The Election: What Does Obama Want? What Do I Want?

I want the Republicans to take the House, since I view divided government as a good thing—the less the government does, ceteris paribus, the less damage it does. I am less sure of my desires with regard to the Senate. Are we better off with House and Senate fighting each other or both of them fighting the administration?

Obama's (hypothetical) preferences are more interesting. Everyone takes it for granted that he wants the Democrats to do as well as possible, and it may well be true. On the other hand ... .

Suppose he believes that most of the things that are going badly now, most notably the unemployment rate and the deficit, will still be going badly two years from now. If the Democrats retain control Congress there will be nobody but the Democrats to blame, which could have negative consequences for an incumbent running for reelection. If, on the other hand, the Republicans control one or both houses ... .

Returning to my preferences, there is one more factor. The better the Republicans do, the more emphatic the public rejection of Obama's policies. Since most of the policies in question—stimulus, bailout, Obamacare, and cap-and-trade—strike me as bad ones, that would be good. It would make it less likely that later politicians will repeat what I view as his mistakes.

Constitutional Chaos

I recently read a paper by a colleague discussing the lawsuits currently being pursued by various states against the new health care rules. His conclusion was that some of the arguments made by the states were legitimate and that there was a real possibility that one or more of them would convince a majority of the Court.

One of the lines of argument he covered struck me as raising some broader issues. The new rules require states to expand medicaid coverage in expensive ways. The states argue that this amounts to commandeering them, compelling states to implement, and pay for, policies imposed on them by the federal government.

The other side argues that there is no compulsion. Medicaid is a program run by the states, although largely paid for by the federal government, and any state unhappy with the new rules is free to abolish its medicaid program—and, of course, stop receiving federal dollars to pay for it. The states respond that that is not a real alternative, both because many of their citizens are now dependent on the program and because the amount of money involved comes to a sizable fraction of the total state budget. My colleague's view is that the states are unlikely to win on this one, since past cases have made it clear that the federal government can get states to do things—impose a 55 mile per hour speed limit, for instance—by threatening to reduce or eliminate federal subsidies if they don't.

Which raises the following question ... . Suppose the federal government wants to force the states to do something which, according to the Supreme Court, is not within its power—for instance to ban firearms within 1000 feet of a school (United States v. Lopez —but see this Wikipedia article for complications). It does so by creating an income surtax calculated to bring in fifty billion dollars a year, and announces that the money will be used to help states with their budget difficulties—but only states that have passed the ban. To make the logic of what it is doing even clearer, it adds a second condition—states that accept the new money must use it to give every citizen a credit on his state taxes equal to the amount of the surtax.

Aside from some extra paperwork, the law has no effect on states that agree to pass the ban, but acts as a steep fine on states that do not. My colleague's opinion was that such a law—absent the final step, which hadn't occurred to me when I put the question to him—would be found constitutional. There is no constitutional requirement that federal expenditures be allocated fairly among the states, whatever that might mean.

There is a requirement with regard to allocating taxation—Article I Section 2 ("Representative and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers ..."). Later amendments changed the details, but I believe it would still be found unconstitutional for the federal government to announce a tax that would be collected only from some states but not others—not, for instance, from states that had passed regulations the federal government wanted them to pass. So the federal government can evade constraints on its power over the states by targeted expenditures but not by targeted taxes.

When the Constitution was written, that may have been sufficient. So long as all expenditure was for "the common Defense and general Welfare," targeting would not be an issue—although no doubt, in practice, ways were found of promoting the welfare of some people more than others.

My conclusion is that the destruction of one part of the original Constitutional scheme resulted in the indirect destruction of a different part. Once it is accepted that Congress has an almost unrestricted power to tax as much money as it wants to be spent in whatever way it likes, it becomes impossible in practice to restrict its ability to make states do things. All it has to do is take enough money away from their citizens and offer to return it if, and only if, the states are suitably obedient to Congressional commands.

What Defines a Sham Marriage?

A recent story on Fox News concerns a Lebanese man convicted of entering into a sham marriage with an American citizen in order to get permission to stay in the U.S. What made the story newsworthy was that the woman was later an aide to Senator Harry Reid. There is no clear evidence that Reid knew about the case until recently, when the story broke—at which point the aide apparently quit or was fired. I expect that his opponent in the current election will argue either that he knew, that he should have known, or that hiring someone who would do such a thing is evidence of poor judgment. Very likely Reid's people are now combing through the public records in search of some similar misdeed by an employee of the other side, assuming they don't already have evidence of one in stock and ready.

What struck me about the case was not the political element but the question of what, for purposes of immigration, makes a marriage a sham. Married couples usually live together, usually sleep together, usually share income and meals. But none of those is a defining characteristic of marriage. If a couple goes through the usual legal formalities, what more do they have to do in order that their marriage count as real?

It's a serious issue in the context of immigration. Eighty years ago, when marriage was a more serious and divorce a more difficult matter and the reputation for female virginity a significant asset on the marriage market, marrying someone you didn't love or plan to live with was a costly way of getting him or her permission to immigrate, although I expect it occasionally happened. In our current society, those costs are a great deal less. Permitting anyone married to a U.S. citizen to live in the U.S., perhaps to become a citizen, looks like a yawning gap in the barriers that the U.S. puts up against would-be immigrants. But how, given the difficulty of defining what makes a marriage real, can that gap be closed?

Apparently the INS has an answer to that question. Anyone know what it is?

Separation of Church and State or Public Schools: Pick One

A commenter on my previous post asks what the content of a creationist course would be, readings from the book of Genesis or merely bad science, and adds that "teaching Marxist ideas of 'laws of history' is peddling a form of religious pseudo-science. Some of the environmental dogma being taught in schools is also on par with this stuff."

This suggests a more general point—is the existence of a public school system consistent with a serious commitment to the separation of church and state?

I think the answer is that it is not. While teaching a fundamentalist version of the origin of life is indeed taking a side in a religious dispute, teaching a conventional account of biology and geology is is also taking a side in that dispute, just the opposite side. I do not see how I can honestly tell a fundamentalist that it is a violation of the separation of church and state to teach children that his religious beliefs are true but not a violation to teach children that they are false.

The conventional view is, in this case, the one I believe is true. But then, if they were teaching creationism, they would be taking the side he believes is true. So what purports to be separation of church and state ends up as the opposite—the state supporting a particular view of religious questions. That comes pretty close to the established church that the First Amendment explicitly forbids.

Of course, these are not only religious questions, they are also scientific questions. But then, most religious questions are also scientific, or historical, or philosophical, questions. If the rule is that the state can teach whatever it believes is true provided that here is some basis for that belief other than religion, that leaves the state free to teach the truth or falsity of pretty nearly every religion. The doctrine of separation of church and state then becomes the doctrine that one can only teach the truth, which sounds fine as rhetoric but has some practical difficulties in a world where different people have different views of what the truth is.

So far, I have considered a case where the school teaches what I believe is true. In the real world there is no such limitation, as the quoted comment with which I started this suggests. When schools teach children that they have an obligation to take care of Mother Earth they are teaching religion, whether or not they put it in an explicitly religious form; religions are not limited to beliefs about gods. And I find it hard to draw any sharp line between religions and secular ideologies such as Marxism or libertarianism.

Eliminate all content that is in a broad sense religious and there is nothing left. Even eliminate all content that is religious in a narrow sense, where that includes claims that religions are false as well as claims that they are true, and there is not a whole lot left.

In practice, the application of separation of church and state in the American public schools usually comes down to not teaching what most of those concerned see as something that one would believe only for religious reasons. A century or more ago, that mostly meant that teaching Christianity was fine, since practically everyone took it for granted that Christianity was true. Today, insofar as matters are decided at the local level, it means that teaching things that the locals almost all agree with are fine—which can be Christian fundamentalism in some places and environmentalism and left-wing politics in others.

Problems arise when there is a conflict either between local and national views or between the views of the local parents and the views of the teachers and/or administrators running the schools. It is only at that point that what one group sees as obvious truth gets attacked by another as teaching religion.

The Constitution and the Separation of Church and State

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Christine O'Donnell has been widely mocked for expressing doubt as to the presence in the Constitution of separation of church and state. As you can see from the First Amendment, quoted in full above, she is correct and her critics are mistaken. Not only do the words not appear in the Constitution, the idea does not appear either. Establishment of religion was a well understood concept; it meant an official state church, supported by government money. England had had such an arrangement since at least the sixteenth century and still does. So, currently, do Denmark, Norway, and Iceland (all Lutheran), as well as lots of Muslim countries. When the First Amendment was passed, Connecticut and Massachusetts had established churches.

Teaching creationism in the public schools—not a burning issue in those pre-Darwin and pre-public school days—is not an establishment of religion. Nor is having the government contract with religious groups to do things it wants done. The modern concept of the separation of church and state, based on a phrase used by Jefferson, is a creation of the courts that goes well beyond the language of the First Amendment. For details, see this post by Jim Lindgren, who teaches law at Northwestern.

That so many observers took it for granted that O'Donnell was demonstrating her ignorance rather than theirs is testimony to the power of that particular civic myth.

Wanted: A Taped Alarm Clock

I spent the weekend at a libertarian conference (libertopia). A common problem at such events is keeping to the schedule. A speaker goes overtime, the next speaker, having started late ends late, and the schedule gradually fades away. This one did better than most—I think there was only one day when talks ended up starting noticeably later than they should.

I have observed a similar problem at academic workshops, where a speaker is supposed to have a limited amount of time to present his paper, with the remaining time for questions and discussions. It is a particularly serious problem at Chicago style workshops, where the theory is that everyone in the audience has read the paper so the speaker does not have to read it to them; his fifteen or twenty minutes are supposed to be spent talking about his paper. The more often speakers end up breaking the rules and using most of the time to present the paper the less likely those attending are to bother reading it in advance. The fewer read it in advance, the greater the incentive for the speaker to spend the time presenting it instead of discussing it.

I have a techno-social solution. It consists of an alarm clock that can have multiple settings, and will ring at each for a fixed length of time, say five seconds. At the start of the conference day, it is set to ring when each speaker is supposed to be finished. Once it has been set, the mechanism for changing the setting is ceremonially (but temporarily) disabled, perhaps by putting a strip of tape over the relevant button, and the alarm clock is put next to the podium. Now schedule drift can happen only by an explicit decision to change the rules, not by a gradual erosion.

Historical Recreation: U.K. vs U.S.

I have been involved in historical recreation with the Society for Creative Anachronism for a very long time and have just had a very interesting online exchange with someone doing historical recreation in England, largely on the differences between how they do it and how we do it.

The central difference, so far as I can see, is that almost all U.K. recreation consists of performances for an audience, usually a paying audience. Almost all SCA recreation, and I think (although I might be mistaken) most U.S. recreation in other periods, most notably the U.S. Civil War, is done by and for the participants. An SCA tournament has an audience, but it is a medieval audience—an audience of participants dressed in some attempt at period clothing. The spectator at the tournament may also be one of the people cooking the evening's feast or, later, teaching renaissance dances.

One result that I found particularly striking, given my interests, was a very different attitude to medieval cooking. My correspondent assured me that medieval feasts were very expensive. A little online browsing, searching for "medieval feast" in .uk domains, confirmed that. So far as I could tell, the nearest thing to an authentic medieval feast available in the U.K., put on by a catering firm, costs 34 pounds/head in the least expensive version and a whopping 270 pounds per head in the fancy, seven course, version. A large part of that cost, of course, is for the labor of cooks and servers.

In contrast, I would expect an SCA feast, at least equally authentic, to be no more than ten dollars for the meal, plus perhaps another five or ten as a site fee to pay for the rental of the hall. The labor cost is zero, since the cooks and servers are themselves participants, doing it for fun—at most they might (or might not) get a free meal. My correspondent found that idea, along with the idea of musicians performing at the feast for free, almost unbelievable—in his view, anyone worth listening to would expect to be paid.

Another consequence of the difference is that, as best I can tell, English historical recreation is tied much more closely to the official educational system than similar activities in the U.S., with performances to some degree designed to fit into the standard curriculum. The recreation is subsidized by the state—on how large a scale I do not know. And at least some of the customers for the performances are state schools. Indeed at one point in the conversation, it seemed to me that my opposite number took "fitting into the official curriculum" as part of the definition of eduational, although when pressed on the point he denied it. What was clear was that he thought of "educational" as meaning "educating the audience," while I thought of the activity's primary educational role as educating the participants. Or perhaps, more precisely, encouraging them to educate themselves.

I am curious as to the consequences of these very different approaches. One striking contrast with the SCA is that the U.K. groups have quite a high level of required physical authenticity. The SCA, in contrast, has a minimal level of required authenticity—some attempt at pre-17th century garb. But while physical authenticity is not required, it is admired, and there is a lot of it at a high standard. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that our best armorers or costumers are at least as good as theirs. And it is worth noting that Civil War recreation in the U.S., at least by reputation, maintains a level of required authenticity comparable to the corresponding activities in the U.K.

I am also curious as to the reasons for the difference. Is it merely a matter of historical accident? Or is there some difference between cultures that makes Americans (and Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, ...) more willing to put time and effort into something they are doing for the fun of it?

With luck, some readers of this blog will have experience with historical recreation and be able to provide additional information.

"Unemployment compensation is unconstitutional"

The same article on the Tea Party movement that inspired my previous post also contains:

"The Senate candidates include Joe Miller of Alaska, who has said unemployment compensation is unconstitutional."

This one is wrong too, but in a subtler fashion. What Miller actually claims, as one can check pretty easily by listening to what he says, is that federal unemployment compensation is unconstitutional. That is not the view of the current court, but it is a defensible reading of the Constitution based, as Miller makes clear, on the doctrine of enumerated powers. On that interpretation, the federal government is only entitled to do those things that the Constitution explicitly says it can do, with the Tenth Amendment providing that anything else is reserved to the states and to the people.

Unemployment compensation is administered by the states, funded by both the federal and state governments, and varies from state to state. Eliminating the federal role would be a substantial change but one well short of eliminating unemployment compensation, which is what "unemployment compensation is unconstitutional" seems to imply that Miller is proposing.

It seems I have a new hobby—debunking overstated claims about what Tea Party supported candidates have said.

Ken Buck and "separation of church and state"

A recent news story on the Tea Party movement refers to "Colorado’s Ken Buck, who says he opposes the principle of separation of church and state." That got me curious, in part because I have found other assertions about Tea Party backed candidates to be less than accurate, so I googled around and eventually found a video of Ken Buck speaking on the subject. I am guessing that this is the origin of the claim, but I actually don't know—I was unable to find anyone who made the claim and supported it with an actual quote from Buck.

The video is on a Huffington Post page; to their credit they do not claim that he opposes the principle, only that he "has called for a 'much closer relationship' between church and state." What he actually says in the video, after mentioning the existence of state religions in Europe at the time the Constitution was written, is:

… the freedom of religion in this country in my view was meant to be a freedom from state imposed religion. I can’t tell you what god you are going to pray to, you can’t tell me, and that is, that is one of the great things of, in this country. The idea that church and state should be separated is fine with me. The idea that there should be no interrelationship between the two is not fine with me. I think that the separation of church and state is much different than our founding fathers intended it to be and we would be much better off with a closer relationship between church and state. Not a state sponsored religion and not religion dictating to the state public policy but a much closer relationship.”

He goes on to speak of the fact that Bush had a number of “faith based programs” that “I think are appropriate.”

Perhaps there is some other evidence to support the claim that Buck says he opposes the separation of church and state—commenters are invited to offer some. As it stands now, it looks as though the claim is simply false, one more example of the willingness of journalists to say things without any good reason to believe they are true.

Provided, of course, that the things they say fit their own views.

I should probably add, given the earlier discussion of O'Donnell, that Buck looks, based on what I have found so far, to be a considerably more articulate and intelligent candidate than she is. That is based in part on the Huffington Post video, in part on an interesting piece by a liberal interviewer.

A Sceptical Rule of Thumb

I recently came across a webbed review of the movie Agora. The review, and I presume the movie, is an attack on early Christianity, seen as responsible for the destruction of classical civilization. The review includes, along with much else, the claim that "in 391, archbishop of Alexandria, Theophilos, was behind the destruction of the library of Alexandria."

What is interesting about this story is how many people were responsible for destroying the library of Alexandria. The three best known candidates are Julius Caesar, the Caliph Umar, and, of course, Archbishop Theophilos.

Of the three stories the best is Umar's. After Egypt came under Muslim rule, he was supposedly asked what was to be done with the library, and replied that books which disagreed with the Koran were false, books that agreed were superfluous. So they burned it. Like the other two versions—Caesar is supposed to have destroyed it by accident in the course of military operations—there is no good reason to believe the story is true. You can find a detailed account of the different versions of the destruction of the library and the evidence for and against each at Wikipedia.

Why so many stories? The answer, I think, is clear. The destruction of the greatest collection of classical literature ever assembled—much of it now lost forever—is a dramatic event, and one that provides a useful setting for an attack on whatever person or group you regard as particularly barbarous. That is the function the story serves in both the Christian and Muslim versions. The Julius Caesar story may perhaps have survived from pure literary merit—there is something dramatic about so important an event happening by accident in the middle of a battle. Think of it as a post script to the killing of Archimedes at the end of the siege of Syracuse—by a soldier impatient at the unwillingness of the mathematician, absorbed in some theoretical problem, to come when ordered.

All of which brings me to my simple rule of thumb: Distrust any historical anecdote good enough to have survived on its literary merit. It might be true. But it might equally well be a guess or a lie or a mistake by one person, spread by many others—and getting better at each repetition. I got to observe the process at first hand in a long-ago Usenet argument when I discovered that a period reference to a woman who, in the battle of Junain, "had a dagger which she carried about" had morphed to "tied a dagger around her waist abover her pregnant belly and fought in the ranks of Mohammed and his followers" (modern Arabic speaking feminist) to "with an armory of swords and daggars strapped around her pregnant belly fought in the ranks of Mohammed and his followers" (modern English speaking feminist) to "one of the Prophet's wives was renowned for winning a cavalry charge when eight months pregnant, ..." (Usnet poster).

And, for a final example, consider the phrase "rule of thumb." According to a popular story, it originated with the rule that a husband was entitled to beat his wife so long as he used a stick no thicker than his thumb. In fact, no such legal rule ever existed. The origin of the story seems to be a comment attributed to an 18th century judge and ridiculed by his contemporaries.

----

P.S. A commenter points to a devastating review of the film. Not only is there no evidence that the mob that destroyed the temple of Serapis burned any manuscripts at all, there is no evidence that, by the date of the destruction, there were any manuscripts there to be burned. And the movie has altered the historical facts in a variety of other ways, all designed to serve its message, converting a rather unpleasant political squabble between two civic factions into a grand story of the suppression of knowledge by Christian fanatics.

Read it.

Could Woodward's Source be ...?

I haven't read Woodward's new book—indeed, I don't think it is out yet. But from what I have heard about it, I have a possible solution to the puzzle of how Woodward got lots of detailed information about what happened at a variety of supposedly secret meetings.

One theme of the book, as so far described, is that Obama wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan and reluctantly agreed to send more troops instead only due to pressure from his military advisors. If things continue to go badly in Afghanistan, that story could be very useful for the President, since it makes it look as though he was the farsighted one in the administration and the mistake of going in instead of out wasn't really his. If, on the other hand, things go well, Obama can take credit for the decisions he made and not worry about being blamed for the decisions he didn't make but, if Woodward is to be believed, wanted to.

Think of it as a win/win strategy.

What Should Count As Nutty?

Two of my recent posts dealt with the question of whether Christine O'Donnell, currently the republican nominee for senate in Delaware, is a nut. That raises a more general question of some interest: What counts as nutty?

Pretty clearly, it isn't enough to merely hold mistaken beliefs; we don't regard Ptolemy as a nut, although he famously believed that the earth was at the center of the universe, embedded in a nested collection of crystaline spheres. Those of us who are atheists do not conclude that all the religious believers are nuts although, seen from our perspective, the beliefs of many of them do indeed look pretty weird. So what does it take?

In the first of my two posts, I mentioned that O'Donnell, in arguing that masturbation was sinful, was correctly (so far as I could tell) reporting a position expressed in the New Testament (not about masturbation directly but about lust), and that although I disagreed I did not take that as evidence that she was a nut. Several people commenting wanted to know why, or else clearly disagreed.

In that particular case, I think there are two answers. The first is that I don't have any solid basis for my own moral beliefs, any way of proving to a reasonable and open minded skeptic that they are correct. That puts me in a poor position to condemn as obvious nonsense someone else's moral beliefs.

I could have gone on to point out that a number of moral beliefs strongly held by many people in our current society would be seen as distinctly nutty by most people, including most intelligent, educated, and reasonable people, in a fair number of past societies. Consider, as one example, our rejection of slavery, contrasted with the view of the subject held by Aristotle and his contemporaries. For another, consider our view of the minimum age for sexual intercourse, reflected in age of consent and statutory rape laws, contrasted with the views of most past societies. There is good reason to believe that we know more about science than people did in the past, but I have not yet seen any evidence that we know more about moral philosophy. And I know of at least one twentieth century case where a legal change replacing traditional with modern views of the subject—in Jewish law by rabbis in Palestine—was defended by the factual claim that bearing children young was more dangerous now than it had been two thousand years ago, a "scientific" claim that strikes me as distinctly nutty.

But the special problems of moral beliefs don't answer the more general question. There are lots of people who disagree with me on factual questions whom I don't consider nutty either. So where do I, where should I, draw the line.

Consider a second and more troubling piece of evidence against O'Donnell. In a TV interview a few years back, she said:

"American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains."

The story I got the quote from suggested that she was "misremembering this 2005 report on scientists who successfully grew human brain cells within mice."

Misremembering the details of a news story doesn't qualify as nutty—people do that all the time. Getting facts wrong, even badly wrong, doesn't qualify either. As I pointed out in a piece some time back, David Frum, a prominent conservative commentator, got the facts about the beginning of the Great Depression backwards, thought Hoover cut spending when in fact he sharply increased it; that doesn't make him a nut. Biden, in his debate with Palin, described FDR as responding to the stockmarket crash by going on television to reassure the nation. That doesn't make him a nut either.

What is disturbing about the O'Donnell quote is not that she got the facts wrong but that she got them so very wrong, believed something that, on the face of it, no reasonable person would believe. That strikes me as a good first cut at a definition of nutty.

But the application is not as simple as it might seem, even in that case, because it depends on what one can expect a reasonable person to already know. Biden's comment contains two claims that, to anyone moderately familiar with American history, should have been obviously false—that FDR was president in 1929 and that television was widely available at the time. But most Americans are not even moderately familiar with American history, and that probably includes quite a lot of prominent American politicians.

Similarly with the O'Donnell quote. The idea that one could get a fully functional human brain into a mouse's skull is, on the face of it, absurd—to someone with any feel for either the current state of biotech or the relevant biology. But I think there is quite a lot of evidence—most obviously the circulation figures of the wilder tabloids—that a sizable fraction of the American population doesn't have any feel for that sort of thing. Do they all count as nuts?

Let me go back to the question of the Bible, not as a source of moral authority but as a source of truth. My first instinct is to write off anyone who believes that as obviously crazy. And I am at least tempted to broaden that to anyone who believes the central claims of any of the major religions, anyone who, in Orwell's phrase, believes in Heaven the way he believes in Australia.

The reason I don't write them off that way is that I know of too many people, present and past, who quite obviously were intelligent, thoughtful, and reasonable, yet believed in the Bible, some of them in a pretty literal sense, others at least to the extent of believing in its central claims.

In trying to make sense of all this, I fall back on the observation that most of what most of us, perhaps all of us, believe, is based not on evidence directly available to us but on what the people around us tell us. Not only is it so based, it has to be. Nobody has the time and energy to check enough of the facts for himself—to be sure that Australia, and New Zealand, and Antarctica, and Orford, N.H., actually exist by going and looking at them, rather than by believing what he is told or reads.

One reason I am confident it can't be done is that I know someone who tries, a fellow poster to Usenet with whom I have interacted over a period of many years. He is an intelligent and energetic fellow, and he appears to follow a policy of regarding with skepticism anything he can't check for himself. Thus, for example, he takes it for granted that none of the official figures on inflation can be trusted, and tries to make his own estimate from prices he has himself observed. His conclusions, in that case and many others, sharply diverge from what the rest of us believe. One result is that he comes across, to many people and not entirely without reason, as a nut.

Once you accept the practical necessity of relying heavily on second hand information, you have to modify your view of what a reasonable person would believe to take account of what those around him believed. If you have no training in science and your only information on biotech comes from the popular press, it may not be obvious that a story on mice with human brains cannot be right. If you have devoted your time, energy, and intelligence to living your own life, doing your job, dealing with those around you, it isn't all that unreasonable to accept as truth what those around you believe about wider issues less directly observed, such as the existence of God or the weakness of the case for evolution.

That applies not only to people in the past who couldn't have known the evidence for evolution but to people in the present who could have but in all probability don't. I long ago concluded that most people who say they do believe in evolution, like most who say they don't, are going mostly on faith. As I pointed out in a post some years back, many of those who say they believe in evolution, most notably people left of center, have no difficulty rejecting even its most obvious implications when those clash with their ideology.

So what does qualify one as a nut? I think the best answer I can come up with is holding beliefs that no reasonable person with your intellectual background could hold. In practice, since one rarely knows enough about some else's background to apply that criterion, it comes down to observing how someone holds and defends his beliefs. Someone who argues for creationism and against evolution in a coherent, consistent, intelligent fashion isn't a nut, even if there are lots of facts he doesn't know that contradict his argument, even if he bases his attack on a mistaken (but widely believed) account of the contents of the theory he is attacking.

It is at the point when the argument depends on ignoring facts he does know, on defending inconsistent positions, demonstrates that he is committed to the conclusion whatever the evidence and the arguments might be, that the balance begins to tip. The clue is not what he argues for but how he argues for it.

At least, I think that's the closest I can come to answering the question that started this post.

Moynihan on O'Donnell

One of the things that first got me paying attention to the charges against Christine O'Donnell was a piece in the Reason blog by Michael Moynihan attacking her. He has now posted a second one. It provides a little evidence that she is a nut, more that Moynihan is either incompetent or dishonest. He writes:

I mean, we all could make the mistake of thinking that there exists an army of mice with human brains, or that Vince Foster was “murdered,” possibly by those in the White House. (A number of people are offering up the “O’Donnell was just asking questions” defense, though she explicitly refers to “the murder of Vince Foster,” ...

As you can easily check by following the "murdered" link, O'Donnell did not explicitly refer to "the murder of Vince Foster." What she actually said, arguing that Newt Gingrich was being attacked on relatively minor charges while much more serious charges against President Clinton were being ignored, was:

"And then there's also the issue of murder with Vincent Foster. That's a much more serious charge than failing to seek legal advice"

There is a large difference between "the issue of murder with Vincent Foster" described as a "charge," which implies that he might have been murdered, and "explicitly" referring to "the murder of Vince Foster." Moynihan not only attributes the latter to O'Donnell, he does it in quotation marks. Attributing words to someone that she did not say is either incompetent or dishonest journalism.

The "army of mice with human brains," on the other hand, exaggerates what she said but there is something real there to exaggerate. The actual quote is:

"American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains"

The story he links to suggests that she was "misremembering this 2005 report on scientists who successfully grew human brain cells within mice." If so, she was careless with her facts and demonstrated a badly exaggerated idea of the capabilities of current bioscience.

The piece offers two other pieces of evidence against O'Donnell. One is that someone who worked for her 2008 senatorial campaign reported that O'Donnell "told me that she thought Joe Biden tapped her phone line." If Moynihan believes the idea that political campaigns sometimes engage in illegal wiretapping is absurd, he somehow managed to miss the entire Watergate episode along with much else.

The other evidence, from someone who volunteered for the same campaign, is that O'Donnell talked to him about winning a lucrative television contract with CNN or Fox News Channel.

"I informed her that most media organizations prohibit their employees from running for office. She didn't seem to understand and was more interested in getting a contract," he recalled. "She was more concerned about getting a TV deal than winning office."

It does not seem to have occurred to either him or Moynihan that O'Donnell's chances of winning office—while running in an election she ended up losing by about two to one—did not deserve a major role in her career plans.

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P.S. I emailed Moynihan pointing out that he was misquoting O'Donnell and he has now put a correction up on his post.