Chris --
Even very good gas turbines are still combustion tech, and combustion tech is what we have to get rid of. (Coal first, turbines last, but the whole category needs to go.)
Nuke plants are not required to be large; there are pebble bed, gas cooled designs down in the five to eight megawatt range explicitly designed for the same kinds of efficient thermal recovery you're talking about, particularly to give hospitals independent heat and power. (There are half megawatt passive convection nuke designs, for that matter, with stirling engines sitting on the rads.)
Which is not to say that I think greater efficiency doesn't matter; it does, a great deal. But there's this huge percentage of the generating capacity that needs to be shut off, which means replaced with something, and nukes -- little, local ones, run by people who live near them -- are a good answer for that.
Patrick --
I'd pay more to see the George W. Bush vs Jean Chretien version, especially if Jean got his Inuit carving.
It's a pity the US doesn't have the same tradition of having politicians appear as guests on political satire shows, really it is.
Dave Weingart -
Hey, this is the Globe and Mail. They're not necessarily trying to be funny.
(The Globe and Mail is the analog of the Wall Street Journal, sorta.)
Xopher --
I'm not sure if I can make this explanation work, but Bob and Doug aren't even parody, they're fiction.
They're a great big shaggy dog version of the 'Americans at the border with skis on the roof rack in July' joke turned round and looked at from the back. (Also in this genre -- Spirit of the West, "We Are The People of the Frozen North".)
Bob and Doug are also a joke that has a lot to do with the presumption of stupidity -- it works off of Bob and Doug being dumb, in a way that's a counterpoint to 'and you think we're so dumb, eh?' -- being mistaken for stupid -- as a cultural response. (Keep in mind that both the actors/writers are very sharp guys, and well known as such.)
So here's the leader of our largest trading partner (and if people in the US forget that, the readers of the Globe and Mail generally will not) arriving for a state visit, and the stuff on his mind is this thing that depends for its humour on the instant recognition of how wrong it is, and how familiar the value of wrong is, presented in a way that implies he's taking it for the Gospel truth.
Which is to say, 'dumber than a five pound sack of ten pound hammers'.
Hey, the Globe and Mail cartoon from Tuesday about the Bush visit was nasty, in a way I will give you long odds neither George nor any of his advisers will notice.
Same thing with the way Chretien phrased his disappointed comment, about the start of Iraq War. So far as I can tell, it sounds quite innocuous unless one is an ethnic Canadian.
Greg London -
I'm saying to speak in a way that is inclusive of everyone's humanity, and let everyone react the way they react.
At which point you lose, because some of those people are entirely willing to beat you to death in order to get you to shut up, as their self-respect, sense of what is right and proper, and belief in what is good demand.
The basic challenge facing any social system is 'what does it do to survive contact with a hostile social system?'
It does not matter how well it provides for the needs of its members, how diverse its arts and learning are, how well it tends the land -- what matters is how well it defends itself from the raiders arround it, because it can only do those things to the extent that it has resources left over from warding off the hostile social systems around it.
Dr. King was up against a system that was perfectly willing to kill him, and lots of his fellows, to make them accept that they were inferior. His response to that was to convince the preponderance of brute material power that the position of his enemies was wrong, and should be forcibly suppressed. (Don't let an awareness that his argument addressed axiomatic issues of self respect obscure that it was a plea for forceful succor.)
His response was not to ignore the probable responses of "racist assholes".
Greg London --
You are seen here to be prefering the frame of morals to the frame of results.
Avram --
Which was called, back at the beginnings of taxation when the Church caused the invention of the private ownership of land in the Saxon Heptarchy, "the common burdens".
I suspect that quite a lot could be done with that frame.
Greg London --
There's a generational movement to destroy the US Federal government presently busily succeeding. The Least Hypothesis is that they're doing this in large part because any government with the power to tell them they have to treat a black man as an equal is unbearable and intolerable. On top of that, MLK was assassinated -- shot dead for his politics.
So don't try to sell me a line of bullshit about MLK not alienating anybody.
The choice you've got, collective you, is to utterly erase the theocrats and the thugs -- not necessarily to kill them, but to ensure that the cultural change takes place so that their children and grandchildren think they're laughable idiots -- or to be their slaves. That's what pitching the validity of elections means; it's a declaration that it's better to cheat than to lose.
That's the same as deciding that you'd rather have power than civilization -- that you would, when it comes right down to it, rather live in a log hut than deal with the idea that you can't always do what you want.
That's not widely a conscious decision, but don't kid yourself that it's not a decision.
Euros are not a good long term plan; the Euro is backed by the European economy, which prospers by doing high-margin, high-value add manufacturing. The rise of the Euro is murdering that margin, which will in turn murder the Euro right around the time the dollar crisis peaks.
Hedge funds probably not a good idea either; most of them are inadequately backed, and I think Brad De Long's point about a twenty year selection process for irrational optimists in financial institutions is well taken.
Dubya, like any true aristocrat, wants an economy where the only things of reliable value are gold, land, and cattle, and he's probably going to get it, world-wide.
If I had to come up with something to invest in, I'd try tool steel additives -- vanadium and molybdenum, say -- which are tolerably rare and very hard to do without unless we're postulating that the lights are going to go out, rather than everyone becoming much poorer.
Greg --
There isn't a frame-of-frames because frames are an essential aspect of human cognition. It's possible to have a complicated frame that includes models of (your best guess at) other people's, but that's as meta as it gets.
There's strong social selection pressure for picking a compelexity handling mechanism -- that would be a cognitive frame at the personal level -- with a low cost, because all the thinking you do about how you're thinking is effort that doesn't go into anything else.
Especially in circumstances where there are few threats to life and limb, it's quite possible to get by for generations with a frame that doesn't even try to handle the edge cases; so long as it handles the 80% or so of events that actually happen frequently, it works fine.
This is a whole lot of what the neocons get support from; people feel as though they are being compelled to change their frames by external events. This is a reasonably factual position -- technological change and population growth are regularly presenting situations that the established frames can't handle. If part of your frame is that there are absolute truths, it's hard to deal with this in the 'how much work for how much reward?' way that will seem sensible to people lacking those absolutes. (I'm leaving aside the cherised axioms of no factual basis which the law has been refusing to reflect in the last thirty-odd years; while that's certainly part of the sense of compulsion, it's not, to my mind, the major part.)
Oh, and is the conflation of 'conservative' -- people who prefer to avoid change because it's easy to make things worse and hard to make things better -- and the current neocon movement (which is radical, rather than conservative) a good idea?
There are certainly plenty of people of good will out there whose cognitive frames for most issues are generations out of date; many of them are progressives, come to that.
But there are just as certainly plenty of people who are not of good will, whose diverse objects involve the subjugation of others to their will, and whose cognitive frames explicitly assert that this is their right and duty to accomplish.
I'd submit that it makes much more sense to clearly distinguish between these two cases, because the cognitive frames the first group are using are insufficent to the observed complexity, and the cognitive frames the second group are using are dishonest.
It's not enough to be against.
The theocrats haven't got where they are by being against complexity, trade, and the general increase in access to choice; they've got there by being for simplicity and a 'return to a natural life'.
Never mind that it's a bogus simplicity and a value of natural that's purely fictional; given a choice between something that makes them feel better about themselves, and something that makes them feel like a bad person, people will naturally prefer the former.
Why do you think the attack on the ideal of progress and an increased access to choice -- more people having opportunity to do more things -- is so consistent?
Same with rigour; can't have that, because if you use that it becomes obvious that the 'simple, natural' position is wrong. (Indefensible. Cone-headed lunacy. Whatever.)
I'm not going to try to give anybody in the States tactical advice (beyond hoping you've all taken steps to get any savings you might have out of dollar denominated assets and into something that will do better in a global currency crisis), but sure, there's a way ahead.
Keep in mind that your side has most of the technical ability, most of the import-replacing economy, the numeracy, and the world view that can actually handle the complexity management for a post-industrial culture. You're not the side that's terrified of having to change, or willing to commit any stupidity rather than acknowledge that axioms need changing when the world changes. (They may not be scared of you, personally, but they're terrified of living in a world where their moral absolutes don't make sense. You can't translate the precepts of neolithic nomadic sheep-herders into this future and have them make sense; you can admit that, and get on with life and a more complex theology that gives up its absolutes, or you can wreck the place until the sheep-herding axioms do make sense.)
Organization is what triumphs in conflicts. Organization rests on ability to handle complexity.
So, you know, once the good guys -- and yes, the party of prosperity and opportunity is the good guys -- recognize that this isn't a problem of compromise and collegiality and policy dispute, but an actual ass-kicking contest, you can expect to win it.
If the have to switch the spin back to Osama bin Forgotten being the big deal, they will be admitting that Iraq is a failure.
While it would be a good thing for them to do that, I don't think they agree with me about that.
The surprise is quite likely that all 38 states with Diebold voting machines will elect Bush; all they have to do to get that is to keep the polls close enough that it's publically plausible for this to be the case.
Clarke --
Any absolutist is wandering off into nutbar territory; the universe we've actually got has error bars.
I am certainly not in favour of an absolute right of free speech (especially when money is defined as speech) -- I do consider it inappropriate to shout fire! in a crowded theatre, or to play loud music at 3 AM in a residential area, or to claim that your right of free speech means that the NDA doesn't apply.
I do not agree with the 2nd Ammendment at all (I'm a Canadian, it's not my Constitution); what I was trying to point out is that by the rhetoric used to defend an absolutist stance on the 2nd Ammendment, the folks taking that position should have started shooting by now.
So their rhetoric and their actual position are pretty wildly inconsistent.
It's not like the 2nd Ammendment absolutists actually mean the oft-touted defense against tyranny parts; American citizens have been slung into prison without charge and subjected to indefinite detention without trial, the president has claimed powers Henry VII couldn't have got away with -- arbitrary detention has been considered unacceptable for quite awhile, but so has "the king feels like starting a war", ever since Long Edward fucked up his first war back in 1340 or so -- and they haven't shot anybody over it.
Which means it's really a "no one gets to tell me what to do about anything", not on this planet, la-la-la I can't hear you issue, not a princpled question of balancing rights and obligations in a civil society.
It's not lack of arms that makes you helpless; it's lack of organization that makes you helpless, lack of the ability to co-operate with your neighbours.
Especially when you don't agree about everything.
Eric --
I think your sense of tactics is leaking.
The Republicans do not want media focus on their platform; it costs them a net loss of votes. A totally dull convention where the only things to report are 'gosh, what a lot of New Yorkers are wearing anti-Bush slogans' and 'yep, same old repressive platform' is of net benefit to the folks who do not want Bush to be elected.
It's not like street protest is going to accomplish anything other than a PR disaster; the only thing that has been shifting Bush's rating up has been the fear of imminent death, and pictures of mass civil violence play into that.
It doesn't matter why that violence took place, how good the reasons for it are, anything. None of this stuff matters; what matters is how people's very basic social conditioning makes them react to the violence on television.
And yes, there will be violence, given the slightest opportunity; so the only real solution is to not present the opportunity.
Michael --
Thank you, and yup, Rummy broke the bulldozer.
Over historical time, the guys who won't negotiate -- who don't think you're human, and do want your labour or stuff -- always show up.
I mean, sixty years ago, when the United States had the entire freaking world by the throat -- as much empire as it cared to take -- and let go and went home, something neither the French nor the Russians have ever managed to get their heads around, who would have thought that two generations later, the United States would be the pillagers?
Monumentally inept pillagers? From the self-same folks who do logistical support as a thing of transcendent beauty? It defies belief.
Lenny --
Going all poetic and taking them from their offices, emptying their pockets, and putting them at dusk in some souk in Sadr City has a certain appeal, as does liquidating the assets of everyone and everything currently engaged in profiteering in Iraq (start with Haliburton), and giving the results out as cash to individual Iraqis.
I'd argue, though, that the core problem is so much bigger than those three individuals that there isn't a financial fix. There certainly isn't enough pain, or enough cash, in them, singularly or collectively, to pay for the pain and devastation they've made.
Lenny --
You're rediscovered the Quaker dilemma -- Quakers are about the best neighbours you can hope to have until the steppe nomads show up.
Generalized, you want to live in a community of compromise and consensus rule-of-law pacifists until you have to deal with an external group that doesn't grant you the status of "worth negotiating with" and which will use force to get what it wants from you.
(Note that in the case of Iraq, the US is the steppe nomads.)
Historically, democracies have been very good at dealing with the dilemma by biasing their society toward the 'trade' side, rather than the 'raid' side, of the human behavioural repertoire, and out-innovating (and consequently out-producing) their enemies. The relative fraction of their output and population which must go to military expenses is lower than that of their enemies, and the thalassocracy has historically been very good at keeping conflicts fundamentally naval, which has a different set of stress constraints on the people involved and produces social demands for innovation.
Currently, there are three disturbing trends.
One is the emergence of corporations which deny that the common burdens apply to them; they're readily modeled ecologically as predators on labour, and they are fundamentally against innovation, because innovation threatens their relative success. (Just like any biological predator will kill the young of any other biological predator which it comes across, a corporate will kill innovation whenever it can.)
Another is the emergence of a strong political faction within the United States which prefers the corporate power structure to the public power structure of the United States, and sees looting the latter to benefit the former as a virtuous act. This faction is against not only innovation but the mechanisms, starting with the rule of law, which allow it.
Third is one of the very specific means of looting; using the military power of the state to force market access. This has been a widespread pattern for US policy for many years, and it really annoys people. It's been getting worse over time, and it's used to support that desire for a rigidly stable hierarchy in which no threatening innovation (either social or technical) can take place.
So, here we are with an army; it is going to get indifferent to the death of everyone around it if it fights, because that is what happens to the people in it when you put them somewhere they get shot at.
Could we make it more careful, even though it is indifferent?
Probably; that would be tricky, but really purely professional militaries (see Kipling's "The Army of a Dream" for an evocation of how you might get such a thing; it's wildly technically dated, but the evocation of the necessary social change is pretty good) have done stuff like that in the past, because they're fighting and dying for pride in personal excellence rather than a concept of tribe or territory.
Unfortunately, that's freaking hard to get, and the current US military is under heavy, heavy pressure to be a better tool for looting. (Note Secretary Rumsfeld's determination to get rid of the heavy brigades and replace them with forces suitable for rapid deployment as occupation forces with inferior equipment.)
So, yes, your military could be a machine to build something somewhat different, that fought well; it would have a (much) higher unit cost, it would require more maintenance, it would probably remove the United States from Great Power status (able to wage offencive war against another Power) but it could be different. It would still kill people by mistake, but quite possibly not so many.
As Bellatrys says, it would take changing the root society of the military to get such a change.
Clark --
The contents of those posts remain good descriptions of my current thinking.
Appreciate the commendation.
Lenny --
I don't think the atrocities are excusable. I would like to know where you get off imputing that I do think they're excusable. (This is not a light accusation to make in my birth culture.)
Break things and kill people is a design description.
Think of it this way -- some guy who is really good with a bulldozer can use it to turn over your flower garden in the spring so you can plant in properly turned soil, but no matter how good that guy is with that machine, you have these big tread dents in your lawn.
Similarly, really able people can use an army to sit on a society long enough that some other people can change the institutions of that that society; it will still get people killed and stuff blown up that oughtn't to be, because of the nature of the toolset available to an army.
It's like the Islamic cultural concepts of "Dar Al-Islam", "the house of peace", and "Dar al-harb", "the house of war". Once you're using an army you're in the house of war. Civil society doesn't exist, can't exist, until you're not using an army anymore.
One of the things about civil society that is dead, gone, one with Thebes the Golden in that situation, is the time to take considered decisions; if you do that, the other fellow will kill you, your unit, and leave your beloved home at the entire mercy of the enemy.
So you don't do that; you make rapid pessimistic assumptions and react on that basis. You'll do this in an information vacuum for every category of information except the physical capability to be a threat, using a very simple set of rules because human minds can only handle very simple rules under that level of stress and with that constraint of speed.
That is what an army is for; this is what using an army means, just as using a bulldozer to turn your flowerbed means the big tread dents in your lawn. The guy driving can be really, really good, very careful, dedicated to doing the least amount of damage to your lawn as can possibly be done, but fundamentally it's a bulldozer and it's going to mangle your lawn.
So, yeah, the guys driving the bulldozer -- those responsible for the operations of the army -- have a responsibility to do so carefully, to strengthen the traditions of conduct so that the people involved have self image heavily invested in not shooting the wrong people, to prosecute those who fail to exhibit due care -- which is not the same thing as a 'house of peace' definition of due care -- and to strive to learn from this experience and to apply it to the next one.
Because they are dealing with human beings under conditions where they're being stressed past the point of failure, they're not always going to succeed. They wouldn't always succeed even if there weren't an information vacuum to deal with. This is going to be the case so long as there are human beings involved.
They are not responsible for the decision to use an army in the first place, with all its foreseeable consequences of death and destruction; that rests solely with the political masters of the army.
The political decision to use an army involves taking responsibility for the widows and orphans and cripples and destruction. This is precisely what has not happened about Iraq, what is being denied as something either needful or possible by the government of the United States of America.
Matthew --
You might well be correct concerning the specific value of "too incompetent to be trusted with firecrackers", but in my universe at least, that is just what you are describing.
I mean, would you give an aweless, nutso, God-shouting woo-woo disdainful of empirical evidence, experience, expertise, and actual results firecrackers? A cap pistol? A metal spoon?
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 50 |
| 2003 | 212 |
Total: 263 comments. View all these comments on a single page. (May take some time to load.)
The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Graydon:
Show all comments by Graydon.