Author Page for Scott Lemieux

200

Great.

Nice to see Pedro get #200 last night. (Oddly, it’s the second time I’ve seen a pitcher named “Martinez” win his 200th win live; I saw Dennis’ in Florida in 1993.) You’ll see that Pedro’s most comparable pitcher right now is Sandy Koufax. This, however, is misleading. Pedro is substantially better…

…BTW, speaking of ticket prices, the Mets are now using variable pricing; since it was the Braves, my mid-level ticket cost 5 bucks more than his first home start against the Nationals. And, yet, ticket pricing can never be variable enough to actually maximize revenue. I had assumed that there was a massive walkup, given that I got a very good ticket at 10 AM but there were more than 36,000 there, and according to the Times there were indeed more than 13,000 tickets sold yesterday. But, obviously, teams can’t know in advance that there will be a milestone at stake or a particular pitcher throwing on a given day, and game-day pricing would screw up advance sales, so they can’t take advantage of this huge spike in demand.

Sometimes I Think That Love is Just a Tumor: You’ve Got To Cut It Out

PSST…McCain is an unprincipled reactionary

Is there any more pathetic spectacle than the ongoing crush that some centrist liberals have on John McCain? Even liberals who one would think (Iraq excepted, of course) would know better, like Jon Chait, have fallen for his shtick. But given what’s transpired in the past four years, this mash note written by Jacob “Lord of the Eyelash” Weisberg is particularly embarrassing. Letting no evidence or logic stand in his way, remains unshakably convinced that McCain is really a social liberal: “the literal-minded left has McCain all wrong” sez Weisberg:

…McCain’s smoke signals spell out something different–an unsuccessful attempt to back away from a mandatory position he no longer believes in, if he ever really did. In August 1999, McCain said, “I’d love to see a point where Roe v. Wade is irrelevant, and could be repealed because abortion is no longer necessary. But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations.” This wasn’t a fluke comment–McCain said the same thing more than once. But his trial balloon was quickly shot down by the theo-cons, prompting him to abandon the experiment. The same thing happened again following McCain’s suggestion that the nutty Republican platform plank on the topic be rewritten, and again after he made the comment that if his daughter–who was 15 at the time–became pregnant, it would be up to her to decide whether to have an abortion. Despite his professions of fidelity, the pro-life lobby knows better than to trust him. Pro-choicers should similarly recognize that McCain is a hostage, not a hostage-taker, on this issue.

As Ace Rothstein said, there’s that explanation, and then there’s one that makes sense. Yes, McCain has, in the past, said that while he disagrees with Roe it might not be immediately practical to overturn it, and he has taken the radical position that it might not be desirable to pass a Constitutional amendment that would make abortion first-degree murder in all 50 states (as would, of course, any major Republican politician if the thing had any chance of passing.) On the other hand, he has recently come out in favor of South Dakota’s draconian (and illegal) law banning all abortions. Weisberg wants us to believe that the latter (which is not actually inconsistent with anything he’s said in the past) is the pander. Why should we believe that? Isn’t it just as likely that his previous comments were careful panders to the pro-choice majority, and the more recent comments reflect his actual beliefs? (Remember, in the 2000 primaries the religious right was already behind the other candidate, so his rational strategy was to appeal to voters who don’t care for the theocratic right.) If you, unlike Weisberg, don’t start with an a priori belief that McCain secretly agrees with you and all evidence to the contrary is therefore to be rejected, I don’t see why we would immediately accept that he’s only “pandering” now.

But wait: I left out the most crucial part. If there were just dueling statements, then Weisberg might have an argument. But as he concedes, McCain’s “literal-minded” critics “usually begin by complaining about his down-the-line anti-abortion voting record.” Well, sorry to be literal-minded and all, but isn’t his voting record kind of, you know, important? Weisberg is asking is to believe that, despite being a stated pro-lifer with a 0% NARAL rating, he’s really a closet pro-choicer. This is just silly. McCain may say it’s not practical to overturn Roe, but if he had his way Roe would already be gone, as he voted for Robert Bork to be the 5th vote to overturn it, and of course also voted for Thomas and Alito. It’s his pro-choice feints, not his consistent pro-life record, that are the dishonest pander.

And there’s a bigger problem here, what one may call the George Wallace problem. When it comes to politicians, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: what matters is the polices they enact, not their subjective beliefs. Maybe Weisberg is right that McCain is a “hostage” to the pro-life movement, just as Wallace was not so much a virulent racist as someone who played one when it was politically profitable. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. Whether he’s a “hostage” or “hostage taker” is irrelevant as long as his voting record is Santorumesque. Weisberg seems to think that after the primaries he will no longer be “hostage” to the pro-life movement, and will be free to tear off the mask and be the pro-choicer that appears nowhere in his public statements or voting record. But, of course, this isn’t true–Presidents are also subject to political pressures. The modern GOP strategy for winning federal elections is to use a motivated base to overcome counter-majoritarian positions on many domestic issues, and McCain–who has a history of emphasizing extremely unpopular cuts to middle-class entitlements rather than more popular tax cuts–will be particularly beholden to a high turnout for both election and re-election, and particularly unlikely to cross a base that doesn’t trust him. If he’s not willing to be anything but a hardcore anti-choicer as an unbeatable Senator, what makes you think he’ll suddenly turn into one when he needs a high turnout to have a decent shot of winning? Whatever he subjectively thinks about abortion, there’s every reason to believe that as President he’ll continue his reactionary policies on abortion and countless other issues when he’s in office. People waiting for the “real” moderate McCain to emerge are living on ice-cream castles in the air.

(Cross-posted to FDL. Graphic by Shakes Sis.)

…UPDATE: Alas, I’m afraid Chait is still being suckered.

The 9/11 Bedwetter Hawk Defined

In the Vodkapundit thread cited by Belle, I believe we have (4/7 6:39 AM) the definitive example of the wankosphere’s vast strategic acumen:

With respect to what else….

Every play Civilization?

I think Syria and Iran are next on the list. I’ve mentioned this before, but We should take on Syria by land and let the Israelis take out Iran’s nuke program. Then, if Iran decided it wanted to attack US in Iraq, our air and naval air forces could chew them up.

Like, Tehran is only being guarded by a phalanx and a warrior! All we have to do is send over a few caravels of elephants and their civilization will be officially colonized! And everyone knows that Baghdad is a booming metropolis with almost no resistance!

…OK, this might actually be more definitive.

The Real M/W Problem

Via Henry comes the good news that Jacob Levy is back to at least intermittent blogging, with a definitive take on the Mearsheimer/Walt controversy. Levy notes that “Mearsheimer and Walt are among the country’s leading scholars of security and of international power relations…it’s very far afield from being specialists in interest group politics, or in the nexus between interest group politics and policy formation, or in the domestic political sources of foreign policy. (Indeed, they’re committed to not being specialists in that last, which is part of the problem.)” That, I think it the fundamental problem; not anti-Semitism, but a quite remarkably unsophisticated take on how interest group politics affects policy-making. Consider this footnote, which Levy calls “the worst paragraph of political science I’ve read in many years”:

The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.

That is indeed profoundly embarrassing; not because it’s being used as a cover for anti-Semitism, but because it makes clear that M/W fail to grasp even the most rudimentary insights of the contemporary literature of the field they’re working within here. As Levy says, they’re working within a theory that discounts the effects of domestic politics, and the paper just doesn’t take the nature of domestic policy-making seriously, which leads them to obvious howlers.

Pop-Soc Buzzwords Are Not a Plan

Walter ShapiroKirn, guest-blogging Chez Sully, has a great post about the use of the phrase “the tipping point” as a contemporary update of the “domino effect,” with roughly the same empirical validity. I’ve noted that Jon Chait–an excellent thinker when not writing about Iraq or John McCain (more about the latter later)–used this buzzword where an argument about where the mythical hundreds of thousands of troops needed to secure Iraq were going to come from and what evidence existed that Bush was going to send them should have been. But it’s even worse to see Rumsfeld himself invoking it although the concept itself has nothing to do with regime change. As Shapiro asks:

Behind every failed war is a failed metaphor (remember The Domino Effect, the Vietnam-era version of The Tipping Point?) that mesmerized its masters into waging it, kept them waging it once they started losing it, and immobilized them with disbelief when it turned back into intellectual smoke. From business-section bestseller to Pentagon battle-plan. Only in America. And it was a phony, decrepit notion to start with, despite being updated for today’s executives and cleverly remarketed to every no one who ever dreamed of being a someone by working at home, in his or her spare time. The idea that one straw can break the camel’s back, that one well-placed lever can move the world, that one added particle can bring on “critical mass” is the delusion that wears a thousand faces. It’s the manic creed of the assassin: fire a single bullet, alter history. The principle rarely works when applied on purpose, but because it quite often works by accident (or seems to have worked, when viewed in retrospect; Henry Ford built his Model T and, presto, freeways!) it never loses its appeal.

What’s next? The Freakonomics war? The Six-Sigma attack against Iran? The Blink campaign against global terrorism? Capturing Osama the Warren Buffett Way?

…Since I misattributed Walter Kirn‘s work to Walter Shapiro, allow me to link to one of my favorite exquisitely mean reviews of recent years:

This style does create an effect and have a point, but it’s an old effect and an ancient point, of approximately the same vintage as Plexiglas coffee tables, ”2001: A Space Odyssey” and Yale University faculty fondue parties. For going on 50 years now, educated Europeans and Americans have been satirizing unbridled materialism, rampant dehumanization and the like consistently and pretty much en masse (though perhaps not to much effect in the real world). This particular nightmare vision of sleek despair and medium cool existential aimlessness has been smelling stale for quite a while now, as riddled with trite conventions and canned attitudes as late medieval chivalric poetry.

I’m an admirer of DeLillo, but Cosmopolis was pretty disastrous…

Slate: Lords of the Realm of Illogic I

William Saletan’s latest piece comparing the “war on smoking” to an upcoming “war on obesity” rests on two clearly erroneous underlying premises, one of them fatal. The somewhat less important one is the uncritical relating of the claim of “federal officials” that “would soon surpass tobacco as the chief cause of preventable death.” But, unlike tobacco, obesity as an independent variable is in fact a trivial source of preventable death. Eating trans-fats-laden food and the other behaviors Saletan discusses do have potentially serious deleterious health effects, but this is true whether the behaviors make one obese or not. Since he mostly discusses the behaviors, though, this doesn’t necessarily sink his argument.

What does sink the argument is that the central analogy is self-evidently specious. He spends the first paragraph discussing “bans” on smoking. But, of course, none of these are “bans” per se; they are bans of smoking in enclosed public places. Kind of odd–tobacco doesn’t become less toxic when you do it in your home, does it? Oh, right–these restrictions on smoking are put in place because smoking directly affects third parties. In one of the linked articles, Denmark’s health minister actually grasps the issue: “The government’s goal is very clear: to know that you can walk around without being exposed to cigarette smoke against your will.” Since I’ve never had someone force-feed me fries at a bar, Saletan’s whole argument is rendered moot. The legitimate reason for regulating smoking is not to control the tradeoffs that individuals make between pleasure and health risks, but to prevent people from being involuntarily exposed to health risks. The government does have a role in regulating unhealthy foods in some of the ways it regulates tobacco by ensuring that the public is making informed choices; it is good policy for the government to require labels on fast food, educate the public about trans-fats and other health risks, etc. But the way Saletan frames the debate obscures more reasonable solutions.

And what’s odd about this is how lazy it is. Saletan can’t possibly be so obtuse as to not understand the difference between risking your own health and risking the health of others, just as he can’t possibly believe that every federal election is a plebiscite on the legality of abortion. And, yet, he’s willing to make these arguments anyway. That neither he nor his employers can be bothered to think through his arguments beyond the most superficial level, or that he doesn’t think his audience will notice, says a lot about the norms of contemporary punditry.

Michael Kay Whore Watch

I come home from a movie and turn on Al-Yankeezera to see what the final score was. Bottom 9th, 1-2 pitch to Torri Hunter, Twins down a run, runners on second and third.

Kay: “Strike three called. Right down the middle!”

[Replay shows pitch crossing the plate at least 3 inches inside.]

Kay: “Hunter can say what he wants, but you can’t take that pitch with 2 strikes!”

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending.

The Mythical Ticket/Payroll Connection

It’s nice to see King Kaufman tackle a particularly stupid element of sports labor-bashing, the idea that increasing ticket prices are due to high salaries:

A Sox fan named Don Watts made the old connection between salaries and high prices to a reporter from the Fitchburg Sentinel and Enterprise who wrote about high prices in general, at the stadium and around it.

“I wish some of the players would think more about the game than about how much money they’re making,” Watts said. “The more money they make, the harder it is for us to go see them.”

That’s a funny thing to say right outside Fenway Park, which has by far the highest ticket prices in baseball, but by far not the baseball team with the highest payroll. That team, of course, is the New York Yankees, with an Opening Day payroll of $194 million, give or take a Bubba Crosby or two. The Red Sox are second at $120 million, according to USA Today’s figures.

The average ticket at Fenway Park, Team Marketing Report’s annual survey says, costs $46.46 this year, $12.16 more than the second-highest average ticket, at Wrigley Field. Yankee Stadium ducats go for an average of $28.27, fourth highest in baseball, just behind those at the St. Louis Cardinals’ new Busch Stadium.

So the Red Sox’s payroll is about 62 percent of the Yankees’ payroll, but their tickets cost 64 percent more on average.

As the excellent baseball business analyst Maury Brown points out in the Hardball Times, of the 10 teams that lowered payroll from 2005 to 2006, only one of them, the Colorado Rockies, also lowered ticket prices. Seven of them raised prices and two held steady.

The Florida Marlins slashed their payroll by 75 percent and raised ticket prices 7 percent.

What is it the players should be thinking about again?

Ticket prices are high for the same reasons salaries are high, which are the same reasons parking near Fenway is high. Scarcity and what the market will bear. There are only so many seats at major league ballparks, and hardly any available ones at the popular parks. There are only so many guys good enough to play in the major leagues, and hardly any good enough to play well. And there are hardly any places to park within a comfortable walk of Fenway.

What’s remarkable about the persistence of this myth is that it’s both utterly illogical and transparently wrong in practice. In theory, it’s obvious that you set ticket prices at the level that roughly maximizes revenues, a point that is the same whether your payroll is nothing or 500 million. (A higher payroll may lead to increased ticket prices because it increases demand, but it’s the demand and not the payroll that’s doing the work.) And in practice, even more instructive than Kaufman’s examples is to look at the NCAA. NCAA players are so ruthlessly exploited as to be a sportswriter’s wet dream–which much make the games dirt cheap to attend, right? But, of course, if you want season tickets to watch, say, University of Florida football from the “Touchdown Terrace” it will cost you $200…plus a $1,200 booster club “contribution.” Or about 230 bucks a (regular season) game. Think of how expensive it would be if those damned greedy players were paid anything!
But other than the fact that it’s both illogical and empirically wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the idea that high ticket prices are because of high salaries. The way in which both so many fans and sportswriters seem to believe that everything they don’t like about sports–whether alleged “competitive balance” problems or high ticket prices–would be solved if only the owners kept more money is quite remarkable.

This isn’t to say that I like the status quo. Sure, I wax nostalgic for the fact that when I moved to Montreal in 1990 you could get bleacher tickets for C$1 and great seats for less than C$30. I suppose I should see a game at Yankee Stadium at some point, but even a ticket in the “tier box”–a pretty terrible seat–will run you $40, and even a mediocre-at-best “Field Box” $60. Or, rather, the latter would–except that they’re completely sold out for the season. And of course, that’s the point. The Yankees have extraordinarily high ticket prices (although, as Kaufman notes, still cheaper than Fenway)–and last Thursday they drew 54,381 fans. For a weekday day game. In April. Against the worst team in baseball. (If anything, their ticket prices are probably irrationally low at this point; I’m sure they could tack on at least 10 bucks across the board on the high end tickets and still sell them out for every game.) And that’s drives ticket prices–not payroll. If the demand wasn’t there, they could pay their players $500 million and they wouldn’t be able to raise ticket prices a cent.

Reproductive Freedom Roundup

• I think it’s correct to say that it’s frequently “a background assumption of the conversation — so much so that neither participant questions it — that women have the ability to plan how many children they will have. No one even asks how it is that women will be able to make this decision; it’s taken for granted. And I wonder how often do we have a conversation with a casual, background assumption that families will be able to plan the number of children they will have.” In this sense–as we can see by the number of people in South Dakota who voted for Republicans on tax or agriculture issues and got an atavistic abortion ban instead–the pro-choice movement has been a victim of its own success. A lot of women don’t have to think of abortion as a political issue; when they discuss things like whether to have a planned c-section, its availability is just an underlying assumption rather than something which requires struggle to achieve. One potential positive that can be derived from the less-disingenuous-than-usual success of the forced pregnancy lobby South Dakota is that it might make that point clear. But it won’t just happen– pro-choicers have to be proactive about it.
• Matt does a great job with the obvious unseriousness of attempting to ban Mifepristone on “public health” grounds. Given that it’s both safer than many other drugs nobody is trying to ban but also far safer than childbirth, there’s obviously no principled justification that doesn’t circle back to wanting to restrict abortion rights. (And, of course, we have yet more examples of what a pathetic dodge the focus on late-term abortions is; people who were serious about avoiding them, as opposed to using them as a rhetorical wedge to get much broader regulations passed, would want to make RU-486 more easily available.)
• The ratcheting-up of silliness with respect to pharmacists interposing themselves between the people with the actual authority to write prescriptions and the medical interests of their patients in order to impose your moral convictions on others (which has now extended beyond dishonest claims about Plan B to reach to giving antibiotics and vitamins to women who make moral choices that you don’t like) compels me to point out again how ludicrous the claims that such actions constitute acts of “principle.” The “principled” action in this case would be to say that “because I cannot in good conscience dispense drugs that are, er, accessories after the fact to abortion or something–I’m sure it it’s in the Bible somewhere if you squint really hard, and if James Dobson books are religious texts–I must resign.” Conversely, the argument that “I should continue to get paid although I refuse to do my job” is the antithesis of an act of principle. It’s sure easy to be “principled” if this means “never having to accept any negative consequences for your actions.”

On Fish And Originalism

One strange thing about Stanley Fish’s defense of an originalism based on discovering the intentions of the author is that most defenders of originalism see the obvious fallacy involved. In addition to Scalia, who Fish mentions, even Robert Bork’s notoriously flimsy defense of originalism understands that “[t]he requirement that the judge know what the specific intention of the lawgiver was regarding the case at hand would destroy all law.” (TTOA, 162) In addition to the philosophical problems Matt notes is the additional problem that when it comes to law there is no meaningful individual “intent” because statutes and constitutional provisions have multiple authors, and hence multiple subjective intentions. Indeed, many of the most interesting problems of statutory and constitutional interpretation arise because ambiguity is useful in generating the support necessary to ratify them; different actors can assume that they mean different things. As Bork and Scalia realize, if you define originalism in this way, then originalism fails as a grand theory before you even get out of the starting blocks.

This also explains why Fish can go in this direction, since he is quite open about the fact that originalism completely fails to produce anything resembling determinate results. And Fish is also right, of course, that Scalia and Bork’s textualist originalism–while passing one obvious killer objection–also completely fails to produce determinate results. To talk about deriving determinate meanings from broad and/or ambiguous texts ultimately runs into all the same problems that the cruder form of originalism has. This can be easily seen by looking at originalist defenses of Brown v. Board. It’s not strictly accurate to say that you can’t come up a plausible originalist defense of Brown, but you can do so only by defining legal principles at such a high level of abstraction that anybody can call themselves an “originalist,” and this then leads you to Dworkin’s point that choosing among the multiple level of abstraction at which constitutional principles can be read is something for which “originalism” provides no help, permitting the “originalist” judge to make arbitrary choices that are congenial to the outcome she desires. And even in cases in which originalism would seem to produce a fairly compelling result, in practice its purported adherents generally feel free to set it aside. But I don’t think Fish’s move backward solves any of these problems, and it remains unclear why the point of interpretive work “will always and necessarily be the specification of intention.”

The Strange Decline of Ressentiment

Odd; maybe it’s that I had a good news/company/food kinda day, but I’m actually inclined to celebrate the 2005-6 Northwest Division champions while noting the admittedly glorious Canucks elimination as a secondary item. Of course, the ressentiment frame doesn’t really fit in this case anyway, since I cheer for the marginally more historically successful team.

I would like to say that I am also happier when the Mariners win than when the Yankees lose, but let’s just say I was dancing up and down in my apartment when the Diamondbacks won the 2001 World Series…

The Guy Who Screwed Up My Order At the Drive Through? He Wanted Hitler To Conquer Europe!

William Kristol–who I would say was “phoning it in” except that punching the numbers on the phone requires effort; it’s more like that Alec Baldwin “how to be a handsome actor” sketch where you just pick up the phone and start talking, or in this case recycling ludicrously inappropriate analogies–doesn’t even bother with a serious argument and heads straight for Munich like any fourth-rate blogger for whom “Peace In Our Time” is the only knowledge about foreign affairs not derived from Civ 2:

IN THE SPRING OF 1936–seventy years ago–Hitler’s Germany occupied the Rhineland. France’s Leon Blum denounced this as “unacceptable.” But France did nothing. As did the British. And the United States.

In a talk last year, Christopher Caldwell quoted the great Raymond Aron’s verdict: “To say that something is unacceptable was to say that one accepted it.” Aron further remarked that Blum had in fact seemed proud of France’s putting up no resistance. Indeed, Blum had said, “No one suggested using military force. That is a sign of humanity’s moral progress.” Aron remarked: “This moral progress meant the end of the French system of alliances, and almost certain war.”

Look, enough already. The analogy with Iran and Nazi Germany is a little better than it was when it was dusted off three years ago; Iran going nuclear would actually be a security threat to the United States, while Hussein for all intents and purposes posed no security threat to the United States at all. But all analogies with Chamberlain are null until Iran has the potential capacity to conquer and initiate full-scale genocide over a large region, or in other words not in any foreseeable future. Iran having nuclear weapons is certainly suboptimal, but at least two nasty Stalinist regimes have had nuclear weapons and the republic still stands, with its gravest security threats having nothing to do with either. These analogies are pathetically quarter-assed smear jobs, glossing over every difficult question.

It’s also worth noting that the purported domino effect that the Iraq war would purportedly unleash throughout the middle east, causing dictators to surrender in trembling fear to pro-American and -Israeli liberal democracies, seems not to be working in this case. Strange. It’s almost as if invading a country for no obvious reason makes it all the more important for states to acquire nuclear weapons. What a surprise!