Month: August 2009

Tyler Cowen searches for a single word for "Insight Through Horribleness".  E.D. Kain joins him:

Sort of an anti-catharsis, whereby insight or clarity is achieved through tragedy or disaster? The moment Hamlet realizes his uncle was behind his father’s murder; Raskolnikov’s crime and eventual confession; everything Cormac McCarthy has ever written. Is there a word for these moments, these horrible revelations or insights?

"Epinfamy" is the best neologism suggested by a Cowen commenter. But another points to a real word:

Anagnorisis — a revelation into the true nature of things, usually through tragedy. We could broaden the technical, literary meaning of anagnorisis to include the truth that is revealed, not just to the tragic protagonist, but also to the readers. There is a classic poem by Aeschylus that expresses insight through horror:

"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls, drop by drop, upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."

If the reports are true and attorney general Eric Holder really is going to launch criminal investigations only for those who went beyond the torture authorized by Bush, then the Obama administration, however well-intentioned it may be, risks essentially legitimizing the torture it does not prosecute. This strikes me as the very very worst of all possible worlds – the kind of split-the-difference pragmatism that will end up alienating everyone. It is vital that the Obama administration does nothing to imply that what was authorized within the rules under the Cheney torture program is in any way legal, defensible or moral.

Obama has ended the torture – and in ths subsequent six months, we have seen real progress against al Qaeda.

But if the Obama administration does not investigate those really responsible for war crimes, and scapegoats a few sadists down the line instead, then they risk retroactively justifying the crimes they ran against.

Is this what Frank Rich calls being "punked" by Obama? By parsing this thing so finely, he will provoke the rage of his enemies merely by doing; but he will also fail to address the real issue of accountability and the rule of law. Perhaps Holder thinks that if he pulls at this string, others will follow. Better to have a truth commission to nail down in real detail all the prisoner abuse and torture of the Cheney years – and then decide whom to prosecute.

I find myself again in agreement with David Frum. It was one thing to oppose greater government involvement in healthcare in 1993. It is another to do so in 2009. There are several reasons for this and it is hard to improve on David's summary of them. The status quo means:

I'd add the crippling health costs for the private sector – costs that are slowly killing their global competitiveness. But the deepest reason for reform is fiscal. No serious plan to reduce deficits without hugely increasing taxes excludes healthcare savings. There's no way to get from spiraling debt to stable public finances without tackling the exponentially rising costs of healthcare. So this is a fiscally conservative issue.

Instead of pulling a Palin, conservatives should propose real reforms: ending the tax exemption for businesses; medical malpractice reform; an independent body to provide some kind of data on the relative effectiveness of treatments; incentives to reward doctors less for any and all services provided than for health outcomes within clear budgets. This, actually, is not far from the Romney model, as the NYT notes today. Real conservatives should point out that the current proposals are not tough enough on costs – and criticize Obama for that, not for fantasies like a communist takeover or euthanasia program for special needs kids.

The Romney-Obama model will require fiscal boundaries to healthcare provision and this will mean a trade-off that will be hard to postpone much longer. We'll get less innovation, and probably some rationing at some point. But that is already happening – the rationing is done by insurance companies.

One final thing: most Americans do not want people dying in the streets.

If you have guaranteed emergency room care for the uninsured at public expense, you have already effectively socialized medicine. It makes no sense not to bring these people into the insurance system, and to offer less expensive, long-term preventive healthcare. To insist that ideology stand in the way of this piece of compassionate common sense is irresponsible.

I've come to accept that the fiscal and economic costs of the current system, however wonderful it has been for a few decades, simply cannot be sustained much longer. I say that not because I have become a socialist, but because the US is on the brink of the kind of bankruptcy it will be very hard to recover from if we do not tackle its source now. Taking measures to avoid fiscal collapse even greater than today's is a conservative impulse. Letting one sector of the economy destroy the rest of it – and public finances too – is sheer recklessness.

What do you want, GOP? A permanent populist culture-war? Or actual solutions to pressing problems? Let us know when you've matured enough to answer that question.

Yglesias proffers. Zengerle responds:

I have a hunch his thinking might change if/when he has a kid.

Or a beagle.

The tension between the business interests of the conservative-industrial-complex and the Republican party is real. There is a huge amount of money to be made by selling to a segment of the country that alienates the critical middle that every party needs to occupy to remain a national force. And so the success of the movement risks the failure of the party. And the failure of the party – its permanent isolation from power – only fuels the resentment and alienation that make so much moolah.

This is the GOP's Fox problem. You ride that fox; it eats you in the end.

The Thursday outage on Twitter and Facebook that left millions without access was the result of a cyber-attack against a political blogger from the Republic of Georgia. The blogger, who goes by the name "CYXYMU," accuses the Russian government of trying to silence him. FP's Evgeny Morozov has been tracking CYXYMU's campaign of dissent for many months now, dubbing him the first "digital refugee." Morozov's post on the latest attack is a must read for those interested in the growing geopolitical influence of technologies such as Twitter:

One immediate danger here is that we will spend the next few days arguing about Russia's cyberwarfare ambitions, while, in fact, we should be talking about ways to protect freedom of expression online. […] CYXYMU's blogs were deleted [last year] by the platforms that had been attacked (LiveJournal and WordPress amongst them), since there was no other way to stop them. […I]n the absence of strong and public commitments to defending freedom of expression, most Web2.0 companies would inevitably lean towards organizational efficiency and cost-optimization – i.e. deleting problematic users, particularly if solving their problems eats up too much of corporate resources and staff time.

His discussion of the "cute cat" strategy is also fascinating:

Targeted cyber-attacks on popular Web services like Twitter and Facebook also present the strongest antidote to Ethan Zuckerman's Cute Cat Theory, which states that to avoid being censored activists should place their online presence right in the middle of mundane and trivial spaces (e.g. people sharing videos of cats), because their governments won't be bold enough to censor those ones. Well, as we have seen in the case of CYXYMU, if bloggers do irk somebody, they might be still be silenced – this time not by a government fiat blocking the service, but by targeted cyberwarfare campaigns against the sites that host that blogger, no matter how trivial those are.

(Illustration of #Iranelection by Jeff Clark)

A reader writes:

I’ve been thinking about the anger emanating from a certain segment of the right.  I’ve been making obvious comparisons in my mind to the loony left that came out en masse during Bush’s years (I have lots of memories of giant puppets being paraded around for no discernible reason).  These two extremes, focused on the edges of the American political spectrum, have much in common; and yet the right feels different today than the left did.  I’ve been trying to figure out why I feel slightly differently about these two ships of fools. For me, I think a part of it comes down to demographics.  When I see strung-out neo-hippies,  giant puppets almost make sense (I am, of course, speaking of the extremes on purpose—this is not the image of all those who equivocated Bush to Hitler). 

But when I see the town hall meetings  I see middle age plus, middle American, town hall attendees—these are the straights, the normals, the squares.  And when I see their posters with swastikas, hear the repeated decision not to debate healthcare reform with logic (there are reasons not to want the proposed reform to pass), and witness the power of mobs across the nation—there is a difference.

I don’t expect the old to be all that much wiser than the young; this is a myth.  I do expect for them to act less like jackasses, though.  For me, this is another continuation in the failings of the Hippie generation.

"One of the most dramatic moments [of the campaign] for me was when I was watching McCain on television, and I thought I saw in McCain’s eyes himself, when someone yelled something out, a recognition of, ‘Oh, God, what have I done?’ This is not McCain; he doesn’t cater to this. But for the first time in his political life, I think he realized that there are some strange people in the Republican tent. My father used to say, ‘Larry beware of the left because they will bankrupt you; beware of the right because they will kill you,’" – Larry Wilkerson.

But these days, the right will bankrupt you as well.

A reader writes

I should be one of the guys conservatives want to help. I started a small consulting business in 2008 – the third time I’ve struck out on my own. The last time I did so, in 2003, I was on COBRA from a previous employer at $365/mo. Now, I’m on COBRA from my last employer at $792/mo. Various insurance complexities contribute to that difference, including the fact that I’m the only ex-employee of my last company living in California, so I’m an “out of state” member. In October, my COBRA will run out. I’ve been flooded with email from insurance companies encouraging me to apply. I’m a very healthy 45-year-old, and I’m HIV-positive. My meds work great: no viral load, healthy t-cells. Aside from this, nothing wrong. But I can’t miss even a day in coverage, because the list price for my HIV meds is $1,798/month.

So far, I can handle the $792/mo COBRA, but it certainly puts a damper on my profits. I decided to try and end-run the application game, knowing I’d be rejected. Every rep encouraged me to apply anyway, but applications can take hours to complete – who has all that time? I started telling them upfront I was HIV-positive. None had any advice, save “there might be some California state plan you can apply for…” There’s no central source of information about this, nor does any private insurer have any incentive to help me find a plan – I’m uninsurable. The hours I’ve wasted searching for an answer are turning into weeks. Even those of us that can bite the bullet and tap savings to pay for private plans simply can’t get them.

So if I hear one more Republican blowhard babble on about rationing or government takeovers or the effects on small business, I just might have a plasma TV to replace. I’m as leery as anyone about government programs, but I have zero confidence that our private-sector-loving conservative representatives will be able to enforce any of their promised new controls and restrictions on private plans.