Dawkins, Nagel, and The God Delusion

I just finished reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and I liked it very much. It's a book trying to popularize certain biological and philosophical ideas, and having studied both biology and philosophy in college, there was much I found unoriginal and a little that I felt was poorly treated. Nonetheless, on the whole the book is very interesting, not least for it's hard-line stance against religion. The central project of the book is well captured by the title of the fourth chapter: "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God". And Dawkins makes a point of being as blunt as possible about his anti-theism. Raising the young to be religious is child abuse, he thinks, and he fails to see why theology ought to be viewed as a field of study at all.

As my acquaintances may guess, I am broadly sympathetic to these sorts of ideas. I'll come right out and say that I think the world would be a better place, on balance, without religion, and I too resent the privileged status granted to religious beliefs such that they are considered to be above criticism. Believing something to be true in the absence of supporting evidence is, to put it mildly, silly, and when the evidence is in opposition to your belief, well, then, you're just being willfully stupid.

When it comes to matters of faith, though, a great many people are willfully stupid, and a great many of the criticisms of The God Delusion are predictably unintelligent. There is the fair charge that the book is poorly edited and contemptuous, but none of that speaks to the merits of its argumentation. I'd like to have read a clearer, more disciplined book, but that sort of quibble is a distraction. It's also true that Dawkins could have been more polite in his delivery but, again, the most this gets you as a criticism is that the book is likely to offend people it could otherwise persuade.

To date, I've read only one insightful criticism of this book, and it comes from Thomas Nagel. I'd known that Nagel had written a review , but prior to reading the book I didn't see why I should particularly care what he had to say about it since it wasn't obviously his field. Dawkins, though, makes some dismissive comments about moral absolutism and ontological dualism. After reading the book, I can see why Nagel would be interested, since Nagel is among the world's foremost advocates of both moral absolutism and ontological dualism. And besides, Nagel's a genuinely brilliant guy - a fact I can testify to not just as a result of reading his work but also from personal experience - so, I signed up for a trial subscription to the otherwise-lame New Republic just to read what he had to say.

Nagel's objection boils down to this:

The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism. Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.

This reductionist dream is nourished by the extraordinary success of the physical sciences in our time, not least in their recent application to the understanding of life through molecular biology. It is natural to try to take any successful intellectual method as far as it will go. Yet the impulse to find an explanation of everything in physics has over the last fifty years gotten out of control. The concepts of physical science provide a very special, and partial, description of the world that experience reveals to us. It is the world with all subjective consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will left out. What remains is the mathematically describable order of things and events in space and time.

In other words, Dawkins has succumbed to the temptation to think that everything that exists has to be explained exclusively and ultimately in physical terms. Initially, Nagel dismissively refers to this as "amateur philosophy". Eventually he concedes in an off-hand way that there are actually a lot of questions left unanswered by "[a]ny anti-reductionist view", but the gist of the complaint seems to be that if Dawkins had just read "What is it Like to be a Bat?", his book would be very different (and, presumably, better.)

Now, I think Nagel is right that Dawkins is too dismissive of dualism in general, probably because his exposure to philosophy is limited. You can file a similar complaint against Dawkins's contempt of moral absolutism, best captured by this bit from pg. 232:

Moral philosophers are the professionals when it comes to thinking about right and wrong. As Robert Hinde succinctly put it, they agree that 'moral precepts, while not necessarily constructed by reason, should be defensible by reason'. They classify themselves in many ways, but in modern terminology the major divide is between 'deontologists' (such as Kant) and 'consequentialists' (including 'utilitarians' such as Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832). Deontology is a fancy name for the belief that morality consists in the obeying of rules. It is literally the science of duty, from the Greek for 'that which is binding'. Deontology is not quite the same thing as moral absolutism, but for most purposes in a book about religion there is no need to dwell on the distinction. Absolutists believe there are absolutes of right and wrong, imperatives whose rightness makes no reference to their consequences. Consequentialists more pragmatically hold that the morality of an action should be judged by its consequences.

..

Not all absolutism is derived from religion. Nevertheless, it is pretty hard to defend absolutist morals on grounds other than religious ones.

Since Dawkins himself had pointed out only a few pages earlier that there are very plausible arguments that Kant was himself an atheist, it's not clear why he now dismisses deontologists out of hand as religious nuts. Certainly today there are no shortage of non-religious deontologists among the ranks of those moral philosophers who "are the professionals when it comes to thinking about right and wrong." (Nagel is one, as a matter of fact.)

One is forced to conclude that Dawkins isn't actually very familiar with the ins-and-outs of contemporary philosophy, since he seems oblivious to the widely-respected arguments for both ontological dualism and ethical absolutism. In both cases he just assumes - without any evident reason - that the position he disfavors is necessarily bound up with religion, and must therefore be summarily tossed out.

Plainly put, Dawkins is wrong to reject dualism and absolutism on the basis of the arguments he offers. At the same time, those technical philosophical criticisms have almost no practical impact on the arguments of the book. One need not reject ontological dualism to point out that religious people ascribe all sorts of ridiculous characteristics to the non-physical world and tend to assume that if non-physical phenomena exist, they must be the sort of phenomena that are described in, for instance, the Bible. Similarly, one need not reject moral absolutism to acknowledge that religious groups tend to come up with really lousy moral absolutes.

In other words, Dawkins assumes in multiple instances that when the content of religious beliefs is absurd, the underlying ethics or metaphysics must be equally absurd. That's a baby-with-the-bathwater mistake, and Dawkins of all people probably has friends who could have helped him clarify his thinking. Instead, he gets the philosophy wrong even though it's got no significance to his central thesis: namely, that we'd do well to get rid of religion altogether.

Update: Because Tom asked, and because I felt like this post wasn't quite long enough, I thought I'd expand on my thoughts on dualism a little bit.

I personally don't know that I subscribe to dualism. But I don't think I'm really committed to monism, either. My issue with Dawkins is that he just acts like dualism is obviously wrong, but in fact that is one of the central and most contentious questions in contemporary metaphysics.

I think dualism's got problems - most notably, a dualist has got to give some account of how it is that an essentially non-physical thing can interact causally with a physical thing (without running into conservation of energy problems, no less!) But dualism also has some very powerful arguments going for it.

The gist of the problem was formulated with force by Nagel, in that "Bat" article I linked to.

I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.

...

It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?

Reducing the mind down to physical facts about the body isn't like, say, reducing proteins down to individual amino acids, he thinks, because mental phenomena are necessarily subjective, while the physicalist project is aimed at moving toward ever-increasing objectivity. I can imagine, at best, what it would be like for me to be a bat, but no amount of physical knowledge could possibly let me know what it's like for the bat. This isn't a problem about being able to reproduce neurological states; it's a problem about being able to actually occupy a point of view that's not your own.

I think Nagel identifies a very real problem here, but Frank Jackson probably did it more clearly in "What Mary Didn't Know", the central argument of which is this:

Mary is a girl who is locked up in a black and white room without windows, where she is taught every physical fact about the world (using, of course, only black and white materials.) If it is actually possible to explain everything in the world in terms of physical facts, Mary knows everything there is to know.

Presumably, though, if Mary is then let out of the room, she will learn something new: namely, what it is like to see, for instance, red.

The underlying concern in both cases is that mental phenomena seem to have these subjective properties - "qualia", in the jargon - that you just can't get at with any quantity of physical knowledge. It's difficult to see how any set of physical facts could possibly lead to knowledge about what a mental phenomenon is like.

Of course, the way that philosophy works is that a lot of very smart people - Dawkins's buddy Daniel Dennett, for instance - have come up with really brilliant reasons why we shouldn't think that Mary learns anything new at all when she leaves her room. But it's not like the case has been closed, and my only real problem was with Dawkins acting like it was.

For my own part, I have physicalist sympathies, and I get the impression that monism generally is on the rise these days. But I am by no means confident that I could ever know what being a bat is like for a bat, and I think that's a real dilemma.

Idiocracy and Dysgenics

I watched Idiocracy and it disturbed me more than most dystopian visions have. In the film, stupid people were said to reproduced more than smart people leading too a general dumbing down of the population to the point that - when the protagonist is defrosted in the year 2500 - humanity finds itself in a food crisis when they try to grow crops with Gatorade. That's good old fashioned Dysgenics which you might remember from such books as The Marching Morons.

Upon researching the topic I've become a lot less worried about any such effect but I wanted to describe some weakness in the theory I saw off the top of my head:

• People with low IQs might have more babies but they die young more often, so it's a wash
  
• People with high IQs don't necessarily have to reproduce more just so long as they recruit more. IE, they support progressive policies that help uplift others and make them reach their intellectual potential.
• As we gain more knowledge about genetics we draw closer to the end of evolution as we know it. IE, in the future if you think your baby is going to be dumb you'll just go to a doctor and have them fix it.
• If the effect were ever to become manifest it's highly improbable that it would effect the whole world equally. One society would figure out a way around it and would end up invading and taking over the rest.
  

Really? Both of you?

It's common among many socially progressive couples--different sex and same sex alike--to exclaim, when one member of the partnership is pregnant, that "we're" pregnant. "When we were pregnant, Ellen got horrible morning sickness." "We're pregnant right now, so Jen's feet are swollen."

I appreciate the sentiment behind this choice of words, especially in heterosexual couples where, for logistical reasons, any attempt to equally divide the duty of pregnancy would be impossible. Namely, the couple is trying to verbally indicate that both members are invested in the creation, outcome, and, most saliently, backbreaking work associated with a pregnancy. It's nice when the man in the partnership steps out of the customary male role and contributes to the pregnancy, too, which usually means taking care of all the other miserable work (driving the future mom to doctor visits, shopping for tiny footsie pajamas, sending baby shower invites, all the usual housework) that pregnant women usually are expected to perform in addition to carrying around a 30-pound parasite with foreign genetic material for nine months. Usually the "we" designation indicates that, contrary to tradition, both mom and dad will play active roles in rearing the child-to-be. Further, exclusively referring to the pregnancy as "hers" comes off as dismissive, disinterested, or unwilling to absorb the duties that you formerly divided equally. "Oh, that's her shoe rack; I have nothing to do with that. Oh, that's her pregnancy; I'm sure glad I don't have to help out with that mess!"

On the other hand, any semantical attempt at equality aside, men simply can't get pregnant (yet!), and it's absurd and insulting to imply that the burden of pregnancy can shared equally between both partners. Sorry, bub, but you're not the one peeing on a stick, putting on weight, getting stretch marks, enduring strange hormonal shifts, passing a basketball through your vagina, getting stitched up, breast feeding, and potentially suffering severe depression as a result of this pregnancy.

This isn't to say that good future fathers don't have to do extra work when their partners are pregnant. Even soon-to-be older siblings have to pick up the slack when Mom isn't able to do all the work she normally does. But the concept of mutual pregnancy justifies related phenomena such as "sympathy weight," or the idea that PMS hurts men as much as it huts women ("She gets so irritable when she's about to start her period; it affects me, too!"). Yes, women's issues are everyone's issues, but there's no comparing being a male in solidarity to actually being a woman. (I might also accuse men who "suffer" from PMS of just being wimpy. Brother, if you had any idea how bad it actually is...)

The greater implications of a "shared" pregnancy, though no one who uses "we" has this in mind, is that ownership of the pregnancy shifts from the pregnant woman to both members of the partnership. A major tenet of abortion rights is that the pregnancy, fetus, and choice to carry the pregnancy to term belong solely to the pregnant woman, not her husband, boyfriend, father, mother, community, or local legislators. Of course the progressive men who refer to "our" pregnancy probably don't question this philosophical foundation of abortion rights. I fear, though, that many anti-feminists and anti-abortion proponents have a knack for co-opting feminist and socially progressive terminology or ideals and insidiously twisting them beyond recognition. A popular example is, "Feminists say they want to have sex as freely as men do, so it's feminists' faults when college men rape their woman classmates. These poor boys are getting mixed messages from those sex-crazed feminists!" That's not far from, "If the pregnancy is both of yours, then the fetus belongs to both of you, too. If feminists want to share the pregnancy, then men should have to approve it before their wives and girlfriends get abortions!"

Admittedly, I'm being a bit of a worry wart, and will label myself as such. In the meantime, when I get pregnant, I'll let my partner spend all the time he wants decorating for our baby shower.

Is it bad

That in 2009 I want:

My Mayor to be a four-time failure at passing the Bar
My Governor to be a former steroid user
And my President to have once used coke?

Forget about Wii. Maybe the problem is Yuu.

Beware, parents: the Nintendo Wii "can be porn gateway," even in the hands of six-year-old girls! Due to the game console's internet access, apparently otherwise innocent children can now browse gigabyte upon gigabyte of dirty, filthy, steamy fetish pornography (we're talking donkeys-in-pantyhose dirty) that would make Larry Flynt blush ... all between frames of video bowling.

Some parents are calling for Nintendo to install a "cyber-nanny" function that would allow guardians to filter the content that reaches the Wii. Maybe after they've achieved that goal these parents can start a letter writing campaign to Sony demanding that PS3s help their teens with their algebra homework and provide Junior an interactive, 3-D graphics version of "the talk."

If you're worried about your elementary-aged kids using their game consoles to access porn, maybe you should examine your parenting skills, not the filtering features on your Wii. Something tells me that your average well-adjusted first grade girl isn't trolling the Internet for clips of hot lunches and light BDSM.

I'm no parenting counselor, but I get the feeling that telling kids that there's a world of super-secret pictures out there that only grown-ups are allowed to look at is just a little too intriguing to pass up. It seems that those most obsessed with sex are those fighting the hardest to suppress it.

What a Girl Wants

Something I’ve written about before, in other forums, is the likely misconception that many women adopt their husbands’ surnames not because society demands that they do so, but because they think it’s just a nice gesture. This strikes me as unlikely for two reasons. First, it seems much more reasonable, to me, to suppose that what’s really going on in cases that look that way is that the woman is coming up with a ad hoc justification for not taking the more courageous step of bucking the status quo. Declining your husband’s name probably invites lots of uncomfortable questions from all sorts of people, quite possibly including the groom. That a woman wouldn’t want to deal with all of that is entirely understandable, even in the face of a strong emotional attachment to her own name. In that context, taking the “it’s just a sweet thing to do” argument at face value seems kind of naïve.

The second problem is the plain empirical fact that you don’t see men deciding to give up their last names as a symbol of their love. If the niceness of the gesture is its most salient feature, then you’d expect to see men and women making it at roughly comparable rates. But you don’t. In fact, you almost never hear about a man taking his wife’s name. Almost never:

All Michael Buday wanted to do was marry Diana Bijon and live happily ever after, with one tiny twist: He agreed to take her last name.

Quickly, the couple were plunged into what they describe as a bureaucratic inequity that has sparked both a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and new legislation to alter marriage licenses.

Buday said California discriminates by making it easy for women to take their husband's name upon marriage, but not vice versa.

...

Their complaint, filed Dec. 15 in a Los Angeles federal court, says:

• Los Angeles County's marriage application provides a space for the bride to enter her married name, but not the groom.

So rare is the practice of the groom adopting the bride's name that the marriage paperwork doesn't even accommodate it.

It's no surprise, of course, that women change their last name far more often than men, but what did strike me was that a number of parties seem to have the conviction that the problem with LA County's application is that it discriminates against men. The Sacramento Bee, for instance, takes the following position:

The path to full gender equality is a long and tortuous one, and it turns out that it's not only women who face discrimination.

...

When Buday sought to change his name to that of his fiancée, Diana Bijon, he was confronted by a four-step process requiring him to petition the state, pay a $32 application fee (in addition to the $70 marriage license fee), publish the change in a local newspaper for four weeks (which in another case cost a man $475), then go to court to get a judge's blessing.

Buday was not amused. Neither was the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed suit in federal court on behalf of the now-married couple, charging that Buday is a victim of discrimination under the Constitution's 14th Amendment. Six states allow men to change their names as easily as women can. California should do the same.

That seems like a peculiar way of looking at the situation. It seems to me that the underlying problem is discrimination against women, not against men. The reason that Buday can't change his name on his marriage application isn't that the government especially cares about whether he does so. Rather, it's that society and the government have conspired to pressure women into getting rid of their family names for the sake of men.

In other words, there's a real asymmetry here in the way the government treats the sexes. The source of that asymmetry, though, isn't that the government is forcibly preventing men from doing something highly desirable, it's that the government is helping to force women to do something undesirable. It can't be right to say that men are the victims of society's unreasonable demands here, can it? Men are just getting an unfair assist from the state in their own misogynistic project.

A Tremendous What?

Given that I've knocked Right on the Left Coast for ranting rather than arguing in the past, I think it's only fair to mention that I think this is basically right.

It turns out that the teacher who also happens to paint stuff with his butt in his spare time has been fired. As Darren says, "when doing something entirely legal, completely outside of school, becomes a cause to fire a teacher, we've gone too far." One wonders why we shouldn't just outlaw butt painting altogether.

Darren inexplicably fails, however, to mention this quote, from the teacher's attorney:

Chesterfield [County public schools] lost a tremendous asset today.

Firmly in the Third Quadrant

I know that these things are supposed to be viewed as silly and uninformative, but I actually think the Political Compass test is reasonably interesting. I've been taking it every couple of years at least since I started college, just to see whether and to what extent my views shift over time. I also think comparing scores between people can be illuminating, since I often assume that people, especially bloggers that I have no actual personal experience with, are more liberal or conservative than they really are.

As of today, I'm -4.38 on the economic axis and -5.49 on the social issues axis. My economic score almost never varies much, but my social score tends to vacillate a point and a half in either direction. Not sure if that's a function of my mood at the time or what, since I don't keep any record of how I answer individual questions. I'm definitely still a liberal though. Phew.

Don't be snotty

Joe Klein is catching flak for this statement:

Liberals were "right" about Vietnam, but they have paid a price ever since because they were so obnoxious about their correctness.

I have never seen a better, more concise explanation of the struggles I've had to be a true, full-fledged liberal.

Because, in my heart of hearts, I found a lot of liberals to be very irritating. Berkeley cemented this. I met a lot of Progressives who are snotty, humorless, intolerant of dissenting opinions, love to needle, quick to badger. And so forth. In sum, do not pass the Beer Test. Would I have a beer with this guy? At Berkeley I read a lot of self-haters like kausfiles and actual-conservatives like Instapundit because I was so tired of going through the Daily Planet's letter page. They seemed more fun!

Thankfully for my Liberalism, I moved to LA. Where people are more friendly. It's a lot easier here to understand the difference between the occasional moonbats espousing certain causes, and the underlying correctness of those causes. The war in Iraq IS stupid. National Health Insurance IS a good idea. Now I feel sad for those beknighted sorta-Democrats like Klein who cannot divorce their personal revulsion of the people behind Liberalism and the policies about it. What a crappy way to live! Intellectually convinced in your position but unable to party with your fellow adherents. So angry at Liberals that you morally equate the slaughter and torture of Vietnam with... being snotty about it afterwards! How many Cambodian bombings equal one Michael Moore documentary?

Nationally, the Democrats and Republicans have made the distinction easier. Mostly because the Democrats have increasingly understood the importance of presentability. 2004 was certainly a nadir. Michael Moore is even unpleasant to look at. Kerry was such a dour, pompous ass I have no idea what we were thinking. Now we've got Obama. Even Hillary has worked hard to cement a friendly image. Meanwhile, Republicans, urged on by the blogs and talk radio, have become so unhinged and wide-eyed they just come off as giant dicks.

This could explain the accession of Jonah Goldberg to the upper ranks of Republican commentariat. He's not the deepest thinker, nor does he make much sense. But he's NICE. He makes JOKES. Stuff like that is a positive.

Maybe he IS a visionary!

Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed universal health care for the great state of California. I haven't immersed myself in the analysis of this potential policy, but at first blush it appears to be really ... great!

It shifts the costs of emergency room care into preventative care, it requires that all employers (with some exceptions for small businesses) offer health care plans or pay a 4% payroll tax to contribute to the resource pool, and it covers all kids.

I'm waiting for my better-informed colleagues to explain why this is a bad idea.

Ezra Klien asks a question

Ezra Klein wonders what's wrong with Joe Klein:

Joe Klein And The Politics of Tone: ... Klein's actual complaint is staggering in its mendacity: Democrats, who he thinks arerightabout the uselessness of a "surge" strategy, are being too nasty in saying so. Let's go over that again: In Joe Klein's very first blog post, his initial chance to opine in an instant and high-profile medium, he doesn't choose to inveigh against a dangerous and counterproductive strategy which he admittedly believes would cost thousands of lives and prolong an immoral, grievously wrong-headed war. No, he chooses to toss off a tantrum against Democrats who are too rhetorically dismissive of the strategy he admittedly believes would cost thousands of lives and prolong an immoral, grievously wrong-headed war.

What is wrong with these people?

My guess: Joe Klein is unable to understand a world where liberals suffer more from timidity than they do from overreach. It makes him antsy anytime a liberal uses strong language or says things plainly. It bothers him even more when these liberals do so on issues of national defense where Joe instinctively assumes that the Democratic position should be hidden and downplayed - lest the public punish them - no matter how correct it is.

From my experience this is common in people who formed their political opinions in the 70's (like Joe Klein) and people who formed their political views thinking that BAMN is actually something worth thinking about. Why Time magazine pays Klein to provide political analysis that's 30 years out of date I can't say.

Update: Brad Delong is driven shrill by Joe Klein's foolishness.

Update: Chris Bowler weighs in with an alternate answer. He says that Joe Klein is simply acting to preserve the power of pundits in the face of discrediting facts:

As someone who opposed the war from long before it began, and thus was long branded as "not serious" as a result, it is remarkable to me how those who now support escalation are immediately branded as "serious" by those who do not support escalation but who did support the war in the first place. In fact, the entire Washington Post editorial yesterday seemed simply to be a defense of the people who support escalation as "serious" and otherwise good people, even if the Washington Post itself can't bring itself to personally step onto the ashbin of history. This isn't surprising really, since another serious commentator, Richard Cohen, has recently stated that the main reason he opposed supported the war was because he didn't want to throw his lot with the unserious, dirty hippies who opposed it.

There may be disagreements within the DLC-nexus of pundits from time to time, but as we can see form the DLC-nexus pundits are dealing with the current schism over escalation, maintaining the power and image of the punditry nexus itself is more important than any short term schism. For Joe Klein and Fred Hyatt, the most important point is that the people who wrongly support escalation are still serious and worthy of our attention. They are not, heaven forbid, any of those unserious, dirty fucking hippies who are not worthy of serious attention.

Update: Greg Sargent has another theory. He thinks Joe Klein just wants to think he's courageous. That's why he assume that liberals who oppose the surge must have nefarious motives.

Here's a possible answer, and it's something you see this again and again in today's pundits. It's not enough for them to be getting six-figure salaries to spout their opinions; to be feted at cocktail parties; invited on TV chat shows; sucked up to by star-struck underlings; and constantly told by colleagues how incisive and witty their latest effort was. No, they also need to feel that they are brave and heroic in holding their opinions, too.

To look into the mirror and see a brave and heroic pundit staring back, of course, you need to flatter yourself into believing that you're challenging entrenched ideas and the people who hold them in some way, even if you aren't. This impression can be created in several ways. One is to simply dream up a whole class of people, claim they hold "extreme" opinions based on nothing at all, and set yourself up as a lonely warrior against them -- preferably while standing shoulder to shoulder with other lonely heroes of moderation like John McCain and Joe Lieberman. That's David Broder's preferred approach. Another way is to dream up a whole series of nefarious but nonexistent motives driving colleagues' opinions, so that you can deprive those colleagues of credit for those opinions, and position yourself as, again, braver and more heroic than they are -- even though you agree with them. That is Klein's approach -- and I submit that at bottom it's all about vanity.

Klein issued a challenge in his column today that was deftly handled by Boo Man. So here's a challenge for Klein: Back up your arguments with facts and evidence. Produce one example of someone whose comments betray the fact that they're tacitly rooting for American failure. Quote this person. Explain why this person's quotes should be interpreted that way. And finally, explain why that one person's motives reveal those of the whole class of people you're so dedicated to disparaging.

Update: Kevin Drum has no idea what's gone wrong with Joe Klein.

Klein knows this perfectly well, just as he knows that the "motivating force" behind the surge almost certainly doesn't come from "military intellectuals" anyway. It comes from George Bush and Dick Cheney, who are casting around for something -- anything -- to fend off calls for withdrawal, and are desperately latching on to the tiny number of people who believe (or claim to believe) that a surge will work.

Why Klein pretends otherwise I don't know. Today, though, he goes from merely incoherent to completely flipped out. Unhappy at being criticized, and apparently unable to marshal any further arguments for his case, he lashes out:

And so a challenge to those who slagged me in their comments. Can you honestly say the following:

Even though I disagree with this escalation, I am hoping that General Petraeus succeeds in calming down Baghdad.

Does the thought even cross your mind?

I'd like to respond with some kind of snappy comment here, but words fail me. I suspect Klein would be better off if words failed him too.

Mmm.. coke

Were you guys as surprised as I was that Obama once used cocaine?

Obama writes about smoking marijuana and trying cocaine during his teenage years. Inviting journalists to contrast his earlier admission with Bill Clinton's "didn't inhale" remarks made during the 1992 presidential campaign, Obama recently stated: "I inhaled—that was the point." Obama added: "It was reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy; teenage boys are frequently confused."

My significant other concluded, upon hearing this, that Obama has no prayer. And isn't that the automatic reaction most would reach? I mean, geeze, coke!

I guess the reason I felt differently was the persistent exaltation of redemption in American public life. Even when it's pathetic -- Mark Foley -- some sort of renunciation/apology/rehabilitation cycle is usually acceptable to restart a stalled career. And Obama is nothing if not about the possibilities of redemption and second chances. Probably the reason Clinton took so much flack for marginal pot use was that you got the feeling he'd smoke a bowl today, if Stephenopolous was carrying.

Still, this should be an interesting thing to explore when the media types go after Barack.

Scaffolding Your Way to the Truth

Looking at this post and its update, it's remarkable how smoothly Glenn Reynolds transitions from treating media bias as the conclusion of an argument to just treating media bias as an axiom once his argument gets debunked. People who think that the media has some sort of significant partisan bias seem to think that arguments are just a kind of scaffolding, and it doesn't really matter if the argument falls apart as long as you've already put in place the conclusion you want.

A Man With A Plan

Watching the folks at the Corner get all excited about the prospect of a troop "surge" in Iraq reminded me of something I wanted to say several weeks ago but forgot about. I think a lot of people who realize we ought to be pulling out of Iraq as soon as possible made a mistake in complaining that Bush was advocating sending in more troops without having a specific plan for what to do with them. Now the guy's going to come up with a plan and, by that very fact, he'll take the wind out of the anti-surge/withdrawal argument.

But the problem was never that Bush didn't have a plan, it was that no plan whatever would stand any real chance of success. Obviously Bush was going to slap together a plan for the surge at some point, so it was kind of silly to lower the bar for him by making the absence of a plan the main obstacle for him to overcome. The appropriate strategy was to prep everybody for the fact that Bush was going to come up, inevitably, with a strategy that was doomed to failure. Now we're going to have to hear grudging concessions about Bush's wisdom just because he decided to figure out what to do with the troops before actually deploying them.

Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir, At Long Last?

An interesting fact I was not aware of until today: immigration form I-485 - the application to apply for permanent residence in the U.S. - asks applicants, "Have you ever been a member of, or in any way affiliated with, the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party?"

An immigration attorney assures me that despite the sizable number of individuals from China and the former Soviet Union who apply for permanent residence, nobody checks the "Yes" box.

Eh!

Does anyone else feel like they're going to survive Bush?

I've been thinking about the past six years. It's been that long since I learned Bush won, sitting in my dorm room at Berkeley. Screams of pronounced horror echoed across faux-Scandinavian rooftops.

But six years in, I have yet to feel personally affected by Bush. Not once in the past six years have I felt like something he has done has actually affected my day-to-day life.

Now, this isn't to say that he hasn't. At the very least, his tax cuts and budget deficits will shape fiscal policy for untold decades, in ways that I will never directly notice. And he has personally affected anybody with a friend or family member in the military. Or a New Orleans resident.

But politics is, first and foremost, about individual needs and desires. And in my daily life, in what I do, Bush has affected me not even the slightest. No draft. No national legislation that really changes my life. He doesn't even run the economy. Kind of sad. Not even social security legislation.

Has anyone else here felt affected by something Bush has caused, outside of something they saw on a TV screen? I don't mean to imply that others have not, just that I haven't.

Mean Girls

Matthew Yglesias links to this article about women discriminating against each other in the workplace and says:

Let me note that these survey results could have been framed in any number of ways. The newspaper chooses to frame it as debunking the notion that women are held back in the workplace by discrimination by men. As best I can tell, however, the survey actually indicates that men and women were both inclined to discriminate against women candidates, but that men were somewhat less so inclined than were women.

Another qualification that has to be added is that it does not follow from the fact that women are more likely to discriminate against female employees that women do most of the discriminating against female employees. Most of the people making these sorts of decisions about who gets promoted and who doesn't, after all, are probably men.

Gay Sheep

I'm a little bit late to the game, but there are some researchers in Oregon trying to see if they can manipulate the sexual preferences of sheep by tinkering with their physiologies. The moral issues involved have gotten a little muddled, thanks to the combined efforts of PETA and Martina Navratilova, but I think I understand the form of the objections from liberal quarters. In particular, I think Navratilova's big objection is that the implication of working to figure out how to manipulate sexual preference seems to be that we would want to manipulate sexual preference. That would further imply, presumably, that certain sexual preferences are more desirable than, and thus superior to, others.

First, let me say that I think Navratilova mischaracterizes the research being done in Oregon; I think a fairer way of describing things is to say that researchers feel that the ability to manipulate sexual preference is a major test of our knowledge of the mechanisms involved.

Second, I want to just briefly mention one of my pet issues, which is that the distinction between genetics and choice in discussions of sexual preference acquisition is more apparent than real. It just doesn't make sense to talk about people choosing what they like and don't like. When people choose, all they're really doing is taking one course of action instead of the alternatives, but they do so on the basis of their previously-existing preferences. That is, what is a choice supposed to be if it's not an expression of preferences? The most charitable thing you can say about the whole thing is that you can't explain preference acquisition in terms of choice without falling into an infinite regress. Really, though, I think you can file this under "it's not even wrong". Actually, I'll do just that.

Update: To clarify, the only thing, here, I really consider "not even wrong" is the argument that people choose their sexual preferences. That particular position just doesn't make any kind of sense.

The concerns that Navratilova brings up are another matter. Those are coherent beliefs about the issues, they're just wrong or misapplied for various reasons. I don't think that the research should stop, nor am I especially worried about its implications, but I can at least understand what her objections are supposed to be.

Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me a Map

If the Internet were a person, her achievements would be myriad: community-based knowledge creation, an expansive index of fetish pornography, instant access to a world of current events, free real-time communication with anyone one the planet, and universal access to massive libraries of publicly-funded data reserves! The World Wide Web, coupled with her sister Geospatial Data, brings you the National Atlas, a two-dimensional gold mine of place-based information about the United States.

Yes! Geospatial data! That's up there with Lego in my nerdly pleasure hierarchy.

The National Atlas has many awesome features - printable maps of every presidential election result since 1789, dynamic maps of monthly vegetation growth in America, downloadable raw data on which the maps are based - but the coolest way to impress your friends is with the National Atlas Map Maker. Go ahead, indulge in a few hours of exploration. Each layer is a tasty little nugget of data visually describing our country's energy use, geology, economic health, or some other nifty construct. Most data are disaggregated by county, which is neat when trying to illustrate, for example, how different San Francisco is from, say, Inyo County.

Not only are the maps a fun and easy way to absorb information about your United States, they're also a handy tool in political debates. Is your racist Midwestern uncle claiming that Mexicans are taking his job? Go ahead and show him that his county is less than 3% Hispanic, then let him observe the apparent lack of correlation between Hispanic population and jobs per capita and unemployment rates! You'll be the life of the party.

Or show all your cheese-eating in-laws that colon cancer rates are highly concentrated in the upper Midwest, then illustrate that the American West enjoys lower cancer rates than everyone else. Everyone likes a know-it-all.

Or, less argumentatively, simply peruse cool information like vegetable harvesting acreage or fertility rates among women over 40 or the location and magnitude of earthquakes since the late 16th century. (California leads the pack in all three categories.)

A caveat: Raw number data in the same category might not be easily compared across time periods due to varied distribution of color codes from one map to the next. For example, in the map of "Percent of Population: White" for 2000, the bright yellow indicates a percentage range of 0.1 to 33.1; in the 1980 map of the same variable, the bright yellow represents 6.332 to 38.928 percentage points. This distribution is based on a formula I learned about in my brief ArcGIS training; I forgot the name of the formula, but it distributes ranges in a more informative way than a simple linear distribution would.

Hopefully USGS will include a map illustrating climate change over the centuries and degades once it's available. I look forward to the depressing news.

Happy mapmaking!

It's not an endorsement; it's just cowardace

I'm both an atheist and an avid user of and advocate for the National Park Service, so I feel kinda caught in the middle of this debate. The long and short of it, though, is that NPS is being cowardly and disloyal to its mission. However, there are two distinct debates occurring simultaneously, and it's important not to conflate the two.

Debate One: Should the National Park Service permit non-scientific beliefs to influence their educational materials and official statements? Not in a million years! (Or 6,000 years, if that's your game.) If what the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility say is true, and "Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature," then I'm outraged. As a governmental entity (and as an organization statedly devoted to education about the natural world), it's legally and ethically wrong for NPS to bow to religion in the face of scientific fact. Boo, National Park System!

Debate Two: Should the National Park Service allow a religious-themed publication to be sold in its bookstore? Sure, why not? As Paul pointed out, there are plenty of books sold in the Grand Canyon bookstore describing the spiritual (and geologically inaccurate) beliefs of American Indians, and permitting Christian creationist texts is no different. The bookstore and giftshop is a clearinghouse for Grand Canyon-themed items, not a library of fact and endorsements. (They also sell Grand Canyon shot glasses in the giftshop. I wouldn't interpret that as a government endorsement to drink.) It's important to note that few, if any, items sold in the bookstore are published or produced by the National Park Service; they are created by private or non-profit groups and sold on NPS property. Insisting that the Grand Canyon bookstore only sell items devoid of religious content is like demanding that public libraries not carry The Holy Bible, lest doing so be interpreted as an endorsement of Christianity. The NPS is permitting a venue in which all voices (no matter how crazy) are heard. Hooray, National Park Service!

If I were to take issue with anything NPS does, I'd complain about their pro-Manifest Destiny video presentation at Mount Rushmore National Monument. Blech.

Rebecca picks on WND column, proceeds to steal candy from baby

World Net Daily is a vast well from which I can drink continually and never feel the pang of thirst. Smart people like my Bajillion readers know that everything published at WND bears the argumentative integrity of a drunk seven-year-old speaking Latin. But what about all the doofuses who aren't smart and take WND seriously?

WND does a good job of reflecting the erroneous or specious (yet semi-coherent) arguments that plague otherwise innocuous thinkers, then take those arguments to their logical conclusions, thus revealing how painfully weak the original argument was to begin with. They use the same rhetorical techniques employed by stupid people who aren't crazy (e.g., Bill O'Reilley, Sean Hannity), then utilize those exact techniques to be crazy (like Pat Buchanan or this asshat).

Here's an example: Profiling: Because we're not God. The content of the article is crazy claptrap; most essays touting racial profiling are. The title alone should be a dead givaway. But the arguments that Walter E. Williams uses are so familiar and successful among less insane pundits and writers that they warrant analysis.

1. WND's editors have cashed in on the principle of Oppressed Subgroup Immunity, namely that if you're black or Muslim or a woman then you're automatically granted license to spout bullshittery on behalf of all blacks or Muslims or women without fear of reprimandation. "But I'm black! How could I be racist?!" Well played, World Net Daily.

2. Williams begins by stating the obvious. By leading with an inarguable assertion, he poises himself as a reasonable, truthful character.

God, or some other omniscient being, would never racially profile. Why? Since He is all-knowing, He'd know who is and is not a terrorist or a criminal. We humans are not all-knowing.

Well, I guess you got me there, Walt. Even if you don't believe in god, you have to accept the internal logic of this statement. Shit. I guess this means humans are obligated to perform all the functions the G-man isn't around to do for us. Has anyone invented a Hurricane Course Changer yet?

3. The author uses a bogus analogy that is structurally identical to the topic at hand, yet is in practice totally different from the issue being debated.

Mortality rates for cardiovascular diseases were approximately 30 percent higher among black adults than among white adults. The Pima Indians of Arizona have the world's highest known diabetes rates. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men. Would anyone bring racial profiling charges against a doctor who routinely ordered more frequent blood tests and prostate screening among his black patients and more glucose tolerance tests for his Pima Indian patients?

Of course, while racially-specific medical screening saves the lives of blacks and American Indians, racial profiling at airports negatively discriminates against Middle Eastern-looking people. See? Internally logical analogy coupled with insanely stupid extension of that analogy.

4. Williams invokes legitimate facts to support an illegitimate stance.

It is clear, whether we like it or not, or want to say it or not, that there is a strong correlation between terrorist acts and being a Muslim, and being black and high rates of crime.

Since September 11, 2001, fewer than ten terrorists have attacked American soil, and they happened to all be Muslim. Okay, so 100% of terrorists to attack the US in the last six years have been Muslim. But that also means that fewer than 0.00000001% of all Muslims have attacked the US in the last six years. Somehow that's a less impressive number.

Also, I'm pretty sure that most terrorist acts on US territory in the 1990s were by white American Christian dudes. For some reason we didn't racially profile white guys after the Oklahoma City bombing. Clearly, there's another variable (hint: racism) at play.

5. Finally, Walter pulls the "blame the victims, not the victimizers" rabbit out of his magic top hat of crazy.

A law-abiding Muslim who's given extra airport screening or a black who's stopped by the police is perfectly justified in being angry, but with whom should he be angry? I think a Muslim should be angry with those who've made terrorism and Muslim synonymous and blacks angry with those who've made blacks and crime synonymous.

Yes, and don't blame rapists ... blame the rape victims for dressing like sluts! Or, better yet, blame every self-empowered woman who's expressed interest in sex at any point in her life. So any woman who doesn't want to be sexually assaulted should air her grievances with all the feminist women who like dick. (Note how I used an analogy that actually makes sense. Sheesh.)

Racism should not be the burdon the oppressed. There's no such thing as a legitimate stereotype. And racism is always wrong, no matter what color the racist's skin is.

Apples to Apples

I'm on vacation, so I have time to read stuff like this:

While I think Edwards should be taken more seriously than JPod does — if only because so many Democrats and pundits take him seriously — let's not forget that Edwards didn't help Kerry in the South at all. If memory serves, Edwards didn't even boost Kerry's percentage in Edwards' home state of North Carolina by even a single percentage point over Gore's in 2000. We were told when Kerry picked Edwards that the move would put all of the South in play. That was obvious nonsense. But, if he's the guy who can win in the South, shouldn't he have helped the ticket in his own state just an eensy-weensy bit?

Well, OK, but Al Gore was a southerner himself. If Edwards didn't shift many southern states toward the Democrats relative to 2000, that probably had something to do with the fact that his ticket was more-or-less the inverse of Gore's, which featured a southerner at the top and relegated the scary New England character to the bottom.

Volokh and States, Sitting in a Tree...

There's a (one-sided) debate going on over at the Volokh Conspiracy about whether or not federalism is "tainted" in virtue of its history with Jim Crow, slavery, and racism generally. Much conservative hand-wringing ensues, and much cognitive dissonance is introduced. Ilya Somin, at one point, draws a tortured distinction between "federalism" and "states' rights" by claiming that the former "requires citizen mobility between states, so that people can 'vote with their feet' against jurisdictions that adopt harmful or oppressive policies toward them."

Uh, since when? I mean, I appreciate that it's more than a little bit awkward to be a decent proponent of federalism in a world in which defending the autonomy of individual states has been used as a pretext for implementing brutal, disgusting, racist policies. What aren't cool are the intellectual convolutions the rest of us have to listen to to hear why all federalists shouldn't be painted with the same brush. It's confusing and it's complicated, and it's all entirely unnecessary.

All you've really got to do to wash your hands of federalism's history, in my view, is to admit that federalism isn't a fundamental ethical principle. States aren't morally relevant entities, so we've got no basic ethical reason to start giving them rights. Federalism is ultimately just a useful rule of thumb for implementing policy effectively and justly arranging institutions. The difference isn't hard to see, but a lot of conservatives are emotionally wedded to their federalism, so there's a lot of reluctance to recognize it. Among other things, acknowledging that distinction would mean that modern-day federalists would have to start defending their stances in terms of actual costs and benefits rather than lazy appeals to abstract principle, but that's just so much the worse for modern-day federalists.

Certainly, that would take some of the wind out of federalism's sails, but that's the price you pay for having elevated the whole philosophy so high in the first place.

2,973

Matthew Yglesias points out an argument from Ann Althouse that's as pathetic as it is absurd. Overlooked, though, are the deeper absurdities of the statistic first brought up by Orin Kerr: "Today the war in Iraq passed a very sad milestone: the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq has now exceeded the number of persons killed in the 9/11 attacks."

The appropriate response to this is to point out that it is of no consequence whatever. Or, "Uh, who cares?"

2,973 isn't a magic number, or the minimum number of people you have to kill to have done something wrong or regrettable. It's just the number of people who happened to have died in the attacks of September 11, 2001. One (1) dead person is a large moral problem; 2,973 of them is not a different sort of problem. What we're dealing with is a numerical coincidence, not a normative threshold of any significance.

P.S. - I'd sort of hoped that Althouse would explain in the comments to her post what she meant when she described invading Iraq as "fighting back". No such luck.

Let's bag on The American Prospect too

TAP runs David Greenberg's review of "The Race Beat":

On February 6, 1956, Peter Kihss of The New York Times was covering the enrollment of the first black student, Autherine Lucy, at the University of Alabama. Mobs of racist thugs swarmed the campus, harassing her whenever she left a classroom, and late that day they encircled an older black man who had come to drive Lucy home. Impulsively, Kihss moved to protect the driver, and when the crowd closed in, he abandoned journalistic protocol entirely. "I'm a reporter for The New York Times, and I've gotten a wonderful impression of the University of Alabama," he threatened. "Now I'll be glad to take on the whole student body, two at a time." The mob spared him, while Lucy scooted out the building's back door into a patrol car.

As Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff show in their bracing new history, The Race Beat, the stakes of the civil-rights movement forced many reporters who covered it to choose sides. They found themselves faced with impossible professional, political, and moral dilemmas, with human decency often pitted against journalistic norms. In the process, they challenged professional conventions, aided the cause of equal rights, and, in their own way, made history.

So far so good. But Greenberg tacks his own moral at the end of his piece:

If the civil-rights movement represented one of American journalism's finest hours, it carried a cost. It's a shame that Roberts and Klibanoff don't explicitly state the conclusion that much of their evidence suggests: Today's right-wing bogeyman of "the liberal media" originated in this struggle. Coverage of the movement convinced much of the white South that the networks, papers like the Times, and magazines like Time and Newsweek were hostile and biased interlopers that told only one side of the story.

...

Thus, while Roberts and Klibanoff are right to celebrate these journalists for bravely documenting the cruelty of Jim Crow and helping to hasten its demise, their legacy is more ambiguous. For in choosing to support right over wrong, good over evil, they fueled a distrust and resentment of what we now call "the mainstream media" that has, over the years, only grown in virulence.

To me it seems an unmitigated good that Kihss stood down the Alabama mob and told them to follow the law. To me broadcasting visceral images of civil-rights protesters getting attacked is just good journalism. To me reporting on It doesn't look like "ambiguous" at all. Greenberg instead believes that these actions traded away some credibility which eventually gave rise to the anti-media resentment that we see today.

Greenberg's assumption here is that reporters could have maintained their credibility in the eyes of the South had the reporters simply refrained from things like "deliver[ing] the raw images of brutality and injustice into American living rooms, destroying any last support for Jim Crow outside the South.". But we have very little reason to believe this. After all, when authorities set dogs on protesters, that's news. You can't not report it. If you want to know what it would have taken to satisfy conservative Southerners look no farther that Greenberg's own review:

In one fascinating section, they relate a conspiracy hatched among white Southern editors who belonged to the Associated Press to try to force the wire service to write about crimes by blacks in the North as avidly as it spotlighted the violence of the white South.

The problem wasn't that reporters were broadcasting bias. The problem was that they were accurately discerning what was relevant - the civil-rights movement - from what was not newsworthy. Essentially, conservative Southerners didn't want the truth reported because the truth was that the southern system was corrupt and immoral. Objectively. So the "trade-off" Greensburg wants to artlessly tack on to to the end of the book rings hollow.

The most contrarian position is the one which is clearly wrong

Shorter Peter Beinart:

The "reality based" liberals who oppose the war are the real neocons.

It would be ten times funnier if the joint advocacy of the Iraq war by Peter Beinart's TNR and the neocons didn't lead to thousands of American and Iraqi deaths.

Sloppy Metaphysics

Ugh...

Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future.

Visions of the status of robots around 2056 have emerged from one of 270 forward-looking papers sponsored by Sir David King, the UK government’s chief scientist. The paper covering robots’ rights was written by a UK partnership of Outsights, the management consultancy, and Ipsos Mori, the opinion research organisation.

“If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Sure, but so what? We're not 50 years away from conscious robots. We might be 50 years away from robots that seem to all outward appearances to be conscious, but that's not the same thing.

It's not even that consciousness couldn't be artificially created. If, for instance, consciousness is just an emergent property of brains set up and functioning like our own, then there's no reason, in principle, that we couldn't replicate the necessary conditions to give rise to consciousness artificially. That's not the way robots or artificial intelligence work, though. And why should they? It seems pointlessly complicated to try to create a robot that functions mechanically the way we do, since all we're really after in a robot is the functionality of responding in the desired way to stimuli we provide.

In fact, the prospect of artificially inducing consciousness seems like an awfully good incentive not to take the consciousness-inducing strategy with a robot, since then you get into precisely those sorts of thorny ethical issues.

TNR Run down

I might grow old and die before finishing this review of TNR, so I'll be quicker about it:

Divide Iraq, Peter W. Galbraith

Wrong. The regions of Iraq are not heterogeneous. Dividing Iraq would take one state where minorities aren’t safe and turn them into a bunch of countries where different minorities aren’t safe. See this for more. Much of Galbraith’s arguments are refuted in the next article:

Keep It Whole, Reza Aslan

Right on. The best point he makes is that oil is not evenly distributed in Iraq. Any division of Iraq would necessarily founder on that issue.

Force Everyone To The Table, Anne-Marie Slaughter

She says “throw a big peace conference and if it doesn’t work go home”. Fine. I don’t think a conference would work but I’m happy to try one if that’s what it takes to get some people to support withdrawal. I should point out that not talking to countries like Syria and Iran are part of official Bush doctrine and he shows no sign of changing that.

Deal With The Sunnis, Larry Diamond

He wants to cut a deal with the Sunni insurgents to get them on our side. He says “ensure that the central government will control the oil and not the Shia regions that have the oil”. Of course the problem is “we” can’t cut any kind of deal. The US doesn’t own the oil-fields in Iraq. The Iraqi government does. And it’s run by Maliki and his Sadr’s chums. So the question is how do we get Maliki to hand over the oil? I don’t know. And how do we get Sadr’s voting block in parliament to go along with it? I don’t know that either. And why should the Sunnis be happy knowing that the central government will control the oil when they know they will always be outnumbered by the Shia there? Mr. Diamond doesn’t know either or else he’s not very good at writing essays.

To be continued…

I Can Give You Facts and Figures, I Could Give You Plans and Forecasts

If you want to see me angry, remind me about the Bush administration's insistence that sex education funds be given exclusively to abstinence-only programs. This isn't because I think teenagers shouldn't be abstinent (it didn't hurt me none). It's not even that I think abstinence-only education is the underhanded tool of fundamental Christians trying to shoehorn religious teachings into public education (though it totally is).

No, the reason I get so steamed about abstinence-only sex ed is because it doesn't even work! More comprehensive sex ed programs, such as those touting abstinence and condoms, are more successful at preventing teen pregnancy, STDs, and sexual activity. So, based on the research, if fundies really wanted to curb the clap and unwanted babies (and, by extension, abortions), they'd promote comprehensive sex ed over the laughable "not 'til you're married" policy.

Beware--I invoked the holy name of Research when debating an emotionally-charged topic. For some reason research isn't a popular tool in policy making; in some contexts, it's practically a dirty word. There's something about a nerd with a pie chart telling you that your 12-year-old daughter should watch her teacher roll a condom over a banana that, well, rubs parents the wrong way. Who the hell do you think you are, with your fancy applied statistics degree and flashy bar graphs. Do you even have a daughter of your own?

Sure, we pretend to advocate the use of research in civic decision-making. Representatives like to walk onto Capitol Hill with a stack of charts and data under their arm. Constituencies like the authenticity that research affords their lawmakers. When a bearded Berkeley professor goes on the local news to act as an expert about the connection between carbon emissions and climate change, audiences hold that researcher in a certain regard. For a moment.

When it comes down to it, though, beliefs will always trump facts.

There are plenty of reasons for this. The first and most subtle is that Americans don't like know-it-alls. Data are exotic and mysterious, and come to think of it most of us have always hated math. Sarah Vowell writes about this phenomenon when assessing why voters undervalued Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. Al Gore embodies what the populace hates about research-oriented thinkers: he uses big words, cites numbers and trends and published reports, and then acts like he knows more than I do because, most likely, he knows more than I do. He's a big nerd, and he makes us feel dumb. Researchers, experts, and Al Gore spend their whole careers rubbing it our face that they know better than we do how we should spend our lives. The audacity!

That brings me to the next reason Americans dismiss poindexters and their highfalutin' data: we don't like people telling us what to do. A lot of research out there is exploratory--it seeks to discover unknown facts. It's when research gets prescriptive, however, that we get ornery. And when research hops in bed with policy, the most prescriptive element of our society, it feels like mom and dad are making us eat our veggies.

Along those lines, the most obvious reason we poo-poo research in policy is that we're confident that we know how to take care of ourselves, no matter what the bespectacled number-crunchers say. It's the same mentality that prompts some of us to never wear our seat belts; seat belts are for bad drivers, not me. Or sometimes the research results in question counter everything we've experienced in our lives. How can pork be bad for you if my granny ate a rack of ribs every day until the day she died at the age of 98? Or the research results might simply be counter-intuitive. You mean red light cameras actually increase car accidents? No way! Very simply, research can prescribe behaviors that completely violate preexisting beliefs, morals, or folk knowledge, and it's going to take more than a few papers published in Harvard Educational Review to change our minds about how schools should be run. If my parents always told me that milk builds strong bones, I'm not going to value research that says it doesn't. If I think pre-teens shouldn't be exposed to condoms, I don't care if the Mighty World of Research says they should. If I think God created the Earth in six days, fossil records mean nothing to me.

There is one last, and semi-logical, reason to question the role of research in your daily life. Frankly, research results are confusing, conflicting, and ever-changing. Is milk bad for me or good for me? What about beef? Vitamins? Some research says yes, and some says no! From a layperson's perspective, the Research Community can't make up its mind. "Research" is viewed as an amorphous lump of scientists in lab coats, a unified coalition of smarty-pants who convene every year to agree on the Truth. So it's a little confusing when one member of the research community says milk makes you fat while another equally believable source says it'll help you lose weight. To decipher all the conflicting information would require a degree of research methods and statistics literacy that very few people actually have.

The truth is that most the research that gets published and makes headlines is internally valid, and usually fairly externally valid. The source of confusion is in how these data are presented to the public: the USA Today headline says something earth-shattering like "Watching TV Makes your Kids Stupid," when in reality the research study simply correlated television viewing with lower grades. How is Joanne Meatball supposed to detect the nuanced differences between those two statements? If you carefully examine every study that makes the front page, you'll find that most of them are sound, and most of the studies that reveal ostensibly opposed truths are actually measuring completely different constructs. But if I can't understand what the data imply, why should I trust it?

The question is whether these are actually good reasons to discourage the marriage of research and law.

The advantages of research-based policy are clear. We would expect to see laws actually yield their intended results at a greater rate than currently enjoyed, assuming the policies are enforced properly. Fewer pregnant teenagers, fewer women with osteoporosis, fewer inmates on death row, fewer gun deaths, fewer accidents at lit intersections. It's a utopia waiting to happen.

The disadvantages are not easily overlooked, though. What if the policy that research prescribes violates the sanctity of civil liberties? So what if tracking sex offenders with GPS devices is effective at reducing repeat crimes? It's also invasive and cruel. (Come to think of it, though, I doubt if it'll prove effective.) Relying heavily on research to inform policy is precariously undemocratic. When lawmaking is put in the hands of unelected experts, the public's right to enforce their beliefs, however unfounded, is limited. For better or worse, it's my right as an American to demand that morals, not science, dictate policy. And given how inscrutable most research is, who would mediate between the academic world and the policy-making world? Would their motives be free of bias? Finally, as new data are collected, the "facts" can change with generations. Can we afford to bend law around a seemingly fickle collection of truths?

Despite these drawbacks, research should play a more prominent role in lawmaking. I think resistance to fact-based policy is rooted primarily in unfounded skepticism and ignorance, and perhaps a little in hardheadedness. Americans display a distrust of science not observed in comparable nations, and while it hasn't been stifling our short-term economic health, our environmental and personal health is suffering as a result.

Plus my income for the last three years has relied on publicly funded education research, so maybe I'm just looking out for Numero Uno.

Sloppy Metaethics

Ilya Somin admirably refuses to concede ground to Jeff Jacoby on the relationship between atheism and moral relativism*, but fails to call B.S. on the argument that:

What society loses when it discards Judeo-Christian faith and belief in G-d is something far more difficult to replace: the value system most likely to promote ethical behavior and sustain a decent society. That is because without G-d, the difference between good and evil becomes purely subjective. What makes murder inherently wrong is not that it feels wrong,but that a transcendent Creator to whom we are answerable commands: "Thou shalt not murder...."

If the reason you don't kill somebody is that you're scared of what God will do to you, you're not acknowledging an objective moral truth, you're just being bullied around. The real question is whether God is enforcing a preexisting normative law, or whether He's making arbitrary demands of the people unfortunate enough to be answerable to Him. In neither case does God do any actual metaethical work.

*I think the real disagreement is about moral skepticism, but who's counting?

Butt it's art!

The Education Wonks are showing their prudish side:

TipWonk KauiMark has pointed us to the incredible story of Virginia art teacher Stephen Murmer. It seems as though Mr. Murmer has been suspended from his classroom because of his somewhat...er...ah.. peculiar habit of painting pictures with his backside and/or his genitals. (We didn't make this up---- honest!) Of course it goes without saying that the American Civil Liberties Union couldn't wait to get itself involved.

Reading that, you'd think Murmer was dropping his drawers in the classroom. (Crazy ACLU!) But as they say, always follow the link:

To hear the students tell it, Stephen Murmer is a fun, popular art teacher who is always quick to crack a joke. But there is another side to Murmer...Outside of class and under an alter ego, the self-proclaimed "butt-printing artist" creates floral and abstract art by plastering his posterior and genitals with paint and pressing them against canvas. His cheeky creations sell for hundreds of dollars.

This has not gone over well with Chesterfield County school officials, who placed Murmer on administrative leave from his job at Monacan High School.

...

Murmer went to great lengths to keep his work life separate from his activities as an artist, said ACLU executive director Kent Willis. As a butt-printing artist, he goes by the name "Stan Murmur," and appears in disguise in photographs and videos promoting his art.

"As a public employee, he has constitutional rights, and he certainly has the right to engage in private legal activities protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution," Willis said.

The students seem to agree. As do I. The school district wants to say that Murmer is "expected to set an example for students through their personal conduct" and "that teachers, like parents, are role models." All of which is correct, and none of which provides a reason to kick Murmer out of the classroom. Unless Virginia has some law against painting with your butt that I don't know about, it's not obvious what's supposed to be the poor example being set. Are we expected to worry that a cohort of kids will grow up to be butt painters?

I don't understand old people.

TNR Review: On Robert Kagan

Next up in my review of TNR is the article by NeoCon Robert Kagan. He wants to send more troops to Iraq.

The first priority ought to be to secure Baghdad, which U.S. policy has disastrously failed to do. To accomplish this, the United States should send an additional 50,000 troops at least, the bulk of them to Baghdad so that the city can be made safe for its inhabitants, but without drawing forces from elsewhere in the country. Once Baghdad is secure, U.S. and Iraqi forces could extend their operations into Sunni-controlled areas. This will take time. But a secure Baghdad would provide at least one pillar on which any eventual political settlement could be based.

Some claim that we don’t have 50,000 troops to send to Iraq. In fact, the troops are available. Sending additional forces to Iraq means lengthening troop rotations, as the United States has done in previous major conflicts. Sustaining such an increased deployment, however, will require a substantial increase in the overall size of the Army and Marines. This increase, which does not require a draft but does require money, is necessary regardless of what we do in Iraq. It is stunning that this administration has attempted to fight two wars and has envisioned other possible interventions with a force clearly inadequate.

I want to keep my TNR bashing to minimum but I should point out that not only does this sound like it was cribbed from The Weekly Standard – it actually was. But lets deal with the substance instead of guilt by association. Do we actually have 50,000 extra troops to send to Iraq? Well the Pentagon says no:

The US army is being stretched, by its deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, into a "thin green line" in danger of breaking before the insurgents are defeated, claims a report commissioned by the Pentagon.

Andrew Krepinevich, a former army officer who wrote the report, said that the army could not sustain the current pace of deployments - which was likely in the end to discourage recruitment.

So, at best we could surge forces for a little while. Ok fine. Kagan's whole point is that no political solution can arise until there is security so we should focus on that first. The problem is that - like the underpants gnomes - Kagan is pretty shady on what exactly the political solution is or how it will be reached.

The truth is that we have vast militias in Iraq that are politically invulnerable because the people who run them are in the Iraqi government. Those militias are fighting each other because each honestly thinks they can prevail at least within their sphere of influence. Kagan's plan only makes sense if you already believe that a positive resolution to the Iraq conflict is possible. If, like me, you disagree, Kagan's plan just looks like a way of getting a whole lot more American soldiers killed.

Update: Spencer Ackerman (formerly of TNR) responds to Kagan's lunacy in more depth.

Wait, THAT'S the REAL reason he hasn't proposed yet

Ladies, it's not that your marriage-phobic boyfriend is boycotting the institution until same-sex couples can also enjoy the rights of matrimony. Nope, it's that all the tofu he sucks down is making him question opposite-sex couples to begin with. Soy makes you gay, apparently.

Don't believe me? Just ask this guy.

Soy is nutritious and contains lots of good things. Unfortunately, when you eat or drink a lot of soy stuff, you're also getting substantial quantities of estrogens.

Estrogens are female hormones. If you're a woman, you're flooding your system with a substance it can't handle in surplus. If you're a man, you're suppressing your masculinity and stimulating your "female side," physically and mentally.

In fetal development, the default is being female. All humans (even in old age) tend toward femininity. The main thing that keeps men from diverging into the female pattern is testosterone, and testosterone is suppressed by an excess of estrogen.

See, he's using almost real science (soy contains phytoestrogens that mimic estrogen; estrogen is the primary female sex hormone) and applying it to theoretically and empirically unfounded statements (soy makes you feminine). Clever. This is a dismissable (dare I say bat shit crazy) application of the real-science-plus-fake-conclusions tactic that's especially popular among people who foster anti-scientific thinking.

But there are many who employ the methods of scientists and researchers, then twist these methods beyond recognition into a mangled clump of speculation, superstition, and prejudice, but still have their ideas taken seriously! Take the Intelligent Design team or anti-feminists, for example.

All this talk about soy-based estrogens got met thinking, though. Given that about two-thirds of soybeans grown in America are fed to livestock, and given that a cow's diet is as much soybean as anything else, maybe beef is to blame for the gay epidemic. I feel so sorry for those millions of beef steers who have to spend their entire two years on the planet questioning their own bovine sexuality.

By the way, could there be a more hilarious headline than "A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals"? That wins.

I Still No Hablo Español

A while back I suggested that most of the time students spend studying foreign languages in school is essentially wasted. Kevin Carey seems to agree:

Now, I'm not against global literacy, being sensitive to foreign cultures, etc. I think they're important. But I'm not sure that means it's a problem that only half of high school students are taking a foreign language. I base this on what is admittedly the worst of all sample sizes of one: myself. I took French for six years, starting in the seventh grade and going all the way through high school. In retrospect, it was pretty much a waste of time. I've long since forgotten most of it, and what I remember has been useful only when travelling in French-speaking countries, of which they aren't very many.

...

All else being equal, students are undoubtedly better off knowing multiple languages than just one. But there are lots of things they're better off knowing than not knowing, the question is which of those things are most important. If foreign languages go onto that list, something else has to come off. It's not clear to me what that should be.

My only real objection is to this bit at the end:

The only exception I could see is Spanish, which is spoken by a large and growing number of Americans. If students were required to take a least a few years of Spanish, they'd have a stronger connection to many of their fellow citizens, as well as most of the rest of the Western hemisphere.

This argument, like so many others in favor of foreign language education, ends up resting on an appeal to cultural sensitivity or affinity, which is not the same thing as language proficiency. And if cultural awareness is so important, what really needs to happen is better desegregation of schools. If we're willing to settle in the short term, we could look into classes dedicated to cultural awareness. In any event, pretending we're teaching a significant number of kids to speak Spanish really doesn't get us anywhere.

Cheat Sheet for Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D)

Since it seems to be difficult to keep track of, here's a list for everybody to use:

Sunni Saddam Saudi Arabia Al Queda Osama Bin Laden Most of the Palestinians Most of Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Malaysia The Kurds

Shiite (AKA Shia, Shi'ite) Iran Maliki Most of Iraq Badr Hezbollah Most of the Muslims in Lebanon

TNR review: the continuation

Richard Clarke and David Rieff bother have article in this issue that call for withdrawal. Here’s Clarke:

We can pursue our core interests in Iraq--ensuring that the country does not become a terrorist base and that it does not destabilize the rest of the region--without a large occupying force. To do this, we should announce our intention to reduce U.S. forces in Iraq beginning in December and concluding with the withdrawal of all major ground combat units within 18 months; declare that the United States seeks no permanent military bases in Iraq; gain permission from Kuwait to station additional combat units there to create an "over the horizon" capability to deal with terrorists in Iraq; accelerate the training and equipping of the Iraqi army with embedded Special Forces; work with our regional allies to create an enhanced covert action capacity to combat Iraq-based terrorism; speed up U.S. reconstruction efforts; and convene a regional process to guarantee the stability of Iraq, inviting Iran, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and the Gulf countries to join.

It’s telling that they had to hire an outsider to pen this reasonable piece. Though it’s not an opinion often expressed in TNR supporting troop withdrawals doesn’t mean supporting isolation.
This “support the war or support pulling out in half and hour” paradigm seems to be so strong at TNR that when David Rieff - a regular contributor – penned his piece he couldn’t help but fulfill some of the worst instincts of the anti-war forces:

At the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, while his policemen were beating up the demonstrators along the Loop and in Lincoln Park, Mayor Richard Daley apparently told Lyndon Johnson that it was time to pull the troops out of Vietnam, once and for all. "How am I to do this?" Johnson asked pleadingly. To which Daley is said to have replied: "You put the fucking troops on the fucking planes and you get them out of there!"

Apart from protecting the Kurds, whose possible acquisition of statehood may be the only good news of this whole dreadful adventure--America's Sicilian Expedition, I fear--there is no longer anything we can do. And the Kurds can probably look after themselves anyway. It is time to put the fucking troops on the fucking planes. Now! Before any more of our children die for their country's hubris.

Now it could be that Rieff is just being hyperbolic here. He could just mean “get them out quickly in the safest way possible”. As far as I know doing that would take somewhere around a year to – as Clarke said – 18 months. Still I can’t help but take him seriously when he makes the unserious suggestion of just putting the soldiers onto planes as fast a possible. Not only would this be logistically difficult for our troops but it wouldn't give Iraqis any chance to prepare for the sea change it would bring. It seems that TNR offers an equal opportunity to read both unserious pro-war arguments and unserious anti-war ones.

Tom’s rating: 10/10 and 6/10

Probability of being instituted: 5/10 and 5/10

Pony plan rating: N/A and N/A

Update: Spencer Ackerman, formerly of TNR explains that being for withdrawal is not good for your career at TNR.

How many times, guys? How many times did you intimate to me that I was in league with the terrorists when I told you to get out of Iraq? Hey, Leon, do you remember the editorial meeting after the Blackwater lynching in late March 2004? That was the first time I said I thought the war was unwinnable, and that was the first time you told me ("joking," of course) that I was fired. Yeah, it was funny the first time, I guess, but after the next hundred, the joke gets kind of old.

Spencer Ackerman was a writer at TNR whom the editors once thought so well-versed in Iraq that they let him write a blog dedicated to it.

So THAT'S why he hasn't proposed yet!

And here you thought your partner just had cold feet. From the depths of the Meaningless Protest/Shittiest Excuse Ever archives comes this little gem: "The Sit-In at the Altar: No 'I Do' Till Gays Can Do It, Too." A few hetero couples have decided not to tie the knot until this country evolves from its homophobic, bass-ackwards funk and gives gay couples the same matrimonial rights as straights.

How on earth could someone refuse to marry simply because their government doesn't recognize same-sex marriages? That'd be like deciding not to eat all of your mashed potatoes simply because there are starving children in Africa. Isn't that the opposite of what your parents taught you? Speaking of analogies ...

“I usually explain that I wouldn’t go to a lunch counter that wouldn’t allow people of color to eat there, so why would I support an institution that won’t allow everyone to take part,” said Ms. White, 24, a law student at the University of California, Davis. “Sometimes people don’t buy that analogy.”

Count me among those who think that analogy is, for lack of a better phrase, completely moronic. A better analogy, using Ms. White's ingredients, would be if you refused to eat sandwiches because sandwiches are served at lunch counters, and people of color aren't allowed to eat at some lunch counters. Don't throw out the sandwich with the lunch counter. There's nothing intrinsicly heterosexist (or misogynistic) about state-recognized partnerships; right now the government's application of marriage is unfair and bigoted, but that's an error of the government, not of the institution of marriage. Certainly marriage has some unsavory historical roots, but so does the United States interstate highway system. Don't tell me you boycott the 580 because it was Hitler's idea.

Some protesters seem to oppose hetersexual marriage in part because of the cultural connotations associated with traditional weddings.

“I didn’t have the wedding fantasies some little girls have,” said Sarah Augusto...

This implies that the kind of women (or men) who want to get married and have a wedding are buying in to an antiquated, anit-feminist fantasy that's inculcated into children by heterosexist culture. Where is it written that a wedding has to be look like a page torn from a story book? Why do you even have to have a wedding, per se, in order to be married? I'm pretty sure all you need is a form, an application fee, and a few witnesses. Don't piggyback your revulsion toward traditional weddings onto a legitimate concern about equal rights.

Very obnoxiously, one woman they interviewed seemed quite turned on by the idea of shaking things up for the sake of shaking things up.

Referring to each other as “partner” usually helps avoid the misperception, but that can be tricky, too. When Ms. Augusto, the sociology graduate student, speaks of her partner, people ask if she’s a lesbian. “I say, ‘My partner is male,’” she said. “‘We’re not getting married because it’s not a universal right, and I feel that the word boyfriend trivializes our relationship.’ It’s really shocking to the people I tell that to. Probably as shocking as if I were a lesbian.”

Probably as shocking as if I were a lesbian?! That assumes that (a) being a lesbian is shocking, (b) not getting married is shocking, and (c) anyone cares enough about your life to be shocked by it. Family members, maybe, wacky conservative Christians, sure; but Joanne Schmo on the street doesn't give a damn about your baseless protest. Mostly it seems like these people are trying to be co-martyrs; maybe they feel guilty that they were born straight and thus can't "suffer" as gays and lesbians do, so they're adopting useless burdon to compensate. Or maybe they just want attention.

Oh yeah, this argument was supposed to be about gay rights, not about some straight couples' attempts to look for a reason to avoid marriage, remember? The New York Times actually got a hold of some gay rights groups' leaders, and, according to the article, many such groups aren't advocating the anti-marriage platform.

Molly McKay, a founder of Marriage Equality U.S.A. in Oakland, said its goal is to increase the number of people who have the protections that come with marriage. “We love weddings,” Ms. McKay said.

You mean people who advocate for the expansion of marriage aren't suggesting that fewer people get married? Crazy.

Slapped, Not Stirred.

I've watched each of the twenty-one films in the James Bond series, in chronological order, over the last nine months. Thus I can say with authority that Casino Royale is hands-down the best movie in over a score of otherwise boorish action flicks, and Daniel Craig is easily the most dynamic, nuanced, intriguing, vulnerable, and skilled actor to portray the titular double-O. And guess what? He's sexier than all the five previous bonds. Guess what number two? He makes Sean Connery look like a flabby, balding, slimy, antiquated, meat-headed Neanderthal in comparison.

After viewing about fifty hours of Bond flicks, I've grown to appreciate exactly how misogynistic the first twenty (and, to a lesser extent, the twenty-first) movies are in their portrayal of women, men, and sex. Women are passive objects, men are violent saviors, and sex exists for male pleasure (or as a way to wrangle top-secret information from naive women). You know, the usual afflictions of any popular cultural output largely informed by male priviledge.

/Commence plot spoilers/ But Casino Royale paints a slightly different picture, much to some viewers' shagrin. Bond seems more interested in playing good poker than bedding a good partner. He only definitively sleeps with one woman, Vesper, whom he eventually falls in love with, and who is clearly the secret agent's intellectual equal. Rather than spending 150 minutes rescuing Vesper from improbable situations, Bond proves to actually be quite bad at rescuing anyone, including himself. If Vesper is a damsel in distress, she can't count on James being her knight in shining armor. Eva Green's character even enjoys the distinction of nearly double-crossing Bond, and only failed deliberately. One disturbing element of the movie, though, was in complying with the theme that the only good woman is a dead woman; the underlying violence toward women is a little hard to swallow, but necessary for the future of the Bond franchise. Far be it from me to choose between a married James Bond and the production of more 007 movies. /Conclude plot spoilers/

Casino Royale critics having been falling back on the "Sean Connery is the quintessential Bond" argument when defaming Daniel Craig. Maybe this is because Connery helped sculpt Bond's anti-woman demanor over the course of his six films as the character, and the other fourteen pre-Craig* movies took that misogyny and ran with it, thus establishing Bond as necesssarily an anti-woman character. Connery is the definitive Bond specifically because Bond is the asshole Connery made him into. Daniel Craig does not portray a misogynist douchebag version of Bond, so he inherently cannot be what we expect of 007. To which I say, thank goodness.

But why listen to my analysis? Let's let Craig and Sean speak for themselves. Yes, the two men's Bonds aren't clones of the actors behind the tuxedo, but the actors' personal beliefs certainly shine through. Here, Sean Connery explains that it's okay to slap a woman if she's talking too much.** (Not only is that sexist, tasteless, and morally wrong, it's also illegal. Jesus.) Daniel Craig on the other hand, as if to prove how un-Sean Connery he can be, welcomes the idea of having James engage in a gay-themed scene in an upcoming Bond movie. How far in advance can I buy my tickets?

* Or B.C., as I like to say.

** For some reason the anti-feminist propogandists have fooled dullards into thinking that feminists should think that slapping women is acceptable because hitting men is also acceptable and, hey, you wouldn't want women and men to receive unequal treatment! There are so many things wrong with that argument that I'll have to address them in a later post.

Reviewing TNR: George Packer

In his heart-breaking piece "Save Whomever We Can" George Packer demonstrates his understanding of just how horrible the situation in Iraq has become. He doesn't offer a any Pony Plan's to accomplish impossible goals but he does describe one goal which is attainable in withdrawal:

...Those Iraqis who have had anything to do with the occupation and its promises of democracy will be among the first to be killed: the translators, the government officials, the embassy employees, the journalists, the organizers of women's and human rights groups. As it is, they are being killed one by one. (I personally know at least half a dozen of them who have been murdered.) Without the protection of the Green Zone, U.S. bases, or the inhibiting effect on the Sunni and Shia militias of 150,000 U.S. troops, they will be killed in much greater numbers. To me, the relevant historical analogy is not the helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, leaving thousands of Vietnamese to the reeducation camps. It is the systematic slaughter by the Khmer Rouge of every Cambodian who appeared to have had anything to do with the West.

...

We should start issuing visas in Baghdad, as well as in the regional embassies in Mosul, Kirkuk, Hilla, and Basra. We should issue them liberally, which means that we should vastly increase our quota for Iraqi refugees. (Last year, it was fewer than 200.) We should prepare contingency plans for massive airlifts and ground escorts. We should be ready for desperate and angry crowds at the gates of the Green Zone and U.S. bases. We should not allow wishful thinking to put off these decisions until it's too late. We should not compound our betrayals of Iraqis who put their hopes in our hands.

I'm with Kevin Drumm, the only question is whether this plan is practical. I don't really see why not. Surely getting them out of Iraq won't be a problem. Mostly it'll be a question of security. That we'd have to take on the risk of issuing visas to terrorists to make the best out of a bad situation is yet another grim irony for those who saw invading Iraq as a way securing the US.

Tom’s rating: 10/10

Probability of being instituted: 5/10

Pony plan rating: 0/10