It seems that Mitch McConnell hates the fact that Democrats won’t go along with his ideas. The fact that his ideas are terrible is sort of besides the point. Remember that gridlock comes, not from congressional obstinance, but from legitimate disagreement about the best course of action for America. That disagreement is good and healthy, but in order to properly weigh and measure which side has the better plan, they must be allowed to implement that plan.

So McConnall has a… call it a vestige of a point. The American political system really is broken. In 2008, Americans elected Obama and a huge Democratic majority. They promised to pass a huge stimulus, pass healthcare reform, and end the war in Iraq.

We ended up with… a continued involvement in Iraq, a barely adequate healthcare reform, and a Federal economic stimulus that almost (but didn’t quite) do enough to cover the anti-stimulus being done by the various states.

The reasons for this had little to do with the leadership of Obama or Pelosi (or Reid!), and everything to do with the mechanics of Congress. It is shockingly easy for a small group of elected officials to gum up all of Congress and keep it from doing anything. Blaming Obama for this is a bit like blaming an engine installer for auto body damage.

If we tried the Democratic plan and it failed, I’d agree that McConnell should be allowed his turn to fix things. Instead, he was able to block the Democrats from implementing their plans, and is furious that Democrats are able to block his.

The approach of the 4th of July seems like an ideal time to delve into an obscure part of American history. The founding fathers were rabid video game players. Fittingly, they didn’t generally have the same tastes.

Benjamin Franklin: Ben had lived most of his life with nothing but casual contempt for video games. Instead, in the age of dueling, he preferred the most dangerous game, sleeping with married women. One day, a charming lady on Facebook asked for help raising a barn in farmville. From there, he became branched out to the Bioware oeuvre, exploring every romance option available. Franklin died impoverished, the first victim of the microtransaction payment model. Gamer Tag: EarlyRiser69

George Washington: First in War, First in Peace, first in line for the new Total War games. An indifferent-at-best player, he was mainly hobbled by an ability to manage troop morale. Gamer Tag: HisExcellency

John Adams: Noted forum troll John Adams was under the mistaken impression that he enjoyed cooperative games. He was actually VAC banned from Left 4 Dead after screaming “All the perplexities, confusion and distress on this team arise, not from defects in us, but from [player's name]‘s INABILITY TO CR0WN THE f***ing WITCH!” Adams went on to have a successful League of Legends career. Gamer tag: FirePaladin1030

Thomas Jefferson: When asked, this laconic founder said only “The Sims. Words with Friends.” Gamer Tag: LoverNotPatriot

John Jay: Most historians will claim that Europa Universalis was his game of choice while Jay unwound from a long day of founding the Federalist party. In fact, this is exactly backwards. Modern evidence indicates that Federalist number 2 was intended as an After Action Report of a particularly heinous outing. Gamer tag: PUBLIUSdipLOmat

James Madison: The British Admiral Cockburn was so incensed at the constant tea-bagging done by James Madison after every Halo kill that he burned the White House specifically to destroy Madison’s XBOX. Dolly handed the console over in exchange for allowing her to save other valuables. Gamer tag: PUBLIUSrighter

Alexander Hamilton: Apologists for this founder claim that he simply held himself to a higher standard of sportsmanship than the average online FPS gamer. Others claim that he was simply a lousy shot. Either way, Hamilton was always a welcome sight on an opponent’s roster, or good for free kills in a free for all. Eventually, he moved over to StarCraft 2, where he climbed to the 1V1 Diamond League (Protoss). The famous duel with Burr was sparked when Burr claimed that he had “totally typed GG, my connection must have dropped before you saw it”, and Hamilton “called bullshit”. Gamer tag: PUBLIUSking

Wisconsin Labor Rally – Madison, WI – Saturday, Feb 26 2011 from ubiquity75 on Vimeo.

One of the more important conversations I had in my college career went something like:

Professor: So really, a paper is just an answer to a question
Me: So how do you generate questions
Professor: that’s the hard part.

The trick to writing a good paper is to think of a question no one has ever before answered, and then answer it. And you need to anticipate every possible objection– questions about your methodology, data, etc– and answer those, too. Want to tear a paper apart? The trick to that is not to attack the methodology, but to attack the thing I just glossed over in the “etc”*. Attacking the basic assumptions made by a thought process is the the most fundamental method of determining the strength of that thought process.

So: how big should government be? This isn’t the fundamental question, obviously. The fundamental question is “what is government”. Wikipedia provides a pretty good answer: “governments are the means through which state power is employed”. Employing state power sounds… unpleasant. So that brings up the next question “why would we want that?”

The very short version is this: government exists in order to facilitate positive-sum interactions, in cases where humans tend to default to negative-sum interactions.

There are a whole host of goods and services for which it is cheaper to buy them in bulk, or there are positive or negative externalities associated with their presence or absence**. It is almost always easier for government to set up rules for private organizations to provide those goods and services, but once we have a fabulous coercive mechanism in place, there is a temptation to use that mechanism to provide for some of those goods and services.

Once citizens decide to use the coercive power of the State to do things like pay for children to learn things, or keep unemployed people from starving to death, or keep old people from dying in the gutters, or create and maintain a system for removing excrement from our homes and transporting it elsewhere, or any of a thousand other things, we need to pay people to do these things, and (with some oversight and performance metrics ) get out of their way.

Vague talk about “shrinking government” doesn’t really enter into this equation. The question is “which services are we collectively over-paying for?” It may even be “which programs should we cease being responsible for collectively?” The question, in other words, isn’t about size, it’s about efficiency.

I don’t like paying taxes either. I don’t like paying for anything, but the people who create the goods and services I want would like some recompense for their labor. It doesn’t really matter if I’m paying a private organization or a public one– I’ve still got to pay for services rendered.

*see what I did there?
**Yeah, I’m repeating stuff I said yesterday

Jamelle Bouie has some thoughts on atheists in Congress. Specifically: why there are none. The whole thing is worth a read, but I’ll just yank a sample section:

For an “unaffiliated” House candidate, the landscape is a little less harsh. Since nonbelievers tend to live in urban areas, it’s conceivable that an openly atheist candidate could find a large enough base to support a primary or general election run against more religious competitors. Even still, given the relatively small number of unaffiliated, this isn’t very likely.

I think this partially ignores– or forgets, or is ignores of– the mechanics of running for office. I don’t think Jamelle is wrong, but I think there’s something he fails to consider.

People don’t simply decide one day that they’d make a great politician. They see a problem, they talk about it, they fume about it, and eventually one of their friends and neighbors tells them to shut up and fix it already. But to get there, they need a network of friends and neighbors. Politicians are invariably the most connected members of their community. The major function of a religious organization? Connecting people. Churches are a major source of community building. Synagogues will hold singles mixers. Churches do charity dinners, and mosques will, um, do music nights*. Even most of the pagans and atheist I know will choose to get married in a Church (usually Universalists Unitarian) because the infrastructure is pre-existing.

It’s not that atheists and agnostics don’t have strong networks of friends, but campaigns- especially local ones- are won and lost by meeting people. If a church attender and a non-church attender square off for city council, the attender will have just a few more people to meet every week, one more avenue of attack, one more tie to the community. That adds up. And who tends to win congressional elections? People who hold local office. A small difference in community support can utterly demolish someone’s chance for higher office.

All of that, before we even mention the self-described anti-atheist bias of the American electorate.

*Yeah, I stretched that alliteration to the breaking point. Sorry.

It's a big mack. Get it?

One of the things I haven’t talked about on this blog is that I’m trying to lose weight. Technically, I’m on a diet; what I’m really trying to do is change the way I eat. It’s harder than it seems. Part of this means that when I’m out with friends and they want to go to McDonalds, I need to find something on that menu…

So: last night I ordered a hamburger, medium fries and a medium drink (Total calories: ~680). The woman then suggested I could get a McDouble Meal for less money (total Calories: 770). I said that no, I’d prefer just the regular burger. Oh! Perhaps I mean the 2 cheeseburger? (Total Calories: ~1000).

The weirdest part of the experience is this: the woman taking my order was trying her hardest to give me a positive experience. What I wanted to do was more costly— and less filling– than what she wanted me to do.

This is the result of a bizarre food scheme we have where consumers are looking to maximize not their health, but rather their total caloric intake– for the least amount of money. The net result is that we get fatter. Not only that: because its the poorest of us who are unable to afford healthier food, fat becomes a class issue. Fun times all around.

Thing is, everyone I’ve talked with about this does the same.

Now, take this confusion and multiply it by everything on your grocery list. Think of all the healthy eating fads America has seen come and go. Eat carbs, don’t eat carbs, drink wine, eat only grapefruit… These are the basic tools by which Americans transmit information about product choices. That’s a lot of information, and most of it is either bad or misinformed or half transmitted. But researching every item that goes into your grocery basket is time consuming and boring. The FDA would yank anything harmful from the shelves, so the hippocratic oath we make to ourselves won’t be violated.

I can’t even imagine researching the factory of every product I put into my body, and then suing if the company is lying about what they’re producing. It sounds like a boring sort of job I’m more than willing to pay someone else to do.

There is a political philosophy that holds life I’ve just described as the highest, freest, ideal. They have a child-like belief that the market’s ability to perfectly transmit information is so stupendous that simply by lifting all government oversight, producers wouldn’t dare lie to, cheat, or steal from their customers. After all– Firestone tires was destroyed after they (knowingly!) killed scores of people. They certainly didn’t change their name and move on.

Of course– of course!– government oversight isn’t perfect. Regulatory capture happens, sometimes government regulators simply aren’t up to doing their jobs, etc. That’s why we have other forms of protection, like the aforementioned lawsuits. Libertarianism is the only political philosophy I’ve ever heard of to agree with Hobbes that life is “Nasty, Brutish, and Short”, but then turn around and say that we should keep fighting anyway. Cooperation for mutual benefit is a sucker’s game.

The California GLBT movement is waiting. The California Supreme Court should hear oral arguments in late February sometime. Because they identified gay and lesbians as a “suspect class”, they need to look very closely at laws that concern this group of people and to make sure that they are above and beyond fair. This idea came from the civil rights era, and it will be interesting how the California Supreme Court sees the case.

In the meantime, I’m compiling a list of gay-friendly religious organizations and doing some work with them in the next few months. In the bay area alone, there are over 300 GLBT-friendly places of worship. While this makes my work significantly harder (you try individually addressing over 300 different religious leaders), I am thankful that my community is so welcoming. Even our local Catholic church marches in the gay pride parade.

Estimates vary, but between 13-17% of Californian Jews voted in favor of Proposition 8. The Jewish community is very largely in favor of GLBT rights, and I think that they will be a great resource and tool for fight that has already begun. Ironically, though, there is no marriage equality curriculum with a Jewish perspective. There is an “interfaith” training, but that really means it’s an educational curriculum with a Christian perspective, as many “interfaith” documents are.

Equality California is holding a Lobby Day on Tuesday, February 17. Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) and Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) have both proposed bills to overturn Proposition 8, SR 7 and HR 5 respectively. No matter what happens at the Supreme Court level, we need to maintain a civil rights movement. Discrimination is wrong, and discrimination can happen in other places than a courthouse. There are many laws that need to still come, and there are many laws that must be kept in place.

(P.S. The title of this is indeed a Buffy reference.)