The Bilerico Project

Calling Keynes Gay Isn't Enough Anymore

Alex Blaze — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:30:00 -0500

Conservative historian Niall Ferguson, the other day, said not to listen to what early 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes had to say because he was gay and childless and prissy (he liked poetry and ballet!).

It apparently has been a thing among conservatives going back to the 1930's, calling Keynes gay to discredit him. Brad Delong has quite a few quotations from conservatives saying, as he puts it: "Keynes was a perv and Keynesianism is pervy and Keynesians are perhaps perverts themselves."

To say that Keynes is an influential economist is an understatement. Macroeconomics wasn't a separate field until well after The General Theory was published, and his observations made it into most macro models that followed.

But conservatives don't like him. Conservatives who don't understand The General Theory hate him because his most famous policy implication was the government can do a lot to help the economy. Worse still, most people who say they hate Keynes don't understand the evidence, the reasoning, and the intuition that went into building the theoretical framework that makes government intervention in recessions the optimal response. I've even seen liberals over the last few days refer to The General Theory as an "ideology" or "philosophy," when it's about as scientific as one can get in economics. It's OK not to like his work, but at least engage the work.

I should take that back - conservatives who understand Keynes tend to hate him even more.

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Yes, Some People Are Actually Against Divorce

Alex Blaze — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 12:00:00 -0500

One of the less talked about hobby horses of the marriage movement (the anti-gay one) is that they're actually against divorce for straight people. They'll make exceptions for rape and incest and life of the mother... I mean, domestic violence and adultery, but they really don't like the idea of people living with and making families with the people that they want to.

Divorce is popular since most people don't want the risk legally enforced "til death do us part" implies, so Republicans try to hide that religious right position in the same place that they hide the "ban contraception" stuff. But every now and then their hostility to divorce comes out:

Proving that once again the Republican Party is beyond parody, a bill being considered by the Iowa state House would "prohibit [married] parents of minor children from getting a 'no-fault' divorce" and would require married parents of minor children "to show a spouse was guilty of adultery, had been sent to prison on a felony conviction, had physically or sexually abused someone in the family, or had abandoned the family for at least a year."

Great idea! I can't think of something an abused spouse would rather do than to start a long legal proceeding against the person who is violent to them. The surprise is when "reasonable doubt" means that the victim is still married to a person who's probably angry that they were arrested and prosecuted.

All around great policy.

Again, no-fault divorce is awesome and it's a 20th century achievement that barely needs protection because of its obvious awesomeness. People should be allowed to divorce for whatever reason, on whatever whim, because the rest of us have no right to force anyone to stay married who doesn't want to be married.

It's something to think about the next time someone trots out the "straight people are already ruining marriage with divorce!" argument. No, dear, they're celebrating marriage by freeing themselves up for another one.

The alternative is to be like France, where I've met more than a few gay men still married to their wives from before coming out because divorce - even amicable divorce - is an expensive and onerous process. What interest the state has in keeping those couples together I can't begin to fathom.

The Economics of Risky Sex & Love

Alex Blaze — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:00:00 -0500

Thinking some more about this column, I do like how Robert Frank suggests applying cost-benefit analysis to the quest to love and be loved. I just wish he did it more effectively.

Consider the enormous costs people pay with when it comes to seeking love and sex. Americans spend billions of dollars on dating and weight loss and beauty products and fancy toys and everything else people use to get others sexually interested in them, and it's impossible to count products not explicitly sold for dating but still get used that way anyway (like cars and food).

Add to that the time spent seeking romantic partners - it can be several hours a day for some people. They could earn a lot of money by taking on a part-time job or have lots of fun with a cheaper, less time-consuming hobby.

Then add in the cost of uncertainty: some people risk losing their family and job and respect from others when the sex and love a person wants isn't what others want for them. Not everyone takes these risks, but enough people do that it can't be ignored.

Frank doesn't get into it (his column would have been more interesting if he did), but one of the most fundamental concepts in economic theory is that the expected benefit has to exceed the expected cost for someone to do something. People don't buy things they don't think they'll like.

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No, Forcing People to Abstain from Sex Is Mysterious

Alex Blaze — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:30:00 -0500

Here's your daily dose of The Kids Today being wretched. Robert Frank in the NY Times:

Proponents of a ban [on contraception] may just want teenagers to grow up in an environment where they aren't expected to sleep with the first classmate who hits on them. A ban, though, would cause enormous harm, and is an ill-advised strategy for creating such an environment. But the wish itself is hardly mysterious.

First: where exactly are teenagers expected to sleep with the first classmate who hits on them? Frank could at least say he's just talking about how some parents don't want their teens to have sex at all instead of implying that schools are little more than non-stop orgies, where rejecting others so impolite that you have to drop your pants the minute someone propositions you to make his point.

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Freezing Your Employees Should Be Illegal

Alex Blaze — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:30:00 -0500

On Monday, I saw someone in Indiana holding a sign in front of a parking lot for a pizza deal. I don't know if this person was a man or a woman or what race they were or anything about them - it was so cold they were all bundled up. It was cold, like 0 or minus 10 with the wind chill.

So not only was this person working on MLK Day, but they were risking their life to tell people about dollar off pizza (or whatever).

Two thoughts: First, what does this output (in the economic sense) add to the general welfare? If this person ended up in a hospital, would it have been worth it? Would it have been worse to give this person a paycheck (paid by the government, maybe) to stay home than to force them to work in the cold?

Second, since it was a day about dreaming, wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where responsible law enforcement officers could be called by a passing driver, and the cop would show up and give that person's employer a ticket?

Jobs aren't guaranteed, people are effectively required to work, so the employer/employee relationship is coercive. Abusing power, especially power that's encouraged by the state, should be illegal.

(Pizza snow man via Flickr)

Why Young Adults Don't Vote Republican

Alex Blaze — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:00:00 -0500

I'm guessing no one outside the Republican party wonders why young people generally don't vote GOP, but here's a pithy reminder in the form of a headline on Fox News's website:

We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists

Fox's resident psychiatry pseudo-expert argues that college first-years have higher self-esteem than ever (except no) while doing worse at school than ever before (also no), which is enough to diagnose narcissism (ha ha no). And it's all the fault of video games and MTV, even though today's young people's parents grew up with those things too. The get-off-my-property crowd hasn't updated their cultural references in a few decades.

So young people are told by conservatives that they need to study harder and be more motivated to succeed today. If they don't, then anything bad that happens to them is entirely their fault and no one should help them. When they actually do study harder and say they're more motivated, conservatives ignore the results and then call young people deluded narcissists.

That's hatred.

Not that this entirely accounts for why young people don't like Republicans, but surely if conservatives stopped openly hating The Kids Today they could make some inroads.

How Not to Argue that Marriage Is Important

Alex Blaze — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:30:00 -0500

Proving that children who are raised by their biological, married parents* do better than other kids requires more than just looking at statistical attributes of those kids and comparing them to other kids. But the "marriage will solve everything" crowd relies only on those sorts of statistical measures because more accurate methodologies refute their claims.

It's just bad social science. The assumptions you have to make to draw those conclusions are large and counter intuitive. For example, if you wanted to say that kids who are raised by their biological, married parents are more likely to go to college, then you'd have to assume that neither having married parents nor getting a college degree are correlated with other forms of privilege (race and parents' income and parents' education and national origin, etc), which is a joke.

Moreover, even if they crunched the numbers in a way that controlled for other, measurable factors like parents' income, they'd still have to assume that they accounted for everything that cannot be measured as well (parents' happiness, community support, social skills, etc), or at least assume that those unobservables don't matter. Which is also a joke of an assumption.

The more I learn about human behavior, the less natural the platonic ideal of the nuclear family (one mother, one father, their biological offspring in one house, to the exclusion of extended family and friends, with no significant ties to other people who aren't related by blood or marriage) appears to me. Kids should not just have friends their age; families need community support; each parent should have their own lives and social networks; and the bias should be towards openness, not exclusion, in home and community.

I don't know if the statistics back up my instincts, but at least I know I'm not just making some up to pretend like I have science on my side.

*I left the word "heterosexual" out for a reason: the National Review's article doesn't directly argue that only straight parents are good, even though it's probably what the authors believe. Also, I've heard plenty of gay activists over the years make that same argument (i.e., Marriage, the piece of paper itself, will make kids of same-sex couples succeed).

Louie Giglio's Strange Logic

Alex Blaze — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 10:00:00 -0500

People joke about how they "lose faith in humanity" from reading this blog, and since I gave up full-time blogging I've been seeing my faith in humanity restored. I have more confidence than I used to that random people are smart, or at least smarter than I thought they were.

Reading homophobic pastor Louie Giglio's statement on why he's not giving a benediction at the inauguration I remembered why I thought people were so dumb. It was arguments like this:

The issue of homosexuality (which a particular message of mine some 20 years ago addressed) is one of the most difficult our nation will navigate. However, individuals' rights of freedom, and the collective right to hold differing views on any subject is a critical balance we, as a people, must recover and preserve.

Translation: "You're intolerant of my intolerance and that's the real intolerance" mixed with "Free speech for everybody means that I, and only I, have a right to this very specific platform, that I was previously granted after of decades of saying what others expected of me."

A year and a half of not blogging has restored my faith in humanity, and I refuse to believe that someone could think that those arguments make sense. The only conclusion that leaves is that it's just dishonesty.

(image source)

Gay Couple Kicked Out of Bowling Alley

Alex Blaze — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 15:00:00 -0500

A gay couple in Plano, Texas, got kicked out of a bowling alley after they asked to switch lanes a few times and...:

Once the couple began to bowl in the new lane, a child from a large group next to them kept bowling in their lane. Lesmes said his partner went up to ask if they could be moved again. When Lesmes saw his partner get upset, he went over to speak to the manager on duty.

The manager was already irritated, Lesmes said, and said they were causing a problem by asking to be moved again. The manager asked if they were professional bowlers. When the couple replied they were not, the manager said the venue was a family environment. Lesmes said he told the manager he was with his family. When the manager asked where they were, Lesmes pointed to his partner and said they were family and wanted to enjoy their evening.

But the manager refused to move them to another lane and told them that they "were not family."

What I don't get is why it matters at all if they're a family (whatever that means). It's probably a "single men shouldn't be allowed near children because we're stupid and think this is a way to prevent child molestation" thing more than a homophobia thing... although the two are closely related.

The company in question has a nondiscrimination policy with the phrase "sexual preference" in it. Good for them. They should add "family status" to the policy, because, heavens to murgatroid, why should a bowling alley care if they're a family.

(Bowling graphic via Bigstock)

The First Step Is Young, Thin, White Female Marriage

Alex Blaze — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:30:00 -0500

Could there be a more obsequious protest against homophobia?

Homophobic Pastor to Speak at Inauguration

Alex Blaze — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 10:00:00 -0500

Obama's second term will apparently start with reruns: he's elected to have an anti-gay preacher deliver the benediction at the inauguration.

Hearing Dems talk about how this isn't all that big of a deal will be just as much fun as hearing them talk about how authorizing murder (via drone) is just a little whoopsie that even awesome, educated people sometimes accidentally do. The best thing about being a conservative Democrat is that liberal Democrats are always willing to put party above ideology and excuse your crimes.

(And, as always, I'm open to the possibility that Mr. Giglio has changed his views since the 90's. Perhaps he could make his retraction and apology as easily google-able as his original incendiary sermon is.)

UPDATE: Mr. Giglio has withdrawn from the program.

Homophobes for Marriage for All

Alex Blaze — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 17:20:00 -0500

I know conservatives love projection and "up-is-down" when it comes to argument strategies, but I don't get why the anti-gay-marriage pamphleteers that I saw at the market the other day (same-sex marriage will come up for a vote soon in France) were saying "Marriage for all." Even though I can't find it on the anti-gay material online, I know a couple people who heard pamphleteers say that elsewhere.

Effective conservative argumentation is about giving a pseudo-rational explanation to people's baser instincts ("Everyone is better off when I get a tax cut!" "It sucks when your kids are smarter than you, so teaching them lies must be good!" etc).

But completely irrational explanations? French homophobes have a lot to learn from their American counterparts.

A Simple Answer to Andrew Sullivan's Question

Alex Blaze — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:00:00 -0500

Andrew Sullivan asks (referring to budget cuts):

Why Is The Pentagon Off The Table?

Good question! The Defense Department's budget should definitely be cut.

But he doesn't ask if it should be cut; he asks why no one's allowed to talk about it. Could it be because influential columnists write BS like this?

The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.

There are lots of reasons for the bloated Defense budget, the biggest one being corruption. But the #1 reason we can't talk about it is because anyone who brings it up when it counts (that is, when America's getting ready for a war) gets labeled a traitor by establishment columnists like Sullivan.

(Military arm-in-arm graphic via Bigstock)

Queer Music Friday: Le1f

Alex Blaze — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 15:30:00 -0500

A little search of the site shows that no one has posted one of the best videos of the year to this site, Le1f's unapologetically queer "Wut."

The whole album is awesome, and it's available through Le1f's website. It's a low-fi album with dissonant beats and smooth vocals, reminiscent of Aaliyah's work with Timbaland, and I'll read the Aaliyah sample in "Fresh" as a nod to that.

How Mitt Romney Learned to Rule the World

Alex Blaze — Fri, 11 May 2012 10:45:00 -0500

Bil posted yesterday about Mitt Romney's days as a violent bully back in the 60's. The Washington Post had five witnesses who independently verified the story, the Boston Globe has a sixth. The short version is that Romney led others in holding down a kid and cutting off his hair and would shout "atta-girl" at another student who was perceived as gay when he spoke in class, but both articles are worth reading for the whole story.

Romney has several excuses for the whole thing:

he does not remember the incident (even though six classmates, some of whom sound fairly Republican, all do),
even though he doesn't remember the incident, he's absolutely sure he didn't do it because the kids were gay since there were no gay kids in the 60's,
he's had a bunch of kids who also had a bunch of kids, which means that his past is erased or something,
why can't we talk about stuff that's relevant, like how he stole pensions from workers in Kansas City?
it's funny, something to laugh about with Brian Kilmeade, and
he's sorry for any incident that "may have gone too far."

A few years ago I worked at a summer camp for future Bain-esque boys whose b/millionaire parents sent them there to toughen them up. Unlike my fairly middle class upbringing, these kids weren't taught to meticulously follow the rules. Instead, they could do pretty much anything they wanted to do so long as they were tough little men about it, and that included bullying and fighting.

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