Ron Paul and the paranoid style in American politics

The John Birch Society is a notorious far-right nutcase group, founded in 1958 by a businessman named Robert Welch, whose trademark was paranoid and delusional conspiracy theories. In case you think that I am exaggerating unfairly when I use words like "paranoid" and "delusional," let me just mention that Robert Welch accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" (no, I'm not making that up). That captures the general style of their world-view.

One might assume that the John Birch Society faded away decades ago, but no such luck. In fact, in February 2010 they hit the news as one one of the co-sponsors of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington DC. Now, in my opinion, a lot of the other CPAC participants, past and future, are already hard-right extremists only tenuously in contact with reality. But including the John Birch Society, no less, brought this tendency to the point of self-parody.

Nor is this just my opinion. Even some people sympathetic to CPAC and all its works, including a writer on the right-wing website Pajamas Media, Ryan Mauro, described this as a "monumentally stupid decision." Mauro also explained why even CPAC should continue to regard the John Birch Society as a fringe group beyond the pale of political respectability (as, say, William F. Buckley argued over four decades ago). At the very least, he suggested, "CPAC has made a major PR mistake in forming this alliance with JBS." For more details, including some information on the present-day activities of the John Birch Society, see here:

(In 2011 CPAC cut its ties with both the John Birch Society and the gay-rights Republican organization GOProud, which apparently were deemed equally bad for PR.)

But it so happens that one of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination is an open and enthusiastic fan of the John Birch Society. As you can probably guess, I'm talking about Ron Paul, who was a keynote speaker at their 50th anniversary celebration—not back in the 1980s or 1990s, but in 2008. If you like, you can see his speech on video here.



Ron Paul's very public alliance with the John Birch society was one of the points highlighted by James Kirchik in his December 29 piece on "Ron Paul's World" in the New York Times campaign blog. Kirchik has been a useful source of (carefully researched and accurate) information on some of Ron Paul's more unsavory activities and affiliations over the years. These include

the repugnant newsletters that Paul published from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, which contain a raft of bigoted statements. Paul has denied authorship and implausibly claims not to know who wrote them.

The story of the newsletters is not new. In 1996, Lefty Morris, Paul’s Democratic Congressional opponent, publicized a handful, and in January 2008, I published a long piece in The New Republic based on my discovery of batches of the newsletters held at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Yet Paul’s popularity in the prelude to the Iowa caucuses, where many polls put him in first place, has renewed attention to their revolting contents.

Recent media reports have tended to focus on the newsletters’ bigotry, which was primarily aimed at blacks, and to a smaller extent at gay people and Jews. The newsletters have complicated the situation for writers who have defended Paul, who point out that there is no trace of such prejudice in his public statements. [....]

But there is one major aspect of the newsletters, no less disturbing than their racist content, that has always been present in Paul’s rhetoric, in every forum: a penchant for conspiracy theories. [....]

Paul is proud of his association with the [John Birch Society], telling the Times Magazine in 2007, “I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution.” In 1998, Paul appeared in a Birch Society documentary which lauded a bill he had introduced to force American withdrawal from the United Nations. [....]

Paul has frequently attacked the alleged New World Order that “elitist” cabals, like the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller family, in conjunction with “globalist” organizations, like the United Nations and the World Bank, wish to foist on Americans. In a 2006 column published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell (his former Congressional chief of staff and the man widely suspected of being the ghostwriter of the newsletters, although he denied it to me), Paul addressed the alleged “Nafta Superhighway.” [....] Paul wrote that the ultimate goal of the project [JW: which happens to be imaginary] was an “integrated North American Union” — yet one more bugbear of conspiracy theorists — which “would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.”

In his newsletters, Paul expressed support for far-right militia movements, which at the time saw validation for their extreme, anti-government beliefs in events like the F.B.I. assault on the Branch Davidians and at Ruby Ridge. Paul was eager to fan their paranoia and portray himself as the one man capable of doing anything about it politically. [....]

In light of the newsletters and his current rhetoric, it is no wonder that Paul has attracted not just prominent racists, but seemingly every conspiracy theorist in America. [....] As Paul told The Times last week, he has no interest in dissuading the various extremists from backing his campaign, which is hardly surprising considering he’s spent three decades cultivating their support. Paul’s shady associations are hardly “bygone” and the “facts” of his dangerous conspiracy-mongering are very much “in evidence.” Paul has not just marinated in a stew of far-right paranoia; he is one of the chefs.

Of course, it is impossible to know what Ron Paul truly thinks about black or gay people or the other groups so viciously disparaged in his newsletters. What we do know with absolute certainty, however, is that Ron Paul is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who regularly imputes the worst possible motives to the very government he wants to lead.

I know that some otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people (I am too polite to mention names, but they know who they are) have resisted acknowledging the undeniable fact that Ron Paul is not just a poisonously reactionary political troglodyte but an out-and-out crackpot. But they should try to face reality. The fact that a number of the other Republican candidates are also dangerous loons is not a good excuse for giving Ron Paul a free pass. And the fact that one might find some of his specific positions, or some of his pseudo-"libertarian" rhetoric, sympathetic is not a good enough excuse either.

Meanwhile, for those of you to whom this information about Ron Paul is news, I recommend reading Kirchik's latest piece in full (below). But this is the tip of the iceberg.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

==============================
New York Times (Campaign Stops)
December 29, 2011, 12:22 am
Ron Paul’s World
By James Kirchik

Earlier this week, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said that he would not vote for his fellow presidential candidate Ron Paul should Paul become the Republican nominee. The immediate cause of this dissension – highly unusual in a party primary – was the repugnant newsletters that Paul published from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, which contain a raft of bigoted statements. Paul has denied authorship and implausibly claims not to know who wrote them.

The story of the newsletters is not new. In 1996, Lefty Morris, Paul’s Democratic Congressional opponent, publicized a handful, and in January 2008, I published a long piece in The New Republic based on my discovery of batches of the newsletters held at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Yet Paul’s popularity in the prelude to the Iowa caucuses, where many polls put him in first place, has renewed attention to their revolting contents.

Recent media reports have tended to focus on the newsletters’ bigotry, which was primarily aimed at blacks, and to a smaller extent at gay people and Jews. The newsletters have complicated the situation for writers who have defended Paul, who point out that there is no trace of such prejudice in his public statements. Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast, for instance, writing last week about “rethinking” his original endorsement of Paul, suggests that

A fringe protest candidate need not fully address issues two decades ago that do not in any way reflect the campaign he has run or the issues on which he has made an appeal. But a man who could win the Iowa caucuses and is now third in national polls has to have a plausible answer for this.

In a long, anguished post on the Web site of The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf wrote that “the question is complicated by facts not in evidence and inherently subjective judgments about politics, race and the norms that govern how much a candidate’s bygone associations matter.” As long as one accepts the most charitable explanation for Paul’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (it infringes on private property rights) or re-litigation of the Civil War (the government should have bought and released the slaves instead), perhaps there’s something to that argument. Though Paul’s penchant for promoting the cause of secession puts these stances in a dubious context.

But there is one major aspect of the newsletters, no less disturbing than their racist content, that has always been present in Paul’s rhetoric, in every forum: a penchant for conspiracy theories.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Ron Paul at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Feb. 11, 2011.

In a 1990 C-Span appearance, taped between Congressional stints, Paul was asked by a caller to comment on the “treasonous, Marxist, alcoholic dictators that pull the strings in our country.” Rather than roll his eyes, Paul responded,“there’s pretty good evidence that those who are involved in the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations usually end up in positions of power. And I believe this is true.”

Paul then went on to stress the negligible differences between various “Rockefeller Trilateralists.” The notion that these three specific groups — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family — run the world has been at the center of far-right conspiracy theorizing for a long time, promoted especially by the extremist John Birch Society, whose 50^th anniversary gala dinner Paul keynoted in 2008.

Paul is proud of his association with the society, telling the Times Magazine in 2007, “I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution.” In 1998, Paul appeared in a Birch Society documentary which lauded a bill he had introduced to force American withdrawal from the United Nations. With ominous music in the background and images of United Nations peacekeepers patrolling deserted streets, the film warned that the world body would destroy American private property rights, replace the Constitution with the United Nations Charter and burn churches to the ground.

Paul has frequently attacked the alleged New World Order that “elitist” cabals, like the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller family, in conjunction with “globalist” organizations, like the United Nations and the World Bank, wish to foist on Americans. In a 2006 column published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell (his former Congressional chief of staff and the man widely suspected of being the ghostwriter of the newsletters, although he denied it to me), Paul addressed the alleged “Nafta Superhighway.” This is a system of pre-existing and proposed roads from Mexico to Canada that conspiracy theorists claim is part of a nefarious transnational attempt to open America’s borders and merge the United States with its neighbors into a supra-national entity. Paul wrote that the ultimate goal of the project was an “integrated North American Union” — yet one more bugbear of conspiracy theorists — which “would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.”

In his newsletters, Paul expressed support for far-right militia movements, which at the time saw validation for their extreme, anti-government beliefs in events like the F.B.I. assault on the Branch Davidians and at Ruby Ridge. Paul was eager to fan their paranoia and portray himself as the one man capable of doing anything about it politically. Three months before the Oklahoma City bombing, in an item for the Ron Paul Survival Report titled, “10 Militia Commandments,” he offered advice to militia members, including that they, “Keep the group size down,” “Keep quiet and you’re harder to find,” “Leave no clues,” “Avoid the phone as much as possible,” and “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

The closest Paul has come in his public statements to endorsing violence against the government was during an interview in 2007, when he was asked about Ed and Elaine Brown, a New Hampshire couple who had refused to pay federal income taxes. In the summer of that year, they instigated a five-month armed standoff with United States marshals, whom Ed Brown accused of being part of a “Zionist, Illuminati, Freemason movement.” Echoing a speech he had just delivered on the House floor, Paul praised the pair as “heroic” “true patriots,” likened them to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and compared them favorably to “zombies,” that is, those of us who “just go along” and pay income tax.

Finally, there’s Paul’s stance on the most pervasive conspiracy theory in America today, the idea that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated not by Al Qaeda, but by the federal government or some other shadowy force. While Paul has never explicitly endorsed this claim, there is a reason so many 9/11 “truthers” flock to his campaign. In a recent YouTube video posted by a leading 9/11 conspiracy group, “We Are Change,” Paul is asked, “Why won’t you come out about the truth about 9/11?”

Rather than answer, say, that the “9/11 Commission already investigated the attacks,” or ask the questioner what particular element of “the truth” remained unknown, Paul knowingly replied, “Because I can’t handle the controversy, I have the I.M.F., the Federal Reserve to deal with, the I.R.S. to deal with, no because I just have more, too many things on my plate. Because I just have too much to do.”

Paul knows where his bread is buttered. He regularly appears on the radio program of Alex Jones, a vocal 9/11 and New World Order conspiracy theorist based in his home state of Texas. On Jones’s show earlier this month, Paul alleged that the Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on United States soil was a “propaganda stunt” perpetrated by the Obama administration.

In light of the newsletters and his current rhetoric, it is no wonder that Paul has attracted not just prominent racists, but seemingly every conspiracy theorist in America. The title of one of Paul’s newsletter series – the Ron Paul Survival Report – was a conscious appeal to followers of the “survivalist” movement of the 1990s, whose ideology blended white supremacy and anti-government militancy in preparation for what Paul himself termed the “coming race war.”

As Paul told The Times last week, he has no interest in dissuading the various extremists from backing his campaign, which is hardly surprising considering he’s spent three decades cultivating their support. Paul’s shady associations are hardly “bygone” and the “facts” of his dangerous conspiracy-mongering are very much “in evidence.” Paul has not just marinated in a stew of far-right paranoia; he is one of the chefs.

Of course, it is impossible to know what Ron Paul truly thinks about black or gay people or the other groups so viciously disparaged in his newsletters. What we do know with absolute certainty, however, is that Ron Paul is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who regularly imputes the worst possible motives to the very government he wants to lead.

James Kirchick is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Walter Russell Mead on democracy in South Africa

I can't resist quoting a passage (below) from one of Meade's recent posts. One can agree or disagree with the rest of the post. But I share these sentiments.

Yours for democracy & the oppenness of historical possibility,
Jeff Weintraub
===================================
Walter Russell Meade (Via Meadia)
December 27, 2011
South Africa: The Democracy That Will Not Die

[....]

South African democracy is one of the world’s more improbable success stories, and its future can never be taken for granted. It is a little bit like a giraffe; if you hadn’t seen one you would never imagine that it was possible.



The peaceful transition to majority rule and the establishment of an orderly majority government under Nelson Mandela was one of the political miracles of the twentieth century. That this miracle continues to inspire so many South Africans under such difficult conditions remains a great blessing and a sign of hope to Africa and the world.

The Republic of South Africa is one of the countries Via Meadia will be watching in 2012; the battle for South Africa’s future has implications far beyond its frontiers.

Where did the US federal deficit come from? (#2)

A second reality check, to complement the item I just posted: How did the US federal deficit get so big? (#1). This one is less detailed, but in some ways more sweepingly comprehensive.

I think the graph below, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (based on estimates from the Congressional Budget Office), is fairly self-explanatory. But here are a few of its implications.

If we look at the current federal deficit and projected deficits for the rest of this decade, based on the assumption that currently enacted policies (like the Bush tax cuts) remain in place, then these deficits are overwhelmingly accounted for by two sets of causes:

(1) the current and long-term consequences of fiscally irresponsible policies by the Bush II administration, including the Bush tax cuts and two wars that weren't paid for; and
(2) the direct and indirect effects of the economic crash that began in 2007-2008.

That second category includes reduced federal tax revenues and the cost of various compensatory programs that kick in more or less automatically (e.g., increased unemployment payments)—at least, they used to function as "automatic stabilizers" before the Congressional Republicans embarked on their rule-or-ruin strategy of indiscriminate and monolithic obstructionism. It also includes policy initiatives undertaken during the Obama administration to counteract the recession, including the 2009 economic "stimulus" (without which the economic situation would almost certainly be much worse than it actually is right now).

If we leave out the Bush-era tax cuts, the unfunded wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, the direct effects of the economic crash, and the recovery measures undertaken during the Obama administration ... then the resulting level of current and projected federal deficits is indicated by that black line down at the bottom of the graph ("Deficit without these factors"). The long-term costs of Obama administration recovery measures are indicated by that light blue band running across the graph. Where does the rest of the deficit come from?

The next time you hear right-wing propaganda blaming the mushrooming federal deficits on "out-of-control spending" under Obama, propaganda that tends to get mindlessly repeated by too many pundits and alleged journalists, please keep this graph in mind.

—Jeff Weintraub

How did the US federal deficit get so big? (#1)

At the end of the 1990s—i.e., at the end of the Clinton administration—the US government was running a surplus. Since 2001, the federal government has been running large and increasing annual deficits. So what produced these deficits? Where do they come from?

The basic answer is pretty simple. The two major causes responsible for size of the current federal deficit are:

(1) fiscally irresponsible policies of the Bush II administration, including the Bush tax cuts, two wars that weren't paid for, and a poorly designed expansion of Medicare that wasn't paid for; and
(2) the direct and indirect effects of the economic crash that began in 2007-2008.

That second category includes reduced federal tax revenues, the cost of various compensatory programs that are supposed to kick in more or less automatically (e.g., increased unemployment payments), and policy initiatives undertaken by the Obama administration to counteract the recession.

Actually, if we leave out the direct and indirect consequences of the economic crash, a surprisingly large proportion of the present and projected federal deficit can be attributed to just one cause: the Bush tax cuts. As Ross Perot used to say (memorably, if not always accurately), it's that simple.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq obviously cost a lot too, and their impact on the deficit was increased by the historically unprecedented decision to wage two major wars while reducing taxes for the wealthy. But the costs of those wars are presumably winding down, while the Bush tax cuts remain.

According to right-wing propaganda, "out-of-control spending" by the Obama administration is to blame. So how much has additional spending by the Obama administration, including the 2009 economic "stimulus" (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), contributed to the mushrooming deficits?

By comparison with the other factors, a fairly small amount. And even there one has to add two caveats. First, a lot of that additional spending really falls in category #2 above—i.e., the cost of policies undertaken to counteract the recession and to prevent it from turning into a full-scale depression. (To be fair, this caveat also applies to some of the Bush administration spending in 2008, including the TARP and the 2008 economic "stimulus".) Second, most of the new Obama-era spending is temporary, whereas the consequences of some of the Bush II policies, especially the tax cuts, are "structural" in the sense that they can be expected to continue into the indefinite future (unless the underlying policies are fixed).

=> These are all fairly obvious and undeniable facts. But a depressingly large proportion of current public discussion and political propaganda tends to ignore, obfuscate, distort, or deny them. So some reality checks would be useful

One good reality check on this subject is provided by the excellent New York Times piece below, from July 2011. I've also reproduced one of the two graphs that accompanied this article. (That graph, by the way, does not include the direct effects of the economic crash. But even without them, the comparison it presents is pretty clear.)

Some implications:

A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels. Second, a healthy budget requires a healthy economy; recessions wreak havoc by reducing tax revenue. [....] Third, spending cuts alone will not close the gap. The chronic revenue shortfalls from serial tax cuts are simply too deep to fill with spending cuts alone. Taxes have to go up.

Read the whole thing. It's brief and cogent.

—Jeff Weintraub

P.S. For two more, complementary, reality checks see: Where did the US federal deficit come from? (#2) and Where did the US federal deficit come from? (#3) – Bruce Bartlett on the fiscal consequences of the Bush II administration.

==============================
New York Times
July 23, 2011
EDITORIAL/DECONSTRUCTION
How the Deficit Got This Big
By Teresa Trich

With President Obama and Republican leaders calling for cutting the budget by trillions over the next 10 years, it is worth asking how we got here — from healthy surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and the promise of future surpluses, to nine straight years of deficits, including the $1.3 trillion shortfall in 2010. The answer is largely the Bush-era tax cuts, war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recessions.

Despite what antigovernment conservatives say, non-defense discretionary spending on areas like foreign aid, education and food safety was not a driving factor in creating the deficits. In fact, such spending, accounting for only 15 percent of the budget, has been basically flat as a share of the economy for decades. Cutting it simply will not fill the deficit hole.

The first graph shows the difference between budget projections and budget reality. In 2001, President George W. Bush inherited a surplus, with projections by the Congressional Budget Office for ever-increasing surpluses, assuming continuation of the good economy and President Bill Clinton’s policies. But every year starting in 2002, the budget fell into deficit. In January 2009, just before President Obama took office, the budget office projected a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009 and deficits in subsequent years, based on continuing Mr. Bush’s policies and the effects of recession. Mr. Obama’s policies in 2009 and 2010, including the stimulus package, added to the deficits in those years but are largely temporary.

The second graph shows that under Mr. Bush, tax cuts and war spending were the biggest policy drivers of the swing from projected surpluses to deficits from 2002 to 2009. Budget estimates that didn’t foresee the recessions in 2001 and in 2008 and 2009 also contributed to deficits. Mr. Obama’s policies, taken out to 2017, add to deficits, but not by nearly as much.


-------------------

A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels. Second, a healthy budget requires a healthy economy; recessions wreak havoc by reducing tax revenue. Government has to spur demand and create jobs in a deep downturn, even though doing so worsens the deficit in the short run. Third, spending cuts alone will not close the gap. The chronic revenue shortfalls from serial tax cuts are simply too deep to fill with spending cuts alone. Taxes have to go up.

In future decades, when rising health costs with an aging population hit the budget in full force, deficits are projected to be far deeper than they are now. Effective health care reform, and a willingness to pay more taxes, will be the biggest factors in controlling those deficits.

Time for The Nation to give up any lingering nostalgia for the Soviet Union

In many ways The Nation has been, and remains, a valuable and admirable magazine. But for much of the 20th century it had a disgraceful record of fellow-traveling apologetics for Stalinism, the post-Stalin Soviet Union, and a whole range of other allegedly "progressive" and/or "anti-imperialist" dictatorships around the world. In 1981 Susan Sontag created a bit of a scandal in American left-liberal circles by pointing out, correctly, that if we imagined one person who read only The Nation between 1950 and 1970, and another person who read only (the right-leaning and intensely anti-Communist) Reader's Digest, the one with a better grasp of the realities of Communism would clearly be the Reader's Digest reader. (The Nation's coverage of North Korea from the 1950s through the 1980s also makes pretty embarrassing reading in retrospect, by the way.)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the world-wide collapse of the whole Leninist project, the magazine appeared to have gotten over these infatuations. It's certainly true that, since the departure of the appalling Alexander Cockburn, no one writing for The Nation would actually try to defend Stalinist totalitarianism. But when it comes to equivocations and apologetics about the Soviet Union, it seems that The Nation can't quite break the habit completely.

The issue of The Nation dated January 9-16, 2012 includes a symposium whose agenda is to reconsider the Soviet Union in a more positive light and to suggest, or insinuate, that maybe the end of the Soviet Union was not such a Good Thing:

Virtually all American commentary about the end of the Soviet Union extols what the West is believed to have gained from that historic event. On this twentieth anniversary of the breakup, The Nation presents three writers who focus instead on what may have been lost. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader and first constitutional president, argues that a chance for a more secure and just world order was missed. Stephen F. Cohen, a historian and longtime Nation contributor, reminds readers of the political, economic and social costs to Russians themselves. And Vadim Nikitin, a US-educated Russian journalist, presents a new interpretation of pro-Soviet nostalgia. —The Editors

I react to this sort of thing with a sense of weary resignation, mixed with a bit of irritation. Spencer Ackerman, on the other hand, is appropriately apoplectic:

[....] So it’s with horror and frustration that I see The Nation is running a series of essays asking if the world is really, really safer without the U.S.S.R. I’m embarrassed as a liberal by this shit. The liberals I know — those of my generation, certainly — have no nostalgia for an empire whose chief characteristics were slaughter and mass immiseration. The Nation would rather be Soviet Union Truthers.

Because that’s what you get from this bullshit package. It’s not an affirmative argument that the world was safer with the Soviet Union around. That would actually be more intellectually bracing than this dreck from Mikhail Gorbachev, who really is a titan of history:

In short, the world without the Soviet Union has not become safer, more just or more stable. Instead of a new world order—that is, enough global governance to prevent international affairs from becoming dangerously unpredictable—we have had global turmoil, a world drifting in uncharted waters. The global economic crisis that broke out in 2008 made that abundantly clear.

Wait, a lifelong Soviet apparatchik is going to decry the irrelevance of the United Nations? The man who opened his eyes to the chronic poverty endured by Soviet subjects is going to sit in judgment on a superior system’s economic faults? This isn’t an essay. It’s historical-counterfactual equivalent of performative skepticism. Do we know for suuuuure that the Towers weren’t knocked down by a controlled demolition? Reaaaaally? What, you believe that was really bin Laden on those tapes…

These aren’t good-faith arguments. They’re not even forthright defenses of the Soviet Union. They’re juvenile attempts at satisfaction through reminding everyone that the world didn’t magically attain perfection after the fall of the USSR. The right response to that is to improve the world, not to cultivate nostalgia for one of the central reasons the 20th century was a slaughterhouse.

Stephen P. Cohen swipes at straw men “commentators” here, caring more about historiography than the thing-itself. He’s upset at the “triumphalist narrative” in the U.S. — because you’re being a dick by not shedding a tear for what truly was an Evil Empire, even if the hated Ronald Reagan said it:

Because its seventy-four-year role in the twentieth century is still bitterly disputed, because the way it ended remains so controversial and because the full ramifications of its disappearance are still unclear, its fate can only confirm the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl’s axiom, “History is indeed an argument without end.”

Suffice it to say there are many Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Hungarians, Finns, Ukrainians, Afghans and others who don’t really have much patience for Geyl in this context. If you can find an Afghan rebel that the Moscow bullets missed, ask him what he thinks of voting Communist.

Amen.

—Jeff Weintraub

What do Rick Perry & Ron Paul know about Canada that we don't?

Governor Perry on the stump in Clarinda, Iowa:

Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” Mr. Perry said [....]

Loud applause.

Did Perry simply forget that Canada is a foreign country? That would be a typically superficial, elitist response. But perhaps this apparent blooper has a deeper significance.

Among the various paranoid conspiracy theories endorsed by Ron Paul over the years ... no let me put that a bit less judgmentally ....

Ron Paul and others have discovered that there is a plot afoot to create a North American Union which, according to Paul, "would create a single nation out of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, with a new unelected bureaucracy and money system. Forget about controlling immigration under this scheme.” Ron Paul explained in 2006 that the first step in executing this nefarious scheme was the building of a proposed NAFTA Superhighway ("a ten-lane colossus the width of several football fields") and added that "Governor Perry is a supporter of the superhighway project".

So maybe Rick Perry was just being prescient—or, to put it another way, was prematurely spilling the beans about the forthcoming North American Union?

=> OK, I'm being facetious. In the real world, both the NAFTA Superhighway and the plot to dissolve the US, Mexico, and Canada into a North American Union are quite imaginary. But when Ron Paul denounces these imaginary dangers, he's not joking. And the fact that both Ron Paul and Rick Perry are potentially serious candidates for the Republican nomination for President of the United States is, unfortunately, also no joke.

—Jeff Weintraub

Iran threatens global economic Armageddon

That's a threat of massive retaliation, not for a possible military attack against Iran's nuclear program, but for the next round of intensified economic sanctions being planned against Iran. There has been speculation about whether or not the Iranian government would respond by threatening to use force to disrupt the world's oil supply, much of which passes through the narrow waters of the Persian Gulf (or, as some call it, the Arabian Gulf). Now they have made this threat loudly and publicly: According to the report in today's New York Times:

A senior Iranian official on Tuesday delivered a sharp threat in response to economic sanctions being readied by the United States, saying his country would retaliate against any crackdown by blocking all oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for transporting about one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. [JW: Actually, one-fifth is probably a low estimate.]

The declaration by Iran’s first vice president, Mohammad-Reza Rahimi, came as President Obama prepares to sign legislation that, if fully implemented, could substantially reduce Iran’s oil revenue in a bid to deter it from pursuing a nuclear weapons program. [....]

Apparently fearful of the expanded sanctions’ possible impact on the already-stressed economy of Iran, the world’s third-largest energy exporter, Mr. Rahimi said, “If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz,” according to Iran’s official news agency. Iran just began a 10-day naval exercise in the area. [....]

I think one conclusion we can safely draw is that at least some important tendencies in Iran's ruling elite are genuinely worried by the prospect of these intensified economic sanctions, despite frequent Iranian claims to the contrary.

A broader question is whether the sanctions — even if successful at lowering Iran’s oil revenue — would force the government to give up its nuclear ambitions.

One measure of the effects, however, is that the Iranian leadership is clearly concerned. Already the Iranian currency is plummeting in value against the dollar, and there are rumors of bank runs.

“Iran’s economic problems seem to be mounting and the whole economy is in a state of suspended expectation,” said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. “The regime keeps repeating that they’re not going to be impacted by the sanctions. That they have more money than they know what to do with. The lady doth protest too much.” [....]

This Iranian threat to blockade the Strait of Hormuz may well be a bluff, too. Using military force to choke off a significant proportion of the world's oil supply would be an act of war. It would be highly imprudent, not to say a bit crazy, for the Iranian regime to take the first step toward starting a war right now. And for what it's worth, they would be unambiguously in the wrong in terms of international law. Furthermore, if Iran did succeed in cutting off all oil exports from the Gulf, the economic consequences for Iran itself would be catastrophic.

On the other hand, if governments never did recklessly unwise or crazy things, the world would be quite different from the way it actually is. So we may be headed toward a major confrontation with unpredictable and potentially very serious consequences. The potential economic consequences are serious enough, even if the Iranians never actually try to blockade the Strait of Hormuz.

Merely uttering the threat appeared to be part of an Iranian effort to demonstrate its ability to cause a spike in oil prices, thus slowing the United States economy, and to warn American trading partners that joining the new sanctions, which the Senate passed by a rare 100-0 vote, would come at a high cost.

Oil prices rose above $100 a barrel in trading after the threat was issued, though it was unclear how much that could be attributed to investors’ concern that confrontation in the Persian Gulf could disrupt oil flows.

The new punitive measures, part of a bill financing the military, would significantly escalate American sanctions against Iran. They come just a month and a half after the International Atomic Energy Agency published a report that for the first time laid out its evidence that Iran may be secretly working to design a nuclear warhead, despite the country’s repeated denials.

In the wake of the I.A.E.A. report and a November attack on the British Embassy in Tehran, the European Union is also contemplating strict new sanctions, such as an embargo on Iranian oil.

For five years, the United States has implemented increasingly severe sanctions in an attempt to force Iran’s leaders to reconsider the suspected nuclear weapons program, and answer a growing list of questions from the I.A.E.A. But it has deliberately stopped short of targeting oil exports, which finance as much as half of Iran’s budget.

Now, with its hand forced by Congress, the administration is preparing to take that final step, penalizing foreign corporations that do business with Iran’s central bank, which collects payment for most of the country’s energy exports.

The sanction would effectively make it difficult for those who do business with Iran’s central bank to also conduct financial transactions with the United States. The step was so severe that one of President Obama’s top national security aides said two months ago that it was “a last resort.” The administration raced to put some loopholes in the final legislation so that it could reduce the impact on close allies who have signed on to pressuring Iran.

The legislation allows President Obama to waive sanctions if they cause the price of oil to rise or threaten national security.

Still, the new sanctions raise crucial economic, diplomatic, and security questions. [....]

The American effort, as described by [David S. Cohen, ... treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence] and others, is more subtle than simply cutting off Iran’s ability to export oil, a step that would immediately send the price of gasoline, heating fuel, and other petroleum products skyward. That would “mean that Iran would, in fact, have more money to fuel its nuclear ambitions, not less,” Wendy R. Sherman, the newly installed under secretary of state for political affairs, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this month.

Instead, the administration’s aim is to reduce Iran’s oil revenue by diminishing the volume of sales and forcing Iran to give its customers a discount on the price of crude. [....]

Since President Obama’s first months in office, his aides have been talking to Saudi Arabia and other oil suppliers about increasing their production, and about guaranteeing sales to countries like China, which is among Iran’s biggest customers. But it is unclear that the Saudis can fill in the gap left by Iran, even with the help of Libyan oil that is coming back on the market. The United States is also looking to countries like Iraq and Angola to increase production.

Daniel Yergin, whose new book, “The Quest,” describes the oil politics of dealing with states like Iran, noted in an interview that “given the relative tightness of the market, it will require careful construction of the sanctions combined with vigorous efforts to bring alternative supplies into the market.” [....]

“The only strategy that is going to work here is one where you get the cooperation of oil buyers,” said Michael Singh, managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “You could imagine the Europeans, the Japanese, and the South Koreans cooperating, and then China would suck up all of the oil that was initially going to everyone else.”

That adds up to a lot of uncertainties—even if we ignore the possibility of a violent response by the Iranian regime. Stay tuned.

—Jeff Weintraub

Andy Borowitz explains the meaning of Hanukkah as a Judeo-American holiday

For the close of this year's Hanukkah, a thought from Andy Borowitz of The Borowitz Report:

Hanukkah is the most American holiday because it's a celebration of burning oil that we don't have.

BorowitzReport 1 weeks ago

--Jeff Weintraub

The Arab League names a Sudanese general to head its humanitarian mission to Syria

No, that's not a parody. It would be too heavy-handed for satire. Michael Rubin:

Several weeks ago, the Arab League made headlines when the notoriously ineffective body first chided and then sanctioned Syria. Alas, it seems the Arab League has now reverted to its usual, leaving the Syrian people the sacrificial lamb.

The Arab League just nominated Sudanese Lt. Gen. Mohammad al-Dabi to head its mission in Damascus. Previously, Al-Dabi served as the Sudanese government’s top representative for Darfur in which capacity he obfuscated international efforts to alleviate the mass murder the Sudanese government sought to perpetrate in that western province. With Al-Dabi in Damascus, what could possibly go wrong?

Among his other previous positions, General Al-Dabi has also been the head of military intelligence and security minister for the genocidal regime in Khartoum—which has, of course, received strong and unwavering support from the Arab League.

For more details on the pending arrival of Arab League monitors in Syria, see this article in Beirut's Daily Star. Few observers expect this mission to do much to stop the ongoing bloodshed and repression in Syria, so perhaps sending General Al-Dabi is actually appropriate.

—Jeff Weintraub

A more rosy view of North Korea (from Simon Winchester, via Mick Hartley)

Among the many virtues of Mick Hartley's excellent Culture and Politics blog is that it offers a useful guide to bits of information about the exceptionally isolated bizarro-world of North Korea ... and also about the different varieties of apologists and cheerleaders for North Korea in the west. Not all of them are Stalinists by any means, and most of them would probably not want to live under a totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship (with racist, xenophobic, and dynastic-monarchical flourishes) themselves, but many of them seem to think that it probably suits Koreans.

Yesterday Mick Hartley picked up an illuminating expression of this outlook (True to its cultural roots):

You'd expect the Guardian to come up with something stupid on the occasion of the Dear Leader's demise, but it's more of a surprise to find this (£) in the Times today, from Simon Winchester..."Life under the Kims was grim. But at least the North has stayed true to its cultural roots."

Winchester spells that out:

The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please.

To grasp the full absurdity of this encomium, it helps to know something about the concrete reality of "Juche". Yes, "self-reliance" (juche) was a central slogan of the regime established by Kim Il Sung. But in practice the claim of "self-reliance" was a sick joke—or, at best, an optical illusion—since in reality the whole system depended on a steady stream of subsidies from the Soviet Union (and, to a lesser extent, from China). Even with those subsidies, economic development in North Korea ground to a halt as early as the 1970s and probably began to regress. Then, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the subsidies dried up. And since the North Korean regime refused to respond with any constructive reforms or policy adjustments, the result was economic catastrophe for ordinary people, at least a million of whom died of famine during the 1990s (despite massive food aid from the outside world, much of which seems to have been diverted to the military, bureaucratic officialdom, and the elite). Paranoid, xenophobic, and truculent self-isolation, yes; self-reliance, no.

Also, it's a little misleading to say that Kim Il Sung asked only for North Korea "to be left alone". He threatened continually to re-invade the South, and undoubtedly would have tried it if there hadn't been a US military guarantee for South Korea.

If Kim Il Sung had succeeded in bringing the whole country under his rule, then perhaps South Koreans would now share the same blessings enjoyed by North Koreans. Winchester continues:

India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.

Mick Hartley's observations are on-target:

Better a starving slave state, it seems, than this ghastly modern Americanised culture.

Conservative romanticism raised to a truly idiotic level.

Hard to disagree.

=> In the "Comments" thread following Mick Hartley's post, Martin Adamson adds his own two cents:

And it's not even remotely true on its own terms. The architecture of Pyongyang is Moscow 1952. The mass displays are China 1964. Painting is Soviet Academy 1936. Music is Gang of Four Operas 1974. Dress is Bucharest 1988 etc etc.

Ah, tradition ...

—Jeff Weintraub

What do we know about North Korea? (Fred Kaplan)

Fred Kaplan gets right to the point:

Kim Jong-il, the pygmy tyrant of North Korea, is dead at the age of 69. His 28-year-old son, Kim Jong-un, now assumes the throne of Pyongyang. According to various press analyses, the new leader is either a bumbling naïf or a clever, multilingual operator who’s already formed alliances with key generals. He will either push market reforms or preserve the status quo. He will reach out to the West or step up confrontation or do neither.

Here’s the real answer: We really don’t know much of anything.

And by “we,” I don’t mean just the pundits. A few years ago, when the elder Kim was said to have suffered a stroke, and rumors churned of a succession crisis, I asked a fairly senior U.S. official whether even our intelligence agencies had much insight into the dynamics of internal North Korean politics. The official replied, “No.” [....]

Kaplan nevertheless manages to offer an intelligent and illuminating discussion of some likely possibilities and dangers for the near future, based mostly on analyzing the historical record. You can read it here.

In its foreign relations, the North Korean regime has always pursued a deliberate strategy of provocative belligerence, brinksmanship, and unpredictability, recently augmented by nuclear blackmail. This strategy has paid off in significant ways, and turned some of its intrinsic weaknesses into negotiating strengths, so it is likely to continue. The results are uncertain, though, and the stakes are, as Kaplan says, scary. Some highlights below.

—Jeff Weintraub

===============================
Slate
Monday, Dec. 19, 2011
Will North Korea Stay Crazy?
We know practically nothing about its new leader and what he might do. That’s scary.
By Fred Kaplan

[....]

Daniel Sneider, associate director of the Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, says the regime’s politics are similar to the Soviet Union’s under Stalin, with one important difference: They are overlaid with a dynastic element, which underlies the ruling party’s claim to legitimacy.

Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong-il’s father, was the first leader of North Korea, beginning in 1945, when the peninsula was split into two nations, the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north and the U.S.-backed Republic of Korea in the south. He was a guerrilla fighter, battling against Japan in the Second World War. Afterward, he mythologized his record into that of a “Great Leader” (his nickname forever after) whose triumphs secured Korea’s independence. Since then, the Korean Workers’ Party, the Kim family, and a nationalist ideology of Kim Il Sung’s invention have survived as the inseparable elements of a single package.

This package ensured Kim Jong-il’s ascension to the throne after Kim Il Sung died in 1994. And it will probably ensure that Kim Jong-un is at least given a lot of leeway.

There is, however, a difference between the two successors. Kim Jong-il was 52 when he succeeded his father. He’d been groomed for office, and had held senior posts in the party and the regime for a quarter-century. By contrast, Kim Jong-un was a total unknown until January 2009, when suddenly his father designated him as the successor. (Kim had two older sons, but they were deemed unsuitable; one had stirred a scandal by trying to sneak into Japan on a false passport, so he could visit Disneyland.) The following spring, Jong-un, despite a lack of military experience, was appointed to the National Defense Commission. In October 2010, he was elevated to the commission’s vice chairman with the rank of four-star general.

When Kim Jong-il became leader, he continued his father’s policies and displayed a similar shrewdness for handling power. Kim Il Sung had regarded North Korea as a “guerrilla state” that would operate—as Scott Snyder put it in Negotiating on the Edge, a brilliant book about the Kims’ diplomatic style—as “a guerrilla fighter who has nothing to lose and yet faces the prospect of losing everything.” Kim also (rightly) saw North Korea as “a shrimp among whales,” and so maximized his leverage by playing the whales—the much larger, often hostile nations all around him—off one another. One way of doing that was to sow an atmosphere of constant “drama and catastrophe,” which also served to rationalize his repressive domestic policies.

Kim Jong-il played this weak hand no less capably than did his father, threatening to launch wars, build and fire nuclear weapons, unleash terror of various kinds—using the threats as blackmail to obtain much-needed economic assistance, in the form of food, electrical power plants, or (through various banking schemes, which went unexamined for many years) hard currency.

The Kims were particularly agile at playing their great neighbor, and at the moment best ally, China. In recent years, Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have tried to persuade the Chinese to join them pressuring North Korea—through sanctions and other means—to abandon its nuclear-weapons program. Nearly all of North Korea’s trade comes through China. [JW: And North Korea relies on substantial Chinese subsidies to keep going.] If anyone has leverage over Pyongyang on these matters, it’s the leaders of Beijing.

But the Chinese are willing to go down this road only so far. They have no interest in seeing North Korea build a substantial atomic arsenal. Yet they have even less interest in seeing its regime collapse, which would probably send millions of North Koreans dashing for the Chinese border, creating a humanitarian crisis that Beijing has no desire or ability to deal with. [....]

When Barack Obama entered the White House, he was initially interested in resuming serious talks with the North Koreans. But now Kim Jong-il was resistant. It soon became clear that talking with the North Koreans was pointless and that the best thing to do was simply to ignore their antics, stop playing their game.

But the North Koreans do have nukes, perhaps as many as a dozen (even though they’ve tested only two bombs, each of very small explosive yield). They are working on missiles (even if all three of their long-range missile tests have fizzled). An unstable country with these sorts of things can’t be ignored for very long. Nor can it simply be bombarded. As the Joint Chiefs made clear to Clinton and Bush, when they entertained the notion, we don’t know where all their facilities are, and they have a few thousand artillery rockets near the South Korean border, which they might fire at Seoul in retaliation, easily killing 1 million or more civilians.

At some point, then, the game will start again. What the stakes and tactics will be, no one knows. Much of what happens will depend on a dynastic inheritor, not yet 30 years of age, about whose character, style, disposition, intelligence, and just about everything else, we know very little. That’s nerve-wracking.

If North Korea’s new leader is smart, he will play on that fact. He will, at certain key moments, behave like a loon. And that will raise two further questions: Is the craziness strategic, or is it real? And which of those two possibilities is more dangerous?

North Korea, the black hole

Can you spot the difference between North Korea and South Korea in the satellite photo below? The commentary by Matt Yglesias, who posted this striking photo, is not written with great elegance or complete precision, but it does zero in on the crucial points:

The absolute tragedy of malgovernance and suffering that is North Korea [and] that will probably continue for some time yet despite the death of Kim Jong Il does serve as probably the most convenient illustration imaginable of the importance of political and economic institutions in shaping human destiny. North Korea and South Korea have similar geography, similar culture, similar racial/demographic issues, and totally different economic output thanks overwhelmingly to completely different political systems.

Actually, their social and economic systems are also dramatically different, not just their political systems. But in an ultra-Stalinist totalitarian dictatorship like the one ruling North Korea, all those dimensions are part of one package. So in that sense Yglesias's formulation is basically right.



Lest one imagine that North Korea has simply found a way to solve the problem of light pollution, the economic contrast between the two Koreas is also vividly captured by the following graph (from here). Admittedly, economic estimates for a closed society like North Korea involve a fair amount of guesswork. But my impression is that the assessments here broadly accord with the consensus of serious analysts.



And even this graph fails to convey the full awfulness of living conditions for most of the North Korean population. No one is quite sure how many North Koreans died of famine during the 1990s, but most serious estimates range from about a million to several million, and hunger remains pervasive—all this despite massive food aid from the outside world and ongoing subsidies from China and other sources, including South Korea until fairly recently. As Nick Eberstadt has written:

Today, North Korea has the awful distinction of being the only literate and urbanized society in human history to suffer mass famine in peacetime. And North Korea's hunger problem continues to this day: Pyongyang has relied upon "emergency" international humanitarian relief for over a decade and a half. Earlier this year the DPRK lodged an urgent appeal to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) for another round of food aid. North Korea is thus the world's first and only industrialized economy to lose the capacity to feed itself.

Even if North Korea were more prosperous, it would still be a horrifically repressive totalitarian police state, the closest contemporary equivalent to the world depicted by Orwell in 1984, ruled by a semi-deranged power elite. But in addition, North Korea's experiment in totalitarianism has been a spectacular failure in economic terms. If any of this sounds exaggerated, it's not.

Nor is it easy to imagine optimistic scenarios for the foreseeable future. There is no reason to believe that the North Korean regime has either the desire or the capacity to effectively reform itself. And the dysfunctional character of the regime is, perversely enough, one of its key assets in its strategy of international brinksmanship. The current situation, in which an unpredictable, paranoid, and deliberately erratic regime armed with nuclear weapons rules over an impoverished, terrorized, and isolated population, is scary enough. But what really scares North Korea's neighbors out of their wits is the prospect that this horrible regime might collapse, unleashing a tidal wave of refugees and requiring the reconstruction and recuperation of a devastated and deeply distorted society. That will be a crushing burden in economic terms alone, and nobody is eager to take on the task. South Korea, in particular, would prefer not to think ahead to this situation, even though it is very likely to materialize within a generation.

—Jeff Weintraub

Calvin and his father argue about astronomy and the logic of scientific explanation (continued)

Here's a scientific follow-up to my earlier post, Calvin (of "Calvin & Hobbes") on how we should interpret trends:

Calvin:

Since September it’s just gotten colder and colder. There’s less daylight now, I’ve noticed too. This can only mean one thing – the sun is going out. In a few more months the Earth will be a dark and lifeless ball of ice.

Dad says the sun isn't going out. He says its colder because the earth’s orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon.

Isn’t it sad how some people’s grip on their lives is so precarious that they’ll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

Calvin's father is right about the cyclical character of the seasons, and he's right to think that this seasonal cycle has something to do with the earth's revolution around the sun. He is also right on the more general analytical point that when you see a trend, you can't assume it will simply continue indefinitely. This happens to be a very important point to grasp, since it is so often disregarded. (Remember Dow 36,000?)

=> However, an e-mail message from my friend Eugene Matusov (which I quote with his permission) reminds me that I should have added a significant caveat. Eugene is a socio-cultural psychologist, originally from the former Evil Empire, who is now at the School of Education of the University of Delaware. But he was once a physics teacher. And he can't resist pointing out that the scientific explanation for the cycle of the seasons offered by Calvin's father is, in fact, erroneous.

As a former physics teacher I can’t let pass the following misconception, “Dad says the sun isn't going out. He says its colder because the earth’s orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon.” It is clear that the dad “forgot” that the Southern hemisphere experiences spring in September as it gets more light from the sun. It cannot be true that for the Northern hemisphere the earth is moving farther from the sun in its orbit at the same time that, for the Southern hemisphere, the earth is moving closer to the sun. Something is missing in this explanation. It is interesting that the great majority of my undergraduate students, future teachers, reason like the dad. They often use seasons as an example of a scientific fact that they know well and can easily explain, but they get the explanation wrong.

The earth's orbit around the sun is somewhat elliptical, not perfectly circular, so our distance from the sun does vary slightly during the year. But that's not what causes the change of seasons. The real explanation is a little more complicated. It has to do with the fact that the axis of the earth's own rotation is tilted at an angle with respect to the sun, and the tilt of this axis remains constant as the earth goes around the sun each year. So the part of the earth tilted toward the sun changes over time. When the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun it gets warmer, when it's tilted away from the sun it gets colder, and vice-versa for the southern hemisphere. If you're interested, the process is nicely illustrated here.

The misunderstanding of this point demonstrated by Calvin's dad seems to be widely shared. For a 1987 documentary film on science teaching cited by Michael O'Hare, the film-makers went to a Harvard graduation and asked 23 randomly selected graduating seniors, faculty, and alumni why we have seasons; 21 out of 23 gave the same superficially-plausible-but-obviously-incorrect answer as Calvin's dad.

=> All this suggests some interesting lessons ... which I will mostly leave to readers to draw for themselves. But here are a few offhand remarks.

One of Piaget's seminal insights early in his career was that if we want to understand how people think, we can sometimes learn as much from analyzing common errors as from analyzing correct answers. I think that's true in this case.

There are certain errors and misconceptions we can expect to hear from uneducated people, but there are also certain errors and misconceptions that are especially characteristic of half-educated people. Unfortunately, even those of us who have accumulated many years of formal education tend to be half-educated, at most, in a lot of areas outside our specific fields of expertise. The blooper repeated by Calvin's father and those Harvard graduates looks like a typical example of a half-educated error.

The premise for the explanation they offered was an underlying model of celestial reality in which the earth circles around the sun rather than the other way around. It's worth emphasizing that this astronomical model is not based on common-sense observation. On the contrary, it's a rather counter-intuitive abstract model which comes to us from "science," usually via formal schooling, and which we generally accept on the authority of "science". I suspect that most people in this society, if they think about the matter at all, accept this heliocentric model of the solar system as an established and taken-for-granted scientific "fact" (unlike, say, the theory of evolution, where epistemological resistance is stronger for ideological reasons). For what it's worth, I think we're right to accept it, and I am convinced that this theoretical model brings us closer to reality than simple common sense.

The problem arises when such models, and other scientific "facts" we swallow in the course of our schooling, don't serve as a basis for thinking further but instead are used as a substitute for further thinking, or even a barrier to further thinking. So those half-baked ideas get repeated with confidence and self-satisfaction, but the confidence is misplaced.

As I said, most of us are half-educated, at best, in many areas we don't deal with on a regular basis. (And, unfortunately, that holds true for a lot of the public issues we have to consider as citizens.) But anyone who has spent time in professional and/or academic circles, and has been paying attention, ought to be aware of another dirty little secret—namely, that many people who have picked up the standard training and credentials are, nevertheless, only half-educated in their alleged fields of expertise. A reliance on jargon and superficial formulas in place of actual thinking is often one sign of this condition, but far from the only sign. I'm sure that somewhere or other Calvin had something illuminating to say about this problem, too.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

Christmastime for the Jews – A seasonal collection

These will be new for some of you, re-runs for others, but timely for all (or so I hope). With good will for Jews and goyim alike. —Jeff Weintraub

Jewish Christmas - The Chinese connection

Christmastime for the Jews (contd.)

All I want for Christmas is ... Jews (Pseudo-Mariah Carey)

Calvin (of "Calvin & Hobbes") on how we should interpret trends

Via Brad DeLong. (For a scientific follow-up, see here.) —Jeff Weintraub
---------------------------------------------------------
Calvin:

Since September it’s just gotten colder and colder. There’s less daylight now, I’ve noticed too. This can only mean one thing – the sun is going out. In a few more months the Earth will be a dark and lifeless ball of ice.

Dad says the sun isn't going out. He says its colder because the earth’s orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon.

Isn’t it sad how some people’s grip on their lives is so precarious that they’ll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

Mapping the political geography of US Presidential elections

As we all know, representations of reality shape perceptions of reality. A map of the US in which states are weighted by their electoral votes conveys a somewhat different picture of the overall shape of the American Presidential-election universe than a purely geographic or spatial map. Here are some examples (from 2008).

The first is a Cartogram of predicted 2008 election results based on data from FiveThirtyEight.com, presented by Jason Morrison's photostream. The explanatory code for this map is given here, along with some other electoral maps. Blue meant safe for Obama, red meant safe for McCain, and so on. The predictions were largely on-target, but I think what's most striking is the way this map conveyed the information.



(See that pure-red belt of states running from Texas up to the Canadian border, broadening out to take in Montana and Idaho at the top? On a purely spatial map of the US, of the sort one usually sees on the TV news, that portion of the country looks enormous. See here for an example, or the 2004 election map toward the end of this post. But in terms of comparative population figures, many of those states come close to being just big stretches of empty space. If it weren't for the fact that the Constitution gives each of them at least 3 electoral votes, some of those states would look even more minuscule on this map than they do now. California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England, on the other hand ....)

Another map, also based on calculations from FiveThirtyEight.com, tried to do something similar while preserving each state's familiar shape. I suspect that for most of you this map will probably look less 'distorted' than the first one, even though it fragments the country. Or am I wrong about that?


-----

And here is yet another Electoral College Map from 2008, this one constructed by polling meta-analysts at the Princeton Election Consortium (further details here). I think this representation is even more striking than the one in the first map, and the projected outcomes turned out to be even more precise.


-----

=> And now, for the sake of contrast, here is a more standard-format election map for the 2004 US Presidential election (using the same post-2000 convention of red for Republican and blue for Democratic).



At first glance, that looks like a lot of red, doesn't it? Would you guess from this map that John Kerry came within a whisker of winning the election? (A switch of about 1% of the votes in Ohio—whose official results, incidentally, smelled a little fishy to some people—from red to blue would have given that state to Kerry and, with it, an Electoral College majority. You can check the figures here.)

=> There is actually a discipline called "political geography" with historical roots that go back to 19th-century France, Germany, and Britain; and I suppose these maps bring the tools of computer graphics to political geography. But that's just a new technological twist on an old story. Every kind of map has a perspective, and all cartographic projections are necessarily stylizing and selective. (And, in their own distinctive ways, weirdly distorting—consider the size of Greenland on a Mercator projection, for example.) That's true for physical maps, but even more for socio-political maps ... and, as it happens, most maps we see embody socio-political world-views.

For example, consider the intriguing but usually taken-for-granted fact that on almost all world maps not intended for specialized topographical or scientific purposes, the entire land surface of the earth is divided up into different countries, each with a precisely drawn border, on the premise that every patch of dirt must be part of one and only one of these political units. In the exceptional cases where some maps use dotted lines, that marks a political, conceptual, and symbolic anomaly. In this sense, the maps portray a Hobbesian or Westphalian world defined by mutually exclusive sovereignties. There's nothing natural, obvious, or inevitable about representing or conceiving the world that particular way. It means something.

—Jeff Weintraub

"Can men and women be just friends?" — A survey

Via AllahPundit & Normblog:



Of course, the responses included in this video are probably selective, so we don't know whether or not they're statistically representative. We don't even know whether this was a real survey or a clever spoof. Still ...

—Jeff Weintraub

The Onion concedes that political parody can no longer keep up with reality

So with this story, The Onion decided to throw in the towel and simply play it straight. A headline was sufficient. --Jeff Weintraub

Rumors Of Extramarital Affair End Campaign Of Presidential Candidate Who Didn't Know China Has Nuclear Weapons

Also, no sleeping under bridges (Anatole France & Paul Krugman)

There's a wickedly penetrating line by Anatole France that nicely captures the difference between purely formal equality and actual substantive equality:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. (Le lys rouge, 1894)

Paul Krugman is reminded of that saying by the latest Republican venture in unintentional self-parody:

They just can’t help themselves:

In addition, Senate Republican leaders would go after “millionaires and billionaires,” not by raising their taxes but by making them ineligible for unemployment compensation and food stamps and increasing their Medicare premiums.

I mean, there are lots of millionaires on food stamps, right?

—Jeff Weintraub