Thoughts for Sunday

My soul makes its boast in the Lord;
    let the humble hear and be glad. --Psalm 34:2

I don't much like praising God. It doesn't seem to come naturally to me, and besides, I'd much rather wallow in self-pity. So I skim over verses like this. As a result, it didn't occur to me until recently that this is much more than just another way to praise God. It describes something that the vast majority of us don't do. The reason humble people are glad when they hear it is because they're the only ones who really get it.

You might boast in all sorts of things. Your looks, your money, who you know, your kids. Or more insidiously, you might boast in your moral behavior. If you'll allow a little semantic slippage here, I think of this as the thing you draw sustenance from, the thing that makes you alright with the world, that justifies you being here. For me, that's my recent track record. I can face the day because of late I have met my arbitrary definition of the appropriate amount of hard work, faithfulness, and kindness. 

There is no room for God in that scenario. My behavior determines whether I'm up or down on any given day. Getting my strength from this does not just set me up for a bumpy ride. It actually precludes the possibility of Christian living because "good" days inevitably lead to judgment and pride, while "bad" days produce self-absorption and pity. All the while God has not changed, nor has the way he feels about me.

Humble people get this. When God justifies our existence instead of us trying to do it there are no bad days, and good days come by without bringing a spirit of pride and judgment in their wake.

Why is Killing a Fetus Considered Murder in Certain Contexts?

My understanding is that the Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro may well be charged with multiple counts of murder for inducing miscarriages in one of the woman he raped. This raises some interesting questions for me. I'm not grandstanding or trying to make a big point; I really don't know anything about the intricacies of law and its implications, so I'm basically just asking some questions.

For the purposes of this murder charge, doesn't the law have to assume that the fetus has personhood? Otherwise I don't see how the charge makes any sense. In any murder charge there is a victim. The victim can't be the woman, as she is still alive. Thus the victims are the fetuses that were forcibly miscarried. But to be a victim of murder you have to be a person as far as the law is concerned, right?

What I don't understand is precisely how this legal regime is constructed. Are there other cases in which the legality of an act is determined not by what happens to the victim but by the status of the perpetrator? However a pregnancy is terminated, it is basically all the same to victim of the act, the baby in the womb. The difference between the murder charge and the lawful act appear to rest entirely in the status of the one terminating the pregnancy. And notice that the fact that Castro violently did it against the woman's will is not really relevant. We're talking about a murder charge, after all, and the woman was certainly not a victim of murder. His method, I imagine, will produce a variety of other assault charges pertaining to the woman.

Again, I'm discussing this because I'm genuinely confused about it. Is anyone aware of the precise legal and philosophical justifications for these distinctions? I find it very odd.

How Should U.S. Power Be Visualized?

I was pondering what textbooks hundreds of years from now (as if there will be books) will say about the nature of U.S. global hegemony, and how they might try to visualize it. When you read about the Mongol Empire or the British Empire it is a simple matter of putting its power on the map. Here are the borders, here are the colonies, now you know.

But the United States has built a global system that largely operates according to its rules, without literally taking over lots of countries. Part of the difficulty in visualizing this is that a lot of U.S. influence occurs through U.S. sponsored institutions like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and so on. These don't look impressive on a map. And in the military realm, we do have lots of bases around the world but these are, at least superficially and theoretically, voluntary arrangements with other countries.

Anyway, below is a handy-dandy little map I made to try to get a better sense of the scope of our military power. Unfortunately, this map projection is notoriously distorted (South America is actually much bigger than Greenland) but leave that aside. Let me clarify the four groups of countries represented below. The darker blue centered in Europe represents members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The United States started this organization during the Cold War, and it basically amounts to a mutual protection pact. If any of these nations are attacked, the others are pledged to come to their aid. That's why so many NATO troops have been in Afghanistan, because, among other things, September 11 amounted to an attack on NATO.

The lighter blue countries are officially designated Major Non-NATO Allies. The main thing to know about this is that it's not a qualitative description; it's actually an official category that, once invoked, entitles these nations to a variety of benefits and military partnerships with the United States. Japan, Israel, and Australia fall in this category, as do, surprisingly, countries like Morocco and Egypt.

The green countries are states that are not official allies but in which we have some sort of military base. We have bases in many other countries, of course, but they're colored blue because they are allies. The yellow countries have received significant military aid from us in recent years (the smallest amount was 96 million, to Mexico). Presumably Russia's inclusion here pertains to assistance in securing loose nuclear material.

In any case, I think this map begins to give a sense of the massive scale of U.S. military power. And this doesn't even begin to address the economic dimension, which is in many respects even more pervasive. What does this map make you think? Is it surprising?

StepMap Map Editor

The sourcing for this is mostly from Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt if you like.

Keeping Me Honest

A couple of years ago I wrote a few small items about the Pigford settlement for black farmers discriminated against by the department of agriculture. The existence of systemic discrimination was well-documented, and redressing that wrong was the right thing to do. As I wrote at the time, much of the conservative opposition to it was tinged with racial resentment and nonsensical comparisons to reparations. It shouldn't need to be said that getting compensation for unlawful discrimination has nothing to do with reparations.

All that said, it turns out the execution of settlement claims has descended into widespread fraud and opportunism, just as conservatives claimed it would. It is a huge shame that this attempt to right past wrongs has turned into this. Part of it is the difficulty inherent in compensating individuals for what was ultimately a systemic problem. In any given individual case, the evidence of discrimination may not be concrete.

This is an especially sad thing for me to have admit being wrong about, because the loathsome Andrew Breitbart was obsessed over this. His meta-reason for focusing on Pigford was atrocious ("Look, dems and blacks are the real racists! We conservative whites are the good guys!") but it turns out he was largely right in his concern about fraud. Conor Friedersdorf is on the case.

Benghazi in Context

The Republican fishing expedition for a scandal goes on, while GOP members of congress show remarkably little interest in exercising useful oversight or making productive reforms.

What we know is that there was a security and intelligence failure that resulted in the death of four Americans. The state department was inexcusably caught flat-footed by the attack, and the administration's subsequent weird fascination with the anti-Muslim video (which we now know was not mentioned in the CIA intelligence reports) gives every appearance of being politically motivated.

So what should be done in response? Beef up security at embassies around the world? Check. Increase funding for state department security? The GOP doesn't want to do that. Punish those responsible for the failure? Several people in the state department have already lost their jobs. As for the political massaging of the talking points, what is to be done? It has been exposed, and the primary purveyor of those talking points, Susan Rice, lost her inside track to the secretary of state job as a result.

The deeply odd thing about this entire process is that the Republicans seem completely uninterested in the substantive issues involved here. The substance of the case is a mild security failure followed by some disingenuous and temporary political doublespeak from the administration. Indeed, at this time it is still not clear to what extent the inaccuracies may have resulted from genuine confusion amid an ongoing investigation. Yet Republicans are trying to hype this into an impeachable offense.

How does this little incident become such a big deal, you ask? Easy! Just create a story about how Barack Obama deliberately left four Americans to die. The idea is that they could have been rescued but a "stand-down" order came from the very top. Even after this week's testimony from whistle-blowers this story remains completely unsubstantiated. The secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs testified that military assets could not have gotten there in time.

Many commentators assume that this is about damaging Clinton for 2016. That's no doubt true, but as the rumblings of impeachment from conservative media and a few elected Republicans indicate, this is also about laying the groundwork for the impeachment of President Obama if only they can find some shred of evidence to support their story.

I haven't heard much commentary on exactly why this witch hunt is so off-putting to people who are not rabid partisans, so I'll go there. September 11th. Look, the folks treating Benghazi as a giant scandal and the death of four Americans as blood on the hands of our president are the same people who repeat the absurd and empirically false mantra of "Bush kept us safe." They're the same people who still haven't repudiated the Bush administration.

I don't like to go here, because I accept that attacks on Americans are inevitable and even the most responsible administration can be taken by surprise. I don't really blame the Bush administration for September 11, or Roosevelt for Pearl Harbor. These things happen. It's a dangerous world. But if the Republicans want to apply their Benghazi standard across the board, they need to be pressured to completely disassociate themselves from anyone who had a hand in national security issues during the Bush administration.

This is the President who is famously alleged to have remarked after being briefed about Al-Qaeda's determination to attack the U.S. mainland, "Alright, you've covered your ass now."  This is a president who was, by all appearances, cavalier about the danger of foreign threats before September 11, and irrationally fearful about it afterward. This is the administration that, whether through hubris or lies, blundered into an unnecessary war under false assumptions. This is the administration that institutionalized torture as state policy. This is the administration that invaded a country entirely unrelated to the attacks, without bothering to develop a realistic plan for rebuilding it.

The unique blend of incompetence and duplicity exhibited by the Bush presidency easily qualifies it as the worst national security administration since that of Lyndon Johnson. Did someone in the Obama administration, perhaps even the president himself, massage the Benghazi talking points? Sure, it's possible. Yet in the run up to the Iraq war, Bush and other key figures in his administration made statements that were known to be false at the time they were made. And the number of deaths involved was literally thousands of times what occurred in Benghazi.

The mindless partisanship the GOP is indulging is actually really destructive to democratic accountability. If a big scandal were to emerge from the Obama administration, many fair-minded Americans would give it less scrutiny than it deserves because the GOP has cried wolf so often. The opposition party must provide substantive oversight and accountability. It can't do that when it's on an impeachment hunt.

Barack Obama's Legacy

I've been thinking a bit about how President Obama is likely to be regarded by historians. Much of this is still quite unknowable and will depend on events outside of his control. Another key variable is the health of the economy over the next decade. If the banks bring down the economy again, President Obama will be faulted for not seeking more systemic change when he had the chance.

But significant pieces are already coming into focus. President Obama will be remembered as the President who finally delivered universal health care. Contrary to conservative hopes, this is no more likely to be seen as a failure than other programs that Americans of all political persuasions now depend on such as Medicare and Social Security. Not only that, if economic growth continues and the next crisis is far removed from his time in office, Obama will be remembered as the president who thwarted a Great Depression. The reality of how much worse things could have been is likely to become clearer in time.

This passage of time will also take the edge off the perception of President Obama's general political posture. He will be remembered as the pragmatist he is rather than the radical he is often portrayed as. He will also be remembered as the president who presided over the culmination of the gay rights movement and successfully extricated the United States from Iraq. Future historians are likely to look highly favorably on both of these outcomes.

President Obama will probably benefit from a bit of a halo effect during historians' initial appraisal of him. Other presidents who have benefited from the halo effect tend to have led us through major wars or died in office (or both). Hopefully neither of these will apply to President Obama but because of the historic nature of his presidency and his stewardship of the gay rights movement he is likely to be viewed more favorably than he will probably deserve.

Our two other most notable halo presidents are Lincoln and Kennedy, both of whom were assassinated. Lincoln is justly remembered as perhaps our greatest president, but had he lived he could hardly have increased historians' esteem in the difficult Reconstruction era and probably would have lessened it. Kennedy was a middling president who is loved for exuding a false sense of youth and energy and for having died in office. President Obama's accomplishments are much greater than Kennedy's and much less than Lincoln's.

I think it is possible, though, that President Obama will end up being justly seen as a very good president against the backdrop of an unpatriotic and insensible congress. President Obama tries to convey an image as the only adult and decent person in the room. It is self-serving but it is also uncomfortably close to the truth. Historians are likely to be absolutely scathing toward the Republican Party of this era. It will be faulted for being uninterested in governance, in policy, in economic outcomes for the country. It will be seen as a mindless opposition party with a determination to bring down the president out of all proportion to its policy disagreements with him. In this light, all of the things about Obama that so infuriate his liberal supporters -- his outreach to the other side, his pragmatism, his opening offers full of big concessions -- might be seen by historians as just the sort of leadership a divided country needed.

How Networks Perpetuate Inequality

Nancy DiTomaso had a great piece in the Times a couple days ago distilling some of the information from her recent book, The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism. One of the reasons unemployment is so high for African Americans is because access to jobs continues to be conditioned by social networks that are racially distinct.

Favoritism is almost universal in today’s job market. In interviews with hundreds of people on this topic, I found that all but a handful used the help of family and friends to find 70 percent of the jobs they held over their lifetimes; they all used personal networks and insider information if it was available to them.

In this context of widespread networking, the idea that there is a job “market” based solely on skills, qualifications and merit is false. Whenever possible, Americans seeking jobs try to avoid market competition: they look for unequal rather than equal opportunity. In fact, the last thing job seekers want to face is equal opportunity; they want an advantage. They want to find ways to cut in line and get ahead.

Despite the crucial role social networks play in employment, DiTomaso found that most whites are reluctant to acknowledge their good fortune.

When I asked my interviewees what most contributed to their level of career success, they usually discussed how hard they had worked and how uncertain were the outcomes — not the help they had received throughout their lives to gain most of their jobs. In fact, only 14 percent mentioned that they had received help of any kind from others.

The gulf between the 70% figure above and the 14% figure here represents the extent of our delusions. Part of what DiTomaso is trying to get across is that this failure to acknowledge reality has serious consequences. By pretending that there is some sort of level playing field in which everyone gets where their hard work will take them, whites position themselves to be offended by affirmative action. This taking of offense is opportunistic rather than principled, as Di Tomaso finds that "the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism."

This ought to drive home the banality of racial injustice. We're not even talking about discrimination (though that occurs frequently too). In this case we're simply talking about people using their existing networks and showing favoritism in completely natural ways. But because of our unique circumstances, this produces horrible outcomes for minorities.  Many whites assume that drastically bad outcomes must have equally dramatic causes. Not at all. When networks are segregated and the bulk of wealth and power is concentrated in one of them, simply going about our business will perpetuate exclusion and inequality. It is made all the worse when those in the powerful network pretend that they are not privileged.

What this means is that if we are ever in a position of influence in hiring but have a segregated social network we need to consciously reach beyond our network in an attempt to break down privilege. To just go through the normal channels and whisper about job openings to friends and neighbors is not some sort neutral playing field. It is a proactive choice to advantage an already privileged group.

The most remarkable thing is how unwilling DiTomaso's respondents were to acknowledge the ways in which they succeeded due to factors beyond themselves. As I think about the nine jobs I've had in my lifetime, I can see that two were very clearly due to network effects. The other seven do not appear to have been, but I may be missing something. More importantly, I probably got some of my subsequent jobs because my resume and skills were dramatically bolstered by my network effect jobs. And I'll keep pounding away at this in a way that makes proud people uncomfortable: one of the big reasons I have achieved the success I have is because I'm white and middle class. I started out on third base. It is to be expected that many Americans would be reluctant to acknowledge their dependence; they often find their identity in their own individual effort. But it is a scandal that many Christians are unwilling to bring the spiritual truths of the gospel down to earth.

The Academic-Popular Divide

I apologize for the barren blogging landscape around here. My kids and my thesis are dominating my life. They're giving me a proper beating. The former is personal, and the most juicy details of the latter I want to save for a proper reveal. I will say, though, that the vast disconnect between academic debates and popular perceptions is astonishing.

But it makes me realize how little I know. When you begin to become something of an expert in a narrowly defined field of knowledge (the career of John C. Stennis and its implications) you realize how frequently you and everyone else are just - pardon the crude bluntness - talking out of their butt.

It is odd to see things being debated in the popular realm that are considered settled in the academic world. For example, historians and political scientists don't sit around going, "Gee, I wonder which party has been more racially progressive the last 50 years?" Yet the standard view of Republican partisans is that this is a profound question up for debate. Interestingly, the responses of Democratic partisans, while broadly correct, are also simplistic and self-serving. Or consider white Americans' racial attitudes.
I'm not aware of any historian who thinks the linking together of blacks with immigrant groups in the same category is a useful analytical tool. The African American experience and the ethnic immigrant experience have been two completely different things. By obscuring that fact, the average white American finds comfort for conservative racial views.

There is, too, a huge corpus of academic work on the ways American society and the federal government discriminated against black Americans after World War 2. Again, by ignoring and denying this history completely, white Americans pretend that questions of redistribution and affirmative action are just about slavery. It is remarkable that the federal government has paid reparations to Japanese Americans for their internment during World War 2, but has not paid reparations to black Americans for the systematic discrimination against them in federal housing, social security, veterans affairs, and welfare policies.

The disconnect is most striking in the area of colorblindness. The dominant racial ideology of white Americans, so accepted that people aren't even aware it is an ideology, so ingrained that people think it is "natural," has been ruthlessly deconstructed in academia and is widely seen as a means of hiding and preserving white privilege. This is downright shocking and confusing to average people.

This is fast taking on all the hallmarks of an elitist rant, but I only mean to say that in learning more about a few specific topics, I have become less certain on many other topics. I wish more white Americans would consider this dynamic before making their confident and ignorant pronouncements on race.

The United States Has Been Ridiculously Rich For A Long Time

The horrific factory collapse in Bangladesh has renewed the debate about tradeoffs between better safety and fewer jobs in developing countries. It's a difficult question, but I am generally of the view that worker safety and labor regulations have to be relative to the wealth of the country to a significant extent. Basically, if a poor country tries to make things really safe, it won't be able to get rich. If it doesn't get rich, it won't be able to make things safe. But Bangladesh really has a long road ahead, as Matt Yglesias pointed out today. Bangladesh is much poorer now than the United States was when we had our own epochal factory disaster...in 1911!

Measuring GDP across this much time and space is not an exact science, but if the chart is to be believed, the average American in 1800 was richer than the average Bangladeshi in 2013. I don't really have anything to say about this. It's just mind-boggling.

Hellish Thoughts

I might as well lay this bare for you all to see. Recently, after interacting with an individual at some length, I looked at them in all their brokenness and unlikability and had a sudden, visceral sense deep in my heart that God could not possibly value that person as much as he values me.

I simply couldn't believe it.

These are the thoughts of a soul beating a path to hell. Yet grace has a way of cutting through even my refusal to accept my need for it. It had better, or I am irrevocably lost.