I just read a really insightful article over at the Heritage Foundation website, What Does Equality of Opportunity Mean? The article is by David Weinberger and he explains that to conservatives like him, “equality of opportunity” means “no equality of opportunity.” According to him, it is all about the government. As long as there is no law saying that certain kinds of people are prohibited from doing something, then there is equality of opportunity.

Consider how brilliant this is! If conservatives got their way, there would be no public education. So the only people who would be certain to get an education would be the rich. So Mitt Romney’s kids would have no more opportunity than, say, the child of a junkie who never knows life off the street and has never seen the inside of a classroom or learned to read.

I’m not a big fan on even the best definitions of “equality of opportunity.” They strike me as little more than a nice way to justify social Darwinism. But Weinberger’s definition completely throws out the idea of opportunity. Or at least he defines it so narrowly as to be meaningless. By this definition, slavery provided equality of opportunity because a slave could buy himself out of slavery and go on to succeed just like the child of a slave owner.

This is an extreme statement, but that’s what’s called for. After all, this conservative definition of the term “opportunity” has already been pushed to its limit. Why would slavery get in the way? It was, after all, a legal institution. It was possible to get out of slavery using that very legal system. Was it hard it do? Yes! Was it impossible? Absolutely not! Working one’s way out of poverty in the conservative hellscape that conservatives so admire, without a basic education or decent nutrition, is also possible. I don’t see how the systems are fundamentally different. (It’s also worth noting that Weinberger’s intellectual forebearers would have made the same argument in 1850s Virginia.)

What is most interesting about this definition is how conservatives keep changing the rules of how society is supposed to work. First they claimed that they didn’t want equality of outcomes, only equality of opportunity. But now it turns out that the term itself was a smokescreen. All they mean by it is that they don’t think that the government should make any laws that have been universally considered repugnant for at least 50 years. How farsighted of the conservative movement!

Afterword

Note that by this definition, preventing gays from teaching would still be just fine. Most conservatives would just define the issue out of existence. Gays are not “born” like African Americans. They get no such protections! This would go right along with slavery, of course. Slaveholders were all for equal rights. It was just that slaves weren’t people; they were property. There is always a way to keep the weak down and elevate the powerful. And the young David Weinberger has provided yet another example of it!

Before getting to birthdays, we should sit back and savor an anniversary today. Given what’s happening with Glenn Greenwald and his crew, it just makes sense that 60 years ago today, the CIA managed to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh. The CIA did it at the request of MI6, so I guess the whole Greenwald thing is just returning the favor. Mosaddegh was a progressive and the British especially hated him because he nationalized the oil industry. This all came home to roost 25 years later.

When I was a kid, I wondered why the United States was always supporting dictators. Mosaddegh, for example, was democratically elected and mostly did right by his people. But we couldn’t support him because he wasn’t doing right by the only constituency that we care about: global corporate and American military power. So he had to go. But the United States has by far the biggest military in the world so our entirely fucked up foreign policy is never held accountable. And most Americans are not even aware of it because we have a press that does nothing so well as yield to power.

On this day back in 1570, the early Baroque composer Salamone Rossi was born. Here is his very pretty Adon ‘Olam:

One of Rembrandt’s favorite students, the great Golden Age painter Gerbrand van den Eeckhout was born in 1621. Epistolary novelist Samuel Richardson was born in 1689. The longer lived of the brothers, Orville Wright was born in 1871. Fashion designer Coco Chanel was born in 1883. Poet Ogden Nash was born in 1902. Novelist James Gould Cozzens was born in 1903.

Gene Roddenberry was born in 1921. He wasn’t great in any way that I can see, but he did create Star Trek and even with its many faults that’s something. Interestingly, when he created Star Trek: the Next Generation, he tried to fix many of those faults. And he destroyed it. Sure, it makes no sense to send the captain out on missions—that’s just not the way things are done! So send out the first officer! But by far the biggest problem was that he made all the characters so well adjusted that there was no human drama.

Co-inventor of the CCD, Willard Boyle was born in 1924. And one of the few jockies I’ve ever heard of, Bill Shoemaker was born in 1931.

Musician Ginger Baker is 74 today. Singer-songwriter Johnny Nash is 73. This is unquestionably a great pop song (slightly out of sync):

Bill Clinton is 67. Actor Jim Carter is 65, so no more acting for him! Speaking of bad Star Trek, the first officer who is always going out on missions, Jonathan Frakes is 61. Actor Peter Gallagher is 58. He was in the terribly under appreciated Tune in Tomorrow. Actor Adam Arkin is 57. And comedic actor Matthew Perry is 44.

The day, however, belongs to painter Gustave Caillebotte who was born in 1848. He died at only 45, but left quite a lot of great work. Surprisingly, he was not considered an important member of the impressionist movement until rather recently. I’ve always found his work incredibly compelling. I especially like his sense of composition, which is much stronger than many of the other painters of the movement. His most famous work is probably Paris Street; Rainy Day:

I had long known and loved this painting. But I was totally unprepared for seeing it. For one thing, it was far more carefully painted than I expected. Normally when you see a painting close up, you can see the shortcuts that painters use. I definitely got the impression that Caillebotte took much more care than most painters of that time. He also didn’t use an excessive amount of paint. But the biggest surprise was how big the painting is: it is roughly 7 feet by 9 feet. It is a thing to behold for so many reasons.

Happy birthday Gustave Caillebotte!

Update (19 August 2013 8:33 pm)

Great minds fret alike!

After the recent fast food worker organizing, Business Insider decided to look at minimum wages all over the world. And when you compare us to, you know, comparable countries, we don’t look too good. Australia (those rugged individualists) have a minimum wage that is $1.88 higher than the wage the fast food workers are asking for. You know: the wage that pretty much everyone scoffed at? France, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and Canada all have a minimum wage that is in the ballpark of what the president has called for.

Of course, you can also see that the minimum wage in poor little Sierra Leone is only 3¢. But that’s the funny thing about conservatives when it comes to this kind of stuff. When it comes to spouting off about our country, America is always number one! But when it comes to having a fair judicial system or reasonable pay, somehow we just can’t cut it. The country is just getting by! We need to lower Social Security benefits. We need to kill off Medicare. (Better to kill Granny with neglect than with Death Panels!) We just don’t have the resources to educate our children. In other words, these people think America is a third world nation if it comes down to asking the rich to pay the smallest amount.

Of course, as Dylan Matthews reported, not all countries have minimum wages. Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, and Switzerland, for example, do not have them. But all advanced countries have policies designed to provide workers with more leverage than they would have in the social Darwinian hellscape that conservatives so admire. For example, most countries have not spent the last 60 years enacting policies designed to destroy unions. As Matthews noted, “Most of them make up for it with widespread collective bargaining, which sets de facto minimums.” De facto minimums that are higher than ours.

But even after seeing this, I wondered: does this take into account the cost of living that people experience in different countries? Helpfully, Business Insider offered another article that addressed this issue, Here’s How Many Minutes Of Working Minimum Wage It Takes To Buy A Big Mac All Around The World. Now the “Big Mac Index” is far from perfect, but it does provide an idea of just how well workers are doing in the various countries:

What’s interesting here is that if you look at the labor cost component of the Big Mac in each of these countries, you will see that it is quite stable. It is about 20% higher in Australia and about 10% lower in the United Kingdom. And about the same in the US, France, and Japan. As I’ve argued so many times before, raising worker wages does not not not increase prices by the same amount. So we really could raise the minimum wage and it would not only help the workers, it would help the economy!

But there is one big reason that conservatives are against it: it would hurt profits a little. But the rest of us have to ask: are we going to continue electing politicians who do the bidding of the 1% or are we going to elect those who support the rest of us?

Paul Waldman is a writer for The American Prospect and I quite like him even if I disagree from time to time. And this morning, he wrote a cheeky little article, Seven Reasons You Will Click on This Article about 2016. Basically, it is an apologia for writing about elections that are far in the future. What I find interesting about it is that I don’t think of Waldman as particularly the kind of journalist who writes about this kind of stuff all that much. The article is probably just an indication that Waldman is at least a bit on an iconoclast. Lots of people complain about the “coverage” of the 2016 election, but few provide a full-throated defense of it.

That dynamic may explain why his defense of the practice is so lame. The seven reasons are: (1) it’s easy; (2) it’s easy; (3) it’s easy; (4) it’s easy; (5) it’s easy; (6) it’s easy; and (7) elections matter but maybe not three years out. He wrote, “I’ve been doing this blogging/column-writing thing for about a decade, and let me tell you, my job gets a lot easier once a presidential campaign gets rolling.” Never a truer statement was made. Just with my blogging here, it is amazing how much easier it was last year at this time. Every day was a smorgasbord—even Sunday. There is much less happening this year. And now that Congress is in recess, I can’t even write articles about how Congress isn’t getting anything done!

But I think that Waldman is wrong to focus on reporters in his apologia. The truth is that readers really like the election coverage. It is kind of hard to compare readership on this site because it has increased so much over the last year. But nonetheless, readership went way up in the two months up through the election. (It never went back down, but that has to do with the increasing trend.) Now I understand, this too is about the writer. All writers want to please their readers. But it is wrong to think that writers would just do what comes easy despite a lack of interest from readers.

In fact, people often ask me why I write so much about politics. And the truth is that in the early years, I thought that I was being lazy when I wrote about politics. I’ve always found politics a lot easier than science or literature or even film. But politics has gotten the most readership. And even more, my writing about political media figures has gotten the most of all. Nothing seems to please my readers so much as ragging on Josh Barro or Ezra Klein. (When I say nice things about them—which is most of the time—no one really cares.)

On the other hand, I do not write the kind of articles that Waldman is talking about. While it is true that I think they are stupid, that isn’t the reason. I just don’t think I have anything to say about what Hillary Clinton should do to secure the nomination in 2016. Anyway, when it comes to elections, I’m more of a “fundamentals” kind of guy. For example, I wrote, The Next Three Election Cycles. There I was speculating all the way through 2018. But I didn’t talk about who the people involved might be. For one thing, I really don’t know. But far more important, I don’t care because I don’t think it matters.

When it comes to this stuff, I really think we ought to depend upon the free market. If people want to read articles about how Hillary Clinton needs a “message,” then I think people should write those articles. When it comes to actual news reporting, we should expect something more. Important stories should be covered just because they are important, even if they are not popular. Of course, that sort of stuff too has been going away. But among the opinion ranters, what does it matter?

This morning, Jonathan Chait flags three voter suppression apologias. Rich Lowry at Politico accuses Hillary Clinton of playing the “race card” in her criticism of the recent voter suppression law in North Carolina. Jonathan Tobin in Commentary claims that these voter ID laws are not a civil rights cause. And the National Review dismisses the whole issue with, The Good Sense of Voter ID.

I’m especially taken with Tobin’s argument because it show a shocking level of historical ignorance. His claim is that voter ID laws just inconvenience people; they aren’t like Jim Crow where the government was making laws to stop people from voting. That’s a silly statement because these voter ID laws are the government making laws to stop people from voting. They may not be as extreme as Jim Crow, but they are as extreme as the politicians can currently make them. What’s more, Jim Crow and slavery itself were not primarily about racism. They were about power and money for those who already had a lot of power and money.

Think of it like this: wasn’t Jim Crow just an “inconvenience”? After all, African Americans in Mississippi could have moved to New York were there would have be no problem registering to vote. Everyone now accepts that poll taxes were a real issue meant to stop poor blacks from voting. What are voter ID laws other than a poll tax by another name? What’s more, the whole argument comes down to something like this, “There is nothing wrong with cutting off a man’s foot; now if you cut off his whole leg, that would be a problem…” Voter suppression is very much a civil rights issue.

What this recent wave of voter suppression apologetics reminds me of is the lead up to the Iraq War. The administration claimed that they didn’t want to go to war and that they would do anything to avoid it. But the truth is—And this was obvious even at the time, Peter Beinart!—that this was totally disingenuous. The Bush administration was hell bent on war with Iraq, as they had been at least since 9/11.

The same thing is true with the recent conservative push for voter ID laws. The proponents don’t generally say, “We’re trying to disenfranchise Democratic leaning voters!” (Although, as Chait notes, often they do say just that.) Instead, the conservatives are just trying to make voting pure. Sure, it may inadvertently disenfranchise Democratic voters, but that’s only because there is so much voter fraud going on within the Democratic Party. I’m talking to you ACORN!

The big problem with all of this is that the conservative movement has found a great loophole in the mainstream media. The conservatives are fine as long as not too many of them scream in the streets, “Let’s get the darkies!” The press will just pretend that that the conservatives are honest brokers who really believe their talking points. After all, what could go wrong? Other than a war. Or a fascist take over of the country. But these are minor risks compared to having a “biased” media or letting the mythical voter fraud threat go unchecked.

Afterword

This article has gotten this song stuck in my brain:

Here’s a fun story. Facebook has a “white hat hacker” program where they give money to hackers who report security problems. Well, a guy named Khalil Shreateh found such a bug. But despite repeated attempts to get through to Facebook reps, he was unsuccessful. In fact, a rep told him, “I am sorry this is not a bug.” So Shreateh just used the bug to post his finding to Mark Zuckerberg’s private timeline. That got a Facebook engineer’s attention—within minutes! Facebook confirmed that he had indeed found a bug. And soon the company rewarded Shreateh by shutting down his account.

After some screaming and begging, Shreateh got Facebook to reinstate his account. But the company claims that they can’t pay him for the bug they admit he found because (1) he didn’t provide them with enough information and (2) he violated Facebook terms of service by using the bug. But they said, “We do hope, however, that you continue to work with us to find vulnerabilities in the site.” According to The Daily Dot, what this shows is, “It pays to fully document a vulnerability before you send in your report. It doesn’t pay to mess with Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy.” That strikes me as awfully cavalier.

A much better response comes from Samuel Knight who has been manning the Political Animal blog this weekend. He wrote, “Typical Silicon Valley libertarianism—cheating Shreateh out of money, while inviting him to continue to do work on the company’s behalf.” Indeed! It goes a lot further than that. I’m sure all the top people at Facebook see themselves as the very model of the libertarian ideal—meritocracy at work! But they’ll use any opportunity to screw over the non-billionaires. And what does this story really say other than, “Facebook doesn’t care about results; we have rules, damn it!”

I’m very concerned about the attitude of the article in The Daily Dot. I would think any normal high tech person would be outraged at this. And it’s pretty stupid for Facebook too. If you want to turn a White Hat into a Black Hat, this is the way to do it! My only hope is that if Shreateh does move over to the dark side that he finds something to destroy Facebook. Then maybe people will stop bugging me to join that evil enterprise.

By the way: the total amount of money Facebook is withholding is—Wait for it!—$500. What a totally fucked up company!

On this day back in 1657, the Italian architect Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena was born. Mathematician Brook Taylor was born in 1685. The last member of the House of Lords to be put to death, Laurence Shirley was born in 1720. No wonder England has gone to hell since then! Wildlife painter Carl Rungius was born in 1869. Film director Marcel Carne was born in 1906. The first and greatest female flying ace Lydia Litvyak was born in 1920. Writer Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in 1922. And chain-smoking heart throb Patrick Swayze was born in 1952.

Civil rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson is 102 today. Discoverer of HIV, Luc Montagnier is 81. Seriously messed up human being but absolutely great film director Roman Polanski is 80. Here’s a great scene (admittedly, thanks mostly to Robert Towne and Faye Dunaway) from Chinatown:

Actor and quite a good director in his own right, Robert Redford is 77. Comedian Martin Mull is 70. Here he is on Fernwood Tonight:

Sculptor Robert Hitchcock is 69. Comedian Elayne Boosler is 61. Actor Madeleine Stowe is 55. And actor Edward Norton is 44.

The day, however, belongs to one of the great Classical period composers Antonio Salieri who was born on this day in 1750. Hugely popular in his own day, he was probably even more important as a teacher. Sadly, he is only quite recently being played with any frequency at all. As far as I know, there has never been an English language biography of him. I think this all stems from the fact that Mozart’s letters have been so picked over by historians. In those letters, the young Mozart was clearly jealous of Salieri’s greater success. But after Mozart started gaining success, he and Salieri were on very friendly terms and even worked together. But all those old letters stuck around and I’m afraid that people held it against Salieri as though he were responsible for holding Mozart in poverty and hastening his death. (Note: the last couple of years of Mozart’s life were quite successful financially and would have led to him becoming a very rich man had he lived.)

What Salieri did was live a long time—well into the Romantic period. In fact, he taught composition to Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt. As a result of this, just as is indicated in Amadeus, he saw his music go out of style. Of course, the same thing happened to Mozart’s music, he just wasn’t around to see it happen. Of course, with Mozart, there is all the speculation that had he lived he would have turned into Beethoven—a patently absurd notion. But there is no doubt that Mozart was a better composer than Salieri. I can listen to straight Mozart for a lot longer than I can Salieri before each of their cliches start to drive me crazy. But Salieri is nonetheless a great composer who isn’t listened to nearly enough. Here is his Twenty-Six Variations for the Orchestra on a Theme called La Folia di Spagna, which is exquisite:

Happy birthday Antonio Salieri!

Last week, I discussed how ideology blinds conservative thinking to the full range of possible economic solutions to problems. In particular, I was talking about Milton Friedman and how his insistence on avoiding Keynesian solutions caused him to come up with some very clever economic tools—even if we have since found that those tools have limited usefulness and must be an addition to Keynesian tools, not their replacement. Yesterday, William K Black published a great article over at OpEd News, Rajan Calls Krugman “Paranoid” for Criticizing Reinhart and Rogoff’s Research. It is a rundown of recent economic history of the disintegration of the austerity economics coming out of the IMF. But more to the point: it discusses this issue of ideological blindness in economics.

The two major players in this story are Raghuram Rajan and Ken Rogoff. These are both guys who are first and foremost political ideologues. Then they are economists. And that means that their economic skills (unquestionably great) are used as weapons in persuit of their ideological goals. Again: this is not how science works! Although both men pretend to be regular economists, their actual job titles should be Conservative Apologist. Both men are laser focused on keeping inflation down at all costs. As I’ve discussed before, higher inflation would have been a good think over the past many years. It would only have been a bad thing for the rich who are sitting on piles of cash. So Rajan, who has been appointed the next Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, can be depended upon not to do what is best for the broad interests of the people, but rather just what is in the interests of the rich.

Black points out conservative economists have managed to miss major problems in the real economy by defining the issues away in their models:

In other words: “There can be no corruption because it doesn’t exist in my model. And because there can be no corruption, we don’t need any regulation!” And it just so happens that the people who make these models start with an ideology that says that regulation is bad. Funny that!

This also goes along with the whole theme of Black’s article. The conservatives have claimed that people like Krugman and Stiglitz are meanies who make personal attacks. But the truth is quite the opposite. The conservative attacks have been almost entirely personal. And there is a good reason for that: the conservative economic arguments have been weak from the start and are now basically nonexistent. That basically leaves, “You’re a potty head!” And, “All the real economists think just what I do!”

Black has coined a term for these people: theoclassical. As best as I can tell, these are economists who believe in classical economics as a matter of faith. It seems related to the Confidence Fairy. She was a creation of Paul Krugman to explain why conservatives thought that cutting spending would improve a weak economy. The Confidence Fairy is like the Great Pumpkin: if the government cuts social spending, she will magically appear to reward the good policy makers. It’s silly but this is in fact what conservatives claim. “Theoclassical economics” is a more serious notion: conservatives really do not have reasons for what they believe regarding the economy. It is all faith based: they start with the truth that they just know and try to come up with economic theories to justify the truth that cannot be questioned.

So maybe the Republican constituency isn’t so strange after all: it is faith based social conservatives on one side and faith base economic conservatives on the other. They are bound by their resistance to facts.

JoyfulA retweeted a really disturbing twitter conversation. It amazes me what many conservatives say online. I have to admit, they sound a whole lot different from the conservatives who I have actual conversations with. Online, the people come off as rigid and hateful. But I guess that makes sense. There is that simmering under the surface of my conversations. And I rarely confront conservatives on their opinions; I’m more interested in drawing them out and finding out why they think what they think. It is hard to conclude that at base, conservatives are just pissed off that other people are getting away with stuff.

The conversation started with a man writing, “Baby murder is 100% a liberal agenda. Margaret Sanger wanted blacks eliminated. Murder is not a choice.” Sanger was a birth control advocate who started organizations that later became Planned Parenthood. She was also a racist. She believed that light skinned people were superior to dark skinned people. There appears to now be a conservative meme that says that Sanger was really only interested killing black babies. This is patently false. For one thing, her focus was on birth control, not abortions. She was actually against abortions (because they were so unsafe) and wanted to use birth control as a way to stop them.

Many years ago, I predicted that if conservatives got abortion made illegal, they would move on to birth control. Well, they didn’t even wait that long. The anti-choice movement has embraced opposition to birth control in a big way. This is mostly in the form of opposition to “the pill,” which they seem to think causes an abortion. (It does not.) What all of this shows is that the anti-choice movement is fundamentally an anti-woman movement. The idea is to limit the choices that women have.

Yet another man added, “Her legacy is planned Parenthood, and she was a racist.” And finally a woman joined the chorus, “Democrats support the war on women, minorities, elderly. Wake up. You are being exploited.” I don’t really know what these people are talking about. The Christian Church was started by a homophobic man with extreme sexual hang-ups. I’ve always thought that was pretty amazing: because of Paul’s many personal problems, much of western civilization continues to have a screwed up relationship to sex. Regardless, none of these people would accept the argument that their religion is invalid because Paul was at best a man of his times. Margaret Sanger was right about birth control and that is all that is relevant.

The one good thing that came out of this is that Anthony B (who has been fighting the good fight against these idiots) tweeted the following cartoon that rather well sums up the modern Republican Party: