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I tried to respond to Publius and Hilzoy at their place, but the comments system wouldn't let me.  So I'll have to carry the debate on here.

Why the analogy to slavery, or Hitler?  It's inflammatory, and rarely advances the debate.  Such analogies too often degenerate into "Hitler was a vegetarian too, you tofu-eating Nazi!!!*"

But in this case, I think the analogy to slavery is important, for two reasons.  First of all, it was the last time we had an extended, society-wide debate about personhood.  And second of all, as now, there were structural political reasons that it was much harder--nearly impossible--to change slavery through the existing political process.

Listening to the debates about abortion, it seems to me that really broad swathes of the pro-choice movement seem to genuinely not understand that this is a debate about personhood, which is why you get moronic statements like "If you think abortions are wrong, don't have one!"  If you think a fetus is a person, it is not useful to be told that you, personally, are not required to commit murder, as long as you leave the neighbors alone while they do it.

Conversely, if Africans are not people, then slavery is not wrong.  Or at least it's arguably not wrong--if Africans occupy some intermediate status between persons and animals**, then there is at least a legitimate argument for treating them like animals, rather than people.

The difference between our reaction to the two is that now we know Africans are people.  It seems ridiculous to think that anyone ever thought they might not be people.  They meet all the relevant criteria for personhood in twenty-first century America.

But of course, those criteria are socially constructed.  The definition of personhood (and, related, of citizenship) changes over time.  It generally expands--as we get richer, we can, or at least do, grant full personhood to wider categories.  Except in the case of fetuses.  We expanded "persons" to include fetuses in the 19th century, as we learned more about gestation.  Then in the late 1960s, for the first time I can think of, western civilization started to contract the group "persons" in order to exclude fetuses.

But that conception was not universally shared.  And rather than leave it to the political process, the Supreme Court essentially put it beyond that process.  Congress, the President, the justices themselves, have been fighting a thirty-five year guerilla war over court seats.  Presidents try to appoint candidates who will support their theory of Roe, Congress strategically blocks change, and the justices refuse to retire until they know they will be replaced by someone who supports their side.  To change the outcome, a pro-life political coalition would have to gain a supermajority in Congress for twenty years--long enough for a few liberal justices to die in office.

It is theoretically possible that this could happen, just as it was theoretically possible to come to some political accomodation over slavery.  But a combination of supreme court rulings and the peculiar federalist structure of American meant that the only way for either side to gain decisive results was violence.  At every turn, the pro-slavery forces no doubt slyly congratulated themselves on their political acumen, while also solemnly and sincerely believing that they preserved an important right.  But they made war inevitable.

If you interpret this murder as a political act, rather than that of a lone whacko, than this should be a troubling sign that the political system has failed.  So why do so many people think that the obvious answer is simply to more firmly entrench laws that are rightly intolerable to someone who thinks that a late term fetus is a person?

I am accused, in the comments of Hilzoy's post, of loving violence and terror.  Well, call me a terrorist sympathizer, but I believe that most terrorists do what they do because they, at least, genuinely believe that there is no other way to seek justice.  Indeed, they are usually right, for all that I radically dissent from both their idea of justice, and their right to seek it through violence.  But I am also humble enough to recognize that my own morality on a topic like abortion is constructed in context of two important facts: virtually all my friends are pro-choice, as is the social milieu in which I was raised, and a lack of access to abortion would significantly restrict women's autonomy.

These are not bad arguments in favor of abortion--I think modern America is more right than not about most moral questions, and the right to bodily integrity is important.  On the other hand, in the face of fetal personhood, they are not very good arguments either.  My parents significantly restrict my autonomy by continuing to be alive--if they died, I would inherit some money, which would increase my choices.  But I still shouldn't be allowed to kill them in order to collect my inheritance--a moral insight which seems to be much more obvious and fundamental, I might add, than the wrongness of slavery or the rightness of abortion.  Every society I know of forbids slaughtering your parents.

(Not that I want to, I hasten to point out.  Hi, Dad!  We're pricing out a nice GPS for father's day!)

I am aware that I have constructed my beliefs about personhood in the face of these things--like any good undergrad, I know the answer I need to reason to in order to ensure both social comfort and maximum personal freedom.  I like to think that I am too rigorous a thinker to be seduced by such ephemera.  But I am also aware that a lot of very fine thinkers were seduced into reasoning that Africans weren't people.  Whatever evidence they thought they had, we're pretty sure how they arrived at their conclusions:   African personhood would have caused enormous personal and social upheaval.  Thousands of their friends and family would have personally suffered enormously without their slave wealth.  Ergo, slaves weren't people!

And if I look at my own reasoning, well, frankly, it's not even reasoning.  I've never sat down and thought, "how do I know that Africans are human beings?"  I know.  And I'm enough of a Chestertonian to be okay with that way of knowing.  But presumably if I'd been raised in 1840 Alabama, I'd know just as certainly that they weren't.

Perhaps I find the certainty of the pro-choice side so disturbing because it feels a lot like the certainty of the warbloggers in the run up to the Iraq invasion.  As some of Hilzoy's commenters point out, I was myself too caught up in it, which makes me cautious of getting caught up again.  The pro-choicers seem to be acting as if people who shoot abortion doctors are some weird species of moral alien, whose actions can only be understood in Satantic terms, and who cannot and should not be negotiated with, because they only understand raw displays of power.  Yet it seems to me that if I were in a society that believed fervently in the personhood of a fetus, I would very possibly agree, and view Tiller's murderer the way I'd view someone who, say, assassinated Mengele.

I realize that this opens many other questions, like "What does it mean to have access to the political process?" and what constitutes personhood.  But I remain stuck with a fundemantal problem:  I can understand their moral logic.  When someone whose moral logic I can understand, even endorse  (without endorsing the underlying judgement about the personhood of the fetus) is driven by that moral logic to kill, I think there may be a problem that society needs to solve.  When more than one kills for the same cause, I assume that there's a structural problem in the political process that needs to be fixed.  I'm not saying the violence is okay--I think Tiller's murderer needs to go to jail.  But like many contributors to Obsidian Wings, I can understand the structural forces that contribute to Palestinian terrorism without believing the terrorism is legitimate.  Unlike them, apparently, I don't find it all that hard to transfer that understanding to the fringes of our own democratic system.

*  Sadly, I'm not even joking--see my old vegan threads
** Go ahead.  I triple-dog-dare you to quote me out of context

The European Union is close to banning all Canadian seal products, and a grassroots campaign to boycott Canadian fish and seafood is gaining momentum. But what of Europe's own barbaric culinary practices? In response, Full Comment will call attention to European hypocrisy and demand an immediate end to the brutal slaughter of helpless creatures. Today's poor victim of continental cruelty: mice...or possibly rat. It's hard to tell.

Thousands of years ago, Roman legions on the march brought along specimens of mice, known as edible dormouse or glis glis, which could be quickly fattened and then consumed as an emergency source of food, should the unit find itself unable to live off the land. That tradition lives on today, concentrated primarily in European Union member Slovenia, though glis glis poaching remains common in parts of Italy, as well.

The dormouse is a rodent, of course, and bears some superficial similarities to the common North American squirrel. A nocturnal creature, their loud squeaking makes them an easy target for human hunters, who can paralyze them with flashlight beams before killing them with a firearm or a well-thrust skewer. Various forms of wire or bladed traps are also common means of capturing dormouse. Dormouse hunting was especially popular in Slovenia due to a belief that Satan is their shepherd, meaning that the slaughter of a dormouse is not only a way to eat, but also a way to strike a blow against Satan. Even in modern times, stewing dormice with red wine and vegetables is a popular dish, as is fried chopped dormouse.

In Italy, where the hunting of dormouse is illegal, they have been poached almost to the brink of extinction in certain areas. Some Italians, facing increasing difficulties in finding dormice in the wild, have taken to raising dormice domestically, fattening them up before turning them into stew. Italian chefs, arrested for serving such stew, have offered as a defence that they aren't really serving the protected creatures, but are merely lying to their customers and feeding them common rats, instead. The wisdom of this legal defence remains in question, as serving rat is also illegal.

The National Post calls on all Canadians to boycott Slovenian agricultural products, until such time that this barbaric practice is brought to an end, and further calls upon the Italian government to crack down on the illegal poaching of dormice within their national borders that is threatening this peaceful species with extinction.

Matt Gurney
National Post

matt@mattgurney.ca

Steve Herzfeld managed an admirably inventive end-run around high healthcare costs for his Parkinson's- and Alzheimer's-afflicted parents. After in-home care was no longer possible, he priced American nursing homes, but found that the cheapest acceptable option was still $6,000. So he sent them to India. Quality elderly care in Puducherry cost less than his father's fixed income. According to the Guardian:

[In India, Herzfeld] could give his parents a much higher standard of care than would have been possible in the US for his father's income of $2,000 (£1,200) a month. In India that paid for their rent, a team of carers—a cook, a valet for his father, nurses to be with his mother 12 hours a day, six days a week, a physiotherapist and a masseuse—and drugs (costing a fifth of US prices), and also allowed them to put some money away...."In India, they really like older people," says Herzfeld, describing how the staff seemed to regard his parents as their own family.

Of course, the care was inexpensive because a couple thousand bucks goes further in Puducherry than it might in, say, Fort Lauderdale. Herzfeld, though, apparently believes that it was cheap because elderly care in America is greedily overpriced by providers. He vents about about healthcare and the profit motive: 

[Herzfeld] believes that India could teach the US and UK a lot about care of the elderly. "In America, healthcare is done for profit, so that skews the whole thing and makes it very inhuman in its values," he says.

I try not to begrudge a man his fantasies, but the idea that the nurses, valets, and masseuses of Puducherry were doing it all out of the goodness of their hearts—rather than the goodness of their paychecks—is condescending. It was simple outsourcing, not subcontinental altruism, that saved Steve Herzfeld so much money.

In Reason's May 2009 print edition, Ronald Bailey wrote about the outsourcing of hip replacement.

Obama has had something of a media coup in the Middle Eastern press, especially Iran:

Know hope.

North Korea?"s underground detonation of a nuclear device on May 25 has rattled the global community and confronted President Barack Obama with a major national security challenge. It seems every so often that the regime in Pyongyang engages in provocative behavior, so as to bind world attention. ?SWe are unpredictable and dangerous, so world, you better pay attention to us,? appears to be the radioactive clarion call being uttered from North Korea. In the past, these unorthodox tactics on the part of the ?SDemocratic People?"s Republic of Korea,? or DPRK, have been employed as an effective means of blackmail. In the wake of the DPRK?"s first nuclear test, in October 2006, then U.S. President George W. Bush agreed to American concessions to North Korea that seemed inconceivable based on his prior rhetoric. Many of these concessions involved economic support for the ailing North Korean economy, especially with regard to the supply of energy and foodstuffs.

The latest nuclear escapade by North Korea is being interpreted as continuity with its longstanding policy of using its possession of weapons of mass destruction as a means to creatively employ economic blackmail. However, the North Korean political economy is so dysfunctional, I think there may be a much more radical calculation emanating from Pyongyang.

There are few countries on the planet that have economies as shattered as North Korea?"s. Officially a Marxist-Communist state, its reality is in fact much different. Peculiar for a nation supposedly based on Marxism, North Korea is ruled by a family dynasty. The founder of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, is worshipped as a God, and his lifeless corpse is constitutionally still the president-for-life of the DPRK. The son of Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-il, is the current ruler of North Korea and it is rumored that one of his sons is also being groomed for political succession. Like his father, Kim Jong-il is also deified, and referred to in every proclamation as ?Sthe Great Leader.? However, despite his exalted status, his people have endured repeated famines that have snuffed out the lives of millions, according to international relief organizations. Furthermore, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the termination of its subsidies to North Korea, the nation?"s industrial infrastructure has essentially collapsed. Men still show up for work in the factories, but nothing is produced, for the most part, and the pay is a pittance. It is the women who actually run the economy of North Korea, largely through the black market. Though theoretically illegal, this otherwise draconian police state largely tolerates the female-dominated black market, estimated by some observers to represent 80% of the DPRK?"s meager economic output. The women of North Korea are the breadwinners in that society, having rediscovered entrepreneurial skills and are engaged in craft production and trading goods smuggled into the DPRK from China.

Having a national economy largely based on the black market is actually in conformity with other aspects of North Korea?"s unique political culture. Another example is how its communist-indoctrinated diplomats are expected to engage in profitable capitalism while posted abroad, so as not to bother Pyongyang with inconsequential and mundane matters, such as paying the rent on their embassies. For that reason, numerous North Korean diplomats have been expelled by their foreign hosts for engaging in activity ?Sincompatible with their status.? That term usually means espionage; in the case of the DPRK, the diplomats were expelled for engaging in narcotics trafficking.

In this basket-case of an economy, North Korea has had only one export commodity that has consistently been a strong earner of foreign exchange; armaments. In the past, ballistic missiles have been a hot export commodity for the rulers in Pyongyang. However, many of North Korea?"s traditional missile buyers, including Iran, now manufacture their own rockets. With demand for its medium range missiles potentially drying up, North Korea must look at new products that will stimulate demand. Long range ballistic missiles that can strike targets in the United States are one example of product diversification that may explain the DPRK?"s recent test of a supposed satellite launch. However, the crown jewel in North Korea?"s product portfolio is its nuclear weapons capability.

Though most analysts believe that the recent detonation of a nuclear device by North Korea was just its traditional blackmail-driven saber rattling, I think there may be a far more dangerous motive behind the atomic weapons test. North Korea?"s first nuclear test in 2006 is widely viewed as being a dude. While the basic concept of creating a nuclear blast is relatively simple-bringing together a critical mass of fissile materials-the means of achieving full yield requires sophisticated physics and engineering. The small yield of the blast in 2006 revealed that the DPRK had not yet mastered the technique of ?Sextending the generation,? meaning prolonging the natural onset of a nuclear explosion by a ten millionth of a second. What seems like an insignificant time factor makes all the difference between an explosion that is in the same category as a large conventional bomb, and a blast on par with the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Until the DPRK had demonstrated its ability to ?Sextend the generation,? potential foreign buyers of nuclear weapons would have little faith in North Korean nuclear weapons technology.

The May 25 nuclear test by the DPRK was, by all accounts, successful. The Russians estimate that the device detonated by the DPRK had a yield of between 10 and 20 kilotons, on par with the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Potential customers, including both rogue nations and non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda, have now received a ?Sproduct demonstration? that is convincing.

While my theory that North Korea?"s recent actions are based on a policy decision to begin surreptitiously marketing nuclear weapons technology, and possibly fully assembled nuclear weapons to the highest bidder, may seem far-fetched, there are signs that key decision-makers in the U.S. national security establishment have adopted a similar viewpoint. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security has abandoned plans to place radiation detectors in most ports of entry to the United States. This decision was based on the conclusion that technology does not exists that would reliably detect a well-planned attempt to smuggle a nuclear weapon or its components into the United States. However, there is another area that the Department of Energy, in particular, is aggressively moving forward on. A new field has been invented, called ?Snuclear forensics.? It is based on the belief that a nuclear detonation is so unique, post-blast analysis can reveal the origin of the fissile materials that were used in the weapon. This seems to be the new deterrent doctrine; if a country such as North Korea sells a nuclear weapon to a terrorist organization that then used it to destroy an American city, the U.S. will be able to scientifically determine the point of origin of the nuclear device, and launch a retaliatory response against the offending nation. The Obama administration considers North Korea a major nuclear proliferation threat

As if the Global Economic Crisis was not enough to worry about, we now may be witnessing the emergence of nuclear proliferation as an export-based strategy for capital formation. It makes one hope that nuclear blackmail is all that North Korea is truly interested in. President Obama will have many sleepless nights worrying about North Korea.

As both Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch argued last week, commenting on this article in The Weekly Standard, we are seeing the "last gasp of a losing argument" from opponents of gay marriage. A few days later, former Solicitor General Ted Olson, who argued Bush v. Gore for the Bushies, joined forces with liberal lawyer (and former Gore council) David Boies and filed a legal challenge to California's Prop. 8. Now former Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking at the National Press Club, affirmed his support for a federalist approach to same-sex marriage, telling assembled journalists that "people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish."

The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support. I do believe that the historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis. But I don't have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that.

Via RealClearPolitics, which also has the video.

So.  Alea iacta est, as Julius Caesar might have said, if there had been a major Roman chariot manufacturer in putative need of nationalization.  The nation's largest automaker, our most iconic firm, is bankrupt,  GM and Citigroup exit the Dow in favor of Travelers and Cisco. 

The first obvious thing to say is that the only alternative the US government probably had to this massively expensive reorganization was probably liquidation.  I take seriously the claims that there was no DIP financing available for the automakers.

However.  The reason there was no DIP financing available is, at least in part, that there's no obvious upside here.  The government is acting as if GM's main problem is that it stubbornly refused to enter the lucrative market for small, fuel-efficient cars.  But the market for small, fuel efficient cars is not lucrative--they're the cars with the thinnest margins.  And no one's making it up on volume, either:  at the height of last year's oil spike, when barrels of Brent Crude were being quoted in first-born sons, small cars soared to . . . 20% of the American market.  Yes, there was a glut of SUVs, but that's because American companies were making a lot of SUVs.  Foreign companies make money on small cars because they develop them for lucrative home markets before modifying them for American production.

GM's main problem is not that the market is unreasonably unwilling to finance a potentially profitable company.  Nor that it can't produce an awesome small car that shockingly few people want to buy.  (Believe me, as the owner of a tiny, ultra-efficient car, I would that there were higher demand for my rapidly depreciating asset).  GM's main problems are

1)  A terrible, bloated cost structure
2)  A terrible, bloated bureaucracy
3)  A bunch of meh car lines

Which of these is the government going to solve?  That terrible, bloated cost structure supports a bloated union whose jobs are the entire rationale for the government intervention.  Leaning on the parts suppliers just risks UAW jobs further down the supply chain.  Maybe we can take it out of the budget for copy paper and pencils.

Forgive me if I am skeptical that the government is going to show GM how to streamline its bureaucracy.  Nor do governments historically have a good record as cutting-edge auto designers.

All the government can give GM is money.  Our money.  Perhaps we should change the name to American Leyland.