It’s a quiet holiday weekend, and I’ve nothing much to write about. The only major news from here on Hiram Hill is that a fox going by the name of Wily Willy seems to have taken up residence under our deck. He’s an elusive critter, but earlier today I did manage to whip out my phone and snap a shot of him through the living-room window as he trotted by. Here he is:
We’ve decamped for a few days to the woods near Wellfleet Harbor, and on this warm late-May evening there are some huge insects storming the screens at the doors and windows. June-bugs, I figured they must be, and wanting to know a little more I Googled junebugs Cape Cod.
Here’s what I found. Massachusetts has a special charm that’s all its own.
Ah, the Shaggs — a pebble in our shoe, a nagging reminder of the dimensionless infinitude of Man (or in this case, three teenage girls).
Our friend Jeffery Hodges cracks open the door for a little peek.
Lawrence Auster, in a post commenting on the idiotic and occasionally dangerous fad known as “planking” (in which people take photos of themselves stretched out horizontally in odd locations), suggests that plankers deserve a Darwin Award.
So far, so good, and I quite agree. But Mr. Auster, who has an intellectually unfortunate antipathy to Darwinism, took the opportunity once again to rail against it (or to rail, I should say, against what he imagines Darwinism to be).
We read:
Collective suicidal behavior meriting the Darwin Award is no joke. Given the immigration and race policies that are being assiduously followed by every historically white country, the entire white race arguably deserves the Darwin Award. Which raises an interesting question. How can Darwinian evolution, consisting of random genetic mutations which are naturally selected because of their power to help their possessors survive and produce offspring, have produced an entire race that is committing suicide? The wholesale adoption of Darwin Award-winning behavior by the white race would seem to suggest that the Darwinian theory of evolution is not true.
Mr. Auster’s post has touched off a long thread at Mangan’s, but as far as I can tell the main point has been missed all round, more or less, so I’ll just make it briefly here.
That point is that we humans embody a disruptive evolutionary innovation. On our little branch of life’s tree (and so far as we know, only on our little branch), evolution has found an unusual corner of design space: one in which behavior is controlled not only by instinct, but also by culture and memetics. We might say that humans are the first general-purpose behavior machines — or to use a computer metaphor, the first in which hard-wired behavior has to any great extent been replaced (and even in our case only partially so, I hasten to add) by the ability to load and run software.
That has given us extraordinary flexibility, and the coupling of cultural/memetic evolution to biological evolution has meant that from a behavioral standpoint, human populations can “speciate” in very short intervals (I use the word “speciate” metaphorically here, of course).
What this means is that even more or less biologically identical human populations can have very different outcomes depending on the “software” they run. The results, however, can be every bit as “Darwinian” as you like; the wages of memetic maladaptation is still extinction. (As an extreme example, consider the Shakers, who incorporated into their behavioral software the rule that they mustn’t have children. There are no longer any Shakers.)
So the answer to the question (leaving aside for now the premise of the particular example):
How can Darwinian evolution, consisting of random genetic mutations which are naturally selected because of their power to help their possessors survive and produce offspring, have produced an entire race that is committing suicide?
…is this: that natural selection’s contribution to the scenario was simply the creation of a flexible machine for running behavioral software. That some software, however, might contain lethal bugs is itself no more an indictment of Darwinism than is the historical fact that the fate of nearly every species that has ever lived has been extinction.
Mr. Auster also wrote this, in response to a commenter who said that his example might be a case of previously adaptive behavior becoming maladaptive in a changed environment:
A new or changed environment can explain a species dying out. But it can’t explain a species systematically adopting an entirely new behavior leading to its destruction, since the new behavior, not enhancing survival and reproduction, would not be naturally selected.
But this gets the temporal sequence exactly backward: first comes variation (the new behavior), and then selection. “Destruction” — i.e. extinction — is how selection does its work. In other words: mutation proposes, selection disposes.
For tonight, four foreign-affairs items:
First: A transcript of Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.
Second: When Vladimir Putin had to step aside in 2008 to honor Russia’s term-limit laws, he selected his chief of staff, Dmitry Medvedev, to keep his seat warm. Now Mr. Putin, eligible to run again in 2012, wants it back — but his former servant, now master, may no longer be inclined to play along. As Paul Gregory argues here, we should hope Mr. Medvedev prevails.
Third: An article from George Friedman at STRATFOR: Obama and the Arab Spring. An excerpt:
Let me repeat something I have said before: All demonstrations are not revolutions. All revolutions are not democratic revolutions. All democratic revolutions do not lead to constitutional democracy.
The Middle East has seen many demonstrations of late, but that does not make them revolutions. The 300,000 or so demonstrators concentrated mainly in Tahrir Square in Cairo represented a tiny fraction of Egyptian society. However committed and democratic those 300,000 were, the masses of Egyptians did not join them along the lines of what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in Iran in 1979. For all the media attention paid to Egypt’s demonstrators, the most interesting thing in Egypt is not who demonstrated, but the vast majority who did not. Instead, a series of demonstrations gave the Egyptian army cover to carry out what was tantamount to a military coup. The president was removed, but his removal would be difficult to call a revolution.
And where revolutions could be said to have occurred, as in Libya, it is not clear they were democratic revolutions. The forces in eastern Libya remain opaque, and it cannot be assumed their desires represent the will of the majority of Libyans ”” or that the eastern rebels intend to create, or are capable of creating, a democratic society. They want to get rid of a tyrant, but that doesn’t mean they won’t just create another tyranny.
Then, there are revolutions that genuinely represent the will of the majority, as in Bahrain. Bahrain’s Shiite majority rose up against the Sunni royal family, clearly seeking a regime that truly represents the majority. But it is not at all clear that they want to create a constitutional democracy, or at least not one the United States would recognize as such. Obama said each country can take its own path, but he also made clear that the path could not diverge from basic principles of human rights ”” in other words, their paths can be different, but they cannot be too different. Assume for the moment that the Bahraini revolution resulted in a democratic Bahrain tightly aligned with Iran and hostile to the United States. Would the United States recognize Bahrain as a satisfactory democratic model?
The central problem from my point of view is that the Arab Spring has consisted of demonstrations of limited influence, in non-democratic revolutions and in revolutions whose supporters would create regimes quite alien from what Washington would see as democratic. There is no single vision to the Arab Spring, and the places where the risings have the most support are the places that will be least democratic, while the places where there is the most democratic focus have the weakest risings.
As important, even if we assume that democratic regimes would emerge, there is no reason to believe they would form a coalition with the United States. In this, Obama seems to side with the neoconservatives, his ideological enemies. Neoconservatives argued that democratic republics have common interests, so not only would they not fight each other, they would band together ”” hence their rhetoric about creating democracies in the Middle East. Obama seems to have bought into this idea that a truly democratic Egypt would be friendly to the United States and its interests. That may be so, but it is hardly self-evident ”” and this assumes democracy is a real option in Egypt, which is questionable.
Obama addressed this by saying we must take risks in the short run to be on the right side of history in the long run. The problem embedded in this strategy is that if the United States miscalculates about the long run of history, it might wind up with short-term risks and no long-term payoff. Even if by some extraordinary evolution the Middle East became a genuine democracy, it is the ultimate arrogance to assume that a Muslim country would choose to be allied with the United States. Maybe it would, but Obama and the neoconservatives can’t know that.
But to me, this is an intellectual abstraction. There is no Arab Spring, just some demonstrations accompanied by slaughter and extraordinarily vacuous observers. While the pressures are rising, the demonstrations and risings have so far largely failed, from Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak was replaced by a junta, to Bahrain, where Saudi Arabia by invitation led a contingent of forces to occupy the country, to Syria, where Bashar al Assad continues to slaughter his enemies just like his father did.
Fourth: Barry Rubin on the Arab Spring, and what to expect in the fall.
I’ve been busy mixing at the moment, and completely out of touch, with no time for following up on matters blogospheric (comment-thread rebuttals, etc.). Back in harness shortly, insh’Allah.
One thing I have seen is the utter devastation in Joplin, MO — and tonight I heard a meteorologist saying something like: “those were little tornadoes, but tomorrow, when the sun boils up all that moisture and a disturbance comes down out of the Rockies, there are likely to be big tornadoes all over the Midwest.”
That’s horrifying. This whole tornado thing is getting really out of hand, I have to say; we even had one here in Brooklyn last year. It’s getting almost, well, Biblical.
Mark Steyn weighs in on the DSK affair. A morsel:
As the developed world drowns under the weight of Big Government, the gilded princelings of statism will hunker down in their interior courtyards and guard their privileges ever more zealously. Once in a while, as in that Manhattan hotel suite, a chance encounter between the seigneurs and their subjects will go awry, but more often, as in the Geithner confirmation, it will be understood that the Great Men of the Permanent Governing Class cannot be bound by the rules they impose on the rest of you schmucks.
Whole thing here.
If you missed it: here’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, explaining reality yesterday after his conversation with the President.
Given the tone of President Obama’s Middle East speech yesterday, I expect it will be a very lively sit-down with Benjamin Netanyahu today. Awaiting reports.
There was a lot to comment on (e.g. the speech’s thematic Bush-era neoconservatism, the call for “1967” borders, the lack of any mention whatsoever of either Islam or Saudi Arabia, and plenty more) but I’ve no time at the moment. The oddest line by far, though, was this:
The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.
What???
You can bet that’s bound to come up in today’s little chat.
Update:
The Syrian people have shown their courage in demanding a transition to democracy. President Assad now has a choice: he can lead that transition, or get out of the way.
…or not…
A couple of days ago, David Brooks wrote a column about the evolution of morality by group selection, an idea that is finally gaining broader acceptance. I’m glad to see that happening; the group-selection model provides such a solid foundation for an evolutionary account of the origins of religion and morality that I was persuaded of its validity some time ago, and have been banging the drum (here, for example) ever since. (Mind, it’s still seen as heresy by many in the field; I know Richard Dawkins, for one, is a staunch opponent. But science advances, as they say, funeral by funeral.)
Anyway, it’s understandable that secular types and metrocons like Mr. Brooks would happily embrace the emerging view that group selection is the explanatory basis of human morality; without it, altruism was a nagging loose end for the naturalistic worldview. Mr. Brooks writes:
The story of evolution, we have been told, is the story of the survival of the fittest. The strong eat the weak. The creatures that adapt to the environment pass on their selfish genes. Those that do not become extinct.
In this telling, we humans are like all other animals ”” deeply and thoroughly selfish. We spend our time trying to maximize our outcomes ”” competing for status, wealth and mating opportunities. Behavior that seems altruistic is really self-interest in disguise. Charity and fellowship are the cultural drapery atop the iron logic of nature.
All this is partially true, of course. Yet every day, it seems, a book crosses my desk, emphasizing a different side of the story. These are books about sympathy, empathy, cooperation and collaboration, written by scientists, evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists and others. It seems there’s been a shift among those who study this ground, yielding a more nuanced, and often gentler picture of our nature.
Yes, very uplifting indeed. But before we all float away on a fragrant cloud of nuanced, cooperative gentleness, I’ll point out that the “iron logic” of Darwinism is still very much the same. The “story of natural selection” now includes the survival of the fittest group, that’s all. The strong still eat the weak, but now we must also keep in mind that the strong groups eat the weak groups, too. The groups that adapt to their environment pass on their genes. Those groups that do not, become extinct.
The same process that selects for “sympathy, empathy, cooperation and collaboration” within groups also selects for high cohesion (tribalism, religious zeal), hostility toward those outside the group (racism, xenophobia), and competing successfully as a group against other groups (war).
Furthermore, as I argued here, the new moral naturalists are trying to pull a bit of a fast one as far as “objective” morality is concerned; at the very least, what they are willing to settle for as an objective basis for defining good and evil will leave many unsatisfied.
But having said all that, I’ll stop carping. It’s gratifying to see the idea of group selection gaining traction.
Read Mr. Brooks’s column here.
I meant to post this link from STRATFOR a week or so ago, when it first landed in my inbox (but better late than never): a short, sharp summary of the strategic relationship between the US and Pakistan.
Here.
Biologists use the term “neoteny” to describe the retention of juvenile characteristics in an organism’s adult form. Humans exhibit neoteny in many of the morphological features that distinguish us from our primate cousins: our big heads, big brains, small jaws, thin skulls, small teeth, and lack of body hair.
Thinking back the other day on my recent visit to Google, it occurred to me that the place is a hotbed of neoteny. There are toys and playrooms everywhere, and beds for taking naps. On every floor there are little snack-bars decorated in various happy themes. Working hours are unstructured. Everybody eats together, and nobody pays for food. Everybody’s dressed in T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, and they even push themselves around the building on little scooters.
Once I got to thinking about it, I realized our whole culture has become more and more neotenous. If you look at photos and movies from the mid-twentieth century, it’s striking how grown-up everybody seemed — the men in their suits and hats, the women in their smart dresses. Children knew their place, and adults had serious work to do. Grown-ups smoked, and drank, and ate grown-up food. When they went out at night, they dressed up. They learned penmanship in school, and wrote letters. Popular music was written by people like Cole Porter and Duke Ellington, and the songs had witty, printable lyrics. Tough men vied for beautiful women.
And today? Comic books as literature. “Business casual.” Ill-mannered children in expensive restaurants. Britney Spears. Kanye West. Grown men wearing little safety helmets to ride their bicycles to work. Unfettered impulsiveness as regards almost everything. An infantilizing obsession, in all aspects of public life, with never hurting anyone’s feelings. Unisex everything, just like in kindergarten.
It’s cultural neoteny.
From James Taranto, on l’affaire Strauss-Kahn:
What’s the difference between an orthodox Marxist and a French Socialist? The French guy thinks the state should seize the means of reproduction.
Here you have it, from Stephen Hawking:
“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
I’ve had no time for writing much of anything today, so for tonight here’s an amusing relic from a bygone age of the world: the 1968 Playboy Club Bunny Manual.
Ah, the Arab Spring — that sweet season, so long overdue, in which secular democracy began at last to bloom in the Muslim nations of the Middle East, ending a long dark winter of tyranny, tribalism and theocratic oppression. Observers here in the West swooned at the sight of all those brave young people, their faces alight with hope, standing up as one to build a better future. We always knew, after all, that people everywhere are just like us, and so of course they want the same things we want: democracy, secular government, women’s rights, the many freedoms we take for granted, and above all Tolerance, Diversity, and Inclusiveness. (Maybe they weren’t ready for gay marriage just yet, but they’d get there once they got the hang of it all. Rome wasn’t built in a day.)
Alas, in the event the soil turns out not to have been as fertile as some had imagined. The “reformer” Bashar al-Assad is slaughtering his subjects in Syria. Hamas and Fatah have joined forces in Palestine. Saleh retains his grip on Yemen. The Gulf Cooperative Council’s armored formations have forcefully imposed order in Bahrain. The Libyan uprising has, with NATO’s help and the bumbling support of the USA, descended into civil war. And despite the absurd psychological projections of many here in the West, the “revolution” in Egypt that provided convenient cover for the military to oust Hosni Mubarak has led, as I expected, to ascendant Islamism — and to what has been, throughout history, one of Diversity’s most reliable blessings: gruesome sectarian violence, in this case renewed persecution of the Copts.
With regard to that last, I’ve been struck this week by the prevailing tendency of our news organizations to refer to these recent assaults as “clashes” — a term that, with its implication of symmetry, was no doubt carefully chosen to spare further amplification of Islam’s reputation for intolerance.
I’m not the only one, it seems. Andrew McCarthy comments here.
Although there’s plenty in the political news to comment on (for example, President Obama’s immigration speech, and his telling businesses to “step up” and hire more workers), I just haven’t any time this week.
We do, however, have a prescient item by the late Douglas Adams, sent my way by my friend Howard Robinson.
Here.
Tonight, two items from Christopher Hitchens, who is, thankfully, still with us.
One of the things I’ve always admired most about Mr. Hitchens (apart from his razor-sharp intellect, his quick wit, his willingness to change his mind publicly when reason dictates, his debating skills, and his formidable prose style) is his marvellous speaking voice — a rich and beautifully accented baritone.
Now it seems that the cancer that may soon take his life has, with the cruelly playful sadism so characteristic of the disease, robbed him of the power of speech. He writes about it here.
In the second item, Mr. Hitchens responds to Noam Chomsky’s commentary on the death of Osama bin Laden.
Due to the demands of the workplace and a flurry of evening activities, I’ll not have much time for blogging this week, and things may be fairly quiet around here.
Between a drumming gig in the wilds of rural New Jersey yesterday, and Mother’s Day doings today, it’s been one of those busy weekends. So for tonight, an analyst’s report sent our way by the indefatigable JK: Osama bin Laden’s Death: Implications and Considerations.
I haven’t had time yet to read it through myself, but I’m sure it will be of interest to some of you, at least.
Here.
Well, predictably enough, the conspiracy theorists are out in force, alleging that the OBL operation was a hoax.
Fortunately, our network of embedded USN sources has sent us, by clandestine channels, incontrovertible evidence straight from the deck of the USS Carl Vinson (that’s CVN-70, to you InfoDiss readers).
This should, I think, put matters to rest:
When it comes to thinking about human consciousness and reason, people divide, broadly speaking, into two camps: those who see consciousness and reason as primary features of reality, and those who see them as emerging from the activity of suitably configured physical systems (in particular, human brains). For those in the first camp, consciousness is in some important sense prior to the physical brain, and reason apprehends and connects abstracta that have an existence independent of physically instantiated thinkers.
The contrasting view (and the one that I incline toward) is that consciousness arises, in some way that we do not yet understand, from the workings of the brain — which means that before there were any brains in in the world, there was no consciousness — and that reason is a practical affair, a Good Trick that we have learned as a highly effective (and therefore highly adaptive) way of modeling the world so as to predict those aspects of the future that have, over the eons, had some bearing on our reproductive success.
C.S. Lewis considered this physicalist view of reason to be “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism”. Genuine Reason, he argued, must flow according to the logical relations between ground and consequent, while any form of “reason” instantiated as a purely physical system can only proceed according to physical cause and effect. Therefore, he argued, our Reason must cannot rest upon a purely physical foundation, or we wouldn’t be able to trust it.
For Lewis this was a sort of reductio ad absurdum: of course we do consider reason to be trustworthy, and so the only possible basis fit can possibly have is one that transcends the “merely” physical. But as I argued in a post some time ago, there’s another possibility: that our reason actually is quite limited and imperfect, in ways that are hard for us to see — just as we’d expect from a purely practical brain-based system that has been cobbled together over the eons by natural selection. Our trust, in other words, may go too far.
A great deal of clever experimentation and neuro-psychological research has been done since C.S. Lewis died (on November 22nd, 1963, by the way), and the peculiarities, defaults, and curious limitations of human cognition have become far more apparent. Among the more recent ideas about why we reason the way we do is one put forward by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier in a paper called Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Their premise? As Jonathan Haidt explains:
“Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”
Here’s the abstract:
Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.
It’s an interesting idea, though my first impression is that it sounds a bit all-or-nothing: while I can easily see how such social factors could have exerted a strong selection pressure, it seems to me that more objective feedback from the real world must have had a major role to play also.
But I’ve only just run across this, and haven’t yet read the paper (or the article linked below), so I can’t say yet if it makes a truly persuasive, well-reasoned argument.
Learn more here.
From President Obama’s address on the death of Osama bin Laden:
…[S]hortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.
Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.
Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
OK, now here’s a related item.
N.B. I make no warrant for the linked article’s veracity. But if we’ve got to the point where bloggers can’t spread vicious rumors and disseminate unsubstantiated material, then it’s pretty clear the terrorists have won.
While everyone is concentrating on the details of the death of Osama bin Laden, and on what his extinction will mean for the War on Terror, the more interesting question is what will happen in Pakistan. Don’t be surprised if all hell breaks loose.
Our relationship with Pakistan is excruciatingly difficult. As a “secular democracy”, Pakistan is, ostensibly at least, the enemy of our enemy, jihadist Islam — but only sort of, as sympathies within the ISI and the military are clearly divided. At the same time, though, it is also the enemy of our friend: India.
Because Pakistan controls a nuclear arsenal, we have a clear interest in doing what we can to maintain a working relationship with its government and military (if a clear distinction can be made between them), and in doing what we can to prop them up against a determined fundamentalist insurgency of which a great many Pakistanis (not all of them civilians) are partisan supporters. To further this interest we provide a steady flow of money and weapons, despite the fact that much of our largesse ends up where we wouldn’t like to think of it going. (Particularly worrying, especially in light of recent proposals to send state-of-the-art drones to Pakistan, is the cozy relationship between Islamabad and Beijing; it is reasonable to assume that any technology we provide to Pakistan will end up being reverse-engineered in Chinese laboratories.)
Meanwhile the USA is deeply unpopular in Pakistan (viscerally loathed might be a better way of putting it), and so the government’s cooperation with America, and with the secular West generally, is an enormous political liability; the regime exists with the consent and loyalty of only a fraction of its people. Our uneasy alliance with Pakistan, in other words, is a costly one on both ends.
What, in turn, are Pakistan’s interests? As always, local trumps global, and along with its homegrown insurgency, Pakistan’s overarching concern is its contiguous foe, nuclear-armed India. The nightmare scenario for Pakistan would be if Afghanistan, once the US departs (as it inevitably will), were to fall under India’s sway; such an encirclement would be a strategic disaster, and Islamabad must do everything it can to prevent it. With this in mind Pakistan has, since at least the time of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, allied itself with various Afghan militias and tribal factions, to ensure that it can influence Afghanistan’s internal balance of power. These interests and alliances, however, no longer coincide with US interests in the region, as they did during the 1980s, and this divergence makes for a great deal of uncertainty and duplicity as regards tactical cooperation and the sharing of intelligence.
Finally, the secular regime stands on very shaky ground these days. There have been waves of assassinations in recent months — notably, killings of prominent secularist officials for their stand against blasphemy laws — and anti-Western, Islamist sentiment has been running very high indeed. The Raymond Davis case brought things very nearly to a boil, and civil violence now erupts at the slightest provocation. The place is a tinderbox, a powderkeg — choose your metaphor — and although Osama bin Laden may not have been a wildly popular figure in Pakistan, the idea that the Pakistani government sold him out to the US may be enough to light the fuse. Both the US and Pakistan are bending over backward to deny any involvement by Pakistan in the operation, but this is surely just a cover story, and I doubt many will be fooled by it.
Pakistan is the most dangerous place on earth right now. I wonder what will happen next.
New York City thanks you, SEAL Team Six.
This will sharpen everything. Osama bin Laden has been such a potent symbol of American impotence that his death will be a jolt of electricity. We’ll see far-reaching effects, I think, quite out of proportion to any tactical, or even strategic, effect his death will have.
The political effect will be powerfully unifying, however briefly, and it can’t help but mute criticism of the administration. (I’d gladly give Mr. Obama a high-five myself — or fist bump, or whatever.) Crowds are gathering at the White House and Ground Zero, cheering and singing. Don’t be surprised to see the stock markets pop tomorrow.
I’m glad it isn’t October, 2012. (I’m sure there were those who were tempted to wait. Credit to them for not doing so.)
It’s late, and I haven’t combed the Internet yet to find out what I can about this, but I am very curious about Pakistan’s role here. Given the enormous compound Osama was living in, the ISI had to know where he was. Did they sell him out? That will be hard to keep secret, and when it gets out it will get hot in the streets over there. Did they not sell him out? Were they hiding him from us? That will get interesting too.
Now Osama is a martyr. Will that fan the flames of jihad? Have we poked a stick in the hornets’ nest?
I don’t think so: my feeling is that there’s little that could fan those flames any higher; at this point they’re pretty much self-fanning anyway. On the other hand, this could be a bracing tonic for the West, for a little while at least.
Should be an interesting few days.
The lovely Nina and I are unwinding by the sea this weekend, and so soothing to the inflamed spirit are the fragrant littoral breezes, so dulcifying the clear spring sunshine, that it’s going to be hard for me to work up any of the partisan tirades and effusions of bitter gall that usually grace these pages, and that keep our loyal readers coming back for more.
Fortunately, readers B.H. and O.E.M. have sent along some items of interest: here, here and here.
Oh, and here’s a piquant item, courtesy of Lawrence Auster.
In the latest New Yorker there’s an article by Ryan Lizza called “Leading from Behind”, which presents the President’s recent foreign-policy tactics as a way to do things without exposing ourselves to charges of unilateralist swagger. In a recent blog entry, Lizza explains:
…at the heart of the idea of leading from behind is the empowerment of other actors to do your bidding or, as in the case of Libya, to be used as cover for a policy that would be suspect in the eyes of other nations if it’s branded as a purely American operation.
Well, Charles Krauthammer’s having none of it. Like it or not — and that’s really what’s at issue here — we are still the world’s dominant economic and military superpower. If that makes us unpopular in some circles — as it inevitably will, no matter how much “cover” we seek — so be it. Multilateral fig leaves aren’t fooling anyone, anyway, and if you worry more about pleasing everyone than being effective, you’ll get neither.
Krauthammer sums up (my emphasis):
We must lead from behind because we are reviled. Pray tell, when were we not? During Vietnam? Or earlier, under Eisenhower? When his vice president was sent on a good-will trip to Latin America, he was spat upon and so threatened by the crowds that he had to cut short his trip. Or maybe later, under the blessed Reagan? The Reagan years were marked by vast demonstrations in the capitals of our closest allies denouncing America as a warmongering menace taking the world into nuclear winter.
“Obama came of age politically,’ explains Lizza, “during the post”“Cold War era, a time when America’s unmatched power created widespread resentment.’ But the world did not begin with the coming to consciousness of Barack Obama. Cold War resentments ran just as deep.
It is the fate of any assertive superpower to be envied, denounced, and blamed for everything under the sun. Nothing has changed. Moreover, for a country so deeply reviled, why during the massive unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, and Syria have anti-American demonstrations been such a rarity?
Who truly reviles America the hegemon? The world that Obama lived in and that shaped him intellectually: the elite universities; his Hyde Park milieu (including his not-to-be-mentioned friends, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn); the church he attended for two decades, ringing with sermons more virulently anti-American than anything heard in today’s full-throated uprising of the Arab Street.
It is the liberal elites who revile the American colossus and devoutly wish to see it cut down to size. Leading from behind ”” diminishing America’s global standing and assertiveness ”” is a reaction to their view of America, not the world’s.
Other presidents take anti-Americanism as a given, rather than evidence of American malignancy, believing ”” as do most Americans ”” in the rightness of our cause and the nobility of our intentions. Obama thinks anti-Americanism is a verdict on America’s fitness for leadership.
I don’t always agree with Dr. Krauthammer — his views on foreign policy lean more toward the neoconservative than mine do these days — but this is exactly right. What he describes is just what I hear from my liberal friends in academia, in the music biz, in my ultra-blue haunts of Park Slope and Wellfleet. It is a Zinn/Chomsky foreign policy; a policy of atonement.
Read Krauthammer’s essay here.
If you look at any vigorous society in its prime, you see a healthy balance between rights and privileges. When either grows too much at the expense of the other, a nation declines: on the one hand toward impotent mediocrity, on the other into tyranny.
Not swooning over the One the way you used to? Do his declamatory cadences no longer give you that old thrill up your leg? Is the bloom off the rose? Is the honeymoon over? Are you bored with the hat, and looking for some cattle? Wish you’d ordered steak instead of sizzle?
Andrew Malcolm understands.
Here’s a happy item:
More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA’s twin Voyager probes are now at the edge of the solar system. Not only that, they’re still working. And with each passing day they are beaming back a message that, to scientists, is both unsettling and thrilling.
The message is, “Expect the unexpected.”
“It’s uncanny,” says Ed Stone of Caltech, Voyager Project Scientist since 1972. “Voyager 1 and 2 have a knack for making discoveries.”
Today, April 28, 2011, NASA held a live briefing to reflect on what the Voyager mission has accomplished–and to preview what lies ahead as the probes prepare to enter the realm of the Milky Way itself.
My favorite thing about the Voyager probes is the golden phonograph records they carry.
More here.
Here’s a harrowing video clip of today’s tornado in Alabama. The terror of the person filming it is palpable, and contagious.
In the wake of the latest massacre of US personnel by our Muslim “allies”, here is a response from Diana West.
We’ve lost our minds, and as a result the best among us are losing their lives.
We note with sadness the death of singer Phoebe Snow, whom those of us of a “certain age” will best remember for her beautiful 1974 song Poetry Man.
I did not know Ms. Snow well, but I did know her slightly, having done a few recording sessions with her back in the 1990s. She was an amiable person, with a ready and somewhat mordant wit, and in the studio she was a top-notch professional. It always seemed to me that her playful banter concealed some darkness within; it was not until much later that I learned that much of her life was consumed by caring for her profoundly disabled daughter, who died in 2007.
What a voice she had! I’m sorry to hear she’s gone.
You can read her obituary here.
In totalitarian states, you keep your private sentiments and beliefs about the world’s realities to yourself; the penalty is harsh for expressing opinions that conflict with the official line. Example:
Khruschev was busy denouncing Stalin at a public meeting when a voice shouted out “If you feel this way now, why didn’t you say so then?” To which the Soviet leader thundered “Who said that?” There was a long and petrified silence which Kruschev finally broke. “Now you know why.”
Are things really so different here and now? In an essay at NRO titled The American Soviet, Victor Davis Hanson argues that they are not.
I’m sympathetic to Dr. Hanson’s point: these days there are certainly many things that we all know to be true, but mustn’t say in public. But in making the comparison that he does Hanson overstates, and weakens, his case.
The crucial difference is this: had Dr. Hanson made the same points in the old Soviet Union, he’d have been hauled off to Lubyanka. But unlike Soviet Russia (or even Europe and Canada, where a dark night is swiftly descending upon the right to express “offensive” thoughts), the tyranny that binds and gags us here in America is still self-imposed. Though it has certainly taken hold of a great many of our public and private institutions (just ask Lawrence Summers or James Watson or E.O. Wilson), we need only look at places like Syria or North Korea — or even Holland, England, and Denmark! — to realize how free we still are in America, where it’s far more difficult for our P.C. taboos to take on the force of law. We can still cast off our chains any time we make up our minds to do so.
Meanwhile, though, it isn’t as if our pathological inclination to deny awkward facts doesn’t have serious consequences: for more on that, see today’s post at Mangan’s.
For colleges, men’s sports are often hugely profitable, while women’s sports nearly always aren’t. This caused many schools not to support women’s sports at nearly the same level as men’s. Add to that the fact that far fewer young women than men are even interested in joining college sports teams — due, no doubt, to pernicious masculine oppression — and what do you get?
Inequality.
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the State abhors inequality. So a few years back, into the breach it leapt — with all the sagacity, foresight, and subtlety of method we’ve come to expect. This has now produced the usual cornucopia of unintended, if not entirely unpredictable, consequences. Story here.
Are deeds objective? If an agent performs some action X, then X influences the world’s causal network in some particular way, with particular consequences. Does it make sense to say that for the same X, X is good if performed by “good” agent Smith, and X is bad if performed by “bad” agent Jones?
Why do I ask? I’ll let Andrew Stiles explain.
It’s another busy spell for me; I haven’t had much time to comment on the passing scene since putting up that brief eugenics post last week, and I’ve had no time for writing today.
But don’t touch that dial! I have something I’m sure you’ll enjoy: Ants As Fluids.
My birthday’s just gone by, on April 13th — but in case you’re wondering what to get me next year…
A story that’s been making the rounds the past few days (thanks to the indefatigable JK for sending along this version of it) has to do with recent research that casts doubt on a cornerstone of contemporary thought about human language: namely that we all are born with a “language module” that constrains possible grammars to a few basic systems.
This idea has become more or less hegemonic amongst linguists due to the work of Noam Chomsky (and subsequent proponents such as Steven Pinker), and has also been taken as a model for work on the evolutionary psychology of morality by people like Marc Hauser. If it’s wrong, that’s a pretty big deal; it will be interesting to see how the research community responds.
Learn more here.
A hot topic at the moment is taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Social and fiscal conservatives have allied themselves against it — the former because they think abortion is murder, the latter because they don’t think what Planned Parenthood does is among the government’s enumerated functions, and it costs money. Liberals support it, for all the obvious reasons.
But is Planned Parenthood actually a net drain on the public fisc? In Thursday’s Times, Gail Collins persuasively argues just the opposite. In doing so she hearkens back to old-time, pre-war Progressivism, and to one of the central principles upon which Planned Parenthood itself was founded: that because the poorest and least educated (and least educable) people tend to have the most children, and because a persistent underclass is expensive to maintain in a thousand different ways, then the lower their birthrate, the better the public balance-sheet. Therefore, in Ms. Collins’ words, “destroying Planned Parenthood is a money-loser”.
Ms. Collins didn’t put it all quite this way, but that’s the idea — and it’s how Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger (along with most other Progressives of the era) saw it, too. In Sanger’s 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization, she wrote: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit: that is the issue of birth control.”
I don’t always agree with Gail Collins, but she may be right about this one. Fiscal conservatives, take note.
OK, enough politics. Time for a little Kumbaya, and maybe a reason to go on living.
Here’s a young Scotsman by the name of Brendan MacFarlane. And here, and here.
I haven’t written much about this — I hate to get involved in this sort of thing, and prefer to focus on matters of genuine significance — but I must come out and say that it’s downright weird that the great big noisy fuss about the circumstances of President Obama’s birth hasn’t gone away. It must be a terrible, nagging annoyance for Mr. Obama, and there is simply no good explanation for why he hasn’t simply put the matter to rest, because it ought to be trivially easy to do. To see a fop like Donald Trump swaggering about making political hay with it must be unspeakably irritating.
Anticipating objections, let me reduce the question to a few essential points.
There are those who say: “The President has released an official document from the state of Hawaii. Case closed.”
Well, not quite. The document that has been made public is something called a ‘Certification of Live Birth’. This form, often referred to as a COLB, is a secondary, post-hoc document usually issued when, for example, a person’s original birth certificate is in a foreign language. It refers to, and derives its authority from, the underlying primary document, which in Hawaii would have had been called by a confusingly similar name: a long-form ‘Certificate of Live Birth’, or more commonly, a ‘birth certificate’. This is the official record made at the time of birth, with detailed information including the attending physician’s name, and so forth.
Did whoever issued the COLB have the actual birth certificate to refer to? If so, then why not just release that? It’s a mere triviality, presumably, and yet Mr. Obama doesn’t do it. Why on Earth not? You or I, or anybody else, would get it out there in a heartbeat; it would immediately put an end to all of this nonsense, just like that. It makes no sense not to do so.
Did the issuing party not have the original in hand? Then on what authority was the COLB issued? (There are also various other questions about its authenticity.)
There are contemporaneous newspaper announcements, which indeed add circumstantial support. But if, as others have suggested, there may be other complexities to the details of Mr. Obama’s arrival, the announcements may have been placed, by a family in awkward circumstances, in order to obscure questions of timing or legitimacy. They certainly are not legal documents; anyone can place an ad.
Again — all of this is terribly tiresome, and I have — seriously! — no agenda here. While I would of course love to see him gone, I will remind all of you that getting the sitting President tossed out on some technicality would put Joe Biden in the Oval Office. So I want to be clear: as far as I’m concerned, this birther stuff is just a bizarre distraction. My preference is that we rebut and refute Mr. Obama’s destructive ideology in public discourse, confound his grand schemes within the normal political channels, and work toward that happy day in 2012 when we will see the man put out of office in a fair election.
But it sure is odd. Why the heck doesn’t the President just pony up the real birth certificate, and at a single stroke put an end to all this tomfoolery? Until he does, this distraction — which is increasingly a political liability — will never go away. I just don’t understand it. Do you?
I’ve been busy, so for tonight, with the budget debate on everybody’s mind, just a brief item: a post by statistician William Briggs that has as its central feature a starkly simple graph, devoid of any ideological content. It merely plots the amount spent by the US government per capita, year by year, in inflation-adjusted dollars.
A log scale is needed on the money axis, because the rise is so steep: the amount has doubled — doubled! — in a single generation. It has risen a hundredfold in the last century. Make of that what you will.
Here.
(Hat tip: John D.)
We note with sorrow the death, at 66, of the great recording engineer Roger Nichols — best known for the immaculate recordings and mixes he made with Steely Dan. His artistic brilliance and superb technical craftsmanship were an inspiration to me and to countless other engineers.
His New York Times obituary is here.
As I write, the Dow is collapsing; it’s down 237 points, and heading south. The reason? Standard and Poor’s has downgraded its long-term outlook for the US to “negative”. The reason for that? Simply put, we’ve utterly failed to demonstrate that we are serious about controlling our exploding public debt.
We’ve been hurtling toward a very tall cliff for a long time now; we may finally be going over it. If today isn’t the day, rest assured that it’s coming soon.
Meanwhile: remember the Gabrielle Giffords shooting? Remember the reeking cloud of opprobrium emitted by prominent figures on the Left, and their despicable attempt to blame a psychotic loner’s murderous rampage on the Right’s lack of “civility”? Remember their pious calls for a new era of politeness in public discourse, lest there be more “victims” of the Right’s “inflammatory” dissent?
Well, in today’s Times out slithers the worst of the lot, Paul Krugman — the arch-Keynesian liberal polemicist for whom the only problem with US deficits is that they aren’t vast enough — with a column entitled “Let’s Not Be Civil”.
By his own logic, this is nothing less than an incitement to political violence. But very well, then, Mr. Krugman, have it your way: if you would like for us all not to be civil any longer, I’m sure that can be arranged.
