Enough Rosa Parks

I'm not a big fan of Rosa Parks. Everything I have seen points to her as a fellow traveler or perhaps a useful idiot of Communists. I'm not happy with the selection of this one person for sainthood, when there were so many people laboring for civil rights all over the place. I have the same objection to every city having an MLK blvd. Pick a civil rights leader from your home state. You have one, they worked as hard, and some of them too were martyred by klansmen or their allies. Show me a George Washington Carver monument, school, or street in Missouri (he was born near Diamond Grove MO) and I'm much happier. There is a constellation of black civil rights heros, from the gradualist Carver to duBois to the Black Nationaist Garvey, just to pick some more or less contemporary figures. That constellation is much richer in its conflict and contradiction than is any unified view of one figure, something that often just amounts to a hagiography. Especially when someone like Parks is reduced to the dignified seamstress with tired feet, rather than the political activist that she was.

Its complicated in that so many opponants of the civil rights were racists, and were inclined to throw around the communits lable rather freely. However, its worthwhile to note that the racists can be right in calling Communists "Communists" and the Communists can be right calling the racists "racists". An error in one or many areas does not mean they cannot be right about others. The Communists were eager to advance the civil rights cause, but not wholey because they sought equity, but because in part because they wanted to disrupt American society. Its this last part that is a taint. The very nature of a fellow traveler or useful idiot (depending on whether or not you understood the Communist role) is that they advance the cause of the Communists because some other cause you support is also advanced. Learning how to do useful things without Communists was a neccessary and useful development for unions and other Left organizations. The civil rights movement never made that leap, and its more recent history has floundered I think in part because of this inability.

Sam Alito

Bush gave 'em the fight they wanted, he will name Sam Alito to the high court in a few hours, or so it now appears solidly.

My brother's current blog page has nothing! Lapse I say, lapse!

"alleged insurging rebel militants of non-specific ideology"

Ah, Mark Steyn. He's not on my extreamly short blogroll for nothing.

Interestingly, he touches on an issue I made a few days ago about the intelligensia and wishful thinking. Steyn writes:

"I underestimated multiculturalism. After 9/11, I assumed the internal
contradictions of the rainbow coalition would be made plain: that a
cult of "tolerance" would in the end founder against a demographic so
cheerfully upfront in their intolerance. Instead, Islamic "militants" have
become the highest repository of multicultural pieties. So you're nice about
gays and Native Americans? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant,
but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure
to the multiculti- masochists. And so Islamists who murder non-Muslims in
pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic
"rebel forces." You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and that's
just the way the Western media intend to keep it."

Indeed. Just like the academics, they have a way they want to interpret the world and they won't let the facts get in the way of that. So why is that? In this case, I think Steyn is right to attribute it to multiculturalism. People have trouble moving the particlular (metropolitan) to the general (cosmopoilitan) without becoming hostile to the parochialism of the particular. This is because people have a hard time with "and" and an easy time with "or". They don't like competing goods, and prefer a good/bad binary opposition. So when people move from metropoloitanism to cosmopolititanism, they frequently become hostile to the metropol. As such, by embracing the broader world, they become anti-American. For journalists, who aspire to be people of words and ideas, this means rejecting the American view of things, not so much that they root for the other side (such as some Leftists do - a habit picked up when there was a Soviet system to root for). So they seek neutral words in order not to take sides. Hence the "alleged insurging rebel militants of non-specific ideology."

There are two alternatives. One is the "and" position. All people are good, universalist yeah, and up with people, and America is good, wants these things in its words and deeds. Some people see the Iraq was as Americans against Iraqis, others see the Iraq war as Amerians with Iraqis against tyranny of various forms.

Another alternative is the "truth" position. In this case, you regard both American claims and other claims as just that, claims, and seek out the truth based on the best evidence. Further, you describe things as they are, regardless of who is pleased or displeased. You need a certain amount of sophistry to do this, because you need to hold all the competing ideas in your head as viable claims to be tested. To do this well you need to avoid impeaching the good evidence with the bad. For example, just because it is in figure X's advantage to say Z, doesn't mean Z isn't true. Second, you need to be able to recognize partial truths. Even if you are unwilling to say that Z is true, does X have a point? Is there some truth, a truth that may need nuance, but a truth that can't just be rejected. Too often the press reports government statements as if they were just claims absent any truth, or possessed of some unknowability. Then evidence is assembled to argue for the opposite point, even when that looks like special pleading to the informed.

Lileks on ElBaradei

"Let's look at Mr. ElBaradei's highlight reel: Completely whiffed the Libyan nuke program. Failed to notice that Iran had a secret nuclear program going for a fifth of a century. (You can hardly blame the U.N. types – it was secret, after all. I mean, it's not like you can barge in and say, "What's all this, then?") The IAEA also didn't have a clue about A.Q. Khan, the wannabe Bond villain who ran a nuclear Wal-Mart for rogue states. Mr. ElBaradei would have been better off sending Mr. Magoo to ferret out Mr. Khan's network; at least Mr. Magoo would have tripped over something."

Audible Althouse

These are some interesting podcasts. Clever, idiosyncratic, and worth listening to.

Bennett and the Babies

I came across William Saletan's human nature submission on Bill Bennett's statement about abortion and black babies. I think its clear that Bennett was proposing a straw man in order to knock it down. When you create a straw man, you mean it to get knocked down. He created a case against utilitarian arguments against abortion so obsene no one would be willing to cling to it. That is why he followed up with "ridiculous and morally reprehensible." People who took Bennett's straw man argument seriously are apparently unable to distinguish between the two. John McWhorter's line about this was, "Mr. Bennett, actually, was rejecting a possible defense of his own pro-life position. He was demonstrating thoughtful nuance. I assume that the rest of us, black and white, can too. " Jonah Goldberg offers "The former philosophy professor picked a hypothetical that he thought would make the horror of such utilitarianism obvious to everybody. [...] Bennett's real mistake was in thinking people would be mature enough to get it."

When the Intelligensia Wishes Upon a Star

LGF links to a piece in the Guardian that makes a familiar mistake. The author, a “leading black intellectual and anti-racist campaigner,” engages in some wishful thinking that the terrorists' campaigns are "struggles against poverty, against dictatorships and against foreign occupation." He's hoping for "a profound and desirable shift in the anti-imperialist struggles waged by the Muslim world: away from individual acts of terror, to mass, collective action that finds common cause with the anti-globalisation, anti-imperialist movement beyond it."

I've seen academics make the same mistake, interpreting the war on terror in terms of Marxist theory or some other Leftist template. Rather than interpreting the current events in terms of what I already knew (entirely) I looked at arguments being made by others, and found Marc Sageman and Fawaz Gerges. Their argument follows the ideas of the Salafi jihad through their development, debates within the movement, and getting to the current situation. I did have some applicable knowledge, since the nature of insurgency is something I look at. But what I knew applied mostly to what the coallition should do in responce, rather than being able to answer "why did it happen / who are they."

This failure by many on the Left to recognize the real nature of the Salafi jihad is not only a great analytical mis-step, but it has resulted in a few Lefties, possessed of clearer understanding, breaking with the rest. Christopher Hitchens may only be the more famous example. With this kind of thinking coming from the intelligensia, the whole Left is polluted by an analysis that is so wrong, its worse than useless, its dangerous. And as those like Hitchens and David Horowitz makes clear, this failure to understand means that the causes of the Left are most at risk. This "unholy allaince", as Horowitz puts it, is nothing short of an abdication of what the Left has believed in order to interpret the current situation according to those beliefs. Or to state it plainly, imagining that Islamist terrorism is not part of a fascist (or at least reactionary) attack on modernity, freedom, diversity, self-determination, but rather some kind of fellow traveling "struggle against poverty, against dictatorships and against foreign occupation." To believe that this imperialism of reaction is a Marx-compatable anti-imperialism is to get it exactly backwards. Neither the current pronouncements, the actions, or the history (the Afghani jihad was against Soviet athiesm in a Muslim land) of the Salafi jihad seems to have any influence.

Deciding Rightly

The NYTimes has a peice on American's lack of science savvy.

"American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century."

Folks on the left point to something like this as evidence that people cannot decide rightly. So many public issues involve science: "If you don't know what a cell is, you can't make sense of stem cell research." Of course many issues are the opposite. Many issues, such as which car you should drive, are such that experts cannot know what is best in your particular situation, and individuals are experts in such matters.

There are two issues here:
people are persuadable
a group full of people with imperfect knowledge can make decisions that are good enough

Because people are persuadable, when an object of knowledge moves from the realm of the well educated person to a political issue, we can explain the issue as evidence for our argument. This happens all the time with specific facts. While I do prefer that people understand the basic workings of physics, chemistry, and biology, but given that it is not so, I am content that people can be informed when an object of knowledge becomes a policy issue.

Second, the essense of democracy is that people can govern themselves, and that the best and brightest (aristocracy) are not required for governance. I am not a Jacksonian, suspiscious of the best and brightest, but am well aware of the dangers of too much confidence in the best and brightest. When you know you're right and the people reject your great ideas you have two choices, stand down and wait for them to embrace your ideas, or force it on them. If you stand down, you are a democrat, yielding to the will of the majority. If you impose, you are aristocratic (at best) and have two choices. When people resist, comprimise or repress. Too often, small minorities convinced of their ideological rightness have been willing to repress the majority to maintain their prefered policies. So, to conclude, I don't suspect the best and brightest, but I do suspect when they think they know better than the people.

American Elites

Instapundit describes it as "an elite problem." Michael Barone writes in USNews about the disconnect between America's elites and its populace. One could tease this even further, and distinguish between the cosmopolitan character of most elites, the concept of the revolutionary vanguard, and their attitude toward the people.

Elites have always been cosmopolitan, will ever be so. The question to ask is whether their cosmopolitanism is in addition to a strong Americanism, or whether its an either/or proposition. Barone's mention of FDR is an example of Americanism plus cosmopolitanism. (I suppose the proper parallel formulation here is metropolitanism and cosmopolitianism. Metropolitan refers to the mother city, and so has a meaning similar to patriotism, which refers to a fatherland.)

Elites often think that their job is to conserve the heritage and greatness of the society in which they are elites, but elites can also be strong advocates of progress. The Enlightenment was an elite effort, and large landowners in England were behind the second agricultural revolution. Above, I used the Lennist phrase, "vanguard of the revolution" and it was done as much to suggest elite change leaders as it was to suggest a leftist reconstruction of society. Part of the elite problem discussed by Barone is the Leftism of many elites. Their vision of America is substantially different from the people's (see next item), but what is pretty clear is that they seek significant change.

Elites can regard themselves as the first servants of a society, restrain themselves with nobless oblige, and have something of a paternalistic concen for the welfare and happiness of the people. The elites we are confronted with today, and which Europe has labored with, regard the people as incapable of deciding rightly and in need of leadership: what Lenin called the dictatorship of the proletariat. A tyranny in the name of the people lead by idealogues in contempt of the people.

We can certainly imagine an elite that is cosmopolitan, advocates progress, and regards the people as the reseviour of wisdom, greatness, and values encouraging change in society. Much of the history of America has seen an elite more or less cosmopolitan which had a deep faith in technology and technological improvement, even accepting unpredicatble social change as a consequence. A feature of the problem Barone identifies is the contempt for the people as ignorant, superstitious, and incapable of right understanding.

In discussions with people on the center left I have seen this notion of the people having been fooled by the Republicans, the need for slicker advertising, redefining the terms of debate, more telegenic candidates, and other issues of style rather that substance. It certainly reasonable for the Democrats to argue that the country is evenly split and that they just need to persuade people of the quality of their ideas, but too many on the left don't give the people the benefit of any belief in their ability to think for themselves.

Bennett and Credentials

Bill Bennett has been opposing Meirs on the basis of her lack of credentials, record, and intellectual gravity. Supporters have been making Jacksonian arguments that Meirs' character is right, and so she is qualified. Bennett however has been making weak arguments against the Jacksonians. I called the show and said as much, but it was clear by the end of it why. Bennett is himself too much of a Jacksonian to attack the assumptions of that kind of American. It seems obvious in hindsight that Bennett is a believer in character as a qualification for office, but in his opposition to Meirs he has relied on his Jeffersonian side. As such, the Meirs supporters might be described as "character only" and Bennett as "character plus". Contrast this to Dennis Prager's critique of character. Prager makes several attacks on a character only position. He points to the errors of good intentions. He identifies that there are people of good character who hold to bad ideas. For instance, he regards GHWB as being an excellent person and a poor president. Carter might even be a stronger example. For Prager, character is not a reliable guide to public performance. This can also tie into his public-private distinction. I think Prager likes good character, but regards it as much weaker as a qualification for right political action. This is why Prager can bring stronger arguments to bear against the character issue. Jacksonians are suspicious of sophistication, and Bennett is seeking sophistication. But the Jacksonians want character (and regard character as suficient) while Bennett wants character as well. So Bennett, who wants character plus, fails to offer a really good criticism of the character only argument.

Flu Pandemic

The CDC has a six phase description of pandemic, from phase 1) the disease exsists, but is not a serious risk, to 6) full blown pandemic. It appears we may be in phase 2

Phase 2: No new influenza virus subtypes have been detected in humans. However, a circulating animal influenza virus subtype poses a substantial risk of human disease.

Pandemic alert period
Phase 3: Human infection(s) with a new subtype, but no human-to-human spread, or at most rare instances of spread to a close contact.

Once we start hearing about human to human spread or mutations of a new subtype in humans, then we're up to stage 3. The Survival Manual suggests preperation well ahead of serious threats. Plan now.

Slate slips a shade closer to a Blog

There are blog things that can work well for an on-line publication, like Slate. Nearly all of them have embraced links, but Slate has started to put additional links below articles. These link to related articles by the same author, other authors, and other sites that cover the issue. TCS has a bar on the left side with some of the same stuff.

Hugh on Party

I first found Hugh Hewitt because James Lileks described him

Generally, I have been very happy with Hewitt, and through him, have discovered Dennis Prager, whom I also value. I did have a problem with Hewitt's "gang of seven" talk of purge back in may, but its good to see Hugh arguing for victory over ideology (the half a loaf is better than no loaf theory of politics). Stephen Bainbridge is typical of many whom I have seen, in numbers growing since victory in the Iraq War, who wants a full loaf and disparages the half he has won. I think that many such critics, have sound criticisms, in so much as their loaf is not as full as they desire. The problem is, there is no such thing as a full loaf. So the better question is, how much of a loaf is it reasonable to expect given my views and the present political climate. Further, when you find that your desired portion of loaf is too small, rather than attacking the politicians who operate in a given political climate, one instead should advocate for change in the political climate, not the politicians closer to your position and party.

I sympathize with Baimbridge in that without 9-11, I too would be unhappy. But those as conservative as Baimbridge, who attack Bush from the right should also understand that I would be opposing them from the center if they had sway. My priorities in politics start with foreign policy, move to economics, and then to domestic politics. As such, being right on Iraq and taxes, and being wrong on everything else counts for quite a lot for me.

One current critic, at least of the Miers nomination, Bill Bennett has argued that the SCOTUS is a great seminar. Therefore the person nominated must be capable of debate, rich of ideas, and able to advance the causes to which the nominating President's supporters seek such advance. This argument troubles me because the only cause I seek advanced in the court is that the court stops legislating. I want an irrelevant court which merely requires the actual legislature to fix its bad laws. I certainly do not want the court taking on an activism of the right. I want the court to simply ignore bad precident, not over-turn it. Let the court settle into a quietude as soon as possible. The rich debate should not take place in the Court, but first among the people, and second, in the legislature. It is Bennett himself, on TV, radio, print, and web, that advances debate. Let the Justices be mere technitians of the law.

Fellow Traveling

How does fellow traveling work? Take a look at this Anatomy of a Photograph. As you can see by this example, a fellow traveler is someone who is sympathetic to some part of a radical, generally communist, agenda, and overlooks those parts they might disagree with to advance the other part. Indeed, a fellow traveler often overlooks the disagreable part even to themselves.

McCaffery coming to Springfield

Barry McCaffery is speaking at MSU on Tuesday the 11th of October. The News-Leader includes his attacks on the Administration with a rebuttle from a MSU professor. Several related stories take the same defeatist tone. Here, Here, and Here. The last link, "Poll finds scant support...," seems to reflect the coverage. I wonder of one causes the other. If they both cause the other, we have a feed-back loop.

Trouble for Transformation

Defence Tech has a piece on problems implimenting transformation. It certainly appears that the solution is fewer armored vehicles and more personal armor. Of course some changes, shifting from divisions to brigades as core units, smarter weapons, better communications are already under way. Making units lighter is the area where troubles remain. Rapid deployment is the benefit, but the ability to stand up in a fight is threatened. I suspect that combat endurance will be achived by abandoning heavy technologies (armor and vehicles) and protecting troops with the lighter technologies, smart weapons, communications, tactics, and training.

More Renaissance Conference: reviews

Here is the schedule

Attended "The Shakespearean Stage" though I was tempted to attend "Art History, North and South" but ended up in Shakespear and stayed put. The most interesting paper was "Antitheatrical Tracts" because these issues, and as it turns out, these arguments are still with us today.

Attended "Classical and Humanist Influences in the Late Renaissance." Interesting, but all three papers were heavy on text analysis, such as comparisons of versions of Daphnis and Chloe, assumed qualities (in Bembo and followers) of particular word choices and patters, and so on.

The Museum Demonstration was nice. I've been there many times before, but the presentation was pleasing and informative. Its always interesting to have art de-coded.

Dinner was excellent.

The Plenary talk, "The Facetious Renaissance" was on humor, and focused mostly on how humor operated in the Renaissance with specific attention to how some things they found funny are not commonly funny now, and the reverse. The speaker's personality was strong in the choices made, but given the subject, that's inevitable.

I would have attended "Belief and Ethics in English Thought" but I visited friends the night before, and slept in.

I started Saturday off with "Art History, Images and Patrons." As a graduate student, I had given a gallery talk on the patronage of Marie de Medici of Reubens, and as far as art history goes, patronage and thertefore the political content of art, is the only place I am strong. The Sistine paper reader wasn't there, so we heard about sculpture pieces of St George and John the Baptist above doors, and related objects in Genoa. The speaker, Madeline Rislow of KU argued that Genoa's artistic heritage is undervalued, indeed almost dimissed, but this has more to do with the kinds of art created than the quality of Genoese art production. The second speaker gave a longish (45-50 min) illustrated biography of Alphonso V, Isabella and Ferdinand. It should have found a focus and stuck with that, but it was otherwise interesting. I am reasonably well versed in these figures and had some differences with the speaker, but otherwise enjoyed the paper.

"Faith and Last Things" was the end of the day, and was a very interesting session. The first paper was on a minor author's apocalyptic writings. The second was on the Roman Inquisition, in which the speaker, Jane Wickersham, argued that the Inquisition intended both the recovery of souls and the supervision of the wayward. The last paper was on Mary Magdalene and her use by early modern Protestants (mostly English) as a redeemded sinner. An interesting observation was that where Catholic works theology saw the Virgin Mary as the ideal model, Protestant grace theology saw Mary Magdalene as the ideal model.

More on Intel

Strategy Page has more on some of the same kind of thing I wrote about in the previous post, with specific interest in OPSEC (Operational Security).

Problems at the Pentagon

Andrew C. McCarthy has a good peice on some things wrong over at Defense. Its unfortunate that institutions operate this way, but as James Q Wilson and others have shown in their studies of bureaucracy, this kind of turf activity is as natural as breathing. I am not as familiar with the business literature, but I have seen the same kind of thing there too. Reasons can include glory seeking, empire building, worry that someone else will screw things up, or just being so accustomed to keeping secret information secret that telling someone, even another intelligence agency seems like the wrong thing to do. In business, refoming the old tired ways is so common that Dilbert makes sport of ridiculing the attempts to improve operations. Indeed the reforms are not a panacea, and often are as bad as the problem they are meant to solve. What one must keep in mind is that these shifts are not a question of better or worse, they are a question of shifting the costs around. Peter paying Paul. In its most general sense, one can choose to err on the side of keeping secrets, knowing that some analysis might fail because secrets were too secret; or one can choose to err on the side of analysis, knowing that some secrets might get out. Enter a new problem. When analysis fails, its normally never known to anyone. Does the CIA know where Vladimr Putin is right now? If they don't, the consequences are probabaly very small. Occassionally failures of this kind result in a Pearl Harbor or a 9-11. On the other end of the table is loose lips sinking ships. When secrets get out, its more likely to get noticed, and that means trouble for whoever should have been keeping that secret. So, under normal circumstances, there is a tendency to favor keeping secrets, because it avoids more routine and regular loss of secret information, even though it means occassional lapses in analysis that result in Pearl Harbors and 9-11's.

The US intelligence community used to have to operate with a very aggressive KGB attempting to winckle secrets out of it. The result was a tremendous emphasis on secrecy. Keep in mind all of this follows some spectacular examples of Soviet spies being discovered in American government. Al Qaeda doesn't have spies in the FBI or the CIA, but careless handling of information can still result in operational details or the names of moles (and one hopes we are developing them) getting into terrorists' hands. One example we may all remember is Geraldo Rivera drawing operational maps in the Iraqi sand. Ooops.

Nevertheless, it still appears that US intelligence is still too concerned with secrets at the expence of analysis, which means sharing intelligence with anyone who can help interpret it. This a cultural issue, because lessons have been learned in the intelligence community that go way back to before any of its current members were doing this kind of work. The CIA is over fifty years old, the FBI a few decades older, and Army intelligence, older still. Institutional memory makes an organization risk averse. Since there is more routine risk in sharing secrets than there is in keeping them, that's what intelligence organizations will default to, without strong leadership to do otherwise.