ShrinkWrapped

Verbal Passivity in the face of Brutality is Not Realpolitik

I have not yet added my two cents to the discussion of Iran.  Yaacov Lozowick covers the problem neatly:

"Fog Over Channel, Continent Cut Off"

I continue not to know what to say about the turmoil in Iran. Which is too bad, since cyberspace is chock-full of all sorts of commentary from folks who are quite certain about it all. Well, I'm not. I know who the Bad Guys, are, for example, but not who the Good Guys are. I think I know what the one side wishes to achieve, have however not the slightest idea what the other camp wants. Nor am I convinced there are two camps: perhaps there are five? I could easily write a long post about all the things I don't understand, before explaining how I'd just love the events to vindicate whatever set of political beliefs and especially pet animosites that I harbor. Alas, none of that would make me any better informed.

Also, since we don't know how this chapter of the story is going to end, there's always the danger that if I pretend to know what I'm talking about three days will suffice to prove me wrong - and that would be embarassing. Most pundits normally have at least ten days between pontificating and being proven wrong, by which time no-one remembers any longer.

So I feel for President Obama, who is coming under growing criticism for not knowing what to say. I mean, the man has unbeatable resources and tools at his fingertips, from the CIA and the NSA all the way over to Rahm Emanuel, and still he's at a loss for words. (Obama!)

I do take issue with Yaacov's empathy for President Obama, who is presumably the leader of the free world, if that phrase has any meaning in our post-modern world.  His diffidence effectively offers the Mullahs his imprimatur.

There are a number of available rationalizations for Obama to justify caution in his statements about the Iranian situation.  John Kerry offered this bit of sophistry that has already been overtaken by events:

What comes next in Iran is unclear. What is clear is that the tough talk that Senator McCain advocates got us nowhere for the last eight years. Our saber-rattling only empowered hard-liners and put reformers on the defensive. An Iranian president who advocated a “dialogue among civilizations” and societal reforms was replaced by one who denied the Holocaust and routinely called for the destruction of Israel.

Meanwhile, Iran’s influence in the Middle East expanded and it made considerable progress on its nuclear program.

The last thing we should do is give Mr. Ahmadinejad an opportunity to evoke the 1953 American-sponsored coup, which ousted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and returned Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power. Doing so would only allow him to cast himself as a modern-day Mossadegh, standing up for principle against a Western puppet.

Words are important. President Obama has made that clear in devising a new approach to Iran and the wider Muslim world. In offering negotiation and conciliation, he has put the region’s extremists on the defensive.

Someone should explain to Kerry that the presence of hundreds of thousands of Iranians protesting peacefully against the regime in Iran is qualitatively different than dealing with Ayatollah's who are completely in control of their country.  In times of such disequilibrium, it is impossible to know what kinds of inputs can further destabilize the system.  By making statements that appear to empower the Mullahs, Obama appears to be supportive of an unacceptable status quo ante.  This is not where America should be; considering that the Mullahs have already accused the United States of interference, or meddling, which seems to be the word of the day, Obama's diffidence becomes even less morally or strategically acceptable.

The New York Times, on its editorial page, chimes in with some perfectly tone-deaf remarks which include the quintessential trope of the enervated class:

Iran’s Nonrepublic

June 17, 2009

Looking at the behavior of Iran’s government, one can only conclude that it is terrified of its own people. Looking at the courage of the hundreds of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets, one can only feel admiration and anxiety for their safety. 

...

More violence against the Iranian people will only highlight the government’s illegitimacy and desperation.

If the authorities want to resolve this impasse peacefully — that must be the goal — they should call a new election, monitored by independent Iranian observers. Before last week’s results were prematurely and improbably declared, a runoff was expected between Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Moussavi. As a first step, authorities should set up a commission representing all major candidates to examine the election data and jointly determine a face-saving and credible way forward. [Empahses mine-SW]

Some in Washington, meanwhile, have been complaining that President Obama hasn’t been tough enough in his criticism of Iran’s government. He may have to speak out more forcefully in the days to come. But given its history with Iran, the United States must take special care not to be seen as interfering. That would only give Iran’s hard-liners a further excuse to blame the United States for their own shameful failures.

I am always struck by the insistence by so many New York Times-liberals, that thugs and autocrats must have this or that goal and should do this or that action which appeals to the fair play instincts of the doyens of the Times.  As Yaacov noted, we know who the bad guys are, and in this case, the bad guys will do whatever they want and can get away with.  The only restraints that exist on sociopaths are the restraints imposed upon them by more powerful forces.  That is Abnormal Psychology 101, though generally learned operationally, first hand, in kindergarten.

 Perhaps the odds of fundamental change in Iran are minimal.  The Mullahs and their hired guns have shown themselves perfectly willing to sacrifice as many of their subjects as necessary to ensure their rule.  They know that the choice before them is life or death.  A divinely inspired system cannot tolerate being seen in error.  Further, the Mullahs surely remember Nicolae Ceauşescu.

There is little we can do to help those courageous Iranians who know they may be walking into a hail of steel.  Sadly, the ease and alacrity with which our President and his supporters are ready to effectively (or passively) prop up a failed, amoral, and sadistic status quo is dispiriting.  This is Realpolitik at its very worst and is a disaster, especially when you calculate how a Mullah victory will effect the chances of a peaceful surrender of their nuclear program and apocalyptic ideology.

The Pornification of Culture, Continued

The pornification of our culture and the concomitant commodification of the body took another giant step forward over the weekend, courtesy of Calvin Klein.

 Calvin Klein Billboard In SoHo Creates Controversy

It's hard to offend a New Yorker with an advertisement, but that's not to say that people won't keep trying.

The latest racy billboard hoping to shock people is in SoHo, and it features four partially clothed models in a sexually suggestive situation.

A billboard is supposed to catch your eye, and in this instance, consider that mission accomplished.

"It's just completely out there," one mother said. "I don't want the kids to see it."

"I think it's telling people it's okay to do that, and it's kind of gross," Aleasha Stephens, a tourist from Houston, says.

I have no particular objection to whatever consenting adults do in the privacy of their boudoir, however, there are a great number of problems with this ad, presumably meant to be "edgy" and provocative, that are of great concern.  First of all, it is a billboard, an image that is impossible to avoid.  Adults who would prefer their children not be exposed to pornographic and quasi-pornographic images can use parental controls on their children's computers, keep them away from movies, magazines, TV shows, etc that they find objectionable, and in general make efforts to protect their children from pornography until such time as the children reach adulthood (or, more often, attain the capabilities required to circumvent their parent's efforts.) 

The worst effect of such ads is to normalize behavior that is amoral and detrimental to the mental health of our children and young adults.

A perversion is a sexual act that fundamentally diminishes the humanity of the participants.  Many sexual perversions reduce a person to a body part.  Pornography explicitly does so, for example when a scene never shows the face of the performers but merely their genitals.  The sexual act is then a confluence of body parts rather than an intimate relationship between two people. 

The billboard's celebration of a menage a quatre reduces the young woman to a mere object of the young male's interest. 

Many years ago a young woman in analysis was struggling with her tendency toward promiscuous sex.  She had a desperate "object hunger", ie a deep seated desire for intimacy based on a history of emotional deprivation.  She would go to bed with any man who showed an interest in her and tolerated degrading sex in order to have a few moments of physical closeness that she confused with intimacy.  As she became more aware of her desperation and its roots and the ways in which her behavior sabotaged her wish to be loved and to love, she began to alter her behavior; she started dating more appropriate men (ie, men with a future) who could offer her a future.  In a moment of self-loathing, reflecting upon her promiscuity, she said, "all I was, all that time, was a sperm receptacle."  She recognized that, in part because of the psycho-biological differences between men and women in terms of sexuality, she had allowed herself to be used as an object by men rather than insisting on being related to as a person.

By normalizing such expectations and behavior, our culture has devalued relationships, continued its infatuation with narcissism, and made adolescence and young adulthood even more difficult than they have traditionally been.  Many of our young will avoid the ubiquitous temptations to perverse behavior that our culture offers and expects; many will succumb but ultimately navigate the transition to adulthood with minimal scarring; sadly, those most vulnerable, those on the margins who lack familial role models and requisite strength of character, will descend into a "Hell of Other People" in which they can only relate to others as objects, cut off from the possibility of intimacy and love. 

[Note that I am not even discussing the danger of life threatening/altering effects of promiscuous sex, such as STDs, including HIV, and pregnancy.  Even without such effects, the psychological impact of such behavior can be devastating and lasting.]

There has never been any question that "sex sells."  There has also been an increasing awareness that when the need to "transgress" is a primal motivation, excess must always escalate.  Adults have access to every sort of pornographic image and video imaginable (and adolescents increasingly have equal access) but the idea that the "adults" are normalizing pornography and the use of the body as a commodity is tragic.  To inflict this upon the young in order to sell over-priced blue jeans is despicable.

The Honeymoon is Over?

A dedicated, far left liberal confided in me this morning that, though he still likes Obama, he doesn't think he is a very good leader and is not doing a very good job of running the country.  Take it for what its worth.

Power to the People

During the faux revolutionary times of the 1960s, retrospectively romanticized by an aging leftist baby boomer cohort, the most popular expression of revolutionary zeal was "Power to the People."  Of course, the slogan meant many different things.  To the serious Trotskyite revolutionaries, it meant a violent overthrow of the government to be replaced by a communist "dictatorship of the proletariat."  To the less virulent "New Left", it meant tossing out the sclerotic old guard (on the left side of the Democratic party) and replacing them with young, vibrant leftists like John Kerry and Teddy Kennedy.  To the vast majority of young people protesting against the Vietnam War, it meant getting rid of the draft and the evil LBJ, followed by the evil Richard Nixon.  In 1968, when the Chicago convention riots took place, there was an euphoric sense that "the people" were going to bring down the government and usher in a new world of love and peace.  It didn't quite work out that way, but we now live in very different times, and it is worth wondering if "Power to the People" might actually make a great deal more sense today than it did in 1968.

On Sunday Smitten Eagle posted a thought provoking post at Chicago Boyz, in which he comments on Zenpundit and Tom Barnett:

A Strategic Clarion Call: Part I

About two weeks ago the National Security Blogosphere saw a great burst of creativity by the mind of Zenpundit. In this post (read every word!), Zenpundit identified several issues that the last couple of years of operations in Iraq have brought to the fore:

• The importance of policy and doctrine to be meme-ified. This means that all levels of international relations, ranging from high-level grand strategy to the infantry tactics that make COIN operations successful, must be transmittable and digestable by the various power-brokering actors of the global stage. I refer to this as the Meme-ification of Policy.
• The tactical and operational art of COIN are without strategic foundation.

Smitten Eagle comments on the meme-ification (which essentially has to do with creating sound bites in which to encapsulate larger ideas) and then discusses our lack of a grand strategy. 

In fairness to others, Zenpundit hasn’t been the only one making this point. Andrew Exum, of abu muqawama, has been making this point for some time now. In any case, Zen and Ex are right. COIN doctrine is applicable only to the tactical and operational levels of war. As of yet, nobody has created a strategy, let alone a grand strategy, that is capable of being executed and understood up and down the levels of international relations. COIN tactics remain without strategic foundation.

...

Zenpundit is absolutely correct. Barnett has managed to create an (albeit flawed) grand strategy that is easily digestable. It has its own easily-understood logic, its own glossary of terms, and as Boyd would put it, its own (flawed) Orientation (PPT). That Orientation is capable of being transmitted from person to person, is highly persuasive, and provides the capability for “Think Global, Act Local” action by myriad sorts of actors: diplomats, military officers, financial wizards, corporate tycoons, media personalities, private citizens, etc. Barnett deserves the highest praise for this! Indeed, it is very difficult to critique Barnett without resorting to using the very lexicon he created!

So, where does this leave us?

We are left where we began:

• We need a new grand strategy–one that doesn’t rely on past tactical actions for its basis.
• We need to adopt Barnett’s method of proselytizing. His translation of (flawed) grand strategy into a meme that is capable of viral transmittal to elites of all power-brokering disciplines must be emulated.

I will address a possible new basis for grand strategy in future posts.

I am looking forward to Smitten Eagle's further thoughts on this.  I am well out of my depth when it comes to discussing strategy but it seems to me we could do a lot worse at this time than by focusing on "Power to the People" as a critical meme.  There are several reasons for this.

1) Advances in technology have greatly empowered the individual.  Just as al Qaeda, perverting our own technology, has been greatly empowered by such developments as the internet, cell phones, viral video, etc, so, too, as we are seeing from Iran, many ordinary people who simply desire more control in their own daily lives, ie more freedom, are finding ways to leverage technology to frighten tyrants.

2) The Left very successfully co-opted the language of rights to discredit conservative ideas, such as free markets and the supremacy of the individual over the identity group.  By co-opting "Power to the People" we would be turning the tables.  How could the Left object to policies which include as part of their intent, doing exactly what the Left has always claimed they wanted to do, ie, empower people?  The difficulty many on the Left have had in finding a way to understand the Iranian turmoil reflects their difficulty understanding what the "progressive" position should be when anti-America and anti-Capitalism is insufficient or irrelevant to the issues at hand.

3) Thinkers like John Robb have made the case that some of the greatest dangers we will face in the near to middle term will emerge from "hollow states", states with the trappings of nationality without the workings of a functioning state.  Much of our COIN tactics have been designed specifically to create space in which civil society can form free from violent intimidation.  Short of sending troops and special forces into every hollow state (not possible even if desired), we must find ways to empower those people within those borders who are willing and able to create civil societies.  It is possible and perhaps even plausible to envision a time when a population under duress can be protected by the judicious availability of COIN tools that the indigenous population could use to a) protect themselves and b) support themselves. 

[As an example, I have written many times about the miniaturization of surveillance tools and weapons.  Imagine a village in Darfur protected by a cloud of armed "smart birds/bats/mosquitoes" and "snakes/centipedes"; such a village could easily become self sufficient, with little need for foreign military support; they could stay on their land, protected from low tech assailants.  A few trained youngsters with inexpensive video monitors and joysticks, backed up by Western smart bombs for those times when problems arise, could do more than a thousand UN peacekeepers to stop the genocide in Darfur.

Ultimately, "smart dust" could be harnessed by individuals and communities to enhance freedom.  Of course, all of these technologies can, and will, be used by tyrants to attempt to control their captive populations, but as we can see time and again, eventually such technology becomes tools for freedom.  Note how China is opening up despite the desire of the leadership to control the population; openness and connectivity wins!]

I appreciate we remain years away from the vision of smart surveillance and smart weaponry protecting the most vulnerable, yet it could easily be a goal of American military research, under the rubric of "Power to the People."

Yet we don't have to wait quite so long.

Consider other ways to engage in "Power to the People":

Supply cheap web enabled cameras and video equipment to Iranians, Palestinians, Syrians, et al.  YouTube videos from Iran show that the regime is engaging in brutality on a regular basis.  Only by controlling the images that escape their totalitarian paradises can the thugs of Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah maintain their power.  We have already seen that the sadistic behavior of Islamists puts the lie to their affectation as "freedom fighters."  Granted, guns can still trump cameras, but not indefinitely. 

Michael Ledeen notes that it is modern technoogy that is faciliatating the Iranian uprising:

So How’s it Going in Iran?

But the key element is the people.  They are only just beginning to understand the reality of their situation.  Virtually none of them imagined that they would be in a revolutionary confrontation with the regime just two days after the electoral circus, and few of them can realize, so soon, that they can actually change the world.  I think the Mousavis now understand it (they know that they are either going to win or be destroyed).  It remains to be seen if they can instruct and inspire the movement.

Much will depend on their ability to communicate.  The regime has been waging a cyberwar against the dissidents, shutting down websites, cell phones, Facebook, and the like.  As most people have learned, the basic communiations tool is Twitter, which somehow continues to function.  Bigtime Kudos to Twitter, by the way, for postponing its planned maintenance so that the Iranians can continue to Tweet.  Would that Google were so solicitous of freedom.

We don’t know who’s going to win.  The Iranian people know that they’re on their own;  they aren’t going to get any help from us, or the United Nations, or the Europeans.  But paradoxically, this lack of support may strengthen their will.  There is no cavalry on the horizon.  If they are going to prevail, they and their unlikely leaders will have to gut it out by themselves.  God be with them.

As Michael J. Totten notes, Iran's regime is an enemy of the world; its people are not.

Vietnam was the first war that failed because of the camera.  It was the Vietnam protesters that streamed through the streets chanting "Power to the People."  Wouldn't it be remarkable if now, in the closing days of the first decade of the 21^st century, we can finally imagine a world in which "Power to the People" is more than an empty slogan.

It is true that we have to share our world with tyrants and will need to manage our relations with them but "Power to the Peopel" would offer a way to bypass the ruling elites and the thugs, with our efforts going directly to the people who could use it.  Wouldn't it be nice if America could, in a bipartisan way, be a beacon like never before, for those individuals who only desire freedom.  What a Grand Strategy that would be!

Ending the Health Care Debate

Dr. Sanity explains why she has not commented on the Health Care Debate.  Her reasoning is compelling and worth keeping in mind as the debate unfolds:

THIS TIME, I DON'T CARE ANYMORE...LET THE ZOMBIES TAKE OVER MEDICINE

A number of emailers have written wondering why I haven't commented on Obama's health care plans for America.

Doug Ross highlights an ad/op-ed piece by Nicolas Kristof, part of the massive PR campaign in the Age of Obama to make socialized medicine palatable to the American public. Kristof calls people like me "scaremongers;" and defiantly says, "This time we won't scare." But he doesn't have to worry.

I'm done.

My entire professional life as a physician and psychiatrist I have been exceptionally vocal about the prospect of government medicine here in the US. I have given impassioned speeches (when I was younger); written essays in medical journals and elsewhere; and talked until I am blue in the face to anyone and everyone about the horrors of socialized medicine and government interference in the health care system of this country. Once it would have seemed impossible that I would ever want to quit medicine; to stop practicing psychiatry.

I have watched with dismay as every year we have inched closer and closer to the Democrats and the left's goals; goals which I firmly believe will completely destroy American medicine. I have watched up close and personal the utter soul-destroying consequences to both patients and doctors alike, of the pervasive cultural collectivist and looter thinking in my specialty. Every time this madness is killed, it just doesn't stay dead. Like some kind of putrefying zombie, the left just keeps resurrecting it. Logic doesn't matter. Facts don't matter.

Let's face it. To the zombies of the left, reality doesn't matter. With President Postmodern in office, aided and abetted by zombie hordes in Congress; why should I pretend anymore that it does?

This time around, I JUST DON'T CARE ANYMORE. If that's what people want, so be it.

I'm done. If Congress passes Obama's destructive zombie health plan in any form, I quit.

Read the whole thing and keep this in mind:  A non-trivial percentage of Medical Doctors, often including the "best and the brightest" have no interest in becoming employees of the Federal Bureaucracy, with work rules, fees, and treatments determined by a set of Washington Bureaucrats who have no idea what clinical medicine entails.  

(That includes those Academic Doctors who have minimal patient care responsibilities and from their lofty perch are quite willing to tell us what the evidence determines is good medical practice.  Keep in mind that at one time, state of the art Medical treatment for neurasthenia included the manual masturbation of female patients by their male Physicians.  In fact, the vibrator was invented because of the stress that the treatment imposed on the Physicians.  One year's "best practices" can and all too often does become the next year's "bizarre medical treatments from history."  Considering we still do not have adequate etiological explanations for most illnesses, diseases, and organismic dysfunction, take the "evidence based" rubric with a grain of salt.  Further, keep in mind that once the government has inserted itself even further into determinations of appropriate treatment, those with the most political clout will be those with the most effective treatments.)

A final point: I am tired of being told that "rich" Doctors make too much money and should sacrifice so that everyone can have access to universal health care, ie access to my expertise at a non-market price.  (If I'm so rich why do I drive a Honda with 135,000 miles and my wife drives a Honda with 150,000 miles, instead of a new Mercedes or Lexus?  It is not because we love driving cars that require a lot of maintenance.)  Medicare, the model for government run health care, has cut compensation for Doctors by ~30% in the last decade, with greater cuts sure to follow.  My compensation from Medicare has been cut an additional 8% because a year ago I had to hire a billing service (who takes the aforementioned 8%) because Medicare had become so adept as finding ways to avoid paying my bills.  I stopped my involvement on any insurance panels many years ago and as of last year will not accept another Medicare patient.  I don't care if you think I am selfish, over-value my time and expertise, or any of the other comments that have come my way since this debate started.  Like Dr. Sanity, I no longer care; if the country wants government run health care, welcome to it and know that I will not be a part of it.

Today on "Its the Mind"

Some very smart, very curious people are asking interesting questions about how we think and what can be done to improve the speed and quality of our thinking:

Manipulating the Brain Network Could Improve IQ

In an attempt to investigate why some brains are more intelligent than others, researchers have found that efficient wiring between different brain regions is associated with a higher IQ. This understanding could potentially lead to the development of drugs that could improve IQ by improving the brain's network efficiency

Neuroscientists are closing in on some of the essential components of intelligence.  IQ measures "g", broadly speaking a measure of one's ability to solve problems.  (That IQ or g is not a complete descriptor of what it means to be intelligent is a given; however, it remains the most useful measure for predicting a number of other measures, like academic success, financial success, or the ability to comprehend and use complex data, that certainly correlate with intelligence.)  It is becoming undeniable that within fairly short order we will have gained the ability to manipulate IQ; ie, some people are going to be a lot smarter than most other people.  This leads to the usual warnings:

Will designer brains divide humanity?

WE ARE on the brink of technological breakthroughs that could augment our mental powers beyond recognition. It will soon be possible to boost human brainpower with electronic "plug-ins" or even by genetic enhancement. What will this mean for the future of humanity?

This was the theme of a recent Neuroscience in Context meeting in Berlin, Germany, where anthropologists, technologists, neurologists, archaeologists and philosophers met to consider the implications of this next stage of human brain development. Would it widen the gulf between the world's haves and have-nots - and perhaps even lead to a distinct and dominant species with unmatchable powers of intellect?

One view is that this is merely the next phase in a process that has been taking place throughout human history. Humans have always played an active role in improving their own brainpower, says Lambros Malafouris of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge, UK, who was one of the organisers of the Berlin meeting. It began with inherited gene mutations that gave us uniquely "plastic" brains, capable of changing physically to meet hitherto unassailable intellectual and practical challenges.

The obvious answer is, "Yes"; this technology will absolutely lead some individuals and societies to have a great advantage over those who have less access to the technology.  However, there are other implications that should concern and thrill.

There are three main theories of how we might attain an "IQ Singularity" that point at which recursive self-improving AI enters the logarithmic part of the curve. 

1) At some undefined point, the total processing power of our computing hardware will pass a threshold and our computers will "wake up."  At that point, following Moore's Law, within short order our computers will be come far smarter than us.  A "Terminator" scenario could arise; alternatively, our machine offspring could choose to keep us around as pets or simply ignore us as beneath their attention, much as we ignore insects who don't actively bother us.  (DARPA is working on machine intelligence and may be working on the question of "moral" AI as we discuss this.)

2) A second theory, to my mind more likely (though my reasons for this would require an additional post), is that as brain-computer interfaces are perfected, and we again the ability o effectively implant chips in our heads to add all sorts of capabilities, our hybrid brains will become that much smarter than ordinary biology only brains.  In this case, the morality and behavior of the Superintelligence will at least be effected by its biological, human roots.

3) A third theory, for which I do not see much convincing evidence, is that inorganic substances can never achieve "intelligence" and it will therefore be through biological enhancements exclusively that Superintelligence will be attained.  In this case, the Superintelligence morality will be even more closely grounded in the human.

Recently I discussed AI, the Unconscious, & Morality and took issue with the idea that we can design a "moral AI" without using the concept of a Deity (or its equivalent) as a way to protect us against our own unconscious tendencies to subvert morality. 

[I hope (pray?) that I am wrong about this because I suspect that morality, in whatever Superintelligence is evolved or created, will be a completely atheistic construct, perhaps with homo sapiens, a la Asimov's Three Laws, serving as the idealized demigod.  The problem here is likely to be that once humans declare ourselves to be deities, our obvious fallibility will soon become all too apparent to our offspring with results that human beings have been struggling to resolve since man stood upright on the Savannah.  There is no salvation going to be found in this direction, and G-d forbid the designers of machine morality overestimate their abilties or the "wrong" people determine the defining characteristics of morality.]

It is a given that most Western scientists are operationally atheist (or agnostic) and do not consider G-d necessary for morality (and certainly most consider themselves moral actors.)  I suspect we will be seeing signs relating to these questions sooner rather than later.  As a society we are thoroughly unprepared for the difficult discussions ahead.

Anti-Semitism: Maintaining Distinctions

As happens with far too much regularity, the latest heinous crime that has a political dimension is being used by left and right to push their agenda.  Yesterday, a hate filled, anti-Semitic, anti-government, neo-Nazi, 9/11 Truther, conducted an assault on the Holocaust Museum during which one guard was killed, another was seriously wounded, and the assailant wounded.  From the paper of record:

An 88-year-old white supremacist with a rifle walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the capital’s most visited sites, on Wednesday afternoon and began shooting, fatally wounding a security guard and sending tourists scrambling before he himself was shot, the authorities said.

...

Officials and others who track conspiracy theorists have long been familiar with Mr. von Brunn, whose latest address is believed to be in Eastern Maryland, in part because he maintains a Web site. (Wednesday night, only an archived version of the site was available.) He has claimed variously to be a member of Mensa, the high-I.Q. society; to have played varsity football at a Midwestern college, where he earned a degree in journalism; to have been a PT boat commander in World War II; and to be a painter and an author.

Mr. von Brunn has also claimed to have been victimized by a court system run by Jews and blacks.

Some on the Left immediately jumped on the gunman's pedigree on the far right to attack the right:

More Terrorism From The Loopy Far Right

That DHS report doesn't look so iffy any more, does it?

The gunman was identified by several news agencies as James W. von Brunn, a man in his late 80s. According to a Web site maintained by Mr. von Brunn, he embraces a far-reaching conspiracy theory involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups.

Goldblog is all over the story. The ADL found some emails from the alleged old Holocaust denier. Here they are. TPM has more. Like another right-wing fanatic, he was also a painter.

Some on the Right immediately rushed to insist that, although this gunman was a denizen of the Right, his actions were facilitated by a climate created by Muslim anti-Semitism:

So What if Holocaust Museum Shooter is White Christian: We Know Who Crescented, er . . . Created This Atmosphere; 9/11 Truther

Much is being made by Muslims and their many defenders on the left--and the ignoramus "conservatives" at Hot Air (who lecture us that hate has no ideological bounds, which I already learned not from those clueless ones, but from Sarah Palin e-mails wishing me cancer)--that the shooter of several people (one now dead) at the U.S. Holocaust Museum is not a Muslim but a White guy, James W. Von Brunn, who is a neo-Nazi.

But that is a distinction without a difference. In fact, it is because of Muslims--who are the biggest contributor to the worldwide rise in anti-Semitism to Holocaust-eve levels--that neo-Nazis feel comfortable--far more comfortable!--manifesting their views about Jews. Until 9/11 and our resulting new tolerance for Islam, the neo-Nazi types were marginalized and howling at the wind. We know who has been targeting Jewish museums and centers affiliated with Jews in recent years. And it hasn't been, in general, 89-year-old White guys.

Jeffrey Goldberg, in response to Debbie Schlussel's post, makes the point that Muslims have no monopoly on anti-Semitism:

Maybe this was meant to be a parody, I don't know. I've never read Debbie Schlussel before. But if it's meant seriously, then it's ridiculous. White Christians have done an excellent job being anti-Semitic for several hundred years -- almost a couple of thousand, actually --  without any help whatsoever from Muslims. In fact, it is Muslim Jew-haters who rely on the publications of European and white American anti-Semites -- most notably the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the International Jew -- for inspiration. I hope Schlussel retracts this absurd piece of "analysis." Does she have any idea what this country was like in the 1930s? I don't think Muslims dominated the German Bund.

Yet all of them miss the point.  The intersection of psychopathology, anti-Semitism, and politics is exceedingly complex and those who simplify the matter in order to score political points are doing a disservice to their readers and shortchanging themselves.

Let's start with the psychological.

Many people have a predisposition to paranoia, either by virtue of having a paranoid character or a paranoid psychosis.  Consider this description of a young person having a first paranoid episode, from my post, Paranoia: Rationality in the service of the Irrational:

Paranoid psychosis often strikes young people in their late teens, early twenties. Many people do not realize that there is almost always a prodromal period (the period of weeks to months leading up to the overt psychotic break with reality) in which the world becomes more and more chaotic and makes less and less sense to the patient.  If you see them during their first break (a person's first overt psychotic episode) they will often describe how frightening this time is; they are no longer sure of what they are seeing and hearing and experiencing and feeling.  They worry they are losing their minds; they often despair and contemplate suicide.  If they are in college, they have increasing difficulty getting their work done; lectures and readings become confusing and disorienting.  They become more and more anxious until suddenly, they receive an insight and Everything Makes Sense!  Rationality has returned, they are not losing their minds.  These things are happening to them because they are special, singled out by God to do great things, to save the world; they might even be Jesus Christ himself returned to help mankind. It is important to recognize that once they have discovered this heretofore hidden secret about themselves, their anxiety diminishes and changes. They are no longer anxious that they are losing their minds, now they are anxious about being able to accomplish great things.  In fact, this is where things often take a darker turn. There can be only one explanation for why they have flunked out of college, or are living on the streets, or are now in a psychiatric hospital: they can not accomplish great things (saving the world) because other powerful forces are opposed to them.  What other explanation could possibly account for what is happening?  This is when the paranoid is most dangerous (though most psychiatric patients are more likely to be victims and taken advantage of than to be perpetrators) because they have projected their unacceptable murderous rage onto their (invented) enemy, at which point a defensive attack may become necessary.

The paranoid character undergoes much the same process but it is more gradual and represents a less abrupt demarcation from prior functioning.  In either case, the person with a tendency to externalize and project, who has a history of poor or declining functioning , seeks a reason in his environment to explain his failures. 

Which leads to the role of anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism has a long and inglorious history.  After the Holocaust it was repressed and suppressed until it began to re-emerge following the transformation of Jews from victims into victors during the 1967 war.  Where anti-Semitism was considered to be the province of the right prior to WWII, the open anti-Semitism of the Arab countries, overtly modeled on the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, began to find traction on the left as Israel was increasingly depicted as a colonial occupier and an illegitimate Western presence in the Arab world.  The emergence of anti-Semitism from the shadows has led to its appropriation by many paranoids as the nidus of their delusions.  This is not at all surprising.  Paranoids use available constructs in their own cultures around which to accrete their delusions.  For someone convinced  the government has caused him to fail in life or prevented a more perfect union (a white Christian Utopia, a Muslim caliphate, for example) it is the most natural step to note the prevalence of Jewish names in high positions and ascribe hidden powers and malevolence to them.    This process is aided and abetted by the mainstreaming of anti-Semitic tropes perpetrated by the likes of Walt and Mearsheimer on the left and Patrick Buchanan on the right.  The paranoid who sees academics offering scholarly explanations for how the Jews control American foreign policy have very little distance to go to seeing the Jews as behind the interference with their personal plans.

Which then leads to the political.

Where anti-Semitism becomes most dangerous is when it moves from the realm of the personal to the political.  There is no question that a lone, anti-Semitic Muslim, motivated by his religion and sanctioned by his religious leaders, can be very dangerous.  Sudden Jihad Syndrome is an expression of just such a confluence of political and psychopathological anti-Semitism.  So, too, the acts of one such as the Holocaust Museum gunman represent a confluence of political and psychopathological anti-Semitism.  Yet as dangerous as these kinds of terrorists can be, they pale in comparison to the potential of those who are not only politically and psychopathologically anti-Semitic, but include membership in terrorist groups (or states) dedicated to bringing their distinct political philosophy to fruition.  Here then is where the distinction must be made, between those who are acting alone, even if under the influence of a particular ideology, and those who have leveraged their hatred and psychopathology with other like minded individuals, to act in concert. 

We will have to contend with anti-Semitism and hatred indefinitely, as long as humans remain fallible and delusions remain adaptive for them in preserving their self esteem.  The Holocaust Museum gunman is indeed a terrorist (just as the murderer of an abortion Doctor and the terrorist murderer of our Army recruits) but to build the case meant to indict the left, the right, or Muslims for his behavior threatens to efface any value we might gain from this experience and that would be shameful.  Anti-Semitism is a protean hate easily manipulated into forms conducive to the hater's goals.

[For more on the psychological structure of anti-Semitism, consider reading Pity the Poor Anti-Semite.  While anti-Semitism, like all paranoid delusions, serves initially to explain one's failings while preserving one's self-esteem, it is an unstable construct and cannot bolster self-esteeem indefinitely.  As well, it includes imperatives toward action that serve to undermine the anti-Semite in the long run.]

[For a very interesting and enlightening discussion of the dangers of abstraction in the social arena, take a look at Shannon's post at the Chicago Boyz.  The thought experiment discussing Nazis is germane.]

Healthcare is a Right, Not a Privilege: Discuss

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders offers a chance to understand the thinking motivating those who overtly propose to create a new "access to health care insurance" entitlement/mandate as a stealth approach to universal, government run health care.  He suggest that not only is our health care system collapsing but as the title implies, health care is a right, not a privilege.

Let's be clear. Our health care system is disintegrating. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. At a time when 60 million people, including many with insurance, do not have access to a medical home, more than 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses because they do not get to the doctor when they should. This is six times the number who died at the tragedy of 9/11 - but this occurs every year.

Hm, patients don't make appointments in a timely fashion?  Maybe part of the health care reform will be to mandate yearly physicals and then make it, as an example, illegal to drink alcohol if your liver enzymes are elevated or illegal to eat McDonald's if your cholesterol is over 200.  As someone who lives in New York and has seen first hand the paternalism of the Bloomberg administration (first they came for our cigarettes, then for our trans fats...) the theory that if the government pays for health care they can determine our behavior has already been established in this liberal bastion of uncommon sense.

In the midst of this horrendous lack of coverage, the U.S. spends far more per capita on health care than any other nation - and health care costs continue to soar. At $2.4 trillion dollars, and 18 percent of our GDP, the skyrocketing cost of health care in this country is unsustainable both from a personal and macro-economic perspective.

At the individual level, the average American spends about $7,900 per year on health care. Despite that huge outlay, a recent study found that medical problems contributed to 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007. From a business perspective, General Motors spends more on health care per automobile than on steel while small business owners are forced to divert hard-earned profits into health coverage for their employees - rather than new business investments. And, because of rising costs, many businesses are cutting back drastically on their level of health care coverage or are doing away with it entirely.

Further, despite the fact that we spend almost twice as much per person on health care as any other country, our health care outcomes lag behind many other nations. We get poor value for what we spend. According to the World Health Organization the United States ranks 37th in terms of health system performance and we are far behind many other countries in terms of such important indices as infant mortality, life expectancy and preventable deaths.

Although there are probably good reasons to question Senator Sanders's numbers, and he is overtly incorrect about some of his suppositions (recent studies has shown fairly conclusively that Cancer victims live longer in America than in our neighbor to the North or our relatives int he UK, where National Health Insurance is indeed a right.)  However, even if we accept his premises, the article is disingenuous.  First, as is typical of most articles about the plans to reform our health care system, the issue is actually all about actually paying for the health care we receive.  There already exists universal access to health care.  No one, by statute, is turned away from an Emergency Room in this country.  Who pays for the care received is the issue.

After setting up his premise, that the "health care system is disintegrating" Senator Sanders trumps his nonsense with this:

As the health care debate heats up in Washington, we as a nation have to answer two very fundamental questions. First, should all Americans be entitled to health care as a right and not a privilege - which is the way every other major country treats health care and the way we respond to such other basic needs as education, police and fire protection? Second, if we are to provide quality health care to all, how do we accomplish that in the most cost-effective way possible?

I think the answer to the first question is pretty clear, and one of the reasons that Barack Obama was elected president. Most Americans do believe that all of us should have health care coverage, and that nobody should be left out of the system. The real debate is how we accomplish that goal in an affordable and sustainable way. In that regard, I think the evidence is overwhelming that we must end the private insurance company domination of health care in our country and move toward a publicly-funded, single-payer Medicare for All approach.

Sanders is at least more honest than those who profess to be in favor of preserving a private insurance option.

Our current private health insurance system is the most costly, wasteful, complicated and bureaucratic in the world. Its function is not to provide quality health care for all, but to make huge profits for those who own the companies. With thousands of different health benefit programs designed to maximize profits, private health insurance companies spend an incredible (30 percent) of each health care dollar on administration and billing, exorbitant CEO compensation packages, advertising, lobbying and campaign contributions. Public programs like Medicare, Medicaid and the VA are administered for far less.

I am thoroughly annoyed and disgusted at the outsized compensation packages of the Insurance company executives who were allowed to monopolize the field ever since Hillarycare set the stage for them in the1990s, but Sanders's comments are risible.  Is he actually claiming that Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA are more efficient in their approach to health care than private insurers?  If that is the case, perhaps he can explain why it is so hard for new patients to find Doctors that accept Medicare and Medicaid.  (The VA model, of hiring Physicians to work in VA facilities, may be  workable system but is not being suggested as a model for reform; further, the VA system has traditionally been staffed by those more comfortable seeing Medicine as a 9-5 job rather than a vocation.)

Ultimately, however, where the Sanders approach breaks down is in its misapplication of its title, the bait-and-switch whereby a right to health care becomes a right to have it paid for by others, with prices set by fiat rather than by the market.  It will be fascinating to watch how the debate takes form and as the provisions necessary to make health care a right collide with the reality of the cost of health care and people's right and responsibility for their own health care choices.  Increased coercion will almost certainly ensue.

Our "Borderline" Politics

American politics increasingly resembles nothing so much as the thinking and behavior of people characterized as having "Borderline Personality Disorder."   The sine qua non of the Borderline is encapsulated in the concept of "splitting" which is an unconscious process whereby people (objects) and concepts are divided into all-bad and all-good.  There is no nuance or complexity in splitting; it alleviates the tension of ambiguity and helps the troubled character make sense of their often inchoate yearnings and desires that are in conflict with the prohibitions of their own conscience or societal mores and laws.  It leads to unstable mood states and elevated levels of affectivity (highs and lows), unstable relationships (since a person can go from all-good to all-bad by virtue of the inevitable failures that occur in every relationship), and instability in their work life for many of the same reasons (with the addition of problems tolerating authority.)  Our politics are the politics of the Borderline.

[Please note that I am using BPD, a Psychiatric diagnosis, only as a model of functioning.  This is not meant as an actual diagnosis of any person or political party; it is meant as an additional explanation, along with all the other political, sociological, biological, etc, that attempt to explicate often inexplicable human behavior.]

[In diagnostic terms, splitting is usually thought of as a defense, though it is far more pervasive than what is usually thought of as a psychological defense.  Psychological Splitting has its roots in the earliest period of life (generally 12-18 months) when the child is developing "object constancy".  That is, the infant must take all of its disparate images (object representations) of the important people in its world, and fuse them into a single, complex object.  The "bad" withholding mother must be fused with the angry/loud mother with the loving/holding mother and the satiating/nursing mother to form one image that carries all the many meanings of mother.  Since self-representations emerge and form from a maternal-infant matrix, problems in the secure development of an infant's maternal object constancy lead to problems in the person's own inconsistent self-representations.  When, for reasons of constitution or early developmental vicissitudes or mother-infant dysfunction, the fused images of objects are insecurely integrated, the person then has a later tendency to regress to splitting under stress.  This leads to many of the related issues for the Borderline, which can include intermittent problems with reality testing, affective instability, and the frequent presence of "vertical splits in the ego."  The core defect in the Borderline is the existence of poorly integrated (ie, "split") self and object representations.

It is difficult to convey how pervasive this can be.  For the Borderline, distinct affective states (and the attendant, particluar split self- and object-  representations) are experienced as if they have no relation to previous or future affect states.  For example, a patient may be enraptured by an idealized other (boyfriend) but once disappointed, all the good feelings toward him dissipate and she now declares she "always knew" he was a loser but in the past "it didn't register" or she "didn't care."  On an emotional level, the boyfriend is a different person and so is the Borderline herself, who explicitily experiences herself as a different person.  Where once she was a femme fatale, now, having been disappointed, she is an eternal victim.]

A key point about the BPD is the persistence of "vertical splits in the ego."  As a patient once eloquently described this to me, she had always known one and one existed, but had never added one and one together before entering therapy.  For this particular patient, she had always known that her father was cold and occasionally overtly cruel, and had always known she chose to become involved with men who were sadistic in their relationships with her, but had never connected the two points even though in retrospect she could see how obvious the connection was.  For patients with the most severe problems in the BPD spectrum, they can develop overt learning disabilities that do not have the usual neurological substrate that we often expect with severe LD.  When obvious facts must be kept separate in the person's mind, the act of integrating data can be universally impaired.  The classic example is the patient who was physically abused as a child yet knows (because she was told throughout her childhood) that her mother only hit her because she loved her.  Being beaten for minimal provocation alternating with lavish overindulgence do not equate to being loved.  The only way the child can tolerate the contradiction is to avoid doing the summing.

The explicit failure to add one and one and get two perfuses our societal discourse.  We demand energy independence and CO2 neutral, green power, which does not yet exist and can not be scaled in the foreseeable future.  Those most vocal about the need for minimizing our Carbon footprints are often the most profligate in their use of energy.  At the same time the experience of the last 100 years should tell us that the best way to clean up the environment is to increase the level of wealth.  There is a clear arc of development that stars with cheap energy, wealth creation, and the formation of a threshold level of Middle Class which then demands that attention be paid to the environment and can afford to pay the cost of safe guarding the environment.  For that great majority of Americans who have no historical memory, the air and water is many times cleaner today than in the 1960s when the environmental movement began as a mass movement.  China today, while still an authoritarian country, is already in the early stages of the transition.  As the Chinese become wealthier (in part because they have had access to inexpensive energy) they initially sought development at the expense of the environment but are now beginning to make the turn toward more environmental consciousness.  Such a turn is inevitable and can only be truncated if we decide to impoverish us all by refusing to develop our own energy and imposing additional costs while empowering our enemies as a bonus.

Just as there is no ability to add one and one in regards to energy, the Health Care debate (what there is of it) suffers from the same shortcoming.  There is simply no way we can extend health care insurance coverage to everyone (including illegal aliens), while ignoring personal responsibility for one's health, and maintain high quality care for all without massive increases in costs.  There are not enough rich people to pay for everyone's health care and the outcome must be to cause us all to become poorer, which will cause all of the worst case scenarios that have already occurred in other nations that have tried to institute universal (free) health care.  We will have less Doctors, less good Doctors (as the best find other ways to make a living that is freer of bureaucratic interference and third party fee setting), more expenses, and rationing.  This is as sure as one plus one equals two, yet our political elite refuses to do the math and our MSM apparently cannot even recognize numbers anymore.

And this does not even include any discussion of the all-too-predictable "unexpected" consequences of the government nationalization of GM and Chrysler.  A hint, GM and Chrysler sales will crater and there will be no possibility of a return to profitability.  That is simple math, not prognostication.

Finally, with the North Koreans becoming ever more irrationally bellicose, we can see the outcome of appeasing bullies on an international scale.  When the most feral and brutal are treated as statesmen and when all the demands are placed on the civilized while no repercussions accompany rogue states' ill behavior, allies will tend to hunker down and belligerents will tend to become more belligerent.

Americans want peace and contentment so strongly that we are willing to refuse to notice one and one and when it does cross our threshold of awareness, we refuse to add the numbers.  When a Borderline patient meets reality, they suffer terribly, even as they make all around them miserable.  Therapy requires many years of consistent interpretations of reality.  The therapist must act as a stable object willing to tolerate the Borderline's rage and disappointment and continue to point out what needs to be pointed out.  A charismatic politician willing to risk defeat by constantly iterating the reality that we cannot continue to behave as if we can have something (everything) for nothing may well lose an election but if by chance he or she were to win, we could actually start dealing appropriately with reality once again.

A Thought Experiment

In a discussion with Dr. Sanity she helped crystallize an issue that lies at the core of the Middle East dilemma and simply stating the problem goes a long way toward underlining the absurdity of much of the discussion of the "Peace Process."  President Obama, who has pledged to listen and not to dictate terms tot he protagonists, has made his one specific policy the cessation of settlement activity by Israel.  This includes expansion of settlements, ie suburbs of Jerusalem, which Israel has no intention of giving back under any conceivable final settlement (short of the settlement most desired by the Arabs, ie the elimination of Israel.) 

Here is the conundrum:

Israel has a large minority population of Arabs who have full citizenship under Israeli law yet the Arab countries have become essentially Judenrein since the establishment of the state of Israel.  If a Palestinian state is established on the West bank and includes some current Israeli settlements, why must they be forced to leave rather than remain as citizens with full rights of the new state?

Do the thought experiment:  Imagine the fate of a small Jewish community incorporated as a part of a Palestinian state.

Merely to pose the question reveals its absurdity.  The Arab hatred of Jews is so robust and profound, nurtured for 3 generations, taught in their schools, daily promulgated in their media, that the idea of Jews living in safety and freedom surrounded by Arabs is risible.

The Arabs have demanded since 1948 that the Middle East be free of the taint of the Jew.  The Arabs continue to boycott Israel despite agreements to do otherwise; the boycott has persisted despite the ups and downs of the "Peace Process."  Despite President Obama's kind words and his adoption of the Arab perspective on the Middle East, the Saudis, our good friends, refuse to even consider opening an interest section in Tel Aviv.  The more honest among the Arab or Muslim World, such as Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, proudly announce their genocidal intention to destroy Israel and kill Jews, quoting approvingly from the Koranic verses purporting to prove that Allah hates the Jews and that even the trees and stones will turn on the Jews come the end times. 

It is reported with some frequency and without particular comment, as if so obvious that no comment is necessary or required, that Arabs routinely refuse to acknowledge Israelis (and sometimes non Israeli Jews, as well) at international forums and at incidental meetings.  Arab hatred of Jews is simply now assumed. 

Certainly there are exceptions in the Arab world, but that is what is so sad.  Arabs who do not hate Jews are a minority in the Middle East and in a sea of such hatred no Peace is possible.