7.12.02

VVV

Read Bin Laden's Letter My friends in the peace movement who dissent from this country's response to the Sept. 11 attacks have another take on what must be done to free us from terrorism and restore security. Look, they say, at what America is doing to make people fly planes into buildings. They cite our "miserly" $6 billion foreign aid budget to help the world's poor vs. more than $300 billion "for the power to kill." Rather than crusade against wickedness, America should halt the arms trade, lift sanctions against Iraq and curb the CIA, they argue. Correct, they demand, the 50-year imbalance in the U.S. stance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ("the most important source of hatred for the U.S. throughout the Muslim world"). Embrace the United Nations, the Kyoto agreement on global warming, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Law of the Seas agreement and an international war-crimes court. To quote one author, "Until we take responsibility to try to lift up that which is good in us and cast out that which is bad, the scourge of terrorism will continue to torment us." Sorry, but I don't think that's going to quite cut it with al Qaeda. We are, I do believe, regarded by Osama as beyond the pale.

This highlights the problem with thinking of the war on terror as a fight against al-Qaida. Al-Qaida is a (relatively) small coordinating group, which links angry fundamentalists and lends them a catchy brand name (a la the Dread Pirate Roberts). Assuming we can take Osama's words at face value, that they're not propagandistic rhetoric or a high opening bid, they reflect the feelings of Osama and his close cohorts. They don't necessarily reflect the larger phenomenon of Islamic discontent that provides support and a friendly environment for al-Qaida and the less well known groups it works with. The sins of the West cited by the anti-war movement are part of what makes third-world Muslims turn to fundamentalism and al-Qaida for answers. Colbert King may be right that Osama and other leaders have a non-negotiable hatred of the West and won't be satisfied with anything less than a completion of the Holocaust. But what Osama thinks would be much less relevant to world affairs if millions of desperate people weren't looking to him for answers.

The anti-war movement makes the opposite mistake -- assuming that since some poor Palestinians hate the West because the Israeli Defense Force flattened their houses with an American bulldozer, then Osama's personal grievances are a list of legitimate complaints that the West can simply address. I'll admit to having been in this camp, as I wrote a commentary shortly after September 11 arguing that American foreign policy was the root of Osama's Islamist anti-Americanism. My point there should be revised to reflect that fact that American foreign policy is an important, not the only, factor in making a radical movement like Islamism appealing to third-world Muslims (though without saying that "they hate our freedom" is part of it). And that Osama is capitalizing on this, without saying that he is just like the "Arab street" that supports him.

Both schools of thought on Islamic anti-Americanism -- the "they hate us for what we did to them" and the "it's irrational hatred that we can't negotiate with" positions -- have elements of truth. But they both stumble over the assumption that Islamic terrorism is a unified phenomenon, rather than a process made up of diverse elements.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 17:01 -- link --

VVV

The Great Water Crisis A social and ecological disaster is unfolding in Australia - not for want of water, but because we misuse it.... At its simplest - and Andrews's theories and methods are not simple - he wants the river system returned to its pre-European state. "Australia evolved a remarkable hydrology to move water, it was the opposite of the European system," he says. "Before the Aborigines arrived, this country hardly had a river running to the sea."... ..."In two recent state elections in Victoria and South Australia the result was determined on the basis of water issues," says Tim Fisher, the land and water co-ordinator of the Australian Conservation Foundation. "The independents won their seats on Snowy and Murray river issues respectively ... Water is now such a scarce commodity that every choice we face has a trade-off attached, involving winners and losers."

This is a very nice article about Australia's water problems. It's good to hear that there may be solutions in the works -- when I researched the salinity problem a couple years back, conventional wisdom was that the best we could do was keep things from getting worse.

But the thing I found most interesting was the impact on politics. We're used to thinking of the relationship running the other way -- political situations shape how we impact the environment (from changing logging policy to civil unrest causing changes in settlement and agriculture patterns). To the extent that the environment does affect politics, it's through a strong proxy in people's ideas about the environment -- global warming only motivates Green politics to the extent that people are convinced it's ocurring. Of course the environment will always have to work through the proxy of people's attitudes, barring cases where (for example) a natural disaster kills off a portion of the voting public and thus directly affects politics. But in Australia we're seeing an instance of the environment taking a more active role in driving people's attitudes and hence their politics. While it's only people's ideas about the environment that count, nobody is free to believe whatever they want about it. The environment makes certain ways of thinking about it easier than others. Mounting water problems are thus forcing people to alter their view of the environment and the way they make that view known at the ballot box.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 02:36 -- link --

6.12.02

VVV On kuudes joulukuuta -- hauska Itsenäisyyspäivä!!!
posted by Stentor Danielson at 21:01 -- link --

VVV

Explaining Ethics Part 6 Kant illustrates the logic of his formulation of the categorical imperative with the example of promise keeping. Suppose I cannot get a loan without promising to repay it, but I know that I will never be able to do so. If I promise to repay and I take the loan, then could I reasonably determine a categorical imperative from my action? It would have to be, 'make promises to secure your wishes even if you cannot keep them'. Such an imperative would be self-defeating: promise-keeping would fall into disrepute and nobody would ever trust another's word. It would be contrary to what is meant by a promise.

This sounds all well and good. But the question I have about the categorical imperative is this: Which features of your action should be put into the general rule? It's possible that, in the example given above, "make promises to secure your wishes even if you cannot keep them" would be the general rule. But why not "make promises to banks to secure your wishes even if you cannot keep them"? What about "make promises on Fridays to secure your wishes even if you cannot keep them"? What about "make promises only if you cannot keep them"? If you're only working from one data point, there are an infinite number of universal rules you could claim to be adhering to, some of such specificity that they would hardly create the social problems foreshadowed by making all promises meaningless. The categorical imperative becomes simply an injunction against hypocrisy -- that is, judge others' actions the same as your own unless there is a significant difference between them. That's not exactly a profound insight.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 14:31 -- link --

VVV

Violence and Islam Is Islam an inherently violent religion? A debate on this subject has received much attention in the United States. The question is absurd. It is like asking whether Christianity is a religion of peace. Well, there is Francis of Assisi. And there is the Thirty Years' War. Which do you choose? Religions are interpreted by the people of their time and thus change over time. Scripture can be invoked to support almost any position. Islam has its periods of violence and its periods of tolerance.

I'm not usually a big Charles Krauthammer fan, but here he makes what ought to be an obvious point.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 11:16 -- link --

4.12.02

VVV I notice skippy linked to a post I did earlier about the Wall Street Journal's "tax the poor" plan. So I'll milk the issue for all it's worth ("find a winner and never deviate from it" works for Hollywood, right?).

Most people commenting on the plan have taken a pretty cynical view of the motivations behind it. And really, the WSJ set them up by declaring that part of the plan was to make the poor resent the government. But I think I can uncover a different cynical tack to take. I think the barrage of criticism is just what the WSJ wanted.

The "tax the poor" piece sounds like a decoy balloon. The decoy balloon strategy in politics is this: You mention an idea that's similar to the policy you favor, but much more extreme. You let your enemies fixate on this caricature, and exhaust themselves knocking it down. Then, when your real plan comes out, it looks moderate by comparison. People say "hey, that's not so bad. What were all those x-wing nutjobs so bent out of shape about?" It's basically the opposite of the "how to boil a frog" strategy, under which you slowly ratchet up toward your goal so that people don't realize you've drifted from the center.

The war on Iraq is a good example of a decoy balloon. Bush's opening gambit was to declare that we were going to invade now, and screw the rest of the world. He even released a policy manifesto that made real the anti-war movement's worst nighmares about American unilateral imperialism. The image of the war that Bush portrayed early on is still the focus of the anti-war movement's criticism. Yet look at his actual policy. He went to the UN and got permission -- even France agreed. He's building a coalition. And he's not talking about attacking anyone but Iraq, even though North Korea pretty much hand-delivered a causus belli under the Bush doctrine. I find it hard to believe that this shift was entirely due to pressure from the supine Democrats or the overrated Colin Powell. So the anti-war movement has become marginalized in the eyes of the large segment of the American public who support war but are uneasy about unilateralism.

It seems likely that the WSJ editorial was a similar decoy balloon. Conservative policymakers are likely preparing a new tax proposal that would shift the tax burden away from the rich. But it's not nearly so clear-cut a case of "soak the poor" as the WSJ plan. Once Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne have locked themselves into assailing the decoy, the new plan can emerge as a reassuring comparatively moderate measure, and those who criticized the original will seem like crazy left-wingers. I think the language of the editorial hints that it isn't a serious policy recommendation -- I mean, "lucky duckies"? I guess the "make them hate the government" line wasn't self-parodying enough.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 02:40 -- link --

VVV Calpundit has pointed out Kenneth Pollack's answer to my earlier question about what to call Iraq's president:

The correct shorthand is "Saddam." It is not "Hussein," which is merely Saddam's father's first name, not Saddam's family name....In Iraqi tribal society, most people do not have family names. Instead they are called by their own first name and their father's first name....Thus Saddam Hussein essentially means "Saddam, son of Hussein"....Saddam's sons' names are Udayy Saddam and Qusayy Saddam -- their own first names followed by their father's first name.

Glad to have that cleared up.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 00:40 -- link --

3.12.02

VVV Positionality in action: It can be strange to pay attention to the dates when you're reading about things outside your field of expertise. I looked up some brief summaries of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Schrödinger's cat today to make sure I understood them, because I'm giving a presentation tomorrow on postmodernism in geography. One of the things postmodernists like to do is to point out weird quantum physics stuff in order to challenge our usual assumption that, whatever problems the social sciences may face in determining truth, the hard sciences -- epitomized by physics -- can make concrete predictive laws. In the 80s, geographers started to cite these things to knock physics down off its pedestal (on which the social sciences' inferiority complex had placed it) and prove that the problem of observers messing with the observed isn't just a quirk of studying people.

Then I looked at the dates. Heisenberg was 1927. Schrödinger was 1935. This weird physics that challenges all our notions of how the world works and how science operates came out when geography was still mired in environmental determinism. And anthropology was proposing that matriarchies were a universal stage of social development because primitive people don't understand that pregnancy is caused by sex. My conception of the progress of human knowledge has been shaken up, because these developments in quantum physics don't fit the (low) level of scientific sophistication that I associate with the 20s and 30s due to my immersion in geography.

But then, my perception about Heisenberg and Schrödinger may be skewed by being a social scientist. Maybe their stuff is old hat to today's physicists, and people citing the original uncertainty principle paper would look as silly as a geographer backing up a piece of research with Ellen Churchill Semple's theories.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 23:28 -- link --