Opportunity amidst the Rhetoric Posted by Lorelei Kelly

I heard a speech recently by Iraq war critic Zbigniew Brzezinski.  He spoke of how, during the Cold War, Americans and their leaders faced their common threat with a unifying spirit of confidence. In contrast, today's common sentiment is fear--the result of failed leadership.

Democrats and their progressive supporters take note: don't let the recent escalation of the Iraq rhetoric muddle a fundamental truth that could redefine the terms of the debate about where America is headed in the future.  Progressives need an "eyes on the prize" framework for our discussions on Iraq-- something that resonates beyond "we can do better" and "change the course."  After all, the Bush administration and their conservative supporters have finally admitted that good government--lots of it-- is their exit strategy.  Meanwhile, this week's conservative  National Review (their 50th anniversary edition) contains a trance-like anti-government theme. Now is the time for progressives to step in and redefine what this all means with a better philosophy of governing.

Yesterday the New York Times published a piece on how the White House has recognized the need to cut the military budget.  We're spending 441 billion a year on defense and that doesn't even include the cost of two ongoing wars.  This would seem to be a perfect opportunity to re-assess our long-term security needs and prioritize  human resources (military and otherwise) over hardware. Yet Congress, the Pentagon and the defense industry are working to crush this possibility.  They are already talking about personnel cuts to pay for obsolete weapons systems--even at a time when it could not be more obvious that winning today's wars requires people skills across the US government--at least as much as hardware.

Here's where a good progressive and pro-military framework comes in.  If I were a progressive candidate and I wanted to firmly establish pro-military credentials in the midst of the withdraw/stay the course cacaphony, I would start off by saying "Whatever happens in Iraq is going to have significant implications for Americans and for Iraqis for years to come."

Then point out that, irregardless of timelines, if we want to both lower military numbers AND be responsible to the Iraqi people,  then it's the US military who will be doing much of the work. This point brings up the division of labor.  Why does the military have to do all the work?  Here is a chance to bring in some post-Cold War history, about how our military has become quite good at non-traditional missions that involve both combat, reconstruction and even reconciliation.  But this is also the chance to pivot to the big philosophical framework: The military will be involved in Iraq because it is the only US government institution that works, and we need to change that.   Thirty years of conservative domination in American politics has badly hurt our government.   Commercialization and corruption are just two examples of  public decay.

In contrast, the military is a fine public servant because we devote resources to it. We educate and train its people and  build its institutional memory. We make it a priority and a source of pride.  But now we've harmed it as well--through over-use and privatization. For this, too, we can point to the conservatives.

How can we make the rest of our government serve the American public as well as our military?  This should be the progressive rallying cry to today's fear-struck masses.  What's good for Iraqis should be good for Americans,  too.

and Remember Pearl Harbor

Comments

[Dan Kervick]

He spoke of how, during the Cold War, Americans and their leaders faced their common threat with a unifying spirit of confidence. In contrast, today's common sentiment is fear--the result of failed leadership.

Wow. I suppose people are capable of romanticizing anything once it recedes far enough into history. Let's take a little stroll down our cultural and political memory lane, shall we? Recall:

The Army McCarthy hearings; the blacklist; duck and cover; Sputnik; the missile gap; the Iron curtain; the domino theory; On The Beach; the Manchurian Candidate; the Cuban Missile Crisis; Korea; Vietnam; The Day After; U2s; FBI wiretapping; mutually assured destruction; Civil Defense siren tests; Checkpoint Charlie; nuclear shelter signs on school buildings; East Germany; West Germany; backyard nuclear shelters; the John Birch Society; the fifth column; Soviet May Day parades with nuclear missile floats; the Hydrogen Bomb tests; the Kennedy Assassination; NATO; the Warsaw pact; Witness; the Allende assasination; "precious bodily fluids"; ICBMs; "pinkos"; MIRVs; battlefied nuclear weapons; "We will bury you!"; the Daisy commercial; a nuclear first-strike policy in Europe; the KGB and the CIA; nuclear winter; the MX missile; the neutron bomb.

The Cold War was several consecutive decades of inescapable, monotonous, draining fear and paranoia - a perpetual campaign of government warnings and fear-mongering, and public suspicion of hidden enemies and threats, overlaid with the suffocating terror of impending nuclear doom. It was a prolonged dose of spiritual poison, and the sickness continues into the present day.

Confident? Until the very day we won, prominent leaders warned us daily we were falling behind and losing.

Unified? Yeah, I guess. Except for the one half of the country that was convinced the other half of the country were traitors.

While I recognize the government's continuing use of fear today, I personally don't feel near as much fear as I did during the Cold War. As a boy and young man, I was morally certain that I would never see my thirties. The threat of the odd terrorist attack doesn't spook me nearly so much as did all those hairtrigger Soviet ICBM's with my name on them.

[Donald Macdonald]

L. Kelly posts: Then point out that, irregardless of timelines, if we want to both lower military numbers AND be responsible. . .''
Irregardless? Come on, if you wanty to be taken seriously, use serious grammar.

[J Thomas]

I will consider people's ideas independent of their grammar. The important thing is to get the idea across. If I misunderstand what they're saying I'll respond to what I misunderstood.

[Jeff Younger]

In this case, 'irregardless' is probably soon to be an accepted word, if only for its widespread use.

The general point made by JThomas, “I will consider people's ideas independent of their grammar. The important thing is to get the idea across. If I misunderstand what they're saying I'll respond to what I misunderstood,” cannot be logically maintained.

Grammar indicates the relations of ideas. It is in fact the only way to indicate relations between ideas. Thus, ideas cannot be considered “independent of their grammar,” as J Thomas maintains.

That J Thomas usually “respond[s] to what...[he]...misunderstood” shows the practical uselessness of his approach.

[J Thomas]

When the meaning is clear, go with the meaning.

When the meaning is not clear, discuss the ambiguity.

This is not useless, this is how communication happens. When it does happen.

[Jeff Younger]

J Thomas, it is provable that you do not "discuss the ambiguity," but rather you make unwarranted inferences and improper characterizations to distort and misrepresent.

That is how communication stops, not how it happens.

[J Thomas]

Jeff, you are generalising from an example where your words looked to me unambiguous, but you said they weren't what you meant. After we established that you meant something else you wanted to discuss only my mistake in listening to you, and not the topic.

Which is where this discussion has gone, we've had one single post on the topic at hand.

[J Thomas]

Back to Lorelei's point, I have three concerns. Is it true? Is it an effective stand? How could it actually be done?

"In contrast, the military is a fine public servant because we devote resources to it."

Is this true? We've certainly devoted resources to it. How effective is it? We've seen that it's very effective at destroying third-world armies, at great environmental cost, with months of preparation time and prepositioning etc. And our navy owns the blue water. We have much more military than we need to beat third-world armies, and apparently not enough to beat first-world armies on their own ground. What's the mission? Is it to beat third-world armies and go home?

"Here is a chance to bring in some post-Cold War history, about how our military has become quite good at non-traditional missions that involve both combat, reconstruction and even reconciliation."

This probably needs to be expanded some. What are the post-Cold War examples? Panama? Haiti? Kuwait? Somalia? I'd like to believe it's true, I somehow have the general impression it's true, but then I look for examples I know something about and I'm coming up blank.

Then I look at what various military people say about these new missions. "Our job is to kill people and blow things up and we're real good at that."

"The military will be involved in Iraq because it is the only US government institution that works, and we need to change that."

I'm not clear that the military really works. It's hard to say whether it does, since a lot of its purpose is to deter. We kept the russians out of western europe for a very long time. How long did it take for the russians to notice that they were utterly dependent on western europe for their own economy, and that an invasion which left western europe a smoking ruin would not be good for them? I don't know. At some point our deterrence turned into a fantasy, but I don't know when.

When the task is to deter, you never really see the hits, you can only count the misses.

Our goals for our military are such a mess that it's hard to tell whether the military works or not.

And yet, on a tactical level our military really does work. People who've been through it have experienced that. Here's what I think is responsible for that.

1. Clear goals. Each unit is assigned a task that's easy to understand, and it's easy to understand the difference between success and failure. The steps needed to achieve the task may be quite complicated, but those steps are assigned to sub-units as tasks that are easy to understand.

2. Careful training. Each unit is trained to do the things they may be called upon to do. They don't have to make it up as they go along. The training is repeated until it's totally familiar.

3. Careful inspection. Each responsible individual is trained to inspect, rather than assuming the resources are available and the training is sufficient, he tests that it is so.

When the military does no better than the rest of government, it tends to be when these principles aren't followed. When the goals are not clear. When the training is skimped or the training doesn't cover the skills needed for the particular task. When the resources or trained people aren't available.

The first of those is vital. The civilians at the top are prone to assigning unclear goals. And the third, over a period of 8 to 12 years the funding is unreliable. Projects get cancelled, quantities get cut, the size of the military changes (and of course the mission changes considerably).

How could the rest of government benefit from the methods that work for the military?

First, they must be overtly ready for funding changes. The military is large, to some extent they can shift money around to patch funding holes. The smaller the government department the less stability they can expect in funding from year to year. And we can't expect to change that, it's part of how our democracy is intended to work.

The big problem with funding changes is personnel. The funding is cut and you have to lay off trained people. Then funding is restored and you have to train new ones. While they train they aren't fully ready to do the job, and then when they're trained you get another funding cut....

If the job can be broken down into simple tasks, then it would be possible to design, say, online training for those tasks. We could pay people, say, half-pay for the time they spend learning the job while they're unemployed. Get a pool of people who each are trained in half a dozen government jobs and when an opening shows up one of them takes it....

So the EPA or FEMA or whoever could each have 12,000 trained people who're ready to step in whenever funding is available. They won't be as effective as people who've actually been on the job, but lots better than plain new hires.

With the jobs broken down into simple tasks connected simply, it's easier to tell how well they're being done.

We'd need to simplify the tasks for the people who design the simple tasks too. It needs a quick feedback loop. The people who do the work (and the citizens they interact with) need a quick channel to say how the training fails to meet the goals. And updated training needs to be available quickly.

Could all that work? Our military now, fighting in iraq, needs a year of training for each year of fighting. Would other government employees need a day of updated training for each day working? We could hope it wouldn't take that much....

Inspection. Some fraction of each employee's work would be checked to make sure it was done correctly. (The testers would in some cases have exciting jobs. Women could be paid to wear sexy clothing and drive illegally to see whether traffic police behaved appropriately. Houses could be set up with video cameras for unsuspecting no-knock police squads to invade, and be critiqued on their performance. Etc.) The intention would not usually be to get the employees reprimanded, but to check the general level of training and correct deficiencies.

I think something along these lines might work. It has considerable overhead, but the obvious alternative requires highly-trained people who don't always get word of changes, and who are very hard to replace. There's a lot of hidden overhead that way.

Could we come up with ways to get the legislature to assign clearer goals when they provide funding? Maybe. But it would be hard for the legislature to enforce that on themselves. I'm hesitant to suggest rules for the House and Senate without any way to actually encourage them to follow the rules beyond suggesting the public vote out the worst offenders.

Could an effective campaign be built around something like this? I dunno. It's maybe too wonky. Easier to talk about just cutting government because it doesn't work than about how to make it work better. But maybe soon we'll be ready for something other than the easiest way to talk about it.

[Jeff Younger]

J thomas wrote, "Jeff, you are generalising from an example where your words looked to me unambiguous, but you said they weren't what you meant."

No, I'm pointing out that you make things up, posit them as facts, illogically infer their advocacy, then justify the subterfuge based on the irrelevance of grammar.

Classic dishonest rhetoric.

[J Thomas]

Jeff, attacking the character of the opposition is supposed to be the last resort, after you're losing every other argument. I suppose I should be flattered.

You repeatedly evade the issues.

[Jeff Younger]

J Thomas, I don't know anything about your character. I haven't commented on your character. You may honestly believe that honest argument allows you to make inferences for the other side. In that case, your character wouldn’t be the issue, but your knowledge of honest rhetoric and basic logic would be at issue. I can think of many other situations in which your penchant for misrepresentations would have nothing to do with your character.

So, you see, you have made another unwarranted inference – you claim I am attacking your character – yet all I reference are your writings. You clearly evade the issue, since the issue is your misrepresentations.

I only know that you have repeatedly misrepresented my writings by hugely unwarranted inferences. The proof is in plain HTML. Other writers, even liberal ones, were taken in by your misrepresentations.

If you had no intention of misrepresentation, I'll accept an apology. I’m willing to warrant that you acted without malicious intent.

I'm even willing to accept some of the blame for using unfamiliar diplomatic terms --- Dan Kervick pointed that out to me as a valid criticism. But I still honestly think you need to reconsider your approach to rhetoric.

[J Thomas]

Jeff, the longer we discuss this meta-issue instead of the actual issues, the more you succeed at evading the important topics where your best rhetoric is (maybe) inadequate? But I'll go along a little bit.

"Classic dishonest rhetoric."

"Well, you've now shown yourself to be dishonest."

You said I'm dishonest.

"Your ethics are repugnant, but I appreciate your honesty."

Well, maybe you changed your mind.

"J Thomas, you’re a sophist. You don't seek to understand but rather to obfuscate."

"You'll make a fine conservative one day."

That last was absolutely the worst smear on my character. You implied that I'm heading toward being an unethical lying sophist all in one sentence. ;)

"I haven't commented on your character."

It bothers me a little bit that you insist the way you use words is the correct way and is the only correct way. Your use of language does not match up with that of normal people.

I have in the past sometimes wasted my time trying to follow your reasoning. When I saw logical implications of your stands and pointed them out, you said I was wrong. You did not show what it is you believe that doesn't have those implications or what your beliefs imply instead.

I think the fundamental difficulty here is that I am attempting to do communication, while you are attempting to do rhetoric. You aren't trying to communicate but to influence, to persuade.

Communication works with feedback. You say something. I say it back in my own words. You say no, that wasn't quite it, here's what I mean. I repeat it back until you agree I got it right. Without feedback you can only hypothesise that your language is clear and unambiguous and everybody ought to understand.

Rhetoric can work better when people don't actually understand. It's more important for it to sound good than to make sense.

Look back at previous issues. In "Paying off journalists in Iraq" you resolutely hypothesised that there's nothing wrong going on. You pretended that the black propaganda effort in iraq might be intended to somehow deceive "the enemy". You mixed up official PR efforts written in the name of the US Army with black propaganda. You agreed that it's wrong when the primary intention is to deceive the US public, but you felt it was OK to deceive the public provided we deceive the enemy too. And you repeatedly asked for documentation when the original link put up by the first poster was explicit.

In "Misunderstanding Iraq/Recommendations for U.S. Policy" the first poster explained in some detail a collection of problems and made 4 recommendations. You disagreed on 3 points and called one of them unimportant. The OP's 4th suggestion was to withdraw from areas where we are the big problem, and let the native militias drive out al qaeda themselves. Your response to this was incoherent. The closest I can come to it now is that you were complaining that when we get native allies the liberal press calls them "death squads" so we can't do it. When I repeated what I understood of your point you said that it was completely wrong but you didn't say what would have been better. I haven't noticed anybody claim they understood you, and you didn't explain. But you did explain that you weren't advocating anything in particular, you were only criticising other people's stands. The whole back and forth about that dominated the discussion, once it started nobody discussed the OP's ideas.

In "10 more" the OP bitterly complained that we continue to take casualties and took 10 dead (and 11 wounded) at once right after Bush's speech. Someone commented that our problems come from thinking only in terms of staying the course versus pulling out, that this limits the thinking. You then claimed you disagreed but you didn't say what it was you disagreed with. You said that the meaning of "unlimited political goals" is that the intention is to destroy the enemy. And you seemed to imply that we had unlimited goals and therefore we would succeed if our enemies are destroyed and lose otherwise. You didn't say we should or shouldn't have unlimited goals, you argued about what it meant. It didn't mean we had to kill them all, it was enough to eliminate them as a political force. No mention of what it means if their political organisation is disbanded and replaced by a new one that is exactly the same with a new name. You did provide a link to the definition of "unlimited war" which does not fit iraq, and you provided a collection of abstruse definitions. And when Dan provided a nuanced interpretation of our victory conditions implying that we might get some results we want and not get others, you defined victory in iraq strictly in terms of what happens in iran and syria. You ended the thread with a couple of blorps, one where you imagined that world terrorism has been intentionally contained by threatening the nations that sponsor terrorism or might sponsor terrorism. That is, you looked at the most favorable interpretation of where the arrow might have landed and you drew a bullseye around it. The second was a wandering philosophical discourse that would surely be very informative to someone with your exact background. It included a discussion of how to win "the Iraq Theater" that was notable for mentioning iraqis only once, glancingly. (It was an important idea about iraqis. The claim is that no iraqis are able to provide for their own military support. So every iraqi force gets its operational and logistic support from one of 5 sources -- syria, iran, saudi arabia, the old iraqi army, or the USA.) No one gave any sort of substantive response, and the thread was dead.

In "Thinking about the Insurgents" the OP suggests we need to understand the insurgents. He's clear that Rumsfeld etc misunderstand or pretend to misunderstand. The insurgents are not particularly doing jihad, they're more doing something else which might translate as 'revenge'. This might be promising or might not -- it can be harder to subdue people who want revenge than people who want to take over the world. If they want to take over the world and they see they can't, they might settle for less. If they want revenge they might not stop until they're dead or they feel like they've had *enough* revenge. Say we carelessly bomb a man's house and kill his mother, his wife, and his children. How much revenge would be enough if it was you? But the point was, we strongly need to understand them. In this thread you started an argument about the meaning of "understand", "sympathise", and "empathise". You apparently thought it was wrong to sympathise with terrorists. I couldn't tell exactly what the problem was because you went into another definitions rant and never made your point.

Then there's this thread where Donald McDonald sidetracked the discussion at the very beginning and you've never yet posted anything remotely ontopic.

My advice to you on rhetoric is to speak from your heart. Tell us what you believe. You might get laughed at, you might get disagreed with, but you'll have more effect. You act like it's some sort of debate where the referees in the sky grade on skill. But there aren't any referees in the sky. There are precious few undecided visiting readers. If we disagree, so what? Get a rollicking argument going that stays interesting and people are more likely to read it.

If I was being uncharitable I might suppose your intention here is to try to shut down the discussion. Like you think it's a liberal blog so you do better to make it boring and irrelevant. But I don't think that's the case. I think you come from an environment where being perceived to make a mistake means you lose all credibility. So you try to control the vocabulary and you try to guard your back at every instant. Like a diplomat speaking to the foreign press. But that fails on a fundamental level. Speak from the heart. Tell us what you most believe and why it's important. You might not persuade that way, but how can you hope to do more than just cloud the issues when you keep that unclear?

[Jeff Younger]

J Thomas, you're right. I am hijacking this thread, and I shouldn't be.

I have been too rough on you, despite what I think was legitimate provocation. I apologize. Nevertheless, please do not make inferences in my name; make them in your name. I am quite careful to qualify my remarks, and you need only ask, if you think I need to make significant qualifications.

I share Christopher Hitchens’ admiration of irony, but I suppose the irony of remarks like "you'll make a fine conservative one day," "you're a sophist," "you've shown yourself to be dishonest" and the like are hard to convey in short writings. From my perspective, I was ironically employing the techniques you deployed against me in an effort to show you how frustrating it is, and how it shuts down communication.

I sense irony even now with the accusation being laid on me. But this happens often when I have discussions with liberals who routinely object to other people’s use of the very methods they employ. (This happens in all fields not just rhetoric.)

At least you can see that these approaches are illegitimate, which puts you ahead of most liberals I encounter. Moreover, I think my employment of your previous methods will preempt your use of unwarranted inference in the future, and that was my sole aim.

I do not think 'rhetoric' is a bad word. Rhetoric is the only means to communicate. Means can be used for good or bad purposes, a fortiori so can rhetoric. Plato defined sophistry as “making the weaker argument the stronger.” Good rhetoric is not sophistry, but it does demand some attention to tropes, especially irony.

[Jeff Younger]

J Thomas, I’m putting these points in a separate post from remarks about rhetoric.

On the article “Misunderstanding Iraq/Recommendations for U.S. Policy”

J Thomas wrote: The OP's 4th suggestion was to withdraw from areas where we are the big problem, and let the native militias drive out al qaeda themselves. Your response to this was incoherent. The closest I can come to it now is that you were complaining that when we get native allies the liberal press calls them "death squads" so we can't do it.

Not so. Here is what the OP actually wrote: “There is a need to break vicious circle of insurgency and counterinsurgency by enlisting nationalist insurgents into the fight against Al-Qaeda terrorists on the basis of a political compromise which involves a fair and open political process and a roadmap for the withdrawal of US troops. [emphasis mine].” We were not talking about militias which are commonly defined as “a body of citizens organized for military service,” but “nationalist insurgents” which the DoD defines as “members of a political party who rebel against established leadership.” You have either misread the OP’s recommendations or the OP is confused at the meaning of military-diplomatic terms of art. In any case, this does explain why you find my fourth point “incoherent” — you didn’t properly understand it. As for your notion that I didn’t clarify my position after you mischaracterized it, the written record of my posts on Dec 5, 2005 6:19:07 PM and Dec 5, 2005 9:38:25 PM are really decisive on this point. As for other people being confused about my position, it seems that bob mcmanus was more confused by your mischaracterizations than my post. Really, you have no case here.

On the article “10 More”

J Thomas wrote: You said that the meaning of "unlimited political goals" is that the intention is to destroy the enemy. And you seemed to imply that we had unlimited goals and therefore we would succeed if our enemies are destroyed and lose otherwise. You didn't say we should or shouldn't have unlimited goals, you argued about what it meant. It didn't mean we had to kill them all, it was enough to eliminate them as a political force. No mention of what it means if their political organisation is disbanded and replaced by a new one that is exactly the same with a new name.

You are confusing sense of words again. It’s hard to tell of you do it intentionally, or not. Destroying the enemy as a political entity, means “to put the enemy out of existence as a political entity”, not “to put enemy political entities out of existence.” War aims at coercing an enemy into a certain course of action, unlimited war aims at eliminating all future course of action for the enemy; hence, I did address the resurgence of political organizations when I wrote “unlimited political goals provide only for win/lose thinking.” Certainly, as Dan Kervick pointed out, people unfamiliar with military-diplomatic terms of art might become confused. You may find justification to ignore these terms because they are “abstruse,” but you are sure to misinterpret US military policy which is couched in these very terms. Honestly, I think your confusion about basic military-diplomatic terminology is so profound that you ought to refrain from making claims about what definitions fit Iraq and which do not.

J Thomas wrote: And when Dan provided a nuanced interpretation of our victory conditions implying that we might get some results we want and not get others, you defined victory in iraq strictly in terms of what happens in iran and syria.

You seem to have great difficulty parsing English sentences. I wrote “Victory in Iraq will be determined by the attainment (or not) of strategic political goals. In particular, the geographical, political, economic, intelligence and military containment of the two most pro terrorist states in the world: Syria and Iran.” Let me be the first to inform you: “in particular” does not mean “strictly in terms of.” I honestly think this point is disposed of.

J Thomas wrote: The second was a wandering philosophical discourse that would surely be very informative to someone with your exact background.

This is more Chomsky-esqe misinterpretation by dropping context. I was replying specifically to Dan Kervick who wrote “I agree with your general point that major issues about large political goals and philosophical presuppositions are barely touched on in our public discussions. This is particularly galling to me since I was a philosophy professor for 18 years.” Dan and I were having a philosophical dialog; it’s not my fault you don’t have the background to follow it. Dan does, and I was addressing him. Why do you have a problem with that? Why do you want to shut down the communication again?

J Thomas wrote: It included a discussion of how to win "the Iraq Theater" that was notable for mentioning iraqis only once, glancingly.

Actually, your ignorance of the meaning of “tache d'oeil counter-insurgency operations” prevents you from making intelligent judgments what I recommended. Tache d’oeil is a warfighting approach that emphasizes political pacification of native peoples. It is actually a very well-known theory of counter-insurgency. So, the concept ‘Iraqi people’ is subsumed in term tache d’oeil. Lastly, the thread probably “died” because it scrolled so far down blog.

On the article “Thinking about the Insurgents”

J Thomas wrote: But the point was, we strongly need to understand them. In this thread you started an argument about the meaning of "understand", "sympathise", and "empathise". You apparently thought it was wrong to sympathise with terrorists. I couldn't tell exactly what the problem was because you went into another definitions rant and never made your point.

I am forced to go into “definitions rants” because you make things up, or you are so ignorant of the meanings of common words that I have to educate you. My point was perfectly clear: “There are two senses of ‘understand.’ (1) “to achieve a grasp of the nature, significance, or explanation of something, ” and (2) “to show a sympathetic or tolerant attitude toward something… It is precisely because we do understand terrorism (including abortion bombers) in the sense of (1), that we refuse understanding in the sense of (2).” I.e. we do not sympathize with terrorists because we understand them.

J Thomas wrote: My advice to you on rhetoric is to speak from your heart. Tell us what you believe. You might get laughed at, you might get disagreed with, but you'll have more effect. You act like it's some sort of debate where the referees in the sky grade on skill. But there aren't any referees in the sky. There are precious few undecided visiting readers. If we disagree, so what? Get a rollicking argument going that stays interesting and people are more likely to read it.

But I am speaking from the heart, at least in the Augustinian sense of the word ‘heart.’. I have told what I believe. I’m laughed at all the time. You should here conservatives laugh when I explain that I’m an anti-corporate Capitalist. You should see their anger when I can virtually prove that corporations are not Capitalist entities. I’m used to derision, and I’m used to being misrepresented by liberals and conservatives alike. That’s why it’s so easy for me to parse your misrepresentations. I have a lot of experience with this kind of sophistry.

J Thomas wrote: If I was being uncharitable I might suppose your intention here is to try to shut down the discussion. Like you think it's a liberal blog so you do better to make it boring and irrelevant. But I don't think that's the case. I think you come from an environment where being perceived to make a mistake means you lose all credibility. So you try to control the vocabulary and you try to guard your back at every instant. Like a diplomat speaking to the foreign press.

I thought it was ucharitability, but now I think it is a genuine disregard for basic semantics. I’m not trying to control the vocabulary; I’m just trying to ensure I’m not misrepresented. As the examples above demonstrate, it is a real danger on Democracy Arsenal.

You want to know what I believe? Here it is.

Jeff Younger’s neo-Aristotelian philosophy in a nutshell:

• Metaphysics: realism (There exist real things.)
• Epistemology: pragmatic-essentialism (We perceive real things and interpret them as essences using pragmatic criteria.)
• Ethics: individualism (The flourishing of individual human beings in the fullest sense.)
• Politics: Capitalism (Humans flourish best in societies that protect private property and ration goods by the actions of individual actors.)
• Aesthetics: Romantic Realism (Portrayal of man as he should be, not as he is; emphasizes the artists selectivity; Dostoevsky and Hugo are arguably the greatest exemplars.)

Now you have it!

[J Thomas]

Jeff Younger, it appears you are not a garden-variety troll. I think it would probably lead at best to more back-and-forth miscommunication if I respond directly to each of your points, so I'll start with the ones that look most promising.

I have hardly any background in philosophy, but I can try to explain my sense of things.

Nominalism (There may exist real things but our interpretation of them is not real, or inevitable, or unique.)

Operationism (To the extent we can get reproducible results by repeating similar actions, we can make up stories that link the actions to the results. Our stories may be fundamentally wrong but if they correctly link perceived actions to perceived results, we can get by.)

Evolutionism (Ethical systems that provide self-defeating criteria are flawed. Given what you want, it is self-defeating to get yourself culled for no good result. If the rules of the game oppose your ethical system and yourself, then it's valuable to do whatever it takes to change the rules -- but it is not valuable to let the existing rules penalise you unless that's a side effect of changing the rules.)

Cynicism (People who do politics or government are not disinterested. They look out for themselves and the public interest in some varying proportion. Look for ways to align their self interest with the public good. To the extent you fail to do that, be pleasantly surprised when the public good is served anyway.)

My esthetics are eclectic, but I particularly enjoy finding subtle fallacies and statistical failures. Only counting the hits. Biased sampling. Begging the question. False authority. False consensus. Etc. I particularly enjoy finding such things in my own thinking. It's a lot like the feeling of waking up without a hangover but in a strange room and a strange bed with a strange woman and no idea how you got there -- that sense of unknown possibilities and unknown limits. Discovering that some of my habits of thought can be abandoned leading to who-knows-what.... It's a marvelous feeling and I feel sorry for the guy whose first thought is to worry what happened to his pants.)

My point was perfectly clear: “There are two senses of ‘understand.’ (1) “to achieve a grasp of the nature, significance, or explanation of something, ” and (2) “to show a sympathetic or tolerant attitude toward something… It is precisely because we do understand terrorism (including abortion bombers) in the sense of (1), that we refuse understanding in the sense of (2).

Here is where we understood each other but you didn't realise that I disagreed. I say you don't truly "understand" another human without (2). Failing that you are likely to understand a logical train of thought he might have created, but have no sense of what it takes to get him to abandon that train of thought.

Treating people as if they are ruthless fanatics can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. On various WWII pacific islands we spread stories of japanese who pretended they wanted to surrender so they could get close and kill americans. POWs who had hidden grenades and when they raised their hands the grenades went off, killing them and their captors. So we became very cautious about accepting surrender, we killed a lot of japanese who tried to surrender. And -- surprise! -- with every expectation that we'd kill them no matter what they did, many more of them got fanatical and suicidal.

Then we figured that the fanatical soldiers showed that the old men and women and boys on the mainland would be the same way. We developed a doctrine about what kind of people they were, based on their response to our actions based on that doctrine. Luckily for us, it was mostly the japanese suffered from our fantasy rather than us.

I claim that sympathising with the enemy won't weaken your resolve -- unless it ought to. It won't make you hesitate to do what's necessary. But it might make you hesitate to do what's unnecessary and useless.

And I've tended to fail at sympathising with you. Not that you're an enemy. But you've presented mostly tactic-fantasies and I've tended not to get to anything to sympathise with.

I’m laughed at all the time. You should here conservatives laugh when I explain that I’m an anti-corporate Capitalist. You should see their anger when I can virtually prove that corporations are not Capitalist entities. I’m used to derision, and I’m used to being misrepresented by liberals and conservatives alike.

I can very much sympathise with this. And I want to suggest that maybe it isn't just that people want to disagree. It's hard for people to wrap their minds around a genuinely new idea. The natural thing is to mistake it for what they've heard before. Like when I saw the report that the new Republican talking point about iraq is that what matters is really what happens in syria and iran, and then you explained that victory conditions in iraq were determined by whether we achieve our goals for syria and iran. It was the most natural thing in the world for me to think you were parroting the new talking point, and not saying something brand new.

When I've run into this problem sometimes it's helped to make my point as a joke. A joke can expose a contradiction in thought without making a direct attack. If they can laugh they can think out the details later. Maybe. At least if it's a new joke they won't mistake it for an old talking point.

[Jeff Younger]

JThomas, you might consider that I’m not a troll at all. But anything can happen.

I actually do understand your position on understanding, but it’s wrong. I’ve already explained myself. All evidence is against your account of the tenacity of Imperial Japanese soldiers. On the contrary, I think liberals do intend to weaken resolve by their rhetoric of “understanding.” In fact, I’ve never encountered it outside the context of attempting to prevent the use of force, which is by definition a weakening of resolve to fight.

I do get your point. I’ve even been required to “empathize” with the enemy in classes on the FARC and FMLN, but they did not aim at what liberals mean by “understanding.”

Liberals have a hard time believing it, but most Republicans are very independent. The Republican Party since its days as the abolition party has been a “big tent” party. I’m in the libertarian wing, but there are at least six quite distinct political philosophies at play in the party.

I’m completely convinced I cannot communicate with you. So, you have the last word.

[J Thomas]

"JThomas, you might consider that I’m not a troll at all."

As I said, you're clearly not a garden-variety troll.

"All evidence is against your account of the tenacity of Imperial Japanese soldiers."

Well, no. If you look at the evidence with my mindset you'll find lots of room to interpret it my way. But if you look at it from the view that I'm wrong then there will be lots of room to interpret it that way too.

My point is that by assuming we understood them we tended to force them into fitting our assumptions. There's plenty of evidence for that. However, this doesn't say what they'd have done if we had behaved otherwise. The experiment cannot be done -- we only got one war. So now if we want we can argue over nuances of the biased reports. I'd just as soon not, because there's no standard to judge our interpretations of the evidence by, except our varied prejudices.

I agree that the GOP contains a collection of opposed factions that tenuously stay together. Maybe what liberals are talking about is the amazing voting discipline under 4 years of Bush. I'm tempted to explain it by the FBI or NSA or somebody collecting blackmail information on most Republican legislators. And of course similar material could explain the disturbing passivity of Democratic legislators.

I don't see that you're having trouble communicating now. You have successfully explained that you disagree with me on a couple of points. You didn't attempt to do more than say you disagreed on those, except claim "all evidence" in one case.

By "communicate" do you perhaps mean "make the other guy agree with you"?

[Jeff Younger]

People don’t seriously communicate with trolls. It’s a reliable commonplace.

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