Patrick, there's a part of me that wants to rise up an exclaim that you and Schwartz are cynical citified SOBs who do not appreciate the true wonderfulness of America, which is why you can say such bad things.
Hoowever, its meeping is being drowned out by the 99% of the rest of my brain that isn't devoted to things like maintaining air circulation and internal temperature. The larger portion is trying to jump onto my desk and yell "Amen, brothers! Tell it! Tell it!"

Revivals should not be this depressing, though, and I wonder if a good dinner on the grounds would help any.

Posted August 2, 2007 4:00 PM by fidelio

I'm getting that queasy feeling I got when I watched Pat Buchanan speak to the RNC in 92 (on TV). Like I need to go exercise my Second Amendment rights. I wish the cleaners would get done with my tin-foil hat. I expect I'm going to be needing it again, soon.

Posted August 2, 2007 4:31 PM by Steve Buchheit

I wouldn't mind if I were an imperial elite: the perks are fantastic. I could finally get that Maybach with chauffeur I've been wanting all these years.

Posted August 2, 2007 4:34 PM by Earl Cooley III

This is exemplified by the tragic bridge collapse yesterday. it could have been avoided, if we simply spent money to repair our basic infrastructure. But that might require using tax money for something other than bombing Iraqi children, so those bills get vetoed if they get to the state senate floor at all.

better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, I guess.

Posted August 2, 2007 4:39 PM by Keith

Honestly, I think that Ayn Rand actually got something right in the more nightmarish portions of Atlas Shrugged, with the leaders who are perfectly content presiding over the collapse of America back into agrarian poverty as long as it's theirs. None of the Bush/Cheney junta have much experience actually creating anything, and certainly not creating anything for the general public and the public's well-being. If someone else can bail them out, well, that's fine, but if not, they're set to be lords of the manor in the midst of a decaying march as far back in history as it takes to squelch the competition.

Posted August 2, 2007 4:44 PM by Bruce Baugh

Following from Ned Beattie's monologue at the end of Network, my mother's theory is that the reason the vast majority of America and Americans are being left to rot by TPTB is that they're moving their consumer base to China. There's a ready-made, huge population there just waiting to be exploited, and the one here is getting too expensive to maintain. Makes sense to me.

Posted August 2, 2007 5:00 PM by ethan

A bit off topic, but I just realized -- again with the stupid! -- how insane the Saudis must think George Bush is, every time he talks about the Iraqi army "standing up." The last thing any of Iraq's neighbors wants is a functioning Iraqi army. Much better to have what they all have -- nonfunctional armies with bright shiny Murrcan weapons, and functional militias who spend most of their time fighting each other.

The imperial elite really, really does not give a flying f*ck for anyone not in their circle. We are all tools.

Marat we're poor...and the poor stay poor.
Marat, don't make us wait any more.
We want our right and we don't care how.
[All together now.]
We want a revolution -- now.

Posted August 2, 2007 5:05 PM by Lizzy L

I must be a more cynical SOB than Patrick --- I'm not remotely surprised. It's just a fact of human nature that there are some people who are more motivated by power than by money. And being what they are, they tend to gravitate towards, well... positions of power. They just want it more than the rest of us. Which, in my view, is why third world elites have historically been more interested in keeping their own poor down than "deploying their productive capacity". And why, over here in the first world, many cartels have been more stable than you'd expect if the members were maximizing their profits --- they're not; what comes first is preserving their shared position on top of the heap.

I don't think this would have been much of a surprise at all to the founding fathers, by the way --- they were all too familiar with personal powerlust, and the Federalist papers are largely about containing it. If the arrangements they made are breaking down now, ironically enough, it may be because a lot of Republican senators and Congressmen have been willing to give up their personal power out of loyalty to what Publius called "a spirit of faction". Which is irrationality of a different kind; viz. "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer...

Posted August 2, 2007 5:12 PM by "Charles Dodgson"

Charles Dodgson, those Congressfolk and Senators all know that when they leave their official positions of power they will be very, very, very well taken care of -- see Billy Tauzin for an example -- and their ability to influence the powerful will probably increase. They hope and expect to give up nothing. (Honor, integrity... who cares? As Shakespeare pointed out in one of the Henrys (I paraphrase):

"Who hath honor?"

"Him that died a' Wednesday."

Posted August 2, 2007 5:22 PM by Lizzy L

The word, surely, is not imperialism but kleptocracy - "a government that extends the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class (collectively, kleptocrats) at the expense of the population."

In the "developing world", the kleptocrat stashes stolen billions secretly in his Swiss bank account and then skips to Europe to enjoy them. The new kleptocracies don't seem to need the Swiss, or even the secrecy, to the same extent.

Posted August 2, 2007 5:22 PM by John Stanning

Charles D @ #8, Digby had some remarks the other day about Republicans giving up personal power:

The founders never counted on politicians "doing the right thing." Profiles in courage are always in short supply and no government can depend upon good intentions. But they did assume that they would, at least, want to preserve their own careers and constitutional prerogatives. The modern Republicans are so committed to their party that they will follow their 28% president over the cliff, and that is a mindset we haven't seen since the civil war.

I think she's spot on, and I don't understand it. When your leader is failing and is taking you with him, why do you not jump off the bandwagon?

Posted August 2, 2007 6:01 PM by Linkmeister

#11 Linkmeister ..."why do you not jump off the bandwagon?"

Faith. And that 28% don't see it as failing.

Posted August 2, 2007 6:05 PM by Steve Buchheit

better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, I guess.

Ye Gods. I remember using that phrase to oppose a friend's "I don't care! America's the best, that's all that matters!" gung-ho jingoism during my first experiment with being drunk when I was, oh, fourteen maybe.

This involving drunkeness, I recall thinking it was the height of cleverness and put-an-end-to-the-debateness, or at least most urgent, to say it many times, loudly: "Who cares if we're the best if all it means is we rule in Hell?" Eventually one of the parents came out of the bedroom area and intoned that he had just been woken up and who woke him up was me.

This would be one reason I don't do drunk. Failed experiment. But I digress.

There are people who care only about whether their faction, their nation, their family, their whatever, is "best." Whether they're good be damned. I suspect it's the same mindset that thinks "Not as bad as Saddam" is a winning defense against any accusation inveighed against Bush.

I think, also, familiarity may play a part. Who cares about being powerful among a bunch of strangers when you can bully the people you know? It's the same dynamic that makes us pay more attention when a friend criticizes us than a stranger, or compliments us. To a bully, the fear of familiar people, people who maybe despised the bully, is more warming than it is to cause fear in strangers. There's a sense of come-uppence, of having one's superiority be acknowledged, that means less when there's no familiarity between the bully and the victims.

Like I said, I don't do drunk. But I do caffeine. If the above doesn't make much sense, blame the bean.

Posted August 2, 2007 6:05 PM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Linkmeister@11:

When your leader is failing and is taking you with him, why do you not jump off the bandwagon?

Complete personal identification with "the movement"; they care more about whether it succeeds than about whether they succeed personally. Read Hoffer. "The True Believer"'s not on line, so far as I know. Read him anyway.

Posted August 2, 2007 6:10 PM by "Charles Dodgson"

When your leader is failing and is taking you with him, why do you not jump off the bandwagon?

Pehaps because there's no better place. Sensible rats jump off a leaky bandwagon before it sails; it's too late when it gets to the middle of the ocean where there's nowhere to swim to.

Perhaps, alternatively, because they still somehow think this leader will get them somewhere, whereas he's more likely to throw them off the bandwagon into the snow if the wolves get too close.

Posted August 2, 2007 6:15 PM by John Stanning

Steve, Charles, John:

Maybe individually it's too hard to jump, but when the leader is dragging your entire party with him it would seem to me the height of sensibility to jettison him before the party's future is semi-permanently damaged.

For selfish and patriotic reasons I hope they hang on until 2008 and many of them get dumped by the voters for their intransigence and obstinacy, but that's predicated on my side repeatedly telling voters that it's their fault things aren't getting done as quickly as we'd hoped.

Posted August 2, 2007 7:04 PM by Linkmeister

Complete personal identification with "the movement"

And complete personal identification with having supported the movement. It's hard enough to admit to having been wrong--it gets harder the more vehemently one has voiced one's support.

I know at least one person who has begun complaining about Bush's policies but reacts very badly to anyone linking those policies to Bush himself. It's like, he's a logical person who knows stupidity when he sees it, but has invested so much identity in supporting Bush since 2001 that I guess he feels obliged to keep defending Bush from critique, even while decrying Bush's policies. It's weird to watch.

Posted August 2, 2007 7:07 PM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Sure, there are some among this country's elite who see the world this way, but it's far from monolithic. I believe that people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett sincerely want to make the world (and this country along with it) a better place. It's just that the wrong clique among the elites are calling the shots right now. This means that change is possible, and it can have the support of a different clique of the rich and powerful.

If you want to see the same phenomenon PNH describes above writ small and in fiction, I refer you to The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter. His work features aristocratic African-Americans pining for the days of segregation, when they were kings of a much smaller hill.

Posted August 2, 2007 7:07 PM by Larry Brennan

#15 John:

I think a lot of Republican politicians are also in a hard place, because of three factors:

a. Hardly anyone supports the war.

b. They made all kinds of strong, public commitments about how much they supported the war, how anyone who didn't support it was a traitor, etc.

c. Many of them will be running again in a gerrymandered district, which means they can't easily walk away from supporting the war in Iraq and related stuff.

I think you can see a lot of the impact of (b) and (c) in the immigration debate, which was one in which Republicans could safely oppose the president, without either alienating lots of their own base or contradicting their previous statements.

Posted August 2, 2007 7:13 PM by albatross

Linkmeister@16, re: Republicans in Congress:

Maybe individually it's too hard to jump, but when the leader is dragging your entire party with him it would seem to me the height of sensibility to jettison him before the party's future is semi-permanently damaged.

By and large, these are not sensible people. They were selected by a process that filters for fanaticism. Some of them may be counting on the kind of Wingnut Welfare that Lizzy mentioned in #9, but I really believe that the bulk of them have a milder case of the same disease that made the followers of Jim Jones willingly drink the kool-aid: identifying with "The Movement" to the point that their own personal welfare just doesn't matter that much to them.

(Ironically enough, to people who have this disease, which movement matters less than you'd expect. An amusing case can be seen in the current crop of neoconservatives, many of whom were leftists, or even Trotskyists, in their political youth. Again, see Hoffer for case studies and analysis.)

Posted August 2, 2007 7:59 PM by "Charles Dodgson"

Linkmeister@16:

Perhaps the Republicans in Congress are thinking long-term.

Richard Nixon disgraced the Republican Party. Rumsfeld and Cheney were in the Nixon administration. Twenty years later, they were running the country.

John Poindexter disgraced the Republican Party when he was convicted of multiple felonies in the Iran-Contra affair. Then he got a job in the Bush administration.

It remains to be seen just how long this particular "semi-permanent" disgrace will last. History does not provide many examples of Republicans being punished for their crimes. The last thirty years have been nothing but pardons, bailouts, and amnesia. It's not illogical for Republicans to assume that this will continue.

Posted August 2, 2007 9:01 PM by MikeB

I've been wondering for a long time whether some fraction of Republican party discipline is actually the result of blackmail.

Posted August 2, 2007 9:08 PM by Nancy Lebovitz

It's really hard for most of us to give up the faith that this is still a democracy and that elections matter to the ruling class. But it doesn't, any longer.

They have a plan, they've been planning for decades, and it's just about all in place now. The Republican Party's lawyer in California has proposed a ballot initiative that has posed the biggest hurdle we've seen yet to getting a Democrat in the White House.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/08/06/070806taco_talk_hertzberg

Love, C.

Posted August 2, 2007 9:10 PM by Constance

"Failure" has context. If someone can get very wealthy helping to push an agenda while in office and go from there to lifelong seucurity as a lobbyist, consultant, editorial writer, and the like, where's the failure? And who cares what the public thinks when their whole social network is carefully arranged to keep the public out? What matters to them are the views of those with the money, and those people - the only public they're interested in - haven't gotten disillusioned with empire, nor are they suffering from the setback of this effort or not, since their money comes up front, along the way, and through various indirect channels. One of the most important things to keep in mind about the modern conservative movement is that about 98% of us, our various fortunes and troubles, our hopes and expectations, don't matter. We are not subjects of policy but objects, and as long as we're not in actual armed revolt, then we get the sort of attention the motor pool does...and we've seen how serious they are about funding that, too.

Posted August 2, 2007 9:11 PM by Bruce Baugh

#8, "Charles Dodgson": "I must be a more cynical SOB than Patrick --- I'm not remotely surprised. It's just a fact of human nature that [etc]"

I like your writing and I like you, but this is an online rhetorical gambit on which I call BS.

First, point to where I said I was surprised.

Second, the game of "You're surprised by $ODIOUSBEHAVIOR???" is itself odious. Hello, person who has, by dint of great effort, worked themselves around to agreeing with me! Allow me to point out in the most withering possible terms that I'm more worldly than you, more knowledgeable than you, more sophisticated than you, and boy howdy, are you ever a chump.

I've indulged in this variety of superiority dance myself. Astonishingly, it turns out to not be the most effective imaginable way of acquiring and retaining allies. Human nature is so unpredictable; who could have known?

Posted August 2, 2007 10:07 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

I took "coming to suspect" to imply some sort of a recent change. Apologies if I misread.

Posted August 2, 2007 10:50 PM by "Charles Dodgson"

You read that exactly right. What you're misreading is the nature and substance of my objection.

Posted August 2, 2007 11:52 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

By and large, these are not sensible people. They were selected by a process that filters for fanaticism. Also, they only talk to people who agree with them and who confirm their views.

Planet Bush

Posted August 3, 2007 12:24 AM by Lizzy L

THere is a well-established set of techniques for creating and maintaining a cult, an organization based on the fanaticism of the rank and file. One of the techniques used to bind the group tegether is to give them a shared shame, to make them commit acts with consequences they can be reminded of. This is blackmail, but something more as well. The binding force is not just fear of exposure, but a feeling of being closer to those within the group who've conmitted the acts than to those outside who haven't.

For instance, street gangs and white supremacist groups use this technique by having new members commit a violent act, sometimes murder, against their adversaries. The members become criminals, and their crimes bind them together. Our new kleptocratic overlords use a different sort of crime but the principle is the same.

Posted August 3, 2007 1:24 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

I think there's more to the politics of this disaster than is captured in this analysis. This sort of engineering just isn't sexy and it's almost impossible to get voters to support spending on maintenance until there's been some major failure--it is too much like trying to get people to take out the trash. The problem, of course, is exacerbated by the idea that "the government doesn't/can't do anything well". Well, no, actually. We have very good engineers, and a very good system that educates them and puts them in positions of authority. But it doesn't mean a damn thing if most of us aren't willing to take their advice.

So...though I have many problems with our elites, I don't think we can lay this entirely at their door. To some extent, sure. But only to some extent--the general voting public has to take some responsibility. BTW, Patrick, "You're surprised by $ODIOUSBEHAVIOR???" is time-warped variant of "I told you so." It's annoying, sure. But it's also an expression of frustration.

Posted August 3, 2007 2:05 AM by Randolph Fritz

Patrick Nielsen Hayden @ 305 on Open Thread 89

The entire practice of "message discipline," as practiced by a million and a half tech startups and entertainment-industry marketing operations, is wholly alien to her,

This point goes to the general problem of our government feeling it has to act like a bunch of corporate executives, because, as we all know, Bob, the private sector is so much more efficient and effective than the public sector. To which my reply is a rude noise and an obscene gesture. I've worked in both large and small corporations where I was close enough to the executives to see at least some of what was going on, and believe me, they don't know any more about how to run a large organization than most anybody else.*

On top of which, these so-called "executives" in the NeoBarb community are among the poorer specimens. Bush was just as successful as his Daddy and his good buddies could make him. Rumsfeld really screwed up DOD on the pretext of making it run right.** I could go on in this vein, but then so can anyone else commenting in this thread.

There's another point that Tauscher's failure to lead her staff makes: the rotting away of the requirement for taking responsibility for one's actions in the public sphere. "It's not her fault, one of the people she's responsible for did it." Put that way it doesn't make much sense, does it? But more and more that's what we're given to expect from the people who would be our leaders.***

[/rant] Thank you for letting me get that out of my system. Some days the frustration of living in what increasingly looks like the last days of Republican Rome gets to be a little too much to take without venting.

* On average, that is. There are in fact good exectives and leaders in the world, but not very many, and I highly doubt that any of them are MBAs.

** I could have told him that putting butter in the clockwork would not make it run better.

*** If they weren't trailing behind us in so many ways.

Posted August 3, 2007 2:32 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

And also, Infrastructure is patriotic.

Posted August 3, 2007 2:51 AM by Randolph Fritz

Complete personal identification with "the movement"; they care more about whether it succeeds than about whether they succeed personally.

Which is a problem how?

Christ cared more about the movement than about himself; so did the Buddha, Gandhi, and Hardie. One can go on; I'd start with the Catholic Church's handy lists of saints.

If you truly think that Bush is doing God's work, or even just that Bush is right, and that withdrawal will result in mass deaths, then you shouldn't be willing to betray him for momentary electoral gain. If the Congressional Republicans are logically consistent (let us assume that the sky is green), then they should be prepared to follow the President through Hell. Because that's not as bad as what they claim the Democratic policies would do.

The fact that Bush is wrong is beside the point here: Congressional Republicans don't think that's true, so they aren't going to act like it is.

If the arrangements they made are breaking down now, ironically enough, it may be because a lot of Republican senators and Congressmen have been willing to give up their personal power out of loyalty to what Publius called "a spirit of faction". Which is irrationality of a different kind; viz. "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer...

Breaking down now? McCarthy? The South, ante and post bellum? Bellum itself?

The Framers screwed up a lot: their genius was in screwing up less than anyone else at the time. Their system has been pretty crap for long periods at a time.

One of the ways they screwed up was underestimating the basic selflessness of the human.

People are willing to die for something greater than themselves -- martyrdom is a pretty easy sell. Compared to the cross, what's losing an election? Compared to losing an election, what's giving up some power to someone doing the right thing?

Posted August 3, 2007 5:11 AM by Keir

I'm interested that the entire comment stream has been on the American side of the illustration, and none on the Middle-Eastern. As an American Jew, I have a butt-cheek on each side.

One of the litmus tests I've generated is that someone genuinely concerned about the "Palestinians" first, and only anti-Israel secondly, is that they are as concerned about abuses by the rest of the Arab world as by the Israelis.

Those who pass the test are vanishingly rare. I have been told on several occasions that even if the Arab Legion *did* overrun and occupy the land designated for the state of Palestine in 1948, that's Israel's fault, too.

Recently, I was very heatedly told that it was no use talking to me because my mind was closed, because I wanted to ADD facts to the discussion.

It has been clear to me for a long time that one of the most important reasons that the Arab population is kept in an uproar against Israel is that both the medieval monarchies and duchies and the military states are terrified of what would happen if their populations took a good look at education and democracy.

Better to rule in Hell, indeed . . .

Posted August 3, 2007 5:26 AM by Neil

My guess is that getting off of the bandwagon would mean admitting you were wrong, and that in some sense, the other team was right. Also, the message that "If you don't support us, the terrorists will win, because the Democrats will surrender" is bought into by that 30%. They have a simple world view in which they are the muscular Chuck Norris good guys, and we are the effeminate communist loving bad guys.

I think my later suggestion is what motivates most of the Bush supporters - they see him as doing something in "the fight against international terrorism" and are convinced (by Bush propaganda) that democrats will put America at risk.

Posted August 3, 2007 7:23 AM by Josh Jasper

Charles Dodgson @8: Like you, I'm surprised that this is news to anyone. (Although I don't think it's news to Patrick ...)

More to the point: It's just a fact of human nature that there are some people who are more motivated by power than by money. And being what they are, they tend to gravitate towards, well... positions of power.

The utility of money diminishes, the more of it you have. The improvement in your standard of living from an income of $100 to $1000 a year is enormous: from $1000 to $10,000 it's pretty big: from $10,000 to $100,000 it's noticable: from $100K to $1M ... you switch from flying economy to flying business class, and get a bigger house. Above $1M/year, order-of-magnitude improvements in income make very little difference to your lifestyle (you might own that 100' yacht, rather than renting it for a week when you want it, but that's about it).

So once the greedy ugly folks have maxed out the utility of their pile -- and it doesn't have to be a terribly big pile to put then in the realm where adding a few hundred million more doesn't fundamentally change anything in their lives -- what else are they left to play games with, but power?

Finally, to circle back to Patrick's opening, I've visited Sweden. I didn't see any stretch limos. I didn't see any beggars, either; or graffiti and slums and run-down infrastructure. It was actually a bit spooky. Degradation doesn't only brutalize the poor and the down-trodden -- it degrades the comfortable classes above them by forcing them to accept as natural an environment in which degradation is permitted.

If we were a well-informed, rational species, we'd all live like Swedes.

Posted August 3, 2007 7:49 AM by Charlie Stross

Re: Moderately rich men in Sweden, I am tempted to add that Europe's richest man (and probably on the world top 5) is IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad. He is notoriously media-shy but we know a few things about him. For instance that he lives at least part of the year in rural Sweden, near his childhood home, and has a net worth in the 50-billion range. He was implicated in a fascist movement when he was a young man, but has since backpedalled furiously. He is supposedly modest and thrifty, wearing simple clothing, riding a dingy old bike to work and having a Volvo as his main car. (though it should be added that part of this is real, and some of it is almost certainly company branding)

Conclusion: even the insanely wealthy of Sweden are moderates.

(Well, no they're not. But some of them are.)

Posted August 3, 2007 8:01 AM by Martin GL

Charlie Stross #36:

An interesting question, to me, is what makes one guy reach the level of "f-ck you money" (enough he never has to work again to be comfortable) and retire or shift over to fun projects, and another guy reach that level, and keep going for greater and greater wealth. The way it looks to me, the people who keep going enjoy the game of getting greater wealth, as well as the greater wealth.

There are all kinds of similar things. Some researchers in my field, long after having established themselves, keep cranking out new and interesting ideas. Others publish a lot to get tenure (PhD, postdoc, tenure-track job, then tenure, so several years of research) and then don't innovate much after that. (Often they weren't innovating all that much per paper before, but that's another rant.) It's interesting to ask why. If Ron Rivest never published another academic paper, his (deserved) reputation as a first-rank genius would remain. Yet he keeps on going.

This is a kind of weird selection process. To get to the very top in various areas of life, you must keep being driven long after there are substantial external rewards. This shapes the whole society, because the people at the top are all people who've been filtered this way--the guy who sees he's 10th richest in America and wants to go up in the rankings, the guy whose ambitions take him past being an effective governor or mayor or senator, to running for president, the guy who keeps cranking out the research until they carry him out of his lab feet first.

I guess there are other areas with different filters. Some filters are largely luck (you need some luck for most kinds of success, but I think being a successful pop musician or actor may be more luck than being a successful businessman). Some involve consistent not-screwing-up (senior bureaucrats in both government and industry). Some people are born into places from which their climb to the top is not too long, though that doesn't seem to be most of America. (Alas, it seems to be true in politics, though!)

It's interesting to ask how this affects the dynamics of the society.

Posted August 3, 2007 8:26 AM by albatross

albatross@38: the people who keep going enjoy the game of getting greater wealth,

Read an article years ago about some current stock barron (can't remember name) who was visiting a tourist site about some early 1900's bagillionaire. The tour was in one of the old houses that the old bagillionaire bought and focused on all the stuff that the bagillionaire bought with his bagillions.

The new guy stopped the person giving the tour and said something to the effect of "I don't want to know what he did with his money, I want to know how he made it." This was his telling of the story in some interview. He told the interviewer that he viewed capitalism as a sport and money was a way of keeping score.

So I think there is definitely something to the idea of money for money's sake for some people.

Posted August 3, 2007 9:09 AM by Greg London

One of the techniques used to bind the group tegether is to give them a shared shame, to make them commit acts with consequences they can be reminded of.

I've seen it described as the power of atrocity*, which is complex. Members are forced/coerced/pressured to commit acts which go against their values, and to protect themselves pyschologically they have to rationalize/justify the atrocity. So they defend the rationalization beyond all logic, because otherwise they would have to face the reality that they are monsters.

A way of burning the bridges -- there's no going back now.

*On Killing by Grossman

Posted August 3, 2007 10:01 AM by mayakda

My comment was directed to Bruce at #29. (Sorry for not prefacing with that).

Posted August 3, 2007 10:04 AM by mayakda

Greg London @ 39

Everyone has some set of measures of success, how satisfied they are with the outcome of their actions, and of utility, how much an action or object (or another person) can contribute to that success. Some people have very concrete measures, e.g., what position am I on a list of rich people, people with explicit rank like military officers, people with implicit rank, like members of a hierarchical social class; or how many members of a class of people are affected by me, e.g., how many people read my articles or listen to my radio show. These concrete measures almost always involve numbers; the ordinal position on a list, or the cardinal count of things possessed.

Some people have more abstract measures: how happy am I, how much do I respect myself, how much revenge can I get for injustices to me. Note that there's not necessarily a coorelation between the abstractness of person's measure of success and the nobility or "goodness" of the person's actions; it's the effect of the actions taken to get that success that determine the moral nature of a goal.

If you fixate on a single measure, to the exclusion of all others, you practically guarantee that the actions taken will be at least amoral, and often unsuccessful in a larger sense. "Take that hill at all costs" probably means you'll lose a lot more soldiers than you might if your goal were different (ask General Pickett, or one of the men in his division). "Corporate profit is the only ethical measure of an executive's fiduciary responsibility" can mean ignoring safety or the needs of the surrounding community; consider Bopal. "Monetary success is the only acceptable goal for an adult" can lead to some truly unhappy marriages and confrontational styles of relationship.

Using a single measure of success is a kind of fanaticism, and I think the history of the 20th century, and what we've seen so far of the 21st shows just how much trouble fanaticism can make for all the people the fanatic has to deal with to get to the goal.

Posted August 3, 2007 10:08 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

mayakda @ 40

Yes, precisely. And very often the group's members go on to commit more and more heinous acts to prove how important the reasons for joining the group are. The logic is that truly important goals justify aberrant acts ("The end justifies the means"), and therefore if you commit horrible acts, your goals must be horribly important. After awhile, no bad outcome can break this spiral, leading to a "Death before surrender" attitude, maybe even one of "Everyone's death before my surrender".

Posted August 3, 2007 10:16 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

It remains to be seen just how long this particular "semi-permanent" disgrace will last. History does not provide many examples of Republicans being punished for their crimes. The last thirty years have been nothing but pardons, bailouts, and amnesia. It's not illogical for Republicans to assume that this will continue.

If the ruling class doesn't experience any consequences for illegal action, they'll just keep acting illegally. The pardon of Nixon was the first step to allowing the Nixonian cancer metastasize and we're suffering for it today. If we don't eradicate the problem now (to beat my own metaphor into the ground) we'll be suffering for it again in the future.

Posted August 3, 2007 10:42 AM by Vir Modestus

Keir@33:

Complete personal identification with "the movement"; they care more about whether it succeeds than about whether they succeed personally.

Which is a problem how?

Well, that depends on the movement; the civil rights workers who got themselves killed in the deep south in the '60s were doing the same thing, and quite likely for the same psychological reasons.

PNH@27: Well, I see at least part of your point on rhetorical stance. Better, perhaps, to begin "Yep --- positions of power are often filled by the power-hungry because they just want it more," and take it from there; the extra words not only convey a bad attitude, but worse, they don't actually say anything. The next sentence is no peach either; it completely misses the point I wanted it to make. But once the post is up, it's too late to rewrite it.

And albatross@38: In Rivest's case, I think he actually likes his job. That happens too.

Posted August 3, 2007 10:47 AM by "Charles Dodgson"

Vir Modestus #44 : they should be talking about turning over every stone and throwing every corrupt politician in jail.

Depends what you think is the level of political corruption in the US, on both sides. If the Dems were demonstrably squeaky-clean, nationally and locally, then they could go down the turn-over-every-stone-and-throw-'em-in-jail route, and probably win. But what if, when they start calling for a purge, the Reps can come right back with dozens of examples of less-than-pretty conduct by Dem politicians? Then you're into name-calling and trying to show which of two bad sides is worse, and the voters turn right off. I'd guess that the "reconciliation" line is the better strategy.

Posted August 3, 2007 11:12 AM by John Stanning

CD @ 45
"Yep --- positions of power are often filled by the power-hungry because they just want it more,"

Maybe triva, but I'll post about it anyway, in case other readers are fond of personality type thingies. A Myers-Briggs book I happen to be browsing says that their database of people who have taken MBTI personality tests across corporate, government, and military organizations, shows that the top executives/brass are composed almost entirely of TJs (Thinking Judging). Mostly ISTJ (32.1%), ESTJ (28%), INTJ (15.8%), ENTJ (9.4%). Then a big gap to the Thinking Perceivers, ENTP (5.3%), INTP (1.3%). The FPs are hardly there at all, starting with ESFP at 1% down to ISFP at .1%.

This distribution is way out of proportion to the general population, so if the people at the top seem different from most of us, it's probably because they are.

(ISTJ & ESTJ are described as having Traditionalist temperaments, btw.)

Posted August 3, 2007 11:21 AM by mayakda

One of the litmus tests I've generated is that someone genuinely concerned about the "Palestinians" first, and only anti-Israel secondly, is that they are as concerned about abuses by the rest of the Arab world as by the Israelis.

It has been clear to me for a long time that one of the most important reasons that the Arab population is kept in an uproar against Israel is that both the medieval monarchies and duchies and the military states are terrified of what would happen if their populations took a good look at education and democracy.

Posted August 3, 2007 12:32 PM by Gag Halfrunt

One of the litmus tests I've generated is that someone genuinely concerned about the "Palestinians" first, and only anti-Israel secondly, is that they are as concerned about abuses by the rest of the Arab world as by the Israelis.

I'll happily state upfront that I'm more concerned by Israeli abuses. That's because Israel is a democracy and I expect better of democracies than I do of the appalling regimes in charge of many Arab countries.

Posted August 3, 2007 1:00 PM by Rob Hansen

One of the litmus tests I've generated is that someone genuinely concerned about the "Palestinians" first, and only anti-Israel secondly, is that they are as concerned about abuses by the rest of the Arab world as by the Israelis.

I'll happily state upfront that I'm more concerned by Israeli abuses. That's because Israel is a democracy and I expect better of democracies than I do of the appalling regimes in charge of many Arab countries.

Posted August 3, 2007 1:00 PM by Rob Hansen

In another Arab case, that of Syria, Edward Luttwak in Coup d'Etat says that the Syrians need not have lost the Golan Heights to Israel in 1967, had they moved a crack unit to the heights to hold the Israelis off. When Hafez Assad, then defence minister, asked Ba'ath leader Salah Jadid for permission to move the brigade, Jadid beat him up and then explained he needed the brigade to hand to discourage any domestic enemies. Assad was so discouraged that in 1970 he staged his own successful coup.

Posted August 3, 2007 1:22 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Earl Cooley #3: You don't have to be a member of an imperial élite for that, the King of Swaziland certainly isn't.

Posted August 3, 2007 1:29 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Fragano, your link in #52 is munged: I guess you meant this:
Swazi king splashes on luxury car

Posted August 3, 2007 2:28 PM by John Stanning

Rob Hansen #50 : I'll happily state upfront that I'm more concerned by Israeli abuses. That's because Israel is a democracy...

Yes, although my doubt about this often-used argument is the implication that the Israeli people have control over the Israeli state, and therefore approve what is being done to the Palestinians. The USA is also a democracy, after all.

Posted August 3, 2007 2:44 PM by John Stanning

John Stanning #54: And we're not concerned about what the USA is doing?

Posted August 3, 2007 2:46 PM by ethan

Neil@34: someone genuinely concerned about the "Palestinians" first, and only anti-Israel secondly

I don't think it possible to measure that in any objective way. The treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis since the nation was forced into the area is indemic to Israel. You can't remove the Palestinian problem and then look at Israel, because Israel's entire history is tightly coupled with the Palestinians.

I suppose if the person is straight out anti-semetic, then sure, they don't care about the Palestinians, they just hate jewish people, and therefore Israel.

But I take issue with Israel's treatment of the Palestinians throughout their entire history, and find it impossible to look at the problem in any sensible way by removing half the people involved.

Israel triggers my "collective punishment" hair trigger. Actually, they bulldoze my collective punishment trigger. Even literally. Bulldozing an entire apartment complex because one resident is violent doesn't work for me. Nor does punishing an entire population by refusing to engage in any constructive peace talks until the violent individual palestinians are stopped.

If Israel had half as much priority on making peace with the peaceful palestinians as it does on hunting down and killing the violent ones, then I'd reconsider.

But how do I separate that I take issue with Israel's behaviour without being concerned about the Palestinians if it's Israel's behaviour specifically towards Palestinians that I have an issue with? I don't think it's one first and then the other second, it's one directly because of another.

It might separate out the anti-semitic person, but it sounds like your litmus test would also separate out someone who has a legitimate problem with Israel's actions.

Posted August 3, 2007 2:54 PM by Greg London

ethan #55: Of course we are. But I think the analogy holds: if the Israeli people, as a whole, are assumed by virtue of their democracy to approve collectively their state's treatment of the Palestinians, then the peope of the USA are similarly assumed to approve collectively their state's behaviour in Guantanamo, Iraq, etc.

For the avoidance of doubt, I do not accept either the former or the latter assumption. But they seem to be implicit in the "Israel-is-a-democracy" argument above.

Posted August 3, 2007 2:56 PM by John Stanning

John Stanning #53: You're right. Sorry.

Posted August 3, 2007 3:11 PM by Fragano Ledgister

#36 - Charlie Stross- If we were a well-informed, rational species, we'd all live like Swedes.

Hm. I don't particularly want to live like a Sweede. I can't say that if I had a gazillion dollars, I'd ride around in a stretch limo, but I *would* probably have a car and a driver, and a maid, possibly even two.

There's a difference between ostentation and luxury. I have no need to scream out luxury, but when I've lived in it, I certainly appreciated it. I dislike the ethic that says that use of wealth to create comfort and even luxury is inherently immoral. I'm not saying you're suggesting that, but some subcultures certainly do. I got sneered at recently for having my laundry picked up and delivered, as if I was some sort of capitalist oppressor for not doing it myself.

And I don't think that people living in luxury, even ostentations luxury necessitates people living in abject poverty. Social mores in the US about displays of wealth are different. Not better or worse. What's worse is our level of social welfare. That's all.

Posted August 3, 2007 3:43 PM by Josh Jasper

Bruce 31: I agree, but shorter (re Tauscher): "You're responsible for what goes out over your signature, whether you wrote it (or even read it) or not."

Posted August 3, 2007 4:18 PM by Xopher

Holy Crap, Maya @47!

That explains so bloody much. As an ENFP, I've always wondered how so many powerful people seem to work without considering the wider view, and without empathizing. That... pretty much sums it up right there.

It also answers my much more trivial question of "why no one in power does anything cool anymore." It seems to me that rich people used to tend to bug out and get creative more often... building castles, founding eccentric museums, financing plays and movies simply for their own amusement. It may be that in the past the elites tended towards a more varied personality sample, and thus had more varied interests.

That is really, really scary to me. There aren't ANY of my type in that breakdowns, and no INFPs either. No Champions or Lyricists.

Ooof. The problem is I have no idea how to fix that, or if it would be possible to.

Posted August 3, 2007 4:31 PM by Leah Miller

Leah #61: It may be that in the past the elites tended towards a more varied personality sample, and thus had more varied interests.

People get into an elite by two means: inheritance or earning their way in. It's the latter category, I suspect, that seems to select more for certain personality traits.

(None of this explains Andrew Carnegie, who displayed an astonishing single-mindedness in the getting of his money, but who did some fascinating things once he had a ton of it. I'm incredibly grateful to the Carnegie Libraries.)

Posted August 3, 2007 4:41 PM by joann

Several other prominent billionaires have also done interesting/cool things with their wealth, both in business and philanthropy. Think Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and George Soros for a few examples, but there are more.

Posted August 3, 2007 5:22 PM by albatross

So, if I'm going to become an imperial elite, I'm going to need a good lawyer, and a personal assistant who won't rob me blind, and will recruit a posse for me. I'll certainly, at the very least, need someone to meticulously deshell crab meat for me.

Thing is, I have a basic entrenched distrust for truth parsers that I haven't coded myself, so finding a lawyer will be hard for me; they'd at least have to be EFF alumni or something. It has been alleged that some Second Life lawyers have souls, too.

As for the King of Swaziland, his birthday party cost a frugal six figures, no where near the seven figure minimum required for credible Tycoesque opulence.

Posted August 3, 2007 5:35 PM by Earl Cooley III

John Stanning@#57 - Yes, exactly. By virtue of their democracy, Americans can (and should) be held complicit in the events of Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Though deplorable, I no more expect the Israelis to rise up against their democratically elected government than I expect to see Americans rise up against their own. But the atrocities are still being committed in their name. Would that more individuals could remember this and act upon it.

Posted August 3, 2007 5:53 PM by Paul Lalonde

Earl, you can just have your crabs air-freighted to Thailand to be shelled by cheap fingers...

Posted August 3, 2007 5:55 PM by John Stanning

Earl Cooley III: That's because Swaziland is a poor country, with 40 percent of the adult population being HIV positive. Mswati can't compete with really big corporate heads, though he can give every wife a Mercedes.

Posted August 3, 2007 6:04 PM by Fragano Ledgister

I am morally opposed to outsourcing as economic treason. My crab meat will be 100% American. My crab meat quality control consultant will be an American with an egregia cum laude Fisheries Sciences and Management college degree, and will be lavishly overpaid as a way to encourage personal loyalty and to avoid pesky poisoned or contaminated crab incidents. As an imperial elite, I need not be concerned about searching for the cheapest form of labor available; I prefer quality. Besides, a round trip to Thailand unacceptably ages the seafood.

Posted August 3, 2007 6:16 PM by Earl Cooley III

47, 61: For those puzzled (as I was) by MBTI and ISTJ, ESTJ, INTJ, ENTJ (and so on), here is a link to a wikipedia article describing Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality profiling.

Posted August 3, 2007 6:25 PM by Rob Rusick

#61 Leah Miller : It seems to me that rich people used to tend to bug out and get creative more often... building castles, founding eccentric museums, financing plays and movies simply for their own amusement.

Well, John Fry (of Fry's Electronics) is building a replica of the Alhambra in Morgan Hill, California, just so he can fill it with mathematicians...

Posted August 3, 2007 7:19 PM by Rich McAllister

So, Earl, how are you going to house the visiting workers who pick your crabs? Because they have to be picked by hand.

Posted August 3, 2007 8:59 PM by Marilee

Historian diving in here. I call bullshit. Now, possibly, if you were going to talk about elites post-industrialism, or post-Enlightenment, I could agree. I'm not disagreeing that this is what's happened, by the way. I'm simply saying that Schwarz's argument is flawed, in the sense that his sense of history is incomplete, ignorant, and annoying. And you know, I'm not even sure that he's right for modern empires. Seriously. He's assuming that people thought a lot of things for which there is no historical evidence. What exactly is a healthy society? My own readings tell me that, for the people at the top of most historic empires, the social and economic justice implied in Schwarz's comment, healthy meant "profitable for us and people aren't trying to kill us." For some, there might be a religious aspect, "there's no heresy/there is proper worship of the god(s), so there's no plague/drought/natural disasters/vengeful acts of god(s), so we're profiting and people aren't trying to kill us."

Sorry. I just find arguments like this weaker when they're based on presentist historical interpretations.

Posted August 3, 2007 9:09 PM by Another Damned Medievalist

"Visiting workers"? What makes you think that housing them is in any way my imperial responsibility? It's not as if I will be stuffing myself full of crab meat to the extent that I'd need 24/7/365 crab worker coverage. Besides, I'd rather not be drawn into any sort of "guest worker" argument. They'd be paid a reasonable "living wage", at the very least, so would be able, by definition, to afford their own housing.

It occurs to me that I'm going to need a lot of raw power to make my imperial elite utopia work correctly. I'm going to need omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.

Posted August 3, 2007 9:11 PM by Earl Cooley III

Earl @ #73, And machine guns.

Posted August 3, 2007 9:15 PM by Linkmeister

ethan @6: my mother's theory is that the reason the vast majority of America and Americans are being left to rot by TPTB is that they're moving their consumer base to China.

Their consumer base for *what*? The domestic manufacturing base in the US has already been dismantled by globalization, and TPTB's goods are probably already being *made* in China and shipped back to Wal-Mart.

Posted August 3, 2007 9:43 PM by Julie L.

Earl @ 73

You're going to need some good henchmen too. Learn from Vader's and Blofeld's mistakes and don't get them from Thugs 'R Us. Very poor quality, especially for critical functions like world conquest.

Posted August 3, 2007 11:48 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

#72, Another Damn Medievalist: I get the sense that I might agree with you if I could figure out what you're saying. Perhaps you could take a deep breath and try again, spelling out the connections a little more s-l-o-w-l-y?

Posted August 4, 2007 12:20 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Linkmeister #74,

We must remember, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.

Posted August 4, 2007 12:34 AM by Dave Luckett

Dave Luckett @ #78, what's that from? Kipling?

Posted August 4, 2007 1:46 AM by Linkmeister

Hilaire Belloc, I think.

Posted August 4, 2007 2:17 AM by John Stanning

John @ #80, I Googled; you're right. I don't know enough about Belloc to know what the occasion was for his composing it.

Posted August 4, 2007 3:09 AM by Linkmeister

It's a couplet that's become detached from the poem it came from, which isn't very memorable. I haven't got the book to hand, but after a little Internet searching, I found this:

The Modern Traveller

Blood thought he knew the native mind;
He said you must be firm, but kind.
A mutiny resulted.
I shall never forget the way
That Blood stood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
'Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.'

Posted August 4, 2007 5:04 AM by John Stanning

But, Linkmeister, you weren't far off with Kipling. Kipling's short story 'The Captive', in the collection Traffics and Discoveries, tells the story of Laughton O. Zigler who is in South Africa during the second Boer war, trying to sell a gun to the British Army. Zigler might well be based on Hiram S. Maxim.

Posted August 4, 2007 5:18 AM by John Stanning

Bruce @76: the best henchmen are the ones that come out of the ACME Clone-Me™[1] -- they know what you want to do, they know how you want to do it, and they're in it for the same rewards as yourself. The only question is how to divvy up the spoils afterwards.

[1] The deluxe model Clone-Me™, where you pull the lever and the clone pops out fully mature and with all your memories and unpleasant personality traits already installed. Not the boringly mundane real world model they're working on at the Roslin Institute with all that mucking around with sheep ...

Posted August 4, 2007 5:25 AM by Charlie Stross

I wonder if Kipling had Sir Basil Zaharoff in mind.

Posted August 4, 2007 6:23 AM by Dave Bell

A little more searching turned up the whole of Belloc's The Modern Traveller in the Internet Archive, where it's reproduced in facsimile in a PDF (worth looking at for the drawings), and transcribed, with shaky spelling and formatting, in a text file. IMHO it's not up to the standard of Belloc's other works such as the "Cautionary Tales".

Posted August 4, 2007 6:52 AM by John Stanning

Maxim guns are all well and good, but sometimes not even a Maxim gun will help you.

Posted August 4, 2007 9:00 AM by James D. Macdonald

I knew I should have looked that quotation up before posting. Gawd, my memory's porous these days.

Posted August 4, 2007 9:10 AM by Dave Luckett

Sorry PNH at #77, I meant first that I agree with Schwarz's fundamental argument that TPTB in this country refuse to recognize or choose to ignore the necessity of what he calls a healthy society to ultimately ensure their survival, and the survival of the US as a world power. I'd actually take that a step further and say that a large percentage of USians(enough to elect GWB, at least) have the same mindset. After all, you just have to look around and see the vast amount of luxury goods owned by people who claim that their taxes are too high.

My overall crankiness was brought on by the raising of the "historical" flag. Schwarz bases his arguments in large part on the premise that healthy society is a democratic and just one. By using 'historical' and 'imperial' together, he invokes the specters of other great empires, which I think for most people might include Rome, and possibly Persia, as well as more modern empires like the Hapbsburg Empire and the British Empire. For a person who knows more, the ghosts of empires past might included any number of non-western empires as well: Han, Mongol, Mughal, Incan, Aztec, Mali, Maurya, Songhay ... For me, of course, there's the Carolingian Empire, too ;-)

The problem with Schwarz's argument is that his original premise doesn't really work in any of those examples. The democracy and other underpinnings of what _he_ calls a healthy society did not necessarily exist, and more importantly, were not thought to be necessary, in any of those Empires. Certainly in many of them there was the idea of a just society and rights for the citizen, but the definition of citizenship was far different than ours. I can't speak to each and every one of these cases, but in terms of Europe and China, society was very stratified (and in different ways, with different reasons) and the stratification was often legally enforced. There were times of relatively greater social mobility, but these societies judged the factors that made a healthy society differently than we tend to in a post-Enlightenment, post-Industrial Revolution world.

In the pre-modern world, a healthy society tended to be one where there an absence of warfare, natural disaster, and rebellion, which often resulted from people of many social strata being fed up with the costs of war and natural disaster. A healthy imperial society was one in which the costs of war were balanced by the benefits of conquering other people and incorporating them and their riches into the empire. I realise this is oversimplified, too, but at least it's a fairly accurate oversimplification.

So even though I think what Schwarz is saying makes sense, I object to his misinterpretation of history to support it. I think it ill serves both his argument and history.

Posted August 4, 2007 9:35 AM by Another Damned Medievalist

eep. I just used the word 'argument' far too much.

Posted August 4, 2007 9:39 AM by Another Damned Medievalist

I don't think it possible to measure that in any objective way. The treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis since the nation was forced into the area is indemic to Israel. You can't remove the Palestinian problem and then look at Israel, because Israel's entire history is tightly coupled with the Palestinians.

And like all colonial powers, they want the dirty wogs to get out of the way so they can enjoy their manifest destiny. While it's possible and even likely that not *all* Israelis think this way, it seems to me to be the predominant force in their politics and policy.

Now, I know perfectly well that I come from a country that has a colonial past itself. If I had been born then I might even have supported it - I like to think not, but who can tell. But while the past isn't changeable, the future is, and I don't really want to see any *more* colonialism - we've had quite enough of that for one planet, thanks.

Sooner or later they get the Maxim gun - or rockets that they can fire at you from the Golan Heights - and then things can get really ugly.

Complicating this are the people who try to draw a connection between modern Israel and the ancient state of the same name, claiming that they are the "real" natives and not these interlopers who have lived there for a mere 2000 years. I think that claim is, frankly, ludicrous. I might as well claim to own Ireland because I have some Irish ancestors.

Maybe they're just hoping to hang on until time entrenches their theft the way it did for the US, Canada, Australia... while the Palestinians are hoping that they'll eventually throw the colonials back out like India and most of Africa. In both cases some remnant of both sides persist, but the ethnic and cultural result is shaped more by one side than the other.

P.S. I think it is important not to confuse the Hebrew ethnic group, Judaism as a religion, and Israel as a political entity. These criticisms focus on the latter.

Posted August 4, 2007 9:40 AM by Chris

John Stanning (#82) - I asked my husband, the military history buff, about this Blood person, and he came up with the info: Major General Sir Bindon Blood. He told me the name off the top of his head, but then looked in North-West Frontier 1837-1947 (in the Osprey Men-at-Arms series) to get the rank correct. He also told me there was a real General Primrose at around that time. Sounds like Gilbert & Sullivan didn't need to look far for inspiration!

Posted August 4, 2007 10:00 AM by Faren Miller

Chris 91: I wonder what would happen if the Cherokees went back to Georgia and said "This land is ours; we were driven off it by bad guys, and now we want it back. Please leave" to all the people who "own" the land now? And that's very recent indeed, by these standards. I doubt they'd get far.

That said, it would be nice if the Jews didn't need a homeland. I'm afraid the events of the 20th Century, and the many centuries of events that led up to them, demonstrate that they do.

Those two things are what keep me torn about Israel. I dislike the idea of nations where one's citizenship, or lack thereof, is dependent upon one's religious identity—and that applies to Israel today AND to Spain in 1492. Not to mention Germany in 1939.

Posted August 4, 2007 10:54 AM by Xopher

ADM@89: My overall crankiness was brought on by the raising of the "historical" flag.

Well, at least he uses relatively recent history. I think it's safe to say that anything prior to WW2 is probably mostly irrelevant as to what is currently possible in creating a "healthy" society.

Certainly there are things to learn from history about human behaviour, but I think that some things are possible now that simply weren't possible a hundred years ago. So what was needed to make a "healthy" society a century ago is no longer the only path.

Something like one in three societies in pre-industrial times had slavery, the apparent reasoning being slavery was the quick solution to the labor intense work of farming. The industrial revolution made this issue moot, and all the societal conversations that had been in place to justify the use of slavery to exist, suddenly collapsed. And slavery itself came into question.

So what was "healthy" back then might be abhorrent to most people now.

I believe we are at a technological point now (What is it, the post-information age? Pre-Singularity age?) where what is possible in terms of a healthy society simply wasn't concievable even fifty years ago. And what was healthy even fifty years ago is no longer applicable by default.

I'm definitely not a techno-dreamist with visions of a Star Trek world where technology solves everything to the point we don't need money, but I think technology, like a simple internal combustion engine, has changed some of the underlying premises about what is and is not healthy as a society.

Posted August 4, 2007 10:54 AM by Greg London

Xopher @ 93

This is essentially what the Mohawk tribe did in New York. IIRC, they laid claim to something like 80,000 acres of land, most of it inhabited to medium density by white people.* They ended up getting a little less than 15,000, none by eminent domain, plus $10E8 over a 35 year period, plus a bunch of smaller door prizes (see story). It got ugly for some time while the claim was being negotiated; if they'd gotten everything they asked for I suspect there would have been lynchings, if not an outright race war.

* I.e., it wasn't farmland, wilderness, or desert.

Posted August 4, 2007 11:49 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Xopher @ 93

That said, it would be nice if the Jews didn't need a homeland.

I've always wondered how different the world would be if they hadn't listened to the Zionists and had set up a Jewish state on the pampas of Argentina. But it wasn't just the Jews who made that decision; the British government had a stake in it from the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which I believe was a chess move in the Great Game rather than any sort of attempt to deal with a human and political problem.

Posted August 4, 2007 11:57 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Greg London @#94 -- Part of my irritations stemmed from the fact that he doesn't ever say he's talking about "modern" empires. So either he's assuming his audience will know that he's dismissing several thousand years of human experience -- and it always pisses me off when people do that -- or he's misrepresenting how people in pre-modern empires saw the world. I'm a huge fan of technology-based utopias, myself, but have never discounted the Borg/Terminator scenarios.

Posted August 4, 2007 11:57 AM by Another Damned Medievalist

Charlie Stross @ 84
The only question is how to divvy up the spoils afterwards.

That's the perennial question. It's almost inevitable that a group of highly sociopathic evil geniuses will fall out over who gets the big slice of the pie. That's why the latest model Clone-Me™, version 6.66, has a special feature called Automatic Secession. Once the evil plan is fulfilled, the original can call all the clones together at a grand celebration party, and with the utterance of a single trigger word, cause them all to fall into a deep trance called "Barbarossa Sleep". They can be kept this way for long periods of time, as a safeguard against the return of the forces of good.

Posted August 4, 2007 12:06 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Greg London@94 I can't speak for ADM, but I think you're misunderstanding her point. It isn't that we shouldn't set ourselves higher goals in the organisation of society than the Romans now that we can - we should, that much is surely unarguable. But the thing is that a longer view of history shows that there are other social equilibria besides the one we grew up with that are equally acceptable to an elite class.

Democracy is, after all, a pretty fragile flower. No serious gambler in 1940 would have put money on it surviving anywhere in the world except North America, and even there it would probably just been a matter of time. We have had 60 very privileged years, in some senses, and there is no law of nature which says there have to be another 60.

Posted August 4, 2007 12:22 PM by chris y

That said, it would be nice if the Jews didn't need a homeland. I'm afraid the events of the 20th Century, and the many centuries of events that led up to them, demonstrate that they do.

Even more unfortunately, you can say the same thing about most of Earth, and the exceptions are places you probably wouldn't want to live even with early 21st century technology.

However, I think the events of the 20th century demonstrate pretty clearly that no ethnic group or religion really needs a homeland in the old sense: what they need is a land where they will not be targeted because of their ethnicity or religion.

Being the locally dominant group is only one way to achieve this (and requires constant struggles for dominance against other groups, domestic and foreign); a society built on tolerance is another. Jews in the U.S. and most of Europe are (AFAIK) just as well off, or possibly better off, than Jews in Israel (and they seem to agree, since many have the resources to emigrate to Israel and choose not to), and I think that would remain true even if the Palestinians magically vanished.

The only thing Jews get from Israel's existence (that I can see) is the ability to act out power fantasies about oppressing other groups and the shoe being on the other foot - an understandable reaction from humans, I suppose, but one I see no need to promote. The antidote to oppression is justice, not counter-oppression.

And the Palestinians *won't* magically vanish - so now they need a homeland, right? Who are you going to displace to house them?

Don't create a homeland for Jews. Create a homeland for humans.

Posted August 4, 2007 12:27 PM by Chris

Chris @ 100

Jews in the U.S. and most of Europe are (AFAIK) just as well off

I don't think so. There is still a great deal of hidden and not-so-hidden antisemitism in Western Europe (especially Germany and France as I understand it), let alone in Eastern Europe. At the end of WWII there were approximately 6,000 Jews still alive within the borders of Poland; there aren't very many more today, and you can't fault anyone for not being willing to walk back into the furnace (almost literally).

Even if things are better now than they were, there was no way for an individual Jew to know that would happen when trying to find a safe place to live right after the war. And there were millions of refugees, a number large enough that just leaving the problem to the private sectors of the countries that were still standing was not a reasonable solution.

And if you don't think there's any antisemitism left in the US, you aren't looking closely enough.

I, too, deplore the choice of location for Israel, but I'm not naive enough to believe that it would have been possible not to set up some sort of retreat. The unfortunate consequence of the location was that the retreat became a redoubt, and a fortress mentality set in.

Posted August 4, 2007 12:46 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

John Stanning @ 57

if the Israeli people, as a whole, are assumed by virtue of their democracy to approve collectively their state's treatment of the Palestinians

This proposition doesn't hold, as the premise is false. For at least the last 20 years, and probably for a lot longer, policy vis a vis Palestinians, both internal and external, has been set by a political alliance representing around 40% of the population (possibly even less today, given the President's lack of approval rating). Because it's an alliance, some policies have been set based on the wishes of the smaller, more religiously fundamental, but also more politically active faction, which represents less than 10% of the population. Opinion polls in the last few years have consistently shown that a percentage of voters that would be called a landslide in a US election disapprove of those policies and want them changed.

It's interesting to compare this with the Palestinians' situation. Until very recently, they had no say in their government at all. Even now, civil order in Palestine more closely resembles that in East LA, gangs and all, than a modern democratic state. And a significant fraction of the population makes it clear, when asked, that they do not consider the current situation acceptable either, and that many of them think their leaders are going in th