Author Page for Scott Lemieux

Hacktacular!

Kay: “You can get to Jaret Wright in the first inning, but after that he settles down.”

Jaret Wright, ERA by inning (min 10 G):

1st: 5.73
2nd: 2.45
3rd: 7.84
4th: 1.80
5th: 14.00

Yep, you’d better to get to Jaret Wright in the 1st, because if not you might have to wait until the third.

What’s really amazing about this kind of hackery is how pointless it is. Do you think you’re going to convince anybody that Jaret Wright can pitch? I know your boss blew a lot of money on him, but Christ, give it up.

Of course, it would be nice if Scott “Baby let me follow you” Downs wasn’t doing his own homage to Wright…

The False Hope of Consensus

Ed Thibodeau makes an argument that is increasingly common among the pro-choice community: Roe v. Wade, he argues, “is a fig leaf that can easily be blown away by the winds of political fortune. If we really believe in abortion rights, let us stand up and say so in a form that will resolve the issue once and for all.” As I’ve said previously, I think as political strategy this is profoundly misguided; I should probably explain why in a little more detail.

I do agree with Ed on a couple of points. Most importantly, as I argued in a previous discussion with Publius, I don’t think (David Souter’s valiant attempts in Casey notwithstanding) that stare decisis is a very convincing basis for upholding Roe. On these issues, I’m basically with Thomas; when it comes to constitutional (as opposed to statutory) interpretation it’s more important to get it right than uphold a bad precedent. I think that Roe should be upheld because it was correctly decided, but it’s virtually impossible (I think) to articulate a principled standard that would not allow one to reconsider Roe but would allow the overturning of, say, Bowers v. Hardwick. And certainly stare decisis won’t save Roe if 5 members of the Court are determined to overturn it.

But none of this makes a constitutional amendment viable. Nobody who favors reproductive rights could dispute that a constitutional amendment entrenching Roe would be a good idea. The problem is that 1)there is absolutely no chance of it happening, and 2)in a hypothetical context in which you could get 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of the states to agree to such an amendment, Roe would obviously not be threatened in the first place. Even though Roe is popular and the Republican-endorsed Human Life Amendment is not, the former doesn’t have any more chance of passing the arduous amendment process than the latter, and using resources to fight for it would be an equally big waste of time. We should leave hopeless amendment fights to opponents of reproductive freedom.

One of the thing that puzzles me, in studying the abortion issue, how many people are desperate to believe that there’s some way of just ending the debate once and for all, despite the obvious incommensurability of the opposing positions. This is just something that I can’t really understand. Here’s the thing: politics is about conflict. Issues like slavery, on which a true consensus that a previous social arrangement was unjust emerges, are exceptionally rare. Most issues don’t end up being resolved by constitutional amendments. (The 14th Amendment, which would be more analogous, is the exception that proves the rule; it had to be ratified by replacing the amendment process by force, arguably its most important provision was immediately gutted by the Supreme Court, and the apartheid system it was designed to pre-empt persisted for damn near a century anyway.) Moreover, the 13th Amendment reflected the new social consensus; it didn’t create it. A constitutional amendment is not a means of winning the abortion debate; it would be a sign that you’ve already won. But it’s winning in the first place where all the work comes in.

The brutal truth is this: there are no guarantees. Protecting the freedom and equality of women is an ongoing political struggle; there’s no way around it. There’s only two viable ways of protecting Roe: 1)winning elections, or 2)making it politically unprofitable for Republicans to appoint justices who will overturn Roe. It’s difficult to accept that core freedoms should be subject to political changes, but as with most freedoms there’s no way around it. There are no shortcuts.

To: Bobo and Kotkin Re: The Blindingly Obvious

Especially in the South, the automatic equation of “Democratic” and “liberal” is utterly ludicrous.

And That Goes Double For Priscilla Owen

Lauren finds this quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg told an audience Wednesday that she doesn’t like the idea of being the only female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. But in choosing to fill one of the two open positions on the court, “any woman will not do,” she said. There are “some women who might be appointed who would not advance human rights or women’s rights,” Ginsburg told those gathered at the New York City Bar Association.

Which is a good time for me to re-quote what Thurgood Marshall said after his resignation:

“My dad told me way back that you can’t use race. For example, there’s no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They’ll both bite.”

The same can be said, of course, of a woman or man wielding a bloody coathanger…

The Anti-Tribble

An interesting article on the great Leo Mazzone. The key to his approach can be summed up, I think, in one word–rationality. For example:

Maddux
There are no parachutes on your back, no cones to run around, no 10 different meetings talking about something that doesn’t concern you. All the other stuff, you don’t partake in. So you spend less time doing nothing, and you spend all your time doing what it is you have to do to get better on the mound.

Mazzone
You don’t think pitchers appreciate that? Running all these drills and doing all this stuff before you get on the mound is not very bright. Your first priority is to get on the mound and practice your craft, without being fatigued from drills that are not going to mean near as much as you trying to make pitches.

This is the sign of quality management, and why Cox and Mazzone have such a great record. If you want to hire a good academic, you should focus on their academic work and teaching, not on what television programs they watch (even if it’s easier to do a quick google search than to look carefully at someone’s dissertation.) And if you want to win the division title every year, you have players do things because they actually work and are connected to developing their skills, not because they allow you to assert your author-i-tah or because your high school coach did it that way. You would think that this would be widely understood, but people like Cox and Mazzone are always a minority.

This can also be seen with respect to Billy Beane. The A’s probably won’t make the playoffs this year, but their record given their payroll and stage of development is remarkable; but, of course, he’s widely hated throughout baseball. The Seattle media for many years discussed the question of Beane vs. the Mariners management as if the question was actually open; uh, I think when the other team beats your brains out every year with a third of the payroll I don’t think there’s really a debate here. And the chief argument against Beane illustrates a misunderstanding of his method, which is sometimes boiled down to being about “statistics.” Beane was overrated, people argue, because the A’s were built on Hudson/Zito/Mulder, and hence their scouts. But that’s completely wrong. Mulder, admittedly, was widely recognized as a great prospect. But Hudson was considered by scouts to be too short, and Zito was considered a flake who didn’t have a good enough fastball. Beane drafted the latter two over the objections of his scouts. The key quote of Moneyball is “we’re not selling jeans here.” The core philosophy of Beane is that talent is about performance, not images. Statistics are part of it because they allow more accurate evaluation of performance, but they’re just a tool; it’s the general philosophy that matters. And the wisdom inherent in the rationality of a Mazzone or Beane goes well beyond baseball.

Count Hackula Tries Political Science

Shorter Mickey Kaus: The success of political parties is based entirely on their ability to implement objectively sound public policy and ignore the demands of narrow interest groups, which certainly explains the success of the Bush Administration and the DeLay-led Republican Party. Conversely, the decline of organized labor has obviously not hurt the Democrats in any way.

(Yglesias notes that in addition to the fact that he understands absolutely nothing about politics, he’s also wrong about the merits of the policy.)

Like Elisabeth Rohm Never Happened

Admittedly, I watched the first half while writing lectures/editing overdue papers, but tonight’s Law & Order must have been the best episode in many, many years. The plot was fairly interesting, although admittedly pretty similar to the one in which Edie Falco defended a guy who looks like Don Imus (“an irony he gets to ponder for the next 30 years in Attica”). There were some classic corkscrew ethics and a nice DA/ADA conflict. But–I know you won’t believe this–no courtroom scene turned into two lawyers reading position papers about the Iraq War or something; the logic of the story actually played itself out. (They must have used a script from 1996.) And then there was the highly questionable legal manipulations to produce a nice pro-state conclusion, which as a friend notes was always the defining characteristic of the show in its great years (although admittedly the rule of law has been subverted more egregiously in the past; here, just some abuse of judicial discretion.) And, of course, The Sopranos it wasn’t, but then it never was; just good solid middlebrow entertainment, rare enough these days.

Whether this is a fluke or a portends a serious improvement, I don’t know. But the couple post-Rohm episodes I caught last year did seemed OK, so maybe it’s righted itself a bit.

The Counterspin Theory of Language

My vote for the most unintentionally funny thing to appear on the political wing of the internets* is FactChuck admonishing the opponents of Janice Rogers Brown for using her words to imply that, she did, in fact, believe that Social Security was the same as eating human flesh. Brendan Nyhan, former proprietor of the similar and equally useless Spinsanity, is also a big believer in the theory that because he does not believe that words can ever convey anything other than their literal, decontextualized meaning, everyone else must share the belief too. Nyhan applies this new theory of language to Eric Alterman, with hilarious results. And then, in defending Nyhan, Justin Gardner says that I’m make a similar mistake as Alterman, although “he is the Alterman” in this debate. (I admit that I’m a little confused.)

So lest there be any confusion, when I titled this post “John Birch Lives,” I did not in fact mean that John Birch–or even Robert Welch–has risen from his grave and is attacking the International Islamist Conspiracy in zombiefied form. When I used the phrase “the shape that hates America” I was not attributing a belief to opponents of the memorial that the semicircular shape literally feels the emotion of hatred toward the United States. (Well, maybe Charles Johnson.) With respect to the shape/symbol distinction, Justin is simply begging the question. The point of my argument was that I completely reject the claim that a semicircle of maple trees constitutes a symbol of Islam simply because the shapes share some similarities, and proponents of this belief have not provided any evidence whatsoever that this symbolism was intended in any way. I am perfectly clear about the distinction between shapes and symbols, which is why I would not make such a silly conflation; it is people who believe that the Flight 93 memorial is a tribute to Islam who apparently are having trouble with this distinction.

*This phrase is a references to a statement made by President Bush. The author does not in fact believe that there are multiple internets.

Pull the Endorsement

Um, I think that this ends any significant debate on the question of whether NARAL was right to endorse Lincoln Chafee. The guy rolls on the first Supreme Court vote after the endorsement–so why is he being endorsed over a pro-choice Democrat again? What’s the logic here?

It’s the same lesson as Pataki vetoing over-the-counter Plan B as the opening salvo in one of the most pathetically futile presidential campaigns in living memory–in the current context, there is functionally no such thing as a pro-choice Republican. There’s always some reason for them to roll over for the party leadership, and the pressure required seems to get less and less. This was not always true historically, but it’s the case now. I’m not saying pro-choice groups should be mere appendages of the Democratic Party either, but they really need to adapt to this reality.

Moral Complexity and Choice

As Pseudo-Adrienne, Amanda, and Jessica all point out, this NYT article about the experience of women getting abortions is very good. However, there is one argument it contains that drives me crazy whenever I hear it:

While public conversation about abortion is dominated by advocates with all-or-nothing positions – treating the fetus as a complete person, with full rights, or as a nonentity, with none – most patients at the clinic, like most Americans, found themselves on rockier ground, weighing religious, ethical, practical, sentimental and financial imperatives that were often in conflict.

Now, it is true that the “pro-life” position pretty much empties decisions about abortion of moral complexity; criminalizing abortion does indeed deny the ability of women to make moral choices. But the reverse is most certainly not true. To advocate the legality of abortion is most certainly not to deny that the experience of getting an abortion is morally complex; moral reasoning is not limited to the universe of legal statutes. (It is true that pro-choicers do believe that the fetus has no legal rights, but this is quite different than saying that abortion therefore lacks any complex moral dimension.) The fact that I think the adultery should not be illegal doesn’t mean that I think that committing adultery doesn’t often raise grave moral questions, and similarly even when abortion is legal many women will struggle with various moral imperatives when deciding whether to get an abortion–and nobody denies this. The pro-choice position is not that abortion presents no difficult moral issues; it is that women should be taken seriously as moral agents. (This is a particularly strong contrast with pro-lifers who believe that abortion involves the murder of a human being but should not involve legal sanctions for a woman who procures one, a position which requires the belief that women have no moral agency at all.) Obviously, the fact that women are not compelled by the force of the state to carry pregnancies to term does not mean that the decision of an individual woman to get (or not get) an abortion is devoid of moral deliberation. It is those who wish to use the blunt instrument of state coercion to prevent all abortions who drain abortion of all of its moral and ethical complexities.

…Prof. B reminds us of her earlier work on the topic.

Contrarianism Justified

In light of the decision of the DOJ, discussed by various law-talkin’ people, to make prosecuting porn a “top priority”–apparently 9/11 “changed everything” by making counterterrorism less important–it’s hard not to see retrospective merit in Yglesias’ contrarian half-defense of John Ashcroft. Ashcroft was a bad AG because of his extremely reactionary views, but he was not a hack or an administration lickspittle. Gonzales, conversely, is a completely unqualified administration buttboy, and because he’s such a pandering hack he ends up having the same substantive problems as Ashcroft. The worst of all worlds.

This also seems like a good time to return to my own contrarian argument (see also here) that engaging in pandering about popular culture is not quite as harmless as people who see it as the Democrats’ road to victory would have you believe. Obviously, in any rational universe taking scarce resources away from fighting terrorism and other violent crime and putting it into suppressing porn would generate widespread derision and shred the administrations reputation for being “tough on terror” and “tough on crime.” The problem is that once you’re publicly committed to the position that Janet Jackson’s nipple is in fact an immense threat to the republic and that the federal government should be in the business of telling people what to watch (even if only through moral posturing and vague threats rather than censorship), it becomes rather difficult to make this case effectively.

For Those Who Find Mallard Fillmore Too Subtle And Well-Drawn…

…We bring you Gaggle!

…and the Editors bring you funnier Mallard Fillmore. If he can make Day-to-Day funnier he would be the best blogger in world history, but that’s a tall order.