Health care rage, Lieberman rage, and I mean real rage: where is it? Because I'm not seeing it yet.
Let's follow our friend Mog a little bit. Mog's a neolithic hunter/gatherer. Mog's just filled her sack with nuts and berries, and she's walking home to where her S.O. has hopefully gathered some wood and a rabbit, and they're going to have din-din.
As Mog's walking, her neighbor Zad comes by, points a spear to her head, and says, "Give me half your nuts, or I'll kill you". Logically, what's the right thing to do?
Let's do a good ol' cost/benefit analysis. On the one hand, if Mog says no, she probably dies. On the other, if she gives in, she loses half her nuts (-0.50 nut-dinners, in the currency of the day). On the other hand, she'll live to eat lots more nut dinners in the future (+5000 nut-dinners), if she lives to a ripe old neolithic age. So the balance (+4999.50 nut-dinners) says "just hand over your nuts, dammit!"
For the neighbor, of course, this is a great deal. Zad soon figures out that Mog'll hand the nuts over every time. Granted Zad's not going to see Mog every time, so she'll be able to feed herself and keep trudging. She'll definitely become a less efficient forager though, so she may lose her S.O. in the process, but it's going to take a long time to offset those +5000 nut-dinners, so Mog can expect to see that Clovis point on a fairly regular basis.
I'll call this math nut-calculus. This is a great way to be taken advantage of, and, I'm sorry to say, there's probably no way Mog's gene pool could survive such an onslaught. Fortunately, Mog had a cousin, Ook, with a rare mutation that gave a fighting change: rage.
You see, Ook, when confronted with a spear too many times, actually goes into another mental state where the normal rules don't apply. Ook goes, as we say now, "fucking batshit crazy" when the spear shows up at the neck. Her* mental state will not return to normal until the threat is removed, either through the threat withdrawing or the threat ceasing to exist, if you know what I mean. Once she enters this state, she no longer does nut-calculus. Her one objective is to do as much damage to the threat as possible, no matter what the cost to herself. She is out to BLOW YOUR SHIT THE FUCK UP. There will be no stopping her until she's either immobilized or dead. And if she's not dead, well there's this little vengeance module that's gonna pop up in a couple of generations that will take care of that too.
It's pretty easy to see how this changes evil neighbor's Zad's calculus. Now when neighbor's in CBA mode, it's 1) get a chance at some nuts, versus 2) risk Ook grabbing that spear and making Zad fillet. Which happens to have a nice flavor, being fatted an nut-fed. It's best for Zad not to taunt Ook that way, and either pick on one of Mog's pushover descendants, or for Zad to go get her own damn nuts.
Rage is Ook's gift/curse to humanity, and you may recognize it by a more modern name, mutual assured destruction.
[discussing the Doomsday machine]
President Merkin Muffley: How is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically and at the same time impossible to untrigger?
Dr. Strangelove: Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the FEAR to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the Doomsday machine is terrifying and simple to understand... and completely credible and convincing.
— Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
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So far, none of Lieberman's defenders have argued that stopping an exchange-limited Medicare buy-in for people between 55 and 64 is more important than 150,000 lives, or even than one life. How they reconcile that with his willingness to doom the bill over that issue and make passage much harder by killing a tenuous compromise amidst an uncertain legislative environment is not for me to say.
— What we have here is a failure to communicate, Ezra Klein
As for 150,000, well, that's almost certainly too low. That's just the 2006 number across 10 years, which is the time frame we generally use for health care, with a third of the lives saved lopped off, as we're not going to cover all of the uninsured.
— The 150,000-life health-care plan, Ezra Klein
I suppose you can see where I'm going with this.
You can see the nut-calculus at work, right?
Klein's making a point out of the morality of 150,000 lives, but the 150,000 lives have already had their numbers reduced by a third.
Republicans, Blue Dogs, Lieberman, etc. have a (barely metaphorical) spear to our throats. Every time they say "No", it makes it harder for people to be alive, on average. That's just a fact. And it's sociopathic.
Now, I'm going to tone down this rhetoric a (tiny) bit, because I don't want to imply, like in the neolithic story above, that people need to be maimed. But people do need to be punished, and as we all know, Lieberman suffers no consequences from anyone else.
How many nuts are we going to let them take? Because I can keep Ezra's logic going down to, well, one life, really. Oh, wait. He already did right up there.
Why does everybody like to punch the dirty fucking hippies, as Digby says? Because they can! Nut-calculus, you see. And in fact, because we're not willing to be sociopaths, well they've already got our number. Hell, I was minding my own business coming back from Wendy's tonight, and decided to just go ahead and punch a DFH and get a Frosty. Where's the payback?
What do you think the next three years are going to look like? Home foreclosures? "Better to save some houses than none at all." Financial regulation? "Shouldn't we at least get something done on capital requirements for medium-sized banks serving mostly Hispanic small business baking establishments? We can tackle naked CDSs later." Iraq? "Isn't it better to pull out in 72 months than 74?"
Nut-calculus needs to be ditched by somebody.
Will the politicians do it? I highly doubt it. Uncivil. Irrational. Too emotional. Everybody knows dispassionate discourse is the way to solve problems.
I would love to see some progressive politicians raging. And I'm not talking about stripping Lieberman of his chairmanships. That's about a civil a rage as I could imaging. He's fucking with the lives of millions of Americans, and we're going to deny him some... headlines. Ooh.
The kind of rage I'm talking about is things like: congressional inquest into any and all activities of the Susan G. Komen foundation unless they terminate Hadassah. Congressional inquest into Hadassah's love life. Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate all business dealings of anybody who can be found to be important to Lieberman. Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate anybody who donates to Lieberman. Etc. Etc. You know, dirty like dirty used to be. Back in the 90's for fuck's sake. These people remember Lewinsky, right?
But that's never gonna happen with these politicians. When will we do it? Nobody's afraid to stand in our way. Our nut-calculus has calculated away our nuts. Look at what the teabaggers' rage did to their representatives: it got them the fuck in line. And they're raging over "death panels"? We've got actual, fact-based reasons to be enraged!
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Here's the problem with rage: since the reptiles, it's worked. It's here to stay.
And I firmly believe, if we don't get some rage and direct it the right way, it's gonna come from the guy whose wife just got rescinded due to her breast cancer diagnosis. And that's gonna be a double tragedy that we could have prevented.
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* Bet you were thinking the other sex**, weren't you?
** You were thinking intersex? Good for you!
PS. I don't mean to sound harsh on Ezra Klein. My normal brain totally agrees with him. But my Jekyll accepts my Hyde, and I know that nut-calculus is not the whole solution here.
Also, if any of you game theorists can find a better Nash equilibrium for the progressives' situation, please tell us!
PPS. As I was writing this, I saw this diary up on the rec list, and it probably stole my thunder, but there you go. I couldn't agree more with it.
Oh, yeah, crossposted from here