Senator McCain. I would expect this sort of thinking and marketing from him. I expect better from the usually reasonable George Will. Perhaps I’m confusing the quality of his analysis with the quality of his recommendations resulting from his analysis? If so, he should stick solely to the latter.

Unfortunately, Barbour also was a lobbyist for a while, and the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances” is another part of the First Amendment that the co-author of McCain-Feingold finds unimpressive.

Maybe I should rethink my opinion on the quality of Mr. Will’s analysis. It’s citizens, not lobbyists, that McCain has a problem with. Sure, his public statements suggest Mr. Will’s analysis. But his public (and private) actions do not. Those already in power are free to do much, much more than those not in power.

Competition is better than government fiat.

Lance Ulanoff, writing in PC Magazine, explains why he was wrong on who would win the Blu-ray/HD-DVD battle.

I finally figured out why I was so dead wrong about the HD DVD versus Blu-ray format war. I should have analyzed the sides—Sony and Toshiba—not as two countries going to war, but as opponents in a close-quarters boxing match. Had I done so, I would have properly assessed each of the technology’s assets and deficits.

Mr. Ulanoff was wrong in prognosticating consumer technology for a magazine. No harm, no foul. We all make judgments, whether we commit them to print or not, that turn out wrong. We’re all human.

Remember that every time a central planner comes along and tells us confidently why we should choose X (with money taken from taxpayers) and outlaw Y.

The topic is serious. The process is sport.

Kip was wrong. Until now, I was the last person in the blogosphere who hadn’t posted this comic from Xkcd:

This is quite true for me. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve told Danielle to hang on, I just need to finish a comment. But, while the accuracy of the comic is spot-on, the tone is missing completely. The reader must insert a contextual judgment. For that, I refer you to John Scalzi’s Whatever:

Krissy used to worry that I got too wrapped up in absolutley [sic] pointless Internet slugfests until the day she realized that the reason I did it was because I was having fun, not because I was massively emotionally invested. I might stay up to thump on someone online, but once I step away from the monitor, it’s done. Letting people you don’t even know get you all wound up is no way to go through life.

The slugfests I get involved in concern exactly what you think they concern. Still, Mr. Scalzi is correct. On my chosen subject, I know I’m right. I do not engage in an attempt to fix someone’s thinking. I seek to refine my thinking and debate skills against common irrationality and misunderstanding. It’s self-improvement, not fighting.

The central planner’s impulse is the parental decision-making crutch.

Most of this article from a Portland, Maine television station is boilerplate stupidity. The parents’ opinion matters exclusively. It’s no big deal. The potential for benefits overcomes the absence of medical need. Every one of those incorrect excuses is the brain output of a narcissist. But this is a different, less-common expression of that:

In the past, pain relief was not commonly used on babies during the procedure. [Obstetrician-Gynecologist] Dr. [Anne] Rainville says she always uses a local anesthetic.

“When I do a circumcision on a baby, they cry less than the baby next door who is getting their blood drawn. The way we do it is very humane and it is not a terrible barbaric procedure as some people might be led to believe,” she said.

The use of pain relief is not the primary determinant for whether or not a surgical procedure is humane. Humane intervention requires science. Humane intervention requires medical need. Humane intervention respects individual human rights. Medically unnecessary genital cutting forced on an individual fails every test of humanity.

A doctor can cut off a child’s healthy arm without forcing the child to feel it. Only a fool would argue that such a procedure is humane and not terrible or barbaric. Cultural blindness based on tradition and peer pressure does not excuse violating a healthy individuals bodily integrity.

From the Female Genital Mutilation Act of 1995, the discriminatory federal prohibition on medically unnecessary genital surgery on female minors:

In applying subsection (b)(1), no account shall be taken of the effect on the person on whom the operation is to be performed of any belief on the part of that or any other person that the operation is required as a matter of custom or ritual.

Any other person includes parents. And doctors. And God. And Jimmy next door who will (allegedly) tease Billy in the middle school locker room if Billy’s parents leave his healthy, normal foreskin intact.

Subsection (b)(1) states:

(b) A surgical operation is not a violation of this section if the operation is —

“(1) necessary to the health of the person on whom it is performed, and is performed by a person licensed in the place of its performance as a medical practitioners; …

That is humane. Where that exact interpretation is not also applied to males, any pretense that the use of pain relief makes the surgery acceptable is willful denial. It is a shameful ignorance of humanity. It is the permanent subjugation of a part of an individual to another’s control.

Post Script: Note Dr. Rainville’s statement that boys under local anesthetic cry less. She did not say they don’t cry.

I’m offended. So are you.

The FCC creates an interesting concept [emphasis mine]:

The Federal Communications Commission erased nearly all of a proposed $1.2 million indecency fine against a number of Fox television stations yesterday, saying the Rupert Murdoch-owned network should be fined for airing an offensive television show only in markets where viewers complained about it.

Instead of ordering all 169 stations that aired it to pay the larger fine, the FCC ordered 13 Fox-owned and -affiliated stations to pay a total of $91,000 in indecency fines for broadcasting an episode of the long-canceled reality show “Married by America” nearly five years ago.

This action attempts to apply the (illegitimate) majoritarian “community standards” as the FCC’s guide. In reality, it now permits only the minoritarian requirement of one offended viewer in a community, with viewer defined quite loosely. This is not progress. The First Amendment still says what it says.

Sic Semper Medius Consilium¹

Megan McArdle on individuals who claim to want the government to tax them more:

No, I simply cannot grant that people really believe that they pay too little in taxes. It seems more like they think the government has a better use for everyone else’s money, and should therefore take it. They believe this so strongly that if they have to pay some of their own money to rectify the situation, they will do so. In other words, they don’t so much want higher taxes on themselves, as to purchase the good “State coercion of other affluent people”. That is not the same moral intuition as “I have too much money, and the government should take it away”, however much nicer it would be if that were true.

That is correct. And it’s a given that said individuals always know better how that good should be used by government.

Ms. McArdle’s “tax me more” thread continues here and here.

¹ Even with four years of Latin in school, I’m sure I’ve messed up the translation. Aside from simple grammar, maybe cogito should replace consilium?

Indifference does not prevent difficulty.

From the New York Times Magazine:

I wondered how [26-year-old Capt. Dan] Kearney was going to win back his own guys, let alone win over the Korengalis. Just before I left, Kearney told me his biggest struggle would be holding his guys in check. “I’ve got too many geeking out, wanting to go off the deep end and kill people,” he said. One of his lieutenants wanted to shoot every Afghan in the face. Kearney shook his head. He wished he could buy 20 goats and let the boys beat and burn them and let loose their rage. He tried to tell them the restraints were a product of their success — that there was an Afghan government with its own rules. “I’m balancing plates on my goddamn nose is what I’m doing,” he said. “All it’s gonna take is for one of these guys to snap.”

My initial reaction to this is disgust, given the indifference to the idea of inflicting suffering and death on goats. I understand (and agree with) the desire to save people before animals, but that’s not the call here. The either/or scenario here is self-imposed. Yes, the soldiers are a victim of circumstance. No, that doesn’t matter. They’re professional soldiers.

After that thought passed, this quote indicates the problem with our military strategy. Take an invading force and turn it into an peace-keeping force and this sort of challenge seems inevitable. Afghanistan was a legitimate war. From the moment the Taliban’s involvement in permitting attacks on the United States was clear, it was always reasonable to plan to oust it from Afghanistan. But we also needed to prepare for the rebuilding aftermath of invasion, both in infrastructure and government. Capt. Kearney’s concern reveals a flaw somewhere in the chain of command if a problem can fester long enough to create this type of rage. How badly has the transition been managed? How prevalent is this in Iraq? How significant will this be when these soldiers return to civilian life in the U.S.?

War is chaotic. Outcomes are unpredictable. I accept that, and some uncomfortable level of challenge in multiple areas is not a sign of extraordinary behavior. But this is ridiculous. The manner in which the Bush administration drove us into two simultaneous wars with seemingly little concern for these long-term outcomes and consequences displays a mind-boggling level of incompetence.

Link via Slate, via Ben Casnocha.

Two Voluntary Participants

On an interesting concept among plastic surgeons:

“No, Judith. Just … no.”

Lee A. Gibstein, M.D., a plastic surgeon with offices in New York City and Miami, crumpled up the photo of the shiny, preternaturally line-free celebrity I’d brought with me and tossed it over his shoulder. “Oh, c’mon. Why not?” I whined.

“Because you’re a walking advertisement for me, and I don’t want my patients looking as if they belong in Madame Tussauds,” Dr. Gibstein said, setting down his syringe.

Doctors can reject a patient’s request for cosmetic surgery? Who knew? (Me.) If only other doctors might consider other examples of cosmetic surgery that demand a “no” in 100% of cases. And wouldn’t it be nice if they rejected such requests for ethical concerns rather than (the appropriate for the linked example) marketing concerns?

Link via Kevin, M.D.