"Women Don't Care About Contraception"

The Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, does not seem to think that women care about contraception.  If that is a mainstream view among Republican leaders, I am willing to bet they are a bit out of touch with the concerns of American women.

The Occupy Movement

It seems like the Occupy Movement is still going, despite what appears to be little or no mainstream media coverage. 

I do not own a TV and follow the mainstream media mostly via their websites, so I could be very wrong about the lack of mainstream media coverage.  Does anyone know whether the major networks have been covering the Occupy Movement?

On the other hand, I get email updates of some of the things happening in New York City.  At times, I am being told that the marchers have filled up the street for four or five city blocks.  That could easily be a thousand or more people.  But, again, the media seems to be silent on these protests, which are now happening frequently.

Is it news that the Occupy Movement appears to be coming back after the winter?

Are the Republicans Against Obama, or Against a Fiction They Call "Obama"?

Bill Maher strikes me as making an interesting point here when he states that "Republicans have created an entirely fictional President [Obama]" that they are running against instead of running against the real Obama.  The things the Republican candidates are saying about Obama are simply not true, but are widely believed by the Republican Base. 

According to Maher, this is largely a Republican thing.  That is, the Democrats by and large did not make things up about Bush when running against him, but Bush made things up about Kerry when running against him.

I think Maher might have a point.  And, if so, I wonder how much of the situation could be owed to the Republicans having their own media outlets in the Fox News Network and Clearwater Communications.  Neither one of those outlets provides a fair and balanced view of the world, but rather puts a conservative spin on things, which could go far in allowing the Republican Base to live in a little bubble, rather than to confront reality.

But what do you think?  Is there any truth to what Maher says?

The Amazing Success of Trickle Down Economics

Source

Some folks insist that anyone who is for raising taxes on the top 1% is engaging in class warfare.  But as Warren Buffett said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

About 2000 years ago, Plutarch observed, "An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."  It will be interesting to see whether America has the political will to save its republic.

Slouching Towards America's "Lost Decade"

I am re-posting the following article by Mark Weisbrot, with permission, because I think it speaks to one of the major issues facing the US -- as well as many other nations.

As you may know, the focus of the politicians has been on austerity -- cutting the budget -- despite that jobs are what most people want the politicians to focus on. Consequently, some folks are now predicting that, if the current focus continues, full employment will wait years to be achieved.

Such an outcome would be morally obscene and result in massive suffering.

The original article was first published on January 10th, in The Guardian (UK), under the heading, The Economic Idiocy of Economists.  Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.

The American Economic Association's annual meetings are a scary sight, with thousands of economists all gathered in the same place – a veritable weapon of mass destruction. Chicago was the lucky city for 2012 this past weekend, and I had just finished participating in an interesting panel on "the economics of regime change", when I stumbled over to see what the big budget experts had to say about "the political economy of the US debt and deficits".

The session was introduced by UC Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach, who put up a graph of the United States' rising debt-to-GDP ratio, and warned of dire consequences if Congress didn't do something about it. Yawn.

But the panelists got off to a good start, with Alan Blinder of Princeton, former vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve, describing the public discussion of the US national debt as generally ranging from "ludicrous to horrific". True, that. He asked and answered four questions.

First, is there any urgency (to reduce the deficit or debt)? No. The government can borrow short term at negative real interest rates, and long-term at about zero. The world is paying us to hold their money. That is anything but a debt crisis. The Fed is out of bullets, he said – referring to the fact that the US Federal Reserve had lowered short-term rates to zero and had used quantitative easing to help keep long-term rates low. So we need more fiscal stimulus, preferably spending that focuses on actually creating jobs. Amen.

Second, should we focus on the next decade? No, he said, and noted that the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO's) budget deficit projections over the next decade are about 3.6% of GDP, which is not much to get agitated about. Also true.

Third, is government spending the problem? No, he said, it's healthcare costs, and mainly the rising price of healthcare (that is, not the ageing of the population). Most important truth yet! (More on this below.)

Fourth, is the public really up in arms about the deficit? No, actually, they care more about the economy and jobs. As they should.

Blinder concluded that since this is an election year, we can forget about having any fact-based discussion of these issues in 2012. Happy New Year, he said, and the audience laughed. Well, that was refreshing, I thought – an economist telling the unvarnished truth to hundreds of his people at the annual meetings.

But a rapid descent into hell was imminent. Former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin was next, talking about the need to "repair" social security and Medicare. The United States has all the characteristics of countries that run into trouble, he said. Then he warned that the US is going to end up like Greece. This is one of the dumbest things that anyone with an economics degree can say.

Hello, Mr Holtz-Eakin! Have you ever heard of the US dollar, the world's key reserve currency?

The United States is not going to end up like Greece, any sooner than it will end up like Haiti or Burkina Faso. A country that can pay its foreign public debt in its own currency and runs its own central bank does not end up like Greece.

In fact, even Japan is not going to end up like Greece, and Japan has a gross public debt of about 220% of its GDP, more than twice the size of ours and vastly larger – again, relative to its economy – than that of Greece. And the yen is nowhere near the dollar in its importance as an international reserve currency. But the Japanese government is still borrowing at just 1% interest rates for its ten-year bonds.

At this point, it was clear that this panel, other than Blinder, was living in a dystopian fantasy world. Next up was Rudy Penner of the Urban Institute, another former CBO director. His perspective was not much different from that of Auerbach or Holtz-Eakin. He complained about the polarisation of the political process, which prevents the two major parties from reaching an agreement. It's not partisanship, he said: House speaker Tip O'Neill and President Ronald Reagan knew how to be partisan, but they were able to reach agreement on the 1983 social security package and the 1986 tax reforms. And yada yada.

He might have added that we have had 25 years of lying about social security since then, and even Reagan didn't dare try to privatise social security. And, of course, social security can currently pay all promised benefits for the next 24 years without any changes.

These arguments about polarisation really pose the key issue: from the viewpoint of the 99%, it's not polarisation, but weakness in defending our interests that is the problem. President Obama compromised much more than he should have last year, offering cuts to social security and Medicare, in exchange for a long-term budget deal. The 99% are just lucky that the Republicans were too extremist to make this kind of a "grand bargain" with Obama.

The last panelist was Alice Rivlin of the Brookings Institution, another former CBO budget director and Fed vice-chair, as well as a member of the president's (2010) National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. She agreed with Blinder that we need more stimulus. But we can only get this if we agree to long-run spending cuts – including social security, of course. Yuck. This is a political strategy that is sure to end in disaster, given the prevailing state of misinformation and disinformation.

During the discussion, Blinder – who identified himself as a Democrat – expressed his frustration in not being able to convince fellow Democrats to cut social security. Double yuck. The average social security check is about $1,177 a month, and a majority of senior citizens are getting most of their meager income from social security. Why these people insist on creating more poverty among the elderly, especially when the program is solvent for decades to come, is beyond me.

I got to ask the first question for the panel. I called attention to Blinder's presentation of the long-term budget problem as almost completely a problem of the rising price of healthcare. I pointed out that you could take any country with a life expectancy greater than ours – including the other high-income countries – and put their per capita healthcare costs into our budget, and the long-term budget deficit would turn into a surplus.

My question was simple: are Americans so inherently different from other nationalities that we can't have similar healthcare costs? And if not, then why are we talking about long-term budget problems – instead of how to fix our healthcare system?

None of the panelists offered a serious answer to this question. Auerbach, the moderator, said that other countries have rising healthcare costs, too. And some of the others said or implied that healthcare costs were rising at an unsustainable pace worldwide.

But this is nonsense. The United States pays about twice as much per person for healthcare as other high-income countries – and still leaves 50 million people uninsured. This is a result of a dysfunctional healthcare system that has had healthcare prices rising much faster than those of other high-income countries for decades.

What the budget hawks are basically telling us is that we must assume that insurance and pharmaceutical companies will have a veto over the provisions of healthcare reform for decades to come. And that, therefore, we must find other ways to make up for these excessive costs, including cutting social security and other government spending, and pushing us into higher rates of poverty and inequality than we already have.

And even worse in the short run, all this crap about the deficit and the debt will be used to block the necessary stimulus measures – "stimulus" has already become a dirty word that Democratic politicians are afraid to utter. This means high unemployment and a lot of unnecessary misery in the world's richest country for the foreseeable future.

A dismal performance for the dismal science, on some of the most important issues of the day. Of course, there are other economists, including Nobel Prize winners such as Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz and Robert Solow (full disclosure: the latter two are members of CEPR's advisory board), who would offer more sensible views. But this panel was, sadly, representative of economists with the most influence on public policy.

With a brain trust like this, a lost decade for America looks likely – unless the citizenry can steer a different course.

Why This Election is a Yawn?

So far as I can see, the real issue in politics this year is not the presidential election.  The election will, of course, get most of the media coverage since most mainstream reporters and commentators are the tame little pets of the 1% who rule us.

Those tame little reporters and commentators will try to create as much excitement around the election as they possibly can. But I think people nowadays are becoming increasingly aware that national elections in America are for the most part charades to decide which candidate of the 1% gets elected.  If you are not a candidate of the 1%, you have very little chance of election.

Both Mitt Romney and Barrack Obama are candidates of  the 1%.  There may be a few real differences between them, but, in general, both are owned by the same people.

So, the real issue in politics this year is not the presidential elections.  Nor most any elections. The real issues, so far as I can see, are being raised by the Occupy Movement.  Only the Occupy Movement is serious about addressing the problems facing this country.

It will be interesting to see if the Occupy Movement survives the winter to rebound in the Spring.  The issues that fuel the Movement are not going away -- so I think there's a good chance the Movement will still be around in a few months.

But what do you think? Is the election the most important think happening in politics this year?  Why or why not?

Rick Santorum's Strange Notions of Sex and Sexuality

"One of the things I'm constantly reminding people about Rick Santorum is that he doesn't have merely an anti-gay agenda -- he has an anti-straight agenda too. He's against birth control, he's against abortion, he's against pornography, he's against all sorts of things that straight people use and enjoy frequently....You need to know, heterosexual Americans, that gay-bashing isn't his only hobby." -- Dan Savage

As long term readers of my blog know full well, I am a man of passions -- huge, towering passions -- passions that are apt to wantonly reveal themselves in my unbridled gallops through flowering fields of epistemology, in my full frontal assaults upon the castle walls of logical fallacies, in my undying lover's devotion to well-evidenced arguments.  And so forth, etc.  Still, it may come as some surprise to my readers that I am not entirely unfamiliar with sex. Especially if said readers have been listening to the bitter and scurrilous reports of my two ex-wives.

Because I have in the past been on intimate terms with sex (see, for instance, my treasure for newlyweds, Towards an Epistemology of Carnal Knowledge, by Paul Sunstone, Bust, Colorado: Charging Boar Books.) I sometimes take an understandably passionate interest in sex.  Specifically, in:

• what people are saying about sex,
• what their reasoning is,
• and how they have arrived at their conclusions about sex.

Today, two of my online friends -- Nance and the Cognitive Dissenter -- both urged me to examine the reasoning on matters sexual of the GOP presidential candidate, Rick Santorum.

I was at first reluctant to attempt such an examination, for I am nearly settled in the opinion that the man or woman who sets forth upon the task of extracting a reasonably logical and well-evidenced argument on sexual matters from a 21st Century American politician might as well indulge his or herself in trying to fornicate on the hop with a fleeing kangaroo.

Yet, Nance and CD finally aroused my interest by suggestively hinting that Rick Santorum might be downright promiscuous in both his fallacies and his falsehoods.  And, as you know, few things have the power to titillate one's interest as do logical and factual errors. 

So, one of the first things I discovered about Santorum is he seems to be best known for his opposition to gay marriage. But after a little digging, I discovered that he is also opposed to contraception.

For instance, as recently as last October, he stated in an interview with CaffeinatedThoughts.com editor Shane Vander Hart that, if elected president, he would repeal all federal funding for contraception because contraception devalues the act of procreation:

“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country." And also, “It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” (Source)

So, boiling that down, we might arrive at somewhat of an argument: Contraception is a license to do things that run counter to how things are supposed to be. Therefore we should repeal all federal funding for contraception.

However, as an argument, it fails to satisfy.  Perhaps it is not penetrating enough.  Or, perhaps the premiss is too vague. After all, what can you do with words like, "how things are supposed to be", besides ask for clarification?

In the same interview, Santorum also says:

[Sex] is supposed to be within marriage. It’s supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal…but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen…This is special and it needs to be seen as special.

I'll wager if we squint hard, we might extract an argument from that statement!  An argument such as this one:

• Sex is supposed to be for purposes both conjugal and procreative.
• The perfect way to realize those purposes is within the context of a marriage.
• Therefore, sex should take place [only?] within the context of a marriage.

Does the conclusion follow logically from the premisses?  To my thinking, that would depend on whether Santorum believes sex should take place only within the context of a marriage.  He doesn't quite come out and say that here, so I have placed "only" in brackets.  But from everything else he's said elsewhere, I would guess he believes sex should only take place within the context of a marriage.  And if that is so, then I believe his reasoning to be invalid.

Let's grant, for the sake of demonstration, that "sex is supposed to be for purposes both conjugal and procreative."  Let's further grant that "the perfect way to realize those purposes is within the context of a marriage."  Even if we grant both premisses, the conclusion does not necessarily follow because it is conceivable that one might yet argue for sex outside of marriage as a less than perfect, but nevertheless still desirable, activity. 

TUT! TUT! MR. SANTORUM! TUT! TUT!!!


I must now beg my reader's forgiveness for my sudden, emphatic outburst.


There is much else -- much else -- that could be said about Santorum's strange sexual statements. Not just the ones presented here, but statements he's made elsewhere as well.  If I were to attempt to analyze them all fully, it might take several blog posts.  But it's getting late, and I still have work to do before I can go to bed.  However, I would like to mention one last thing.

Santorum brings up the notion that sex is for procreation.  Sometime ago, I wrote on that subject. My post began:

It’s easy to believe the natural purpose of sex is reproduction.   Offspring, after all, are the single most spectacular result of sex.  Many of us seem bedazzled by that fact.  Consequently, some of us seem to have got the notion the natural purpose of sex is reproduction and that sex without the possibility of reproduction is at best selfish indulgence and, at worse, perversion.

I then sally on to bring up a few of the many reasons sex cannot be legitimately seen as solely for reproduction -- nor even as having a purpose!  I recommend reading that post if you are interested in the topic.  It can be found here.

Are Misogynists Wimps at Heart?

"The same broadcast featured a religious eight-year-old girl terrified to walk the short distance between her home and school, since she is subject to verbal abuse of ultra-Orthodox men who claim her attire is not sufficiently 'modest'." -- Source.

They must be very macho men to verbally abuse an eight year old girl.  I would like to meet them in person so I could personally congratulate these men on their macho.  I would also like to ask them what they think of Yocheved Horowitz.

Horowitz, you see, is an Orthodox woman who does not buy into the bullshit of these Orthodox men.  And apparently, because she is not a (understandably) frightened eight year old girl, she is sometimes able to shut them up.

Horowitz was on a public bus one day when one of these macho men told her to move to the back of the bus:

"Women to the back," he called out like a conductor. "To the back, to the back." He trembled with anger. A man sitting in the first row whose appearance revealed him to be a Gur Hasid, shushed him, with a finger to his lip. But the shouter paid no attention to him. "Men's area," he continued to shout. "Women to the back."

Now Horowitz turned around and said loudly and clearly: "What do you mean by 'men's area'? A geographical area?" she wondered. "What is mehadrin? Are you talking about an etrog, a lulav?" she queried, referring to two of the principal symbols used during the festival of Sukkot. "Nowhere in rabbinical law does it say that it is forbidden to sit behind a woman, not in the Shulchan Arukh and not in the Yoreh De'ah [two classical compilations of Jewish law]. What is written in the Torah and in rabbinical law is that it is forbidden to humiliate sons and daughters of Israel."

Like a deflated balloon, the man became quiet, and maintained his silence for the rest of the bus ride.

What do you think?  Do you think maybe these macho misogynists are not really so macho unless they outnumber their victims?

I have often wondered what relationship there might be, if any, between a man being a misogynist and a man being a wimp?

_________________
(H/T: Hoyden About Town)