The Wrong Sort of Equality

not the real issue

On this very early morning (can’t sleep at home) I’ve decided to write briefly on what I feel to be the most important foreign policy question that should be facing 2008 candidates. Based on the media’s response the answer would seem overwhelmingly to be the war in Iraq. Each new motion, resolution and bill brings a volley of news reports and sends analysts into a frenzy parsing the actions of each candidate. Iraq is certainly in crises, and with each new suicide bomb or IED this is brought again into sharp focus. Yet although the war will almost certainly be around in 2008, it will in all likelihood be too late for any substantive policy change to take effect. After all, in many ways the damage has been done. Today Iraq represents a colossal terrorist training ground, a place for the global mujahadeen set to get in some practice against Western troops in Bahgdad and Haditha before applying their lessons to New York and London. Ethnic tensions could well lead to a civil war and potentially lead to genocide. Health conditions have spiraled downward, and today the life expectancy of a child is falling faster in Iraq than anywhere else in the world, with 1 in 8 dying from violence or illness before their 5th birthday. Finally, and most importantly, some 3000 American troops and perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been lost to the conflict, men women and children that the victor of 2008 can never bring back. And so, when the commander in chief inherits Bush’s then 5 year old war, he will find that any policy course he takes will not erase most of the pernicious impacts of Iraq.

At this point, then, it seems that America’s democratic process is engaged in a sunk cost fallacy writ large. Though the war in Iraq is horrific, it is the consequence of decisions made years ago that are even today irreversible. Indeed, this truth has become fairly apparent if one looks to the actual Iraq policies of each serious 2008 candidate. Considering the positions held by all parties in question, one finds two broad sorts of boundaries. For the Democrats part, no one has dared to suggest and immediate withdraw. Barack Obama has called for a cap of 130,000 troops with a “phased” exit over an unannounced time period, Edwards has called for an immediate reduction of 40,000 (the anti surge?), and Hillary Clinton has called for “eventual withdrawal” (as opposed to, say, statehood for Iraq). While all of these positions allow for rhetorical claims of opposition to the war, none changes the reality on the ground. On the Republicans side, by contrast, we find no one in favor of seriously or qualitatively changing the way the war will be fought. Though some (Giuliani, McCain) support Bush’s surge and others do not, the general consensus seems to be that Iraq is badly off, that “strategy must change” and that “security is important”. Yet while all have spouted off familiar platitudes, none has dared to commit the US to any formal time period or timeframe to stay. What this suggests is that should the GOP win in 2008, the result will be a scramble to “declare victory” and then reduce troop levels as much as feasible. What this means is that whether the oath of office is taken by Obama, Clinton, Romney, McCain, Giuliani or Edwards (or most of the others), the US will be doing roughly the same thing; fighting a messy war while very slowly leaving.

But if our next president can’t significantly change Iraq, what should he focus on? What is the most decisive foreign policy question that should be posed again and again to our crop of hopefuls? For me the answer seems clear: what are you prepared to do to keep the United States as the world superpower.

Today America’s power is slipping in the world. Since our height at the end of the Cold War, our economic and military influence has been increasingly challenged by up-and-coming rival powers. As globalization makes the world increasingly prosperous it has reduced America’s advantage on all fronts. Many both inside and outside of the US have seen this as positive. The argument here is that a unilateral US must be checked by nations like China, Iran, and Venezuela in order to ensure a diversity of views in the global arena. Once the US has been knocked from its high horse then all the world will unite and everyone will have a fair say. To us in the US, this seems to make intuitive sense; after all, it just doesn’t seem right that only one nation or group of nations should have their voices heard. Right?

But not all ideas are created equally. In the West we have adopted a framework that defends freedom, tolerance, and the liberty for each individual to best pursue their own potential. These are the ideas that have animated documents like the US constitution and the UN universal declaration of human rights, and have improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. What makes these norms unique, furthermore, is that they know no racial or cultural bounds; given time and adopted to local conditions, they are capable of providing a framework through which everyone can live together and prosper. Yet against this set of universally applicable beliefs rests the frameworks of the aspiring powers, namely the rule of self-determination. Within this view each nation ought to follow the Las Vegas rule: What happens here, stays here.

To see a preview of what such a world would be like, one need look no further than China’s actions over the past decade. One of the reasons for China’s growing influence has been that it does not “preach” to other nations as the US and the west have seemed to. Yet the reason this is so is that for China each nation should be allowed to do whatever they please, and provided they leave China alone they will not be bothered about it. On one hand, this means that if China gains the upper hand they certainly won’t actively try to crush democracies in the West. Unlike the USSR, for instance, China has no real global ideological agenda at this time. Yet the flip side of this coin is that just as Geneva will be allowed to keep their democracy, the janjaweed will be allowed to keep their genocide. In the era of China, Iran, and Venezuela the world that will emerge will shift from the ideal of individual equality to the ideal of civilizational equality, one in which genocide, slavery, secret police and oppression of women shares equal weight with we the people.



genocide doesn't deserve equality

Of course, none of this is to say that the US has been perfect as global steward. Far from it. Abuses like Abu Ghrahib and mistakes like the war in Iraq have justly sullied us in the eyes of the world, and we deserve to be held accountable. Additionally, with the rise of a united Europe, it seems likely that the US could someday get the best of both worlds; a multipolar strategic environment where nations hold each other in check while united in their fundamental beliefs. Finally, as time goes on, the liberalizing forces of the global market and the internet have begun to slowly change attitudes worldwide. China is increasingly a more responsible global citizen, in large part because in the status quo it must conform to a structure of values and institutions “imposed” by the US. If another few decades of such “imposition” can occur, pesky little things like freedom of press or human rights may actually come into vogue in their own right, at which point a power shift would be far less pernicious. Yet while that world is promising, it is not the world that will hit us if the US loses pre-eminence in the next couple of years. For the foreseeable future the choice is between a US power that imperfectly pursues the right sort of equality or a vacuum that strives only to protect the wrong sort of equality, one which presupposes no notion of rights, freedoms, or values that are inherent to human life. In such a world even if US decline is, in fact, inevitable, we should be doing our darndest to slow it down.

And so, candidates of 2008, I pose today’s question: how can we forestall this disaster? How can we keep our economy competitive, get our military home and repaired as quickly as possible, tighten our relationships with other likeminded nations, and ensure our entitlement system doesn’t drown us? How will we make sure that the voice of freedom and rights does not become merely one among many, but instead continues to be held out as an ideal applicable to all peoples. That’s my question to you, and I feel that I, and the rest of the nation, and the rest of the world, deserve an answer as soon as possible.

Cheers, DER

Let's Get Krunk

WHAT?! WHAT?! YEAHHH


With my first year of college behind me, I thought today would be an opportune time to talk about America’s second favorite college pastime: getting drunk (the first, of course, being learning). For most American college students (so says alcoholEDU), drinking is certainly part of college life. Most colleges, for their part, have adapted, either through zealous, religiously motivated rage (looking at you Fordham), to general permissiveness. The most common arrangement based on my travels this year seems to be a sort of rough campus social contract whereby drinking is okay provided it is done in private and in relatively small groups or in designated areas. As a result, students of such colleges often get to experience, at least in some degree, what the world would look like if the drinking age reverted to 18. Generally speaking, it looks good. While there are certainly those who become particularly irresponsible (my personal favorite such anecdote ends with a Princeton sophomore shattering and then eating most of his own cellphone), it seems unlikely that they would be any more responsible at 21. Less distracted by chasing all alcohol use at all times, campus police can focus their resources on more serious problems or the few instances of alcohol use that are genuinely seen as pernicious (such as, say, distilling moonshine). Meanwhile, a huge swath of students who did not drink much in high school for fear of legal consequences is able to enjoy this activity, and to experience something that is, generally speaking, a great deal of fun.

If this seems like a rosy picture, it is. As a result of the fact that college appears to function fairly normally with alcohol, many students of the more activist bent become convinced that the drinking age really should be 18. And they seem to have a point. After all, the fact that one can vote or own a business but can’t have a beer to celebrate either does seem intuitively strange. Countries like Canada, Britain, and Australia all allow 18 year olds to drink, and none has ground to a halt or exploded (incidentally, Jamaica’s drinking age is literally 0, though arguably that nation has both ground to a halt and exploded). Unsurprisingly, then, facebook and political groups such as 18not21.org have sprung up to channel this angst. And though it will never be our generation’s Civil Rights movement, the fight to allow 18 year olds to drink seems to be a correct one to our generation; after all, it pits the seemingly rational and just policy choice against the “political will” of old, stodgy politicians who just need to loosen up. How could it be wrong?

For a long time, I shared the above position. It did seem strange that the right to drink was one of the only ones not gained at majority, and it was bizarre that the US differed so greatly from the rest of the world. So, by default, my position was also one of mild contempt toward the law while flouting its tenants on the weekends, weekdays, and several mornings. Indeed, while I would never be the one to hold the picket sign for drinker’s rights, I was gleefully willing to view my own jaunts to the streets as per formative criticisms of an unjust law. Earlier this year, however, I began to look at the issue more carefully, and after discussing it with several people smarter than myself and thinking about it for a while, I began to see that perhaps there’s a logic to 21.


positive consequence of alcohol use

The first salient objection I heard to lowering the drinking age is that of trickle down. When the drinking age is 21 everyone in college generally has access to alcohol as most people have at least one junior/senior friend. Because of this, combined with difficulties of enforcement, if the drinking age is set at 21 society must know that 18 year old will regularly drink, an outcome that seems fairly okay. When the age is pushed to 18, however, it causes major problems within the US context since it means that one quarter of every high school can now legally acquire alcohol. At this point, the trickle down is not to 18 but rather to 14, where the harms of drinking are far more pronounced. Biologically, all the things DARE warns about actually happen (as opposed to in more developed 18 year olds), while judgment is, generally speaking, dismal. For my part, as a high school freshman I was barely competent to find my locker and not set fire to myself; in an environment of regular and easy alcohol consumption I have no idea how I would have turned out.

The standard response to this is something like: “ Oh wow; high school freshman drinking. Never heard of that before”, generally followed by a snicker as said objector thinks they’re the first person to have come up with the barb in question. Yet truth be told, I feel a good number of high school students don’t start drinking until well into their high school careers in large part because one needs a 21 year old friend (or parent) to buy liquor. After all, although the age bracket of HS is arbitrary, the fact is that most people don’t have friends 7 years older than them who they would trust to hook them up with alcohol. Additionally, proximity to the line justifies people a lot of the time. For example, if a 19 year old drinks the fact that they are just 48 months away from legality makes it seem less wrong than if they were, say, 6 years out. If the drinking age is 18, then suddenly its just weird when a high school sophomore can’t get drunk regularly since they are, after all, just a couple of years out.

Additionally, some would argue that in other nations this is considered an acceptable risk. That said, if one looks more carefully they’ll find international examples are not all that applicable. If the US had a culture like that of France, where drinking was introduced gradually since childhood, binge drinking almost never occurred and beer ads were far less amusing, then the trickle down effect is far less noticeable. Additionally, since many European nations end secondary schooling at 16, younger drinking ages don’t necessarily mean a trickle down. In Canada, where the system is fairly similar, the drinking age is often 19 for that very reason.

Yet beyond the trickle down, there is a far more important and decisive reason for the law; namely that of driving. On one hand, America is an auto culture. The suburbs and exurbs in which most of us live cannot be navigated without a car, and beyond pragmatics our national romance with the automobile is a deeply engrained one. Because of this, every state in the union allows 18 year olds to drive, with most allowing driving rights several years earlier.

Yet although 18 year olds are empowered to drive, they’re not terribly good at it. Beyond the feeling of immortality et. al., it turns out that the brain structures that house crucial functions like judgment that are necessary for driving don’t fully form until one is 22 or 23. Such research has been used elsewhere, with one example being arguments that the death penalty shouldn’t be applied to 19 year olds as they are not fully capable of recognizing right and wrong. Along these lines, nueroscientists like the University of Pennslyvania's Rueben Gur have actually argued that voting rights should be restricted to those 23 and older. And while this biological evidence is compelling in the laboratory, in the 1970s it proved deadly on America’s highways.

The last time 18 year olds were allowed to drink; the result was a veritable surge of driving deaths. When one combines the legal alcohol BAC (.10 at the time) combined with brain structures already ill suited to driving, the result was thousands of highway fatalities. Additionally, as all 18 year olds could legally drink the amount of active drunk driving within the age group skyrocketed. Thus, the “political will” to change the drinking age came not from evil politicians trying to deprive college students of fun for their own pleasure but instead from the pressure group like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, groups created from thousands of individual tragedies. Thus far, the plan appears to be working; a recent study suggests that something like a thousand lives a year are saved solely by the existance of higher age laws, to say nothing of the many more cases where one would be illegally drunk more often or in which alcohol use may not have been the decisive factor but was a crucial contributing cause.


negative consequence of alcohol use

And so, with new evidence in hand, it seems that in the US context a drinking age of 18 is simply not tenable. Barring super-strict penalties for drunk driving it seems that allowing those whose brains have not fully developed to drive while moderately intoxicated is an unacceptable cost to society. So, while arguments about the disconnect between age of majority and age of drinking are intuitively compelling, they fail to recognize the unique biological harms in question. If suffrage for 18 year olds killed 1,000 Americans a year, voting rights would come at 21, too.

Back in Buisiness

Boundless 又聪明,又漂亮

大考试以前我艇忙的，可是现在我不是喝 The Purp, 就是跟 vapid prostitutes 一快吃龙虾。

Boundless is back.

You know the drill

Spring Exams have arrived again. Not failing out > saving the world with my blog. You know the drill. Back on 5/26, DER


by the time exams end, he'll be unemployed

Get Us Talking

not quite cicero

I'm fairly excited about today's post, because while I am often preoccupied by competitive public speaking or by presidential politics, it is rare that I get to talk about both. That said, in the past few weeks we have seen both the Deomcrats and the Republicans hold the first debates of their primary seasons, and thus it seemed approrpiate to write about the notion of debate and political discourse. Before I do, though, here's a 30 second summary of discourse and democracy in the West. In the Western tradition the notion of competition among ideas is a fundamental one. Homer's Oddyseus, for instance, at one point declares

One man may fail to impress us with his looks
but a god can crown his words with beauty, charm
and men can look on with delight when he speaks out
Never faltering, filled with winning self control
he shines forth at the assembly grounds and people gaze
at him like a god when he walks through the streets

Beyond demonstrating the ancient origins of GDS, this passage indicates the deep cultural attraction this idea has held . Over the ensuing millenia our notion of debate and discourse kept gaining traction, with advents like the freedom of the press expanding its role ( for an awesome defence of the free press, check out John Milton's Areopagitica (Milton of Paradise Lost fame)). When founded, America was largely based upon the principles of free exchange of ideas , as seen in the first amendment. Hooray!

Having brought everyone up to speed, we can now turn to the idea of the presidential debate in America. The notion that presidential elections have been determined by such contests is a long one, running from Lincoln-Douglas to Bush-Kerry. But while the influence of the debates has been relatively constant, it intuitively seems that the converstaion has been...well..dumbed down. Somehow, between "fourscore and seven years ago" and "flip-flop", it feels like we've lost our way. Sadly, this hunch is one that has been empirically verified. In 2000, the Flesch-Kincaid reading scale, a widely accepted test of verbal sophistication, was applied to the presidential debates of the past 2 centuries. While most everything from Lincoln-Douglas to Franklin Roosevelt occured at a 12th grade level , by the era of Reagan it had dipped to 10th grade and by 2000, both Bush and Gore spoke at less than the level of an 8th grader (with Bush speaking at a 6th grade level in the third contest). So, while our democracy is generating fantastic practice for "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader", we are hemmoraging our ability to consider ideas.


Lincoln subsequnetly dropped on a 3-2

Of course, there are many reasons for this, the most obvious being the introduction of television, the internet, and other such tools. But whatever the reason, the effects are highly pernicious. If a real contest of ideas does not occur, and if the presidential debates don't actually allow those ideas to be explored, it seems that the very notion of voting as a reliable mechanism for choice may be questionable.

But can anything be done? Yes and no. On one hand, the genie is out of the bottle in terms of sound-bite media and the youtube era. No one will ever sit for a 3 hour rhetorical contest on the Fundmanetal Rights of Man when they have access to Peekvid, and I think that's something we have to accept. Yet although the media is largely to blame for the steady drop in the level of discourse, it may also provide the solution. Today there are a few ideas which I think should be seriously considered in order to make sure that ideas are properly seen and compared, and that vital demorcatic process can survive the age of "Dick in a Box". The first, and perhaps most important, is to make sure that full videos of the debates are posted online. This seems like a no brainer, since it would ensure that the information already out there is better disseminated and that sound bites have at least some context for those who want it. While some would argue that no one would watch the debates in their entirety online, I think people are far more likely to tune in and do so intellgiently if, say, given articles linked to the relevant segment of videotape. While this seems like a no-brainer, as of now news companies are not required to put the deabtes into the public domain or the public commons. To date, this has drawn the protest of Obama, Edwards, Dodd, and others, but it remains to be seen if the networks will respond.

Second, and more intriguing, is a call being made by Newt Gingrich, among others, for a series of 9 presidential debates to be held on Sundays in 2008 . Called the 9 Sundays plan, the series would be spread across the 9 major networks ( ) and would focus each round on a different policy issue (ex. Iraq, healthcare). Such a plan would create far more clash between candidates and would ensure that ideas compete more rigorously than in the status quo. Additionally, because they would take place on Sundays, they would allow the candidates to campaign during the week before resting for their national performances. Finally, by spreading the debates out across various networks the potential commerical loss would be defrayed to a very managable 90 minutes per organization. At this point, some would argue that wider access and frequency wouldn't neccesarily mean higher discourse. That said, the format of a 90 minute debate on a single issue is such that eventually, soundbites will run out and someone will have to say something. When one has 2 minutes to talk about Iraq, they can mumble out something about "keeping America strong" and move on. When they need to spend 90, they would need to express their views on sectarian tension, oil revenues, the impact and role of Kurdistan, the economic impact to the region, the exact state of the Iraqi army, and a host of other issues. Put another way, they would be virtually forced to prove their policy mettle. Many of the candidates in this field are remarkably intelligent and articulate, and I feel that such exchanges would allow people like Bill Richardson or Barack Obama a chance to demonstrate the sort of skills that would make them a superb commander in chief. Alternatively, it seems highly unlikely that George Bush would be in office today if he had to justify the war in Iraq based on 90 minues of substantive policy conversations.

Seems like a win win. So why hasn't anyone thought of this before? Actually, they have. In 1991 the 9 Sundays plan was proposed, but was dismissed both because candidates wanted to maintain contorl of their message and networks didn't want to give up their time. That said, there are several reasons why the dynamics on the ground have or can be changed. First off, in the youtube era, control over message has slipped so much that a candidates performance in a debate gives him a relatively high degree of power over what reaches the people (vs. say, Macaca). Additionally, in a hyperactive 24 news cycle I can't imagine that many would turn down the chance at so much uninterrupted (and free) national air time. And this isn't just theory; Rudy Giuliani has already pledged his supprot the program, and Tim Russert has promised to confront candidates about it whenever they appear on his show. And from the networks perspective the rise of new media and the internet has meant that if they are to stay relevant, changes are needed. Fortunatly, by hosting such debates, the networks could re-center themselves and regain their importance and prominence vs. other, newer forms of media which have threatened their control (Such as Boundless Rationality steadily cutting into the viewership of CBS, NBC, Fox News, and the Spice Channel). Furthermore, if this is not incentive enough, it seems there is a case for the government to step in and subsidize the debates on national networks. Government often steps in to facilitate free speech (such as the tax dollars that fund the equipment used in White House interviews), and spend a great deal more in things like matching funds to encourage competitive campaigns, and so it doesn't seem too out there to imagine a policy of incentivizing frequent contests for the sake of the democracy.


has newt got it right?

And while these solutions are great, they're just first steps. Even as the media has steadily destroyed public discourse it may also be its redeemer, whether through the YouTube videos that reveal bigotry to debates and town hall meetings which take place entirely in virtual worlds . Bearing this in mind, provided we employ sufficient effort the level and impact of presidential debates can increase, and the discourse vital to democracy can be protected and advanced.