ShrinkWrapped

A Post-Modern World: Part I

All Presidents shade the truth.  Presidents lead governments, which as a subset of bureaucracies, depend upon euphemisms and spin to depict the reality they prefer for their audience, the electorate.  Part of the beauty of a government bureaucracy is the ability to spread around responsibility in such a way that no one can ever be held personally responsible for decisions that produce poor results.  This has been the "Way of the Bureaucracy" from time immemorial.  It is likely that the first tax collector termed his collections "mutual protection services" so as to avoid acknowledging that he was using coercion to take what belonged to another for the use of himself and his fellow bureaucrats.  It is never surprising when a government, which after all is the largest bureaucracy extant, calls things by names which do more to obfuscate than illuminate and it is only when a particular government takes euphemism to such an extreme degrees as to invite parody that the citizenry takes notice.  When the President declaims in ways which invite questions about his veracity, he is treading a slippery and dangerous slope.

During the Vietnam War, as the conflict became less and less popular, the Johnson administration adopted more and more jarring ways to avoid accidentally telling the truth; their efforts eventually led to the "credibility gap."  Ricard Nixon went so far as to commit and cover up felonies in his efforts to keep his activities hidden from the American people.  Bill Clinton is rightly infamous for his parsing of language in ways meant to deceive.  Clinton, Nixon, and LBJ, however, did not start their presidencies intending to deceive (at least no more than to the usual degree a new President intends to deceive.)  Barack Obama, emerging as he does from a background deeply infused with modern academic thinking, is already at risk of developing his own "credibility gap" but the genesis of his credibility gap is quite different from his predecessors.

Lyndon Johnson's lies were more the result of wishful thinking than of overt and conscious fabrication.  He believed in the prosecution of the Vietnam War, could not accept that our tactics needed to be changed, and believed those who told him that we were winning, even when our tactics precluded actually winning the war.  His greatest lies were lies he told to himself and they cost him his Presidency.

Richard Nixon lied with full awareness of his lies; he was determined, like most liars, to avoid the consequences of his behavior.  When caught, he was impeached and forced to resign in disgrace.

Bill Clinton had the most flexible definition of the truth and took full advantage of that flexibility.  Yet, at bottom, his lies were the most tawdry.  He lied to avoid admitting sexual transgressions and there is good reason to believe that he lied about so many other things in order to preserve an image of himself as he would wish to be seen; ie, Clinton lied to avoid shame and humiliation.  His Presidency failed because of his lies.

Barack Obama's lies are of a different nature.  Consider two such examples in which Obama and his administration are choosing to lie to the American people, both courtesy of Glenn Reynolds.

No Posting Today

Discuss among yourselves:  Are Barack Obama's exaggerations and outright falsehoods the typical stock in trade misstatements of politicians, intentional lies, unintentional errors, or something novel to our political experience?

I hope to post my response tomorrow.

Succinctly Summarizing Obama's Speech

Maxed Out Mama does it better than almost anyone else.  Take a look at her post, Laughing So Hard I Can Barely Write.  My favorite bit:

Read Obama's speech. This poor man is a BS merchant, but the tragedy is that he doesn't know it. Nothing in his life has ever taught him how to balance the books.

Priceless.

Read the whole thing.

Failing to Act on the Paradigm Shift: A Form of Dysfunctional Passivity

Listening to President Obama's speech last night I was struck by two things. The theatrics were excellent, though his presentation did include a few verbal stumbles, and the content was incredible.  Our current economic crisis was germinated by excessive borrowing of artificially cheap money and came to fruition when we discovered that once called upon to pay back the massive sums we have been living on for the last 25 years, too many people and businesses were not in position to do so.  To then hear the President offer essentially another campaign speech promising to have the government take care of all sorts of extremely expensive problems felt a little unreal. 

There is a particular type of patient I often see in the clinic who has arrived there in a particular, predictable way.  This patient is middle class and has a history of full time employment but has recently fallen on hard times.  He, or she, arrives at the clinic in a state of despair, on the verge of losing their apartments, in serious financial difficulty.  Their problems are identified as beginning when they lost their job yet upon further investigation, that is hardly the fill story.  Very often they recognized their jobs were at risk long before arriving at the clinic yet could not overcome a type of passivity that led them to behave as if nothing was ever going to change.  They could not or would not change their behavior even when their behavior was no longer functional or adaptive.  For example, they could see that their company was cutting back, that their jobs were insecure, yet continued going into the office everyday, making only the most vague and cursory attempts to look for alternative work.  They felt a lassitude that is inadequately diagnosed as depression but is more correctly thought of as a dysfunctional passivity (which can be attended by depression, of course.)  By the time they arrive at the clinic, they would typically be 6-12 months out of work, with no insurance, and thoroughly defeated.  Although they are treated as if they are depressed and often gain some symptomatic relief, in reality their dysfunction started well before their depressive symptoms appeared; their problems began when they assumed that nothing would ever change in their lives even as they could see the writing on the wall.

Many of these people simply felt that they were unprepared to face making major changes in their lives and simply continued to exist as if such changes would never be necessary.  And, the changes were not necessary, until having lost their jobs and having maxed out their credit cards, with eviction notices in their mailbox, they suddenly notice they are depressed and need to be rescued.

I do not fault Barack Obama for acting as if nothing has changed even when we are facing an economic disruption that appears to heralds a paradigm shift in the global economy.

Pogo Politics

We have met the enemy and he is us.

                        Pogo (Walt Kelly)

From almost the moment I began to spend time in the blogosphere I noted, and was alarmed by, the prevalence of BDS on the left.  Bush Derangement Syndrome was diagnosed by Charles Krauthammer in a 2003 article and became a staple assumption of those on the right.  We recognized that once a person succumbed to BDS their ability to remain rational when any discussion touched down near George W. Bush was limited.  The most rational discussions were regularly derailed from some fantastic quasi-delusion about George W. Bush.  He was alternately an idiot controlled by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney or a devious manipulator whose talons were deeply inserted in all sorts of nefarious deeds.  I am now concerned that incipient ODS may be discernible in the Conservative Blogosphere.  This is not a happy realization and I risk alienating many people who I consider friends, but it may well be inevitable and I fear it may also be thought to work (at least until proven otherwise.)

Yesterday there were a series of posts on The Corner started by John Derbyshire discussing incipient ODS:

Obamaology — The Extremes   [John Derbyshire]

I don't know how it is with colleagues, but I'm getting both extremes of Obamaology in my email bag. That is, I am getting emails telling me that the President is clueless and just winging it, and other emails telling me he's a Machiavellian playing a deep game.

I have received very similar e-mails.  Derbyshire's conclusion is apt:

That all brings to mind Roger Kimball's favorite phrase:  "the hermeneutics of suspicion." I dunno. I have a deep-rooted conviction that the world is a chaotic place, through which most people stumble and grope their way, and in which most complex 20-stage plans fall in a pothole or run out of batteries around stage 4. Possibly this is only stage 4 of Obama's plan for world mastery … but I think he's winging it.

Yuval Levin, Andy McCarthy, and Jonah Goldberg weighed in, in agreement with Derbyshire's conclusion, and with Jonah Goldberg adding an important additional element:

Therapy Paradigms and Therapeutic Change

There are three basic paradigms of talk therapy that lead to different approaches and different outcome goals. 

Consider a hypothetical patient, AB, who comes to the therapist's office with a general sense that his life isn't working well; AB is deeply unhappy and has some clinical signs of depression (low mood, low energy, mild sleep difficulties, for example.)  His relationships are unsatisfying, his home life unhappy, and his work unrewarding.  Consider as a given that during the evaluation process we learn that AB shows patterns of behavior, established in his earliest years, that inexorably lead to his present unhappiness. 

The first paradigm of therapy, typically offered by the less well trained to those with less internal and external resources, is the pop psychology paradigm offered by such notable "therapists" as Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil.  In this kind of therapy the patient is essentially told that most of their problems are caused by other people or situations beyond their control.  In other words the responsibility for the patient's unhappiness is caused by others and the patient's contributions are minimized.  The patient is a victim of systems and people beyond their control and the goal of therapy may include some change in circumstances but more often involves simply making the person feel better.  The therapy often directs itself toward relieving guilt and shame. (There's nothing wrong with S & M, or bestiality, or any of the other myriad quirks that people often find shameful; in fact the problem really inheres in the straight laced, retrogressive society that doesn't understand the unfairly stigmatized patient.)  There is nothing particularly wrong with making someone feel better but the goal in treatment is quite distant from increasing the person's understanding of himself so that he can more successfully choose his own future.  The change sought is change that is approved of by the therapist.  The therapist's ideology typically dictates any change.  (For example, few such therapists would empathize with their patient's desire to discuss their conflicts with a religious leader if the religious leader were a born again Christian or Orthodox Rabbi.)

The second therapeutic approach would be to help AB identify what he is most unhappy about and find ways for him to take steps to change his condition. 

This Seems Like a Worthwhile Idea

According to Lori Byrd, the RNC is asking for Bloggers and Blog readers to come up with ideas for their consideration:

I am working on one of the subcommittees of the GOP TechSummit Grassroots Working Group that will be reporting to the RNC.  We are trying to get as many ideas, suggestions, comments, etc. as possible from as many people as possible.  If you have ever criticized the RNC, this is the time to make your voice heard because they are listening.  If there are things you believe the RNC has done right, this is the time to let them know. 

Since the quality of comments on my Blog are quite impressive, anyone with ideas should take advantage of this opportunity.  Have at it!

Political Correctness, Racism, and Anti-Semitism

In today's Jerusalem Post, David Horowitz decries the resurgence of the world's oldest hatred.  He starts by discussing, and quoting from Nick Cohen's recent piece "Hatred is turning me into a Jew."  Nick Cohen is a man of the left and a non-Jew, yet the virulence of the resurgent anti-Semitism in Britain is alarming, and non-rational, to him:

Cohen... steers his agonized polemic toward the consequent dangers facing his local Jewish community. In a stunning indictment of the current mindset, he asserts that Britain's Jews are "the only ethnic minority whose slaughter official society will excuse. If a mass murderer bombed a mosque or black Pentecostal church, no respectable person would say that the 'root cause' of the crime was an understandable repulsion at the deeds of al-Qaida or a legitimate opposition to mass immigration. Rightly, they would blame the criminal for the crime."

David Horowitz then adds a chilling corollary:

Let's just slightly rework his key sentences: Israel is the only sovereign state whose destruction international society will excuse. If it came under existential attack, we can guarantee that within minutes the airwaves would be filled with insinuating voices insisting that the 'root cause' of the crime was a rational anger at its behavior. Put like this, the position of Israel sounds grim.

Do we doubt any of this? Terribly, we cannot.

Indulged by societies that have lost their moral compass, Iran and the Islamists are banking on nothing less.

America has been Israel's staunchest and steadiest defender yet with the ascension of the newest "best and the brightest" to Washington, that support is waning even as the best and brightest believe they are paving the way for Peace.  Barack Obama's intellectual background was steeped in academic political correctness and the same can be said of a great many of the members of his administration.  They all attended our finest academies, studied the social sciences and incorporated the modern liberal post-modern mindset suffused with Political Correctness.  This, more than naivety or venality, paves the way for disaster.

A Culture of Travis the Chimp

The subtitle of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1993 article in The American Spectator magazine, "Defining Deviancy Down", was "How We’ve Become Accustomed to Alarming Levels of Crime and Destructive Behavior."

Because crime seemed intractable and there was so much of it, various municipalities (eg, New York City) simply decided to stop arresting or prosecuting people for "minor" crimes.  Street dealers and hustlers were free to ply their trades.  As a result neighborhoods deteriorated and more serious crime escalated.  In 1993, Rudolph Giuliani won the Mayoralty in New York and instituted the broken windows policy first proposed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in the early 1980s and the drug fueled crime wave in New York began to subside.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was prescient in recognizing the high price our society would pay for tolerating criminal behavior in the name of (an illusion) of domestic tranquility.  His message has applicability to the current international order.

The world's civilized nations have worked very hard since the horrors of the last century to develop a minimal set of standards of behavior to regulate the interactions between peoples and nations.  When the UN was founded there was a minimal consensus, often as not breached in reality, that certain behaviors were simply unacceptable to the civilized world.  Genocide was at the top of the list but all sorts of abrogations of human rights were rightly considered beyond the pale.  The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a high water mark of sorts setting out the obligations that a sovereign had to its people.  Even earlier, the Geneva Conventions had attempted to place limits on the use of force expressly to defend noncombatant populations.  The attempts to regulate human behavior so as to manage the savagery that lies within were laudable but now, it appears that the entire world has embarked on a concerted effort to decivilize.

The world's demopaths have learned well the language of the left and the left, and the "useful idiots" who enable them, no longer believe or understand that words and deeds comprise reality as opposed to wishes constructing reality. 

Predictable Consequences

Much is written about unintended consequences of policies that start from good intentions and often end up creating larger problems than they meant to solve.  This is one of the better arguments in favor of a smaller, less activist government.  Those who argue in favor of more government must somehow believe that government bureaucrats are uniquely able to discern and avoid such "unintended consequences.'  In some cases, the unintended consequences are so predictable as to raise questions about the intelligence of the architects.  A series of policies and proposals that are in the news have entirely predictable consequences which will become increasingly apparent as times goes on.

Biotech  innovation is one of the great, impending growth fields for the near term.  Biology is rapidly becoming an Information Technology and new treatments for all sorts of intractable medical conditions are right around the corner.  The system works by balancing hope (or hype) with a risk averse regulatory environment.  This means that new discoveries are hyped long before they offer any possibility of clinical efficacy.  Compounding the inherent tendency to disappoint desperate people, the regulatory agency (FDA) in charge of medical technology requires negotiating a byzantine structure of rules and regulations which delay potentially life saving treatment and makes it far costlier than necessary.  The predictable consequences include terribly painful outcomes:

Report: Fetal stem cells trigger tumors in ill boy

A family desperate to save a child from a lethal brain disease sought highly experimental injections of fetal stem cells—injections that triggered tumors in the boy's brain and spinal cord, Israeli scientists reported Tuesday.

Scientists are furiously trying to harness different types of stem cells—the building blocks for other cells in the body—to regrow damaged tissues and thus treat devastating diseases. But for all the promise, researchers have long warned that they must learn to control newly injected stem cells so they don't grow where they shouldn't, and small studies in people are only just beginning.

Tuesday's report in the journal PLoS Medicine is the first documented case of a human brain tumor—albeit a benign, slow-growing one—after fetal stem cell therapy, and hammers home the need for careful research. The journal is published by the Public Library of Science.