Month: February 2010

After a pretty crazy week of debate and travel, I've now been able to read and ponder Mr Stack's "manifesto." It seems to me that there are all sorts of incoherent strands of populist rage within it, right and left, as well, obviously, as personal issues that almost certainly pushed him from simply raging at the TV set to becoming a terrorist. I think the attempt to use him to condemn either political party is unhelpful.

But I want to make a few simple points: this was obviously an act of terrorism. When someone is mad at the government, and when he flies a plane into a federal building, killing two and traumatizing countless others and urges others to do the same, he is a terrorist.

Secondly, it is pernicious to define terrorism by the race or religion of its perpetrators. In the country I grew up in, London and the town where my sister's family now lives, Guildford, endured brutal IRA bombings. These acts of terror were no less terror than Jihadist terror or far right domestic terrorism, such as Timothy McVeigh's. Ordinary people were drinking a beer in a pub or shopping in a department store and blown to bits.

None approached the numbers killed in the mass murder of 9/11 in one incident, but over the years of terror, very large numbers of innocents were killed. What I find deeply alarming is that race is now beginning to define an act of terrorism in America. Fox News described the Fort Hood shootings as an act of terrorism, but did not describe the assassination of Dr George Tiller as an act of terrorism.

Both were politically motivated, and designed to foment terror, and both were influenced by extremist forms of religious teaching. Is terrorism defined by the number of people it kills? Or the race of the perpetrators? Or the religion of the terrorists? The Dish tries hard not to make such distinctions. 

Terrorism is terrorism whoever does it. Torture is torture whoever does it. Murder is murder whoever does it. Just as I oppose affirmative action and hate crime laws, which make specious distinction on the basis of race and other characteristics, so I oppose making any distinction on those grounds when describing terrorism. That, I think, is a conservative position. And Fox News is not a conservative news organization. It is, in many ways, a racist and xenophobic one whose double standards are a result of pure prejudice not reason.

Mark Schmitt pops third-party dreams:

The independence movement melds populism of both the left and right varieties (see Lou Dobbs, author of the 2007 book Independents Day), centrism, and technocratic anti-politics into one messy soup. Concern about long-term budget deficits and slipping U.S. economic superiority, plus tax cuts, are usually mainstays of the movement's vague platforms. The mere idea of being somehow different from whatever is on offer in current politics seems to be "unity" enough. Independents share not a vision of where to take the country but an analysis of its politics.

Second, most of the people involved in these efforts aren't independent at all but deeply embedded in the political system as candidates or consultants. (McCain and Lieberman are lifelong politicians; among Ford's several titles is chair of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.) They never suffer for lack of funds. And the most gullible audience for their efforts consists of the most practiced purveyors of conventional wisdom, like Washington Post columnist David Broder, who swooned over Unity08. Often it seems like the independents' primary complaint about the state of American politics is simply that they're not the ones running it.

Buzzfeed compiles 20 Olympic ice-skating faces.

A reader continues the conversation:

This series of posts are really interesting to me, in large part because they seem so divorced to the reality that I experience living in Southern California.  I live in Orange County, the suburbs.  A vehicle with a range of 40 miles would not have gotten me from my front door to my former office (I'm now self-employed and working from home until we have an office space), and 20-30 mph would have doubled, if not tripled my commute time.  I don't think my experience is very unique in Southern California, either.  And the fact is that Southern California is not really designed well (anymore) for public transportation.  This sort of thing might (I stress, might) work in an urban hub center (New York, Chicago, downtown Los Angeles) but for those of us who have to travel in and out on a daily basis?  It would be the Zune of cars, not the iphone.

Avent endorsed public transit in addition to smaller cars. He wrote that  "commutes could potentially involve some sort of transit, but to make that happen, one needs to effectively solve the last mile (or last few miles) problem in the suburbs." Another reader:

Regulation isn't preventing the creation of an "iPhone of cars".  Frankly comparing iPhones and cars is a bit apples and oranges, but since wer're making the comparison, here's another excerpt from Ryan Avent's post:

Every weekday, tens of millions of Americans get into vehicles that are full of passenger space which won’t be used, with engines capable of horsepower and speeds that won’t be attained, holding fuel tanks that could power the car for distances that won’t be traveled. The result of all this over-engineering is that cars cost way more than a vehicle for daily commuting need cost, and they consume way more energy than a vehicle for daily commuting need consume. This all adds up to a remarkable waste of resources, even before you begin talking about things like congestion.

So why is that?  It's not a matter of regulation, but rather a simple matter of demand.  In the 60's and 70's the cars that people demanded were enormous pieces of Detroit steel that seemed to propel themselves by simply ejecting gasoline out the rear.  It made sense in a time of cheap energy.  Why not have the big car with the big back seat when you have some place to park it and plenty of cheap gas to run it?

With the oil price spikes, we saw demand increase for more compact cars.  The premium for that extra space simply wasn't worth the long term costs of the gasoline to drive it.  This trend has continued with a constant back and forth between spaciousness, power, and fuel efficiency depending on the cost of gasoline at the time.  A few years ago, the Hummer was all the rage, and today it's the Prius, the Mini, and the Smart Car.  Sounds a bit like innovation to me.

Every year we have cars that can go a little further and a little faster for a little less fuel.  Depending on market conditions the types of cars will vary, but the overall trend is towards greater efficiency no matter the vehicle.  There are barriers that reduce the rate of innovation in the automotive industry, but regulation is a small part of that puzzle.  The real barrier is that manufacturing a car is a labor and resource intensive process that tends to make manufacturers risk averse.  An iPhone, for all it's electronic complexity, is relatively simple to manufacture. 

For a small electronic device like the iPhone you can design everything on a computer, send it off to a manufacturing plant in China and have them whip up a sample in a short period of time at minimal cost.  There is no equivalent capability in the automotive industry.  To build even a prototype of a car is expensive, let alone tooling up an entire assembly line to make them in sufficient quantities for the market.  If the iPad is a bust for Apple, they'll scrap it and try something else, but if the Prius is a bust, Toyota is screwed.

John Cloud reports on McDonald's test kitchen:

[G]reat manufacturing company runs a crazy R&D department, a place where mad scientists get to fiddle with toys and produce one or two breakthroughs a year. Coudreaut and his staff of 16 consider approximately 1,800 ideas for new menu items each year, but only a couple — or in an atypical year, as many as five — make it onto the menu. Few stay permanently.

The Innocent Smith questions the global terrorism death numbers used in this poster. Lewis e-mails:

The discrepancy apparently comes from a change in the way the state department defines terrorism. The 774 figure defines terrorism as an international act and comes from Patterns of Global Terrorism by Berkshire publishing. The larger figure comes from when the that definition was widened to include acts of terrorism within borders. Had I known this I'd probably have picked a less controversial comparison, though obviously it brings up the question of what terrorism is, which I think is interesting in itself.

I had originally wanted to compare the health care deaths to terrorism deaths in the US, but even taking the loosest estimate 17 or so to 45,000 is too big to illustrate!

Hitchens really doesn't like sports:

I can't count the number of times that I have picked up the newspaper at a time of crisis and found whole swaths of the front page given over either to the already known result of some other dull game or to the moral or criminal depredations of some overpaid steroid swallower. Listen: the paper has a whole separate section devoted to people who want to degrade the act of reading by staring enthusiastically at the outcomes of sporting events that occurred the previous day. These avid consumers also have tons of dedicated channels and publications that

are lovingly contoured to their special needs. All I ask is that they keep out of the grown-up

parts of the paper.

Dave Zirin isn't having it:

Yes there is much to detest in the world of sports. But why then is it also such a source of solace, joy, and – heaven forefend – fun? Hitchens doesn't care to explore this question. His contempt for the "rabble" triumphs any effort at reason. Just as with his ham-fisted analysis of religion, our love of sport is also proof-positive of our irredeemable idiocy.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 10.38 am

Turns out we do feel with our gut:

Technically known as the enteric nervous system, …the second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system, Gershon says. "…A big part of our emotions are probably influenced by the nerves in our gut," Mayer says. Butterflies in the stomach—signaling in the gut as part of our physiological stress response, Gershon says—is but one example.

E.D. Kain responds to Thiessen:

If a German soldier or intelligence officer in WWII had been captured that soldier may have possessed knowledge of planned German offensives.  Getting that information may indeed have saved thousands of American or Allied lives.  A captured SS officer may have had information regarding death camps or other atrocities which would have led to increased support for the war effort.  Countless scenarios, whether ticking-time-bomb or not, could be conceived wherein during the course of traditional warfare intelligence garnered from captured soldiers would lead to saving the lives of many on our side.  Does this make torture or “enhanced interrogation techniques” any more viable or moral or practical?

In terms of Catholic teaching, I would say that this is absolutely not the case.

And if it does not apply to traditional war, then I fail to see how it applies any more or less to terrorism.  After all, does it apply to crime-fighting?  That is not traditional warfare, but I imagine there are countless scenarios where criminals have information that could save lives.  And can we not simply redefine all engagements that are traditional warfare as non-traditional and then change the rules accordingly.  At what point does an asymmetrical conflict become non-traditional war by necessity?