Cybrpnk's Rantings

With today's surprise announcement of the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor we are entering a period of what will probably be intense partisan wrangling over what sort of person should replace her. Unfortunately for the American left there is unlikely to be one clear voice of advocacy for what we want. Already the pro-choice groups have been ramping up for a battle focused entirely on the issue of protecting Roe v. Wade. I am concerned that this is playing into the hands of the Bush Administration. While I am sympathetic to the position, and a strong supporter of the government staying out of personal health decisions, I think that fighting this battle may do more harm than good. If the left cannot unify and present a coherent clear platform as to minimal standard of acceptability, look for Karl Rove and company to practice their rhetorical Kung Fu and use the strength of our many individual positions to defeat us on all counts. I don't think the GOP really wants to overturn Roe, but will use a push to preserve Roe to their advantage.

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Starting with Ronald Reagan there has been a very public, quite successful campaign by American conservatives to paint liberals as elitists who just want to control how people live their lives. Through masterful use of media (aided, of course, by the growing conservative control of said media) this campaign has been quite successful. Millions of people see the Republicans as the party that will protect them from the excesses of big government, and liberals as people who want to tell them how to live. This record needs examination on both counts.

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I've been mulling over the recent death of Jacques Derrida, and contemplating why it is that the conservatives I know are so hostile towards the ideas he developed during his lifetime. Some of it certainly is their discomfort with his dismissal of moral absolutism, which they are very open about. Some of it, one suspects, is just envy: Derrida makes them feel stupid. They just don't get what he's on about, and they are very bad at admitting that they don't know everything. And don't take that as an arrogant allusion to my own presumed brilliance. Everything I know about Derrida I have learned from others. I just happen to be fortunate enough to have an academic philosopher in my family. But I digress. I believe that at the real heart of why the American conservatives hate Derrida is that not only is he so on to them he makes them look like half-wits (which they most assuredly are not, except perhaps relative to him), but embracing his teachings provides people with a way out of the linguistic net they have been casting over our society in the course of the last thirty-plus years. In Derrida is the seed of the Conservatives' destruction. No wonder they were eager to bury him years before he died.

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Providence has decreed that my current consumption of literature is centered on Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, a work of historical fiction that takes place during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England and around Europe. One of the central themes running through both that period of history and Stephenson's novel is the horrific human cost exacted by the periods' many religious wars and plots. Protestants vs. Puritans. Catholics vs. Protestants. And, to borrow a line from Tom Lehrer, "everybody hates the jews." Remembering this as the backdrop against which our Founding Fathers enshrined the principle of separation of church and state helps to illustrate the grave disservice and threat to our country posed by the Republican strategy of fashioning George W. Bush's second administration as a religious institution.

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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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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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