Cobb

Obligatory Seriousness on the Kill List

Deconstructionist, post-modernist, relativists once more are muddled in a semiotic swamp of their own indiscipline. The news is that the American President pursues and destroys enemies of America, and so now they are stuck, now that this president is their boy with coming up with more euphemisms and justifications for such. Instead, they have the starkly frank 'Obama's Kill List' and the implications of all the meetings and decisions that went into such a thing. 

This is like a previously 'perfect' and catty teenager discovering her own zits, and it has about that level of emotional impact on me. I guess I've lived long enough.

My input on the matter is simple. According to the New Yorker, the President has been intimately involved in giving the go orders from the Oval Office. This can only mean that he is micromanaging the military - having usurped their public credibility - doing the exact same thing with assuredly worse competence but with presumably superior political cover. I would not go as far as to say 'accountability' because accountability requires transparency, and transparency can only be established at the President's level when he hasn't scorched the earth of his predecessor.

A wise Obama, the sort we don't have, would have merely declared such targets of his 'kill list' as 'enemy combattants', a term we in the American public know as well as we do 'WMD'. He could have then said that the Army was doing America's business as usual, standing on the shoulders of GWBush. Of course the suckers who voted him into office would never accept that, but he would have the benefit of actually telling the truth. Instead, he must continue to pretend to be the European Social Democrat, drive on the left hand side of the road and call a hood a 'bonnet' and all sorts of other un-American things. Only that way can he please a constituency steeped in doublespeak. Speaking of which...

The method we have built, over a couple of hundred years, for sorting out questions of guilt and innocence and probable cause, is due process. And that may be the most degraded phrase of all.

No grownup could possibly make this kind of assertion about military action if Obama didn't give such poison rhetoric the sort of cover he has. But the President has backed himself into the corner of putting an actual war using our own actual soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and special forces on his own political shoulders while sustaining the foolish and incorrect context of criminal prosecution. 

That's the massive ego of a man responsible only to those fools who elected him. Unfortunately, that's not America. I wonder if Romney can do any better. 

Reagan was a coward with his plausible deniability. Obama is a snake with his obfuscations and duplicity. GWBush called out our enemies to the world and reminded us every day what his intentions were. There was never any question that we are at war.  But we clearly have a man in Washington who will use weasel words to suggest that we are not. 

The Gopher Hole

In the news:

Two weeks ago, Steve Wozniak made a public call for Apple to open its platforms for those who wish to tinker, tweak and innovate with their internals.

EFF supports Wozniak's position: while Apple's products have many virtues, they are marred by an ugly set of restrictions on what users and programmers can do with them. This is most especially true of iOS, though other Apple products sometimes suffer in the same way. In this article we will delve into the kinds of restrictions that Apple, phone companies, and Microsoft have been imposing on mobile computers; the excuses these companies make when they impose these restrictions; the dangers this is creating for open innovation; why Apple in particular should lead the way in fixing this mess. We also propose a bill of rights that need to be secured for people who are purchasing smartphones and other pocket computers.

Apple's recent products, especially their mobile iOS devices, are like beautiful crystal prisons, with a wide range of restrictions imposed by the OS, the hardware, and Apple's contracts with carriers as well as contracts with developers. Only users who can hack or "jailbreak" their devices can escape these limitations.

Marred?

Follow my analogy for a moment. "No car is perfect if everybody can't be a mechanic." Get me? Or let's go to the example of nature. 

Everyone should be permitted to run free through the forest. In fact, this is the state of nature. And in this unregulated free state of nature if during your sprint you catch your foot in a gopher hole and snap your tibia, you will basically become wolf bait. You can't sue the gopher. You can't take your broken leg back to your parents and demand a refund. You also can't sue the property owner because there is no property owner. You are in a state of nature.

But if you want the risk mitigation of running through a forest that is owned by somebody who takes responsibility for your idiot mistakes, then you must accept the possibibility, and in this modern world the probability, that there will be posted signs that tell you not to run off the paved path and denies you any legal recourse should you step into a gopher hole. (Remember it was the 'freedom' to run in a forest which brought you here in the first place - you thought the treadmill at Bally's was too artificial.) But you want to run with the risks, ignore the signs and sue the makers anyway. Why? Because you want your freedom. So jailbreakers are like joggers who hate people on bikes. And Apple's IOS is like a tollroad with a nice fence on it, and the joggers don't want to be treated like people on bikes, or God forbid people in passenger cars. They want to cut the switchbacks. But they don't want to run in their *own* forest because it takes too much time to grow the trees, and you like the trees in Mr. Steve Jobs' forest even though you think they can stand some improvement.  But most importantly, you want an army of joggers to follow your path.

When is the last time you actually read the terms and conditions on a piece of software you purchased, or borrowed, or appropriated? What do you really care? You don't. You just think you're entitled to run. It's what God gave you legs for. 

This is a case of people in the open source community, if you can call it that monolithically, being shameless. It's not enough that they have a functional rival in Android. But they cannot stand the idea that something functionally equivalent cannot be subject to their criticism and meddling. 

I suppose this would all be a no brainer with regard to fault if the legacy of Mr. Jobs had an absent landlord who didn't go poking around in other forests and claiming ownership of the shape of the trees. But that's what happens when too many people are greedy; it doesn't pay not to be greedy.

Still, I maintain the perspective of a little bit of age and a fair bit of sophistication, and my wisdom tells me that there is greed all around. After all, what is the point of fooling around with IOS and the iPhone in the first place? It's the same point as being interested in getting exclusive interviews with [Kim Kardashian] <= {Lindsay Lohan, Brittany Spears, Courtney Love, Nancy Kerrigan}. IOS is a hot bitch. But really should you have a dog in that fight?  Dear Capitalist, Turing's Rule is still in effect. Signed Scientist.  What you really want to be is the guy who did the "Duh" improvement over the legacy of Apple. Three years ago it was adding 'cut' and 'paste', and didn't that little glitch keep you awake nights? Two years ago it was background processing. Oh you poor unrecognized geniuses. 

We have entered a new era of hateration, which is to say, the counter on the same cycle of human impatience and jealousy has been incremented and given a new typeface. 

 All any of us need is an audience. It's hard to gain one if all you want is applause and its hard to convert one once it is gained. In the end, I think there is a lot of disingenuous friending going around. But that's how markets work. Unfortunately, we also know that interest groups with lawyers work hard too, which is why people who grow forests have to post signs. 

Meanwhile, where there's no money, no youth and no particular public agenda, things are a bit more peaceful. 

Amazon: The Next General Motors

At some point, we must consider the basic needs of humanity and figure out how the economy is arranged to provide for it and what goods and services the markets can sustain beyond those of necessity. In America, we can predict beyond necessity because ours are so well spoken for. It is that interesting gap that I spend hours thinking when I try to distinguish our 9% unemployment rate from the poverty of the second and third worlds. 

Several years ago, the NYT published a survey about the most prestigious professions. I was mildly surprised to see that Database Administrators ranked third, behind doctors and lawyers out of 447 job titles. But what has not been surprising is how much of our economy has moved into what I must call industrial dependency on computing services. We are at a point in our history where taking away the computers would be like taking away the automobiles. Information technology and telecommunications are where what we know must live or else die. The efficiencies and effectiveness of this industry too compelling to put aside. In this world there are as many microchips as grains of rice, and the trend is irreversible.

Clay Shirky, among many inquisitors into the phenomena of this age has written a book entitled 'Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age'. In i, he shows how many ventures on the internet capture human efforts quite effectively - in ways heretofore impossible. Imagine the creation of a global encyclopedia in fifty languages written by nobody in particular in their spare time. That's Wikipedia. The ability for a literate population of billions to create products and services for the intellect is the world historical process that is emerging now. 

The Industrial Revolution as we know it come to be because it generated a great surplus in one basic human need, clothing. It turned out that once properly organized, ordinary people had the skill to produce in factories, a product everyone needed. By applying a process that scaled up the ordinary work of an individual tailor, people were able to earn more money, make more clothes and create for the population of ordinary people, choices in what clothing to wear. What started as clothing, once individually crafted, moved on to other sorts of manufacture with its ultimate expressions in the automobile and jet aircraft.  For an ordinary person to have choices in how to get to a destination, and have many destinations to choose from drastically changed the shape of the world. We don't talk much about the 'jet set' because now frequent flying is commonplace. It's hard to imagine rolling back to a time when an automobile was not an option or when jet transport did not exist. FedEx overnight delivery was created in our lifetimes. In America, 'allow six weeks for delivery' used to be the standard.

In these ways the future of IT are certain to create surpluses for the common man. What is necessary is for the high cost of craftsmanship to be surpassed by the low cost of mass production. For manufacturing, that required the factory. For computing it requires the cloud. What is a factory but a streamlined and standardized version of a craftsman's workshop scaled up for mass production? The cloud is certainly that as compared to the typical corporate IT shop.

In 1908, the head of Cadillac in England famously put on a remarkable demonstration. He had three Cadillac Model Ks race around a track and then disassembled. Then he scrambled the parts and even took out some and replaced them with off the shelf replacements. He then had the cars reassembled. All three of them worked perfectly. Today, most software is built in such a way that this would be impossible, but the cloud and the open source movement are rapidly changing that condition. 

Amazon is the leading cloud provider and I predict that the services, products, standards and practices that emerge from what it is learning about computing, networks, and security at massive scale will be every bit as influential in society as the paradigms that emerged over the 20th century for the automobile at Ford and General Motors. Moreover, the effect of these new ideas will provide similar surpluses. 

It was 1903 when the Wright Brothers first succeeded. It was a mere 14 years later when the Red Baron emerged as the combat 'ace' of WW1. That is how quickly people can adapt and master something that didn't even exist, on a world scale. Amazon and its rivals now host the software solutions of companies like Netflix. 14 years ago, in 1998, high definition video on demand to mass markets of mobile devices was considered impossible.

General Motors became the world's largest business and ushered in a new way of thinking about business. Even today we have a hard time not thinking about those businesses organized around the automobile when we say the word 'industry'. Glass, rubber, plastics and steel were all made that much more important owing to their place in the autombility manufacturing. Today oil is king because it is the consumable part of the worlds automotive needs. But it is *an* economy, not *the* economy. The next economic progression will come from the real fact that we will have more literate people on the planet than ever before in our history. Their cognitive needs and wants will fuel an even larger economy than that based on the clever assembly of glass, rubber, plastics, steel and oil. 

It begins with enabling a new class of database administrators, mathematicians, computer scientists, and all of the various kinds of creative, thoughtful knowledge and communications workers we can assemble and setting them loose in the cloud - the scaled up information factories of tomorrow. 

Today, we sit on the verge of enabling the common man a choice of thought previously only available in the same ways a choice of clothing was scarcely affordable in an age of hand sewn tailored garments. He will demand his choice and those who provide it will profit. The economy of intellect is at hand and it will be the Americans, once again, who light the way forward by providing the infrastructure necessary - the largest and most advanced software factories in the world. Considering what Microsoft and Oracle have been, I do not see how Amazon can lose. 

Chris Bowen: First Trumpet

Jeremy Winters at ChefConf 2012

Nouning Hatey

Nouning is the application of a platonic label to a person who exhibits behavior in some form of the platonic ideal. It is an error of absolutism. Consider the essay Nouning Considered Harmful. Excerpt:

Here's the thing: Using adjectives as nouns obscures meaning, harms discourse, impairs communication, and ultimately reduces our ability to think in a careful and nuanced way about controversial issues, let alone effect social progress. Anyone who wants to see our society become less divided rather than more, and in particular anyone who wants to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other forms of prejudice and modes of oppression, should try hard to avoid the practice, and refrain from calling a person a sexist, or a racist, or a homophobe, instead applying those descriptors to his or her actions.

Good catch, rather obvious from my perspective. It was one of the singular lessons from my highschool debate class. The only thing that doesn't change about you is your last name. So call people by their last name and describe their attraction to ideas they express. If you do this enough times, you make the distinction between the person and the ideas they hold. People as vessels of spirit, et al. Very basic and fundamental thinking. 

Up Yours, Mighty Race

The Baby Boom isn't dead. Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes not. 

Like most of the people slightly older than me, I thought the Space Race was a thrilling time and I picked up the usual compliment of values and heroes. Like the Boomers, I have lamented the failure of vision and see no flying cars or colonies on the Moon. I have lamented the lame days of the 80s when American Muscle cars disappeared from the planet - enough to make Knight Rider a superstar. But unlike Boomers, especially those that don't get the 'Information Superhighway'. I know where the energy of all that inspiration has gone. It has gone into my generation through different metaphors, like Star Wars and video games, and come out different and more powerful. I never forget the inspiration and the original vision, but I don't mistake the different shape and form of today's reality for failure. No matter how brilliant Kubrick may have been, the future of computing was never HAL 9000. 

Whenever I hear somebody older than me (and I'm 50) talk about how many race problems we have in America, I know immediately that we are hearing the voice of some pesky Boomer demanding his flying car. Another clue is the phrase 'post-racial America'. 

A thoughtful reader has reminded me that Frank Rich might be exactly the kind of bummed out Boomer missing his racial utopia. Consider the following litany of complaint ailing our poor critic's conscience, and presumeably that of our nation:

Just a short list would include: the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Cambridge; the hysterical tea-party rally against health-care reform that showered obscenities on black congressmen entering the Capitol; the ousting of the African-­American Department of Agriculture worker Shirley Sherrod after she was ­libeled as a racist; the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia; the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida; and, this month, the protest of more than 40 percent of West Virginia Democratic-primary voters, who pulled the lever for an obscure white federal-­prison inmate rather than endorse a second run for the incumbent president of their own party. Last week brought the pièce de résistance: the Times revelation of a proposed super-PAC TV commercial that would slime Obama as pretending to be a “metrosexual black Abe Lincoln.” 

and then finally

I still remember seeing A Raisin in the Sun as a white middle-class kid in 1961, a few months after the Kennedy inaugural, when it played the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., on tour. It was just as Martin Luther King was bringing his gospel to the nation. For an 11-year-old attending a (de facto) segregated public-school system in the nation’s capital, it was an awakening to the unreconstructed apartheid America all around me. Anyone of any race who remembers that America knows just how epic a difference the civil-rights movement made in sweeping so much of it away. The actual lives of many, if hardly all, black Americans have improved immeasurably in those 50 years.

What about 'Blues for Mister Charlie'? Didn't he see that play too? Or how about 'The Colored Museum'? Or ar the only plays that have anything significant to say about race bound to be that old sentimental favorite? 

I happen to be blessed with the curse of having read at least 50 books by black authors over the past 20 years. My sentimental favorite is 'Drylongso' by Gwaltney. The premise and proof of this book is that black Americans see their situations very well and do so continuously with a very clear understanding of their individual predicaments. The implication of this is that for the purposes of justice and the general welfare, there needn't be great orators, politicians, speechifiers, playwrights or their critics. 

Think about it. If you were writing about computers in 1961 and you cared about equality, you might be concerned that the government would create some Colossus or WOPR to take the planet to the brink of nuclear war - something no black Americans wanted. Today, 50 years later, black Americans have more compute power in their pockets than Neil Armstrong had on the moon, and they play chess better than HAL 9000. That's because the vision of the future and the nature of social reality is in the hands of the people, not so much in the hands of great orators, etc. 

There are not flying cars. But a car has gone faster than the speed of sound, and there are cars that parallel park themselves and there are styles of automobiles that reflect the specific and uniques cultural tastes of some black Americans. 

Like many Boomers, I had some trouble thinking past '2001'. For decades we thought of that year as 'the future' and we all through we knew how it would be shaped. But we were as wrong as the Japanese filmmakers of Godzilla were about the effects of nuclear tests at sea. We were as wrong as the animators of the Bugs Bunny era were about household robots that looked like toasters with their own arms and four-fingered hands. We were as wrong as Edison was about DC electrification of the country. 

But let's talk about race shall we? 

My parents don't. They've done their share, and as black parents they stand pretty much in awe of what has transpired. I speak as the son of a mother who dodged bricks thrown at her when she was pregnant, protesting restrictive housing covenants in Los Angeles County. Something far less odious than Jim Crow. I speak as the son of a father arrested and thrown in jail for dating a white girl in New Haven, CT. I've known what they think about race for my entire life, a conversation that has never been difficult to have, or require the ministrations of a Broadway production. I speak as the nephew of one of the first black stewardesses in the American airline industry, and as the nephew of a college president.  I speak as the brother of a young man who died in police custody. I speak as the brother of a man who is a sworn police officer. My black family has experienced a lot of the things we like to talk when we talk about race and a lot of things we don't like to talk about when we talk about race. 

I have the choice to abstract these experiences into that narrow kind of plus and minus calculation we like to use when we talk about race in America. But since I know, like all reasonably unsentimentally thoughtful people know, race is a fiction - a narrative kept alive by people who want to believe something about race and have some idea how things ought to be when it comes to race. I'm tempted to say that I have no idea how things ought to be when it comes to race, but I have my druthers. In fact, thinking about race is as easy to me as thinking about sin and I understand very well what a lack of moderation in thinking about sin turns you into.  So on the whole, it's very clear that you take race like you take sin, like you take war. Which is to say, you bury the dead and you move on.  

I am not stunned that wars end. I am not amazed that the future happens.  But here is Frank Rich:

There has been change on the American playing field of race since Inauguration Day 2009—not so much for the better or the worse, but a shift into a kind of twilight zone where the nation’s racial conversation has moved from its usual gears of intractability, obfuscation, angry debate, and platitudinous sentimentality to the truly unhinged. It’s as if everyone can now say, well, that’s that, we’ve elected our first African-American president, we can pat ourselves on the back for doing so, and, with that noble and historic accomplishment in the bank, we will sign on to sideshows ranging from a Herman Cain stunt presidential run to a malicious jihad mounted by a right-wing hit man in Los Angeles, Andrew Breitbart, to destroy Sherrod, an obscure federal worker in Georgia. You’d think Obama’s victory gave the entire country permission to act out like the racial brawlers ofClybourne Park.

There is something unhinged about detatching the narrative about race from its traditional boundaries of 'civil discourse' to the kind of sideshow freakorama it takes on these days. I think two things about that. The first is that Rich, among his Boomer peers, remains bound to articles of faith about race that were set in stone by simple American conventions that are passe and were never quite welded to sound philosophy. And the second is that the unreality of race - its essential Orwellian nature has made all civil discourse about it plainly absurd. These thoughts reinforce each other when taken in the historical context of the Negro Problem and the international attention it once commanded and now no longer deserves. If Herman Cain is a joke, perhaps it is because Thurgood Marshall had to be so serious. But in Thurgood's light, Barack Obama is a joke as well. Perhaps a more sophisticated joke, of the sort that gets giggles of the sort reserved for New Yorker cartoons, but a cartoon nonetheless. For how could this, the administration of the NDAA and secret B-52 bombings, er drone assassinations, be considered serious in contrast to the civil libertarian standards of Justice Marshall? All these jokes are acceptable because there is no deadly or world historical subtext. No great Communist conspiracy is attempting to turn the Negro against America in any Cold War context. No great Pan African Summit awaits great black American keynote speakers about the post-colonial future. Skip Gates is no WEB DuBois. He's just another Harvard professor, and that's all he needs to be. So we don't need to think about him, his predicament or his predictions do we?

Speaking of which, Toni Morrison won her Nobel prize in literature 19 years ago. How many of her books do you suppose Trayvon Martin read? I happen to be one of those black Americans who tends to think a great deal more about our Morrisons than our Martins, more about our Churchills than our chavs. And I recognize that it is outside the narrative for a black American to be inspired by Winston Churchill or to use the term 'chav'. Then again I'm one of those folks that Gwaltney was talking about. I write my own words. I'm invested in the idea that my individuality matters, no matter what whomever is scribbling elsewhere about the significance of the sacking of this or that petty bureacrat or how fair or foul ethnic insults get.

I suddenly was attacked by the idea of the single word I've banned from this website being amplified in a sort of twist on the Stanford Prisoner Experiment. There is that assumption that if the white person turns up the volume dial high and hard enough that the black pain is inevitable. It's not the content that hurts, but the ridiculous volume. The narrative on race has always and ever been noise. The truth is in millions of lives who neither fit the profile, nor the audience for the utopian dreams of yesteryear. How do I get through life without a racial discourse? How does anyone?

I hear they're making plays about race on Broadway. I wonder if any line from it will ever compete with Marcus Garvey who said around the time my great-grandparents died, "Up you mighty race, accomplish what you will."  What if we had and nobody noticed? I suppose we couldn't be called a race any longer could we?

 

Certainty vs Hope

science is about certainty.

those who pursue science want to be certain. and they discipline themselves and their thought process to deal with the results of all experiments. they seek to prove things beyond the shadow of a doubt. this is how knowledge progresses. without knowledge there is only guesswork and superstition. 

 

guesswork and superstition are the enemy of civilization.

this is because if you rule your life through guesswork and/or superstition you assume others do as well.

if others run their lives via guesswork and superstition.

 

a. your guess is as good as mine.

b. my god is just as righteous as your god.

 

in other words everything is possible because the possible is defined NOT BY CERTAINTY but by guesswork and superstition. 

 

in a world of certainty, NOT everything is possible. AND, you can know exactly what is impossible.

 

in a world of guesswork and superstition, everything and anything is possible. 

 

in the world of guesswork and superstition, the way people make predictions is called HOPE. you make your prediction and keep your fingers crossed.

 

in the world of certainty, the way people make predictions is called THEORY. you either prove your theory or you disprove your theory.

 

you can also say that in the world of guesswork and superstition, you can also call HOPE: either SUPPLICATION or PRAYER.

 

when HOPE, SUPPLICATION and PRAYER fail to produce predicted results, you can always hope, supplicate and pray again for the same results. this is called 'keeping hope alive' also 'keeping the faith' also 'protest'. this can go on indefinitely. 

 

when THEORY fails to produce predicted results, you get rid of the disproven theory as soon as possible.

 

a disproven theory expands knowledge because it adds to the knowledge about what is impossible. 

 

a failed PRAYER, HOPE or SUPPLICATION does not expand knowledge, it merely tries the patience of those who live in the world of guesswork and superstition. so they tend to PRAY more, HOPE more and SUPPLICATE more, instead of changing direction. 

 

that is because they do not accept that anything is impossible. they do not accept any certainty or proof or disproof. they only accept that.

 

a. your guess is as good as mine.

b. my god is just as righteous as your god.

 

guesswork and superstition are the friend of revolution.

this is because dashed hopes, unrequited supplication and unanswered prayers try human patience to the breaking point.  such broken humans turn on those who they see as having their hopes, supplications and prayers fulfilled. they say the the others do not deserve what they possess. 

 

revolution allows the hopeful, prayerful supplicants to have their way with society. 

 

revolution becomes the means to the ends of HOPE, the hope that has no need for THEORY, for proof or for disproof. 

 

 

--- 

So when anyone says to 'keep hope alive' what they mean is to dismiss proof and certainty because anything is possible, you merely have to keep the faith, hope, supplicate and pray more. 

 

Eclipse

Why 'Keep Hope Alive' is Wrong

It just occurred to me that one of the primary strategies of the Left is to keep hope alive. The problem with this is that it requires a willful suppression of disbelief. In other words, the truth.

I happened upon a story in NPR this morning, forwarded to me by one of my lefty friends. And it asked the question about whether or not 'we' ought to find a different way to talk about 'obesity'. I put obesity in quotes because it's very difficult in our mediasphere to think of obesity outside of the way it is being defined every day. The NPR headline raises the issue in the way it assumes we all come to any understanding whatseover, by altering the terms of the 'discussion'.

Let me be startlingly clear for a moment. Fat people are ugly and unhealthy and lazy and it's all their fault. This is something I learned in kindergarten. Fat people should be ostracized. This is something I learned in the second grade and practiced with gusto. I was right, and I've always been right, and it didn't take the mind of a 10 year old to figure all of that out. Except I was as cruel as a child can be, with my little 3 ounce fists, and American political correctness is seeking to overturn such cruelty with their billion dollar charities and megawatt broadcast stations. 

NPR would have us all wait until some collection of grad students chasing their own degrees came up with a white paper explaining to us in $10 words the list of diseases etc, that are indicated by 'obesity'. And then we can all sound professional and well-informed (thanks NPR) by our discussion. But we are not all professional and we don't all need to sound well-informed over chardonnay. It's a simple biological fact and it's something we human beings inherently know. People are unattractive for a reason. Poop smells bad for a reason. Ice cream tastes good for a reason. There is no point inflating the value of all those reasons with high-falutin' words and pledge donations to public radio UNLESS

Unless high-falutin' words and pledge donations to public radio are organized to keep the public in a state of suspended disbelief in our own human knowledge and common sense. 

If 'we still have a long way to go' and 'the discussion must be kept going' and we must 'keep hope alive' it means that we sit around doing nothing until the proper regime tells us that what we always hoped for despite the odds is now 'True'! Or at least indicated by a groundbreaking study at a famous university, or by a new comprehensive survey by a famous pollster. 

Do you get what I'm saying? Hope is the suspension of disbelief in common sense. Hope should be dashed to bits by certainty and that's what science is for, but certainty is the enemy of the ever-shifting discussion and the media impressarios of short attention span theater whom it serves. That's why you can't say 'fat people are ugly and unhealthy and lazy and it's all their fault.' It's to obvious and certain. 

How Phil Agre Was Wrong About Conservatism

I'm going to interactively debug this old essay by Phil Agre called

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

Philip E. Agre 
August 2004

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

Q: What is conservatism? 
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism? 
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

If you can accept this fundamental misrepresentation of Conservatism, then you are finished rather in the way logicians understand that assertion of the truth of a falsehood implies a universe of illogic. This is apparently Agre's religion, and so I reject his premises. That's remarkably simple, but maybe he finds other truths that make his mistated case more compelling. Let's see. BTW, this is about all that I read to convince me this is worth writing. I have no idea what lies ahead...

These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

If people don't know what they are, then they cannot be considered properly. If I tell you that I am a Martian but am not from Mars, you cannot judge real Martians based on my shortcomings. So Agre may be shadowboxing.

//1 The Main Arguments of Conservatism

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

Shaky. People are leaders who can lead. Aristocracies are about ability. Not direction. The faculty at Brown University is an aristocracy. The architects of the Bauhaus are an aristocracy. It doesn't make them evil because they lead. It doesn't make them right or wrong. It only makes them leaders. 

The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

Conservatism has not existed for thousands of years, but human leadership has. We are to ask ourselves whether or not any regime of leadership is just, honorable, effective, righteous. This is the study of history. We study history in order to learn, and we make judgments. But let us ask a simple question about democracy. Is it representative? Is the purpose of elections, vote-getting and office-holding self-serving or in service to society? If a Conservative or any candidate for democratic election campaigns to serve for the benefit of society, it is a simple task to measure whether or not that promise is fulfilled. 

The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on earth. Although one of the goals of every aristocracy is to make its preferred social order seem permanent and timeless, in reality conservatism must be reinvented in every generation. This is true for many reasons, including internal conflicts among the aristocrats; institutional shifts due to climate, markets, or warfare; and ideological gains and losses in the perpetual struggle against democracy. In some societies the aristocracy is rigid, closed, and stratified, while in others it is more of an aspiration among various fluid and factionalized groups. The situation in the United States right now is toward the latter end of the spectrum. A main goal in life of all aristocrats, however, is to pass on their positions of privilege to their children, and many of the aspiring aristocrats of the United States are appointing their children to positions in government and in the archipelago of think tanks that promote conservative theories.

Nepotism is the proper word here, not conservatism. How many Republicans from Chicago are named Daley? How many Republicans from Massachusetts are named Kennedy?  How many named Clinton? But beyond that, let me take this opportunity to assert something in parallel to Mr. Agre's claims about aristocracy. I will quote Thomas Jefferson whom I understand to be quoting Plato, in that his goal for American government is to establish an 'aristocracy of merit'. So let us see whether Agre is against aristocracy or against bad aristocracy.

Conservatism in every place and time is founded on deception. The deceptions of conservatism today are especially sophisticated, simply because culture today is sufficiently democratic that the myths of earlier times will no longer suffice.

Before analyzing current-day conservatism's machinery of deception, let us outline the main arguments of conservatism. Although these arguments have changed little through history, they might seem unfamiliar to many people today, indeed even to people who claim to be conservatives. That unfamiliarity is a very recent phenomenon. Yet it is only through the classical arguments and their fallacies that we can begin to analyze how conservatism operates now.

1. Institutions

According to the first type of argument, found for example in Burke, social institutions are a kind of capital. A properly ordered society will be blessed with large quantities of this capital. This capital has very particular properties. It is a sprawling tangle of social arrangements and patterns of thought, passed down through generations as part of the culture. It is generally tacit in nature and cannot be rationally analyzed. It is fragile and must be conserved, because a society that lacks it will collapse into anarchy and tyranny. Innovation is bad, therefore, and prejudice is good. Although the institutions can tolerate incremental reforms around the edges, systematic questioning is a threat to social order. In particular, rational thought is evil. Nothing can be worse for the conservative than rational thought, because people who think rationally might decide to try replacing inherited institutions with new ones, something that a conservative regards as impossible. This is where the word "conservative" comes from: the supposed importance of conserving established institutions.

Well this is a tangle. Perhaps Agre doesn't want to deal with examples. Again, let us consider Brown University and the Bauhaus school of architecture. Are such social institutions anti-rational? Is the Red Cross anti-rational?

This argument is not wholly false. Institutions are in fact sprawling tangles of social arrangements and patterns of thought, passed down through generations as part of the culture. And people who think they can reengineer the whole of human society overnight are generally mistaken. The people of ancien regime France were oppressed by the conservative order of their time, but indeed their revolution did not work, and would probably not have worked even if conservatives from elsewhere were not militarily attacking them. After all, the conservative order had gone to insane lengths to deprive them of the education, practical experience, and patterns of thought that would be required to operate a democracy. They could not invent those things overnight.

Even so, the argument about conserving institutions is mostly untrue. Most institutions are less fragile and more dynamic than conservatives claim. Large amounts of institutional innovation happen in every generation. If people lack a rational analysis of institutions, that is mostly a product of conservatism rather than an argument for it. And although conservatism has historically claimed to conserve institutions, history makes clear that conservatism is only interested in conserving particular kinds of institutions: the institutions that reinforce conservative power. Conservatism rarely tries to conserve institutions such as Social Security and welfare that decrease the common people's dependency on the aristocracy and the social authorities that serve it. To the contrary, they represent those institutions in various twisted ways as dangerous to to the social order generally or to their beneficiaries in particular.

I take it as axiomatic that any ideology rarely tries to conserve institutions that are antithetical to their premises. Clearly the Jacobins didn't seek to conserve the Ancien Regime. Revolutions *are* the active destruction of particular institutions. The Barbarians didn't seek to conserve Rome. So as things change, for rational or irrational reasons what is conserved or enhanced has a particular flavor. Elementary. Agre's phrasing is odd "institutions such as Social Security and welfare that decrease the common people's dependency on the aristocracy and the social authorities that serve it." Social security and welfare he appears to claim *decrease* the common people's dependency on the aristocracy. Really? I wonder if he'll spell that out.

2. Hierarchy

The opposite of conservatism is democracy, and contempt for democracy is a constant thread in the history of conservative argument. Instead, conservatism has argued that society ought to be organized in a hierarchy of orders and classes and controlled by its uppermost hierarchical stratum, the aristocracy. Many of these arguments against egalitarianism are ancient, and most of them are routinely heard on the radio. One tends to hear the arguments in bits and pieces, for example the emphatic if vague claim that people are different. Of course, most of these arguments, if considered rationally, actually argue for meritocracy rather than for aristocracy. Meritocracy is a democratic principle. George Bush, however, was apparently scarred for life by having been one of the last students admitted to Yale under its old aristocratic admissions system, and having to attend classes with students admitted under the meritocratic system who considered themselves to be smarter than him. Although he has lately claimed to oppose the system of legacy admissions from which he benefitted, that is a tactic, part of a package deal to eliminate affirmative action, thereby allowing conservative social hierarchies to be reaffirmed in other ways.

Here Agre seeks to conflate and confuse a school of thought existing before the flowering of democracy in the West with that before. Some measure of historical specificity is required here. I'm not sure that I'm going to get it. For example, you could not examine the history of the Whigs in England, the precursors of the Republicans in America and suggest that they did not support aristocracies. But they are much fruther from Agre's conception of 'conservatives' than are the English Tories. So are they 'less' conservative or not conservative? Futhermore, what is the United States Senate but an aristocracy, in fact, what is a Republic if not a society organized of orders and classes controlled by its uppermost hierarchical stratum - where that stratum is in the American case, the Constitution and those practitioners most superior in its understanding? Is there not a Supreme Court, Superior Courts and Lower Courts? Do not the lower bow unconditionally to the higher?

American culture still being comparatively healthy, overt arguments for aristocracy (for example, that the children of aristocrats learn by osmosis the profound arts of government and thereby acquire a wisdom that mere experts cannot match) are still relatively unusual. Instead, conservatism must proceed through complicated indirection, and the next few sections of this article will explain in some detail how this works. The issue is not that rich people are bad, or that hierarchical types of organization have no place in a democracy. Nor are the descendents of aristocrats necessarily bad people if they do not try to perpetuate conservative types of domination over society. The issue is both narrow and enormous: no aristocracy should be allowed to trick the rest of society into deferring to it.

Which is why conservatives often dispute the political opinions of academics who have been granted tenure.

3. Freedom

But isn't conservatism about freedom? Of course everyone wants freedom, and so conservatism has no choice but to promise freedom to its subjects. In reality conservatism has meant complicated things by "freedom", and the reality of conservatism in practice has scarcely corresponded even to the contorted definitions in conservative texts.

To start with, conservatism constantly shifts in its degree of authoritarianism. Conservative rhetors, in the Wall Street Journal for example, have no difficulty claiming to be the party of freedom in one breath and attacking civil liberties in the next.

For example?

The real situation with conservatism and freedom is best understood in historical context. Conservatism constantly changes, always adapting itself to provide the minimum amount of freedom that is required to hold together a dominant coalition in the society. In Burke's day, for example, this meant an alliance between traditional social authorities and the rising business class. Although the business class has always defined its agenda in terms of something it calls "freedom", in reality conservatism from the 18th century onward has simply implied a shift from one kind of government intervention in the economy to another, quite different kind, together with a continuation of medieval models of cultural domination.

This is a central conservative argument: freedom is impossible unless the common people internalize aristocratic domination. Indeed, many conservative theorists to the present day have argued that freedom is not possible at all. Without the internalized domination of conservatism, it is argued, social order would require the external domination of state terror. In a sense this argument is correct: historically conservatives have routinely resorted to terror when internalized domination has not worked. What is unthinkable by design here is the possibility that people might organize their lives in a democratic fashion.

This is foolish, fallacious and wrong. Conservatives understand and believe that freedom is an inherent God given right of individuals and that it is only by social contract that any individual should be bound to give up any freedom whatsoever. That in fact, the state should take only a minimum proxy of power by consent and has in and of itself no power not derived from said God given inalienable right. Conservatives make the acknowledgement that men can and will do anything and must promise to do little of what is known to be socially destructive. Failing that promise, they must be compelled by law - and not arbitrary law, but the accumulated wisdom of law. Thus freedom under the law is Liberty and Conservatives seek to maximize Liberty. The central Conservative argument is for a politics and social order that retains the Hobbsean Leviathan of Law through the power of the state yet maximizes individual Liberty. It is this dynamic tension that energizes the work of Conservatives.

This alliance between traditional social authorities and the business class is artificial. The market continually undermines the institutions of cultural domination. It does this partly through its constant revolutionizing of institutions generally and partly by encouraging a culture of entrepreneurial initiative. As a result, the alliance must be continually reinvented, all the while pretending that its reinventions simply reinstate an eternal order.

The market does not continually undermine the institutions of cultural domination, read 'social order'. The market is an amoral force, and no amount of marketing convinces human beings that parents should not feed their children, or that the dead should remain unburied in the streets. Conservatives respect that individual liberty is undermined by the suppression of cultural traditions which are the result of human evolution and the fundamental unchanging aspects of human nature itself. It is human nature itself that is eternal and so it orders itself according to what is eternal about human desire - good and evil, loyalty and betrayal, generosity and greed, shamelessness and discretion, every virtue and vice. Conservatives are not confused about what should be and what should never be up for sale in free markets.

Conservatism promotes (and so does liberalism, misguidedly) the idea that liberalism is about activist government where conservatism is not. This is absurd. It is unrelated to the history of conservative government. Conservatism promotes activist government that acts in the interests of the aristocracy. This has been true for thousands of years. What is distinctive about liberalism is not that it promotes activist government but that it promotes government that acts in the interests of the majority. Democratic government, however, is not simply majoritarian. It is, rather, one institutional expression of a democratic type of culture that is still very much in the process of being invented.

For someone who refuses even to give a direct quote from Burke, Agre's authority on what his conservatism has been 'for thousands of years' is suspect. But what he claims of liberalism is in fact something of great concernt to Conservatives. To promote government that acts in the interests of the majority is by definition majoritarian, something quite obviously problematic to Agre. What he should know and what Chomsky has shown is that 'the majority' is a fictional, political creation. In other words, a 'majority' can be defined and such a majority can be artificially aggregated. Consent can be manufactured. This is, indeed, the work of Progressives. But as I mentioned previously, the dynamic tension between the Leviathan of Law and Individual Liberty requires work, and amidst a world full of change, such work is never complete. Conservatives seek balance. Balance is virtuous. Equilibrium should be sought.

//2 How Conservatism Works

Conservative social orders have often described themselves as civilized, and so one reads in the Wall Street Journal that "the enemies of civilization hate bow ties". But what conservatism calls civilization is little but the domination of an aristocracy. Every aspect of social life is subordinated to this goal. That is not civilization.

Agre disagrees with the Wall Street Journal, presumably its editorial board. Wish we had some examples.

The reality is quite the opposite. To impose its order on society, conservatism must destroy civilization. In particular conservatism must destroy conscience, democracy, reason, and language.

Odd that. Surely then conservatism must be able to recognize such things in order to be able to destroy them, and if they were to destroy them, surely they would not miss them. Thus a perfect conservative society would have no conscience, democracy, reason or language. To us he ascribes God-like powers, he must then think us devils.

* The Destruction of Conscience

Liberalism is a movement of conscience. Liberals speak endlessly of conscience. Yet conservative rhetors have taken to acting as if they owned the language of conscience. They even routinely assert that liberals disparage conscience. The magnitude of the falsehood here is so great that decent people have been set back on their heels.

Conservatism continually twists the language of conscience into its opposite. It has no choice: conservatism is unjust, and cannot survive except by pretending to be the opposite of what it is.

Conservative arguments are often arbitrary in nature. Consider, for example, the controversy over Elian Gonzalez. Conservatism claims that the universe is ordered by absolutes. This would certainly make life easier if it was true. The difficulty is that the absolutes constantly conflict with one another. When the absolutes do not conflict, there is rarely any controversy. But when absolutes do conflict, conservatism is forced into sophistry. In the case of Elian Gonzalez, two absolutes conflicted: keeping families together and not making people return to tyrannies. In a democratic society, the decision would be made through rational debate. Conservatism, however, required picking one of the two absolutes arbitrarily (based perhaps on tactical politics in Florida) and simply accusing anyone who disagreed of flouting absolutes and thereby nihilistically denying the fundamental order of the universe. This happens every day. Arbitrariness replaces reason with authority. When arbitrariness becomes established in the culture, democracy decays and it becomes possible for aristocracies to dominate people's minds.

Does Physics claim the universe is ordered by absolutes? Just curious. Is Planck's constant actually constant? The mass of a gram? The wavelengths of visible light? The size of an electron?

Elian Gonzales' fate is something trivial enough to be determined by the wisdom of one ordinary mid-level judge. Conservatives have no fundamental issue with the judiciary. The example of one child is hardly enough to overturn the legitimacy of a poltical ideology, that is unless one is so beseiged by 'conscience' that one can handily ignore the reality of capital crimes in America.

Another example of conservative twisting of the language of conscience is the argument, in the context of the attacks of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, that holding our side to things like the Geneva Convention implies an equivalence between ourselves and our enemies. This is a logical fallacy. The fallacy is something like: they kill so they are bad, but we are good so it is okay for us to kill. The argument that everything we do is okay so long as it is not as bad as the most extreme evil in the world is a rejection of nearly all of civilization. It is precisely the destruction of conscience.

Evidently Agre had most of his arguments with college freshmen.

Or take the notion of "political correctness". It is true that movements of conscience have piled demands onto people faster than the culture can absorb them. That is an unfortunate side-effect of social progress. Conservatism, however, twists language to make the inconvenience of conscience sound like a kind of oppression. The campaign against political correctness is thus a search-and-destroy campaign against all vestiges of conscience in society. The flamboyant nastiness of rhetors such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter represents the destruction of conscience as a type of liberation. They are like cultists, continually egging on their audiences to destroy their own minds by punching through one layer after another of their consciences.

I should like to substitute the words 'revolutions' for 'movements of conscience' and 'eugenic evolution' for 'social progress'. Now reread Agre's sentences above. The campaign against political correctness was not a search and destroy mission against all vestiges of conscience, it was a successful injection of common sense into an over-production of perverse dissatisfaction with all that is settled in society. It was leaven against the adolescent instinct. But note how Agre presumes that which is 'conservative' by his defintion must be devoid of reason, language, and conscience. It must be impossible for conservatives to serve humanity by this definition, and in order for humanity to even *be* humanity, Agre's view of social progress *must* be fulfilled. This is the imperative of revolution. It always has been. 

Once I wrote on the Internet that bears in zoos are miserable and should be let go. In response to this, I received an e-mail viciously mocking me as an animal rights wacko. This is an example of the destruction of conscience. Any human being with a halfways functioning conscience will be capable of rationally debating the notion that unhappy bears in zoos should be let go. Of course, rational people might have other opinions. They might claim that the bears are not actually miserable, or that they would be just as miserable in the forest. Conservatism, though, has stereotyped concern for animals by associating it with its most extreme fringe. This sort of mockery of conscience has become systematic and commonplace.

One is either for or against the establishment and defense of civil rights for animals. It's all any Conservative should care about.

Obama Flips Again

It has been an Orwellian political season during the current Administration. And now I wonder exactly which way the President threads this new needle. You see he campaigned to one of his few credits that a Marriage is between a man and a woman. Today, this is what he's saying. 

I have to tell you that over the course of several years, as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that ‘don't ask, don't tell’ is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

Smarmy and political yes, but mostly slimy, because it basically walks directly into the rhetorical truck of the redefinition of marriage - the conservative peeve. North Carolina was on background in this context wrong to categorically ban civil union on an equal rights basis, and I suppose a federal case will have to be made, again.  On the other hand, nobody just happens to live in North Carolina, and its sovereignty cannot be denied. 

I reiterate my position. Marriage is between a man and a woman. Civil union should be legal. States should not recognize anything but all civil unions, encompassing common law, religiously ordained and the recent twists with regard to anything that amounts to a civil right. 

 

The Last African American Defense of Palestinians

Imagine if you will, the following historical scenario. After the defeat of the Confederacy, and the failure of Reconstruction, the US offered African Americans control of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The African Americans said NO because there were slaves in Florida, Georgia and other states too. 15 years later, they said, OK how about blacks get control of North Carolina and South Carolina, and they said NO, what happened to Mississippi? If we can't get Mississippi, what's the point? 20 years after that, the US offered Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina, and African Americans said, NO again.

At what point do you realize that there is just no pleasing these people?

In fact of course, African Americans received no such promise. There has never been and there never will be a two state solution to the problem of slavery. What makes us think that after 60 years there might be a two state solution to the mere theft of real estate? And exactly how long can the ever changing Palestinian authorities expect political support from the ever changing African American public?

How long? Not long.