Category Archives: Op-Eds and other opinions

Robert Kagan, Things that are false

Civil war

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Almost two years ago, a “guest blogger” in the Washington Post made the claim that Iraq was not in a civil war, because civil wars tend to be more bloody than what he had seen. He might as well have said that Civil Wars tend to be more old-timey, with lambchops, fiddles, and morphine. The number of people dead and the violence involved don’t make them any less of a civil war.

Someone ought to tell Robert Kagan. He writes:

>It is what’s wrong with this story, however, that makes it so irresponsible. The fact is that, contrary to so many predictions, Iraq has not descended into civil war. Political bargaining continues. Signs of life are returning to Baghdad and elsewhere. Many Sunnis are fighting al-Qaeda terrorist groups, not their Shiite neighbors. And sectarian violence is down by about 50 percent since December.

So, evidence of a civil war includes (1) decreased violence; (2) some Sunnis fighting al-Qaeda groups; and (3) diminished sectarian violence.

Some might think a civil war has less stringent requirements:

>”Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance, determined by the latter’s ability to inflict upon the government forces at least 5 percent of the fatalities that the insurgents sustain.” (Errol A. Henderson and J. David Singer, “Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 3, May 2000.)

Does Iraq qualify?

>The definition focuses on three main dimensions of civil war: that it is fought within a country rather than between states; that it is fought between insurgent forces and the state; and that the insurgent forces offer effective resistance.

>The Iraqi central government is pitted against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance. Some 50 distinct cells, spanning the political spectrum from secular Arab nationalists to religious fundamentalists, direct the activities of at least 20,000 to 30,000 part-time guerrillas, and perhaps many more. They strike regularly throughout seven key center-north provinces, including Baghdad, which at 6 million persons contains a fourth of the inhabitants of Iraq. In civil wars, the violence is staccato and almost random. Journalists or bloggers who visit Iraq and find bustling bazaars and brisk traffic are often fooled by their naiveté into thinking that the violence has been exaggerated. But it should be remembered that boys went swimming and fished not far from where the battle of Gettysburg was being fought in the U.S. Civil War. Guerrilla violence does not need to be omnipresent to effectively disrupt the society.

Seems so.

Update: Reuters.

False Dichotomy, George Will, Straw Man

Liberalism is dumb

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Yesterday, George Will made his case for “conservatism.” This mainly involves making the case against Mayor Quimby, the corrupt and degenerate mayor of the fictional town of Springfield on the Simpsons. For in making the case for conservatism, Will presumes there is only one alternative–his. There may indeed be two major parties, but hardly anyone at this point can claim that they divide along the lines Will suggests–one is for freedom, the other for equality. The one that ought to be for freedom–the conservative one–openly advocates the rollback of plain-language constitutional guarantees; while the one that’s for equality over freedom, often comes out for freedom over equality. If we had more patience with this, we’d say what Will means is the freedom of individuals (which includes corporations, but not unions of workers) to make money without government restraint; but not the freedom of individuals to seek redress through the courts. Someone else can make that case. We’d just like to point out the silly straw man, and consequent false dichotomy. Someone really ought to make the case for “conservatism” in a way that does not presuppose some dumb-ass liberal view. Liberalism after all has its John Rawls.

Here’s the straw man:

>Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism’s goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market’s role in allocating wealth and opportunity. Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.

>Hence liberals’ hostility to school choice programs that challenge public education’s semimonopoly. Hence hostility to private accounts funded by a portion of each individual’s Social Security taxes. Hence their fear of health savings accounts (individuals who buy high-deductible health insurance become eligible for tax-preferred savings accounts from which they pay their routine medical expenses — just as car owners do not buy insurance to cover oil changes). Hence liberals’ advocacy of government responsibility for — and, inevitably, rationing of — health care, which is 16 percent of the economy and rising.

>Steadily enlarging dependence on government accords with liberalism’s ethic of common provision, and with the liberal party’s interest in pleasing its most powerful faction — public employees and their unions. Conservatism’s rejoinder should be that the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over. Today’s proper debate is about the modalities by which entitlements are delivered. Modalities matter, because some encourage and others discourage attributes and attitudes — a future orientation, self-reliance, individual responsibility for healthy living — that are essential for dignified living in an economically vibrant society that a welfare state, ravenous for revenue in an aging society, requires.

Right. Now the false dichotomy:

>This reasoning is congruent with conservatism’s argument that excessively benevolent government is not a benefactor, and that capitalism does not merely make people better off, it makes them better. Liberalism once argued that large corporate entities of industrial capitalism degraded individuals by breeding dependence, passivity and servility. Conservatism challenges liberalism’s blindness about the comparable dangers from the biggest social entity, government.

Liberals pro-government. Government bad. Conservatives anti-government. Anti-government good. Conservatism good.

Ad Hominem Abusive, Ad hominem circumstantial, Bad Explanations, Contradictions, David Brooks, George Will, Politicians

Brooks on Gore III

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Lots to choose from today: Sam Brownback’s evolution confusion or George Will’s “Case for Conservatism” (which is, as one would suspect, the case against his cartoonish liberal with the subsequently unjustified claim that this makes the case for his view–which it doesn’t). But David Brooks’ column the other day still offers some final ignorant tidbits. So far, the reader may remember, Brooks has accused Gore of favoring some kind of vulcan-like existence because he wants people to argue with facts and logic.

The final paragraphs of Brooks piece descend into nonsense. He writes:

> This, in turn, grows out of a bizarre view of human nature. Gore seems to have come up with a theory that the upper, logical mind sits on top of, and should master, the primitive and more emotional mind below. He thinks this can be done through a technical process that minimizes information flow to the lower brain and maximizes information flow to the higher brain.

Now the mind is identical to the brain? Doesn’t that make Brooks a determinist?

>The reality, of course, is that there is no neat distinction between the “higher” and “lower” parts of the brain. There are no neat distinctions between the “rational” mind and the “visceral” body. The mind is a much more complex network of feedback loops than accounted for in Gore’s simplistic pseudoscience.

>Without emotions like fear, the “logical” mind can’t reach conclusions. On the other hand, many of the most vicious, genocidal acts are committed by people who are emotionally numb, not passionately out of control.

Now we’ve veered far from the discussion of civil discourse, into simplistic (ironically it seems) pseudo-science about the nature of reasoning and consciousness and their relation to brain processes.

>Some great philosopher should write a book about people — and there are many of them — who flee from discussions of substance and try to turn them into discussions of process. Utterly at a loss when asked to talk about virtue and justice, they try to shift attention to technology and methods of communication. They imagine that by altering machines they can alter the fundamentals of behavior, or at least avoid the dark thickets of human nature.

>If a philosopher did write such a book, it would help us understand Al Gore, and it would, as he would say, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

I don’t think any philosopher would write a book of that sort, as it rests on a confusion between argument and explanation. Brooks can’t bring himself to consider Al Gore’s argument, so he distorts it, and then asks what would explain such a distorted view. Ironically, even Gore’s distorted view is superior, on Brooks’ own grounds, to Brooks’ brain state analysis of human nature.

Perhaps Gore can include Brooks unreasoning response as an appendix in a subsequent edition of his book about the assault on rational discourse.

David Brooks, False Dichotomy, Straw Man

Brooks on Gore II

David Brooks’ review of Al Gore’s latest book merits another post (at least). Gore argues that the participatory nature of our democracy has been undermined by the one-way media. While that may not be an original idea, Gore has a lot of experience with its consequences. Brooks has no patience, however, for argument (something we have long suspected). He writes:

>But Gore’s imperviousness to reality is not the most striking feature of the book. It’s the chilliness and sterility of his worldview. Gore is laying out a comprehensive theory of social development, but it allows almost no role for family, friendship, neighborhood or just face-to-face contact. He sees society the way you might see it from a speaking podium — as a public mass exercise with little allowance for intimacy or private life. He envisions a sort of Vulcan Utopia, in which dispassionate individuals exchange facts and arrive at logical conclusions.

It really would suck if people “exchang[ed] facts and arriv[ed] at logical conclusions.” The mysterious thing here is that not only is Gore lamenting the absence of civil discourse–which is, dear Mr.Brooks, a kind of civic engagement–but he can hardly be taken to be claiming that it’s the only thing people do.

What lurks behind Brooks dimwitted review is the classic Brooksian dichotomy: things can only be one way (my way) or the totally absurd other way (whatever your way is). Gore cannot be right about logic, because then we would all be Vulcans–like Dr.Spock (the one on TV). Maybe Al Gore is saying that we need logic at least, or perhaps, also.

Some, maybe like Kant or Aristotle or Aquinas, would agree with Gore.

More on this tomorrow. It’s too horrible for one or two days.

Ad Hominem Abusive, David Brooks, Straw Man, Things that are false

Brooks on Gore I

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Al Gore says that there’s an assault on reason, David Brooks writes and a review and shows him why. The first paragraphs of Brooks’s review center on Gore’s sentence structure and word choice–not the facts, the reason, or the logic. For instance:

>As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, “The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.”

Maybe Gore doesn’t write well, maybe he does (you can’t tell by a few sentences taken at random), but at least it’s him that’s doing the writing. Worse than Brooks’s Blackwell criticism, is his failure to comprehend Gore’s point. For Brooks, Gore’s history is technological, “determined” by machines. This nicely plays into another of the many Gore tropes invented and endlessly repeated by the likes of Brooks: Gore is a “strange” person, a machine-like person, who needs someone to teach him how to act or dress.

Brooks failure to grasp Gore’s point repeats the now standard tropes of the printed pundit. The internet is bad:

> Fortunately, another technology is here to save us. “The Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for re-establishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish,” he writes. The Internet will restore reason, logic and the pursuit of truth.

>The first response to this argument is: Has Al Gore ever actually looked at the Internet? He spends much of this book praising cold, dispassionate logic, but is that really what he finds on most political blogs or in his e-mail folder?

Golly-gee. Ever so many political blogs engage in real serious political discourse. The real surprising thing here is that Brooks wants us to think that somehow he knows what reasoned political discourse is.

George Will, Hasty Generalization

Memorial Day

It’s Memorial Day. George Will, one-time ardent supporter (“The Case for Bush“) of the man who has created the mess we’ll be in for a long time, reflects on its significance:

>The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment says no property shall be “taken” without just compensation. The concept of an injury through “regulatory taking” is familiar and defensible: Such an injury occurs when a government regulation reduces the value of property by restricting its use. But the taxi cartel is claiming a deregulatory taking: It wants compensation because it now faces unanticipated competition.

Taxis in Minneapolis. Sure, immigration has been in the news. But not everything is an opportunity to make such pseudo-libertarian points. As a low-tax, civil liberties kind of guy, perhaps Will might be interested in the more obvious theme of the weekend–the war in Iraq. Aside from the sheer murderous folly of our entire Middle East venture, the erosion of the plain-language civil liberties of the constitution and the executive’s groundless assertions of power seem more pressing than crappy arguments by anecdote against Will’s silly view of “liberalism.”

Probably better for folks to meditate on this:

>Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

And he was against the war.

V.D.Hanson, Weak Analogy

Someone with patience

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To comment on every problem in a recent Victor Hanson piece. Hanson writes:

>Yet American Cassandras are old stuff. Grim Charles Lindberg in the late 1930s lectured a Depression-era America that Hitler’s new order in Germany could only be appeased, never opposed.

Sadly, No! responds:

>Oop. Oh well.

>It should be noted that:

>a.) You spelled “Lindbergh” wrong.
>b.) Lindbergh was a conservative who had sympathies with hardcore nationalist ideologies, while modern liberals don’t.
>c.) After Saddam was ousted from Kuwait in the ’90s, he never invaded another country again; not exactly the stuff Hitlers are made of. Iran hasn’t exactly been bowling over Poland and France either, y’know.
>d.) The WWII analogies are tired and boring. Look for some new ones. May I suggest my own brilliant essays on the Left’s failure to learn the lessons of Cola Wars and the Punic Wars?

David Brooks, General discussion

Our problems are solved

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Who thought it could be so easy:

>In fact, if you really wanted to supercharge the nation, you’d fill it with college students who constantly attend church, but who are skeptical of everything they hear there. For there are at least two things we know about flourishing in a modern society.

>First, college students who attend religious services regularly do better than those that don’t. As Margarita Mooney, a Princeton sociologist, has demonstrated in her research, they work harder and are more engaged with campus life. Second, students who come from denominations that encourage dissent are more successful, on average, than students from denominations that don’t.

Wouldn’t it be quicker if we all became Jesuits?

category mistake, Contradictions, David Brooks

David Brooks rethinks

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David Brooks once called John Kerry "a fraud with a manly bearing." He made fun of him for correctly understanding the nature of terrorism–that it wasn’t a question of armies and generals and nation states, but rather a matter of politics, and of course, law and order. Now this:

The war on terror has shredded the reputation of the Bush administration. It’s destroyed the reputation of Tony Blair’s government in Britain, Ehud Olmert’s government in Israel and Nuri al-Maliki’s government in Iraq. And here’s a prediction: It will destroy future American administrations, and future Israeli, European and world governments as well.

That’s because setbacks in the war on terror don’t only flow from the mistakes of individual leaders and generals. They’re structural. Thanks to a series of organizational technological innovations, guerrilla insurgencies are increasingly able to take on and defeat nation-states.

So he was wrong. But it turns out that it wasn’t anyone’s fault after all. Not so. The mistakes in Iraq–and in Afghanistan–flow from one single source–the commander guy. Had he not envisioned the whole thing–wrongly–as an epic battle between good and evil, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now. And it seems wrong therefore to call all insurgency, as Brooks does, "war on terror." If you take what he says seriously, that’s the problem.

Ad hominem tu quoque, George Will, Straw Man

Full of gas

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George Will’s faith in free markets knows no bounds. Any suggestion that gas prices are too high results in all sorts of unrestrained sophmoric vitriol–supported by research from the American Enterprise Institute of all places. As always, an argument can be made that gas is not as high as it used to be (adjusted for inflation and so forth), but that’s not really the point. Gas has more than doubled in price very suddenly. On top of that, more and more people are dependent on it being cheap (don’t get me wrong, that’s not a right). That creates a good deal of shock. But the fact that people keep driving doesn’t mean they don’t care about the price, as Will seems to think:

>Democrats, seething at the injustice of gasoline prices, have sprung to the aid of embattled motorists. So resolute are Democrats about defending the downtrodden, they are undeterred by the fact that motorists, not acting like people trodden upon, are driving more than ever. Gasoline consumption has increased 2.14 percent during the past year.

It means they don’t have a choice. The more relevant question would be whether people continue to engage in frivolous driving. Or if people who engage in unnecessary driving make cuts elsewhere. In either case, the simple fact of continued gas buying doesn’t establish anything about the mental state of the purchaser.

But here’s the real gem of whiny sophomoric libertarianism:

>Pelosi announced herself “particularly concerned” that the highest price of gasoline recently was in her San Francisco district — $3.49. So she endorses HR 1252 to protect consumers from “price gouging,” defined, not altogether helpfully, by a blizzard of adjectives and adverbs. Gouging occurs when gasoline prices are “unconscionably” excessive, or sellers raise prices “unreasonably” by taking “unfair” advantage of “unusual” market conditions, or when the price charged represents a “gross” disparity from the price of crude oil, or when the amount charged “grossly” exceeds the price at which gasoline is obtainable in the same area. The bill does not explain how a gouger can gouge when his product is obtainable more cheaply nearby. Actually, Pelosi’s constituents are being gouged by people like Pelosi — by government. While oil companies make about 13 cents on a gallon of gasoline, the federal government makes 18.4 cents (the federal tax) and California’s various governments make 40.2 cents (the nation’s third-highest gasoline tax). Pelosi’s San Francisco collects a local sales tax of 8.5 percent — higher than the state’s average for local sales taxes.

The absence of an entire quotation ought to be a sign to the kids out there that a straw man is in the works. Why not just tell us what the law says in its own words–like snot-nosed internet critics do for you? Here’s an example:

>B) indicates the seller is taking unfair advantage unusual market conditions (whether real or perceived) or the circumstances of an emergency to increase prices unreasonably.

That seems far less unreasonable than the selective quotes. He doesn’t even link to the text of the bill. If he had, he could make a stronger case for his position. But having distorted the purpose and content of the bill, Will now grasps even further: but the government gouges too! Jeez. That’s not even close. If you don’t know what “gouges” means, look it up in the dictionary.