The war we deserve?

So what would Sartre say now? The man who gave existential accounts of occupied Paris, attempting to give some sort of meaning to the horror Europe witnessed, and famously declared that 'each person got the war he deserved' with far greater respect for catharsis than for any notion whatever of historical accuracy, would yet be a better voice from the Cartesian land than the current French intelligensia. So let me take up the challenge and ask whether the non-Muslim world is getting the war it deserves. But first, I will make a slight foray into causal analysis, flawed though it may be, and defend the simple thesis that the global war of reactions against terror has one overwhelming cause, and that it is the obvious one.
It is frequently said that poverty and despair, not Islam, are the causes of terror. This is true; the behavior of the Islamic and non-Islamic people living in similar circumstances are not different in terms of their willingness to resort to violence, their attitude toward human life, in the epistomological and ethical attitudes they reveal. Accounts of the conflict in Sri Lanka I read in an anthropology journal a few years ago, countless reports on African wars, and the known historical record all confirm this beyond the shadow of a doubt. But does this mean that we should treat it similarly? Absolutely not; organization makes all the difference.
Put bluntly, local violence is a much more limited threat than global violence, even if it replicated in just as many places, causes just as much death and suffering, etc. A collection of locales does not the world span. Violence that takes aim at a global order is a threat to our vision of cosmopolitan identity, to a world where it is possible to identify with anything beyond one's immediate physical circumstances and the cultural representations these spawn. It is a threat to the ability of people everywhere to defect geographically and dissent intellectually. It is not bodies and lands which the Islamists are fighting. It is minds.
Whether perverting monotheism or simply laying bare what it does in certain circumstances in its original, unmitigated form, the Islamists attempt to destroy our global order because they have their own, a vision of how everybody everywhere should live that they find imminent. Only it bears no resemblance other than being a global vision to cosmopolitan ethics. The French commentator Baudrillard or his translator, writing in Harper's magazine, called Islamic terror the necessary other of globalization. But as Alain Badiou wrote in an anti-Levinas essay, 'the other must not be too different'. His sarcasm was as unwarranted as Levinas's initial idea of embracing the other would have been if he had been referring to a cultural other, as Badiou pretended to believe. This view is flatly correct; only a global vision is compatible with another global vision and can interact with it in a space. I am not Hegelian enough to think it necessary, although the long and checkered history of global visions since its obscure beginnings in the ancient middle east was in some sense bound to leave behind some traces of its many mutually distrustful selves. I leave it to others to explain to me exactly what the Islamic global vision is, although frankly my concern for its' finer points is limited. Since I believe ethics, the science of discovering the implications of one's actions for the life and liberty of others, can't start from any other basis than self-preservation, and is a logical extension thereof (as Charles Peirce among others wuite brilliantly demonstrated) I have a duty not to stop and ask whether those who would destroy my global vision have one with merits. I don't care, and I hold the particular stream of Islam known as 'Islamic radicalism' completely accountable for its actions. Trying to understand what poverty drives people to regardless of their traditions is an ethical duty. Understanding the Islamic worldview is ethically counterindicated. The duty of verstehende of the universals of poverty can be classified as an application of the cosmopolitan duty to enrich the world by comprehension of its' impersonal laws and to make these part of the personal soul. The interdiction of compatible other comprehension falls under the duty of self-preservation, a pre-ethical requirement for any coherent ethics, cosmopolitan or not. They are not contradictory, but complementary. The cause of terrorism may be poverty, but the cause of the terrorist threat to the world is radical Islam. Noone should feel required to mince words about this; quite the contrary.

There is no war without an internal war. As every empire falls from both within and without, the Western vision of cosmopolitanism has its cowardly dissenters, its enemy sympathizers, and even its collaborators. Many have reacted to the Islamist demands with a belief they must somehow be justified. They are not. Our world visions are not justified by external sources, so there is no way for the Islamist demands to be understood from without. There is only mitigation of its cost in human lives and suffering, and even were intellectual synthesis a possibility, I do not see the reason to believe it would get us any closer to achieving this goal. What I have learned of world history has taught me neither that mutual comprehension stops bloodshed or that mutual incomprehension causes it. Unreconcilable worldviews are perfectly fine, as I see it, and the duty of synthesizing our views and our enemies' is anything but fine. This view does not affect one's degree of hawkishness.
Should we choose to indulge in noble quests beyond self-preservation, we find it necessary to understand what circumstance drives people to, which is to say what we ourselves would do in their shoes. Trying to understand their traditions, a name for that part of their behavior that does not fall within a universal range of reactions, varying no more within tribes than between them, is no ethical or cosmopolitan duty at all. It is without malice that I say to radical Islam that I don't give a damn what it thinks.

So is this the war we deserve? I don't think we can answer that question any more than we ever could or ever will be able to. But it certainly has only a theatric rather than an historical meaning.

Hesparus Unhinged; An Armchair Anthropology of the Election

Blogdom,
Instant history is generally considered garbage. Anthropology is current, and a debate persists over whether it is appropriate to apply the ahistorical methods of anthropology to specific historical events. The author, one goofball by pseudonym, thinks that since it would be a plainly biased choice of evidence and problems to focus the science of man only on those who are reputed by outsiders to have an 'everpresent now' view of time in which specific historical events do not intrude, and who undeniably have no systematic writing, the answer must be that the science of man and proper study of mankind must deal with historical events. If it is to be a study other than history, it must have different criteria. In particular, the criterion of past-ness is abandoned in favor of the criterion of having been there. History is there to correct anthropology, but anthropological speculation being there gives it something to correct it otherwise wouldn't have. If there were no Thucydides, but only political documents, ancient Greek history would be completely other to what it studies; one kind of narrative applied to another. Similarly, if people like me didn't attempt instant anthropology, historians of our lifetime, operating as historians on a shorter time scale than the classical historian, would have nothing formally equivalent to their own texts to correct. So here tis.

Perpetual Exceptionalism for Perpetual Normalcy

'American exceptionalism' is a well known ideology. But how does the belief that a nation represents an irrational ontological category actually affect external reality, that cares not for these claims? To answer this is as difficult as answering any question concerning the interface of mythology and reality. When I first attempted to answer this question, once and for all, in the naive fashion that marks any answer to a question one has just thought of, I took a page from my nomadic ancestors and considered mythology by analogy to something more concrete, a possession, a weapon, a contract; whatever the precise analogy, a means of creating utility beyond some given material basis. Being a student of economics at the time, I thought that this made sense, and justified a discrepancy between the confusing observable world, which did not and could not validate the straightforward theory, with the economists' usual tool of hidden variables whose values surprise our intuition when presented with them. A true variable, though, is never always and everywhere hidden until culled from the situation because it explains it. Many variables have surprising values if measured (e.g. 95% of what is said about 95% of people applies to a surprisingly smaller percent of people), and many are sometimes hidden, but some of the variables I made up simply didn't exist except as explanations, like the concept of utility from which they spawned. Variables must be things that were measured at one time, or at least ones that someone has thought of measuring without the hope of explaining the matter at hand. Otherwise, the variables become entirely other to what they are trying to explain, that is arbitrary.

I now think the question of this interface as a historical question is metaphysical, a quest after a small piece of the grand causal chain of everything and anything which no piece of can be recovered. All we can do is say the myth is around, and that any reason for what is outside of it to naturally correspond to it would have to be proven by people independently coming up with it from different perspectives. Real facts, or correspondences, should have no lineage in thinkers' minds. I affirm this principle born of applying the standards of science to our understanding of the human world on the grounds that while there is neither hope of replicating controlled experiment in society nor of postulating a specific hypothesis, testable or not, concerning cause and effect in the social world, by the very assumption that the social world is a real entity, I can postulate that our analysis of it should follow those principles that are common to all of science. Therefore, I can say no more about whether the idea arose out of circumstances or was handed down as a meme from generation to generation, locale to locale. My undergraduate attempts were in vain. I can still, however, let the distinction guide both my choice of problems and my choice of cuts, or law of the excluded middle statements brought to bear on a question though they are not logically derived from the statement. These two choices belong not to science but to its necessary background.

For instance, knowing empirically that the exceptionalist view exists widely regardless of whether it is a fact, and knowing this question is undecidable, I may modify my question from 'what is the effect of the myth of American exceptionalism on the actual world?' to 'what is the effect of the belief, true or false?' which is in a different thought-world from the hovering realities previously expounded. That is, a thought-world which does not attempt to recover pieces of the grand causal chain, but only to predict a consequence of an item the evidence before our eyes happens to tell us exists somewhere in that overarching and unknowable morass; a properly social-scientific thought world.

Sitting in a room in 2009, knowing the mythology still burns strong, I can look at the latest world event of which I can establish its independence from the mythology and try to predict the consequences of the belief for our reaction to it. According to today's Times, some of the news that is fit to print involves North Korea's launch of (another) rocket and three suicide attacks in 24 hours in Pakistan (which is also not unusual). I have so far looked only at the headlines, being concerned more with American diplomatic moves than the events they are reactions to of late. But that is fine, since empirical evidence shows the headline is the thing that will chiefly stick in the collective mind, and my task here is not to correct factual errors concerning these foreign events. At any rate, I have no special knowledge of them. These events are currently commonplace, regardless of how shocking they may be ethically, and it would not be amiss to imagine that the first reaction of many people to the Pakistani event, in particular will be along the lines of 'why can't these crazies stop killing each other to prove points?' 'why can't democracy seem to function in Pakistan?' etc. Others will ask 'what have we done to make this happen, as the most powerful country in the world?' or 'Did our Musharraf support destabilize the country?' The fact these are questions has no particular relation to American exceptionalism. The first thought of any inquisitive mind out there is to question why things happen. The key ideas are rather a stupendous and willful incomprehension of the different ground-conditions of Pakistan relative to the United States on the one side and a belief that we actually run the world and have unimpeachable responsibility for it on the other. I make no secret of which side I have sympathy for; understanding of ground-conditions can be corrected if a provincial stupor merely be removed from the eye of the public. The ontological errors of the second position, thinking that preeminent influence means causative control, and declining to attach moral responsibility to those who react to this influence, that is absolving them by plea of animalism or insanity, thus making them mere mechanical reactors to our own moves in our moral assessment, cannot be cured by any known means.

The first side seems to take the other villages to be like its own in the medieval fashion. This can be labelled a false sense of normalcy. The latter seems to think the actions of the most powerful are the only ones to attach moral responsibility to simply because they are the more powerful, as if the stronger and the weaker had no other characteristics we might care about. This position strikes many as being internally consistent and properly generic in its assessment, that is according neither privilege nor special ontology to any party. Internally consistent it is, but few Americans are actually willing to follow its dictate to the permanent revolution providing its own sense of justice to which it leads. Neither is this generic maxim adopted at random, that is generically. The position that we ourselves are the root of all evil in the world many sound generic philosophically, but a cursory examination of the times, places, and instances where it is or is not adopted reveal that it is anthropologically exceptionalist. The mythology of American exceptionalism has been turned on its head, but left intact. Truth be told, noone thinks the weak are always right without thinking the strong always have some characteristic, or have so far always been the very same party. To look for this characteristic in history is almost as futile as to validate the blatantly inaccurate second and simpler claim. No sort of evidence could possibly validate it; it is inexorably metaphysical, a maxim by which to look for and organize evidence rather than a fact to which evidence could correspond. I look elsewhere; what makes a maxim look like a fact is a mythologeme. In this particular case, I happen to think the mythologeme of American exceptionalism is a good candidate regardless of the position taken on it; mythologemes do not go away being called lies. It provides the answer to the difference those who happen to be strong have relative to all other parties.

But are the two parties, the normalists and the exceptionalists, who are readily describable as products of different political cultures, products of different cultures, period? This is a question one could look into their surroundings and lineage for clues to. But this is merely an armchair anthropology, so I will take the existence of both positions in any class, millieu, or region, which has been well documented by Morris Fiorina among others, as good evidence that they are not. Further evidence is provided by their largely if by means exclusively similar store of quoted facts. Concerning Pakistan, they all read the same newspapers. Concerning the founding of America, the left reads books such as 'A People's History of the United States' which contains only well-known and undisputed facts with a particular spin. The difference between the parties is one of ethical stance, not culture. The political cultures are then, not cultures in the anthropologists' sense. America happens to be a multicultural society, but, as is well known, cultural differences within it are poorly correlated with political differences.

Then one must look to unite these two terms, normalism and exceptionalism, and show that they are anthropologically related. There is a philosophical justification for doing so.

If reality knows of no normalcy, then one must declare a perpetual state of exception to perpetually believe in the normalcy of what is before one's eyes. Something is normal for the exception or a mere exception to the norm; it really doesn't make a difference in practice. They may seem like opposites considered by analogy to material processes, but the forms that hover upon us are not analogous to material processes. I rely on the experience of the reader to verify this.

Philosophical grounds do not establish anthropological truth, but merely exclude impossible items from the list of possible situations. But the anthropological evidence happens to be there. Regional and cultural diversity exist but are more frequently than not ignored; this is what makes a certain cartoon show claiming to show 'middle America' by confounding its different versions funny. We no more know what middle America looks like than we are able to accurately place the Simpson family in a place, class, or grouping. We continually refer to members of other classes, backgrounds, and sometimes ideologies, as adolescents or senescents, so as to place the others within our own life-orbits, where they do not belong. This is the game of perpetual normalcy. And then we think America must be different from the others, regardless of what happens. This is perpetual exceptionalism, that while grounded in certain incontrovertible historical facts, becomes mythological by the must. I claim that the facts they co-exist and that the one can enable the other are grounds for provisionally considering the following hypothesis; the anthropological character of America is strongly defined by the positing of perpetual exceptionalism in the interest of perpetual normalcy.

And when Hesperus happens to be somewhat unhinged

Enter a new historical era, a new form of communication, and a widely reviled conservative regime that unhinges the west, or hesparic world, with frightening speed. Who does the situation elect as candidates and who does the populace select from among their number? The situation selects one candidate who wants to return America to her guiding myths, another who represents an unthought compromise on all issues and a return to something much more recent, and a third who means to change what the guiding myths mean by using the familiar rhetoric of American exceptionalism coupled with actual policies previously unthinkable under the banner of this rhetoric, insofar as thinkable within this country's context at all. Not coincidentally, the unthought compromise goes out the window on the first round. And I say this having voted for her out of overwhelming tactical and ethical objections to both sides of what would turn out to be a more straightforward election than had previously been anticipated. Revolution requires simplification.

That leaves us with the candidate representing conservative preservation on all fronts, and choosing to conserve the most stable vision of the past, ignoring recent fluctuations, and a revolutionary of whom we really know absolutely nothing other than that he is a revolutionary. The old ground for perpetual normalcy is defended by the one party as the guiding light of American exceptionalism, with the subtext that America, used to it as you may be, is not the norm in this world, and that the demagogue on the other side, promising hope through inspiring vision, is an unfortunate global norm you don't want in your living room. Enough to get my vote, despite grave disagreements with specific redistributive economic policies and the apparent lack of an agenda for education and health reform (which is not the same-thing as health-care reform. See my previous post on that subject). I'll take the proven track record and the promise to conserve what's around over the second side, which promises to achieve its particular priorities at any cost whatever, to redefine success for an adminstration in such a fashion that it must achieve it. And does not pretend to promise what the laws of political and diplomatic binding track-record assure it cannot provide; any concrete restraints on what that might mean. And win a landslide that will in retrospect seem all but inevitable.

After the ecstatic world-simulcast party promising the end of history as we know it comes the lame duck of inescapable physical reality, under the continued aegis of the national mythology of perpetual normalcy and perpetual exceptionalism. And after the lame duck comes the new presidency, which it is beyond the scope of this note to comment on and too early to say anything about anyway. But one thing is already clear; longstanding anthropological facts about us will continue to shade our understanding of the world, even as both it and our own behavior change radically. I end on no particular hypothesis, but only the perhaps trite observation that this mythology selected candidates and victor in conjunction with all else, that its role is influential enough to be said to be determinative given the rest, and that revolutions such as the one we just had do not change the anthropological facts.

You might be an aspiring dictator if...

Goofball presents the top ten signs that you, US presidential candidate Joe Schmo, might be a dictator-in-waiting.

1) You revive imbecilic sentiments that no one remembered they had concerning crusty national mythology to bring yourself to national prominence.
2) Most of your supporters are obsessed with slogans of one or two common words they cultishly insist you embody.
3) You are the subject of a new form of pop-art iconography that might be entitled 'political reality imitates Warhol' if political reality had not been there first.
4) You have mysteriously huge amounts of funding that you insist came in five and ten dollar amounts from armies of contributors unseen or heard-of by any man or woman alive, which probably come from shady sources no one can track down.
5) Taking a page from your third-world brethren in the art of aspiring dictatorship, you boycott an election in a province you have no chance of carrying, then later get your pals in government to invalidate the election, hoping no one notices.
6) Knowing that you cannot offer any solution to a global financial crisis, you say very little about it and let everybody assume that the party in power you oppose is responsible for the trouble.
7) You jump from office to office leaving no perceivable track record of positions or associations and doing as little as possible so as to incriminate yourself as little as possible in the eyes of a public obsessed with a 'lamb of the heartland unspotted' purity.
8) You use exaggerated gestures of deference to 'formidable opponents' and 'humbling endorsements', to convince everybody of how much humility you have, which it is quite obvious from the speed of your rise you do not.
9) You say that uncomfortable issues are 'far above your pay grade' as if there were an infinite technocracy out there to decide them, when in fact this is one issue you have a record on, only one many of your potential voters don't happen to like.
10) You claim to represent groups you don't belong to by birth or upbringing.

Suma et substancia Obama (foreign policy edition)

Blogdom,
To refute the coherence theory of truth was the dream of the logical positivists which may, for all I know, have been acquired from an unknown father. I'm not sure (and in fact have absolutely no reason to believe) that A.J. Ayer's father was unknown to him, but without looking up this biographical datum, I am nonetheless just as sure that such an estranged deadbeat was the source of the wisdom of this philosopher as I am that Obama's father was the source of his. Mr. Obama's goal is different from A.J. Ayer's. Instead of refuting the idea that anything coherent is true, the blessed one seems to want us to believe, especially on Nov. 4th, 2008, that coherence is not only insufficient but also unnecessary.
What else could account for the stated sum of his foreign policy pronouncements?
A. We cannot and could never have defeated a movement that operates in 80 countries by invading Iraq, which is only one (1) country.
B. All our attention need be concentrated on Afghanistan (which is by my count one (1) country).
C. As a backup strategy in case the Afghanistan policy doesn't work, we should mosey our way over to the hella chique frontier of Waziristan, located in the (newly destabilized and nuclear-armed) nation of Pakistan.
D. Before this nation was destabilized, it was run by one Pervez Musharraf, who, while overtly an ally, followed a policy of mere containment of the tribal region of Waziristan (having as far as the editor can tell no choice). Therefore, I am very proud to have supported the removal of this Musharraf and his inevitable replacement by parties which are neither overtly nor in actuality allies of any sort. I just don't like phonies, being the authentic son of a Luo Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother that everybody knows me to be.
E. Clearly I would act like this only on 'credible' intelligence. (Editor's punctuation).
F. Intelligence is never entirely credible, as we have learned under Mr. Bush.
G. Russia-Georgia: We cannot hope to resolve conflicts of this sort, about which I take absolutely no firm position, if we have alienated our closest allies. Granted, they are with us on this one, but still... Granted, the situation I am referring to ceased to exist two years ago, as Merkel and Sarkozy are now in charge of Europe, but still...

Now let's be fair to Obama; on logical grounds, there is nothing wrong with opposing doing anything about Iran's rise to nuclear status if you start by the assumption that it is fine and dandy to go around invading nuclear-armed nations when you have 'credible' intelligence supporting their sponsorship of activities that threaten America or its' allies. I just happen to question the assumption here.

Conflict-tainment

Blogdom,
We all remember the television industry giving us infotainment, the marriage for purposes of fattening a visa account between the innocent maiden unexhumed Alice Information and the swaggering self-made businessman L. Otis Entertainment. Alice Information was mysteriously out there to be found, somewhat like Cain's wife in Genesis, who appears to arise outside the creation of Adam and Eve, the mother of all living things. Come along L. Otis Entertainment, who grabs her by the head and dances her round the fire 24/7. But this is not the place to discuss the nature of truth. Whatever she be and wherever she go, she sh0uld have stayed unmarried, if not necessarily virginal.
The television industry may as well cash out now and put the money in China, because infotainment has gone homespun. No one needs an evil media empire to conflate information about the world with entertainment to satisfy various layers of the soul anymore. However, Alice aint in a Kansas movie palace sleeping a night-table away from the silk-pajamaed Otis anymore. We're doing this now with the we-wide-web, on which there is no room for them, whoever they may be. No room for them means conflict now. Thus, inevitably, is born conflict-tainment, in which our own dilemmas are projected on the computer screen as embodied in very real conflicts we have little to do with, and instead of living out our own lives, we hope our side wins the war somewhere else, while we watch, spectators to the soul.
I hear the retort to the previous paragraph already; there is no other, it's a smear fiction. I have two firm defenses against this argument, which I consider ridiculous in this context. First, Alain Badiou, in his controversy with Emanuel Levinas the most eloquent and erudite defendant of the idea that the other doesn't exist, in his less read but more significant tome Being and Event states that "Every multiple contains some other" as a simple truth of set theory. Frankly, in the tome he was concerned with establishing the true philosophy, in the anti-Levinas essay, winning at all costs. (The same duality is seen in Socrates via Plato, I am informed by an expert and good friend). Second, as long as there is human conflict, there is an other whose desires are radically opposed to one's own. While the other is not a permanent installation of the over there like the Egyptology wing of the British Museum, there were multiple others yesterday, are many others today, and will be more tomorrow, till the last syllable of you know what. In philosophais one would say something like "l'alterite est un fait structurel permanent, mais l'autre particulier est passager." Bible-wise, Goy-el-goy (nation against nation) till the end of time. That's that; I am I am, he is he is.
When a conflict is somebody else's it is very difficult to tell what sort of conflict it actually is, and our social science universal categoricals like economic, political, ethnic, and religious, to present a partial list in descending order of sensefulness, can tell us nothing. They are deliberately and happily terms empty of particular nature, or eidetic terms (terms of kind) under which to classify unlike things by their surface manifestations. These I maintain to be choices of representation from an available body of idioms in the outside world radically separate from the actual mental world of man.
Concerning conflict, I find no eiditic analysis particularly more useful and convincing than that I learned in 4th grade reading class: there were there three types of conflict. The conflict of man against man, the conflict of man against himself, and the conflict of man against nature. In a conflict into which foreigners inject their passions, all possible variety of commentary can be found online, and I pick the random example of, oh, say, the Israel-Palestine conflict to demonstrate how effective this particular classificatory scheme actually is. In physical fact, as best I can ascertain it, there are as many conflicts as there are Israelis and Palestinians, but they are brought together under their flags to fight a war in the timeless fashion of physical reality from the ancient Pelloneus to contemporary Iraq. In cyberspace, though, a couple of motifs repeat, of which the eidetic analysis of my onetime teacher can help us see some varieties. The conflict of man against man, or regular Joe, regular Yussef, shows us regular dudes, or at least dudes regular by the standards of that veiled and mysterious middle east, who all want a good life and happen to be on opposite sides of fence. Then there is the conflict of man against himself, in which the two particular traditions and cultures involved must be similar because they all believe in only one god and chant a variant of the ancient name "Avram" and therefore, the conflict must be between a high and a base impulse played in one arbitrary "culture" among others real or possible (dem non-Abrahamitics), which I will call the Isradam or "struggle against man" conflict. Then there is the most peculiar conflict of all, which falls perfectly under the remaining category of my early teacher, the conflict of man against nature, or Israel/Philistine conflict. It does not concern the Palestinians, but some idea of a natural people pitted against an explicitly demarcated people celebrating all in human nature that may or may not be rotten but needs to sublimated and not speak its own name. Hilariously enough, the nature's people regrettably chosen nom de guerre happens to come from the ancient root just mentioned. The word "Palestine" comes from "Philistine", as surely and irrelevantly as the Swahili Barack and the Hebrew Baruch are closely related forms of "blessed" or "benedict." Spinoza is spinning in his Netherlandish grave.

Not only do I find the conflict-tainment an aesthetically repugnant form of life, but
it has the already manifest potential to dull or sensibilities for action wherever we happen to actually be, as we hope our aspirations will be won with blood--of somebody else and by somebody else. This here is not the "society of the spectacle." It's the society of spectator.

May it shock and outrage the world that this blog does not take a piously
pure stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The blogger has no particular stake in the real situation thousands of miles eastward and thus finds it unethical to take a pious position other than the following: may your conflict-tainment at the expense of others be put to bed relatively painlessly.

Does Public Disease Call for Nationalized Remedies?

Internautes,
The health records of the world leave little doubt of two facts; first basic sanitation and access to lifestyle improvements have done more for the health (including the longevity) of world citizens than all applicable knowledge of biology thus far, and it is arguable that neither further medicine nor human engineering can ever replace the essentials. Second, the United States is dead last in the industrialized world in providing opportunities for lifestyle improvements. While the record can never budge us from the correlation of poor lifestyle-improvement opportunities with the poor public health/preventative medicine outcome for America if we wish to blame lazy Americans who have had everything too good for their own bad health, but the correlations are there to suggest heavily not only the obvious importance of lifestyle, but the contribution of relative prices of healthy and unhealthy food, availability of healthy food altogether, urban design, transportation policy, etc. to the relative health of nations.
This is public health or health economics 101.
What is more frequently missed is what all this means to health-care policy. When one method is more important than another in achieving results, it makes correlatory statistics, from everyday mental comparison tests to the fanciest of regressions, looking at the effect of the second and less important variable on the outcome while ignoring the first all but bunk. In the case of regressions, the omitted variables are in this case exceedingly unlikely to be uncorrelated to the included ones. The regions of the United States or Europe with better preventative care, for instance, are almost certainly the ones with more effective medicine; there are legal and political reasons why this should be so within the blocs but not between them. All of which means that to say that the proposition that European nationalized healthcare systems have proven themselves by the health outcomes they achieve against the American system is bunk simply beacuse that they're not the achievers here at all. The European lifestyle and incentives to lead it are what we ought to be imitating. Starting by explicit health-care is all but insane: the United States has the best curative medicine in the world, if also the most expensive. While some are excluded from the system, the majority of people get what the nation pays for. It is a question of value whether one gives more importance to the total quality-weighed amount of curative medicine in the country, or gives more importance to the basics being broadly provided. Especially given the diminishing marginal returns of care to any one individual, there is much to be said for the second position. But it is a matter of fact that the best available care in the United States is the best available care anywhere, that the United States is the leader in medical research and actually subsidizes the rest of the world in the arena of prescription medicine (a highly atypical but real situation). It is also a highly likely conjecture that the continued incentives to produce medical goods in the United States could give this country the advantage in next-generation biological technologies; an advantage we seem to now lack in just about everything else, and consequently need desperately.
The state of the nation's health is an outrage that calls for public health solutions, not nationalized medicine whose results are not what they appear to be if one ignores this crucial causative factor. A serious healthy urban planning, healthy food incentive-creating program together with more innovative approaches to improving lifestyle would of course drastically reduce insanely rising health-care costs far more effectively than Hillary Clinton's proposal to create a monospomy (buyer-side monopoly, which reduces costs) of health-care or Barack Obama's unthought compromise plan, which includes elements from so many sources the likely economic result is presently undecipherable. Why is no one telling the public any of this? We live in a republic, not a democracy, not so we may elect pop-stars to embody our ideal selves but so that those who thought most about a question are in a position to present it to those who have thought less and have them ratify the leaders who listen to the best advisers. The hope of republican forms of government is that the people's reasoning about candidates' debate correspond or map unto the actual complicated policy questions, of which no one has a grasp of all. Each person trying to decide the issues all for themselves adds up to a highly repetitive crystal matrix of dunces projecting a largely grey image on the screen of governmental decision. The citizens of a republic each contribute a different facet to the image on the screen; the members of a mob, each in his own isolated world, all do more or less the same thing, creating an additive, rather than a transformative, aggregate.
Obama and company have perverted a common-sense but already flawed logical imperative to judge things by their results into a nonsensical injunction to compare systems by their late surfaces; which is precisely what the Madisonian republican form of government is supposed to prevent.

So why does Europe have nationalized health-care whereas we do not? It is a complicated question involving historical accident, selection of citizens by mentality in the era of mass migration, two world wars, and many other factors of which I am but hazily aware. None of them however means that Europe's medical system works better than ours. Europe's public health system is what's doing that work. Perhaps American medicine is still what it is because it is the only remedy to our lifestyle, or perhaps it is a flawed system that could use improvement. But no such ammendations will have the massive consequences that the candidates believe they will have.

I am all for public works projects. But the candidates have agreed upon the wrong starting point by which to orient the rest of the picture through a presumed future policy process.

probable truth^many=complete nonsense: so what might be true?

Blogdom,

Put together a number of propositions that are very likely, and you get an extremely unlikely conclusion. (Michael Dummett has an excellent passage on the phenomenon that actually convincingly explains common sense as the quality of letting nature supply new information that beats out attempts to reason thouroughly in "The Logical Basis of Metaphysics"). If the more you look at the news over the last seven years from beginning to end, the crazier all the parties involved appear, the possibility of doing this under an unprecedented media and information regime should be noted as the proeminent explanation. The more information there is, the more of it can be put together in thought and discourse, and the more vigilent adherence to Dummett's principle is necessary to avoid immensely logical, but absolutely false, conclusions.

The consequences of this logical depreciation through probabilistic multiplication are unfortunate for the contemporary world. But, deluding oneself into believing the multiplicity of voices on the internet is a passing confusion that will organize itself out of existence ere long, it is not directly evident how to follow Dummett's advice and draw at the well of nature frequently in these times. Nature used to just crowd upon us in our less reflective hours. It is what became us when stopped thinking, neither matter nor our deliberate selves. As such, in one sense it was metaphysical, and there was nearly mathematical identity between metaphysics and nature. That was before Gutenberg II, the generic coming. The internet is one machine. Everything on it, from a maximal multiplicity of sources that essentially cover what folk there happen to be that one can understand and thus truly shares a world with, appears through one generic filter. The medium cannot help but affect the message, here or elsewhere. How the message is received and integrated into the communication between self and reality simply always matters, whether in McCluer's hell, his heaven, his middle earth, or, say, Galicia in 1843. What makes the particular information regime we live in so disturbing is that the singularity of nature, the well we draw upon that at once voids the previous and anchors the real, is being challenged by another thing singular in nature. There isn't room for two such singularities in our brains, and hence on this planet. With apologies to Eliayahu (Elijah) and translators, I would sum it up by saying that if the deep affords an effectively infinite string of words of unknown provenance, it then affords no water.

If our conception of reality, including political-historical reality, were made of words, the internet would be a utopic revolution. As I firmly hold that it does not, not as a probable truth but as an operational axiom, my system of thought inclines to think that the supposed neccesity of its absolute benevolence in helping us accomplish whatever goals we priorly had or have developed, personally or collectively, must be understood in light of, or perhaps under the shade of, the fundamental rewriting of the human and natural condition under the new univocity.

Since I declare all this axiomatically, rather than as a probable truth under fundamental shades of meaning of the words I employ, I can only hope the reader shares enough natural and internautical experience with me to momentarily share this interpretation with me. What effect it will have on anybody's future mind, only nature and its possible succesors can determine. Things change radically; but belief in a metaphysical reality (not a religiously defined one) inclines to believe that the categories of one and many, self and other, thought and forgetting, also bestow on us an indestructable continuity and an inalienable condition---of a very abstract and difficult to grasp kind. It does not ensure a continuity of our political condition across technologies, whatever laws, cultures, or resolves we may try to bring with us to great novelty.

Work stoppage as a strategy of effecting political ends (such as impeaching improperly elected presidents)

Blogdom,

As an admirer of certain aspects of James Madison's thought, I exercise caution before suggesting any strategy of activism meaning to effect political ends directly rather than improve a democratic/republican system so that it may effect them by an approximation of the ultimate idealized law of the greatest good for the greatest number. As careful readers of Madison know (but Noam Chomsky pretends not to know) Madison's strategy for effecting this gain in aggregate welfare was two-fold; to allow representative government, but not pure democracy, at the highest level, and to have two fundamental layers of government, state and national. Pure democracy in which each question be decided upon by a show of hands, he reckoned in part, was mobocracy, in which a collective decides what to do according to the law of crowds: each part is ignorant of most necessary information and the whole cannot be guaranteed to directly simulate the knowledge its' parts lack. An invisible hand of politics in which the opposite is true is ludicrous to intuition and most forms of reason, and besides that, empirically unprovable given ever-changing definitions of "the good." Madison called the actual mechanism of crowd decision faction formation, a name which implies at least a prisoner's dillemma-like achievement of less than optimal gain from each man competing for himself, and at worst all forms of extra-legal manipulation contrary to the basic premises of government for the people, by the people, and of the people. However, recognizing holes in the theory (there must be holes in any theory), and the lack of competition rendering a parliament an uncontested authority in any single-layered and purely republican government, he allowed considerable leverage to states, and allowed them to have purely democratic (and thus potentially mobocratic) elements, with a supreme court holding ultimate jurisdiction over the propriety of their laws.

As many say today, states (and somtimes cities) are laboratories of new ideas. This is an interesting twist on both Madisonian and economic ideas: a small number (50 max, currently) of tested laws to choose from, developed naturally (mobocratically) in a republic-controlled environment, as an alternative of a market of untested ideas too large to count. I think Madison would be proud of this line of thought: first because empirically tested ideas are information to go on other than instinct, and second because it allows for democratic elements without the perils of pure democracy. And its' no surprise: the idea is the brainchild of a people reared in a system he played a very important role in fashioning.


Democratic mobocracy, however, may very well be the best way to decide upon questions everybody does have the necessary information about given a failure of a globally republican government. When in the course of human events does activism indisputably become necessary? When the republican form of government defeats itself, such as in a rigged election. Therefore, I suggest activism in the face of any future stolen election.



It having been demonstrated "beyond a reasonable doubt" with Bayesian statistical and elementary probabilistic means that an election has been rigged, extra-legal means of action are appropriate. In its' broadest outline, needing details (feel free to comment if you're out there), this is the one I suggest.



A work stoppage, or general strike. May everybody who believes the United States has crossed the line into dictatorship refuse to work until corrective legal measure is taken or new elections are held, (whichever is more democratic-republican under the circumstances), at the risk of their job. Labor is the power of the people. Demonstrating is useless. The only hope of a bloodless revolution should revolution become necessary (such as in the case of a massively rigged election) is to cripple the economic system for political ends.

This is not a question of whether the ends justify the means. It is a question of whether one mean can be used to effect an end of a different kind, which can only reasonably be answered in the positive.



To make this stoppage practicable, rather than a fanciful idea, it is necessary to reduce the number of jobs lost, or for each individual the probability they will lose their job. This requires making deals with factions one doesn't respect. Such as the most abusive of corporations, etc. Natural principles reveal that, once the strike has achieved its' ends, most people will be rehired, as the cause of the strike is the enstatement of a man who will then be the president-elect, which it is in business's interest to please, and, if the strike has enough adherents, there won't be pools of same-skilled alternate employees to hire. This "most" isn't good enough to ensure safety, especially if the arguments behind it aren't known. So steps need to be taken to put at least a few major corporations on the side of the strikers: in other words, to make the companies themselves part of the stoppage, with means of labor, money, reasoning, or whatever else may work.



So, again, the suggestion is: put down your placards and stay home from work in the case of a clearly illegitemally elected president. There are not enough compliant soldiers to enact the Taft-Hartley act on the scale I'm suggesting. The weapon of the people is labor, as known by Gandhi, a rather succesful non-violent revolutionary, whatever else he was, and all his followers. This is the answer given unjust regimes, regardless of the situation and whether you're a Wall Street Broker or a day-laborer, a citizen or not.

A retraction ala Beethoven

I am no longer planning to vote for Barack Obama or supporting his candidacy for a simple reason: I find it dangerous to say in any capacity within public life that one would invade a part of a sovereign state that happens to have nuclear weapons on "creditable intelligence" that Al Qaeda (the base) has a base there. The creditability of "creditable intelligence" has a poor track record to say the least, besides which, causing a potential nuclear standoff in any way, shape or form is insanity the likes of which has not been seen from the White House (to my knowledge) since another charismatic but inexperienced leader some forty-five years ago brought the world to the brink of annihilation for a fortnight. In other words, all the JFK comparisons are more on the mark than their supporters imagine, and this is bad because he was a lousy president until the day he got shot, at least in this most important of respects.

Of course, Mr. Obama probably says all this not out of plain inexperience, seeing as even little young inexperienced me knows what's wrong with it, but because it's what a portion of undecided voters wants to hear more than the other portions might be turned off by it. It still appears appropriate to me to call it inexperience and mean something other by that word than a euphemism for demagoguery because experience would teach the said candidate not to say under pressure what under more normal circumstances he or I both already realize should not be said. Any candidate who sleeps in the White House on Jaunary 20th-21st 2009 will find upon waking up that his or her diplomatic record as a president retroactively stretches back to the wild days of his or her campaign. Since diplomacy is the number one job of a president, I'm taking everything said about it right now very seriously. And voting Clinton with some reservations.

It seems to me that the Soviets were as "insane" in actuality as any nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Pakistan would be if it came to exist, and it seems untenable to me to strike nuclear-armed enemies no matter who they are, what they do, or what they say they "believe". They could use the things! Simple enough, but it seems that game theory and other strategic thought as informed and altered by historical example has largely been replaced in our times by a political "language game" I call "pro-Bush, anti-Bush." Whether you're with him like Romney or against him like Obama, the cowboy has largely decided the backbone of publicly acceptable reasoning for the worse. in particular, he has undermined the Kennan et al. framework of international diplomacy with unthought garbage allegedly drawn from the work of Leo Strauss (a bad writer and besides that a Plato, Maimonides, and Spinoza commentator rather than a political strategist).For the record, this here publicly unacceptable commentator endorses the following theses: A) Kennan et al.'s manner of diplomacy was based on strategic (game-theoretical, for any economists out there) considerations of how to wage cold war given a set of weapons and any state out there threatening our country with them, and their day is on that account not over if it ever began. B) Communism and Islam are both "religions" whose stated and real goal is to inform politics, so if we dealt with one crop of madmen we can deal with another similarly. The only difference is that Islam is purportedtly "stateless." This I find to be purported but not factual. Radical Islam exists only insofar as states harbor it, and this includes both the Islamic republics and the so-called secular dictatorships that tolerate Islamic factions, brotherhoods, and other organizations. That's a big list with question marks, but it's still less dangerous than the good old Soviet Union. So why not render unto Caesar what deters Caesar, whether the Caesar calls himself communist or Muslim? C) If Al Qaeda is really a stateless enemy, rather than a multi-state enemy as I argue, tough talk about getting at one of its arms is assassination by starfish mutilation (the other arms regenerate). Either we're dealing with a nihilistic army of shadows that means to bring about Armageddon for virgins in the sky or we're dealing with states and alliances thereof, but in either case, Obama's gesture is a bad move.

So, like Beethoven ripping up his dedication of the Eroica symphony to Napoleon upon his invasion of I forget which German state, as a Palinodist retracts a poem with another, I offer this argument.