Obsidian Wings

The eyes have (had) it Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

I've had glasses since the third grade, something that was only caught by my observant 2nd grade teacher, Mrs Carmody, who noticed that while many of my math answers were wrong, it was because I had copied down the wrong numbers from the blackboard. My mother scoffed at the notion until one day, our across the street neighbor, who was an Air Force major, was coming to our house and I looked out and told her that the plumber was coming. I still remember the realization that you could actually see individual leaves on a tree.

I tried soft contacts for a year in college. It was great to not have glasses, though I continually was pushing up my now absent frames, but my eyes would get so dried out that I gave up.

Now, my cousin had Lasik done and I've been wondering about it and the other variations. Lasik was approved in Japan in 2000, so I hope that the bugs have been straighted out, though Asian patients tend to get dry eye much more than Caucasians, according to Wikipedia. So I'm wondering if any ObWiers have had it done. I'm really curious how it works with the far-sightedness that comes with old age. Any thoughts?

Government Mandates And Moral Disagreement

--by Sebastian

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled to uphold the PPCA, a fruitful discussion about government mandates should be more possible without immediate worries of whether gettting it 'wrong' hurts your own side or helps the other side of whichever political divide you happen to be on.

I tend to buy into many of the libertarian arguments against mandates--that the government should generally minimize its decisions about how citizens live their lives.  But an anti-mandate stance has virtues even to those who don't agree with the libertarian critique. 

Government mandates tend to undermine the democratic balance between government action and conscientious objection.  In most modern democratic-style states, we allow for tolerance of moral disagreement by separating taxing and spending.  For the most part, everyone gets taxed and the money goes into a government pool.  That pool of money becomes the government's money.  There are then various government means for determining how that money is spent (direct acts of the legislature, funding through various agencies, etc.).  Nearly everyone has some disagreement with some of the choices made.  Sometimes that agreement has specific and strong moral dimensions (you may believe that the death penalty, or abortion, or crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing disparities are injustices).  You are certainly free to use the political process to attempt to change those government allocations.  But the process allows for some moral distance.  You disagree with how the government is spending its money.  You want to use politics to change how the government is spending its money.  But you aren't generally forced to participate in whatever it is that you object to more than the fact that you have been taxed, and the government later decided what to do with the tax money it collected.  Systemically this allows for diversity and tolerance for many of those who lose out in the political system.  You lost out on your opinion about the death penalty?  Fine, but we don't force you to pull the switch on a murderer. 

Government mandates raise the stakes because they don't allow for that distancing.  They force moral dissenters to choose between personally engaging in the activity in which they lost the political fight, or to defy the government and break the law by violating the mandate.  Even in non conscientious objector cases, government mandates force dissenters to directly participate in the activity that they just lost a political fight over.  It is something worth thinking about when there are non-mandate options. 

Why the Affordable Care Act is "socialism"

by Doctor Science

Call me a slow learner. It wasn't until I read Jonathan Chait's piece on Health Care As a Privilege: What the GOP Won’t Admit that I grasped why so many people have been calling the Affordable Care Act "socialism".

It hasn't made any sense to me, because I know socialists, I was raised by one, I practically *am* one -- and a government program requiring you to support for-profit insurance companies is *not* socialism.

But Chait explains it so I get it:

What is being disputed is whether the punishments to the losers in the market system should include, in addition to these other things, a denial of access to non-emergency medical treatment. The Republican position is that it should. They may not want a woman to have to suffer an untreated broken ankle for lack of affordable treatment. Likewise, I don’t want people to be denied nice televisions or other luxuries. I just don’t think high-definition television or nice clothing are goods that society owes to one and all. That is how Republicans think about health care.

This is why it’s vital to bring yourself face-to face with the implications of mass uninsurance — not as emotional manipulation, but to force you to decide what forms of material deprivation ought to be morally acceptable. This question has become, at least at the moment, the primary philosophical divide between the parties. Democrats will confine the unfortunate to many forms of deprivation, but not deprivation of basic medical care. Republicans will. The GOP is the only mainstream political party in the advanced world to hold this stance.

[bolds mine and from Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice.]

The penny drops!

What I like about socialism is the idea that people need to take care of each other, that we're all in this life together and we should help each other through it. And that's precisely what people are objecting to in "Obamacare": taking care of each other, feeling a social connection.

When you don't feel (and don't want to feel) that social connection, when you resent the idea of taking care of each other, then yes, I can see that even supporting a major industry might be labeled "socialism". "Socialism" in this sense isn't actual, y'know, *socialism*, but it is the feeling that's at the root of actual-y'know-socialism. So it's not as completely off-the-wall, coming-out-of-left[heh]-field as I supposed.

As to how the GOP came to be the only major political party in the G20 to view health care as a privilege, let's just say that the concept of a social connection has a different complexion in the US than it does in other countries.

The Penny Wedding by David Wilkie. It depicts

a type of marriage ceremony, common in Scotland, where the guests each paid a penny towards the expenses and anything left over went towards the couple’s new home. ... The idea of the subject would seem to be that no richer couple could be happier, more loving, gracious and handsome, and no father of the bride could offer hospitality more generous and convivial than this, laid on by the community as a whole.

Perils of skimming

by liberal japonicus

I cracked open my google news, and saw this

And thought SC in the second headline was Supreme Court... Thoughts?

 

Do US flag officers believe Iraq had WMDs?

by Doctor Science

Daniel Drezner reported at Foreign Policy on a recent poll conducted by Dartmouth political scientist Benjamin Valentino that found, among other points, that 63% of Republicans believe that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction at the time of the US invasion in 2003. This is approximately the same percentage who believe that President Obama was born in a foreign country.

What these beliefs have in common is that they are both untrue. To believe such things is to believe lies.

It's also kind of staggering that Republicans assert these things *equally*, even though the idea that Obama was not born in Hawai'i is a patently ludicrous paranoid delusion, while the idea that Iraq might have had WMDs is complex and arguable.

Since I really would rather not believe that such a significant part of the US population is out-and-out delusional, I assume that for most Republicans "Obama isn't really American" and "Iraq had WMD" are tribal markers more than statements of fact -- whether they're actually true isn't important, what matters is showing what tribe you're in and how loyal you are.

What I wonder is whether US flag officers, who are more likely to be Republican than either enlisted or the population at large, are also buying in to "Iraq had WMD". For them this isn't an abstract issue, it relates directly to their error of so-called expertise. I say "so-called" because the run-up from September 11 to Iraq convinced me that the officer corps is neither braver nor more knowledgeable than I am, when it comes to basic issues of war and peace.

John Steuart Curry, Parade to War. Painted during the run-up to World War II, the museum blogger says "this painting represents the isolationist attitudes and growing disillusionment expressed by an increasing number of Americans in the late 1930s" -- but what I see is not so much isolationism as *pacifism*, the feeling that war, exemplified by The Great War, is monstrous. But maybe I'm too used to thinking of WWI from a British/European perspective, and their awareness that it was the most pointless of wars -- and since it led to WWII, the most destructive. Monstrous indeed.

Friday Shakespeare open thread

by liberal japonicus

I got to the Bard a bit late. The high school English teachers taught Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet more out of duty than love (my senior year English teacher had a love for Victorian novels, which was good) and my university classics was the Greek and Latin kind. One of the problems was that it wasn't really possible to see the plays staged, and being able to see performances, either theatric or filmic, on screen was not in the cards.

I didn't really realize what I was missing until a summer in London at a time when student theatre tickets were incredibly cheap and I could see the plays up close. Even then, the process of reading a play never really grabbed me. Something about the layout, which made things discontinuous.

I mentioned this to a friend when I was in graduate school and she said that we should form a play reading circle, which we did. We'd go to the used bookstore, get a bunch of copies of a play, and once or twice a month, read a play in the afternoon and then make a big dinner. Fun times.

The chance of that happening now is pretty remote, what with kids and living outside the Anglosphere, though it is a lot easier now to get a version on DVD or on youtube even and follow the play. All this comes to mind after seeing this article in the Graniaud about two new stagings of Shakespeare, one of Julius Caesar as an African play and another of Richard II, which I really don't know a lot about. 

Julius Caesar is directed by Gregory Doran (His partner is Anthony Sher, the author of Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook, which details his preparation to play Richard the III) Both Sher and Doran are from South Africa and the article relates this anecdote

It wasn't until we arrived in South Africa that I became aware of just how the country – and the continent – had taken Shakespeare to its heart. In 2001, the education department in Gauteng province banned some of Shakespeare's plays from the curriculum (Julius Caesar was deemed sexist because it "elevates men"; Hamlet was "not optimistic or uplifting"), and the response was rapid. Anthony Sampson, sometime editor of the influential Drum Magazine, wrote of the way Shakespeare had helped Nelson Mandela and other ANC activists incarcerated by the apartheid government. An Indian inmate, Sonny Venkatrathnam, had smuggled in a complete Shakespeare, disguising the cover with images torn from a Hindu calendar (the guards thought it was a prayer book). The book was circulated among his fellow prisoners, who underlined and autographed their favourite passages.

About Richard II, I am unfamiliar with the play, but the director (it is being filmed for BBC) points to the deposition scene as being one of the two best speeches in Shakespeare, and I think the speech he is referring to is this:

Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be;
Therefore no no, for I resign to thee.
Now mark me, how I will undo myself;
I give this heavy weight from off my head
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duty's rites:
All pomp and majesty I do forswear;
My manors, rents, revenues I forego;
My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny:
God pardon all oaths that are broke to me!
God keep all vows unbroke that swear to thee!
Make me, that nothing have, with nothing grieved,
And thou with all pleased, that hast all achieved!
Long mayst thou live in Richard's seat to sit,
And soon lie Richard in an earthly pit!
God save King Harry, unking'd Richard says,
And send him many years of sunshine days!
What more remains?

below the fold is a discussion of the scene. As a bonus, I have also lifted up the Count's link to Gary Oldham talking about athlete's acting, which, truth to tell, probably prompted this more than refined thoughts on one of the greatest playwrights of all time. So the thread is open for Shakespeare related musings, acting related musings or anything else that grabs you. 

A Restaurant for Food, not Math

by Doctor Science

I'm almost done with the massive project of helping my mother put together a book of family history -- or at least the part of our history that's taken place in America. Publishing is *hard*, yo, with all the fiddly steps -- never let it be said that I don't respect people who do the actual work of editing, proofreading, fact-checking, and making sure the pictures come out right. Between that and actual what they call "work" I haven't had time for writing more than a sentence or so.

I have kept reading, of course, and one of the things I've read was Mark Bittman's column about how food service workers are paid: wretchedly. Most do not make significantly over the poverty line: the "tipped minimum wage" is $2.13/hour, which the employers are supposed to bring up to the general minimum wage when tips fall short -- but they mostly don't. Bittman points out:

the "tipped minimum wage" — that $2.13 — once increased in proportion to the regular minimum wage. But in 1996, the year [Herman] Cain took over as head of the National Restaurant Association (NRA), he struck a deal with President Bill Clinton and his fellow Democrats. In exchange for an increase in the regular minimum wage, the tipped minimum wage was de-coupled. The result: despite regular increases in the regular minimum wage, the tipped minimum wage hasn’t changed since 1991.

On top of that, very few food-service workers have health insurance or sick days, which means they have to come to work when they're ill -- the worst possible situation for public health.

Sprog the Elder and I were discussing this, and wondering why no-one has started a restaurant chain called "No Tipping Please", at which it is the proclaimed policy that the employers will pay the staff directly, and make sure they get sick days and take them, too. Yes, prices would have to be higher -- but if they're only about 15-20% higher than comparable tips-plz places, it's a win for the customers financially, and 25-30% might be worth not having the hassle of deciding how much to tip. "A Restaurant for Food, not Math" is just one of the many ad slogans that spring to mind.

Why hasn't anyone done this? What do you think the reactions of customers and employees would be? Is there really a good reason for Americans to habitually underpay people who bring food -- or is it, like underpaying farm workers, a custom that reflects more about social status than about how valuable the work is, in either moral or free-market terms?

Andra Hancock: "Utah Ariel, Pregnant Waitress". Doesn't it make your feet hurt to look at her? Talk about a double whammy ...

The retrain your brain open friday thread

by liberal japonicus

This Guardian article, about Barbara Arrowsmith, on neuroplasticity, seems like nice weekend fodder. This passage struck me.

"I was experiencing a mental exhaustion like I had never known," she says, "so I figured something was happening. And by the time I'd done that for three or four months, it really felt like something had shifted, something had fundamentally changed in my brain, allowing me to process and understand information

While I didn't experience that when I studied French, learning Japanese gave me a similar feeling. I was first based at a relatively high level high school, and consequently could make do with English, sign language and the odd Japanese vocabulary item that I could remember. After a year, I was transferred to a low level boys' school, with a number of older men who would come round my desk when I wasn't teaching and speak to me in Japanese. The first month of this, I would go back to my apartment feeling like my head was about to split open. But after half a year, I went back to my first posting and participated in a panel discussion in Japanese and all of my former colleagues said 'why didn't you tell us you spoke Japanese'. 

 

Anyway, a thread for that or anything else that strikes your fancy.

Thoughts on Drone Strikes

--Sebastian

There is a pretty interesting discussion of drone strikes going on at crookedtimber, you all should check it out.

I'm torn on drone strikes, so what follows aren't really conclusions about them, but rather examinations of the tension in different ways of looking at them.

The Pentagon view appears to be that they are much more targeted, much more accurate, have less risk for our soldiers, and cause much less collateral damage than bombing strikes.  From that perspective they sound pretty good.  If we have to get at some known terrorist organization, some known terrorist, or some clear military target near civilians, drone strikes seem like an excellent choice. 

Given the choice between bombing and using a drone, I would think that using a drone is morally better almost all of the time. 

However, I worry that from an institutional perspective, the relative ease, saftey and lower level of collatoral damage means that drones end up being used in situations where bombing would not be remotely considered.  That could easily create a situation where there are fewer civilian deaths per strike, but still a greater number of civilian deaths total.  And also, insofar as each bombing run/drone strike could potentially end up being a diplomatic disaster, having vastly more instances risks diplomatic disaster more frequently. 

Also the apparent accuracy leads to problematic situations that may not have existed with bombing strikes.  The idea of using a bombing strike to kill a 'bad' American citizen doesn't seem very likely.  But a drone strike?  Apparently the administration thinks that is different. 

I think ideally I would want to have the military analyze whether or not a target was worth a bombing run (keeping them rarer) and then only after that analyze whether or not a bombing run or drone strike is better (keeping non-target casualties down).  Unfortunately I know of no way to do that in an actual human system.  Given bombing strikes, I'd rather do drone strikes most of the time, but I'd rather not just let the bombing strikes be a given. 

Masazumi Harada, RIP

by liberal japonicus

A colleague who I respect very much has passed away, and I'd like to introduce him and the cause that he devoted his life to.

Harada sensei was one of the people who discovered the causal link between an unexplained disease that was found in Minamata and methylmercury discharges by the Chisso corporation, which was later terms Minamata disease, though if there were any justice, it would have been termed Chisso disease. The wikipedia article gives a rundown. Minamata disease entered the US public consciousness with the publication of Eugene Smith's photographs, particularly one of a victim being bathed by her mother. After Eugene Smith's death, his widow, on learning that the family had was having second thoughts about the photo, handed the copyright back to them (this is the speech given by Aileen Smith to explain concerning that) 

This Asahi article gives some background about Harada sensei, but only gives a glimpse of how humane and compassionate he was. Even though he wasn't in good health, he travelled to Ontario in 2010 to document the effects of mercury pollution in First Nation areas and the paper discussed can be found here. He was a prime mover in founding the Minamata Studies department at my university. If there are other things that folks would like to know, I'll try to answer them in the comments.