Politics – Page 65 – Common Infirmities

Computer culture and gun culture, ctd.

Since I’ve been interested in the history and political significance of cryptography (I discussed the connection between computers and the 2nd amendment here) I read the book This Machine Kills Secrets by journalist Andy Greenberg, a fascinating, if somewhat brief and barely technical history of underground cryptography in the internet age. Among other things I learned there is that, whereas I had thought of gun culture and computer culture as analogous but non-intersecting, in fact there was considerable overlap:

One adjunct group, called the Cypherpunks Shooting Club, even organized trips to rifle ranges to teach each other to shoot .22s and semiautomatic weapons, the final resort should the government ever come after their electronic and physical freedoms. (Tim May, an avid gun enthusiast himself, didn’t attend. “I Don’t give free lessons, especially not to clueless software people,” he says.)

Jim Bell, a cypherpunk insider, proposed in the mid-1990s “Assassination Politics”, basically a scheme for combining strong cryptography with a sort of stock market for murder contracts. The goal was anarchy:

If only one person in a thousand was willing to pay $1 to see some government slimeball dead, that would be, in effect, a $250,000 bounty on his head[…] Chances are good that nobody above the level of county commissioner would even risk staying in office.

Just how would this change politics in America? It would take far less time to answer, “What would remain the same?” No longer would we be electing people who will turn around and tax us to death, regulate us to death, or for that matter send hired thugs to kill us when we oppose their wishes.

This all sounds like the sorts of rant you hear these days from the extreme gun nuts. So maybe the analogy is not that far-fetched.

And, come to think of it, now that concrete schemes are afoot to turn weapons manufacture into a software problem with 3d printing, even the technical differences between guns and codes are dissipating.

New frontiers in cost-benefit analysis

Headline in the online edition of the Toronto Star

Finding the ‘sweet spot’ on transit taxes: where benefit and cost match up.

I’m no expert on the subject, but I think that when the costs and benefits “match up”, you’ve gone too far…

More seriously, the article is based on weird analysis like this:

“It’s unfair to tax people for parking their cars when there is no real alternative (to driving),” he said.

That sounds superficially fair, but does it correspond to any principle that is more generally followed? How about: It’s unfair to tax people (i.e., charge them) for riding a bus when there is no real alternative. Or, it’s unfair to tax people for getting a passport when there is no real alternative. Why is it that services provided by the government ought to be free by default? Conversely, if “fairness” (defined as not charging people for necessities) is an important principle for the public sector, then why not for the private sector?

The right to bear codes

Back when I was a graduate student, in the late 1980s and early 90s, there was a lot of discussion, among those interested in cryptography and computing (which I was, only peripherally) of the status of cryptographic algorithms as “weapons”, subject to export controls. The idea seemed bizarre to those of us who thought of algorithms as things you prove theorems about, and computer code as something you write. It seemed as absurd as declaring a book to be a weapon. Sure, you might metaphorically call Das Kapital a weapon, or the Declaration of Independence, but it’s not really a weapon, and a country was much more likely to think about banning imports than banning exports. The author of PGP was then being threatened with prosecution, and had the code published as a book to mate the analogy more explicit.

So, I used to defend free access to cryptography because I thought it was ridiculous to consider codes to be weapons. I now think that was naïve. But if codes are weapons, does that provide a justification for a right of free access (in the US)? Maybe it’s not freedom of speech or the press — 1st amendment — but if cryptography is a weapon, is the use and manufacture of cryptographic algorithms and software protected in the US by the 2nd amendment? Certainly the main arguments made for a right to firearms — sport, self-defence, and bulwark against tyranny — are all applicable to cryptography as well. Are there current US laws or government practices that restrict the people’s free access to cryptography that would be called into question if cryptography were “arms” in the sense of the 2nd amendment?

This is connected to the question I have wondered about occasionally: Why didn’t strong cryptography happen? That is, back then I (and many others) assumed that essentially unbreakable cryptography would become easy and default, causing trouble for snoops and law enforcement. But in fact, most of our data and communications are pretty insecure still. Is this because of legal constraints, or general disinterest, or something else? The software is available, but it’s sufficiently inconvenient that most people don’t use it. And while it wouldn’t actually be difficult to encode all my email (say) with PGP, I’d feel awkward asking people to do it, since no one else is doing it.

It seems as though the philosophy of the Clipper chip has prevailed: Some people really need some sort of cryptography for legitimate purposes. If you make a barely adequate tool for the purpose conveniently available, you’ll prevent people from making the small extra effort to obtain really strong cryptography.

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Exile in the modern world: Can a country deport its own citizens?

One of my favourite novels is B. Traven’s Das Totenschiff (“The Ship of the Dead”). Written in the mid-1920s, this novel tells the story of an American seaman who accidentally gets left behind with no papers when his ship sails from Rotterdam. Suddenly he is a stateless person. He tries to get help from the US consulate, but gets a Catch 22-like sermon, along the lines of, “I would of course help an American citizen who was stranded here without papers, but I am unable to assist you without proof that you are indeed an American citizen.” All the officials he encounters treat him as some sort of ghost, a man without identity papers being a contradiction in terms. (This reminds me of Bertrand Russell’s comments on the imposition of passport requirements for international travel after the First World War, a tyranny that until then had been thought characteristic of Russian despotism.) Since no one wants to deal with a ghost, they find ways to dump him across a border, taking him further and further west, until he lands in Barcelona and ends up being signed on, not entirely willingly, to the Yorick, a ramshackle ship, a floating hell of labour, crewed by other unpersons from all over the world, its hold stuffed with useless cargo that is just being carried around the Seven Seas in the hopes that it will eventually sink and yield an insurance payment.

Anyway, I thought of this surreal novel when I read the recent New Yorker article by William Finnegan, about a US citizen with a minor criminal record and mental disabilities who, for no reason that anyone can reconstruct, was targeted by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for deportation to Mexico. He was born in the US, had never been outside the US, was not Hispanic, but somehow when he was booked into a state prison for a short sentence his birthplace was listed as Mexico, and that was enough to get him deported to Mexico less than a year later. And the Mexican authorities, since he wasn’t Mexican, managed to ship him off to Guatemala. He eventually got returned to the US, though more by accident than design. When he flew into Atlanta, with a passport issued to him by a vice consul in Guatemala City, the immigration officials there noted that he had already been deported and had him arrested, intending to redeport him.

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Why don’t we throw people out of emergency rooms?

In discussions of market forces in health care, someone always points out that we don’t allow people to just die in the streets. Anyone who shows up in an emergency room must be treated (in the US this has been true since the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986, I believe). Among the many other reasons why medical care does not respond to free market incentives, then, is the fact that the providers are not able to turn away customers who are unwilling or unable to pay.

But here’s what I’m wondering: This is always presented as an issue of basic humanity, or altruism. We can’t let the poor die of treatable injuries or illnesses because that seems too brutal. But is that the whole story, or even most of the story? My suspicion — and I’d have to go back to the debates on EMTALA to develop any clarity on this — is that the real reason we have a no-exceptions requirement that hospitals provide urgent care to the poor is that there’s a significant danger that the non-poor might be confused with the poor, particularly in times of medical emergency. Someone who has been hit by a car or has suffered a stroke and is disoriented is likely incapable of quickly identifying herself as an upstanding creditworthy citizen with health insurance. So the hospital is required to try to keep them alive long enough to allow them (or their relatives) to demonstrate that they are worth saving.

Which leads to a question: Supposing biometric databases become universal, and the hospitals are able to immediately ID anyone who comes through the door. Will we then relax the rules, and allow them to turn away the indigent, perhaps sending them off to some primitive alternative hospital for the poor?

Paradoxes of belief: Holocaust denial edition

(or, Vonnegut’s Mother Night reversed)

I’ve long thought it amazing how many odd, nearly unbelievable, individual stories are hidden in the corners of the grand ghastly narrative of the Holocaust; and no matter how many stories I read — Peter Wyden’s account of Stella Goldschlag, for instance, his Jewish schoolmate in 1930s Berlin who specialised in sniffing out undercover Jews for the Gestapo — there’s always another even stranger, such as the jewish graphic designer Cioma Schönhaus who survived the war, and saved many other lives, by learning to forge identity papers.

Holocaust denial seems to have its own bizarre corners. To wit, this new revelation:

[David Stein] a cerebral, fun-loving gadfly who hosted boozy gatherings for Hollywood’s political conservatives […] brought right-wing congressmen, celebrities, writers and entertainment industry figures together for shindigs, closed to outsiders, where they could scorn liberals and proclaim their true beliefs. That he made respected documentaries on the Holocaust added intellectual cachet and Jewish support to Stein’s cocktail of politics, irreverence and rock and roll.

[Under his original name David Cole he] was once a reviled Holocaust revisionist who questioned the existence of Nazi gas chambers. He changed identities in January 1998.

This reads like an April Fool’s prank, or a high-concept film plot from the fevered leftist imagination. The right-wing Jewish Holocaust documentary maker and fanatical Israel supporter is actually a secret neo-Nazi. Ha ha. Who would believe that? It’s not so easy to change your identity, particularly if you’ve just made yourself notorious on TV chat shows. And how would a man with no past be able to start a new career and become a political insider?

But what intrigues me most of all is when the Guardian article touches on the question of Stein/Cole’s true beliefs. One of the important lessons of modern cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind is that it is very difficult — perhaps impossible — to develop a coherent theory of beliefs, under which statements like “X believes Y” are statements of fact. (See, for example, the seminal book by Stephen Stich, that relegates beliefs — and other many other concepts — to the realm of “folk psychology”.)

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Freedom of religion in Britain and Germany

After the monarchy, state-sponsored religion is one of the strangest customs I’ve had to adapt to in the UK (and Germany, the other European country that I’ve lived in for a number of years). In the UK I’ve already written about the somewhat insidious role of state religion, such as the way it dictates which schools your children will be admitted to; that 26 bishops sit ex officio in the House of Lords (though it should be mentioned that the other state religion, Finance, has its own peculiar kind of special representation in the Commons); and that non-Anglican foreigners who wish to marry in the UK require permission of the Home Office, for which they must pay a substantial fee. (This Anglican exception may now have been rescinded; I know there was pressure from the European Court of Human Rights.) All UK state schools are required — following a Blair-era edict — to have daily Christian prayer (unless they are state-sponsored non-Christian religious schools, another Blair novum), though that law is not always followed, particularly in secondary schools — see par. 141 of this Ofsted report.

Germany is a federation in most respects, with wide variation in religion and religiosity, but a requirement for church-approved religious education (of two flavours, Catholic and Protestant) in the schools is anchored in the constitution. The federal government collects tax on behalf of the churches. And the churches, which control a significant portion of the hospitals, among other businesses and institutions — are allowed to discriminate against their employees in ways that would be forbidden, and indeed morally condemned, by any other employer. A recent court decision in Germany concerns a 60-year-old pediatric social worker, who worked for the Catholic organisation Caritas. Shocked and appalled by the extent of child-abuse perpetrated and covered up by the Church, he officially left the Church. (In other countries it’s not clear how you would officially stop being Catholic, other than by joining another church, but in Germany you just stop paying tax and you’re out. Reassignment of your soul’s eternal fate follows in 4 to 6 weeks.)

So the Church, which knows how to respond to a major breach of moral and ethical norms, clearly couldn’t stand for the scandal of a social worker in their employ taking a public stand against sexual abuse of children. And while being Catholic was apparently not a requirement of the job to begin, the courts agreed that being an ex-Catholic is forbidden, particularly one whose break with the Church was provoked by something so unseemly as individual conscience.

The Life of Julia: Another longitudinal fable

Picking up from my earlier discussion of the way cross-sectional data get turned into (sometimes misleading) longitudinal stories, it’s been about a year since the Obama campaign unveiled The Life of Julia, a slide show that contrasted Obama’s and Romney’s policies with regard to their effects on women at different ages. Stated that way it would be pretty standard and uncontroversial, but in fact it turned into a flashpoint for the early part of the campaign. Why? Precisely because it was not a list of cross-sectional promises — What President Obama will do for children; What President Obama will do for seniors; etc. would be standard campaign web site headings — but was turned into a longitudinal story. These were not 12 different women, of different ages, who would putatively be helped by the president’s policies, but a single woman “Julia” who seems to be spending her whole life looking for government programs to scrounge from. Of course, it only seems this way because of the way this infographic interacts with our expectations of a biographical narrative, where we expect to be seeing the high points of her life, and every one of them involves government services. Creepy! It’s no wonder some critics were reminded of cradle-to-grave socialism.

Of course, the real story is cross-sectional. If Julia is 3 years old now, Obama is not really promising to provide a small business loan to her in the year 2040. And by the time she reaches retirement, she’ll probably be living on a Mars colony or hiding out from roving mutant bandits in subterranean bunkers after the nuclear climate catastrophe.

Beware the Dijsselbomb!

Why are rich people so squeamish about the truth?

Some very smart people have taken to the Internet to ridicule Eurogroup president and Netherlands finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem for his inappropriate attack of clear speech. He said that “the Cyprus deal will serve as a template for future bank restructurings in the euro zone.” Sounds like something to cheer: Deposit insurance has been affirmed, but implicit taxpayer guarantees for wealthy bank creditors have been repudiated.

But instead we have Matt Yglesias saying “That’s the kind of remark that it would be very sensible for, say, a blogger to make. But Dijsselbloem is president of the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, and a guy in his role is supposed to be reassuring people. Instead he caused them to panic.” And so Meneer Dijsselbloem issued another statement saying that of course the Cyprus bailout isn’t a template for anything, because every financial crisis is a unique special flower and no other European tax haven is an island and you can’t step into the same river twice… Continue reading “Beware the Dijsselbomb!”

World’s greatest healthcare (TM)

What does it mean when a US politician like Chris Christie tells the Republican National Convention the US has “the world’s greatest healthcare system”? Is it like when kids buy a “World’s Greatest Dad” mug for Father’s Day: An expression of affection for an ill-favoured thing, but mine own?

One of my formative political experiences was the summer during graduate school, when I listened on the radio to broadcasts of the US Senate debating the Clinton healthcare proposals. What struck me above all was how the senators universally (it seemed) invoked the unmatched excellence of American health care. “The envy of the world”, “best health care in the world”. The only difference of opinion was, of course, that opponents of the reform said that tinkering with this paragon of perfection would inevitably be disastrous, while supporters argued for making this blessing available to more people.*

So, the politicians certainly appear to believe it, and to believe that it should have policy implications; or to believe that a significant portion of the public believes it; or to believe that a significant portion of the public will respond favourably to the assertion, even if they suspect it is untrue. Is it cognitive dissonance? We’re America dammit, and being the sort of people we are, we certainly wouldn’t put up with a ramshackle healthcare system.

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