Egyptian Courts Assert Rule of Law

By denying the power of the army to renew martial law, and Egyptian administrative court today defended a key element of any legitimate government: an independent judiciary. This is very different from the "rule of law" many conservatives  -- both here and in Egypt -- talk about, which emphasizes the value of the law in controlling individuals. Here, the courts are attempting to control the government's intrusion into the lives of individuals.

An Islamic Democracy

Hamas won a majority in the Palestinian parliament six years ago now, and at the time it seemed like the first opportunity to test all the claims -- going all the way back to Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations?" -- about whether Islam is or is not compatible with democratic government. That experiment was spoiled, however, by the severe restrictions on Palestinian autonomy imposed by Israel and the United States, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes not.

Elections in Egypt may now give us a new opportunity to see how Islamists rule in a democratic government. But once again, the Islamists and the democrats must overcome un-democratic interventions, this time by the controlling military council of Egypt itself. As Hamas itself has observed, the protests of Tahrir Square have not yet secured victory. We can only hope for more progress in the near future.

Bobby Valentine is No Genius

Although every commentator at ESPN save Michael Wilbon thinks Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine is "smarter than everybody else in the room," most of what he does suggests the opposite. His own view seems to be that managing a baseball team well is akin to rocket science -- it's a highly technical matter that only people with large brains can do. He imposes wacky and ineffective "innovations" on his players, like making the first baseman dance around behind a runner instead of holding the guy on in the way that thousands of other coaches and players have determined to be best.

I detest Valentine's attitude, not because I think good managers and coaches are not intelligent, but because the best ones understand that it's not technical intelligence that makes them good. Ron Gardenhire is a great coach because almost every year his teams get better over the course of the summer. His success stems not from creating new ways of playing, but from insisting on sound fundamentals and from earning the trust of his players. Valentine alienates the people he works with by trying to prove all the time how smart he is.

Valentine's most recent foolishness came in the form of a call to have machines call all balls and strikes. As part of his rant against human umpires, he cited a "study" showing that the human eye is incapable of tracking a 90 mph fastball all the way to the plate. I don't know whether Valentine has read the paper or not, but I have. It was written in 1984, by Professor A. Terry Bahill of the University of Arizona, and Valentine does not fairly represent its content. Bahill does indicate that professional baseball players can track a ball much more effectively than most people, and that the eye can not literally track the ball all the way to the bat. To quote:

Although the professional athlete was better than the students at tracking the simulated fastball, it is clear from our simulations that batters, even professional batters, cannot keep their eyes on the ball. Our professional athlete was able to track the ball u n t i l it was 5.5 ft in front of the plate. This could hardly be improved on; we hypothesize that the best imaginable athlete could not track the ball closer than 5 ft from the plate, at which point it is moving three times faster than the fastest human could track.

His point is that the advice to "keep your eye on the ball" is not possible to follow.

But here's the part that Valentine did not know or understand:

[this data] makes it d i f f i c u l t to account for the widely reported claim that Ted Williams could sometimes see the ball hit his bat. If Ted Williams were indeed able to do this, it could only be possible if he made an anticipatory saccade that put his eye ahead of the ball and then let the ball catch up to his eye. This was the strategy employed by the subject of Figure 5: this batter observed the ball over the first half of its trajectory, predicted where it would be when it crossed the plate, and then made an anticipatory saccade that put his eye ahead of the ball. Using this strategy, the batter could see the ball hit the bat.

In other words, the batter (or the umpire) does not need to follow the entire trajectory of the ball to know where it will end up. People with natural talent and training can anticipate with very high accuracy where the ball will be at the end of the track. And the umpire has an even greater advantage over the batter, in that he has a second to make a decision after the ball has stopped, whereas the batter does not.

Nobody at ESPN appears to have tried to find the source of Valentine's supposed immense knowledge. Valentine does not claim to have done "the study" himself, so why not ask him about it? Did he actually read it? Does he need help understanding it, despite his enormous intellect? Or is he being disingenuous?

Hm.

Unemployment and the Public Sector

Today is a big day in Wisconsin, as voters there decide whether to recall Governor Scott Walker for his efforts to break public sector unions in that state. I saw a brief exchange on Facebook between two acquaintances that illustrates the strange logic of Walker's position, and reflects some of the trouble in our current political discourse.

In response to one friend's rooting for Wisconsin voters to "get it done," another wrote "I agree. Show the unions they can't just get rid of a governor for doing what he promised he would do in the election. Unions are bankrupting the state. As they are other states."

So what does this response argue, in effect? 

First, it assumes that Wisconsin has a very large budget deficit, and that such a deficit amounts to "bankruptcy." Is that true? Using its traditional methods of counting (discussed here by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Wisconsin did have a fiscal gap of about $3 billion -- that is, in 2011 they paid out more than they took in. But this calculation does not constitute "bankruptcy" the way it might for individuals and private companies. Especially in times of economic downturn, government may face budget shortfalls because tax revenue drops and social service demands increase. This is not bankruptcy, it's fulfilling the responsibility of government, which is to "promote the general welfare," among other things. Government is not a profit-seeking venture.

Second, the Facebook reply contends that unions are responsible for whatever budget problems Wisconsin has. There can be no denying that salaries constitute an enormous percentage of any state budget. People are expensive. And insofar as unions protect the interests of those workers, unions are responsible for raising the cost of government in Wisconsin. If union rules cause a loss of efficiency or result in unnecessary work, then unions might be said to cause a real loss in value in Wisconsin. But it is not the unions that are expensive, it's the services. The Facebook reply is therefore mistaken in an important way.

And herein lies a problem with the nature of our national discourse. Rather than assessing the value of government services, we argue about whether "government" is good at all. Does the GOP want there to be no roads, or police, or schools, or parks, or sewers? Of course not. Does it want the best price for those services? Of course, and the Democrats need to pay attention to such issues and respond to them responsibly.

(By the way, the man who complained about public sector pay on Facebook is a soldier in the US Army. I wonder whether he sees any irony. Does he assume that the need for soldiers is just a lot more obvious than the need for teachers?)

But what about those costs? Let's say government workers lose negotiating power, and then lose health benefits as a result. Who foots that bill? Well, the government does, because people don't stop getting sick when they lose insurance, they just stop getting access to primary care doctors. And then what? They go to the emergency room, which is paid for by the state, unless we say that the ill and injured just have to die ... which might run contrary to the "pro life agenda," in certain ironic ways.

Finally, if we are concerned about unemployment and its effect on the economy, then Walker has it wrong. Cutting state jobs only means that all those workers need to find employment somewhere else, and in a downturn they won't find it easily. So, what happens then? The state has to pick up the cost of having more unemployed people, either by providing benefits or by facing the social and political costs that incur. 

In other words, Walker may have some things right. Government may be inefficient, and that waste might make economic recovery slower. But the way he went about talking and acting on that observation was such nonsense that it led not to a solution but to a apolitical distraction like the one today. We have to settle down and say real things to each other if we are going to fix anything.