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(Captain's log): Why is it that I'm suddenly feeling insecure and frightened? I feel as if I'm being watched. In the last two days I've received two different emails from academics which included questionaires about blogging they wanted me to answer. I don't know if this is good or bad; it depends on whether they're trying to "study" something they find threatening in hopes of finding a comforting reason to dismiss them, or whether they're really trying to find out what we're doing. It strike me that if an academic wants to learn about blogs, then the best approach is field work: read a bunch of 'em. You can observe them in their native habitat without leaving the comfort of your desk, as long as you have a net connection. But these people want me to tell them things about myself and my blog, and most of it seems strange. One included 27 questions, most of which could have been answered by direct examination of my site. How frequently do you post to your weblog? Answer: Go look at my archives; every post has a date. Does your weblog contain a section for comments other than your e-mail address? Do you see anything like that on the site? Other questions are silly or can't easily be answered: On average how many weblogs, apart from your own, do you read on a regular basis? There's nothing regular about how I read weblogs. There's no pattern at all. To what degree do you feel your views are already represented by a major political party or interest group? Heh-heh-heh... They don't know me very well, do they? Most of the questions have multiple-choice answers. At least they didn't do that for this one: Why did you develop a weblog? Sheesh... At the beginning, it says, "This survey assesses political participation by individuals who write weblogs. Please place an X next to the choice(s) that best answer the question." Based on the kind of questions they're asking, it seems to have a rather specific definition of "political participation". First, they ask about political orientation: Am I liberal? centrist? conservative? libertarian? socialist? other? Well, I'm five of those, but I missed a clean sweep because I'm not socialist. Then they ask whether I've engaged in other kinds of activist activities, or urged my readers to do the same:
I have an uncomfortable feeling of being wedged into a box I don't fit. Seems as if someone has some preconceptions. But nothing like the preconceptions apparent in the kinds of questions the other asked. There were only four, so I'll reproduce them and my answers for your amusement:
What in the heck is this person trying to learn? It certainly looks as if he's trying to find confirmation for a hypothesis that we're seeking fame and glory and a lasting reputation. My reaction to the second question was actually, "WTF?" But then, that was my first reaction to both questionaires in their entirety. But my second reaction is a feeling of nervousness and insecurity. Why are those people looking at me? I'm scared! Somebody make them go away!
(Captain's log): Jon writes:
I think his question includes an implicit assumption that there is a unified enemy controlled centrally, and that the acts of these groups are intended to contribute to its strategy. It seems to imply that these groups see themselves as part of a larger struggle, and that they are responding to the overall state of the war. I don't think it's like that. There is no central control at all. Some of the larger groups have operated in ways which indicated that they have something of a strategy, but there is no overall strategy. The groups doing these things are only dimly aware of the overall state of the war, and aren't really thinking of themselves as being part of a force trying to win the war. Frankly, I think that the recent beheadings are copycat. Daniel Pearl was beheaded, and then a couple of years later, another group beheaded someone, and now other groups have noticed how cool it looked in the video, and the kind of prestige it brought to those who did it, and are imitating the others. Quite honestly, I think that's mainly it. It's happened before. There were a rash of airline hijackings in the 1970's like that, made by unrelated groups who were not coordinating with one another and didn't even really share the same goals. One group did it, and other groups read about it, and decided to try it themselves. It was only after a few cases where the hijacking was pretty much a fiasco for the group responsible, and after changes in airline security which made even the attempt more difficult, that it stopped. It may sound strange to put it this way, but there are fads and fashions in terrorism, just as there are in clothes and toys and music. Right now beheadings are in fashion for terrorist groups. With regard to Iran, it's impossible for someone working from open sources to really estimate what the situation really is. They may already have produced enough fissionables for several weapons. Perhaps they are within a few months of producing enough for one. Perhaps they are years away. I certainly can't tell, and though our intelligence people have a lot more info than I do, even they probably don't know for sure. The Iranians have been working on this for a very long time. How many facilities do they have? Where are they all located? If they've already produced enough fissionables for one or more warheads, would they not move that away from the enrichment facilities, and if so, where did they put it? I don't think it's likely we'll attempt to take out Iran's nuclear program, either before or after the election. If you try, you have to get it all. If you only get part, you're in deep trouble. If we take out the production facilities, but if they have already produced enough fissionables for one or more bombs and we don't manage to get that, too, what would they do next? And even if you did get it all (and you could never really be sure) there would have to be a more general followup. If we take out Iran's nuclear program, we also have to take out the Mullahs. If we don't, then we maximize the chance that they'll retaliate against us, possibly with tragic results. Even if they can't retaliate with nuclear weapons, there are a lot of other things they might do we wouldn't like. That doesn't necessarily mean we'd have to invade, the way we invaded Iraq. Every military problem is different. We only used a handful of men on the ground in Afghanistan; we used more than three divisions in Iraq. What would be needed for Iran? I don't know. It's possible it would be even larger than what was needed in Iraq. Or it might be a lot smaller. It doesn't necessarily have to be us who takes out the Mullahs; perhaps we could somehow induce the Iranian people to do it. But one way or another, if we launch such an attack on Iran, there had better be a plan for how to de-Mullah-ize Iran as soon thereafter as possible, with a high degree of confidence. And if our military planners think the only way to do it is with large masses of troops, then we'll have to wait. We don't have the forces to handle that; we're near our limit now. Of course, we could ask our allies for help. I'm sure they'd be glad to contribute substantial forces for a multinational effort. (heh heh heh... Sorry about that.) Update 20040623: The Happy Carpenter comments. Update: Brad Wardell is worried about other consequences of this new fascination for decapitation of helpless prisoners. Will it lead to dirty war?
(On Screen): Last week I received a letter from a young man named Daryl who lives in Singapore, and replied to it in this post. TMLutas had some comments of his own to Daryl's letter, and mailed them to me with the request that I forward them, which I did, including Lutas' email address. Daryl replied to Lutas (and CC'ed me) and Lutas responded (likewise copying me) and I ended up responding to what Lutas had said. I then requested that Lutas post his letter (which he did) so that I could post my response to it, which you are about to read (though I recommend that you read the Lutas post first). The basic question was the nature of virtue, and whether government could or should try to promote it. Lutas used marital infidelity as a way of explaining his view of the nature of virtue, but I found his explanation unsatisfying. He talked about two women, one of whom never considered cheating on her husband, while the other did cheat if she thought she could get away with it. I felt that didn't adequately explore the situation, and expanded it to three women. I suppose that it is necessary to make clear that everything Lutas said, and everything I said, apply equally to husbands as to wives. Many people, and many cultures, have a double standard about marital fidelity, but I don't think that's ethically defensible. The only reason I talked about "wives" was because Lutas had done so, but if all the sexes of the people in my example are swapped, it would change nothing. Having made that disclaimer, here is a slightly abridged version of the letter I sent: I'm an atheist, but I was raised Christian. In my mid 20's, I went through a process of examining all my attitudes and beliefs to see which were the result of my Christian upbringing. But I'm no fool, and if I determined that I believed something was "right" because Christianity had told me so, that didn't mean I would instead decide it was "wrong". Rather, it became a proposition instead of a conclusion, something I would have to think it through and determine to be "right" or "wrong" without reference to Christian dogma. It turned out that I still agree with quite a lot of the practical ethical guidelines I was taught, but my justification for them is not related to the Church's justification. I say that because what follows will at first sound a lot like it was written by a Christian, and I am not one. In fact it also makes sense without reference to Christian teachings, but I'm not going to go into why. But it's also roughly consistent with Christian dogma. Lutas is a Christian IIRC, but I don't think he would deeply disagree with it. Instead of Lutas's two women, let's consider three. Two are similar to his two, but there are subtle differences in my descriptions. Alice loves her husband Allen and thinks it would be wrong to cheat on him, but has never met a man who made her consider cheating on Allen. Betty loves her husband Bob, but she meets a lot of men who also attract her, and if she thinks she can do so without getting caught, she often cheats on Bob even though she knows it's wrong. Cathy loves her husband Carl. She meets a lot of men who attract her, and she knows there have been cases where she could have slept with other men without getting caught, but she always decided not to. Cathy has never cheated on Carl. Alice has never been tempted. Betty gives in to temptation. Cathy does not give in to temptation. That's not exhaustive. All three believe that marital infidelity is wrong. We could describe three more women (Dorothy, Elizabeth, and some-name-starting-with-F, identical to these three except that none of them think cheating on their husband is wrong. For my purposes, those are irrelevant. Let me offer my definition of "virtue": Virtue means acting right even if you know you could get away with acting wrong. (In other words, virtue means you reject the "11th Commandment".) Virtue means that you try to act morally because you think you should, not because you're afraid someone might be watching. (And since moral codes are internal, that's why Dorothy, Elizabeth, and some-name-starting-with-F don't matter. If they face a choice and if they don't think either alternative is wrong, then it isn't a moral decision even if someone else does think some choices are wrong.) In terms of my definition, that means we can't tell whether Alice is virtuous. Virtue is as virtue does, but Alice has never faced temptation, and has never had to make a choice about it. So Alice has never had an opportunity demonstrate virtue. Betty has been tempted, and Betty gave in. Betty is not virtuous. Cathy is the only one of the three who has acted virtuously. She's been tempted, and she knows she could sometimes give in to temptation without suffering any practical consequences, but she nonetheless chose not to because she decided it would be wrong. On the surface it can seem as if Alice and Cathy are the same, because neither of them has ever cheated on her husband. In Christian terms, one could argue that neither of them has sinned. But even for a Christian, there's more to virtue than lack-of-sin. As an atheist, I don't grant the concept of "sin" as a Christian uses the term. But even as an atheist, I would contend that there's a big difference between Alice and Cathy. And here's the reason why: Think about what happens when each of those three end up meeting the most gorgeous, attractive, sexy, charming man they could possibly conceive of, one who shows every sign of being interested in them. (Think "Pierce Brosnan" or a young "Sean Connery".) And let's further assume that the opportunity exists to philander without getting caught (i.e. the hubby is away on a business trip and definitely won't be back for two weeks). Which of the three is least likely to land on her back? It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that Betty will land on her back; she's done so before with men who were far less delectable. There's a story of a philosopher at a party who asked a woman from the upper crust if she would sleep with him for $100 million dollars. She blushed, and then admitted that she would. He then asked if she'd do it for $50, and she responded angrily, "What do you think I am, a prostitute?" He answered, "We've already established that. Now we're attempting to determine your price." The price of Betty's virtue got determined a long time ago, and it isn't very high. But that's not so for Cathy. If she has a price at all, it is high. Cathy is unlikely to give in. It's certain that she'll be attracted to the guy, and she may even engage in some harmless flirting, but she's resisted the urge before and she'll most likely resist this time, too. The temptation is stronger than it ever had been, but she's long since thought it all through, and she's in the habit of controlling herself. It's likely that she'll indulge in some private fantasies, but Pierce Connery won't learn of them. It's Alice that I'm worried about. This will be the first time any man besides Allen has inspired carnal thoughts in her since she got married, and she's going to get nuked by carnal thoughts because Pierce Connery is so attractive. Alice is totally unprepared and may be overwhelmed, and there's no telling what might happen. She will face temptation for the first time, and that temptation will be monumentally huge. A related idea in a different realm: there's research recently which suggests that homemaker-mothers who are too dedicated to cleaning and who use germicides too freely inside their homes actually raise children who are more susceptible to disease. Our immune systems operate better and are stronger if they're constantly challenged, and such mothers remove so many challenges from their children's environments that when the child finally gets exposed to something serious, their immune system is less able to handle it. Of course, some kids do die from what we ordinarily think of as minor diseases. I almost did; when I was 3 I almost died from flu. Back then flu usually made you vomit, and I was so sick I couldn't keep anything down, even water. I became seriously dehydrated and had to spend three days in the hospital getting intravenous fluids. I was a sick little puppy, and without that IV I probably would have died. But kids who are overprotected this way are more likely to get really sick or even to die when they get older. (And some have suggested that this may be one of the reasons for the rise in the incidence of asthma.) A kid who is pretty constantly challenged by minor germs will end up better able to react to a huge disease once it comes along. Likewise, I would suggest that it is easier for most people to become virtuous if they face a low constant rate of minor temptations. I would make the argument that censorship laws about porn which are intended to help people be sexually virtuous are thus actually counterproductive. It's true that if porn is freely available then some people will be seduced by it. (In other words, they react like Betty.) But for most people it becomes an opportunity they choose not to avail themselves of, or only do so a few times. Thus when they face a big challenge of that kind, they're more like Cathy than like Alice. They've already built up an immunity. They're already virtuous. If porn is suppressed through censorship, then there can be no Cathys. If censorship is perfect, and there are no leaks, then everyone is an Alice, no one has faced temptation and they are totally unprepared for a huge temptation which is the first they've ever faced. [Of course, some people don't think porn is inherently bad. In fact, I don't. But such people are irrelevant to my argument; they're the equivalents of Dorothy, Elizabeth, and some-name-starting-with-F.] In my example, I don't contend that it's necessarily certain or even probable that Alice will give in to temptation, but it is far more likely that Alice will give in than that Cathy will when meeting Pierce Connery, because Cathy has already gotten used to refusing temptation by dealing with lesser cases of temptation. If we take Alice, Betty, and Cathy as groups, then statistically we would expect the percentage of Alices who would give in to that temptation would be greater than the percentage of Cathys, though it still might be the case that the majority of Alices did not give in. I think the same is true when it comes to political ideas. If the government clamps down on public expression of "dangerous" ideas, there will be little opportunity for citizens to slowly build up an immunity to them before they face a really big temptation by one of them. That means more of them will succumb. People who are not "protected" from "dangerous" ideas by censorship will have learned that extreme advocates often lie, and will have learned critical thinking and will have a degree of skepticism. But those who never encountered such things won't have those mental tools. The argument then is this: Is it better that a society be made up exclusively of Alice's, or that society consist of a mix of Betty's and Cathy's, but with Cathy's in the majority? Those are basically your choices. It isn't possible for a society to be made up exclusively of Cathys. If temptation is permitted, some will succumb. But if temptation is not permitted, you get Alices, not Cathys. If one believes that the goal is to prevent sin (as it were), then avoiding Bettys is the most important thing, and you would tend to opt for the uniform-Alice society. That's the basic argument in favor of strong censorship and other government involvement in virtue/religion. However, as an atheist and an engineer, what I'm most concerned about is having a society which is resilient and which won't shatter when facing an unexpected challenge. I argue that Cathy is better able to deal with that. A minority of Bettys is an acceptable price to pay for a majority of Cathys and a society which can deal with large challenges without self-destructing. The collective population of Alices consists of some who are latent Bettys and some who are latent Cathys. But the ratio isn't preordained; there are a lot who might go either way. The kind and amount of temptation they face will affect the outcome, and I would contend that more will become Bettys if their first challenge is Pierce Connery. I would contend that committed government attempts to "promote virtue" usually end up trying to eliminate temptation. Virtuous people are those who decide to act morally, but these programs try to prevent them ever having to decide. But I also think that is impossible. Eventually everyone will face such a decision. And I would contend that when they finally do, the perverse consequence of such government programs is to reduce the percentage who ultimately demonstrate virtue through their decision. And that is one of the reasons I oppose having the government be involved in this kind of thing. Paradoxically, a society which permits free discussion of dangerous ideas is less likely to become dominated by those ideas than one which uses the power of government to try to suppress discussion of them. So, for instance, I oppose censorship of "hate speech". I agree with the aphorism that the solution to too much free speech is more free speech. If you object to what someone else says because you think it is hate speech, you should join in the public discourse and explain why. If it really is hate speech and really is wrong, you should be able to prevail in that debate. The proper response to web sites belonging to Holocaust Deniers is not to try to shut them down, but to create sites which debunk their arguments (such as Nizkor). You also have to keep in mind that you might be wrong in your judgment. Who decides what is "hate speech", and on what basis? What if they're wrong? There's a political difference between hate speech and unpleasant truths, and reliance on censorship to suppress the former risks also suppressing the later. Mark Steyn writes:
If you are prevented, by law or convention, from honestly expressing your opinion on the causes and solutions of a given problem, or if you're prevented from even mentioning the problem at all, then how will you deal with it? The evidence from Europe is that you won't deal with it until it becomes so huge that you can no longer ignore it. Another reason why it is better to debate than to censor is that those who listen to the debate will not only learn about that particular issue, but will also learn how to think clearly about such issues. They will learn about fallacious arguments, and start to recognize telltale signs indicating that someone is trying to deceive them. If you prevail in the debate about some particular case of hate speech, not only will those who listened to the debate reject that instance of hate speech, they'll also learn how to think critically, and will be more likely to reject the next instance of hate speech they encounter. And the same is true for other kinds of moral and political temptations. I have other reasons beyond these. In fact, these are not even the most important reasons why I oppose censorship and oppose government involvement in trying to promote "virtuous behavior". But I'm not going to discuss them here ([DWL!]). Ultimately, I think a utilitarian case can be made that society is better served by permitting its citizens to be exposed to harmful ideas or to temptation, even though some will give in.
(Captain's log): Quentin sent me this URL for a quite amazing post on the Aces High bulletin board. I've decided that it is sufficiently important that it justifies being added to my Essential Library, the first new addition in months. I think what it says is extremely important, but identifying the source of it has turned out to be problematic. It wasn't written by "Toad", the pseudonym of the person who posted it. I googled to see if I could locate other, perhaps more definitive (and more permanent) instances, and I didn't find anything which looked like the official, original, authorized copy online. I did find it posted here on "The Anderson Report". That copy ended with an email address at netvision.net.il, an ISP in Israel. Probably that's the person who sent it to the The Anderson Report, but there's no indication of where he got it. As I write this (20040619) Google also indicates that it was posted on Free Republic, but though a copy of that post remains in Google's cache (for the time being), Free Republic seems to have deleted the post. (Which is quite puzzling. Since when has Free Republic worried about copyright violation or controversy?) Google's cache-copy included a photograph of Haim Harari, the purported author, along with his surface mail address, phone number, and an email address at weizmann.ac.il. That's the "K.B. Weissman Institute of Physical Sciences" in Israel, and there is a Professor Harari working there. But it is very unlikely that Professor Harari posted it to Free Republic, or that he mailed it directly to the person who posted it. I didn't find any other instance of it anywhere online within Google's Argus-eyed field of vision. My guess is that it was leaked. The original transcript was either on a web server or was circulated via email inside a "large multinational corporation", and it was supposed to be company-confidential. I suspect that someone inside the company mailed a copy of it to a friend outside, and it began to spread from there, and eventually it was emailed to The Anderson Report. I don't know if the person who posted it on Aces High BB or the person who posted it on Free Republic got it from there or were also recipients of the circulating email copy. I suspect that the attribution is correct. I think that Professor Harari actually did present it at some sort of meeting in April 2004. These kinds of things get circulated by email all the time. All kinds of things get spread around this way: the latest joke, pleas that people send business cards to a dying kid who wants to get into the Guinness Book of World Records, other kinds of chain letters, alarmist reports of some sort of dreadful danger. And it's happened to me, too. In September of 2002, I wrote this post. About a year later, I learned that it had been circulating on the email circuit, and that the copy which was circulating didn't include any attribution. A couple of recipients who were curious and technically savvy googled some phrases from it and discovered that I was the author, and sent me email. If they hadn't, I never would have known. And to this day I don't have the slightest idea how many people ultimately got sent copies of it, or how many of those actually read it. It might only have been a few hundred, or it could have been millions. There's no way for me to discover that. I don't really mind, actually. I wrote that post because I believed what I was saying and thought it was important to say it in public at that time so others could read it. Frankly, if I had been permitted to choose any post I made during that period to circulate widely on the email circuit, that would have been my choice. I don't care if those who read it know my name; I'm just glad to learn that a lot of people ended up reading it and thinking about it. Later I learned that it had been posted on the web site of the "US Committee for a Free Lebanon", under the byline "Muhammad Oueiny". When one of my readers recognized it and wrote to the editor there pointing me out as the original author, the editor responded with the claim that Oueiny was the true author and that I had plagiarized it from him. I had been amused when I first learned of Oueiny's plagiarism, but I was not amused by that accusation, and I sent my own email to the editor. He promised to investigate, and though I never heard from him again, the page was taken down. In May of 2004, another reader pointed out that there are now copies of my post out there mirrored on various web sites under the title "A Case for War". What's stranger is that they attribute it to Ralph Peters. I respect Ralph Peters enormously, and I'm quite flattered that someone might think it plausible that something I wrote came from him. But I suspect that it is rather the case that it is not utterly implausible that Peters wrote it, and that it was attributed to Ralph Peters in hopes that it would lend weight to what it said. Likely whoever posted it with the Peters attribution didn't make any attempt to discover the original author (i.e. me), and even if he had, a proper attribution would not have been anything like as impressive. I am not a household name, and my site name is frivolous, and my formal credentials (software engineer and college dropout) don't really stack up very well as such things go. It was actually a US Army Major who wrote to me about that, and he also said, "Word I am getting is that Generals like to read your material." Ye Gods. Doubtless there are other copies of my post out there with other attributions, which I will never know about. It's possible that this attribution is faked, too. It's possible that Professor Harari had nothing to do with it. But I think that the attribution is accurate. For one thing, "mutations" tend to increase as time and spread increase, and it looks like I've run into it "early". It doesn't seem to have spread very widely yet, and all three copies I've found are identical and have the same attribution. So if that attribution is wrong, it was deliberately forged in the first copy which "infected" the grapevine. That doesn't seem likely. Professor Harari is no more of a household name than I am, and though he has quite impressive credentials in the field of sub-atomic physics, that doesn't necessarily lend weight to what he might say about this subject. (After all, Chomsky's credentials look impressive, too.) Besides which, if someone decided to hoax the attribution in order to lend prestige to an article, they'd hardly be likely to choose an Israeli as the claimed author. Sadly, there are a lot of people who will immediately discount it because of that. (And none of the alternate reasons I thought of for why the attribution might have been faked made any sense, either. [DWL!]) So I believe the attribution. But even if the attribution is bogus, I don't think it matters. Apparently the reason my post got circulated was because people felt that what it said was important, even though most of them never knew who wrote it. Likewise, I think that what this article says is extremely important, irrespective of who actually wrote it. It sets out a clear-headed description of the threat we face, nicely debunks a lot of bogus claims currently in common circulation, makes clear why the threat exists, and in the end explains why the only solution which would be effective and conscionable is to induce broad reform both culturally and politically in Arab nations and in Iran. It is straight-forward, well written, clear, and cogent. I agree with it in almost every way. Of course, because of what it says, and how it says it, and (alas) because of who said it, it's likely to induce apoplexy and raving denunciations from the usual suspects. Those same "usual suspects" apoplectically denounced my post, too. (In an email I included as an update on that post, Hesiod tried to convince me that it proved I was insane and that I should check myself into a psychiatric hospital. Oh, and that it indicated I was a Nazi.) This article goes into my Essential Library because I want to make sure there's a copy online I can link to if those other two copies go away. But even more, because I think that it is just as profoundly insightful as the other articles I have included there. I urge you to "Read The Whole Thing", something I don't say very often. Most of you will be glad you did. (On the other hand, some of you are going to hate every word of it). Update 20040620: DSmith comments. Update 20040621: Tom Schaller writes:
I'm happy to know I was able to unwittingly "represent a source of innocent merriment" for Mr. Schaller. Update 20040623: Brad Wardell comments.
(On Screen): Murdoc responded to my post about the Cold War (among other things, you know me).
It is true that the USSR did much more to defeat Germany in WWII than anyone else, by quite a long margin. But that wasn't in any way an indication that the USSR was any sort of superb military superpower at the time, and I don't know of any evidence we can derive from study of the Eastern Front which would prove that the Soviet system was superior (to the Nazi system, or to ours either) or that their people were any more motivated. The real reason the USSR was able to defeat Germany was because Stalin was willing to sacrifice huge numbers of men to win, and finally found a top commander (Zhukov) to do it. Zhukov was ruthless enough to make those kinds of sacrifices, but also competent enough so that those sacrifices were not pointless wastes. He was able to push the Germans back and retake all the ground which had been lost, but to do so, it sometimes seems as if he paved all the territory he recaptured with the graves of Red Army soldiers. There was a striking contrast between how the USSR and USA fought in WWII. The Red Army fought a poor man's war: men were cheap and plentiful, but equipment and supplies were dear, so men were sacrificed as needed in order to optimize the use of equipment and supplies. The US fought a rich man's war: men were considered valuable, and equipment and supplies were plentiful and cheap, so the US was willing to use up large amounts of supplies in order to reduce casualties. For instance, if there was a stand of trees or a group of buildings which might contain enemies, the Soviets would send a platoon of men into it, and would gauge the strength of enemy forces there by how many of those men managed to come back alive. The Americans were more likely to use what is known as reconnaissance by fire, which means you order a lot of men to start shooting into the woods or buildings from cover at a distance, in hopes that if there are enemies hiding there they will assume they've been discovered and will return fire. The strength of the enemy is then gauged by the quantity of return fire. That uses up a lot of ammunition, since you shoot up a lot of empty woods and empty buildings, but if there are actually enemies then you won't usually suffer significant casualties in order to find out. But you can only fight that way if you have plenty of ammunition and don't mind using it up. The US did, because US industrial might was unmatched in the world at the time (and was rightly feared by the German top command as representing a profound military threat should America ultimately enter the war). Nonetheless, any honest student of the European theater in WWII must conclude that Germany was primarily defeated by the USSR, with help from the US and UK. However, it is not true that the US and UK made only negligible contributions, or that the USSR could have defeated Germany without any help from the British, and in particular from the Americans. I have not read Zinn's history and have little interest in doing so, but from what I've heard I've come to the conclusion that it bears only a slight resemblance to history as it actually happened. Most of what Zinn describes did happen at least in gross, but didn't really happen quite as he says it did. He seems to have been very selective about what he included, and he left out a hell of a lot that most historians used to think was relevant. His explanations of what led to certain events are virtually total moonshine. I'm also not particularly surprised to learn that Zinn's book contains the kind of profound contradictions Murdoc mentions. In the "new" "enlightened" approach to history, you don't study historical events in order to learn the consequences and results of certain kinds of decisions and policies. History is a source of lessons, but you don't study history and derive lessons from past events. The lesson comes first. The conclusion is already known. You study history to find justifications for that lesson, but you already know the lesson is right before you begin that study. If history doesn't actually give you the justification you require, then you modify it as needed so that it does. That may mean you ignore some of it and emphasize other parts, or it may require you to rewrite it so that it happens the way it should have happened. This is a fundamentally teleological approach to history, in which the esthetic beauty of a conclusion, and the fact that we strongly want it to be true, are more important than whether it is empirically correct. If not, then the universe must change, because the mind and the concept are the most fundamental realities of all. Zinn's book is apparently a classic example of the new approach to history, which uses it to support a priori conclusions. (In this case, that America is the root of all evil, and that everything America ever did caused only pain, death, and hardship for non-Americans and for Americans from the lower classes, and that the reason America was and is so awful is because Americans refuse to give up sovereignty and nationalism, and refuse to start thinking of themselves as post-nationalist citizens of the world, and refuse to submit themselves to world governance. [Or was that Chomsky?]) Contradictions don't matter, of course; "logic" is local (the term actually used, I gather, is "situated"). Logic is a tool created by White Men to oppress everyone else in the world. If someone (usually a White Man, please note) tries to claim that an argument in favor of the right lessons doesn't make sense because it is logically inconsistent and because it draws conclusions which are not logically justified by its premises and reasoning, then that's just another demonstration of the way logic is used as a tool of oppression. There are a lot of kinds of logic, and when someone (usually a White Man, please note) claims that Western-style sentential logic is universally applicable and universally valid, it shows that he is multi-culturally insensitive. He is clearly a chauvinist; he has taken an aspect of European culture and decided it applies equally to everyone else in other cultures, whether they like it or not. He declares that European Men are right about this and everyone else is wrong if they disagree with European Men. He probably didn't even bother studying the way other cultures look at these things; he probably didn't feel he even needed to. He dismisses them as being inferior and wrong, because they were created by People of Color and People of Gender, who he obviously also dismisses as being inferior and wrong. It's obvious that he feels nothing but contempt for anyone who isn't a White Man. Obviously he's racist and sexist, and we don't need to pay attention to anything he says. (My friend Bill tossed off this definition of "racist" in a letter I received this morning: anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal. I wonder if that's the reason I get called a racist so often? I would extrapolate from his definition that a "sexist" is any man who is winning an argument with a liberal woman.) We should pity him, but of course we don't need to listen to what he says. You think I'm making this up? Sadly, I am not:
Not to mention engineers, who are even worse scum than scientists. (Engineers not only insist on all that stuff about evidence, statistics, and so on, but they also demand that the conclusions have practical value.) Murdoc also wrote:
Murdoc is not the only one who has noticed historical revisionism about the USSR and the claims made about it. Despite what we're being told now, few "experts" in the 1970's and 1980's, and none who were leftist, claimed that the USSR was crumbling. Murdoc (and I) remembers accurately:
There were exceptions. One relatively lonely voice was Andrew Cockburn. He wrote a book called "The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine" which was published in 1983. A few years before that, the USSR had permitted large numbers of Jews to emigrate, and most of the men had served in the Soviet military. He sought out and interviewed a lot of them to find out what it really had been like, and based on that and on other open sources, he wrote a detailed analysis of the Soviet military in which he claimed that it was far less formidable than was generally thought. I bought that book at the time and thought it was completely convincing, but it did not make much impact and was generally dismissed. After the fall of the USSR, when we got a much better look at what the USSR had really been like, Cockburn was totally vindicated. (This post I wrote in September of 2002 was mostly based on parts of his book.) Before the fall of the Soviet Union, the "party line" in the west was that it was useless to try to compete with the USSR because the Soviet economy was strong and the Soviet military was formidable, and there was no way it was going to collapse, so we should negotiate and try to come to some sort of accommodation, instead of relying on competition and military build-up. After the USSR collapsed, the party line changed to this: The USSR had always been a basket case and its collapse was inevitable anyway. (We always said that, and it turned out we were right.) So there wasn't any need to rely on competition and military build-up; we should have negotiated and tried to come to some sort of accommodation while we waited for the inevitable collapse. We have seen exactly the same thing happen in the "War on Terror". Prior to the Madrid bombing, the "party line" was that the threat of terrorism had been massively overblown and the American response was preposterously excessive and totally unjustified. Rather than try to rely on military might and confrontation, we should instead negotiate and try to come to a peaceful accommodation. (In a spectacular example of bad timing, the International Herald Tribune notoriously published an opinion piece which said exactly that on the day that Madrid was bombed.) After Madrid, the party line turned on a dime, and became: It's apparent that the use of military power and confrontation to deal with the threat of terrorism is a failure. We should instead try to negotiate and come to some sort of accommodation. You may have noticed a common theme in the party line. (If so, you're probably one of those racists who try to learn by looking at history with open eyes.) People who study pseudo-science have a term: "falsifiability". Falsifiability is one of those tiresome, pedantic things that get in the way of imaginative hypotheses. A theory is considered to be falsifiable if one can describe a piece of evidence which, if discovered, would show that the theory was false. A theory is considered false if such evidence is actually found. And a theory is considered to be unfalsifiable if we cannot describe any piece of evidence which, if discovered, would show that the theory was false. Unfalsifiable theories are generally not taken very seriously. That's not because an unfalsifiable theory is wrong. It's because they are tautological, and that means they are useless. They may be true, but they do not tell us anything. The strength and value of scientific theories is a function of their ability to permit us to make useful predictions, but not all predictions are useful. All useful predictions can be phrased as negatives. All useful predictions can be phrased as statements about what cannot happen, what we can be sure we will not find. The more powerful and important a theory is, the more it will be able to exclude. The most powerful theories of all (such as the Special Theory of Relativity) make predictions of the form, "It is impossible for anything to happen except for exactly thus-and-so." Note therefore that usefulness and falsifiability are different names for the same thing. A useful theory makes predictions about what cannot happen, and such predictions also describe evidence which, if found, would prove the theory to be false. And that's why unfalsifiable theories are useless. They cannot make any prediction which tells us what cannot happen. In practice, the only prediction which an unfalsifiable theory can make is, "Anything could happen." That's not very helpful. The amazing coincidence in the party line's recommended policy is an indication of something akin to unfalsifiability, but to show that we have to use sentential logic. (And thereby prove that we're racists. Moving right along...) Sentential logic was developed from Boolean algebra, but it includes operators which are not classically part of Boolean algebra. One new operator in sentential logic is if-then:
This clearly is patterned on the way those words are commonly used, but the rigorous definition of its truth table is not quite what most people expect. In sentential logic, that statement is considered to be true if B is true or if A is false. It is only considered to be false if A is true and B is false. One can think of "then" as an infix binary operator, and it turns out that it's defined as:
in terms of Boolean algebra. That's logically equivalent to this:
but that's not conceptually as obvious. Why should the if-then statement be considered true if A is false, no matter whether B is true or false? Consider these two statements:
Sentential logic considers both of those statements to be true, as long as we are certain that no pig exists which has wings. A is false, and that means the if-then statement is true irrespective of the truth value of B. So both statements are true even though they seem to contradict one another. But as long as no pig exists which has wings, there is no contradiction because neither statement can be used to produce a conclusion. Once the first such pig appears, on the other hand, both statements suddenly produce conclusions which contradict one another. We will then discover that one of those two statements is false based on the empirical observation of the pigeon-ness of this amazing new variety of swine. But until that pig appears, those statements are true. The reason is that it must be like that because of something which is referred to as a contrapositive:
In sentential logic, those two statements always have the same truth value. For all four combinations of true and false for statements A and B, if either of these statements is true then the other will be true, and if either is false then the other will be false. This is important because it permits us to reason backwards through if-then statements. If you are given one of these, you are permitted to deduce the other and can start reasoning backward from effects to causes. (Or rather, from lack of effects to lack of causes.) The contrapositive turns out to be the logic of falsifiability: If a theory is valid, then this is what we will expect to see happen. If we see that it did not happen, then that theory wasn't valid. A is a statement that the theory is valid, and B is a prediction made by the theory. So forward, fellow racists. Let us try to apply our culturally situated logic to the party line. One problem we face is that sentential logic requires that primitive statements (A and B) be empirical claims (or axioms, but let's not get into that). It has to be possible to objectively evaluate whether they are true or false, and that means that they can't be opinions or value judgments. There's a subtle distinction between the statements "Vanilla ice cream is delicious" and "I think that vanilla ice cream is delicious". The latter is a testable statement about me (which happens to be empirically true, because I do like vanilla ice cream). The former statement is an opinion, and there's no way to determine whether it is true, either empirically or logically. (In fact, it doesn't even make sense to talk about whether opinions are true.) Statements of opinion are not grist for the sentential logic mill. They have to be manipulated to yield something which can be evaluated empirically. If we interpret that statement of opinion as implying universal consensus, then we could rephrase it as "everyone thinks that vanilla ice cream is delicious", which is a statement we can test empirically. If we ever found someone who hated vanilla ice cream, we would know that this statement was false. Of course, it might just have meant "I think vanilla ice cream is delicious". That's much different. Likewise, "we should negotiate" is an opinion, not an empirical claim. It would have to be rephrased a bit before we can be racists about it. So let me try to paraphrase the party line as it existed before the collapse of the USSR in terms which permit us to
After the USSR imploded, the party line changed so that it always had been:
The basic idea for the first statement was that confrontation would not bring about the end of the USSR unless there was an all-out nuclear exchange, that confrontation short of that would require spending a lot of money on the military which could better be used elsewhere, and that confrontation would result in low level conflicts which would get a lot of people killed. Negotiations were better because it meant that less money would be needed on defense spending, so more money would be available for social spending and foreign aid, and because negotiations would not cause lots of deaths in brush wars. The justification for the second statement is the presumption that collapse of the USSR was inevitable no matter what we did. Therefore confrontation still represented a risk of nuclear exchange, still involved useless excess defense spending, and still resulted in lots of unnecessary deaths in brush wars. Negotiations were still better, since the USSR would collapse anyway, and we would waste less money on defense spending and kill fewer people in brush wars. Logically speaking, if we say that statement A is "The USSR is economically and militarily strong" and statement B is "Any policy other than negotiations will not yield positive results", then the first claim is:
and the second is:
From L1 we can form the contrapositive L3, and likewise from L2 we can form the contrapositive L4:
So if negotiations was not actually the best policy, we would conclude that the USSR was both weak and strong. It turns out that the deductive conclusion from L3 and L4 is that B is true. L3 and L4 yield contradictory statements if B is false, so B must be true. Therefore, negotiations are always the best policy. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. And that, in fact, seems to be what they believe. But if you look at the translation of L3, it says, "If a policy other than negotiations yields positive results, we can thus conclude that the USSR is militarily and economically weak." L3 is the contrapositive of L1, which was the party line before the collapse of the USSR. And in a sense that is right. It says that if a policy other than negotiations was adopted and if it did actually lead to positive results, then it would be because the USSR was weak. Reagan's supporters claim that's what actually did happen, that the USSR actually was weak, that Reagan was among the few to see it, believe it, and act on it, and that his policy was confrontational, and because of all that, eventually the USSR collapsed. However, L4 claims that "If a policy other than negotiations yields positive results, we can thus conclude that the USSR is militarily and economically strong." And if Reagan's policies did yield positive results, then that one is not true, because the USSR wasn't actually strong. Hmm... There are a couple of ways of resolving this without abandoning the leftist claim. It all comes down to whether Reagan's policies actually did have positive results. If you agree with that and if you're on the left, then you have to try to claim that Reagan actually relied on negotiation, not on confrontation, and therefore his success confirms the supposition that negotiation is the best answer. Patrick Diggins made exactly that claim in an editorial in the NYT a few days ago. If, on the other hand, you're on the left and you agree that Reagan's policy relied on confrontation, then you must conclude that Reagan's policies were actually a failure, and the outcome wasn't positive. You would certainly contend that it ended up much worse than if Reagan had relied on negotiations instead, but your argument will be even more powerful if you claim that the outcome wasn't even positive even in absolute terms, because it yielded much more bad stuff than good stuff. That means you talk about how the Reagan administration supported al Qaeda in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, and how it supported Saddam in Iraq, and therefore how the Reagan policy of confrontation was directly responsible for the war we're in now. Never mind the fact that al Qaeda didn't exist in the early 1980's, or how little actual support was given to Saddam by the US either during the Iran-Iraq war or afterwards. The lesson of history is clear, and such niggling historical details must be changed to support that lesson: it was Reagan's fault. Reagan's confrontationalism was a failure. Negotiations would have been better. Sound familiar? Actually, none of the reasoning given above is rigorous. For one thing, "positive results" is a matter of degree, not of kind. It's also very much a matter of opinion; it can't be evaluated objectively. And much of our knowledge was then and remains now of doubtful reliability, especially when it comes to evaluating hypothetical outcomes of roads-not-taken. But the most important reason why it isn't rigorous is my first step, where I assumed consequentialism. I assumed that they favor negotiation because they think it is most likely to yield good results. They might not. For one thing, they might not actually want good results, or at least what the rest of us think would be good results. (Maybe they want us to lose.) Or maybe consequences don't even matter to them; maybe their dedication to negotiation is more akin to religious dogma. Maybe it is axiomatic for them that negotiation and cooperation are inherently better than confrontation and conflict, that intentions are more important than results. If so, consequences don't actually matter. We can't actually apply sentential logic (or any other form of deductive logic) to this problem. It can only be addressed inductively, and since inductive reasoning is not objective, there might be no consensus about inductive conclusions. But it's certainly interesting that a flawed deductive examination of the party line leads to one of two ways to interpret and explain Reagan, and that we've heard both from the left: that he was successful because he relied on negotiation, or that his confrontational policies weren't actually successful. Does this mean leftists actually believe in logic after all, even though perspectivism (aka "situatedness" aka "social constructionism") clearly demonstrates that it is embedded in the culture of White Men and is not really universally applicable? Since Reagan was a White Man, I guess that means it's OK to apply logic to him, just as long as we don't force People of Color or People of Gender to comply with it. Update: Jim comments. Update: Murdoc has more on that Zinn history book. I knew it was being used as a text in some classes; it's the kind of thing which appalls me but which I know I can't do anything about. Back in the day, there was a facetious urban legend among computer programmers to the effect that if the first computer language you learned was BASIC, you would suffer brain damage which would impede you the rest of your software life. I can only hope that the students exposed to Zinn's rubbish are not scarred for life by it.
(On Screen): Mark wrote:
Yeesh...
I remember seeing that site quite a while ago. There were others who claimed that it was at least partially a hoax. They said that some of what she claimed she had been doing (riding her motorcycle around in that area) wasn't possible, and that she probably had visited some of those areas and taken the photos as part of organized motor-bus tours instead. I don't have any idea whether the criticism makes sense, and whether we should consider the story on that site of how the pictures were taken to be a fabrication. What I think is most significant is that the criticism does not in any way claim that the pictures themselves are faked. They actually were shot in that area, and show things as they actually exist there. It makes that area somewhat similar, in archeological terms, to Pompeii. One problem with studying old ruins in order to try to understand everyday life as it was lived in that place and time, and a problem especially in studying the artifacts found there, is that the artifacts are not a representative sample of the objects they actually owned. If the original inhabitants of the ruins left deliberately and without haste, then they took with them everything they valued, and left behind them things which were broken or which were too heavy and not valuable enough to be worth carrying. Archeologists have learned a great deal by digging through ancient trash heaps. What people throw away can reveal a lot about them. But it doesn't necessarily reveal as much as you'd like to know about what they had which they did not throw away. That is why Pompeii was so fascinating for historians: it was destroyed extremely rapidly, without warning. Some people did flee and tried to take cover in nearby caves, where they died anyway. Most of those who fled took nothing with them, or only grabbed items which were small, light and extremely valuable (i.e. they took their babies, their jewelry and gold). A lot of people didn't get away at all, and died inside Pompeii. So when Pompeii was excavated, the artifacts they found were actually a pretty representative sample of the artifacts which were actually owned by people who lived there at the time. The archeologists got to look at the stuff that people would not have thrown away. When those cities near the Chernobyl power plant were evacuated, it wasn't done with 15 minutes notice; the people did have the ability to pack up their stuff. In that sense it isn't really quite the same thing. But the other reason Pompeii was extraordinarily valuable was because the structures uncovered there represented an instantaneous snapshot in time. Other similar archeological sites weren't the same. Usually other similar abandoned towns were abandoned slowly, often in a gradual process taking decades, with some parts of the town becoming empty as the declining population clustered in other parts. Then after it was totally abandoned, the structures were exposed to weather and vandalism for up to several centuries, because the process of covering them was slow – if, indeed, they were covered at all. By contrast, Pompeii went from thriving city to totally-buried memory in just a few hours, and that meant that all the structures were contemporaneous, and the overall preservation of those structures was exceptional. The areas near Chernobyl which were evacuated are very much like Pompeii in that way. They aren't buried, of course, but they have only been exposed to environmental insults for a short time and that has had little effect.The area went from bustling (sort of) urban center to ghost town in no more than a week. But unlike Pompeii, what caused depopulation did not also cause physical destruction. The most of buildings in Pompeii were seriously damaged by the volcanic ash which buried them, but even though the Chernobyl meltdown forced that part of Ukraine to be evacuated, it didn't cause widespread physical destruction. So as Mark says, it is a unique opportunity to see what everyday life was like for people in a particular time and place. The organization of the city, and the kinds of buildings which are there, and the way those buildings were designed and built, and the way they look, and a lot of other things like that are, as Mark says, honestly preserved as a snapshot of life in Communist-dominated Ukraine in 1985. The artifacts which remain are not as representative as the ones in Pompeii, but are more representative than the ones in sites which were abandoned slowly over a period of years or decades. Those who left had days to pack and huge carrying capacity, so the threshold for "too heavy and unimportant to be worth taking" was pretty high. Even so, the things which were left behind are very revealing. It may seem strange to talk about archeology, and about "ruins" which were only abandoned 20 years ago, and to talk about "studying" those ruins to learn about everyday life in that time and place, when millions of people are now alive who remember those times. But there was so much deliberate distortion about it, then and still today, that eye-witness accounts are unlikely to be believed by many, and unlikely to even be read by most. These pictures have the virtue of being interesting and also of being directly informative. I did think the pictures on that site were quite amazing, and anyone viewing those pictures with honest eyes could scarcely avoid recognizing just how poorly Socialism actually performed compared to the myth of the People's Communist Paradise which Socialists all the way back to Marx himself claimed would result from the eventual and inevitable switch everywhere from capitalism to socialism. The theory was that it would create a life of comfort and plenty, unencumbered by wicked capitalists screwing over the proletariat. The USSR instead had a system profoundly encumbered by stupid and corrupt bureaucrats who screwed over the proletariat through widespread incompetence and graft. The one undeniable difference was that for all their faults and evilness, those wicked capitalists at least knew how to produce lots of stuff, good stuff. Those pictures also make it apparent why it was that the Soviet government didn't want its people to know the truth about everyday life in western Europe and the US, where (at the time) both capitalism and liberal democracy dominated. Given an honest look at both, and a free choice between them, most people would have chosen the West over the USSR. It was almost instantly obvious that the day-to-day lives of the people in the West was far more comfortable and pleasant. I heard a Polish joke one time, after the success of the Solidarity movement in Poland but before the USSR collapsed. This was a joke Poles actually told each other.
A lot of people in the Soviet bloc risked their lives to get out. Most of the border of the Soviet bloc was difficult to penetrate, with barbed wire, mine fields, and armed guards who shot to kill. They weren't there to prevent people from coming in; they were there to prevent people from getting out. The Berlin Wall was a wall around East Germany, not a wall around Berlin. Many who tried to escape ended up dead, but even with that substantial risk people kept making the attempt. In the late 1970's I worked with a guy who had escaped from eastern Europe, and he wouldn't talk about how he'd gotten out. I don't know if that was because it was a horrible experience, or because he didn't want to reveal the method for fear word would get back to Soviet authorities and permit them to close off that escape route. My guess is that it was both. I don't remember ever hearing about anyone trying to sneak into the Soviet bloc that way, let alone dying in the attempt. About the only people who might have wanted to would have been spies. Even so, there were many in the West who portrayed life in the USSR in glowing romantic colors and emphasized its virtues, though somehow they didn't seem to be interested in emigrating. If pressed, they would grudgingly admit that life in the USSR wasn't everything it should have been, but they blamed all the shortcomings on the West. Some of it actually was caused by the West, in fact. That was a conscious part of the Western strategy of the Cold War. But that was not the primary reason for the failure of the Soviet system. I remember reading about Soviet internal propaganda regarding life in the West, and about how it backfired. The government of the Soviet Union wanted to convince the people there that they were lucky to live in the USSR, and things were much worse in the West. Soviet television would pick and choose video clips from from Western TV news to try to portray the West in the worst possible light. So, for instance, they loved showing film of big protests, and even more so of riots. I gather that film of the Watts riot was given big play on Soviet TV. I gather they tried to portray that riot, and the rising tide of protest broadly in the US in the late 1960's, as evidence of social breakdown and rising discontent on the part of the people in the West who were chafing under capitalism. That was what Marx said would eventually happen, and that it would culminate in revolution by the Proletariat and conversion to Socialism. Even Socialists in Western Europe tried to portray it that way.) But most of the people in the USSR who watched that film on TV news completely ignored the spin. They didn't even listen to the commentary. (One problem with chronic prevarication is that eventually others stop listening to anything you say.) Viewers didn't even pay much attention to the overt events being portrayed. When looking at video of a riot in America, they didn't really think too much about the fact that the people were rioting. When looking at a closeup of someone in a riot who was throwing a rock at the police, they didn't think much about what he was throwing rocks. They looked at other things entirely, like the clothes he was wearing. Instead of saying, "Hey, look at that guy throwing a rock at the police!" they'd say, "Hey, look at that Mickey Mouse T-shirt! Look at the blue jeans and tennis shoes he's wearing! Jeeze, that stuff looks cool!" It turned out that there was a lot demand for western blue jeans in the USSR, the more tattered the better. Eventually the USSR reluctantly started producing denim and jeans to help satisfy the demand and to dilute the prestige of those who got their hands on genuine tattered jeans from the West. If Soviet TV viewers saw several people throwing rocks, what really impressed them was not that a lot of people felt the need to throw rocks; it was that that they were all dressed differently, and the clothes were all so fashionable. If they were shown film of rioters looting a store, what they looked at was the stuff which was being stolen. Instead of keying in on the fact that the store was being looted by discontented western proles tired of being oppressed by the evil bourgeois capitalists, as the Soviet authorities wanted them to, they keyed in on the fact that the west actually made lots of cool things which the Soviet Union could not. The images were a two-edged sword, and the wrong edge did the cutting. If someone saw film of rioters looting 21" color TVs, it contrasted rather sharply with the fact that the USSR did not produce such TVs at all. People in the West might be stealing 21" color TVs, but people in the USSR couldn't even do that, let alone buy them. (A few were imported from the West, but they were sold in special stores in Moscow which few Soviet citizens were even permitted to enter, and they had to be purchased with hard currency. I think the fiction was that those stores were there to cater to westerners such as embassy staff.) Almost any time they saw street scenes from the West, no matter why the film was shown, one thing they always keyed in on was the cars: how modern they looked, the incredible variety in shapes and sizes and colors and styles, and the astoundingly large number of cars there seemed to be. Everywhere you looked in the West, there seemed to be swarms of cars. If they had been shown film of traffic jams in western cities, I don't think they would have really been very impressed by how much of a pain traffic jams were and how they showed that the western system was failing. If you think about it, a traffic jam on a 10-lane highway is actually an indication that a lot of things are working extremely well. Before that can happen, you have to have 10-lane highways, and you have to produce so many cars and so much fuel and sell them at a price low enough that there would be enough people owning cars and driving them to overload that 10-lane highway. It's an example of a problem a lot of people in the rest of the world would have loved to have had. (It's like the way a lot of bloggers feel less than sorry for me when I complain about all the mail I get because of the popularity of this site, and they have a point.) The Soviet authorities tried to convince their people that the capitalist system in the west was at the edge of total breakdown, but what their people really learned from the film they were shown was that life in the West was a lot better than their own. The pictures on the site Mark wrote about should have the reverse lesson for some here: the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union was in large part due to chronic economic underperformance, due to the fact that socialism and central planning and control don't work well. That kind of system is not dynamic and it does not thrive; it tends to stagnate, and what it does manage to produce is poor quality, uninspired and rather drab, and not produced in sufficient quantity. Those pictures should convey that lesson, but they probably won't. Even partial implementation of such a system doesn't work. Europe in 2004 splits the difference between the Soviet system in the 1960's and 1970's which built most of what we see in those photos and the system in the US. Europe has partially embraced Soviet-style socialism -- and it is failing, but not as badly. When American leftists demand that we, too, embrace "Third Way Social Democracy" (which is what Europe's system is sometimes called, because it was somehow seen as taking the best aspects of the other two), they don't seem to understand that it, too, has ultimately been a failure when compared to the much less fettered capitalist system we have. If it has not failed as badly as the Soviet system, it is only because Europe has not as fully embraced the features of the Soviet system which made it fail. I'm no fan of laissez faire. I'm not one of the big-L Libertarian zealots who think that there should be no government interference with business whatever. I think that if there is no government regulation at all that capitalism, like a steam engine without a governor, will eventually shake itself to pieces. I have thought a lot about this and have identified many ways in which a laissez faire system would eventually succumb to various manifestations of the tragedy of the commons, or the prisoner's dilemma leading to a race to the bottom, or to consequences of non-linear scaling, or to yield inversion. In most of those cases, I've concluded the only way to prevent such failures is government intervention. But when it comes to governors on steam engines, there's a difference between adding enough feedback and control to ensure smooth and efficient operation, and massive overcontrol leading to strangulation, underperformance, and huge parasitic losses. And that's also true for capitalism: some government regulation is necessary, but beyond a certain point there's negative yield. Too much regulation is worse than none at all. I would not claim that American labor law is currently at an ideal level, such that it prevents all potential problems without causing any. But if there are no labor laws at all, then you can get things like "company towns", where there's only one employer and if you live there you have to take whatever job you're offered by that employer or not work at all. If you can't afford to leave, then you don't really have any choice. In some such cases, most of the people living in towns like that were effectively "bonded labor", a variant form of slavery. As a kid I remember a song performed by Tennessee Ernie Ford which included the line, "St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go; I owe my soul to the company store." Thee were cases where the company which employed everyone also owned all the stores, and it set both wages and prices so that almost no one got enough ahead financially to be able to move away. That was an extreme case; it usually isn't that bad. But there are other forms of employee abuse which are less serious but will also be more common, and I support labor laws to limit such things. (For instance, OSHA has long since taken things much too far, but the basic idea of ensuring workplace safety is a good one.) If a total lack of labor law makes possible situations where employees are little different from bonded slaves, too much labor law virtually guarantees there will be a lot of people who don't work at all, as Europe has convincingly proved. In much of continental Europe, it is damned near impossible for a company to close a division or to lay workers off. Government regulations don't outright forbid layoffs or division closures, but before a business is permitted to do anything like that it has to go through a process so long and involved, one which can be challenged, impeded, and delayed so easily by others, that it may as well be impossible. The social theory was, I think, that if companies are prevented from destroying jobs through layoffs and division closures, then you'll have lots of jobs and thus employment will remain high. That isn't what they actually got, however. Look at it from the point of view of business leaders trying to make plans. If companies know they cannot shed staff in recessions, then they won't be aggressive about hiring during booms. They can't be. If they expand their workforce too much during a boom, then in the next recession when their sales decline they'll be stuck with too many employees and won't be able to afford to pay them, leading to bankruptcy. If you know you cannot lay off anyone, the prudent thing to do is to tune your hiring to the worst-case long term outlook. You must reluctantly refuse to take advantage of the opportunities presented by economic expansion, and you must always operate your business in ways and at levels you know could be sustained in a recession, so that you won't go bankrupt when recession comes. In particular, you'll make hiring decisions as if you were in a recession even if you're in a boom. Europe's labor laws, which were intended to increase employment by preserving existing jobs, have instead yielded chronic high unemployment because they have discouraged creation of new jobs. Meanwhile, in America it is relatively easy for companies to lay off workers, and that means they are more aggressive about hiring because the risk in hiring is much lower. Karl Zinsmeister says (about the pre-enlargement EU):
The nations which just joined the EU generally have lower corporate tax rates, and though their absolute level of economic activity is lower, their economies have been growing faster than most of the nations in pre-enlargement EU. But that won't be permitted to continue, because the EU is probably going to enforce "tax harmonisation", which means the "New European" nations will be forced to raise their tax rates to match those in "Old Europe". (It's another of those marvelous "multilateral" plans coming from the France/German axis. There have been a couple of times when the French have proposed that treaties regarding international trade include a requirement that every other nation impose equally high corporate taxes, most especially the US. Deep down, they know that those taxes help make them uncompetitive, but they cannot reduce them. Such proposals never come to anything, however, because they never survive the "horse-laugh" test with the Americans.) Those pictures of the abandoned cities in the Chernobyl region of Ukraine describe the Soviet past. Do they also predict the EU's future? If the EU constitution is ratified and goes into effect, Europe will move closer to the Soviet model, further away from the American model. Europe will get even more centralized bureaucratic control, and become even more Socialist because of constitutionally-mandated social spending, and increased taxation necessary to support it. Will Europe's economy eventually fail as badly as the economy of the USSR failed? I sincerely hope we don't find out, and I'm growing more and more confident that we won't. The most recent election in Europe indicated broad discontent; it almost seemed as if the people there embraced a political slogan you sometimes see on bumper stickers here: Re-elect Nobody Seems as if voters turned against their leaders everywhere. The press spin was predictable: if the government had supported America in Iraq, then it was claimed that the voters were expressing anti-war sentiment. If the government had opposed America, then the voters were expressing discontent about local issues such as economic problems. However, from the press reports one wold come away with the impression that none of the voters were expressing discontent with the EU and the constitution, except for real lunatic fringies. I saw an analysis of the election results on a blog somewhere (which I'd love to link to but which, dammit, I can't find now; it wasn't Samizdata or Innocents Abroad, which were my first two guesses on where I'd seen it). [Update: It was actually this.] It took a close look at how several parties in the UK election stacked up on three major issues (the war, European integration, and economic policy) and how each did in the election. There only correlation which was consistent was that parties which opposed ratification of the EU constitution prospered, those who favored it did poorly. Apparently the results elsewhere in Europe are not inconsistent with that interpretation. So if we're lucky, maybe backlash against the constitution will rise in time, and be strong enough, to prevent it from being ratified. And maybe we won't ever see an equivalent web site showing abandoned villages in Britain or Germany which betray an equally bad economic failure caused by yet another attempt to "do Socialism, but do it right this time". Update: Irina writes:
Irina caught me out; I chose the example of a 21" color TV somewhat arbitrarily, and didn't actually know whether they made the same thing there. That was really intended to be a concrete example of a more general principle, and even if they did make color TVs, there was a lot else we had which the USSR did not make. Meanwhile, a reader with no name (only initials) helped me out. The article I was trying to locate about the European elections was on Chicago Boyz. (And I remembered one of the three issues wrong.) And Edward Driscoll has an interesting quote from Arthur Schlesinger about the USSR from four years before Chernobyl. Update 20040618: James R. Rummel comments. Update: Alice asks:
I wonder if Alice is aware that there are people now who claim that Cuba is a paradise because of its continuing commitment to Socialism.
(Captain's log): Daryl writes:
I'm glad you like my site, and I hope you continue to get enjoyment and mental stimulation from reading it. But you'd have to be a fool to believe everything you see on it, so I'm glad that you say you don't. I don't actively try to lie, but I have just as much chance of being misinformed as anyone else, and what I write is biased because it passes through the lense of my mind. It isn't objective and I make no pretense to being objective. I am not presenting the truth, I am presenting my opinion and my view. Use what you read here as a starting point. Think about what I say, but then check out other sources. When I present an opinion, I try to present the reasoning behind it. Examine my reasoning, and consider it. You might agree with me, and you might not, but when you finish you'll understand your own opinion better, no matter what it ends up being. I don't necessarily want you to agree with me. But if you disagree, I want you to understand why.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "communist". I suspect that those who do are making the rhetorical point that it is similar to the communist nations, and in some ways Singapore is. In other ways it is radically different. Singapore isn't socialist, and its economy isn't the basket case that centrally-planned communist economies somehow always ended up being. Singapore has a per-capita GDP comparable to European nations. But Singapore is much more authoritarian and much less liberal (in the traditional sense of the word) than the UK or Japan or the US, or even South Korea or Taiwan.
And that is a good capsule description of the biggest difference between Singapore and the US.
No form of liberty is absolute and unrestricted. As a practical matter it isn't possible, since liberties come into conflict. It's sometime said that "Your right to throw a punch ends a centimeter from the tip of my nose." There was a Supreme Court decision about our First Amendment which included the statement, "Freedom of Speech doesn't include the right to scream 'Fire!' in a crowded theater." (Presumably that would cause a stampede for the exits with a good chance of people falling and being trampled and possibly being killed.) In the US, our right of free expression does have certain restrictions, but there are not very many and they are very carefully constrained. I cannot directly advocate things which would represent a clear and imminent danger to someone else, which is why I cannot yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theater. Equally, I can't publicly advocate that some specific person be murdered. "Incitement of riot" is not protected speech. Sedition is also not protected speech. I cannot publicly advocate armed revolution. Neither is what the Supreme Court refers to as "fighting words", uttered by one person directly to another which have the potential to inspire killing rage in the other. Child porn is also not protected, but the logic behind that is a bit more complex. Conspiracy to commit a crime is not protected. And in a lot of cases unauthorized revelation of government secrets is not protected, though the jurisprudence on that is a lot more complex. Slander and libel are not subject to criminal prosecution, but they are actionable in civil court. I can't be thrown in jail for that, but I could be bankrupted by lawsuits. Generally the courts have been extremely hostile to attempts to take these exceptions and to broaden them. And even in most cases of unprotected speech which are subject to criminal prosecution, the courts are very, very reluctant to authorize what's known as "prior restraint", which would permit the government to prevent that expression from happening. I think there do have to be some limits on free expression. There are even instances where prior restraint is justified. To take one extreme example: the US government has what is called the "witness protection program". It was set up during a period when the government was trying to break the power of the Mafia, and when they managed to convince someone in the Mafia to testify against others, it was clear such a person would eventually be murdered. The "witness protection program" created a new identity for those witnesses which permitted them to vanish. Presumably there are records of what became of those in the program, and if those records were revealed, hundreds of people would suddenly face mortal peril. If some hotshot reporter got his hands on those records and decided to print them in the newspaper, I think the courts would grant approval for prior restraint. But though I agree that there have to be some limits, in general I think there should not be very many, and they should be extremely carefully circumscribed. I generally think that the citizen right of free expression should be very broad, and the government power to censor or punish should be extremely small. And that is actually pretty much the situation here right now, though you wouldn't think it based on what some American leftists claim. (Somehow they never seem to recognize the basic paradox inherent in the situation. Every time some firebrand makes a speech at a rally about how America is a police state, and walks away afterwards without being arrested, he himself proves that he's wrong.) Leaving aside their romantic delusions about living in the modern reincarnation of Nazi Germany and being the only ones courageous enough to stand up against oppression, we Americans actually have very broad ability to express ourselves without fear. By comparison, Singapore is much, much more restrictive. Europe is also more restrictive, though not as much so. In Europe "hate speech" is subject to criminal prosecution; here in the US equivalent hate speech is considered protected speech. The defamation laws in Europe are much more broad, and a lot of things which would get you sued in Europe are protected speech here. Certain icons and political positions are illegal there; they're permitted here. (My opinion is that they can not tolerate extreme political positions because their parliamentary systems make it possible for small extremist political parties to influence governmental policy; we Americans can tolerate extreme political positions because our electoral system is much less vulnerable to them.) There's a French law which among other things bans the swastika, as a symbol of Nazism. The American company "Yahoo!" had an online auction site (similar to Ebay) and someone was auctioning off Nazi memorabilia. The web site included photographs of objects carrying swastikas, and the web being what it is, that could readily be accessed from France. A French judge issued a court order to Yahoo to remove it. The problem was jurisdiction. The server was in the US, not in France. Yahoo went to US Federal court, and the US judge essentially told the French judge to stick his court order where the sun didn't shine. The material might have been considered loathsome by the majority, and it might have violated French law if it was in France, but there was no doubt whatever that in the US it was protected under the First Amendment. The mere fact that it could be viewed from France didn't give the French court the authority to order it taken offline, and no US judge could approve such an order because doing so would violate the First Amendment. "Compare Singapore to the USA, does Singapore really seem so restrictive?" Very much so, I'm afraid. "Don't you feel that sometimes liberty is abused to the fullest extent in America?" No doubt of it, and it can be a royal pain. But the cure would be much, much worse than the disease. "Don't you agree that certain restrictions are necessary, restrictions that aren't in place in the USA?" I agree that there must be some limits on free expression, but I do not think that there should be significantly more restrictions than we already have. (In fact, in some ways I think we still have too many restrictions, though it's a hell of a lot better than it was 50 years ago.)
About 1980 (I don't remember exactly) there was a period in which the USSR permitted huge numbers of Jews to leave and move to Israel. A lot of them got off the jet in Tel Aviv and instantly boarded another one bound for New York, and ended up here. For most of them, our society was quite a shock. They were free; they were out of the cage. But with freedom came responsibility. The State didn't tell them what to do, but the State also didn't look out for them. The State didn't prevent them from doing what they wanted, but the State also didn't prevent them from screwing up royally. One of the freedoms they discovered they had was the freedom to starve. Most of them got over that shock quite rapidly, and adapted and thrived, and indeed most immigrants to the US adapt and thrive. But there were some old people who just couldn't adjust. A few of them decided to return to the USSR. Capitalism is like that. It gives you the opportunity to be wealthy, but you can also be poor, and you actually have to compete and work hard and perform. There's plenty of opportunity, but there are no guarantees. If you're not used to doing that kind of thing, it's a shock. Some people don't really successfully make that transition. I understand why some people and some groups fear it. I understand them, but I don't sympathize with them or excuse them for it. There's a price for everything; there's no free lunch in life. If they want the benefits, they have to pay the price. If you want to be free, you have to pay a really big price, one which many think is much too high. If you want to be free, you have to put up with everyone else being free. If you want to be able to do things that your neighbors disapprove of, you have to put up with the fact that they will do things you disapprove of. If you want to be able to say things others despise, you have to put up with it when others say things you despise. In other words, if you want to be free, you have to be tolerant. For some people, tolerance is very difficult. For others, it's heresy. And that's a problem, especially if their intolerance knows no borders or limits. That's actually one of the big reasons why we're at war. The Islamic extremists consider tolerance to be heresy. They cannot accept us as we are, even though we're quite willing to accept them as they are. They demand that we conform to their view of how we should behave, and we won't do it. So either they'll force us to conform, or they'll kill us all, or we'll force them to be tolerant, or we'll kill them all. Or maybe everybody will end up dead. The first of those won't happen. My nation is not going to surrender, and they are not going to convert this nation into an Islamic Republic without exterminating the vast majority of us first. (If they try, they'll discover the true reason for our Second Amendment.) Each of the others is a distinct possibility, but the third one (us forcing them to be tolerant) is by far the least bloody of those outcomes. That's the basis of the US strategy in the war (though there's much more to it than that). If it fails, the body count is going to get extremely high. Islamic extremists may eventually gain the means to slaughter large numbers of us, but they won't ever have the ability to wipe us out completely. On the other hand, we have the ability to wipe them out now, if we're ruthless enough to kill 10,000 innocent civilians for every militant we kill. Burning down the house to kill the roaches is pretty extreme, but there's no doubt it actually would kill almost all the roaches. If it comes to that, it would be nearly as much of a disaster for us to do that as it would be for them to have that done to them. But if we face the stark choice of surrendering or committing nuclear genocide, then the body count is going to become very large in a very short time. I'm willing to do almost anything to avoid that. But I am not willing to surrender in order to avoid that. Update 20040616: Comments from David Boxenhorn, Amritas, and TMLutas.
(Captain's log): Whoa! Just had an earthquake here! Sharp enough jolt to startle, but not enough to damage anything. I'm not really used to that kind of that kind of thing. The USGS says there was a magnitude 5.1 out under the ocean SW of here:
About 40 seconds later there was a 4.7 up north of LA. I think I noticed that, too. One sure sign that this wasn't very serious is that I had no trouble accessing the USGS site. After the 7.1 we had five years ago, It took me something like 20 minutes to get in, even though that quake happened about 3 AM.
Update: It seems I wasn't the only person here in San Diego to notice. (heh) Update: They've revised the estimate to magnitude 5.2. The quake originally reported north of here was apparently a calculation mistake and its report was withdrawn.
(Captain's log): Kevin writes:
I'm going to respond to this because it typifies one kind of email I receive quite a lot: the social activist announcement asking for publicity, and the followup letter more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger asking why I hadn't joined in the cause, hoping perhaps that I might reconsider Because It Is Really Important. I suspect the main reason I get a lot of these is just because I do a lot of traffic, so an advertisement here would be valuable. But it's barely possible that it may arise from a pretty serious misunderstanding about the nature of my blog. I am not engaged in any kind of social crusade, where I deliberately try to shine lights on The Things Which Are Important. I do not see myself as part of any kind of movement. I do not engage in publicity campaigns. I do not help Get The Word Out. I don't put ribbon-icons on my sidebar, or make the background black for 24 hours, or engage in other similar gestures of solidarity. I never have and I'm not particularly interested in starting now. I'm not trying to change the world. I'm not trying to influence public opinion. I'm not trying to "make a difference". Those things are totally orthogonal to the real motivation for this site. USS Clueless is 21st century high-tech vanity press, and that's all it has ever been. It permits me to write and make my writings available to other people to read, because I like to write and because all writers like having readers. Some people keep links to their "blog children" or their "blog parents". If I have a blog mother, it would be Sarah Bunting, whose site isn't even formatted as a blog. If people have gotten into the habit of visiting here regularly, it's because what they find here cannot be found anywhere else. A given post may be long or short, profound or banal, informed or deluded, wise or foolish. But it will be mine and it will be unique and substantial. It will explain what I think about the subject, and why. The one thing it will not be is cookie-cutter trivial, something which could just as easily have been found on any of fifty other blogs, word for word. It's entirely possible that I have influenced public opinion more than a negligible amount, and "made a difference", though I doubt it. I have no way to determine that. But if I have influenced others, the paradox is that I was only able to do so because I did not deliberately set out to do so. If anything I wrote actually did influence others, it was only because it was heartfelt and genuine and spontaneous, rather than being forced and calculated. I write about things when, and only when, I have things to say about them and when I feel inspired to write. That inspiration is not something I consciously control, and when I try to write without it the result is invariably crap. I don't make posts that say nothing except, "Go look at this." (Or "Go look at this, because it's Really Really Important That Lots Of People Know About It.") There are many other bloggers who do that, and it's an important and useful function some blogs perform. There are no rules about what blogs must be or must do, except one: "There are no rules about what blogs must be or must do, except one: 'There are no... I'm a "thinker", not a "linker". There's no rule that says I have to become linker-for-a-day just because It Is Really Important To Get The Word Out. Other people Get The Word Out. I just write about stuff, and I never know what I'm going to write about on any given day until I suddenly find myself writing it. I'm usually just as surprised writing it as you are when reading it. It's not totally wrong to say that I'm actually the first reader of each post, rather than the writer of it. When it comes to any given group's plans to Change The World, or to Make A Difference, I wish you well. But include me out of your plans. I want nothing to do with it. I did not link to the thing Kevin wrote about in his previous email, and I will not be doing so. I don't link to any of the other Really Important Things I get sent mail about. (This was the only exception.) It has nothing to do with whether I approve or disapprove of it, or whether I agree or disagree about the importance. It is because I have nothing useful to say about the matter, and I don't link to anything unless I feel inspired to write about it. Those are the only things which "warrant a response" on my site. Kevin's feelings also seem to have been hurt by the fact that I didn't respond to his first email. I try to answer as much of my mail as I can, but it is flatly impossible for me to answer it all. My mail contact page makes very clear that some mail won't be answered. All of my email "warrants a response" on the merits, but the practical reality is that it won't all get one. Perhaps I should change the name of this site to "USS Vanity Press".
(Captain's log): [Update 20040616: The guy who sent the email below wrote to me again, and there seems to have been a huge misunderstanding. He doesn't want his letter quoted. He agrees he probably shouldn't have sent it to me, and I now know I overreacted.] Remember Micah Wright? He had his fifteen minutes of fame a couple of months ago, though it would be more accurate to call it his fifteen minutes of mortification. He works in the comics industry, and has also been a prominent, one might even say strident, anti-war voice in online political discussions. And one of the reasons he was held in such high regard by others who opposed the war was that he was a veteran. He'd been in the Rangers; he'd seen action in Panama. He'd really done that stuff, and he opposed the invasion of Iraq. That gave him the moral authority to condemn and excoriate "chickenbloggers" who favored war and had never served in the military. Except that Wright didn't actually serve in the Rangers. He was nowhere near Panama when US forces captured Noriega. In fact, he never served at all. It was all a lie, a very elaborate one, one he constantly talked about. It was also a long-standing lie, going back years. But he drew the attention of a reporter for the Washington Post, who filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the service records which would confirm whether Wright had actually been in the service. When Wright learned of that, he confessed that he had made it all up. A couple of bloggers named Kevin Parrott and Jim Treacher were particularly key in revealing this hoax, and in directing enough attention to it to attract the attention of that Wapo reporter. It would seem that someone out there is nursing a grudge against them. I just received the following email:
My friend and fellow "warblogger" Jeremy thoughtfully attached two PDF files containing the whois reports on those URLs, just in case I didn't know how to look them up myself, or perhaps in order to preserve the information in case Kevin/Jim scrambled to cover it up. (And because of that, this email message was 343K. Thanks for the sour persimmons, buster.) My first reaction upon reading this was "who cares?" (in a snide rhetorical tone) My second reaction was "who cares?" (genuine curiosity) Why was this sent to me? By whom? What response did they hope they'd get from me? My guess is that this is classic tu quoque: These guys accused Micah Wright of lying, but lookee at this! They're liars, too! Or rather, he's a liar, since it's actually one guy using two sock-puppets. My actual reaction: Why am I supposed to be impressed, even if that were true? And why should I believe that it is true, when it's more likely that one guy took care of acquiring a URL for the other guy? I know of lots of sites where the whois contact information has nothing to do with the person who actually controls the content on the site. And why should I give a damn anyway? Frankly, I don't read either of them regularly. (They're good, but there are a hundred times more good sites than I could possibly read.) It took me a while to even remember the Micah Wright connection. Someone seems to be trying to make a mountain out of something so small that a molehill already looks huge by comparison. The content of this email is uninteresting, irrelevant, and insignificant. But the fact that it was sent to me is not uninteresting, nor insignificant, nor irrelevant. So I started investigating.
"Fellow warblogger" isn't the kind of thing that "warbloggers" would actually say to one another, but it's certainly the kind of thing that those who despise "warbloggers" might imagine that "warbloggers" say to each other. Moreover, I don't think anyone who used warblog and warblogger seriously back in the day encapsulated them in scare quotes, and hardly anyone uses those terms seriously at all any more. But there were scare quotes around "warblogger" in that email message. Even ignoring all the other things I should have found but didn't, the letter itself doesn't even ring true. It feigns camaraderie, but it's obviously a con. And it's an appallingly inept one. I visited Kevin Parrott's site, and it's gone dormant. He stopped posting in May. But Jim Treacher's site is active, and the top post at the time I visited said this: Conspiracy theories are your best entertainment value Imagine how unsurprised I am to learn that a group of supporters of Micah Wright turned this up and somehow are exulting about it. Just imagine my lack of surprise. I have no interest in registering for that forum, so I haven't read what was posted there. But it's clear that someone checked out the registration information for those two URLs, noticed the coincidence, and posted about it. Then he, or some other Wright fanboy, decided that it was a Really Big Thing and an opportunity to get revenge by publicly disgracing Jim Treacher just as badly as Wright himself had previously been disgraced. So Fanboy decided to mail it to every "warblogger" he could find. I have no doubt whatever that I'm not the only "warblogger" to have received this. He presented himself in the email as a fellow "warblogger" to lull our suspicions, so that we "warbloggers" would accept it uncritically, and react to it viscerally and viciously. After all, "warbloggers" are stupid and gullible and are dominated by brute emotion and atavistic aggressiveness. (We know that conservatives all suffer from brain damage and low IQ; there was a university study which proved it. Beside which, if they were smart they'd oppose the war, like all the smart people do.) I resent this. I resent the fact that it was sent to me. It's an insult to my intelligence. Did "Jeremy Huggins" really think I would turn suddenly and bury my fangs in Jim and Kevin like a rabid dog? Or that a large number of others whose political writing tends to align with mine would do the same when they received copies of it? Did he think this might somehow cause "warblogging" to fold in on itself and self destruct in a blaze of internecine combat? Did "Jeremy Huggins" think that I would be gulled by the fact that it came from a "fellow warblogger"? Even if it were true that "Kevin Parrott" and "Jim Treacher" were assumed names used by one person, does "Jeremy Huggins" think that this would be equivalent to the kind of lies Wright was caught telling? Quite frankly, I suspect "Jeremy Huggins" and the rest of Micah's fanboys do view them as equivalent. Remember, a lot of people on the loonie left also think that the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal is morally equivalent to the attack on the US on 9/11, and that Abu Ghraib demonstrates that we (the US) are just as bad as al Qaeda. Actually, to read what some of them say, Abu Ghraib proves that we are worse. al Qaeda just killed people. The guards at that prison humiliated those prisoners. (The horror!) I think that this email is important. But it is not the allegations regarding Jim Treacher and Kevin Parrott which make it important. It's important because someone thought those allegations were significant, and decided to try to use them to smear Jim and Kevin, and thought that people like me would fall for it. I decided to write this post, and to include the text of the letter and the originating IPs, partly in hopes that any other "warblogger" who received the same letter will speak up. After I post this, I'm going to send email to Jim. There's the making of another scandal here, and given the bemused tone of Jim's last post, and given that he's the target of this smear job, I think Jim would be more than willing to investigate it. If anyone else received the same email, or one much like it, I urge them to send a copy of it to Jim. Make sure to include the full header if you know how to do so, but do not include any attachments (like the two 120K PDF files that "Jeremy" sent me) so as to avoid overflowing Jim's email inbox. If the email originated from a different IP, that will be particularly important. (Is this one rogue fanboy or a team effort?) I request that everyone who knows how to do so search their email archives for letters sent from IP [10.11.0.71]. If you find one and if you think it might actually reveal the true identity of "Jeremy Huggins", I have no doubt Jim would be very interested in knowing about it. I am not really interested, so please don't send those things to me. My "friend" "Jeremy Huggins" has involved me because he tried to manipulate me into attacking or helping to disgrace Jim. But aside from that, this doesn't really have anything to do with me, and I would just as soon be included out again. I'll keep an eye on Jim's site and see what he says about it all. I have no doubt that it will turn out to be most amusing, and end up as an own-goal for my good friend and fellow warblogger Jeremy Huggins, who thinks I'm an oblivious gullible halfwit. Update: I have not looked at that forum, but Michelle did, and it turns out it was Wright himself who looked up the two name records and noticed the similarity. It doesn't seem likely, however, that Wright has access to the network at Dupage Community College, so he was probably not the one who mailed that message to me. Update: A reader pointed out that [10.*.*.*] is one of the blocks reserved for local use, like the [192.168.*.*] block which I use on my LAN. I'd forgotten about that; he's right. What that means is that my server can never see an IP in the [10.*.*.*] block. However, they would still show up in email headers. Update 20040616: Jeremy wrote to me again, and there seems to have been a massive misunderstanding. Whether it was his mistake or mine is moot; I'm willing to share the blame. He generally agrees that he probably should not have sent that letter, and I think I probably overreacted to it. He doesn't want to be quoted, so let's let it go at that. 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