The Wondering Mind

I just had the misfortune of reading an article on Car’s website about an apparent proposal for reducing speed limits in the UK. This is one of the sadder examples of a rabid advocate and partisan trying to disguise their writing as “reporting” for unsuspecting readers. Somthing we see far too frequently in what passes for public discourse today. So as a long time reader of the magazine, I’m going to dissect why this piece should have been ripped up by the editor.

First of all, the title: “Growing opposition to UK 50mph speed limit plan.” If you actually read the consultation paper here, it actually recommends an accelerated review of speed limits on British roads, on the premise that the limit on some roads might then be reduced as a result of reclassification of some types of roads. So right at the start, the “reporter” actually gets the facts wrong.

Then he claims that opposition to these (fictional) plans “is gathering momentum.” How can we tell? There is a petition with 34,000 signatures opposing the plans. To put that in perspective, according to the CIA World Factbook, the estimated population for the UK in July 2009 is over 61 million. That means that the people who signed this petition, if all are genuine, represent approximately 0.05% of the population. Or to put it another way, Old Trafford, the stadium for Manchester United, will seat over twice that many people in a sold-out match. Wow! What a momentum!

The reporter then claims these plans are being “steamrollered through” and are really just “a revenue raising scam.” And the basis for these claims? I have no idea, since there is no evidence provided. I guess we’re supposed to just take the reporter’s word for it, what with him having gotten everything else right so far.

But finally, we get some more support for this reporter’s bias.

A recent CAR Online poll showed a similar dissatisfaction among our regulars. An overwhelming 62% of you thought the 60mph limit should remain in force on rural roads, 31% said the limit should be raised and only 7% backed the Government’s plan.

This is, obviously, a voluntary poll among people who read a magazine about fast cars. To expect a different result than the one presented would be like polling the NRA on gun control. Would you expect too many NRA members to say guns should be banned?

In fact, as a voluntary poll, as in one which you volunteer to participate in, it is likely to attract participants who hold particularly extreme views, as they are more likely to be riled up enough to spend time responding to a poll which actually impacts nothing.

Our hapless reporter then appeals to the Association of British Drivers. I refer you to my previous comparison to the NRA. This is clearly a group of sad and crazy fanatics who people avoid at parties. If you want to evaluate the bona fides of this organisation, you can check out their website. There, among other things, they cling to the fiction that global warming is real. Even many American Republican politicians don’t claim to believe this rubbish any more.

And yet, Brian Gregory, the “association’s” chairman appeals to scientific principles.

On higher quality roads, the speed limit should even be raised. They need to use scientific principles. Speed limits should be based on the 85th percentile [between the speeds where 80 to 90% of road users drive]. On the motorway, many people drive at 85 to 90mph, so 85mph would be a safe speed limit.

He even appeals to economic consequences.

Each mph you slow the average speed down by costs the economy £800 million to £1 billion each year.

I haven’t bothered to test this man’s economic claims. I stopped after checking out the association’s webpage on the “scientific principle” of the “85th percentile.” I won’t explain here what’s wrong with this quasi-scientific sounding nonsense, but anyone who has any training in any science (natural or social) or statistics will immediately recognise that Brian Gregory lacks any such training or understanding.

I’m really sick and tired of lazy, stupid, and partisan hacks pretending to journalism and laying on a screed. Either write an editorial or report the news; don’t conflate the two. Which is not to say that there are not bad policy ideas which should be exposed as such. But my experience in such cases has been that laying out an honest, fair, and thorough analysis and reporting of facts will do more to convince an intelligent person than an obviously biased manifesto.

As it stands, all this article does is to convince me that the reporter is a sad fanatic, and not a very bright one at that. And the fact that he is clearly riled up about this position paper is in no way a mark against it. If anything, you can’t help suspecting that it’s got to have something to recommend it if the crazies are against it.

This story caught my eye today.

CARROLL COUNTY, Ga. — This is a story that may leave you shaking your head.

A Sandy Springs man got a phone call Monday that his family home in Carroll County was gone. Torn down. Demolished.

The thing is, it was the wrong house.

The demolition company said it had paperwork.

“I said, ‘Paperwork for what?’ and he said, ‘For the house, to demolish the house.’ I said, ‘I’m the owner of the house, I haven’t given anybody any authority to demolish this house,’” said Byrd.

So what was this “paperwork” that the moron company was so proud of?

Channel 2 Action News reporter Jovita Moore asked Byrd if the demolition company had an address.

“I said, ‘What address did you have?’ and he said, ‘They sent me some GPS coordinates.’ I said, ‘Don’t you have an address?’ (and) he said, ‘Yes, my GPS coordinates led me right to this address here and this house was described,’” said Byrd.

Byrd said he suspects the intended target was actually across the road.

There are clearly multiple levels of stupidity on the part of this demolition company here. Before you do something as destructive as total demolition of a building, the sensible thing to do would be to get more than “GPS coordinates” which can be misinterpreted by your retard workers.

(And what the hell does “GPS corrdinates” mean anyway? Are we talking longitude and latitude? What? Most people find directions to an address using a GPS unit, so I’m not sure what these clowns really mean here.)

Before you do something dangerous like demolishing a house, wouldn’t it be sensible to check that it is uninhabited at the time? That there is no one or nothing inside which they should not harm or destroy? They do that sort of thing when they demolish buildings with explosives and the like, and I don’t see why it would be different with any other demolition. And of course, if these cretins had performed, or tried to perform, even a cursory check, they would have realised that the house was still occupied.

Sad for the family involved and, one hopes, it will be very, very expensive for the companies involved. Preferably to the point they go out of business. For good.

The reason this story stuck with me was that I had somewhat of a similar experience a few years ago, although thankfully, my story did not end badly.

One day I’m in a Chick-fil-A having lunch. You can see out through the windows, obviously, and I could see my car in the lot from where I was eating. So I’m enjoying my lunch when I see a tow-truck pull up and a guy get out by my car. This guy promptly goes up to my car and appears to be trying the door handles.

Now, this was in the middle of the day, on a bright sunny day, in a large parking lot of a strip mall, with lots of people around. Which was why I was sat there for at least a minute or so, observing all this with incredulity. I’m thinking, “WTF? What is this idiot up to? He can’t be brazenly trying to break into my car in open daylight, in an open parking lot?”

It seemed so strange and incredible, I thought this simpleton was just confused and would move on soon enough. But no. He keeps fiddling about with my door handles. I still had to finish my lunch, but I had had enough. I went out to the parking lot and confronted him.

Me: “Hey! What the f@ck do you think you’re doing? Get the f@ck away from there!”

Idiot: “Is this your car?”

Me: “No, I’m just yelling at you because it’s someone else’s car! Of course it’s my car, you idiot! What the fu@ck do you think you’re doing?”

Idiot: “I got a call from someone who said they’d locked themselves out of their Acura in this parking lot. They wanted me to come out and unlock the car.”

Me: “And they gave you my license plate number?”

Idiot: “No. They just said it was an Acura.”

Me (now more incredulous than angry): “Well, is it another CL in this colour?”

Idiot: “Well, no. I don’t know what model it is. Or what colour. I just saw this Acura and thought this one was it.”

Me (now angry again and incredulous): “Are you telling me you were trying to break into my car without having any freakin’ idea if this one was the right one? You have no freakin’ idea which Acura it is, you f@cking idiot! What the f@ck were you going to do? Try every Acura in the lot? Or did you think there would just be one in the entire lot?”

Idiot (still f@cking clueless): “Sorry about that. I guess I’d better try to call back and get more info.”

Me: “You THINK?!”

At this point, the moron went back to his truck and sat in his cab, apparently making calls. After checking my car, I went back inside and finished my lunch.

I have to say that by the time I went back to my lunch, I was so pissed I was ready to call the cops. Before you think I was over-reacting, I was going to call if this cretin went onto another Acura. You never know; the guy might have been lying and it’s a ruse for theft. Or even if he was telling the truth, I had no confidence that he wouldn’t be randomly trying to break open other people’s cars. Fortunately, he left the parking lot altogether after a couple of minutes in his truck.

At the risk of sounding like a terrible snob, there are just some people who are too stupid to be anything more than a janitor. If not because they’re too dumb to be anything else, but for the protection of the rest of us.

Anyone else read the “Room for Debate” blog on the NY Times?

I found it while reading a piece on the silly comment on gay marriage by an even sillier girl in a beauty pageant. And then I read another article they have in the series, this one on gays in the military.

More than the article themselves or what the commentators they invited had to say in the articles, I was struck by one thing. Both articles seemed to include at least one right-wing crazy who is there because they work for some “policy organisation”.

In the gay marriage piece, it is someone from the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). In the military piece, it’s someone from the Center for Military Readiness (CMR). NOM is infamous at this point for having created a crazy advertisement against gay marriage. And I don’t mean it’s crazy for its stance; I mean the advertisement is crazy. (Just google for it and search on YouTube.)

As for CMR, Google Chrome browser warned me and would not let me explore their website with the following warning:

Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer! The website at cmrlink.org contains elements from the site telecom.dgnet.net, which appears to host malware – software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer.

Wow. Must be a reputable organisation!

All this is just my way of wondering how NY Times thinks the “debate” is furthered by giving a forum to people who are clearly on the extreme fringes of the issues by most reasonable standards. While people do have the right of free speech, the press, or anyone else for that matter, do not have an obligation to listen to the rantings of extremists, or an obligation to give them a forum.

Perhaps someone at the NY Times thinks we are better served by being informed of these extremist views. I don’t think so. They wouldn’t think to print the views of a neo-Nazi on a piece on anti-Semitism, and rightly so. Such fringe views don’t educate the reader in any meaningful way, and therefore does not, and cannot, further any debate.

So someone actually published a study on something I’ve always wondered about when watching The Colbert Report. Specifically, when I watch some conservative guests, I wonder if they realise that they are sometimes being mocked, and usually being challenged, on their conservative views. You really get the feeling that some of these people just don’t realise they are not on a conservative show.

Well, there appears to be plenty of evidence that there are conservatives who don’t get it. An observation now backed up by the study.

I don’t have access to the full article so I don’t know if the researchers reached any conclusions beyond the observation that the viewer’s opinion of the show’s political leanings appears to be influenced by the viewer’s own political sympathies. But I’m more interested in exactly how and why the viewer’s political sympathies would colour their perspective of the show.

So without the benefit of any empirical evidence, I would like to speculate on a few hypotheses of my own. In no particular order, they are:

1. They just don’t watch the show that often. If they did, it would be rather difficult for intelligent and educated viewers not to catch onto the biting sarcasm of some of the “bits”, especially some of the “The Word” pieces. I’ve often wondered if this is the case with some of the politicians interviewed for “Better Know a District”. To be fair to these people, if you are only an occasional, or even sporadic, viewer and you don’t know much about Stephen Colbert, you could easily be confused as to whether he’s serious or not. To be even more fair, these people can, and probably should, do more research before they go on the show. Or answering a study.
2. The conservative brain is different. Conservatives may genuinely perceive the world differently. I don’t mean to imply there’s anything necessarily defective about that. I just mean that it’s entirely conceivable that at least part of the reason conservatives hold a different world view to more left-wing people might be that their minds work differently.
3. Some conservatives, just like some left-wingers, are just idiots. There’s no way around it. People like Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage (“NOM”), are clearly stupid. How else would anyone who actually saw the bit Colbert did on the NOM advert think it was serious? At least Brian Brown, NOM’s Executive Director, seemed to realise in the same press release that the bit was not serious and not at all complementary, thanking Colbert only for the free playing of the ridiculous advert. (I don’t fully understand, though, why he or anyone else at NOM didn’t think to tell Maggie Gallagher.)

As I said, these are pure speculation and conjecture, since I have nothing more than annecdotal evidence, at best, to support them.

But they are an attempt to answer what is the most interesting aspect of the study. Not that some conservatives don’t get The Colbert Show, but why they don’t get it.

A really fascinating article on the BBC is about surveillance at protests. Specifically, video surveillance by the protesters on the police.

I just found it really interesting because, as obvious an idea as it is, it had never occurred to me that protesters would want to film the protests, and especially the police.

In any case, anything which acts as an additional check on abuse of power is welcome. And really it should be welcomed by the police as well, if they are doing what they are supposed to be, as they claim. The potential for misleading footage aside, the more cameras there are, the more evidence to show the public what a great job they are doing.

Of course, putting my social scientist cap on, I couldn’t help notice the little bit of information towards the end of the article on police being outfitted with body-worn cameras, usually on their helmets.

Pilot tests by police in 2006-07 were pronounced a success by the Home Office. Its assessment found that as well as reducing some crime, the use of the headcams reduced the amount of paperwork and, crucially, led to a drop in complaints against the police. There were no complaints against officers wearing the headcams during the pilot period.

The most obvious conclusion many people might take away from this is that people did not file false against the officers equiped with cameras, knowing there was footage. But an additional conclusion to be reached should be that those officers behaved better knowing they would be on camera. It’s the same effect as protesters filming the police.

I’m not sure how obvious that last point was to other people, but it was just the most interesting part of the article for me.

One thing you learn to do when you learn economics is to think of a problem in terms of incentives. Not always easy, but I think I have a very clear and good example. The piracy problem off the coast of Somalia. This is something that has been in the news much this past week due to the U.S. crew on cargo ship which was attacked. Thankfully, all crews are now free and safe.

The piracy problem, however, is far from resolved and only seems to be getting worse by the day. And when one looks past a lot of rhetoric and bluster, it’s clear that no one has an answer to this problem.

On a BBC News web page soliciting public opinion, there appear to be broadly 3 types of actions being suggested. (I am not counting a lot of the political finger-pointing, which is not all that helpful.)

1. Punitive collective punishment, against all the pirates, the various villages they come from, or the whole damned country. A less violent (and legal) version of this is for forceful response to piracy.
2. Use of escort convoys. People make comparisons to WWII, but this is something that is actually being done now with some, if not all, shipments of food aid to Somalia.
3. Arming the merchant ships and sailors.

(There are also some other useful suggestions at the very end of the article here.)

What all these suggestions seem to have in common is that fact that they seem to have resulted from a complete lack of any thought on the incentives and disincentives at work on the various parties.

So let us look at each party one at a time and see what incentives and disincentives they have.

First, the pirates.  The incentives are obvious. According to one report on the BBC, one pirate claims to have netted $250,000 from just one incident. You don’t have to live in Somalia for that to be exceptional pay for a day’s work. The disincentives are that it is dangerous work. Just look at what happened to three of the pirates holding the U.S. captain hostage.

Unfortunately, this is not that much of a disincentive. Those cases where the pirates are captured, less actually come to harm, are rare. And for pirates who are captured, it is not at all clear what you can do with them. Somalia has no functioning government, less an effective judicial system. No country wants to start bringing Somalis to their own country to prosecute. Some have tried dumping them on Kenya, but no one actually knows how effective a deterrent that has been, or if the Kenyans are even equipped to prosecute pirates seized by other countries.

What we have just looked at are absolute incentives and disincentives. There are also comparative incentives and disincentives. How does piracy compare against alternatives for these people?

In terms of incentives, it compares very well, since there are very few, if any, alternative means of income for many of these people. If there are no alternatives, it doesn’t really matter what you think or feel about piracy.

The disincentives compare favourably also. Living in Somalia is hard and dangerous by any standards. The main difference between engaging in piracy and not seems to be that most people try to avoid the dangers of Somali life, whereas you are seeking a higher level of danger by pursuing piracy. Unfortunately, piracy has a huge potential payoff, the other option does not. And besides, there’s no getting away from the hardships of Somali life short of leaving the country.

When seen in this light, the suggestions for action don’t have much merit. Action against Somalia will not work, unless you are intent on wiping out the entire population (I think they call that genocide), or you want to occupy the country and rebuild it.

Convoys are hugely expensive and, for that reason, untenable.  The pirates can just wait it out, until the navies get sick of escorting convoys, and then start again.

Arming merchant ships is not very practical. The pirates can, and will, always out-gun any armed merchant vessel. The only certain result of such policy will be increased danger and fatality, mostly for the merchant crew. Remember, the pirates’ lives are already pretty miserable and dangerous; how much worse will armed merchant ships make things for them?

What everyone seems to be missing in all this is that they are intent on setting up punitive deterrents. Clearly that won’t work. If punishment as deterrent worked all the time, we wouldn’t have any crime. So how about taking away the incentives for the pirates?

One, admittedly very simplistic, suggestion would be to make it illegal (maybe even criminal) to pay ransoms. This would be somewhat different from the classic “kidnap for ransom” scenario in that the party capable of paying the ransom is disinterested. While a rich person might pay a ransom for a family member even if it was against the law, a business would not, at least not without risking going out of business.

Businesses would then be faced with a choice. They can risk piracy by taking the same routes, assuming that they can find people to crew the ships. If a ship is taken by a pirate, the company can either pay up and face being prosecuted out of business, or not pay and face ruin in the court of public opinion. Or, they can reroute their ships to stay clear of pirates.

As people have already observed, rerouting ships is costly. But so is paying ransoms, and the various navies who protect ships don’t come free.

Under such a scenario, the payoff from piracy may decrease sufficiently that there is no longer enough incentive to keep doing it. The problem is in the details of such a plan.

This will take collective action on the part of many governments to enact, and properly enforce, the anti-ransom laws. Piracy will not be discouraged as long as there are ships to loot from countries with no such policy. And enforcement will also be problematic. There will be those sympathetic to companies paying ransom to save lives (while conveniently forgetting that it was those companies who put those lives deliberately in harms way in the first place).

The point isn’t that I think I have some great solution. The point is that public debate doesn’t seem to be considering all the incentives at work in shaping our current situation.

I used to find Frank Rich’s columns a bit too ranty for my tastes. So it worries me that I seem to find them more and more reasonable and in agreement with my own views. Either Rich is getting “better” in his columns, or I’m starting to lose it. Probably a bit of both.

So I was a little cheered to read his latest column and find that I didn’t agree with everything he said. I generally agreed with the bits which were for tarring and feathering the CEO-class. It was this little bit of aside in the middle of the piece I didn’t agree with. The question he asks us, and himself, is,

But even as that unanswered question hangs in the air, a more revealing inquiry might be this: Why is there any sympathy whatsoever for a Detroit C.E.O. who helped wreck his company, ruined investors and cost thousands of hard-working underlings their jobs, when there is no mercy for those who did the same on Wall Street? Might we, too, have a double standard? Could we still be in denial of the reality that greed and irresponsibility were not an exclusive Wall Street franchise during our national bender?

The answer he suggest is “yes”.

Perhaps we’re tempted to give Detroit a pass because it still summons nostalgic memories of “American Graffiti,” “Little Deuce Coupe” and certain things we used to do in the back seat of a Chevy. Wall Street and bankers are the un-aphrodisiac: “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Old Man Potter of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and, of course, Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.”

Though Gekko’s most famous line is “Greed is good,” even more emblematic is his defiant summation of his brand of capitalism: “I create nothing. I own.” At least Wagoner, unlike the sultans of finance, created cars, clunkers though they often were. The politically conservative Nashville star John Rich draws this moral distinction in his powerful new hit single “Shuttin’ Detroit Down.” Motor City is “the real world,” he sings, unlike those big shots “living it up on Wall Street in that New York City town.”

I’m not sure that’s entirely correct. I’m sure there is a certain level of class-ism in a country which loves to see itself as classless (a self-delusion which has always made for good PR, not so much as penetrating political and social analysis). This is helped quite a bit by the fact that GM and Chrysler factory workers did not get into their careers to get rich by not giving a damn about anyone else but themselves. (Well, they might have, but in that case they are very stupid and made a very poor choice of careers.) I think any apparent “sympathy” for Rick Wagoner et al. is only collateral sympathy which is held for the workers. (Firing Wagoner is not a vote of confidence for GM, which is bad for the GM workers.)

No matter how much the banking cabal bleat on about their their (non-existent) innocence and decency, most sane people recognise that anyone who thinks they deserve, because they own, so much more than others who work is possessed of gargantuan arrogance and some level of misanthropy. To varying degrees, these are people who are culpable in any sticky end they come to, and they got very (in some cases obscenely) rich in the process. Why do they need, never mind deserve, our sympathies?

And yes, there are and were plenty of people in finance who did not get rich who essentially got done in by “friendly fire”, but in most cases these people did not fail to get rich for want of trying. I’m not sure you deserve sympathy when you wanted to be one of the “masters of the universe”, but never got there because you just weren’t good enough.

Personally, I don’t think GM should be bailed out. Not because I don’t have sympathy for the workers. I do, and I think the government needs to do much more for them, and for the millions of others who have been made redundant. But the size of the failing business should not justify propping up a company which would be allowed to fail if it was only smaller and less politically sensitive.

But by the same token, I think the government should have, and should now be, scything through the ranks of the finance sector. (I refuse to call finance an “industry”. That’s just insulting for people who do actually work in industry.) They should be allowing many, many more financial institutions to fail and firing a lot more “executives”.

The failure to root out the cancer that these institutions and individuals represent to the rest of society has huge costs, both financial and social. The insistence on trying to repair a rotten system speaks volumes of the lack of imagination and courage on the part of the people involved. (We can start with Larry Summers and Geithner, but it’s a long list.)

More to the point, it won’t work. Even before the current crisis is over, news papers are writing about how executive pay is still not seriously curtailed, or the fact that many expect any reversal in fortunes to be temporary at best. (Not really surprising when you think of the sorts of “heroes” who make up the highly paid boards at many companies.)

And it’s this double-standard the people are railing against. Between those who are at the top who don’t think they should be held accountable for anything, and the rest of us who are always held accountable for everything. Wall Streets is in the cross-hairs more than Detroit because the hypocrisy is on a larger scale and so much more obvious.

The on-going saga at AIG is a drama in the ridiculous, the outrageous, and (for the taxpayers) the tragic. The public outrage that came about from the news of the “retention” bonuses did not have long on the news cycle before the media outlets and the Obama administration started a concerted campaign to convince us that it was over the top and misdirected, so that the masses would not get in the way of the continuing bailout.

I’ve blogged before about why I don’t believe the public anger is misplaced or over the top. I’ve also written about what many believe is an arrogant sense of entitlement among these Wall Street types.

Well, just to  make my point for me even more clearly, this idiot wrote an op-ed in the NY Times. You can read some of the reasons why at least one of my friends hoped the author would get hit by a bus.

The letter is so outrageously self-righteous, self-satisfied, and self-entitled, that it literally took my breath away. I also could not believe someone would be quite so stupid as to publicise the biggest “kick me” sign on his back I have ever seen.

The amazing thing is that this fool is not alone. Just read here and here for more whining from the gilded set.

It’s not surprising that these people may feel put-upon. And that, seen in isolation, their treatment in the last year or so by various parties has been harsh, if not outright unfair. But they can’t be that stupid.

You can’t see the treatment of these people in isolation from what they did for years. The anonymous author of the supposed letter from within AIG rightly holds the system and the politicians responsible. But there is absolutely no recognition of the fact that he/she, and others like them at AIG, played within that system. Played by that system’s rules, played with the politicians, for profit which was completely dissociated from any benefit they may have conferred on society at large. If you participate in what you yourself describe as a corrupt system, why would be expect a happy ending for yourself?

There is also a complete lack of solidarity with the millions of others who have been victims of the financial crisis. They too worked hard and they had even less, if any, involvement with creating, running, and perpetuating the system which caused the current crisis. And yet they find themselves in straits even more dire than many at AIG. Why are those at AIG owed more than the rest of us?

You really have to look to the Middle Ages, or the Dark Ages, for this sort of sense of entitlement. When people were taught that kings and lords were somehow entitled because God must have ordained it. Maybe DeSantis and others believe that God ordained their bonuses.

For the rest of us who don’t believe that kind of rubbish, we need to let our politicians know that it is now beyond time they threw out the corrupt system of finance and the crooked actors who have profited from it once and for all. If they want to put a failed system on life-support with our hard-earned money so that this self-appointed new class of gentry can live in $10,000 a month flats, then we need new politicians.

I’ve long been a critic of Israeli policies regarding the Palestinians, and of America’s slavish support of those policies. I think they regularly violate international law and are a source (although far from being the only source) of violence and instability in the Middle East. I also believe that the conflict with the Palestinians has had, and continues to have, a corrosive effect on the Israeli society and its institutions such as its armed forces. None of these things are good for the U.S.

So it was disappointing, but perhaps wholly predictable, when a nominee for a top intelligence post in the Obama administration was essentially ousted from the nomination by the “pro-Israeli” lobby. Their opposition seems to be based on the fact that the nominee does not have a history of rubber-stamping whatever Israel does, no matter how outrageous or ill-advised its actions. This resulted in a concerted effort to cripple the nomination, resulting in the nominee’s withdrawal.

Having said all this, the BBC had a more nuanced analysis, which seems to suggest that the candidate may have been undone not only by the opposition of the Israel lobby, but also by other qualities which proved controversial.

Since I am not already versed in the minutia of the history of this man, it would take me hours and hours to sift through records to figure out whose story is the more accurate portrayal. It’s time I don’t really have. So it’s hard for me to say if the man really did say things which put him in a poor light, or whether his opponents have misrepresented his record for their own purposes.

One thing does seem clear, however. While I don’t know that I necessarily agree with the concluding analysis of the BBC piece about the Arab-Israeli issue being a zero-sum game, it does make a very good point about diplomacy and analysis.

Even if this candidate is accurate in his portrayal of his past statements, it seems clear that he had been, and continues to be, somewhat tone-deaf politically. As an adviser, his jobs have been, and would have been in intelligence, one that is not only objective, but also political. He should have been mindful of the profile of his audience and couched his analyses accordingly.

More broadly, people should be mindful of the greater goals of what they are doing. People sometime lose sight of what their goal should be, instead focusing on making a point or about “being right”. In this case, the person’s job wasn’t to be right (well, actually it was, but that wasn’t the point of his jobs); it was to convey the correct analysis and to get his point across to his audience.

A while ago, I had an experience where a co-worker got into an argument with our boss. He was trying to get our boss to do something which we all knew he did not want to do. The co-worker finally said something which, while he had a point, caused the boss to yell at him. As I said, the co-worker had a valid point, but he was missing the bigger picture. The point wasn’t to be in the right, the point was to get our boss to do this thing, and at that he failed. So really, he got yelled at for no gain or good reason on his part.

A lot of the time, that old cliche that, “you should work smarter, not harder,” is a load of condescending bollocks. You would be working “smarter” if you knew how! Most of the time, you have no choice but to work harder. But sometimes, you really can, and should, work smarter.

President Obama was in the news (very briefly) about a small comment he made on legalising marijuana. It was during the “cyber-townhall” meeting he held on a wide ranging set of issues.

Apparently, one of the more popular questions posed was regarding legalising marijuana. As President Obama characterised it, the question proposed that legalising the use of the drug, and thereby taxing its sale, might help create jobs and improve the economy. (You can see a video of it here.)

If that was a fair characterisation by the President, then it was a silly question and it deserved to be brushed off. You don’t need to be an economist to realise that the size of the current economic problem is such that, for legalised sales of marijuana to solve the economic problem, we would all have to consume vast quantities.

To put this in context, Diageo, one of the world’s largest drinks companies, has sales (not profits) of £10.6 billion for the year ended June 30, 2008. (The current exchange rate is approx. $1.40 for £1.) With banks such as Chase having received two and a half times that individually to bail them out, you can see that for marijuana sales to rescue the economy, it would have to become the most popular drug sold, by a factor of thousands.

All this is my way of saying that it was an incredibly silly way of asking about legalisation of marijuana. But I suspect the questioners thought they were being very clever and sly in asking their real question: Will President Obama support legalising marijuana for recreational use?

There are potentially powerful arguments to be made for legalisation from a law and order perspective. There is little evidence to support the notion that it is a “gateway drug” and, because it does not have the sorts of addictive properties as some of the “Class A” drugs such as cocaine or morphine (heroine), it is debatable whether marijuana causes additional criminality that is not associated soley with the fact that possession and use of it is a criminal act in and of itself.

There are, however, also good reasons for opposing legalisation. For example, marijuana can and does come in different grades of potency and it is questionable as to whether the more powerful variants would ever be allowed for recreational use. In that case, the recreational users are likely to keep on seeking out the more potent, and illegal, variant. Legalisation of the less powerful variants may then not alleviate the law and order issues, and may eaxcerbate them by creating potential loopholes for criminals.

I admit I’m not the most well-versed person on the topic, but there does not appear to be sufficiently convincing arguments for legalisation which overwhelm those opposed, at least for recreational use. I also suspect that that is not far off from what many people think. Which is why the “cyber-potheads” ask silly questions.

What’s more disappointing is the level of discourse coming from some people who apparently favour legalisation, at least for medical use. I’ve read two on Huffington Post, both of which are poorly argued and off the mark.

The first one was so off the mark I’m still not sure why the author was so worked up. First, the President’s point was addressing the question whether legalising pot would aid the economy. Neither this nor the second article address that point. As one of the commentors for the first article noted, this may have been deliberate on the President’s part to avoid having to tackle a tricky issue he’d rather not deal with. But the author didn’t even make this obvious observation.

In fact, in this author’s case, he was talking about a legally available drug containing an active ingredient derived from pot. So what is his beef? Other people can get the same drug he did, legally!

If his point was to argue that there are people who would benefit from having access to a more powerful variant of the drug he had, i.e. medicinal marijuana, then he never got around to making that argument. And he never makes any link between those posing the silly question to the President and those who need medicinal marijuana, which would have justified the comment that the President was laughing at “them” as a group.

The second article I mentioned seems to make exactly the same mistake.

While this author makes a more convincing, and coherent, argument for legalising medicinal use of marijuana, he is still missing the point. Which is, the President was not addressing that issue; he was saying legalising marijuana would not help the economy. (At this point, I suspect that was at least a mischaraterisation of the sorts of questions which came in on the issue, deliberately setting up an easy straw, and I’m amazed it seems to have worked so well.)

I think what both authors are missing, or deliberately avoiding, was the question of whether marijuana should be legalised for medicinal use only, or if it should also be permitted for recreational use as well. Because lets face it: whatever the merits or demerits of a serious argument about marijuana’s benefits, the majority of those who support legalising marijuana want to use it recreationally.

Of the many people I know, and have known, who favour legalisation of recreational use, most of whom are recreational users themselves, I have never met a single person who had anything to say about its medicinal properties.

That means that the supporters of medicinal marijuana are faced with a choice. They can support keeping the drug illegal for recreational use, in which case there is almost certainly not enough interest, let alone support, among the public in legalising the medicinal use. Or, they can support recreational use, in which case their cause is linked with a much weaker cause, and one which has powerful law-enforcement opponents.

If supporters of medical marijuana want real change, they have to start making difficult, and brave, choices, instead of venting misdirected anger and frustration like the two authors.