Defying international law, Jewish Settlers continue to evict Palestinians from their homes and demolish their homes. According to this report from Al Jazeera, this pattern has been recurring all over East Jerusalem.
Sometimes, I cannot comprehend how the United States of America has come to occupy the landscape that it has in the year 2009. Growing up, I learned in school about all of the wonderful things that the United States had done for the world. Out of the tyranny that the British Empire had become, our forefathers had the temerity and the moral fortitude to announce to the world that we would be building a new kind of nation– one in which the rights of the individual would trump government power. People were inherently vested with natural rights, inalienable rights. Our First Amendment- the right to speak freely, to worship (or not) as one pleases, free press, who could ask for a better check on governmental power? Can the government force the citizenry to quarter soldiers?
Not here, we’ve got the Constitution! Governments stopping people for no reason, or on trumped-up charges? No way, we’ve got the 4th Amendment! To be sure, there were some stark contradictions, but I didn’t realize those until I was a little older. I mean, it’s a little hard to take seriously those that would lecture on the topic of liberty while being slave-owners, but the overall idea was pretty great.
We were the force for truth and justice and all that is right. We proved it, too. We fought tyranny in World War II, the most recent (winning) war. We saw the evil that was done in the name of National Socialism, Fascism, or whatever label you want to use. We saw the evil in those Nazi bastards and we would have none of it– and rightly so. The indescribable acts of torture and dehumanization were enough to turn anyone’s stomach. I read Night, as well as some other works by holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and was moved to tears. I looked at the photographs of the concentration camps and saw the shivering, starving groups of people blankly staring at the camera lens. I saw the piles of bodies- massive piles of them! What kind of people could order (or commit?) these horrible, despicable acts? What kind of person could so callously cause the suffering of their fellow human beings? The Nazi experiment was a singular example of the brutality that one group could inflict on another. There is no crime so heinous that it could compare to the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The scale of the suffering defies understanding– we named it The Holocaust. [More . . . ]
Caroline Baum, a columnist for Bloomberg News, had this to say in an August 12 column about health care reform:
Take the issue of a public option. How can the private insurance industry survive with a not-for-profit government plan charging a pittance?
Ms. Baum has overlooked some basic facts that would undermine this claim. Namely, in America, there are public universities competing with private universities, public hospitals competing with private hospitals, public libraries competing with private bookstores, and a public post office competing with private package delivery companies. To cite an even more obvious example, there are already public, not-for-profit government plans like Medicare competing with private insurers. Even in Europe, where most countries already offer universal public health coverage, private insurers still operate.
In none of these instances has the public alternative put private competitors out of business. Why on earth would this suddenly change if the U.S. Congress created a public health insurance option?
It’s time that America passed a federal law which requires that any time former Vice President Dick Cheney is mentioned or featured in the broadcast media, that the attached “Darth Vader” theme clip from Lego Star Wars be played:
If Mr. Cheney actually speaks—which he no longer does because he prefers not to be questioned further about secret assassination squads which he apparently set up and then ordered the CIA not to disclose such actions to the Congress as mandated by federal law.
—federal law should require that in every such instance there also be an interpreter to interpret for the Penguin-speak impaired.
There should be no expiration date on this law.
The US Supreme Court carved out a narrow and near unanimous decision today which retains the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. All justices concurred in the opinion which remanded the case back to the District Court for further proceedings but, there was a partial dissent filed by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.
The NW Austin Municipal Utility District filed an action to be removed from the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act or to declare the statute unconstitutional insofar as it mandated the District be subject to the 2006 enactment of such requirement. The Supreme Court declined to declare Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, and instead carved out a more limited remedy for political entities such as the utility district to have a private right to file suit to be removed from the pre-clearance requirement (presumably if the DOJ does not allow a “bail out”).
In his concurrence Associate Justice Thomas also dissented in part, arguing in favor of striking down the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, making the claim that;
Covered jurisdictions are not now engaged in a systematic campaign to deny black citizens access to the ballot through intimidation and violence. And the days of…’property qualifications’ …are gone. There is thus currently no concerted effort in these jurisdictions to engage in the ‘unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution’ that served as the constitutional basis for upholding the ‘uncommon exercise of congressional power embodied in [Section] 5’ (citations omitted).
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It is in fact the case that since 1986, there have been “some 200 cases in which the voter change was withdrawn after DOJ objection” according to Associate Justice Souter in the oral arguments of the case. Associate Justice Breyer in the same oral argument noted that “[s]ince 1982 there were at least 105 successful Section 5 suits and 653 Section 2 suits.”
Justice Thomas went on:
I work as a trial lawyer. My work presents me with a substantial challenge every day. I work hard to represent my clients as best I can and my job requires me to constantly think of presenting their cases with their best feet forward. But I’m tormented by the confirmation bias.
Because we work hard for our clients and we want to believe in their cases, we tend to see their cases the way we want to see their cases. It’s too easy to get excited about the evidence in my client’s favor and it’s all too easy to overlook the evidence that can hurt my client’s case. How’s that lawsuit coming? It’s always looking pretty decent, it seems, because my natural inclination is to stay upbeat about the case by assuming that the courtroom jury will see the case the same way I want to see it.
If I really want to represent my clients well, however, I need to do better than that. Even though I might tend to minimize the importance of the evidence that hurts my client’s case, my opponent will not overlook that dangerous evidence. My opponent will zero in on it and jam it down my throat at trial. What I really need is to be able to see my case the same way my opponent sees my case, so that I can be a better lawyer. I somehow need to take off my rose colored glasses.
One simple way to do this is to find a quiet place and pretend that that I am my own opponent, but that is much easier said than done. Once again, the confirmation bias is the culprit. It’s really difficult to turn one’s biases upside down.
Over the years, my firm has discovered that conducting “focus groups” is a much better way to see the weaknesses of our own cases. What is a focus group? It is a random unbiased group of people we hire to tell us what they really think about our cases. Here’s how we do it: we hire a group of about 30 people (from a temporary employment agency) for three or four hours on Saturday morning, and sit them down in a big conference room. We don’t tell them which side of the lawsuit we represent. We read them detailed descriptions about our lawsuit. First of all, we give them the “neutral” facts. Then we give them the facts favoring the plaintiff, and then the facts favoring the defendant. We listen in while they deliberate and they eventually give us their verdict.
We also give the focus group “jurors” multiple sets of questionnaires though0ut the process. We give them the first set of questionnaires even before they hear the neutral facts. After all, we want to know what they think about lawsuits in general. What do you think about people who sue? What do they think about big corporations? What do they think about intellectual property cases or consumer fraud cases? After we give our jurors the neutral facts, we give them another questionnaire:
What do you think about this case so far? As we give them more and more facts, we follow it up with more questionaires so that we can track their thought processes.
What’s really delightful is that these people, who are simply there to give their opinions, tell it to us straight. Sometimes, they tell us that we have a strong case. Equally often they tell us that our case doesn’t impress them, and they tell us why. They tell us that they don’t like the plaintiff, or that they sympathize with the defendant, or that our key piece of evidence is not impressive. What’s important is that they actually tell us what they think, and they don’t hold back at all.
When the jurors tell us that our case is weak, it’s a very good thing (although it doesn’t feel good when we first hear it). When they tell us that our case is weak, we are forced to confront reality. When the “jurors” tell us that a key piece of our client’s evidence is unimpressive, there’s no use trying to kid ourselves about it anymore, and it provokes us to reevaluate the way we present our case. Maybe there’s other evidence that we can use to make that point better. Or maybe we will learn that our client’s case is not impressive to matter how we might present it in a real-life courtroom. If so, we have still learned an incredibly important bit of information. If our case is fatally flawed, it’s time to approach the opponent and talk settlement.
On many occasions, we have intentionally stacked the deck against our own case, enhancing our opponent’s evidence and downplaying (or even omitting) the evidence favoring our own client. That way, we can learn what a group of neutral jurors thinks about our opponent’s best foot forward. The bottom line is that when we spin our client’s case against our own client, we learn some incredibly important things that are otherwise difficult to predict or understand. There is simply nothing like having a truly neutral group of individuals weighing-in on a matter in which you yourself are highly biased. The bottom line is that we gain immensely from the process no matter what the focus group “jurors” conclude.
I’ve been thinking a lot about focus groups because we’ve assembled quite a few focus groups over the past couple of months on a variety of cases. It occurred to me that it would be wonderful for non-lawyers to have access to focus groups too. This isn’t a practical suggestion, since assembling a focus group would take a significant financial outlay. But consider this thought experiment: a married couple gets into a heated argument, the wife suggesting that the husband doesn’t do his fair share of the chores and imagine the husband arguing that the wife spends too much money on non-necessities. This is a classic non-resolvable argument. Without a focus group, this married couple will usually end up resenting each other for even bringing up these emotionally-charged topics. Nothing will get resolved. 
But imagine how different things could be if a focus group were available to help out. Imagine bringing 20 randomly chosen people into the living room, sitting them down. First, the wife could stand up and talk for ten minutes, and then the husband could have his turn. The focus group “jurors” could then deliberate right front of the married couple and reach their “verdict.” “Yes,” they might tell the husband. “You do need to cut the grass more often and your wife is right that you need to engage in more foreplay.”
Just imagine the many applications for focus groups! Consider an employee having a dispute with her supervisor at work. Was she unfairly overlooked for that promotion? Or imagine a young parent getting angry with her own mother for meddling with how she raises her own children. Was Grandma meddling? Bring in the focus group and get some valuable feedback! Do you think that waiter at the restaurant was being rude? Bring in the focus group! Do you think the neighbor should turn down the stereo? Focus group!
Maybe somebody could even set up a service, “Focus groups for every occasion,” where you would dial 1-800-FOCUS and enter your credit card. Then you’d be put into contact with a telephone conference call includes a dozen neutral jurors ready to weigh in on any dispute you like to present to them. $10 per minute to get real guidance on any serious problem you’d like to present? It could be a bargain. This would be much better than ranting to your friends, who will always tend to agree with you. You need people with no loyalties and no bias. You need a group of hired guns who will tell you what they really think, regardless of how much it might hurt your feelings.
Bottom line? You dial 1-800-FOCUS, you present your case honestly and succinctly and then, after the focus jury tells you that you’re full of shit, you gather the composure to thank the jurors. Then you act on their unbiased advice: “Sorry, [Honey, boss, daughter, mother], I consulted the focus jury, I was wrong, and I’m ready to make some changes in my life.”
If only.
Recently on Dangerous Intersection, an article was posted about the problem of Power in relation to truth. I wrote a response and decided to post it here, at more length, as a short essay on the (occasionally etymological) problem of Truth.
When people start talking about what is true or not, they tend to use the word like a Swiss Army knife. It means what they want it to mean when they point at something. Truth is a slippery term and has many facets. Usually, in casual conversation, when people say something is true, they’re usually talking something being factual. Truth and fact are conjoined in many, possibly most, instances, but are not the same things. The “truth” of a “fact” can often be a matter of interpretation, making conversation occasionally problematic.
The problem is in the variability of the term “truth”—like many such words, we stretch it to include things which are related but not the same. There is Truth and then there is Fact. 2 + 2 = 4 is a fact. It may, if analyzed sufficiently, yield a fundamental “truth” about the universe, but in an of itself it is only a fact.
When someone comes along and insists, through power (an assertion of will), that 2 + 2 = 5, the “truth” being challenged is not in the addition but in the relation of the assertion to reality and the intent of the power in question. The arithmetic becomes irrelevant. Truth then is in the relationship being asserted and the response to it. The one doing the asserting and the one who must respond to the assertion.
Similarly, in examples of law, we get into difficulty in discussions over morality. Take for instance civil rights era court decisions, where there is a conflation of ethics and morality. They are connected, certainly, but they are not the same thing. Ethics deal with the proper channels of response within a stated system—in which case, Plessy vs Fergusson could be seen as ethical given the criteria upon which it was based. But not moral, given a larger criteria based on valuations of human worth. To establish that larger criterion, overturning one system in favor of another, would require a redefintion of “ethical” into “unethical”, changing the norm, for instance in Brown vs The Board of Education. The “truth” of either decision is a moving target, albeit one based on a priori concepts of human value as applied through ethical systems that adapt.
Who would have thought that intellectual property issues would maintain such a high-profile position in the daily news. Here’s another item. Just imagine how much things have changed in the music recording industry. Consider this excerpt by Trent Reznor (of the band Nine Inch Nails), appearing in contactmusic.com:
“One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract. I said, ‘Wait - you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it? Who the f**k made that rule? Oh! The record labels made it because artists are dumb and they’ll sign anything’ - like I did.
As reported by Marie Cocco at Alternet:
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just signed a law that forces women to obey their husbands’ sexual demands, keeps women from leaving the house — even for work or school — without a husband’s permission, automatically grants child custody rights to fathers and grandfathers before mothers, and favors men in inheritance disputes and other legal matters. In short, the law again consigns Afghan women to lives of brutal repression. . .
The ugly truth is that Afghanistan has long been sliding back into the violent chaos that is friendly political ground for the Taliban and other extremist groups. Women have, as usual, been among the chief victims.
George Will’s recent journalistic malpractice has inspired much discussion by many people concerned about climate change. It’s a critically important issue given that 41% of Americans currently think that the threat of global warming is being exaggerated by the media.
The intellectual energy runs even deeper than criticism of George Will, though, leading us to the fundamental issue of how journalists and readers can distinguish legitimate
science from sham (or politicized) science. The Washington Post recently agreed to publish a precisely-worded response to Will by Christopher Mooney. Here’s Mooney’s opener:
A recent controversy over claims about climate science by Post op-ed columnist George F. Will raises a critical question: Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?
Mooney methodically takes Will to task on point after point. For instance, weather is not the same thing as the climate. The state of the art in 1970s climate science has been superseded by 2007 climate science. You can’t determine long-term trends in Arctic ice by comparing ice thickness only on two strategically picked days.
The bottom line is not surprising. If you want to do science well you have to do it with precision, measuring repeatedly, crunching the numbers every which way and then drawing your conclusions self-critically. What is not allowed is cherry picking.
Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists — following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It’s also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be — now more than ever.
Mooney has given considerable thought to these topics. His byline indicates that he is the author of “The Republican War on Science” and co-author of the forthcoming “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.”
I would supplement Mooney’s well-written points, borrowing from our federal courts. They have long been faced with the struggle to determine what is real science and what is junk science, and they have settled on what is now called the “Daubert” test, (named after the case first applying the test, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579 (1993)). The Daubert analysis is applied many times every day in all federal courts (and many state courts) all across America.
The problem facing judges is that the parties to law suits often produce experts who express scientific theories and explanations that are never heard outside of courtrooms. This justifiably makes judges suspicious. Is the witness doing “real” science or his he/she doing sham science to further the interests of the party paying his/her bills? The Daubert test asks the judge to serve as gatekeeper, to make sure that only legitimate science sees the light of day in courtrooms. Here are the relevant factors:
Positive answers to each of these factors suggests that the witness is doing real science. Astrology would fail this test miserably.
Applied to climate science, the Daubert test would require that we listen carefully to what the scientists talk about with each other, in person and in their peer-reviewed journals. Daubert would require that we know enough about the techniques of climate science to know how it makes its measurements and conclusions. Daubert would certainly require that we know the difference between the weather and the climate.
Applying Daubert is not simply a matter of listening to the scientists. Quite often, the scientists are bought and paid for (e.g., scientists working for tobacco companies and corrupt pharmaceutical companies). Applying Daubert requires taking the time to understand how the science works to solve real-world questions and problems and then taking the time to see that its methodology is being used with rigor in this application. There are no shortcuts, expecially for outsider non-scientists.
No shortcuts. No cherry-picking.
Arianna Huffington has just released her new book, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. Huffington has reviewed the main themes of her book at Huffpo.
In the book, Huffington concludes that there are three main areas to consider in order to understand [...]
Philosophy majors are not getting rich, but they’re able to buy enough food to allow them to sit around and ponder things. Truth be told, philosophy majors are at the bottom of the list in starting salaries. As someone who majored in philosophy, I found these statistics to be of interest. In my junior year of undergrad, [...]
I just found another interesting article at the U.N. Observer. It reports on the recent dismissal of a suit for damages filed by prisoners being held at Guantanamo:
In a 43-page opinion, Circuit Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all “persons” did not [...]
