Self Censorship

Posted on October 19, 2009 by Bradlaugh

The stone refusal of U.S. news reporters to mention race even when it is obviously the big factor driving a story, baffles and amazes me.

This morning’s New York Post carries a full-page story (p.15) by one of the paper’s big-name writers, Andrea Peyser, about a 12-year-old boy, Eric Benson, who’s afraid to go to school. He attends New Horizons School in Boerums Hill, Brooklyn. “Should attend,” I mean: he’s been badly bullied, and now is afraid to go. He hasn’t been able to get the “safety transfer” which is apparently usual in these cases. His not getting the transfer is the main point of Ms. Peyser’s story, which has no mention whatever of student demographics.

The story has a picture of Eric, a mild-looking skinny white kid. My instinctive reaction was: “Oh, he’s getting beaten up by Sun People.” I went to GreatSchools.net to see student demographics for the school.   Sun People: 90 percent.

Eric: “I don’t know why they don’t like me.”  Uh …

Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

Attitudes toward immigration

Posted on October 18, 2009 by David Hume

Below, Art says:

Of course the Republican and conservative segment of the population is strongly anti-immigration …

They are strongly anti-illegal immigration. Most conservatives favor legal immigration, particularly skilled immigrants.

This is not really true, depending on how you interpret what Art meant. In fact, Americans as a whole want lower levels of legal immigration. In 2006 the Center for Immigration Studies republished a Zogby Poll on American attitudes toward immigration. I reproduced some of the responses to two questions below in a table.

I highlighted a few rows.

1) American Jews are outliers on immigration (though even among them there is a tendency to toward immigration skeptic positions).

2) No surprise that the highest income Americans are those who most agree that one needs immigration to bolster the unskilled labor force.

3) There are some peculiar numbers for “very conservative” individuals. 21% are “not sure” if immigration is necessary to meet the needs of unskilled labor in this country. I have two hypotheses:

a) A significant proportion of “very conservative” individuals are strongly influenced by economic libertarian arguments about the utility of easy flows of capital and labor in a global economy. So this is an empirical question for them which they will not offer an opinion upon if they don’t have the information on hand.

b) A significant proportion of “very conservative” individuals don’t see immigration as an economic issue at all, but rather one of race, ethnicity and national character. So these sorts of considerations are moot for them.
Continue reading →

Posted in data, politics | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

How the states align on liberalism & conservatism

Posted on October 18, 2009 by David Hume

Economic, social, and foreign policy congressional conservatism by state, 2008.

Posted in data | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Sometimes heterodoxy is good

Posted on October 18, 2009 by David Hume

I know David Frum comes in for a lot of criticism from the conservatives. Sometimes I think this is justified, as I have found some of his methods objectionable. That being said, I am struck by the fact that Frum seems be injecting an immigration-skeptic voice into the discussion rather frequently. For example, How Will Great Recession Shape Youth?

Immigration policies that accept huge numbers of less-skilled workers, bad schools that fail to teach the children of those immigrants what they need to know, and very high dropout rates among the children of immigrants — these are the trends that led the Educational Testing Service to issue a warning: the American work force of 2025 will be less literate and less skilled than the American work force of 1995.

And this time there will be many fewer of the steady, if dull, jobs that provided security to the post-Depression generation: the blue-collar job on the assembly line, the clerical data-processing job. Life for people with fewer skills is becoming a lot harder and scarier at a time when there are soon to be a lot more of them

Of course the Republican and conservative segment of the population is strongly anti-immigration, and helped to block George W. Bush’s proposals from several years back. But ultimately it seems to me that it is too primal and inchoate to do anything more than serve as a rearguard action; the economic conservative elite is strongly influenced by the sort of open-borders thinking dominant at The Wall Street Journal. What needs to emerge for genuine immigration reform which adds solidity to the idea of the United States as a nation-state with a common culture is an elaborated alternative vision to the ultra-capitalist utopia of unconstrained action of markets, capital and labor. Basically, an intellectual conservatism which balances neoclassical and institutional perspectives.

Posted in culture, politics | Tagged | 5 Comments

Paying for healthcare

Posted on October 17, 2009 by David Hume

Tim Harford has an excellent article, A brilliant (and doomed) template for healthcare reform:

Yet in one vital way, the systems are exactly the same: at no point during my interactions with either system did I ever have to wonder about whether a procedure was worth the price. Large sums were spent on me and my family, but I never had to ask myself whether my doctors and I were treading the path of cost-effectiveness, straying off into wasteful indulgence, or indulging in dangerous penny-pinching. Someone else always picked up the bill.

There is an obvious alternative. We could pay for our medical treatment the same way that we pay for our cars or our food or a roof over our heads: out of our own pockets. Before rejecting the idea out of hand, at least acknowledge that it would encourage us to ask a very different set of questions, including: “is there a cheaper way that would work?”, “can I get better value treatment elsewhere?”, and even “would I save money if I drank less and exercised more?” The effect on cost and quality would be bracing.

We do pay for healthcare. If you have an individual plan, you can see the rapid inflation before your very eyes. If you don’t, your employer provided plan has probably decreased in quality, and there is an argument that the cost of the plan to the employer is one main reason for wage stagnation (in other words, the cost of the employee included healthcare). There are issues with assuming that purchasing healthcare is analogous to purchasing food. But it is true that people do not as individuals (the doctor and the patient) make decisions which minimize costs because there are no incentives to do so.

Whether we like it or not, rationing is coming. It is not if, but who.

Posted in culture, politics | Tagged | 11 Comments

The Romney Paradox

Posted on October 17, 2009 by Andrew Stuttaford

The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison responds to my earlier post on the ‘Party of Huckabee’ here. As always with Larison, the whole thing is well worth a read, but even if I may not agree with everything he has to say in his post, this section is spot-on:

…the things that make Romney more attractive to non-evangelicals in the GOP also force him to spend more time trying to prove that evangelicals and social conservatives can accept him. Aside from the complication that his religion introduces into this, this means that Romney has to emphasize social issues, on which he has no credibility, and public professions of religious faith, which are some of the things that so many Republicans and independents find viscerally unappealing about what they perceive to be the norm in Republican politics.

Posted in politics, Uncategorized | Tagged | 3 Comments

Literary Criticism

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Andrew Stuttaford

The King James Bible is (with more than a little help from William Tyndale), one of the great achievements of English literature, but enthusiastic as I am about its merits, I don’t think I’d go this far:

Marc Grizzard, the pastor of Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, North Carolina, says that he and his congregation plan to burn Bibles on Halloween. Marc Grizzard, of Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, North Carolina, says that the first King James translation of the Bible is the only true declaration of God’s word, and that all others are “satanic”. Pastor Grizzard and 14 other members of the church plan to burn copies of the other “perversions” of Scripture on Halloween, 31 October. The New Revised Version Bible, the American Standard Version Bible, and even the New King James Version are all pronounced to be works of the Devil by Pastor Grizzard and his followers. Pastor Grizzard said: “I believe the King James version is God’s preserved, inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God… for English-speaking people. “We are burning books that we believe to be Satanic.”

A full (and possibly useful) list of Satanic authors (including Mother Theresa – who knew?) is reportedly available on the church’s website.  Unfortunately Beelzebub may have hit back: the website appears to have crashed.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 12 Comments

‘Sharia’ Watch

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Andrew Stuttaford

I’m almost always opposed to the death penalty (mainly because I tend to be skeptical of government’s ability to do anything right), so I’m probably biased, but, if this report from the London Times is accurate, it is, to say the least, dismaying:

A Texas man is due to be executed next month despite admissions by jurors that they consulted biblical passages advocating death as a punishment to help to decide his fate.

Before sending Khristian Oliver to his death after he was convicted of murdering his victim — who was bludgeoned with a gun barrel — jurors read passages of the Old Testament, including one that states that a killer who uses an iron object to kill “shall surely be put to death”. Oliver, 32, is due to be executed on November 5. He was convicted in 1999 of the murder of Joe Collins, 64, during a 1998 break-in at the victim’s rural East Texas home.

During the trial, the jurors were instructed by the judge not to refer to anything that was not presented as evidence in the courtroom.

Amnesty International called on the Texas authorities to commute Oliver’s death sentence because since his trial, jurors had admitted that they read the Bible while they decided whether he should live or die. In particular, they said that Bibles were passed around with specific passages highlighted, and that one juror read aloud to his fellow jurors the passage, from Numbers XXXV, 16: “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 11 Comments

The Party of Huckabee?

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via Rasmussen:

Twenty-nine percent (29%) of Republican voters nationwide say former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is their pick to represent the GOP in the 2012 Presidential campaign.

Full details can be found here.

Palin’s pain has been Huckabee’s gain, it seems, as he appears to have picked up some of her support. Given the selection on offer, it’s probably not that surprising that Mitt Romney emerges as the preferred candidate of the wicked secular right (or at least among those Republicans “who attend church once a month or less”). Meanwhile, Pawlenty’s nod to the Intelligent Design crowd doesn’t (I’m delighted to say) seem to have done him much good so far. He’s the candidate that GOP voters would least like to see as the party’s pick, although I suspect that glorious distinction may in reality simply reflect the fact that Pawlenty is just not that well-known. Perhaps he should try coming out for UFOs next time.

We’re a long, long way from 2012, but there’s nothing in this poll that’s bad news for Obama. And that’s bad news.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 36 Comments

UNICEF, boo!

Posted on October 15, 2009 by David Hume

What’s different about Kiva:

Contrast Kiva with, for example, UNICEF. Kiva makes it possible to trace the path of your donation, to the extent that such tracing is realistic (and it largely turns out to be more along the lines of “you funded a certain MFI” rather than “you funded a certain person”). UNICEF doesn’t even seem to have a breakdown of how much money is going to each continent. We definitely can’t find information on questions like (a) What specific projects are you funding? (b) What is your role in each? (c) What new projects are planned, and where? (d) How is each project going, whom is it affecting, and how?

There are no strange patterns in UNICEF’s numbers because there are no numbers. There are no contradictions because there is no concrete information. And the intent here isn’t to single out UNICEF – it’s merely one of the vast majority of international aid organizations about which we know essentially nothing.

If you’re not an Objectivist, you might consider adding The GiveWell Blog to your RSS.

Posted in culture | Tagged , | 3 Comments