Friday, May 30, 2003
NASA'S FAILURE
An Epitaph for the Golden Age?
GlennReynolds.com spotted an article at Space Daily by Philip Chapman that very succinctly sums up the history of NASA's failure to deliver on the promise of the manned space program of my youth. This is as good a short summary of the background and current state of uselessness of NASA's manned space program as I've seen. It's a sad, sad story for people like me who grew up with the inspiration of the astronauts of the 1960s as the brightest spot in our childhood. But I've just about had it with NASA: The STS/ISS system is just plain broken and it may be that no amount of tinkering can fix it.
But maybe not. See this early post here at burchismo that discusses a proposal to automate the remaining three shuttles and this one from a couple of days ago about the possibility that ISS' stupid, highly-inclined orbit might be shifted equator-ward if the Russkies could start launching from Kourou in French Guiana. These two things together might be enough to raise the utility and lower the cost of the current mix of systems to the point where they can become a platform from which to do something more useful and with more potential for real growth in extraterrestrial infrastructure.
I'm sorry to say, though, that I have little hope of a radical solution like this being implemented. Too risky for the politicians and bureaucrats. Sad, sad, sad.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:09 PM
Thursday, May 29, 2003
DEFENDING PLAINTIFFS
Ron Bailey Takes the Bait
There's an article at Reason magazine this morning by "science and society" correspondent Ron Bailey (with whom I've had the pleasure of sharing a podium, and whose work I usually find to be very worthwhile and well thought-out) leveling some of the usual attacks against plaintiffs' lawyers. I'm afraid Bailey's got it wrong this time. His piece collects the usual complaints: Jury awards are getting bigger, allegations are getting wilder (e.g. McDonald's failure to warn about the fat in their foods), the proliferation of ridiculous warning labels. This is the standard litany of complaints against the civil justice system in America, but it suffers from the same flaws that recitation of that litany always fails to address. Here's an example:
In 1999, the top ten jury awards totaled nearly $9 billion, up from a mere $750 million in 1997. Given the current contingency fee system, the lawyers got around $3 billion of the take. More recently, the total of the top 100 jury verdicts in 2002 was 3 ˝ times higher than the amount awarded in 2001.
Shocking! Well, the source Bailey cites notes that "large awards are frequently changed," without further details. This is typical. Citation of a jury verdict is all but meaningless without a rigorous follow-up to determine what happened on appeal. This is an example of something I've been saying for years, and I feel so strongly about it that I'll quote myself: "Anyone who quotes statistics to support their position one way or another about 'tort reform' is either ignorant or intentionally deceptive." What do I mean by that? The U.S. civil justice system does not and never has been set up to allow the collection of systematic data on the quantity or quality of economic transfers effected through litigation. There are tens of thousands of courts working in thousands of more or less independent jurisdictions in the U.S. If you count arbitral panels, the numbers go up by perhaps another order of magnitude. Most of these distinct authorities have no method whatsoever established for the on-going compilation of meaningful data, and what data does exist cannot be accessed by anyone seeking to undertake any kind of rigorous analysis. Add to this the fact that the vast majority (from personal experience, more than 90%) of disputes are settled before any kind of publicly-available resolution is reached, and those settlements are almost all strictly confidential. As a result, all information that comes out of the U.S. civil justice system is by its nature anecdotal. Therefore there is no way at all to filter out or even be systematically aware of selection effects or bias in the collection or analysis of data.
This is the empirical aspect of the problem. Now, look at the political/policy questions. Foremost to me is the basic question, "Compared to what?" As a libertarian, I have to ask whether the system of private enforcement of legal rights is preferable to enforcement by the state, which is the only alternative. For me, the answer is clear: Better to let individuals judge for themselves when to invest resources and how much of their resources to invest in the enforcement or defense of their rights than to leave that decision to the state. I make that judgment on "Hayekian" grounds: Only the individuals involved can know enough about all of the factors effecting the cost/benefit equation to make a rational choice. (In fact, even they will often make mistakes, over-investing or under-investing in the enforcement process. But they are in a better position than the state to make these decisions.) The rejoinder from critics of the system is that the profit to be made by plaintiffs' lawyers (through contingency fees) skews the equation in favor of over-enforcement. Bailey's comment here is typical:
Anyone negligently or intentionally injured deserves his or her day in court and just compensation. However, many Americans are now recognizing that the civil courts have become a lottery in which far too many people win much more than their cases merit. Trial lawyer avarice is at the heart of this dysfunctional system, and fortunately it looks like many states are finally taking steps to rein in their greed.
But this is an inherently anti-capitalist and anti-libertarian argument. Capitalism is premised on the specialization of effort through the market. Plaintiffs' lawyers are, in essence, professional valuators of claims. In a free market for legal services and claims, sellers and buyers will match themselves based on expected returns. In other words, successful plaintiffs' lawyers will seek out good claims and meritorious claims will find their way to successful plaintiffs' lawyers. The discipline imposed on the system comes from the self-interest of the plaintiffs' lawyers: Why waste time and effort on worthless claims? Now, this is the theory. In practice, things don't work out so well, and the reason is that information does not flow in a completely free and open way between people who possess claims (potential plaintiffs) and those who are in the best position to bring those claims to a final, enforceable judgment (plaintiffs' lawyers). I'll close this already-too-long post with this observation: People who find problems in the current system of civil justice in America would do much better to work to improve information transfer about claims than to use state power to artificially limit the market value of claims, which almost all tort reform consists of.
[Ron Bailey wrote more on this topic, referring to this blog entry, and then I responded again.
Since then, I've also written this and this.
I welcome correspondence on the subject, but please take a look at everything I've written before you write to tell me I'm an idiot. Then you can still call me an idiot.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:19 AM
SHARIA SETTING IN?
Islamic Courts in Iraq
The Washington Post has a piece this morning about the growth of Islamic religious courts in Iraq.
Partly in response to the disorder in Baghdad since Saddam Hussein's government collapsed April 9, partly in response to a vision of a more religious Muslim society, the Shiite clergy -- perhaps the best-organized force in the unsettled capital besides the U.S. occupation -- have moved deftly to create de facto institutions of justice, ruling on cases from divorce to property disputes. At the same time, they have begun enforcing their version of Islamic law, warning shops not to sell alcoholic beverages and theaters not to show risque movies.
Whether private or public, law is a "good," and those exercising U.S. power in Iraq need to act swiftly to provide a secular alternative to the Sharia courts, or the vaccum will be filled completely, with no room for an alternative. Unfortunately, there is zero precedent for secular civil society, and so there is no indigenous foundation upon which to build that alternative. As I've said from the beginning, I am not at all hopeful about this development, and I expect the Islamofascists to ultimately win out in the short term, at least. I wish I could be more optimistic.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:33 AM
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
SAVE THE HOG!
My old high school friend Mike Hall is blogging about an item in -- of all places -- the NYT about the Air Force's continuing efforts to permanently ground the A-10 Thunderbolt II, more affectionately known as the Warthog. This piece repeats the idea, expressed many times, that the Air Force is institutionally opposed to the role of close air support and that the jet-jockeys who run the Air Force's program offices can't work up any enthusiasm for the subsonic and just plain ugly A-10. If the Air Force succeeds in killing the Hog, they'll have used up all of the goodwill in my book they gained for their performance in GWII.
Speaking of which, it's worth remembering what was perhaps the most compelling story about the Hog from GWII, the amazing survival of Capt. Kim "Killer Chick" Campbell, who flew her heavily shot-up T-Bolt back to her base using the plane's back-up mechanical controls. Here's the story from Capt. Campbell's home-town paper, the San Jose Mercury News, and here's a pic of her checking out the damage to her bird; both links courtesy of Warthog Territory, the definitive source for all things Hoggish on the net.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:17 AM
SPITTING IMAGE
Here's a NYT story about the now-official anti-spitting campaign in China. As much as I love China and many things about its traditions, this is one thing I won't be sorry to see go. One note: I had already noticed that the morning ritual of public phlegm-flinging was much less common in contemporary China than it was in the time, immediately after the Cultural Revolution, when I was first there.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:53 AM
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
SARS SOURCE
Here's an AP story in the Houston Chronicle indicating that people who handled exotic animals in south China have antibodies for the corona virus that causes SARS. This tends to confirm the story, noted here earlier, that SARS originated in the custom of eating exotic game animals that is increasingly common in south China. It also indicates that some -- perhaps most -- people exposed to the virus do not become seriously ill, since the tested workers weren't suffering from the disease. I now fully expect that these southern "delicacies" will be determined to be the source of the SARS epidemic. Now I can find some rational cause for my reluctance to enjoy these kinds of meals...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:27 PM
Monday, May 26, 2003
RUSSIAN ROCKETS IN THE TROPICS
In a general report on the European launch industry, the Beeb mentions something I've been seeing tantalizing hints about for a long time: The possibility of an agreement with the Russians to launch Soyuz vehicles from the ESA's facility at Kourou in French Guiana. This story has been around for a while, which this report from 2001 indicates.
This could be very important in the long run, because of the highly-inclined orbit that the space station is in. It's there because the Russians have to be able to get to it, and their launch site at Baikonor is farther north than any of the other launch facilities on Earth. But having such an inclined orbit for the space station has a cost: The more tilted from the equator an orbit is, the more energy is required to put something in that orbit, since you lose some of the free energy available from the Earth's rotation. As a result, U.S. launches to ISS from Cape Canaveral -- which is about half-way closer to the equator than Baikonor -- are less efficient than they otherwise could be. If Russian work on the ISS could be carried out from Kourou, then maybe the ISS' orbit could be shifted to a more equatorial plane and all concerned could lift more to the station with each launch. The savings would be considerable over the life of the program.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 12:37 PM
Sunday, May 25, 2003
ED LU'S JOURNAL
Ed Lu is one of the two men aboard the International Space Station as its "caretaker" crew pending a decision about resumption of shuttle flights. Here's the first entry in what I hope will be his blog from orbit, in which he recounts his ride "uphill" in the Soyuz crew tranfer vehicle. My favorite parts? He confesses to falling asleep once he and commander Malenchenko were strapped into the Soyuz, awaiting their liftoff. And then there's this, about the conservatism of system design:
Spacecraft are a bit like humans in that there are leftover characteristics from old designs that have remained but no longer serve a purpose, like your appendix or your tonsils. In the case of the Soyuz, even though there are new electronic displays, the commands are still sent using a matrix of commands where you specify the row and column number. This is simply a holdover from the previous Soyuz design, which had mechanical switches arranged in rows and columns. Now, on the high tech computer display, there is a picture of the old mechanical design, which you use to issue commands!
Makes sense.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:55 PM
MAC ATTACK
Michael Dougan is giving me a hard time about the fact that Virginia Postrel uses a Mac. This is funny (to Michael) because, on the one hand, I just might start a religion about Virginia some day and, on the other hand, I've inflicted an unending stream of abuse on his grinning visage about "Macist heresy" for going on 15 years or so. Michael's an artist, so he can get away with using a Mac. But then, he has to suffer from the long history of closed-platform cultishness that Apple adopted as a survival strategy (the IT equivalent of the rope-a-dope, I guess), which results in him having not nearly as much software available as PC-users. So, for instance, his blog doesn't have permalinks, so I can't even give a precise cite to the ribbing he's giving me. Ironic, huh?
Oh yeah, and Virginia's a girl.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:37 PM
IRAN CRACKS DOWN ON CLOTHES
The Beeb is reporting this morning that
Iran's conservatives are cracking down on women's clothing ahead of the baking summer. Clothing shops and factories have been given a written order to stop producing clothes that stray from the strict female dress codes, the head of a clothing trade union in Tehran told a local newspaper.
When will liberals in the West speak out against this kind of thing? If the Religious Rightists in the Bush administration tried to impose their religious morality by state power in this way, there would be an international outcry from the left. I'll start giving the left consideration as real "progressives" when they treat the Islamofascists the same way.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:55 AM
Saturday, May 24, 2003
OUR TOWN
Anthea and I just had the very enjoyable experience of seeing a filmed performance of this production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. I had never seen this play performed and haven't read it in 30 years. What an amazing play! Written in 1938, it introduced a whole host of then-new dramatic techniques to American theater that have now become commonplace: minimalist settings, the crossing of boundaries between audience and stage and the mixing of roles between narrator and actor, to name just a few. It's hard to imagine a better production than the particular performance we saw this evening, with Paul Newman in the central role of the narrator. Here's a note from the link reviewing the stage production:
Newman, at the play's literal heart as the Stage Manager, comes to life in a brief scene in which he pretends to be the owner of a drugstore; and by the time we've arrived in the cemetery in the final act, he has found his bearings. Taking us on a tour of the gravestones, he tells us about the Civil War veterans buried beneath them:
"... had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they'd never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends--the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it."
Newman weighs each word as he speaks it, and a concept that we take so much for granted that it's beyond hackneyed suddenly acquires mass, and density, and meaning.
And then just now, refreshing my knowledge about the play with some browsing on the net, I came across this:
Thornton Wilder had firsthand experience of China in the early 1910s when his father was appointed American consul in Shanghai and he was sent to a school run by British missionaries in Chefoo. Drawing on his personal experience of China, Wilder in his unpublished undergraduate writings returned again and again to the setting of "a certain treaty port on the Yang-tze Kiang river." He was inspired in 1930 by a New York performance by Mei Lan-fang, a legendary Chinese actor to transpose the Chinese "property man" into the stage manager and stress the minimalist setting of Chinese theater in Our Town.
Isn't it funny when you find strange connections like this? Reading about Wilder's growing up in China gave me a chill. Small world.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:22 PM
Friday, May 23, 2003
SARS ORIGIN
Lingering Suspicion May be Confirmed
This story is one out today indicating that a fairly rare southern Chinese game animal -- the civet -- may be the origin of the SARS corona virus. There's been a lingering suspicion for some time among many of my (mainly northern) Chinese friends that the exotic cuisine of south China might have been somehow connected to the origins of the SARS epidemic. There's a caricature among northerners that the stranger the animal, the more highly prized it is by southerners as a meal. I can attest that there's some truth to this -- the fact is that "high cuisine" in the south puts a high value on the rarity of the meal; the wierder the better, as far as my pedestrian palette can tell. This could be true.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:02 PM
SARS RECEDING?
A report this morning indicates that the WHO has lifted its travel advisory for Guangdong, although they still say Beijing is a problem. Looks like I'll be blogging from China this summer.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:17 AM
JUDICIAL REFORM IN TEXAS
Yet Another Try
For years, reformers have been trying to de-politicize the selection of Texas judges. The best chance in 16 years is upon us now, and the Houston Chronicle is reporting this morning about lobbying by sitting state Supreme Court justices in favor of the pending legislation that would set Texas on course to meaningful reform. The current plan would create an appointed judiciary that would then sit for retention elections. This is a good plan and, if you're a Texan, write to your state representative, demanding that the citizens of the state be allowed to vote on the current proposal.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:14 AM
Thursday, May 22, 2003
FIGHTING FASHIONABLE NONSENSE
Of Butterflies and Wheels
Having just (at this late hour) settled a case that was set for trial next week, I was cruising Arts and Letters Daily and came across this site: "Butterflies and Wheels." What a wonderful resource! Here's how its authors describe its purpose:
Butterflies and Wheels has been established in order to oppose a number of related phenomena. These include:
1. Pseudoscience that is ideologically and politically motivated.
2. Epistemic relativism in the humanities (for example, the idea that statements are only true or false relative to particular cultures, discourses or language-games).
3. Those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents, and the general tendency to judge the veracity of claims about the world in terms of such commitments.
I've been preoccupied these last few months with more concrete matters of world affairs, so my interest in the "culture wars," most specifically the utter degradation of liberal arts education by postmodernist claptrap, had somewhat lapsed. Perusing this wonderful site caused me to recall just how important opposing the pomo corrosion of our intellectual life is. For instance, check out the authors' collection of quotes, from both pomo academics, and those from realms more grounded in reality.
What's refreshing is the authors' explicit statement that they are coming from "the left." They say that their aim is to attack
the tendency of the political Left (which both editors of this site consider themselves to be part of) to subjugate the rational assessment of truth-claims to the demands of a variety of pre-existing political and moral frameworks. We believe this tendency to be a mistake on practical as well as epistemological and ethical grounds. Alan Sokal expressed this concern well, when talking about his motivation for the Sokal Hoax: ‘My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. Like innumerable others from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, I call for the Left to reclaim its Enlightenment roots.’ (Reply to Social Text Editorial)
Maybe there's hope for a rational political dialogue yet. But it will take a generation, at least, to repair the damage that the pomos have done to our culture.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:11 PM
GLOBAL WARMING ?
Best Data Shows Very Little
Here's an article from Space Daily reporting on a recent study that compared data from satellites and balloons over a long period of time. The conclusion? "[A] a dataset that shows global atmospheric warming at the rate of about 0.07 degrees C (about 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade since November 1978."
"That works out to a global warming trend of about one and a quarter degrees Fahrenheit over 100 years," said Dr. John Christy, who compiled the comparison data. "That's a definite warming trend, which is probably due in part to human influences. But it's substantially less than the warming forecast by most climate models, and it isn't entirely out of the range of climate change we might expect from natural causes."
Of course, I expect this to be buried by the mainstream press. Who needs facts when everyone knows that global warming is a real and present danger, right?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:39 PM
LOOK HOMEWARD
Mars Global Surveyor Images Earth and Moon
Fortuitously, there's more Mars news this evening. JPL has released a picture of Earth and the moon taken by the Mars Global Surveyor. This is a wonderful image, since MGS wasn't designed to do this kind of photography, and is a testament both to the imaging hardware and the precision of the pointing system on this spacecraft.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:04 PM
SPACE PROBE SUMMARY
Space Daily has a good, brief article about things on the agenda at JPL (the incorrectly-named Jet Propulsion Laboratory). Featured are the two Mars rover missions to be launched this summer. These will land at two different sites on Mars in January, 2004.
Hunting around JPL's site, I found a fantastic piece of animation depicting the complete mission profile of the Mars rovers. These are large downloads in Real Player format, but well worth the bandwidth. Awesome work!
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:12 AM
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
TRANSPARENT HERO
China Celebrates a "Whistleblower"
China Daily has a story this morning celebrating the acts of Jiang Yanyong, 72, a retired physician at the People's Liberation Army General Hospital (Hospital No 301 in Beijing), who is credited as a "whistleblower" who contacted press outlets (including Western media) back in early April to report that SARS was worse in Beijing than was being officially reported. Stories like this represent a significant change in the public life of the PRC, bearing out my earlier post to the effect that this kind of thing could be a silver lining for the cloud of SARS.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:47 AM
STAR WARS RELOADED
International Opposition to Missile Shield Tech Evaporates
The Washinton Times is reporting this morning that support for development and implementation of missile defense systems is growing. Kim Jong Il has become the poster boy for missile defense, since the capabilities and intentions of North Korea pretty much exactly fit the profile of the kind of threat an early-stage system would be designed to counter: A rogue nation able and willing to use a small number of WMD-tipped ballistic missiles with single warheads.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:33 AM
GUN CONTROL?
U.S. to Confiscate Iraqi Weapons
The NYT is reporting this morning that U.S. forces are going to begin confiscating automatic rifles and RPGs from people in Iraq. Presumably this is a move that the left will support, since it's gun control in it's most clear-cut form.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:28 AM
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY
China Plays the Anti-Dumping Game
Here's a report in China Daily that cases against companies in Russia, South Korea, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Taiwan have been initiated alleging that they have dumped cold-rolled steel coil in China. This is great: Chinese industries have been plagued by dumping allegations in the U.S. and elsewhere for years, and it's nice to see Chinese industry learning to fight back and play by the new WTO rules they've agreed to adopt. Welcome to the club!
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:08 PM
ARAB PARANOIA?
Decide for Yourself
A few days ago, a friend of mine who keeps up with MEMRI, The Middle East Media Research Institute, sent me a link to a report there about the Zayed Centre, which is basically a permanent think-tank for the Arab League. I thought about blogging this at the time, but the report is long and, in most of its bulk lacks great "punch." It did report that the Zayed Centre has hosted such luminaries as Jimmy Carter, Kurt Waldheim and Jacques Chirac. Like many of the articles translated by MEMRI, it establishes pretty clearly that this quasi-official organ of the Arab League has sponsored some fairly overt anti-Semetic and paranoid stuff, such as the usual rants about Jews controlling the world, planning and carrying out the 911 attacks, etc.
Well, the Zayed Centre has struck back! Check this link for an image of the press release they've issued today. In it, the Zayed Centre claims that the MEMRI report labelled the Zayed Centre "the stray black stone in the Islamic galaxy" and called the individuals mentioned above "donkeys and idiots." No such language exists in MEMRI's report.
Doesn't this sound like the same kind of thing that Saddam's "information minister" used to do -- tell bald-faced, outright lies? I'm honestly mystified by the childish, ham-fisted way that these people handle polemical dialogue. It's as if the concept that someone might check to see if the language they claim to quote was actually used by MEMRI is utterly foreign to them. Is it a mind-set that, as some sort of "authorities," they won't be subject to any kind of doubt? Or do they expect their audience to know that they're probably lying, anyway? I honestly don't get it.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:47 PM
REYNOLDS v. POWELL: THE FCC and the OPENNESS OF NETWORKS
This morning, Glenn Reynolds is taking on Michael Powell's attempt to loosen rules on media concentration. Some might be surprised at Reynolds' position, making the mistaken assumption that a libertarian like the InstaPundit would favor Powell's attempt to "deregulate" the ownership of media outlets. But Glenn's piece bears close reading and some thought: He's for real deregulation, i.e. letting consumers do what they want with the access they have to networks, instead of the direction he thinks we're heading, in which Big Media uses the power of the state to limit the ability of consumers to make choices.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:42 AM
Monday, May 19, 2003
INSPIRATION FOR MURDER
This morning the Guardian has a piece mentioning three murders in which the perpetrators have pointed to the Matrix films as somehow inspiring their acts. I suppose this is newsworthy, but how many killings have been inspired by the Bible or the Koran?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:25 AM
Sunday, May 18, 2003
MICHAEL MOORE CRITICIZED FROM THE LEFT
Dissent magazine has a good piece by Kevin Mattason critical of Michael Moore from a left-liberal perspective. Now, I loathe Michael Moore: He's a boorish liar, as far as I'm concerned. So I'm glad at least someone on the left is willing to take him to task for his lack of real substance:
[H]e inherits the New Left's conflation of "guerrilla theater" with politics. Unfortunately, confrontation is very often not political but emotional or melodramatic, inviting opponents to scoff at legitimate concerns. It rarely produces deliberation or reform. The historian Christopher Lasch argued that Abbie Hoffman's guerrilla theater "imprisoned the left in a politics of. . .dramatic gestures, or style without substance-a mirror image of the politics of unreality which it should have been the purpose of the left to unmask." Aimed at Moore's predecessor, this critique hits Moore too. Generating a humorous buzz doesn't shake things up so much as symbolize powerlessness.
Unfortunately, the Michael Moores and Bill O'Reillies of the world seem to have more and more influence on what passes for popular political dialogue in the U.S. Has television and its degradation of our attention span and hunger for dramatic images and sound bites reduced us to shouting caricatures? It seems so.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:19 AM
LAW "ENFORCEMENT" IN ENGLAND
Here's a piece in the Spectator that's similar to many news items we see these days: About the unwillingness of the police in England to enforce the law. In this case, it's a personal account of the author's inability to get the bobbies at the local station to do anything to find his stolen scooter, or to do anything to aprehend the thieves once he'd found the bike and witnesses who could identify the kids who stole it. We know from many, many other stories over the last few years that it is riskier from a legal standpoint in England to take any meaningful action to defend one's life or property than to be a criminal. Defending one's self is considered itself to be a greater crime by the police and courts than initiating violence in the first place. It seems that England has gotten itself into a real crisis of values here. The famous English sense of "fair play" has become infected with such a load of sympathy for the kinds of people who commit crimes that even the cop on the beat is paralyzed into inaction. What will it take to turn this trend around?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:32 AM
Saturday, May 17, 2003
DIVE PICS!
I've finally gotten around to beginning the process of getting still pictures from our recent dive trip to Cozumel up on the web site. You can see the first batch -- the underwater stills mainly taken by my partner John Hall with the camera we've also bought as partners. (I took very few stills myself -- I mainly shot video on the deeper dives, not pictured here.) Anyway, here's the pics.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:31 PM
PROGRESS WITH MECHANICAL HEART (?)
The Houston Chronicle is reporting today that a second patient has received the redesigned Abiomed mechanical heart implant. After some initial success, the test program experienced setbacks when all patients receiving the heart eventually died from strokes or other problems. This story indicates that there has been a subsequent redesign. Perhaps they've licked the stroke problem. I hope so. This device might be just the kind of stopgap needed until truly new hearts -- and other organs -- can be cloned from a patient's own cells (thus bypassing the rejection problem with transplanted human and pig hearts).
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 4:30 PM
ALL THE JOKES FIT TO TELL
Here's a story about how the NYT is taking a roasting in television comedy. Worth reading just for the jokes.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 4:08 PM
CASSINI HICCUPS
Here's a report on a recent glitch on the Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft. Cassini is the last of the great 20th century deep space probes, headed to an orbital rendezvous with Saturn in July of 2004. Cassini will (hopefully) deploy a probe into the atmosphere of Saturn's mysterious moon, Titan (but not on the originally planned schedule, due to a communication issue between the Titan probe, called Huygens -- which was built by the ESA, and the main Cassini spacecraft, a NASA/JPL creation).
This report is interesting simply because it offers a glimpse into how this complex machine and the even more complex Earth-side support systems, operate -- even when something goes wrong. Here, what looks like a purely software glitch in the spacecraft's main "background sequence" (i.e. its primary operational program) caused the spacecraft to go into "safe mode," i.e. stop all uneccessary activity and revert to a simple program that maintains communication with Earth. Pretty cool, huh?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 1:38 PM
BAILEY vs. THE BIO-LUDDITES
A few days ago I blogged Virginia Postrel's take on Bill McKibben's new bio-luddite book. Today, Ronald Bailey is doing his usual good job of upholding the real progressive standard by taking McKibben head on in an exchange over at Reason.
McKibben tries to ingratiate himself with his audience, by stating that libertarians (presumably, Reason's readers) should oppose germ-line genetic engineering, because such would somehow infringe on the liberty of the next generation. Bailey smacks this right back at McKibben:
Giving children such enhanced capacities as good health, stronger bodies, and cleverer brains, far from constraining them, would in fact give them greater freedom and more choices. It's a strange kind of despotism that enlarges a person's abilities and options in life. Genetic enhancements to prevent ills that nature so liberally deals out would not violate a child's liberty or autonomy, and certainly do not constitute tyranny.
These bio-luddites need to go ahead and admit that they're being tyrannical in their desire to impose their limits on other people. McKibben and the other bioconservatives are reactionaries, pure and simple. They prefer the randomness -- and risk -- of chance genetic combinations to people intentionally doing the best for themselves and their families.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 12:38 PM
RED MENACE
I'm a car nut, as my car page, ROAD TRIP shows. I have a moderately-modified 2001 red Corvette coupe, affectionately named "Red Menace." I'm a regular poster on Corvette Forum, and wrote a "service review" there this morning about the experience I had taking my baby in to Mac Haik Chevrolet:
Since we often hear about how Chevy dealers don't appreciate the delicate sensibilities of Corvette owners, I thought I'd post an attaboy for Mac Haik on Houston's west side. I took my baby in for its 30,000 mile major service, an oil and filter change and a look at a few items that had been bothering me (especially, the intermittent failure of my turn signals).
David (didn't get his last name) in the service dept. took the job and made sure it was done right. I carefully sounded him out about the mods I've made -- to see if he'd balk about warranty issues. Not only was he cool about the issue, but was actually enthusiastic in discussing the horsepower gains, the merits of opening up the car's breathing, etc. They fixed the turn signal problem, replaced the serpentine belts (which had some dry rot) (both under warranty, no questions asked), flushed the fluids (the main part of the 30k service program), replaced the fuel filter and O2 sensor, checked the brakes (still plenty of pad at 29K+ miles) and got the car back to me when they'd said they would. All in all, a nice service experience!
This is the kind of thing that Corvette fanatics care about -- believe it or not. BTW, here's my "sig pic" from corvetteforum.com:
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:20 AM
Friday, May 16, 2003
LEO STRAUSS IN CHINA?
As a postscript to this introductory profile of Leo Strauss and his influence on American ideology and politics, Jeet Heer in the Boston Globe writes that Strauss' ideas have found a warm welcome in China, of all places. Hmm. This bears investigating...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:25 PM
CRITICS CORNER
Michael Dougan is claiming that I have the same taste in art as Saddam Hussein. He's probably referring to my CGI artwork, a hobby of mine. Saddam and I also both have big, ugly dark mustaches. Go figure.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:31 PM
VIEWS OF A CHINESE "LIBERAL POPULIST"
This is a very engaging (but long) interview with Qin Hui, a scholar of pre-modern Chinese peasant rebellions, and very knowledgeable observor of China's recent history of political and economic reform, especially as it has impacted the rural world. Be forewarned, Qin is a very erudite guy, and you'll find some pretty dense discussion of the comparative Russian history of peasant reform and rebellion, classical Greek and Roman political and legal history and much more here -- without a lot of explanation.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:11 PM
TAIKONAUTS STILL ON SCHEDULE
Space Daily reports here that preparations for China's first manned space flight have not been negatively impacted by SARS problems. Things are still on schedule for an October launch at this point.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:48 PM
Thursday, May 15, 2003
JUSTICES, GOOD AND BAD
Here's a review of two books relating to the Supreme Court, one a new biography of William O. Douglas and the other Sandra Day O'Connor's new book. The Douglas biography reveals what a character he was -- and how "injudicial" his character was: He was an outright liar about important details of his own life, and his role on the Court was that of an open ideologue with little respect for stare decisis. O'Connor, on the other hand, has been a steady, hardworking judge. This piece reminds us that she is now 73 and has been on the Court for 21 years. Ouch! It seems like just yesterday that she was appointed.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:08 PM
ANTI-AGING BREAKTHROUGH (?)
Here's a news item from Eurekalert about prolific biologist Cynthia Kenyon's work on the little worm, C. Elegans. It seems she's found a relatively simple genetic key to a whole host of age-related "protein-aggregation" diseases:
In studies of the powerfully informative roundworm, C. elegans, UCSF scientists have discovered that a class of molecules found in the worms and in people can both prolong life in the worm and prevent the harmful accumulation of abnormal proteins that cause a debilitating Huntington's-like disease. The finding appears to be the first evidence in an animal of a link between aging and age-related disease.
The molecules, called "small heat-shock proteins," are known to assemble into complexes that bind to damaged or unfolded cellular proteins and prevent them from forming into harmful aggregations.
"We think we've found an important physiological explanation for both aging and age-related disease," said Cynthia Kenyon, PhD, the Herbert Boyer Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF and senior author on a paper describing the work in the May 16 issue of SCIENCE. "The question of why older people are more susceptible to so many diseases has been a fundamental, unsolved problem in biology. Our findings suggest a beautiful molecular explanation, at least for this protein-aggregation disease.
"By preventing damaged and unfolded proteins from aggregating, this one set of proteins may be able to stave off both aging and age-related disease. The small heat-shock proteins are the molecular link between the two."
The growing roster of diseases thought to be caused by protein clumping or aggregation -- Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, prion diseases -- suggests that the small heat shock proteins may influence the onset of many age-related ailments, the researchers say. The pharmaceutical industry is already exploring ways to increase the activity of heat-shock proteins. The research by Kenyon's laboratory indicates that if these drugs work, they may not only protect protein function, but also extend life.
I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Kenyon at Extro 4, Extropy Institute's 1999 gathering. She was already on her way to great things then. Looks like she's continuing on that trajectory. Way to go, doc! Take that, bio-luddites!
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:20 PM
MATRICES
InstaPundit recaps some reviews of The Matrix Reloaded here. I know I'll see it, and soon -- maybe this weekend. But, you know, although the original was great and had superb special effects, I always much preferred another film in the same genre of "reality hacking" flics from a few years ago, The Thirteenth Floor.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:28 AM
SALON ON THE TIMES/BLAIR STORY
Salon has an excellent article this morning about the race issue in the NYT/Jayson Blair story. Eric Boehlert does a very good job of airing all sides of the discussion, with quotes from those who think there's no question that Blair's transgressions were treated with a light hand because of the Times' desire to promote diversity, and those who think race wasn't a factor at all and, like this one, from people who think race was a factor, but that it isn't the whole story:
Times metro editor Jonathan Landman, who tried to warn fellow editors at the paper about Blair's increasingly erratic behavior, says the truth lies somewhere in the middle. "There are two conventional wisdoms out there [about the Blair scandal]," he says, but "neither one of them is right. It's not a morality play about race and affirmative action, as some would like to suggest, and it's not a story that has nothing to do with race. Race was one factor among many in a subtle interplay."
Personally, I feel that the Blair tragedy -- and it is a tragedy of classic proportions for all involved -- should teach us the lesson that the real need is to do more to ensure that there are qualified minority candidates for the kind of important job Blair had. The hard question, of course, is what steps those should be. Until we find some better answers, maybe the NYT should try this.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:39 AM
THE POUND REMAINS STERLING
The Beeb is reporting that whatever mysterious economic analysis the chancellor was doing regarding the UK's adopting the euro and ditching the pound has come up negative and that PM Blair has decided to quietly postpone a decision to join the eurozone. If this was your only source of news on the subject, you'd have no clue what the substance of the analysis leading to this decision was, other than a murky reference to "substantial difference in housing markets," whatever the heck that means. Instead of any kind of substantive explanation, the Beeb only makes veiled commentary on the personal political implications of the decision for Blair (how typical). Hopefully, I'll be able to find some more substantive discussion of this development soon. Also of note is the fact that many mainstream U.S. news sources this morning (for instance CNN and MSNBC) have no discussion of this news item at all, despite the fact that this is a very important development in the English-speaking world.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:37 AM
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
RICHARD POSNER ON COMMUNITY AND MARKET
One of my great heroes is former University of Chicago law professor and now federal court of appeals judge Richard Posner. My great torts professor at UT law school, James Treece, used Posner's then-new and unique case book for our first year torts class. The book was unusual at the time because it was among the first published that used the Chicago School "law and economics" approach to teach torts to law students in a systematic way. This book had a profound effect on my philosophical development: Studying from it probably marked the most distinct turning point in my development as a libertarian. (I was saddened recently to discover, when I was developing a curriculum for Chinese lawyers studying law in the U.S., that this book is now out of print.)
This morning, there's this wonderful essay from Judge Posner about the relationship of market and "community" in contemporary America. This is a gem of a piece, that begins by recapping in a most economical (ahem) way how the modern American left's and right's agenda's have tended to cancel each other out to steadily advance the return to classical 19th cenury liberal values in our country. He goes on to say that the only theoretically cogent challenge to this trend has come from what he calls "communitarianism:"
The most sweeping intellectual challenge to our reviving nineteenth-century liberalism comes not from the dwindling band of socialists, with their narrow focus on economic issues, or from the social or religious conservatives, with their narrow focus on abortion, homosexuality, religion, and a handful of other purely "social" issues, but from the communitarians. These political theorists think that liberalism as practiced in the United States today is causing people to lose all sense of communal responsibility. They argue that people are becoming self-preoccupied and thus indifferent to the claims of the community. As evidence they point to our high rates of crime and divorce and out-of-wedlock births; and to our declining rates of participation in communal activities such as voting; and even to the prevalence of commuting and the popularity of television-watching because these (the first especially) tend to be solitary activities.
Judge Posner then goes on to observe some factual matters that give the lie to the communitarian critique of contemporary American society:
Its diagnosis of the nation's ills is empirically off. We know this because in recent years, at the same time that the ties of community as they are imagined by communitarians have been fraying, the ills to which that fraying was thought to give rise have been abating rather than increasing. Crime rates have fallen, as have rates of abortion, teenage births, and births out of wedlock; welfare dependency has declined; racial tension is significantly reduced. The causality is complex; but the communitarians owe us an explanation for why their predictions have been falsified. A possible answer that they will not like is that commodification promotes prosperity and prosperity alleviates social ills. Think of the social and economic implications of abolishing life insurance, which commodifies human life; or re-instituting the draft or imposing other compulsory national service, which would deprive the economy of a significant slice of its productive labor; or ending Social Security and child care subsidies in order to strengthen the family. Not that many communitarians would endorse all these measures, but nothing in their theory tells them when to stop turning back the clock.
Posner concludes with an elegant and powerful point: That the all-volunteer Army is the best example of how the return to classically liberal (i.e. libertarian) values has worked an improvement in the life of the community. I highly recommend this wonderful essay!
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:37 AM
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
GORE VIDAL, HYSTERICAL NUTCASE
A couple of days ago, I wrote here about listening to Pacifica radio as a source of views from the left. Well, I caught most of an interview with Gore Vidal this morning on Amy Goodman's show, "Democracy Now". I've read his commentary on the 2000 U.S. presidential election and his ranting about the war in Iraq, but I have to say that listening to him speak his ideas was truly chilling. There's no word that can describe his ideas other than "paranoid." He buys into the "blood for oil" theory hook, line and sinker, and basically preaches the idea that America has become a military state. I know that our friends on the left are fond of saying that Rush Limbaugh, Fox and the like are inflamatory. Well, so is Vidal.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:07 PM
SHARIA IN ACTION
Here's a report at MEMRI about "the Al-Madina regional branch of the Saudi religious and morality police, formally known as 'The Authority for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices,'" which gives a glimpse into what a theocratic sharia state (Saudi Arabia) is like. I thought this was a particularly interesting item:
The Authority's website posted the text of a book written by Dr. Fadhel Alha of the Department of Islamic Preaching and Communications at the University of Riyadh, which discusses the Authority's activities. Dr. Alha wrote: "There are those who say that we must leave people alone and not interfere in personal matters of virtue from which they refrain, because this conflicts with their individual freedom which is set out in Islam. Those preaching this approach quote the words of Allah in the Koran: 'There is no coercion in religion…'"
"First of all, there is no such thing as 'personal freedom.' It is a lie. We would like to ask those who argue in this matter: Have you found personal freedom in the east of the land or in its west? In Eastern or Western regimes? None whatsoever, neither here nor there. Man is required to obey rules and regulations against his will everywhere. Is a man permitted, in the East or the West, to cross the street at a red light? In the West, is a man permitted to build a house with his own money… without observing the municipality's regulations? In the East, the situation is even more clear, and he has no right to own a house at all."
"Second, the personal freedom granted by Islam to the Muslims lies in [Allah's] liberating them from enslavement to men. This does not mean that man is liberated from enslavement to the God of these men…"
"Third, the verse 'There is no coercion in religion' does not mean that everyone can do what they want and refrain from doing what they don't want, or that no one is entitled to require them to do the good that they have abandoned or to refrain from the evil that they do. The meaning of the verse… is that a person must not be forced to convert to Islam – and this too does not concern all non-Muslims, but only the People of the Book [i.e. Jews and Christians], [regarding] the Bedouin polytheist idol worshippers, you must either force them to convert to Islam, or fight them."
I'm sorry, but when I see this kind of thing, I'm not at all hopeful about the idea of spreading values of liberty to the Middle East.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:49 PM
SARS' SILVER LINING?
Here's a good, brief summary piece on the impact that SARS has had on China's political culture. While it's still early days, I (naturally) tend toward the optimistic side of the spectrum of opinion and projection described.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:22 AM
Monday, May 12, 2003
Here's a story from the Financial Times that claims that CNOOC's bid to buy into Caspian Sea oil reserves was blocked by concerted action by western oil companies, and that Sinopec's bid will be similarly blocked. A strange story, if true,
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:07 PM
ANGLOSPHERE NEWS
The Beeb is reporting this morning that International Development Secretary Clare Short is quitting. Recall that she threatened to quit before the war over Tony Blair's decisions to particpate in the coalition without UN Security Council support, but didn't follow through at the time. Her claim now? That Blair has "broken promises" about post-war involvement of the UN:
"The position the UK's adopting in the Security Council is totally dishonourable and breaches the promises that the UN would have the proper role in bringing into being a legitimate interim Iraqi authority. I cannot defend it. It is wrong in international law and for the rebuilding of Iraq and it breaches the promises that the prime minister gave to me."
Blair's office has denied these accusations. Well, it's good riddance, as far as I'm concerned. Hopefully, Blair's popularity after a successful outing in Iraq will make Short's harrumphing a non-event, and help to further distance him from the left wing of Labour, from which Short comes. In a typically smooth move, Blair has appointed Baroness Amos, a photogenic black woman (the first black woman to serve in an English cabinet post) to replace Short.
Another positive step for the Anglosphere!
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:37 AM
Sunday, May 11, 2003
SPACE CASE
I'm a life-long space fanatic, as my space web site makes clear. Here's an article (don't skip the second part, linked at the bottom of the page) from a couple of weeks ago by Bruce Moomaw that addresses some pressing issues in the aftermath of the loss of Columbia. Basically, Moomaw takes on the "elephant at the table" -- the extreme cost and risk of continuing to operate the remaining shuttle fleet, and the practical problem that the U.S. space program has gotten itself into: Completing construction and then operating the space station (ISS) is utterly dependent on the shuttle program, but the cost and risk of the shuttle program makes continuation of the ISS program very problematic. Moomaw's suggestion for dealing with this? Automate the shuttle. The Russians proved that this can be done with the sole -- unmanned, but very successful -- flight of their Buran shuttle copy. Use Soyuz expendables for crew transfer and life-boat duty until a successor vehicle can be built.
As much as I'm a deep-rooted proponent of manned spaceflight, I can't help but think that this idea is flat-out brilliant: It elegantly cuts the Gordian knot entangling ISS and the troubled shuttle fleet, it could be done cheaply and quickly and would likely have the benefit of making all ISS operations less expensive. I say do it.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:19 PM
CLASH OF BOGOSITIES
Here's a story about a woman charged with assault for wearing perfume and spraying disinfecants and insecticides in the home she shared with her husband, who had just received $150,000 in a worker's compensation settlement for alleged "allergies that resulted from exposure to toxic mold and hazardous chemicals." He claimed he had become "chemically sensitive" as a result of these work-related exposures, a kind of claim I used to see when I was doing personal injury cases. Seems he wouldn't share the loot when the couple decided to split up. Her comment? "The guy's a faker," she said. "He just wants to gain an advantage in the divorce case." Pretty funny. Sounds like someone needs to do a Daubert motion.
posted by Greg 12:28 PM
ANTHRAX!
The Washington Post (via MSNBC in this link) has a story about new evidence in the Anthrax probe. It seems the killer may have used a pond as a clever containment structure -- loading the envelopes in some kind of submerged device, presumably some sort of glove box. Now that is fiendishly clever! Somehow that makes me think it wasn't any kind of Islamofascist terrorist.
posted by Greg 11:53 AM
LEFT, RIGHT AND ELSEWHERE (the discussion continues)
From: MrPool@aol.com [mailto:MrPool@aol.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 10, 2003 11:04 AM
> First, I've deliberately started seeking out and reading
> work from a liberal/left-wing perspective. I want to see
> what they're saying, and why. The worst injustice we can
> do, at least intellectually, is to respond exclusively to
> the distorted mirror images of views seen through commentators
> who are deeply committed to positions we may share, but are
> antagonistic and partisan toward the Opposition, whatever that
> may be.
I agree and do the same. The three sources of left-wing material I regularly expose myself to are NPR, Salon and Pacifica, in "leftward order." Each has a different editorial policy. NPR is the most balanced, in three senses. By and large, they keep opinion out of their reporting, they also feature opinion from non-left sources and, with occasional exceptions, they don't feature the more radical elements of either left or right in their commentary. NPR's leftist orientation is subtle, but is heard, I think, in their editorial policy -- the kinds of stories they cover reveal the issues about which they are concerned, and their attitudes toward them. One often hears material about racial and gender issues, but almost never about matters of property rights, for instance, in their in-depth reporting. And, of course, one would never hear a pro-gun-ownership item on NPR.
Salon is explicitly leftist in their editorial stance but, to their great credit, they often allow non-leftists to express themselves in their pages (something the right-wing press almost never does). Perhaps because it's web-based, the rhetoric one finds in Salon is much hotter than one hears on NPR. Perhaps the most clearly leftist expression one sees in Salon is in their cartoon pages, where the most simple-minded leftist propaganda is expressed.
Pacifica is certainly among the farthest left media outlets in America. I regularly listen to Amy Goodman's show during my drive-time in the morning. Actually, Michael Dougan has chastised me before for doing this, accusing me of intentionally using Pacifica to inflame myself, a kind of political S&M onanism. If you don't live somewhere where you can regularly hear Pacifica programming, you just don't know what the American far left is all about. I do occasionally hear some good stuff, though, that I wouldn't hear anywhere else. For instance, last week I caught most of a long speech by Ralph Nader that was actually very well reasoned and delivered.
Oh, and for pure entertainment value, I read and listen to the Beeb.
From all these sources, I think I get a pretty good -- and up-to-date -- picture of the left here and abroad.
> And that does not include the shock jocks, the Political
> Entertainers, like O'Reilley and Limbaugh, and the current
> denizens, whoever they are, of Crossfire. Every political
> tendency spawns its own fruitcakes and loonies and extremists,
> and even basically good folks say dumb stuff from time to time,
> so it's important to have some idea of what The Opposition is
> actually talking about.
Actually, I have never intentionally watched, listened to or read anything from any of these sources in my life, another thing that Dougan occasionally chides me for. I have an irrational prejudice against the Fox Network, which is wrong-headed, I guess, since 1) they spawned The Simpsons, perhaps the best animated series of all time and 2) they have been superceded in the low-brow department by other, even lower networks since. I can't imagine why I'd ever listen to Limbaugh. I have occasionally caught bits of the shouting-shows on CNN when I was looking for news during major events. They have seemed uniformly shallow and utterly useless. Again. I can't imagine why anyone would want to watch this kind of thing other than for perverse entertainment value -- like watching mud wrestling between people with Down's Syndrome.
[snip]
> I wonder what you guys, especially on the right, have to say
> about this article:
> http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030512&s=greider
Since I have been cast onto "the right" by my friends (horrible dictu), I suppose I'll comment briefly:
From the cited piece: "These broad objectives may sound reactionary and destructive (in historical terms they are)..." "Many opponents and critics (myself included) have found the right's historic vision so improbable that we tend to guffaw and misjudge the political potency of what it has put together. We might ask ourselves: If these ideas are so self-evidently cockeyed and reactionary, why do they keep advancing?"
These items from the introduction reveal the problem. The author, William Greider, shares the leftist assumption that the statist trends of 20th century American politics were progressive and good, and that any meaningful attempt to undo them are regressive, oppressive and bad. Ever use pliers to turn a screw? Not very efficient, is it? The left, though tells us that any attempt to put down the pliers and go looking for a screw driver is a mistake, a step backward, a return to the evil past of unscrewed-ness. There's not much you can tell a person who accepts this as an article of faith. Of course, the better tool-box analogy is the old saw (ugh) that "to the person who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail." The leftist assumption that state power is the only tool that can or should be used to address social issues is the beginning and end of dialogue for so much of what passes for political discussion in America. Elsewhere in the world, there's not even any dialogue, because there's no disagreement at all.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:09 AM
Saturday, May 10, 2003
Virginia Postrel is blogging about Bill McKibben's new book,Enough, which I'm sure it deserves. I know I need to read books like this, and Fukuyama's , but time's short, especially if these guys have their way and we remain condemned to the traditional "three score and ten." Ironic, huh? If I had more time, I'd be more likely to read what these bio-Luddites have to say. At any rate, Virgina's point is to criticize the compliments these bio-conservatives get for being "brave" in "standing up" to the prospect of human genetic engineering:
"This is an abuse of language. McKibben's book may be sincere, forceful, impassioned. It may be well written. But it is not brave. It will offend absolutely no one who matters in Bill McKibben's world. To the contrary, it will reinforce the righteous self-image of those who promote his career. By writing this book, McKibben can count on attention and praise. That doesn't make him a coward. But neither does it make him brave--or the reviewers brave for praising him."
If you want to see brave, check this out.
Fukuyama's conversion to bio-conservatism is particularly irksome to me, since his previous book, "Trust" seemed like such a brilliant book, and one to which I still often refer. Oh well, just shows to go you -- even really smart people can be dead wrong about really important things.
Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds did mention this blog! I guess I'm famous now.
posted by Greg 9:24 PM
Friday, May 09, 2003
[a new blog ought to have some content, so here's a note I tossed off to my usual grumbing-group this morning.]
I've been musing about politics and ideology in my drive-time since returning from a short Cozumel dive trip last weekend. Some more or less random thoughts:
Folks are starting to think and talk a lot about the '04 presidential election, at the same time that post-war commentary from left, right and elsewhere seems to begin to be settling in to the "digestion" phase. On the latter point, I think it's worthwhile to read Margaret Drabble's anti-American screed in the Telegraph that's linked on ALDaily this morning. Drabble's essay is one of the clearest examples I've seen of a kind of European anti-Americanism that's based on an aesthetic revulsion more than any sort of principled philosophical or even ideological basis. Except for the "illegal war" and "it's all about oil" ideas, I find much of the Euro-weenie anti-American sentiment boils down to this -- "America is gauche and bourgeois, eeeewwwww." This may be a strong sentiment, but it's fundamentally reactionary and certainly not "progressive" in any meaningful sense of the word. I think this marks a basic weakness for the anti-Americans and the traditional left from which they mainly come. Thinking about this has led me to some ideas about how deeply wounded the left is, some ideas about why that is and what it may all mean ...
When I look at the left today, I see a politically balkanized front. The U.S. democratic party is a collection of ideologically disjointed constituencies: many victim groups, from blacks, to women, to gays, each fighting for their specific agenda, labor unions, fighting a sad rear-guard action based on a vision of an industrial America that doesn't exist any more, wealthy plaintiff's lawyers and media celebrates, old Marxists in academia, greens and machine politicians. The right in America is VERY different and I think can be meaningfully divided into just two distinct groups that have any chance of political impact: The "paleoconservatives" and the "neocons." The former group includes "social/cultural conservatives" with much in common, and the latter includes the corporatist and Chicago-school elites and the new foreign-policy leaders. Uniting those two groups is MUCH easier than uniting the extremely disparate groups that make up the polyglot "left" in America. The strength of the Naderite Green Party is a sign of the multiple fracture lines in what gets called the left in America. What is seen on the left is an inherently unstable shifting alliance that can be tipped over in many ways by a much more unified "right."
Why is this? I honestly think that one of the main reasons for this is that the deep philosophical foundation of the left has collapsed. That foundation -- not acknowledged, but real nevertheless -- was Marxism and class theory. With the obvious judgment of history now in, there is no ideological core. The right on the other hand has a still vital ideological core: for the paleos it's religion and for the neocons it's lassez-faire capitalism, invigorated by the mid-20th century Chicago theorists. The only group that challenges the ideological alliance is the tiny fringe to which I belong, the humanist libertarians. No one listens to us and there's no risk of any humanist libertarian being elected to office on this planet, so there's no threat the paleo-neo alliance upon which the right bases its political power can be fractured. A sign of the robustness of the paleo-neo alliance is the relatively peaceful way that the "Patriot Act" is being rolled back -- the neos knew it was wrong and they're slowly succeeding in quieting the mad dog paleos on that front. Somehow, the people who run the alliance know that Ashcroft et al. are the biggest threat to their power, and realize that curbing their excesses is the route to staying in power. The weak leftist alliance has no such political statesmanship on their side.
I'm out of time to write this evening, so I'll toss these thoughts out for your consideration ...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:56 PM
For some inexplicable reason, I'm sitting here on a Friday night when I should be doing something else, and I'm creating a BLOG! Maybe, if I post some truly interesting stuff up here, Glenn Reynolds (with whom I've had some interestng past association) will post a link. Probably way too much to hope for.
Oh -- you can see my main webpage at gregburch.net
posted by Greg 6:21 PM
