The Freeholders – part 2

John Ray and Amritas link to my post (The Freeholders). John says:

David's view that Leftists advocate what they do because they do not foresee the ill effects of their policies suggests to me that he has been conned, however. Conservatives point out all the follies way in advance but the Left just will not listen. They don't WANT to know about the consequences of their actions. They just want to feel good by sounding big and kind at the time.

I should make it clear that I’m not talking about pathological cases like Michael Moore, but for the rest I think that this gets into the nature of knowledge – I’ve encountered it many times. I frequently run into people who claim things that I think are absurd. Often they have “evidence” to support their claims – and challenge me to check it out. I don’t, because I don’t have time, and I have so much evidence to support what I think is a contradictory claim that I dismiss it out of hand. But sometimes it turns out that the common wisdom is wrong, and the claims that we dismiss out of hand are right. For example:

For most of the 20th century, peptic ulcers were rarely cured. The reigning theory said that ulcers resulted from psychological stress and dietary factors…

In 1981, Robin Warren, M.D., a pathologist at the Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia, discovered numerous bacteria living in tissue taken during a stomach biopsy. Over time, he began to notice a pattern in stomach biopsies…

Later that year, Barry Marshall, M.D., joined Dr. Warren in his research, and together they verified the link between the spiral bacterium—later termed Helicobacter pylori—and the presence of peptic ulcers…

Most doctors were not convinced by the findings, and often, Drs. Warren and Marshall met with extreme skepticism and even hostility…

So, in July 1984, Dr. Marshall decided to swallow a large number of the bacteria himself to test his ideas about H. pylori…

For five days, he noticed nothing. Then, he began to experience nausea and vomiting. Although these symptoms resolved on their own after 14 days, an endoscopy on the eighth day revealed that he had developed severe gastritis. Still, Dr. Marshall’s presentations at gastroenterology meetings did little to convince doctors who proceeded to treat ulcer patients with new acid-reducing drugs…

After more evidence accumulated, the National Institutes of Health recommended in 1994 that people with peptic ulcer and H. pylori infection should receive antibiotics as a first-line therapy…

Ten years after compelling evidence was demonstrated! Most people simply dismissed the evidence because it contradicted their pre-conceived notions!

Amritas applies my thesis to Hawaii, with some interesting results. I’m afraid though, that I might have made it sound like the US and Israel are two peas in a pod – they are not, I’d like to talk about it more but I’m afraid I’ll have to push it off to a future post.

The New Iraq

Amritas doubts the ability of Iraqis to maintain democracy. I have my doubts too. Having said that, I fully support Bush’s actions in Iraq. Has he made mistakes? Probably. But I don’t know what they are – hindsight is twenty/twenty, and we don’t have it yet. I don’t think that the lessons of Israel in Lebanon are completely applicable in Iraq. The biggest difference is that the US is A LOT more powerful than Israel.

I don’t know whether the US will be successful in creating a democratic Iraq, but I think it would be immoral, given the position that the US is in, not to try. And I’m sure that Iraq will end up being better for it, whatever that may mean.

Engels proud not to be Icelandic, Marx not Jewish

Engels is proud not to be Icelandic (via Bjarni Ólafsson):

The Dane regards Germany as a country which one visits in order to ‘keep mistresses and squander one’s fortune on them’ (while travelling in Germany, he had a mistress who ran through the better part of his fortune, we read in a Danish school book). He calls the German a tydsk [German] windbag, and regards himself as the true representative of the Teutonic soul — the Swede in turn despises the Dane as ‘Germanised’ and degenerate, garrulous and effete — the Norwegian looks down on the Gallicised Swede and his aristocracy and rejoices in the fact that at home in Norge [Norway] exactly the same stupid, peasant economy is dominant as at the time of the noble Canute, and he, for his part, is treated en canaille [scornfully] by the Icelander, who still continues to speak exactly the same language as the unwashed Vikings of anno 900, swills whale oil, lives in a mud hut and goes to pieces in any atmosphere that does not reek of rotten fish. I have several times felt tempted to be proud of the fact that I am at least no Dane, nor yet an Icelander, but merely a German.

Marx is not Jewish:

But whether this was the case or not, there can be no doubt that Heinrich Marx had attained that humanistic culture which freed him entirely from all Jewish prejudices, and he handed on this freedom to his son Karl as a valuable heritage. There is nothing in the numerous letters Heinrich Marx wrote to his student son which betrays a trace of any specifically Jewish traits, either good or bad.

Comment:

If the communists think it's bad to be either Icelandic or Jewish, the only logical conclusion is that being Icelandic and/or Jewish is good for you!

Incidentally, my birthday is the 14th of May - a date wich I only recently found out has some significance over in your part of the world ;)

Posted by: Bjarni Ólafsson at July 5, 2004 12:55 PM Permalink

Comment:

In all fairness, it's not a logical conclusion, but I think it's a correct one.

Happy Birthday! I presume you are referring to Israel's independence day. I'm actually not sure about the exact date in the Gregorian calendar, because here it's known by its date in the Hebrew calendar: 5 Iyar.

Posted by: David Boxenhorn at July 5, 2004 01:13 PM Permalink

Comment:

Yes, I was referring to Israel's Independence day. I was browsing for 4th of July quotes and came across a site which said that the state of Israel was founded on the 14th of May, but that because your calendar is lunisolar, you don't always celebrate it on the same day (according to the gregorian calendar anyway).

I hope you had a safe and pleasant Independance day this year.

Posted by: Bjarni Ólafsson at July 5, 2004 01:48 PM Permalink

Comment:

Ísland über alles! Ísland über alles in der welt!

Posted by: Ásgeir Helgi at November 30, 2004 03:40 AM Permalink

Happy Independence Day, USA

I sometimes wonder about the origins of my political orientation. It has changed little during the course of my life – though I should hope that it has matured some. One of the things that made a big impression on me at a young age (I’m not sure if the impression was causal, it might have been) was American history. From 1620 to 1776, many of its most important events occurred around Boston, where I grew up. When I was a kid, the schools made a big deal about local history (I hope they still do today, but I don’t know): The Pilgrims, who sailed to the New World to escape persecution. A City on a Hill. No taxation without representation. Don’t tread on me. The shot heard around the world. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Separation of powers. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The government that governs least governs best. (Oddly, I can’t find a serious link for this last quote.)

My teachers were almost uniformly leftist. In fact, my 7th-grade teacher who introduced me to American history a reasonably serious level, and who was one of my favorite teachers, revealed at the end of the year that she had a goal to convince at least some of the class that the colonists were crazy to rebel against England. While American history was taught with more than a little emphasis on social awareness: slavery, poverty, oppression, the importance of unions, etc., the original messages of the United States founders shone through, at least to me.

This legacy is one of the great strengths of the United States. It is impossible to teach US history without encountering these concepts. Rhetoric to the contrary, the American Revolution was fought by the freest people in the world, against one of the world’s least despotic governments. It is remarkable that Quebec, at the time recently conquered from the French in 1763, refrained from joining the revolution, despite the fact that is was ruled by foreigners.

Unfortunately, Israel has nothing comparable in its history. In Israeli consciousness, overwhelming all is the collective freedom of self-defense. While the American trauma was taxation without representation, the Jewish trauma was helplessness in the face of people trying to kill us. While Americans proclaimed, “Live free or die!” Israelis exalted in the mere chance to fight for their lives. Before the founding of the state, Israel had no history of democracy or even self-government. Immigrants were from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, whose history was likewise despotic. When the British left, they evacuated. They didn’t leave anything resembling a government, let alone a democratic government, as they did in India and most of their empire. They turned over their military installations to various Arab militias, and left. Under the circumstances, it is remarkable that Israel is a democracy at all, and has been since independence.

To add to the problems, Israel was born at a time when socialism (the real thing, not its red-green-nihilist form of today) was fashionable. Kibbutzim (communes) were the vanguard of the nation, vigorous and entrepreneurial (today, the grandchildren of the founders are dismantling their tired remains). Over a million Jewish refugees, the survivors of concentration camps, and the exiles from Arab regimes, descended on an impoverished population of 600,000. Under such circumstances it is perhaps understandable that the government stepped in to plan the economy, to tax and provide jobs. The bureaucratic infrastructure was already there to build on – the British ruled their colonies though bureaucracy.

Israel is still very much burdened by this legacy – but I predict its eventual demise. It has been weakening markedly since the 1980s, though it is still strong today. In two generations, the state hasn’t been able to extinguish a culture of centuries of self-reliance and independence. Already, in the newer industries, such as high-tech and communications, the culture of innovation has reasserted itself. Older industries, like power generation, the ports, and most of all the government itself, remain to improve. But their time will come, the sooner the better.

Trackback from trying to grok, CLASS:

My class this weekend was pretty good. We all thought it would focus on the current terrorist events, but instead the prof mostly lectured about terrorism in the 70s and 80s. It was interesting because I didn't know that much...

“The most important thing to encourage growth”

Netanyahu speaks:

"What is the first most important thing a government can do to encourage growth?" asked Netanyahu rhetorically.

"Cut taxes. What is the second most important thing? Lower taxes.

"And the third? Right again – tax reductions."

Boxenhorn’s Razor

In my search yesterday for a good link to go with the statement, “The government that governs best governs least,” I came across several protests that this is a recipe for anarchy. It seems self-evident to me that this statement should not read as an oxymoronic advocacy for no government at all, rather as a recognition that government is a necessary evil which should be kept to a minimum. To dispel all confusion, I would like to propose a principle along the lines of Occam’s razor – not a proof, but an heuristic for making decisions which are usually right.

Occam’s Razor:

Of two equivalent theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred.

Boxenhorn’s Razor:

Of two possible solutions to a problem, all other things being equal, the one involving less government is to be preferred.

The people who do genocide best

Gary Brecher says something that I want to preserve (via Amritas), so I can think about it. I don’t have anything to say yet.

The Hutu and the Tutsi are real law-abiding, organized people. If you've only heard about them from the genocide news out of Rwanda, that might seem surprising. But...well, to understand this you have to be willing to tell the bitter truth. And here it is: the people who do genocide best are law-abiding, decent, stand-up folks. Strange but true. Take the Germans: wouldn't hurt a fly...unless someone in uniform told them to.

Backwards on Iraq

After reading the link in the last post, where he talks about the Congo, I had high hopes for Gary Brecher. Then I followed this link from Amritas, where he talks about Iraq, and was disappointed. He said a lot of right things (I’ve had similar experiences with Arab merchants, for example, to the one he describes), but he gets the big picture backwards.

Try thinking about it for a second, actually thinking like an Iraqi guerrilla. You have nothing. You start from scratch. So step one is getting a bomb. That means dealing with a lot of people -- somebody's cousin who stole a couple of mortar shells, or a cop sent out the word he's actually on your side.

Before you even contact this guy you need to know, can you trust him? You don't get a second chance. If you contact him and he's actually working for the occupiers, they'll have you down in the basement with a guy smashing your fingertips with a hammer. Then they'll bring in your wife and start on her.

If you make contact and it goes well -- you get the explosives from him -- you're still a long way from being able to set up the bomb. You still need detonator wire and something like a blasting cap to set it off, so you have to contact another dude, maybe some guy who used to work in the Fallujah Radio Shack. Before you talk to him you need to know.for certain, no second chance, if you can trust him. If you're wrong: basement. Hammer. Fingernails.

So just getting your material is a big, scary step. It involves dozens of people, and if just one of them turns out to be working for the other side, your whole insurgent network will be wiped out before it carries out a single attack. The guy who told you who to contact -- what if they capture him and take him down to the basement? It won't be a nice polite interrogation. It'll be torture.

You can bet we're ready to use torture in Iraq, no matter what the papers say. It's basic practice in counter-insurgency warfare. We probably farm it out to Iraqis so we can deny taking part, but we're doing it.

I don’t believe the Americans are using torture in Iraq, that’s the stuff of conspiracy thinking – in this world such a thing couldn’t remain secret. But the other side can – and I’m sure it does.

Gary, try thinking about it for a second, actually thinking like an Iraqi villager: You may have some opinions, but mostly you just want to live what you’re used to thinking of as a normal life. There are some powerful people in town, powerful because they have guns and are ruthless. They have powerful friends in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia who support them. They know you, and your family, and what you do – everything about you, because you and everyone else in town have lived there for generations. And they won’t wait for proof before they come for you. Any weirdness is suspect. If you’re a little odd, or doing drugs, or suddenly successful in business – it’s because you’re a collaborator.

That’s what gives the terrorists such freedom of movement around Fallujah, and in the Palestinian territories – but not in most of Iraq. The only way to beat it is from the inside; you need to understand the who’s who in the local scene. Israelis, Kurds, and the new central government in Iraq understand this. We can win this war.

Comment:

I am confused you say "I don’t believe the Americans are using torture in Iraq" but this is dated july 6, 2004 well after the abugrahab came out.

You also mentioned how Gary described an iraqi villager. I think Gary was not referring to a typical villager. He was reffering to a typical teenage, hot headed shite insurgent. In other articles Gary states that most villagers just want to get through it alive.

Posted by: Joseph Fallon at July 9, 2004 11:38 AM Permalink

Comment:

I was referring to torture for the purpose of extracting information. What happened in Abu Ghraib was a bunch of bullies "having fun".

Gary's point was that in a typical village everyone knows who’s doing what, and if the secret doesn't get out it's because everybody supports it. I agree with the first part of his analysis but point out that there is a different reason the secret doesn't get out - that the bad guys also know who's doing what and won't hesitate to kill you.

Posted by: David Boxenhorn at July 9, 2004 02:48 PM Permalink

Comment:

I don’t believe the Americans are using torture in Iraq, that’s the stuff of conspiracy thinking – in this world such a thing couldn’t remain secret.

Are you kidding me? It's not secret or a conspiracy theory at all! It's documented by the US Army, International Red Cross, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and many many others. It's well docmented that:

1) The Office of Legal Counsel (in the Justice Dept) wrote a brief (dated 01 Aug 2002) justifying torture, saying the Geneva conventions didn't apply, saying the President could break laws banning torture, and providing US gov't personnel (soldiers, etc.) legal strategies to avoid prosecution and conviction.

2) Gen. Miller was sent to Gitmo, then Iraq, to push more 'aggressive' interrogation techniques.

3) Several prisonors, including an Iraqi general, have died during interrogation. There were ~ 70 or 80 active investigations into such homicides in the Army as of a month or two ago.

4) The International Committee for the Red Cross; General Taguba, appointed to investigate these issues by the US Army; and many others have documented these issues.

These aren't conspiracy theorists and you can download and read everything I've mentioned above -- and I'm just talking off the top of my head. There's much, much more. The Washington Post has many of the documents for free.

You can easily find the documents mentioned above. Here's a bunch of articles:

"The Roots of Torture" Newsweek ~ 24 May '04

"TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB" by SEYMOUR M. HERSH, New Yorker ~30 Apr 04

"GI: Boy mistreated to get dad to talk" Chicgo Tribune 20 May 04

"Abuse of Captives More Widespread, Says Army Survey" NY Times 26 May 04

"Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations" NY Times 13 May 04

"Rumsfeld Issued an Order to Hide Detainee in Iraq" NY Times 17 Jun 04

"'Beyond human imagination'" Toronto Globe and Mail 05 Nov 2003 (or just search the web for "Maher Arar" stories)

"General Advised on Use of Dogs In Iraq Prison, Army Report Says" Wall St Journal 26 May 04

"Rumsfeld Approved Methods For Guantanamo Interrogations" Wall St Journal 10 Jun 04

"System Failures Cited for Delayed Action on Abuses" Washington Post 20 May 04

"Angry Ex-Detainees Tell of Abuse" Wash Post 03 May 04

"Tough New Tactics by U.S. Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns" NY Times ~06 Dec 03 "American soldiers ... have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas ..."

"U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations; 'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities" Wash Post 26 Dec 02

Posted by: Evidence at August 23, 2004 11:08 PM Permalink

The War Nerd

Amritas is becoming a fan of Gary Brecher, the War Nerd. After reading his piece on torture, I was going to bring Amritas to task, but then I decided to read some more first, and my reaction is a bit more complex. But don’t forget, the guy’s a sociopath. Just read his self-introduction:

Anyway, war-wise it's been a pretty good year. Let's start with the WTC. Technically that wasn't an act of war, and also it happened last year, but you have to mention it because it was just so beautiful. Come on, be honest, it was beautiful.

It was like a two-course dessert. First there was the towers falling down in slo-mo, over and over. Which was really, really beautiful. Don't tell me you didn't watch them fall about a million times in a row. That was the first time an office building ever got beautiful in the history of the world.

The best war is when you can hate both sides, and that's how it was with the WTC. I cheered those jets. I work in like a ten-story version of those towers, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one who perks up every time a plane gets close to the building. Everybody cheers the planes now. Until those planes hit the WTC nobody dreamed you could knock down an American corporation building. Nobody ever thought one would come down. And when they did, damn! It was like the noche triste, when Aztecs made the Conquistadors bleed for the first time and said, "Hey these aren't magic six-legged metal monsters, they're just a bunch of victims like us!"

It makes me sick just to have those words in my blog, but I don’t want you to miss them. He does say some insightful things, like my quote from two posts down – he certainly knows something. And he does a good job of making his subject interesting, and brutally honest. But he also loves conspiracy theories, as I point out in the previous post. For example:

Iraq was a fantasy story for Bush's people right from the start. The NeoCon commissars like Perle and Wolfowitz went around saying we'd be "welcomed with open arms" in Baghdad because we were bringing "freedom and democracy," two things that sell worse than women's soccer in the Middle East. I don't know where they got this insane idea. It's got something to do with Israel wanting Iraq out of the way; Perle and Wolfowitz are Israeli/Likud policy wonks from way back.

As if only Israel wanted (Saddam's) Iraq out of the way, and Perle and Wolfowitz were secretly in its employ. And as if nobody in Iraq is cheering democracy, and anyone who does must have some secret agenda.

There's another reason we can't see Iraq as clearly as Afghanistan. More like three reasons tied up in one: Cheney, oil, money. Cheney wants our troops to stick around like unpaid security guards for all his Halliburton kickback cronies while they suck out the crude, drive the price per barrel down, and teach the Saudis some humility.

As if there were no other reason for driving the price of oil down but to line the pockets of Halliburton and settle a personal grudge with the Saudis. Seems Cheney’s pretty loyal to his friends – oh, I forgot, if you believe in conspiracies it’s easy for Cheney to have secret financial ties.

Understand, I don’t have any problem with being interested in war. There’s a lot to be interested in: strategy, tactics, the matching of wits, creative use of resources. But the best part for Gary seems to be the death and misery. The rest is action, since every show has to have a storyline. Take a look at this:

So back to the Merkava. A great design, yes. But the whole greatness of the design advertises the weakness of the Israelis: they don't like taking casualties. You're thinking, "Nobody likes it you jerk!" Except that's totally untrue. Lots of places like taking casualties. The Shiites - they never felt prouder or happier. The Russians under Stalin - they died crying for joy. All you f***ing happy people - you think everybody's like you? Lots of people want to die. I want to die! There's more like me than like you, you smug bastards.

How do I relate to this mix of wisdom, honesty, and malady? I don’t know, but I’m not going back, it makes me sick. All I can say is caveat emptor – buyer beware!

Amends

Amritas makes amends. It’s hard for me to express how weirdly disturbing it was for me to read Brecher. Reading Marxist or Nazi polemics, for instance, is totally different – I might feel disgust, anger, or even fear, but I also find it boring. Perhaps it is because it’s familiar, and totally debunked, any germs of positive originality already adopted by some mainstream, and no longer belonging to their originators.

In contrast, Brecher seems to have a lot of original thoughts worth examining, and many which seem to be illuminating – mixed in with a lot of nonsense, clearly the product of a sick mind out of touch with the world. Am I looking at a would-be Hitler or Mao? We like to portray them as lunatics, but clearly they must have understood a lot about the world in order to achieve power and maintain it. But they were also crazy. Could their theories have been interesting in their time in the same way as Brecher’s?

I did get something from reading Brecher (I read about half of his articles, and I don’t intend to read any more), I quoted one example on this blog before I had grasped the nature of his work as a whole. But that’s because I already have a fairly well developed picture of the subjects he reviews. I can lift his points out of their contexts, and drop them into my own inner context, free of crazy conspiracy theories, and love of gore. For example, he makes a point about primitive (tribal) warfare, and points out that this was the nature of European war as recently as thousand years ago. I already knew that, I just never thought about it quite this way before. The same goes for the quote below – it is common, in the circles I travel in, to point out how the Holocaust was perpetrated by the most “civilized” people in the world, this quote just extends the example to Rwanda. I also think he got half way to the truth in his piece about torture in Iraq. Being a resident of the Middle East, I was able to see where he went wrong. I wonder if he would recognize the truth if he read my post, or would it be unbeautiful to his sick mind?

The US Constitution – a system

Steven Den Beste posts about the US Constitution. As a systems lover, I have always loved the US Constitution. It is a tremendously elegant solution – it solves a complex problem in a simple way. There are several parts to the problem (which is what makes it complex). The part I want to talk about right now is balancing effectively with democracy.

The problem is this: Being as democratic as possible means involving the most number of people, the most number of opinions, and representing the people as accurately as possible. Being effective requires clearly stated goals, clear lines of authority, and clear accountability. The US addresses this problem though separation of powers – having separately elected legislative and executive branches of government. The legislative branch is optimized branch is optimized for democracy, and the executive branch is optimized for effectiveness.

Usually the separation of powers is presented as a means of preventing tyranny through the creation of separate authorities, which check and balance each other (this discussion also includes the judicial branch, which is not directly relevant to me at the moment), and prevent any one institution from becoming too powerful. It is that too, which is one reason the US Constitution is so elegant.

The parliamentary system is just the opposite. In the parliamentary system, all power rests with parliament. The Prime Minister is “first among equals” – in other words, derives all power from parliament. Parliament is the seat of both legislative and executive power (and in some countries, judicial power as well). Paradoxically, this system tends to concentrate power in the Prime Minister, who is not only the chief executive, but also the chief legislator.

It is interesting that both systems developed from the English parliamentary system. At the time the United States of America was formed, the British system looked remarkably like the US system as specified by the constitution. The King was the chief executive, and Parliament consisted of two chambers: the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. The US constitution takes this system and democratizes it. The lower house (Commons in England, Representatives in the US) represents the people in both. The upper house (Lords in England, Senate in US), instead of representing the aristocracy, represents the states. And the inherited position of King becomes the elected position of President. The powers and relationships of the three institutions are essentially the same.

While the US democratized the English system of government, the English systematized the democracy. In England, the democratically elected House of Commons (yes, I know its democracy also developed over time) gradually gained power at the expense of the King and the House of Lords, until today it’s practically all-powerful.

The Israeli system has a different history. Like the US and English systems, it wasn’t created from whole cloth. It derives from the World Zionist Congress. The World Zionist Congress was an umbrella organization for Zionist organizations. (There is some confusion about the meaning of the word Zionist: It means Israeli Patriot.) The British Mandate, and the Turks before them, provided few of the services we usually think of governments providing today: education, health, etc. As a result, the Jews of the area organized what amounted to voluntary governments to provide them. These organizations elected delegates to the World Zionist Congress in proportion to their membership – the “proportional representation system”. After independence, the Israeli parliament was created: the Knesset, and the Zionist organizations became parties. The method of electing Knesset members was the same as the method of electing WZC delegates.

The result was a system which is strikingly ill-suited to governing. (The purpose of the WZC was not to govern.) The fact that it functions at all is testimony to Israelis’ democratic nature. Before I go into details, lets talk about the system’s good points. Almost none of the pre-state parties still survive, one of their few relics is Israel’s two sports leagues: Maccabi and Betar, which were the sport clubs of Mapai (Ben Gurion’s party) and Herut (Begin’s party) respectively. But a myriad of new parties have sprung up, representing a multidimensional range of ideologies. This makes voting a lot more fun, instead of voting for the lesser of two evils, most voters get to choose between several parties that they like. The other thing that makes voting fun is that every vote counts. The more votes your party gets, the greater its representation – it’s not just win/lose. The system can also be said to be more democratic, since a far larger range of voices is heard in Knesset than is heard in the constituency-based US Congress, or British Parliament.

The downside is that the system is tremendously lacking in effectiveness. The major part of the problem is the sheer number of parties – all of which are in an endless battle of shifting alliances, seeking to undermine each other. The primary concern of every Israeli prime minister is holding the governing coalition together. That doesn’t leave much time for everything else, i.e. governing the country. An important, but little-known contributory factor is the fact that Knesset members compete directly with one another in each election, whereas in a constituency system incumbents are united in competing with non-incumbents in the next election, so they can more easily feel like peers, and there is no direct benefit to discrediting your fellow legislator.

It is unfortunate that the proportional representation system should be combined with the parliamentary system. As in the US, it is possible to separate the executive from the legislature, and optimize each in a different way. Israel botched an attempt to do just that a few years ago when it decided to directly elect the Prime Minister – without providing for separation of powers. The result was the worst of both systems – the directly elected Prime Minister found it impossible to govern – and the change was reversed before the last round of elections. I fear that change has been discredited forever, and for the foreseeable future we’ll just have to muddle through.

The importance of being diverse

I have encountered a link (via John Ray) so important, that for the first time I’ve mirrored it on my own blog. It is a review of The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. Of course, having just encountered it, I haven’t (yet) read the book, so what you see here is based on the review.

Based on my posts, many of you have probably decided that I am a libertarian. While I advocate some of the same policies, notably less government intervention, I am not. I might be more aptly described as a diversitarian (I just made that up) – I want to promote the maximum degree of diversity in society, both among individuals and groups. Not only do I think that freedom to pursue diverse goals and lifestyles maximizes happiness, I also think that it is the best recipe for progress (the definition of which itself benefits from diverse thinking). Thus I am not necessarily against government intervention, I am just skeptical of it. I do think there are a fair number of exceptions where government intervention promotes diversity rather than inhibiting it, such as anti-trust laws, one example of where I part ways with libertarians.

Now, I want to be clear that when I speak of diversity, I am primarily talking about diversity of thinking – both rational and intuitive thinking. I suppose genetic diversity is also important, though pigmentation diversity (what you most often hear called diversity) is probably one of the least important of all.

"Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." This is so even when "most of the people within the group are not especially well-informed or rational." What is wonderful, and surprising, is that "when our imperfect judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often excellent."

Surowiecki does not make the implausible suggestion that all crowds are wise. To qualify as such, a crowd needs to satisfy three conditions. It must be diverse; its members must be independent; and it must have a "particular kind of decentralization." Each of these conditions is designed to ensure what most interests Surowiecki, which is the emergence and the aggregation of information that group members have. Diversity is important simply to ensure that the group has a lot of information. If a crowd consists of nearly identical people, it is unlikely to be wise, because the group will not know more than the individuals of whom it is composed.

This is why diversity is so important to me. I want to live in a society of diverse individuals and groups. Since so much of who we are is determined in our formative years, and so much of those years is spent in school, I feel it is particularly important to have a diverse school system – not one of government-imposed uniformity. School vouchers would elegantly achieve this goal, because in addition they would give parents the freedom to choose – solving several problems at once. Choice almost universally promotes happiness, welfare, quality and efficiency – in addition to diversity.

The author of the review then goes on to ridicule some of Surowiecki’s conclusions:

Diversity is usually good, above all because it allows groups to acquire more information. But what is needed is not diversity as such, but diversity of the right kind. NASA's judgment would not have been improved if the relevant officials had included members of the Flat Earth Society, or people who believed that aliens are among us or that space flight is simply impossible.

Who will decide what’s the “right kind” of diversity?

What this fails to take into account (as usual) is feedback. Over time, the group will learn who is right and who is wrong, and about which questions. Of course, I don’t expect such a group, if large enough, to ever reach equilibrium. But this lack of equilibrium is a good thing – it shows that given sufficient diversity there’s always something to learn.

The Security Myth

Security is a big deal in my business – software. Most of the time when people talk about the issue, they use the terms “secure” or “insecure”. They ask, “How can I make this secure?” or “is this secure?” Well, the answer is no. Nothing is ever secure. Think about software security like the security of your house: is it secure? Well, it’s pretty secure, but if someone really wanted to… What about your bank? More secure. What about the White House? Etc. There are lots of ways to make things more secure: walls, guards, cameras, but you can never be sure when someone will think of a way to break in, or when someone will make a mistake that lets someone in. The only thing you can be sure of is that lots of people are trying to break into lots of places, and sometimes they will succeed. The missing ingredient is policing. You can’t think of security as a static thing – put up your defenses and rest securely – you have to think of it as an ongoing battle, that sometimes you’ll lose.

I was thinking of these things while reading Ten lessons to take away from Iraq (via Amritas). I disagree, more or less, with all ten. Many of them were truisms, like “ideology makes a poor substitute for strategy” or “wars leave loose ends” others were misleading, like “the myth of American casualty aversion is just that” and “so too with the myth of an American genius for spreading democracy” still others were simply untrue, like “Israel’s war is not our war”. All explicitly criticize the policies of the Bush administration. The fact is that for the first time in decades, terrorism is on the retreat. We will never “win” the war against terrorism in the sense that it will disappear completely – have we “won” the war against crime? But we can make the world much safer than it is buy making a serious (and continual) effort to combat it. At the present time, most terrorism is state-sponsored, and we know which states they are, the main ones: Iran, North Korea, Syria, Saudi Arabia. Since 9/11 we have eliminated three: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. That’s a pretty impressive record, and the results show. Since 9/11 terrorism in Israel is down significantly (by something like 90%), incidentally disproving “lesson 4”.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that Bush is doing a pretty amazing job. He’s done it by pursuing a very politically incorrect policy: eliminating regimes that support terror. In my opinion, his biggest contribution to world progress is breaking that taboo. I don’t know if Iraq will end up democratic, but even a corrupt military dictatorship like Egypt is infinitely better than Saddam’s Iraq. Better, but still less than democracy, would be an authoritarian regime that can lead to democracy, like those that preceded democracy in South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile. The belief that anything less than perfect is failure is, in my mind, another kind of evil.

Take a look at this fiskable claim:

Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed to finish the job that Bush’s father had left undone in 1991. Oust Saddam Hussein, the war’s supporters promised, and all sorts of good things were sure to follow. War would transform Iraq into the first Arab democracy, usher the Middle East into an era of lasting peace, and nudge Islam toward moderation and modernity. Today, the Ba’athist regime is gone, but none of the predicted benefits seems likely to materialize. Instead the United States has exchanged the limited burdens of containment for the far more onerous burdens of occupation. We have overthrown a tin-pot dictator posing no immediate threat to the United States and thereby energized and encouraged far more dangerous enemies.

It begins with the canard that the Iraq war is some kind of family feud (the Bushes and the Saddams), and continues by dismissing the idea that, “all sorts of good things were sure to follow.” Well, all sorts of good things are following, and I expect it to continue. As I said, all is not perfect, neither do I expect it to be perfect in the future, but “none of the predicted benefits seems likely to materialize” is already false. How can anyone make such an assertion to even a moderately well informed audience? Worse than that is the last sentence, the war has definitely NOT “energized and encouraged far more dangerous enemies”. The enemies of the free world are weakened and discouraged. What energizes and encourages them is the possibility that, having come this far, we might just give up.

Opportunity Knocks

Life is chaos. Or, as Forrest Gump would say, “Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're going to get.”

Amritas discovers (from Mark Evanier):

1. The system is not fair.
2. It's never going to be fair.
3. You have two choices: Play under the system, as it is, or get out.
4. If it should happen to pay off, it pays off big.

This is especially evident in show business – and entrepreneurship – and, I suppose, many other professions. Only a few (doctors and accountants come to mind) have a clear path to success, if you can climb it. In general, entrepreneurship has the same problem as show business:

Show Business purports to be a meritocracy, which means that everyone gets rewarded according to their abilities. The trouble is that it's a meritocracy wherein, as William Goldman has noted, Nobody knows anything.

It's all a matter of educated guesses, hunches, whims, wishful thinking and, often, someone making the choice that they're least likely to be blamed for if there's a train wreck. This doesn't mean that a person's track record and skills count for nothing. It just means that the people who do the choosing -- who decide who gets what job, who gets to be a movie star, whose screenplay get filmed -- sometimes pick wrong. Sometimes, they aren't even sure what they want and it turns into a game of eenie-meenie-minie-mo.

In fact, the best ideas are the ones nobody gets – how many people would get the World Wide Web, before it was the World Wide Web? Evanier again:

Often, in order to reach the kind of non-creative folks who invariably wind up in the jobs where they say yea or nay to your creative ideas, you have to tap dance. You explain your idea in terms of something they've seen, something that's a proven success. That way, they at least have a reference point...a precedent of some security.

The best ideas are the ones that can’t be explained “in terms of something they’ve seen”.

In any case my advice is this: Know yourself. Define your goals as broadly as possible. Have as many goals as possible. Keep an open mind.

And most of all: When opportunity knocks – open the door!

Israel's tax burden among highest in West

What we are up against:

Israel's tax burden is among the highest in the West, reaching 39.1% of GDP, compared with 32.5% among developing countries and the OECD average of 36.9%.

Heroic Struggle

I came across an old post by Kim du Toit about his visit to Dachau. In light of yesterday’s post, I was struck by this comment:

Only two barrack buildings remain. The other thirty are marked simply by their foundations, which are all that remain. They are laid out in orderly rows, like huge gravestones, which is what they really are. The buildings are gone, and now, most of their inhabitants are gone too. The fortunate ones died early, the less-fortunate ones died after years of pain and torment, and the very fortunate ones were liberated by the U.S. Army.

Do you want to be fortunate and give up?

Or keep going and suffer years of pain and torment?

And perhaps live to be free (though the odds are against you)?

Or maybe… you can escape?

Jews and Arabs

I was entertained by this reminiscence by Ray Hanania:

I grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. In fact, many Arabs I knew grew up in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, because Arabs and Jews actually have much in common. And were it not for the Arab-Israeli wars, we would have had a fine existence together, eating the same foods, sharing the same ties to biblical history (my last name is a Hebrew word that means "God has been Gracious"), and boasting the same kind of overbearing mothers.

He tells how Jews and Arabs fought for American support on university campuses:

The Jewish students would try to do it by organizing festivals recognizing Israel's independence every May. They'd hold rallies at the Circle Forum, where they would sing folk songs, hold candlelight vigils, recite poetry, hold hands and dance, and eat "Israeli foods" like wariq duwally, felafil, and humos.

The Arab students would do it by organizing "Palestine Day" protests -- marking the day the Israelis tookover Palestine -- and surrounding the Jewish students. They waved placards written in Arabic, chanted Marxist slogans, embraced weird organizations, and slung angry epithets at the Jewish students.

And what it means to be an Arab reporter:

Arabs dislike reporters. That's because there is no such thing as true journalism in the Middle East. Arabs hate to admit it, but journalists in the Arab world are synonymous with political hacks, government shills employed by government-controlled newspapers and television and radio stations that are filled with government-controlled propaganda, high with emotion and nearly always wrong.

He also spreads a few lies (I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s misinformed. Israeli Arabs openly support our enemies without retribution.)

While the Arabs have stringent controls over their media, so do the Israelis, who impose harsh censorship on the Arab press. They frequently jail Arab reporters, another reason to stay out of the business.

He asks hard questions:

Eban was born "Aubrey Solomon" in Cape Town, South Africa. My dad was born in Jerusalem. "How come you can go to Jerusalem anytime you want and become a citizen of Israel, and I can't?" I asked.

But doesn’t wait for an answer:

There are over three million Jews in Israel from Arab countries (including their descendents) how come they can’t go back? There are thousands of Jews born and raised in Gaza and the West Bank, how come they have no right to live there when millions of Arabs who have never lived there claim that right?

Icelandic Islam

Here’s one for the Great Auk. What do you think of this, by Anna Linda Traustadóttir an Icelandic-Syrian Muslim woman?

I've also since got some new Muslim girlfriends over the Internet. Whilst searching the net, I came across an Icelandic Muslim site: www.islam.is, and I contacted the writer. We started a correspondence. Around New Year's 2004, I sent her a report I wrote entitled "Islam in Iceland 2003," which I am submitting to the Saudi Government, she suggested we three work on the translation of the Qur'an from Arabic to Icelandic (Kóraninn), as she also speaks Arabic. So it seems that we will be three Icelandic Muslim women working on translating the Arabic Qur'an. For those of you looking for a good English version, I’ve heard the Muhammad Asad translation is also very direct, but I myself have yet to get hold of it.

I’d also really like to know what you think of that Icelandic Islamic site – Iceland is so small, that if you don’t know these people personally, you surely know people who know them.

UPDATE: Bjarni responds. Excerpt:

The thing is that Iceland has the same problem as many western countries – rising anti-semitism disguised as criticism of the Israeli government. Talk for more than a couple of minutes with these people (more on the left than the right, but there are lots of anti-Israelites on the right as well), and they start telling you how the Jews control America, they control American TV and Hollywood, they control the IMF and the World Bank etc. etc.

I just thought it was jarring and exotic to think of Islam in Iceland. More:

There is a term often used here, barnatrú, or child’s faith. This is the faith that you take with you into adulthood from the time you were a child. This is often a rather generalized version of Christianity, you don’t qoute chapter and verse, but you know your stories and the morals of the faith and you consider yourself a Christian. This is, I think, one reason why many Icelandic Christians have no problems with single mothers or homosexuality – it may contradict some verses in the Bible, but it isn’t in conflict with the more basic, maybe naive, barnatrú.

I, for example, consider myself Christian. I don’t go to church, and I have never read the Bible from cover to cover. My barnatrú tells me that God isn’t going to punish me for using the reason or conscience that He gave me and I trust those better than most single bible verses.

I find this interesting because in Judaism there’s an oral tradition – the Talmud – alongside the written tradition – the Bible – which interprets it in sometimes surprising ways. But in Judaism it is this tradition that is considered correct. Is the Talmud the record of the Jewish barnatrú?

UPDATE: Amritas tells us the etymology of barnatrú. I was wondering about that.

UPDATE: Bjarni responds again.

UPDATE: Bjarni answers Amritas.

Comment:

Given that I know next to nothing about the Talmud, this is my take on the Barnatrú/Talmud thing.

It's a mistake to think that the Barnatrú is in any way a regimented faith. It might even be called Christianity for dummies, or Christianity Light. Barnatrú has sometimes had a "simpleton" stamp on it - stupid peas