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Roe v. Kuhn

[ 30 ] August 20, 2008 | Paul Campos

One way of sorting out peoples’ politics of law is to ask them if they find Harry Blackmun’s opinion for the Court in Roe v. Wade or Flood v. Kuhn more jurisprudentially offensive. (Flood held that, in order to avoid reversing a half-century-old precedent, baseball’s reserve clause would continue to be treated as legal under federal antitrust laws.) I teach the Flood case in my Legislation course, and one thing I try to bring out is the economic naivete of the opinion, which proceeds from the dual assumptions that

(a) Americans love baseball more than almost anything else; and

(b) Major league baseball can’t survive as a viable economic enterprise without special legal protections for team owners.

The Flood case came to mind this morning when I was putting together my Legislation syllabus, and I happened to notice that the major league minimum salary ($390,000) is now roughly three times higher, in real terms, than the mean salary at the time of the Flood case (the median salary was of course much lower), and almost exactly the same as what the mean salary was back in 1981, after the first great wave of free agency had driven salaries to what the owners insisted were unsustainable levels.

What’s a normal body?

[ 31 ] August 20, 2008 | Paul Campos

One of the strangest aspects of the moral panic over fat in our culture is the bizarre concept that having a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 is “normal.” It certainly isn’t normal in the standard statistical sense of the word (only about a third of the adult population is in this range). It isn’t normal in the sense that everyone or even most people would have a BMI in this range if they had an optimal lifestyle, even assuming we could define that term satisfactorily. There’s no evidence for this belief, and in fact there has been no time in US history since records on the subject began to be kept that a significant majority of the populace had a “normal” body mass, as currently defined.

Another striking aspect of the current definition of “normal” is how extreme it is, in the sense that, for example, the extraordinarily thin Olympic gymnast Nastia Liukin is at the edge of the “normal weight” category, even though only about one in 50 Americans are as thin as she is. But, culturally speaking, Liukin’s body is very much presented as “normal” and indeed normative, both in terms of media representations, and public health recommendations.

The tremendous popularity of “women’s” Olympic gymnastics (a sport in which being 13 years old is actually a competitive advantage) is a nice example of how certain cultural obsessions with tiny child-like female bodies end up getting reflected by what gets called science.

Old Man Look at My Life

[ 0 ] August 19, 2008 | Paul Campos

Cheap Abe Simpson humor aside, one issue that the media seem to be treating with extreme delicacy so far is McCain’s age. It of course is a legitimate concern, given that from a purely actuarial point of view, which doesn’t take into account the special health risks associated with being president, he has a 15% chance of dying over the next four years (at the least swing voters ought to be quite a bit more concerned with McCain’s veep choice than Obama’s).

Furthermore, the incidence of Alzheimer’s, which is extremely low prior to age 70, starts increasing exponentially at McCain’s present age, to the point where nearly half of 90 year-olds display significant symptoms. Using an n = 1 for American presidents elected in their 70s, Ronald Reagan was two years younger than McCain when he took office, and he was almost surely dealing with the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s onset before he left office.

Impressionistically, I remember far more media and popular culture discussion of Reagan’s age in 1980 than is taking place about McCain’s so far. And it was certainly a big issue in the 1984 campaign, until a clever one-liner during a presidential debate made it yet another issue that was unexpectedly Good For the Republicans.

On (Toward) A Hermeneutics of the Musical Confessions of John McCain

[ 0 ] August 16, 2008 | Paul Campos

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a presidential candidate’s list of top ten favorite songs, published in a magazine aimed at self-identified young urban hipsters, will be an essentially disingenuous document, with the putative preferences having been selected by a campaign subcomittee assigned the task of generating an ideally — from a political, rather than aesthetic point of view — eclectic list, that does not actually appear on any known Ipod.

Any deviation from this practice deserves the closest scrutiny. Thus John McCain’s unexpected selection of The Gayest Song of All Time as his personal #1 favorite manifestation of the Terpsichorean muse almost literally cries out for careful analysis. What follows is a (admittedly preliminary) attempt to undertake that task.

“Dancing Queen” was released in the United States on Nov. 12 1976, and five months later became Abba’s only #1 American hit (the sugary pop confections of the Swedish quartet were always far more popular on the international scene, and they remain one of the top-selling musical acts of all time).

The narrative structure of the song is a model of classical economy: as one critic has noted, “[I]t’s about a seventeen-year-old girl having a good time on a Friday night. Not fazed by the social pressures in her daily life as a teenager, all she wants to do is go out and look for a ‘king’ to dance with.”

What, we might — and will — ask, was it about this story that a 40-year-old married father of three children found so compelling about this particular story in that long-ago spring of 1977, as he roamed the dance floors of discotheques in southern Florida? McCain himself has tried to answer that question, but his response merely confuses the issue, with its highly anachronistic reference to being shot down over North Vietnam a full decade earlier, thus (according to him) permanently disabling his musical taste, while at the same time granting him the gift of Patriotism.

The cynical interpretation of this hermeneutic gesture would be that McCain is merely grasping at every opportunity, no matter how implausible, to remind voters he was a prisoner of war. The present author, who will admit to a deep affection for Dancing Queen — he recently performed, with the able assistance of two of his sisters in law, a karaoke version of it for the benefit of a surprisingly unreceptive audience inside a rural west Michigan bar — prefers a more charitable account.

Do we not see, in McCain’s extraordinary revelation that he loves Dancing Queen (note his third-favorite song is the equally revelatory Abba opus Take A Chance On Me) a kind of confession? Some might claim it is irresponsible to speculate in this manner. To the contrary, it is irresponsible not to.

Is there the slightest doubt that, if Barack Obama were to name Dancing Queen as his favorite song, Maureen Dowd, to name but one particularly prominent arbiter of such things, would have found indisputable evidence of barely hidden homoerotic longings in the soul of a man she has characterized as an “anorexic starlet?” The question answers itself.

What exactly is John McCain trying to tell us? And why won’t we listen?

I don’t wish to sound alarmist

[ 25 ] August 15, 2008 | Paul Campos

But the front page of the NY Times sure looks like Chapter One of a Tom Clancy novel right now.

It’s just that under the present circumstances the idea of this guy

running for president while sounding like a character in a Tom Clancy novel is a bit unnerving.
Luckily I’ve done my patriotic duty and DVR’d some Olympic beach volleyball to help get my mind right.

A Long Way Down

[ 234 ] August 13, 2008 | Paul Campos

I recently saw Eric Steel’s 2006 documentary film The Bridge, about people who commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Steel got permission from local authorities to set up cameras on public land that would allow him to film the bridge for an entire year during almost all daylight hours. What he didn’t tell them was that his real reason for doing so was to film people jumping off the bridge (He captured footage of 23 of the 24 known suicides that year. 2004 was a typical year in this regard, as there is about one confirmed suicide from the bridge every two weeks, on average. The real number is higher, as some people jump off without being seen, usually at night, and their bodies sometimes aren’t recovered).

It’s a disturbing and thought-provoking film — it includes footage of several people jumping — but it doesn’t address a very live political issue, which is what ought to be done about making it more difficult to jump off what is currently believed to be the world’s most popular suicide spot. Steel’s film was inspired by this great piece which appeared five years ago in the New Yorker.

More thoughts on the subject here.

Future events such as these will affect you in the future

[ 63 ] August 13, 2008 | Paul Campos

My friend Steve is an atmospheric scientist and a hardcore baseball fan. He’s devised an ingenious simulation, in which he predicts the probable outcome of the remainder of a baseball season based on a method which involves using the Pythagorean records of teams to predict how they will do given their remaining schedules. In other words he evaluates both the strength of individual teams and of their schedules on the basis of runs scored and allowed rather than won-loss records. He (or rather his computer) then plays out the remainder of the season 100,000 times.

Here’s his current simulation results for the remainder of this season:

AL East: Rays 56%, Red Sox 43%, Yankees 1%, Blue Jays 0.1%

AL Central: White Sox 61%, Twins 38%, Tigers 0.6%, Indians 0.04%

AL West: Angels 99.993%, Rangers 0.007%

AL Wildcard: Red Sox 46%, Rays 36%, Twins 7%, White Sox 5%, Yankees 5%, Blue Jays 0.8%, Rangers 0.2%, Tigers 0.1%

NL East: Phillies 62%, Mets 28%, Marlins 9%, Braves 0.7%

NL Central: Cubs 87%, Brewers 12%, Cardinals 0.9%

NL West: Diamondbacks 57%, Dodgers 43%, Rockies 0.09%

NL Wildcard: Brewers 71%, Cardinals 14%, Cubs 11%, Mets 1%, Phillies 1%, Marlins 0.4%, Astros 0.4%, Diamondbacks 0.2%, Dodgers 0.2%, Braves 0.01%

If your favorite team isn’t listed it means they didn’t make the playoffs in any of the 100,000 simulations.

Imagine if Obama had done this

[ 23 ] August 12, 2008 | Paul Campos

“Some” would have seen it as a Secret Terrorist Gesture, while more sober-minded chin-scratchers would have taken it as evidence that Obama is too much of a foreigner to understand our customs and traditions.
Of course on the left this is seen as yet further confirmation that the Leader of the Free World is, as Jeeves said of his equally clueless employer, “mentally negligible,” but on the right that same judgment is generally understood to be a kind of compliment.
(Edited to reflect sensitivity to the plight of the mentally disabled who don’t have access to nuclear weapons.)

Reds exploit world distracted by Olympics and . . .

[ 14 ] August 11, 2008 | Paul Campos

. . . donate Adam Dunn to Arizona for a petrified starfish and two pre-owned copies of The Transformed Man.

Dunn is a free agent in six weeks, so if the Reds would have gotten two first round picks if they had kept him, assuming they would have offered arbitration and he would have walked (which seems like a safe bet).

Obviously you can’t really evaluate the trade without knowing who the two propects to be named later are, but as it stands now it looks like something of a giveaway and I don’t understand why the Dodgers let him clear waivers.

Of what does the Georgia-Russia situation remind Billy Kristol?

[ 23 ] August 11, 2008 | Paul Campos

My guess would be . . . Munich, 1938!

What do I win?

BTW it would be difficult to top this phrase for some sort of Neo-Con Unselfconscious Irony Award: “Fanatics aren’t deterred by the disapproval of men of moderation or refinement.”

The funny thing is that the whole column is structured around the idea that Russia isn’t like the Nazis because there are no Nazis around these days. Except in Wingnuttia, that argument is going to go over like a lead zeppelin, so whaddaya know by the end of 750 words we’re somehow back in England in 1938, looking for Winston Churchill. Again.

I don’t know the first thing about this conflict (or rather everything I know is based on Rob’s excellent blogging on the subject), but there are few rules in life more dependable than that if William Kristol is advocating something it’s almost certainly a good idea to do the opposite.

Dodging a bullet

[ 39 ] August 8, 2008 | Paul Campos

I was an Edwards supporter early on, so I find this particularly disturbing. In an ideal world I agree this would be a private affair in every sense, but did he really think he could get away with this while running for president? And did he ever consider what a disaster this would be for his party — not to mention the nation — if he had actually won the nomination?

Are war crimes not war crimes if they’re sufficiently "necessary?"

[ 408 ] August 7, 2008 | Paul Campos

In the comments to the Hiroshima thread below, djw asks an excellent question, in response to justifications for dropping the bomb on Japan because doing so arguably saved many more lives than were killed by the atom bombs:

King Rat, do you think our definition of war crimes (as codified in the Geneva conventions) should be amended to remove intentionally mass-murdering civilians from a list of war crimes when the utilitarian calculus tilts against it?(I’m not trying to be snarky, I mean this as a serious question. Something about Truman as war criminal seems not quite right to me too, but the alternative seems much worse).

Justifications of the terror bombing of cities come down to the claim that it’s OK to intentionally kill large numbers of civilians if doing so produces good results on the whole. As djw says, this would seem to require the defenders of dropping the bomb (and of course the defenders of the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden and Hamburg) to explain if they favor a general utilitarian exemption to the concept of a war crime.

Another way of putting this is to ask if there’s a moral difference between marching into a city and systematically rounding up and machine gunning its populace, and getting exactly the same result by dropping bombs from planes. For reasons that are hard to understand rationally but which seem to have great psychological force, violence at a distance seems different to many (most?) people than violence at close range, even when the intention and result is exactly the same (lots of dead people). Or to put it another way, as William Ian Miller points out in his book Humiliation, violence at a distance somehow seems less violent and therefore less morally problematic (relatively speaking of course).

I’m guessing no one would defend the idea of rounding up and then machine-gunning the entire populace of a large city, no matter how beneficial the consequences of this act were purported to be. But the terror bombing of cities during WWII continues to have many supporters. Like djw I’m trying not to pose this question in a rhetorical way — I’m sincerely curious how people make these distinctions.

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