Category Archives: General discussion

Anything else.

Two pundits

The lack of ideological "balance" among the distribution of syndicated columnists (pointed out by Media Matters) ought perhaps to be considered in greater depth. (This is not to say, by the way, that "balance" is some kind of objective worthy for its own sake). Eric Alterman pointed out the other day that the "progressive" pundits tend to be far less ideological and much more prone to argue against "progressive" positions than ideological conservatives will argue against conservative positions: >Were I writing about it in detail, and I may, I would note that many of the top "liberal" columnists, including particularly Richard Cohen, Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kistof, Susan Estrich, and Nat Hentoff, among others, are the kind of "liberal" columnists who feel no sense of loyalty whatever to liberals and liberalism and actually enjoy bashing them whenever possible. This is not true of the conservatives. And so the balance is actually much worse than it looks from these numbers and graphics. George Will, for instance, has remarked on a few occasions that the war in Iraq has been an unmitigated foreign policy disaster. Count how many times, however, liberals such as Joe Klein attack the progressive left. That's a good point. But there's more. E.J. Dionne spends most of his time on meta-political navel gazing: >As Virginia goes, so goes the Senate — and the nation? >The decision of former Virginia governor Mark Warner to run for the seat of retiring Republican Sen. John Warner is more than just bad news for the GOP. It reflects fundamental shifts in the balance of political power in the country, the growing force and volatility of suburban voters, and the fact that the old red-state-blue-state maps are becoming obsolete. That's really political reporting. What it's doing on the op-ed page is a mystery. Here's Jonah Goldberg, in another paper: >For years, some of the shriller voices on the left have argued Sept. 11, 2001, was a classic example of blowback from our support of the mujahedeen's struggle against Afghanistan. But the fact is, we didn't "create bin Laden" — he largely created himself. And to the extent that any superpower can claim credit for him, it's the Soviets. It was their withdrawal, not our support, that convinced the foreign fighters that their pinpricks felled the Soviet bear. >Today, a new blowback thesis is in the works. The Washington Post, Time magazine and The Associated Press are just a few of the news outlets that have asserted the U.S. is arming the Sunnis in Iraq. This is simply not true, Gen. David Petraeus insisted in congressional testimony Monday. But it's no surprise that many people are leaping to that conclusion because the familiar blowback story line is the only plausible one for millions of people who've made up their minds that the war is, was and forever shall be hubristic folly. Similarly, opponents of the war denounced Petraeus' testimony before he said a single word, not because they know the facts better than Petraeus — please — but because anything that doesn't fit the narrative of an ever-worsening quagmire must be a lie. Many war supporters have certainly forced reality to kneel before faith in recent years. But reality can't stay on bended knees for very long. Many Democrats, too, have been grudgingly breaking from their base's otherworldly narrative of late, though they continue to insist that a "political solution" can be had in Iraq without a concomitant military one. Even the Sunni insurgents are coming to grips with the fact that Al Qaeda doesn't have Iraq's best interests at heart. >But there is one group that is under no inclination to nod to reality: Al Qaeda. The jihadis' mission, as always, is to create a new reality. If the bin Laden of the late 1980s could convince himself that his motley crew delivered the death blow to the Evil Empire, leading to the formation of Al Qaeda, one can only imagine what lesson he and the bin Ladens of tomorrow would take from America's defeat in Iraq. That's a story line we should all hope won't be written. However full that passage is of sophisms (pick them out if you want), you have to admit that Goldberg has the courtesy to use the op-ed page in attempt to advance a thesis.

Gendarmes de pensee

John Leo hasn’t held an academic job. But he sure can endorse right wing screeds about the likes of Ward Churchill, the Duke rape case (wtf?) and Norman Finkelstein (I suppose he was for tenure denial).

>As college students return to campus this fall, we are reminded of the academic controversies of the past year. These events — associated with the names Norman Finkelstein, Ward Churchill, and the Dartmouth Trustees — raise profound questions about the health of our universities. Have they forgotten their academic purpose in pursuit of radical ideological causes?

>MindingTheCampus.com has a short answer to that question: yes. It is a new enterprise that will seek to provide necessary supervision for universities that have increasingly cut themselves off from the broader society. During his brief term as president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers noted this insularity when he spoke to the faculty about patriotism, praised the ROTC and the military, and warned that “coastal elites” were drifting dangerously away from the mainstream and its values. He was right.

>One need only look to the many professors who falsely accused the Duke players of rape last year, or to the large number of academic supporters that Ward Churchill gained, or to the growing threat to free speech on many campuses highlighted by such organizations as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E.), to understand that our universities require closer scrutiny-and reform.

Hasn’t he ever heard of La Liberte dans la salle de cours?

Anything’s possible

According to well documented accounts, what Michael Gerson, prose warrior, says in today’s Post op-ed is flatly wrong. Later in the day the blogosphere will be alive with links to documents which will establish that is the case (start here for factual rebuttal). If I find time today I’ll post an update. I was more intrigued by the following claim:

>Four months ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could confidently declare: “This war is lost.” Now that is an open question. A recent Zogby poll found that a majority of Americans do not believe the war is lost. And this makes Democratic policies based on the assumption of hopelessness — rigid timetables and funding cuts — strategically irresponsible and politically risky. If defeat is inevitable, it makes sense to cut our losses. If defeat is only possible, preemptively ensuring it would confirm a long-standing Democratic image of weakness.

I’m going to break that down.

>1. Harry Reid said the “war is lost.”

>2. But a Zogby poll found that Americans–a majority of them–disagree.

>3. Therefore, “funding cuts and timetables” are (a) strategically irresponsible and (b) politically risky.

Out of curiosity, both victory and defeat ought to issue in “funding cuts and timetables.” If we win, we leave; if we lose we leave. But it’s odd that 3b finds its way into Gerson’s argument. As far as I know, Americans don’t have a vote in day to day military affairs. Even if true, in other words, whether Americans think the war is lost is irrelevant.

Naturally it’s not irrelevant politically. Democrats can appear weak, but that discussion should be meaningless to anyone but political hacks. Having been right about the prospects for success in military conflict has nothing to do with actual strength and weakness.

Finally, there’s a wide gulf between the inevitable defeat and the possible victory. In addition to the confused notions of victory and defeat for whatever is going on in Iraq (what’s defeated? Us? A strategy? A goal–what was the goal, and so on and so on), some on the right (SOR) hold fast to the “one-percent doctrine.” This involves treating as inevitable that which is merely barely possible. The whole thing, of course, is a raging sophistry (if sophistries can “rage”). “Victory” may still be possible in Iraq, but that depends on the meaning of possible. The irrelevant meaning is whether victory is possible all things considered.

The relevant question is given what whether victory is likely (if so, how likely), given what we are willing to commit to attaining it.

Magisterium

Without knowing it, Michael Gerson makes some points about believing.

>According to a recent television ad run by the Louisiana Democratic Party, the leading Republican candidate for governor, Bobby Jindal, has “insulted thousands of Louisiana Protestants” by describing their beliefs as “scandalous, depraved, selfish and heretical.” Jindal, the attack goes on, “doubts the morals and questions the beliefs of Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Pentecostals and other Protestant religions.”

>The ad is theologically ignorant — Methodism and the others are not “religions,” they are denominations. The main problem, however, is that the ad stretches the truth so phyllo-thin it can only be called a smear.

Gerson is nit-picking with the “denominations” point, for Jindal thinks the other Christian denominations are wrong, as wrong as anything non Christian, if not more. But here’s why the truth is “phyllo-thin”:

>And Jindal’s chosen tradition is a muscular Roman Catholicism. In an article published in the 1990s, he argued, “The same Catholic Church which infallibly determined the canon of the Bible must be trusted to interpret her handiwork; the alternative is to trust individual Christians, burdened with, as Calvin termed it, their ‘utterly depraved’ minds, to overcome their tendency to rationalize, their selfish desires, and other effects of original sin.” And elsewhere: “The choice is between Catholicism’s authoritative Magisterium and subjective interpretation which leads to anarchy and heresy.

It seems to me that what Jindal says is actually worse than the ad makes it sound. Not to Gerson’s ears, however:

>This is the whole basis for the Democratic attack — that Jindal holds an orthodox view of his own faith and rejects the Protestant Reformation. He has asserted, in short, that Roman Catholicism is correct — and that other religious traditions, by implication, are prone to error. This is presumably the main reason to convert to Catholicism: because it most closely approximates the truth. And speaking for a moment as a Protestant: How does it insult us that Roman Catholics believe in . . . Roman Catholicism? We had gathered that much.

Way too much fudging going on in this paragraph for my taste. Jindal has asserted that views (religious or not) are heretical and false (not “prone to error” as if they might stray but might not). Besides, heresy is more than an innocuous epistemological designation–it’s more than just ordinary wrongness. It’s outright moral condemnation for people who ought to know better and will or should pay the price for their moral epistemological failing. Speaking of Roman Catholicism, nobody said it most closely “approximates” anything: Jindal said that the alternatives involved “anarchy and heresy.” From all of this, Gerson concludes that Jindal is just being Catholic, as one would expect.

That’s probably not the case (even with the current Pope’s recent pronouncement). But that’s another matter that doesn’t concern us. For us the more interesting question is the way Gerson handles the question of “believing.” Jindal is a Catholic, as a Catholic he will, in Gerson’s world, think everyone else is wrong; the same will be true of Gerson presumably (but maybe not, that’s not the point).

Here’s how Gerson reads this:

>On the receiving end of those expectations, Jindal has given these issues considerable thought. “This would be a poorer society,” he told me, “if pluralism meant the least common denominator, if we couldn’t hold a passionate, well-articulated belief system. If you enforce a liberalism devoid of content, you end up with the very violations of freedom you were trying to prevent in the first place.”

There’s considerable ground, I’d say, between Jindal’s claim that Protestants are dumb-ass heretics and the wishy-washy caricature of “liberalism” he considers the alternative. Beyond that, perhaps people find it strange that Jindal finds it necessary to pass judgment on other people’s religious orthodoxy in light of his fairly new and obviously partial understanding the “magisterium.” And indeed, in light of the role of the magisterium, it is strange indeed that Jindal would find himself qualified to pronounce heresy in the first place.

Unquote

Today a minor point. One I often complain about. Op-eds are often too short for one to deal with someone’s views fairly. Quoting selectively is especially pernicious, in that it gives the impression of research, while in reality it may distort someone’s original meaning (we’re not the only ones to have noticed this strategy for what it is). George Will, a frequent practitioner of this strategy, gives us another example today. Even though Will thinks Bush has gotten us into horrible mess in Iraq, he can’t bring himself to say that a Democrat was right. His overall take is that democrats and republicans cannot face reality. Odd that he would say this, because his view seems to accord with the democrats.

But back to the quote-picking. Here’s his take on the comments of Nancy Boyda (curiously similar in editing to many war blogger pages):

>Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, House majority whip, recently said that it would be “a real big problem for us” — Democrats — if Petraeus reports substantial progress. Rep. Nancy Boyda, a Kansas Democrat, recently found reports of progress unendurable. She left a hearing of the Armed Services Committee because retired Gen. Jack Keane was saying things Boyda thinks might “further divide this country,” such as that Iraq’s “schools are open. The markets are teeming with people.” Boyda explained: “There is only so much you can take until we in fact had to leave the room for a while . . . after so much of the frustration of having to listen to what we listened to.”

The implication is that the democrats are so intolerant of reality they walk out on actual reports from the field. The impression is rather different from the full quotation:

>I was certainly hoping that General Keane would be able to be here as well. Let me say thank you very much for your testimony so much, Mr. Korb, and I just will make some statements more for the record based on what I heard mainly General Keane. As many of us, there was only so much that you could take until we, in fact, had to leave the room for a while, and so I think I am back and maybe can articulate some things that after so much of the frustration of having to listen to what we listened to.

>But let me just first say that the description of Iraq as if some way or another that it’s a place that I might take the family for a vacation, things are going so well, those kinds of comments will in fact show up in the media and further divide this country instead of saying here’s the reality of the problem and people, we have to come together and deal with the reality of this issue.

It turns out that Boyda means to criticize the delusional metrics of war supporters–it’s just like a Market in Indiana–which is, after all, Will’s point.

Hypocrites!!!

I’ve never understood the argument occasionally advanced that having moral concern for animals makes a person “anti-human.” Even considering the cases where an animal’s significant interests directly conflict with human significant interests, if one were to conclude that the animals interests trumped the human interest this would not it seems provide evidence for some diminished concern for human beings, never mind antipathy towards human beings in general. Sometimes a variation of the argument is offered that claims that concern with “animal rights” or animal interests necessarily takes away from one’s concern for human rights. I’ve never found that persuasively argued either.
We have much weaker and sillier arguments flying around the public discourse space prompted by the Michael Vick case. Here’s one of Tenessee’s representatives weighing in:

But does anyone besides me see the hypocrisy of some on the left who go nuts about Michael Vick and the whole dog fighting thing and yet are the same people who don’t care about the loss of human life caused by illegal aliens or are the same people who fight for the right to kill unborn babies?

I hear the battle cry of: “It is my body, it is my property, I can do with it what I want” from the pro aborts, but the opposite cry from the same person against a person whose property is a dog. Do they respect the life of a dog more then they respect the life of a human?

The sport’s savants weigh in as well, for example, here.

The larger point is that, as much as we’re tempted to react to the federal indictment of Vick as though it contained the most heinous accusations against a football player since O.J. Simpson’s, there’s a whole lot of hypocrisy here.

For one thing, animals are put to death on a continuous basis, as I was just telling one of my fellow pet-lovers at a neighborhood barbecue while wiping away the hamburger grease that had dripped onto my suede Pumas.

It also must be noted – and I am not defending the sick behavior of anyone whom a jury decides has committed an offense such as electrocuting a pit bull – that there are NFL players who’ve been charged with having committed deplorable crimes against actual human beings. Some of them even have been convicted, yet most of us manage to let it go when they do good things for the home team or emerge as value picks in the fantasy draft.

It’s worth considering what an argument that purports to demonstrate hypocrisy must accomplish. In the first example above the argument would have to show that “some on the left” (s.o.t.l.) are applying the same moral principle in a discriminatory way. For example, if s.o.t.l believed that what Michael Vick apparently did to dogs is wrong because killing mammals is wrong then perhaps granting that a fetus or the victims of the murderous illegal aliens are mammals, if they condone those latter deaths they are hypocrites. But there are obvious and well articulated differences between the cases being considered that s.o.t.l. can appeal to.
The second case is weirder. He seems to be suggesting that we ought to be less upset about Michael Vick because in the past people who have committed other crimes have been forgiven by the fans. Whether the moral fiber of the football fan is the appropriate test is a difficult question. But, nevertheless, even granting the premises of this argument it isn’t clear that “hypocrisy” has anything to do with it.

The accusation of hypocrisy in moral argument is often a cheap rhetorical ploy, functioning somewhere in the neighborhood of the ad hominem fallacy. By attacking the consistency of the moral critic you try to undermine the particular position they are advancing. At the same time, these sorts of arguments based on similarities between cases are theoretically central to moral argument. The burden of the argument lies with the person who claims that cases are the same or similar in the relevant morally significant ways. This would be why Peter Singer’s argument from the first chapter of Animal Liberation could be used to demonstrate hypocrisy (speciesism), while the first quote above fails to do so.

Of course, there is one point that I’ll agree with: it isn’t clear why there is a moral difference between killing an animal for entertainment and killing an animal for gustatory pleasure.

Please invade me

Every now and then it’s fun to go back into history. Not far back, just enough to peak at public arguments concerning invading Iraq. War, as we know from much reading and history channel watching, can involve all of those things Mark Twain’s anti-war prayer speaks of:

>O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Whatever the likelihood of any of that–or the absence of even more likely things from that prayer–it’s a reminder of the dreadfully serious consequences of justified or unjustified belligerence. War is pestilence.

Here are three paragraphs from a prewar article by George Packer:

>One chilly evening in late November, a panel discussion on Iraq was convened at New York University. The participants were liberal intellectuals, and one by one they framed reasonable arguments against a war in Iraq: inspections need time to work; the Bush doctrine has a dangerous agenda; the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East is not encouraging. The audience of 150 New Yorkers seemed persuaded.

>Then the last panelist spoke. He was an Iraqi dissident named Kanan Makiya, and he said, ”I’m afraid I’m going to strike a discordant note.” He pointed out that Iraqis, who will pay the highest price in the event of an invasion, ”overwhelmingly want this war.” He outlined a vision of postwar Iraq as a secular democracy with equal rights for all of its citizens. This vision would be new to the Arab world. ”It can be encouraged, or it can be crushed just like that. But think about what you’re doing if you crush it.” Makiya’s voice rose as he came to an end. ”I rest my moral case on the following: if there’s a sliver of a chance of it happening, a 5 to 10 percent chance, you have a moral obligation, I say, to do it.”

>The effect was electrifying. The room, which just minutes earlier had settled into a sober and comfortable rejection of war, exploded in applause. The other panelists looked startled, and their reasonable arguments suddenly lay deflated on the table before them.

Their mistake was making reasonable arguments.

Special relation to the facts

In a comment on yesterday’s post about expertise, frequent commenter Matt K observes:

>If I need my car fixed I go to an automotive mechanic and not a plumber. When I need to get a good handle on some set of facts, say the historical/cultural circumstances of Iraq, I seek the knowledge of academics who are experts in that area. Politicians and their lackeys (aka pundits) are NOT the relevant experts on almost any matter. I don’t understand why a large bulk of the American public finds this hard to believe.

>We live in a society where we put a lot of trust into experts. Experts are people who we believe not only have more knowledge than we of certain subjects, but also who we believe are qualified to form solid well-informed opinions on those subjects, opinions that we can use to make good decisions. Pundits are certainly not experts, so we should trust there opinions no more than we would trust the opinion of any other non-expert. So we need to focus closely on their arguments since they have no special relation to the facts. And, when actual experts come to conclusions that differ from pundits we should cast a very critical eye toward the pundit’s arguments.

>So my point is that it is a very good thing to evaluate arguments found in op/ed pieces, but if we want to show the wider public the biggest weakness behind such foolish argumentation we need to help them understand the difference between experts and non-experts. Experts can make foolish arguments too, even in their area of expertise. But, the argument of the expert should begin at a different status than the argument of a non-expert. And, perhaps if Goldberg understood that then he wouldn’t say such foolish things.

He makes I think a number of important points about our impoverished public discourse. At the risk of generalization, public discourse (and by that I mean stuff that you’ll find on an op-ed page, or other similar public forum) is largely run by invested advocates. These are (1) pundits, people whose sole function consists in partisan advocacy of some variety (and there are many varieties–more on that another time), (2) members of ideologically defined “think tanks” whose sole function is, wait for it, advocacy (on special issues such as the economy, foreign policy, “family values” and so on) or (3) actual partisan political operatives (members of congress, or the administration) whose function again is to, you guessed it, advocate for their position. Don’t bother pointing out exceptions to the rule. They are few (Paul Krugman is a real economist at an Ivy League institution, but, at times unfortunately, he’s also a general pundit of everything).

It’s fairly rare that anyone other than these three classes of people finds her or his way onto an op-ed page. And now a number of rather famous bloggers types have simply replicated the kind of generalized a priori pontificating proper to the print pundit. You can probably guess who I mean. This is really unfortunate. The neat thing about blogging (not ours of course) is that it gives you greater access to people who know things. It’s too bad that some have chosen to replicate all of the defects of the op-ed page.

Back to the point. Among those who fall outside of these classes are academic (as well as other) experts. For the reasons Matt states above–the car mechanic reasons–you’d think we’d hear more from people with the kind of basic knowledge of the sundry areas of human knowledge. I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that I don’t know much about anything, really. I’m especially ignorant of Middle Eastern cultures, history, economics, military strategy, to give a few recent and relevant examples. When called upon to think about these matters, I follow the advice of Gene Hackman in Heist: I think of someone who knows more than I do and I ask: what would she do?

After all, so many questions of vital public interest differ very little from the kinds of questions that interest me on a daily basis: how do I make crispy French fries? Start by asking Alton Brown.

Partisans

One almost never sees any op-ed of any kind anywhere respond to criticism. For some reason unknown to me, the Post’s Outlook section features another article by Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

In the first article, she argued that partisanship is separating our nation into separate parties. Here are the two parties: on the one hand, you have the virulent Rovians of the Bush administration–dedicated to party at almost any cost–on the other you have some bloggers, some guy who wrote an op-ed, and maybe some think-tankers. These people–these bloggers (and some anonymous commenters nutpicked from bloggers’ sites) on the left are the proper partisan complement to Bolton, Rove and Cheney. Notice a problem anyone? Well. Many did. And so they criticized her for such a silly comparison. It should be government figure versus government figure (or if not available, then national party leader). But it’s Dick Cheney versus op-ed guy.

Aside from that, Slaughter advances the idea that people are devoted to “the characteristic of being devoted to a view” rather than to a view. It might be more proper to say that people hold views in a more entrenched fashion–they’re less willing to compromise and so forth, because their views have grown so incompatible. That way the problem remains where it should be, with the content of peoples’ views (not with the way they hold them). Bipartisanship, for its own sake, is a silly goal. And even Slaughter knows this:

>I was not condemning passionate criticism of the Bush administration on issues like supporting torture, the conduct of the war in Iraq, or illegal wiretapping. On the contrary, I share it. In my new book, “The Idea That Is America,” I call for a critical patriotism that is honest about our failings and insists on holding our government and ourselves to the values we proclaim as a nation. If we are going to pledge allegiance to “liberty and justice for all,” it is incumbent on all of us to stand up and denounce what is currently being done in our name at Guantanamo and at various secret CIA prisons.

She’s “partisan” about these things. But that’s what people are partisan about–CIA prisons, preemptive war, and so forth:

>This reaction should not be partisan. It should be, and is beginning to be, the reaction of decent people across the political spectrum who are standing up not for their party but for their country.

After all, one party thinks those things–preemptive war, and so on–are good things. That’s their party’s position. Objecting to it–as Slaughter does–is bound to be “partisan.”