One Argument for Keeping DADT

If you know my politics you probably did a double take at the title of this post. What reason could there possibly be for keeping a discriminatory policy like DADT? Isn’t it great that Obama got rid of it?

An emphatic yes to the last question, but I was talking to a veteran the other day, and he became very disillusioned with the military and he wanted to get out early but with an HONORABLE discharge. This is hard to do, but one way that many people were able to do this (and he did not take this route) was to become “gay.” (look at this report for stats and analysis; it mentions that a lot of people used this way out).

Now, depending on what your general view of the military is, this could be good or bad. You might think that people getting out of their service early is bad and so therefore think that this is just another reason to get rid of DADT — it will end the “leak” of service people out of the military.

You might though, see this phenomenon of fake homosexuality as a cost of ending the policy. The reason is that some people start out supporting the military’s operations when they join up, but they become disillusioned (Iraq will do that to you) and so think they are ethically required not to participate in the duties they’ve been asked to perform. For these people, DADT helped them realize their ethical ideals and so acted as a “moral escape hatch.” And since admitting to homosexuality when one is not homosexual has a high cost, the route is not likely to be abused. In other words, not just anyone will fake homosexuality to leave the military, but those who have strong moral convictions can use this route.

All told, DADT was (in some cases) a kind of a quirky and interesting mechanism that some people used to stay true to their ethical beliefs

Zen and art of climate science

Here’s a nice post about people who deny global warming.

The point of the article is simple: the forces of public discussion are massively in favor of the long term triumph of understanding of climate issues. According to a recent report (from Yale, woohoo), many Americans want to know more about climate science and they trust scientists to give them this information. The real issue is getting the message out in a robust and controlled manner. The report also notes that extreme skeptics about climate change are a rarity and not the norm.

A lot of people spend time getting worked up about people who deny that global warming is real, but everyone should just chill out. I say this so much on this blog, but I’ll say it again. America has serious problems to deal with, and the sooner everyone can stop whining and playing back-biting garbage games about small potatoes, the better we’ll all be.

Of course, global warming IS a real issue, and people should be trying to change policy on this issue, but as I’ve also said a billion times before, sometimes the right response is a zen-like take-the-high-road attitude. And what I mean is that persuasion is  science. If you want large groups of society to come around to a certain position, then you better not be so naive as to think that SIMPLY BEING RIGHT on the factual matters at play is enough to come out ahead.

So you think to yourself, kind of dramatically, “the truth is not enough, there has to be aggressive campaigns to get those doubters to see the light.” Well not really. Sometimes the best way for one view to ascend in acceptance and popularity is to remain above the fray and to be serene and imperturbable rather than angry and reactionary.

One example is gay marriage. As far as I can tell, history is on the side of gays becoming substantially better off in the medium to long term. People who don’t like rights for gays are getting old, or are just plain dying. It’s important to work on behalf of gay rights, but people who get really angry about homosexual haters are really just doing a disservice to everyone by giving more grist to those who WANT politics to be about anger. Every extreme leftist that lets slip inflammatory (but often true) statements about military, spending, homosexuality, or welfare just further alienates even open-minded conservatives. In other words, society works on trust and not just on arguments, and for that very reason, the best policy is to ONLY TALK in terms of argument. The side of an issue that speaks in terms of facts, projects their moderation, their reasonability, and above all, CONFIDENCE.

Nothing settles arguments better than confidence, and the best way to project it in the case of climate science is just to keep stating the arguments and putting them forward in the best light possible. They may even be wrong. The final analysis will tell (after all science was Newtonian before it realized it should be Einsteinian), but the point is that to convince as many people as possible, one should be zen-like. In control of oneself and in control of the arguments.

As with rights for homosexuality, I believe that history is on the side of climate change, and the sooner we calmly acknowledge that fact and non-condescendingly (that’s a huge piece of advice that many liberals just can’t seem to take) spread the message, the sooner we’ll bring the future toward the present.

I start my day with Top Gun

So many different things to talk about. This is more of a grab bag, but I’ll try to relate the different things that show up.

First, I’ll get the most unrelated part of this post out of the way: check out these maps. Kind of cool.

But now back to the titular (someone help me with usage here. Strictly speaking, it seems this word only refers to titles of POSITIONS, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it used to mean just the title of something) theme of this post.

Top Gun is an old movie these days, and in fact, it was old already even when I first saw it.  First time through, I was sad that Goose died, but I didn’t really latch on to much else. Of course, being a young kid, the dogfighting was pretty sweet.

As I’ve grown older though, I really do think the movie actually succeeds at a more complicated level, and for all the complaining I do about pop culture being vacuous and utterly degrading to the spirit of citizenship, self-realization, and free-thinkingness, there are, indisputably, pop cultural phenomenon that go on to deeply mesh with themes and questions floating around in, well, the popular culture. Superman is a prime example (though his time is fading, or is it now that reboot is being contemplated on the order of Batman Begins). Seinfeld (for you younger people, think The Wire) is another case in point. Pop sometimes touches something so deep and so universal that it explodes out of its cliched garbage pit and onto the map of cultural history.

I am not assuming that you already think Top Gun is such a movie, but I will try to convince you that it deserves this praise.

My main argument consists of identifying the way in which this movie succeeds at depicting a certain kind of male camaraderie. Now right off the bat, you might say, what value does such a sexist and retrograde theme have in our progressive society? My answer is that art does not need to be all things at once. There is art that celebrates women, gays (band played on), blacks, and every other group under the sun. Now of course, anytime you have a movie discussing the DOMINANT group in society, you’ve got to be careful. A movie about whiteness would be very troubling, and so a movie about maleness should be seen as suspicion right from the start.

It’s fair to say though that maleness is different than blackness or whiteness. Separate bathrooms for whites and blacks is unacceptable, but separate bathrooms for men and women seems almost required by a variety of reasons. Anyway, I think there is room for a movie about men that treats the subject with care and poignancy.

Immediately, there is the issue of interpreting the movie as homosexual allegory, (click this link, the movie is hilarious and smart) and indeed, there are many ways to read the movie to support this.

However, I reject the reading that Top Gun is only about homosexuality, though I think what it does do is to highlight how close maleness trends toward homosexuality at some points. In point of fact, I think the movie treats the issue of homosexuality in a very sensitive way. As far as I know, there is not a single use of a gay slur or insinuation in the entire movie. Rather remarkable considering the movie is supposed to be pop cultural romp through a seductively misrepresented fighter pilot culture. Instead, I think the movie is about a special type of humor and camaraderie that can most often be found amongst men.

Having grown up attending an all boys prep school, I can really appreciate how well this movie captures the rough and tumble friendships of men in competition with each other. This relates to my point, said many times on this blog, that competition is the social production of excellence. In Top Gun, the movie is about one man (Maverick) who is competing against an enemy that cannot be defeated: the legacy of dead father. No risk is too much to take when the enemy is invincible and so beyond life. Even Iceman is a less dangerous opponent for Maverick.

Goose on the other hand is the representation of the free-wheeling and easygoing humor that greases the tension that arises out of close competition with peers. I know at my high school, the friendly banter, and yes, insults, flew fast and furiously, but it was all cover for the sober business of trying to succeed in an environment of very competent other people. Each kid in my high school (well not quite all) was an achiever. They wanted to do things, and so did everyone else. Finding the niche where one could flourish was not easy, and had to be earned by each person. Goose is the family man who wishes that Maverick would just relax and not take so many risks, but he goes along for the ride no matter what. So, not only does he represent humor, but the spirit of loyalty that pervades friendships formed under stress and tribulation.

In the end though, Maverick does succeed at the highest level, and he does so primarily by being able to move the target of his competition from his dead father onto the actually existing Russians. The final scene of the movie more than anything I think illustrates the respect that develops between two people that are struggling to be the best. I found this patten to be very pervasive at my school. There was one kid who I was in constant competition with. We even had several violent clashes. It would be fair to say that we came as close to hating each other as you can do without actually invoking the emotion of hate. And that’s the beauty, I did not actually hate my opponent, and in time, our competition developed into a powerful and abiding friendship, as well as a healthy dose of respect for the fighting spirit of the other.

These day, fighter pilots in the U.S. military have an enormous advantage over their opponents. The F-22 for example (see my post here) is a technological marvel and as this handy video shows, frees up a lot of the pilot’s brainpower so that he can focus on strategy rather than keeping the plane from ripping itself apart, or running out of fuel, or all the other mentally taxing parts of flying an airplane close to the speed of sound while others are trying to kill you.

Also, with pilotless drones, there may not be a need for the top gun pilots for that much longer. You see, there is no glory in modern warfare (death is dealt so effectively from far away), but there was in dogfighting, the last bastion of one on one combat augmented by obscenely powerful technologies. That era may be coming to a close as well.

Tenure and Marriages, and an intersection with proposition 8

So there are these two really smart guys, Gary Becker and Richard Posner who have written a bajillion articles on law and economics, and they have a blog. I unwittingly picked up a book that I thought was written by them, but just turned out to be a collection of their blog posts. I wouldn’t have checked out this book if I could have just looked online, but anyway, no big deal, library books are free.

The point is this: these guys are hilarious in how smart they are and yet how narrow their approach to life can be. I don’t mean this in a political way, and I don’t necessarily mean it as a criticism. What I mean is that they see the world in such interesting economic terms, but often miss the obvious other ways a situation could be viewed.

Here are two examples.

Posner talking about gay marriage (see here):

Why so much passion is expended over the word “marriage” baffles me. After all, even today, and even more so if civil unions were officially recognized, homosexual couples can call themselves “married” if they want to. And this brings to the fore the disadvantage of treating marriage as a legal status. Were it just a contract, government would have no role in deciding what word the parties could use to describe the relationship created by it.

This is in the context of an argument for getting rid of the special legal status of marriage so that marriage would be just like any other contract. You could negotiate a five year marriage, a till-death-till-us-part marriage, one with prenuptial conditions, one without, a polygamous marriage (yes he talks about polygamy later), etc. etc. The goal isn’t to inflame people’s passions about what marriage about, but rather to notice how hard it is for Posner to imagine that people might care about institutions for reasons unrelated to their contractual specifications.

For example, marriage has a legally recognized status because we think it has a special significance the way it is constructed. It’s not just for five years and it does come with special privileges and obligations, and this to recognize and hold out for praise a certain type of relationship, a type we often think is closely connected to love (though of course, marriage and love are not the same thing). The law is made to try and mirror the contours of that commitment and our society is organized to value it and recognize it for what it is.

And so I think its very unsurprising that gay people want the word marriage to be applied to them and that it would be discriminatory to do otherwise. Even if gay civil unions had all the perks of marriage, something would still be missing, which is the recognition that a certain relationship is valuable.

Take this example: pretend a gay person was wounded in the line of duty in the military and he was given all the benefits of a wounded veteran — pension, healthcare, etc. But this person was not given the legal STATUS of veteran. This seem to a snub of sorts I think, and probably rightly so. (I think someone made this exact point in the comment section for this post).

Maybe if marriage, at some point in the future, lost all its special connotations, then his puzzlement might make more sense, but in today’s world, I think it’s pretty clear that gays want the term marriage to be applied to them out of pride and out of a defense of their way of life. I think all the interest in the repeal of proposition 8 makes it clear that the “word” marriage has important social meaning.

Later there is a discussion about tenure and the basic argument is that there is no rationale for tenure in universities and that it should be abandoned. In short, the idea is that there are information problems for monitoring which professors are good (and should be retained year in and year out) and that insulation from firing for political reasons (the professor has an unpopular viewpoint) can be built into the contract.

I think there are many responses. First, how efficient would it be to negotiate such a contract. What counts as “political reasons.” The top brass at a university can find all sorts of reasons to menace a professor whose views they do not like and in the end, they can through him out for reasons that are “not” political even though the underlying motivation clearly is. It might be more efficient to give more comprehensive protection.

Also, tenure is designed precisely because academic value cannot be measured. Posner thinks that student evaluations (is he kidding?) and a publishing record in journals can tell which professors are good, but tenure is designed exactly so that academics can blaze new trails without being a slave to publishing or students anymore. I think intellectual breakthroughs happen best when the only thing guiding research is the desire to pursue an interesting line of thought (which would happen when the professor has tenure. He is free to pursue something SOLELY because it is interesting and may not entrance students or win attention from other scholars).

Lastly, there is a strictly economic rationale for tenure, which is that it allows teachers to train talented students without fear that they are training their replacements.