ShrinkWrapped

Middle East Chimeras

Jeffrey Goldberg is the kind of reasonable liberal who does excellent work in illuminating the excesses of those who self identify as "liberal" but operationally behave as leftists.  For that reason, among others, he is a very good read, but his posts, as reasonable as they are, often contain a nugget of unreality that highlights the limitations of the liberal idea in the Middle East.  Consider On the Hitler-Loving-Mufti Photo:

Seth Lipsky thinks it's actually a good thing that Avigdor Lieberman is encouraging Israeli government officials to circulate a picture of Haj Amin el-Husseini, the late mufti of Jerusalem, palling around with Hitler in 1941. Lipsky laments that Lieberman's decision was greeted with ridicule inside Israel's own foreign ministry -- and by me, by the way -- but then cites a piece I wrote in 2008 to make a semi-reasonable sound argument that the mufti's ties to Nazi Germany actually had a pretty significant impact on the rampant anti-Semitism seen around the world today. It is true that the Mufti was a terrible genocidal Nazi; it's also true, however, that he's dead. In the interest of encouraging Palestinian moderates -- the sort of people who scare Lieberman the most -- I think it's not overly useful to equate the Palestinians of today with their long-gone leader. [Emphasis mine-SW]

Leaving aside the fact that the current Palestinians are spiritually indistinguishable from their predecessors, Jeffrey Goldberg makes the typical error of the well meaning liberal.  Liberals see the best in people at all times, even when the best does not appear obvious to any other observers.  For Jeffrey Goldberg and other liberals, it is an article of faith that Palestinian moderates exist.  I have a great deal of sympathy with this position, which I held for many years.  Tragically, this has proved to be an unwarranted assumption, for several reasons.

First, even those most often identified as Moderate by the MS, like Mahmoud Abbas, are hardly moderate in any conventional sense of the word.  They may be more realistic than the so-called radicals, that is they recognize that the Palestinians will be unable to destroy Israel int he foreseeable future, but they are no more willing to recognize a Jewish state than the worst of the radicals.  As Barry Rubin has pointed out, Palestinian Moderates Want Peace-With Hamas, Not Israel:

To see what’s happening—and what’s wrong—with Palestinian politics, consider Muhammad Dahlan. In him is embodied the ideological and strategic straitjacket, preventing Palestinians from making peace and getting a state of their own.

Dahlan, 48, is one of the two most able young Fatah leaders, the other being Marwan Barghouti. Dahlan, an architect of the first intifada in the late 1980s, became PLO and Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Yasir Arafat’s favorite proteges. A decade later, however, Dahlan broke with Arafat because he thought his boss was letting Hamas get too strong. If Arafat had heeded him, Fatah and the PA would be far better off today.

For many years, Dahlan was the key PA-Fatah “general” battling Hamas in the Gaza Strip. So when Hamas totally defeated Fatah in a 2007 coup and seized control there, Dahlan was responsible for the debacle. Now he’s back as special advisor to PA leader Mahmoud Abbas. 

Aside from his anti-Hamas credentials, Dahlan has been considered a relative moderate on the peace process. But what does this mean in practice? Dahlan told al-Sharq al-Awsat that the second (2000-2005) intifada and terrorism against Israeli civilians harmed Palestinian interests. His critique, though, was based not on moral considerations but because such acts hurt the Palestinian image and made Israel react more toughly. 

He also complains that the uprising lacked a clear goal. Yet Dahlan never defines what that objective should have been. Here’s the movement’s fatal flaw. Neither he nor the PA nor Fatah tell Palestinians to accept Israel’s existence and build their state alongside it in permanent peace. Such a notion is outside the actual Palestinian debate.

Next, Dahlan talks of his hatred for Hamas but not because it blocks any deal with Israel. He accuses Hama of murdering hundreds of Palestinians; being an Iranian tool, a gang that is building a radical Islamist state in Gaza. 

So what’s his solution? Merely that Hamas and the PA unite. Yet, given what Dahlan says about Hamas, what possible joint strategy and activities could such a coalition pursue?

Clearly, peace with Hamas is more important for Dahlan than peace with Israel. And make no mistake: these two alternatives are mutually exclusive.

This is a truism that should be obvious to all but those who are most insistent on the Fata Morgana of Palestinian Moderation.

Second, even if there are actual Palestinian Moderates who desire peaceful coexistence with a Jewish state, their influence is non-existent.  A Palestinian who speaks out in favor of coexistence is a soon-to-be-dead traitor.  For those who have not been paying attention, the Fatah run (Moderate) PA has made it a capital crime to sell land to a Jew, continues to foment the worst kinds of anti-Semitism in their media and schools, and celebrates those who murder Israeli women and children. 

For 20 years now we have been told repeatedly by our Diplomats and most of the MSM that there exist Moderate Palestinians, who if only empowered by Israeli concessions, would be willing and able to make peace.  Each Israeli concession has been met with increased attacks on Israel but this is ignored.  This suggests that those who insist upon the existence of a cohort of Palestinians in the conspicuous absence of any objective evidence must have their own psychological reasons for needing to believe in their existence. 

Obviously Jeffrey Goldberg is not a self hating Jew.  He is a strong supporter of Israel who does not automatically find fault with Israeli behavior while excusing the most noxious behavior form the Palestinians.  He implicitly believes that Jews are more ethical and moral than Palestinians (else why would he agree that a future Palestine must be Judenrien while being appalled at the notion that Israel should eject the Arabs within its midst?)  Yet despite that he continues to maintain the belief that if only Israel made enough concessions somehow the true, though hidden, peace loving Palestinians would appear and magically find it within themselves to accept their Jewish neighbors.  This is based on a wishful fantasy; sadly, there is nothing in reality that supports the notion that a sturdy enough cohort of Palestinians in favor of peaceful coexistence either exists or will be allowed to emerge, any time in the foreseeable future.

One Nuclear Bomb Can Ruin Your Whole Day

Back in what for most people is now known as ancient history, the disarmament movement used a number of  slogans (now known as "sound bites") to encapsulate their opposition to war and various and sundry other "bad things."  This post title was one of the slogans featured.  The slogan may need to be amended.

Consider the shape of our emerging foreign policy as articulated by Hillary Clinton and propounded by Tom Barnett:

The New Rules: Clinton's Blueprint for a Multi-Partner World

Last week's major policy address by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was as noteworthy for the strategic concepts she dismissed as for the ones she embraced. Clinton provided Americans with a strong sense of how she plans to conduct U.S. foreign policy: not merely as "the indispensable nation" that assumes international leadership, but rather as the global rule-set convener that aggressively builds partnerships across a strategic landscape pulsating with rising players -- both state-based and transnational.

In doing so, Secretary Clinton explicitly rejected the emerging -- and yet painfully antiquated -- conventional wisdom that portrays a world inevitably divided into antagonistic poles.

The shift in vision is both profound and important.

Following 9/11, the Bush-Cheney neocons accurately diagnosed a global architecture that needed dramatic restructuring, but they set about doing so with a strategic impatience that was startling. Hard-power wars were expected to trigger immediate regional transformation (i.e., southwest Asia), with follow-on nation-building a brief afterthought to be outsourced to government contractors. Worse, we did it all largely alone, drawing upon our demographically moribund -- and thus rapidly aging -- Western allies, while defending our "primacy" among the world's rising powers.

Why such unilateralism?

In the minds of the neocons, those rising powers were one day bound to fight us for influence and resources across the world's developing regions, essentially replaying the balance-of-power politics and colonial-era warfare of the late 19th century. In short, no "near-peer competitors" could be allowed, even as we sought to remake the world around them.

The result of such strategic hubris was predictable enough. America quickly became overextended and its citizenry exhausted. And in the subsequent disillusionment, we reflexively imagined ourselves to be reliving the past -- doomed to perpetual warfare.

Secretary Clinton is having none of that:

Our approach to foreign policy must reflect the world as it is, not as it used to be. It does not make sense to adapt a 19th century concert of powers, or a 20th century balance of power strategy. We cannot go back to Cold War containment or to unilateralism.

Today, we must acknowledge two inescapable facts that define our world:

First, no nation can meet the world's challenges alone. . . . Second, most nations worry about the same global threats. . . .

So these two facts demand a different global architecture -- one in which states have clear incentives to cooperate and live up to their responsibilities, as well as strong disincentives to sit on the sidelines or sow discord and division. . . .

And here's how we'll do it . . . We'll use our power to convene, our ability to connect countries around the world, and sound foreign policy strategies to create partnerships aimed at solving problems. We'll go beyond states to create opportunities for non-state actors and individuals to contribute to solutions. . . .

In short, we will lead by inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance away from a multi-polar world and toward a multi-partner world.

The outline here is correct.  We cannot expect to remain a hyper-power for long, and if nothing else, Iraq should have taught us that even a hyper-power, unless it is willing to act in ways which are no longer culturally tolerable, can never hope to impose its will upon other populations.  (At the same time I think Tom Barnett allows his antipathy to the Bush administration to color his perspective.  We went into Iraq with our old allies because those where the allies we had.  To paraphrase Secretary Rumsfeld, who was lambasted for telling the truth, "you go to war with the allies you have, not the allies you would like to have.")

Judah Grunstein added some texture to Tom Barnett's article:

The Three Layers of Obama's Foreign Policy

In preparation for a France 24 panel discussion program yesterday -- which unfortunately hasn't been put online yet (Note: Part I now available here, Part II here) -- I tried to dial in a bit more closely this idea of President Barack Obama's foreign policy so far representing a great deal of continuity with the final two years of the Bush administration. And what I came up with, and had the pleasure of discussing with some very insightful fellow panelists, was not so much an either/or comparison between the two, but rather a multi-layered model of Obama's foreign policy.

The surface layer is the much-vaunted Communicator-in-Chief who, through his extraordinary oratorical skills and personal history, has very distinctly changed the tone of American diplomacy and reversed negative global perceptions of the United States. As we agreed yesterday, this layer has had an immediate impact, in terms of global opinion, but also a long-term impact, because Obama directs it so often at the world's younger generation (the insistence on speeches at universities, for instance).

Beneath that surface layer, there is a more concrete policy layer. This is where there is a good deal of continuity with George W. Bush's "third term," for the reasons I discussed previously. This is a slower, less immediate track, with a short- to medium-term horizon.

Beneath that, however, is an even deeper, third layer, which I described yesterday as the "genetic code" of Obama's foreign policy, and functions as the long-term conceptual foundation from which it logically flows. For me, Hillary Clinton's speech to the CFR is the clearest expression of this vision. It involves both institutional transformation in terms of U.S. diplomacy, but also in terms of the global governance architecture. For me, it boils down to replacing the declinists' "multi-polar" world (terminology I've been guilty of using) with what Clinton dubbed the "multi-partner" world. Thomas P.M. Barnett examined why this is so significant in his recent WPR column.

It is an axiom of Psychoanalysis that when freely associating, two ideas that come up together are usually related.  I look upon my blog reading as a bit like free association and blogs are often constructed in such a way as to encourage more immediate, freer communications.  (Like all analogies this is quite limited, but gives a view of how I try to understand the various metacommunications that are inherent in the Weltanschauung I am constantly re-working.)  While reading two posts in succession (separated by brief announcement posts) from Michael Anissimov, my Psychoanalytic antennae lit up.

The first post concerned an outbreak of politically hostility and vitriol in the Transhumanist field.  The key point of Phil Bowermaster’s Response to Mike Treder is how quickly the discussion leads to regression:

One area where transhumanists consistently disappointment me is politics. We can talk about accelerating change and singularities and human enhancement and the possibilities are endless, but when the subject comes to politics, everyone seems to revert to one of a very small number of philosophical templates, most of them created in the 19th century or earlier. And for some reason those are inviolate.

But that’s not to say that technology has played no role in the recent evolution of political discourse. The rise of the blogosphere and sites like Daily Kos and Free Republic have established a new “accelerated” rhetorical framework for politics which now seems to be more or less universally applied. The basic assumption behind the framework is that there is Our Group and then there is the Other. Any ideas from the Other are subjected to a three-step analysis and response:

1. Hysteria / overreaction

2. Vilification

3. Condemnation

(See Kingraven, above.)

This process has worked great for the political blogs in drawing in huge masses of eager readers, mostly the same people who think they’re up to date on current events because they watch The Colbert Report or listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Personally, I’d like to see a group such as IEET take a different approach. Maybe they could look for some kind of, oh I don’t know, Middle Way that transcends opposites? Or maybe that’s too ambitious. To use Brian’s analogy, maybe they could at least come up with a middle way that transcends Pepsi and Coke? Frankly, I would expect that sort of thing to be more in line with their world view than all this (both figurative and now literal) fire and brimstone talk.

High stress, which occurs in disagreements when the opponents have a powerful  emotional investment in their arguments easily lead to regression, which long time readers of this blog appreciate.  This occurs even in a community that prides itself on its rationality.  Michael's follow on post was Chance of Nuclear War is Greater Than You Think: Stanford Engineer Makes Risk Analysis.  I thought the Engineer's (Stanford Professor Emeritus Martin Hellman) assumptions were so difficult to quantify as to leave his conclusion nearly worthless, but what I would take from the chain of associations in this post is that there is a powerful tendency to regress under stress, this tendency is being neglected by a foreign policy that imagines itself to be based on realism and rationality, and that the risk of a nuclear exchange is not nearly as small as one might wish.  And, please note that Professor Hellman pointedly omits the risk of terrorist bomb (or a terrorist state bomb.)

As David Foster notes, Deterrence is problematic when it comes to Iran.

I would add that a nuclear exchange, even the loss of one city to a terrorist nuclear weapon (and this is exponentially true of an actual, effective EMP attack) will lead to a regression to primitive thinking that could well risk the entirety of civilization.  Yet, even an unused Iranian bomb would almost certainly destroy Clinton/Obama's new multipolar concept.  (You cannot harness people's interests when they do not share any of your interests.  The Iranians do not play by our rule set and have little interest in stability; in fact, stability represents their death.) 

President Obama has not yet been truly tested, but that test is coming.

Willful Deafness

The Obama administration's diplomatic approach to Iran, Israel, and the greater Middle East is either brilliant in its subtlety or worse than foolishly tone deaf to its own implications. 

Michael Gerson, in the Washington Post notes that the Obama doctrine has nearly run its course and the end game is coming into focus:

Might we fall into a foreign policy trap?

Obama can engage only so much before he'll be forced to take action.

The Obama administration lacks a foreign policy ideology as a matter of ideology. Speaking recently at the Council on Foreign Relations, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted, "Rigid ideologies and old formulas don't apply." The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- tempered by pragmatism, proud of its ad hockery and willing to consider everything on a case-by-case basis.

But even lacking an ideology, the administration does have a doctrine.

The defining principle of President Obama's foreign policy is engagement with America's adversaries. Much of the president's public diplomacy has been designed to clear a path for such talks -- expressing respect for legitimate grievances, apologizing for past wrongs and offering dialogue without preconditions.

Six months on, how fares the Obama doctrine? Concerning North Korea and Iran, it is on its deathbed.

His conclusion?

The Obama administration's public campaign of engaging enemies is headed toward an entirely unintended consequence. Eventually it will raise expectations for action. As the extended hand is slapped again and again, the goals of North Korea and Iran will be fully revealed and the cost to American credibility will rise. Already the administration has given Iran a September deadline to respond to the offer of talks and has threatened "crippling action" if Iran achieves nuclear capabilities. Congress is preparing sanctions on Iranian refined petroleum, which would escalate tensions significantly

This is the paradox of the Obama doctrine. By attempting to engage North Korea and Iran so visibly, Obama is dramatically exposing the limits of engagement -- and building the case for confrontation.

Jennifer Rubin points out that Conflict Avoidance Is Not a Foreign Policy and the Obama administration's approach to foreign policy might be better described as a n affectation, an attitude, rather than a policy, but beyond the semantics, she notes that the approach fails to consider the point of view of our adversaries:

Obama’s foreign policy is hobbled by a fundamental misunderstanding of our adversaries and their goals and by the willingness to subsume American interests in order to avoid conflict. It is a formula destined to fail as it slowly dawns on the administration that our adversaries are not simply misunderstood but have interests antithetical to ours. And then, having discarded many instruments to manage conflicts (e.g., regime change, robust funding for national defense) and denigrated his country, Obama may find it all the more difficult to rally allies and address the real conflicts that cannot be wished — or talked — away.

Danielle Pletka helpfully advises that the Iranians appear to believe that they understand Obama quite well and are suitably comfortable with his approach:

Will the U.S. Tolerate a Nuclear Iran? Iran Certainly Thinks So

Hoagland went on to suggest that “Israeli politicians” were jumping to conclusions, unfairly portraying “Clinton’s remarks in Thailand as a weakening of the U.S. stance on Iran by suggesting that the Obama administration is looking at scenarios for living with a nuclear-armed Iran.” Not so, says Hoagland, who is a well-informed and thoughtful analyst.  The president “will not accept” a nuclear Iran.

I beg to differ, and hear that the administration has done just what those “Israeli politicians” suggest—begun to consider how to live with a nuclear Iran. But what does it matter what we in Washington hear? Let’s listen to the Iranians:  The hardline Kayhan editorialized earlier this week that “in her speech last week, Clinton accepted a hypothetically nuclear Iran and only tried to show that the threat of a nuclear Iran has been exaggerated and the classic doctrine of deterrence works with Iran as any other nuclear power . . . The key issue is that the statements of the U.S. Secretary of State are that the United States recognizing a nuclear Iran.”

Not surprisingly, the Iranian position has been little commented upon in the MSM.  If the comments in the Kayhan editorial have been noted in the State Department or the Oval Office, there is little evidence to attest to such.

I do not know if the Obama administration's approach is of such exquisite nuance and subtlety as to bring about a grand rapprochement in the Middle East, in which the Mullahs will put away their grand designs for Middle East hegemony, learn to live with Israel without the threat of mutual assured destruction hanging over both peoples, and will then rejoin the civilized world.  I have my doubts, primarily because the Obama approach is to offer platitudes while remaining deaf to the interests and desires of the audience. 

One defining aspect of Narcissism is the (unconscious) failure to grant agency to the object, which has value only in so far as it gratifies the Narcissist.  The Obama administration's foreign policy is analogous to this.  The Obama administration's desires that the world work the way they believe and wish it works is so powerful that the actions and words of those who orbit around them, are not even discounted, they are never even heard.

Time will tell if their view of the world has utility.  It is  a large bet and if they are wrong there will be a great many people who will pay the price of their deafness.

This is Priceless

First we had Barack Obama's admission in his press conference that he didn't know what was in the healthcare bill.  Then along came John Conyers' dismissive comments that no Congressman could be expected to read and understand what they are voting on.  The icing on the cake of political malpractice shows up today from a 2004 interview; Barack Obama and Randi Rhodes on the radio in 2004:

Obama 2004: Bush Rushed Legislation Through Congress Without Allowing Time to Read Or Debate

BARACK OBAMA: ...When you rush these budgets that are a foot high and nobody has any idea what's in them and nobody has read them.

RANDI RHODES: 14 pounds it was!

BARACK OBAMA:  Yeah. And it gets rushed through without any clear deliberation or debate then these kinds of things happen.  And I think that this is in some ways what happened to the Patriot Act. I mean you remember that there was no real debate about that. It was so quick after 9/11 that it was introduced that people felt very intimidated by the administration.

Here is the mp3 of the interview: Shocking Hypocrisy Audio found Obama didn't like it when Bush Rushed Through Legislation.  Pass it on.

It is impossible not to agree with Barack Obama 2004; when Congress doesn't know what it is voting on, our representative democracy is a sham.

No Time For Blogging Today

Work, work, work...

Willful Ignorance

The naive think that rational people should be able to incorporate new data to modify their beliefs.  For example, if you once believed that the moon is made of green cheese, you would have watched the first moon landing and concluded that you were wrong.  In reality, there were some who supposed the moon was covered with a layer of dust many feet deep; they saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and concluded their fears of astronaut engulfing dust were misguided (at least for that section of the moon.)  Learning from new data is an assumption.  Sadly, once ideas and beliefs have become cathected (an archaic word meaning that they have become invested with psychic energy, ie have become emotionally attached) the ability of reality to made any inroads into the beliefs is quite limited.

Some examples from today's news of long dead ideas that distort our polity:

1) Israeli intransigence prevents a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Barry Rubin describes the leadership of the "moderate' Fatah movement:

Fatah's power structure spells trouble for peace with Israel

With Fatah, ruler of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the PLO - in effect, Israel's Palestinian negotiating partner - planning to hold a rare congress to determine the group's future, it's a good time to examine its leadership, the Fatah Central Committee.

Two important facts leap out at you: the high degree of both age and intransigence among those who lead the Palestinian movement. A generational struggle cannot be postponed forever, but the younger cohort may be even more radical. Almost all the members have been on the committee for more than 20 years; the last one was added in 1995. All are over age 65.

Why are Fatah's leaders so rarely discussed? Because to do so immediately shows there isn't going to be any comprehensive peace agreement in this generation and that the designation of Fatah as "moderate" rests on a rather broad definition of that word.

PLO and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, 74 years old, is no dictator able to order around the other leaders. Even if he wanted to make a compromise deal - which he doesn't - he couldn't deliver his own purported followers, much less his Hamas rivals.

Read the whole thing and keep in mind that those who insist that if only Israel were to stop all settlement activity there would be an opening for Peace have never addressed the fact that Fatah's leadership, let alone Hamas or any of the various and sundry other "Resistance" groups, have ever accepted Israel's right to exist.  Barry Rubin concludes:

The end of Abbas's career is in sight. There is no conceivable consensus candidate to become head of Fatah, the PA, and/or the PLO. Equally, there's no leadership willing to make any comprehensive peace agreement with Israel. The Palestinian movement's troubles may get much worse.

How can such huge factors be ignored by those many people and governments in the West acting as if a quick resolution of the conflict is both possible and such a high priority?

This is not that difficult to understand.  A fair minded, rational person concerned with the Middle East can only conclude that there is nothing Israel (or the United States) can do to bring about Peace until the Arabs decide that Change is necessary for them.  Yet too many, including far too many among the Western elites, simply ignore such inconvenient truths as the belief structure of the Palestinian leadership.

2) Racism remains the biggest problem facing black Americans.

Last week President Obama bemoaned the racism inherent in the interaction between a Cambridge Policeman and a Harvard Professor, who happened to be black.  Shelby Steele in his comments Sunday, pointed out that this incident is a distraction.  Group identity and racism miss the point that the black community is failing, even with all the assistance that has been offered in the last 30 plus years.  At some point, surrendering one's victimhood is the only way to stop being a victim:

Today's "black" problem is underdevelopment, not discrimination. Success in modernity will demand profound cultural changes -- changes in child-rearing, a restoration of marriage and family, a focus on academic rigor, a greater appreciation of entrepreneurialism and an embrace of individual development as the best road to group development.

Whites are embarrassed to speak forthrightly about black underdevelopment, and blacks are too proud to openly explore it for all to see. So, by unspoken agreement, we discuss black underdevelopment in a language of discrimination and injustice. We rejoin the exhausted affirmative action debate as if it really mattered, and we do not acknowledge that this underdevelopment is primarily a black responsibility. And yet it is -- as historically unfair as it may be, as much as it seems to blame the victim. In human affairs we are responsible not just for our "just" fate, but also for our existential fate.

But continuing black underdevelopment will flush both races out of their postures and make most discussions of race in America, outside a context of development, irrelevant.

3) The cost of healthcare is spiraling out of control because of greedy Insurance companies and/or Doctors.

The healthcare discussion is a triumph of sloganeering over reality.  The president and liberal Democrats insist that "Health Care is in crisis" because the costs are rising so fast.  Further, they insist that increasing the availability of health insurance will solve the problem.  Even without the math, which doesn't add up, the arguments have missed the key problem with healthcare.  The cost of health care is increasing because too many of us are surviving illnesses that once would have killed us, and by living longer and healthier lives, we are costing much, much more money:

A Case of Getting What You Pay For
With Heart Attack Treatments, as Quality Rises, So Does Cost

In the 1960s, the chance of dying in the days immediately after a heart attack was 30 to 40 percent. In 1975, it was 27 percent. In 1984, it was 19 percent. In 1994, it was about 10 percent. Today, it's about 6 percent.

Over the same period, the charges for treating a heart attack marched steadily upward, from about $5,700 in 1977 to $54,400 in 2007 (without adjusting for inflation).

There is simply no getting away from the fact that if we wish to live longer, healthier lives than our ancestors, it costs money.  Those of us who wish to refuse emergency cardiac care would be saving us all a great deal of money, but few wish to volunteer for the sacrifice.  If we don't want to die prematurely, and the definition of premature death changes daily as Medical science comes up with new and expensive treatments to cure/manage once deadly diseases and disorders, than we have to pay for the care we want.

Unfortunately human beings are expert as devising ways to convince themselves that their failing ideas are true while dismissing all evidence to the contrary.  That is why people change very, very slowly, if at all.

Politicians and the "Sliding of Meaning"

Dr. X discusses the use of Linguistic Tells in Narcissism to discern the level of Narcissism in our politicians and offers a very useful caveat:

Mark Liberman at Language Log investigated recent claims that Barack Obama and Sarah Palin overuse first-person pronouns.  Using a counting script he developed, Liberman found that Obama used the word 'I' far less than George W. Bush did in a comparison of first inaugural addresses and first press conferences.  Comparing Sarah Palin's resignation speech with other major resignation and concession speeches, Liberman found only "equivocal" evidence for the claim of excessive first-person pronoun usage.

These erroneous claims about first-person pronoun usage were intended to support arguments that both politicians are unusually narcissistic, egocentric or excessively self-involved, but I am extremely skeptical of the notion that frequency of first-person pronoun use is anything more than a weak indicator of egocentricity.

There are a number of reasons such frequency usage is a misleading measure of Narcissism in politicians, not least that they so often have a carefully constructed, focus group approved, False Self that they present to the public.  Their responses to questions are often rehearsed and anything but spontaneous.  (It is possible that during rare moments of spontaneity their true self leaks through, but in general we are watching an act at most times with far too many politicians.)  The political False Self is seen most overtly when politicians believe they need to disguise their real (Narcissistic) or ideological interests from the public.  No politician is authentic enough to suggest that he really wants power because it is a deeply held desire to tell people what to do!

Dr. X then discusses a much greater danger from Political speech, a danger not confined to Narcissists:

These erroneous claims about first-person pronoun usage were intended to support arguments that both politicians are unusually narcissistic, egocentric or excessively self-involved, but I am extremely skeptical of the notion that frequency of first-person pronoun use is anything more than a weak indicator of egocentricity.  A far more interesting claim about the narcissist's use of language comes from Mardi Horowitz (1).

Horowitz says that narcissists rely on a defense he has termed "sliding of meanings."  Within the context of narcissism, sliding of meaning refers to defensive remolding of linguistic meaning to preserve the narcissist's primitive sense of perfection.  In layman's terms, the narcissist can never admit to being wrong or deficient in any significant way, so he or she plays weaselly games with words.

This defensive maneuver can be maddening for anyone dealing with a narcissist, but the narcissist doesn't slide meanings merely as a device to deceive others.  For the narcissist, sliding of meanings is a habitual form of self-deception.

Aside from the meaningless truism that most politicians have more than a surfeit of Narcissism, it is also a truism that all Politicians rely on "sliding of meaning" to obfuscate and hide unpalatable realities.  Few Politicians get re-elected promising that the voters will have to pay for all the things they want and expect from government.  However, once people catch on that the "sliding of meaning" has become so overt and egregious as to constitute what appears to be indistinguishable from lying, the Politician is in trouble.

President Obama is having more difficulty with this he had any reason to expect.  He has the talent for Florentine articulation that most successful Politicians need, in which the art of saying very little while speaking a great deal leaves the audience believing whatever they want most fervently to believe.  Obama's problem is that the usual Panglossian approach to politics practiced for the last three decades, where everything is offered to the voters, little is expected from them, and someone else always pays the bill, has broken down during a deep recession. 

Realty has finally caught up with our bubble economy and it is Barack Obama's great misfortune, and the source of his great bewilderment, to be President just when the government's ability to continue to be the great cornucopia of our desires is no longer believable to a growing number of Americans, who suddenly have to pay their bills and do not think they can pay everyone else's bills at the same time.  It is a cruel irony that the most liberal President since Jimmy Carter has a nation which can no longer afford him.

On Demographics: Part II

Resilient Communities

The two greatest engines of change in the next decades will involve improvements in the health and longevity of human beings (Resilient Humans) and the development and increasing robustness of the local environment (Resilient Communities). 

John Robb writes about the dangers that Globalization engenders in our increasingly connected world.  He is, in some ways, the mirror image of Tom Barnett.  However, his discussions of Resilient Communities as a response to, and protection from, the inevitable dangers of increased connectivity, is worth exploring.  In John Robb's conception, a Resilient Community is one where the people can survive and thrive even in the face of major disruptions in its connectivity.  Imagine a successful terrorist attack in which the electric grid is damaged or rendered useless for two weeks.  Few communities have food and water reserves that can last for that long and far too few people have two weeks worth of provisions on their property.  Here is the interesting point: John Robb and Tom Barnett are both correct.  Increased connectivity and increased community resilience are going to continue to co-evolve and the results will prove to be fascinating.  The future will be forced by developing technologies and cost-benefit/risk-benefit calculations that will all point in the same direction.

We are entering a period of time when most of the things that we depend on are becoming more expensive.  The cost of energy is escalating, even with the current temporary decrease in gasoline prices;  while free markets could well prove to manage the price of energy without marked increases even in the face of peak oil (which is a theory, not a fact), the point is that we do not have free markets in energy production in the West.  Our layers of regulation, based on the fear of environmental catastrophe (a nuclear "China Syndrome", Anthropomorphic Global warming, etc) and the NIMBY mentality means that even if the political environment were to change markedly, it would still take years to ramp up production adequately to force the price to do much more than moderate its inexorable increase; the era of cheap energy is over.  The down stream effects mean that everything that needs to be moved from one area to another will become more expensive with time.  One answer lies in the possibility of mini-nuclear reactors:

Commercial Shipping Uses 9% of world oil and is Major Air Pollution Source

Factory mass produced small nuclear reactors like the one being developed by Hyperion Power Generation or variants of the pebble bed reactor being made in China or new liquid flouride thorium reactor proposals would all work for total nuclearizing commercial shipping. There would also be the benefit that the ships would need to rarely stop for refueling and in general could operate at faster speed.

While the article is focused on the costs of shipping, the possibility of using mini nuclear reactors (MNRs) to supply electricity to communities has already been broached (and China is moving toward full scale production of such MNRs.)  Even if the United States refuses to move into large scale use of MNRs, other nations will have to use them to generate more and more of their energy.  They will have very little choice in the matter since petroleum is not getting cheaper any time soon.  But, in fact, there may well be an alternative to MNRs in your back yard.

Analyst: Solar approaching grid parity in U.S

By 2015, two-thirds of the U.S. will have achieved grid parity, the point at which electricity generated from photovoltaics is equal in cost or less expensive than grid power, an analyst said Monday (July 13). At that point, solar power will be no more than 5 cents per kilowatt hour more expensive than grid power for 99 percent of the country, according to Travis Bradford, founder and president of the non-profit research group The Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development.

So far, the environmental lawyers have not yet found a way to attack Solar Power and as time goes on the logic of using solar power for very local power and a means to become partially independent from the grid will become compelling.  The idea that we are going to decide to upgrade our electrical system to a "Smart Grid" is a chimera.  It will cost (see NPR) somewhere between $100 billion to $2 trillion (and maybe more once the government and the lawyers get involved), and there is no possibility of such a large scale  infrastructure development taking place in the foreseeable future.  In addition, it may well prove to be obsolete even before it is started.  Once a significant portion of our electric power comes from local sources (our homes, cars, MNRs) with any excess being sold back to the grid, the next logical step will be to increase manufacturing and farming on a local basis; from John Robb's Global Guerrillas:

JOURNAL: The Switch to Local Manufacturing

Here's a think piece that you may find of value:

It is likely that by 2025, the majority of the "consumer" goods you purchase/acquire, will be manufactured locally.  However, this doesn't likely mean what you think it means.  The process will look like this:

...

Local fabrication will get cheap and easy.  The cost of machines that can print, lathe, etch, cut materials to produce three dimensional products will drop to affordable levels (including consumer level versions).  This sector is about to pass out of its "home brew computer club phase" and rocket to global acceptance.

By all means read the entire post and keep in mind that although he may have some of the details wrong, even if the price of raw materials, labor, and transportation remain low, the logic of home based desktop fabrication is unassailable.  Having a fabricator at home that can produce goods on demand for negligible prices means that for all but the most intelligence intensive products (those with the highest degree of complexity) it will be cheaper to have it made at home than going out to buy something made by someone on the other side of the world.  Please note that the first generation of desktop fabricators, still basically novelties, are already available.  Adding powder and getting a  dinner plate may not be very exciting, but such fabricators will almost certainly follow their own version of Moore's Law, which suggests most of us will be fabricating simple products within the next 10 years.  In addition, desktop printers that can produce cheap high tech electronics and biologicals are already in the works.

Food production may follow.  I doubt local farming of more than a small percentage of our food is likely except under certain circumstances.  For example, an electricity outage and failure of the transportation system of two to three weeks duration in a large section of the country (think Katrina times 10 or an EMP) could lead to food shortages rather quickly.  The lesson of such an event would encourage interest in and development of local farming.  Proof of concept for city (vertical) farming already exists, and suburban and rural farming would be a matter of simply scaling up.  Short of actual food shortages, such developments seem unnecessary and unlikely, but the option will be there if needed.  Upscale communities are likely to indulge in local farming if the quality trumps imported food.

[It is possible that a high budget Hollywood production depicting a post-EMP Dystopia could move a significant number of people toward local farming.  The recession has already had some effects in that direction, as well.]

Once energy, material, and, possibly, food production have become local, entire communities will be more robust, more self sufficient, and more able to sustain themselves in the face of large scale disruptions.  They will be Resilient in ways not seen in 100-200 years but with the advantage of high technology that would be indistinguishable from magic to our ancestors.

Such communities will develop their own trading patterns with other communities, facilitated by an internet vastly more robust and sophisticated than our current version.  Local wireless nets would connect through fiber and wireless to the larger internet; the local net would be able to survive a disastrous failure of the global network and would have firewalls in place to protect the local net from malicious software.  Each community would have their own defenders.

Beyond the logic of price there are additional factors which favor the development of Resilient Communities and this has everything to do with the coming acceleration of the development of Resilient Humans.  It is also important to understand that these developments, as all technological advances are wont to do, will occur first in certain wealthy communities, a point I will expand upon in the next post.

Brief Responses

I do not have the time today for a long post but wanted to address a few questions that have come up recently.

First, in response to my post on Paradigm Shifts, I wanted to thank Eric Gisin for reminding me of Mimsy Were the Borogoves, a delightful and thought provoking short story that has lingered in my memory for a good many years. 

In response to Gloria's question concerning my focus on robotics, my response is two-fold.  First,  no single teacher can perform the kind of teaching job that Middle Ages tutors could offer wealthy aristocrats' children, that is, there is simply too much and too complicated a mix of information that should be conveyed to the youngster that a single teacher (in a home school environment, for example) could never hope to do the job adequately.  Second, with the collapse (in slow motion but ongoing nonetheless) of our traditional models of schooling, only a robotic (or web based) software construct could learn the individual child's learning style, adapt to it, and help the child learn what the he needs and wants to know.  There is no way to offer this kind of individualized instruction to more than handful of students at a time without resorting to software to multiply the effects.  My use of the term "robotics" is as a shorthand and actually covers any software based agent, ie non-human, that interacts with the child or facilitates human to human interaction.

An upcoming post on Demographics will more directly address the devolution of our educational system and the implications of such a change.

In response to my first post On Demographics: Part I, Gary and Tom are both partially correct.  In the short to middle term, getting to space is so costly that the possibility of large numbers of people living off planet is minimal.  However, the technology already exists to bring the price down significantly and with further development of nanotechnology, the price of getting into space should eventually be low enough for large numbers to begun to emigrate.  Unfortunately, even the best case scenarios suggest that large scale emigration to space is at least 50 years off, if not more likely 100 years.  On the other hand, the carrying capacity of the Earth is far higher than most people, unwittingly under thrall to radical environmentalism, actually recognize.  Past a certain level of development, more technology does not translate to a despoiled environment.  For example, America has far more forest today than when the first settlers arrived.  It is possible, and indeed likely, that a far higher population can live with a far smaller environmental foot print (not just Carbon, but in every way) as new technological developments  come on line.  This will be a secondary subject of a future post in the series On Demographics.

Finally, the future will indeed belong, in part, to the most highly fecund, though precisely who those people are will be determinative.  Further, such development will be much more complex than one might imagine and will not be without surprises.  This, too, will be addressed in some detail in a future post.

In the meantime, for a succinct look at the disaster of Healthcare reform and the arrogance that is fueling the process, make sure you read John Stossels' article today on Arrogance.  It is a must-read.

On Demographics: Part I

Is Demography Destiny?

Mark Steyn and John Derbyshire had a brief discussion of Demography over the last few days.

Mark Steyn:

No Future

The "alarmism" of my book seems to be going mainstream. Newsweek's economics editor Daniel Gross belatedly joins the demographic deathwatch on Japan:

...

The transformation of developed societies — either into old folks' homes (like Japan) or semi-Islamized dystopias (like Amsterdam, Brussels, etc) — will lead, in fact, to emigration. A young German or Japanese circa 2040 will have no reason whatsoever to stay in his native land and have most of his income confiscated in a vain attempt to prop up an unsustainable geriatric welfare system. So many will leave. Where will they go? At one time the obvious answer would have been America — but Good King Barack seems determined to saddle us with the same unaffordable entitlements that have scuttled the rest of the west.

For much of the developed world, the "credit crunch," the debt burden, and the rest are not part of a cyclical economic downturn but the first manifestations of an existential crisis.

In response, John Derbyshire:

Gerontocracy, Idiocracy, and the Coming Japanese Century

I'm no more thrilled than you are by the prospect of a geezer-heavy population. It's inevitable, though, so the sensible course of action would be to start thinking really hard of ways we might science ourselves out of the associated problems.

I'll qualify that "inevitable." There are actually two futures for the human population of Earth over the next century or so: (1) a big die-off, or (2) geezerization. There is obviously — inevitably! — some upper limit to the number of people our planet can support, so at some point the population has to stop growing. You can have an argument about where in time that point is located — past, present, or future (me: past) — but you can't argue that the point exists. Not many things are inevitable, but this one is.

...

When the human race comes to a bridge like this, the first nation to figure out a way across the bridge gets a huge head start on the rest. Britain was the first nation to transition from agricultural to industrial society, and she dominated the world for a century afterwards. Whichever nation can first figure out a way through the Great Demographic Transition will likewise be at an advantage. Japan, with one foot already on the bridge, has an excellent shot at being that nation. Then the 22nd century will be the Japanese Century.

Of course — and as you say in your book — the thing we should worry about is not so much demographic decline overall as differential demographic decline, with more-civilized nations aging and dwindling ahead of less-civilized ones. A related problem is the differential demographic decline within civilized nations.

There is no doubt that the most successful societies (in terms of the most modern and innovative) have apparently chosen to commit demographic suicide.  Modern, secular, liberal democracies are filled with highly educated people who do not value their own culture and are not reproducing.  The two options posited by John Derbyshire, of "a big die-off" or "geezerization", are certainly possible future scenarios for the West.  It is likely that the wealthy will be even more outnumbered by the impoverished (and I use that term in a broad sense that includes material wealth as a minor factor and cultural wealth as the primary determinant) as time goes by. 

There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that a significant majority of people from Gap societies, and more problematically a significant percentage of their offspring, are ill equipped to become productive members of modern societies.  Uneducated poor from rural Mexico, Pakistan, or Algeria can learn English or French, can learn to use a cash register, but far too few have the wherewithal to become generative members of a modern society.  (Please note, I am not ascribing this to a lack of intellectual abilities or cultural aspects or any other particular cause, simply stating a cruel fact; as an example, the percentage of fourth generation Mexican Americans who go to college has been dropping in the recent past, falling from already very low levels.  If education is the key to entering a modern society, this group is failing.)  It is for these reasons that people like Mark Steyn are pessimistic about the future of the West.  When Europe and Japan are no longer reproducing themselves, they are faced with the bleak prospect of either growing old and feeble or importing multitudes of young people from societies that have traditionally not integrated well into the European culture.  Worse, significant second and third generation immigrant cohorts often regress in their assimilation.  Simple extrapolation suggests that the crisis is coming.

However, both Mark Steyn and John Derbyshire may be limited by the fallacy of extrapolation.  The future will not look like the present and our technology may well be transformative in ways which intersect with our demographic crisis in surprising ways.  

In the coming days, I would like to suggest some alternate scenarios that are at least as possible as the bleak futures outlined above but will require the liberation of our imaginations and heightened innovation (both trends which are diminished in statist economies.)