Back of the Envelope

This was originally posted at 4:03 pm on Dec 24, 2004. I'm reposting it, and deleting the original post, in order to eliminate the trackback spamming this post routinely receives.

"I thought that, in today's column, I would heal the nation." And that's what Dave Barry sets out to do, with such beautiful words, too:

As Americans, we need to stay here in America and work things out, because regardless of what color or hue of state we live in, we are all, deep down inside our undershorts, Americans. And as Americans, we must ask ourselves: Are we really so different? Must we stereotype those who disagree with us? Do we truly believe that ALL red-state residents are ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying roadkill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks; or that ALL blue-state residents are godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts?

Yes. This is called ''diversity,'' and it is why we are such a great nation — a nation that has given the world both nuclear weapons AND SpongeBob Squarepants.

Read the whole thing.

I found this article by Jeffrey Friedman in NRO to be incredibly interesting, partly because it touches on one of my pet peeves. Here's an excerpt before I add my two cents:

At the end of the 19th century, growing government power placed more and more complicated questions, such as those raised by economic regulation, onto the political agenda. This required the electorate to master more and more information in order to vote intelligently. Not coincidentally, at the same time the overtly partisan newspapers of the 19th century were replaced by media that, following the lead of the New York Times, prided themselves on being fair to all "legitimate" points of view. The new, nonpartisan media assured conscientious voters that they could understand the complexities of modern politics by trusting journalists to present, as part of "all the news that's fit to print," both (1) a balanced account of various partisan arguments, and (2) an objective account of "the facts," which would allow voters to decide which partisan claims are correct.

The main problem with this model of journalism is not, as Okrent seems to think, whether it leans too heavily toward (1) balancing opinions instead of (2) presenting an objective account of "undeniable" facts. The real difficulty is that neither a true balance of opinions nor an objective reporting of facts is likely if politics is complicated. But the reason people feel the need to turn to "nonpartisan" journalists to help sort out political issues is precisely that-especially since the advent of big government-politics is very complicated indeed.

The new model of journalism solved the problem of complexity only in the sense of wishing it away. The facts about the problems modern governments try to solve would have to be pretty simple if the journalist could make sense of them without himself needing to be an expert. But if the political world that simple, readers would need journalists to sort it out just as little as Okrent thinks journalists need experts. Okrent's "just the facts, ma'am" approach is based on the same wishful thinking that stood behind the new model of journalism.

In the new model of journalism, reporters need to put their views into the mouths of experts so they can appear to be taking adequate account of the world's complexity. But the unspoken assumption behind the media's complacent invocation of expertise is, in reality, that the facts of the political world, when not immediately plain to the reporter, are at least clear to people who make a career of studying them: people who are "experts." These specialists need only relay their "findings" to the journalist--who, in turn, needs only report them to the public--for the public to gain a clear understanding of the world.

In a world that straightforward, honest experts wouldn't disagree with each other-which Okrent appears to think is the case. The truth, of course, is that honest experts disagree with each other all the time-which calls into doubt the expertise of some or all of them. When two people disagree, at least one of them must be wrong.

Honest experts' disagreements are rooted in the very thing to which the new model of journalism pays only lip service: the difficulty of making sense of the modern world. In the face of the world's complexity, the interpretation offered by a given expert will tend to reflect his theoretical — including ideological — assumptions as much as, or more than, it springs from his direct contact with "undeniable truths."

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people state opinions as facts, something which is particularly dangerous when an expert is talking to a non-expert. Experts often do this when talking to each other, but when talking to other experts who know the material and are adept at separating fact from opinion, it isn't all that dangerous. It's part of the background noise, and you take it into account when weighing what the other person has to say.

Among scientists, it's even easier, since scientific papers are usually divided between the experimental data and the analysis. The data should be accurate as a matter of scientific ethics--people who falsify their data are obviously not honest experts--but the analysis can invoke a great deal of opinion. Often, it's a non-controversial opinion: you apply the standard scientific model and you come up with this explanation for the data. But other times it can be very controversial, especially when your analysis shows problems with the standard model. Guess which papers make the mainstream media.

When experts, scientific or political, talk to non-experts, such as journalists, they are rarely careful to separate the data from the analysis, and even less careful when it comes to saying "This method of analysis is pretty standard and non-controversial, but that one is where we substitute our brand-new and, for the most part, untested, model." That is where the conflation of fact and opinion are most dangerous, and it's something I try to be careful of. (I'm not an expert on most of the things that I write about, but I do have a Ph.D., so there are some things I could get away with calling myself an "expert" on.) I'd ask that all experts, as a matter of principle, be likewise careful.

Steven Vincent has some discouraging words from Iraqis. For example:

She was a Sunni Muslim, an attractive, thirty-something writer, one of the few women I met who eschewed a scarf in public. And she was overjoyed at the demise of Saddam. "I am so happy! Freedom at last! The world is open to me now!" she exclaimed during a small social function at an art gallery in Karada. "Can you recommend some American magazines I might send my writing to?"

I promised I'd draw up a list of suitable periodicals, then added — carelessly, for this was my first trip to Iraq — "You must not mind seeing American soldiers on the streets."

The woman's smile vanished. Her brow darkened and she shook her head. "Oh, no. I hate the soldiers. I hate them so much I fantasize about taking a gun and shooting one dead."

Stunned by her vehemence, "But American soldiers are responsible for your freedom!" I replied.

"I know," the woman snarled. "And you can't imagine how humiliated that makes me feel."

As Vincent observes, this attitude is much more common among the Sunnis than the Shi'ites or the Kurds:

After more than eighteen months of fighting in Iraq, there seems to be no means of dealing with this insurrection. The Kurds and the Shia (renegade cleric Moqtada al-Sadr notwithstanding) have shown a willingness to negotiate over the future of Iraq — why not the Sunnis? What do they hope to gain from their "guerrilla" war against the U.S. and against the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi? More important, what factors in the Arab Iraqi character lie behind Sunni opposition to a democratic Iraq, and why can't American politicians, military personnel and members of the media seem to understand them?

This is discouraging, but there's one thing to remember. We don't need the Sunnis to rebuild Iraq, and they know this. If they don't participate in the reconstruction, they run the risk of being sidelined, and being forever the powerless fringe of Iraqi politics. And they don't want that any more than we do. I think once it becomes clear that they can't beat us, they will, for the most part, join us.

Victor Davis Hanson has some interesting thoughts on the need for the left to rethink its foreign policy:

There is much talk of post-election reorganization and rethinking among demoralized liberals, especially in matters of foreign policy. They could start by accepting that the demise of many of their cherished beliefs and institutions was not the fault of others. More often, the problems are fundamental flaws in their own thinking — such as the ends of good intentions justifying the means of expediency and untruth, and forced equality being a higher moral good than individual liberty and freedom. Whether we call such notions "political correctness" or "progressivism," the practice of privileging race, class, and gender over basic ethical considerations has earned the moralists of the Left not merely hypocrisy, but virtual incoherence.

Democratic leaders are never going to be trusted in matters of foreign policy unless they can convince Americans that they once more believe in American exceptionalism and are the proper co-custodians of values such as freedom and individual liberty. If in the 1950s rightists were criticized as cynical Cold Warriors who never met a right-wing thug they wouldn't support, as long as he mouthed a few anti-Soviet platitudes, then in the last two decades almost any thug from Latin America to the Middle East who professed concern for "the people" — from Castro and the Noriega Brothers to Yasser Arafat and the Iranian mullahs — was likely to earn a pass from the American and European cultural elite and media. To regain credibility, the Left must start to apply the same standard of moral outrage to a number of its favorite causes that it does to the United States government, the corporations, and the Christian Right. Here are a few places to start.

Read the whole thing.

James Taranto uses a new word in his Best of the Web piece on Thursday. I don't know whether he's coined it, or whether it comes from someplace else. The word is RABIN, which he applies to Zell Miller, which means: "Republican all but in name, the opposite of a RINO."

Also see what James has to say about the Democratic attitude towards Blacks.

Doc Rampage has some thoughts on the British approach to home burglary and terrorism:

Perhaps this tendency toward actively passive behavior (also known as "cowardice") is partly genetic. If so, there have been powerful environmental influences to make it a common trait and such a genetic trait would help to explain the European/leftist approach to terrorism. They are in many ways mimicking a helpless homeowner confronted by a cruel and brutal foe. They speak bravely when they think the foe cannot hear. They cower in silence when the foe is threatening them. They give the foe whatever he wants and avoid even criticizing him. They tell themselves they deserve the abuse to make it easier to take and to excuse themselves from self defense. They take the part of the foe against their neighbors, terrified that if the neighbors are not passive enough, the foe will be angry at all of them. They make cowardice a virtue and courage a vice. No matter what successes their neighbors have in attacking the foe, they only fear that it will make the foe more angry.

It seems not to matter whether you are a householder in a small village or a nation on the world stage. Some of your neighbors will want to band together for self defense, and other neighbors will want to submissively give up their wealth and women (as in allowing Muslim immigrants to abuse women) to appease the attacker. And when the courageous men of the village actually fight back, the cowards will hate them for it.

This is not an encouraging way of looking at things, but it may be accurate. Read the whole thing.

There's an interesting article on the power of freedom by Sharansky and Dermer at the National Review Online:

Had Reagan and Jackson listened to their critics, who called them dangerous warmongers, I am convinced that hundreds of millions of people would still be living under totalitarian rule. Instead, they ignored the critics and doggedly pursued an activist policy that linked the Soviet Union's international standing to the regime's treatment of its own people.

The logic of linkage was simple. The Soviets needed things from the West — legitimacy, economic benefits, technology, etc. To get them, leaders like Reagan and Jackson demanded that the Soviets change their behavior toward their own people. For all it simplicity, this was nothing less than a revolution in diplomatic thinking. Whereas statesmen before them had tried to link their countries' foreign policies to a rival regime's international conduct, Jackson and Reagan would link America's policies to the Soviet's domestic conduct.

In pursing this linkage, Jackson, Reagan, and those who supported them found the Achilles heel of their enemies. Beset on the inside by dissidents demanding the regime live up to its international commitments and pressed on the outside by leaders willing to link their diplomacy to internal Soviet changes, Soviet leaders were forced to lower their arms. The spark of freedom that was unleashed spread like a brushfire to burn down an empire. As a dumbfounded West watched in awe, the people of the East taught them a lesson in the power of freedom.

Dazzled by success, policymakers in the West quickly forgot what had provided the basis for it. Astonishingly, the lessons of the West's spectacular victory in which an empire crumbled without a shot fired or a missile launched were neglected. More than fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the free world continues to underestimate the universal appeal of its own ideas. Rather than place its faith in the power of freedom to rapidly transform authoritarian states, it is eager once again to achieve "peaceful coexistence" and "détente" with dictatorial regimes.

I, too, think freedom is a powerful thing, and I'm hoping it spreads. Today, Ukraine. Tomorrow, Iran. And from there to North Korea, China, and the rest of the world.

You know, I sometimes think that journalists think they have more legal standing than they really do. Jonah Goldberg agrees:

The commentary about this affair is focused on whether or not journalists should report what they know about a crime. After all, knowingly endangering a CIA agent's identity is, and should be, a serious offense. If a plumber witnesses a crime, he has to say what he saw or he goes to jail. But not journalists. Indeed, Michael Kinsley recounts an illuminating story. "A very distinguished New York Times writer" once told Kinsley that "if the Times ballet critic, heading home after assessing the day's offerings of pliés and glissades, happens to witness a murder on her way to the Times Square subway, she has a First Amendment right and obligation to refuse to testify about what she saw." Why? Because she's a journalist!

But in all of this debate, what people seem to be overlooking is that journalists aren't always analogous to witnesses to crimes. Sometimes they're accomplices. Imagine that a vindictive government official wants to embarrass an opponent by leaking his tax returns. He steals them from confidential files and meets a reporter from the Times in a back alley. The reporter publishes them. It seems to me the reporter isn't a witness, he's an accessory. If it makes it easier to understand the point, imagine instead of tax returns it's plans for a cheap nuclear weapon al Qaeda could make.

Obviously, there's a real, longstanding tension here; journalists do need some wiggle-room. But keep in mind, the Plame case isn't about a whistleblower. It's allegedly about a government official (or officials) abusing their authority. These journalists aren't exposing wrongdoing; they're concealing it.

As usual, read the whole thing.

This is the sort of thing that would go unnoticed without blogs, yet is of grave importance. Here it is, as reported by the Grand Forks Herald, in October, and apparently nowhere else in the US (via Hugh Hewitt and Captain's Quarters):

Four times in recent months, Dutch doctors have pumped lethal doses of drugs into newborns they believe are terminally ill, setting off a new phase in a growing European debate over when, if ever, it's acceptable to hasten death for the critically ill.

Few details of the four newborns' deaths have been made public. Official investigations have found that the doctors made appropriate and professional decisions under an experimental policy allowing child euthanasia that's known as the Groningen University Hospital protocol.

But the children's deaths, and the possibility that the protocol will become standard practice throughout the Netherlands, have sparked heated discussion about whether the idea of assisting adults who seek to die should ever be applied to children and others who are incapable of making, or understanding, such a request.
...
Under the Groningen protocol, if doctors at the hospital think a child is suffering unbearably from a terminal condition, they have the authority to end the child's life. The protocol is likely to be used primarily for newborns, but it covers any child up to age 12.
...
A parent's role is limited under the protocol. While experts and critics familiar with the policy said a parent's wishes to let a child live or die naturally most likely would be considered, they note that the decision must be professional, so rests with doctors.

The protocol was written by hospital doctors and officials, with help from Dutch prosecutors. It's being studied by lawmakers as potential law.

To say that this is morally abhorrent is an understatement. It is murder sanctioned by the state. An argument can be made that one should not take extraordinary measures to keep someone who is terminally ill alive if he does not wish it, but killing those who have no choice in the matter is obscene. I think this sort of thinking comes from a natural progression which begins with accepting abortion and euthanasia as uncontroversial. Thankfully, we have not reached that point yet in this country.

Since I'm a (mostly) Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, I don't belong to a Designated Victim Group. Usually I find the victim culture so popular in America amusing, but when it becomes a deterrent to preventing terrorist attacks, it is literally a menace to society. Heather MacDonald takes a close look at those Muslims who have suffered the depradations of the federal government:

So who are the victims of this "heightened climate of suspicion" that Swiss-born director Rossier offers his viewers? Well, there's Ali, a young man in the computer business whom the FBI interviewed after 9/11 on the basis of a tip. Like all of the men featured in the film, we don't learn why the FBI was interested in Ali. Ali does acknowledge, however, eclectic web-surfing habits. Does he frequent jihadist websites? Rossier doesn't bother to ask.

Four months after the Bureau interview, Ali lost his job — a common occurrence in the computer industry, all the more so in the post-9/11 downturn. We are to suspect, however, that his employer retaliated against him for the FBI's brief interest, even though Brothers and Others provides nothing to back up that innuendo.

The FBI quickly cleared Ali, and he has not heard from them again. That's it. End of story. But on the basis of such minimal government action, Ali dons full victim status. "I don't have any rights," he whines, though nothing the government did to him came even close to infringing on his civil liberties (since it may ask an individual for a non-custodial interview without crossing any constitutional tripwires). Ali also claims that he has been censored, and the filmmaker obligingly poses him skimming a book about censorship.

Of course, there are those who have a more legitimate grievance, including illegal aliens who were detained while being investigated, to which MacDonald responds:

The Iranian Ali and the Pakistani store owner [discussed earlier in the article] can qualify as targets of racist government power only if one posits that immigration enforcement is per se racist. And that isexactly what the film posits. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, an advocacy group, tells the camera: "It is wrong to arrest people for visa violations; it violates the Constitution."

The only thing remarkable about this statement is its clarity; the sentiment, however, animates most attacks on the government's post-9/11 terrorism investigations. Behind much criticism of the domestic war on terror lies the unstated premise that the government has no right to enforce immigration laws, and that any effort to do so is discriminatory.

These are all very telling observations. My favorite statement of the article is "Given the fact that Osama bin Laden has yet to invite Jews or Christians to join his jihad against America, however, it is unavoidable that an investigation of Islamic terrorism will have Muslims for its subject." As they say, read the whole thing.

The only thing more fun than watching Democrats mercilessly attack the alien and dangerous "moral values voters," is watching them scramble to win over those alien and dangerous moral values voters. For the most part, the Democrats figure they have two years before they need the votes of these people, so only the long-term thinkers like Hillary Clinton are claiming to be born-again evangelicals while the others are letting off steam with vicious name-calling. Things are different in Louisiana, which has open primaries. What that means is that in the Nov. 2nd election, it was not one Republican against one Democrat, but every Republican candidate versus every Democratic candidate, and all the third party candidates as well. If no one wins a straight majority in the general election, there's a run-off election between the top two candidates. This means that there are still races to be won in Louisiana, and so the Democrats have caught the moral values bug early here. The three races are a State Senate race, and two US House of Representatives race.

Recently, I've been hearing a lot of ads for Willie Landry Mount, a Democrat running for Representative, extolling her Louisiana values. I've heard this ad a lot, since it's running on the Christian music station. I find this funny, partly since the value which Louisiana politics is best known for is its corruption. In terms of Ms. Mount, she means pro-life, anti-gay marriage, and anti-embryonic stem cell research, which makes me wonder how she can run as a Democrat for national office. What I find most interesting is that the Democratic National Committee is the one sponsoring the ad.