You're Kidding

The dueling between social advocates and businesses over the minimum wage continues. Washington's is set to increase to $8.07 an hour tomorrow.

According to Camille St. Onge, spokeswoman for the Washington Restaurant Association, the average employee being paid minimum wage plus tips makes $20.71 per hour. (Washington doesn't allow businesses to count tips as part of the minimum wage.) Which means that the average tipped employee makes in the area of $40,000.00 a year. Am I the only person to whom that sounds fishy?

Power Plays

John McGuinness penned an interesting column for Quiblit Magazine that leaves me in something of a quandary. I share his dislike for Paul Krugman's stance in his recent Slate column, not caring for the assertion that Democrats "have to be ready to forcefully make the case that progressive goals are right and conservatives are wrong," in the same way that I disliked the Republican assertion that conservative goals were always right, and liberals were always (and often intentionally) wrong.

John points out that groups that have used political power to "unfairly" benefit themselves (the forces of "organized money," as FDR termed them) are unlikely to accept policies in which they are the losers, and that they are powerful enough to "sabotage a plan they were shut out of creating." And he could very well be right.

But look at where that leaves us: We seem to then have three primary options -
1) The forces of organized money benefit at the expense of others.
2) The forces of organized money break even, holding on to what they already have.
3) The forces of organized money, refusing to accept any scenario that casts them as losers, sabotage the process.

If we therefore admit that they must always have a seat at the table, we are forced to admit that they have all of the power, and that no-one else really has any. After all, the forces of organized money didn't fear being sabotaged by the people who their preferred policies cast as losers up until this point. And if they effectively have the ability to kill any proposals they don't like, one wonders why they would even settle for simply breaking even.

"I spent a lot of time covering politics before I got into science, and one thing I learned is that anybody who starts pleading for consensus is losing." William Saletan ("Technical Knockout" Slate Magazine, 17 November, 2005)

Anyone who starts out from a position of seeking consensus with organizations that are understood to have gamed the system for their own benefit at the expense of others is, I think, going to be seen as weak, begging for crumbs at the feet of the powerful. A candidate that projects himself as being unable to stand up for their core constituency only appeals to a) a constituency that already sees themselves as defeated or b) the opposition. I don't see how either platform carries much hope for success in today's political climate.

I'd like to think that there is way to implement democracy without always succumbing to the tyranny of the majority. But that requires a level of enlightenment on ALL sides, not just one. But at this point, is anyone really going to believe that a Republican repentance of a policy of using a 51% majority to impose their ideas on the rest of the nation as being anything other than empty political expediency? Especially when the standard conservative position is still one of belligerence and self-righteousness? (John's a great guy - but he's not the sort of conservative that we've become accustomed to.) Everyone can be trusted to see the light when faced with the shoe being on the other foot - in light of that, it's going to be hard to make the case that anyone who takes them at their word on that is anything but a naïf.

Bad Laws, Ridiculous Outcomes

This situation is completely messed up. While I don't think of myself as a hardcore Law and Order type, I do understand that societies make rules for a reason, and that a society with the wherewithal is allowed to enforce sanctions on people who break the rules. But this crosses the line into the outright ludicrous, and seems to serve nothing other than the spiteful vengefulness that is a common hallmark of the insecure and fearful.

"I feel that I helped create a solution," [Miami-Dade County Commissioner Rebecca Sosa] insists. Asked if she knows how many men are living under the bridge, she answers, "Yes, many. I guess that at some point, the system will have to address that issue," she concedes with vague cheerfulness. "But I am not ready to address that issue. Maybe another commissioner should address that issue.... Your question is: Am I going to do something? The answer is no."

Tax dollars at work, folks. But perhaps the scary thing is that Commissioner Sosa clearly realizes that anyone who attempts to alter her idiotic law to create a better solution is, in effect, painting a massive bullseye on their forehead. You get the government you pay for.

If someone can explain to me how ANYONE - survivors, families, society, offenders, anybody - benefits from forcing sex offenders to live literally under bridges, I'll be all for it. I'm not holding my breath, however.

There is abundant evidence that residency restrictions do nothing to reduce sex crimes against children. For one thing, the vast majority of sex offenses are not committed by strangers: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nine of 10 victims under the age of 18 know their abusers, and 34 percent were family members. And while residency restrictions target those who have already offended, most sex offenses — 87 percent — are committed by individuals with no prior records.

The Supreme Court of Public Opinion

The flap over the destruction of a set of recordings of a CIA interrogation of two al-Qaida members drones on.

There's an interesting twist to this tale that's come up recently - the idea that it was in the best interests of the United States that the tapes were destroyed, because the reaction from the Arab Street to whatever was on them would be worse than the uproar over rendition and Abu Ghraib. I've heard this a few times by now, and it's starting to get old, mainly because it seems like an attempt to make something that doesn't make any sense appear logical through repetition.

The idea that now that the recordings can never come to light will shield the reputation of the United States from further harm is spurious because that horse is already FAR away from the barn. People already know that the recordings were made. And people understand that the tapes were destroyed. Given what we saw from the goings-on at Abu Ghraib, I suspect that people feel that the new tapes must really show some bad stuff, otherwise, there would have been no need to dispose of them. I suspect that the reputation of the United States has become autocatalytic at this point - people who think the worst of the United States ascribe nightmare scenarios to American actions, and in preaching those scenarios into an anti-American echo chamber, bolster their negative view of the United States.

If there's one thing that we should have learned by now, it's that lack of hard evidence doesn't tend to mean much to the Court of Public Opinion. After all, O. J. Simpson was acquitted of murder - and you can see how many minds that's changed. With the recordings gone, people can read into them whatever they want to. If people decide that what's on the tapes are orders of magnitude worse than anything that's come out so far, now there's no way to refute that. The idea that something that if you can't prove it, it didn't happen, is an example of the sort of legalistic thinking that doesn't really fly in the real world. (Technically, it doesn't work in a court of law, either, buts that's the way that people tend to think of things.) Not that people always believe the proof that you might put in front of them - let a member of the September 11th Truth Movement vent at you for a while, and they'll happily lay out for you mounds of evidence that they feel people have ignored. But in the absence of evidence to really bolster a position, the other side can have a field day, presenting conjectures as facts and challenging you to refute them.

From the point of view of the reputation of the United States, the damage, if any, is already done. It seems unlikely that one more video would have really made a difference.

Miscellaneous Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection

In this chapter, Mr. Darwin selects and tackles a number of objections to the Theory of Natural Selection raised by others. It's interesting to note that right off the bat he declines to be bothered with people whom he feels haven't bothered to actually acquaint themselves with the theory before embarking on criticisms. (I, for my part, am reading this book from the opposite perspective - since once cannot very well defend, or otherwise intelligently speak to, a work that one hasn't actually read.) It's also a safe bet that had Darwin attempted to answer every possible critic of his, he would have needed another 670 pages, devoted just to that alone.

In structure, this chapter is somewhat dull. Darwin rattles off some critique raised by some or another noted scientist of his time (one Mr. St. George Mivart seeming to be his chief critic), and then proceeds to explain why he feels that the particular objection is off the mark. Hardly a rousing read, unless one is really into this sort of thing, which I am not. But again, there are some really wonderful insights into the period to be gleaned, and it's an interesting look into how people of the time thought of things. The evolution of organisms over time is clearly seen as a progressive force, with later editions of a species moving towards some standard of perfection. This is a notion that doesn't seem to be so prevalent today. It's also worth noting that Darwin doesn't see Natural Selection as being an agent of change - but merely the mechanism by which certain changes become fixed. Other changes may occur on their own, and as long as there is no particular reason why Natural Selection would act against them, they could very well stick around.

Darwin also deals with one of the most tiresome questions of any discussion of evolution - "Why hasn't such-and-such an animal evolved into some other sort of animal?" (In the modern world, ninety-seven times out of one hundred, it's because the person asking the question is an idiot, wanting to know something stupid like "Why haven't humans evolved wings?" or something else equally inane.) In the end, it's about competition. Someone once asked me why monkeys hadn't evolved to displace us yet. The answer is simple - with humans already on the scene, monkeys aren't going to be able to get to a place where they can beat us at our own game. The way I see it, primates would have about one generation to go from wild animals to "Planet of the Apes," because if it took any longer, we'd see the threat, and deal with it. Most primates are better off where they are, as masters of the ecological niches they inhabit, where humans (while they might be a threat to the ecosystem) are not direct competition.

Whether Darwin manages to answer all of the criticisms raised convincingly is not for me to answer. I would say yes, but I'm biased, and I also understand that I have insights into the goings-on of life that the scientific community of a century and a half ago didn't have access to. Hence it is perhaps easier for me to quit the realm of miracle for that of science than it was for some of Darwin's forgotten contemporaries.