11.29.06
Posted in Culture at 11:51 pm by steve
One of the attractions of going to a car show is seeng the new models. But even more fun is to look at the concept cars. What you know about concept cars is that they will never see the light of day as production models. Still, it is fun to dream.
In this case, the dream is of justice. The dream is about punishing one of the greatest, most cynical, most desctuctive deceipts of the last five decades.
Elizabeth de la Vega has prepared for us an indictment documenting precisely which acts of fraud and deception the Bush administration used to defraud the American people into buying the war on Iraq. Its a good start.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 4:24 pm by steve
Santa Clarita CA. Twelve year old Quentin Arbuckle was injured at a local Chuck E. Cheeses today while playing a modified game of Whack-a-Mole. The game had gotten pretty intense and young Arbuckle found himself pounding away at the targets with great enthusiasm. That enthusiasm springs from his own dislike of the “mole” - in this particular case, little statuettes of George W. Bush. “I really don’t like that guy, ” Arbuckle said. “I suppose it doesn’t help much that my older brother lost his left earlobe in Iraq.” But that’s another story. The question of how the machine got modified is under investigation, but there is an unsubstantiated rumor that Republican party canvasers were massed around it soon after election night.
Arbuckle showed up at the Santa Clarita emergency ward screaming in pain from a face injury. “He had green goo oozing from the side of his face,” said the triage nurse. Fortunately he only had to wait two hours for treatment; it was an otherwise quiet evening at the hospital. The goo in question was evidently emitted from an impostor in the game he was playing. It seems that in his Whack-a-Mole fury Arbuckle actually encountered a statuette of Dick Cheney. And he actually gave it a good sound whack. “That part felt pretty good,” Arbuckle said. But that was when the trouble started. “Cheney’s head exploded,” and emitted a dense, green oozy goo that struck him an inch below the eye.
Turns out that it was heavily laden with hydrofluoric acid. “Young Mr. Arbuckle is very lucky he was hit in that exact part of the face,” claimed Dr. Schmegma. “The toxic goo was effectively stopped and neutralized when it dissolved Quentin’s cheek bone. Had he been struck an inch higher, in the eye, it would have eaten all the way through his brain, like a bookworm through a dry old book. Possibly he’d be dead. At very least he’d be stuck voting for psychotics the rest of his life.”
(For those who may be unclear on the point : The town of Santa Clarita does exist. And so does Chuck E. Cheeses and the game Whack-a-Mole. All the events, dialogue, names and descriptions in this story are a figment of the imagination. Any resemblance of the names to those of people real or fictional, living or dead is accidental or miraculous.)
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Posted in Social at 12:55 am by steve
There once was a lovely, quaint a town of 50,000 people. It had tree-lined streets, a bank, some pretty white-steepled churches, an ice cream store, a hardware store, a library, a grocery store. It even had a toy store. People worked in its offices, ate in its restaurants, skateboarded on its sidewalks, slept quietly and soundly in its houses and apartments.
One day the gasoline pipeline that ran underground along Main Street sprung a big leak. Before long, 1,000,000 gallons of gasoline stood in a 2 inch deep pool and covered most of downtown. The townspeople were smart but for some odd quirk of nature they proved completely incapable of dealing with this particular problem. They failed to remove the gasoline. So they learned to live with it. They were scrupulous about not igniting it because they perfectly understood its hazards.
Then one night some foreigner in a Hummer drove through town and tossed a lit cigarette butt into the pool of gasoline and the entire town burned down, killing most of its inhabitants and levelling all the buildings. Meanwhile the paint on the foreigner’s Hummer got scorched. “Stupid fucking town,” he complained. “Never going there again. ”
Being kind and decent people, what are we inclined to think of this foreigner? One might observe that “If you are going to throw butts out the window, it would be courteous to the locals to understand quite clearly that the action will not cause a great, destructive conflagration.” This is the kind of thing one learns as a six year old. Perhaps your mother never told you this exact thing. But if she had reason to think about it, she probably would have.
This very contrived story might help us see the situation in Iraq just a little better. The country was composed of two sects who have fought each other fiercly and frequently over more than a millennium. And the relative state of peace that existed there recently was extremely fragile. It existed primarily because the minority party who tended to have the education, connections, wealth, and power, ruled the majority ruthlessly. It was ruthless suppression that kept the peace.
The Iraqis were not killing each other at 3000 per month when we arrived. No, this ongoing killing spree owes its existence to our invasion, our deBaathification program, and our own rather profound Rumsfeldian neglect. It has caused at least half a million Iraqi deaths. We are tempted to blame the Iraqis, because it is Iraqis who are actually killing each other. But Iraqis cannot bear all the blame. It may be their gasoline; but they had learned to live with it. It was, however, our flaming butts getting stuck in the wrong place that started the conflagration.
The way power was distributed before the invasion was so completely different from the way it would be distributed afterwards in a ‘rule by majority theocracy’ that a civil war was inevitable. People with power advantages do not reliquish them easily. Almost any village idiot could have predicted it before the invasion happened. I did in April 2003: see stratum.blogspot.com
Today only one of two things will fix Iraq: 1) another Saddam with an equally repressive regime or 2) partition of the country. America is constitutionally incapable of doing the first and legally incapable of doing the second. That means it’s time to beg forgiveness for being idiots and assholes. And it’s time to leave. We can do it with the neighbors’ help or without. But no matter what happens America, Iraq, and most of her neighbors will suffer for our decision for a long time to come.
In the mean time, that Hummer neads a new paint job.
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11.26.06
Posted in Philosophy &c at 7:03 pm by steve
The neoconservative beast has slunk back beneath the surface of the swamp and we need to be ready for it when it emerges. It would be most helpful if we could disabuse the public of the myths promulgated by the neocons and if we could undermine their philosophical basis. To the extent that we are successful, the beast will then encounter a more hostile environment next time it emerges.
Here is one idea:
Neocons like to characterize themselves as “liberals whose illusions have been shattered by reality.” But their ideas tend to violate all the core beliefs of the enlightenment. There is no liberal there; none that I can readily identify. Nor much conservative for that matter. They do well as authoritarians; and would probably succeed better than anyone in a feudalistic society. Their language seems calculated to move us in that direction.
I was recently re-reading Gertrude Himmelfarb’s preface to the J.S. Mill work On Liberty (Penguin Classics). And I found she was arguing (p32) against his idea that public policy can only be made in a process of ongoing open debate. Mill argues that even once policy is acted upon and issues are “settled,” the debate ought to continue so that we can keep on being sure our actions and points of view make sense. And so that our policy does not become “dogma.” ( My extremely loose interpretation.)
For example, in Mill’s idea of the world, there would have existed a party within Congress who would have advocated for a different approach to Iraq. They would have challenged the reasoning, the evidence, the motivation, and so on. And even if the outcome would have been the same, then at least the process would have been an intellectually valid one.
Himmelfarb comes frighteningly close to dismissing such a concept of persistent debate as nonsense, obliquely suggesting that there is some “ultimate truth” that might be knowable and that Mill’s process places liberty above that “truth.” But this, it seems to me, purposefully misses Mill’s point; in matters of policy things are not known. They almost never can be. Assuming they are always proves to be a huge mistake. Truth is not a very meaningful concept. Facts are helpful, but truth exists not so much as an object to grasp and bludgeon one’s opponent with as it does as a distant object of hope, a hopeful objective of policy. It is a shimmering beacon far, far off in the distance. We really cannot see it very well. And often we cannot see it at all. Debate lights a few steps of the path that lies between where we are and some very distant, hypothetical goal.
The truth Himmelfarb imagines is tangible, clear, unmistakable. But this is the kind of truth one sees with the clarity that is rarely possible without a rather profoundly dogmatic and closed-minded view of the world. Her point of view challenges Mill in many areas.
Her introduction tends to be much stronger in identifying the weaknesses in Mill’s argument and voicing the many objections to it than it is in explicating its nature and implications. And that strikes me as an odd angle from which to introduce an influencial book. Rarely does one expect an introduction to undermine the sense of the book. Voice challenges and objections, yes. Undermine its sense, no. And this leads me to wonder precisely what it is about liberty that Himmelfarb finds threatening.
The scary thing about ‘cons is that they are persuaded that they own ultimate truth exclusively, permanently, completely. It is a sensibility shared by other fundamentalist groups. They are happy enough to engage in conversation and debate so long as their own policies are not in force; but once those policies are in force, ‘cons tend to assume the unassailable position of gods. “Truth” gets inscribed in stone tablets. Even when it is patently false. Perhaps this is a general problem of Americans rather than one specific to the ‘cons.
Take, for example the way Dubya persistently denies scientific facts inconvenient to his policies on such issues as global warming and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. His administration has a well established pattern of ignoring facts and sound scientific judgment when such are inconvenient to his “truths.” Bush represents ‘cons more closely than he does any other groups and he has done more to express their political priorities. If he is not a ‘con himself he certainly represents their views and methods and has given them almost free reign in his administration.
Using their own simplistic notion of “truth” to slip Americans in an ideological straightjacket was one of the ‘cons’ early acts. It is no accident that neoconservatism arose at the same time as the cold war and Joseph McCarthy, and that ‘cons supported him. Nor is it an accident that the ‘con point of view has been sustained by the ‘domino theory’ and the terrorist threat. If these threats did not naturally exist, the ‘cons would have had to create them. Fear makes men senseless and provokes them to trade liberty for empty promises of security. ‘Cons seem happy enough to exploit this little human weakness. But the ruse is threatened by lively public debate. And where better to chop off the legs of lively public debate than at the philosophical source?
It is hard to find a ‘con idea expressed by the current regime that has not demonstrated itself to be patently false. Yet, Mill might teach us that even if every single one of the ‘cons’ truths really had some evident basis in fact we must still sustain an element of disbelief, else public discourse falls into a long narcotic sleep. And we do with it. This is the long-term effect of those unchallenged little “truths.” This is why we must debate them.
Democracy and the liberties it affords can only exist and remain vital so long as all reasonable voices and points of view are heard and all parties are able to imagine that other parties have valuable things to bring to the conversation, and so long as we are capable of sustaining the belief that sometimes we might be wrong, individually and collectively.
I am grateful to Himmelfarb for making many of her points, because they can help inform how we ought to go about interpreting Mill. Liberty may be a natural right of man, it may be his chief source of happiness; but it cannot be sustained in the absence of sober, responsible, cooperative behavior. Mill understood this, I imagine. It would explain his insistence on mandatory public education. ‘Cons, similarly understand this, I imagine, hence the Reagan emphasis on “Readin’ Rightin’ & ‘Rithmetic” to the exclusion of civics classes in public schools. Some of our favorite “truths” simply cannot withstand the scrutiny of Mill’s process of advocacy.
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11.25.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:58 pm by steve
Don’t “throw good money after bad.” That’s an old adage that we might do well to keep in mind. It is an adage about lost causes. Wise people have the capacity to judge when a cause is lost and to act accordingly. Fools, on the other hand, are too narcissistically attached to their own mistaken projections about the world to accept reality, so they keep on wasting resources on lost causes until they are driven into ruin.
America is reaching the point at which the number of soldiers killed in Iraq will exceed the number of civilians killed in the event that was used to justify that war. And as we do, the situation in Iraq grows ever worse. It has already taken the lives of almost 3000 soldiers. Over 22,000 Americans have been wounded. In Iraq, many more innocent civilians have lost their lives. A recent Johns Hopkins study suggests that probably 600,000 Iraqis have died either as a direct result of fighting or blasts or as an indirect result of tensions. The President characterizes this as a gross exaggeration, claiming “only” half as many deaths.
If one were to imagine that there were clear objectives, that those objectives were sensible and had a compelling basis that lay in our national interest, and that there were steady and unmistakable progress in Iraq, it would be an uphill struggle to justify the whole affair; but reasonable people might have differing opinions on the subject. None of this is true, however. The objectives were never clear. There never was a factually true and compelling case made for a connection between American action in Iraq and national interest. What arguments were made have all been soundly discredited as false, misleading, or delusional. And all progress since the toppling of the regime some years ago has been retrograde. By any objective measure, Iraq is a monumental failure, a f***up of epic proportions. It is impossible to describe it accurately while being constrained by polite language.
The situation in Iraq is so terrible that no westerner can begin to discover what it is. The situation in Iraq is so terrible that even independent local press find it hazardous, and almost impossible to operate outside the tiny sliver of land in Baghdad known as the Green Zone. In terms of press coverage, Iraq makes Vietnam look like a Sunday picnic in the park.
All we have knowledge of is the daily body counts. Almost daily another blast kills between six and a hundred six innocent civilians. The body count for October was over 3000. And the general trend is upwards. The situation is so bad that the short stretch of road between the Airport and the Green Zone is not safe. Only large military convoys travel it. Westerners are flown by helicopter between airport and Green Zone. Many western press and military brass have not been outside the Green Zone in the greater part of a year. Schools, markets and other institutions teeter on the brink of dysfunction. Vigilantes and militias rule pockets here and there. And secret groups blow things up with quite remarkable daily regularity.
While Iraqis bleed real blood, American taxpayers are bleeding money. This war was financed by debt. And by various estimates it has already cost between $1 trillion and $2 trillion . These are mind-numbing numbers. They represent a debt of $3000-$6000 on behalf of every citizen of this nation. And the administration is advocating that we keep on doing what we have been doing, indefinitiely.
When we consider doing this we need to think about a number of issues. One is the issue of trust. Ever since the “Stuff will happen” comment by Rumsfeld disorder has been getting worse in Iraq. And ever since that day the administration has claimed that things are getting better in Iraq. This means either that the administration is so completely delusional that they cannot be trusted to make any sound judgment about any important policy foreign or domestic. Or that they are so completely committed to doing what they please without any accountablility to the American people that they are willing to lie, cheat, and deceive about essentially every aspect of their administration. Or both.
In neither case is it reasonable for Americans to trust the administration either on their judgment of the situation or on their recommendations for action. It might be more helpful to trust a dead smart person than a living fool.
Einstein said “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” So if we were to imagine staying in Iraq, then it would be essential that our politicians articulate precisely what went wrong and spell out clearly what changes they expect to make in order to be successful. But the gap between where Iraq is now and where it would have to be if it were successful is so large that it is hard to imagine that five or ten times the rate of resource expenditure there would lead to success, even if it were managed by clear-headed, competent people at the top.
Right now there is no question that the war in Iraq is a monumental and complete failure. It has been for at least three years. Nor has any person proposed substantial changes in action that might precipitate even tiny incremental advantages in Iraq.
Only a “reign of terror” of the sort Saddam himself was capable of producing will be sufficient to quench the violence in Iraq. And unless the US military can produce 2 million soldiers fluent in the native languages who are willing to patrol the street corners and dark alleys of the nation, there is simply no hope of success. Nor are Americans capable of being the kind of monsters that will be required to get results. It would be dangerous to our own democratic society for us to learn to behave as such monsters. So the very means of success must remain far from our grasp. We simply cannot succeed.
Whether we find we are fools for throwing good money after bad or insane for doing the same thing in Iraq until we are incapable of any useful act, we must confront the sheer madness of the mission. We must realize we cannot win: the only remaining question is how to stop losing. We need to leave. The sooner the better.
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11.22.06
Posted in Uncategorized, Policy at 1:03 am by steve
Some people read it as a bluff, a sort of thing to corner the administration. Others have been calling for uniform voluntary service for a decade or more - one with no exemptions whatsoever. I think Rangell, though, was playing to a particular constituency when he recently introduced a bill to restore the draft. He was delivering a rhetorical message. “Our children are dying for this cause; so why aren’t yours?”
This is a message that Americans have to hear. If America is going to commit to a fifty-year long conflict in the Middle East as George Bush and a bunch of neo-cons suggest, then it is a little unfair to burden the lowest classes with the task of fighting and dying. Especially when there simply is no point ( See Opportunity Missed, Below )
What saddens me about this is that Rangell has to do it, or that he imagines he has to. I think more than 60 percent of Americans look at the war in Iraq and see that it was founded upon a false premise, that it has produced few real, important, tangible benefits, and that it has no future - it is a lost cause.
Rangell has been advocating a draft for some time. And, in fact, the idea of some uniform mandatory service has been batted around for perhaps a decade or more. People never really took it very seriously. That’s unfortunate because the service idea can really help young people gain a different perspective of their world. The idea of service might be a good idea if it affects every person at the same age, if it moves them from one cultural situation into some very different cultural situation, and if it helps them appreciate how big and wide and varied this world actually is.
I am a little apprehensive about Rangell’s plan. Firstly, I don’t know the details. If it is a universal service plan that lets people opt into the military under the same conditions that now apply, I cannot think of any serious reservations. It would provide the same benefits, but the people who do it would not suffer the opportunity cost of entering college later than other people.
On the other hand, if it is a real, honest-to-goodness draft that is found in Rangell’s bill, I am both a little angry and a little apprehensive. I am not sure Republicans will not just call his bluff. Why should we not expect that they will push the bill through without any exemptions or exceptions. When Democrats have a piece of legislation that needs some Republican votes, Republicans simply write in rider-language that guts the universality of the service bill, leaving the Rangell constituency in the same position it is now, but with smaller paychecks for being in the service. I don’t really see why this would not happen. The President would be happy, he gets more troops, pays them less. The electorate would be happy, junior would still be able to get around the draft with a college deferment. Or perhaps a congenital and incurable knee problem such as the one that kept jogger Pat Buchanan out of the service during Vietnam.
Those who are happy to see Rangell play this card argue that if we had a universal draft, it would be harder for a President to commit troops to a conflict. This is a funny argument, because most Americans supported the war in Iraq at the start; and if the President had three times as many troops to send he might just as well have sent them. If Iraq had been a success, then Iran would be next. We would keep rolling the dice in the mideast until we were busted. That would be the reward for a draft with a President like the one we now have. The fiasco we now have would be three or five times as large.
Similarly, if Presidents were inclined to learn from history, one might expect a universal draft to make them slightly more cautious about committing to wars that were not easy to win quickly and convincingly. In the case of the current President, however, one can be less certain that the facts of history are either known or used as a point of comparison in making policy. History’s facts are not faith-based. But even Presidents who are quite savvy about history are not above using American troops to advance agendas that are not really to the general advantage of Americans. This frequently turns out to be a mistake. And when the President has the power of a draft, he has the power to make a much, much bigger mistake than he can now make.
Is that what we want to do? Tempt the President to act much less responsibly than he has done?
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11.16.06
Posted in Uncategorized, Policy, Energy - Renewable at 12:54 pm by steve
“Peak Oil” has recently become the trendy “scare du jour.” Probably much of the hype we hear about “Peak Oil” is designed to promote some hidden agenda item by someone on Wall Street. But even if it is a faddish scare, we might do well to believe it. Oil may or may not be scarce today, but it is certainly getting ever more costly to extract and transport to the west. And the sooner Americans focus like a laser on replacing oil with more dependable locally supplied energy, the more secure our future will be.
In a way, Bush has done us all a favor. He has proven that the US is incapable of prosecuting an effective war in the middle east, one that secures America’s energy resources. And knowing this must necessarily force us to adopt a new paradigm when thinking about energy security. Ever since “Three Days of the Condor,” a movie starring Robert Redford as a CIA agent who has uncovered a rather remarkable plot by the American government to secure oil in the middle east, it has been an axiom of US foreign policy that military intervention in the middle east would save our lifestyle. And that it would do so indefinitely.
But the costs of doing that are astronomical. Given $100 billion per year the US is incapable of securing the oil fields of Iraq. And that is in the absence of overt interference from local powers such as Syria or Iran and in the absence of interference from regional powers such as Russia, China, Pakistan, or India. Think about that for a moment. How much would it cost in the presence of such interference? Ten times as much? Fifty times as much? More?
Now, let us imagine that the US spent $100 billion per year for the next five years developing local sources of power. For the sake of argument, we will assume :
1) The operating cost of the generation facilities will be no more than they would have been for oil-powered facilities.
2) Given an ample supply of primary power at cheap prices Americans will figure out how to adapt from one form to another: gasoline to electric, for example.
We present a strawman proposal. It has several very good properties:
1) it is carbon neutral.
2) it employs a plentiful resource
3) it draws on technologies we already have mastered
4) it does not present many serious opportunity-cost consequences.
Let us examine a simple straw-man or benchmark proposal. The cost of a modest sized nuclear power plant, 1000 MW, is roughly $2 billion. For $100 billion America could buy 50,000 MW of electrical power generating capacity. That amounts to 400 E12 Watt-hours of electricity per year.
By comparison, in our cars Americans use 146 billion gallons of gasoline per year Gasoline contains roughly 60 kWh of thermal energy, but when it is converted in an engine it produces roughly 15 kWh of work. When all of the gasoline that Americans buy is converted to work, it amounts to the equivalent of 9.0 E15 Watt-hours of work.
Dividing the amount of work done by the generating capacity, we see that one year’s expenditure in Iraq would have built us 20% of the generating capacity necessary to do the work done by gasoline in a year. Given what America has spent in Iraq in five years, we could have built essentially enough primary power generating capacity so as not to use any gasoline at all! Had Bush built power plants instead of invading Iraq, we simply would not have to worry any more about Iraq’s oil. Only how to run cars using electricity or hydrogen. And that is not a trillion dollar proposal. That is not an insurmountable problem.
Think about it another way. While you were paying three dollars per gallon at the pump, all the gasoline we bought was being “secured” by the Iraq war. Or not. If we allocate the cost of the war to the gasoline we consumed, it cost an extra $1.37 per gallon.
That would be bad enough had the war been a total success. Had Iraq turned out to be a peaceful, stable, model democracy pumping lots of oil out of the ground, we might look back and still decide that in terms of energy policy the Iraq war was a senseless waste of human and capital resources. But it failed not just to create a happy democracy. It actually made Iraq’s resources unavailable. There is no sane measure by which the Iraq war might be considered anything other than a monumental policy failure.
As we have pointed out, had the same amount been spent on energy generating facilities, we would not have reason to care about Iraq’s oil. We could remain disinterested parties in the middle east. This would give us a lot more leverage when it came to promoting peace. We would be well on our way to being presumed to be a disinterested party.
There is no reason to believe that nuclear power is the whole answer. Wind power, for example, is more cost effective right now. We would advocate that at least one third of the $100 billion in question be spent for wind power generation systems, transmission lines, and power storage systems to take advantage of wind power. Wind power is cost effective now. And we should use it. Similarly, solar power is cost effective as a peak-shaving device in areas with large air conditioning loads through much of the year. Many of these are areas where sunlight is likewise plentiful. Solar power ought to be deployed to the point where at least ten percent of America’s electrical needs are met by solar technologies. It costs more than wind and more than nuclear, but it has a role to play as a renewable source.
We wish we could advocate biofuels. They seem like such a logical idea. Unfortunately ethanol, under the current technological practices, is not a breakeven energy proposal. And there is quite a bit of uncertainty that the arable land in the US can sustain both food production and energy production at the levels we now use both those resources. To press the land too hard is to invite disaster on both fronts. Read Jared Diamond’s Collapse.
Energy is of critical importance to our civilization. It is simply foolish to pretend otherwise. We cannot afford to leave energy supplies to the outcomes of war: as Elizabeth I suggested to Walsingham “the outcome is uncertain.”
America’s use of military force to get oil represents a broken paradigm. That paradigm is the use of force to partition existing resources in a way that is favorable to ourselves when, instead, the same level of investment in manufacturing and technology would produce a more durable way of creating enough for everyone.
When will we stop grabbing the weaker kid’s toys because we can? When will our leaders begin to behave better than a spoilt two year old? When will we start facing resource shortages like adults, planning and investing wisely? Or are we incapable of that?
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Posted in Uncategorized, Culture at 12:19 pm by steve
It is time to stop using the T word. That’s right. It is time to banish it. Like a damp mist freshly fallen on an oiled road, the word itself has sent western civilization careening out of control. It has poisoned public discourse. It has corroded public policy. It has transformed all indifferent nations into enemies and all enemies into fiends. It has banished sense and good judgment from public policy and action. It has made us act like madmen. It has poisoned our water, clouded our air, shredded our political system. It has voided our humanity.
The T word is hate speech. It is designed to dehumanize another human being in order for us to imagine being able to kill that person. There is no other purpose for the word. If there ever could have been, if there ever was, I cannot remember and do not know. But certainly over the last five years it has come to have but that one purpose.
How did the word in question enter our political lexicon? During the French Revolution the revolutionaries had a tenuous grasp on power. They understood that their position was hazardous to the extent that there still existed French nobility with the will, the power, and the political support to oppose them. So they imprisoned all whom they saw as being a threat. They tried them on charges that had more basis in political expediency than in law, and they beheaded them. This time in Paris is called the reign of terror. Evidently, the French word for T was coined by a French aristocrat to describe the terrible process taking place and the terrible people responsible for it.
Ever since that time, the word has been used to describe people who used subversive tactics to gain political power. Practices such as assassinations and bombings have been characteristic practices of people belonging to such groups. And the reasons they resort to such tactics is that they represent groups who find they have insufficient political voice. It is only politically marginalized groups who feel ill-used who resort to it.
Toward the middle of last century two such groups were operating. One represented the interests of the Irish, whose lands the English had been occupying and ruling since roughly the sixteenth century. The other represented a group of people who were forcably displaced in the mideast not long before. Both groups advocated use of force, both groups took hostages or blew things up from time to time.
Pressure from the US forced the British, finally, to take the Irish question seriously. Ireland now has a high level of autonomy from Britain. The sparatist state of Northern Ireland, though wobbly, makes efforts at fair policies and practices that represent the interests of both major religious groups. And an organization that once advocated violence has grown much less virulent and destructive. Peace in Ireland is tenuous, but it has some operating presence.
What caused the success? It is impossible to know. One of the things that happened was that level-headed people got together, listened to each others’ issues and concerns, and sorted out an agreement that respected everyone’s rights as humans. They took seriously each others’ concerns as members of a political society. Such a process is not easy. Nor can success be assured. It certainly helps when there is an outside party, considered to be impartial and on good terms with both other parties, who plays a roll in moderating the process. In the end, though, one cannot stop trying. One cannot allow hatred to reign. One has to recognize the humanity in the person on the other side.
In the case of the middle east, less progress seems to have been made. We can only wonder whether things would work better if the more strident, bitter, militaristic voices on both sides weren’t a little more quiet, subdued, reasonable.
Using the T word, for instance, is probably unproductive. It produces deleterious effects in everyone. In the person who speaks it and the people who identify with his group, it produces a rather profound lack of respect for the other person and his group. It strips away his fundamental humanity and turns him into an animal. And once he is an animal, he may be treated worse than our farm animals. Farm animals, at least, we nurture for the hope of food.
The people on the receiving end - the ones at whom the epithet is aimed - cannot help but feel outrage. Outrage is the natural reaction to being dehumanized. If you don’t think so, ask the people who founded the state of Israel. Once one is on the receiving end, it is no longer possible to hear the other person as a human being, only as a threat. For that is what the word does. It threatens. It does not promise justice or punishment; it threatens death.
Thus, the epithet in question drives a wedge between us. It forces us to align with fixed groups having monolithic political ideas and agendas. It forces us to see other human beings as less than human. It keeps us from hearing the force of their ideas. Most of all it keeps us from being respectful of their fundamental humanity.
It is time to banish the word from all public discourse lest we produce a whole legion of Chad Castagana’s.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 10:10 am by steve
“I’m the decider.”
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11.15.06
Posted in Rant and Rave at 2:19 pm by steve
When confronted with complicated issues, Americans represent four distinct styles of coping. Many people use multiple coping styles, but we often tend to adopt one style and stick to it.
One style is the “Bottom Line”. People engaging in this style just want to get things done. They cannot be bothered about the details. Action is everything. General Custer is the epitome of this type. There is a lot to be said for action. Frequently it is in acting that we discover whether a course of action will work. So long as not too much is lost by acting inadvisedly, this is extremely effective, and has been responsible for a goodly measure of America’s success.
A second style would be the “Technical”. Technical people understand a special area extremely well. They are very good a dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. They take care of all the details for the “Bottom Line” people. Sometimes technical people are incredibly narrow and incredibly talented in their narrow fields. And sometimes they can strike one as being a special brand of idiot-savant. But there are a lot of people with technical expertise who are good bottom line people and who are good with argumentation and reasoning.
A third type of people might be ones who could not be bothered to think about issues that do not directly impinge on their immediate circumstances. This is an understandable state, and it is a natural state of the impoverished. But in a wealthy democracy, it is a state we can little afford. Since they have few opinions and are easily manipulated by politicians, people who fall in this group have little voice. In other places we talk about how to make this better, but for the purposes of this work, they have no opinions. None that count, unfortunately.
A fourth type of people are ones who take a keen interest in ideas in their totality. They are interested in how bottom line ideas relate to all the supporting details. They are interested in how the facts in a report are arrived at and how the facts support the conclusion. This sort of behavior is taught well in very good colleges. And it is the basis for much of the success of Europe. This group is not, unfortunately, in the majority. In fact, they seem now to represent a minority even among the major American press. How big is the group? It’s hard to say. Perhaps it is 10% of Americans. Perhaps it is 40% of Americans. Sometimes it depends on the issue. It depends on the technical depth of the details.
Why would this matter? It would matter if there existed governmental or commercial reports with odd constructions. Suppose there existed a report in which some multidisciplinary group of engineers and scientists had to work together to reason out what happened in a crime. And let us suppose they do their work carefully, exactly, precisely, and correctly. Let us suppose that the summary of their work is clear, well organized, articulate, readable, and completely consistent with the best techniques, models, and practices of the art. In other words, it would convince any technical person of its soundness.
Now. Let us suppose that this same report contains one or more executive summaries. The executive summaries are concise, articulate, powerful, unambiguous. In short, they are the very model of executive summaries. The executive summaries would convince any “bottom line” person.
Now, imagine that the same report has one other curious property. Imagine that there appears to be a flawed or tenuous connection between the technical information and the executive summaries. A person who might be capable of writing a good report, or at least of knowing one when he sees it, might see that some bits of the analysis are vaguely supportive of the thesis presented in the bottom line, but the report appears to have two major problems:
1) The major “make or break” arguments are either not made, made indirectly, or are made by misinterpreting evidence.
2) Facts or arguments that might refute the standard model are dismissed out of hand and never treated seriously. Or they are refuted using facts that are no more convincing than the original facts, or by misinterpreting evidence.
If one wished to write a report that misled, this is the approach one might take. Such a report will appeal to the “bottom line” people who tend to be executives and high-powered people with little time. They will read the bottom line and simply assume that the report is well constructed. They may even give the report weight in proportion to how many pages it contains.
Similarly, the technical people will look at the technical treatment of the data and check for things like internal consistency, consistency with known standards and methods, calculational accuracy, and so on. In finding no flaws they will conclude that the technical part is competently prepared and be willing to endorse the conclusions on the basis of the technical competency alone.
Those employing the fourth style will tend to try to understand the technical treatment and connect it with the bottom line arguments. One of the great difficulties, however, is that many who are fluent in technical languages such as those used in engineering, architecture, or medicine might find themselves handicapped in other languages, such as the language of argumentation. Similarly, those very well schooled in the construction of clear arguments may have difficulty following technical reasoning and techniques that employ mathematics or very abstract models of reality.
Hypothetically speaking, then, if one were to set out to deceive a large portion of the population with a technical report, the means are really quite easy. Does this really happen? That is an excellent question to ask; but it is almost impossible to prove. There are people who think it might, sometimes. And if one were to come across such a report what ought one to do?
One might question the flaws, or one might construct competing theories. Raising questions is a good idea, but in a society of salesmen it is incorrectly interpreted as a sign that you don’t understand rather than as a sign that you do understand. So long as the person answering can give an answer that appeals to the bottom-liners and the technical people, the answer does not have to be the least bit sensible. But when they get tired of the game - which may start with the first question - what you hear is:
a) So you have read the whole thing, have you, all 8000 pages? How do you know the problem you see is not addressed in another part of the report?
b) This report was prepared by a panel of 80 people with PhDs. and towering reputations in their respective fields, it cost $67 million dollars and took ten years to write. What makes you think you are smarter than our experts?
Nobody has time to read an 8000 page report. Not even the people who sign off on it. So one has to muddle through with an answer that goes something like “No, but I read Appendix D and pages 1-22. And they contradict.” Then, the answer must inevitably be some form of ” well, if you had read the whole thing, it would be obvious… ” In other words, questioning is useless.
The problem with competing theories is that whole theories can be extremely difficult to defend, even when they are correct. This is especially true when there is a lot invested in the outcome.
It is remarkable how often such rhetorical questions are sufficient to quash valid objections. Non-technical people have no way of assessing who is right. Bottom liners want to be right the first time, and almost always have a stake in what the conclusions say. And technical people will often just want to stay technical.
So the question is, how does one prepare arguments that are convincing to everyone?
How does one pose questions that cannot be easily dismissed, pushed aside, or incorrectly explained?
How does one avoid getting thrown under the bus of vacuous opinion?
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