Assertions

Cindy Sheehan

2005-08-16T19:01:00.000-07:00

(Hi! Did you miss me? Sure you did! ;-)

Dear 0.1 readers, my take on Cindy Sheehan is as follows:

She is a sad figure.

She is obviously in grief. She is obviously trying to keep her son's memory alive. In the interceding time between her jovial meeting with Bush and today she has obviously gone to the darker, lefter corners of the internet and filled her mind with lots of junk that caused her to redirect her rage and anguish towards President Bush. Now she has devoted herself to a pointless PR campaign.

This is all a rather normal reaction, I think. You see it time and time again with parents who have lost children to disease, criminals, tragic accidents, and so forth. Their kid dies of disease X, suddenly they join a disease X foundation, suddenly they're testifying before Congress, suddenly disease X is the most important disease ever. Or they go host a TV show called America's Most Wanted, get a "____'s Law" passed in their state, campaign for tighter regulations regarding the diameter of marbles so they don't block windpipes.... whatever.

This type of largely-symbolic busyness is, for some, a way of honoring their child's memory and keeping them in the forefront of their lives even after death. Who can not sympathize with such a desire? I fear that the effort is ultimately empty, however. I do not suppose that many parents who engage in this sort of avocation find peace from it. (I hope I never know for sure, though.)

Here's the thing, though. And I say this with all due respect for Ms. Sheehan and sympathy for her loss. But: we are not obligated to rearrange our affairs on the say-so of these people. And just to be clear, I am not speaking only about Ms. Sheehan. The parent whose child died of disease X who goes to speak before Congress and insists that all our money be thrown at disease X induces the same reaction from me. Their loss is sad, but life is tradeoffs, and we cannot give any one thing infinite weight.

Just as we cannot give all of our tax dollars to research specifically aimed at disease X (what about Y, Z, ...?), so too we cannot give infinite weight to the (understandable) impulse, felt by understandably many middle aged parents, that no American soldiers be placed in harm's way under any circumstances.

We can, and should (and have!), give it some weight. Just not infinite.

Jumped the shark

2005-05-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

Now the Commissar says that whether or not the federal government funds a particular type of biomedical research could be a political "tipping point" for him.

Clear?

We're in a world war. The war's important. Commissar thinks so. Commissar prefers (based on past writings) Bush's approach to the typical (D) approach.

But DAMMIT, if Bush won't use federal tax dollars to pay for grants for biomedical researchers doing research involving a particular approach, involving embryonic stem cells, about which presumably Commissar knows very little, that's approaching a "tipping point"!

It's JUST THAT IMPORTANT to federally-fund this particular form of biomedical research that everything else must take a back seat!

Asinine. I'm done with him.

Only reason I'm not done with Bill is because he hasn't built up a similar record of recent shrillness (yet).

The asymmetric market for "mavericks"

2005-04-20T15:08:00.000-07:00

I don't have much interest in the Bolton saga either way but it does bring up a point regarding the bias of the mainstream media. By bias I do not mean "liberal bias" per se but simply that the media roots for (D)s; the (D)s are the "home team" - they wear the white hats - to the bulk of the reporters and editors who create media stories. (If you dispute this I presumptively must doubt your sincerity and/or intelligence.)

Now, what has happened to stall the Bolton nomination is that an (R) Senator has stepped up to express "doubts" about allowing a full vote, based on a bunch of silly smoke and nonsense the (D)s have been throwing at him. Be aware, I am just going to take it for granted that none of the actors involved in this stupid kabuki theater - not the (D)s airing the accusations, not Voinovich the faithless (R), not the reporters (at least the smart ones) covering it, not the accuser(s) - actually give a rat's ass about whether John Bolton chased someone down a hallway 15 years ago or raised his voice or whatever. I mean, the thought that this sort of consideration really can be informing any serious person's position on whether it's okay for John Bolton to be our UN Ambassador is really just ludicrous on the face of it.

Rather, what is happening is simply a naked political battle. The (D)s are using a certain tactic to stall a nominee they dislike and the dedicated (R)s are trying to fight against it. Here is where my point comes in: because of media bias, there is always going to be demand in the political marketplace for the "Maverick" Republican.

Any (R) who wishes can step into the "Maverick" Republican role, and garner some instant political scorage. He will get some nice and cheap free press, he will get admiring coverage from opinion writers, he will be approved and patted on the back by more left leaning Washington friends. Being the "Maverick" is worth some not-insignificant amount of political capital. He can then leverage his "Maverick" status to score some pork or get concessions on his pet issue or a nice committee chair. Depending on the nature of the district/state the legislator is from, one can easily understand that the temptation to go "maverick" may, in some circumstances be overwhelming, if the (D)s do their part and give you some phony excuse ("I have concerns about these stupid allegations...") to do so. If it hadn't been Voinovich, or Hagel, it will always be someone. When it comes to media-space and thus potential political-capital, the demand is always present and tempting for the "Maverick" Republican.

There is no such corresponding market for "Maverick" Democrats, to speak of. A "Maverick" Democrat is an entirely different animal and would be reported as such. There is no corresponding political-payoff to be had for being one. The actions of a faithless (D) would be filtered through the "traitor" template rather than the "moderate/maverick" one. Zell Miller was not called "courageous" or "independent-minded", instead aspersions were cast on his character and his "Southern"-ness was played up, and now he is retired.

Maverick (R)s are lauded while maverick (D)s are lambasted. Maverick (R)s can wield enormous power, out of all proportion to their numbers, while maverick (D)s are instantly marginalized. And the (D) bias of the media is a big, if not the, reason for this.

This is not whining about what has happened to Bolton per se, like I said I really couldn't care less who ends up in this UN post. It's not even whining about the fact that there is media bias (there is bound to be bias one way or the other, better just to deal with it). It's just an observation of the effect of that bias, like it or not. It is dishonest to pretend that media bias has no or little effect on the political landscape. It creates a market for "Mavericks" on one side when there is none for the other side, and this can have real and disproportionate effects, as we have seen.

When he's right, he's right

2005-04-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

LGF links this gem of an article by WaPo writer William Raspberry about the effects he fears ("more fear than prediction") of Fox News:

So why would I consider Fox such a generalized threat? Because I think the plan is not so much to convince the public that its particular view is correct but rather to sell the notion that what FNC presents is just another set of biases, no worse (and for some, a good deal better) than the biases that routinely drive the presentation of the news on ABC, CBS or NBC -- and, by extension, the major newspapers.

And we can't have that. We can't have people thinking that ABC, CBS or NBC have biases of their own.

...it isn't necessary to convince Americans that the verbal ruffians who give FNC its crackle have a corner on the truth -- only that all of us in the news business are grinding our partisan axes all the time and that none of us deserves to be taken seriously as seekers of truth.

Good point. That indeed would suffice to break the mainstream media's truth monopoly.

But if the Times and The Post or any other mainstream news outlet -- including the major networks -- come to be seen as the left-of-center counterparts of Fox News Channel, why would anyone accept them as authoritative sources of truth?

Who indeed?

But it has been generally accepted that the mainstream media at least try to get it right -- even when they too grudgingly acknowledge their errors after the fact.

And that belief, however unwarranted or distorted, must be kept alive.

Still, I'm worried that what is happening in that sandbox may wind up polluting the entire schoolyard. And no one, including the big kids of traditional journalism, seems sure what to do about it.

I mean, all I can say here is, when he's right, he's right. There's really very little to add. William Raspberry has accurately identified the dangers of Fox News to people like him.

Point-scoring

2005-04-18T08:33:00.000-07:00

I noticed a mini-wave of posed-outrage from the center-rightosphere recently regarding an angle of attack apparently taken by Bill Frist in the judge wars. As far as I understand, Frist has allied himself with an argument that asserts that (D) judge filibustering is aimed, in whole or in part, at people of faith - that religious judges are targeted for opposition and filibuster and therefore religious people (Christians, presumably) have an interest in stopping the (D)s in their tracks.

Leaving aside whether this argument is reasonable (I don't find it fully persuasive but I think it's reasonable for people to throw it out there - after all is it false as a macroscopic observation that (D) opposition will be stronger when the judge is religious?), what simultaneously annoyed and amused me was how over the top the posed-outrage was. Apparently this was a handy opportunity for a bunch of centrist and right-leaning bloggers to SHOW THEIR EVENHANDEDNESS ("see? I don't always take the (R) side!") by venting and braying like hyenas beyond all sense of proportion to the supposed offense in question.

Here's Joe Gandelman the self-proclaimed "Moderate Voice" - GOT THAT?. Listen to this "moderate", totally sane rhetoric:

If he does it, it'll be a watershed moment — a transformational moment for the GOP...marking the political death of a dominant part of its party. ...Anyone who is a libertarian Republican, centrist, or independent voter has to be extremely concerned — and angered — by this ... Isn't this ushering in a new LOW in American political demonization? ... f Frist goes through with being an accomplice in the theocratic McCarthyization of America, then he will set a new standard — one of the lowest in modern memory. And hopefully he — and the GOP — will be HELD ACCOUNTABLE

I mean, just listen to those CAPITAL LETTERS. Can't you SEE how angry this thing makes him?

Anyway, once Gandelman showed the way so earn your cheap Moderate Points on this issue, many others couldn't resist rushing through the opening.

Matt Rustler:

Is it any wonder that some people believe the "Religious Right" is trying to establish an American theocracy?

You mean as an overreaction to this kind of silly hyperbole? I s'pose not.

John Cole builds a gigantic straw man to pummel for Super Bonus Points. Why you see, apparently Frist is saying

Vote Republican Or You Hate the Baby Jesus

He goes on to claim it is "so patently offensive that I don't have adequate words to describe how truly wrong this is." Except for that Baby Jesus thing, evidently.

Which the ever-increasingly-shrill Commissar seemingly endorses:

...hate the baby Jesus because you fail to fall in line on a matter of Senate procedure

James Joyner calls it a "slimy tactic". Josh Chafetz is "thoroughly disgusted" because it's "pathetic and dishonest". He "can think of few better ways to drive me and my fellow independents into the arms of the Democrats." You hear that? This might make him vote Democrat! He just wants us all to know that.

The message here from all these and more is quite simple: they're not only against the Republicans on this, they're AGAINST THE REPUBLICANS in CAPITAL LETTERS. They want everyone to take note and remember that time when they were AGAINST THE REPUBLICANS so that they may always say "hey, I don't always take the (R) side, remember that time when". If they have to engage in idiotic over-the-top hyperbole along the way, well then so be it.

There are some cheap evenhandedness points to score here and these guys wanted to grab them up. Kudos to them.

At least I hope that's the explanation and that this was just a pose. Because there's no way that an intelligent person could sincerely, seriously be as outraged by this trivial Frist/judges/gavel thing as all these people were so busily and loudly pretending to be last week.

Scandivaniana

2005-04-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

Flit(tm) posts on the "Scandinavian model" (for socialism that Works) being dead.

The reason I disagree with this has nothing to do with results or outcomes but because of the fact that the reason people believe in and are so easily willing to embrace the "Scandinavian model" has a great deal more to do with the fact that Scandinavian people are deemed attractive and sexual than it does results/outcomes in the first place. The subtext of "but it works in Sweden" is "but Swedish girls are hot and free/easy with their bodies so the health/welfare/etc system that produces them must be doing something right". Now, Scandinavians being attractive & sexual may or may not be true in the aggregate either, but remember this is all about perceptions. Unless/until that perception is dislodged, purveyors of the "Scandinavian model" will have little trouble recruiting new believers.

Idiocy

2005-04-16T17:56:00.000-07:00

Democrats have cultivated the image of being the wonkish, expert party. They're "smarter". They know about the issues. Their only electoral problem is that the average person is easily misled by simplistic rhetoric.

So it's worth noting that Howard Dean has issued the most idiotic statement in connection with the Schiavo affair that has been uttered by a public figure:

...we're going to have an ad with a picture of Tom DeLay saying, 'Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not? Or is that going to be up to your loved ones?' "

Howard Dean is a doctor. There have been times when his supporters have pointed at his MDness to imply that it makes him smarter than the average pol when it comes to health, abortion and insurance matters.

This statement of his is idiotic. Idiotic in at least two ways.

He appears to be positing an issue of who "decide[s] whether you die". He seems to think that people will dislike the answer "Tom Delay" and like the answer "my loved ones". Apparently in (D) land our loved ones get to "decide whether [we] die". Or, that's what we want to hear. Or a state of affairs we want to bring about. Or something.

Does it never occur to the precious (D) geniuses that some of us might just want no one "decid[ing] whether [we] die"?

Second, Dean is either disingenuously misrepresenting or fails to understand the nature of the Shiavo opposition represented by Delay. He does this to make it sound scarier. By calling to mind the spectre of Tom Delay "decid[ing] whether" we die, he glosses over the fact that for Delay, myself, and others the answer is uniformly "No" and never "Yes". None of the anti-starve-Schiavo side wanted the government to "decide" to kill an innocent person in the first place, which was the whole point. Painting a "don't kill people" position as "deciding whether we die" is like painting an abolitionist position as "deciding whether we can be enslaved"; it is trivially true but dishonest in the extreme. By Dean's statement he is either a moron or an intellectually dishonest charlatan for failing to acknowledge this.

It is precisely this type of idiocy that made the pro-killing side simply impossible to get behind. Howard Dean is an idiot for saying these things. If Dean's statements make sense to you, you're an idiot on this issue.

HT Powerline

Paid for his opinion

2005-04-14T10:52:00.000-07:00

A professional opinion writer writes,

Speaking of which, fuck the small businessman.

Allegedly the writer is also highly educated, and a grownup, but Assertions awaits tangible evidence before jumping to such conclusions.

Completely different

2005-04-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

I note that Eric Rudolph, and abortion-doctor-killing in general, is back in the news.

Eric Rudolph, of course, is an extremist zealot whose idea of moral purity (abortion = murder and must be resisted at all costs) told him that it was justifiable for him to engage in terrorism and violence against those (including doctors, and those escorting/associating with doctors) he deemed to have crossed the line.

This is bad, of course, and the news is laden with the appropriate condemnatory tone.

But, more importantly, it is to be highly contrasted with extremist zealots in Iraq whose idea of moral purity (for 'Arab Land' to be occupied by or even contain white/Western/infidel people is an abomination and must be resisted at all costs) tells them it is justifiable for them to engage in terrorism and violence against those (including Iraqi policemen and civilians working with the coalition) they deem to have crossed the line.

That, of course, is MUCH different. It is their "right", the "right of resistance".

Completely different things.

Cargo cult approach to fighting terrorism

2005-04-13T08:08:00.000-07:00

Mary Madigan has a post on Michael Totten's page lauding energy conservation/new energy technologies as "the best way for American civilians to fight terrorism". Dozens of commenters there agree.

It's never been clear to me how, or whether, the thinking here rationally connects up. There seems to be a certain amount of geographical superstition going on here, or a sort of reverse cargo-cult: "Terrorism comes from the ME. A large fraction of oil comes from the ME. So, therefore, um. Less oil make no terrorism." If there is anything more to the logic it is not evident from the aforementioned post or comments.

If terror is caused by despotic regimes exporting their dissent then the solution is to undermine the despots, i.e. foster democracy. If terror is caused by our leadership's reluctance to undermine the despots because they "keep the oil flowing" the solution is to elect people who weigh cost/benefits more accurately. ("Reducing energy usage" is at best a second-order method to accomplish that.)

If terror is caused by despots whom we coddle, and our coddling despots is motivated by the judgment that the despot's likely replacement would be worse (e.g. yes the Saudis are bad but we don't want Al Qaeda taking over Saudi Arabia do we?), then the solution is to keep the lesser-evil in power while (1) reducing their power and capital, and thus, ability to export terror, (2) reducing the value and importance of the wealth they squat upon, making them less of a target for bad actors seeking to grab it for themselves, and (3) liberalizing to the extent possible, reducing the power to be had by grabbing the despot's seat.

Add this all up and you get something resembling Bush Doctrine.

What is not particularly helpful is to implement measures to artifically suppress our demand for petroleum. This is especially harmful to (2) above because if the oil price stays low, then oil is less profitable. If oil is less profitable, then fewer places can afford to drill.

Saudi Arabia will be on any short list of such places. You're not knocking it off.

But you do knock off, for example, the Canada oil shales.

So what does Green Power accomplish? It prices the Saudis' competition out of the market. This really sticks it to those terror-producing Middle Easterners, don't it? Really "fights terror", huh?

To be clear, there are rational arguments for conserving petroleum. These arguments include: since/assuming petroleum is finite, it's the wise thing to do; it will save each of us money (on the personal level).

But "fighting terrorism" is not one of them. I mean, say we all move to hybrids and as a result the Saudis make 9 kajillion instead of 10 kajillion in pure despotic profit, meanwhile shoring up their relative dominance of the oil market. This helps "fight terrorism" how?

Nationalism for me but not for thee

2005-04-12T16:22:00.000-07:00

I can't speak for the archeological dispute but this guy (HT LGF) certainly does a nice take-down of Juan Cole, at least on general logical grounds.

I must say I was stunned to see the Juan Cole pull-quote where he speaks disparagingly about nationalism:

Historians are unkind to nationalism of any sort. Nineteenth century romantic nationalism of the Zionist sort posits eternal "peoples" through history, who have a blood relationship (i.e. are a "race") and who have a mystical relationship with some particular territory. The Germans, who were very good at this game, called it "blood and soil." Nationalism casts about for some ancient exemplar of the "nation" to glorify as a predecessor to the modern nation. (Since nations actually did not exist in the modern sense before the late 1700s, the relationship is fictive. To explain what happened between ancient glory and modern nationalism, nationalists often say that the "nation" "fell asleep" or "went into centuries of decline. My colleague Ron Suny calls this the "sleeping beauty" theory of nationalism.)

But there are no eternal nations through history. People get all mixed up genetically over time, except for tiny parts of the genome like the mitochondria or the Y chromosome, on which too much emphasis is now put. Since there are no eternal nations based in "blood," they cannot have a mystical connection to the "land." People get moved around. The Turks now in Anatolia once lived in Mongolia (and most Turks anyway are just Greeks who converted to Islam and began speaking Turkish).

Did Juan Cole really write this? He speaks disparagingly of the whole notion (so much cherished on the left that we rarely hear the singular form of the noun anymore) of "peoples". He identifies nationalism as an essentially romanticist impulse. He debunks the notion of "nation" existing prior to a few hundred years ago. Nations "cannot have a mystical connection to the 'land'". (!)

I mean hell, I'm pretty much ready to give Juan Cole a high-five by this point. Preach it!

Of course, the reason I found all this so shocking is because Juan Cole regularly and quite obviously neglects to obey his own preachings when it comes to one nation, or set of nations, in particular. I'll give you one guess what nation or nations.

Anyway, by the time I had realized that this called for a sarcastic response calling attention to Cole's glaring inconsistency, I read further and saw that Across the Bay had beaten me to it:

If it's Arab nationalism, Palestinian nationalism, or some Islamic tie across the centuries, then that's ok. Otherwise, it's Nazi. ...
Perhaps it's a bit much to ask John to be consistent, but if he were really "unkind" to nationalism of any kind, one would expect to see that applied to Arabs and Muslims as well.

Damn. I wanted to be the one to get to say that.

SURF in USA

2005-04-12T15:38:00.000-07:00

This post via Marginal Revolution reports that while richer states may have leaned blue, the conventional wisdom that rich people (and, counties) lean red is no less true for it. Triumphalist rhetoric we've been hearing from some conservatives fallaciously pointing to (D)s as the new party of the rich is therefore deflated.

A interesting question is raised here however. Since we all agree it's true that rich people lean (R), how does it ever happen that a state with a high average income votes (D)? How arises this rich blue state anomaly?

Intuitively (and ignoring the difference between "wealth" and "income" - a mistake?^*), one way or another the answer would seem to involve that state having a tiny but super-rich fraction (hereafter denoted SURF) of residents in its borders. A SURF that is disproportionately rich enough to pull up the average income of the state without being numerous enough to affect the vote outcome. Ignore the tiny number of SURs in a SURF state and then you'd be looking at a poor blue state just like rich=red theory predicts.

Moreover, since from the linked post it follows that this doesn't happen to counties (there are no, or few, rich blue county anomalies), we further intuit that the typical SURF state will have its SURF mostly highly concentrated in one or a small number of counties, rather than spread out evenly amongst all the state's counties. If it were spread out evenly, then each county (or, at least, many counties) would have its own sub-SURF and thus we'd see rich-blue-county anomalies, and the rich-(R) pattern would not hold among counties. But the author claims it does.

Summarizing, we've got this picture: A typical rich-blue state (and thus, a typical blue state) is one that is mostly poor (county by county, and person by person) but has a handful of super-rich people concentrated in one or a few swanky counties.

The following, then, seem to be fair followup questions (I don't know the answers):

Super-rich people can live anywhere they want. Can we conclude from all this that super-rich people like to live in states run by (D)s for whatever reason - that (D) policies are friendlier to the super-rich?
Or do I have the chronology wrong: Did having a tiny, geographically concentrated SURF in a few rich counties somehow make/keep the rest of the state poor, and thus blue?
Or do I have the causality wrong: Did having a concentrated SURF make the rest of the state blue (e.g. people voting (D) out of class-envy against those bluebloods in Silver Spoon County)?
Do (D) policies destroy the upper middle class? (See here which seems related, even if aimed at Bush) In other words these blue states, their income distribution is low-flat with a spike at "super-rich". Why aren't there more upper-middle-class people to turn it into a rich-red-state like we'd expect?

To some extent, after all, the rich-blue-state anomaly seems to point us to the following:

(D) = party of lower class and super-rich

(R) = party of middle/upper middle class

I say "to some extent", of course, because as far as I can tell from the above and similar posts floating around, it's not true that the SURF actually votes (D) themselves. They vote (R) like you'd expect.

^*But that's where my footnote comes into play. Is everyone making a significant mistake by equating "rich" with "high income"? Due to various accounting tricks your typical trust fund baby might not having such a high "income" but nevertheless be super-rich by any realistic measure. How does such a person vote? Which party helps such a person? Or, is perceived to?

Just wondering....

Chait, still

2005-04-08T16:41:00.000-07:00

Well, Jonah took even longer to smack down Chait's "empiricist" pretenses than I did. But he arrived at the destination I started from, so it's all good in a time-reversal sort of way.

Jonah, 4/5:

In my mind this underscores how liberalism is a Potemkin label for an ideology that really doesn't have anything to do with liberty. Take back the word "progressive" and be done with it.

T.A., 2/18:

There's a morbid fascination to be had in watching self-proclaimed "liberals" discuss what they think characterizes and underpins "liberalism" with no hint of acknowledgment or recognition from anyone involved that nothing any of them speaks about is recognizably, well, liberal. [but rather] something like a preference for a powerful, benevolent meritocratic oligarchy. It's fine and dandy to have this political preference. Many do (often, coincidentally, folks who perceive themselves to be part of the meritocracy). It's just not liberalism.

Newsflash: politics waged in D.C.

2005-04-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

The Commissar takes the Powerline types to task for not backing off the Great Scandal Regarding Who Wrote A Memo, Of 2005. Although he makes some fair points, he ought to be smarter than this. Commissar comes so close to the truth when he asks:

Where is a story? What would be newsworthy? What would be significant?

He says that a dirty trick or media incompetence would have been significant, but now that the memo has proven to be real (i.e. was written by a person, who works for an (R)), it's not significant so, apparently....

Well, but that's just it. It's not significant. It's not newsworthy.

There was - or should have been - no news story here to begin with. Which. is. the. point.

An employee of a politician wrote a piece of paper outlining what he believed to be the political ramifications of a news event.

STOP THE PRESSES!

The problem here is simple: Conservatives have fallen into a trap. By taking up the gauntlet regarding the disputed authorship of the "Memo", they bought into the idea that there was something untoward about someone-who-works-for-someone-(R) having written such a thing. There isn't.

People should not have been asking themselves who wrote that "memo", but rather: why did the mainstream media deem the "memo" newsworthy?

Wojtyla

2005-04-08T15:40:00.000-07:00

I am not a Catholic and far from an expert on the life of Karol Wojtyla, but from everything I have read, seen, and heard, he was (particularly when one imagines what might have been) a very good man to have been in charge of such a large institution for such a long time, and for that we all ought to be grateful.

Levelling

2005-04-08T14:09:00.000-07:00

A while back, the quote "I don't think US should be the leader of the world" has caused more controversy than I would have expected.

When venting outrage about that quote, it's important to specify the problem with it. Let's note that the idea it expresses comes in both a Sane Version and a Non-sane Version.

The Sane Version:

All things considered it would be preferable for all concerned, including the U.S., if relations among nation-states, as well as "world police" functions such as protection of the sea lanes and such, were peaceful, consensual and effective without having the dynamic of a power asymmetry in which the U.S. takes on the properties of what could be called a "leader".

The Non-sane Version:

It's bad for the U.S. to be the "leader", and therefore we should try to hobble the power of the U.S. at every opportunity (and, elevate the power of certain other states) so as to make it not so. And Americans should voluntarily assist us in these efforts.

Sadly, most people who speak on this subject and use it in arguments for things are in fact espousing the Non-sane Version, but justify themselves by trying to dress it up as the Sane Version.

Often the attraction to the Non-sane Version seems to spring from a kind of laziness. The observation that it would be better in the abstract if world affairs were such that the U.S. were not the "leader" that it is now, is inoffensive enough by itself. The problem is how to get from A to B. The lazy answer is to say that because in B, the U.S. would be less powerful (and France, China etc. more powerful), any idea or proposal which reduces the power of the U.S. or increases the power of France or China or whoever else is to be supported.

This is kind of like saying that because it would be nice to live in a world where no one needed guns, let's disarm the police. Or even have them spread the guns around to criminals, to equalize things.

I don't really blame the Chinese, or the French or the UN, for being attracted to this type of International-Levelling Movement. Who can blame them? Rhetoric such as this costs very little and the payoffs could be huge if Americans become convinced, through its abstract idealism, that they should hand off power to others voluntarily.

I do blame Americans for being stupid enough to fall for it however.

The abstract ideal of a world in which the U.S. didn't have to serve as "leader" is fine and dandy but intentionally de-powering ourselves and empowering France, or anyone else cynically saying "give us your power for a better world", is not an obvious way to get there. In some respects it's a recipe for disaster. Many of the people who push the "U.S. shouldn't be the leader" line, whether for cynical reasons or not, wouldn't even necessarily like the results if its Non-sane Version were actually implemented. Who would patrol shipping lanes? What would guarantee that some other country wouldn't step forward as "leaders", worse ones? If you haven't addressed or even considered these questions that's a sure sign that you haven't waded in any deeper than the shallow Non-sane waters, and need not be taken seriously.

As for the Bennett quote in the article above, it's hard for me to tell whether it's pushing the Sane or Non-sane Version. The article is from a Chinese paper, he was answering leading questions, in a certain context, his words were highlighted by them not him, and so I'm tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Like I said, I was surprised by the outrage at his quote. That may just mean that he knows better than most how to make his Non-sane levelling advocacy sound Sane, however.

Levelling movements are certainly nothing new in human history; communism was far from the first example of one. The fact that this "Stop the U.S. hyperpower" levelling movement is occurring on the scale of nation-states rather than individuals may be new. I suspect what is even more new is the fact that this latest demand for the haves to give to the have-nots in the name of some abstract ideal future is finding nearly as much appeal among the haves as it has among the have-nots.

I doubt that the Czar's family said merrily to their captors, "Yes, I see your point, we all need to be killed to root out the dynasty", or that they were even split on the subject.

Schiavo wrapup

2005-04-07T14:52:00.000-07:00

Of course, by now mountains have been written about the Schiavo case. I will (mostly..) pass comment on most of the issues some people claimed were raised by this case, such as phony concerns about "states' rights", phony concerns about "separation of powers", phony insistence that judges #2...N declining to overturn judge #1's "finding of fact" is the same thing as "due process", phony pretenses of being concerned with legalisms above all else, and make the only observation that is important.

It is this: An innocent women who suffered from a malady that was neither terminal nor, as far as anybody can tell, even painful, was deliberately starved to death because her husband wanted her life to cease and her disability rendered her unable to communicate. This was unjust and wrong, and there is no sophistry which can change that fact.

Absence

2005-04-07T14:32:00.000-07:00

The fact that I have not had much to assert lately is not entirely unconnected to the fact that much of recent news has been dominated by celebrity trials and pseudo-scandals (e.g. who wrote a memo) that are completely boring.

Tenure track material

2005-03-15T14:16:00.000-08:00

I've noted numerous times that what often seems to animate and unite the various factions making up the "left" more than anything else is a constant desire for chosen forms of political violence to be considered acceptable, and not to be opposed effectively, perhaps because the "leftists" in question continually contemplate violence themselves and would like for it to be effective if/when the "need" arises.

Via LGF, I see that one aspiring political scientist is so attracted to the notion of political violence targeting children being considered acceptable in some contexts that he has undertaken an effort to flesh out just what those contexts might be and based his PhD thesis on his findings.

I am not surprised in the least that there is a market for such inquiries.

On respecting France

2005-03-08T16:27:00.000-08:00

Read Norman Geras's 5th retrospective (!) on the argument over Iraq.

The arguments that were personal irritants for me have always fallen under the category of what Geras calls mild NB (not Bush) techniques, or "get out clauses", for arguing against ousting Hussein without seeming to be against ousting Hussein or even war. Because this type of argument's absurdity is always so intuitively obvious to me, yet its slippery nature makes it difficult to elucidate its flaws (Geras does the best I've ever seen), it is especially grating. No doubt for precisely the same reasons, it was and remains wildly popular among the anti-war faction.

As I understand Geras's version, mild NB goes essentially like this: "Hey, don't get us wrong, we're not against ousting Hussein with a war, not even with Bush at the helm (despite our reservations). We just think it should be more multilateral, therefore we oppose it." Thus rendering it, in a neat self-fulfilling prophecy, Not Multilateral.

Regarding "multilateralism", I want to state a related point that Geras doesn't quite touch on: Opposing the war under the banner of being in favor of "multilateralism" was doubly-slippery. Not content to merely serve as a facile self-fulfilling prophecy, it contained an impossible condition, that few even today are able to acknowledge.

That impossible condition consisted of the supposed overwhelming need to convince the nations of France and Germany to participate militarily, along with the US and other coalition members, in the invasion of Iraq and ouster of the Hussein regime.

Many anti-war folks, even now, raised and raise this impossible condition with the hopes that, by masquerading their anti-war view as pragmatism, they will sway more listeners. Even today Bush is chastised for supposedly "choosing unilateralism" and eschewing the (supposedly easily available to him) "multilateralism" which the critic implies would have made a pivotal difference.

And after all, it does sound reasonable, does it not? War takes troops. War is easier with more troops. More troops makes for an easier time for all (on our side). France has some troops. It's in Europe (they're white people, like us, one might add...). So! Why not just roll up our sleeves, do some wining and dining, and thereby convince France to send in their military too, then? And their little brother Germany too? (And why not throw in China while we're at it, as well? - oh but I get ahead of myself....)

The reason this was an impossible condition, and I want to state this as plainly and pedantically as possible because so many appear confused on this point, is the following:

France and Germany, both the people and the governments of those nations, by large margins, did not want any invasion of the nation-state of Iraq to occur. They did not want to see the government of Hussein unseated. They did not actually share our goals. Our goal was to unset the Hussein government. Theirs was not. Their goal was the opposite: not to see Iraq invaded, let alone the Hussein government unseated.

That being the case, "Get France to help!" was and is just about the most idiotic thing one could possibly request of the US government. Let's think this through: France, a country whose people and government do not want Iraq to be invaded and do not want the government of Hussein to be ousted, is going to send some portion of its military to risk life and limb to help us do just that, the very thing to which they are opposed? All if we simply ask nicely, spend a little more time on diplomacy, make some unspecified "concessions" to them?

Clearly, this was never going to happen. Those who suggested and suggest otherwise are guilty of a strange combination of arrogance (the US can convince any country to participate in our wars with their young men, all it takes is our asking...) and, believe it or not, insensitivity. For France told us straight out, time and time again, that they had no intention of participating in an invasion. All you had to do was listen to nearly any quote uttered by Chirac and de Villepin at the time. Paradoxically, the Francophile anti-war lefties refused to listen to the French themselves: obstinately brushing aside the plain, obvious, expressed wishes of France and her government as mere trifles, they constructed elaborate argument after argument predicated on no more and no less than that France and Germany's wishes and autonomy were irrelevant - that they, or strictly speaking their troops, could be had for our usage, if the price was right. All Bush had to do was "try", which he (therefore, we conclude) "didn't".

The argument still exists, too, as a minor retroactive critique: "Why didn't Bush work more multilaterally?" "It's great what's happening now, but don't you wish we had more countries on our side?" And, so forth. It just won't go away. The impossible condition, not having been fulfilled, now serves as the ultimate unfair criticism: Bush didn't do the impossible first.

As a conservative American Francophobe, hearing this twaddle always put me in the slightly uncomfortable position of arguing to my left-wing Francophile friends that we ought to show a little more respect towards France than all that; indeed that we ought to respect their wishes and position as neutrals in our conflict with Husseinist Iraq. Lefties, meanwhile, still don't display any discomfort of conscience I can detect that they were arguing, in effect, that we should conscript some thousands of troops from unwilling and/or disinterested countries such as France and Germany to help fight our war for us.

The reason for this, of course, is that none of it was meant sincerely. "Get France to help" was not a sincerely-expressed request. It was an impossible condition, stated and set up for the sole reason that it was thought that by forcing Bush to jump an infinitely-high hurdle, the war would be staved off. There is much cowardice in this type of argument. At least more overtly anti-war activists had the courage of their convictions and said straight-out that they opposed unseating Hussein from power. Not so, the mild NB and "get France to help" people. Instead of admitting that they opposed the war, they pretended to favor it as long as we simply satisfied some set of impossible criteria first. Get France to help fight a war whose objective they oppose, square the circle, find the largest prime number... it doesn't really matter what that condition was, because its content was never the point. Its impossibility was the point. No X Till Y, if Y is impossible, is just the coward's way of saying No X.

One wonders why anti-war lefties didn't insist that we could fight the war so long as we convinced the Iraqi Republican Guard to join the coalition, as well. The probability of fulfilling this criterion was no less miniscule.

A terrorist by any other name

2005-03-07T17:54:00.000-08:00

Brian Montopoli thinks that journalists have a problem with the word "terrorist" because its definition is not absolutely clear-cut with mathematical rigor, as evidence citing fascinating facts such as that there exist competing not-fully-consistent definitions that differ on the margins, and that there exist people on the fringes (Montopoli's Exhibit A: Ward Churchill) who would dispute significantly any postulated mean definition.

Which is weird because that is true of many if not most words, including the word "journalist". This raises the chilling question, if usage doesn't suffice, is journalism impossible? Are there any words journalists can use? Can they refer to themselves? Would they implode? I await Montopoli's follow-up.

Matthew Yglesias (who gets the hat tip) has thought about this and decided to invent a clever aphorism encapsulating the situation - I forget how it goes, but it was something along the lines of "one man's such-and-such is another dude's whatchamacalit". After some soul-searching and intense study, he comes to the provocative conclusion, furthermore, that the reluctance of people who are "strangely resistant" (to his and others' pressing, ongoing need to deny that terrorism can possibly have a definition) "stems, I think, from some kind of confusion." You don't say. Having so clearly identified the culprit ("some kind of confusion"), he graciously deigns to dispel our tragic confusion for us (poor us!):

You call certain acts "terrorism" because you think those actions are worthy of condemnation. What you don't do is condemn certain acts because you've determined that the acts are acts of terrorism.

Oh! Well, thanks for the diagnosis Dr. Yglesias. Here I thought I was using a word according to its (albeit fuzzy but nevertheless reasonable) definition in an intellectually honest, objective, and sincere way, but you have seen through to the truth: I'm not.

Like, if I claim to think that terrorism is, basically, non-state violence intentionally aimed at civilians for the purpose of political intimidation, coercion, movement, or instigation, I guess I'm delusional or suffering from false consciousness or something. Because I'm really just trying to condemn this or that act and then letting that tail wag the dog of my definition. So kind of Matthew Yglesias to inform those who disagree with him that they lack sincerity, is it not?

The interesting slippage in his post is the word "condemnation". Where did he get that from? Yglesias decides that folks (like me) who would defend the "terrorist" label are first and foremost trying to condemn those acts. This would seem to betray the real reason he resists the term, because of the condemnation component he perceives in it.

He doesn't like the term because he's afraid of people condemning certain acts he wouldn't want to see condemned. N'est-ce pas?

Because, what if I use the term neutrally, objectively, as described above? Where is the "condemnation" in my saying that Algerians freed themselves of French rule using terrorist tactics, that Nelson Mandela supported (at the very least, rhetorically) terrorism, that Israel's founding came about at least partially through the use of terrorism? I may, or may not, condemn the terrorism in one or more of those cases, to a greater or lesser extent, but you don't know my position on any of them one way or the other as of yet, not just by virtue of my having used the term "terrorism". Do you?

So, contra Yglesias, to call something "terrorism" is not necessarily to "condemn" it. Yet if he worries that it is - or that if people hear the term they will condemn the act on their own - this would explain why he is resistant to the possibility of an objective definition.

Similiarly, if Montopoli worries that it is, this would explain why he singles out "terrorism", of all the thousands of words that have fuzzy definitions on which not everyone is in precise agreement, as the one word that "journalists" (whatever they are, exactly) need to be extra extra vigilant about using (or not).

Because, you know, some readers might (heaven forfend) see the term, interpret it to connote condemnation, and form negative views toward the act(s) in question. And we'd sure hate for this to catch on and for political violence to be thought of as invalid or something.

No - better just to try to banish the word "terrorist" from usage by muddying the waters. Call a guy who bombs dozens of civilians outside a mosque or in a marketplace an "insurgent", and insist (without any apparent sense of irony) that anyone who disagrees with you is Orwellian and playing into politicians' hands at worst, "confused" at best. That way, one man's journalist gets to be another man's freedom fighter.

Ward Churchill = leftist mullah

2005-03-05T14:48:00.000-08:00

Since 9/11 we've all become familiarized to some extent, whether we ever wanted to or not, with the roles played by various mullahs, imams, and other manner of charlatans in brainwashing and warping the minds of Islamic terrorists.

Reading over this account of Ward Churchill on Bill Maher, it occurs to me that he is the left-wing equivalent.

It's been made depressingly clear to all of us that if you just look long enough in the radical fringes of Islam you will have no trouble finding a mullah who issues any crazy claims or inflammatory piece of rhetoric you can think of. You want someone who says that Jews have pigs' blood? They're out there. That the US is "the Great Satan"? No problem. That Allah approves nuking a city and killing five million? Done. That the Protocols are real... that Jews are demons... who eat children... who have prehensile tails... you name it, some mullah is saying it.

Ignorance, superstition, and conspiracy theorizing seem to be job qualifications. Sometimes it seems as if being mentally retarded is considered a plus.

Now consider the kinds of things that Ward Churchill says.

Listen to him babble about strangers - people he doesn't know, has never met, and about whom he actually knows nothing - who he calls "the technological elite". Fancy term but what exactly does this mean? Does he know what the hell he's talking about? Evidently not. He waves his hands and assumes that anyone who worked in the World Trade Center, I can only assume because it's called the "world trade center" (except the janitors, he clarifies with an afterthought), is part of.... well, let me just quote the mullah like a good acolyte:

a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire

Got that? They're a "technocratic corps". Clear?

How, pray tell, are we to distinguish this kind of superstititious, ignorant nonsense-babble from a mullah who calls people "demons" or rants about the "diabolical Jews"? What is the substantive difference here? "Little Eichmanns" infuriated people but few have stopped to notice just what a vague epithet it really is; he may as well have gone all the way and called them "demons". Or just, Jews.

It goes without saying, I hope, that above all else Ward Churchill doesn't know what the f**k he's talking about. He doesn't know the first thing about what the typical or median or average employee who had a job requiring him/her to work in the World Trade Center actually did. From his perch in an "Ethnic Studies" department he has quite evidently conjured up fantastical, paranoid notions about how the world works, what real jobs are like, how money is made.

These notions of his are indistinguishable from the superstitions of a raving religious fanatic.

But Mullah Churchill is pretty sure he's got their number down nevertheless. Why, he has just so accurately divined that what they were "involved in" had "costs and consequences" for... well, some group of people whom Churchill has anointed himself defender. Look how much he knows about World Trade Center People:

To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions

You see, he's seen the movie Wall Street! So he knows what those people are like!

And what do those evil stock transactions cause?

each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants

Got that?

How a stock transaction "translates" into the "starved and rotting flesh of infants" is left tantalizingly unstated. Is this an economic claim from Professor Churchill?

Or magical thinking?

Which does it resemble more?

It's essentially blood libel dressed up in leftist clothing.

The more I read and hear of Churchill the more I realize that there is very little that he says that couldn't have been lifted directly from the sermon of some blind, mentally retarded sociopath with a following in the dozens somewhere in the backwaters of Pakistan. The latter are funded by the Saudi government, Churchill by the Colorado state government. Zealot mullahs attract devotees from among ignorant Muslims; Churchill attracts trained-seal applause from ignorant coddled middle class Americans.

The only real difference is the long hair unfettered by a turban.

Professional journalist

2005-03-04T17:42:00.000-08:00

We hear a lot about how journalists are professional and have a superior view toward facts and objectivity. Here's a perfect illustration of professional journalist Dan Rather's attitude about facts.

LETTERMAN: ... Secondly, they could not prove the documents were false. They could not prove they were true and accurate, but they also could not prove they were false

RATHER: That's correct.

LETTERMAN: That's a push right there.

RATHER: Some people would not regard it, but you've summarized it correctly.

Let's just cut to the chase: when discussing whether to present something as a factual bit of news information, "could not prove they were true and accurate, but they also could not prove they were false" is not a "push". It's a "don't go with it".

I'd say Letterman is excused because he is a comedian, and he is only asking questions (arguably trying to string Rather along). But why doesn't professional, respected journalist Dan Rather say "Well, no, it's not a 'push'. When you can't prove that something is true and accurate, you have no basis for presenting it as news"?

That is what he ought to have said.

Movies

2005-03-03T17:49:00.000-08:00

The interesting thing about this Lee Harris piece is the length he ends up having to go in order to establish that there is a fundamental difference between Palestinian terror, and Algerian terror (the historical example that looms large throughout his arguments and indeed surfaces overtly numerous times throughout the piece). It is a worthy exercise, I think, to grant the premise of those who might be inclined to have been terror-friendly in a case like Algeria and then set about convincing them that they should not be in the case of the Palestinians. Unfortunately, the necessity to do this made the piece a bit long. I'm not saying this gives the argument fatal flaws but it is difficult to take it all in and evaluate its success in one reading.

What it did do, however, is set me to thinking about the influence of movies in politics.

Why, after all, is the example of Algeria so necessary to face head-on for those who, like Harris and myself, wish to denounce terrorism? These are just idle thoughts but I often wonder to what extent it has to do with the classic Pontecorvo film The Battle of Algiers (which is on DVD in a mammoth 3-disc set). Algiers is both a wonderful film cinematically, and politically is an amazingly - I say this even as one who is on the opposite side of the "spectrum" from Pontecorvo - even-handed treatment of both sides of that conflict. Though I am anti-terror, try as I might I could never find fault with its morality.

But it must be admitted that the success of that film had effects that are probably difficult to overestimate: in particular that it tilted opinion, at least slightly, in favor of approving terror tactics and capitulation to same. I dare speculate that The Battle of Algiers was probably the first real introduction to and primary education on that conflict to many (at least, non-French) Western viewers. And although as I said I find it laudably even-handed, nevertheless there is something morally anesthetizing about sitting down to watch a film about a successful, romantic nationalist movement that employs terror as a primary tactic. You can be shocked, you can feel sadness, you can condemn, but in the end, once you have seen the film, with its sympathetic portrayal of the dedication of the Algerians (and some of the heavy-handedness and ineptitude of the French), you can't help but understand.

And tout comprendre, est-ce tout excuser as they might say in Algeria.

I guess what I'm saying is, when your run of the mill leftist intones "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", sometimes I wonder whether he adopted this viewpoint because someone made convincing rational arguments to him... or because he absorbed this point of view from a cool movie he once saw?

But don't listen to me, I have funny ideas about the power of movies. After all, I also think that David O. Russell's Three Kings had a great deal to do with Bush's success in gaining approval of the Iraq war. And that Rocky IV helped win the Cold War.

Tea leaves

2005-03-03T13:53:00.000-08:00

The news yesterday was full of stories on Social Security reform that followed this template:

"The President was pushing his SS reform proposals, despite some recent poll we've decided to trumpet showing that support for private accounts is slipping."

Note,

what was highlighted was the slippage rather than the actual support. The TV-news instantiation of this story-template I saw, for example, did not even mention the poll's actual result; they just said that support was "slipping". From what to what? Could be from 99% to 95% based on the info some of these stories give.
similarly why are we to believe that any such "slippage" is significant? or that the poll is even significant? (If a poll goes from 50 to 45 you could call that "slippage" or just an artifact of sampling, depending on the poll construction.) I'm not sure which poll everyone was latching onto but if it's the one described near the bottom here, the "slippage" doesn't strike me as all that earth shattering nor (more importantly) is the actual question all that relevant to Bush's reform per se.
the supposed paradox of Bush saying he's going to push a proposal "despite" slippage in the polls is really no paradox at all, if you just think about it. Making all the newsreaders' insistence on telling us about it appear rather contrived.

I can only conclude from the evident desperation and illogic of this apparent new talking-point (Bush pushing reform "despite" slippage) that his proposal, in fact, has more prospects of success than I had previously thought.

Boots

2005-03-02T17:37:00.000-08:00

A funny thing about this piece by Phillip Carter and Paul Glastris calling itself "The Case For The Draft" is that in the course of what I can only assume is its fascinating and wonderful theoretical internet-column case for the draft it ends up eviscerating the vaunted, enlightened criticism of Bush and Rummy we've heard time and time again from some that goes something like, "Bush and Rummy didn't send as many troops to Iraq as I've privately and magically calculated they should've, sole reason being because Bush is dumb and Rummy's a stubborn old man."

Carter/Glastris takes a look at the size of our military and does some quick but convincing whittling regarding just how many "boots on the ground"^TM we can feasibly have on an ongoing basis in Iraq. Amazingly, it ends up whittling down to... basically what we have there now - if anything, less. Let's follow the calculations in action:

a U.S. military comprised of 1.4 million active-duty troops, 870,900 reservists, and 110,000 individual ready reservists ... begin by deducting virtually the entire Navy and Air Force from the head count ... instead of counting individual soldiers—a meaningless exercise—one must look at how many units the United States could theoretically put on the ground if it wanted to mobilize every active and reserve soldier available. And if you do that, you come to a figure of roughly 600,000 troops. ... Given the need to hold troops in reserve for deterrence purposes, the Pentagon had perhaps 400,000 troops available for the invasion. ... The number of troops with units that would actually have been of use in Iraq was probably closer to the figures that Gen. Shinseki and Secretary White have suggested: 250,000 to 300,000 ... The Pentagon, then, could have realistically kept those initial 250,000 to 300,000 troops in place only for a limited time—perhaps a year, certainly not more than two. ... Taking the need for rotations into account, then, the U.S. military can comfortably handle something like 80,000 troops in Iraq at any one time. The actual number on the ground has averaged 133,286 for the last two years, and more than 150,000 soldiers are in Iraq now.

Got that? So we could "comfortably" have 80k in the occupation. We've had more than that at all times. And this comes from evidently hand-wavy calculations of Phillip Carter and friend. One may assume that "stubborn old man" Rummy, a guy who's actually head of the department in charge of these things, was given a version of these calculations that was more accurate and detailed rather than less.

So where does this leave the "Rummy's just too stubborn to put more boots on the ground" crowd?

Remember, class, the story as many sages told it went something like,

First you have to understand that Rummy is devoted to "transformation". So his head is in the clouds. He's putting his theories ahead of reality. Someone needs to wake him up. He won't listen to reason. He won't listen to anybody. WE NEED MORE BOOTS ON THE GROUND. And he won't put them there, and the only reason he won't put them there, is "transformation". [Ed. note: the "transformation" part of this story was always a bit foggy to me.] He's an old, old, old, old, man. Rummy is stubborn. Just so stubborn! We'd have more b.o.t.g. if he weren't so stubborn!

But if the authors are even remotely correct, no we wouldn't. We couldn't. It's not Rummy's "stubborness" that has caused the occupation to consist of X rather than Y soldiers. It's math. That's the way the numbers work out. We have as many boots on the ground as we can put. That's the amount of resources our government has available to address this problem - deal with it.

Either that, or the article is wrong. One or the other.

This is the part of the argument where someone says something like one of the following:

well then we shouldn't have invaded!
well then Rummy should have told Bush and the public that the size was insufficient, and we wouldn't have invaded!
well then they should have tried to ramp up the size of the military pronto (and if they couldn't, shouldn't have invaded...)
well then they should have started a draft (which was politically a non-starter therefore HAHA no invasion!!)

Where these rejoinders aren't simply tiresome attempts to argue retroactively against the Iraq war for the zillionth time - where they are meant sincerely, I mean - I find them quite puzzling.

The sincere "more troops" crowd, if I understand them, seems to be saying that when we consider fighting a war, the armed forces should either be of a size so as to mathematically guarantee the war's success in a specified budgeted amount of time - or the war should not be initiated. Either/or.

Man, what a luxury to live in the United States of America. We don't have to whine about losing wars. We get to whine about not budgeting enough troops to win wars with sufficient certainty, cleanliness, and lack of stress!

Further, what is bizarre about this position is that it seems to impose a standard of perfection orders of magnitude beyond anything else done by the government in any arena. The core of the observation is: More troops would make the war go smoother and ensure success better. Yeah, and?

Of what is this not true??

More resources would make virtually any human endeavor go smoother. But resources are finite. Grownups are supposed to learn this at some point or another.

Consider this line of reasoning: Currently the Department of Whatever has a budget of X dollars; to really be assured of solving the problem it's supposed to address, it would need a budget of 100X. Therefore... let's increase the budget to 100X? ...or if we can't, let's forget the whole thing?

Talk about a pie-in-the-sky, letting-perfect-be-enemy-of-good mentality. Guess what? On this issue, I proudly and resolutely wear the reality-based hat. The "more boots" people are not being reality-based.

The size of our military is what it is. More to the point, at the start of the Iraq war, it was what it was. We had to take it or leave it. The proposal on the table was to invade Iraq with the military we had, not the military we wished we had or some kind of theoretical infinite Platonically perfect military. And this was no secret to anyone involved. The Iraq war was either worth doing, or it was not. Whether it was worth doing depended on numerous factors. But an implicit position that the key factor, the only factor, that actually mattered was the number of b.o.t.g. we could put there - that it might have been worth doing if our military had been size 2X but it was not worth doing with a military of size X - is really quite bizarre, when it isn't simply disingenuous and facile, of course. Agreed there's no question that a smaller force size makes things more difficult and a larger size makes things easier, but reasoning that goes like "Hmm, well ousting a dictator and removing an enemy is important, but not if we can only occupy with 130k. If we could occupy with 250k I'd be for it, but I'm gonna have to vote against it" is really quite incomprehensible to me.

In fact, upon reflection I don't believe anyone sincerely believes that. Unfortunately, many claim to.

Back to the Carter piece - you'll recall, that was my jumping-off point here - about needing a draft. It seems to me that he nearly gives the game away here:

In theory, our democracy will not fight unpopular wars because the people who must bear the casualties can impose their will on our elected leaders to end a war they do not support. But when such a small fraction of America shoulders the burden—and pays the cost —of America's wars, this democratic system breaks down.

The author thinks that the democratic system has "broken down". As far as I can tell it is because our government waged a war that he did not want to see occur. But if the previous election is any indication, at least 51% of his countrymen disagree. Oh right, I see, that's the "breaking down" part - the guy they favored, lost. Well never mind that: if a draft were in place, then a larger fraction of America would shoulder the burden of wars - which would therefore not be fought in the first place, as "theory" promises.

Which tells you all you need to know about why the author proposes the draft. He is dissatisfied with his countrymen for having approved a war he does not, and he wants more of them to be threatened with life and limb and "shoulder the burden" so that they will come around to his way of thinking.

We thus have the seemingly paradoxical spectacle of an article that simultaneously argues that we need a far huger military to fight, and that if only people were drafted, we'd never choose to. In fact, Carter, seemingly giddy from this, has already mentally farmed out many of these conscripts (he targets only the college-bound for conscription, by the way) on non-war-related missions:

tutoring disadvantaged children.... vital domestic missions, such as helping a growing population of seniors who want to avoid nursing homes but need help with simple daily tasks like grocery shopping.

Wow! I've got whiplash. At the beginning of this piece I could have sworn I was reading a sobering and thoughtful, sincere analysis concerning RAND and Pentagon estimates for how many b.o.t.g. we need in Iraq and beyond, all for sincere heartfelt geopolitical strategical motives; yet here by the end suddenly we've got kids being pulled out of their Engineering programs at college so they can spend their days buying prune juice for grandma. Are there any other geopolitical strategic benefits, I wonder? Aside, of course, from the prune juice thing?

Why, of course:

It would give more of America's elite an experience of the military.

Admit it: It's about getting back at those damn "fortunate sons", isn't it? Why, if only those chickenhawks... then maybe we wouldn't have....

Sorry, I can no longer take this seriously. Austin Bay has more patience than I do.

Sloppy

2005-03-02T12:29:00.000-08:00

I record that "Sloop" John B took issue with my post. Apparently the StWC's statement endorsing "whatever means they find necessary" is merely "sloppy English", and therefore ok (?). My critique is precisely that the English is sloppy and (at best) irresponsibly open to immoral misinterpretation, so we're in violent agreement.

Anyway, I responded with a hypothetical: Imagine that a short time after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, someone had released a statement reading,

"We support Timothy McVeigh's right to protest his government's actions in Waco two years prior, by whatever means he finds necessary."

Mere "sloppy English"? Or something else?

I still say that if one doesn't want his words to be interpreted as an endorsement of mass murder, one shouldn't write words that can be interpreted as an endorsement of mass murder. I can only reiterate what I already said: If they [StWC] had wanted their words to clearly contemplate, and include space for condemnation of, a category of unjustifiable mass murders such as the recent bombing in Iraq, nothing and nobody prevented them from composing such a statement.

As far as I know, they have not. I'd welcome having my attention brought to any such statement, or at least clarification of their "sloppiness", which is not the mere peccadillo that John B would like us to think, but has real effects on attitudes toward terrorism.

The royal "You" and shattered dreams

2005-03-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

Juan Cole, characteristically, found it difficult to get through a post - this one about events in Lebanon - without mentioning his bugaboo Israel. Shame on me for finding it disorienting, because I really shouldn't have, but read what he wrote to see why:

Al-Jazeerah is reporting that the Lebanese Opposition is now calling for the big demonstrations at Martyrs' Square to continue until all Syrian troops leave Lebanese soil.

You [sic] wonder what would happen if the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza tried the same thing re: Ariel Sharon's military occupation that they face. They'd be crushed by the jackboot (with convenient allegations that they were a front for terrorism).

Again, this being Juan Cole I should not have been surprised by the non sequitur, but in my defense I'd like to note that the second paragraph stunningly contains both an incorrect assertion and a self-contradiction. First, the bit about Cole asserting that "You" wonder what would happen is simply incorrect. No, Professor, I do not; speak for yourself, your obsessions are your own.

More to the point, if Palestinians were to stake their strategy and aspirations on peaceful protest rather than death-worship I'd be stunned more than anything else. Sounds like a good idea! They might indeed do well to note the relative dearth of Lebanese strapping bombs to themselves and walking into crowds of Syrian civilians and detonating them, and draw the logical conclusions.

Weirdly, however, immediately after (incorrectly) asserting that we wonder what would happen, by which I suppose he means himself, he goes on to state what he thinks would happen: Israel would "crush" the hypothesized peaceful protesters with the "jackboot". So I guess Cole never really "wondered" anything in the first place. Is this really how a professor writes?

Anyway, Armed Liberal at Winds of Change tears him apart a bit.

You know what I really wonder? I wonder what would happen if the Western left didn't make excuses and provide ideological succor for the use of political terror to achieve nationalist and territorial aspirations, treating it as a winning strategy rather than - when and where forcefully opposed, as in the case of Israel - a losing one that dooms its purveyors to misery.

What seems to gall the left more than anything else is that Israel has consistently refused to play along and cave in the face of romanticized terrorists, like France eventually did in that movie The Battle of Algiers. This destroys the left's ongoing effort to ensure that political violence remains effective. As with the fall of the USSR, the continued stance of Israel (like the US) represents a shattered dream to the left.

Being

2005-03-01T13:39:00.000-08:00

The Anchoress knows that:

Beware the urge to utilarianism. Everything does not have to be of "use." Nor does everyONE. It is enough to BE, if BEING is what you have been called to.

RTWT.

Debt and crocodile tears about debt

2005-03-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

This piece by John Lott of all people actually raises an interesting point.

Why should we treat future Social Security obligations as less real than obligations to pay future interest and principal payments?

Surely no politician will argue that the former are less likely to occur and should therefore not be recognized as real obligations.

This is actually the mirror-image of an argument that the left has been using that I've found equally clever. It goes something like:

How can you say Social Security will go bankrupt and benefits will be slashed? In any scenario in which that is even politically feasible, we would necessarily have far worse problems on our hands (Depression, meteor strike, etc.) than Social Security. Therefore, it's not actually a contingency worth worrying about. Further, how can transferring part of SS to private accounts be considered safer or better? The funds in private accounts will be held in assets of type X Y Z. But surely in any plausible scenario in which the assets in the trust fund are defaulted upon, assets X Y Z are also going to collapse as well. Therefore, there's nothing to be gained.

What I like about Lott's formulation is that it takes this argument and throws it back in their face. "You're right", says Lott, "these future obligations will be paid one way or another. Just like bonds. Therefore, they are debt instruments. Therefore, it's silly to consider them off the books. Therefore, privatization incurs no additional debt. The debt is already there - as you say, these obligations will be fulfilled."

Unfortunately, this type of argument is of limited value given that the left is not sincere when they pretend to care about the "additional" debt in the first place. Their overarching concern in all of this is preserving a program that they foresee will create a need to raise taxes. There is no other plausible motivation for the Bartleby Democrats.

If you don't mean it, don't say it

2005-03-01T11:53:00.000-08:00

Following a recent ~~mass murder~~ justifiable insurgent attack against collaborators in Iraq, Oliver Kamm reminded us of a particularly noxious quote he had noted a while ago.

For doing so, Kamm is denounced here. How dare he imply that when the "Stop the War Coalition" says that it "recognizes" the "legitimacy" of attempting to eject Coalition troops "by whatever means they find necessary", they actually meant it! You see, this statement is not to be taken so "literally". "By whatever means they find necessary" really secretly means "by those means that we think we can defend at any given moment". You see, it's actually a secret list of Means which are "legitimate", and far from feeling a need to specify or circumscribe that list, the Stop the War Coalition and others on the Left in fact reserve the ongoing right to modify and amend or reduce that list at will, depending on circumstance and political need.

"So, there was a bombing of 100+ Iraqi civilians, you say? Hmm, that's awfully hard to defend. Let's exclude it then. So: don't blame us, that's not the type of thing we meant at all. Now, as I was saying, 'the Iraqis' have the right to use whatever means they find necessary...."

Again, just so we're clear, this is the rebuttal to Kamm and the "defense" against his interpretation of StWC's statement.

If the StWC didn't mean "by whatever means they find necessary" then perhaps they shouldn't have written it. If they had wanted their words to clearly contemplate, and include space for condemnation of, a category of unjustifiable mass murders such as the recent bombing in Iraq, nothing and nobody prevented them from composing such a statement. That they did not is not Oliver Kamm's fault. He simply points it out.

More conservatism of the left

2005-03-01T10:17:00.000-08:00

Matthew Yglesias isn't so sure that the recent events in Lebanon, and the apparent prospect of throwing off Syrian puppet strings etc., is all that good for us.

After all: America first!, as folks on the left always say.

SS shortfall: A feature, not a bug

2005-02-28T16:25:00.000-08:00

Andrew Cory, a new-ish regular to Dean's World whose posts are often just wrong, purports to explain "How Social Security Works.", in yet another post that is just wrong.

First, he tries to contrast the "Old" and "New" (post-1984). The comparison is of dubious relevance; what is important is that both, he says, involve the fact that some money is taken from his paycheck and

gets sent to my Grandmother.

This is both wrong, and raises an important moral issue. First the moral issue: Why is the government needed as an intermediary between Andrew Cory and his Grandmother? Is he so callous and/or irresponsible that he refuses to help his poor Grandmother without the government forcing him to? Unless he is, perhaps this formulation leaves something important out.

As for why it's wrong, well it embodies a static analysis of a sort that completely misses the point: Cory appears to be saying something like, for every Andrew Cory there's an Andrew Cory's Grandmother. Or that the ratio between Corys and Grandmothers is fixed for all time.

Which is precisely the problem: it is not. The problem inherent in Social Security, and this problem exists whether one chooses to call it a "crisis" or not, has quite a bit to do with the fact that the demographic realities mean the ratio is changing.

So it's more accurate to say that currently, money is held from X Andrew Corys and given to someone's Grandmother, but in a decade or three there will only be Y < X Andrew Corys to fund the same Grandmother. This situation is simply unsustainable.

Now, some "liberals" don't see the problem there. This situation can be resolved "just" by cutting benefits (a political non-starter) or raising taxes on the "rich". Which is their goal. Thus, they see no need to acknowledge the demographic problem.

Cory, to his credit, does acknowledge the problem in passing, even if he doesn't seem too exercised about it. He's more concerned with debunking the "accounting trick" characterization of the trust fund. Very well, but then it's worth engaging in some debunking from this end as well. (Sebastian Holsclaw covered much of the same ground here that I'm going to.)

In Cory's version - which is valid - there is a separation between the Social Security and other forms of government funding. SS collects extra money, "buys" some T-bills with it, those T-bills will be paid back barring some disaster, so all is fine. With "Social Security" itself.

What this ignores is the fact that, even if we accept this picture of SS funding, the current US government relies upon SS taxes as a nontrivial component of its funding. Right now. Each year. The "extra" SS taxes that are being "saved" for a rainy day are, in fact, no different than any other government revenue stream that it collects, and spends.

That being the case, all the speeches we now hear from the conservative left about how the trust fund doesn't "run out" for a long long time, or that we'll only "start having to pay off the T-bills" in 2040-whatever, so there's plenty of time, etc., completely miss the point.

The point is that a revenue stream that in practice our government currently relies on to at least some extent is shrinking every year, or at least will start to do so very soon. Therefore the "crisis" is now and getting worse with every passing year.

This is structural, not correctible or reversible in any trivial way. The revenue stream is not shrinking every year because our Congress consciously decided to make it shrink, or because of some unforeseen natural disaster. It's shrinking because the taxes in question are pinned to demographics and the demographics are changing. Thus - unless we adopt a Logan's Run solution - the shortfall is foreseeable and inevitable. Again, this shortfall is not "in the future" or "down the road", something we can put off. It is a cancer that is with us today and only growing with every passing year: a funding stream that our government currently uses and which is structured in such a way that after some point (even if this point hasn't already been reached) it will inevitably get smaller with each passing year.

The fact that the "trust fund" will "run out" in 20-whatever is, of course, a great concern as well, and looms large. But that's merely dickering over when the revenue stream actually crosses the zero point and becomes negative. The mere fact that it's a revenue stream that's drying up - one that we can see, and whose shrinking is absolutely foreseeable - is a problem in and of itself. Right now.

Of course, in the comments to Holsclaw's post, Kevin Drum himself dropped by to say that he doesn't think any of that is a problem with Social Security itself. Why, it's just a "general tax/budget issue." Got that? So in summary, Social Security is a revenue stream that's drying up, then will go negative, eat up more and more of the budget, etc., but Social Security is fine. The "general tax/budget", of course, will have to absorb whatever happens to Social Security - which we can't touch (because it's fine) - but that's a separate issue.

In other words, Social Security is a "fine" program that will create a built-in "need to raise taxes". Is there any wonder the left doesn't want us to touch it?

In many respects, the two sides of the current Social Security debate are simply talking past each other. There is no common goal because one side wants the demographic shortfall to remain unaddressed.

After all, to the left, if a program (especially a Large program!) is destined for a shortfall and will force tax hikes one way or another in the future, that's not a bug, that's a feature.

We must protect the Large

2005-02-28T15:50:00.000-08:00

"Liberal" Matthew Yglesias helpfully explains why he is so dogmatic about opposing any form of privatization of Social Security. Apparently, it's "worth fighting over" because of the fact that it's "the largest federal program". Yes, now I see, if there's a Program and it's Large then you can't and shouldn't touch it. Of course. (That's just "liberalism" 101.)

Well, the (unintentional?) candor here is refreshing, anyway.

I do wonder, however, how he managed to forget so soon the communique sent out by Jonathan Chait last week. You know, the one about how "liberals" are all about being "pragmatic". And in particular that

liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself.

Apparently Chait merely forgot to add that to "liberals", keeping the size of government precisely the same is, in fact, an end in itself.

The fear of being "found"

2005-02-28T14:43:00.000-08:00

Dr. Frank's been freaking me out with a hilarious series of posts on "found" letters and stuff.

What does this underground cult of "found letter" people do, rifle through garbage? Go to the dump regularly?

Can there really be so many honest to goodness "found letters" on the streets, just waiting to be found, with no rifling necessary? I think not. I mean, I've never seen any. Therefore, I choose to freak out.

After all, I've written, and received, letters, at least back in the days of snail-mail. I've thrown away letters and (undoubtedly) had people throw away mine.

One of these days, I fully expect to recognize myself or a correspondent in one of Frank's posts.

Talking about suing Jose Canseco: A good strategy

2005-02-25T18:07:00.000-08:00

There's been some stories from time to time about this or that player possibly maybe thinking about suing Jose Canseco for his allegations of their steroid use.

Here's Rafael Palmeiro:

"I have options available for me. He [lawyer] stands behind me and he's ready. I will look at all my options and I'll decide."

Meanwhile regarding Mark McGwire, here's Tony LaRussa who doesn't advise suing:

`It is so difficult. ... The players can do whatever they want to, but you've got to think long and hard before you make that investment.''

Wow!! This almost kinda sorta sounds like real news about something, doesn't it?

Clearly, no baseball player is going to be suing Jose Canseco. Innocent or not, the last thing any baseball player wants is to take this issue into open court and testify about who saw what in which locker room.

But, it looks as if a lot of baseball players might be vigorously pursuing the (rather sound, if you ask me) strategy of talking about suing Jose Canseco. This strategy is much better from their point of view: it's free, it looks like a denial of his allegations even though it's not ("Palmeiro's so mad he's even thinking about suing! What does that say?"), and so maybe it takes some of the pressure off.

In McGwire's case he's done something even more clever, sent Tony LaRussa out there to "advise him against" suing. It's like some sort of backhanded reverse phantom trial balloon. The casual observer could be forgiven for almost kinda getting the idea from this that Mark McGwire was, indeed, thinking about suing Jose Canseco, even though there's no actual indication of that.

And that's the point.

Because again, nobody is going to be suing Jose Canseco. And I reckon Canseco knew this too when he wrote the book.

Who won't like it?

2005-02-25T17:35:00.000-08:00

A recurring refrain from lefty critics of spreading democracy is to raise the point that if this or that country is democratized we might not like the government the people there choose. Most arguments I've seen to this effect are largely self-nullifying or straw-men or both.

The way you can tell this type of argument is self-nullifying is that the critic will make a claim such as "If they have democracy, they might elect a government that X" and X will be something truly horrible, like dictatorship, oppressing its own people, etc. The reason this is self-nullifying is that such activity is not commonly a good way to win votes and so to postulate a democratically-elected government doing them as a significant-probability event is dubious at best. (At worst it is a sweeping claim that the people of the country in question are deeply masochistic.)

Now, that doesn't mean it never happens that a government comes to power by, or with the aid of, something resembling an election and then does bad things. Lefties have their examples at the ready and so do I. But if a government comes to power at the ballot box and then does become a dictatorship, oppresses people, etc., and stays there - for example, by cancelling elections (and how else?) - well then it's not actually democracy anymore, is it? "Democracy" connotes more than one election, one time; in our parlance I'd argue it actually connotes constitutional democratic republicanism. So even granting this possibility, it transforms the point "X might happen" into a criticism of failing to stick with democracy rather than a criticism of spreading democracy per se.

More commonly, though, the criticism is simply a straw-man. The critique proceeds by setting up a list of things that an elected government might do that "we won't like", and then calls this a contradiction. But so what if we "don't like" what the elected government does? Well (says the critic), Bush might respond by doing such and such.

But it's not Bush who is raising these horror stories. Quite the contrary: typically the people who do the most complaining about what newly-democratized governments "might" do (and, then, do) are the spreading-democracy critics themselves, most of them on the left.

There was no "contradiction", for example, in the fact that Bush supported democracy in Ukraine and then the democratically-elected government of Ukraine pulled out of the Iraq coalition, an act I'm sure we "didn't like". Bush had no apparent problem supporting Yuschenko nevertheless.

Which really just leaves only lefty critics whining about the fact that democracies in foreign lands might not serve our interests - an ironic position for them to take given their professed disdain for "imperialism", and all.

Sometimes I just don't get Glenn

2005-02-24T18:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I just can't envision what it must be like to be Glenn Reynolds. The terse posts and linking I get, and value. But how terse is he? He just stated that

I'VE MEANT FOR SOME TIME to do a post on why blogging is like techno, with a mixture of rearranged samples and original riffs, [...]

And SOME TIME links back to a post from almost 2 months ago when he first mentioned the idea that he "may" post about it some time.

Now here's the thing: Why didn't he just do it? Here, I'll write the post in its entirety for him:

BLOGGING IS LIKE techno, with a mixture of rearranged samples and original riffs.

posted at 09:03 PM by Glenn Reynolds

Would that have been so difficult? Did he think it required some sort of master's thesis, kept putting it off, "oh it will require so much research"? I mean the thesis "blogging is like techno" is pretty much self-contained and needs little elaboration. To hear it is to understand it and nod your head (as long as you know what techno is), and move on. Big deal.

So, the single sentence above would have sufficed. Therefore, what's he saying? That even that was too long for him? ;-)

Why couldn't he have been smarter?

2005-02-24T16:03:00.000-08:00

The most annoying thing about the Ward Churchill controversy has got to be the fact that the man is such a moron. If anything he said or wrote betrayed even a hint of intelligence it might be interesting to spend the time required to wade through his writings and statements and rip them to shreds, but he's such an easy target that it's just not worth it. From everything I've read and heard it seems that he's really just a raving idiot, the kind of hanger-on you'll see on the streets of many college towns talking to themselves, the only difference being that he gets a paycheck and speaking trips for the schtick.

His stupidity and related factors also make him a rather unsuitable test case for a huge First Amendment battle. I actually wish that he were smarter and at least had some integrity so that a true First Amendment/academic freedom battle could be waged - I'd even be on his side - but as it happens it seems plausible that he could be fired for simple misrepresentation and fraud, thus even if that happens, it would resolve nothing from the First Amendment/academic freedom standpoint.

Can't see the forest for the Bush

2005-02-23T15:44:00.000-08:00

Heartening as it is to see the occasional European headline such as Could George W. Bush Be Right?, I can't help feeling a bit uneasy about this way of looking at things. To some extent it just misses the point; it's not about Bush! Who the hell cares about Bush?

Part of my attitude is purely tactical. "Bush was right" is a hard sell. If Europeans can't move past Bush to look at the underlying policy, we'll never get anywhere. Editorials like this aside, we don't stand a chance of convincing a majority of Europeans that "Bush is right".

But I'd settle for convincing them the policy is right. The policy that says, for example, that Iraqis have spoken and endorsed transition to democracy, and it would be in all of our interest to protect and nurture that policy. Germany and France with their lip-service to caring so much about democracy and "human rights" would, you'd think, be the first on board to send peacekeeping forces or otherwise contribute to the stabilization of a nascent democracy. Yet they do not and there is no prospect of their doing so. Why is that?

Well, I have my opinions. But surely a contributing factor is that they are loathe to appear to have capitulated to a "Bush was right" position. So why force them to?

This is bigger than George W. Bush. Let's stipulate here and now that Bush is a moron and anytime and anything on which he is "right" is pure dumb luck on his part, not worthy of crediting. Now then, that having been stipulated, let's look at the reality again, leaving "Bush" out of the equation: Iraq is a nascent democratic republic whose government is under threat from fascists who desire to assume control. We're trying to prevent that. You in or out, Euros?

Forget about Bush for God's sake. Please.

Where is the "real" War On Terror? I gotta know

2005-02-23T11:06:00.000-08:00

Having been a supporter of the Iraq invasion, by definition it is my assertion that all anti-war arguments were and are incorrect. Having said that, some are stupider than others, and a few are perfectly rational (even if, in the end, wrong). There is only one anti-war argument, however, that is to this day utterly incomprehensible.

I don't mean to say simply that it is stupid. It is that, but that's the least of its problems. The worse aspect of this argument by far is that it literally makes no sense and cannot be understood by a thinking person.

The argument, one that still astoundingly pops up from time to time, and is even voiced by Intelligence Professionals (Clarke &c.), goes like this:

The invasion of Iraq is a "distraction" that has "distracted" us from fighting the War On Terror.

For this argument to make any sense whatsoever, one has to envision a chain of logic that, seemingly, has to go something like:

The War On Terror, whatever else it is, is a war against a group of people none of whom (by definition?) are in or associated with Iraq in any way. Being in or associated with Iraq exempts a person from being a valid target in the War On Terror, apparently, which is necessarily and by definition a War against a group of people all of whom are non-Iraqi (and not in Iraq at any time). This group is usually referred to by the name "Al Qaeda". It is axiomatic - apparently this was tacitly decided by all of us on 9/12/2001 - that "Al Qaeda" has had and continues to have "nothing to do with" Iraq or any subset of Iraq. Thus, anyone within the boundaries of Iraq is an "invalid" target in the War On Terror.
By contrast to Iraq, there's a "real" location of the War On Terror out there somewhere. Wherever it is, supposedly it's where "Al Qaeda" is, all or at least the majority of them, and it's not Iraq. (We know this for a fact somehow.)
By being in Iraq, our armed forces are (therefore) prevented from being in that "real" War On Terror's location, fighting the War On Terror, against "Al Qaeda", as (presumably) they would otherwise have done.
The person making this argument, because he considers this all a bad thing, must necessarily be saying he is sincerely interested in fighting this War On Terror against "Al Qaeda".
Except, more than anything else he doesn't want to fight "Al Qaeda" within the boundaries of Iraq. That is the all-pervading principle guiding all else: fight "Al Qaeda" wherever they are, unless they're in Iraq.

Or perhaps, traveling to within the borders of Iraq by definition cleanses you of the "Al Qaeda" label?

Whatever the case, Zarqawi is in Iraq: yet he apparently "doesn't count" as part of the War On Terror against "Al Qaeda". Indeed, even the terror group operating inside of Iraq and calling itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq", paradoxically, doesn't count as part of the War On Terror against "Al Qaeda". No matter how many "Al Qaeda"-associated people travel to Iraq to fight US forces there, no matter how many communiques from "Al Qaeda" leaders emphasizing the importance of combating US forces in Iraq, no matter how many "Al Qaeda" associates we encounter, fight, kill or round up there (in Iraq), our military's presence in Iraq nevertheless represents a "distraction" from the War On Terror.

Against "Al Qaeda".

Try as I might, I simply cannot make heads or tails of this Mobius strip of an argument. It appears to be oxymoronic to the point of self-parody. I can't imagine any thinking person could sincerely take this argument seriously. Yet many people - not all of whom I believe to be idiots - cling to it like a warm blanket.

If I try to take the above-outlined argument seriously, as an argument for why our military was wrong to have invaded and now ought to exit Iraq, I'm forced to conclude that even if we bought this argument and followed its advice and exited Iraq and apologized, we'd immediately have to re-invade Iraq anyway. After all, we all agree we sincerely want to fight the War On Terror, which is against "Al Qaeda", one faction of which is in Iraq. So the argument is, if nothing else, self-cancelling.

But this conclusion seems to be somehow excluded by a sort of mystical magical belief that Iraq is somehow metaphysically insulated from "Al Qaeda" - sort of an "Al Qaeda free zone" by fiat the way Berkeley is nuke-free. People who pretend to be interested in fighting "Al Qaeda" and yet decry our presence in Iraq, which contains many people who are in "Al Qaeda", deserve to suffer from a heavy bout of cognitive dissonance, yet there are no outward signs of it. I can only conclude that they believe that any "Al Qaeda" member who crosses into Iraq instantaneously loses their "Al Qaeda" status.

The closest thing to a "defense" of the preceding "logic" you will see is the assertion that, had we not invaded Iraq, "Al Qaeda" wouldn't be there in any capacity. Although even that is incorrect, let us pretend it's not and stipulate to it for the sake of argument. It doesn't matter. By the purported criteria of the person who makes this "distraction" argument, he wants to fight "Al Qaeda". (That - and that alone - is the War On Terror, you see.) So the only thing that is relevant is where they are now. If they are in Iraq now, that's a good place for our military to be (by the criteria which prefers to fight the War On Terror against "Al Qaeda").

But there's often a seeming rebuttal to that too, which is that Iraq's a relatively bad place to be fighting "Al Qaeda", one we ought not to have chosen - thus by implication that there is a better place to be fighting "Al Qaeda" somewhere out there. (Or maybe the "Al Qaeda" people admitted to be in Iraq are, like, not the genuine article or something - like, second-class "Al Qaeda" and the critic is saying he really really wants to get the upper echelon.) Very well then, but this goes back to the idea that there is a "real" location of the War On Terror out there somewhere, tragically unpopulated by our military, apparently teeming with "Al Qaeda" members just waiting to fight us, fidgeting and tapping their toes and looking at their watches, wondering when the US military will arrive to fight them.

So here's my question:

Where the hell is it?

Where exactly is the War On Terror located?

Where, to fight the "real" War On Terror, would all those members of our military be today if they were not in Iraq?

I'd really like to know.

My gut says that the people who spout "distraction" don't actually know. It often seems as if they vaguely envision our Iraq forces having instead poured into the middle of Afghanistan somewhere and raising Quonset huts by the hundreds. And then doing what? Aimlessly, perpetually "hunting" for Bin Laden in concentric grid patterns? in the wilderness of Afghanistan? Whether or not Bin Laden is actually anywhere near there? Ok, or if not Afghanistan, where then?

Seriously, I'd really like to know: Where's the War On Terror?

Give them an out

2005-02-22T12:52:00.000-08:00

At first I was resistant to the idea proposed here (HT Marginal Revolution), almost to the point of being ready to assert that it's a bad one. But I changed my mind. It's a good one.

The idea is to require national security analysts to rate their confidence in their sources and conclusions in terms of a "probability". We hear weathermen say there's a "60 percent chance" of rain, perhaps intelligence could come up with similar "chance of WMD".

At least, it wouldn't be any more meaningless.

Could such a thing be implemented? Well, those arguing in its favor have an advantage, in that whatever side of the aisle you're on, you can come up with examples where intelligence was wrong on an issue dear to your heart, and where conceivably this probability idea might have helped. On the flip side, the proposal has the disadvantage of being up against inevitable resistance from the institution in question: Why would government employees - or anyone, for that matter - want to go on the record with what in many instances will have been quantifiable predictions if they can at all help it?

As far as whether it should happen, I too have my pet issue on which I believe it would help: Iraq-Al Qaeda connections. For three years many in intelligence have, either publicly or in leak-form, issued the most bizarre of sweeping denials about Iraq and Al Qaeda. We are told with a straight face that "no connection" exists or has ever existed by people like Richard Clarke who simultaneously defend past claims predicated on precisely the opposite. We are told that "no evidence" exists for there being a connection, which in the face of evidence such as appears here (and yes, it is evidence: one can credibly argue how strong or weak a given piece of that evidence is, but not that there's "no evidence"!) appears to be either the most obstinate, tone-deaf type of denial or a deliberate conflation of "evidence" and "proof".

We are even sold this cartoon fairy-tale roleplaying-game version of humanity as guides Middle East affairs, in which there are two distinct groups of people - Secular people and Religious people - and supposedly some sort of, as far as I can tell, metaphysical law prevents these disjoint groups from interacting or communicating with each other in the service of common goals.

That adults would profess to believe such utter nonsense cries out for an explanation. What is it?

Well, I can't claim to know. I do know however that many of the denials appear to be, on inspection, more than anything else like the sort of careful hedging you'd expect of a scientist testifying in a courtroom: It's not established that Hussein had connections to Al Qaeda, therefore everyone is hestitant to claim as much. They want to remain skeptical. Thus until Proof surfaces, no one will claim there's a connection. The hyperbole about "no evidence" and "no connection" would then follow as a sort of protesting-too-much combined with CYA: nobody would like to admit they were wrong in this skeptical, Religious-Secular-Divide analysis.

Now, innocent-until-proven-guilty is all well and good for a jury in a criminal trial, but it's entirely inappropriate for national security analyses. From the probabilistic point of view, what was going on clearly was that many people who would put the probability of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties at .3 or .4 or even .6 were reluctant to put their butts on the line and say Yes there are ties or even allow the possibility. (One can only speculate as to whether this reluctance was compounded by opposition to policies that would surely follow from institutional identification of ties.)

The benefits of the probability-idea are clear then: it gives those people an "out". They don't have to say Yes there are or could be ties, they can just put the probability at whatever makes them feel comfortable. Even if the average intelligence view were that the probability of ties was .2 or .3, this would at least avoid the current absurd situation wherein the agreed-upon conventional wisdom is to categorically intone that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had "nothing to do with" one another.

Which is patently false, by the way.

Reality 2

2005-02-22T10:48:00.000-08:00

(Update to this)

Having now read it in its entirety, I see that another aspect of the Chait piece is worth mentioning. You'll recall, this was a piece designed to show that "liberalism" is more empiricist and pragmatic than conservatism. But let's look at how this "pragmatism" works in practice: by Chait's own admission, "economic liberalism" proceeds from beliefs.

The point is that liberalism has no justification other than the belief that liberal policies produce beneficial outcomes.

Chait's entire case for the "pragmatism" inherent in the policies he calls liberal, apparently, is to say that if "evidence" were to surface that "proved beyond a doubt" that his favored policies (which are constructed how? Well, a hint is that Chait approvingly cites FDR's "experimentation") do not produce beneficial outcomes, then "liberals" would alter their position.

This is an awfully strange form of "pragmatism":

We believe X is beneficial. We need not have evidence that X is beneficial. We insist upon implementing X solely based on our evidence-free belief that it is beneficial. It's up to you to prove beyond a doubt that it is not. Unless and until you do, X will remain in place. If you resist us, you must be ideologues. Of course, if you did prove beyond a doubt that X were not beneficial (we get to judge that), we promise we'd change our minds.

After all, we're pragmatic.

Furthermore, the promise - the thought experiment - upon which Chait hangs his pragmatism may be an empty one. As noted previously, the way Chait frames his "liberal precepts", they are utterly unfalsifiable: It's not possible even in principle that "evidence" could exist to "prove beyond a doubt" that regulations don't produce "undue" distortions or that tax levels don't "barely" affect economic incentives. Evidence could exist to show that the effect of liberal policies is A or B or C, but whether A, B, or C are deemed "undue" or "barely" is in the eye of the beholder. And since liberals (being so "pragmatic") are the ones judging the success or failure of their own policies here - the task certainly cannot be left to those "ideological" conservatives! - they get to define all those terms themselves.

The effective result is a perennial, unassailable, unfalsifiable diagnosis of unmitigated Success for each and every one of their policies (case in point: the 40+ year War On Poverty), until something like an electoral defeat forces them to change their position.

Chait cites Clinton's embrace of welfare reform as an example for his view. It is not. It is an example for mine. It is no coincidence that welfare reform took place after 1994, when Republicans gained Congress, and not before. Oddly, Chait fails to note this fact. One would walk away from his piece thinking that welfare reform was an idea that popped into Bill Clinton's head rather than one that was forced upon him by electoral realities.

Some may dispute my characterization of liberal beliefs as not proceeding from evidence. I imagine Chait would respond by saying that liberals do too formulate their beliefs regarding policy prescriptions based on evidence. To that I could only respond by saying that I could name any number of policies generally proposed and advocated by liberals, many of them stemming from core beliefs, for which nobody has constructed any sort of coherent (i.e. more than hand-wavy) "empirical" argument whatsoever - indeed, for many of them no such argument can possibly exist. On this list I'd place, among other things,

extending marriage rights to same-sex couples
allowing unrestricted abortions prior to the 3rd trimester
employing environmental protections with the aim of preventing species from going extinct at any cost
insisting that all public places be made handicap-friendly
affirmative action
recycling
constructing lanes on highways to be dedicated for "carpools" only (High Occupancy Vehicle lanes)

I list these not because I think they're all bad. (Or good.) I list them as examples of liberal policies that have nothing whatsoever to do with empiricism, pragmatism, or any of that rot. Liberals advocate these policies because they "believe" they are right and proper. They have no objective, quantifiable argument for these beliefs. It is not as if they have set down objective criteria for measuring merits and demerits of any of these policies, performed a sober disinterested cost-benefit analysis, and in this way discovered their "liberal" viewpoint. These views stem from prior beliefs of theirs that are immune to rebuttal or "disproof". Thus, there would be no possible way, even in principle, for me to "prove them wrong" on any of these beliefs.

A Chait defender might say that he was only addressing specifically "economic" liberal policies in his piece. Well, fine, but the final example above, for example, is germane here. The ostensible reason for HOV lanes, as I understand it, is that they will induce fewer people to drive in solo cars, leading to at least some benefits to society as measured by reduced traffic and reduced pollution. At least, this is how liberals, in practice, actually justify the existence of HOV lanes. And these claims, for the merits of HOV lanes, are economic in nature - lessened traffic and better air are tangible quality-of-life benefits that could, at least in principle, be measured economically.

But nobody, as far as I know, has actually made any sort of convincing cost-benefit analysis (and such analysis is, theoretically, possible in this case) demonstrating that HOV lanes actually benefit society in this way more than they harm society (in increased traffic, and increased smog caused by more idling in traffic) by restricting other drivers' access to that extra lane. As far as I can tell people long ago decided that carpool lanes were Good and Will Help Traffic And Smog; this belief stuck, it is immune to rebuttal, and there is no dislodging it.

But just try telling any of that to a "liberal", that there's no actual proof that carpool lanes perform as claimed. (Or that recycling programs don't pay off. Or that all things considered blacks might be better off without affirmative action.)

Good luck.

As I said, and as Chait admits, "liberal" policies are founded upon beliefs; the presumption (theirs) is that their beliefs are correct. (As far as I can tell this presumption stems from their good intentions and high self-regard.) To combat their policies, then, you are required to prove them wrong about the benefits of those policies ("beyond a doubt"). And they get to formulate the criteria by which their policies are measured and judged.

If you protest at any step of the game, you're just not being "pragmatic", like they are; you're an "ideologue" who can be dismissed (unlike them).

All of which is a load of bullshit.

I want to emphasize that I do not disagree with Chait's entire thesis however. It is certainly true that conservatism has its priors - that it is founded upon some principles, among them a preference for a restricted dependence on government solutions to problems. My only point here is that the notion that "liberalism" doesn't also have biases and priors of its own, is a silly conceit. Of course it does.

As seen above, "liberalism" in practice has a built-in, prior bias towards Government Solutions. We believe sans evidence that Government Solution X will be beneficial therefore let's implement X unless/until evidence "proves beyond a doubt" that it's not has such a laughably transparent built-in bias toward government intervention and government expansion that it would take a real true-blue believer not to see it, and to wave his hands and call it "pragmatism".

Finally I want to note that I don't rebut Chait because I think the "pragmatist" hat is so enviable that I want to rob liberals of it and wear it for myself. I find the current fetish for "reality-based", "pragmatic", "empirical" thinking more than a bit odd. As I said before, an objective "pragmatic" case for free speech would be awfully hard to construct. A "pragmatic" case for the American Revolution probably did not exist.

And "liberals" should not be so quick to embrace this "pragmatic" view of themselves either. There are any number of elements of the left-liberal canon that are perfectly salutary, and yet had nothing to do with "pragmatism".

Civil rights, for example. A "pragmatist" in the 1950s might well have had a far easier time constructing a case for retaining the status quo than for taking steps for equal rights and to ensure universal franchise. If Chait takes his own arguments here seriously he'd have been on the other side of them.

Which, in the end, is perhaps no surprise, given that the left-center and the Democratic Party are today the conservative faction of the American political spectrum. Whatever else it is, the notion that Chait's and other liberals' preferred policies ought to remain in place unless/until it is "proved beyond a doubt" that they are harmful is an extremely conservative one.

It has always been conservatives who have claimed the mantle of "absence of ideology" for their philosophy, and perhaps what's really going on here is that we're just seeing that conservative lefties like Chait, and like-minded, are no exception.

UPDATE: Will Wilkinson (HT Jane Galt) tackles the Chait piece as well. Emphasis on self-refuting aspects. Naturally, I assert that my two-part opus rebuttal was better. However, Wilkinson's was more concise and a better read. I couldn't read all the way through mine.

Calculations

2005-02-18T20:58:00.000-08:00

New Sisyphus relates an account of an "insurgent" captured on videotape as he prepares to explode a booby-trapped ambulance at a US checkpoint. Meanwhile, today's news is full of stories of bombings and rocket attacks, in mosques and near police stations, as Shiites approach a holy day of theirs.

New Sisyphus notes the war crime, as are all of these attacks, to the point where the observation becomes numbing and jejune. But that brings to mind a question. For two years, the anti-war faction's response to each and every such event - indeed, to every violent event in Iraq - has been to castigate the Bush administration for poor "planning". These attacks, we are told, occur because Bush has been so incompetent. A corollary is that had Bush done other things, or had someone else been in charge (to choose to do other things), why then, these attacks would not have taken place - or at least, the number of attacks would have been greatly quelled.

It all seems to have to do with the Bush administration having had a bad "plan". And there are plenty of bloggers on the right who join in the bad-plan chorus as well.

Here's what I wonder: What "plan", exactly, would have staved off the ambulance attack described above? What "plan" do the Bush critics have in mind that has even a marginal chance of preventing willing jihadis - you know, people who want to do this stuff - from exploding bombs in public places?

Often when Bush critics talk about Iraq one gets the impression that they think it's all just one big physics experiment or engineering project. You know - everything can be predicted by ironclad Laws Of Humanity, therefore you just take out your slide rule, solve some equations, plug in the numbers, get answers A B C, and implement A B C as your "plan", and because you've "calculated" everything properly (as opposed to "miscalculated" - another common charge against Bush), everything shall succeed.

Wars can be "planned" like this, to the left. You can "calculate" how to not have willing and able jihadis plot against you.

This raises the question: Do lefties understand that in wars (unlike in physics experiments), there are, like, adversaries who are trying to thwart what you are doing?

You know, other people, actively engaged in working contrary to your wishes? People with free wills who don't follow predictable Newtonian paths?

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure an argument could be made that "more troops" could do the trick, and that argument is not wildly insane. If the US would pour enough troops into Iraq so that a team of 100 was standing on every street corner and/or every square quarter-mile (whichever is smaller), with 24 hour camera surveillance covering every square inch, with orders to fire on all moving targets - or if the place were simply nuked dead, for that matter - then yes, I suspect that the number of Sunni-jihadi suicide attacks could be lessened.

But under any realistic scenario we cannot do that. Or anything approaching that. Nor would we want to if we could. We have some 130-150k troops there now. At best we could feasibly double that number. There is no realistic prospect of more than doubling that number. The "reality-based community", surely, understands that and factors it in.

But would having double the number of troops in Iraq have prevented that ambulance attack? the holy day mosque attacks?

Again, I know it's difficult, but you have to remember that people are working against us here. They don't want us to succeed and are trying to prevent us from succeeding. You can't "calculate" how to make them stop.

It's war, not physics class.

Fake "liberalism" and Reality-based lunacy

2005-02-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

There's a morbid fascination to be had in watching self-proclaimed "liberals" discuss what they think characterizes and underpins "liberalism" with no hint of acknowledgment or recognition from anyone involved that nothing any of them speaks about is recognizably, well, liberal.

Matthew Yglesias really seems to want to say that what he, and they (meaning, he thinks, "liberals") are all about is "pragmatic problem-solving". "Liberalism", apparently, is no more and no less than technocratic empiricist consequentialism (or something). To his credit, he recognizes a difficulty in "specify[ing] what the problems to be solved are". Unfortunately he treats that as something like a mere loophole, a "quibble". The truth is that "what the problems to be solved are" is actually a major component of any political dispute. Disagreement over what are admissible "problems to be solved" and what are not generates a major fault line in any political spectrum. Trouble understanding this, however, is common on the left; contributing to their arrogance: Here they come marching in, all ready to solve the "problem" they've identified (that you have endangered lizards on your lawn, etc.), without comprehending that anyone could disagree on whether it actually is one in the first place.

But the real irritant is that, flawed or not, there's nothing "liberal" about the attitude Yglesias espouses. What Yglesias is speaking about is something like a preference for a powerful, benevolent meritocratic oligarchy. It's fine and dandy to have this political preference. Many do (often, coincidentally, folks who perceive themselves to be part of the meritocracy).

It's just not liberalism.

As an example, imagine trying to "empirically", "consequentially" make a case for free speech. Jefferson himself would have had trouble passing Yglesias's test of "liberalism".

The Jonathan Chait piece that Yglesias responds to is even less sober. Chait has convinced himself that "liberals" like him are "deeply pragmatic" -

more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition

For digestive reasons I had to stop reading soon afterward, but I assume it goes on in this vein and that Chait expends a lot of effort and words trying to prove that he actually believes what he is saying and that we should too. (Yes, indeed, liberals are oh so much more open to change.)

Accurate or not, it's difficult to tell whether this fetish for "reality-based" self-mythologizing currently voiced by the left has always been there or has only popped up recently. In any event, if conservatives let them get away with this posturing, shame on them. In that spirit, let's look a bit closer at Chait's piece.

He sets up a thought experiment: Imagine that God appeared on Earth to settle "once and for all, our disputes over economic policy." Chait goes on to assert that, in the event that God were to affirm the purported empirical consequences of conservative principles, then "liberals" would abandon theirs; but if God were to affirm, instead, "liberal" principles, conservatives would stick to their guns. From this he concludes that "liberals" are the pragmatic ones.

There is something that is very telling about Chait's experiment and that is that it is impossible even under his own terms. In fact it exposes the whole "reality-based" mythology as the lie that it is. This is a rather amazing property of a piece that claims to be demonstrating the opposite, so it's important to understand why. Thus let's look closer at the "empirical claims", of conservatives and liberals resp., that Chait imagines God "settling once and for all":

Conservative claims

Cutting taxes produces such great economic growth that even the poor benefit.
Privatizing or eliminating social programs like Medicare and Social Security will cause the elderly to save more money and enjoy higher living standards.
Slashing regulations, by eliminating unintended side effects, actually does a better job helping those whom the regulations were intended to help than the regulations themselves.

Liberal "precepts"

Current tax levels barely affect economic incentives
social programs provide tremendous economic security at modest cost to growth
most regulations achieve their intended effects without producing undue distortions

There is something very curious about these respective lists, if you think about them:

The items on the first list are inherently objective and measurable: in principle, they can be tested (at least, by God) and verified as either true or false. The items on the second list are not: they are inherently subjective. Perhaps Chait's choice of the word "precept" - "rule or principle prescribing a particular course of action or conduct" - was a sort of Freudian slip, his subconscious recognizing this defect. Do empiricists "prescribe"?

To put it another way: For his "conservative claims" Chait has listed a bunch of objective propositions. For his "liberal precepts" he has listed a bunch of value judgments!

The conservative claims are all empirically testable; at least, surely God, with access to many-universes, could examine the quantative answers to:

Whether cutting taxes causes the poor to benefit, or rather how much the poor benefit (or not) if taxes are cut by X, by Y, by Z, etc. Just define a criteria for who's "poor", for what their "quality of life" is (income + goods or something more complicated), and then examine all the other universes where taxes were cut by those amounts, and check the "quality of life" of the "poor" in those universes. You'd get a graph: Quality-of-life-of-poor vs. amount-of-cut-taxes, and you'd have your answer. (Indeed, you'd probably be able to see an Optimal Tax System... but oh wait, I'm not an empiricist, so I wouldn't acknowledge that.)
Similarly, whether "the elderly" (i) save more money and (ii) have higher living standards under this or that type of privatization is empirically testable by God in the exactly analogous way.
Whether "slashing regulations" does a "better job" "helping" people requires defining all those terms, but nevertheless, it's doable.

By contrast, none of the "liberal precepts" are testable, not even in principle.

How is one - how is God, even - to determine whether economic incentives have been "barely" affected by tax levels? What is "barely"? This is obviously begging the question. It is a subjective value judgment. What you might consider "barely", I might consider significant! That Chait doesn't see this is quite telling. His "precept", here, despite all his pretenses to empiricism, is utterly unfalsifiable. Of course taxes "barely" affect economic incentives if he gets to define "barely"! What is "barely"? Everything! That he envisions God somehow "affirming" this value judgment merely reveals that he is blind to his own subjectivity. His thought experiment becomes circular: God has "affirmed" that liberal "precepts", subjective value judgments and all, are somehow correct.
Similarly, whether "social programs" (at what level? what kind? Chait doesn't say) provide economic security at a "modest" cost to economic growth depends on what "modest" is (not to mention what those social programs are), does it not? Is 1% suppression of GDP "modest"? .5%? .1%?
And what constitutes "most" regulations? What distortions count as "undue"? Chait doesn't say. Yet, again, his thought experiment has God "affirming" his "liberal" view, that (apparently) whatever distortions are caused by "most" regulations (whatever "most" means) are not undue. Conservatives in this thought experiment who might think them undue have God to deal with: he says they aren't! So there!

Is this "empirical"? Despite all of Chait's pretenses, it is anything but. In a piece attempting to argue for the empiricist leanings of "liberalism", the author apparently had trouble avoiding loading his own examples of "liberalism"'s supposedly empirical claims with a bunch of subjective baggage. Chait's list of "liberal precepts" are all sweeping value judgments. "Social programs", whatever they are, are good and even if they affect the economy that's okay. Ditto taxes. Ditto regulations.

Laughably, Chait imagines God coming down and "affirming" this subjective gobbledygook. This is not even possible in principle. Chait may as well have God come down and "affirm" that Brown Is The Best Color, and then accuse anyone who might not like brown so much of being anti-empiricist.

Moreover, this gobbledygook explodes the whole "reality-based" myth. Look, defending this or that specific social program empirically, in some context, is perfectly imaginable; an empiricist could indeed make a case that such and such social program had more benefits than drawbacks, suitably defined.

But anyone who stands there and claims that "social programs", as a general rule, have more benefits than drawbacks (not even that - that their drawbacks are merely "modest"), and then has the gumption to claim to be an "empiricist" and a "pragmatist", needs to have a bucket of ice cold water dumped over their head. A real empiricist might need to examine, y'know, the details?

Not so, Chait. Chait, the "empirical" "liberal", is perfectly comfortable standing there and proclaiming "social programs" - all of them, any social program imaginable, apparently - to be empirically justified. He can even imagine God "affirming" this "empirical" claim.

But it's not empirical at all. Chait was right the first time: it's a precept. "Social programs are good and whatever economic suppression that might result, is 'modest'" may be a legitimate political viewpoint, and it is a view held by (regrettably) many intelligent people, but "empirical" it ain't. A real empiricist might well conclude that, you know, some social programs are good while others aren't. And that social programs all have benefits and drawbacks, solve some problems while exacerbating others. And that balancing the two, selecting a preference, is difficult, messy, and inevitably implies a tradeoff, a choice... you know, a value judgment.

Chait's article, and to a lesser extent Yglesias's post, demonstrates the folly of pretending that one can simply write value judgments out of politics. The pretenses of these "reality-based" meritocrats amount to little more than thinly-disguised attempts to define their beliefs as "reality" and honest disagreement as rejection of same. There's even something faintly Orwellian about the attempt.

But anyone who claims to be "reality-based" and goes on to pretend that their political views contain no subjective value judgments has by definition proven himself anything but.

What the childish "reality-based community" needs more than anything else, it seems to me, is a healthy dose of reality.

Multiple positions available

2005-02-17T15:45:00.000-08:00

Kevin Drum thinks that Brit Hume should offer a retraction, and others think he should resign, for some sort of mischaracterization he is said to have made of FDR's position vis-a-vis privatizing all or part or none, of Social Security.

I find the issue too boring to look into it deeper (we care what Saint FDR said about this issue why?). So let's just grant the critics the strongest grievance they make which seems to be that Brit Hume, a TV newscaster, misrepresented the words of a U.S. President in order to bolster a political position.

And let's say that they are correct to say that this constitutes sufficient grounds to demand resignation.

In that case, each and every member of the media who has written or said at any time that President Bush claimed Hussein's Iraq was an "imminent threat" in his 2003 State Of The Union Address is going to need to type up his or her resignation letter.

That's going to leave a lot of job openings.

Don't they know their Mao?

2005-02-17T10:18:00.000-08:00

Lefty bloggers have worked themselves up into a lather over a post from Hindrocket on Powerline characterizing Jimmy Carter as "on the other side". Matthew Yglesias read this and decided that Hindrocket was calling Carter a "traitor" and owed him an apology. In the penumbras of Hindrocket's post, Yglesias saw an allegation that Carter is "in league with the jihadist forces responsible for the murder of thousands of Americas" and a "jihadist agent".

That sounds pretty bad. Indeed, after reading this I was inclined to agree that Powerline's post was over the top, a case of sloppy rhetoric.

That is, until I read this followup. Hindrocket relates, among other things, the story of Carter's lobbying the USSR - during the Cold War - to implement policies he thought would help defeat Ronald Reagan. Is it really unfair to call that "on the other side"?

Then Deacon, in an update, helpfully clarifies the position:

Those who admire Carter will say that he's really a patriot who is trying to set the country he loves back on its proper course. Perhaps. But to me, this means that Carter may rejoin our side if we reinvent ourselves by becoming as ineffectual as we were during the harrowing years of his administration. It does not mean that he's on our side now.

Yglesias reads this and decides that what is being alleged is that there is an "undifferentiated left composed, apparently, of John Podest [sic], Mohammed Atta, John Kerry, Ayatollah Khomeini, Rob Reiner, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi". Yglesias says that Powerline is eliding the distinction between political disagreement and warfare. But "on the other side" could mean many things. Yglesias - bizarrely - seems to think it means, solely and necessarily, fighting on the other side, as in warfare.

It seems to me that it is, rather, Yglesias who is guilty of elision of an all-important distinction: that between enemy forces (or, combatants), and enemy allies.

Steven den Beste long ago wrote a piece on terrorism identifying their allies as one of the seven important groups of people in any conflict.

There are seven critical participants in a terrorist campaign (or in any war): our forces, our people, their forces, their people, our allies outside the zone of conflict, their allies, and the rest of the world.

[...]

Our allies are any groups or governments outside the zone of the conflict who might be feeding us material support or who might be able to bring diplomatic pressure to bear in our favor, and of course our opponents also have allies.

Surely even many on the left would admit that Jimmy Carter, arguably, has acted numerous times in such a way as to bring diplomatic pressure to bear in favor of America's enemies. In the story Powerline relates -

Carter expressed his concern about and opposition to Reagan's defense buildup. He boldly told Dobrynin that Moscow would be better off with someone else in the White House. If Reagan won, he warned, "There would not be a single agreement on arms control, especially on nuclear arms, as long as Reagan remained in power."

- we have Carter approaching our enemy, pitching a course of action to them in terms of what would make our enemy "better off", and showing "concern" that if the U.S. chose the wrong leader, it would increase its defenses (!), and our enemy would fail to induce us to sign arms-limitation agreements with them from its position of weakness.

Can lefties credibly dispute that Jimmy Carter does such things, or that this is typical of his diplomatic behavior? Hardly. Indeed, most of the time, lefties will not only acknowledge but defend such actions on the part of Jimmy Carter, calling them principled and insisting that he had only our best interests at heart; most lefties' only modification to the above account would probably be an insistence on putting the word "enemy" in quotes, for example. So, as with the "Liliputian ropes" charge, they are essentially objecting to the right making an observation whose substance they readily admit to if and when they can frame things in a more positive light. Yes, Jimmy Carter does these things, but it's so unkind of the right to notice, point it out, and call it what it is.

But using den Beste's terminology, Carter can by definition be identified among the allies (whether willful/intentional or not) of America's enemies - or, just as Powerline says, "on the other side". Contra Yglesias, this is not to say that Jimmy Carter is among their forces. Or among their people. All that it says - and this seems clear from Powerline's followup (and Deacon's update) - is that he sides with "the other side", i.e. diplomatically. He predictably and regularly provides diplomatic support and succor to the U.S.'s enemies and adopts positions implying and advocating U.S. weakness and inaction in the face of those enemies.

Can Matthew Yglesias not see a difference between this claim and charging him with fighting on the other side or even being actively "in league with" them? If not, then he's the one with the problem.

Ironically, it is often lefties more than anyone else who tend to pride themselves on being experts through and through on the ins and outs and groupings and methods of asymmetrical, guerrilla, and/or terror warfare. In other conversations, they know all about the difference between a combatant and a sympathizer, the active forces and "the people", propagandists and propagandees. They'll be glad to lecture you at great length on the impossibility of defeating guerrilla movements without winning the Hearts And Minds, on the need to splinter off moderate opinion leaders, on the need to refrain from overreacting to terror-attack provocations lest this loses you those Hearts And Minds - in particular, the necessity to bend over backwards to... drumroll... make a distinction between active terrorists, potential terrorist recruits among the populace, and common sympathizers. Even though they're all "the other side", some are worth fighting and some aren't, some ought to be killed and others bribed or even helped or given jobs. The enemy is not "undifferentiated" at all, and anyone who treats them as such, will lose.

Yes, lefties know all about this kind of stuff. Just ask them.

Yet when Powerline says that Jimmy Carter is "on the other side", Matthew Yglesias and others suddenly and magically forget how to make all of these previously all-important distinctions between their forces, their potential-recruits, their people, their symps, and... their diplomatic allies! All of a sudden they squint their eyes and see only a broad-brush charge that the other side consists of an "undifferentiated left", that Jimmy Carter = Zarqawi.

But who said it was "undifferentiated" in the first place? The only one saying that is Matthew Yglesias.

It seems to me that, if we are all now supposed to become experts on the many different strata and phyla and concentric circles and gradations and orders of magnitude that make up a terror movement and its support system, it ought to be perfectly acceptable to observe and identify those who might be (intentionally or unintentionally, with malice or not) acting as their allies in the den Beste sense. Just as lefties would (rightly) say I ought to bear in mind that for example not all Muslims are necessarily enemy forces or even on their side, lefties ought to acknowledge that not all Americans are necessarily on our side. If Jimmy Carter's public positions provide diplomatic support to their side then he is, ipso facto, "on the other side". This is not to say that he is secretly a jihadi, that he is a "jihadi agent" (in any sense other than unwitting and accidental), let alone that he actually sympathizes with the jihadi's goals in any real sense.

At its core it merely means that he is useful to them. Does Yglesias dispute this? The sticky thing here is that to do so he would have to actually overtly defend the wisdom and benefits of Carter's positions. Clearly it's easier to just cry that Nobody should call Jimmy Carter a traitor and let it rest there.

Mao writes about the Russian guerrilla warfare thusly:

The old men organized themselves into propaganda groups known as 'silver-haired units'; there was a suitable guerrilla activity for the middle-aged; the young men formed combat units, and there were even groups for the children. Among the leaders were determined Communists who carried on general political work among the people. These, although they opposed the doctrine of extreme guerrilla warfare, were quick to oppose those who condemned it.

Mao had no trouble seeing who was on which side, nor in differentiating amongst the different roles that could be played by the various actors. Or understanding that some people are more suited to fighting, while others might be more suited to "general political work among the people".

An observation that someone does the latter is not an accusation that someone does the former, let alone that the entire movement is "undifferentiated".

Have lefties forgotten their Mao?

Cool

2005-02-16T18:08:00.000-08:00

This is just plain cool.

There were Democrats and Republicans in this delegation, but you couldn't tell who was who by listening to their speeches.

More.

HT: New Sisyphus, as well as Mary Madigan on Michael Totten's and Dean Esmay's site (what's up with that?).

New Sisyphus wrote something that was music to my ears:

We in the Foreign Service are well aware of this fascinating fact; differences that appear so key, so fundamental at home--differences like race, religion, party affiliation, regional origin--all of them seem to disappear in the foreign context. One very quickly realizes that we are a people, with a hell of a lot more in common than you would think were you just to listen to the partisan bickering in Washington.

That's good to hear. Isn't it?

Followup and self-criticism

2005-02-16T17:24:00.000-08:00

Earlier I asserted about the (then) upcoming Iraq election that

The Iraq election will take place. There will be a turnout that is higher than for any American election in living memory. Sunni participation will be lower than their demographic presence. And so, folks on the Western "left" will insist that it is "illegitimate". Thus providing the crucial ideological cover for any post-election terror attacks that Sunnis may decide to engage in.

Let's look at how I did.

Take place. Yes, it did, didn't it? Isn't it funny to go back and look at quotes from people who had talked themselves into believing that it simply could not take place?

Turnout. This puts it at 58.3% percent. There seems to be some question as to whether the definition of "turnout" being used for Iraq's election is equivalent to ours; this post makes a fairly convincing case that it's as close as we're going to get, among other things explaining that although "turnout" is indeed defined differently, so is "registered voters": anyone with a food-ration card is a "registered voter" in Iraq, which (in my view) put Iraq's "registered voter" more into our "voting-age" category. So, the 58% figure will have to suffice.

Meanwhile, here is a chart showing turnouts for national elections from 1960 to 2000. The most recent national election listed there with above a 58% turnout was the 1968 election (60.8%). This is within the living memory of anyone in their mid-40s or older.

As is, of course, 2004 (60.7%).

So, I have to say that my assertion on this was, as some of my assertions tragically are going to be, incorrect. Turnout was comparable with some of the highest U.S. national turnouts in living memory, but was indeed smaller than a few of them.

Sunni participation lower. Sunnis are 20% of the population. I don't feel like seeking out hard numbers, it seems clear that the Sunni fraction of the electorate was below 20% (for example one Sunni province had turnout reported at 2%).

Of course, I hardly should get credit for making such an obvious prediction. I will follow-up with an assertion however: an election in which a 20% fraction largely boycotts, winning about 1/10th the seats they otherwise would have, is hardly some kind of travesty we need to wring our hands over. The people wringing their hands should be the Sunnis who for whatever foolish reason declined to participate in the creation of their own nation's constitution.

Western left declares it "illegitimate". My sense is that this complaint has been lodged, but it has been somewhat muted. I could go dig up that interview of Janeane Garofalo, or whoever, but I really don't see the point. Most lefty commentators have acknowledged that the election was better than expected. And if even some of the Sunnis themselves are starting to get on board, it will become awfully hard for the Western left to live down to my expectations and badmouth the results, even if they try.

In general, my predictions for the Iraq election were not spot-on. I am glad for it. The results of the Iraq election have - thus far - been better than I expected them to be.

Social Security: Bainbridge's questions

2005-02-16T13:31:00.000-08:00

I forget where I first saw a link to this post from Stephen Bainbridge asking "questions for my fellow conservatives" regarding Social Security. These "questions" illustrate my annoyance with the entire debate. There are three "questions" each of which is complex and contains several components (and hidden assumptions). Let's try to deal with them component by component, as well as identify any hidden assumptions.

Would we achieve significant actuarial improvements in the health of the Social Security system by (a) changing the method by which the benefit is calculated from being based on wages to one based on prices (see Tyler Cowen's post for details) and (b) increasing the retirement age?

Answer: I'm no economics expert, but I assume so, yes. For that matter we would achieve significant actuarial improvements in the health of the Social Security system by defaulting on all its future obligations (with zero outlays it would be in tiptop shape) or raising tax rates dramatically (the left's preferred solution, presumably). Obviously either of those would be more politically difficult than (a) and (b) above (though perhaps not a whole lot more...).

Hidden assumption: Oddly, the hidden assumption here is that Bush's reforms are targeted primarily or even exclusively at achieving "significant actuarial improvements in the health of the Social Security system" when by the administration's own admission they will not actually do that and (therefore) cannot even be intended to do so in the first place.

Social security was designed for an era in which most folks would live to receive benefits for months rather than years. Why not deal with that problem directly?

Answer: Why not indeed? That's a good idea too. Raise the retirement age, you say? Where do I sign? But this being a good idea doesn't render Bush's a bad one.

If we can achieve significant savings and ensure the health of the system with [(a) and (b)], is there a non-ideological reason for introducing private accounts?

Answer: Sure. For example, private accounts, as almost all agree (and even their opponents usually concede), would simply be a better deal for many, if not most of, the people who would take advantage of them. Is that an "ideological" reason, to give people a better deal? If so, call me an ideologue. Another reason is that currently SS benefits cannot be passed on in the event of premature death, whereas Bush's proposed accounts could be. That is a simple matter of fairness. Again, if that is "ideological", so be it. Is fairness "ideological"?

Having said that, why on earth is this an either-or proposition in the first place? Bainbridge is surely correct that adjusting the retirement age and fiddling with how benefits are indexed could result in bigger savings to Social Security's outlay obligations than what Bush proposes. This means that doing anything else, anything that results in lesser savings, can't have any merits other than "ideological"? This approaches a No X Till Y fallacy: because Bainbridge has identified a basket of changes that would reduce SS's obligations more than Bush's changes will (if at all), for some reason this is thought to constitute an argument against Bush's changes. It does not!

That leaves aside whether Bainbridge's (a) and (b) are even politically feasible. It's wise to be suspicious anytime people point to something politically unfeasible and say "But we should do that instead, therefore we can't do this." I quickly lose patience with that bait & switch game.

There is also a hidden assumption here which is that for some reason the only valid aspect of Social Security that anyone is allowed to address right now are its projected shortfalls. This seems to go along with the asinine There Is No Crisis "argument".

But what about the fact that it's simply a crappy deal for most people? What about the unfairness of not being able to pass on benefits to heirs, of some number of people paying into a system all their lives and getting diddly squat in return? Not allowed to address those, apparently. Off the table. Bizarre.

Even proponents of private accounts concede that the transition costs will require trillions of dollars of government borrowing. Do we conservatives really want revenge on FDR and the New Deal at that price?

Answer: Objection, your honor....

Hidden assumption: That this is all about "revenge on FDR and the New Deal". Get off it.

As Arnold Kling explains, the borrowing and "transition costs" that Bainbridge fears so much are there in our nation's future one way or the other. Bainbridge appears to prefer to keep them farther into the future. I wonder why?

Personally, speaking as a small government fiscal conservative kind of guy, I'd give up personal accounts if any money thereby saved was spent on deficit reduction or, better yet, an income tax rate cut.

Answer: Deficit reduction now is swell. An income tax rate cut now is swell. Let's note first of all however that neither of those would do a darn thing to address the structural and demographic problems inherent in Social Security that Bainbridge claims to be primarily so concerned about. Which is weird. Let's see if I understand, Bush's proposal is bad because it would not eliminate SS's actuarial problems, what Bainbridge wants to do instead is cut current income tax rates?

In fact the more you think about it the more nonsensical this becomes. Bainbridge speaks flippantly of money "saved". What money "saved"? The money "saved" by not adopting a proposal? Does this mean that if Bush proposes to spend a thousand trillion dollars on a time-travel research program, and then we don't do it, we've "saved" a thousand trillion dollars which we can then spend on tax cuts?

More relevant to Bush's proposal, however, is the fact that on the face of it Bainbridge is just saying he'd rather take current government revenues and use them to cut taxes and/or reduce the current deficit, than to transition to a partially-privatized Social Security program. He'd rather fix the problem of his taxes being too high and the deficit being too large, than fix the problems Bush's proposal would address such as that of Social Security being a horrible deal and which picks the pockets of anyone who dies before age 65. Well, bully for him, but that's just a policy preference, not the kind of objective sorting of priorities he'd apparently like us to think he's engaged in.

This also leaves him utterly open to his own line of attack. Watch: Since Bainbridge's preferred usage of this government revenue (that he thinks he's "saved" by saying No to Bush) would not do diddly squat to "achieve significant actuarial improvements in the health of the Social Security system", is there a "non-ideological reason" for doing them?

Am I to understand that "cut my taxes" is somehow non-ideological but "don't pilfer from people who die at age 64" is ideological?

Why aren't conservatives talking about other entitlement programs, such as Medicare, which reportedly is scheduled to go broke long before Social Security does?

Answer: Who says they aren't? I think I'm a conservative (in the U.S. sense). I'm happy to talk about Medicare. What of it?

Is this a sincere question? It's a non sequitur. So what if "conservatives" (all of them?) aren't "talking about" Medicare? That's an argument for... what? against... what? Nothing. There are a thousand and one problems that Bainbridge could identify and then assert conservatives aren't talking about. No matter how true that might be, it does not constitute an argument against Bush's proposal regarding Social Security.

Perhaps, indeed, "conservatives" (this is a misnomer in this debate as in so many others, of course) are wrong and foolhardy to focus on Social Security prior to addressing Medicare. But nevertheless, Bush's proposal regarding Social Security could be well worth adopting. The former is not an argument against the latter.

That all being said, I suppose it's worth noting that there is, most likely, a simple, obvious, practical reason why "conservatives" aren't "talking about" Medicare, which is that implementing policy changes to Medicare has been deemed even more politically difficult than implementing policy changes to Social Security. In a democracy, it is perfectly rational, indeed quite necessary, to address issues in roughly the order of increasing political difficulty rather than in some sort of objectively-measured actuarial criteria.

It's certainly good to hear that Stephen Bainbridge will be on the reform side if and when the issue of reforming Medicare is put on the table, however. Can we hold him to it?

Or will he look around for some other Y to point to as part of his fallacious No X Till Y game?

Overall, Bainbridge appears to buy into all the fallacies of the arch-conservatives on this issue, from There-Is-No-Crisis to No-X-Till-Y to The-only-problem-we're-allowed-to-address-is-the-shortfall. To this he's added one of his own, which is that one can't adopt a policy change if the "only" arguments in favor of it are "ideological".

Who made this rule? This is taking the (ordinarily healthy) small-c conservative distrust of ideology to absurd heights. Frankly, I'm not sure there are any arguments in favor of, say, free speech or the universal franchise, that aren't "ideological".

But what's even worse is that he does not play by his own rules. For the supposedly "ideological" (and therefore, invalid?) policy preference of giving people choice and allowing inheritance of benefits, he substitutes his own private preferences of deficit reduction and tax rate cuts, implicitly declaring his preferences non-"ideological" (and therefore, above reproach?). Moreover, he favors funding his policies with money he thinks will be "saved", when there is no such money. Indeed, he's awfully inconsistent on all fiscal matters: at first he acts as if clearing up Social Security's actuarial problems is not only the most important thing we can do but the only thing we can do, but then he turns around and is happy to spend some nonexistent "saved" money he thinks he's found on tax cuts, which would only make worse the problem he spent so much effort pretending to care about.

In the end, I am left with only one question in return: If Stephen Bainbridge doesn't even take his own arguments seriously, why should anyone else?

Sometimes the media is worse than worthless

2005-02-16T10:43:00.000-08:00

For many months the case of a woman named Terry Schiavo has been swimming at the periphery of my attention. Stories will surface from time to time in the news media. The controversy centers on a dispute between her husband and her parents over whether the medical care that has kept her alive in a certain state, for 15 years, ought to be withdrawn. I emphasize that I always felt as though I was reasonably aware of this controversy and understood in broad terms what it was about.

From the context and treatment of these stories, which are often presented as if they are part of the "right to die"/"death with dignity" euthanasia debate, any casual observer could be forgiven for thinking or assuming, as I did, that

Schiavo is brain-dead
she is in a coma
she is on "life-support"
she is in a "vegetative" state
she responds to no stimuli in any way that is observable

I was more than slightly shocked yesterday to learn via a series of posts from Dean Esmay that just possibly none of these things are true. A press release quotes her brother, who says

I have been able to talk to her, to listen to her struggle to speak, to watch her focus her eyes and smile and attempt to kiss her parents.

If this is even half true, and these videos do appear to confirm that general picture, I am quite simply amazed that there is even a debate. The case for withdrawing her feeding tube - allowing her to starve - becomes utterly indefensible, incomprehensible, monstrous even.

In all the media stories on the subject I got no inkling whatsoever that any of this was the case. It was always presented as if hers was a straight-up coma/vegetable case. Perhaps I did not do due diligence in seeking out more information about her.

But one must wonder why this sort of information was not more readily and directly available in news stories on the case? Without caring one iota about the freakshow that is Michael Jackson, I could still rattle off a hundred and one details of his case. I know that he begged out of court recently after being hospitalized with the flu. I know that Corey Feldman has surfaced to voice concerns about the nature of their relationship when he was younger. I know that Jay Leno is on the witness list for the defense. Again, I honestly don't give a rat's ass about any of that rot. I don't want to know those things, yet I do.

But what I didn't know was that the person from whom Michael Schiavo has been arguing a feeding tube ought to be withheld, can smile and laugh.

Why is that?

The muscle of convenience

2005-02-11T16:56:00.000-08:00

For better or worse, the subject of the convenience-marriage between the "left" (a term I'm using under protest) and radical Islam has bubbled up once again.

What seemingly started this particular round off is a post by Nelson Ascher characterizing the left as out for subconscious revenge for 1989; with no more Communism to support, there is only the U.S.-behemoth to slay, the ongoing need for which has prompted a spontaneous consensus to emerge that attempts to tie down their archenemy with a million "Liliputian ropes" (an example of which might be, I'd assert, an ongoing attempt to construct a rule-set according to which certain, approved political violence is justified and may not be opposed).

Instapundit, following Roger L. Simon, circulated the post with their powerful link powers.

Ted at Crooked Timber cried foul; why, that's just so preposterous - insanity - that it's not even worth addressing substantively. It's typical right-wing slander, and worthy only of my sarcasm. And look, ho ho! What a moron this Ascher is, he said that the left's goal is "the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago", and guess what, if you take that literally, it's obviously false because how can the United States be "destroyed"! So there!

On the flip side, Wretchard at Belmont Club nodded approvingly at Ascher, but felt the need to add one important twist - something coincidentally noted by Demosophist - that converts the seeming slander into tragedy as well: the left thinks they can control the monster they're riding, and how wrong they are.

Interestingly, it's the latter two and not the former who can actually point to current events to bolster their case. When Crooked Timber's Ted challenges,

If Ascher or Reynolds know of left-wingers who are actively helping terrorists attack the United States, they should be telling the FBI and Interpol, not their blog audiences.

Ascher or Reynolds (or Wretchard or Demosophist) might well point out that Lynne Stewart has already been convicted, rendering such informing spurious; and Ward Churchill's meeting with Qaddafi is already a matter of public record.

But of course, Stewart and Churchill don't represent the left. (Nobody who does or says anything you might consider bad represents the left, you see.)

Besides, rising to this bait would be to unduly dignify Ted's straw man in the first place. Ascher's actual charge against the left was a bit more, dare I say it, nuanced than Ted's caricature of it:

...all our leftist friends’ bets are now on radical Islam. What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America’s superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc.

Ted apparently reads this and sees only a charge of "actively helping terrorists attack the United States". If the left is not "actively helping terrorists attack the United States", then they are innocent of everything Ascher says.

Right?

One might speculate Ted's lack of reading comprehension is traceable to the fact that he, like much the left, can't see anything wrong with those "million Liliputian ropes" in the first place. So how can Ascher be criticizing the left for that? Let's just substitute a different charge for the one Ascher actually makes: instead of "tying down America's superior strength" let's pretend Ascher is charging us with "actively helping terrorists attack". There, that's better. That would actually be a negative thing. But THAT'S SLANDER!!

Indeed, Crooked Timber commenter Matt Weiner defends the honor of the "ropes":

Does “a million Liliputian ropes” seems to [sic] refer to denying government officials the power to torture, or to lock up people without evidence, or to murder at will, or what?

The left can see no enemies among the Liliputians.

This presents us with an interesting, exasperating form of doublethink: Nelson Ascher is a liar and slanderer for charging the left with trying to tie down the United States, and besides, tying down the United States in all cases is good, only creepy murderous rightwingers think otherwise.

Getting back to the Wretchard/Demosophist theory:

If the Western Left is convinced of anything it is it can bend the Islamic world to its will once America has been cleared away. [wretchard]

...ultimately, when the time comes, they believe the Jihadists can be controlled. [Demosophist]

"Insane" or not, this is apparently the new observation to the right of the blogosphere. The "left" will scoff and say there is nothing to this. The right will say that for their sake, they had better be right.

In truth, they are both wrong. The left doesn't think that once they succeed, they can control Islam. Rather, the left doesn't actually believe they can, or even want to, "succeed" at the full tie-down in the first place. Ted at Crooked Timber is right that the U.S. can't be "destroyed" and that that's not what the left is trying to do.

Rather, it's more accurate to say that the left is in the destroying-the-U.S. racket. It's their sales pitch, their con. The voters (and the Euros...) are their marks. The left sells them a utopia vision and this requires making the U.S. seem untenable as it is, and causing them to long for "alternatives", even as all the while the left knows the U.S. is strong (and behaves as if it's invincible!).

As for Radical Islam, it's just the muscle of the moment. It's useful for pointing at as an extortion device: do this or they'll kill you, do that or they'll kill you. To this end, they try (sometimes comically) to piggyback all their goals onto that muscle: Radical Islam is totally in favor of Kyoto. Radical Islam totally wants us to sign the treaty banning land-mines. Radical Islam wants us to roll back Bush's tax cuts. (Hey, whatever works.)

The object of the con is to obtain and wield power. The left doesn't ever expect that Radical Islam will "destroy" their archenemy or even believe that it can. They merely hope that it will paralyze their archenemy with fear and self-doubt - so as to allow the left to take over the reins or at least achieve short-term tactical victories.

The only sense in which the left might be underestimating Radical Islam is the extent to which using Radical Islam as their "muscle" can and will cause pain and suffering to some number of individuals in the United States along the way.

But ultimately the left doesn't particularly care about that all that much; after all, you know what they say about omelettes and eggs.

Yawn 2

2005-02-10T18:14:00.000-08:00

Apropos of this, I'd been skimming the occasional blog-post mentioning somebody-Gannon for days now, and only just now after reading that LGF post did I realize that all these posts I'd seen (but not read) were not discussing the Oakland Raiders (ex-?) quarterback. (That would be Rich, not Jeff.)

No idea who the hell this "Jeff" is.

A Reminder

2005-02-10T17:07:00.000-08:00

Just remember, when you speak about money spent on something like the war in Iraq, you cannot call it money, you have to call it "treasure".

As everyone knows, money spent on, say, Medicare is not "treasure", it's just money. But when you spend it on war it becomes "treasure".

Don't ask me how this happens, I don't make the rules.

A link

2005-02-09T16:18:00.000-08:00

All I want to say here is that this Donald Sensing post characterizing different types of Iraq-war opposition is well worth reading.

Why Steroids Matter

2005-02-09T14:22:00.000-08:00

Only Baseball Matters is mostly right that people are over-reacting to steroids. Sports are not "pure". Baseball never was "pure". Competition will always push athletes to do what they can to succeed.

But here's why steroids matter: Because they (we are told) cause health problems. Not minor ones but serious ones that can shorten lifespans by decades, not years.

It's true enough to say that players will do whatever they can to succeed, and I'd like to note that this involves doing many things that are not, strictly speaking, necessarily "good for them". Even if there were no such thing as steroids: they would lift weights, go on special diet regimens and workout loads, practice before and after games, go to Mexico during the winter, neglect their families, and so on. Pitchers by definition are abusing their arm muscles. Batters perform a repeated motion hundreds of times a day that cannot be good for their wrists.

Many of these things - the weights and the workouts and the diet - we identify as "healthy" because they build strength and stamina. But even so, no one does them more than football players, and they often end up going to fat and dying in their 50s.

The point is, we tolerate (and even encourage) players doing these things, putting pressure on each other to do these things, and creating a pressure-environment to do these things, and we don't feel bad about it in the slightest. Why not?

Because they cause a tolerable amount of damage to peoples' lives. Measurable, but small. So we accept it as part of the competitive atmosphere, and feel no compunction about expecting our top athletes to do these things.

With steroids, it's a different story. The damage is measurable, and large. Could we, as fans, feel good about ourselves knowing that we support and cheer on a sport in which, to succeed, players must abuse their bodies to an extent that cuts their lifespans by a decade or two? I say no. Years, sure. Decades, no. Somewhere between years and decades, a line is crossed.

What I'm trying to show is that an opposition to steroids need not be based on any notion of "purity" at all. It's about not debasing our culture to the point where we turn these games into barbarian gladiatoresque spectacles that cheapen life. If the situation in baseball really was that every Armando Rios felt like he had no chance to keep his job without doing steroids, because he saw that everyone around him was doing steroids, and succeeding on steroids, and no rules against it existed let alone were enforced, then that's a problem. It's not a problem because of our precious "numbers" or "record books" (those problems are miniscule by comparison), it's a problem because if the choice is self-abuse or go home in a high-stakes high-payoff game, most players will choose self-abuse. That's human nature.

And when they do, we as baseball fans share in the responsibility for knowingly allowing that environment to persist.

The problem with steroids is that they do lots of harm, not merely a little harm. Note that if steroid-science somehow advances and creates "safer" steroids, then the issue could conceivably vanish for me.

It's not about "purity".

Cole addendum

2005-02-09T13:37:00.000-08:00

One aspect of the (otherwise just dismissable as silly and childish) Juan Cole anti-Goldberg I've-read-more-books-than-you-have tirade has been nagging at me. It comes in the midst of this diatribe.

It's almost too boring to recapitulate what their dispute was, but essentially it seems to boil down to: Jonah says Juan had put forth a silly opinion on such and such matter (had to do with an Iran election), then (interspersed with about a dozen transparently envious mentions of Jonah getting on TV more than he does), Juan recites how many books he's read and (I can only assume) the fact that his ~~penis~~ CV is bigger. Jonah rises to the bait a little too much for my taste, but does get the point out that comparing book-lists is a non sequitur, and so Juan comes out with this:

Goldberg is now saying that he did not challenge my knowledge of the Middle East, but my judgment. I take it he is saying that his judgment is superior to mine.

That's some good sleuthin', Einstein. Yes, that's what Jonah said. Originally. Not "now" but from the very beginning. It took Juan Cole 2-3 exchanges to get past the name-calling and straw-men and apprehend what Goldberg had actually said.

Now here's the part that annoys me; see if you can spot the assumption:

But how would you tell whose judgment is superior? Of course, all this talk of "judgement" is code for "political agreement." Progressives think that other progressives have good judgment, conservatives think that other conservatives have good judgment. This is a tautology in reality. Goldberg believes that I am wrong because I disagree with him about X, and anyone who disagrees with him is wrong, and ipso facto lacks good judgment.

(Emph. mine.) Essentially, Professor Cole dismisses out of hand the possibility that one's judgment on a matter may be evaluated by others. Everything boils down to political disagreement. All is relative. There's no such thing as a valid critique of Juan Cole's judgment because anyone who would make the attempt, would have this accusation of applying a political-agreement-test thrown in their face. Juan Cole's judgment is truly unassailable.

How convenient! What a nice set of rules guys like this always seem to construct for themselves.

I'm here to burst his bubble. Professor Cole, you ask "how would you tell whose judgment is superior?" Answer: we use our brains, that's how. We examine your respective statements and come to a conclusion about the judgments that informed them.

Juan Cole implicitly takes a position that this procedure is not possible. Echoing the oh so original thoughts voiced by each and every junior high school student at some point in their Social Studies class, in the face of a challenge to his judgment on a specific matter, Juan Cole cries out: "Who's to say who's right?"

I am, Professor. And Jonah is too. That's the point.

The purpose of this exercise seems to have been to get out the phrase "anti-intellectual":

An argument that judgment matters but knowledge does not is profoundly anti-intellectual.

We note in passing that Goldberg never said knowledge "doesn't matter". But more to the point, Professor Cole, you just got through telling us that it's not possible to evaluate any other person's judgment - that rational critique is not possible because (in what may be psychological projection on your part, come to think of it) all such critiques are really political-agreement-tests in disguise.

Who's the "anti-intellectual" here anyway?

Brian Sabean

2005-02-08T13:41:00.000-08:00

Via Only Baseball Matters I read this analysis of San Francisco Giants GM Brian Sabean's strategy a few days ago and wasn't sure what to think of it. I believe I am now.

The basic idea seems to be that Sabean intentionally gives up (either through trade or as compensation for a free agent signing) his high draft picks, and the signing bonuses they entail, to save money. For the winning Giants in the past decade their picks have usually come in the 20th-30th position; this would force them to sign the player at a "first-round" price even while he has a very tiny probability of ever becoming a major league star. The analysis goes on to assert that Sabean makes unconventional draft choices anyway (I do not know whether this is true), so chances are the guys he would have wanted will still be available. So he gets 95% of the guys he would've wanted, but at a lower price, and can use the savings to patch holes in the lineup with proven, useful players, like....

Michael Tucker.

Okay, so I think I follow the most of the strategy. It makes sense. But where it trips me up is the part where we go from intelligent-money-savings to Michael Tucker.

As this theory describes the give-up-draft-pick strategy, it makes sense and I'm on board. The problem is in the implementation. Having taken these wise money-saving measures, how does Sabean use all that money he saved? To sign a Vlad Guerrero?

No. Astoundingly, he prefers to gather up a half dozen Michael Tuckers. And this is part of someone's "defense" of Brian Sabean!

If I buy into this theory it actually makes me somehow angrier at Sabean; whereas before he just seemed dumb, this theory makes it seems like he's smart enough to save money but too dumb to know how to spend it.

Guys like Michael Tucker are placeholders. I have a hard time believing that his improvement over, say, Jose Cruz Jr. was anything but marginal. I have a hard time believing Michael Tucker did anything that couldn't be done 95% as well by some no-name from AAA or some reject from another team. What is Michael Tucker's advantage over such a no-name? Basically it boils down to this: He's "proven". He's a "veteran".

This has been my gripe with the Giants personnel strategy for a long time. There is this illogical, seemingly superstitious preference for a .270/.360/15 HR/75 RBI performance that comes from a "veteran" as opposed to an "unproven" rookie. A rookie could put up the same exact type of numbers and be considered a "hole" in the lineup but if a veteran does it, "well you know he's gonna go out there every day, day in day out, and put those numbers up". I have never understood it.

I'm all for saving money and minimizing risk and if giving up draft picks is part of such a strategy then that's great. But it's not enough to save money, you actually have to spend it well too. If Sabean made $15 million worth of budget room last year through shrewd moves like this, well bully for him, but evidently instead of using it to sign a Vlad Guerrero, he used it to pay for 5-8 "veterans" who collectively did virtually nothing that couldn't have been done by a bunch of guys making the major league minimum.

As stated, this is only one half of a wise strategy. And the sad part is, in cases like this, half isn't even really better than none.

UPDATE: Here's a followup containing a comment where the author addresses the Michael Tucker issue. I feel bad for piling so much on Tucker here (he's really not so bad, just mediocre), but nevertheless, I remain unconvinced. Yes, Tucker is an improvement on Jose Cruz. But so is Vlad Guerrero. Yes, obviously signing Guerrero instead would have meant less room to sign other, Tucker-like marginal improvements. Sabean evidently thought that made it a bad idea and that is precisely where I disagree with him. Quick, fill in the blanks: "With the money saved not signing Guerrero, the Giants got Tucker plus ___ and ___ and ___, all of which which is measurably better overall than if they'd had to use rookies and castoffs in those spots." I'll bet you can't do it.

Derb on Iraq

2005-02-08T10:54:00.000-08:00

There's a lot about this John Derbyshire piece that earns my sympathy. I admit that I have some fondness for the cynical isolationist conservative stance especially as embodied by the always-entertainingly-grumpy Derb.

Essentially, Derbyshire is saying: Ok we smashed Hussein, let's get out of Iraq; who cares what happens there next. Not our problem.

Here's why Derbyshire is ultimately wrong, even if he's 98% correct.

First, the only WMDs he seems to be aware of are nukes:

Making nuclear weapons is hi-tech work, needing a large industrial infrastructure. Barring some horrible breakthrough in physics, no terrorist group is going to be able to do it in caves and rooming-house basements. They need help from substantial nations with suitable infrastructure, nations that are inclined to help them. The appropriate action is therefore to either trash those nations' infrastructure, or make them no longer inclined to give help to terrorists. [...] A nation in chaos, under a road-warrior culture, isn't going to be able to make nukes. Somalia can't make nukes. Haiti can't make nukes. So what's the problem?

This is all well and good when it comes to nuclear programs (key features of which we can largely detect remotely) but what about those of us who haven't forgotten about, say, anthrax? Or for that matter, 9/11? One lesson of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is that people themselves can be WMDs: if we allow Iraq to devolve into a failed-state ruled or partitioned by warlords that shelter jihadi training camps, those training camps will be turning out walking bombs, only a few of which can do a lot of damage. The cost of allowing this goes mostly uncounted by Derb.

Or rather, he recognizes that this is a problem, but envisions us being able to deal with it in some magically cheap and easy way:

Ah, but didn't the chaos in Afghanistan allow Osama bin Laden to hatch his evil plots? Yes, it did — but only in combination with our inattention. We have to keep our eye on these places, and go in and blow up a training camp now and again, or chase some mujahedeen round the block; but chaos per se is not our enemy. Plenty of countries — at least half a dozen just in Africa — are more chaotic than Iraq is ever likely to be, yet they are no threat to us, and will not be able to make nukes.

Here's where Derb falters into self-contradiction. So let me get this straight; having created a power vacuum, we're supposed to "pull out" of Iraq entirely. Leave the Iraqis to their fate, which is presumably civil war, partition, prolonged chaos... but so far so good. Can problems pop up? Sure, Derb acknowledges, but we'll just "keep our eye on" Iraq. From time to time we'll "go in" to Iraq (flying sorties nonstop from Rammstein, or..?) and "blow up" this or that location in Iraq.

Here's the point: Even if I accept that this is the right approach - especially if I accept that this is the right approach - then "pulling out" of Iraq, a place Derb thinks we're going to have to "keep our eye on" and periodically "go in" and "blow up" things, is self-defeating.

Since Derb and I (for the sake of argument) agree that we're going to have to do these things, isn't it simpler to just stay there? If anything, this could serve an argument for pulling troops back mostly onto our bases that are there currently and ceasing or scaling back the "nation-building" activities. But it's not actually an argument for "pulling out" at all, if taken seriously.

Finally, Derb poo-poos the idea that "chaos" per se is our enemy, pointing to various unnamed countries in Africa. He has a point, but it does not help his case. Chaos by itself will not hurt us.

It's chaos in combination with, for example, vast oil wealth that can cause a problem. A local warlord in Somalia who might like to cut secret deals to get nukes has somewhat limited resources to draw on. A hypothetical warlord sitting on all or a significant part of Iraq's oil fields? That's a far different story.

Postscript. This is why I always thought that the "it's all about oil" people had a point, just not the one they thought they did. It wasn't "all about oil" in the sense of the United States wanting to Take the oil from underneath Iraq. (Well, granted, for all I know, maybe for Messrs. Bush and Cheney et al it really was "all about oil" - I cannot speak to their private motives.) Speaking for myself however, infinitely more important than us getting Iraq's oil (if we even have) was a man like Saddam not having Iraq's oil. It is an oddly cynical state of affairs that we have today, wherein most Westerners - upon seeing a Western country proposing to topple a dictator who controls, profits from, and amasses vast natural-resource wealth - assumes instantly that the motive is to take that wealth rather than to cut off the dictator from using it for ill ends.

Look at it this way: I'd freeze Osama Bin Laden's bank accounts in a heartbeat too if he still has any and if I knew where they were - but this doesn't actually mean that I covet Osama Bin Laden's money.

Cole v. Goldberg: My 2 cents

2005-02-08T08:21:00.000-08:00

It sure looks as if Juan Cole has read lots more books than Jonah Goldberg about Iraq. My stars, color me impressed. Give that man a megaphone!

P.S. Doesn't this guy have any, like, teaching or research to do? Getting in flame-wars with Jonah Goldberg on the internet? I guess that's tenure for ya.

Where their mouths are

2005-02-05T18:19:00.000-08:00

Services like Tradesports allow people to place bets on not only sporting events, but real-world events such as "Kerry will win" or "The Aviator will win Best Picture". But what's more, the bets are "contracts" that can be bought or sold at prices that can go up or down according to whether there are interested buyers.

The contract price of an event thus serves as a prediction for the probability of that event. If the "Bush wins" contract is selling at 55 this means in some sense that people think there's a 55% chance he'll win. The interesting thing about this is that since people are betting real money, there is a tendency to filter out their biases more than they otherwise might. So the Tradesports contract can actually be more accurate than polls, pundits, and expert prognostications. A Kerry supporter might tell everyone he knows that he expects Kerry to win, but apparently putting C-notes down on the proposition was a somewhat different story: the Bush contracts were more or less steadily above 50 in the months leading up to the election. It's one thing to lie to yourself about what you expect, or to attempt to massage expectations in conversations with others, but it's quite another to drop money on what you believe is a losing proposition.

This gets me to thinking. A common feature of the arch-conservatives' arguments against Social Security reform is to say that the private accounts would just be a "gamble". These accounts, they say, are so "risky" that those who hold them might end up with "nothing". The guarantee of the Social Security benefit - as it is - is better. Preferable. Senator Barbara Mikulski told me so.

My modest proposal is that anyone who puts forth this argument ought to put their money where their mouth is, by pledging never in their life to take the private-account option if Bush's proposal, or similar, passes. Since the reform opponents believe it's such a "gamble" and such a raw deal, surely they'll have no trouble whatsoever rejecting the "risky" private account and staying fully in the government system, right? They'll take that guaranteed 2% return per year over the returns to be had from a stock portfolio, because after all, that stock portfolio is just a "risky" "slot machine" that's liable to come up bust.

Right?

I know this is purely hypothetical but it sure would be interesting to learn whether reform-opponents would actually put their money where there mouth is. Would even a simple majority of anti-SS-reform advocates take the "no private account for me" pledge?

If that proposition (majority takes the pledge) were a Tradesports contract, I'd be selling for sure.

"Iran"'s Emotional Needs

2005-02-04T15:14:00.000-08:00

Even without reading the comments I am sure the Little Green Footballs crowd is having a field day with Joe Biden's comment that

...even if Iran was a full democracy like India, it would want nuclear capability, like India. What the world needed to address was Iran’s emotional needs, he said, with a nonaggression pact.

But to be fair, there is a somewhat reasonable point in there if you are willing to see it.

This goes back to the need to distinguish between "Iran" the group of people who live in the place we call Iran, and Iran's ruling regime. When people speak of the concerns of "Iran", which do they mean? When people say that "Iran" has a valid security concern, which do they mean? It matters. It's possible that Biden made no such distinction in his head when he made this comment and if so he deserves criticism on that note.

But I can clean up Biden's point for him a bit, and make it a completely reasonable one:

Even if Iran were a full democracy like India, its people would want their government to possess nuclear capability, like India's government does. What the world needs to address are the people of Iran’s emotional needs, with a nonaggression pact.

Is this a fair point? Absolutely! The people of Iran have a war against Saddam Hussein in their memory, in which chemical weapons were used. The people of Iran (not "Iran" but the people of Iran!) have the right of self-defense. Nuclear weapons are seen to be a rather strong deterrent. It is perfectly natural and understandable therefore that they would wish to live under their defensive umbrella.

The only problem, of course, is that "the people of Iran" are not by any stretch of the imagination in possession of their own government. So with respect to Iran's current regime, this line of argument is a non-starter. "Iran" as such has no "emotional needs" to speak of; the concept makes no sense. But it makes perfect sense with regard to its people.

So, I am actually all for the idea of a nonaggression pact with the people of Iran (not "Iran" but the people of Iran!). In fact I think it is a fine idea. But there is no good conventional way to do it at present; signing some document with the ruling regime of Iran is a horrible way to do it, for example, because the nation called Iran is ruled by crazy fanatics. Why would we sign a nonaggression pact with them?

But perhaps there is some third way. Instead of idiotically signing a pact with fanatical mullahs, or turning up our noses at the whole idea as the LGF crowd presumably is, let us create and sign a nonaggression pledge to the people of Iran. It could take the form of a Congressional resolution, and would say something like the following:

The United States of America hereby pledges not to engage in unprovoked aggression against or infringe upon the sovereign rights of any future state of Iran that is a true democratic, constitutional republic.

Of course, such a pledge does not apply to the present "Iran" as it is currently constituted....

But yes, Senator Biden, the people of Iran (if not "Iran") do have a valid emotional need for self-defense, and let us take steps assure them that we mean them no harm and (under certain conditions) will not attack any part of their country. The pledge kicks in just as soon as they kick out the crazy bastards who dictate their affairs, fund terrorists, and prattle on and on about wiping Israel off the map and US = Great Satan, of course.

I really like this idea: A promise of nonaggression on condition of kicking out your dictators. I'm almost ready to say that we should apply it universally.

Never let it be said that I'm all "stick" and no "carrot".

UPDATE: To be fair to the "LGF Crowd" that I seem to have unfairly slandered, let me say how pleased I am to note that commenter SJKevin gets it.

Blood

2005-02-04T11:35:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentlemen, Senator Ted Kennedy:

"We want to know when the Iraqis are going to go out there and shed their blood"

Wolfowitz responded by pointing to 1342 Iraqi soldiers and police who have died fighting the insurgents. I suppose that means he did not mention the additional hundreds if not thousands of civilians who have been killed by the "insurgents" for the crimes of going to mosque, going to markets, working elections, voting, etc.

But no matter. That's not enough blood for Ted Kennedy. They must shed MORE. More blood, more.

This was probably the single most disgusting, reprehensible, detestable thing I have heard an American politician say in my lifetime.

Seemed worth noting.

Arch Conservatives

2005-02-04T10:53:00.000-08:00

As we all know, in the American political system, the Democratic Party is the "liberal" party. It is the party to the left of center. This is to be contrasted with the Republican Party, which is "conservative", and right of center.

Here are some definitions associated with the word "liberal": not bound by traditional forms; associated with ideals of individual especially economic freedom.

Here are some associated with the word "conservative": tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions : TRADITIONAL; marked by moderation or caution.

With these in mind, let us examine how this vaunted "liberalism" of the Democratic Party plays out in practice, shall we? As my case study, I shall examine, oh, let us say, the issue of Social Security and reform.

Democrat Senate leader Harry Reid likens reform, in the form of allowing partial privatization, to gambling:

"The Bush plan isn't really social security reform, it's more like social security roulette"

He asserts that Democrats are "all for" giving Americans "more of a say and more choices when it comes to their retirement savings" (how nice of him! I must remember to thank him),

"....but that doesn't mean taking social security's guarantee and gambling with it"

Did you know that all your 401k's are simply "gambling"?

Democrat Senator Byron Dorgan made it clear that the all-important thing for "liberals" such as him is to convince Americans that there isn't a crisis:

"If we let the president successfully convince people there's a crisis in Social Security, when in fact there is no crisis at all, then shame on us.... We've got to fight on this issue, and we've got to wage an aggressive fight."

Yes, he wants to "fight" for there not being a crisis. He wants to "fight" for no change.

Picking up the gambling theme from Reid, it is a special delight to hear the "liberal" words of Democrat Senator Barbara Mikulski (in an article sub-headed "Democrats circle wagons"):

"I will vote for a guaranteed benefit, not a guaranteed gamble"

I could have sworn I heard her speak of slot machines in a sound byte last night, as well.

I could go on, but it is probably a pointless exercise. You get the idea. Examining the big picture of this opposition, what do we see?

above all else, aversion to risk ("gambling"!)
reluctance to change anything that's not a "crisis"
insistence on preserving a program precisely in its extant form, seemingly just because
refusal to expand free choice if it leads to any sort of risk or change
hand-wringing over the deficit and debt (fiscal conservatism)
procrastination (it's fine for a few decades, we can fix it later, why now....)

In short, we see the attitude and stance of a bunch of conservatives. Not "liberals".

In the United States today, contrary to popular belief, on the bulk of the key issues the Democratic Party is the conservative party. Just something to keep in mind.

To critique is to "slur", now

2005-02-03T16:32:00.000-08:00

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has written a whiny post that annoys on multiple levels. Evidently he read a book review of a new book by Robert Conquest; the book review reproduced an excerpt of the introduction of the book; and this excerpt alone sent Mr. Farrell into a tizzy. What is the excerpt?

And we are told that a number of members of the Middle Eastern terror groups had originally been in the local communist movements … The members of [the Real IRA and the Shining Path], as with those in Italy or, for example, the Naxalites in India, were almost entirely recruited from student elements who had accepted the abstractions of fashionable academics. And the September 11 bombers were almost all comfortably off young men, some having been to Western universities and there adopted the extremely anti-Western mind-set.

Farrell, echoing the book-reviewer whose article this was, seems to think that something in here blames "left-leaning professors" for 9/11. When challenged multiple times in comments to show which aspect of the excerpt was false or unproven, he and others failed. Aside from the initial annoyance that all of this reactionary venom was spun out of the introduction to a book he hasn't even read, what is going on?

Conquest, let us assume, is discussing ideas and their effects. Conquest as we know has made a career of chronicling the ill effects of ideas that go under the heading of "communism". But in this case, he is, let us admit, attempting to trace the effects of ideas that represent the "anti-Western mind-set".

Henry Farrell insists that to do so is a "slur" against left-leaning professors everywhere.

What he is saying, if he is saying anything, is that professors ought to be able to hold, promulgate, and espouse ideas and no accounting, reckoning, or tracing of those ideas - linking them to their effects and bastard adherents - may ever be attempted. To do so is to "slur" the professors, you see.

Professors' Ideas are now immune, it seems, to the normal give-and-take of human scientific inquiry. Their Ideas are so sacred, so inviolable, and so precious, that they are a part and parcel of the professors themselves: criticize or even point to an unintended bad effect of an Idea, and you are "slurring" the Idea-holder.

This is an inversion of Science and the Enlightenment.

In a post that only partially hits his mark, Armed Liberal takes him to task, for not believing in "bad philosophy", which is an unsatisfying approximation of my problem with what Farrell's saying. Later, in a comment to Armed Liberal's follow-up, Farrell responds thusly:

I don't anticipate responding further to what you have to say here; I really don't see that it's worthwhile engaging you in argument.

Of course it isn't. Of course it isn't. After all, Armed Liberal has "slurred" Farrell by criticizing his ideas; unless and until Armed Liberal apologizes to Henry Farrell, what more can there possibly be to say?

Finally, today, Jane Galt, in the course of making some otherwise-good points about the "technical" education some terrorists are known to have received, misses the main point here. She dismisses the worth of trying to trace terrorists' ideas to the academy, saying

...I don't know whether Al Qaeda actually did get some of its bad ideas from the academic left. But I don't think trying to establish some causation is really very useful, even if it exists. Much better to spend our time pointing out how bad the ideas are.

I agree, with reservations. Couldn't establishing causation, if it exists, at least be partially useful if it points the way to how to stop our own academy from spreading ideas that do us damage? This isn't about "blame". It's about identifying whether our academies leak poison that sprays back to us, and what if anything to do about it. If our academies were teaching Creationism and this led students to reject evolution and therefore the benefits of genetic research, thus doing us all material damage, would Galt still be saying establishing causation isn't "very useful"?

Nevertheless, Galt is correct that it's better to spend time pointing out how bad the bad ideas are. But there's the rub: it is difficult to point out how bad bad ideas are if their holders consider it a "slur" to even make the attempt.

The main problem with Henry Farrell's post is that in it he effectively attempts to place the ideas of left-leaning academics beyond the bounds of rational criticism and analysis in the first place. This is both infuriating and moronic, and yet somehow pathetic as well.

(Apologies in advance to Henry Farrell for all of the above "slurs".)

Timetable for surrender

2005-02-03T14:06:00.000-08:00

Jim Lindgren at The Volokh Conspiracy has written an amusing post that is worth reading: When People Urge a Timetable, What are They Talking About?

He points out that the mission is incomplete, that we still have numerous troops in various parts of the globe where the situation is far better than in Iraq, and that few consciously desire a surrender in Iraq. I'd say that this passage just about captures the spirit of the piece:

When I read calls for a timetable in the current situation, I really can't figure out what the heck are they talking about.

There is one aspect of the piece of especially high value, which is why I linked it: Lindgren helpfully, crucially reminds me to make the important identification of pullout with surrender.

To pull out now is to surrender in the war, whose present goal is to defeat fascist anti-democratic forces in Iraq so that it may stand on its own feet as a democratic nation. This is not grasped nearly enough by people who profess to be discussing Iraq.

In these postmodern times it's almost difficult to even write the words "surrender" and "victory" without using quotes, but we must try.

Naming the Platonic resistance

2005-02-03T13:45:00.000-08:00

Gene at Harry's Place has a nice (obviously, unwitting) followup to my post about the Platonic idea of resistance. It follows the comments thread here in which commenter Walter aptly outlines the Platonic-resistance delusion.

Gene has a simple question:

"Do you have evidence that the armed insurgency in Iraq includes anyone who can be described fairly as a social democrat or a liberal, or even anyone whose democratic credentials extend beyond calling himself a democrat?"

I'll be interested to see the answers.

For the record, in the second comments thread linked above, Walter puts forth a fascinating statistic, namely that via http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ he has calculated that

The insurgency has vastly outkilled the US military during this period, killing 4 or 5 Iraqis for every 1 US soldier.

But remember, that merely proves that those Iraqis dead at the hands of the "insurgency" don't value freedom. Their murderers represent them (especially since they are, now, dead and silent) and so it is the murderers' demands that count above all else.

So that's what they've meant by "Plan"

2005-02-02T23:56:00.000-08:00

I heard part of Nancy Pelosi's response to the SOTU and it was fascinating.

I don't know about you, but the highlight, for me, was when she described what she says "Democrats believe a credible plan to bring our troops home and stabilizing Iraq" (in that order?) would consist of. Democrat Bush-critics have been yammering about this "Plan" thing for two years now so it's nice to finally understand what they mean by it. Without further ado, I give you the three prongs of the Democrat "Plan" in their entirety:

First, responsibility for Iraqi security must be transferred to the Iraqis as soon as possible. This action is long overdue.

The top priority for the U.S. military should have been for a long time now training the Iraqi army.

We must not be lulled into a false sense of confidence by the administration's claim that a large number of security personnel have been trained. It simply hasn't happened. But it must.

Second, Iraq's economic development must be accelerated. Congress has provided billions of dollars for reconstruction, but little of that money has been spent effectively to put Iraqis to work rebuilding their country.

Infrastructure improvements in Iraq are more than just projects; they give Iraqis hope for a better future and a stake in achieving it, and they contribute to Iraqi stability.

Third, regional diplomacy must be intensified. Diplomacy can lessen the political problems in Iraq, take pressure off of our troops and deprive the insurgency of the fuel of anti-Americanism on which it thrives.

In brief:

1. Transfer responsibility for security to Iraqis. This seems to consist of training Iraqi army men (which, we are doing, but we should keep doing it, Pelosi seems to be saying; good to know).

2. "Accelerate" Iraq's economic development. Key here seems to be Infrastructure improvements. (But is it ok to use Halliburton for the contract?)

3. "Intensify" something called "regional diplomacy". Apparently this "regional diplomacy" thing can cure anti-Americanism. (Who knew?)

Brilliant stuff, this.

I don't even know what to say about it. I'm utterly speechless.

That this woman had, only seconds earlier, chastised Bush for not having voiced a "clear plan" (for "ending our presence in Iraq") just makes it all the more flabbergasting.

If points 1., 2., and 3. above are what constitute a "clear plan", God save us from it.

Violence and its victims

2005-02-02T13:37:00.000-08:00

By now you have seen this article by a previously-unknown-to-most anti-Iraq-war columnist called Mark Brown, voicing some reserved reconsideration after the Iraq election. With rather strong language, The UNPOPULIST calls my attention to an angle I had missed, riffing off of the following passage in the original article:

But after watching Sunday’s election in Iraq and seeing the first clear sign that freedom really may mean something to the Iraqi people, you have to be asking yourself: What if it turns out Bush was right, and we were wrong?

UNPOPULIST (emphasis his) calls this sentiment racism: "As in, maybe the Arabs didn't mind being tortured, raped, gassed, uprooted, menaced and mutilated?". While I think that "racism" is probably a bit strong, it is a dangerous sentiment embodied here nevertheless and as such it is worth examining in detail.

What is Brown saying there? Plainly, that prior to the election he had "see[n]" no "clear sign[s]" that freedom "mean[s] something to the Iraqi people". And in fact, I don't doubt for a second that Mark Brown saw no clear sign of this.

He probably wasn't looking.

It seems clear that if you don't look for "clear signs" that a people living under a dictator value freedom, well then obviously you're not going to see them. What will you see instead? You'll see the dictator on TV, over and over and over again, in multiple settings, always in front of adoring and fawning people.

You'll see Dictator standing before crowds, waving. Crowds always seem large! And the chants, the signs! Dictator wears a military uniform - what a show of strength! Crowds seem to appreciate it. Dictator talks to Dan Rather, wearing a suit. How suave this dictator is! Dictator dispatches ambassador to the UN. This ambassador is so educated and refined! Why, you barely notice his accent. Some purges occur, but you don't really know many details. Some uprisings occur, but are quickly forgotten.

"Well, I'll be damned", the Mark Browns of the world declare. "From what I've seen, I see no sign whatsoever that The People of this country want freedom. I guess they just kinda like their dear Dictator."

Lesson One: Failure of a people to overthrow a Dictator is taken by some as evidence that those people "don't value freedom". If the Dictator holds onto power, The People must want him to.

It's now been nearly two years since we ousted that Dictator by force. In the aftermath a power vacuum was created that we are attempting to fill by arranging for consensual self-government. In response to this, armed groups of one form are another have waged a guerrilla/terror campaign in an effort to at least disrupt those plans and at most assume power over the country. Typical attacks consist of things like bombing a marketplace, exploding a US vehicle with an IED, or kidnapping and beheading an Iraqi who "collaborates" with the US.

Apparently Mark Brown, who we can only assume has been watching this guerrilla/terror campaign, has decided that it constitutes further evidence that "the Iraqi people" don't want freedom. Some jihadi somewhere in Iraq bombs a marketplace, killing 11 innocent Iraqi civilians - "See? They don't want freedom." An Iraqi election worker is kidnapped and beheaded on the Internet - "This just further proves they don't want freedom." Seemingly, the more Iraqis get killed by (often foreign) terrorists, the more convinced the Mark Browns of the world will become that "the Iraqi people" don't want freedom. Yup, gettin' murdered is a sure sign that you just don't value your own freedom.

One assumes that had not Mark Brown had the (slight) change of heart he now - honorably, it must be noted - admits to, he might well have pointed to the dozens of Iraqis who lost their lives because they voted or tried to vote as yet more evidence that they don't want freedom.

Lesson Two: Being a victim of violence and disorder caused by fascists in your midst, proves to some people that you "don't want freedom".

Again, "racism" might be too strong a term for this (all too widespread) attitude, but it is fair to call it a form of condescension and bigotry. I'm tempted to bring it to a more basic level and just call it plain lazy; "they don't value freedom" as a sweeping general conclusion to draw about a country of 25 million people is nothing if not a sign that you refuse to think about those people as fellow human beings.

But I'm not so sure the racism or bigotry charges hit the target in the first place. It's not clear that this attitude has to do with the Iraqis' race, ethnicity, or nationality. One can easily envision lefties making similar statements about plenty of other nations led by autocrats - including, for example, the old Soviet Union.

Examining my Lessons 1 and 2 above, it seems to me that what is really going on is that power is being respected above all else. Violence, if nothing else, demonstrates power. Killing demonstrates power. On some level, that power is respected.

The Dictator has ultimate power over his people. In some sense, therefore, he is his people. Even if they "don't want" him, they want him. They are his victims, true, but (to someone who worships power) victimization is just another form of paying one's respects. Saddam's prisoners and gassing-victims apparently sent one message to the Mark Browns of the world: "Saddam is the one we want or else this would not have happened."

Similarly, now we have a guerrilla/terror movement, they murder and this demonstrates power. So even though - rather, because - the bulk of the Iraqi people are among their victims, this movement must be "the Iraqi people", or they wouldn't exist. Yes their Iraqi murder victims are innocent, to be pitied, and are even the majority, but on some level they must want the murderers to get their wish, or they would not have been murdered.

The murderers' concerns and demands are then inflated and taken as being representative of their victims' concerns as well. You and I might look at a marketplace bombing that kills 11 Iraqis and see one murderer and 11 victims; but the Mark Browns of the world see 12 people pointing at us and saying "your fault: do what the murderer says, he's in charge, he represents us all". Actually, they see that whole marketplace saying it. The whole country, even.

With a certain sense of awe - wow, look what they did, look how powerful they are - violence demonstrates, to some people, that its perpretators are approved of by all the people around them - even their victims. One violent act is taken as evidence that the perpretator represents those around him. Under this twisted analysis, who's the most in charge? Who represents The People the best?

Why, whoever kills the most, of course.

I note in passing that the appeal of this sentiment is not at all difficult to understand if and when it is held by someone who contemplates, at least subconsciously, perpretrating political violence of their own, and in such a case (naturally enough) hopes for its success to be maximized, a trait I have previously asserted belongs to some portion of the "left".

"All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty." --Orwell

Wrong

2005-02-02T10:12:00.000-08:00

By the way, in my previous post I said that pro-war people who point to the election in Iraq as having justified the war are wrong. To clarify, the reason they are wrong is that the war was already justified regardless of the outcome of the election, and nothing can change that.

Move On

2005-02-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

Much of the "left" is stuck in a repeating loop, unable to adequately process new information and perform new calculations. This was driven home to me by listening to their reactions to the Iraq election:

The war should not have happened The war should not have happened The war should not have happened.

(Election takes place.)

Yes the election is all well and good but The war still should not have happened The war still should not have happened The war still should not have happened.

All events are filtered through the singular prism of the Iraq war (which began almost two years ago), how that event relates to the war, and in particular why that event doesn't "justify" or "ratify" that war.

How on earth did these people ever embrace the slogan "move on"?

Prior to the Presidential election, debating the wisdom of having initiated the war at least made some sense with regard to whether the electorate would be convinced to punish or approve President Bush for having been the one to do it. Although even at the time I believed such discussions to be counterproductive, they were at least defensible in the context of electoral politics. Indeed, discussion of the wisdom of having started the war was an inherently valid and important part of the campaign season; it most certainly ought to have been addressed at some level.

But the election is over now. For better or worse, Bush has been inaugurated the President for a new four-year term. He shall not stand for election again. He shall not hold this office after early 2009 at the latest. He is a lame duck. There is no prospect of removing him by election, by persuading people that "the war was wrong". Persuading people who do not already believe so that "the war was wrong", even if possible, will accomplish literally nothing positive and conceivably (if successful enough) much that is negative: a withdrawal from Iraq and a subsequent descent of Iraq into a failed-state or autocratic terror haven.

Although on the flip side there are perhaps some who suggest that the election retroactively "justifies" every aspect of the war, they too are wrong. Surely there are pro-war people who are the mirror image of everything I am saying here: who cannot perceive and analyze any event without relating it to the war and attempting to explain why it either does not damage the argument for having started the war, or (in this case) "justifies" that decision.

Both groups of repeating-loop backward-lookers need to "move on". The war took place and that fact cannot be changed. What is still to be determined is the future of Iraq and beyond.

On that, the lefties who can't move on are causing incalculably more damage with their immature backward-looking stance, because (unlike with the can't-move-on righties), if they got their childish way, both Iraq and the U.S. would suffer.

Cuts like a knife and it feels so right

2005-01-31T14:58:00.000-08:00

I've tried (not terribly hard) to figure out why folks on the "left" so instinctively (at least for the time being, while the President is an (R)...) oppose Social Security reforms to the point where they latch onto the most asinine counterargument-campaign ever. If this post from Matthew Yglesias is any indication, perhaps there's a very good reason I haven't been able to figure that reason out: they don't actually know why they oppose it.

Yglesias frets that his benefits will be "cut dramatically" and this fear, ostensibly, drives his opposition. But why does he think his benefits will be cut dramatically?

Some people would say that indeed his benefits will be cut dramatically for the simple reason that Social Security has a built-in demographic problem that will lead to shortfalls and - therefore - benefit cuts. But Yglesias does not believe this. Indeed, Yglesias is if anything on the vanguard of the "There Is No Crisis" uberconservative stick-in-the-mud revolution. So why does he think his benefits will be cut?

Apparently he counts the replacement of a portion of the benefits with the private account, implicit in any privatization proposal, as a "benefit cut".

Of course (I can't believe this needs to be said) this ignores two things.

(1) Referring to a replacement of one's benefits with some other asset as solely a "benefit cut" is quite boneheaded. Instead of (100% benefits) people who voluntarily choose to do so can receive the basket (67% benefits + income from private account). Is the latter, overall, a "cut" with respect to the former? Plainly, it depends on how well that private account does. But insisting that no matter what, the basket is a "cut" simply because the benefits part has been reduced from 100% to 67% is idiotic. One may as well say that if I promise to give you ownership of 100 Lotuses per year if you'll quit your job, I'm "cutting your salary" (to zero, in this case). It's literally true (unless your current salary is more than the value of 100 Lotuses..) but only a moron would think that tells the whole picture.

(2) Bush's proposal (as far as I know) is entirely voluntary. So even if, as Matthew seems to fear will uniformly occur, the private-account assets (the "Lotuses" in this equation) vanish in value, he can avoid that fate by choosing not to do it in the first place!

So where the hell is the "cut" in all this?

He doesn't know and couldn't possibly defend his characterization of a cut. So why is he so jittery at the thought of reform? I submit: the only thing in this equation that is really being "cut", in the view of the "left", is a future "need" to raise taxes on rich people. This "cut" is his real fear, as Yglesias has already admitted.

The Arab-Muslim Duty To Obey Fascists

2005-01-30T16:47:00.000-08:00

Classic:

John Kerry finds it hard to accept the legitimacy of any election that is not approved by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

This is more than just a snappy one-liner, too. From all appearances, Kerry and likeminded really do operate from a principle that implicitly declares that if some fanatical, crazy, or zealot Arab-Muslim - somewhere - is unhappy with the preference of the majority within some Arab-Muslim nation-state, then that preference is inherently "illegitimate".

To render an Arab-Muslim election "illegitimate" in the eyes of the "Left", evidently, all you need to do is (1) be an Arab-Muslim yourself (note: you don't have to be from the same country as the one whose peoples' preference you are declaring illegitimate), and (2) murder people. That's sufficient.

Arab-Muslims, it seems, have an implicit duty to take orders from murderous fascists and abide by their wishes. It follows that they have a duty to be led by fascist dictators so as to ease Western "Leftist" fears about the "legitimacy" of their majority preferences.

Foreign Imperialists

2005-01-30T13:44:00.000-08:00

Foreign imperialists have been, are, and continue to attempt to impose their will on the people of Iraq. That much is true. But contrary to what you may have heard, these imperialists do not hail from the hated USA. Nor are they culturally "Western".

The people of Iraq by reportedly large margins have cast their votes in endorsement of a transitional democracy that is in the process of forming to govern their nation. That is what the people of Iraq wish for their nation. Anything else said about the wishes of the "people of Iraq", any other claim predicated on any other wish of the "people of Iraq", is a lie.

And so there are people who oppose the wishes of the people of Iraq, but it is not the USA to which this applies. The people in question are people like Zarqawi (not from Iraq) and his (also largely non-Iraqi) "Al Qaeda" invaders. They are radical Islamists (not Iraqis) in other nations who have the unmitigated gall to protest Iraqis' right to vote in their own election. (HT Norman Geras.) And they are the (non-Iraqi) Leftists who supply the two former groups with ideological support by pointing to those (non-Iraqi) groups' complaints (against the Iraqis' wishes) and demands (of the Iraqis) as sufficient evidence that the wishes of the people of Iraq are "illegitimate".

All of these foreign interlopers are opposing the wishes of the people of Iraq. They are non-Iraqis attempting to tell the Iraqis how to arrange their own affairs. May their brayings go unheeded.

Explaining Defeatism

2005-01-28T16:20:00.000-08:00

Observation: Defeatist rhetoric about Iraq has increased noticeably and dramatically in the last few weeks.

Premise: No significant conventional variable one could justifiably use to objectively gauge our status in Iraq (casualty rate, insurgent attack rate, insurgent arrest rate...) has changed significantly in the past few weeks. (Disagree?)

Corollary: Based on such variables alone, then, defeatist rhetoric should not have risen significantly. Broadly speaking, no one who wasn't defeatist 3 months ago should be defeatist now; anyone who is defeatist now should have been equally defeatist 3 months ago. Conventional variables are therefore inadequate to explain the apparent rise in defeatism.

Fact: One variable that has changed, naturally, is time. In particular, T = time until Iraq election, which has changed appreciably. (Today, T=1 day more or less. 3 months ago T was two orders of magnitude larger.)

Corollary: The only significant Iraq-related variable that could explain (as in, correlates with) this noticeable upswing in defeatist rhetoric is T = time until Iraq election. Namely, defeatist rhetoric has increased with the reciprocal of T.

Conclusion: Iraq war critics have stepped up their defeatist rhetoric not for any substantial reason having to do with facts on the ground, but simply because the election has been approaching and is almost upon us.

Explanation: Iraq critics, in fact, regardless of what they say, expect the election to improve matters, which would harm their position. Therefore, as the election has drawn near they have begun to panic in their efforts to sway public opinion, one symptom of this panic being the observed increase in defeatist rhetoric that is not tied in any way to the ground situation in Iraq.

Is this the correct explanation? I don't know. But it does fit all the facts.

Then again, maybe not

2005-01-28T08:17:00.000-08:00

Sometimes my assertions are incorrect. I know, hard to believe, but it happens. Matthew Yglesias nearly destroys my prior explanation of opposition to Social Security reform, what makes it "clear cut", apparently, is:

The main economic consequence of privatization is that it eliminates the need for income taxpayers -- primarily rich people, that is -- to pay higher taxes in the future

Unless I'm parsing this incorrectly, here is an admission that what puts fear in the hearts of some on the left is that if Social Security is privatized, the "need" to raise taxes on "rich people" in the future will vanish.

Thus, people who are interested in modifying SS so as to eliminate the "need" to raise taxes on anyone - you know, by making it more fiscally and demographically sound - are, apparently, barking up the wrong tree if they raise this issue to lefties. Having an unsound program in place that creates a future "need" to raise taxes on "rich people" just might, when all is said and done, be the whole point.

Simple explanation

2005-01-28T05:29:00.000-08:00

In addition to the asinine There Is No Crisis argument, a staple of the Social Security debate has been to point to other programs (Medicare is the current favorite) that allegedly need to be focused on "first" and posit this as a reason not to accept even in principle new policy proposals related to Social Security. The American left is particularly fond of this fallacy nowadays: No Social Security till Medicare, No Iraq till North Korea (or insert other state here). If someone proposes X, and you don't like X, pick some Y and insist that (usually because it's a Bigger Problem according to whatever measure) it must be done "first" before even considering X. It is not hard to see why this strategy has appeal, for this sort of argument is particularly versatile; it can be wielded against all policy proposals as well as their opposites.

Of course, as a result it refutes itself and merits no further comment.

This application of No X Till Y rightly makes Sebastian Holsclaw's list of annoyances with the debate on Social Security. What becomes clear from this and other annoying debate games being employed is that the left is not serious in their opposition on this issue. Their arguments cannot be taken seriously, on their own terms, by anyone with a brain. No X Till Y is not a serious argument. There Is No Crisis is not a serious argument. Playing the slippery morphing game (Now It's A Safety Net, Now It's A Pension) is a sign of deep insincerity. The left's counterarguments to altering Social Security are, on the whole, profoundly unserious.

Again, this is not to say that Bush's proposals are necessarily good or ought to be adopted. It is not to say that everything currently being said by the right about Social Security is correct. All it really means is that these annoying debating games are, probably, going to be a continual factor in the Social Security debate, since they are cheap tricks immune to logic or refutation. But they also indicate a shallowness in the left's opposition to Social Security reform. This opposition evidently has extremely thin roots.

Which seems to indicate that there might be a cure to this annoying-debate-game disease, a way to purify these debates of dreck such as No X Till Y. Now, it's true that there is such a way. Here is how in a nutshell: Elect a Democrat President.

Upon the election of a Democrat President, such debate annoyances shall miraculously vanish. (Unless they resurface on the right.) A Democrat President could make the exact same proposal Bush is making and the bulk of the current critics would be silent.

This is, at root, a debate stemming from which letter appears after our current President's name. And that explains why it is so annoying.

Do Middle East "states" matter or don't they?

2005-01-27T11:16:00.000-08:00

By now you may have heard of this. I don't mean to imply that such drivel merits serious consideration or that it's even worth wasting time or energy on mustering outrage, but I was intrigued by one component of the man's apparent argument:

Churchill's essay argues that the Sept. 11 attacks were in retaliation for the Iraqi children killed in a 1991 U.S. bombing raid and by economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations following the Persian Gulf War.

Let us pretend, just for a moment, that the person who wrote this essay is of some minimal intelligence and thus takes his own theories seriously, and so we can too.

Let us examine his theory: He reportedly examines the 9/11 attacks - waged by, as far as anyone can tell, a group of 15 Saudi Arabs + 4 Egyptians, under the direction of Osama bin Laden (born in Saudi Arabia to a Yemeni family), and masterminded by, we are told, one Khalid Mohammed (of unclear origin - Kuwaiti, Paki, or Baluch, depending on where you look). He declares them to be "in retaliation for" such and such warfare-related violence the United States committed upon... Iraq.

Again: some Yemenis, Saudis, Egyptians, Pakis, and/or Kuwaitis attacked the United States. And this was (we are told by the esteemed Mr. Churchill) justifiable or understandable as "retaliation" for something the United States did to Iraq. Some country from which (by all mainstream accounts) none of the people in question actually hail.

Think about that theory and take it seriously. For example, try to ask yourself what, exactly, is the connection of all these people to Iraq? Leaving aside whether what the US did to Iraq in 1991 was right or wrong, why the hell do these people care in the first place? What gives them the right to arrogate to themselves the job of "retaliation" for what one third party did to another? Why are they not "retaliating" against Russia for what it did in Lithuania in 1991? At any given moment these Saudis/Egyptians/etc could observe any number of violent acts around the world being committed by one third-party against another, neither of which consist of their fellow countrymen. What exactly was it that broke the symmetry and allowed them to pick out US-Iraq warfare as their object of "retaliation"?

His essay was apparently entitled "Some People Push Back: On The Justice Of Roosting Chickens". Yet he suffers no apparent cognitive dissonance from the fact that the actual "people" he insists were just "pushing back", because of US actions, were not the actual subject or victim of those actions in the first place. There is nothing the US can be argued to have done to, say, Mohammed Atta for him to "push back" or "retaliate" for, in the first place! If this was about "pushing back", why were not the hijackers predominantly Iraqis who lost friends and loved ones? Is Mr. Churchill confused, ignorant, or engaging in psychological projection here?

There is evidently some elision between Iraq and all of these other states. "Whatever, they're all Arab-Muslim Countries", I suppose is the attitude here. "You know what I mean."

Yet on the flip side, when calibrating our behavior in response, we are always told there was no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, or Iraq and Islamic terrorism, or Iraq and Islamofascism. Not necessarily incorrectly of course, often Iran, or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia is identified as the "real" home, or seat, or sponsor, of "Al Qaeda", which has "nothing to do with" Iraq. Indeed, this supposed disjointness was presented as a reason in and of itself to remove Iraq's ruling regime from the table of legitimate offensive targets. Iraq is a different country from these other countries that the 9/11 terrorists hail from! The hijackers were mostly from Saudi Arabia, yet Bush invaded Iraq! Stupid Bush, what a moronic bigot, can't he tell the difference between one Arab-Muslim country and another?

Well: Can Mr. Churchill, and like-minded, tell the difference? Evidently not. And (assuming Mr. Churchill is correct) the hijackers themselves couldn't tell the difference either. They, the hijackers, (under this theory) seem to have felt that they had some valid connection to the fate of Iraq and the US's relation to it. All of this flies in the face of the "no connection", "can't you tell the difference between two Middle East states?" geopolitical metaphysics that the anti-war faction insists we adhere to.

After all, our Mr. Churchill here, obviously not having thought it through fully, takes it for granted that it makes perfect sense for a Non-Iraqi Islamofascist to "retaliate" against the United States for crimes the United States allegedly commits against Iraq. That's just obvious. I doubt he even gives the matter a second thought.

But if taken seriously, is this not a tacit admission that these boundaries and firewalls that war opponents continually postulate and insist upon between, for example, Iraq and "Al Qaeda", are largely fiction? That in a de facto sense the various Middle East states are not always necessarily the primary variables in the equation, because in that region there is a (not necessarily universal, but somewhat widespread nevertheless) de facto allegiance to an "Arab-Muslim world" body politic?

If we take Mr. Churchill's theory seriously, he is saying that there's very little difference between one Middle East state and another - more precisely, that the differences are unimportant to certain analyses. They are all part of the same milieu and the boundaries are fiction. You cannot deal with one "state" in isolation without considering its effects on the wider "Arab-Muslim world" body politic. That is precisely what he is saying, whether or not he realizes it.

But if that theory is taken seriously then it destroys all arguments predicated on the notion that on all matters we must treat these Middle East "states" discretely and independently of one another, without regard to the larger region. In other words, there really is some sort of fuzzy (albeit nascent) "Caliphate" or "the Middle East" superstate to speak of, and we need not squint our eyes and pretend that these smaller component "states" that have been drawn on maps are the only reality we are allowed to consider. Yet I doubt very much if the likes of Mr. Churchill would enjoy the foreign policy that would proceed from that.

The alternative, of course, is not to take Mr. Churchill's theory seriously in the first place. Indeed, that is probably what I ought to have done.

Oscars

2005-01-25T14:21:00.000-08:00

I've seen virtually none of the main Oscar nominated films. For the main categories, I can say only that Jamie Foxx in Collateral was very good (I haven't seen Ray) and that Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine was ok but not Oscar-worthy.

The best film I've seen that is listed in IMDB as being from 2004 is Before Sunset. Spiderman 2 and Team America were quite good as well. Odd that none of them are nominated for best film. Truly perplexing.

Terminology

2005-01-25T13:31:00.000-08:00

Too few people refer to political-Islamists (or radical Islamists, Islamofascists, whatever term you like) as imperialists. That's why it's so refreshing when it happens. (HT: Donald Sensing.) Because that is what they are.

Objectively, seeking to unify the "Muslim World" (or, "Arab World") into a single body politic is an imperialist goal. The lament of the "divided" state of affairs (i.e. the fact that there are several different, some more some less independent, nation-states that are majority-Arab and/or majority-Muslim, instead of One Big Arab/Muslim Nation-State) is the lament of an imperialist.

Whatever else it might look like, a revived "Caliphate" would surely be an empire.

So why isn't this terminology used more often? It would bring great clarity to many ongoing debates.

No one on the left would be as confused and misguided about the nature of the beast if (for example) there were a serious radical movement in America, Europe, and Australia to unify the "White World", which lamented the fact that the "White World" had become so "fragmented", which blamed outsiders for causing this fragmentation by "meddling", and which arrogated to itself the right to speak for this greater "White World", including whoever amongst them dared to oppose their goals, on all matters.

Yet when Arab/Muslims say precisely these things, a depressingly large number of people, depressingly overrepresented on the political "left", seem to think they have a point that ought to - indeed, must - be respected. "What right do we have...?" prefaces every other sentence. In effect much of the modern "left" now cleaves to the position that the West "has no right" to prevent foreign fanatics from assembling and growing an empire by force over and against even the wishes of a majority of their own countrymen.

Insisting on the term imperialism for the movement these "leftists" effectively support might force them to at least psychologically confront the inherent irony of their position.

People have rights, nations don't

2005-01-24T16:30:00.000-08:00

Little Green Footballs links to a BBC feedback page containing some typically misguided opinions on the issue of Iran and nukes, one of which in particular illustrates the misconception beautifully (emphasis mine):

Iran has every right to defend itself. The USA has already hinted that it has plans to invade so what option does Iran have other than to develop the weapons necessary for its defence against an unprovoked attack by superpower?
Peter, Welwyn, England

Isn't Peter from Welwyn England correct? Doesn't Iran have the "right to defend itself"? We believe that don't we? All nations have the right to defend themselves. Iran is a nation. Therefore, Iran has the right to defend itself. Thus, in particular, a right to get nukes.

This is incorrect.

The error being committed here is subtle and trips many smart people up. Seeing the error, first of all, requires understanding that by "Iran" we do not mean a person, as in "Jane, Iran, and Joey went to the mall". A nation-state is not a human being.

Instead, "Iran", in this context, refers to the ruling government of Iran. This is a rather different animal, for the ruling government of Iran - as far as we can make out - is a collection of unelected theocrats who dictate matters to the public at large around them by force and threats.

A principle whose end result ends up stating in effect that a small cadre of unelected theocrats who rule a population by force has a "right" to obtain nuclear weapons, is quite self-evidently in error. The problem is that it comes at the end of a long chain of reasoning, most links of which seem pretty reasonable. Let's try to trace that chain, then, and see where the error is committed.

We could do worse than to start with a statement culled from this document:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men ... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life ...

In short, people have a right to Life. A right to self-defense follows easily from this. And presumably when someone spouts a statement like "Iran has every right to defend itself", something such as a right to self-defense is what they think they are basing this on. Indeed, semantically it seems very similar (the word "self" is present, the word "defense" is present), so - if you don't think about it - you too might think that "Iran has the right to defend itself" is an application of the right of self-defense.

And to be sure, when people speak of the United States having a "right of self-defense", this too is what they have in mind; a right that flows from the people (and their respective rights to self-defense), since the government of the United States is representative of all its people.

But is it "self" defense when the government in question, Iran, enjoys no consent whatsoever from those they govern? Do Iran's ruling theocrats get to, in effect, act as rights-proxies for their subjects? I agree that Iranians, as individuals, have a right of self-defense. But that's actually a far cry from Iran's ruling regime having anything like a "right" to obtain whatever weapons it may wish.

An extreme analogy would be a kidnap/hostage situation: Joe kidnaps Jane, Judy, and Joy, and holds them in a compound against their will. The police stake out the place day and night from a safe post across the street. Do Jane, Judy, and Joy have an inalienable right to self-defense? Well, sure. (It's being violated by Joe, but sure.)

Can Joe - acting on behalf of his hostages' self-defense rights - obtain rocket launchers and flamethrowers? Must the police allow it, because Joe has a "right" to do this, a right which flows from the fact that his hostages have a right to life? Does "the Joe hostage-compound" have every right to "defend itself"? Does the following (altering Peter from Welwyn England's statement slightly) make sense?

[Joe's Compound] has every right to defend itself. [The police] have already hinted that it has plans to [raid] so what option does [Joe's Compound] have other than to develop [obtain] the weapons necessary for its defence against an unprovoked attack by [authorities]?

This is self-evidently nonsensical. Hostage-takers don't get to collect up and pool the rights enjoyed by their hostages. And people who are in a de facto state of criminality don't even get to claim weaponry and violence as part of their "right to self-defense" in the first place. Joe, by definition, is in violation of his hostages' rights - namely, their right to liberty.

And so is the government of Iran. Now, is that to say that Iran is, in every respect, directly analogous to the hostage situation? No, of course not. But it approaches one. It is more like a hostage situation than not.

On the other end of the spectrum, suppose free law-abiding citizens form a neighborhood watch, banding together to pool their resources so as to buy weapons and ammo for self-defense, training together on them, taking turns patrolling with them. Most reasonable people (unless anti-gun by nature) would recognize this as a valid application of their self-defense rights: each individual in this neighborhood-watch is simply engaging in self-defense activities, therefore the activities of the organization fall under their collective self-defense rights as well.

Is the United States government, in every respect, directly analogous to an egalitarian community watch? No. The United States is not a pure democracy, there are several levels of buffer between the leadership and the people, there is specialization of tasks (in particular a professional military), there is always significant dissent, etc. But it approaches the neighborhood-watch example in a way that governments such as that of Iran, do not.

It is, then, simply an error to lump in the United States and France with Iran and North Korea just because they all happen to be Nation-states, and make sweeping statements such as that they all have a "right to defend themselves".

Frankly, the government of Iran doesn't have the "right" to do diddly-squat. They are autocrats. They have a right to step down and cease violating their subjects' liberty. If and when that happens, then maybe we'll talk about "Iran"'s rights.

In practice, the right which some apparently think "Iran" has to "defend themselves" translates into - means - the "right" of Iran's ruling regime to use force and obtain weapons which they believe will enable them and anointed successors to remain in power indefinitely, unmolested by outside aggression of any kind. If that's what "right of nation-states to defend themselves" can mean in a given instance, can there really be such a "right"?

No. Of course not.

Platonic Resistance

2005-01-24T10:20:00.000-08:00

Via Tom Frank (via Michael Totten) I was reminded of a quote from Arundhati Roy that I had seen before:

"Of course, [the Iraqi resistance] is riddled with opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery, and criminality. But if we were to only support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity."

Of immediate note: Ms. Roy, and like-minded, apparently find it so abhorrent to imagine a moral world in which, at some given time, "no resistance" is worth supporting, that she insists on making ideological space for even the most fascist ones imaginable. There just has to be a uniform right of resistance, doesn't there? cries the "left". The thought that political violence (against a target they dislike) might be unacceptable in some circumstances is just too horrible for them to contemplate. What if they want to use political violence some day?, they are evidently thinking, I cannot help but conclude.

This is also a good representative of a certain mode of thinking on the "left" that goes like this: We support [group]'s right of resistance even though we may not always agree with their methods. I am here to assert that this is nonsense. It seems to postulate some sort of "Platonic ideal" of Resistance that lives out there in the ether. You can "support" it abstractly, while at the same time upon examination reserving the right to mouth platitudes about how horrible the various actual acts in question are, thus keeping your hands clean.

But there is no separation between "the resistance" and the acts that they perform. The acts are the resistance. If you say you "support the resistance" while at the same time professing not to support those acts, you are saying something meaningless. Do you support the acts or don't you? "No, I abhor these acts, but I still support their Right To Resist" is a non sequitur. I don't give a rat's ass about this theoretical "Right To Resist" you have in your head: do you support these acts or do you not? It is the acts which are at issue, not the abstract notion of "Resistance"; if the resistance were (somehow, were this possible) engaging in their resistance via different acts, it would be a whole different discussion. But they are not. They are engaging in the acts they are engaging in: and these include bombing marketplaces, murdering civilians who dare to sign up to work elections or police, and so on.

To paraphrase two great thinkers: When you are deciding whether or not to support a resistance, you have to go with the resistance you actually have - not the resistance you wish you had. A resistance is as a resistance does.

The Platonic notion of Resistance is irrelevant to, and thus often a confounding factor in, any actual discussion of resistance.

Iraq's election and the "left"

2005-01-24T08:34:00.000-08:00

Assertions (ok, predictions): The Iraq election will take place. There will be a turnout that is higher than for any American election in living memory. Sunni participation will be lower than their demographic presence. And so, folks on the Western "left" will insist that it is "illegitimate". Thus providing the crucial ideological cover for any post-election terror attacks that Sunnis may decide to engage in.

(Hey, I never said that the assertions I make here wouldn't sometimes be obvious.)

Why the "left" seeks in this case to objectively align itself with the power-interests of the Sunni minority in Iraq is instructive to contemplate. Here is a group that we are told comprises 1/5th of that country. The "left" has decided that their non-participation in an election, and resulting presumed underrepresentation at the national level, will ipso facto render the resulting government invalid. Essentially if The Sunnis dislike the result then democracy in Iraq is invalid.

What is so special about this privileged 20%, I wonder, that their mere say-so delegitimizes democracy?

Surely one could go on a fishing expedition to find 20% subsets in the U.S. that don't vote at the same rate as their peers, and which are therefore underrepresented. Does the "left" agonize and wring their hands over it in any other cases besides Iraq? Why take the position that, essentially, Sunni under-representation is enough to kill the legitimacy of any election? Why take the position that an election with depressed Sunni vote is worse than no election at all - withdrawing troops - and a resurgent Baathist autocracy as the predictable result? Is this "leftist", I ask (not for the first time)?

Well, of course: The Sunnis, like the "left", oppose what the U.S. is doing. This simply makes them a convenient mascot at the moment. No further explanation is needed because that's all most of the "left" amounts to nowadays: opposing whatever the U.S. is doing. The U.S. wants the people of Iraq to elect a national assembly to draft its constitution. Therefore, the Western "left" so predictably calculates, it must be opposed.

The speech Bush read

2005-01-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

The spectacle of pundits and talking-heads all poring over a speech a President reads at a pre-arranged ceremony, reading its tea-leaves and "analyzing" its cues and code words, is always perplexing.

Are they not aware that this speech was composed by someone else? Someone who knew that numerous people would be listening, and crafted the words to achieve certain desired effects?

I don't mean to dismiss the value of good rhetoric. By all means, analyze the speech on its own terms: Was it a good speech, bad speech? How well did Bush deliver it? It is even fair to say that lofty rhetoric can be an inspiration or a guide for some people in the world, and thus effect change. But please, spare me from analyses of the form Look at this sentence, does this signal Bush will be doing XYZ?

Do pundits even believe their own "analyses" when they do this, or do they just find it fun to play along with the charade and pretend that an Inauguration Day Speech is a step by step and concrete, yet somehow secret, complete guide to future Presidential actions that desperately needs their expert decoding?

The speech President Bush satisfactorily read was excellently-written, and I hope it inspires people not laden with the baggage of either the Bush-hatred of his critics, or the cynicism of yours truly, to strive for better things.

There Is No There there

2005-01-20T21:59:00.000-08:00

"There Is No Crisis" is the single most asinine political slogan, and campaign, in recent memory. An army of self-proclaimed "liberals", dedicated to the ever so inspiring proposition that There Is No Crisis and (therefore?) Nothing Should Be Done, So Don't. One can only marvel at what sort of mental midget it takes to think such a thing the height of political cleverness. In the world of political causes it is the equivalent of a cargo cult: if we say words, and get links, those words translate into what we want.

Which is... what? That's the truly pathetic part: they want nothing. And why is that? Because the President proposing modifications to Social Security is George W. Bush and there is an R after his name. I have yet to see a more plausible motive articulated.

Mind you, I take no position on whether there is a Social Security "crisis". Vigorously discussing whether there is a "crisis" is, I think, a classroom exercise or perhaps one-page essay assignment for junior high school students. But for an adult, in the real world of politics, to stake one's whole case on "there is no crisis" is a silly exercise in semantic question-begging. This is because the status and predictable future of Social Security is what it is. Whatever that status is, whether it qualifies as a "crisis" depends solely on your definition of "crisis". Different people will have differing opinions. Is this interesting? Certainly, reasonable people may disagree about the nature, extent, seriousness, and prioritization of whatever problems Social Security may be due for. But mouthing "there is no crisis" is not an argument for anything. It lacks all intellectual content.

Neither do I take a position on the advisability of whatever alterations Bush is or will be proposing to the program. I don't even know what the proposal is, aside from its broad outlines. To the extent that I understand the proposal, I find it unremarkable and inoffensive, perhaps desirable while not exactly exciting. But whatever the merits or demerits of Bush's proposal, "there is no crisis" does not even approach being an argument against it. It is a complete non sequitur in addition to being vacuous.

In what is certainly not a first, this campaign against a Bush policy is so thoroughly moronic, in fact, that it forces me to lean in favor of Bush's policy by default, if only to avoid the stench of his opponents.

Mythical rights

2005-01-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

Via Harry's Place I am entertained to see George Galloway torn to shreds on the issue of Iraqian resistance. The author responds to Galloway's "defense" of the resistance - that they "only" "fight" (i.e. murder) those 'working for the occupation'.

But who is 'working for the occupation' according to the resistance? Ah, there's the rub. It turns out to be the vast majority of Iraqi people.

Principled leftists at Harry's Place, rightly, put Galloway in his place for the noxious, pro-fascist morality he exemplifies. I would be more pleased however if the cause of the moral confusion being shown by people on the "left", like Galloway, were being more accurately diagnosed.

It is not sufficiently acknowledged that this confusion is simply a direct application of the noxious myth, believed by all too many and rejected by all too few, that there is a "right" of resistance that applies uniformly in all occupation-and-similar situations. This belief, or (I should say) wishful thinking, is a special case of a larger belief in a "right" to self determination. Setting the World to Rights had a beautiful post explaining why there is, in fact, no such right, to which there is nothing to add.

Activistism as training

2005-01-20T17:24:00.000-08:00

Bravo Romeo Delta has made me aware of this excellent Michael Totten post on "activistism". An important observation has been made here, that to some faction often identified with "liberals" or the left, it is really just "activism" qua activism that drives them, independently of any necessary mooring to serious problems or a coherent political program to address them. This impulse to activistism is rightly observed to be inward-directed: they do it because it's good for themselves.

This observation by itself is a bit unsatisfying however, because it fails to explain why. The observation that there is no coherence to the seemingly disparate "causes" that attract activistists is surely correct, but it only raises a new question, namely: What is there that is coherent in this seeming movement? After all, they certainly seem to find each other easily enough. Phish concert attendees know to save the rainforests and stop "globalization" and defeat Republicans and protect affirmative action, and vice versa. How, then?

If my assertions about the role of self-dramatization in grievance movements and much of the left's perceived need to always keep political violence on the table as an option are correct, then the attraction of activistism becomes more understandable. This fraction of the left is dissatisfied with the lack of romantic drama in their lives and (not coincidentally) continually contemplates the hypothetical need for political violence sometime in the future. As such, believing in activistism for activistism's sake makes perfect sense: just because there's no real drama in their lives has never been a reason for them not to seek it out before, and besides, it's always good to keep up the practice - to keep "active" - just in case a real opportunity comes along.

In fact the lack of coherence in activistism is a feature, not a bug, because to anyone who perceives themselves to be amongst activistism's leadership, the less comprehensible and consistent is the ongoing political program of these trainees, the more easily they will be pointed in the right direction if and when the time comes.

Depressingly: If I am correct, activistism will increase, not decrease, as society prospers and a larger fraction of the West finds themselves living coddled, sheltered, unromantic lives.

Labels

2005-01-20T07:07:00.000-08:00

In the U.S. political scheme, those labeled conservatives tend to be liberal on most things. That which they seek to conserve is, to a large extent, liberalism.

Meanwhile those labeled liberals are not very.

American Beauty

2005-01-19T16:51:00.000-08:00

American Beauty is a well-made, sometimes-entertaining film, whose central dramatic event is asinine and whose underlying message is detestable.

The central dramatic event is prompted by, I am not kidding, an optical illusion that induces a moronic, TV-sitcom-style "misunderstanding". This is an insult to the viewer's intelligence.

But the underlying message of the film is an insult to the very being of many viewers. That message is: sometimes death (and detached observation) is preferable to life (and participation); sometimes you have to die in order to get out of the way of other people; and, you will enjoy it.

Drama and reality

2005-01-19T15:39:00.000-08:00

A caller to a radio talk show complained that after 9/11, President Bush (and, of course, Ashcroft) stripped us of our civil liberties. The show's host challenged the caller to elaborate, by (for example) naming such a civil liberty that the caller had lost since that time. Surely there must be one he could name, the loss of which he felt deeply, for the caller to feel so put-upon? The caller was unable to name even one.

There are people who are compelled to seek out phantom grievances and shadowy conspiracies against them not so much because they exist and have a tangible effect on their lives, but because it makes them feel as if they are at the center of a dangerous drama. This is understandable by making the reasonable conjecture that in reality such people find their actual lives quite boring and more importantly, unromantic. Lodging vague grievances with no foundation will therefore appeal to such people in proportion to how comfortable and sheltered their lives actually are.

People who have actually lost their civil liberties don't, as a general rule, pull their Volvo over to the side of the road, as they're on their way to Starbuck's to buy a chai latte, so as to call a radio talk show host on their cell phone and wait for twenty minutes to inform him that they've lost their civil liberties.

Left ideology and terrorism

2005-01-19T14:56:00.000-08:00

Many on the left are fond of muddying the waters with regard to the moral status of terrorist tactics: a terrorist is just "another man's freedom fighter". The effect of this can be to plunge free nations into semi-paralyzing self doubt as they attempt to confront barbarian behavior. (If they are "freedom fighters" what gives us the right...?)

I have been wondering what the attraction is, to the left, of providing this type of backdoor ideological support to terrorists - even those, as in Iraq, with plainly fascist and antidemocratic aims. During the Cold War, leftist attraction to terrorism - at least, terrorism perceived to aid the global communist cause - was at least understandable as coherent realpolitik. Surely there were times when, in a calculation made just as often by the right, it could be convenient to give ideological safe harbor to nasty groups, as long as those groups were "aligned" in the proper way (with the "left", which is to say, with the Soviet empire that embodied its hopes), and opposed to the left's ideological enemy (the US and "imperialism"). This could be at least plausibly consistent with the traditional leftist attraction to both "revolution" and people power.

But now with the USSR gone, the left has become unmoored from any such coherent guiding principles. Minority-Sunni Baathist terrorists in Iraq, who are murdering their countrymen in order to prevent elections from taking place - in order to prevent the majority of Iraqis from electing their own government - are romanticized by some in the West, mostly on the "left", as "freedom fighters" every bit as much as, say, the Sandinistas were so romanticized. Their "resistance to occupation" (in the form of mass murders, beheadings and the like) is lauded or at least explained away as being their "right". Their grievances (which consist almost solely of: loss of autocratic power, and naked chauvinism) discussed as if they carry equal weight with the remaining 80+% of their countrymen who to a greater or lesser extent simply long for a consensual government. The "legitimacy" of any hypothetical elected government is anguished over, as if the existence of a chosen violent fascist minority in a nation somehow renders its (what will, let's hope, be a) democratically-elected government "illegitimate".

What, I wonder, is "leftist" about any of these concerns? Suppose the terrorists got what they want - no elections, fracture of the country or (worse) a return to power of Baathists. Is that a recognizably "leftist" outcome? There is no Soviet bloc for the hypothetical restored-Baathist dictator to be aligned with. Nor would it be anything resembling "people power" for the 20% of Iraqis who are Sunnis to be represented by a returned Baathist dictatorship while the other 80% receive nothing besides oppression.

Yet some leftists appear to see a straight line from supporting the Sandinistas to supporting the Iraq "insurgency", nevertheless. Without communism what can this line consist of? A plausible explanation - but one which renders them no longer "leftist" in any meaningful way - is reflexive opposition to the United States wielding power.

But there is more to it. Even with no communism to motivate it, there is something consistent besides raw anti-Americanism that drives the left's ideological support, past and present, for terrorism as a valid tactic. What remains in all situations is a longing for there to be, and insistence on the existence of, a rule-set which treats (certain chosen instances of) political violence as a valid tactic for change - not beyond the pale.

In other words, much of the left consistently longs for certain types of politically-directed violence to be treated as acceptable, and does not want it to be opposed effectively. This is presumably because this fraction of the left continually contemplates the possibility of engaging in political violence sometime in their future, and wants to ensure that - should such a "need" arise - it will be maximally effective from their point of view.