I declare this post hereby en-titled.

Republicans and conservative "blue dog" democrats like to go on and on about "entitlement reform." Riight. All I know is that according to the American constitution, all men (and we presume women) are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that it's hard to have any of those things when you are starving in a gutter, and dying of some uncured but curable disease.

Although it would be fun to start an entitlement program by which all registered Republicans are rounded up an thrown in prison. What, do they think they're just entitled to walk around wherever they like?

On a related note, their religion may say that gays shouldn't be allowed to get married, but mine says that Republicans belong in jail. If we are obliged to allow their religion to be freely enforced by the state, then so should mine be too.

What if you played Monopoly and the game never ended?

The game Monopoly is a pretty good metaphor for capitalism (I, personally, am the unlaced boot), because it models the positive feedback loop. Once you own lots of property, it's easy to make money, and that money lets you buy more property off the cash strapped players. The upshot is that you usually get a slow start, then an energetic ferment in the middle of the game where anyone can win, and then a creeping inevitability at the end, as one person gets richer and richer, and everyone else get knocked out of contention.

That's a lot like real life, except here bankruptcy doesn't mean you now have time to grab a new bag of chips from the basement, it means you are at risk of becoming a street person. Also, the game Monopoly has to end when one person owns all the property, because nobody has any more money to pay them anything. But real life doesn't end. Instead, the winners keep sucking in wealth, trickle out a little charity, and hand to their kids ownership of the railroads and Park Avenue. This, historically, is how it's worked (see Robbers, Baron). And this is what libertarians and neo-cons don't understand. The best bit of the game is the middle bit, where everyone is the most engaged, and there is real space for eventual winners to move up.

It took us till the 20th century to figure out is how to make real life Monopoly keep on working. You need a government that progressively skims people's wealth as they get richer, and which takes a fat cut out of what they pass to their kids. Obviously you don't take everyone to zero, but the trick is to keep the game in its middle stages where there are winners and losers, but people are close enough that they can move from one to the other. That's where the action is, that's where the vigor is, that's where the liveliness is.

And hey, now you can use the tax money to help people, and to invest in things like education and research that aren't profitable in the short term, but that level the playing fields in the medium term, and pay off for everyone in the long term. It's win win win win.

More than you ever wanted to know about The Boss

I watched the superbowl with several people who are grad students in poetry at one of the most elite poetry programs in the US. After this happened at half time:



... one of them reported: "Bruce Springsteen just tea bagged all of America."

Ah, poetry.

The enemy of their enemy makes discharge come out of people's whozits

So the right wing is in a lather, demanding that attempts to fight STD's be removed from the stimulus bill. I've never thought of AIDS, syphilis, and gonorrhea as being unfairly persecuted before... But that's Republicans, always expanding our horizons.

Or perhaps it just hasn't occurred to them that spending money on fighting these things involves paying people to do their jobs, which involves putting money in the pockets of potential consumers, which enables consumption, which feeds retailers, which will help minimize the recession... and once this realization takes over their pro-business instincts will kick in and they'll get behind the measure. Or maybe not?

How not to make friends with the modern feminist movement

I've never really liked the term "patriarchy". Before this is written off as exhibit Q of patriarchy in action let me add that much of my PhD was about the psychology of prejudice, and I don't think that a word like patriarchy really does prejudice right.

For one thing it's focused entirely on gender, but what about the other kinds of prejudice? Like 80 years ago it would be fair to say we were in a WASPiarchy, but these days jews aren't really resented in most of North America, and Irish and Italian Americans are no longer (by the bizarre logic of prejudice-land) "races" so much as flavors of whiteness. Plus there's a shifting miasma of other prejudices. Depending where you are there's a smartiarchy or a dumyarchy, and there is an omnipresent and exceptionally powerful cooliarchy (tied in heavily, but not exclusively, to the beautiarchy).

I'm not trying to be glib here - Gender based prejudice is almost certainly the most common form of prejudice in terms of raw frequency of occurrence, and leads to lots of Really Bad Things. The set of stats I found in a quick google search had Black men making a slightly higher median income than white women at all levels of education - though they were reasonably close, and both dwarfed by White men's income (1995 stats makes it slightly old data). And of course, the statistics on rape are just mind-bogglingly evil. But I don't think it's easy to compare suffering side by side. Women are at a far higher risk of being raped, Blacks are at a far higher risk of being imprisoned... I don't think you can even start to contemplate questions like: "how many years in jail would you trade for being raped once". It simply defies humanity to do so. Suffering on this kind of scale is just horrible wherever it is found. And it's not just gender and race. People with mental disorders, for example, can suffer social stigmas that put them at elevated risks of alcoholism and suicide, and poor people are basically screwed every which way to Sunday (especially in the States where they get lousy health care, if any at all). So we're living in a patri-whity-neurotypic-wealthiarchy for starters.

On a more philosophical note, as Wikipedia puts it "The English suffix -archy (from Greek αρχή, rule) denotes leadership and government." Prejudice certainly can be codified into, and enforced by government (see Crow, Jim) but most modern prejudice has little to nothing to do with government, and very little to do with leadership either. In fact, a lot of it takes place at non-conscious levels, merely shaping expectancies rather than directing commandments at people - and people's level of prejudiced actions (at least the non-overt modern kinds) seems to ebb and flow with their level of insecurity. That's not a governing principle, it's people just being shitty to each other when they're feeling defensive.

That isn't to say that prejudice doesn't shape society - the types of roles people get shunted in to, and how easy it is for them to flourish there matter (see the enormous wage disparities). And anything that encourages or excuses aggression can lead to physical assaults and their coverups. But that doesn't make it an "archy: any more than other strong social force are. People feel compelled to surround themselves with other people and have friends, and will massively rearange their worlds to get it, indeed will put up with massive amounts of abuse to get it, but we don't live in a sociarchy do we? Really?

Playing the game so hard you forget to win?

Krugman says:

The House has passed the stimulus bill with not a single Republican vote.

Aren’t you glad that Obama watered it down and added ineffective tax cuts, so as to win bipartisan support?

Ok, but my understanding is that it still has to get through the senate, right. So it's not like the Dems could have just written ANYTHING they liked and zipped it through. Just because mom isn't paying attention doesn't mean you can get away with anything when it still has to get past dad (although it seems odd to be casting R's as the parental figures here, when a whole lot of them seem more intent on behaving like spoiled 12 year olds).

Plus some people smarter than me (e.g.,) argue that Barrack is playing the long-term optics here - he gets to come back and say: "we offer them compromise after compromise, and consultation after consultation, and STILL they don't even try to support the results."

Though, I guess at some point you have to stop playing politics for gain and using the gain that you've already bought... it's a tricky thing, no.

As they say in England,

Good riddance to bad rubbish.