Analyzing Alito

In the Washington Post, Cass Sunstein provides a measured look at Alito's appellate record. I have no doubt that we have a major political battle at hand, but Democrats will face a tough challenge in that Alito's record does not look to be any more conservative than Scalia's, and, by Sunstein's analysis, it might be less so. How would a filibuster be justified here when Scalia was confirmed 98-0? There will likely have to be arguments external to the judge's personal record, in reference to the overall balance of the Court or some such thing. This may take the form of arguments that Alito is not just taking any seat on the Court, but he is replacing O'Connor, a relative moderate, in whose mold the replacement should be cast. I've seen this argument implied in several places already, and I'm not sure it makes much sense. It is difficult to find historical or policy justifications for the idea that the Court needs to adhere to some particular partisan structure or another. In general I think this will be a tough fight for the opposition. Their best approach will probably be to tie this nomination as closely as possible to the White House and try to make the confirmation into a referendum on George Bush to capitalize on his falling popularity.

Update: On Alito-Scalia comparisons, Robert Gordon of the Center for American Progress (a liber think-tank) makes the case on Slate that Alito is more extreme than Scalia.

Update (11/02): For some balance, here a CSM story suggests that Alito is not a hardliner on abortion.

Yet Another Update (11/03): I had to add a link to this rebuttal to the CSM column UVA's own Richard Schragger.

A Rival to NATO?

There's an article on CSM about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a military alliance potentially involving China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, and the various -stans. It's an interesting idea, but do these countries have anything in common other than an interest in increasing their influence? It would be an extremely potent group, one that probably could rival NATO in power in coming decades, but I have a hard time seeing any coherent policies or positions that these nations could all agree on.

Not Our Biggest Fans

(Or 'How Gerhard Schröder Made a Career Out of Dissing Americans') CSM has an interesting column on how Katrina played in recent German elections. I'm curious how much of this will persist after 2008...

Friendly Fire

The more this Harriet Miers thing goes on, the funnier I think it is. Like this article on Laura Bush rebuffing Miers critics. What could be funnier than this scenario: The White House nominates a lame candidate. Conservatives criticize the candidate. The White House, as it has done a hundred times before, responds to criticism by shooting the messenger. Conservative critics say, "Hey! Wait a second! It's us! Hold your fire. We're not sexist pigs!" Pure comedy.

A Spirited Debate on Civil Rights

I happened across this Legal Affairs magazine debate on the Patriot Act between Chicago Professor Geoffrey Stone (against) and Judge Richard Posner (for). Both make some good points and fire off some nice jabs. My favorite exchange:

Posner: "My mother was forced out of her job as a public school teacher, and later hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee, because of her communist sympathies. I consider her political views to have been idiotic, but I am quite sure that she was completely harmless."

Stone: "Let's see, how does it go: A liberal is a conservative who's been mugged; a conservative is a liberal who's been arrested; and an advocate of law-and-economics is a Red diaper baby whose mother's been hauled before HUAC."

George and Harriet Sittin' In a Tree...

This stuff just makes me laugh. I think the confirmation hearings are going to be a lot more fun this time around.

Barack to Kos: Tone it Down

Last Friday Senator Barack Obama wrote a blog post addressing extreme partisanship among special interest groups and party activists (including the Kossacks). It was based on the Roberts confirmations, but obviously has wider applicability. It's a very well written and well thought-out post.

Remember Iraq?

The Washington Post has an excellent editorial summarizing Iraq's constitutional conundrum. It does not appear that the constitution will be the panacea that some folks had thought it would be. It simply boils down to the same old problem that concerned me even before we invaded: how do you come up with democratic government in Iraq that will not dissolve into violent factionalism between the Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis? I wasn't sure it was possible then, and nothing I'm seeing now is convincing me otherwise. It just isn't clear to me that the population in Iraq is homogeneous enough or has a strong enough sense of nationalism to be able to support a democratic federal government.

I Think Mikey Likes It

...back to all-Serenity, all the time, coverage. Not bad for the little movie that could. "The cleverest, crankiest, wittiest, wildest, and most character-driven sci-fi adventure in 25 years; it's the best outer-space trip I've been on since the empire struck back." Nice.

Some Non-Serenity Content

The government went and made Fareed Zakaria upset, so he wrote this fine column.

Not to go overboard with this stuff, but:

Serenity Countdown: 10 Days

I'm counting the hours. You still have over a week to rent, buy, borrow, or steal the Firefly DVD's to fill in the backstory for Serenity.

The Shaving Vanguard

In other news that also leaves me a bit at a loss for words is this story from the razor industry. If ever there was a case of life imitating art... It's uncanny.

Tom Delay: Smokin' the Dope

There's just nothing that can be said for this. I laughed 'til I cried...

My Vote for the Darwin Award

Man Electrocuted While Attempting to Steal Power Line.

I Ain't Sayin' He's a Gold Digger...

So, first Kayne West made waves with his comments on NBC's Hurrican Relief program, concluding, famously, that George Bush doesn't care about black people. And now this. Hilarious. I may not particularly buy it as a political issue, but this stuff is pure gold. God bless 'em.

Pakistanis Tire of Islamism?

A very interesting development from recent elections. I think radical Islamism is too strong in Pakistan to depart quietly, but this is a nice step forward.

A Defense of Intellectualism

I've been absent here for over a month now (just haven't had much inspiration for posting), so I thought I'd copy over something I wrote for a discussion I was having elsewhere. Brief synopsis: the discussion revolved around violence in black culture in America (I'm sure you can guess the basis), and after a couple of people (not me) introduced references to books and studies and such they drew several replies critical of their "book learnin" and their air of intellectual superiority as compared to common sense and life experience. My reply follows:

"For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
-H.L. Mencken

I find this very interesting, I was having a discussion last night with a friend on nearly this very topic. Bertrand Russell in his classic book, The History of Western Philosophy, frames the last several hundred years of Western philosophy as a struggle between the Enlightenment empiricists and reactionary Romantics. It's a theme I've recently run across (in nearly identical terms) again reading Edward O. Wilson's Consilience, and very distinct threads of the same issues popped up in the documentary about the neocons, The Power of Nightmares that I posted on over the summer.

The basic idea is this:

The millenia before the Enlightenment (basically from the end of the Roman Empire on) was a vast wasteland for thought and discovery. For various reasons (mostly relating to the dominance of religious philosophy) little of value happened in the realm of philosophy or science. Eventually empiricism happened along (thanks in no small part to John Locke) and the Enlightenment was born.

Philosophers and intellectuals realized they had uncovered a tool of amazing power to learn about the world around them, and science as a meaningful discipline was created. These early Enlightenment philosophers were awash in optimism believing that in no time they would map out all of the knowledge to be had and perfect mankind in our interactions with the world and one another. As time went on what they discovered that while empiricism was able to unlock the secrets of the physical world at a phenomenal rate, human interaction was a different story. Human society is too complex, has too many variables and dimensions and does not yield to the scientific method in the straightforward way that physics or chemistry does. Empirical truths, they felt, do exist that govern the relations of man, but they would be painfully slow in yielding to empirical study (which is not to say that they did not develop important advances in government and economics). In the meantime we would simply have to live with the uncertainty of knowing that the truth is out there, but that we don't necessarily yet know what it is.

The Romantics, beginning mostly with Rousseau (who is the villain of Russell's tale) rejected this uncertainty and opted instead for answers that were simple, neat, and wrong, based mostly in existing cultural or religious values or in the naive sort of philosophy the preceded the Enlightenment. Rousseau rejected empiricism as the means to discover truth, and held science to be incompatible with virtue. Rousseau believed that truth should be found, not "from the principles of a high philosophy", but "in the depths of my heart, written by Nature in ineffaceable characters." He thought that conscience and intuition should be the only guide and "we are thus freed from all this terrifying apparatus of philosophy; we can be men without being learned; dispensed from wasting our life in the study of morals, we have at less cost a more assured guide in this immense labyrinth of human opinions."

Fast forward 250 years and we are still locked in this same battle between empiricism and romanticism. The terms have hardly changed a lick. The Lockian empirical perspective has descended through our Founding Fathers and the ever-increasing reach of scientific discovery, while Rousseau's Romanticism has passed down through Kant, Hegel, the Transcendentals, and the Straussian neoconservatives. We see it expressed in battles between empirical relativism and absolute moralism, between the scientific method and truth by revelation (intelligent design), in the clash between modernity and traditional cultural values (a thread that manifests itself both domestically between red and blue politics and internationally between the modern West and extreme Islam), and in the certainty of neocon policy in face of contrary data. The conflict between Locke and Rousseau is the defining conflict of mankind these last 250 years and looks to be nowhere near resolved.

And here we are arguing over whether common sense intuition is superior to book-learnin.

I don't mean to be rude, but I do think that intuition informed by book-learnin is superior to naked intuition. I believe in the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the importance of empiricism. I choose Locke.

And I would note that empiricism does not dismiss the importance of intuition. Intuition is a critical element of the Scientific Method and guides its every step. But it is not an end point. It is the starting point. It provides the questions and the hypotheses that empirical study then attempts to evaluate. Intuition anchored by evidence, is to my mind, clearly superior to intuition alone.

The Misunderstanding of Depression

I sent the following to CSM's editors regarding Patrick Chisholm's editorial "The Bright Side of the Blues" (8/5):

I must admit I was shocked to read Patrick Chisholm's editorial "The Bright Side of the Blues" (8/5). In a publication as reputable as CSM, it is unusual to find such misinformation and misrepresentation.

Let's begin with the concept of depression. In psychiatry, depression by its very definition is maladaptive and prevents the afflicted person from thinking about anything else other than how terrible their life is. It is not the sadness that you or I feel as a natural response to life events. Our sadness is adaptive indeed and allows us to alter our behavior and think about life, but it is not the depression that psychiatrists talk about.

Now to antidepressants. A good psychiatrist does not indiscriminately treat every depressed patient with a pill and send them on their way. Evey patient is different - some benefit with just behavioral therapy and an antidepressant may be added if therapy alone does not work. Multiple studies have now shown that a combination of therapy and antidepressant treatment is superior to either therapy alone in treating this terrible disease. There is also no proof that antidepressants "result in suicide". If you read the studies carefully, antidepressants may increase reporting of suicidal thoughts, but were not associated with increased suicides in teens. Far from "handicapping the client's ability to navigate and control their social environment", antidepressants may actually enable a person to start working through their negative thoughts in a more constructive way, thus ending their depression. Chisholm also quotes that "the fact that we can feel depressed in the first place means depression must have a purpose". Does this also mean that cancer has a purpose because we can all get cancer? My hunch is that most people would disagree.

It is obvious to me that Chisholm has not suffered from depression, and I wonder whether he has even known someone with clinical depression. If he has, then perhaps he would understand just how debilitating this disease is. This kind of misinformation and faulty thinking is a disservice to the American public and certainly to all of those suffering from depression. I might expect this from Tom Cruz, but certainly not from the Monitor.

The Moral Hazards of War

Uwe Reinhardt has a good WaPo column that takes a bit more mature angle on the same issue Michael Moore confronted when he tried to recruit politicians to send their kids to Iraq.