Iraq Poll Results

The data from a poll commissioned by Investor's Business Daily are very interesting and well worth a look. I hope other polling outfits will do similar polls to see how robust these results are.

What they suggest to me is that Congressional Democrats and Presidential candidates had better be careful, lest they follow Gen. John Murtha and his army of antiwar groupies straight off an electoral cliff. There are real dangers in being as heavily invested in U.S. defeat as the Democrats have become lately; it is not an attractive stance to most Americans. If the "surge" shows success, they will find themselves with a problem, one that their media allies will not be able to paper over.

John Murtha is a bad egg, and it really shouldn't take much discernment to recognize that; the guy smells from way off. Even the Washington Post has had enough of his act.

Byron

Multi-culti II

The pure spirit in us may safely cultivate universal sympathies; for it can have no grudge against anything...but the man must remain loyal to himself and his traditions, or he will be morally a eunuch and a secret hater of all mankind.

Geo. Santayana (1953)

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Byron's musings follow (snowed in here), which you are encouraged to skip:

Today's multiculturalism seems to me to have a contradiction at its core, because it assumes that no society will ever force the issue by insisting on beliefs and practices that are anathema to others. Multiculturalism thus assumes that cultures won't be very different from one another, an assumption that renders the whole scheme unproblematic, because you are never faced with the decision of how to respond to the utterly unacceptable in another culture. In other words, multiculturalism makes sense only as long as cultures are not very multi.

But that describes an ideal world, not the real one. The problem is that multiculturalists nevertheless want to behave as if the ideal is real. One way that shows up is that obvious outrages (e.g., brutal subjugation of women, execution of homosexuals) evoke a reflexive tendency to make excuses for them, or to pretend they don't exist by refusing to mention or discuss them. Another way it shows up is in the tendency to condemn as cultural imperialism any action taken against the outrage. We have lately been treated to certain internationalists arguing that Iran's nuclear program is not aimed at producing atomic weapons, which takes the concept of the benefit of the doubt to an absurdly dangerous extreme; the virtual silence of Western women's organizations about the treatment of women in Islamic societies has been similarly noteworthy.

This kind of thinking puts an idealistic theory about cultural differences ahead of the facts of the real world of actually existing cultures and their aims and activities. I can't think of when that approach to the world has ever turned out to be a good idea. It has long been a firm principle on the Left that no internal outrage can ever justify intervention by another state, a stipulation that goes back to the goal of protecting fledgling socialist revolutions from capitalist overthrow. If there is a Leftist bottom line in international relations, this is it: There can be no justification for intervention across a national border. For example, the fact that some regime is killing every domestic Jew it can lay hands on, while a terrible thing, cannot justify invasion by outside powers. This may be the sort of thing Santayana had in mind when he wrote of being a moral eunuch.

There lurks in my argument a presumption for the superiority of the values of the Western Enlightenment. But I think that presumption is supported, so far at least, by the greater ability of liberal societies to survive in military and economic competition with the other shop. But there are interesting tests of that view ongoing, so stay tuned.

Byron

Climate

It is possible that the global warming alarmists are entirely correct, but at this point nobody knows. Meanwhile, the premature consensus that is being enforced has to be treated with skepticism. Theoretical models of economic growth are not very good at predicting the behavior of man-made economic systems even 2 or 3 years into the future. The idea that accurate predictions about poorly-specified and uncontrolled natural systems of infinitely greater complexity can be made for long future time periods seems to me ridiculous on its face. Yet, we have claims being taken seriously that introducing this or that policy change, or failing to, will have effects of x tenths of a degree in average global temperatures 50 or 100 years out. Sorry, I find that not just implausible, but absurdly so.

(Here's a cautionary note: Many experiments in social psychology have demonstrated that in situations of ambiguity, people's opinions will tend to converge on a common, consensus judgment. The reason seems to be that people generally find a situation of uncertainty and ambiguity to be aversive, and we will take the steps available to us to reduce or eliminate the ambiguity. If there is good objective evidence at hand, judgments will converge appropriately. But the absence of objective evidence is no barrier to consensus; in that case, the agreement of others becomes a kind of "evidence," and people will escape uncomfortable ambiguity by, in effect, pooling their ignorance to arrive at a consensus judgment. The consensus, in that case, is based on nothing objective, and it bears no necessary relation to reality whatsoever. But, once arrived at, the consensus opinion may be very strongly held, nevertheless, and vigorously enforced within the group. This is sometimes referred to as "Groupthink." With respect to climate change, the issue is time-pressured, with claims of imminent disaster; it is potentially of great important for people pursuing various environmental, economic, and political agendas; and the data are weak and ambiguous. That the pressure for a social consensus would be correspondingly intense is completely predicable. It's a classic case, tailor-made to generate a whole series of scientific and public policy missteps, starting with a serious over-estimation of the state of objective scientific knowledge, especially the accuracy of climate prediction models.)

All that said, some of the policy steps being advocated are good ideas regardless of the true facts about climate change. Others are wrong-headed no matter what. Lowering the amount of CO2 emitted and reducing dependence on oil, especially Mid-East oil, are worth doing, even if they have no significant effect on global temperatures. Sacrificing economic growth on a large scale and investing huge amounts of money to chase tiny theoretical reductions in the rate of temperature rise are bad ideas no matter what the facts about global warming.

Byron