Mad Social Scientist

"Sources" are passing the word that the US is in secret talks with a man who claims to be a representative of Sunni Baathist elements in the Iraqi insurgency would want to make a deal. I haven't, naturally, any idea whether the sources are telling the truth, whether this man is telling the truth, whether he is who he claims to be, and whether any putative deal is in earnest. But if true, this would be a big step---indeed, probably a necessary step---towards a stable Iraq.

How the Bush admin would play such a deal is another question. Talk about a commitment problem! Once the insurgents reveal themselves, they have no security from our overwhelming military power. It's the classic IR problem of being too strong to negotiate a good deal.

And how would the US enforce/coordinate deals with the (as yet undecided) coalition of Shias and Kurds in the National Assembly? And how would Sunnis who "sold out" be received by the public they seek to represent? Or, more pointedly, how do they protect themselves from the remaining rebels?

These aren't necessarily insoluble problems, but they sure are tough.

Humor can be used to provoke powerful righteous anger. Like this.

I got this "invitation" today; it lies somewhere between spam and and personalized waste of my time.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:42:40 -0800
From: XXXXXXXX
To: XXXXXX@XXXXXXX.edu
Subject: Revelations

Dear Professor XXXXXXXX:

NBC is hosting a one time screening of their new pilot "Revelations" in XXXXX on XXXX and we would like to invite students and professors from XXXXXXXXXXX to come and participate in this event.

This is a groundbreaking show for network television--it asks the question of whether God and science can fit into the same equation.

To preview the show, we have provided a password, protected Website that can only be viewed by select universities. The site has a PROMO of the show and the capability to RSVP online.

www.NBCscreenings.com

User Name: nbcscreener

Password: revelations

Attached you will find information pertaining to the event as well as the show. Please forward it to your students, your faculty and to anyone else you feel may be interested in coming to this exclusive NBC screening.

I will follow up with you in the next couple of days to discuss the possibility of your department's participation in this event.

Little do they know that I have seen every MST3K, and could riff their lights out given half a chance. I half-hope they do contact me personally...

"So a dialogue on the roles of science and religion consists of a bunch of endtime believers berating a goggle-eyed scientist for refusing to accept the Book of Revelations as a scientific explanation?

And since when were Catholics end-timers? And since when were nuns hot? And what the hell does it mean to put science and religion in the "same equation"? And if God himself wants to destroy the world, why is the Church trying to *stop* him?

If you want to mix science and religion, why not a movie on scientists being forced to confront the hypothesis that the universe is turtles-all-the-way-down? Why are you using valuable TV time that could be devoted to test-patterns, or the display of cosmic background radiation, or---"

FFFT! My head explodes Servo-style...

A timely article (for me, anyway) notes that the Israeli army has decided to stop demolishing the homes of Palestinian suicide bombers.

Israel's defense minister ordered a halt Thursday to the controversial policy of demolishing the homes of Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen after an internal army review concluded it has not deterred attackers but has inflamed hatred.

Since the 1967 Middle East War, Israel has razed more than 2,400 Palestinian homes -- leaving thousands of people homeless -- including 675 houses destroyed in the past four years of fighting, according to the Israeli human rights group B'tselem.

I was taken aback by the evidence-based approach of the Israeli army on this one. Too often in dealing with violence, governments and democratic publics decide that the only response that will reduce violence is forceful retaliation. While in the limit as retaliation goes to genocide, this is true, for any level of force that leaves some of your enemy alive, retaliation may be counterproductive, for the same reason it was appealing in the first place: when hit, people just want to hit back.

So props to the Israelis for looking at the evidence and trying to fashion a policy that will actually work---thus protecting their own citizens better.

The timeliness comes from the topic of my lecture today, the statistical analysis of event counts. Suppose we count the number of times an "event" happens in a period of time. The event might be the number of phone calls you receive in an hour, or the number of guerilla attacks made in a day, or the number of presidential vetos overriden in a year. A key issue is whether the occurence of an event has any effect on the likelihood of future events in the period. If not, we can say the events are independent.

But suppose we are counting phone calls by the hour, and usually we see 2 in the first 30 minutes, and 2 in the second thirty minutes. Then, something weird happens---in the first thirty minutes of one hour, we get 50 phone calls. Independence says we should drop back to the usual 2 or so in the next thirty minutes. Common sense says that we'll continue to get lots of calls---the calls are "contagious", and probably related.

Inhibition is the opposite of contagion. A classic example is challenges to presidential vetos. They are rare, and once challenged, the chastised president is more cautious with his veto. Having more challenges in the first half of a year should make them (and vetos) less likely in the latter half.

So the Israelis are looking at the past history of terrorist attacks and retaliation, and asking themselves the following question:

When we retaliate, does that lower the need for retaliation in the short-run? Or does it increase it? Does retaliation inhibit suicide bombing, or does it spread it like a disease, so that we must retaliate ever more in a spiral of violence?

This is a question that data can answer, and apparently, the Israelis have looked at the data and decided that while punishment might satisfy the needs of vengeance, may actually be harming the interests of security.

(An aside, reaching from statistics to economics: One might think from the above that a great way to test the effectiveness of deterrence logics is to look for inhibition following actual punishment. I suspect that in most case when actual punishment occurs frequently enough to be analyzed, you will find contagion, overdispersion, and failure of deterrence. Deterrence requires the capacity for rational and coordinated action---in which case, threats need only be credible, not actually carried out. The most effective punishments are those that are never used. If you have to ask whether a punishment is working, the answer is likely "no".)

Bush signaled today that he is willing to consider raising the cap on payroll taxes to help fixed Social Security's long-run funding gap. Well, just barely:

Asked directly, Bush said he would not bar raising the $90,000 cap, although he does not want to see the payroll tax rate go up.

``The one thing I'm not open-minded about is raising the payroll tax rate. And all the other issues go on the table,'' Bush said in the interview, according to an account in Wednesday's New Haven (Conn.) Register.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said raising the cap on Social Security taxes is just one option among many being advocated.

``Just because he said it was an option doesn't mean he embraced it,'' Duffy added.

The present arrangment levies no tax on wages above $90,000 per year, so the change would make Social Security more redistributive to boot.

Why would Bush consider such a move? To date, the Bush proposal appears to be designed to slowly siphon off resources from and eligibility for Social Security, until the program, leaving people with a fixed contribution pension for retirement that is their responsibility to manage. In the process, the mild redistribution of Social Security would be largely abandoned, which makes the rich happier, and Wall Street would get a huge commission on managing private accounts, which would make them very happy.

This burn-down-the-New-Deal dream has hit a solid wall of opposition in red and blue America. So Bush can either search for a graceful exit, or he can double his bets.

That is, Bush could propose a reform that creates private accounts and begins the siphoning off process, and simultaneously increases the SS tax base and progressivity. This would set off a slow class war through the coming decades as the rich and upper middle class seek to privatize their contributions to hold on to them, while the lower middle class and poor fight to hold on to their piece of the payroll tax pie and guaranteed benefits, by curtailing privatization. The outcomes could range from a bigger, more progressive SS, to none at all.

So perhaps Bush is a gambling man, willing to risk strengthening the welfare state while trying to poison it. Or perhaps he just wants to lure the Democrats into a policy debate they shouldn't engage.

The article above also includes this gem:

``Investors aren't just Wall Street people, as far as I'm concerned,'' Bush told the crowd invited by the state's all-GOP congressional delegation. ``I think every citizen, every citizen has got the capacity to manage his or her own money.''

Does anyone really believe that? Surely everyone can think of one person in their lives who would fritter or speculate away any money they got their hands on. It's no coincidence many unscrupulous financial sector firms target suckers---especially elderly pensioners---for foolish investments in gold, currency, land, etc. P.T. Barmun's law of suckers isn't going to be repealed anytime soon.

(Among my nominees for "people who shouldn't be trusted with their own retirement" includes the former chairman of Arbusto himself...)

Of course, Bush is full of it when he suggests he is offering "choice". His advisers know that it would be foolish to do so, and will insist on drastically limiting choice among investment plans, and requiring retirees to purchase annuities with their savings. So this is all, as usual, a cloud of lies...

My third ever post to MSS discussed how Alan Greenspan, while arguably a monetary policy savant, was a best a fiscal policy dunce. His advice to cut taxes in 2001 to avoid "paying off the whole national debt" failed the laugh test when he said it, and failed the reality test in short order.

But as Paul Krugman pointed out, Greenspan may be worse than dumb on fiscal policy---he may be giving misleading advice in order to rip off the middle class and shrink the government. Greenspan helped set up the 1983 pact to improve Social Security's long-term financial position by raising payroll taxes and creating a trust fund. The deal to the middle class, enunciated in plain language by none other than Ronald Reagan, was that there was an "iron-clad" commitment to keep Social Security around forever. You pay your dues, and you get to guaranteed basic retirement benefits. Then, in 2001, Greenspan effectively sold out the middle class, sending the money needed to keep his and Reagan's committment back into the pockets of the rich. The choice, as Al Gore kept pointing out, was between a Social Security "lock box", and a tax cut spree. Greenspan showed *zero* concern for the long-run fiscal position of SS in 2001.

Tax cuts created an unnecessary fiscal crisis in the general fund which now gives Greenspan and Bush cover to cluck about the need for cutbacks in benefits. All those middle class taxpayers, who diligently did their part in the 1980s and 1990s, are being played for chumps.

One might almost think that Greenspan has always hope to gut Social Security, in pursuit of a smaller state. As a Century Foundation report notes, we don't have to speculate---we can read Alan's lips.

A judge has just ruled that a Texas hospital can take a baby, born in September with an almost-always-fatal genetic abnormality, can be removed from life-support. According to this story in the Houston Chronicle, "Texas Children's doctors have said they believed `it was immoral to subject a terminally ill child to unnecessary life-sustaining medical procedures.'"

The report is skimpy, but a key issue seems to be whether any insurer or hospital wants to pay for the (arguably quixotic) attempt to keep the child alive. The hosital in its case claimed that of "40 facilities with neonatal intensive-care units across the country ... not one is willing to accept the baby as a patient".

The mother is black, and according to the article, there are questions about her "mental competence". She has been fighting to keep her child on life-support; the hospital wants to pull the plug.

I find myself thinking of the Florida case, in which Jeb Bush has been grand-standing for religious right votes by intervening in a similar case to override the wishes of a brain-dead woman and her husband to terminate life-support.

They are different cases, to be sure, but a similar principle is involved: that of being so blindly "pro-life" that you refuse to recognize when even the hope of life is long past---and, as a consequence, divert health care resources from active lives that could still be improved or extended.

The differences?

1. The infant is not *yet* brain-dead; his effective death is not-quite guaranteed, while the Floridian woman is actually brain-dead, and thus completely gone, without any hoep of resuscitation ever.

2. Saving money and resources has been the key issue in the debate over the infant's life; abstract issues of euthanasia are the key issue in the debate of the woman's "life".

3. One case involves a white woman. The other a black infant.

So, will the usual cast of pro-life right-wing Christians line up to defend the baby?

Or are they a bunch of flim-flam artists?

With respect to computer security issues, Microsoft is---and certainly aspires to remain---what Mancur Olson called a "privilege group": an entity that benefits so much from a secure cybersphere that is should be willing to pay for that security itself, rather than leave it up to the collective action of others.

For the non-economically inclined, I should note that computer security is a collective good (just as immunization of humans against biolgical viruses is); other people's security precautions make me safer by reducing viral epidemics, and by discouraging network probing as a fruitless endeavor. If everyone else is using a virus checker, and updating it daily, I'll be so much safer that I probably won't need one myself---and there's the dilemma, free riding.

The oldest solution in the book to free riding is a privileged group. MS presides over an operating system monopoly which also happens to be a monocultural breeding ground for viruses. The insecurity of Windows is one of its least attractive features, and has encouraged migration to lesser known alternatives like Linux. MS could reduce the long-term threats to its monopoly by taking the security dilemma onto its own soldiers and bundling free security software with its OS. And they are finally realizing this...

A question: does this run afoul of antitrust? (in theory, I mean; of course the Bush DoJ won't care...)

Now that we have the election returns, it is striking just how complete the Sunni boycott was. I can't tell from today's news just how many seats the Sunnis have, but they appear to have gotten under 5% of the vote, and well under 5% of the seats (remember they are 20% of the population). Turnout in Anbar province, heavily Sunni and the biggest locus of violence, was 2 percent. That's 2 as in 1 in 50 registered voters. That's quite a boycott, whether by choice or intimidation.

The Kurds did better than expected, with turnout in the 90s, and have 26+% of the votes and seats.

Within a week or two, we should see the fruits of bargaining among the theocratic Shias (50+% of the seats), the secular Shias (about 15%) and the Kurds (almost 30%). It's a fascinating problem:

two sides want secular rule, but don't quite have a majority;

the Sistani group doesn't have enough power to design institutions, so any likely institutions will include super-majority requirements to prevent them from taking total control;

the Kurds are in a powerful position, especially since they don't need or want much from an Iraqi state anyway, and will side with whoever gives them the greatest autonomy.

The big problem in Iraq, of course, is the Sunni insurgency, and while the election was a success in the smaller goal of convincing Shias to particate in a democracy they can dominate, it was a failure in the sense that Sunnis refused to participate, choosing instead to continue their insurgency. Now the insurgency has new targets: the officials of the new government, and assassinations look to be the order of the day.

We have successfully transformed a vaguely Sunni, vaguely anti-American insurrection into a nascent civil war, through the magic of ethnic bloc voting. Kudos!

(Another way of putting it: In Bush world, democracy tastes like kordite.)

Now how can the Sunni-Shia war be ended? With almost no Sunnis in the assembly, there is no real political representation to connect the Sunni population with any dealmaking between Sunni and Shia leaders. Hell, they aren't real public Sunni leaders, and I don't expect to see any among the non-suicidal. Whether a majority of Sunnis want peace or democracy doesn't much matter if the only structure in their society is a well-armed, well-organized rebellion willing to kill anyone who tries to settle things politically.

So unless the Shias have the patience and forebearance of Job, eventually this conflict is going to move from nascent civil war to full-on civil war---and the US will be the Shia army. (Which is rather ironic, and has the pleasant side-effect of making it harder to move towards a US-Iran war.) We will have created a new Beirut/Northern Ireland/Palestine right around our occupying forces. At least one side will want us to stay now!

I wonder whether the Kurds will try to extricate themselves of a messy situation altogether. A clever Sunni strategy would be to stop attacking Kurdish leaders or Mosul, while redoubling attacks on Baghdad---in essence, saying to the Kurds that they can go their own way with the Sunni's blessing, as long as they don't side with the Shias. (If we see this happening, it would also probably tell us how centrally coordinated the Sunni rebels are.)

This could be a very long conflict. Perhaps, though great luck, and contingencies I'm afraid I can't really imagine, be nipped in the bud. At this stage of the game, I would like to remind everyone that we knew this day would come when we invaded Iraq. And given the probability distribution of possible outcomes, we can also say that only a fool would have invaded Iraq in the first place.

If things somehow work out, all we can say is that the fool was lucky.

So Congress is seriously considering giving the Secretary of Homeland Security an exemption from the rule of law when it comes to constructing "barriers" in the "vicinity" of US borders. He can ignore any law, and his actions are not subject to judicial review. So if this law reaches the books, with respect to the construction of walls, the US will cease to be a republic, and become, in this instance (walls !?), a dictatorship.

That's just amazing. What is it about building walls near the border that requires this unprecedented break with the rule of law? And why isn't there another way to accomplish whatever goal it is? When did everyone go mad? (ok, 1994, I know...)

Throughout the 1990s, the GOP was obsessed with the "rule of law", but only insofar as it applied to presidents' statements about oral sex while under oath in sexual harassment lawsuits. Today, they are obsessed with "freedom", but only insofar as it applies to certainly crudely designed elections in our colonial dominions.

Giving cabinet secretaries enabling legislation to ignore Congress and the Courts and the Code of the US, and actually protecting colonials from death and maiming at the hands of would-be oppressors, are apparenly minor footnotes to the grand principles to which our moral betters have dedicated all their efforts.

But maybe the House Republicans are sane after all. According to Josh Marshall, who logic appeals, GOP House members may be inferring from Bush's abject failure sell his private accounts patent medicine in red states the implication that to follow his lead would be to commit suicide in the 2006 elections. Has reality finally struck a blow against the faith-based mentality of the Bush Party?

I hope so. But you just can't ever count on this bunch to do anything right.

Here are three notable news items:

1. The Pentagon is considering a draft, and is especially interested in one that would target people with needed skills (can you say, "when they came for my neighbor the doctor, I said nothing...."). But declining recruitment, and a short-sighted willingness to threaten current reservists with compulsory lifetime service may leave no options other than a whole-sale draft, heavy dependence on mercenaries, or a roll-back in US military operations. As always with the Bushies, the only palatable choice is not up for discussion.

2. More, very detailed, allegations of torture from an Australian Muslim picked up in Pakistan in 2001 and detained in Egypt and Guantamo under US orders ever since. I don't know what this guy has done or not done, but we have released him, so there must be slim to no evidence of wrong-doing. When you hear that this guy has kids whom we told him he'd never see again, that hurts. The DoD says there is "no evidence" of torture, which is "odd" since this guy has bruises and scars, which would be a start. We've really sold our souls for these monsters. We aren't above the law, any more than Saddam or Osama.

3. Discharges for gay members of the military are way down. This has several obvious interpretations and implications that should surprise no one. My favorite is that it appears allegations that gays are harmful to the military are deemed false by, well, the military, which tends to keep them in time of war (you know, the time that matters) and dump them afterwards.

A commenter on this blog has posted a few times to defend General Mattis (of "it's fun to kill the Taliban" fame). She points to this defense:

Col. Anderson added: “Please don’t vilify Mattis. If he is guilty of anything, it is for using poor judgment in the use of his words. But it was Mattis who had a mandatory reading program for all Staff and Officers giving them a basic understanding of Islam, the region, and the culture. He is a good Marine and someone we need,” said Anderson, currently a professor of Naval Science at Norwich University, the oldest private military college in the Untied States.

“What came out and what he meant are two different things,” said Col. Anderson. I’m in full support of him, he just needs to be more careful of what he says.”

Perhaps Mattis did choose his words poorly. He probably did not expect them to receive the scrutiny they have, and may regret the way they have been heard. He may also be laying low---rather than publically apoligizing or explaining---on the principle that this is the fastest way to make the problem disapear.

So let me say this: I hope Mattis mispoke. I hope that he doesn't think it's okay to enjoy killing, under any circumstances. I hope he doesn't encourage his men to think that way, either.

But given the recent behavior of our military and government in Iraq and Guantanamo and who knows where else, and the incredible stonewalling on and defense of torture as an instrument of war and police work, I don't think we can be too careful with the idea of dehumanizing an enemy to the point where killing becomes fun.

I think its safe to say that if we all look at Iraqis as people as deserving of respect as anyone else, things would have taken a very difference course.

Okay, so the post title is a bit opaque, but it will clear up in a bit. I met someone at a party this week who's been working on a neat bit of technology, which allows you to take some very large vectorized image*, like a road map, and zoom in from a wide view to a close up in one continuous zoom, rather than a series of discrete steps. Imagine using MapQuest, and having a slider bar to zoom from the whole country to your city to your street, all in the same window. Now do that in real-time, over a slow connection, and no jerkiness in the emergence or scaling of objects.

Better than words is the experience itself; follow the above link, and look for the map demo.

What you get is very elegant and useful for, well maps, at the moment. But I wonder if it might not be the basis as well for very user-friendly explorable 3D plots of quantitative data...

*"Vectorized" refers to the distinction between vector graphics, which consist of precise mathematically defined points, lines, and fills, and raster graphics, which record the color value of each pixel in the mapped space. Vector graphics are very useful for maps, scientific diagrams, and 3D simulations; raster graphics are more practical for pictures of real world objects.

A (clearly well-intentioned) reader posted the following comment on my post about Lt. Gen. Mattis. I've edited only slightly to improve legibility; the original post is below.

"It's fun to kill some people..."

The general said that it's fun to kill SOME people -- so which people did he mean? Well, the Taliban, who you wanted to attack before 9/11.

LtGen Mattis didn't say he enjoys taking human life for its own sake. He said he enjoys killing bad guys - the very bad guys you wanted killed. You can't read the state of a man's soul from one comment which the news services offered free of context. What question was he responding to? what else did he say? (hint: something about addressing the conditions that lead people to join terrorist organizations.)

It's also worth noting that Gen Pace commented that LtGen Mattis' leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan showed proper respect for the value of human life.

The LATimes article gives a little more than CNN did:

Here is my response:

I wanted to stop the Taliban. I didn't "want" to kill them. I wouldn't enjoy killing them (I hope). And if I caught them, I would not have them put to death if there was another option.

Before posting, I looked for more quotes from Mattis, as well as more context on his comments. I found nothing, but I also found no attempts to apologize, or restate his remarks in a way that contradicted the wanton spirit of killing they espouse.

Finally, and most importantly, at present, the US military and the Bush administration take very little care in distrnguishing the "bad guys" from innocents. They round up and torture innocent Iraqis on the slightest suspicion of involvement in the insurgency. They choose to bomb homes from a distance, rather than take the risk of personally confronting the residence. As a result, they often kill innocents. No one participating in such slaughter should call it fun.

(If you seek to justify such behavior as acceptable, because it saves soldiers lives, I would point out that Iraqi lives are just as valuable, and that current law requires taking every precaution to protect civilians, even at the risk of soldiers' lives.)

I have lifted this comment mainly to emphasize an important oversight common among hawks of all persuasions: The illusion that we can confidently identify bad actors in the heat of battle, or based on skimpy intelligence. Often, reports are mistaken, or the subordinates sent out to grab a suspect in Iraq get the wrong person, etc. We cannot assume that everyone driving up to a checkpoint at speed, or living in a suspected residence or neighborhood, or carrying a weapon is an enemy. Even if battlefield circumstances require combat with such people, we cannot stoop to celebrate it.

That kind of moral certainty leads to a dangerous comfort with killing at a distance that leads to tragedies like the ~100,000 Iraqis we've likely slaughtered.

It's also important to remember that in any war, individual soldiers may have their own reasons for fighting. They may have been drafted. They may be patriotic. They may have been forced at gunpoint to join the militia. We cannot point to every soldier fighting with the Taliban, or Saddam, or Hitler, or Stalin and say "There is an evil psychopath. It is okay to kill him. It is even okay to enjoy killing him."

That is a large part of the difference we have tried to create between "civilized" war, and "genocidal" war. I'm not saying the former is great; as I said, I have pacifistic tendencies. But the latter can be much worse, and can seep into the hearts of a nation.

On Brad DeLong's site, there is an amusing discussion of a lay columnist's presentation of some research on anti-matter and on cosmology. Here's a juicy quote from Gregg Easterbrook, the layman in question:

Both the donut and soccer-ball camps hold that when astronomers scan deep space, the infinity they think they see is an illusion. In some doughnut-shaped or soccer-inspired or bagel-sliced way, the cosmos appears much larger than it is. Cosmologists estimate there are at least 100 billion galaxies; actually, these researchers contend, what we observe is reflections of a much smaller number of galaxies: a traveler moving at super-speed straight out into the universe would eventually end up back at the starting point, not continue forever. The universe is an illusion? Well, this seems easier to swallow than the idea that all material for the entire cosmos popped out of a single point with no content, as Big Bang theory maintains.

To a real astrophysicist, I'm sure this sound like mumbo-jumbo, or a Stephen Hawking book turned into magnetic poetry. From my vantage point as layman-with-a-lifelong-interest in cosmology, I have a slightly different perspective. Easterbrook appears to have read a number of NYT science articles over the last year or two giving reports on studies (both theoretical and empirical) of cosmological questions like the open- or closedness of the universe; the amount of matter in the universe, and its related long-term fate; and the big bang. I have read articles over the same period that discussed each of these issues (even the question of whether some galaxies appear to be reflected in the sky because of the shape of a closed universe has been the topic of a recent NYT article). He probably didn't have too much else to go on besides these articles, and cobbled them together into a semblance of an argument. Because he hasn't (presumably) read many books on the subject, or taken any courses, he's missing some major points. For example, no one who believes the universe is open thinks we could see "all of it" from any one place; very speculative theories on the shape of the universe are unlikely to lead to intellectual "camps"; few non-Buddhist physicists would say the universe is illusion under any version of these ideas; and his slam on the Big Bang is, well, silly, wrong, and totally beside the point.

So maybe Easterbrook should have talked to a physicist before publishing (hey, maybe I should have before hitting "publish" myself).

But this is nothing compared to what social scientists have to contend with. Far more comically uninformed or incoherent articles are written about policy, elections, politics, etc. every day. Most of these are taken seriously, and accrete into an almost impenetrable miasma of misunderstanding. Most discussions I have with laypeople fail to get out of the miasma into the realm of coherent arguments based on , say, known data, facts, and history.

And social scientists have it much worse for another reason: there are several well-funded right wing groups which serve as fog machines, exploiting and thickening common misunderstandings of policy so that the public can no longer tell a policy that benefits them from one that doesn't. I'm looking at you, AEI, Cato, and Heritage.

Evolutionary biologists are presently the only natural scientists facing a constant stream of misinformation that is, well, "intelligently designed" by people who want to keep the public confused and ignorant. The biologists are furious. And the physicists may be next---some on the right, for no reason I can fathom, want to refight the debate over the Big Bang.

Welcome to the club, guys.

Four news items in one day provoke a case of "outrage overload". I can do little more than list them:

The "moral" Bush government, that so loves to spread "freedom" to the world (except Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and Russia, and China, and...) also likes to pick up foreign citizens merely suspected, by the boneheads in our intelligence services, of being connected to known terrorists, then delivers them to oppressive regimes for months of torture. As Bob Herbert points out, this is akin to contract killing in its gruesome disregard for liberty, life, and law. There is not an ounce of honest love from freedom in Bush's body, for you cannot have freedom without due process and protected civil rights---and Bush hates these things. How can you sneer at the "courts" and "due process", which protect liberty from the state, at the same time that you hallow liberty in the abstract?

Sinclair news is proudly in the "center" of the American political spectrum (smack dab between the American Nazi Party and everyone else). Their leadership is proud to use their access to the public airwaves to run a Pravda-like new service saying only good about our government, hiding the bad, and firing anyone who refuses to give up their journalistic ethics. All part of a continuum of Bush-party propaganda efforts that include covert payments to "journalists" for their support, and covert insertions of party yes-men as "journalists" in the White House press pool.

Bush didn't run on Social Security reform, and some Americans may be
belated realizing they shouldn't have voted for the lying, smirking chimp. Oh well.

Some right-wing bloggers claim that "everyone" on the Left wants to (literally) destroy America, and are allying with Islamic terrorists to do it. I believe that's called blood libel. So... at what point do the American far right (i.e., the mainstream Republican party elite) decide that American liberals are the real enemy, and start using against us tactics currently reserved for the innocent citizens of countries they don't like?

Part of the the problem is that the wingnuts have their own vision of America, and refuse to accept any other vision of America as legitimate. Oppose their ideals, and ipso facto, you oppose "America" and are a traitor. Moreover, they have decided these ideals are embodied in, of all people, George W. Bush; oppose him, or point out his astounding dishonesty, hypocrisy, cruelty, and stupidity, and likewise you are necessarily a traitor. All treason means to the right nowadays is disagreement. Ideologically, they are headed for absolutism at a minimum, and at worst, fascism dressed up with the hilariously inappropriate rhetoric of liberty.

In his latest smackdown of Jonah Goldberg, Juan Cole raises some trenchant points about the role and problem of "pundits".

We'll start with an oldie-but-goodie: "if you haven't read a printed-on-paper book on a topic, you aren't remotely qualified to pontificate about it":

I do not understand why CNN or NPR would hire someone to talk about Iraq policy who has not read a book on the subject under discussion. Actually, of course, it would be desirable that he had read more than one book. Books are nice. They are rectangular and soft and have information in them. They can even be consumed on airplanes. Goldberg should try one.

My high school debate coach would bludgeon people with that one; especially people with an emotional stake in an issue (say, Israel-Palestine), but no intellectual chops.

My interest here is not on the content of the Cole-Goldberg debate, but about the larger issue of "why we have to listen to people like Goldberg in the first place". So I'm afraid I'll be editing out his retorts, and fast-forwarding to another nice nice jab from the historian:

Goldberg also makes an elementary error in arguing that the fact that people in Iran are disillusioned with Khatami now, in 2005, has any bearing on their attitudes in 1997 when they first elected him. As a historian, Jonah, let me explain to you about this mistake. It is called "anachronism." It occurs when people argue that present conditions explain past ones. It doesn't work that way. Mostly because time's arrow goes forward, not backwards. I should explain that one too. It is called "the second law of thermodynamics." Apparently this law does not exist in Punditland, where the grand pooh-bahs are all permitted 3 anachronisms before breakfast.

Which reminds us that one problem with pundits (and blogs, and water cooler conversations) is that you can get away with silly, nonsensical rhetoric. In a book, Goldberg would have to explain why the degree to which an election is democratic depends on what happens years later; referees and editors would stop you and---well, maybe not at the presses Goldberg frequents.

Round three. Cole puts his finger on something important:

Goldberg is now saying that he did not challenge my knowledge of the Middle East, but my judgment. I take it he is saying that his judgment is superior to mine. But how would you tell whose judgment is superior? Of course, all this talk of "judgement" is code for "political agreement." Progressives think that other progressives have good judgment, conservatives think that other conservatives have good judgment. This is a tautology in reality. Goldberg believes that I am wrong because I disagree with him about X, and anyone who disagrees with him is wrong, and ipso facto lacks good judgment.

An argument that judgment matters but knowledge does not is profoundly anti-intellectual. It implies that we do not need ever to learn anything in order make mature decisions. We can just proceed off some simple ideological template and apply it to everything. This sort of thinking is part of what is wrong with this country. We wouldn't call a man in to fix our plumbing who knew nothing about plumbing, but we call pundits to address millions of people on subjects about which they know nothing of substance.

But I did not say that Goldberg's judgment is always faulty. I said he doesn't at the moment know what he is talking about when it comes to Iraq and the Middle East, and there is no reason anyone should pay attention to what he thinks about those subjects, as a result. If judgment means anything, it has to be grounded in at least a minimum amount of knowledge. Part of the implication of my assertion is that Goldberg could actually improve his knowledge of the Middle East and consequently could improve his judgment about it (although increased knowledge would only help judgment if it were used honestly and analytically). I don't think he is intrinsically ignorant, I think he is being wilfully ignorant.

The American right-wing has called this play---the "judgment call", if you will---incessantly in recent decades. They prefer their values to others---and who doesn't prefer their own values---but they are so enamored, so confident that their values are "right", that they don't care what the facts are. Opponents might show that, regardless of whether their values are "correct", right-wing policies are failures, or that right-wing assessments of the state of the world are factually inaccurate, or right-wing statements are self-contradictory---and they don't care! Many educated people in the left and center (sane people with the ability to admit being wrong) would try to understand knowledge-based criticisms of their assumptions and conclusions, because we know that being wrong has consequences, and so we want to avoid being wrong. That is how we ensure that our values are realized in the world. Good intentions and stupid policies don't deliver good results.

People on the modern American right have an amazing faith that simply espousing their own values makes being right about everything else superfluous. There is clearly a parallel, maybe even an origin, in the bizarre belief that simply accepting Jesus as your "Savior" makes everything okay---no need for good works here! And there is an early exemplar in Reagan, who was so senile and so nutty that he couldn't tell reality from his own fictions---but he knew what his values were.

With followers and leaders like these, modern Republicans have become hopelessly lost intellectually. They seldom respond to factual or knowledge based arguments; bitterly regard instances when they have been proven unarguably wrong to be ideological, rather than intellectual defeats; and relentless respond to intellectual arguments with irrelevant value statements---the strategy of the judgment call.

More than anything else about the modern American right---more than its fascism, its greed, its recklessness and shortsightness, its cruelty and bloodlust---what I cannot stand is its disregard for knowledge. Their values are awful, maybe even evil. But their lack of the slightest respect for truth is something I can never accept, respect, or forgive.

How did we get into this mess? Isn't the media supposed to prevent such idiocy from gaining the highest ranks of power in a democracy? It would, if the media served as the collective expression and puzzling of a great society. But like any other function in our republic, it's not guaranteed. Instead---because many of us want it, and because rich, politically motivated wingnuts have sought it---we have a media that shuns expertise, knowledge, and logic for testosterone, pointless graphics, and overheated lies shouted in 30 second snippets. It has given prominence to ignorant hotheats like Jonah Goldberg, bent on sowing a simple, impossible ideology, even though there are thousands in our country who could use his position to help sort out the confusion of the modern world. I'll give Cole the last word.

Goldberg is just a dime a dozen pundit. Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable.

The thing that really annoyed me about Goldberg's sniping was it reminded me of how our country got into this mess in Iraq. It was because a lot of ignorant but very powerful and visible people told the American people things that were not true. In some instances I believe that they lied. In other instances, they were simply too ignorant of the facts to know when an argument put forward about, say, Iraq, was ridiculous. For instance, it was constantly said that Iraqis were "secular." This allegation ignored four decades of radical Shiite organizing and revolutionary activity by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the al-Dawa Party, and others, as well as the influence on Iraqis of the Khomeini revolution and of the 1991 Saddam crackdown on Shiites. They were never contradicted when they said this on television, though.

And, of course, there was all that hype about Iraq being 2-4 years from having a nuclear weapon, which was either a Big Lie or a Dr. Strangelove fantasy. Khidir Hamza appears to have been paid by someone (and got big royalties from the American Enterprise Institute) to spin a web of complete lies about the Iraqi (non-existent by then) nuclear program. Goldberg in particular pushed that line, with his North Korea comparison, on a number of occasions. His current excuse is that other people were wrong, too. D'oh.

...

The corporate media failed the United States in 2002-2003. The US government failed the American people in 2002-2003. That empty, and often empty-headed punditry, which Jon Stewart destroyed so skilfully, played a big role in dragooning the American people into a wasteful and destructive elective war that threatens to warp American society and very possibly to end the free Republic we have managed to maintain for over 200 years.

Now, just in time for, well, winter, comes a delicious new topping for Freedom(tm) frozen desserts: Censorship(tm). (Mmmm.... Censorship(tm))

It works like this: try to take Dear Leader's ramblings at face-value, and you may get a threatening letter from Dear Leader's thugs implying your station may be sued. You see, Dear Leader carefully chooses his words to ensure you remain as confused as he is:

Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.

'Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

'Okay, better? I'll keep working on it.'

If you try to use the free press to translate Dear Leader's speech into clear policy consequences (e.g., switching from wage-indexation to price-indexation will lower SS costs by, you know, cutting benefits), you will get an Orwellian message from your friendly Freedom(tm) fascists at the RNC.

The RNC letter tastes like marzipan, and goes great with any of the tasty Freedom(tm) flavors on the market.

All kidding aside, if this had happened fifteen years ago, everyone on the left and most of the right would be furious. But people are now accustumed to Bush bullying the press, deriding his tens of millions of opponents as out-of-the-mainstream and un-American.

Just imagine what a hand-picked Bush Supreme Court would do to the Bill of Rights.