The Continual Reinvention of the Wheel

I haven't really been watching TV for some time now. The few things I actually desire to watch have become quite available on a computer. But, today I was put in front of the “boob tube” because it was the only venue where I could observe my beloved St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff game, and this got me thinking. I was glad to be able to watch without having to go to a sports bar or buy the game on my satellite service and pay a veritable fortune; given the current state of my pocketbook, this just wouldn't be acceptable.

So I surrendered to the inevitable exposure to the device that for so long has given us only something to be told and see but not an ability to inquire. I watched my ball game, and - besides the loss I observed - I was glad for what I witnessed. But what kept hitting me was the continual advertisements for the release of old DVDs in new “Blue Ray” technology. What got in my head was how information - TV-wise - is being made “better” for our consumption through continuing advancements in visual technology. Now, I'm very cool with that, as long as it's on a device that lets you ask a question in response to the tripe of the light-lit screen that comes into your house every night.

I've been here for the advancement of this technology, and it is pretty awesome; but I'm thinking that it is advancing to some point that many folks might consider close to Woody Allen's Orgasmatron in his famous work Sleeper: having an advanced piece of technology - no matter how advanced - such as a high-definition television will never replace actual, physical experience of any event it may be designed to mimic, especially if there is no way to "talk back". Yet, sales must continue, money must be made.

When is it that we will come to the realization that the flat screen in front of us, and whatever color content is being played on it, will never be three-dimensional no matter what name that technology has hung on it? Maybe it's just me: I welcome the advent of technology when it enhances learning or makes learning easier, but I'm not sure I come away any different after experiencing the History Channel on a “Liquid Crystal” screen than I do after watching it on my nine-year-old RCA, cathode ray tube-powered television.

Click to read more ...

The nonSTARTer

From Flckr Creative Commons by MuklukA treaty that is a priority of the President, advocated for by the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the head of the Missile Defense Agency, the Secretary of State, every Democrat in the Senate, the President of Russia, every member of NATO, U.K. leaders past and present, major Israeli lobbies, Republican Cabinet Secretaries Henry A. Kissinger, George P. Shultz, James A. Baker III, Lawrence S. Eagleburger and Colin Powell and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would seem to be a slam dunk. Yet, in a testament to U.S. policy’s powerful status quo bias, the new nuclear disarmament START treaty is widely considered to be a long-shot for passage because of the objections of one Senator, John Kyl, the Republican whip.

Click to read more ...

The Taxed and Unrepresented

A Mad Tea Party

"(With Democracy) No man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of... democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness." - Alexis de Tocqueville

Joe's post from Monday got me thinking about the Tea Party and our two-party system: 

It's tempting in a democracy to represent the policies of our elected officials as the center, but this is not an accurate picture of the American republic.  Extremists of every political and ideological stripe exist (I don't necessarily mean that in the pejorative sense).  The Tea Party's existence shows both that our politicians are out of touch with what the people want and that the people themselves are out of touch with what they want.  The Tea Party's anger may be justified, but it is incoherent.  Why should it be coherent?  Different people want different things.

I'd like to conduct a thought experiment to see if we can get any closer to the origins of the Tea Party movement: who is really unrepresented here in America?  Let's look at the three traditional policy axes under the presumption that the stated goals of policy are the actual goals of policy.

Click to read more ...

That E.D. Kain is So Hot Right Now

I've been reading E.D. Kain for quite some time now (aren't I such a great hipster?), and I've had the opportunity to witness his meteoric rise from twelve posts a day at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen to being profiled by Conor Friedersdorf for the Daily Dish during Andrew Sullivan's hibernation (Cause he's a bear, get it?).  I read Kain's posts on Capitalism, Anarchy & War today (I think that's the first time I've ever typed an ampersand.  Seriously, I had to look for it.) and was absolutely floored: it was as though Howard Beale had been crossed with Mikhail Bakunin, cloned by Norman Borlaug, and then grown by Dame Julie Andrews and John Valjean with Michel de Montaigne as a private tutor a la Aristotle.

Kain:

When our government wages a war overseas against terror or domestically against drugs (or overseas against drugs and domestically against terror) [extremely pithy, emphasis mine] or when they tell you that they’re trying only to stabilize Afghanistan or resolve the conflict in such a way as to make a graceful exit, etc. these are lies.

Click to read more ...

Dennis Kucinich is a Maverick

As the bowtie attests to, Dennis Kucinich knows PR.Ron Paul is the most mavericky (read that story if you haven't yet.) in our static and worthless government, and Dennis Kucinich is the second most mavericky.  John McCain is not a maverick, and is probably nothing more than a soulless talking meat puppet.  Anyways, here is Kucinich's take on the Obama Administration's taking a page from the George W. Bush playbook:

Who is in charge of our operations in Iraq, now? George Orwell? A war based on lies continues to be a war based on lies. Today, we have a war that is not a war, with combat troops who are not combat troops. In 2003, President Bush said 'Mission Accomplished'. In 2010, the White House says combat operations are over in Iraq, but will leave 50,000 troops, many of whom will inevitably be involved in combat-related activities. 

Click to read more ...

Why Individual Freedom Sucks and We Shouldn't (Necessarily) Fear China

image courtesy of www.patriotdepot.comI'm about to commit an American taboo worse than almost anything except making a racist joke: I'm about to make the suggestion that the individual freedom held as a sacred value in Western Democracies can be bad.  As a libertarian, this is especially uncharacteristic of me, but self-criticism is necessary and awesome.  Keep in mind that I'm not saying that individual freedom is always bad; I'm simply making the point that there are trade-offs, and a strong case to be made for restraint coercive or otherwise, preferably otherwise. 

Click to read more ...

This Gift Horse has some Cavities

Looking into a gold mine - by CavinIncredibly, the news that Afghanistan, previously thought to be entirely worthless, boasts massive and incredibly valuable mineral wealth has been greeted with catcalls and cold water by seemingly everyone.  The consensus opinion holds that Obama and the Pentagon have planted the story to distract from what a terrible mess the war in Afghanistan has become.  Moreover, this story actually should be understood as bad news, since it will encourage US to stay there.  This analysis massively underestimates the gravity of an economically prosperous Afghanistan, tossing out the baby but keeping the bathwater.

 The biggest industry in Afghanistan today is terrorism.  Technically it's opium, but the value of exported opium is dwarfed by the Western money that flows into Afghanistan to deal with terrorism.

Click to read more ...

Too Simple

Is it crying or bleeding? by HamoidWhen I consider an issue, I like to remind myself that everything is complicated, so if it seems simple that means I don't understand it.  When I hear a partisan describe something as if it were simple, I smell propaganda, not confusion.  The Israeli raid on a Gaza borne ship that left nine activists dead is the case in point.  There are so many moving pieces that any analysis will be incomplete, but the best feature insightful details not black and white moralism.

Click to read more ...

Democratic Militarism

One of the best known theories of Political Science is the "Democratic Peace Theory" which notes that democracies rarely go to war with one another.  The most prominent explanation for this historical trend is that voting brings accountability preventing leaders from unnecessarily engaging in war.  However, Daniel Larison emphatically skewers the notion that Democracies aren't particularly warlike:

States that do not respect international legal norms vis-a-vis other states tend not to abuse human rights at home (or at least they abuse them much less often), while states that abuse human rights at home want to maintain certain strong international legal norms if only to guarantee non-interference in their internal affairs. Internal and external policies are never entirely separable, because the same government is responsible for both, but looking at the last sixty-five years it is not at all clear that repressive and abusive states are more likely to disrupt or undermine international stability.

In other words, China does lots of nasty things to its own citizens, but the U.S. is a hell of a lot more likely to go invade another country and do nasty things to those citizens.

Click to read more ...

Google v. China in the Court of Public Opinion

cartoon from China DailyGoogle's story: 

Google operations in China began in 2006, with a censored, Chinese-language search engine.  In the words of Google, this was because:

...(T)he benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. 

On March 2009, Chinese authorities blocked access to Google's YouTube site and began denying users access to other Google services on a case-by-case basis.  Over the course of the last year, there were further attempts by the Chinese government to limit free speech on the web.  On January 12, 2010, Google announced it was considering ending its Chinese operations:

Click to read more ...

Eagle and Bear: Who's a Hawk?

Russia’s big week in the headlines proved a mixed blessing.  The announced START nuclear arms reduction agreement represented new progress and cooperation with the United States and brought a renewed sense that Cold War clash of civilizations is forever past; meanwhile the graphic violence of the subway bombings demonstrated that Islamic terrorism‘s barbarism has radicalized even the most violent asymmetric conflict in the world with new methods of casual murder.  The stories critically inform one another: the juxtaposition reminds of the opportunities that lie in even slightly improving on policy currently executed counter-productively, even if that just means finding a crappy equilibrium rather than struggling deeper into the quicksand.

Click to read more ...

Brookings: How We're Doing in the World

Brookings recently released its annual survey of how the U.S. is doing in the world, a series of indices for the last four years concerning foreign policy and diplomacy as well as global economics and development.  According to the survey, the United States has made considerable diplomatic progress under the Obama Administration in nearly all spheres, while global economic indicators have gotten decidedly worse across the board.  And while this shouldn't surprise anyone, the progress made over the last two years goes to show the enduring power of a cooperative and cordial international stance and good PR, and the statistics highlight several neglected issues.

Click to read more ...

The Gift that Never Gives

Jeffery Goldberg doesn't like the trend he sees in Israel's foreign policy:

A pattern has emerged in recent weeks of an Israeli government that seems to go far out of its way to alienate countries it has no business alienating. First, there was the gross insult directed at the Turkish ambassador to Israel by the deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon. [...]

Then came the assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai. Israel hasn't claimed responsibility for the assassination, but evidence points to the Mossad. It is one thing to kill Hamas officials -- Hamas, after all, has declared a war of destruction on Israel -- but it is another to do so in the United Arab Emirates, the most open-minded country in the Gulf, especially on matters related to Israel, and a country that is obviously important to the formation of a broad, anti-Iran coalition. 

Then, of course, came the humiliation dealt to Vice President Biden on his visit to Israel, about which enough ink has been spilled. [...]

Then this week came a snub by Danny Ayalon's boss, Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, who boycotted a speech to the Knesset by the president of Brazil because Lula apparently wouldn't pay a visit to the grave of Theodore Herzl, who is now spinning in said grave, because he was a pragmatist as well as a dreamer and he knew that the Jews, a small, embattled people, need friends to survive. [...]

Bibi Netanyahu is not in control of his government. He has brought into his coalition parties -- Lieberman's party, the Shas Party -- that are narrow-focused, excessively-rightist, stubborn and prideful, and now he's paying the price. The problem is that Israel is paying the price as well. America can afford stupid politicians. Israel can't.  

Click to read more ...

Iraq Elections: A Small Step, Not a Giant Leap

After a year of worry, heightened by the drama of the de-Ba'athification candidate purge, the Iraqi elections went off without many hitches.  Which is to say that there were plenty of bombings, 38 people were killed, but turnout was high with two-thirds of the country voting including a majority of the Sunni population which boycotted the last election in 2005.  That's good news for the Iraqis and it's better news for us, because it means that we are on pace to leave on schedule by the end of 2011.  What the election does not do, however, is retroactively vindicate the decision to invade Iraq.  

Click to read more ...

Justified Homicide: Drone Warfare

Drone Attacks in PakistanThe Telegraph published results from a study by the New America Foundation that estimates that 32% of deaths caused by drones attacks in Pakistan since 2004 were civilians.

Their report, The Year of the Drone, studied 114 drone raids in which more than 1200 people were killed. Of those, between 549 and 849 were reliably reported to be militant fighters, while the rest were civilians.

"The true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 per cent," the foundation reported.

The actual study demonstrates how difficult it is to reliably ascertain who was killed by the attacks, as the confirmed number killed varies from 834 to 1,216.  If just the total casualty count varies by that much it's hard to imagine that knowing who exactly is included in the deaths is all that precise.  Nevertheless, the ratio of combatants to fatalities in either the low (34%) or the high (30%) estimate are close enough that their figure passes the smell test.

Click to read more ...