Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Obama’s War On Terror

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His half-hearted one:

Barack Obama’s heart was never in the war on terror, and he burst onto the national scene with an anti-Iraq War riff. He called it a “dumb war,” a phrase that echoes still in his foreign-policy slogan of “don’t do stupid stuff.” The latest declaration, “No boots on the ground,” is cut from the same cloth. As faculty-lounge wordsmiths go, he’s top shelf.

Voters were with him big time in 2008, and a majority stayed with him in 2012 as he promised to get out of Afghanistan, too. He had OK’d the assassination of Osama bin Laden, a fact he waved like a bloody scalp, and it shielded him from direct hits after the Benghazi terror attack.

His mistake, or his latest mistake, was that he began to take his Houdini-like escapes for granted, and thus was gob-smacked when the “war-weary nation” suddenly wanted a tougher president after the Islamic State beheaded two Americans. In a flash, the usually nimble president was way out of step with the country.

Yet Obama again proved himself a cynical politician worthy of a fickle public. After some flub-a-dubs, he announced a strategy that is true to his core. It is ­neither-nor.

It is neither a strategy for victory, nor a strategy for doing nothing. Like a man taking a shower while wearing a raincoat, he put America back into the fight without a commitment to win.

As Glenn notes, this is nothing except an effort to get through the next six weeks. After the election, he’ll (as he told Vladimir) have “more flexibility.”

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

“Marching Against Climate Change”

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The most futile march ever:

It was the usual post-communist leftie march. That is, it was a petit-bourgeois re-enactment of meaningless ritual that passes for serious politics among those too inexperienced, too emotionally excited or too poorly read and too unpracticed at self-reflection or political analysis to know or perhaps care how futile and tired the conventional march has become. Crazed grouplets of anti-capitalist movements trying to fan the embers of Marxism back to life, gender and transgender groups with their own spin on climate, earnest eco-warriors, publicity-seeking hucksters, adrenalin junkies, college kids wanting a taste of the venerable tradition of public protest, and, as always, a great many people who don’t think that burning marijuana adds to the world’s CO2 load, marched down Manhattan’s streets. The chants echoed through the skyscraper canyons, the drums rolled, participants were caught up in a sense of unity and togetherness that some of them had never known. It was almost like politics, almost like the epochal marches that have toppled governments and changed history ever since the Paris mob stormed the Bastille.

Almost. Except street marches today are to real politics what street mime is to Shakespeare. This was an ersatz event: no laws will change, no political balance will tip, no UN delegate will have a change of heart. The world will roll on as if this march had never happened. And the marchers would have emitted less carbon and done more good for the world if they had all stayed home and studied books on economics, politics, science, religion and law. Marches like this create an illusion of politics and an illusion of meaningful activity to fill the void of postmodern life; the tribal ritual matters more than the political result.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

What Is Science?

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A useful essay:

…for all our bleating about “science” we live in an astonishingly unscientific and anti-scientific society. We have plenty of anti-science people, but most of our “pro-science” people are really pro-magic (and therefore anti-science).

This bizarre misunderstanding of science yields the paradox that even as we expect the impossible from science (“Please, Mr Economist, peer into your crystal ball and tell us what will happen if Obama raises/cuts taxes”), we also have a very anti-scientific mindset in many areas.

For example, our approach to education is positively obscurantist. Nobody uses rigorous experimentation to determine better methods of education, and someone who would dare to do so would be laughed out of the room. The first and most momentous scientist of education, Maria Montessori, produced an experimentally based, scientific education method that has been largely ignored by our supposedly science-enamored society. We have departments of education at very prestigious universities, and absolutely no science happens at any of them.

Our approach to public policy is also astonishingly pre-scientific. There have been almost no large-scale truly scientific experiments on public policy since the welfare randomized field trials of the 1990s, and nobody seems to realize how barbaric this is. We have people at Brookings who can run spreadsheets, and Ezra Klein can write about it and say it proves things, we have all the science we need, thank you very much. But that is not science.

Modern science is one of the most important inventions of human civilization. But the reason it took us so long to invent it and the reason we still haven’t quite understood what it is 500 years later is it is very hard to be scientific. Not because science is “expensive” but because it requires a fundamental epistemic humility, and humility is the hardest thing to wring out of the bombastic animals we are.

A useful thought as well see tens of thousands of anti-science, anti-market marching morons in New York today.