Watching Our Government Work

While watching CSPAN's coverage of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's discussion on our strategic interests in Pakistan, I saw one of the more heartening things that I've seen at all related to an American politics.  Senator Marco Rubio, who last I heard had distinct Tea Party leanings, expressed his frustration at how complicated everything is now that he's in the Senate.  Welcome to the real world, Sen. Rubio.  There's a bunch of shit going on, and it doesn't alway line up tidily.  

The other thing that's interesting is watching all the senators run their fat yaps, generally.  Senator Kerry speaks very articulately and knowledgeably, which makes sense inasmuch as he just returned from Pakistan.  Other than his single bright shining gem of knowing shit, the other senators are asking the same questions over and over.  

1) Why are we giving so much fucking money to Pakistan ($4 billion a year!)?

2) Is there a way to give them performance based aid?

3) What if they turn to China?  

Somehow General Jones answered these same three questions from multiple people by addressing them the first time, and then used subsequent questions to provide more detailed information about our strategic relationship.  The question about China is a little ridiculous, inasmuch as China has its own problems with Islamic extremists and any desire that China has to balance India's power will necessarily be qualified by their desire for internal security, as well as the fact the Pakistan is full of a bunch of religious crazies, has nuclear weapons, and has an insecure government.  Sen. Kerry actually gave the most concise and pertinent response to the first question.  

1) 50% of our supplies enter Karachi and go overland through Pakistan to reach Afghanistan.  

2) The Pakistani army has suffered approximately 6,000 killed in action fighting the Taliban in Pakistan, a greater number of KIA than the US military in Afghanistan.  

3) Obama's policies regarding Pakistan have led to the most significant damage to Al Qaeda in the entire war on terror.  Those policies include increased drone strikes and presumably special operations within Pakistan that are unpopular within Pakistan.  The Pakistani government has facilitated the war on terror at significant political cost to themselves.  

4) Obviously there's room for improvement.  

Gen Jones answered the second question by basically saying, "Sort of, but it's complicated."   

Things that I noticed were lacking from the discussion:

1) Pakistani corruption.  Some random thing that I recently read noted that of the $1.2 billion dollars in humanitarian aid given to Pakistan to deal with their recent floods, only $720 million reached flood victims, leaving some $500 million presumably lost to graft.  Corruption is a significant impediment to the development of a functional economy as well as popular belief that the government is acting in the popular best interest.  

2) Pakistan's irrational fear/hatred of India.  Someone really needs to emphatically point out to the Pakistanis that now that they have nuclear weapons, India won't invade them.  Someone should also probably point out that terrorism isn't an effective foreign policy tool, and simply makes a disastrous nuclear conflict (which is in no one's interest) more likely.  

3) The way that they've conducted business has turned their nation into a seething cesspool of instability.  If Pakistan would clean up their act and seriously invest in reducing corruption, developing infrastructure, developing education, and developing an economy instead of slyly funneling our aid money to build hundreds of nuclear bombs and developing new delivery systems, they would end up having a real country with real allies.  As it stands, they're totally alone with only tentative friends because they're a bunch of crazies and fuck-ups.  

I realize that it's been a while between posts, for which I apologize.  I started writing a second book, which has been distracting.  If you want to read the first book, go here.  I apologize for how horrible the formatting is on that blog, as well as the poor character development and lack of a plot.  I'm pretty content with the actual sentences, though.  

The new one's about political philosophy, and involves the sentence "The establishment of power relationships based on the use or implication of force is the most fundamental aspect of human interaction. "

In Which I Utterly Crush Ayn Rand

A while ago I purchased Ayn Rand's Introduction to an Objectivist Epistemology, with the intention of reading it, listening to her side of the story, and forming an unbiased opinion about Randian Objectivism.  I made it two pages before I threw the book across the room, and promptly tried my best to block it from my mind.  Until last night, that is, when I got in an argument with a stranger on Facebook about Rand, and in which I argued that because her epistemology is utter shit, objectivism as a whole is necessarily a flawed and useless ideology.  This stranger's curiosity was apparently roused, and her requested that I elaborate, citing specifics.  

So here we are.  

The first sentence of the first chapter is innocuous enough.  "Consciousness, as a state of awareness, is not a passive state, but an active process that consists of two essentials:  differentiation and integration."  Ignoring the fact that she would have lost nothing by writing "Consciousness is an active process consisting of differentiation and integration," and that a single sentence does not a paragraph make, there's not really anything wrong with her first sentence.  Consciousness actively differentiates a plenum of phenomena into individual objects, and creates an abstract sense of the relationship between things through integration.  Got it.  Good work, Ayn Rand.  

Then come sentence number two:

Although, chronologically, man's consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual-epistemologically, the base of all of man's knowledge is the perceptual stage.

 Again, with the one sentence paragraphs.  Honestly, this sentence in itself is enough to discredit objectivism, but for those of you who don't have philosophy degrees, I'll include sentences three and four so that you can get a better feel for what Rand is saying here.  

 Sensations, as such, are not retained in man's memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation.  As far as can be ascertained, an infant's sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos.  

To elaborate, sensation is input sensory data, untouched by consciousness, prior to differentiation and integration.  One example would be visual data received by your eyes and transmitted along the optic nerve, before your brain gets ahold of it and sorts it into something meaningful.  Perception, then, is sensory data that has been differentiated and integrated by consciousness, and concepts are abstractions drawn from perception.  




At the level of sensation, she is dealing with pure objectivity: light reflects off an object, it enters an eye, physical processes within the eye turn the light striking the retina into impulses along the nerve, which enter the brain.  Consciousness is removed from the process completely.  


As soon as we reach the perceptual stage, however, things have become hopelessly subjective.  Consciousness has differentiated and integrated, and these processes don't reflect objective reality.  The object as a thing in itself has been lost, and has become an object as understood by consciousness.  The film industry is built entirely around this principle.  A movie is a rapid succession of still images, but because of consciousness' automatic processes, our brain unifies this succession of still images into a single subject, moving within its surroundings over a period of time.  


 Thus, in noting the distinction between sensation and perception, Rand is essentially making Hume's point about the fundamental subjectivity of consciousness, although she anachronizes her point using the language of later philosophers.  Hume, however, followed this train of thought to its logical conclusion, which is the death of metaphysics and the fundamental groundlessness of human knowledge.  Rand does not, although she hopes to obfuscate the fact that OBJECTIVITY IS IMPOSSIBLE by using the language of Kant and phenomenology.   


The term "objectivism" implies that objectivity is possible, and her works make an appeal to the popular belief in Cartesian rationalism, albeit devoid of the ethical restraint Descartes borrowed from Christianity.  Given the fact that the second sentence in Rand's objectivist epistemology is enough to completely discredit the concept of objectivity as something meaningful to human experience, objectivism is nothing more than sophistry.  

If treated fairly, the subjective nature of perception, with its inherent tendencies towards distortion and inaccuracy, render the surety of the concepts derived from perception doubtful.  Accordingly, concepts cannot be treated as though they have the imprimatur of TRUTH.  The era of Cogito ergo sum, pregnant with the infallibility of human rationality, is gone.  

Philosophy has realized that this infallibility has been lost to us, and rightfully celebrated this loss, inasmuch as the loss of TRUTH destroys the possibility of absolute ethical codes of good and evil that are separated from the manifest facticity or the infinite variability of human experience.   Because all knowledge is fallible, it has become impossible to conclusively negate the validity of the other's subjective truth.  Ethics, morals, language, and all the other fundamentals of society become realized for what they actually are:  a compromise between a riot of competing self-interests, and a compromise that attempts to accommodate all of those self-interests while preventing one self-interest to triumph at the expense of all other self-interests. The loss of TRUTH has taken us from "Stealing is always wrong, and should be harshly punished," to "Would you steal to feed your starving children?  Why don't we try to make sure that there aren't starving children?" 

Rand's sophistry aside, objectivism acknowledges the dissolution of the TRUTH framework of ethics, but rather than replacing it with the consensus reached by a dialogue of fallible viewpoints, she contradictorily treats subjectivity as the discovery of a subjective TRUTH that cannot be chastised by another's subjective TRUTH except through force of will.  The contradictions between Rand's epistemology and her broader ideology create the justification for a soulless selfishness unrestrained by any sense of the common good.  

Objectivism is a lie that is easily refuted by philosophy.  Thus, I wrote the statement which kicked off the whole Facebook argument in the first place.  

I have concluded that Ayn Rand is an idiot, and should have been killed by a totalitarian dictator while she was a child because she cannot possibly have contributed anything useful to the corpus of Western thought. I want to find her grave, exhume her, pop the top off her skull, and defecate inside because my average bowel movement is smarter and more beneficial to humanity than Ayn Rand's entire existence.

The Merits of a Liberal Education

I read this and this on Friday, got distracted by some beers on Friday and a number of things on Saturday, and then actually spent a couple hours writing a blog post about it (as opposed to my standard practice, which is to type mindlessly for twenty minutes), and the wily internet promptly destroyed the fruits of my labor like a callous son of a bitch.  The moral of the two links is that degrees in the humanities don't financially compensate you the way you think they will, and that the commoditization of everything in America is making college increasingly expensive while lowering the quality of education and limiting the job opportunities that pay a living wage for academics.  


The tendencies described by the aforementioned articles exemplify what Bernard Lonergan described as a bias towards common sense.  Philosophers have a tendency to divide knowledge into techne, technical or practical knowledge, and sophia, which is the sort of pure, abstract wisdom that philosophers are perpetually questing after.  The common tendency among the philosophical sort is a prejudice in favor of sophia; the popular laity favors techne because of the practical fruits that it obviously and immediately bears.  From either party, the tendency is to treat the two as separate entities that are unrelated to each other.  


This artificial division is the source of the problem, and both parties are equally culpable in the degradation of society.  Techne and sophia are engaged in a constant dialogue, and the more dynamic and active this dialogue, the better the civilization.  Taking the Enlightenment as one example, the noble philosophic rhetoric about the rights of man and the democratic state only occurred after improvements in agricultural technology made it possible to grow the surplus food required to support a strong urban class, improvements in military technology gave the masses real military power (as opposed to aristocratic heavy cavalry), and the proliferation of the printing press made it possible to spread the word about liberty and democracy.  


Physical circumstance as driven by technical progress set the stage for the philosophy of liberty by turning the masses into a dynamic physical force, and then technical progress spread the word.  Techne determines the manner in which things are accomplished, the how and what.  Sophia determines the goal at which we aim.  Without sophia, there is blind technical progress but no social progress.  


Accordingly, the degradation of education as it regards sophia, the social fabric, and those abstract ideals that gives humanity its merit, should be of concern to us all.  Our public education system is increasingly failing us, and our college education increasingly fails to inculcate the requisite skill set for wise prudent discourse.  


This failure occurs for two reasons:  the tendency of existing academics to cloister themselves and deal with the world as if the are above the every day hustle and bustle, and the consistent failure to accompany the humanities with actual economic incentives.  For current academics, their publications need to be made more easily available, especially if they regard domestic policy and international relations.  


For the future, we need to invest in our teachers at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, as well as professors for undergraduate education.  At present, teaching is a low-paying profession with little job security, in some states with no ability to collectively bargain, and it is difficult to get into due to ever-shrinking state budgets.  This is not a way to attract quality individuals to the profession.  


We are systematically destroying our future.  

That Jesus Fellow, Just Generally Speaking

You may have noticed a few posts in which I refer to the Bible, the relationship between religion and politics, the relationship between religion and individual choice, and so on.  I doubt very much that many, if any, of my friends would describe me as particularly religious.  I haven't gone to church in quite some time.  I think that my mother worries that I've turned into a godless sinner wallowing in a profligate lifestyle, and I think my sister is convinced that I haven't spent any time cultivating a personal faith-relationship with GOD.  

That being said, I actually am very religious, in a sneaky way that most people don't recognize, and generally think that religion, any and all religion, is a good thing.  I can't help but notice that however much I dislike the theology of the Mormon church, Mormons as individuals are typically kind, generous, reliable people who are very family oriented.  The same goes for Muslims, no matter how overhyped their bad eggs might be.  

I just don't think that people approach religion very sensibly, and it makes religious people come off as a gaggle of thoughtless assholes.  To cite one example, an incident that basically killed my urge to go to church, I once listened to a guy giving a sermon about Jonah (who was swallowed by a whale).  He started talking about Nineveh, and then said, "Now, I don't know how big Nineveh was, but..."  I immediately looked at the footnotes of my Bible (a New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition, NSRV).  The FIRST footnote in the book of Jonah says "Niniveh (the capital of the Assyrians who destroyed Samaria in 722 BCE)" which starts to give you an idea of its size.  The footnote for the verse that says "now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city" explicitly tells you how big Nineveh was.  "Excavations at the site of Nineveh...have revealed a city about three miles long with a city wall eight miles around."  The Google search for Nineveh pulls up this, and the first link on the Google search tells you how big it was.  It took me less than ten minutes to figure out how big Nineveh is, just now.  This guy was giving a sermon, in public, to an entire congregation, and couldn't be bother to do a Google search and read a Wikipedia article.  

This, to me, is indicative of the amount of effort the average lay Christian puts into their religion, which is disgusting.

Here are my basic theological tenets:

1)  There is a God.  God is not an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omnipresent, anthropomorphic being.  If I had to take a swing at it, I would say that God is best described by Nishida in this book.

2)  Good and evil are terms that are defined by individuals in relation to an interests own self-interest as defined within their cultural framework.  Good and evil are the moral froth that are produced as a side effect of a consciousness' interpretation of events.  Good and evil, when defined by a society or group of people, are the arithmetic mean of each composite individual's personal definition of good and evil.  

3) Every individual has the responsibility to decide for themselves what is good/evil, just/unjust, right/wrong.  The yardstick by which these definitions should be measured is the collective good of humankind, and thought should go into the creation of these definitions.  

4) The Bible is a good reference in the effort to create these definitions, inasmuch as it is the documentation of oral traditions, poetry, pre-history, history, etc, told from the point of view of the perpetual losers of history, with complex intertextual relationships.  It can teach you a lot about humanity and inhumanity.  So can the Koran, and Hindu religious writings, and Buddhist writings, and history, literature, philosophy, practical experience, and quiet reflection.  An absolute, immutable TRUTH should be eschewed, because it turns people who believe in that TRUTH into assholes, and is typically the means by which small minds, cowards, and reprobates convince themselves of their own superiority and find the strength to continue on their path to disaster unswervingly.  

5) Think, dammit.  Don't be afraid to reject the traditional interpretations of morality or Christianity, because for the most part, they're based on cultural mores rather than good sense or scripture.  

6) Have compassion.  

7) Whatever beliefs you come up with are probably flat-out wrong, or at the very least cover only a very limited scope accurately.  

Those are my fundamental religious beliefs.  I don't think that they're too obnoxious.  The common argument that I get against them is that not everybody is as smart as me, has the time to study all that, or that my interpretations are pure heresy (this last I've only gotten once, but I included it so that there would be three objections for aesthetic reasons, and also because I think it's funny that people are still called heretics in this day and age).  My response is that if you know that you aren't that smart, and haven't spent much effort reading and thinking about scripture, you probably shouldn't be so damn sure about what's right and wrong, and what God wants us to be doing, should you?

In the Interest of Fairness...

I realize that I've posted a couple times about how I hate our current relationship with Pakistan.  In the interest of fairness, I'm recommending you read this (every day, if you actually care about what's going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan).  If you poke around the website a little bit, there are many, many, many, many articles about our relationship with Pakistan, written from diverse points of view by knowledgable experts.  

That Jesus Fellow is a Democrat

The Republican party is clearly GOD'S PARTY, and its membership includes all good, God-fearing, red-blooded AMERICANS.  This is FACT.  I'm not making it up.  George W. Bush talked to God, Republicans hate abortion because God hates abortion, Republicans support privatization because they hate GODLESS SOCIALISTS.  They hate taxes partly because they hate GODLESS SOCIALISTS and partly because GOD HELPS PEOPLE WHO HELP THEMSELVES, like the very wealthy.  You can tell the the Republican party is GOD'S PARTY because the states that persistently vote Republican are full of GOD-FEARING AMERICANS.  It's only godless atheists in cities (which are clearly bad, because that's where Cain went after he killed Abel) that vote for Democrats.  


This sort of jingoistic Christian rhetoric seems to be the subtext of Republican popularity, but the more I think about it, the more I think that Jesus would think the Republican party is a bunch of assholes.  


Take for example the Republicans' theory that the rich deserve every penny of their hard-earned money.  What does Jesus say?  "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth...For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6.19-21).  Wealth redistribution?  Consider the story of the loaves and the fishes, in which Jesus steals peoples' lunch and gives it to the whole crowd.  


What about, "If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven...Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven...Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Matthew 19.21-24).  In this last, Jesus clearly is arguing that righteousness is dependent on the wealthy providing for the poor.  This sounds suspiciously like raising taxes on the rich to provide, say, unemployment, health care, public education, et cetera, to the poor.  


Unemployment?  Social safety net?  In the beginning of the next chapter of Matthew (20-16), the landowner sounds suspiciously like he's providing wages that aren't merit based.  Apparently, in Jesus' parables, God doesn't help those who help themselves.  He helps everyone.  


Universal health care?  The entire book of Matthew is full of Jesus healing the poor FOR FREE.  In Matthew 10.8, he says "Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.  You received without payment; give without payment."  JESUS SUPPORTS SOCIALIZED MEDICINE.  


War?  Torture?  Extraordinary renditions?  "You have hear that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'  But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer.  But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also..." and "But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" (Matthew 5.38-39, 44-45).  


Sure,  the Republicans have false piety, abortion, and hating fags on their side, but literally all of their major policies contradict the policies that Jesus said we should follow.  The Republican party is basically the Pope in that bit from The Brothers Karamazov in which the Pope meets Jesus and tells him that the church is going to have to do away with Jesus because he undermines everything the church is built on.  As effective as they may be at rallying a strong Christian constituency around the issues of abortion and gay-bashing, Jesus and Republican policy have very little in common, because Jesus supports wealth redistribution, universal healthcare, and pacifism.  


Now if only the Democrats could hit the slow-pitch softball that Jesus through at them out of the park...

Fucking Public Schools

I was talking to a high school English teacher and discovered that they apparently don't have high school students read books in the California public education system.  Instead, they read essays, and learn about rhetorical tools.  This teacher teaches the 12th grade.  When I was in the 12th grade, I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I read Aristotle's Poetics.  I read Siddhartha, and The Old Man and the Sea, and many other things.  


Rhetorical devices got part of one day.  Mr. Alecia, who was, admittedly, a much better than average teacher, explained what each of them were, and then said, "They're logical fallacies.  Don't use them."  This is exactly the treatment that rhetorical devices deserve.  Teach people to identify them, teach them that they're a crutch for people who are trying to argue unsupportable positions, and make them read books.  


Granted, this is Southern California that we're talking about, so there's also an issue with proficiency at the English language in general.  I was ready to write this nonsense, book-less curriculum off as a necessary evil to build proficiency in English, when she started talking about when she was teaching in LA.  Apparently, students who have been educated for twelve years in the Los Angeles school system are much, much worse at reading and writing English than students who recently emigrated from Mexico.  


Mexico's school system is apparently better than Los Angeles'.  


America for the win.  

Abortion

One of my friends posted a link relating to abortion on her Facebook profile, and I noticed that someone described abortion as "taboo."  My gut reaction was a violent rejection to the word choice.  Taboos, to me, describe things like incest or cannibalism, not perfectly legal actions that lots of people disagree with.  

However, the sense in which taboo was used implied that it was something that people shouldn't talk about, and the more I thought about it, the more appealing I found the idea of a  temporary ban on abortion in political discourse.  Honestly, the subject is a distraction, and discussing it is sometimes profoundly counterproductive.  The Republicans, for example, tried to use the threat of a government shutdown to cut federal funding for abortion (and, incidentally, all the free Planned Parenthood condoms that kept me from being a father in college).  

Typically, the argument is framed as a moral argument about the dignity and worth of human life.  I've noticed that this hasn't stopped anyone from advocating war, and the same people who are "Pro-Life" successfully cut human aid programs that kept babies from dying of things like diarrhea and malnutrition.  How many people starve to death while the good folks in the Bible Belt eat their fat asses into a heart attack?  

I think that we can safely say that the issue isn't that we value human life.  Rather, it seems that abortion evolved from the moral condemnation of "loose women" who had to do those sorts of things into an issue that is tied to personal and cultural identity, to a sort of thoughtless self-righteousness, and because it's an emotional issue tied to the sense of self, it gets used as leverage to push through policies that aren't in anyone's self interest, except politicians, lobbyists, and corporations.  

It seems like there are probably more important things to worry about than a drop of dead babies in the ocean of babies who who die around the world.  

The Middle Ages

I was watching that show Camelot, which is atrocious, and thought to myself, "Why is it that there hasn't been a good medieval show with solid, complicated characters and a glorious plot arc?"  The Wire with Vikings.  Why am I listening to someone who is supposed be living in a feudal state, apparently shortly after the Romans left England, talk about restoring a nation to its former glory, when it very clearly didn't have former glory and the concept of a nation was completely meaningless in the fifth century?  


It's interesting to me, because the tendency to view the nation-state as the standard political unit, and to interpret all of our interactions with other cultures and political bodies through the lens of the nation-state seems to be a major limitation on our ability to understand what's going on in the world around us.  To take one example, the word "draconian" is the corruption of the name Draco, who instituted the first laws regarding murder in ancient Athens.  He was so disliked for ending a policy of tribal revenge killings that his name still exists some three thousand years later as an adjective to describe repression.  Tribal revenge killings are still standard practice in some parts of Afghanistan.  


The entire concept of a tribe, and relationship between an individual and his or her family in some cultures is incomprehensible to us.  Talking to a Saudi once, I was informed that his father had the absolute right to kill his children without being prosecuted for murder.  There have beens studies that noted a close correlation between less powerful Pashtun tribes and Taliban membership.  Apparently in setting up the government in Southern Afghanistan, long standing tribal conflicts spanning millennia have been reinforced, which fuels the violence.  


Never mind that Afghanistan as a state is basically a fictitious political concept that is used to describe an area that can't effectively be controlled by any other political entity.  Afghanistan's borders are porous because all of its major ethnic groups have extended relatives across the borders.  The border between the Pashtun parts of Afghanistan and the Pashtun parts of Pakistan are mostly fictitious, especially because a large number of Pashtuns, including many members of the Taliban, spent large portions of the lives in refugee camps or living with relatives in the Pashtun parts of Pakistan.  


A Nigerian that I once lived with told me that he was family friends with Chinua Achebe.  I became very excited, until I realized that he had never met Chinua Achebe.  His extended family was friends with Chinua Achebe's extended family.  


We have similar trouble with the role patronage systems (also known as corruption) plays in the political institutions of most countries.  The idea of government by nepotism and personal loyalty, by blind tribal loyalty, with actions dictated by centuries long tribal grudges is unimaginable.  


When dealing with Western European nations, at least our political and socioeconomic planes of immanence at least intersect at some points.  When dealing with absolutely alien cultures, they might as well be in another dimension.  Meaningful dialogue about issues that inspire strong popular opinions on both sides is nearly impossible.  


The attempt to transpose political institutions like democracy onto other cultures, or for those cultures to freely adopt such institutions, ends in strange outcomes.  Democratic Japan, democratic Russia, democratic France, democratic America, and democratic South Africa are all very different places.  South Africa still lacks effective AIDS policy because of weird, jingoistic tendencies to claim it's a plot by the white devils, compounded by the role played by virile masculinity in their cultural fabric.  


I've also recently stumbled across several articles in which female Muslims advocate veils as a means of self-empowerment and pride in their cultural identity.  


What I'm getting at is the world is a strange and complicated place, and I have no idea what the fuck is going on in it in the grand scheme of things.  This makes me want to learn new things constantly, and one of the things that I'd like to learn about is the Middle Ages, which seem like a riot of polyglot heterogeneity, tribal allegiances, religious conflicts, mystery, squalor, grandeur, violence, death, despair, chivalry, love in a pure and unimaginable sense,et cetera ad infinitum.  


Also, I've gotten a little bored of advocating a community of nations, human rights, and communal interests.  I needed to post something different just to change the pace.  

Pots, Kettles, Realism, Liberal Interventionism

I was stumbling through the internet at random and stumbled across this charming blog post in which Andrew Exum (his blog is pretty good if you're into that sort of thing, which I am) described the lynching of a black man in 1906, notes that he is aware of lynchings that have occurred as late as 1981, describes the confusion of citizens in the Middle East that we protect what they consider blasphemy under freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and ends by reaffirming the value of America's constitutional freedoms.  


The obvious route to take in reaction to this is that if we throw a little historical perspective and self-reflection into the mix, we'll realize that the high horse that Western secular democracies, and America particularly, tend to climb on top of when talking about freedom, the rule of law, human rights, et cetera, is a much shorter horse than we realize.  In essence, we're a barely scrubbed pot calling the kettle black most of the time.  


While this point is certainly worth mentioning, the fact that struck me is that the prominent schools of international relations theory set a foundation that fundamentally limits the ways in which we interact with other nations, and limits the efficacy with which we achieve what should be our strategic aims.  


There are two major schools of IR theory that play a prominent role in American foreign policy, realism and liberal interventionism.  In the former, the assumption is that the ends justify the means and that it is necessary to sully our hands by dealing with despots, tyrants, repressors, criminals, and similarly unpleasant sorts in order to achieve our strategic aims.  In the latter, the assumption is that secular democracy and freedom of the American sort are  best for the world.  


In both cases, it seems that we are advocating a self-absorbed and complicated form of hubris.  The tendency with realists is to deal with the dictator of the present to achieve whatever limited successes that we can manage, without broadening the scope of our evaluation to look for better, long term solutions.  This is exacerbated by the short attention spans of politicians, an inevitable side effect of the cycle of election and reelection.  Such has been the case with our relationship with Saudi Arabia, which is an unpleasantly repressive monarchy that exports Salafism, the flavor of Islam favored by al Qaeda, to name an example off the top of my head, because it simplifies our access to oil.  Thus, we support a government whose strategic aims diverge from ours on a number of points, some of which are actively detrimental to our own strategic aims.  


The broader solution to this is to foster the development of technology that reduces or removes our need for oil, so that we are completely free to pursue our absolute strategic advantage when dealing with the Saudis.  In this particular instance, domestic policy has a significant impact on foreign policy.  


In the case of liberal interventionism, we assume that democracy is the best thing ever, and that we can easily export it to other countries, which will automatically begin to agree with us because of their thankfulness for their liberation from tyranny and repression.  This theory has proven itself of limited use, inasmuch as democracy is not something that is easy to export at all, and inasmuch as people voting democratically don't necessarily vote in favor of American strategic interests.  


In either case, experience seems to demonstrate that the biggest limitation is the inability to understand the values and interests of another culture and manipulate them to our benefit.  An excellent example of this is our relationship with Pakistan prior to 2001.  They had essentially been put on time-out by the international community for the development of nuclear weapons and faced heavy trade sanctions, and were frequently chastised for repression and a lack of democratic institutions.  The practical result of this was a heavily militarized state oriented on its main enemy, India, too impoverished to develop the basic infrastructure necessary for a modern state of any ideological flavor, rife with corruption.  


Essentially, we took a standardized play from the nonproliferation playbook, a standard page from the spreading democracy playbook, and thoughtlessly mixed them together without thinking about the fact that the things that we need from Pakistan are not something that will be fostered by economic sanctions and the blind advocacy of democracy.  


Ultimately, a Pakistan that favors peace, commerce, and international stability over terrorism, chaos, and Islamic extremism will be built on a foundation of an educated professional class and close political and economic relationships with other nations.  This is the track that we have taken with China, and whatever the shortcomings of the strategy may have been, the end result is a China that is integrated into the international community and susceptible to coercion by means other than force.  This is only possible because China has significant interests beyond national defense.  While China certainly pursues its own interests, and especially regional domination, its strategic aims and our own are both benefitted by stability and commerce, whereas violence and extremism negatively impacts us both.  


Since 2001, we have continued with a senseless policy that does little to improve Pakistan's economic self-sufficiency, much less foster close political and economic relationships with the world at large.  Rather, we have bribed them with international and military aid for their half-hearted support of the war effort in Afghanistan.  The end result has been chaos and violence.

Over the last decade, the idea of nation building as been decried as prohibitively expensive, futile, paternalistic, and et cetera.  This criticism is incorrect.  Nation-building, incremental nation building, the development of the physical institutions of civilization of a long period of time, is precisely the means by which peace and prosperity are accomplished.  


We're all in this mess together.  It's time we started acting like it.  

Osama bin Laden's Death

Osama's death is relatively inconsequential in and of itself, inasmuch as he was a figurehead who had been largely paralyzed by his own infamy, and led an organization that is arguably increasingly marginalized and ineffective, and which seems to be transforming into an international organization focused exclusively on regional conflicts.  

What is interesting, however, is the reaction of the American people to the event.  Using an informal survey method that I call, "Reading people's Facebook statuses," I notice that the sentiment ranges from "Ding dong the motherfucker's dead," to "So many people celebrating violent death...kinda make you think."  

Now, I'm a bloodthirsty individual who would like to crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women.  I am a United States Marine, and my job is ultimately to bring so much hate and discontent into the lives of the enemies of America that they take peace into their heart forever, so that they never have to see another Marine.  I'm certainly not a pacifist.  

I find myself, however, more in the "Why exactly are we celebrating?" camp.  Realistically, Osama's death meant the removal of the largely irrelevant figurehead of an organization that seems to have found itself on the wrong side of history.  Sentimentally, we killed public enemy number one and have revenged ourselves against the enemy of America.  I get it.  

But jingoism helps no one, and one dead man does not change the course of history.  Osama bin Laden would have just been the crazy religious brother of the bin Laden family without followers, just like Hitler would have been a crazy anti-semitic failed artist and Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been a humanist and a pastor without their followers.  Just like Gandhi would have been a lawyer without his.  Just like Hosni Mubarak became just an octogenarian without his popular base.  

My point here is that the efficacy of an individual or an organization is dependent upon the mass support it garners.  Many books have been written about how inexplicable it is that Hitler's genocidal fanaticism was so popular, Gandhi and MLK garnered support by advocating collective action to pursue the well-being of disenfranchised masses, and Mubarak was overthrown because the Egyptians found economic stagnation and repression intolerable.  

I won't overreach and pretend that I can definitively explain al Qaeda's popularity.  If I had to venture an explanation for Islamic militarism, I would say that it's the product of traditional cultures being invaded by Western secularism, disenfranchised or repressed majorities, long-standing ethnic tensions, chronic under-education, with the existence of Israel and its tendency towards misbehavior throwing fuel on the fire.  I once read an article (which I have no hope of finding again) in which it was argued that European bigotry towards its Muslim population exacerbated the hatred of America, partly because Muslims absorbed European Anti-Americanism and partly because America was for them the epitome of the Western culture that was discriminating against them (never mind that something like a ban on veils would be immediately ruled as unconstitutional).  

In any case, the root cause of violent Islamic extremism is not something that can be shot, bombed, demolished, or killed.  Ultimately, Osama bin Laden is just a dead Arab.  

Clausewitz famously said that war is politics by other means, and it would serve us well to remember that violence is a limited solution and ultimately a weak tool with which to achieve our aims.  Thus, Clausewitz describes warfare as the exception to the normal tools of statesmanship.  As entertaining and immediately gratifying as gunfire, explosions, and death may be (especially if you're not personally involved in the gunfire, explosions, and death.  I'm talking to you, 99% of America), it is an oversimple means and ill-suited for something as complicated and worthwhile as the development of civilization and the betterment of humankind.  

Ultimately, it is roads, schools, commerce, elections, and prosperity that are hallmarks of civilization, not gunshots and death.  We should probably put a little more effort into the former, and a little less effort into the latter.  

Fuck Pakistan, Part 2

Partly because of recent events, and partly because I thought that the first version of "Fuck Pakistan" was poorly written, I feel compelled to expand and refine my argument.  


A day or two after my first post on Pakistan, Pakistan quite obligingly encouraged Afghanistan to end relations with the US.  While it might seem a little ungrateful for Pakistan, a country that has received billions of dollars in aid from the US, to encourage Afghanistan to end its relationship with the US, it actually makes sense on a certain level.  To be sure, some of the motivation for the request was caused by the need for Pakistani politicians to cater to a population (and a certain segment of the military, which has a great deal of clout) distaste for America, and particularly the American military.  The rest may be explained by Pakistan's desire for geopolitical dominance of the region, its tendency to view Afghanistan as space into which Pakistan's military may fall back in the unlikely event of an Indian invasion, and its tendency to view Afghanistan as a place in which to train terrorists to attack India.  


In any case, the statement may safely be viewed as an assurance that if Pakistan has its way, Afghanistan will be a client state ruled by Pakistani policy.  Given the fact that Pakistan's foreign policy has turned vast swaths of Pakistan into lawless lands with no infrastructure and a great deal of sectarian and religious violence, this doesn't bode well for Afghanistan.  


Obviously the biggest recent news item for the region was the operation in which Osama bin Laden was killed.  According to the official statement regarding the operation, it was a unilateral US military operation that inserted itself into a giant, million dollar fortress outside Islamabad without the knowledge of the Pakistani government.  The fact that bin Laden was hiding just outside the capitol of Pakistan raises a few questions about the complicity of the Pakistanis in harboring bin Laden.  


In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Pakistanis absolutely knew he was there.  He was hiding in a giant fortress, eight times the size of neighboring homes, with 18 to 20 foot high walls topped by barbed wire, that didn't have telephone or internet access.  In a town that is home to numerous retired military officers, Pakistan's military academy, and a popular tourist destination.  Upon the construction of a giant fortress in your neighborhood, the reasonable reaction is to ask yourself, "I wonder what's going on there."  If you happen to be an active or retired general, you have the resources or connections to people who have the resources to find out.  Since it's been there since 2005, you would have several years to pay attention to the comings and goings, to develop quality intelligence, and to take action.  


But no one did, because Pakistan's government, and particularly its intelligence and military establishment, have no problems harboring terrorists.  


At this point, I'd say that it's obvious that the strategic interests of Pakistan and the United States only concur that the US shouldn't invade and occupy Pakistan.  In every other respect, they diverge.  Pakistan remains committed to terrorism and a policy tool, is disinterested in equality, fosters rabid fundamentalism, and because of these commitments, foments violence and discord domestically.  As soon as the US leaves the region, they will foment violence and discord in Afghanistan as well, as the tragic and unavoidable side effect of the policies that they pursue.  


This is a shame, because Pakistan is clearly the most important nation, strategically, in Central Asia, and if oil is removed from the equation, probably the most important Muslim country on Earth.  It's important because it's a nuclear power and long-time state sponsor of terror.  


Accordingly, our attention in the region must never forget Pakistan's importance, and the short-term stability of Afghanistan should not be pursued at the expense of the long-term stability of Pakistan.  Moreover, we need enforce our strategic will on Pakistan to divert them from the suicidal course currently set by their policies.  


The most effective way to do this is not to invade them.  Rather, we need to recognize that we have the incontestable upper hand in the relationship, and use that position of dominance to effect change.  We need to stop coercing the IMF to lend Pakistan billions, cease our flow of aid money, and foster our military relationship with India until and unless Pakistan cracks down on Islamic militants in the short term, and begins to build the infrastructure and institutions necessary for its long-term success.