July 12, 2004
The blame and the remedy are where the NY Times and I part company. The position of the author is right out in front: "It is the poor subsidizing the rich, since African governments paid to educate many of the health care workers who are leaving." Well, the blame is clear. It's all the fault of the prosperous Western regimes. The remedy proposed? Set up some system which will make it more difficult for these women to emigrate, to get out of Africa, to get out of hospitals where it is assumed, for instance, that "any woman they examine may be H.I.V. positive", where "a quarter of public health workers, including nurses, will be dead, mostly of AIDS and tuberculosis, by 2009, according to a study of worker death rates in 40 hospitals here".
Instead of setting up some bureaucratic Berlin Wall to keep these women slaving away for overtime pay of 20 cents an hour, let's turn the focus on corrupt regimes which are killing their people. We cannot force these women to stay. That is immoral if they can get out and especially if they can support themselves elsewhere. No, this is the free market of people -- the movement of people from bad regimes to comparatively better ones. The trick is to make it possible for these women to want to stay in their home countries, not to coerce them into it. That is where the hard work comes in. How to improve African countries. No one wants to focus on that when the easier and more politically attractive explanation is that it is all the fault of the West. Cheap blame will solve nothing.
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July 09, 2004
And if you haven't checked out his blog generally, get thee hence!
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As some of you may know, I am a lawyer. I practice almost exclusively complex commercial and corporate litigation and do some ancillary corporate work for clients who trust me and think I can't possibly screw up their work as badly as the last lawyer who got them into all the trouble they needed me to solve through litigation. Is that a ringing endorsement, or what? I got a referral for a personal injury claim the other day. I don't do PI work. Not my specialty. But, as a courtesy, I listened to the fellow's problem and agreed, at the end of his presentation, that he had a claim. I was about to type the details of his claim, but thought better of it. Even if he did not retain me, I would feel wrong about going into detail. Suffice it to say his wife was injured at a hotel they were staying at. I asked this fellow, at the conclusion of our chat, did anyone at the hotel offer to waive the bill, reverse the charges for the service than injured her, or even apologize. And he said, no, not a thing. This brings me to tort reform. I am beginning to think that a lot of tort cases are brought because the defendant acted like an asshole. If the manager of the hotel had acted like a gentleman, I doubt this fellow would have been on the phone to me looking for compensation.
Maybe this post isn't about tort reform at all, now that I re-read my scribbles to this point, maybe it's really just a continuation of the discussion we've been having about moderates and courtesy. Maybe the real point is not that we need tort reform but that we need courtesy reform. Stop treating each other like idiots, apologize promptly when something's your fault, be sincere, and I am willing to bet the number of lawsuits would go down.
I know that someone might comment, if they feel moved to do so, that the manager of the hotel could not have apologized because it would be seen as an admission of responsibility and an invitation to a suit. I disagree and I'll explain why. If the manager were my client, I'd advise him that he was going to get sued anyway since it took place in his hotel and due to actions by his employees who were acting within the course and scope of their duties as employees. Of course the hotel is a target and saying you're sorry will not make it any less of a target. So, I would counsel the manager to apologize promptly, send flowers, comp them to the room, pick up the medical bills, and make whatever other nice gesture he could think of. At best, he might just avoid a suit and pick up some nice good will out of it. At worst, well, he's probably going to get sued anyway. But, by not apologizing, the idiot has absolutely bought himself an all expenses paid visit from the process server.
So, my personal experience leads me to think: more courtesy, fewer law suits!
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July 08, 2004
Mr. Mugabe scored a diplomatic victory last weekend when the 53-nation African Union, meeting in Ethiopia, voted to table a sharply worded critique of Zimbabwe's civil-liberties record prepared by a committee on human rights. The report, which was leaked last week, accused the government of "failure at critical moments to uphold the rule of law" and of tolerating arbitrary arrests and human-rights violations.
Apparently, by the way, this report dates from 2002!
What a disaster.
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Well, I think we found the moderates. They were here on my comments board and I'm going to reproduce them for the general readership who doesn't look at the comments (and if that's you, you are missing some very good and thoughtful writing).
Amber writes:
I'm always afraid to attach myself to any single label for fear of putting myself in a box. I have voted both Democrat and Republican. I would call myself a conservative/liberal or liberal/conservative too.
I'm all over the place on the issues. No one party suits me, since I'm strongly for the death penalty and strongly for abortion rights. And I'm that way about all the issues.
I don't like the term "moderate" because I feel it's such a tame word...and I'm *passionate*. That's what I am: a Passionate! *grins*
I wish we didn't have a two-party system, I know that.
Amber | Email | Homepage | 07.07.04 - 2:42 pm | #
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Let me be unambiguously clear about this, something I normally hesitate to do, I loathe the idea of lotteries and gambling being used to fund any State program or purpose. Such a thing is merely taxation by other means, indirect taxation if you will. Yes, I know that it is the choice of the participant to play and thus be taxed and if I don't play then I escape that tax. Still, that means nothing. Why? Because revenue raised this way is objectionable for at least two reasons. First, the unfair impact on those who pay. Second, I think that this form of indirect taxation defeats accountability by allowing the government to disguise the true costs of services it provides.
Unfair Impact: Who buys lottery tickets, for the most part? I believe I have read that it is the working poor and lower middle class. How do they buy them? With after-tax dollars, of course. So, if you agree that this is an indirect tax, then you will have to agree that those who purchase these tickets, and pay this tax, are doing so with money which represents a greater proportion of their after tax earnings than, say, my after tax earnings. $10 spent on lottery tickets is going to mean more to the person from a lower economic group than it will to someone in a higher economic group. I am certain that this is recognized by the politicians yet they do not care that the group least able to afford to dispose of their income in this fashion is doing so. And the politicians are abetting it. This is unfair. If taxes need to be raised to support a program, then doing it indirectly and on the backs of those least able to pay for it is unfair. And that leads me to point two.
No Accountability: I said above, "if taxes need to be raised to support a program. . ." If you fund a program from lottery or gambling monies, then you effectively remove from the public forum any reason to debate the need for the program or its funding level. Why talk about, after all, if the taxpayer isn't paying for it? I think of it as the governmental equivalent of an off balance sheet vehicle like Enron used. The result is that no one has to talk about it so no one will discuss whether what the government is doing is right. I think that governments abuse power when the possibility of open review is removed. We are supposed to have government in the sunshine and with freedom of access to information. Laws have been passed to that effect. If we as a people permit the government to sweep a program under the rug by financing public programs with tax money raised indirectly from those who can least afford to pay it, then I submit that we have a problem. Also, if there is no one to complain that the money raised is coming out of their pocket, who is going to complain that the money is not being well spent, which is an issue apart from whether the money should be spent. This system changes the oversight mechanisms built into our participatory democracy and I don't like it.
Finally, governments are like crack addicts -- they can't stay away from the cheap money. Once they go to that well, they'll keep going back. And no one will care enough to make sure it's proper. Well, my thanks today go to the Appellate Division, Third Department, of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, even if they did it for a reason other than the ones I've enunciated here.
Here endeth today's rant.
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July 07, 2004
Did he or she disappear? Is the moderate an endangered species? This is a question I have been pondering, off and on, for a long time. I have no answer but I have formed some thoughts I'd like to jot down about political culture and identity.
Identity. First off, I have identified myself before on this blog as a South Park Republican -- someone who combines the belief in the need for "a hard-ass foreign policy", is "extremely skeptical of political correctness”, but also is socially liberal on many issues. That's me. Not a true Republican and not a true Democrat. Somewhere in between. Perhaps a Liberal conservative. Or a conservative Liberal.
* * *
I was going to come back to this and write about the political culture side and expand on the identity section, but Michele at A Small Victory has done so today in a post that is just so good that I urge you to go check it out: A Social Civil War.
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July 06, 2004
Putting to one side the issue of the pregnancy, because I happen to believe that is not an issue open to discussion. Simply, she should have been given a seat because of her physical condition, just like you give your seat to a person with a cane, for example. That is based on disability. That said, I can recall numerous instances of offering a seat to a pregnant woman on a City bus or subway only to have them decline the offer. And, there is another school of thought that says you do not ask or suggest a woman is pregnant unless you are actually seeing them give birth. As in, what if you're wrong about the pregnancy? But enough, let us return to the chivalry question.
chivalry, at its beginning, was a code of conduct according to which Knights and the nobly born aspired to live their lives. There is plenty of information floating around about it on the internet and some of it might actually be correct. It included within it, the Courtly Love tradition, which had various rules for courtship and marriage and taking lovers. Chivalry has come to mean, I think, a manner of treatment of women by men. Women are exalted by virtue of the fact of their being female. I think that this is meant to memorialize the belief that women were the weaker sex and were to be treated accordingly, better really than the way men treated other men. So, we come back to our question: is it dead?
Yes, I think it is and it ought to be. First, the belief that women are the weaker sex is obviously false. They do not need better treatment out of weakness. Second, I think that the social contract has been redrawn over the last 30-40 years in the US. The playing field is much more level. Yes, I know that there are still glass ceiling issues and pay parity issues, but just the same, I think that women are competing fairly evenly with men now in the workplace, in school, on the athletic fields (at least since Title IX), and every where else. Such competition precludes any claim to chivalrous conduct. I think that it is somewhat a question of having your cake and eating it, too. I think that pregnant women does not deserve a seat on the train because she is a woman. Indeed, if she was not pregnant, she would have no right to complain. Her claim to that seat based on some outdated notion of chivalry rings false.
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June 30, 2004
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June 23, 2004
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June 14, 2004
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June 11, 2004
This leads to the question, also posed by Robert Kagan in his book, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, which was an expansion of his essay here, if you don't feel like buying the whole book, which is: Can Europe afford to play the heavyweight in international affairs? Mississippi certainly cannot.
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I would consider reading that in conjunction with this article, which is a long piece from the NY Observer about the rise of modern anti-Semitism. This is a very well written and terribly sobering piece.
You may ask yourself, why should I care about this? You may think, I'm neither Jewish nor Israeli and it's a world away. Someone much more clever than I once said that the Jews are like the canary in the coal mine for the world. When the atmosphere turns poisonous for the Jews, it's only a matter of time for everyone else.
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June 03, 2004
Parenthetically, I think that the achievement gap is an issue that should concern us all. We as a society need to encourage all of our children to reach their highest potential because we all benefit.
The explanation tendered by Penn State is certainly controversial. It suggests that the answer is to be found in black v. white family dynamics: "recent research points to differences between African-American and White family interaction when children are very young."
According to the study, the problem is that there is a major difference in how often black parents speak to their children and how often they vary their vocabulary. I don't know where or how these figures were obtained, and you'll notice that all of a sudden the press release stops breaking the figures out in terms of race and uses socio-economic class instead, but: "[b]y the age of three, professional parents had spoken an estimated 35 million words to their children, working- and middle-class had spoken about 20 million words, and lower-class parents had only spoken about 10 million words."
The release picks back up on the racial difference later on: "'By 18 to 20 months, the vocabulary growth trajectories of the children of professional parents had already accelerated beyond those of other children,' Farkas adds. According to his research, there seems to be both a social class, and controlling for class, a Black-White difference in children's oral vocabulary growth from infancy to adolescence. Preschool vocabulary knowledge is a strong predictor of reading performance in early elementary school, and early elementary reading performance is a strong predictor of later school performance generally."
The study found that "greater verbal interaction between parents and young children improves students' performance on standardized tests". In other words, if you talk to your children a lot, and use a varied vocabulary, you are likely to have children who do better in school than their peers who did not have the benefit of the same interaction.
The study offers no explanation for how or why black family dynamics are different from white family dynamics. I know very little about family sociology. But, I wonder, did the authors control for whether the families they studied were single parent families? I understand, anecdotally from the NY Times over the years, that there are more single parent households among black families than white families. If this is wrong, feel free to correct me. If so, that would automatically halve the number of adults around to speak to the children. Further, a single mother (or father) is going to have less energy to spend with a child to begin with. Also, the more children you have the less time you can spend with any single child. Did the study look at multiple children families? Would that make a difference?
I spoke to my daughter, my first born, a lot. With both of my children, I use adult vocabulary and try to vary my vocabulary as possible. I do this partly because I love the English language and delight in its rich vocabulary, partly because I abhor baby talk in adults, and partly because I like nothing more than delivering a good monologue! My wife loves to tell the story of how she came out of the shower one morning to find me and the then under three month old daughter on the bed discussing evolution with me saying to my daughter: "vestigial, can you say vestigial?" Before she could speak, I treated her to the monologues on some of the following subjects: the rise of the merchant class in mediaeval Europe; social stratification in feudal Japan; and, the differences between English and French Renaissance landscape architecture. That last one, delivered while my little one was in the baby bjorn and we were standing in front of a florist's window looking at topiary garnered more than a few quizzical looks from passers-by. According to this press release, I have been doing exactly the right thing. My wife does the same thing, only she does it in Norwegian.
So, where am I going with all this? I'm going here: all the money in the world spent improving schools and paying teachers more and wiring schools up to the internet won't significantly overcome a lack of sustained, intelligent parental attention. You can pass all of the No Child Left Behind laws you want, but if you don't fix the problem at home, you may not be able to help the child catch up. We need these children to catch up, if for no other reason than the selfish reason that they will be paying our social security and pensions. But it sounds like first, we need to fix the family. How do you do that? I have no idea. Do you?
By the way, feel free to comment on this. I'm very curious about your reaction to this press release and this post.
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May 25, 2004
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May 20, 2004
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May 14, 2004
"Andrew Sullivan dubs the fans of all this cable-nurtured satire “South Park Republicans”—people who “believe we need a hard-ass foreign policy and are extremely skeptical of political correctness” but also are socially liberal on many issues, Sullivan explains. Such South Park Republicanism is a real trend among younger Americans, he observes: South Park’s typical viewer, for instance, is an advertiser-ideal 28."
I'm a bit older, but the rest may fit pretty well. By way of illustration, I support the rights of gays to marry and of women to choose freely concerning abortion. I also support a strong military and a foreign policy that does not depend on or require the permission of France or the United Nations before we take actions in our interest. So, clearly I would not be at home in either of our two tradtional political parties. But I do have a home in South Park, I suppose.
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May 11, 2004
I am talking here about women's reproductive rights advocates. To be clear, I am not talking about a woman's right to have an abortion or receive reproductive counseling (things which I support).
A Judge in upstate New York has ruled that a couple may not have any more children until they show that they are capable of doing so by regaining custody of the four children of theirs who are currently in the care of the state. Each child, all born since 1998, has tested positive for cocaine at birth. The Judge ruled that this was too much of a burden on the state to continue to care for the children this couple was having. I was surprised to note that the women's reproductive rights groups immediately denounced the decision and vowed to do something about it.
I think the Judge was right and the groups were wrong. One, I do think that the state has the power to regulate behavior. That concept is really beyond cavil. This behavior has an impact on the state, the other children in the state system, and sucks up resources (state and medical) that could be used elsewhere. The state, it seems to me, has a compelling interest in regulating this behavior. Two, what about the children? Studies have shown that children born to mothers who abuse cocaine face significant problems in their lives: lower birth weight; cognitive issues; and physical/health issues. Why don't these groups take into account the lives these future children will face if born to a cocaine abusing mother?
I think you can push the concept of rights just too far. If the judge can fine me for having a dog without a license . . .
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May 07, 2004
Journalist arrested for investigation into fraud. It appears that there is a vast scandal brewing in the European Union over fraudulently diverting Commission money into private hands. Classic corruption. Here, in the United States, a journalist who exposed such a scam would be heading for the Pulitzer Prize. In Europe, he's gone to jail, had his lap top seized, had his records taken, and had his bank statements reviewed. No such treatment has been meted out to those accused of the fraud. The crime this journalist has committed? Insufficient fervor in support of the EU and giving ammunition to the anti-Europeans (read: British). The thing that got me, among others, was the bit about the television station called Euronews. The author of the article, a British MEP (member of European Parliament) had this to say about Euronews:
"[W]hen it reports directly on the EU, impartiality goes out of the window and we are treated to Soviet-style items about millions of workers waking up to higher standards thanks to the Commission. I found the contrast suspicious, so I put down a written question asking Romano Prodi [EU President] whether he gave Euronews any money. His reply was beyond parody. Yes, he said, he did give it grants, but such grants 'in no way restrict the editorial freedom of the beneficiary, who must, however, respect the image of the European institutions and the raison d'etre and general objectives of the Union'." (emphasis added)
I have always had strong views about state funded media. This just confirms them. Remember Prodi's response, please, the next time you read a European newspaper attacking the United States press for being a tool of the administration. Remember that the journalist may have filed that attack while on his or her way to the bank to deposit his or her check from the EU administration.
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