Great. The Chinese Navy is starting to field its first modern domestic frigate. It's undertaking a massive expansion of its navy. It's not the only new design.
And where did they get the anti-air missiles? France: an advanced version of the Crotale. The command and control systems? Gee, could it be France? And the anti-shipping missile? Based on a French design...
And where did they get the engines? France, the same engines that France uses in its frigates.
But wait, there's a second source for the engines: it's MTU, the German engine specialist for marine engines and relatively small turbines for the aerospace industry.
And it's a stealth design, based on... what could it be... a French design? Of their Lafayette class?
Just brilliant. Thanks, France and Germany!
I guess for France it's an answer for all those weapon the US sold to Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Just desserts, eh?
What?
Waddya mean the US didn't sell Germany weapons in the 1920s and 1930s? Well why then are the French selling the Chinese these weapons?
Because France and Germany are countries that give capitalism a bad name.
Thanks fellas. We'll remember this when the next time comes around to ask you to give us a hand solving some sticky problem that your incompetence brought around in the first place. And remember, if China starts a war, maybe over Taiwan or maybe over some gas fields in the China Sea, you've got our buddies in Paris and Berlin to thank for increasing Chinese abilities to wage war well above and beyond their domestic abilities.
Idiots. I'm really starting to think that Marx was right about European capitalists. The Europeans probably have plans to sell to any thuggish regime with lots of cash.
Oh, they already have? Gee, what a surprise.
Dienstag, September 27, 2005
Like you couldn't guess...
Let's see if this works:
| You are a Social Liberal (60% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (85% permissive) You are best described as a:
Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating |
Well, I guess no real surprises there... :-)
Montag, September 26, 2005
Something Positive in "Der Spiegel"?
Amazingly enough, there is something NOT anti-American in this week's Der Spiegel, the major German newsweekly. It's on page 216ff in Spiegel 39/2005
If you know David's Medienkritik, you know that Spiegel is invariably anti-American: it's part of who they always have been (I've been a regular Spiegel reader since sometime in 1976, when I started learning German, and some things rarely change: they write very, very good German and it is the big seller, so I continue to read it...) and probably always will be.
But in today's issue there was a surprise. I haven't been able to find an on-line link, as the interview is too new for Spiegel to provide it for free on-line (they like lagging their articles).
It's an interview with Andre Glucksmann, probably the only French intellectual that actually deserves the title. Here's a link that gives you an inkling of what he's about, as is this.
I've been reading Glucksmann since the mid-1980s as he was the premier French thinker on dissuance in French strategic thinking on nuclear weapon in the 1980s (had to do with my master's thesis...)
I'm not going to translate the article, since I've got a forecast and rating to get finished (and I don't want to run afoul of copyright nonsense: hence only this "fair use") and it's not my job.
But these are the key points that Glucksmann brings that I really wish I could have said as well.
It's about evil: through the major restructuring of the world after WW2, a moral vacuum arose affecting 3/4 of the world's population. Old ways were broken and discarded and new ways haven't made much sense. Rules, norms, institutions and the like have been thrown into turmoil, resulting in armies of "new warriors" (Heerscharen neue Krieger) which explicitly includes the anarchistic child-soldiers of Africa and Asia. These "new warriors" know no limits and no borders for their behavior: their motto is "anything goes". This is the logical result of modern nihilistic philosophies, the negation of any moral strictures within massive societal changes.
The difference between this sort of militarized chaos and anarchy and the chaos and anarchy of the Thirty Year's War is that there is no longer any sense of evil. Everyone argues about what is "good", this is standard political dialogue (we should do x because it results in y, which is a good thing, with others having competing ideas of what needs to be done in order to achieve something that they consider "good") in the modern body politic. This is the core of modern political pluralism, which doesn't really do in and of itself any damage.
What is new is that the existence of evil is not something that anyone is willing to admit to. If there is no evil, than anything goes: it's all relative, right? This is the basic principle of current nihilistic politics in the West, especially Europe and is the core of "political correctness" in the US (this last is my take on this). Civilization is not necessarily based only on common conceptions of a common good, but also on limitations, on setting of taboos and of codifying, via laws, what is considered to be evil. Thus we define evil.
The Spiegel reporer then asks (and I can just hear his tone of incredibility here...): Then President Bush was right, like Reagan before him, and in stark contrast to "old Europe" in speaking of the Axis of Evil or The Evil Empire?
Glucksmann answers him thus: we are defrauding ourselves (Wir betrugen nur uns selbst...) if we think that in the run of history all that is needed is scientific and technological advances, prosperity, tolerance, respect and diplomacy in order to work everything out. This kind of naive "waiting for things to work out", that time is on your side, is deadly. The peaceful end of history, ala Fukuyama, isn't going to happen peacefully because we want it to: western democracies need to realize that there are forces out there that are evil, that will try to acquire absolute power if not challenged.
The Spiegel reporter (Roman Leick, by the way), is appalling here: he says "the Pope couldn't have said it better."
Glucksmann isn't talking about the devil and supports the idea of a secular morality defended by a union of democracies. We need to be closer to Bush than to Putin: Putin is anything but a pure democrat, which is the way the German chancellor, Schroeder, refers to him in a fit either of naivete or cynicism (if you know German politics, it's the latter - JFO).
Now Leick trots out the "objective causes for hate": he insists that hate, manifested by terrorism, has usually a factual, external reason: poverty, repression, slavery, etc.
And Glucksmann says: This may shock you, but yes: I deny that there is such a basis for terrorist hate. He doesn't deny people a right to revolt against tyranny and occupation, but he does deny that there is any objective basis for terrorism, which is the deliberate indiscriminate killing of civilians, human bombs and the use of children as hostages, as was the case in Breslan.
Spiegel: Sure, but how do you prevent such breaking of taboos? (Grenzüberschreitung)
Glucksmann: Throughout history people have been repressed, tyrannized, occupied, have experienced deliberate famines and exploitation without resorting to the kind of hateful terrorism that you see today. For Glucksmann, true heros are those who under such circumstances do not resort to mass murder and terror. Terror has poisoned all modern liberation movements, from Algeria to Vietnam; when the means become horrible, they destroy the ends, regardless of how noble they might be.
And modern terrorism based on hate isn't a function of poverty, but is also at home in the palaces of the rich.
This hate is centered on three objects: Jews, Americans and Women.
The reporter: How did Antisemitism survive Auschwitz (either the reporter is leadng the question or he's incredibly naive. I hope the former...JFO)
Glucksmann: The Jew is the eternal disrupter, a witness of the chaos of the world, the "other" as such. Jewish presence in the middle ages placed into question the christian identity of Europe, since he knew, in contrast to heathens, the bible. In more modern times he was never German enough, never Rusian enough, never French enough, but rather had his own cultural identity, and today the presence of the Jew in Israel means that the dream of a harmonic, peaceful, comprehensive and encompassing vision of the world (Sideline: it was a French diplomat, after all, who complained about that "shitty little country" that was making such a ruin of what could be a wonderful business relationship with the Arab world - JFO)
Further, the survival of Jews after Auschwitz is, for the antisemite, an unexcusable blot on the record of a world that for the most part was more than willing to stand aside and simply watch it happen.
Now, this is fundamentally the same as anti-americanism: America is accused of disrupting the world order by simply existing, one of the long-term basic arguments of anti-Americanism going back to the founding of the country. The mythology of American superiority is used to make the US responsible for everything and to make it guilty for everything.
(Seldom have more accurate words been spoken on the subject of anti-Americanism. - JFO)
The world has been multipolar for quite a while, the US cannot dictate everything. Putin is more imperial than the US, and modern China resembles ancient Egypt of the Pharoahs, with the modern technology married with the modern equivalent of mass slave labor.
And women are targeted because they challenge the traditional role of men in society and family.
And that's basicaly the end of the article.
I'm slightly amazed: rarely has such an article appeared in Spiegel which puts lie to so much nonsense that Spiegel normally propagates.
Could this be a turn for the better?
John
If you know David's Medienkritik, you know that Spiegel is invariably anti-American: it's part of who they always have been (I've been a regular Spiegel reader since sometime in 1976, when I started learning German, and some things rarely change: they write very, very good German and it is the big seller, so I continue to read it...) and probably always will be.
But in today's issue there was a surprise. I haven't been able to find an on-line link, as the interview is too new for Spiegel to provide it for free on-line (they like lagging their articles).
It's an interview with Andre Glucksmann, probably the only French intellectual that actually deserves the title. Here's a link that gives you an inkling of what he's about, as is this.
I've been reading Glucksmann since the mid-1980s as he was the premier French thinker on dissuance in French strategic thinking on nuclear weapon in the 1980s (had to do with my master's thesis...)
I'm not going to translate the article, since I've got a forecast and rating to get finished (and I don't want to run afoul of copyright nonsense: hence only this "fair use") and it's not my job.
But these are the key points that Glucksmann brings that I really wish I could have said as well.
It's about evil: through the major restructuring of the world after WW2, a moral vacuum arose affecting 3/4 of the world's population. Old ways were broken and discarded and new ways haven't made much sense. Rules, norms, institutions and the like have been thrown into turmoil, resulting in armies of "new warriors" (Heerscharen neue Krieger) which explicitly includes the anarchistic child-soldiers of Africa and Asia. These "new warriors" know no limits and no borders for their behavior: their motto is "anything goes". This is the logical result of modern nihilistic philosophies, the negation of any moral strictures within massive societal changes.
The difference between this sort of militarized chaos and anarchy and the chaos and anarchy of the Thirty Year's War is that there is no longer any sense of evil. Everyone argues about what is "good", this is standard political dialogue (we should do x because it results in y, which is a good thing, with others having competing ideas of what needs to be done in order to achieve something that they consider "good") in the modern body politic. This is the core of modern political pluralism, which doesn't really do in and of itself any damage.
What is new is that the existence of evil is not something that anyone is willing to admit to. If there is no evil, than anything goes: it's all relative, right? This is the basic principle of current nihilistic politics in the West, especially Europe and is the core of "political correctness" in the US (this last is my take on this). Civilization is not necessarily based only on common conceptions of a common good, but also on limitations, on setting of taboos and of codifying, via laws, what is considered to be evil. Thus we define evil.
The Spiegel reporer then asks (and I can just hear his tone of incredibility here...): Then President Bush was right, like Reagan before him, and in stark contrast to "old Europe" in speaking of the Axis of Evil or The Evil Empire?
Glucksmann answers him thus: we are defrauding ourselves (Wir betrugen nur uns selbst...) if we think that in the run of history all that is needed is scientific and technological advances, prosperity, tolerance, respect and diplomacy in order to work everything out. This kind of naive "waiting for things to work out", that time is on your side, is deadly. The peaceful end of history, ala Fukuyama, isn't going to happen peacefully because we want it to: western democracies need to realize that there are forces out there that are evil, that will try to acquire absolute power if not challenged.
The Spiegel reporter (Roman Leick, by the way), is appalling here: he says "the Pope couldn't have said it better."
Glucksmann isn't talking about the devil and supports the idea of a secular morality defended by a union of democracies. We need to be closer to Bush than to Putin: Putin is anything but a pure democrat, which is the way the German chancellor, Schroeder, refers to him in a fit either of naivete or cynicism (if you know German politics, it's the latter - JFO).
Now Leick trots out the "objective causes for hate": he insists that hate, manifested by terrorism, has usually a factual, external reason: poverty, repression, slavery, etc.
And Glucksmann says: This may shock you, but yes: I deny that there is such a basis for terrorist hate. He doesn't deny people a right to revolt against tyranny and occupation, but he does deny that there is any objective basis for terrorism, which is the deliberate indiscriminate killing of civilians, human bombs and the use of children as hostages, as was the case in Breslan.
Spiegel: Sure, but how do you prevent such breaking of taboos? (Grenzüberschreitung)
Glucksmann: Throughout history people have been repressed, tyrannized, occupied, have experienced deliberate famines and exploitation without resorting to the kind of hateful terrorism that you see today. For Glucksmann, true heros are those who under such circumstances do not resort to mass murder and terror. Terror has poisoned all modern liberation movements, from Algeria to Vietnam; when the means become horrible, they destroy the ends, regardless of how noble they might be.
And modern terrorism based on hate isn't a function of poverty, but is also at home in the palaces of the rich.
This hate is centered on three objects: Jews, Americans and Women.
The reporter: How did Antisemitism survive Auschwitz (either the reporter is leadng the question or he's incredibly naive. I hope the former...JFO)
Glucksmann: The Jew is the eternal disrupter, a witness of the chaos of the world, the "other" as such. Jewish presence in the middle ages placed into question the christian identity of Europe, since he knew, in contrast to heathens, the bible. In more modern times he was never German enough, never Rusian enough, never French enough, but rather had his own cultural identity, and today the presence of the Jew in Israel means that the dream of a harmonic, peaceful, comprehensive and encompassing vision of the world (Sideline: it was a French diplomat, after all, who complained about that "shitty little country" that was making such a ruin of what could be a wonderful business relationship with the Arab world - JFO)
Further, the survival of Jews after Auschwitz is, for the antisemite, an unexcusable blot on the record of a world that for the most part was more than willing to stand aside and simply watch it happen.
Now, this is fundamentally the same as anti-americanism: America is accused of disrupting the world order by simply existing, one of the long-term basic arguments of anti-Americanism going back to the founding of the country. The mythology of American superiority is used to make the US responsible for everything and to make it guilty for everything.
(Seldom have more accurate words been spoken on the subject of anti-Americanism. - JFO)
The world has been multipolar for quite a while, the US cannot dictate everything. Putin is more imperial than the US, and modern China resembles ancient Egypt of the Pharoahs, with the modern technology married with the modern equivalent of mass slave labor.
And women are targeted because they challenge the traditional role of men in society and family.
And that's basicaly the end of the article.
I'm slightly amazed: rarely has such an article appeared in Spiegel which puts lie to so much nonsense that Spiegel normally propagates.
Could this be a turn for the better?
John
Finally Guilty...
The Spanish court handling the mammoth terrorist case there has rendered a verdict : Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, alias Abu Dahdah, has been convicted of supporting terrorism and put into jail for 27 years instead of the 74,000 years that the prosecutor was asking for.
What is more critical is that Tayssir Alluni has also been convicted. He's an Aljazeera journalist.
This is important. This isn't just any journalist, but rather one that's been in the enemy camp from day one: even Aljazeera describes what he's done and where's he been. He's even been awarded a peace prize by a Spanish peace group: now imagine that, a Spanish peace group awarding a prize to a convicted terrorist. He's been sentenced to 7 years for aiding and abetting a terrorist organization (guess which one), but he was acquitted of actually being a member.
He's basically a fellow-traveller: the "peace group" that he ostentiously works for tried to engineer cease-fires on their own in Afghanistan between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban when the Taliban were losing.
It's indicative that this man is even called a journalist. Instead of being neutral and just being a reporter, covering the facts and writing the story, he got involved. Some may call that courageous and admirable: I call it being being fundamentally dishonest about who you are and what you do.
You can't have it both ways: either you work as a journalist and maintain objectivity, or you become partisan. I guess that when he got this interview he made that decision for himself and now must live with the consequences.
This man decided to go the partisan route: he's been convicted of materially helping a terrorist group. Of course, he just says that he was doing his job as a journalist .
And did I mention that he's actually a Syrian?
Seven years is just fine by me. Damn good start.
Kudos to the Spanish justice system.
What is more critical is that Tayssir Alluni has also been convicted. He's an Aljazeera journalist.
This is important. This isn't just any journalist, but rather one that's been in the enemy camp from day one: even Aljazeera describes what he's done and where's he been. He's even been awarded a peace prize by a Spanish peace group: now imagine that, a Spanish peace group awarding a prize to a convicted terrorist. He's been sentenced to 7 years for aiding and abetting a terrorist organization (guess which one), but he was acquitted of actually being a member.
He's basically a fellow-traveller: the "peace group" that he ostentiously works for tried to engineer cease-fires on their own in Afghanistan between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban when the Taliban were losing.
It's indicative that this man is even called a journalist. Instead of being neutral and just being a reporter, covering the facts and writing the story, he got involved. Some may call that courageous and admirable: I call it being being fundamentally dishonest about who you are and what you do.
You can't have it both ways: either you work as a journalist and maintain objectivity, or you become partisan. I guess that when he got this interview he made that decision for himself and now must live with the consequences.
This man decided to go the partisan route: he's been convicted of materially helping a terrorist group. Of course, he just says that he was doing his job as a journalist .
And did I mention that he's actually a Syrian?
Seven years is just fine by me. Damn good start.
Kudos to the Spanish justice system.
Sonntag, September 25, 2005
Back into the future...
Geez, this is starting to become a meme here.
Another great blog - Done With Mirrors - caught the Boston Globe being, shall we say, a tad loose with reality, prefering instead is own construct that there were large anti-war protests.
But the real story here is that this isn't unusual: according to the story, it's standard operating procedure to write not about what happens, but rather to write about what the press thinks is going to happen.
Another case of how fundamentally clueless the press is: prefering to get something wrong instead of taking the trouble to get it right. And there are people who wonder why the MSM are heading for financial problems???
John
Another great blog - Done With Mirrors - caught the Boston Globe being, shall we say, a tad loose with reality, prefering instead is own construct that there were large anti-war protests.
But the real story here is that this isn't unusual: according to the story, it's standard operating procedure to write not about what happens, but rather to write about what the press thinks is going to happen.
Another case of how fundamentally clueless the press is: prefering to get something wrong instead of taking the trouble to get it right. And there are people who wonder why the MSM are heading for financial problems???
John
Stuck on Stupid..
Well, I can currently think of no better expose on the culpability and incompetence of the media than this.
The media is presenting the fizzled anti-war protest as grass-roots, as organic and spontaneous, when it is anything but that.
Their goal was at least 100,000: only a portion showed up, according to Reuters. And taking a further look you can see that even "thousands" is misleading in the Reuters piece: go to ABC and the number is down to 2,000. Two thousand, most of whom probably showed up for the free concert.
Where are the press reports covering the abject and total failure of the US peace movement and its reduction to a hard core of ANSWER dominated fools?
I googled and yahooed, but ignored the left's own sites, sticking to the mainstream media: I found this, which isn't exactly mainstream (sorry, OC Weekly); there is this from Boston, but that just underscores how useful idiots are exploited by dedicated wackos; and finally this from 2003, on how the peace movement blew it.
Come on, media: this is pathetic. You've got a grrrreat story out there: how millions of people were misled and lied to by a pack of authoritarian opportunists whose only goal is political control. Media, can't you understand that this is what you're supposed to be able to do: dig out the truth.
Stuck on Stupid: give that General a dollar for everytime that phrase is used and Katrina is paid for.
The media is presenting the fizzled anti-war protest as grass-roots, as organic and spontaneous, when it is anything but that.
Their goal was at least 100,000: only a portion showed up, according to Reuters. And taking a further look you can see that even "thousands" is misleading in the Reuters piece: go to ABC and the number is down to 2,000. Two thousand, most of whom probably showed up for the free concert.
Where are the press reports covering the abject and total failure of the US peace movement and its reduction to a hard core of ANSWER dominated fools?
I googled and yahooed, but ignored the left's own sites, sticking to the mainstream media: I found this, which isn't exactly mainstream (sorry, OC Weekly); there is this from Boston, but that just underscores how useful idiots are exploited by dedicated wackos; and finally this from 2003, on how the peace movement blew it.
Come on, media: this is pathetic. You've got a grrrreat story out there: how millions of people were misled and lied to by a pack of authoritarian opportunists whose only goal is political control. Media, can't you understand that this is what you're supposed to be able to do: dig out the truth.
Stuck on Stupid: give that General a dollar for everytime that phrase is used and Katrina is paid for.
Samstag, September 24, 2005
Predictions for 2008...
Hi -
The US elections in 2008 are going to be interesting.
On the Democratic side, the picture is unclear: will Kerry re-try? There are plenty of wannabes that will throw their collective hats into the ring in the middle of 2006 to see what sort of funding they can get together.
But there is no grass-roots campaign that isn't fundamentally centered around getting rid of Bush. Haven't they understood that what they need to do is not sit around in their mastubatory fantasies of defeating Bush, but rather offer an alternative that actually means something? More big government spending plans, more of failed policies dating back to the 60s and 70s that have been nothing more than massive sinkholes of corruption and waste? Or is there a real Democratic party lurking out there, hiding in caves and waiting for the time to strike?
On the other side of the aisle, you've got an open field. Bush can't run.
But what you do have is an emerging revolt of small-government conservatives against the spending policies of the current Republican congress. Will this be the beginning of a neo-neo-con revolution?
Can't call it for sure at this point, this is too far in advance. But I think the election of 2008 will come down to one party desperately trying to turn back the clock to its glory days and the other trying to move the country forward.
The hard part is trying to figure out who is which and why...
John
The US elections in 2008 are going to be interesting.
On the Democratic side, the picture is unclear: will Kerry re-try? There are plenty of wannabes that will throw their collective hats into the ring in the middle of 2006 to see what sort of funding they can get together.
But there is no grass-roots campaign that isn't fundamentally centered around getting rid of Bush. Haven't they understood that what they need to do is not sit around in their mastubatory fantasies of defeating Bush, but rather offer an alternative that actually means something? More big government spending plans, more of failed policies dating back to the 60s and 70s that have been nothing more than massive sinkholes of corruption and waste? Or is there a real Democratic party lurking out there, hiding in caves and waiting for the time to strike?
On the other side of the aisle, you've got an open field. Bush can't run.
But what you do have is an emerging revolt of small-government conservatives against the spending policies of the current Republican congress. Will this be the beginning of a neo-neo-con revolution?
Can't call it for sure at this point, this is too far in advance. But I think the election of 2008 will come down to one party desperately trying to turn back the clock to its glory days and the other trying to move the country forward.
The hard part is trying to figure out who is which and why...
John
Yet another take on the German election...
I've been busy with work: quarterly deadlines coming up and my data, as usual, sucks.
I've been reading the Daily Demarche for a while, and he's got a good take on the German elections that y'all should read.
There are a lot of Germans who think that because the US interest in Germany isn't as great as the German interest in the US, Americans are therefore ignorant of what is going on in the world.
Helllllloooo: it's incredibly annoying for the Germans to be ignored. But you know what?
Germany has made itself irrelevant. It's complete and total inability to help preventing the spread of radical Islamists is apparent in the fact that Germany is a safe haven for terrorists, something hotly denied and yet transparently obvious. Since the WTC cell left Hamburg to complete its mission, the German courts haven't even been able to convict their helpers, sending a devastating message to fellow travellers; no Islamicists have been expelled (Kaplan doesn't count, his absurd situation existed well before then...) for conspiracy or collusion with terrorist groups. The German polity isn't willing to admit that they are keeping vipers in the same room as their children, and that means when such vipers are discovered, they are "placed under observation" and left alone. Political correctness runs amok.
If Germany were to make itself relevant, than a waitress in Cleveland might make sure that when German tourists come in, they'd get an extra portion of apple pie for desert as a thanks for putting their sons and daughters at risk. But as long as Germany sits on the wayside, perched on top of a stalled car that is the German economy, yelling epithets at the troops driving by, why, until that changes, Germany will continue to be irrelevant.
Because they have made themselves so.
I've been reading the Daily Demarche for a while, and he's got a good take on the German elections that y'all should read.
There are a lot of Germans who think that because the US interest in Germany isn't as great as the German interest in the US, Americans are therefore ignorant of what is going on in the world.
Helllllloooo: it's incredibly annoying for the Germans to be ignored. But you know what?
Germany has made itself irrelevant. It's complete and total inability to help preventing the spread of radical Islamists is apparent in the fact that Germany is a safe haven for terrorists, something hotly denied and yet transparently obvious. Since the WTC cell left Hamburg to complete its mission, the German courts haven't even been able to convict their helpers, sending a devastating message to fellow travellers; no Islamicists have been expelled (Kaplan doesn't count, his absurd situation existed well before then...) for conspiracy or collusion with terrorist groups. The German polity isn't willing to admit that they are keeping vipers in the same room as their children, and that means when such vipers are discovered, they are "placed under observation" and left alone. Political correctness runs amok.
If Germany were to make itself relevant, than a waitress in Cleveland might make sure that when German tourists come in, they'd get an extra portion of apple pie for desert as a thanks for putting their sons and daughters at risk. But as long as Germany sits on the wayside, perched on top of a stalled car that is the German economy, yelling epithets at the troops driving by, why, until that changes, Germany will continue to be irrelevant.
Because they have made themselves so.
Freitag, September 23, 2005
So who's the Loon now...
Sigh.
The loons are at it again.
This article is once again typical of how journalism fails it readers: presenting beliefs as facts.
It's even in the first sentence: it's all about the beliefs of someone, not the facts.
Who cares if he's the chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (which, of course, means that he's got an agenda the size of a storm front (duh)). This is argumentum ad verecundium, a logical fallacy that appeals to authority. That doesn't make him an authority on frequency of hurricanes: he's a zoologist. His speciality is population dynamics and biodiversity of birds and insects.
But that's not what the problem is: the article delivers not a single bit of fact, but rather it's ALL belief and speculation, coupled with opinion.
And there's a fundamental confusion with causality and correlation: because one thing happens at the same time as another, it doesn't mean that the one causes the other.
Then again, it's from the Independent.
John
The loons are at it again.
This article is once again typical of how journalism fails it readers: presenting beliefs as facts.
It's even in the first sentence: it's all about the beliefs of someone, not the facts.
Who cares if he's the chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (which, of course, means that he's got an agenda the size of a storm front (duh)). This is argumentum ad verecundium, a logical fallacy that appeals to authority. That doesn't make him an authority on frequency of hurricanes: he's a zoologist. His speciality is population dynamics and biodiversity of birds and insects.
But that's not what the problem is: the article delivers not a single bit of fact, but rather it's ALL belief and speculation, coupled with opinion.
And there's a fundamental confusion with causality and correlation: because one thing happens at the same time as another, it doesn't mean that the one causes the other.
Then again, it's from the Independent.
John
Donnerstag, September 22, 2005
Now here's a fisking...
Hi -
Now this is a fisking. The Skeptical Optimist, always worth reading, takes on Roger Simon and delivers his head on a plate.
Way back when I worked at a library, we called US News & World Report "Useless News and Won't Report."
Some things apparently never change.
This fits in, of course, with sophistry in the media: they aren't reporting reality, but rather their perception of reality in an alternativ universe.
And their assumption of ignorance on the part of the reader is backfiring when readers can publish on their own (like this one here).
Kudos!
John
Now this is a fisking. The Skeptical Optimist, always worth reading, takes on Roger Simon and delivers his head on a plate.
Way back when I worked at a library, we called US News & World Report "Useless News and Won't Report."
Some things apparently never change.
This fits in, of course, with sophistry in the media: they aren't reporting reality, but rather their perception of reality in an alternativ universe.
And their assumption of ignorance on the part of the reader is backfiring when readers can publish on their own (like this one here).
Kudos!
John
Schizoid World...
A recurring theme of this blog when I have the time is sophistry and its current incarnations.
One of the few blogs that actually refer to this one is Squander Two. He's now got a post up wondering why the BBC is so incredibly incompetent that they mix up fact and opinion.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Journalists, I think, have abjectly failed in what should have been a collective effort to find out facts. Instead you have them "speaking truth to power" - a phrase absurd in its hubris as it is laughable in its content ("power" isn't interested in the truth and tends to liquidate anyone in disagreement) - meaning that they posit speculation as "fact" and disagreement as "lies".
Put simply, there is no market for truth out there in journalism as we know it. Newspapers don't get sold reporting the facts when their competition prefers to show spilled blood and ruined lives; TV news is the worship of the sound bite, massive egos and severe simplicity; radio news is the filler between inanity and stupidity.
Sex sells; violence sells; good news doesn't sell.
Last weekend in Ahlen the SchizoidWife and I were with SchizoidDaughter #2 at the birthday party of a friend, an artist struggling to make ends meet.
That's the Saturday night before the Sunday of the German election fiasco..
Although the weather was rather cool, we has the last grill party of the season. Among the guests were three journalists from the local bird cage liner, an editor and 2 reporters. My wife asked them what they had to study to become journalists.
Nothing, they said; you need an abitur (German equivalent of an Associated Bachelor's degree, or high school in the US plus 2 years of college: that's what Germans get accredited for at most universities when they've gone through the system) and having studied something can be useful. You gotta be able to write a few words that actually make sense.
Nothing more?
Nope, that's it.
My wife wanted to know if they had to write what their bosses wanted them to write or could they write what they wanted to write.
What the bosses wanted, but within reason they could place their own "touch" on the subject.
And why did they write so much anti-american stuff?
The first journalist immediately launched into a tirade about violation of international laws and stuff and how Bush was a war criminal. The second journalist sort of shrugged and said that that wasn't the case, but that Iraq etc was a special case and that we shouldn't get into that because it was too incendiary.
The SchizoidWife then pointed me out at the party - I was sitting not far away, listening to this - and said "Be careful, there's an American at the table: why do you guys write such anti-American nonsense?"
"We don't." "We just report the facts."
I could see my wife revving up for the attack: "But you don't report the facts: you only report on murders and death and the bad side of everything in this universe" (In the German it's better: Mord- und Totschlag und das Schlechte und Böse im Universum).
"And why don't you write about the good things happening in Iraq, the schools opening and people getting on with their lives?"
"Because that's not happening: it's a civil war there"
"How absurd: you don't write about it because you're anti-american and you can't let it go: you can't stand it that the Americans are responsible for the fact that you can sit here and criticize them no end and you don't get fed into a wood chopper as a result"
"That didn't happen" "The people there aren't that happy about the Americans being there"
"Yes it did and you know it. People there have been liberated and you don't give the Americans any credit whatsoever for having done that. The German soldiers in the Bundeswehr in Afghanistan aren't there because they want to help people there: they are there because they're getting basically triple pay (TRUE: no German soldier in Afghanistan is a draftee, but are all volunteers with significant pay increases) and not because they want to free these people."
"You're oversimplifying things"
"No I'm not: you journalists just want to write stories trashing the US and Americans: look at what you write about Kyoto. Kyoto is a farce and a massive waste of money, it's costing jobs in Germany, and all you write is how bad the Americans are because they refuse to waste their money."
"That's not true: everyone knows that global warming is caused by CO2 and the Americans are the cause. Besides, there jobs lost aren't that many and it's good for the environment".
"Tell that to the people who have lost their jobs."
"They lost their jobs because of neoliberalism"
"What the hell is that?"
"It's what the Americans do: they fire everyone"
It was at that point that the host intervened and asked if anyone wanted some more sausages, he was gonna put some more on the grill.
I complimented the SchizoidWife on her tenacity and asked what she learned from the experience: she said that she learned that journalists don't know diddly.
Moral of the story?
It's not a BBC thing; it's not a Dan Rather faking memos; it's what journalists are and do in order for them to survive.
But it's not about truth, facts, reality.
It's about fundamentally not being able to understand the difference between facts, opinions and speculation. It's about journalists who think that they are God's gift to the world and are there for one purpose: "Speaking Truth To Power"
They wouldn't know Truth if it came up to them, introduced itself and invited them to dinner nicely. They wouldn't know the facts if they were delivered by God himself on a silver tablet and included URLs and references.
But they know what they think they know: speaking opinion to pander. Speaking speculation to cover up the facts to feed power, the power of ignorance and "The Big Lie" of Goebbels. It's indicative of fundamental arrogance, that the "people" are too stupid to understand the complexities of the situation and need to be force-fed pablum disguised as a three-course meal.
Welcome to the 21st Century Schizoid World.
One of the few blogs that actually refer to this one is Squander Two. He's now got a post up wondering why the BBC is so incredibly incompetent that they mix up fact and opinion.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Journalists, I think, have abjectly failed in what should have been a collective effort to find out facts. Instead you have them "speaking truth to power" - a phrase absurd in its hubris as it is laughable in its content ("power" isn't interested in the truth and tends to liquidate anyone in disagreement) - meaning that they posit speculation as "fact" and disagreement as "lies".
Put simply, there is no market for truth out there in journalism as we know it. Newspapers don't get sold reporting the facts when their competition prefers to show spilled blood and ruined lives; TV news is the worship of the sound bite, massive egos and severe simplicity; radio news is the filler between inanity and stupidity.
Sex sells; violence sells; good news doesn't sell.
Last weekend in Ahlen the SchizoidWife and I were with SchizoidDaughter #2 at the birthday party of a friend, an artist struggling to make ends meet.
That's the Saturday night before the Sunday of the German election fiasco..
Although the weather was rather cool, we has the last grill party of the season. Among the guests were three journalists from the local bird cage liner, an editor and 2 reporters. My wife asked them what they had to study to become journalists.
Nothing, they said; you need an abitur (German equivalent of an Associated Bachelor's degree, or high school in the US plus 2 years of college: that's what Germans get accredited for at most universities when they've gone through the system) and having studied something can be useful. You gotta be able to write a few words that actually make sense.
Nothing more?
Nope, that's it.
My wife wanted to know if they had to write what their bosses wanted them to write or could they write what they wanted to write.
What the bosses wanted, but within reason they could place their own "touch" on the subject.
And why did they write so much anti-american stuff?
The first journalist immediately launched into a tirade about violation of international laws and stuff and how Bush was a war criminal. The second journalist sort of shrugged and said that that wasn't the case, but that Iraq etc was a special case and that we shouldn't get into that because it was too incendiary.
The SchizoidWife then pointed me out at the party - I was sitting not far away, listening to this - and said "Be careful, there's an American at the table: why do you guys write such anti-American nonsense?"
"We don't." "We just report the facts."
I could see my wife revving up for the attack: "But you don't report the facts: you only report on murders and death and the bad side of everything in this universe" (In the German it's better: Mord- und Totschlag und das Schlechte und Böse im Universum).
"And why don't you write about the good things happening in Iraq, the schools opening and people getting on with their lives?"
"Because that's not happening: it's a civil war there"
"How absurd: you don't write about it because you're anti-american and you can't let it go: you can't stand it that the Americans are responsible for the fact that you can sit here and criticize them no end and you don't get fed into a wood chopper as a result"
"That didn't happen" "The people there aren't that happy about the Americans being there"
"Yes it did and you know it. People there have been liberated and you don't give the Americans any credit whatsoever for having done that. The German soldiers in the Bundeswehr in Afghanistan aren't there because they want to help people there: they are there because they're getting basically triple pay (TRUE: no German soldier in Afghanistan is a draftee, but are all volunteers with significant pay increases) and not because they want to free these people."
"You're oversimplifying things"
"No I'm not: you journalists just want to write stories trashing the US and Americans: look at what you write about Kyoto. Kyoto is a farce and a massive waste of money, it's costing jobs in Germany, and all you write is how bad the Americans are because they refuse to waste their money."
"That's not true: everyone knows that global warming is caused by CO2 and the Americans are the cause. Besides, there jobs lost aren't that many and it's good for the environment".
"Tell that to the people who have lost their jobs."
"They lost their jobs because of neoliberalism"
"What the hell is that?"
"It's what the Americans do: they fire everyone"
It was at that point that the host intervened and asked if anyone wanted some more sausages, he was gonna put some more on the grill.
I complimented the SchizoidWife on her tenacity and asked what she learned from the experience: she said that she learned that journalists don't know diddly.
Moral of the story?
It's not a BBC thing; it's not a Dan Rather faking memos; it's what journalists are and do in order for them to survive.
But it's not about truth, facts, reality.
It's about fundamentally not being able to understand the difference between facts, opinions and speculation. It's about journalists who think that they are God's gift to the world and are there for one purpose: "Speaking Truth To Power"
They wouldn't know Truth if it came up to them, introduced itself and invited them to dinner nicely. They wouldn't know the facts if they were delivered by God himself on a silver tablet and included URLs and references.
But they know what they think they know: speaking opinion to pander. Speaking speculation to cover up the facts to feed power, the power of ignorance and "The Big Lie" of Goebbels. It's indicative of fundamental arrogance, that the "people" are too stupid to understand the complexities of the situation and need to be force-fed pablum disguised as a three-course meal.
Welcome to the 21st Century Schizoid World.
Sonntag, September 18, 2005
German Election Results
Hi -
Just got back from visiting friends in Ahlen and on the way back heard the election results for Germany.
There's the old saying of countries getting the governments that they deserve. Certainly the case here.
Germany is in terrible straits right now: there are severe structural economic problems that aren't even being admitted to, let alone adressed; the polity is terribly, terribly passive in the face of outright corruption and incompetence; the nation itself is, in many ways, adrift without any sense of direction.
So the election results reflect this: nobody won. The classic left, the SPD, lost voter share; the classic conservatives, the CDU, lost voter share. Neither can simply go with favored smaller parties to form a coalition, since they've both lost too much share.
The shares lost went to splinter parties who are represented in parliament (ie made the 5% hurdle), meaning that the old bogeyman of German democratic experience, endless bickering over coalitions, will return. German parliamentary democracy has been pretty stable because it's largely bipolar, with junior splinter parties acting as deal-makers.
The problem now is that neither of the two big parties can enter a winning coaliton without taking on not a second, but also a third partner, making that very junior party a real deal maker.
Right now, the only coalition that makes sense to me is Red-Green-Red, of the SPD with 34.2%, the Greens with 8.2% and the Linke.PDS with 8.7%, giving such a government 318 seats in the Bundestag, i.e. a 18-seat majority.
Why does this coalition make sense? Because both the CDU/CSU and the FDP have clearly and categorically rejected any cooperation with Schroeder, meaning that a CDU/CSU coalition with the SPD (430 seats) is about as likely as a coalition in the US between Republicans and Democrats; a SPD/Greens/FDP government (327 seats) is equally unlikely, since, unlike his predecessors, the current head of the FDP isn't an opportunist.
Sceptics will quite correctly point out that Oscar Lafontaine, the head of the Linke.PDS, and Schroeder hate each other: but will that keep them so far apart that they won't agree to disagree in order to keep and get power?
Germans know about Oscar: he's a "luxury leftist" who broke with the SPD because they wouldn't listen to him when Schroeder took over (Schroeder being nothing more than an populistic opportunist). The personal animosities between the two won't prevent them from getting back into bed in order to keep things the way they are.
And "Keeping Things The Way They Are" is nothing less than a recipe for political and economics catastrophe for Germany.
But that's what the electorate fundamentally wants: politicians who lie to them about how great things are while plundering their pockets.
Sad day for Germany. An ideal result would've been a clear CDU/CSU victory and a government with the minority FDP with the resulting unpopular structural reforms and revisions to tax codes and the like finally adressing Germany's severe structural problems. The worst case is more of the same with a movement in the opposite direction.
And I just caught Munterfering on TV (he's the titular party head of the SPD). As far as the SPD is concerned, the election was nothing more than a plebescite on the continuation of Schroeder as chancellor: since Merkel et al failed to dislodge him, he remains chancellor.
Good lord. This line of thinking fits in with the dissolution of the government: that's all that Schroeder was looking at.
Of course, the German political system doesn't allow the results to be interpreted the way that Schroeder and the SPD are doing: they are turning the German political process into a farce.
A sad, sad day for Germany. The last thing that is needed is "more of the same": yet that is exactly what they are getting.
John
Just got back from visiting friends in Ahlen and on the way back heard the election results for Germany.
There's the old saying of countries getting the governments that they deserve. Certainly the case here.
Germany is in terrible straits right now: there are severe structural economic problems that aren't even being admitted to, let alone adressed; the polity is terribly, terribly passive in the face of outright corruption and incompetence; the nation itself is, in many ways, adrift without any sense of direction.
So the election results reflect this: nobody won. The classic left, the SPD, lost voter share; the classic conservatives, the CDU, lost voter share. Neither can simply go with favored smaller parties to form a coalition, since they've both lost too much share.
The shares lost went to splinter parties who are represented in parliament (ie made the 5% hurdle), meaning that the old bogeyman of German democratic experience, endless bickering over coalitions, will return. German parliamentary democracy has been pretty stable because it's largely bipolar, with junior splinter parties acting as deal-makers.
The problem now is that neither of the two big parties can enter a winning coaliton without taking on not a second, but also a third partner, making that very junior party a real deal maker.
Right now, the only coalition that makes sense to me is Red-Green-Red, of the SPD with 34.2%, the Greens with 8.2% and the Linke.PDS with 8.7%, giving such a government 318 seats in the Bundestag, i.e. a 18-seat majority.
Why does this coalition make sense? Because both the CDU/CSU and the FDP have clearly and categorically rejected any cooperation with Schroeder, meaning that a CDU/CSU coalition with the SPD (430 seats) is about as likely as a coalition in the US between Republicans and Democrats; a SPD/Greens/FDP government (327 seats) is equally unlikely, since, unlike his predecessors, the current head of the FDP isn't an opportunist.
Sceptics will quite correctly point out that Oscar Lafontaine, the head of the Linke.PDS, and Schroeder hate each other: but will that keep them so far apart that they won't agree to disagree in order to keep and get power?
Germans know about Oscar: he's a "luxury leftist" who broke with the SPD because they wouldn't listen to him when Schroeder took over (Schroeder being nothing more than an populistic opportunist). The personal animosities between the two won't prevent them from getting back into bed in order to keep things the way they are.
And "Keeping Things The Way They Are" is nothing less than a recipe for political and economics catastrophe for Germany.
But that's what the electorate fundamentally wants: politicians who lie to them about how great things are while plundering their pockets.
Sad day for Germany. An ideal result would've been a clear CDU/CSU victory and a government with the minority FDP with the resulting unpopular structural reforms and revisions to tax codes and the like finally adressing Germany's severe structural problems. The worst case is more of the same with a movement in the opposite direction.
And I just caught Munterfering on TV (he's the titular party head of the SPD). As far as the SPD is concerned, the election was nothing more than a plebescite on the continuation of Schroeder as chancellor: since Merkel et al failed to dislodge him, he remains chancellor.
Good lord. This line of thinking fits in with the dissolution of the government: that's all that Schroeder was looking at.
Of course, the German political system doesn't allow the results to be interpreted the way that Schroeder and the SPD are doing: they are turning the German political process into a farce.
A sad, sad day for Germany. The last thing that is needed is "more of the same": yet that is exactly what they are getting.
John
Donnerstag, September 15, 2005
Why the UN is heading for a meltdown...
According to this the Iranians are willing to "share" their nuclear technology with other "Islamic" nations. Great. Syria with the bomb?
And even when the US and Europe realized that there really isn't any point in talking with the Iranians, since the Iranians aren't serious about not developing nuclear weapons, there is apparently serious opposition (from whom, pray tell? Chinese and Russians? The perfidious French? The soon-to-be-voted-out Germans?) to bringing the problem to the Security Council.
In other words, the UN will fail once again, fail due to corruption, incompetence, appeasement and abject fear. The UN is simply not able to actually do anything and the parallels to the League of Nations are starting to not look good.
Not good, not good at all.
The future? The world will repeat the 1930s, with appeasers on giving ground to military-political threats from fundamentally violent and crypto-fascistic regimes whose only claim to fame is the bomb and a perverted ideology.
Folks, been there, done that. Next time it's really gonna hurt. It's an abject failure of reason and intelligence versus naked power, greed and fanatacism. When this is all over, there's gonna be great clamor for a world government, because you don't want to know what a modern war can do to a population even without the use of nuclear weapons. The actual campaign in Iraq to topple that bunch of thieves and murderers was nothing in comparison. There were more than 60 mn dead in WW2, a WW3 even without nuclear weapons will be vastly larger.
And the failure of the UN to even get its house into order gives you an idea of how bad things really are. The shortsightedness, corruption and sheer stupidity that you can see there today will cost millions and millions of lives.
And if someone uses a nuclear weapon against the US, all bets are off. Want to shut down the Iranian nuclear program? I can guess that no more than 40 small-yield weapons would suffice. North Korea? 20. Pakistan if it goes Islamofascist? 10.
Sheer stupidity. The world has become a vastly more dangerous place since the end of the Cold War, and yet many think we're at peace. Idiots all.
John
And even when the US and Europe realized that there really isn't any point in talking with the Iranians, since the Iranians aren't serious about not developing nuclear weapons, there is apparently serious opposition (from whom, pray tell? Chinese and Russians? The perfidious French? The soon-to-be-voted-out Germans?) to bringing the problem to the Security Council.
In other words, the UN will fail once again, fail due to corruption, incompetence, appeasement and abject fear. The UN is simply not able to actually do anything and the parallels to the League of Nations are starting to not look good.
Not good, not good at all.
The future? The world will repeat the 1930s, with appeasers on giving ground to military-political threats from fundamentally violent and crypto-fascistic regimes whose only claim to fame is the bomb and a perverted ideology.
Folks, been there, done that. Next time it's really gonna hurt. It's an abject failure of reason and intelligence versus naked power, greed and fanatacism. When this is all over, there's gonna be great clamor for a world government, because you don't want to know what a modern war can do to a population even without the use of nuclear weapons. The actual campaign in Iraq to topple that bunch of thieves and murderers was nothing in comparison. There were more than 60 mn dead in WW2, a WW3 even without nuclear weapons will be vastly larger.
And the failure of the UN to even get its house into order gives you an idea of how bad things really are. The shortsightedness, corruption and sheer stupidity that you can see there today will cost millions and millions of lives.
And if someone uses a nuclear weapon against the US, all bets are off. Want to shut down the Iranian nuclear program? I can guess that no more than 40 small-yield weapons would suffice. North Korea? 20. Pakistan if it goes Islamofascist? 10.
Sheer stupidity. The world has become a vastly more dangerous place since the end of the Cold War, and yet many think we're at peace. Idiots all.
John
Why I don't want to live in San Francisco...
I don't want to live in San Francisco. LA I could imagine, but not SF.
Why? I've been there 5 or 6 times in my life, and each and every time I come away with the feeling that the city just isn't right.
Now there's an article in
http://www.sfweekly.com/Issues/2005-09-14/news/smith.html
that explains what I've been feeling: it's the smell of entrenched, intellectual hypocricy in the air that has always left me feeling that San Francisco is a place I just don't want to spend a lot of time in.
This is also a test to see if I can update my blog via email...
John
Why? I've been there 5 or 6 times in my life, and each and every time I come away with the feeling that the city just isn't right.
Now there's an article in
http://www.sfweekly.com/Issues/2005-09-14/news/smith.html
that explains what I've been feeling: it's the smell of entrenched, intellectual hypocricy in the air that has always left me feeling that San Francisco is a place I just don't want to spend a lot of time in.
This is also a test to see if I can update my blog via email...
John
Sonntag, September 11, 2005
Just about the only sensible thing to do...
Hi -
In the wake of Katrina and over last several days I've had to do some modeling work on US energy dependence and how to replace oil dependency.
I can't go into details (duh: I get paid for giving the details), but it's possible. It'll just take three decades to complete (from the time point of signing a national energy bill to the conversion of the last gasoline station to hydrogen). The Skeptical Optimist, who I read regularly, has by far the most sensible post regarding what it will take to make such a conversion: the willingness of consumers to foot the bill, coupled with the political will to reduce US dependence on foreign sources of energy.
Suffice to say: it can and should be done. Not only would it reduce US energy dependence and improve the terms of trade, it would also be an enormous technological advantage that can be translated into significant exports to further reduce the US trade deficit.
But: three decades, 30 years, 120 quarters, 360 months, 1560 weeks. That convers probably two or even three political generations (of actual politicians in office), and I can't think of any US program that has kept its erstwhile eye on the ball for that long a period of time.
The thirty years is the economically optimum model with the least disruption of energy supply and economic dislocation: it can be done in five years, but only with significant disruption and would cost like significantly more than what the US spends on defense right now each year for those five years (damn, I'm going into detail...).
So what do we do: fiddle around for 10 years and then toss money at the problem, or plan it out sensibly and get the job done? Knowing how Washington DC operates, the former is probably the most likely scenario.
John
In the wake of Katrina and over last several days I've had to do some modeling work on US energy dependence and how to replace oil dependency.
I can't go into details (duh: I get paid for giving the details), but it's possible. It'll just take three decades to complete (from the time point of signing a national energy bill to the conversion of the last gasoline station to hydrogen). The Skeptical Optimist, who I read regularly, has by far the most sensible post regarding what it will take to make such a conversion: the willingness of consumers to foot the bill, coupled with the political will to reduce US dependence on foreign sources of energy.
Suffice to say: it can and should be done. Not only would it reduce US energy dependence and improve the terms of trade, it would also be an enormous technological advantage that can be translated into significant exports to further reduce the US trade deficit.
But: three decades, 30 years, 120 quarters, 360 months, 1560 weeks. That convers probably two or even three political generations (of actual politicians in office), and I can't think of any US program that has kept its erstwhile eye on the ball for that long a period of time.
The thirty years is the economically optimum model with the least disruption of energy supply and economic dislocation: it can be done in five years, but only with significant disruption and would cost like significantly more than what the US spends on defense right now each year for those five years (damn, I'm going into detail...).
So what do we do: fiddle around for 10 years and then toss money at the problem, or plan it out sensibly and get the job done? Knowing how Washington DC operates, the former is probably the most likely scenario.
John
Dienstag, September 06, 2005
Katrina and donations...
Hi -
Busy with work etc, but that didn't stop me from donating to the Red Cross in the US. Will continue to do so at regular intervals now, it's been added to the budget.
I can't do much more than that, given where I am and the responsibilities I carry both at work and at home.
Why the Red Cross?
Because from what I've seen and heard, they are genuinely one of the least corrupt and mismanaged NGOs out there. Not the International Red Cross, but the US Red Cross.
Donate and do it again and again. Do it till it hurts: I'm sending the money I would otherwise spend on a hobby. I've given it up until I see that the recovery is under way and that people are back up on their feet: I think it'll probably take at least one year.
John
Busy with work etc, but that didn't stop me from donating to the Red Cross in the US. Will continue to do so at regular intervals now, it's been added to the budget.
I can't do much more than that, given where I am and the responsibilities I carry both at work and at home.
Why the Red Cross?
Because from what I've seen and heard, they are genuinely one of the least corrupt and mismanaged NGOs out there. Not the International Red Cross, but the US Red Cross.
Donate and do it again and again. Do it till it hurts: I'm sending the money I would otherwise spend on a hobby. I've given it up until I see that the recovery is under way and that people are back up on their feet: I think it'll probably take at least one year.
John
Freitag, August 12, 2005
Still on London Time...
Still in London, which is why the posting is even more spotty than normal. And I'm really glad we booked with RyanAir instead of BA. Otherwise we'd probably be hear another two weeks.
On the other hand, maybe it would have been better to fly with RyanAir... I could use another couple of weeks here.
Will be back home, though, in a couple of days...
John
On the other hand, maybe it would have been better to fly with RyanAir... I could use another couple of weeks here.
Will be back home, though, in a couple of days...
John
Sonntag, August 07, 2005
Hi from London
Well, the missus and I are in London for nine days while my poor old suffering father looks after the SchizoidDaughters for a few weeks. So far neither have killed each other off, so things are looking good.
We're in London, using the Tube and busses, and enjoying life immensely. There are extra police, but not any more than I would have expected, and no one seems to let it bother them. We were at Portobello Road yesterday and were at Camden Docks Market today, and the masses of people there were there just as they always have been there.
There'll always be an England!
John
We're in London, using the Tube and busses, and enjoying life immensely. There are extra police, but not any more than I would have expected, and no one seems to let it bother them. We were at Portobello Road yesterday and were at Camden Docks Market today, and the masses of people there were there just as they always have been there.
There'll always be an England!
John
Sonntag, Juli 24, 2005
Thinking the uncomfortable...
This post got me annoyed, and I'm gonna take time off getting something productive done in order to try and pound some sense into this discussion.
So sit back and get a cuppa.
The writer, Jeffrey Lewis, should know better:
First, the primary assumption is incorrect. Target sets have nothing to do with deciding to use a nuclear weapon: rather, a decision to use a nuclear weapon is first and fundamentally a political decision that has nothing to do with target sets. Target sets and SIOP are all about the military implementing a political decision, to use nuclear weapons at all. Target sets and SIOP can allow a politician making such a decision to achieve the goals of such a political decision with a minimum of force and destruction, if the decision is to, for instance, destroy part of the military infrastructure of an adversary.
Hence if the US were to "put" a nuclear weapon on a tank factory, that decision is not made after a careful, anguished decision of whether there is a school next door or not: that decision is made after a careful, anguished decision of the necessity for using nuclear weapons at all.
Hence Jeffrey Lewis is wrong: the decision to use nuclear weapons isn't fundamentally a rational decision: it's a political decision. Now the nitty-gritty of choosing target x under criteria y is one of deciding to, for instance, use a low-yield surface burst in order to destroy utterly a large tank-making complex, rather than using a medium-yield air burst that would do the same job but also destroy a significantly larger area. But the decision here is: eliminate target x under a set of operating criteria.
Not: hand-wringing "gotta get the tank factory, but oh, no, there's a school next door. What should we do????"
It's part of the calculus of deterrence. The Soviets were really hot on scientific planning of war-making capabilities, and using a complex system of correlation of forces to determine when their war-making capabilities were such that they could be guaranteed crushing success. It's important to understand that "guaranteed" thing: if the Soviets thought they could obtain success via the battlefield, that gave them a psychological edge in their confrontational politics.
And that's why so much of SIOP and various missile-defense systems and planning is strictly targeted at ensuring that the enemy can't do what they want to do: get inside of their loop and you've won the game. Not the wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am knock-down exchange of nukes, but rather of making sure the Soviets never thought they could obtain success via the battlefield. That way you don't have to fight, since the confrontational politics are never implemented.
But here is where I really got annoyed:
But more fundamentally, organizations aren't those that abstract reality in order to manage it: people do this. It's how we all work. Reality, that amorphous cacaphony of perceptions and demands, is managed by each and every one of us when we interface with the world. If you can't abstract the real world, how are you supposed to understand it at all?
Abstract reality to manage it. The mere phrase sets me on edge, because it sounds like this is a bad thing: after all, he goes directly to comparing it with the Soviets and Maoists.
But it's not a madness of an inhuman organization.
And STRATCOM doesn't calculate other damages not "because fire damage is hard to calculate and, therefore, not real."
It doesn't because calculating fire damage is fundamentally unknowable, given the fact that it makes a huge difference if the attack is in summer in the middle of a drought or in the middle of winter in a blizzard with 3 meters of snow on the ground after two weeks of sub-zero weather. But that doesn't mean it's not real: it just means that you can't take those factors into account in planning for a strike that might happen at any given time of day.
Further, secondary blast effects are very much real, but not to the target in question: a hardened, deep bunkered target ignores surface fires. Only blast and radiation affect such a target.
Again, secondary effects are ignored because they don't change the cold, cold equations of ensuring that the target is destroyed. The link takes you to an analysis of how fire damage can be calculate, but he's begging the question here: the analysis is for a soft target, not a hard one.
First: the SIOP offers the President a widely nuanced range in the practice of what Tom Lehrer so beautifully called "escalatio" in his song "Who's Next?" It's not a "kitchen sink" of target sets, but if the President decides in a conflict to destroy, for instance, the ability of an adversary to make rocket fuel, that opportunity needs to be available *now* and not after 6 weeks of planning.
Artificial damage expectancies? What SIOP and military planning does is plan on not having a theoretical, ideal performance of weapons and systems, but rather of accepting reality, that they won't always work. That's why you see two conventional bombs hit a target instead of one when the military really, really, really wants to have the target destroyed. The idea that it's not "real" if damage assessment doesn't take into account secondary effects is specious when the planning calls for ensuring a minimum of assured destruction: it's only real if you can be really, really sure that you can do what you claim.
Rigid delivery schedules? Humans are always in the loop: you can stop at any time. The military isn't full of yahoos who simply obey orders. This isn't the Franco-Prussian War or WW1, where the Kaiser was told he couldn't stop the war any more.
And for the very last: SIOP, if not constantly updated and rethought, does fail if it doesn't offer politicians a nuanced, controlled usage. But that's not got anything to do with alienating any President from deciding to use nuclear weapons.
Again: using nukes is first and most fundamentally a political decision. The use of military force is always an expression of political will. The President shouldn't be involved in the technical details of whether to use 45 or 12 weapons, but rather makes the decision to eliminate the enemy's war-making capabilities.
And if the SIOP fails to give him this option, then it's failed in its mission.
I've gone on here for longer than I planned to. I don't want to rag on the man, but this was sloppy and shallow.
And I'll reiterate: using nuclear weapons is a political decision. SIOP serves the President, not the other way around.
And it is one of the fundamentals of our age: if you don't want nuclear weapons to be used, then make sure that everyone involved understands what their use means. If North Korea threatens to use them, make sure that the North Korean leadership knows that one nuke from them means three hundred on them and the complete dismembering of the entire North Korean military apparatus in a hail of complete and utter devestation.
And this is the problem with countries like Iran developing nuclear weapons: that you introduce non-rationality into the nuclear calculus, that an obsession with the destruction of Israel means that deterrence will no longer work. That's when the world becomes very, very dangerous: if you have people who are deeply, completely convinced that Israel must be eliminated, that Israel and the US are indeed direct manifestations of Satan, and you allow them to obtain nukes, then it's gonna be hard to keep them deterred, since they prove day after day that they love death and its transformation to martyrdom more than the lives of their children.
So sit back and get a cuppa.
The writer, Jeffrey Lewis, should know better:
Jeffrey Lewis is a Research Fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy (CISSM). His research focuses on the space policy component of CISSM’s Advanced Methods of Cooperative Security Program, which is generously funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Dr. Lewis is also member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Dr. Lewis received his PhD in Policy Studies (International Security and Economic Policy) from the University of Maryland and his BA in Philosophy and Political Science from Augustana College in Rock Island, IL
Now, I don't have his academic background - I stopped with a MA in political science, economics and philosophy - but I spent a lot of time on Hermann Kahn and his works.
The above linked article includes this:
Most discussions about target sets leave the impression that the decision to use a nuclear weapon here or there is a deeply rational business, with great care taken not just in the selection of each target, but also to ensure each nuclear weapon is really necessary. After all, if we are going to put a nuclear weapon on a tank factory sitting next to a grade school, you'd think that someone made a careful, anguished decision about the lesser of two evils in a morally ambiguous world.
You might think that, but you'd be wrong.
First, the primary assumption is incorrect. Target sets have nothing to do with deciding to use a nuclear weapon: rather, a decision to use a nuclear weapon is first and fundamentally a political decision that has nothing to do with target sets. Target sets and SIOP are all about the military implementing a political decision, to use nuclear weapons at all. Target sets and SIOP can allow a politician making such a decision to achieve the goals of such a political decision with a minimum of force and destruction, if the decision is to, for instance, destroy part of the military infrastructure of an adversary.
Hence if the US were to "put" a nuclear weapon on a tank factory, that decision is not made after a careful, anguished decision of whether there is a school next door or not: that decision is made after a careful, anguished decision of the necessity for using nuclear weapons at all.
Hence Jeffrey Lewis is wrong: the decision to use nuclear weapons isn't fundamentally a rational decision: it's a political decision. Now the nitty-gritty of choosing target x under criteria y is one of deciding to, for instance, use a low-yield surface burst in order to destroy utterly a large tank-making complex, rather than using a medium-yield air burst that would do the same job but also destroy a significantly larger area. But the decision here is: eliminate target x under a set of operating criteria.
Not: hand-wringing "gotta get the tank factory, but oh, no, there's a school next door. What should we do????"
For example, of the 12,500 targets in the SIOP at that time, one of them was slated to be hit by 69 consecutive nuclear weapons. It seems superfluous to say that this is crazy, but it is important to understand how the planning process could result in such a figure. At the level of a presidential directive, a document of a thousand words or so, you will have the reasonable-sounding requirement--if you're thinking about war-fighting at all--to, say, target the political and military leadership. That guidance goes to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which in a 15- or 20-page document called a NUWEP (for "nuclear weapons employment policy") adds some detail: for example, what sorts of leadership facilities should be targeted. The NUWEP then goes to the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which in hundreds of pages of a document called Annex C to the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan lists specific facilities to be struck and damage requirements to be met. Annex C then goes to STRATCOM, where the targetting staff figures out which weapons, and how many, to apply to each target to meet the required level of damage.
[snip]
When I mentioned Butler's 69 weapons to Dr. Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman missileer and acknowledged expert on the operational aspects of nuclear warfighting now at the Brookings Institution, he found in his notes a statement by a high official at SAC in the late 1980s that the highest kill probability for the United States' best weapon against deeply buried, sprawling, hardened command posts was less than 5% (how they calculate this is a whole other matter, but the short answer is, they guess). Blair got out a calculator, assumed a kill probability of 4% for one weapon, and started multiplying. To attain a 50% confidence in destroying the target required 17 weapons. When Blair got up to 69 weapons, the "kill probability" had reached 94%.
It's part of the calculus of deterrence. The Soviets were really hot on scientific planning of war-making capabilities, and using a complex system of correlation of forces to determine when their war-making capabilities were such that they could be guaranteed crushing success. It's important to understand that "guaranteed" thing: if the Soviets thought they could obtain success via the battlefield, that gave them a psychological edge in their confrontational politics.
And that's why so much of SIOP and various missile-defense systems and planning is strictly targeted at ensuring that the enemy can't do what they want to do: get inside of their loop and you've won the game. Not the wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am knock-down exchange of nukes, but rather of making sure the Soviets never thought they could obtain success via the battlefield. That way you don't have to fight, since the confrontational politics are never implemented.
But here is where I really got annoyed:
The real issue here is that organizations abstract reality to manage it. That abstraction, James Scott pointed out in his book, Seeing Like A State, can produce disasterous consequences such as Soviet collectivization and the Maoist Great Leap Forward.
But more fundamentally, organizations aren't those that abstract reality in order to manage it: people do this. It's how we all work. Reality, that amorphous cacaphony of perceptions and demands, is managed by each and every one of us when we interface with the world. If you can't abstract the real world, how are you supposed to understand it at all?
Abstract reality to manage it. The mere phrase sets me on edge, because it sounds like this is a bad thing: after all, he goes directly to comparing it with the Soviets and Maoists.
Most of us intuitively understand the inhumanity of bureaucracies - a perhaps necessary evil in the modern world. This understanding is why General Butler's narrative is so compelling -- a human being acheives a vantage point from which to survey the madness of an inhuman organization. It's Kafka and Joseph Heller in equal measures.
But it's not a madness of an inhuman organization.
Only an organization would target 69 nuclear weapons on a single facility (later revealed to be the Sofrino missile defense radar) outside of
And STRATCOM doesn't calculate other damages not "because fire damage is hard to calculate and, therefore, not real."
It doesn't because calculating fire damage is fundamentally unknowable, given the fact that it makes a huge difference if the attack is in summer in the middle of a drought or in the middle of winter in a blizzard with 3 meters of snow on the ground after two weeks of sub-zero weather. But that doesn't mean it's not real: it just means that you can't take those factors into account in planning for a strike that might happen at any given time of day.
Further, secondary blast effects are very much real, but not to the target in question: a hardened, deep bunkered target ignores surface fires. Only blast and radiation affect such a target.
Again, secondary effects are ignored because they don't change the cold, cold equations of ensuring that the target is destroyed. The link takes you to an analysis of how fire damage can be calculate, but he's begging the question here: the analysis is for a soft target, not a hard one.
Although the details are classified, the contact website makes clear that the ISPAN doesn't change how STRATCOM does business. ISPAN does not address the fundamental myopia of "kitchen sink" target sets, artificial damage expectencies and rigid delivery schedules that encourage the President to use nuclear weapons before an adversary has time to take protective measures.
That's one reason to be worried about efforts by the OVP to plan to strike
First: the SIOP offers the President a widely nuanced range in the practice of what Tom Lehrer so beautifully called "escalatio" in his song "Who's Next?" It's not a "kitchen sink" of target sets, but if the President decides in a conflict to destroy, for instance, the ability of an adversary to make rocket fuel, that opportunity needs to be available *now* and not after 6 weeks of planning.
Artificial damage expectancies? What SIOP and military planning does is plan on not having a theoretical, ideal performance of weapons and systems, but rather of accepting reality, that they won't always work. That's why you see two conventional bombs hit a target instead of one when the military really, really, really wants to have the target destroyed. The idea that it's not "real" if damage assessment doesn't take into account secondary effects is specious when the planning calls for ensuring a minimum of assured destruction: it's only real if you can be really, really sure that you can do what you claim.
Rigid delivery schedules? Humans are always in the loop: you can stop at any time. The military isn't full of yahoos who simply obey orders. This isn't the Franco-Prussian War or WW1, where the Kaiser was told he couldn't stop the war any more.
And for the very last: SIOP, if not constantly updated and rethought, does fail if it doesn't offer politicians a nuanced, controlled usage. But that's not got anything to do with alienating any President from deciding to use nuclear weapons.
Again: using nukes is first and most fundamentally a political decision. The use of military force is always an expression of political will. The President shouldn't be involved in the technical details of whether to use 45 or 12 weapons, but rather makes the decision to eliminate the enemy's war-making capabilities.
And if the SIOP fails to give him this option, then it's failed in its mission.
I've gone on here for longer than I planned to. I don't want to rag on the man, but this was sloppy and shallow.
And I'll reiterate: using nuclear weapons is a political decision. SIOP serves the President, not the other way around.
And it is one of the fundamentals of our age: if you don't want nuclear weapons to be used, then make sure that everyone involved understands what their use means. If North Korea threatens to use them, make sure that the North Korean leadership knows that one nuke from them means three hundred on them and the complete dismembering of the entire North Korean military apparatus in a hail of complete and utter devestation.
And this is the problem with countries like Iran developing nuclear weapons: that you introduce non-rationality into the nuclear calculus, that an obsession with the destruction of Israel means that deterrence will no longer work. That's when the world becomes very, very dangerous: if you have people who are deeply, completely convinced that Israel must be eliminated, that Israel and the US are indeed direct manifestations of Satan, and you allow them to obtain nukes, then it's gonna be hard to keep them deterred, since they prove day after day that they love death and its transformation to martyrdom more than the lives of their children.
Donnerstag, Juli 21, 2005
There will always, always be an England.
Hi -
So the terrorists have tried again. Apparently.
In reading the first report, I realized that there is no way that they can win, nor will they ever be able to.
Here is the quote from Sky News:
Victoria Line train passenger Ivan McCracken told Sky News he spoke to an Italian man who witnessed an explosion just after the train arrived at the platform.
"He told me he had seen a man carrying a rucksack which suddenly exploded. It was a minor explosion but enough to blow open his rucksack. Everyone rushed from the carriage. People evacuated very quickly. There was no panic.
"I didn't see anyone injured but there was shock and fright.
"There was a smell of smoke."
"The man who was holding the rucksack looked extremely dismayed."
"The man who was holding the rucksack looked extremely dismayed."
There is a God, and he is not on their side.
Sooner or later we're going to get them all, just like we did with the IRA and the Basques. Civilized peoples don't take to having innocents blown up for the sheer pleasure of sadistic fools who've learned a veneer of civilizations without understanding anything of what they are doing and the damage that they do to their own causes and peoples.
We're off to London from the 5th to the 13th, and there is nothing that will change our minds on that.
Dienstag, Juli 19, 2005
For all you "journalists" out there...
I see from the usually brilliant LGF that the CBC is splitting the split ends of split hairs.
For all you "reality" based "journalists" out there - like you'd read me - here is a great start for finding a way to avoid calling terrorists "terrorists".
Idiots.
John
PS: Time for blogging is about as scarce as honest men working for the UN's General Secretary, it seems. Prove to me the obverse and I'll make more time to blog on it. :-)
For all you "reality" based "journalists" out there - like you'd read me - here is a great start for finding a way to avoid calling terrorists "terrorists".
3 entries found for terrorist.
| Main Entry: | anarchist |
| Part of Speech: | noun |
| Definition: | insurgent |
| Synonyms: | agitator, insurgent, insurrectionist, malcontent, mutineer, nihilist, rebel, revolter, revolutionary, terrorist |
| Antonyms: | loyalist |
| Source: | Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.1.1) Copyright © 2005 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved. |
| Main Entry: | dictator |
| Part of Speech: | noun |
| Definition: | ruler |
| Synonyms: | absolutist, adviser, autocrat, baron, boss, caesar, caliph, chief, commander, czar, despot, disciplinarian, duce, emir, fascist, kaiser, lama, leader, lord, magnate, martinet, master, mogul, oligarch, oppressor, overlord, rajah, ringleader, sachem, shah, sheik, slave driver, strongman, sultan, taskmaster, terrorist, tycoon, tyrant, usurper |
| Source: | Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.1.1) Copyright © 2005 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved. |
| Main Entry: | enemy |
| Part of Speech: | noun |
| Definition: | foe |
| Synonyms: | adversary, agent, antagonist, archenemy, asperser, assailant, assassin, attacker, backbiter, bad guy, bandit, betrayer, calumniator, competitor, contender, criminal, crip, defamer, defiler, detractor, disputant, emulator, falsifier, fifth column, foe, guerrilla, informer, inquisitor, invader, meat, murderer, opponent, opposition, other side, prosecutor, rebel, revolutionary, rival, saboteur, seditionist, slanderer, spy, terrorist, traducer, traitor, vilifier, villain |
| Antonyms: | ally, benefactor, friend, supporter |
| Source: | Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.1.1) Copyright © 2005 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved. |
Idiots.
John
PS: Time for blogging is about as scarce as honest men working for the UN's General Secretary, it seems. Prove to me the obverse and I'll make more time to blog on it. :-)
Freitag, Juni 24, 2005
Just an observation...
When I started this blog, I wrote a really long screed on sophism and its relevance to the modern political realm, but never posted it because I didn't feel that it was read for prime time. Add to that the fact that I started voting as a Democrat - voted for Carter in my first election since I disliked the Nixon pardon of Ford and thought that a DC outsider would be a change for the better (woops), I wanted to get this down pat.
With the current continuing meltdown of the Democratic party in the US - and I can't see it being anything but that - I thought I'd posit the following:
The driving philosophy behind the current incarnation of the Democrats is sophistry.
Let's take what sophistry first meant (this is all taken from Wikipedia, so don't blame me for the interpretation: I am also very loath to get into any sort of academic discussion on whether angels are discorporeal but human or whether they are instantiations of the divine spirit, if you get my drift):
The meaning of the word sophist (gr. sophistès, meaning "wise-ist," or one who 'does' wisdom; cf. sophós, "wise man") has changed greatly over time. Initially, a sophist was someone who gave sophia to his disciples, i.e., wisdom made from knowledge.
Remember Kennedy and the Democrats of the day? Of MacNamara and the Whiz Kids that he brought on? We're talking about some of the brightest and best minds that the US ever had to offer, and this is what I grew up believing that the Democrats embodied.
And this is still what the Democrats believe: that they are the clever ones, that they are the ones with the wisdom and knowledge to deal with the challenges of the day. That's been the thrust of the Kerry campaign, it's been the thrust of the demonification of Bush, Rove and the Republican party. Democrats are supposed to be the clever ones.
In the second half of the 5th century B.C., and especially at Athens, "sophist" came to be applied to a group of thinkers who employed debate and rhetoric to teach and disseminate their ideas and offered to teach these skills to others. Due to the importance of such skills in the litigious social life of Athens, acclaimed teachers of such skills often commanded very high fees. The practice of taking fees, coupled with the willingness of many practitioners to use their rhetorical skills to pursue unjust lawsuits, eventually led to a decline in respect for practitioners of this form of teaching and the ideas and writings associated with it.
Here we have the first inklings of the problem: the emphasis came to be less on the content, the what of what is said, and more value was laid on the how of how it was said. A simple mistake: of assuming that it's not what is said that is important, but how it is said. Generating original thought in the political realm is extraordinarily difficult. Generating lovely rhetoric without any regard whatsoever for its content is a skill that most intelligent people, if so trained, can master relatively easily.
The essential claim of sophistry is that the actual logical validity of an argument is irrelevant; it is only the ruling of the audience which ultimately determine whether a conclusion is considered "true" or not. By appealing to the prejudices and emotions of the judges, one can garner favorable treatment for one's side of the argument and cause a factually false position to be ruled true.
Isn't this exactly what is meant by "accurate though fake" of RatherGate fame? Isn't this the case when politics is driven not by ideas and how to implement them, but rather by slavish addiction to polls and interest groups?
Now, from another source:
The Sophists taught men how to speak and what arguments to use in public debate. A Sophistic education was increasingly sought after both by members of the oldest families and by aspiring newcomers without family backing. The changing pattern of Athenian society made merely traditional attitudes in many cases no longer adequate. Criticizing such attitudes and replacing them by rational arguments held special attraction for the young, and it explains the violent distaste which they aroused in traditionalists.
Now if this doesn't describe what happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the western world, I don't know what does.
From the same source:
It is fairly clear, however, that the Sophists did concentrate very largely upon man and human society, upon questions of words in their relations to things, upon issues in the theory of knowledge, and upon the importance of the observer and the subjective element in reality and in the correct understanding of reality.
The charge was based on two contentions, both correct: first, that many of the Sophists attacked the traditionally accepted moral code; and second, that they explored and even commended alternative approaches to morality that would condone or allow behaviour of a kind inadmissible under the stricter traditional code.
Isn't this clear in the fact that the Democratic party embraces those whose behavior is inadmissable under traditional mores? Piss Christ, anyone?
The Sophists, in fact, were attempting to explain the phenomenal world without appealing to any principles outside of phenomena. They believed that this could be done by including the observer within the phenomenal world. Their refusal to go beyond phenomena was, for Plato, the great weakness in their thinking.
Enough for now: suffice to say that for me the parallels cannot be lightly dismissed: ideas matter, transcendental concepts matter, and there are objective truths out there. All concepts that many liberal intellectuals hold in disdain and therefore reject: unless you're a minority, you're not allowed to comment on what is happening and has happened to minority families. It's the perversion of lofty ideals, it's a corruption of intellect.
But not like the Democrats, at this point in time, would understand that if you walked up to them and hit them on the head with a salmon to make the point.
John
With the current continuing meltdown of the Democratic party in the US - and I can't see it being anything but that - I thought I'd posit the following:
The driving philosophy behind the current incarnation of the Democrats is sophistry.
Let's take what sophistry first meant (this is all taken from Wikipedia, so don't blame me for the interpretation: I am also very loath to get into any sort of academic discussion on whether angels are discorporeal but human or whether they are instantiations of the divine spirit, if you get my drift):
The meaning of the word sophist (gr. sophistès, meaning "wise-ist," or one who 'does' wisdom; cf. sophós, "wise man") has changed greatly over time. Initially, a sophist was someone who gave sophia to his disciples, i.e., wisdom made from knowledge.
Remember Kennedy and the Democrats of the day? Of MacNamara and the Whiz Kids that he brought on? We're talking about some of the brightest and best minds that the US ever had to offer, and this is what I grew up believing that the Democrats embodied.
And this is still what the Democrats believe: that they are the clever ones, that they are the ones with the wisdom and knowledge to deal with the challenges of the day. That's been the thrust of the Kerry campaign, it's been the thrust of the demonification of Bush, Rove and the Republican party. Democrats are supposed to be the clever ones.
In the second half of the 5th century B.C., and especially at Athens, "sophist" came to be applied to a group of thinkers who employed debate and rhetoric to teach and disseminate their ideas and offered to teach these skills to others. Due to the importance of such skills in the litigious social life of Athens, acclaimed teachers of such skills often commanded very high fees. The practice of taking fees, coupled with the willingness of many practitioners to use their rhetorical skills to pursue unjust lawsuits, eventually led to a decline in respect for practitioners of this form of teaching and the ideas and writings associated with it.
Here we have the first inklings of the problem: the emphasis came to be less on the content, the what of what is said, and more value was laid on the how of how it was said. A simple mistake: of assuming that it's not what is said that is important, but how it is said. Generating original thought in the political realm is extraordinarily difficult. Generating lovely rhetoric without any regard whatsoever for its content is a skill that most intelligent people, if so trained, can master relatively easily.
The essential claim of sophistry is that the actual logical validity of an argument is irrelevant; it is only the ruling of the audience which ultimately determine whether a conclusion is considered "true" or not. By appealing to the prejudices and emotions of the judges, one can garner favorable treatment for one's side of the argument and cause a factually false position to be ruled true.
Isn't this exactly what is meant by "accurate though fake" of RatherGate fame? Isn't this the case when politics is driven not by ideas and how to implement them, but rather by slavish addiction to polls and interest groups?
Now, from another source:
The Sophists taught men how to speak and what arguments to use in public debate. A Sophistic education was increasingly sought after both by members of the oldest families and by aspiring newcomers without family backing. The changing pattern of Athenian society made merely traditional attitudes in many cases no longer adequate. Criticizing such attitudes and replacing them by rational arguments held special attraction for the young, and it explains the violent distaste which they aroused in traditionalists.
Now if this doesn't describe what happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the western world, I don't know what does.
From the same source:
It is fairly clear, however, that the Sophists did concentrate very largely upon man and human society, upon questions of words in their relations to things, upon issues in the theory of knowledge, and upon the importance of the observer and the subjective element in reality and in the correct understanding of reality.
In other words, a very, very strong cultural relativism: sound familiar?
This emphasis helps to explain the philosophical hostility of Plato and Aristotle. Particularly in the eyes of Plato, anyone who looks for the truth in phenomena alone, whether he interprets it subjectively or relativistically, cannot hope to find it there; and his persistence in turning away from the right direction virtually amounts to a rejection of philosophy and of the search for truth. Many a subsequent thinker for whom metaphysics, or the investigation of the deepest nature of reality, was the crowning achievement of philosophy has felt with Plato that the Sophists were so antimetaphysical that they have no claim to rank as philosophers. But in a period when, for many philosophers, metaphysics is no longer the most important part of philosophy and is even for some no part at all, there is growing appreciation of a number of problems and doctrines recurring in the discussions of the Sophists in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. In the 18th and early 19th centuries the Sophists were considered charlatans. Their intellectual honesty was impugned, and their doctrines were blamed for weakening the moral fibre of Greece.
The charge was based on two contentions, both correct: first, that many of the Sophists attacked the traditionally accepted moral code; and second, that they explored and even commended alternative approaches to morality that would condone or allow behaviour of a kind inadmissible under the stricter traditional code.
Isn't this clear in the fact that the Democratic party embraces those whose behavior is inadmissable under traditional mores? Piss Christ, anyone?
The Sophists, in fact, were attempting to explain the phenomenal world without appealing to any principles outside of phenomena. They believed that this could be done by including the observer within the phenomenal world. Their refusal to go beyond phenomena was, for Plato, the great weakness in their thinking.
This provides the basis, to a large extent, of situational ethics, of the rejection, for instance, that a member of one societal group can ever understand the problems of a member of another societal group: according to this doctrine, they can't. Isn't this the basis for any sort of
A second common generalization about the Sophists has been that they represent a revolt against science and the study of the physical world. The evidence is against this, inasmuch as for Hippias, Prodicus, Gorgias, and Protagoras there are records of a definite interest in questions of this kind. The truth is rather that they were in revolt against attempts to explain the physical world by appeals to principles that could not be perceived by the senses; and instead of framing new “objective” explanations, they attempted to explain things, where explanation was required, by introducing the perceiver as one element in the perceptual situation.
Enough for now: suffice to say that for me the parallels cannot be lightly dismissed: ideas matter, transcendental concepts matter, and there are objective truths out there. All concepts that many liberal intellectuals hold in disdain and therefore reject: unless you're a minority, you're not allowed to comment on what is happening and has happened to minority families. It's the perversion of lofty ideals, it's a corruption of intellect.
But not like the Democrats, at this point in time, would understand that if you walked up to them and hit them on the head with a salmon to make the point.
John
Freitag, Juni 03, 2005
NGO Extortion at its best...
Now this is really amazing and blatant. I'm surpised that not more have taken up on it.
This from Bob Geldorf's current attempt to do good: he is attempting to extort services from a private company for his own needs and goals.
O2 refuses to handle a planned 70 million SMS messages for free. Bob and his buddies want them to do it for free. O2 drops the price and it's not enough:
This from Bob Geldorf's current attempt to do good: he is attempting to extort services from a private company for his own needs and goals.
O2 refuses to handle a planned 70 million SMS messages for free. Bob and his buddies want them to do it for free. O2 drops the price and it's not enough:
Phil Willis MP, the head of the all-party mobile communications group, called for the company to give all the money to Live8.
"It seems wherever there is a buck to be made there is always a mobile company willing to do it. They are trying to cream off an exorbitant fee for what is a very simple service. There is no reason they could not simply donate their systems for free," he said.
Now what he is really saying is that the reason that they are not doing it - corporate responsibility to their shareholders comes to my mind immediately - doesn't meet his expectations of what he wants them to do.
The government, who is tied of course into this, has no compunction with using other people's money, or actually simply not taxing the lottery in question:
The news emerged as Gordon Brown today threw his weight behind the Live8 campaign by promising to write off its £500,000 tax bill.
Isn't that nice: Brown is simply willing to forego income from taxes on the results of the lottery: this they equate with actually bearing the costs of the mechanism of the lottery. They are comparing cherries with watermelons.
But politicians today described O2's decision as "disgraceful" and urged the company to follow the Chancellor's example.
Fine. O2 should simple say that they won't impose any additional surcharges. That's what a tax is: it is imposed. What the politicans want is for O2 to take a significant financial hit to pay for what is fundamentally a political stunt that will probably see more harm done than good.
And the chancellor doesn't work in a commercial environment.
And now the best part of the article from This Is London:
"We are charging 10p per entry to cover our administration costs, and we have no plans to waive that fee. This is a huge operation and we will still be making a loss," said an O2 spokesman. Lindsay Boswell, chief executive of the Institute of Fundraising, said: "O2 have actually lowered the rate of the text message, but I think given the massive number of texts being sent, obviously economies of scale come into play. "If you do the sums, it does seem they could make a big profit. I think it's reasonable that they cover their costs and make a modest profit, but nothing more than that." O2 refused to bow to the pressure today. I've added the emphasis. Linday Boswell is the Chief Executive of the Institute of Fundraising, the lobby of the fundraisers in Great Britain. He's ex-army and has been in social work since, so I won't impune his bonafides since they appear sincere. I just checked their on-line financial statements and wasn't able to get his salary, but they spend over 600.000 Pounds Sterling on 20 people, and two of them were earning more than 60.000 each. So his sincerity certainly pays. But he is, I think, obviously clueless when it comes to understanding economies of scale when applied to telephone networks. Here is the first clue: telephone networks of any kind do not benefit from economies of scale, nor do they recognize it. Telephone network economics operate on the basis of the number of people attached to the network: the marginal cost of any, literally any service on the network simply doesn't exist. Telephone networks have very high investment costs and minimal operating costs. You only make money when people use it intensively, and people only use it when they feel that the value offered is higher than the marginal costs of using the network. Once set up, the major operating costs are administrative, and that is where O2 is, IMHO, absolutely correct in refusing to act as a mattress. They have already indicated that they will lose money, not earn any. And when you think of it, this sort of muddled thinking is part of the whole NGO problem: they want to maximize their income by using existing, commercially and government financed infrastructures but are unwilling to accept that there are costs involved. Tragedy of the commons indeed.
The Chancellor today outlined his agenda for Gleneagles, where he hopes to persuade the leading industrialised nations to back his ambitious plans for a "new deal" for Africa.
Describing the programme as a "modern Marshall Plan" for the developing world, he set out proposals to grant 100 per cent debt relief to the poorest nations.
Great. What he is proposing here is a massive abdication of responsibility which at the end of the day will be extraordinarily destructive.
First, debt relief means that you will reward corruption and incompetence. Nothing more, nothing less. This is the wrong approach: what these countries need is to go after those who squandered the millions and billions in question and to punish them for having done so. He rewards, actively, corruption, and will reinforce the current conditions which have led to corruption and waste: lack of responsibility and lack of real, meaningful sanctions not on countries and the defenseless, but rather sanctions on the corrupt and incompetent.
Mr Brown's four-point plan would also see the financing of a mass immunisation and vaccination programme designed to save five million lives by 2015, a doubling of international aid to £27.5billion and improved trade agreements with developing nations.
Oddly enough, no problems here: just that he will end up increasing poverty, destroying local infrastructures that are desperately needed for local economic independence and will further the interests not of the local nations, but rather the interests of the EU.
Mr Brown also backed plans for a million-strong demonstration in Edinburgh to coincide with the G8 summit at Gleneagles.
"We want to get some big decision out of the Gleneagles summit-that people can say 'look, what we have done has some enduring purpose, it's going to change the world, it is going to make it better," he told GMTV.
In other words, distract people from their own problems and interests. If you want to change the world, then by all means go out there and actually do something to change it: but going to a demo is nothing more than emotionally satisfying intellectual masturbation. "Some big decision": what he means is that it'll look great on his resume that he got the G8 to do "something". Doesn't matter what they do, just do something.
But being there is probably a great way to meet chicks.
Scottish police have expressed concerns about the scale of the march through Edinburgh, fearing it could pose a security problem. But Mr Brown said the demonstration should go ahead.
He also insisted he would push ahead with the International Finance Facility (IFF) - his favoured scheme for raising £27.5billion of aid - despite US reservations.
In a challenge to the Americans, he said: "When many have suggested to me it is a demand too large, a programme too ambitious, my reply is that it is not a time for timidity nor a time to fear reaching too high."
Sheesh. Of course it's going to turn into a security nightmare and will attract all sorts of loonies from the left and right, as well as the usual mob of luddite globalization opponents coupled with anarchists who will probably end up doing the usual massive property damage and through activist-instigated riots - and that is where the anarchists have so much fun - so that Brown and all the other fine, nice upstanding socially active and politically correct fellows can feel so good about themselves.
Makes me wanna puke.
Want to do something good in Africa?
For a start, kill subsidies for agricultural products being exported there. Stop destroying local industries by price dumping. Expose corrupt politicians for what they are, parasites; reinforce local rule of law. Remove import restrictions.
Want to do something personal?
Go there and teach. Not sociology or political science - as an institute, the Sorbonne has probably done more damage in the 3rd world than most colonial wars - but engineering, math, literacy.
You don't need much of an infrastucture to teach literacy and math. You need books and patience, coupled with time and food for both teachers and students.
But thinking that getting a really, really neat rock concert together and going to Edinburgh to meet girls is actually doing anything is, for me, intellectually dishonest and politically opportune. It's the exploitation of the poor for specific political gain. And it's something I fund really, really repugnant.
John
First the election...
Hi -
First a comment on the election results in France and in the Netherlands.
It's simple why the voters rejected the election results: they didn't want it. Don't buy the MSM sell of "protest" votes.
I've actually taken the time - it took three full evenings - to read through the now failed constitution. It's, as I've said elswhere, a constitution not of, by and for the people, but one of, by and for the technocrats.
Who are the technocrats?
Simple: they are the ruling elite of Europe, trained in nuance and subtlety of interpretation. They have been indoctrinated from childhood on the inherent superiority of their ways; have gone to university to learn the complexities of the tools that they use to confuse and obfuscate; have gone to work and entered into the incestuous relationship between government and business and punched their way to the top of their respective fields.
And they are clueless, with a rare technocrat who has been outside the sandbox. It's a glorious life, discussing subtle changes to law to attempt to achieve some sort of transcendent social justice; enjoying extensive expense accounts and reimbursements schemes that the taxpayer pays; and most fundamentally enjoying a nice, safe, socially statused existence without really having to worry too much about adding value to people's lives.
Of course they were shocked and amazed that the unwashed masses wouldn't simply accept yet another scheme to screw over the common man. They don't understand the comman man in Europe and never will.
Why not? Because they don't want to. The challenges facing Europe are hard and there is no simple solution: the core of the European system of social nets must be dismantled, demystified, debugged and deloused to get the vermin out.
Demographic problems of nightmare proportions must be addressed and solved. The fundamental core of European political systems has failed, failed fundamentally, and must be restructured. These are all extraordinarily difficult tasks, yet the politicians in Europe are in active denial that any of this needs to be done at all.
These last two decades will go down in history as having been frittered away, with massive consequences.
Why this refusal? It has a lot to do with a fundamental failure of the political system: it is not a critical system. Now all the LWL are going "Huh? Socialists are always critical of the existing system!!!"
But not when you are dealing with dogmatic "criticism" that is nothing more than catechism writ large. I've studied in both the US and in Germany, and in general the German students were less critical than US students.
Now I'm gonna propose something so radical that it's heretical: that Americans are vastly more critical of their system of government and social support than Europeans are. That Americans don't go out on the streets in massive numbers to protest the idea that you should maybe work more than 35 hours a week - HAH! - isn't an indicator that Americans aren't critical, but rather the fact that Americans are too pragmatic to worry about such a completely and totally addled idea of having the government decide how long I should work.
Social inequality issues are DOA in the US because you don't, as an American, generally worry about how everyone else is doing: you worry about how YOU are doing, it's called self interest and is a perfectly normal and human pattern of behavior. And it works.
And ignoring human nature is what got the Eurocrats in trouble: the rejection of the constitution shows that. It's why democracy is the best damn form of government around: it's the only way that you can say NO.
And the French (The French! The French!!! Oh, the glorious irony of it being the French!) and the Dutch populace have told their keepers to well and proper frell off, that the constitution and the politics that have accompanied it - expansion of the members (to dilute and divide the political opposition) and the bureaucracy - are not in their, the people's interest.
And of course the technocrats don't understand that. They obviously think: How dare these people do anything but agree with us, we're the ruling elite. Quelle absurd!
What these ruling elites don't understand is that they are at the very, very beginning of the process of European unity: but where oh where are the European philosopher-politicians of the caliber of the authors of the Federalist Papers? The debate is so desperately needed.
Given the current caliber of European politicians and the politically correct environment that actively suppresses critical and independent thought that passes for politics in Europe - I'll be once again heretical and suggest that Haider and theFPÖ in Austria were so castigated not because of right-wing leanings but rather because he was a successful challenge to the Holy State - this means that there won't be any sort of political awakening as a result of the vote.
Which means that the Europeans will continue to muddle through.
Continue to deny the problems.
Continue to avoid the problems.
Continue to get deeper and deeper into the hole, digging furiously.
Continue to play on the deck of the Titanic.
First a comment on the election results in France and in the Netherlands.
It's simple why the voters rejected the election results: they didn't want it. Don't buy the MSM sell of "protest" votes.
I've actually taken the time - it took three full evenings - to read through the now failed constitution. It's, as I've said elswhere, a constitution not of, by and for the people, but one of, by and for the technocrats.
Who are the technocrats?
Simple: they are the ruling elite of Europe, trained in nuance and subtlety of interpretation. They have been indoctrinated from childhood on the inherent superiority of their ways; have gone to university to learn the complexities of the tools that they use to confuse and obfuscate; have gone to work and entered into the incestuous relationship between government and business and punched their way to the top of their respective fields.
And they are clueless, with a rare technocrat who has been outside the sandbox. It's a glorious life, discussing subtle changes to law to attempt to achieve some sort of transcendent social justice; enjoying extensive expense accounts and reimbursements schemes that the taxpayer pays; and most fundamentally enjoying a nice, safe, socially statused existence without really having to worry too much about adding value to people's lives.
Of course they were shocked and amazed that the unwashed masses wouldn't simply accept yet another scheme to screw over the common man. They don't understand the comman man in Europe and never will.
Why not? Because they don't want to. The challenges facing Europe are hard and there is no simple solution: the core of the European system of social nets must be dismantled, demystified, debugged and deloused to get the vermin out.
Demographic problems of nightmare proportions must be addressed and solved. The fundamental core of European political systems has failed, failed fundamentally, and must be restructured. These are all extraordinarily difficult tasks, yet the politicians in Europe are in active denial that any of this needs to be done at all.
These last two decades will go down in history as having been frittered away, with massive consequences.
Why this refusal? It has a lot to do with a fundamental failure of the political system: it is not a critical system. Now all the LWL are going "Huh? Socialists are always critical of the existing system!!!"
But not when you are dealing with dogmatic "criticism" that is nothing more than catechism writ large. I've studied in both the US and in Germany, and in general the German students were less critical than US students.
Now I'm gonna propose something so radical that it's heretical: that Americans are vastly more critical of their system of government and social support than Europeans are. That Americans don't go out on the streets in massive numbers to protest the idea that you should maybe work more than 35 hours a week - HAH! - isn't an indicator that Americans aren't critical, but rather the fact that Americans are too pragmatic to worry about such a completely and totally addled idea of having the government decide how long I should work.
Social inequality issues are DOA in the US because you don't, as an American, generally worry about how everyone else is doing: you worry about how YOU are doing, it's called self interest and is a perfectly normal and human pattern of behavior. And it works.
And ignoring human nature is what got the Eurocrats in trouble: the rejection of the constitution shows that. It's why democracy is the best damn form of government around: it's the only way that you can say NO.
And the French (The French! The French!!! Oh, the glorious irony of it being the French!) and the Dutch populace have told their keepers to well and proper frell off, that the constitution and the politics that have accompanied it - expansion of the members (to dilute and divide the political opposition) and the bureaucracy - are not in their, the people's interest.
And of course the technocrats don't understand that. They obviously think: How dare these people do anything but agree with us, we're the ruling elite. Quelle absurd!
What these ruling elites don't understand is that they are at the very, very beginning of the process of European unity: but where oh where are the European philosopher-politicians of the caliber of the authors of the Federalist Papers? The debate is so desperately needed.
Given the current caliber of European politicians and the politically correct environment that actively suppresses critical and independent thought that passes for politics in Europe - I'll be once again heretical and suggest that Haider and theFPÖ in Austria were so castigated not because of right-wing leanings but rather because he was a successful challenge to the Holy State - this means that there won't be any sort of political awakening as a result of the vote.
Which means that the Europeans will continue to muddle through.
Continue to deny the problems.
Continue to avoid the problems.
Continue to get deeper and deeper into the hole, digging furiously.
Continue to play on the deck of the Titanic.
Dienstag, Mai 17, 2005
I always knew the French were behind it...
Now this is simply smashingly deadly: the French were largely behind and profited from the international slavery trade that led up to the American civil war.
And can anyone out there tell me with a straight face that the French have ANY basis for being able to take ANY moral high grounds anywhere on this planet?
Not that it will make any difference to the French...
Great post from the folks at Done With Mirrors: read it often and go back there as well.
John
And can anyone out there tell me with a straight face that the French have ANY basis for being able to take ANY moral high grounds anywhere on this planet?
Not that it will make any difference to the French...
Great post from the folks at Done With Mirrors: read it often and go back there as well.
John
Donnerstag, Mai 12, 2005
How to Destroy an Institution
Hi -
What, another post *already*?
Yep.
This afternoon a new report will be coming out on the estimation for tax income for the German government. This is widely expected to be wildly optimistic, based on something like over 1% growth (Yipee! This is, after all, Germany...), which means that the government will plan on taking in x Euros, but will take in something like x-many millions of Euros, resulting in further increase in the German national debt.
What's the problem here? The problem is that what we call the Five Wise Guys (Sachverständigen Rat), the five leading German public research institutes, have utterly failed in their charter, to provide advice to the government and technical expertise.
Their technical expertise remains, but that's all there is: no one takes them seriously anymore, since they consistely remain uncritical of what is increasingly obvious really bad economic policies. They don't see being openly critical as part of their charter, and as a result they fail to fulfill their own charter.
The problem is that German politics is so thoroughly ideologized that it brokes no criticism: all political parties of note here are adamantly refusing to recognize that A) the German economy is, domestically, in very bad shape and B) Germany's rather generous social instracture means that Germany is living beyond its means (due to A), and has been doing so for at least 20 years.
If not longer.
Germany is, bluntly, broke. And has been for a while, covering up the problems with mounting debt and tax burdens.
And the institutions that are supposed to jump up and down pointing out the obvious are on the sidelines reestimating their equations to see if they can get a better fit so that their models continue to show growth rates that are politically acceptable.
A "proper" forecast would show that Germany won't show economic growth until the government is downsized and the tax burden is, if not reduced, then at least made more progressive, so that people actually have some money to spend.
These five institutes are basically blind to these problems because it doesn't fit the accepted orthodoxy of German politics. But by failing to be unorthodox, by failing to provide critical advice, they are ultimately destroying what utility they can provide. No one reads their twice-yearly reports on the German economy, because there is nothing of meaning there.
John
What, another post *already*?
Yep.
This afternoon a new report will be coming out on the estimation for tax income for the German government. This is widely expected to be wildly optimistic, based on something like over 1% growth (Yipee! This is, after all, Germany...), which means that the government will plan on taking in x Euros, but will take in something like x-many millions of Euros, resulting in further increase in the German national debt.
What's the problem here? The problem is that what we call the Five Wise Guys (Sachverständigen Rat), the five leading German public research institutes, have utterly failed in their charter, to provide advice to the government and technical expertise.
Their technical expertise remains, but that's all there is: no one takes them seriously anymore, since they consistely remain uncritical of what is increasingly obvious really bad economic policies. They don't see being openly critical as part of their charter, and as a result they fail to fulfill their own charter.
The problem is that German politics is so thoroughly ideologized that it brokes no criticism: all political parties of note here are adamantly refusing to recognize that A) the German economy is, domestically, in very bad shape and B) Germany's rather generous social instracture means that Germany is living beyond its means (due to A), and has been doing so for at least 20 years.
If not longer.
Germany is, bluntly, broke. And has been for a while, covering up the problems with mounting debt and tax burdens.
And the institutions that are supposed to jump up and down pointing out the obvious are on the sidelines reestimating their equations to see if they can get a better fit so that their models continue to show growth rates that are politically acceptable.
A "proper" forecast would show that Germany won't show economic growth until the government is downsized and the tax burden is, if not reduced, then at least made more progressive, so that people actually have some money to spend.
These five institutes are basically blind to these problems because it doesn't fit the accepted orthodoxy of German politics. But by failing to be unorthodox, by failing to provide critical advice, they are ultimately destroying what utility they can provide. No one reads their twice-yearly reports on the German economy, because there is nothing of meaning there.
John
Donnerstag, Mai 05, 2005
Death of Effective Economic Policy in Germany
Hi -
The title of this post says it all.
How do you do effective economic policy? Especially in these days of restrained marginal government spending ability?
You can simply spend money on pet projects, adding to the debt and maybe or maybe not achieving your politico-economic goals. Not the cleverest way of doing things, but effective for your cronies and friends.
Or you could give tax breaks to investments in those areas where you want people to invest. No direct government outlays, no program costs. What you are doing is accepting that you'll have less government revenue on the value added by those investments in exchange for those investments.
Elegant, effective. Want people to invest in real estate in Berlin, to revitalize the run-down portions of East Germany and save in many cases some great architecture? Give investors there a tax break so that for high-value individuals it's sort of a no-brainer to invest, even if the returns are mediocre or even non-existent.
Want people to invest in ships built in Germany (as opposed to Korea or China)?
Give them a tax break to do so.
Want to support the German film industry?
Give them a tax break to do so.
Want to support wind energy farms?
Give them a tax break to do so.
It's a fairly elegant tool to implement government political-economic industrial policy. Low cost, easily manageable (the market does it, not the government). It attracts high-income people, since by investing €100T you can, in many cases, reduce your taxable income by at least that amount, if not more, meaning if you have an income of €500T, you've just saved €50T taxes, meaning you get a 50% return on your investment of €100T in the first year: for many, anything after that effect is gravy.
Downside: your money is tied up for 10-30 years, and in the case of ships or airplanes, will see heavy depreciation that will be balanced out by a revenue stream. But it's that heavy first-year tax write-off that makes it interesting: immediate reward for making that investment choice.
But no more.
The German government, in it's ***infinite*** wisdom, has decided to kill this entirely by changing §15 of the German tax code. This means that any tax break envisioned can no longer be used to compensate current income from other sources, but can only be used to compensate future incomes from that particular investment. So that investment of €100T generates a tax break of €50T that can be used against future tax liabilities from income flows from that investment.
As a high-value individual, there is no incentive to make the long-term investment.
None whatsoever.
So a government faced with really weak investments decides to kill off the best instrument for effective investment policy that it has ever had.
There is no hope for the German economy under the current administration: if anything, it's gonna take years to undo the damage.
John
The title of this post says it all.
How do you do effective economic policy? Especially in these days of restrained marginal government spending ability?
You can simply spend money on pet projects, adding to the debt and maybe or maybe not achieving your politico-economic goals. Not the cleverest way of doing things, but effective for your cronies and friends.
Or you could give tax breaks to investments in those areas where you want people to invest. No direct government outlays, no program costs. What you are doing is accepting that you'll have less government revenue on the value added by those investments in exchange for those investments.
Elegant, effective. Want people to invest in real estate in Berlin, to revitalize the run-down portions of East Germany and save in many cases some great architecture? Give investors there a tax break so that for high-value individuals it's sort of a no-brainer to invest, even if the returns are mediocre or even non-existent.
Want people to invest in ships built in Germany (as opposed to Korea or China)?
Give them a tax break to do so.
Want to support the German film industry?
Give them a tax break to do so.
Want to support wind energy farms?
Give them a tax break to do so.
It's a fairly elegant tool to implement government political-economic industrial policy. Low cost, easily manageable (the market does it, not the government). It attracts high-income people, since by investing €100T you can, in many cases, reduce your taxable income by at least that amount, if not more, meaning if you have an income of €500T, you've just saved €50T taxes, meaning you get a 50% return on your investment of €100T in the first year: for many, anything after that effect is gravy.
Downside: your money is tied up for 10-30 years, and in the case of ships or airplanes, will see heavy depreciation that will be balanced out by a revenue stream. But it's that heavy first-year tax write-off that makes it interesting: immediate reward for making that investment choice.
But no more.
The German government, in it's ***infinite*** wisdom, has decided to kill this entirely by changing §15 of the German tax code. This means that any tax break envisioned can no longer be used to compensate current income from other sources, but can only be used to compensate future incomes from that particular investment. So that investment of €100T generates a tax break of €50T that can be used against future tax liabilities from income flows from that investment.
As a high-value individual, there is no incentive to make the long-term investment.
None whatsoever.
So a government faced with really weak investments decides to kill off the best instrument for effective investment policy that it has ever had.
There is no hope for the German economy under the current administration: if anything, it's gonna take years to undo the damage.
John
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