Romanticism and statistics

A grad school friend of mine has gradually become a bit of a big deal in the world of sabermetrics. While that sounds like a category of lifesaving surgical techniques, it's not, although surely more top brain-hours are devoted to sabermetrics than are devoted to the development of lifesaving surgical techniques.

Sabermetrics, named for the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR), is the the study of baseball through detailed empirical data. I was thinking about sabermetrics when I read Joe Posnanski, a proponent of 'advanced baseball stats' himself, on the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Among the things that make visiting the museum such a moving experience, I infer from his account, is the room for imagination that exists because of the absense of 'record'.

Through the years, I ... listened to stories from Buck O'Neil and Double Duty Radcliffe and Connie Johnson and the great Monte Irvin, who on his best days, before the war and before integration, might have been the best who ever lived.
     We'll never know that about Irvin, of course, and this is the main thing I used to think about when I and looked through the wire at the statues on the field. We'll never know. We'll never know how good Oscar Charleston was ... and we'll never know how hard Smokey Joe Williams really threw ... and we'll never know how many home runs Turkey Stearnes hit ... and we'll never know what the Devil, Willie Wells, looked like fielding a ground ball ... and we'll never know just how fast Cool Papa Bell ran ...
... and we'll never know anything more than we can imagine.
     That's why I loved the museum so much. When people asked Buck how fast Cool Papa Bell was, he would say: "Faster than that." In other words, Josh Gibson's home runs traveled exactly as far as your imagination allows. And the museum was a place for imagination. It did not have a lot of memorabilia -- too expensive and rare -- and it did not have a lot of interactive exhibits. It was more of a spiritual experience.

Those who know me know I have a bit of a romantic side. I like thinking that things were charming and simple in the past. I'm even known to defend the imperial system against the metric system.*

*For all its 'ease of conversion', the metric system is an imposition of a lab mentality on areas of life where it is inappropriate - areas of life where measurements should have real world referents like cups or feet. I don't need 'ease of conversion' when I'm baking muffins! It's a colonization of the lifeworld by the systemworld, to get all Jurgen Habermas-y.

I love sports stats. As a kid I used to grab the sports section and examine the stats page with an intensity that worried my parents. Even now I rarely watch baseball, but still spend a good deal of time at baseball-reference.com, looking at strange stats most people don't even know are kept or calculated. I still only understand a small fraction of them.   

I suppose stats and records can serve the creation of myths, but even then they can remove their magic. Mythmaking adds to the enjoyment of things past as past, and good recordkeeping can cut the legs out from under local legends, or even support them too coldly.  If all fishcatches were logged, we wouldn't be able to tell that story about the doozy of a fish we caught that day we didn't have the camera. And that one that we almost caught but didn't, it must have wieghted ___. If all homeruns are logged and searchable, it's hard to tell tales of that one I saw that afternoon when I was young: man, it must have been at least ___ feet (down with the metric system!).  “[W]e'll never know how many home runs Turkey Stearnes hit", Posnanski writes. Well, everyone knows how many home runs Albert Pujols hit. We also know that they don't make nicknames like they used to.

I think that'd it'd be great to compose a symphony, after a single performance of which all scores are destroyed and of which no recordings are permitted. Oh, and it'd have to be great, which may be difficult for me, as I don't compose symphonies, let alone great ones. It'd become legendary. People would try to recreate it. People would talk about its sublime this and its soaring that.  A lot of my friends are musicians, and I often hear about jam sessions in living rooms or long-closed bars, where a sort of magic was created that will never be created again. It's a tragedy that there aren't tapes. But it's also an amazing blessing.

Complaining about bureaucratic modernity gets old quickly, but that's not going to stop me! Good record keeping is bad for hagiography, and the absense of hagiography is bad for people. Oh, and that TV show Mythbusters is run by killjoys. 

Jesus, Plato and Confucious all left no records. They're known from the accounts of witnesses. Great leaders certainly aren't hurt by some ambigiuity about authorship (and a few unscrutinable passages). Great athletes need to be able to he remembered as giants. A good cache of stats and records is good fun. A good fish story might be even better.

This has been a statement of ambivalence. It is more a declaration of fogeyness than a denunciation of recordkeeping or statistical analysis.  I'll end this with the same F. Scott Fitzgerald statement of fogeyness that Matt Labash uses to close his fogey essay/rant about Facebook in Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: "It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory." 

I'm not sure that's quite what I'm saying here, but it sure reads pretty.

Conrad Black and the visceral trump card

When it comes to moral systems, hypocrisy, inconsistency and exceptions are different things. Hypocisy, as  La Rochefoucauld put it, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Hypocrisy reflects an inability or unwillingness to live up to one's own standard or a standard one inauthentically espouses. Sometimes I think hypocrisy gets a bad rap. Implicit in hypocrisy is an acknowledgement of the worthwhileness of that standard. I think we're better off if our cads are Dr Johnsons rather than Hugh Hefners.

But let's talk about the related phenomena: inconsistency and exception. Exceptions are an acknowlegement that a system can't apply to all cases. Inconsistencies, I suppose, are exceptions you can't or don't justify.

The tightest systems allow for no exceptions: I love the fact that exceptions aren't needed for the Roman Catholic divorce prohibition. If what appears to be a Catholic marriage breaks down, it was never truly a Catholic marriage, therefore no Catholic marriage has ever broken down. Many ideologies have the same escape valve.

However, most systems need exceptions, and they need the right kind.  In the public square, an allowable elision or aberration has to be articulated in a way that doesn't undermine the principles behind the rule/system itself. Understandably, a lot of effort goes into this process. Just look at the hundreds of years of writing on Just War Theory. Among one's ideological fellow travellers, however, quite often all one needs for a socially acceptable exception is a shared visceral reaction. 

This brings us to Conrad Black, the recently incarcerated historian, commentator and businessman I recently favourably quoted on this blog.  A lot of political progressives downplay the punitive, retributive and deterrent sides of criminal justice. Criminal sanction is, apparently, for a) rehabilitation/restoration, b) public safety, and c) punishing Conrad Black.

There are reasons for the antipathy towards Black. He is, or at least was, rich. He's vocally conservative. He carries himself in a way that some see as snobbish, the effect of which is exacerbated by his conspicuous propensity to marshall the veritable cornucopia of ostentatious words he has at his disposal. He can come across as a bit patronizing.

In 2006, Black was changed with just about every white collar crime imaginable. Over time, all the charges save one were either dropped, resulted in a 'not guilty' verdict, or were overturned on appeal. He's served 28 months and has lost much of his wealth and esteem. Yet, mention his name in some circles and you'll hear rants about how he should spend the rest of his life in jail, and not the comfortable kind of jail either. This is how exceptions work. When theorizing, they're hard to rationalize; in the real world, we reach for the visceral reaction trump card immediately.

There is no chance Conrad Black will 'reoffend'; no accountant or CFO will let him anywhere near an even slightly grey business deal. I'm pretty sure he's not looking to go back to prison, despite his affinity for those with whom he shared accommodations for more than two years. But Black is the exception. People who lament that barbarism of longer jail sentences, mandatory minimum sentences, or uncomfortable prisons, want him to rot in jail. That says more about humans and less about Black.

This sort of viscerality trumping the system isn't particular to this case of course.  I can't remember who it was that observed that, for the most part, Americans actually believe abortion is allowable a) when the health of the mother is at risk, b) when the pregancy is the result of rape, and c) in whatever my own situation is. This is a bit cynical, but it rings true.

I'm not pointing this out to say that viscerality (visceralness?) has no place in moral thinking, or to approve of a Platonic priority for reason over passions.  But if we're going to have systems, and we need to have systems, we shouldn't toss them out the window when someone or something ellicits visceral hatred or wet-eyed sympathy.

Social Movements of the Obama Era

A lot of my friends were/are apoplectic about the Tea Party movement of the past year or two.  I made this chart for them and you:

400+ pages of cheap talk

In case you need convincing that there's a difference between knowledge and conviction, or that higher education's rather unreliable as a means of moral improvement, Maclean's reports that Moummar Gadhafi's son, Saif al-Islam Alqadhafi, currently famous for threatening to unlease a bloody civil war on those who oppose his father's regime (and then following through), obtained a PhD in 2009 from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  His dissertation's title:  The Role of Civil Society in the Democratization of Global Governance Institutions: From ‘Soft Power’ to Collective Decision-Making?

How to debate public policy

Jim Manzi recently did what all policy analysts and political economists are required to periodically do: he wrote about Negative Income Tax (NIT). NIT goes by numerous aliases, including Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI), Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), and Guaranteed Living Income (GLI), and is a streamlined welfare system that, in the words of the Basic Income Earth Network, involves "an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement.”

Manzi does a fine job showing the system's flaws, which is not surprising; Manzi's good at what he does. What's most interesting to me is a general point about public policy debates that he makes in passing.   Regarding the apparent simplicity/'tidiness' advantage NIT/GLI has over the red-tape laden bureaucratic status quo, he notes:

it is the difference between an academic idea that has not yet been subjected to lobbying and legislation, on one hand, and real laws that are the product of a democratic process, on the other. ...[T]here is nothing inherent about an NIT that will prevent Congress from creating thousands of pages of special rules, exemptions, tax expenditures and so on, that are collectively just as convoluted as the current welfare system. After all, “tax each person a given fraction of income” is a pretty simple idea too, but look at the 2011 federal income tax code.

That's exactly correct. Being serious about policy requires us to be at least half serious about the political process and the people involved in it. What could this look like here? is a better question than what could this look like in starting-government-from-scratch-with-a-perfect-citizenry-and-perfect-politicians-ville? 

Moral Tribes

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “hite”, like the horrible Korean beer), is a social psychologist at Virginia. He’s gained a lot of popular exposure for his research in to the moral foundations of politics. I first encountered him in this TED Talk which is quite good, and which I recommend to all students of important things. Recently I came across this talk at Edge, which is even better than the TED Talk because it’s addressed to a convention of social psychologists. It is most certainly not preaching to the choir. He even calls out a previous speaker for providing a great example of what’s wrong with his discipline: tribalism.

Haidt’s work (following Durkheim, as he mentions in the Edge piece) explains morality in terms of its social function, which is group binding. If you want to argue that this is reductionist, fine, but I think that even if we want to expand the definition, all of us would still admit that whatever else morality is or does, it definitely binds people into groups. Haidt is interesting because he takes that very basic social sciences assumption and applies it with considerable force to social scientists themselves - and by extension to highly educated liberals who think their knowledge of social science somehow exempts them from its implications.

Liberals, in other words, are just as “tribalistic” as conservatives. In his Edge talk he backs up this claim with three points usually made by social scientists when they are criticizing “backward” organizations or communities. These are directly specifically at the social psychology community, but they apply to every mostly liberal group that thinks they don’t count as a (in Haidt’s words) “tribalistic moral community. These groups:

1. have taboos and danger zones (e.g. sex differences in standard deviation on IQ scores)
2. have a statistically impossible lack of diversity (there were 3 “conservatives” among the 1000
social psychologists in his audience)
3. create a “hostile environment” for members with different views (as evidenced by several
testimonies from “closeted conservative” social psychologists)

When you live in Portland, Oregon, Haidt’s argument becomes especially convincing. People move here because they want to get away from close-minded midwestern conservatives, and congregate with open-minded west coast liberals. Functionally, there is no difference between their morality and the morality of the group they left behind. Each refuses to countenance certain heretical notions (the 2nd amendment really is in the Constitution?!), each enforces a self-perpetuating homogeneity (a trend intensified nowadays by various structural factors, as Bill Bishop explained in The Big Sort), and each creates a hostile environment for divergent opinions (try defending George W. Bush in a vegan cafe and see what happens).

Of course I could mention some evil twin sister city - Branson, Missouri comes to mind - and reverse the charge with completely different examples. That’s exactly the point.

Haidt’s point, as far as I can tell, is not necessarily that morality is therefore a bad thing, and that we should try to overcome it (in fact it seems more likely he would argue that this is ultimately impossible). The point is rather that for certain endeavors, the “binding and blinding” effect of morality is an obstacle. Scientists are the best example, which is why his thesis is so powerful when aimed at a group of social psychologists. But morality is also an obstacle in politics, where we are ostensibly aiming at the “common good,” in which case conflicts between morally bounded groups is a very large obstacle indeed.

I wonder if anything productive might come from putting Haidt’s ideas into conversation with, say, Rawls' idea of the overlapping consensus. Maybe I should read more social psychology when I start that PhD program.

Pro sports and public funds

My hometown has been fretting of late about whether a proposed sports complex should receive funds, directly or indirectly, from the municiple government.

There are votes to be won and lost in the 'public money for arenas' debates, and the government of Canada has also been weighing its options (and publicly equivocating) about the matter.  Yesterday, news came of a clever roundabout way for Harper's government to financially back the projects without directly doing so.  The portion of the Federal gas tax given to cities, previously only to be used on public transit and a few other select endeavors, could possibly in the future be used for municiple projects, including arenas.  A few hours after word got out, the government sorta maybe stepped back from the idea.

As a number of recent books argue (which I admit I've only heard talked about on the radio), profitability in sports has, for a number of generations, been less about building a community-connected winning brand and more about getting governments to pay one of your major expenses: facilities.  In a sense, sports teams hold governments ransom.  If you decide your city won't try to lure or retain sports francises with direct subsidies and tax expenditures, there is surely another jurisdiction that will. The same, of course, goes for non-sports businesses.

This recent Globe and Mail piece looks at how the reactions to public funding for pro sports differs from public funding for the arts. This post on Colby Cosh's Maclean's blog makes the case that the widespead acceptance of funding for, say, an art gallary, put beside widespread antipathy towards money for a pro sports area makes perfect sense when you think about the meaning of 'public'.  Both are worth reading.

As with all political issues, and I really mean all political issues, we can find great insight into the mess by watching Yes Minister.  In this clip, two top bureaucrats discuss public funding for sports stadiums: 

Yes Minister is the best.

Wikipedia and the social nature of knowledge construction

There are a lot of interesting things to say about Wikipedia, and I like to think I've said a few of those interesting things since its genesis. Today I'm feeling a bit lazy, so I'm going to mention, and link to, two recent pieces about the oft consulted source:

1. A recent study shows that more than 85% of Wikipedia contributions are made by men. Wikipedia, of course, is anonymous and has a participation process that is simple and apparently barrier free. Numerous explanations for the disparity have been tossed around this internet thing, including that the discourse rewards stubbornness, competitiveness and combativeness, and this builds hidden barriers to female participation. What I find to be a plausible partial explanation is that guys are less likely to feel bad about wasting time, either at work or at home.
2. This article in Slate looks at the history of Jesus on Wikipedia. It's fascinating.  It's also fascinating that so many people seem intent on refighting the 'who was Jesus?' battles in the comment section of the Slate story.  The gatekeepers are less vigilant there than at Wikipedia I guess.

Moving too fast on Mubarak?

A while back I wrote a piece on dictators' exits.  Yesterday I wrote about the messiness of Egypt's current mess. If those posts were a pale ale and a stout, this one's a black and tan. 

Egyptian opposition leader Monir Abdel Nour was on the CBC Radio's As It Happens (starts at 9:45 in the clip) yesterday arguing that Hosni Mubarak needs to remain in power for a least two months in order for necessary constitutional changes to be made.  It's quite a compelling argument. Without the necessary constitutional changes and administrative transitions, and without a timely fair election (which just can't be done immediately), whoever takes over from Mubarak may face chaos and hold power, as Mubarak currently does, without legitimacy.  Or, perhaps even worse, the military could impose one of their own, as they did in 1956.

In the National Post, Conrad Black makes a similar argument about order and legitimacy post-Mubarak, and like Nour, says Mubarak has to be allowed to transition out of power over the coming months.   Black posits that leaders faced with mass protests can, a) flee, b) order the protesters to be fired upon (although those ordered to do so don't always obey - see Ceaucescu), or c) wait until the situation makes the majority uncomforable enough to side with a legal resolution rather than passionate chaos.  Black uses De Gaulle's response to France's 1968 uprising as an example of the masterful use of option c.  He suggests Mubarak, while not himself legitimate, is trying to do the same, and will use the time it'll buy to transition out peacefully. The fact that Mubarak may have sponsored the chaos-inducers doesn't seem to me to undermine Black's argument that, legitimacy and stability wise, option c may be better for everyone than the option a the protesters and many westerners want to see.

Legitimacy is about procedures and legality and all that, but more than anything, it's about people buying in.  The appearance of mob-rule, however real the greivances, could lead to a lot of horrible years for Egypt. 

"Devils behind every door..."

When I'd teach my undergrad students about what textbooks quaintly call 'transition to democracy', we would inevitably land on the core dilemma for western countries as they interact with non-democracies: should we prioritize stability or democracy? Will removing this or that particular autocrat lead to a healthy democracy or a post-Tito-Yugoslavia-style hell? Is democracy a good worth pursuing regardless of concomitant chaos? Should we think long-term and push what neoconservative polemicist Daniel Pipes prescribed for post-invasion Iraq: a “democratic-minded strongman”?

The stability/democracy tension is clear in the responses, by governments, experts and pundits, to the past week's mass protests in Egypt. Some think bad things will happen if Mubarak is ousted. Others think (well, know) that bad things will continue to happen if he doesn't. Both sides are probably right.

I can't remember who it was that said that total depravity, a central tenant of five point Calvinism, is the only empirically verifiable theological doctrine. (I also think that Total Depravity would be a great name for a Calvinist heavy-metal band). In politics, the choice isn't between a pure and right option, and a second option that's, well, the opposite of that. All institutions and people and movements are touched by sin. That translates into non-theological language as everything is broken.

Ross Douthat's recent New York Times column puts it well:

There are devils behind every door.
    Americans don’t like to admit this. We take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.
    But history makes fools of us all. We make deals with dictators, and reap the whirlwind of terrorism. We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine. We leap into humanitarian interventions, and get bloodied in Somalia. We stay out, and watch genocide engulf Rwanda. We intervene in Afghanistan and then depart, and watch the Taliban take over. We intervene in Afghanistan and stay, and end up trapped there, with no end in sight.
    Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic. History has its upward arcs, but most crises require weighing unknowns against unknowns, and choosing between competing evils.

When people say 'this is going to lead to some trouble', regardless of what the 'this' is, they're probably right.

Legacies and Comebacks

The Pixies are coming to my home town, which precipitated the predictable conversations about 'the integrity of the legacy of an artist who once truly mattered', versus the desire of many people to a) experience a legendary artist for the first time, or b) relive their youth.

It's rather uncontroversial, albeit impolite, to say that legacy-wise Chapman did Lennon a favour. An old guitar magazine I once owned included an offhand remark that, had Jimi Hendrix survived to middle age, he'd be doing Prince covers for five dollar door-charge at Seattle bars. Dying young is a great career move for artists.

Voluntary retirement, unlike death, is easily reversed. Comebacks, for money (Kim Deal said she agreed to participate in an earlier Pixies reunion so Joey Santiago could move to a better neighbourhood) or attention or merely something to do, are always at least a little bit of a letdown, Michael Jordan's first one excepted.

I don't begrudge the rappers, rockers, politicians and boxers who get back in the ring post-prime. I'm sure I would (or, hopefully, I will) do the same. While self-awareness mitigates some of the legacy conservation problems – the Sex Pistols called their reunion the “Filthy Lucre Tour” and a previous Pixies reunion was called “The Pixies Sell Out” - I have a romantic side that wants tidy legacies and careers with no decline.

A man whose contributions rival Shakesphere's, Bill Watterson, justified retiring and staying retired thusly:

It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.

I'm still buying Pixies tickets. They're playing Doolittle in its entirety!

Watterson quote via the Daily Dish.

Duvalier and disincentives for dictators to democratize

Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, a former dictator of Haiti, is back in Haiti and back in the news. He has, well, run into some difficulties, including incarceration, and his difficulties bring up some interesting questions.

Some helpful background is provided by The National Post's Araminta Wordsworth, who discusses the lives of the ex-dictators of yesterday and today:

It used to be a familiar scenario. An aging dictator is ejected from his homeland by a coup. He flees to a foreign bolt hole where he lives in luxury on the proceeds of ill-gotten gains stolen in his years of power. Then, in the fullness of time, he dies in his bed.

     Think Idi Amin of Uganda and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, who became guests of Saudi Arabia and Morocco respectively. Or Ferdinand Marcos after departing the Philippines.

Things have changed, Wordsworth notes:

To begin with, banking authorities in traditionally secretive countries such as Switzerland are willing to freeze suspect accounts. Next, the supply of congenial safe havens is drying up, as Zinedine Ben Ali discovered to his cost last week.
   [...] Another hazard for today’s dictators is being indicted by international courts, like the UN tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (Slobdan Milosevic of Yugoslavia) or Sierra Leone (Charles Taylor of Liberia).
    Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s President, faces the possibility of such a fate should he ever fall from power. The International Criminal Court at The Hague wants him for genocide in Darfur.

While it's certainly infuriating when someone who's destroyed many lives lives in luxury to the natural end of his own, this new trend might be bad news. Dictators are people, and people respond to incentives. It's a heck of a lot easier to convince a dictator to give up power if he or she will be trading it for life in a villa in the Alps, rather than a jail cell.

An example: Augusto Pinochet killed, imprisoned or exiled his political competition, for which he should have faced justice. However, if other dictators had been or were being prosecuted at that time - if he knew he'd face justice at home and abroad (thanks to the ICC and 'universal jurisdiction' laws in Spain and elsewhere) - Pinochet may not have exited as he did: gradually and peacefully stepping aside throughout the 1980s as Chile transitioned to democracy.  In the same way, his own post-power tribulations might mean longer tenures and bloodier transitions for today's dictatorships. The just desire to see former dictators punished might have to be sacrificed for the benefit of those living under current ones.

The key to Loughner’s politics might be an internet film

A popular internet conspiracy documentary called Zeitgeist, not talk-show rhetoric or his bookshelf, might be the key to understanding Jared Lee Loughner’s eclectic and twisted politics. The parts of his worldview that can be pieced together from his YouTube videos, internet chat logs and his classmates’ and former friends’ comments, suggest he accepts the semicoherent ideology of a particular meta-conspiracy theory based fringe. Zeitgeist represents, and drives, its current manifestation.

Loughner’s political and social views, as best as we can piece together, revolve around four seemingly unrelated planks: a) religions are false and evil; b) non-gold backed currency is illegitimate; c) 9/11 was an inside job used as a pretext for two illegal wars; and, d) government and media are out to control thoughts.

Many people have noticed Loughner’s attraction to conspiracies. What suggests Zeitgeist might be a key to his beliefs is its uniqueness among the many other conspiracy theory documentaries circulating the internet. Zeitgeist stands out for its willingness to tie the thesis of the “Truther” movement – that the attacks were an ‘inside job’ - to a number of other conspiracy theories, some traditionally associated with the political left, some with the political right. The result is a semi-coherent meta-theory.

Zeitgeist was created by Peter Joseph. It was ‘officially’ released in 2007, although early permutations had already circulated. It’s been subsequently recut and given a strange pseudo-religious sequel. Zeitgeist’s thesis can be summarized as this: a) all the world’s religions share a common set of beliefs and are used by the rich and powerful to manipulate and control people’s minds; b) contemporary currency policy, most importantly central banking, is unconstitutional and is structured for the enrichment of these same nefarious elites; c) 9/11 was an ‘inside job’, perpetuated by these same actors; d) the media cannot be trusted to report these truths because it is also under their control.

These correspond very well with the picture we now have of Loughner’s political fixations, listed above.

The film’s theses a), b), and d), are, of course, generations old. In many respects, Zeitgeist is just the Protocols of the Elders of Zion updated for the 21st century, and without the explicit ‘blame Jews’ angle. It should be noted that Loughner’s target, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, is Jewish. It takes few steps to reinsert the anti-Semitic angle into the Zeitgeist narrative.

Of course, no movie, and no conspiracy theory, is the singular cause of an unspeakable act of political violence. Early indications are that Loughner may have suffered from a delusional mental illness. John Hinckley Jr, who shot President Reagan, and James J. Lee, who stormed the Discovery Channel building last fall, were mentally ill. Both also had an obsession, one with a celebrity, one with a pet cause. Loughner may be like them, with political obsessions strikingly similar to those pushed in Zeitgiest . He could also be like Dan White, Harvey Milk's killer. With White, illness and an obsessive idea are like the proverbial chicken and the egg.

Most of the millions who’ve viewed Zeitgeist, including most of those who believe it, continue to function normally in society. They hold the beliefs in a ‘symbolic manner’ – where their ‘special knowledge’ is somehow walled off from their behaviours. The belief functions as a placeholder for general discontent, and has little consequence in how the person lives. This, according to Julian Sanchez, is what allows for a significant number of Democrats to believe that the Bush Administration had advance knowledge of, or even planned, the 9/11 attacks, and for a large minority of Republicans to believe that Obama’s a secret Muslim “Manchurian Candidate”, without having to devote themselves to the drastic measures those beliefs would logically entail. There is, however, a fringe of the fringe, most often adult males with some history of mental illness, whose twisted beliefs turn into horrific actions.

Zeitgeist’s devotees claim, with some credibility, that the film is among the most downloaded in the Internet’s history. It appears, from his anti-religious, pseudo-libertarian, gold and banking obsessed electronic trail, that Loughner was one of those who took it seriously.

Update I: Between the time I wrote this and the time I posted it, this AP article appeared.  In it, the parents of a friend of Loughner provide this insight into his movie viewing: "Loughner's favorites included little-known conspiracy theory documentaries such as 'Zeitgeist' and 'Loose Change'."

Update II: That friend has now spoken to the press. This ABC news story quotes him as saying "I really think that this 'Zeitgeist' documentary had a profound impact on Jared's mindset and how he viewed that world that he lives in."

It looks like I had it right.

Update III: Now The Daily Beast is all over this angle. This story looks at Zeitgeist specifically, while this looks at the his crazy views more generally.