One of the really distressing things about the political discourse in this country is how many political decisions seem to be based on insubstantial things like the vanity and ego and sheer childishness of people who really should know better. The desire to score cheap political points, to not want to give what the other side can claim as a victory even if the measure is a good one has become so obvious, especially in the Republican party, that it should be embarrassing, if as a nation we had not lost our sense of shame.

During the health care debate, for example, it seemed like all it took for the despicable Joe Lieberman to oppose any measure (such as single payer, the public option, extending eligibility for Medicare) was for any progressive group to express support for it. This may also lie behind the fact that the US still has not adopted the metric system or why there is irrational denial to even consider global warming as a potential threat. Opposition in some quarters seems to be at least partly based on the fact that these measures are popular in other countries.

As another example, look at the to-be Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor’s statement on a suggestion to balance the budget.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.), who is likely to become House majority leader in January, said Tuesday that many lawmakers wouldn’t support VAT-type tax because its ties to Europe might make it politically poisonous in Washington. [My italics]

“I don’t think any of us want us to go the direction of the social welfare states around the world,” Mr. Cantor said at the CEO Council.

There are good and bad things about the VAT (Value-Added Tax) but the fact that it is used in some European countries should be totally irrelevant to the discussion except as a source of data on how well it works.

I am not saying that there are no substantive reasons for the opposition but one gets the palpable sense that if Europe does it or if ‘the left’ supports something, that is enough for Republicans to view it with deep suspicion and seek reasons to oppose it.

Republican party leader Mitch McConnell actually said that one of the reasons he opposed the new START treaty (which was ratified yesterday by the Senate on a 71-26 vote) is because he did not want to give a victory to ‘the left’. I do not have an informed opinion on the START treaty since I have only a little idea of what it contains, but the idea that a major political leader would oppose something of international significance because it might provide a boost to his political opponents is highly disturbing.

But this is what passes for political thinking among the leaders of the Republican party. Not the merits of issue itself but where it comes from and who is supporting it.

I suspect that the current Republican opposition to things like high-speed rail is also based on similar feelings. Creating a massive network of high-speed rail lines that span the country would be a tremendous boost to the economy, creating jobs and stimulating industry. But because other countries such as China and in Europe have taken the lead in this area, following in their footsteps would somehow imply that the US is not #1.

This has reached such absurd levels that some are considering repealing Bush-era legislation that will phase out incandescent light bulbs. They presumably think that replacing them with compact fluorescent bulbs is some kind of evil European socialist plot that seeks to deny them their god-given right to have their choice of light bulbs

At least we should be grateful that this kind of childishness on a large scale is a fairly recent phenomenon. If it had happened in the 19th century, we would still be riding in horse-drawn carriages since these same people would have opposed the introduction of the steam engine because it was invented and developed in Europe.

As the country falls further behind in science and technology, as its infrastructure crumbles and its health system falls apart, these people are not going to look for good ideas wherever they originate because they will be too busy chanting “USA! USA! Were #1!”

The recent spate of news over airport security has brought to the forefront of my mind a question that has been puzzling me for some time. Why are terrorist acts seemingly focused on attacking airplanes?

While the attacks on 9/11 were highly sophisticated, involving careful planning and almost military-level coordination of a large number of well-trained people, the more recent attempts such as the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber have been amateurish.

Furthermore, following 9/11, two features have been adopted that have really increased airplane security that make them much harder targets. The first is that the cockpit doors are securely locked and the pilots have weapons. The second is that passengers no longer are passive when someone starts behaving weirdly or threateningly or just acts up. Instead, they now fight back. As a result, it would be impossible now for a few hijackers with boxcutters or knives or even axes and samurai swords to take control of a plane. The crew and other passengers would be able to quickly subdue them with no risk to the plane. So all this effort and expense directed towards confiscating nail clippers, screwdrivers, pocket knives, etc. seems pointless and wasted.
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Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists is one of those people who tries to be a ‘responsible’ transparency advocate which requires him to criticize WikiLeaks. Democracy Now!, a wonderful news source, has Glenn Greenwald debate him. Well worth watching, right up to the end where host Amy Goodman reads memos from the government warning employees not to even read the cables released by WikiLeaks, even on their home computers!

The first three decades of his career were as a serious actor until his appearance in the zany Airplane! (along with other serious actors such as Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack and Peter Graves all playing against type) gave him a second career as a comic whose deadpan delivery made his slapstick so much funnier, putting him in a class with the great Peter Sellers.

Thanks, Leslie, for giving all of us so much innocent pleasure.

Jerry Coyne has a post with photographs describing the devices used by the Catholic Church in Colombia to torture heretics into making confessions during the inquisition that lasted from 1610 to 1821. It is sickening what they did and the article is not for the squeamish.

But of course, all this was done in the service of a loving and merciful god, so it must be good, no?

It turns out that machines similar to the TSA’s porno scanners are being used in mobile vans by private companies. So these private companies are taking these images of people on the streets and in their vehicles without the victims being aware of them. These devices can also apparently penetrate walls so it may now be possible for total strangers to peer into people’s homes.

It is very easy to find bizarre stuff on the web. I usually don’t read the comments sections on the more popular political blogs because they quickly veer into incoherent rants. But once in a while my eye catches something that is so quirky that I become curious as to how any rational mind can think like that.

Take this comment in response to a Politico post about raising the debt ceiling:

END ABORTION NATIONALLY OR FACE NATIONAL BANKRUPTCY. The most recent increase in the U.S. debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion by H.J.Res. 45 was signed into law on February 12, 2010. The amount of national debt accumulated from 1791 until Roe V. Wade made abortion legal on January 22, 1973 was about $444 billion. Do the math to find the % of the total national debt prior abortion being made legal nationally. I predict that US Congress will raise the debt ceiling again. We will go bankrupt as a nation because of the national sin of legal abortion. There is a solution. Abortionility, A plague from sea to sea. To Christ our knees must bend, Then Roe V. Wade will end. 2 Chronicles 7:14

In case you are curious what the Chronicles reference is and don’t carry your Bible around with you all the time, here is the verse: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

The person who wrote this is educated enough to write grammatically and is knowledgeable enough to marshall some fairly esoteric facts to buttress his argument. But then the neurons seem to suddenly start firing randomly, leading to a chain of reasoning that is bizarre, to say the least. Basically the author seems to be saying that god started rapidly increasing the US national debt as punishment for legalizing abortion and will erase the debt if we stop the practice. Who knew?

Not only is it a textbook example of confusing correlation with causation, it is also an example of how religion subverts people’s reasoning skills.

As Glenn Greenwald points out, the hatchet job on WikiLeaks and its head Julian Assange has begun with innuendo and character attacks, led by the New York Times, CNN, and the rest of the major media.

Why?

Because they were all cheerleaders for the Iraq war and WikiLeaks is making that war look bad by revealing details of torture, civilian killings, and cover-ups. And Assange also makes the media look bad by breaking stories that they were either did not investigate themselves or did not want to report for fear of losing their access to US and Iraq government officials.

This is why we need to support WikiLeaks.

In responding to a sudden wave of spam comments, I accidentally deleted some genuine recent comments. My apologies.

Young people (and by young I mean under 25) often do stupid things. I know because I did stupid things when I was that young, casually taking risks that could have resulted in injury or even death that I would not dream of doing now. I am amazed when I recall my younger self that I could have been so foolish and am thankful that I have survived.

Research supports my thesis that young people are prone to stupid behavior since they find that the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, the part that is responsible for reasoning, planning, and making judgments, does not become fully developed until around the age of 25, which is a good reason for raising the age for granting driving licenses, since driving safely in one act that requires particularly good judgment. As a result of both the research and my own experiences, I tend to be very forgiving of young people’s indiscretions, believing that almost all of them, however irresponsible they seem when they are young, will grow up to be sensible adults.

But while poor judgment can be blamed for things like driving while drunk, performing foolish acts of bravado merely to impress the people around you, walking around in shorts in deep winter, and so on, there are some things that young people do that point to deeper problems than simply poor judgment. I am thinking at this point of the two Rutgers University students (Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, both age 18) who allegedly set up a webcam to record Ravi’s roommate Tyler Clementi (also 18) having sex, and streamed the video live on the internet and tweeted their followers to watch. This ended in tragedy when Clementi was so mortified that he committed suicide.

My reaction to this story was sadness at the death and horror at what those two students had done. What were they thinking? How could they not know that what they were doing was deeply wrong? How could they not have a basic moral compass that would tell them that they had completely lost their bearings? After all, this was not even a grey area where reasonable people could disagree about whether the act was appropriate.

The blatantly wrong nature of what was done suggests that it was not merely an act of poor judgment by Ravi and Wei but points to deeper problems, both personal and societal. The personal one is the homophobia involved. Clementi was gay. If he had been having sex with a woman, I think his roommate would not have streamed the video. It is because homosexuality is still viewed as something outside the norm, a cause for teasing, taunting, and tormenting, that the perpetrators felt that what they did was ‘funny’ and that they would not face any repercussions.

The societal problem is that we now live in an age where the boundary between the private and the public has become blurred almost to the point of non-existence. Some people think nothing of freely revealing the most intimate details of their lives to the public on venues such as Facebook and YouTube. Such people are still few but the existence of reality TV has amplified their impact and made it appear as if fame, however fleeting, is sufficient incentive for people to reveal everything about their lives to a voyeuristic audience.

The government is not helping here. It claims that it has the right to snoop into our lives in order to ‘protect us from terrorists’. Businesses also think nothing of harvesting our personal information for commercial use. All these have added to the pervasive sense that people do not have the right to privacy or the expectation that it will be protected.

TV programs in the old Candid Camera mold or people like Sacha Baron Cohen (in his persona as Ali G or Borat or Bruno) have made it seem acceptable to put unsuspecting people in situations in which they say or do embarrassing things and then broadcast the result to the world. And now the internet has made it possible for reality TV or Candid Camera or Cohen wannabees to try their hand at this, not realizing that this is not a harmless prank, that violating people’s privacy is wrong, that there is deep cruelty inherent in their actions, and that the danger is high of things turning out badly. I suspect that this is what lies at the heart of what motivated Ravi and Wei to do what they did.

The harassment that young LGBT people face at the hands of their peers is appalling. And because their knowledge and experience and worldview is so limited, they may think that their entire life is going to be a continuation of their horrible adolescence. It should not be surprising that so many of them commit suicide or are harmed psychologically, with some of them even growing up to be the kinds of hateful closeted anti-gay bigots that keep getting exposed.

Dan Savage has started a great program called It Gets Better aimed at giving hope to young LGBT people that things will improve, to make them aware that if they can weather the tough early years, then as adults life will be much more tolerable. Adults have much more control over their environments, such as where they work and live and whom they interact with, and thus you can avoid the homophobes more easily. I hope Savage’s program takes off and also that we become a society that can deal with sexuality in all its diversity in a mature way.