8.2.03

VVV You'll notice some posts from yesterday have suddenly shown up. I was having some FTP issues that came about due to Brunchma.com moving to a new server. But Djelibeybi did some fiddling and poking and account-reconstructing and so forth, and got things flowing again.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 17:00 -- link --

VVV Avast! That scurvy Google is correcting my spelling! Arrrrrrrr!!!
posted by Stentor Danielson at 00:31 -- link --

7.2.03

VVV 1) I was on Amazon.com updating my wishlist, which I use as a sort of running tally of all the books anyone ever tells me I should read. I had just added the "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Philip Pullman, which Amazon classifies as young adult fantasy. I glanced over at the list of "customers who bought this item also bought..." recommendations. The top video recommendation was Lesbian Lovers Caught On Tape. I guess they got the "adult" and "fantasy" parts right.

2) My commentaries and cartoons from the past few weeks are now online.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 18:29 -- link --

VVV

Scholars Hand Out A Hiding To The Not So Intelligent Academics have debunked the British intelligence report on Iraq which the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, relied on in his address to the United Nations Security Council. But the British Government says it is standing by the intelligence dossier, even after scholars revealed that entire passages had been lifted from magazine articles, complete with spelling mistakes. Large parts of the dossier - which claims to have drawn on "intelligence material" - were plagiarised from published academic articles.

Here we see a newspaper engaging in the fabled "taking a stand on an issue of fact" that so many bloggers wish the media would do instead of their more common "he said/he said" relativistic style. But the story goes too far. Demonstrating that the dossier was plagiarized is not the same as debunking it. Even setting aside the nine of 19 pages that were not shown to have been copied from other sources, all that has been shown is that the document is not original -- not that it is not correct. It's an embarrassing bit of dishonesty on the part of the British govenment, and thus encourages skepticism about their pronouncements. But the claims made in the dossier stand or fall on their own merits, not the source of their wording -- unless one wants to claim that the writers of Jane's Intelligence Review and Ibrahim al-Marashi (who wrote the original articles that were plagiarized from) are incompetent scholars.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 16:05 -- link --

VVV Double posting about Iraq because I found an article via Flynn that helps to clarify my stance on the war (as requested in comments a few posts ago).

A Dove's Guide: How To Be An Honest Critic Of The War Don’t, in summary, dress up moral doubt in the garb of wordlywise punditry. Give warning, by all means, of the huge gamble that allied plans represent, but if all you are talking is the probabilities, say so, and prepare to be vindicated or mocked by the outcomes. We are very quick to aver that Tony Blair will be discredited and humiliated if the war goes wrong. Will we be discredited and humiliated if the war goes right? If the basis of our objection was that the war would fail, that should follow.

My answer is yes. While I think the early steps of the war will succeed, I believe that in the long run an invasion of Iraq will have net negative consequences on the region. I'm no fan of the status quo, and like McDuff, I'd like to see hawks' predictions come true. Based on my best assessment of the situation in the middle east and our current leaders, however, I am more willing to place my bets on peace than on war. I'm prepared to swallow my pride if things turn out otherwise -- though I doubt the outcome will be so clear-cut, especially since we can't set up a "control group" parallel universe (until this war takes its place in myth alongside World War II and Vietnam). To put things in the language of the philosophy of science, my position on the war is falsifiable.

Matthew Parris, who wrote the above article, gives a powerful reminder about the implications of a realist objection to war and the need to be aware of whether that objection is a plausible facade for a different type of objection. The point could just as well be made to hawks -- are you prepared to admit the war was a bad idea if it fails? (The question is complicated, though, by the fact that both sides could agree on the facts of the post-war situation but disagree on whether the situation was a good one). But Parris lets his own certainty that the war will not fail lead him into urging doves to reject all appeals to things that might happen, conceding all of the "what if"s to the hawks. Instead, he holds a non-falsifiable position based on an even larger "maybe" than all the predictions of possible post-war chaos that he dismisses: the prospect of an American empire emerging to dominate the world. He undermines his own argument with his invocation of something that looks like a classic neo-Marxist world-system theory that is so nebulous that it's impossible to show it to be wrong.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 02:36 -- link --

VVV Colin Powell's speech gave both sides of the debate over the war what they wanted to hear. Hawks can now point to Powell's speech as the definitive case for war, thus painting doves as willfully ignorant. Doves, meanwhile, can point to Powell's speech and claim that, if that's the best the US can muster, the case for war is hollow and hawks are therefore warmongers.

Hawks have been preparing for this speech for some time, preparing the storyline of Powell making the case for war in such a way that only a complete defection by the Secretary of State could have totally disrupted it. But Powell did not disappoint. He presented a cataloguing of evidence, sprinkled liberally with detail and bits of "raw data" (the samples of intercepted communications and satellite photos) that can foil attempts to brush aside the pro-war argument by forcing doves to refute a long list of items. The more times a person has to draw on various forms of epistemological doubt, the more they look like they're weaseling. Moreover, the content that the form shields is substantial. If you accept that Powell's bits of data are all accurate, they clearly add up to a picture of Iraq not being honest with the world and trying to hide something. Noncompliance of this sort is the standard that Bush agreed to when he gave in to demands to work through the UN first, and it forms the basis of Resolution 1441. On the balance, the hawks gained more from Powell's speech (at least in the US) than the doves.

Nevertheless, doves can also point to Powell's speech as supporting their talking point that the case for war has not been made, and they picked up a share of those who had remained undecided pending a clear statement of the administration's case. The fabled "smoking gun" -- a fully operational arsenal that can inflict serious damage on other nations -- was not part of Powell's dossier. Neither was there clear evidence that, supposing Saddam had a gun, he would use it on anyone. Further, the speech included a number of items -- such as a link between Iraq and al-Qaida, and photos of sites that inspectors have checked -- that doves consider to be already discredited. Powell's use of these questionable-at-best bits of evidence throws doubt on the face value of the facts that haven't been double-checked by dovish sources.

I don't think the ambivalence of the reaction to the speech is Powell's fault. Rather, it reflects the fine line Iraq has been able to tread. Saddam Hussein has certainly not volunteered full cooperation of the sort South Africa showed when it disarmed, and he has done his best to turn over as little of his weaponry as possible. On the other hand, he has cooperated "on process" (adhering to the letter, but not the spirit, of disarmament orders), and his arsenal is weak -- if for no other reason than that it's tough to hide full-blown weapons-making facilities from seven years of UNSCOM and a month of UNMOVIC inspectors. The problem is that there's a threshold of threat somewhere between groveling and defiance, and between cap guns and atom bombs. The disagreement between hawks and doves over how high that threshold is has influenced their respective assessments of where Iraq stands.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:47 -- link --

5.2.03

VVV

Senate Declares No Confidence Motion In PM The [Australian] Senate today censured the federal government for deploying troops to a potential war against Iraq, declaring no confidence in Prime Minister John Howard. The opposition and minor parties combined to censure the government and slam Mr Howard for his handling of the situation. In a 33 to 31 vote, the Senate criticised the government for sending troops to a potential war without a proper explanation to the Australian people.

This sounds like a big victory for the antiwar side. Even the country most likely to back the US in attacking Iraq (Britain is waffling) is divided. But in reality, most Australians want war. And on the domestic front, Americans are increasingly getting behind the President. Soon conventional wisdom will declare Colin Powell's UN testimony to be conclusive and denial of it to be willful ignorance. The sliding overall approval ratings that liberal bloggers pounce gleefully on say more about the decline in Americans' views of the economy than their dissatisfaction with Bush's foreign policy. Antiwar partisans may hope that, when reports of casualties start showing up, the public will snap out of its video-game view of war. But what nearly always happens is that going to war solidifies public opinion behind the cause of their country. And considering how tight a rein Bush has on the press, it's unlikely that we'l hear much beyond Tommy Franks' talking points for quite some time.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 18:21 -- link --

VVV Some free advice for people writing academic journal articles: An abstract is not a teaser or a movie trailer. Your abstract should state your study's findings. For example, "this study will investigate what newspapers say about forest fires" is not helpful, whereas "this study found that the media over-hypes the risk of forest fires" is.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:15 -- link --

3.2.03

VVV I out-thought myself in the grocery store yesterday. It all started when I wanted some bread. Normally I get a long loaf of generic wheat bread. But they were out of long loaves, forcing me to buy a short stumpy loaf. Then I figured, since I'm getting a short stumpy loaf anyway, I might as well take this opportunity to buy some of the tasty organic bread. Then I thought, if I'm spending the money on fancy bread, I might as well get something more interesting than plain old wheat bread.

So I got home with my organic 12-grain bread, and started to make dinner. Then I felt like it was some sort of sacrilege to be using fancy bread to make grilled cheese.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 19:39 -- link --

VVV

Mohegans Revive Heritage Through Language It has been 95 years since Fidelia Hoscott Fielding, the last fluent Mohegan speaker died. Fielding, the granddaughter of Martha Uncas, called herself Dji'ts Bud dnaca, which means Flying Bird. For five years, Bozsum, Stephanie Fielding, the tribal linguist, and others have researched the state archives for documents and spent month upon month in local libraries compiling word lists. Slowly, they have begun teaching themselves how to speak and read Mohegan. They also have consulted with a linguist in California who works on language restoration with several other tribes. - via WitchVox

That's cool.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 13:43 -- link --

VVV The space shuttle disaster brought home again the way that tragedy stifles criticism. Upon hearing of the disaster, the first response of nearly everyone was to eulogize, to affirm the wonder and importance of the space program. Where the loss of the Mars lander provoked an immediate burst of criticism of NASA's purposes and methods, the loss of Columbia and its crew did not. Only those well outside the mainstream of our culture -- conspiracy-mongers and others who are less integrated into our cultural community -- had anything to express but a sense of loss at the shuttle's demise. Almost two days later, analytical types such as professional and self-proclaimed pundits have been able to reestablish enough emotional distance from the disaster and public opinion of it to dig into the details of what went wrong and start discussing them more frankly. It's all a repetition in miniature of the pattern we saw after September 11 -- the immediate expression of loss and solidarity, recoiling from those who would want to analyze the attacks in the context of global politics. We needed analyses, of course, to make sense of what had happened, but they had to be analyses that affirmed our shared values. The public was willing to hear "they hate our freedom," but not to hear "they hate our imperialist foreign policy and the McDonaldization of their culture." All else becomes insensitive at best when People Died. Locating the discussion in the mundane world of power struggles and human stupidity seems to spit in the face of the people who experienced the most profound tragedy that can happen to a person, the sudden and involuntary ending of a life.

I suspect (in the ex recta fashion of a person not trained in psychology) part of the reason we have this reaction to tragedy is its uncontrollable nature. Disasters seem to come from outside, not created by the internal workings of the system. And we want to see things that way, because an "act of God" absolves us of guilt that could compound the loss. Faced with tragedy, we feel a strong need to clarify the boundary between inside and outside, endogenous change and exogenous change. In eulogizing the dead, we knit them firmly into our society. This dampens criticism of the deceased in two ways. First is the "you're either with us or you're against us" mentality. Lest they be grouped with the causes of the tragedy, forces that come in to destroy a part of the system, even critics must -- to satisfy their own minds as well as public opinion -- make a point of identifying with the deceased, making their criticism nothing to show how small it is compared to the animosity of the tragedy. Republicans eulogized Paul Wellstone to show that, while they may have criticized his policies, they certainly didn't wish him dead. Second (and perhaps more importantly) it stakes a claim to the thing that was destroyed. It's a sort of social Monroe Doctrine, asserting that the deceased was part of our cultural system, and so only we have the right to determine their fate. The space program is uncontestably ours, so we will make the decisions on what to do about it, not some exogenous force.

The issues of setting social boundaries are amplified in the case of a tragedy because of the profundity of the deaths that accompany it. Whatever logic a person might offer when considering the possibility abstractly or at a distance, very few people have truly come to terms -- on a deep emotional level -- with the issue of death. We can get along fine because most of the time death doesn't intrude forcibly on our lives. Deaths happen to people at some social or physical or temporal distance from ourselves, allowing us to take a detached view of them and push the problem aside. But sometimes death becomes an existential issue. (And I suspect my own lack of emotion about death is more a result of my high threshold for existential experience than my reconciliation with death.) At that moment, the hollowness of our philosophical grappling with death elicits a kind of fear that our whole philosophical-cultural project is a sham. Thus we turn to solidarity with others to reaffirm our worldview, to contain the corroding implications of our lack of reconciliation with death.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 00:53 -- link --