Cybrpnk's Rantings

As you can tell from the lag since my last posting this one has taken some time to formulate. But I've been thinking long and hard, and I have some conclusions about the sad state of discourse in America today. And I don't mean the media or the politicians. I mean we the people. Everyone who's paying any attention knows that we are a deeply divided country, and it is hard to miss the complete breakdown of civility in political discourse. I'm sure that I am not alone in having found myself in the situation where I was yelling at people who, political differences aside, are dear to me. Yet if I step back and ask myself, is anything being accomplished by such an exchange, clearly the answer is no. Underlying this tension and internecine warfare is, to be brutally honest, personal failing.

If we are truly honest, we must be taking the time to ask ourselves the sort of tough questions that we expect of our scientists. In general these questions start with 'what if' and usually take the form of acknowledging our own limited knowledge, experience, and expertise. What if brutal military repression is the only effective way to stop Al Qaeda and their ilk? What if the market really can solve poverty? What if entitlements really do cause more problems than they solve? What if we are wrong? What then? It's hard to write those, I'm sure it's hard to read them. Admit it, you are unconsciously recoiling from your screen, rejecting even the asking of these questions. But if you cannot ask those questions, you will never be able to have the sort of conversation with a conservative which might change their mind. And if you confront someone with this sort of honesty and openness and they still do not listen to you, nothing else you can do will get through to them.

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There has been a great deal of talk about polls lately. Steve Soto over at The Left Coaster has been writing a series of articles describing the poor methodology used by many of the polls getting lots of press. Apparently the samples they are using have disproportionately large numbers of self-identified Republicans. The result of the coverage of these polls is of course to discourage people who want to get rid of our Uncumbent and replace him with an elected president. Don't believe the polls. They are all based on the flawed premise that the voter turnout this year will match the pattern established in recent presidential elections. But the whole polling thing uncovers another flaw in our electoral system. As much as both candidates will claim that they don't pay attention to the polls, it is clear that in reality our elections have become massive marketing campaigns which are all about finding the right packaging, rather than sincere efforts to enable the electorate to get to know who the candidates are and what they stand for.

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A spectre is haunting the American Presidential election - the spectre of neo-conservatism. This is the philosophy of those within the Bush administration who argued most vociferously for the invasion of Iraq. Their rationale is the belief that people prefer freedom and democracy to autocracy, and that if the correct conditions are created people will insist on being free. A curious theory. Putting aside the question of how killing civilians and razing cities is creating the conditions necessary for democracy to thrive, let us examine the dissonance between this approach and the central message of the Bush/Cheney campaign for re-election. That message is: be afraid, the world is full of scary people, trust us to protect you. Don't ask too many questions. Allow us to curtail your freedoms to help fight the scary people. In short, while the neo-cons are intent on proving in Iraq that people will choose freedom, the Republicans here in America are intent on proving that people prefer the illusion of safety, and will willingly give up their freedom to attain it.

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I was quite surprised by the contents of some email I received recently. The mail was from someone whom I know to be conservative but believe to be intelligent. The contents concerned the assertion that the facts clearly showed John Kerry to be a liar because, well, that whole Cambodia thing. I must confess that I haven't been paying all that much attention to the details of the whole Swift Boat nonsense, but was fairly sure that virtually all of their concrete assertions had been debunked. So I went off to Google and did a search for 'kerry cambodia' which turned up quite a few hits. A quick glance would lead one to believe that it was a proven fact that Kerry had made up the whole thing about Cambodia. The problem is that when you start looking closely at those hits it becomes apparent that none of them are factual. Lots of blogs, a lot of references to and variations on an Op-Ed piece written by someone from the American Enterprise Institute. No journalism. Not until you get eight or nine pages into the search results. There you find a couple of news articles, none of which have any evidence that Kerry is not telling the truth. On the contrary, they present evidence which suggest that it is completely credible that Kerry is telling the truth here.

This presents an interesting cautionary tale about internet sources, credibility, and noise; and serves as an excellent example of the dangers of basing one's arguments on purported facts presented on someone's website. It also illustrates that direct links into a reputable source (such as a newspaper) might obfuscate the fact the information being viewed is opinion, not journalism. Disturbingly many people seem unable or unwilling to distinguish between legitimate and questionable sources when making online arguments. This seems to suggest that the internet is encouraging, or at least facilitating bad scholarship in public discourse.

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Conservatives like to tout their belief that the best way to fight the war on terror is by killing as many terrorists as we can. Any attempt to understand the social forces that create extremism is weakness. Any suggestion that perhaps our own foreign policy is contributing to the rise of terrorism is treason. We are told that we must create a tough, united front and demonstrate how steadfast we are in this war. This attitude closely matches the approach that Vladimir Putin and the Russian Army have been taking to the insurgency in Chechnya. Today's headlines show, as the standoff at the school in Beslan, Russia has ended in violence and death, it is not an approach without risk. Risks which our government refuses to acknowledge in any but the vaguest sense. Yet through their actions they are inviting terrorists to do in one of our schools what the Chechen rebels have just done in Russia. News reports are still unclear, but preliminary estimates are at least 120 dead, presumably including many children.

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The Fox News headline says it all so perfectly: Man Gets Within 10 Feet of Cheney. Presumably this put Cheney at risk of ending his nearly three years in complete isolation from actual human contact, most of it spent in an undisclosed secure location. The scary thing is, he's the guy who's supposed to be more in touch than Bush. Fortunately alert secret service agents were able to wrestle the man to the ground. He was then arrested and charged with some truly absurd violations: assaulting federal officers (presumably when he responded to being pushed by any action other than going completely limp), and the Kafkaesque ' impeding the operation of the Secret Service.' Well, the secret service are supposed to protect the vice-president. They arrested this guy because they thought he posed a threat. Sounds to me like they were operating just fine. More to the point is the question of whether anyone will think to suggest that the secret service should be arrested for impeding the operation of the first amendment.

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