NY-20

At the time of this writing, Scott Murphy (D) is down by 52-48 to Jim Tedisco (R), an absolute margin of 720 votes. Comparing the numbers to 2006, when Kirsten Gillibrand won 53-47, Murphy appears to be far enough behind that he's unlikel to make up the margin, considering how heavily he's losing in vote-rich Saratoga county.

There's going to be a temptation to read an awful lot into victory or defeat here, but in reality there is very little story beyond "Both Teams Played Hard". A district with a slight Republican lean went for a Democrat by a small margin in a year when Democrats won several red-leaning districts. In a special election three years late, Republicans may take it back by a similarly small margin. Because politics produces discrete winners and losers, and cable news attempts to read everything as a referendum on everything, it's often times hard to see just how small the changes are sometimes.

Update: Sixty-five votes? All I can say is that the past six months have been great economic stimulus if you're an election lawyer.

Does John Cornyn Like Lighting Money on Fire?

Because I can't find any other reason why he hasn't thrown Norm Coleman overboard. Coleman is going to lose. Despite years of aggressive court-packing by conservatives, tempered only modestly during the Clinton era, the law is the law and an election is an election; conservatives aren't going to undo an election count just because the results don't suit their tastes (note the distinction between Bush v. Gore wherin GOP allies on the Court stopped a count that might have changed the outcome). This isn't middle school kickball; you don't get endless do-overs or partial credit for coming very very close. Appeals are only going to postpone the inevitable.

But fifty-nine Democratic Senators are not much more dangerous than fifty-eight Democratic Senators. Arlen Specter has been effectively neutered by the primary process, flip-flopping on EFCA, probably the only bill where he would have been the deciding vote. Democrats have their hands full already between Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, and the surprisingly skittish Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln. Any bill that passes will almost certainly have the votes of at least two Republican Senators, meaning that Franken is in some sense superfluous. So why waste the money, except perhaps because Cornyn wants Democrats to have an easier time getting to a veto-proof majority?

Arming The Elderly

After a crazy person shoots up a place and kills a lot of people, opponents of gun control often argue that the crime wouldn't have happened if people at that place were better armed and could shoot back. I generally take a dim view of this response -- the level of trigger-happiness that would successfully reduce casualties in mass shooting cases would probably cause enough mistaken shootings of innocent people in other cases not to be worthwhile.

I'm curious about whether anyone on the pro-gun side will make this argument in response to the recent shooting in a nursing home. I'm quite amused at the thought of arming elderly people in nursing homes, even as I know that it would be an extremely bad idea.

Peter Suderman, Consequentialism, And The Path Of The Wanker

Katha Pollitt on Ross Douthat going to the NYT:

So who would I like to see in the Kristol slot? Actually, Kristol. I was livid when they gave him the job, but he was perfect: a dull, complacent apparatchik who set forth the Bush line in all its fact-free glory. His columns were like press releases—you could hardly remember them two minutes after reading them. But his presence on the page reminded readers that David Brooks is not really what Republicanism is all about.

I'm not totally sure what to think of the whole thing (I don't know whether he'll be influential in pushing his freaky right-wing social views, or whether he'll just make those views look properly freaky), but Katha's view certainly seems plausible. Peter Suderman's response:

assuming Pollitt actually believes this, this strikes me as a deeply cynical exercise in intellectual bad faith. Partisans and hacks may want the other side to put forth their worst defenders, but shouldn’t anyone who considers herself an intellectual hope for the best from her political opponents?

Well, no. This seems to beg the question against any consequentialist intellectual. If the government enacted my favored policies (universal health care / climate change legislation / liberal social policies / humane foreign policy with huge global antipoverty spending), but the debate in major op-ed pages was reduced to ungrammatical raunchy limericks, I'd call that a wonderful state of affairs. And since I think that good consequences are the criterion of what you should do and what you ought to hope for, I'd say that Pollitt's hopes are in the right place. I don't see anything anti-intellectual about holding these views or honestly expressing them.

This doesn't mean that acting to produce good consequences is always consistent with retaining one's credibility as an intellectual. One can't maintain one's intellectual credibility while making bad arguments just because one thinks they'll be effective in getting people to vote the right way and make the right consequences happen. Now, in some situations, ceasing to be an intellectual and becoming a hack will be the morally right move, because in these situations, hackery has tremendous benefits to others. (Similarly, in some unusual situations, ceasing to be a law-abiding citizen and becoming a thief will be the morally right move, because there are large social goods to be generated by theft.) Of course, none of this is what Pollitt is doing -- she's just expressing an honest opinion about what will best serve her political ends.

Suderman's position seems to be that being an intellectual involves wanting public debate to go well, with smart people on both sides carrying on a respectful and informative discussion. I agree that that's a pretty good thing. But much more central to being an intellectual is presenting good, well-thought-out arguments that you believe in. Someone who honestly presents an interesting argument for why it would be okay for public debate to go to hell is doing the intellectual thing a lot better than somebody who presents a bad argument he doesn't actually believe for why it's important for public debate to be conducted on a high level.

A participant in high-minded public discussion who values high-mindedness so highly that he loses sight of the consequences for the outside world indulges in the vice of wankery. While good intellectual discussions can be quite pleasant and are certainly worthwhile, pursuing them should not lead one to lose track of important and valuable things in the outside world. My purpose is not to accuse Suderman of this vice, but to make clear that the path of the intellectual need not be the path of the wanker.

Pandagon: Porno Pottery

Things I learn from reading Pandagon:

Last year, I interviewed author Marty Klein about this weird irrationality about sex and technology, after seeing him lecture about the long history of people using sexual fears as an excuse to bash technological innovations. This actually dates back to the invention of pottery, he said, which caused a panic because people made pornographic pottery.

The post itself is about 'sexting', which is the latest in a long line of ways to do sexual things with new technologies. I suppose any time you have a new technology, there will be a group of people who don't understand it, and a partially overlapping group of people who are easily freaked out by sexuality.

Because I don't want to believe that my species is colossally dumb, I hope the group of people who didn't quite understand pottery was relatively small.