Bad Role Models, Where You Least Expect Them

 Posted by  Baseball, Football, Sports  4 Responses »
Oct 292007
 

A key principal in sportsmanship is that you shouldn’t run up the score on your opponent. The reasoning is simple: as long as you win, the score doesn’t matter. Part of winning graciously, therefore, is to reserve some dignity for your opponent. And there is very little dignity in getting slaughtered. This basic tenet plays out in different ways in different sports, but all of these things only apply when you have an insurmountable lead late in the game. In baseball it’s considered rude to steal, bunt, sacrifice, pinch run, etc. In basketball, you are never supposed to keep up a full court press–that is guard the ball handler before he reaches half court. In each of these cases, these plays are “supposed” to be high-risk, high-reward strategies, but you shouldn’t go out of your way to score when you’ve already got victory sewn up.

Football probably has the most of these “unwritten” rules of sportsmanship. Teams are supposed to minimize passing, especially passing deep. (Passing the ball in football allows the offense to move down the field using significantly less game clock than rushing.) Teams should avoid running high-risk, high-reward “trick” plays, and they shouldn’t go for it on fourth down. Teams should bench their star skill players, especially in the last few minutes of the game–this also has the practical element of reducing injury risk to those players (which is a much greater concern in football than in most other sports) and giving your bench players some playing time. You get the basic idea.

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Motivating to Hate

 Posted by  Immigration  2 Responses »
Oct 252007
 

It’s shockingly easy to motivate racial hatred. Remind people what their problems are: unemployment, taxes, wars, crime, drugs, etc. Tell them that those problems result from a competition for scarce resources. Whatever your problems are, they result from a lack of enough money, jobs, women, etc. to go around. Tell people that a whole lot of people they don’t even know are having the same problems for the same reasons. And then tell people that a whole lot of people who aren’t like them are doing much better, because they are better organized, or the government helps them more, or because they have some “unfair” advantage. Hitler used this basic strategy to motivate Germans to hate Jews. The KKK used it to motivate southerner whites to hate blacks. The Hutu Power movement in Rwanda used it to motivate Hutus to hate Tutsis.

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Iraq Needs Patience, Not Partition

 Posted by  Foreign Policy, Middle East, War in Iraq  No Responses »
Oct 232007
 

One of my professors in graduate school once said that the only thing that changes with partition is to make civil wars into interstate wars.  I’ve been reminded of that comment lately as an increasingly large number of “experts” have come out favoring some form of partition in Iraq to “avoid a civil war” there.  As Colonel Potter would say: horse hockey.

After all, partition does not solve any of the problems.  Oil revenues will still have to be redistributed.  Multi-ethnic neighborhoods in Baghdad (and elsewhere) will have to be either ruled cooperatively or “cleansed”.  Terrorists and insurgents will still fight to destabilize whatever rule of law comes to exist in the country, where they can.  In fact, partition will exacerbate a number of problems that Iraq is already having.  Iran’s influence over the Shiite regions of Iraq will likely increase, and Turkey will be all that much more likely to intervene into Kurdish affairs.  Most importantly, fights over the border regions between the partitioned areas, including the cities of Baghdad and Kirkuk, will likely intensify as each side tries to lay claim to these historically important areas.

The biggest argument in favor of partition is that it is inevitable.  That may be, but we gain nothing by hurrying the process along.  Any peace agreement and any constitution has to have legitimacy–that squishy undefinable thing that makes people believe that one government’s laws have merit and another does not.  That kind of legitimacy is extremely difficult to generate when an agreement is forced by an outside party.  To put it another way, people need to work out their own problems, and come to their own solutions, in their own time.  If we partition the country from the outside, it will automatically be rejected by a number of people (the Sunnis in particular) as the act of an imperial oppressor.  If partition is inevitable, and I don’t believe it is, then the Sunnis need to come to that conclusion on their own time.

We have neither the right, nor the authority, nor the power, to simply divide Iraq into three pieces and solve all of their problems for them.  It would be an act of extreme hubris for us to even try.  Iraq needs to decide it’s own future.  That process will be long and bloody–it always is–but in the end it’s the only way.

Morally Conservative, Politically Liberal

 Posted by  Education, Gender Roles, Poverty, Racism, U.S. Politics  13 Responses »
Oct 192007
 

The last few days I’ve been reading Come On People, by Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint.  The book, and the extensive book tour that they’ve been doing to support it over the last week, is a call to action for black community leaders, teachers, and parents, among others.  I’m only about half-way through it, and I might write a more extensive review when I’m finished, but as of now I’m finding it very intriguing.

In any case, the most interesting thing about the book so far is that it mostly sounds a lot like what the most conservative, white evangelical preacher would say.  Among their prescriptions for the black community, for instance, are the following:

  • Encouraging men who father children to not abandon that child
  • Returning at least some of the social stigma on becoming an unwed mothers
  • Teaching young men to be good fathers
  • Speaking proper English
  • Dressing professionally
  • Disciplining children appropriately
  • Avoiding “gangsta rap” and other violent and degrading media images
  • Going to Church regularly

Because of these admonitions and others, at times you have to wonder if they authors aren’t taking their cue from James Dobson.  This is traditional conservative family values, spelled out in great detail, with only one or two variants (in particular, they are very critical of using physical punishment as discipline).  The authors want to live in a world full of two-parent households, with well-dressed, well-behaved, and well-spoken children, where the hard work of both the parents and children is rewarded and where laziness and slovenliness is punished.

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More Foreign Policy Articles

 Posted by  2008 Election, Foreign Policy  No Responses »
Oct 192007
 

That Foreign Affairs special series on candidate viewpoints has released their next two articles, by Clinton and McCain respectively.  I haven’t had a chance to check them out thoroughly yet, but I will probably post on one or both of them next week.  Consider yourselves warned!

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