I am constantly flabbergasted by how “common knowledge”, even and especially among experts in a particular field, can so often be so wrong. And I don’t even mean “wrong if you really know what you’re talking about”; I mean “illogical at face value”. I’ll start with a couple examples from football (it is that time of year), and then get to one about national security (inspired by this op-ed in today’s New York Times).
Continue reading »
Sep 092008
Jul 032008
Right now, the United States is an active participant in two civil wars: Iraq and Afghanistan.
Continue reading »
Jun 242008
The GOP is trying to turn this election, in part, into a referendum on President Bush’s handling of the War on Terror. In particular, conservative pundits (cheered by both the White House and the McCain campaign) have attacked Obama for praising the response to the first World Trade Center attacks, bringing back the charge that Democrats have a “9/10″ outlook. It is certainly true that there is a vast divide between the two approaches; I just don’t understand how anyone with even a passing respect for either the Constitution or basic human dignity could prefer the current GOP strategy.
Continue reading »
One of the big issues in this primary season is how the War on Terror should be fought. On the one hand, you have the Democratic candidates, plus Senator McCain and Representative Paul, who believe that the War on Terror is fundamentally a public relations war that the United States can only win by seizing and holding the moral high ground. On the other extreme, you have Vice President Cheney and his neo-conservative advisers who argue that the only way to win the War on Terror is to capture and kill all the terrorists. It’s Thoreau vs. Machiavelli, Martin Luther King vs. the Black Panthers, Eliot Ness vs. Jim Malone, etc. It’s a tough, but important debate that ultimately reflects on debates like secrecy, torture, the Bill of Rights, the Iraq War, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and even our moderation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
My problem with the Bush Administration, not to mention the candidacies of Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson, is that they want to have it both ways. Cheney may be evil, but his “do whatever it takes” philosophy is at least logically consistent. What doesn’t make sense is trying to have it both ways. Either torture is wrong, in which case we ought to take the moral high ground and proclaim our position from largest mountain we can find, or torture is acceptable if it leads to the deaths of more terrorists in the future. A position of “it depends”, or of “it’s usually bad but I’m not going to tell you why or when” both sacrifices the moral high ground and fails to accomplish our goal through brute force. It hands the public relations war to our enemies without putting the fear of eminent destruction into them.
Nov 052007
I’ve bee hearing these kinds of reports for years, but they just keep coming: the Department of Homeland Security backed down off of regulations about the storage and use of industrial chemicals. We’re told that, for our own safety, we need to have our phones tapped, have guards see us almost nude at airport x-ray screenings, and have our friends and neighbors imprisoned or forced to register because they are immigrants from particular countries. Those things will make us safer! And yet if I ran a petrochemical plant in the middle of a major city, I can store chemicals that would kill tens of thousands, if they were stolen or vaporized, without government oversight and with as little security as I want.
Gosh, I sure am glad the Bush Administration is doing so much to keep us safe.
Recent Comments