Restrain Technoloty or Die

 Restrain Technology or Die

A friend of mine wrote an interesting paper on transhumanism: Trans or Not to Trans, Accompanying Slides.  He asked for my thoughts, and here is what I wrote:

I just got around to reading Jerry's Transhumanism paper.  The slides shared previously make a lot more sense now!

This is a great paper, describing as it does human evolution, our current position, and prospects for the future, using a scientific and technological perspective.  With regard to the ultimate question -- "To Trans or not to Trans – That is the Question. What do you think?" -- I would reply that the question is "How should we proceed in the direction of transhumanism?".

As well documented in the paper, the process is already well underway.  While many are recommending we proceed with caution or try to put the cat back in the bag, how can we do that?  The paramount goal must be the same as in natural selection -- survival.  Genes survive which are most well adapted to their environment.  Our environment is changing at breakneck speed and the genes / human technology will not be able to keep up.  Therefore, we need to slow down environmental change.  Above all, this means clamping down on technological change.  

To address one issue with this mentioned in the paper -- "any effort in the West to regulate implementation of the TH agenda will largely fail because the Chinese will never agree to conform to Western ethical values".  I don't think this possibility should be dismissed out of hand.  The Chinese are probably better placed to control technology than "the West" because they have a more top down government and are not as subject to capitalist anarchy.  To the extent that "we" have any power with regard to transhumanism, "we" need to control our own behavior.  That means strict regulation on technological development.

Just my 2 cents.  Thanks for writing this and sharing!

P.S. The book I'm "reading" now (on Audible) is discussing the evolutionary and genetic basis of feelings such as goodwill and guilt (the conscience).  Let's get working on increasing those.

 Revolt of the Public, FBI Edition

My world view is that the CIA assassinated JFK and RFK, and the FBI assassinated MLK.  I now know these things to be true following a lifetime (~ 50 years) of uncertainty.  I believe that it is much easier to uncover the truth in the Internet era.  Whereas in the 20th century it was possible for the elite to control the discourse, this is now impossible as discussed by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri in his book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.

Another thing that has changed since the 1960s is the ubiquity of the cell phone camera.  Imagine if these had been available during the assassination decade (the 1960s).  Well they are available today and we have extensive video evidence indicating the the so-called January 6 insurrection was actually a riot orchestrated by the FBI.  See:

• Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears To Have Led The Very First 1/6 Attack On The U.S. Capitol - Revolver 
• Meet Ray Epps, Part 2: Damning New Details Emerge Exposing Massive Web Of Unindicted Operators At The Heart Of January 6

This seems to me to be conclusive evidence of how the FBI orchestrated the riot.  This sort of documentation was never before possible, and people still can't believe it.  

The larger issue is how we, the public, make use of this new power.  Do we ignore the evidence before our eyes in favor of ratcheting up tribal warfare?  Or do we expand our horizons to understand that our  democracy is not what it has seemed to be according to the conventional wisdom?  I advocate the latter, accompanied by renewed dedication to improving our democracy, and improving our public discourse.  Perhaps if we recognize that our understanding of the world has been flawed, we will be more understanding of one another, and better able to engage in civil discourse.  

Nihilism, the Web, and Grandchildren

 A friend of mine shared a short story he has written, asking for feedback.  It was a good story in a haunting post modernist style.  Here was my response:

Thanks for sharing your story, Jerry   Quite evocative and somewhat descriptive of our lonely times.  It brings to mind the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber:

He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history

I looked up Maus and it fits well with your story:

it depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodernist techniques and represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, the English as fish, the French as frogs, and the Swedish as deer. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992, it became the first (and is still the only) graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize (the Special Award in Letters). Spiegelman depicts these experiences, from the years leading up to World War II to his parents' liberation from the Nazi concentration camps. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father, and the absence of his mother, who committed suicide when he was 20. Her grief-stricken husband destroyed her written accounts of Auschwitz.  

Life is good these days, while it lasts.  Technology is amazing and infinite knowledge is just an Internet connection away.  My current interest is in combating nihilism.  

Nihilism (/ˈnaɪ(h)ɪlɪzəm, ˈniː-/; from Latin nihil 'nothing') is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects general or fundamental aspects of human existence,[1][2] such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values or meaning.[3][4] Different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless.[5][6]

I followed up with this personal reflection:

Jerry's check-in and short story inspire me to do the same.  I will build upon one of my comments in response to Jerry's short story:

infinite knowledge is just an Internet connection away

Here are a couple of examples of this in my life from the past two days:

1. I replaced a 3-way light switch on Wednesday, something I had never done before.  I looked it up on YouTube and instantly found a couple of videos showing how to do this, making it relatively easy.  I followed up later with another video that included an animation showing the mechanism, giving the why it works in addition to the how to do it. 
2. I picked up Lawrence's kids (ages 7, 9, and 12) from school yesterday and they wanted to play math and geography games in the car.  They were able to answer most of my questions.  It turned out that Chase was using his cell phone to get the answers with a calculator or Siri lookup.  Sean ratted him out for using the cell phone in the back seat, but I think it's impressive that a 10 year old can instantly find the answers to many basic questions.  It reminds me of the wisdom of the old proverb:  "Give a person a fish, (s)he eats for a day.  Teach a person to fish, (s)he eats for a lifetime."

I find creative works such as your "On Watch" meaningful, in something of a paradox.  The fact that you write this and share it with friends demonstrates a desire to find meaning in life, in my view.

Sports Fan Life Lesson

 I don't want to make this about me, but rather a life lesson for us all.

I was banned from MGOBLOG after Michigan's dramatic 3 OT comeback victory over Rutgers in 2020.  I was somewhat drunk and compared McNamara to Brady.  I called a poster who diminished our victory an ASSHOLE. 

I feel somewhat vindicated.  McNamara has indeed proven to be an exceptional QB and a remarkable leader.  The team has fought back to being ranked #2 in the country after beating OSU convincingly.  We didn't get to this point by giving up on the team in 2020.

The larger life lesson is that friends should not give up on friends when they are down and out.  Being a sports fan is somewhat analogous to being a friend.  We support the team, and the team tries its best to reward the fans.  When the team is having a bad year, it's more important than ever to be constructive and supportive.  Small victories, such as the Rutgers 2020 game, should be acknowledged in the same way that large victories are acknowledged.  

Anyway, I'm the biggest fair weather fan in the world and am being somewhat hypocritical here.

Go Blue, beat Iowa...

Public Health and Nihilism

Here's a very long article from 2016 showing how public health was politicized before Trump and covid:  

U.S. Public Health Professionals Routinely Mislead the Public about Infectious Diseases: True or False? Dishonest or Self-Deceptive? Harmful or Benign?

For me, this article shows why the covid crisis has been such a political nightmare.  As with the viral lab leak, the chickens are coming home to roost for the medical/scientific establishment. 

It should be noted that I have basically the same attitude towards all of our establishment institutions: military, intelligence, Wall Street, Pharma, media, ...  I'm currently reading The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, which describes this phenomenon.  The Internet, if left uncensored, exposes a lot of previously hidden information about our authoritative institutions, and can engender nihilism in the public.  I'm against nihilism and recognize the need for authoritative institutions, so I try not to be overly alarmist.  There's a lot of good as well as a lot of bad and I want to support the good.

Culture and Politics

I've just finished reading an article describing the Chinese government efforts to promote Chinese culture and reject (neo)liberal nihilism.  The effect this article had on me is remarkable.  Putin just gave a speech with a similar theme.  These views highlight the essential question of our times.  How can we regain common societal values? 

I just wrote a piece advocating changes to our electoral system has a step in the right direction.  The problem with liberal democracy isn't the democracy part, rather it's that we're not doing it well.  This is not some pie in the sky ideal. Other countries have multiparty democracy today and have stronger societies.  I can't prove the correlation, but it seems logical and this book provides some supporting evidence.

Can we solve our cultural problems by doubling down on liberal democracy?  This is only part of the answer, in my opinion.  We need to respect and promote the good things in our inherited cultures.  In other words, we need conservatism as well as liberalism.  We need shared cultural values and institutions in addition to liberal democratic ideals.

It turns out I've thought of this before, and the culture wars are being extensively discussed by many other people.  So I'm using this occasion to review my previous writing and to highlight some other thoughts on the subject. Then I'll draw some conclusions.

My previous writings:

• Authority, Common Sense, and a New Mythology
• Thoughts on Unitarian Universalist Principles

Anti-woke thoughts by others:

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg on kneeling athletes and flag burning
• Dave Chappelle's language and views on LGBTQ and race

In my view, the zeitgeist is changing.  America's neoliberal surge to sole superpower status is on the way out.  The (former) Communist superpowers are rebounding with more conservative nationalist platforms.  The American left is splintering as the anti-Trump "woke" consensus falls apart  The enduring points which we on "the left" should get behind are:

• Technological restraint in the face of global warming, weapons of mass destruction, etc.
• Intercultural cooperation.
• Greater economic equity.
• Support for families and cultural traditions. 
• Human rights, including freedom of speech and limits on "intelligence" agencies.

To me, the Green Party does this best with these ideas at the present time, but I am open-minded.

Being Constructive in the McCarthy Era

 The current era has been replete with hyperbolic comparisons:

• 9/11 and 1/6
• RussiaGate and Pearl Harbor
• Leftist critics of environmentalists as white nationalists
• Texas Abortion law and Fugitive Slave Act
• Trump campaign and Nazis

While I disagree with all of the above, here is one that I agree with: McCarthy era and January 6 investigation (by Glenn Greenwald).  As Greenwald puts it:

With more than 600 people now charged in connection with the events of 1/6, not one person has been charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government, incite insurrection, conspiracy to commit murder or kidnapping of public officials, or any of the other fantastical claims that rained down on them from media narratives. No one has been charged with treason or sedition. Perhaps that is because, as Reuters reported in August, “the FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.” Yet these defendants are being treated as if they were guilty of these grave crimes of which nobody has been formally accused, with the exact type of prosecutorial and judicial overreach that criminal defense lawyers and justice reform advocates have long railed against...

So many of these controversies were, or at least should have been, resolved when the Supreme Court twice intervened in the congressional hearings during the McCarthy era to conclude that Congress was exceeding its authority in its targeting of private citizens. There are some who believe that the domestic threat of communism which the McCarthyite committees cited was more dangerous than the ideology that drove 1/6, while others believe the opposite. But those debates are completely irrelevant to the legal principles governing limitations on congressional investigative authorities; these limitations do not change based on how grave the threat one believes Congress is confronting.

Indeed, the argument made by Congress in the 1950s to justify its investigations into private citizens is strikingly similar to the one advocates of the 1/6 Committee offer now. As the Supreme Court summarized that rationale in its 1957 ruling in Watkins v. U.S.: “The Government contends that the public interest at the core of the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee is the need by the Congress to be informed of efforts to overthrow the Government by force and violence, so that adequate legislative safeguards can be erected.” But in both of the McCarthy era cases decided by the Supreme Court, that rationale was rejected as an invalid basis for Congress's investigative tactics... 

My challenge is to speak out against injustice and erosion of basic human rights without just adding to the general noise and hysteria being generated by so many hyperbolic claims.  Of course, the facts matter and truth is the most important factor in evaluating the relevance of such analogies. For example, RussiaGate has been disproven to my satisfaction and the claim that "hacking the 2016 elections was an act of war" is absurd.   A better analogy is that the RussiaGate claims are analogous to the Cold War era claims that were used to justify the arms race, intervention in 3rd world countries, and intervention by the CIA and FBI in domestic politics.

But moving forward, I suggest that we consider how to deal with extremist threats, or alleged extremist threats.  To the extent that violent acts are advocated involving terrorism or the violent overthrow of legitimate government, then such speech is and should be against the law and prosecuted accordingly.  It's important to distinguish between protestors who enter the capitol and protestors who commit acts of violence including especially bodily harm.  To equate 9/11 with 1/6 is thus to ignore a very important distinction.  Nonviolence is key, and not all acts of violence are equivalent.

So how do we deal with extremists who don't advocate violence?  This category would include many of alleged Communist sympathizers of the 1950s as well as many of the Trumpian protesters of the current era.  My recommendation is that we:

1. Protect the right to protest without retaliatory prosecution and removal of civil rights.  Just as gas pipeline protestors are arrested and then released without prejudice, so should those who went into the capitol but did not otherwise commit violent crimes be released without excessive retribution.
   
   
2. Encourage non-violent extremists to participate in the democratic process by transitioning to multiparty democracy, in place of current two-party system.  This is the thesis of a book that I have just read -- Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, by Lee Drutman, 
   
   Drutman makes a good case, in my opinion, that countries which support multiparty democracies, including left and right extremist parties, do a better job of handling extremism and diffusing potentially violent tendencies.  Government is then executed by coalitions of parties, and the extremists often moderate to get a place in government, while the mainstream parties take extremist concerns more seriously so that the smaller parties may support the larger parties to form coalitions.  Ranked choice voting is a related democratic procedure which can have a similarly constructive effect in channeling dissent through the democratic process and reducing polarization.

Democracy is one of my core values, and one of the core strengths of the United States.  Let's work to improve it rather than to dismantle civil rights in the name of partisan struggle.

Leave the Mountain People Alone

The following is copied from an email discussion with friends:

Part 1 - How the U.S. Gave Birth to the Taliban

Dear Friends and Strangers,

Cultures are complex and I think that's part of where we went wrong in Afghanistan.  We focused on certain aspects of Afghan culture, but haven't had a good understanding of why their culture is the way it is.  

We are looking at Afghanistan from the perspective of a globe spanning empire.  The Afghan people are on the margins of that empire with a dramatically different perspective.

I don't think that empires are either good or bad in and of themselves.  But the fact that the United States is at the center of a global empire does affect much of our domestic politics as well as our international interventions.  We are blessed and cursed within being the locus of power which is manifest around the world.  How many Americans are aware of the extent to which Afghanistan was changed by U.S. military aid to the mujahedin rebels based in Pakistan during the 1980s: 

In the summer of 1979, over six months before the Soviets moved in, the US State Department produced a memorandum making clear how it saw the stakes, no matter how modern-minded Taraki might be, or how feudal the mujahedin: “The United States’ larger interest … would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.” The report continued, “The overthrow of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the Soviets’ view of the socialist course of history as being inevitable is not accurate.” ...

In September 1979 Taraki was killed in a coup organized by Afghan military officers. Hafizullah Amin was installed as president. He had impeccable western credentials, having been to Columbia University in New York and the University of Wisconsin. Amin had served as the president of the Afghan Students Association, which had been funded by the Asia Foundation, a CIA pass-through group, or front. After the coup Amin began meeting regularly with US Embassy officials at a time when the US was arming Islamic rebels in Pakistan. Fearing a fundamentalist, US-backed regime pressing against its own border, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in force on December 27, 1979. ...

American DEA agents were fully apprised of the drug running of the mujahedin in concert with Pakistani intelligence and military leaders. In 1983 the DEA’s congressional liaison, David Melocik, told a congressional committee, “You can say the rebels make their money off the sale of opium. There’s no doubt about it. These rebels keep their cause going through the sale of opium.” But talk about “the cause” depending on drug sales was nonsense at that particular moment. The CIA was paying for everything regardless. The opium revenues were ending up in offshore accounts in the Habib Bank, one of Pakistan’s largest, and in the accounts of BCCI, founded by Agha Hasan Abedi, who began his banking career at Habib. The CIA was simultaneously using BCCI for its own secret transactions. 

 

The DEA had evidence of over forty heroin syndicates operating in Pakistan in the mid-1980s during the Afghan war, and there was evidence of more than 200 heroin labs operating in northwest Pakistan...  Such were the men to whom the CIA was paying $3.2 billion a year to run the Afghan war, and no person better epitomizes this relationship than Lieutenant General Fazle Huq, who oversaw military operations in northwest Pakistan for General Zia, including the arming of the mujahedin who were using the region as a staging area for their raids. ...

The impact of the Afghan war on Pakistan’s addiction rates was even more drastic than the surge in heroin addiction in the US and Europe. Before the CIA program began, there were fewer than 5,000 heroin addicts in Pakistan. By 1996, according to the United Nations, there were more than 1.6 million. The Pakistani representative to the UN Commission on Narcotics, Raoolf Ali Khan, said in 1993 that “there is no branch of government where drug corruption doesn’t pervade.”  ...  By 1994 the value of the heroin trade in Pakistan was twice the amount of the government’s budget. A Western diplomat told the Washington Post in that year that “when you get to the stage where narco-traffickers have more money than the government it’s going to take remarkable efforts and remarkable people to turn it around.”

In February 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev pulled the Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, and asked the US to agree to an embargo on the provision of weapons to any of the Afghan mujahedin factions, who were preparing for another phase of internecine war for control of the country. President Bush refused, thus ensuring a period of continued misery and horror for most Afghans. The war had already turned half the population into refugees, and seen 3 million wounded and more than a million killed. The proclivities of the mujahedin at this point are illustrated by a couple of anecdotes. ...

In September 1996 the Taliban, fundamentalists nurtured originally in Pakistan as creatures of both the ISI and the CIA, seized power in Kabul, whereupon Mullah Omar, their leader, announced that all laws inconsistent with the Muslim Sharia would be changed. Women would be forced to assume the chador and remain at home, with total segregation of the sexes and women kept out of hospitals, schools and public bathrooms. The CIA continued to support these medieval fanatics who, according to Emma Bonino, the European Union’s commissioner for humanitarian affairs, were committing “gender genocide.”

So there's a lot of history that we don't know about. President Biden said:

American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves...  We gave them every tool they could need... We gave them every chance to determine their own future.  What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.   

But I think the Afghans were right not to oppose the Taliban when it became clear that they would win.  More war was averted, and Afghanistan has suffered too much as a pawn on the front lines of a war between opposing empires.  This context can help us to digest the podcast interview with Brig. Gen. Khoshal Sadat, a former Afghan deputy minister for security. 

Hugs,

Dan

Part 2 - Leave Mountain People Alone

Here's a relatively short and readable history of the Pashtun and Afghanistan as a whole: The Pashtun Will Outlast All Empires, but Can They Hold Afghanistan’s Center?  

In the Pashtun world, everything must be decided by a jirga (assembly). They happen at every level – home, village, clan, tribe, whenever necessary. The number of participants varies from a dozen to thousands. I’ve been to a few. It’s a fascinating exercise in direct democracy.

I wish the Afghan people success.  It won't be easy.

In Afghanistan, prior to the latest horrendous four decades of war, the center of the rural political order revolved around landowning khans. As a rule, they were allies of the state. But then, starting with the 1980s jihad, this old elite was smashed by young, self-made military commanders who rapidly built their own political bases. The new generation, who fought NATO on the ground, now also expects to have a future in the new Kabul arrangement. As far as state building goes, this will be extremely tricky to negotiate.

So the big question now is how the old Pashtun breed, having learned the lessons of their dismal governing experience in 1996-2001, will be able to circumvent the inherent weakness of every Afghan central government. The periphery tribal system is bound to remain very strong, with nearly autonomous territories controlled by warlords that are not tribal chiefs, but in fact competitors for regional power and sources of income that should be feeding the state coffers.

Mountainous regions generally resist centralized control as we see around the world in places like the Appalachians (hillbillies), Peru (Andes), Chechnya (Caucasus), the Balkans, the Scottish Highlands, and Afghanistan.  Mountainous regions have low population density and are costly to occupy and rule.  I lived in the Philippines for a couple of years and learned that rebels there hide out in the mountains.  It's a fact of life that geography shapes cultures as much or more so than religion.  In Why Are People Who Live in Mountainous Regions Almost Impossible to Conquer?, T. X. Hammes makes this point:

The English first began serious efforts to subdue Scotland in the twelfth century, but it took centuries of fighting before the Act of Union joined the two countries in 1707. Even this did not end Scottish resistance as the Scots rebelled in 1715 and 1745—and argue about independence to this day. The Russians have been fighting on and off in the Caucasus since the early 1700s, and still struggle to suppress terrorist groups in the region. The Maronite Christians of Lebanon have held their mountains against Muslims for over a thousand years. 

Outside powers can win against mountain people but it takes decades to centuries. Afghans, Chechens, Kurds, Montagnards (which literally means “mountain people” in French), Scots, Welsh, Swiss, Druze and Maronite Christians have all repeatedly seen off outsiders. Although the Scots and Welsh were finally integrated into the United Kingdom, it took centuries to conquer each nation...

Virtually every mountain society has stories of outside invaders turned away. These stories form a central element in the people’s identities. Also central to mountain identities are the long-running internal feuds. Families and clans have engaged in disputes that have lasted for centuries. Inevitably outsiders who enter the mountains get drawn into these feuds although they rarely understand them. In her book No Friends but the Mountains, Judith Matloff takes the reader on an intimate tour of mountain societies from the Sierra Madre to the Caucasus to the Himalayas and Andes. She notes that while mountains contain only 10 percent of the world’s population, they were home to twenty-three of the twenty-seven wars at the time of her writing. She also highlights the blood feuds that complicate governance in the mountains. 

 Switzerland, now seen as one of the most stable, democratic and prosperous nations in the world, took centuries to work out its internal government issues. First formed in 1291 by an alliance of three cantons, it was not until 1848 the Swiss agreed to unify under a single government. Prior to that, there was a great deal of internal conflict. Even today, the twenty-six cantons and three thousand communes (municipalities) retain a great deal of independence in deciding local issues...

Clearly, “Leave mountain people alone” should be a rule of thumb at least as prominent as “Never fight a land war in Asia.”  ...

Even if an outside force does take control of a mountainous region, it will find it very difficult to maintain control. Unlike most lowland societies, mountain societies are physically fragmented, which leads to social fragmentation. While river valleys and plains provide natural lines of communication, which tend to unify a society, often by conquest, mountain ridges separate communities. In particularly rugged terrain, villages as little as ten miles apart by direct line can take a day or more to reach on foot. And during winter, they may not be able to visit each other at all. Just as important, mountain societies do not consistently produce the large surpluses necessary to support a bureaucratic government and thus have only infrequently been able to afford or need a central government to protect that surplus. In contrast, lowland societies have historically produced surpluses, have needed a government to protect those surpluses and developed the stratified social structures to do so. The presence of surpluses and lack of defensible terrain provided the incentive and the resources for strong men to unify these lowland regions. While most lowland societies become unified political entities, mountain societies usually remain fragmented. An invader must deal with each small political entity (family, clan, tribe, etc.) and with the long-term conflicts between them if the outsider hopes to control the mountain populations...

Yet terrain only explains part of the difficulty of “pacifying” mountain people—and the least significant part. Culture is a much greater problem. Mountain people tend to be clannish, inwardly focused, belligerent toward outsiders and tough. Constant infighting among clans and families insures their fighting skills and toughness are continually honed. Between 1991 and 2012, over ten thousand Albanians died in feuding—up to 20 percent of all males in Albania’s mountain communities. David B. Edward’s Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier highlights the role conflict between cousins plays in Afghan society. Edward describes how cousins compete to lead their generation of the family. These competitions are often violent. “The word in Pashto for ‘male father’s-side first cousin’ is tarbur, which is, at the same time, also one way of saying ‘enemy’ in Pashto.” 

Yours in geography and wishing the best for people of whatever ethnicity around the world,

Dan 

Accountability - Republican or Bipartisan?

 A new favorite of my Democratic friends is Heather Cox Richardson.  On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, one of friends sent me her column about 9/11 and the ensuing 20 years.  HCR is a fervent Democrat in my experience and places the blame for our country's problems in recent years on the Republicans:

But even in 2001, that America was under siege by those who distrusted the same democracy today’s events commemorated. Those people, concentrated in the Republican Party, worried that permitting all Americans to have a say in their government would lead to “socialism”: minorities and women would demand government programs paid for with tax dollars collected from hardworking people—usually, white men. They wanted to slash taxes and government regulations, giving individuals the “freedom” to do as they wished.

In 1986, they had begun to talk about purifying the vote; when the Democrats in 1993 passed the so-called Motor Voter law permitting people to register to vote at certain government offices, they claimed that Democrats were buying votes. The next year, Republicans began to claim that Democrats won elections through fraud, and in 1998, the Florida legislature passed a voter ID law that led to a purge of as many as 100,000 voters from the system before the election of 2000, resulting in what the United States Commission on Civil Rights called “an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement,” particularly of African American voters.

This view of the world matches mine from most of my life.  I have been a fervent Democrat and have attributed most of our country's problems to the Republicans.  However, since Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, my view is that the Democrats have adopted Republican deficiencies and become equally culpable.  In particular, the Democrats and their supporters pushed false charges from the intelligence community blaming Russia for Trump's election and initiating a new Cold War with Russia on that basis.  Democrats also used race to divide the county, fighting back in kind against Republicans.

So I have a different take from HCR on the 20 years since 9/11/2001.  She now sides with former president Bush in "calling out the similarities between today's domestic terrorists who attacked our Capitol to overthrow our government on January 6 and the terrorists of 9/11".  As Bush put it:

But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. 

I agree with Matt Taibbi who characterized the equivalence as follows:

the insane comparison of the 9/11 hijackers — people who committed intentional mass murder of thousands — with yahoos who waved Trump 2020 flags and took selfies on the Senate floor before ultimately pleading to crimes like “obstruction of an official proceeding,” the heaviest felony prosecutors could muster. 

So I've diverged from Democrats such as HCR in my view of the world.  She continues to see Republicans as our main problem whereas I see both Republicans and Democrats such as her as the problem.  There has been little accountability for our failures since 9/11/2001, and we need accountability for our increasingly bipartisan failures.  In that light, I commend the following:  

A modest proposal: Fire all of the post 9/11 generals, by Andrew Bacevich

Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick,” published in 1729, suggested that the impoverished Irish might improve their condition by selling their children to be “stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled” and served on the tables of well-to-do English gentry. My own modest proposal envisions nothing quite so drastic. 

But whereas Swift’s “Modest Proposal” was intended as a satire, mine is not. Absent serious efforts to reform the senior officer corps, we can expect more Afghanistans to come. Listen to General Mark Milley, Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, who expected Afghan forces to hang on “from weeks to months and even years following our departure” and tell me I’m wrong.

HCR wrote a post on 9/8/2021 describing decades of Republican malfeasance and noting approvingly that finally Republicans are being held accountable:

While Ford recoiled from the prospect of putting a former president on trial, prosecutors today have seen no reason not to charge the people who stormed the Capitol. More than 570 have been charged so far. 

Yesterday, a 67-year-old Idaho man, Duke Edward Wilson, pleaded guilty to obstruction of an official proceeding and assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers. He faces up to 8 years and a $250,000 fine for assaulting the law enforcement officers. And he faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for obstruction of an official proceeding.

This law was originally put in place in 1871 to stop members of the Ku Klux Klan from crushing state and local governments during Reconstruction. 

HCR started blogging 2 years ago in reaction to and support of Adam Schiff,  chairman of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.  Schiff has been notoriously wrong about Trump's involvement with Russia, claiming repeatedly, for example, that the Steele dossier was legitimate.  

Back in 2017, (Schiff) was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and therefore the man Democrats counted on to lead the charge that Trump had colluded with the Kremlin in order to steal the election. He did so with gusto. Quoting from a dossier prepared by ex-British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, he regaled a March 2017 committee hearing with tales of how Russia bribed Trump adviser Carter Page by offering him a hefty slice of a Russian natural-gas company known as Rosneft and of how Russian agents boosted Trump’s political fortunes by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails and passing them on to WikiLeaks...   

Hours later, he assured MSNBC that the evidence of collusion was “more than circumstantial.” Nine months after that, he informed CNN’s Jake Tapper that the case was no longer in doubt: “The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help, the Russians gave help, and the president made full use of that help.” In February 2018, he told reporters: “There is certainly an abundance of non-public information that we’ve gathered in the investigation. And I think some of that non-public evidence is evidence on the issue of collusion and some … on the issue of obstruction.”

The press lapped it up. But now, thanks to the May 7 release of 57 transcripts of secret testimony – transcripts, by the way, that Schiff bottled up for months – we have a better idea of what such “non-public information” amounts to. The answer: nothing. A parade of high-level witnesses told the intelligence committee that either they didn’t know about collusion or lacked evidence even to venture an opinion. Not one offered the contrary view that collusion was true.

 But rather than admit that the investigation had turned up nothing, Schiff lied that it had – not once but repeatedly.

Let that sink in for a moment. Collusion dominated the headlines from the moment Buzzfeed published the Steele dossier on Jan. 10, 2017, to the release of the Muller report on Apr. 18, 2019. That’s more than two years, a period in which newspapers and TV were filled with Russia, Russia, Russia and little else. Thanks to the uproar, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein secretly discussed using the Twenty-fifth Amendment to force Trump out of office, while an endless parade of newscasters and commentators assured viewers that the president’s days were numbered because “the walls are closing in.”

Schiff’s only response was to egg it on to greater and greater heights. Even when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller issued his no-collusion verdict – “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” his report said – Schiff insisted that there was still “ample evidence of collusion in plain sight.”

Schiff's biggest campaign contributors are defense contractors including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ATK, Harris Corporation, and Raytheon.

But surpassing all these is Parsons Corp, a multinational engineering services firm...  Parsons has maxed out for Schiff ... an honor it hasn’t bestowed on any other congressperson... 

Parsons’s various subsidiaries receive huge amounts of government largesse. Its “Government Services” subsidiary landed more than $740 million in government contracts in 2017, most of which came from the defense department, while its “Global Services” subsidiary has raked in tens of millions of dollars worth over the last few years, almost all from the Pentagon.

Parsons benefited directly from Schiff’s vote for the Iraq War, becoming the second largest reconstruction contractor in the country... And as if war-profiteering wasn’t enough, Parsons’s work in Iraq tended to be rife with problems... While other lawmakers criticized the company for its failures, Schiff was muted...

So HCR wants accountability for the unarmed protestors who went to the Capitol on January 6, but is a big supporter of Adam Schiff and in fact founded her blog in support of his intelligence findings.  It is obvious to me that her demand for accountability is misplaced.  Republicans should be held accountable for our many fiascos over the past 20 years, but so also should Democrats such as Adam Schiff and others in the bipartisan foreign policy establishment.

Democracy vs The Experts

 One of my friends recently sent me the following:

I agree that of course experts/elites make mistakes and are not infallible so their leadership will always be imperfect.

Data driven decision makers are always limited by the data available.

However, I think the know-nothings will be wrong much more often and therefore incapable of providing informed leadership.

Ugh.

I agree that democracy is to some degree an unattainable ideal.  Power will always go to those who are recognized as experts.  Unfortunately, the experts are not always driven by data to make decisions in the public interest.  Rather, there are frequently personal and small group incentives that result in decisions which are against the greater public interest.  Take for example the following 21st century disasters, along with the responsible experts:

• War in Iraq 2003 -- Intelligence Community
• War in Afghanistan 2001-2021 -- Military
• Financial Crisis 2008  -- Wall Street
• Pandemic 2019-present -- Medical / Scientific Establishment

There have all been bipartisan affairs.  Our democracy entrusted the experts to take the lead in all these endeavors, and the experts failed.  It can be argued that the know-nothings are those who support such experts.

Political Discourse, Partisan Warfare, and Taking a Stand

My World of Political Discourse

Lately I've been contemplating the state of our political discourse.  This is personal, as my attempts to discuss politics have been met with comments such as the following:

• We know you hate the CIA, Dan.
• Dan, you're an example of a left winger who is so extreme that you have similar views to extreme right wingers (see Horseshoe Theory) .

To the first of these I say, Hate the lie, not the liar.  The CIA has a job to do, and it often involves lying.  The lies, or propaganda, may be spread with good intentions, or as attempts to gain or maintain power.  I don't hate the CIA.  I don't know enough about the organization, which is very secretive.  There may be CIA agents and employees who make great sacrifices for the benefit of us civilians.  The CIA is not a monolith.  It has factions, some of which are trying to do things I would agree with and others that do things with which I disagree.

The more productive discussion is more specific.  For example, if it appears that a particular story, which is widely circulated and attributed to intelligence source, is false, it is preferable to focus on that issue (the truth).  Credibility, reputation, and motivation are relevant in ascertaining the probability that a particular story or fact is true. 

With regard to the Horseshoe Theory, I would again say that focusing on specific issues is generally more constructive.  If both the left wing and right wing advocate violent overthrow of the government, that is one thing.  If both the left and right wing distrust reporting on Russiagate, that is another.  There is some basis to horseshoe theory in that extremists, by definition, distrust the establishment (center).  But guilt by association should be avoided.  Sometimes the establishment is on the side of the truth, and sometimes they are not.  The more productive conversation focuses on the truth as opposed to a label on a political spectrum.

Truth is the First Casualty of Wars 

I've lived through the Cold War, the Vietnam War, numerous middle eastern wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria), and now, open partisan warfare (Russia elected Trump, January 6 insurrection…).  I think it's objectively true that the more heated the conflict, the more attention is paid to defeating the enemy by whatever means necessary, including propaganda and related forms of misinformation.

Matt Taibbi just posted To Stop War, America Needs a Third Party.  

The American political system has been captured by the military, and only an independent political power can prevent the next Afghanistan...  as the performance of the legacy media in the last few weeks shows, the national commentariat is also fully occupied by the military establishment. Staffed from top to bottom by spooks and hawks, the corporate press’s focus from the pre-Iraq firing of Phil Donahue through the past few weeks of guest star appearances on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by the likes of Leon Panetta, John Bolton, Karl Rove, David Petraeus and Marc Thiessen — all people with direct involvement in the Afghan mess — has been the same. It keeps the public distracted with inane tactical issues or fleeting partisan controversies, leaving the larger problem of a continually expanding Fortress America unexamined.

Taibbi shows of a clip of Eisenhower's farewell address to the American people warning of the influence of the military industrial complex.  Quoting Eisenhower: 

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

What Do I Stand For?

I'm not a pacifist, and I am willing to fight and probably even lie for a good cause.  But I also try to be an alert and knowledgeable citizen, trying to promote democracy and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.  Which conflicts are worth killing and lying for?  Foreign enemies such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, or Russia?  Domestic political foes such as Trump or Hillary?  Or to support those who work to make the world a better place peacefully, such as Bernie Bros and Greens?  I'm with the peaceniks.  Perhaps I will change someday when I feel truly threatened by another country or domestic party, but for the moment I don't find either Democrats or Republicans to be worth fighting for or against.  Rather I feel like fighting both Democrats and Republicans in an honest and non-violent manner.  More constructively, I can work with Democrats, Republicans, and everyone else as necessary on a case by case to promote the public interest. At the present time, truth and attention to priorities are my highest goals.  I see no obvious group or person to pledge my loyalty to, so my political support is up for grabs.

COVID Confusion

The anti-Trump conventional wisdom has been united in support of vaccines as the cure all for covid.  Now, that narrative is collapsing and there is no mainstream consensus on what to do next.  While lockdowns were universally endorsed by the TDS mainstream in 2020, at the current time a policy of resuming lockdowns is more controversial.  For one, this would indicate a failure of the vaccines to completely protect people.  For another, there is no end in sight.  So people who have been super cautious are now realizing they'll have to take chances and likely will get covid, though it won't kill them.  The pandemic is morphing into an endemic nuisance.

A Dispassionate Look at Ivermectin and Covid

A Dispassionate Look at Ivermectin and Covid

Introduction

I tried to discuss the issue of ivermectin as a prophylaxis and/or treatment for covid in two aborted blog posts.  The first looked at the issue from the point of view of our (US) national ethos and the state of discourse.  The second looked at the issue in terms of degenerative politics and crimes against humanity.  I aborted these attempts as secondary to the issue of whether ivermectin is actually effective as a prophylaxis and/or treatment for COVID.

In search of more objective information regarding the efficacy of ivermectin in relation to COVID, I watched a video with this orientation -- Ivermectin, For and Against, with Tess Lawrie, Graham Walker & Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz.  I watched the full video, featuring two opponents of ivermectin and one supporter, and a moderator/producer who was very much neutral.  Then I read through the comments -- there were > 1000 and I can't say that I read them all, but I did spend a couple of hours reading the comments and considering the facts.  As is common these days, the comments were filled with ad hominem attacks and red herrings, but I gradually came to better understand the underlying facts and issues.

Facts 

• There have been at least 60 studies about the effectiveness of ivermectin with regard to COVID.  

• 39 of these have been peer-reviewed

• 30 of these have been randomized controlled trials

• All tolled, the trials have involved 574 scientists and 21,814 patients.

• 64% and 96% lower mortality is observed for early treatment and prophylaxis (RR 0.36 [0.15-0.85] and 0.04 [0.00-0.59]). Statistically significant improvements are seen for mortality, hospitalization, cases, and viral clearance.

• The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as the 60 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 193 billion.

• There are no serious concerns over the safety of ivermectin.

• Ivermectin is cheap and production could be mass produced to give to every person in the world without much difficulty.

• Nobody is arguing that ivermectin has been proven ineffective, or even that it doesn't work.  The arguments against ivermectin allege that it has not been proven effective.  The specific arguments range from misgivings about specific studies, to generalizations that whole categories of study are unreliable.  

• The main argument against promoting ivermectin to as a prophylaxis or treatment covid is that it will discourage people from getting a vaccine.  To this end, the medical establishment has clamped down so that doctors are subject to punishment if they prescribe ivermection.  Discussion of ivermectin has been discouraged and even expressly prohibited on some major media platforms.

• There are few (no?) alternatives to ivermectin recommended by the medical profession in the early treatment of covid.  Likewise, there are few alternatives promoted for treatment of long haul covid.

Authority, Common Sense, and a New Mythology

I personally experienced a breakthrough on November 30, 2020 when I wrote a post titled This I Believe.  

An overriding lesson I have learned is to look at controversial issues using my own common sense.  In case after case, the conventional wisdom defies common sense.  Once common sense is applied, then the pieces fit together reasonably.  Common sense consists of considering both sides of an issue, along with the motives involved.  With respect to the cases below, one side of the issue has won the day with regard to the mainstream media and the conventional wisdom.  Thus, I am questioning "the facts" and recent history as widely accepted across the U.S. global empire.

Common sense leads me to consider the reason why only one side of some issues is considered legitimate.  Most people do not have the time to dwell extensively on such matters.  It is convenient to accept a well established narrative and move on.  I have done that most of my life, but in retirement and with access to the Internet have had time and capability of looking at both sides of confusing episodes.  I learned that it is valuable to weigh circumstantial evidence in forming an accurate mental model of the world.  While there may be no proof for the things "I know" which are listed below, consideration of the likelihood (Bayesian probability) of certain matters based upon circumstantial evidence leads to a more robust mental model.

As Steve Randy Waldman has pointed out, authority is extremely valuable to a society as it allows conflicts to be resolved peaceably:

The behavior of so many bodies must be improbably constrained and synchronized to yield functional societies, which requires elaborate social coordination. Authority is an invisible drummer that helps to organize this dance. We construct authority. How we construct it is among the most important social, ethical, and technological problems we face.  

I am contributing to a crisis of confidence in authority when I question the credibility of mainstream institutions such as the New York Times, the Democratic Party, and the CIA.  Thus, the antipathy I receive in response is understandable.

Take, for example, the Wuhan lab leak origin hypothesis for COVID-19.  For me, this is obviously true.  The closest living relative to the SARS-CoV-2 virus was found in caves and taken to a Wuhan laboratory 1000 miles away for gain of function research.  This was known to be risky and safety concerns were raised shortly before the pathogen was discovered in the open near the lab.  The international team of scientists involved with funding and operating the labs quickly closed ranks to say that a lab leak was impossible, and to prevent investigation.  Objective scientists (i.e. without conflicts of interest) from around the world soon questioned the prevailing wisdom and easily debunked the conventional wisdom.  Meanwhile, no evidence of zoonotic origin has been found.

It doesn't get any more cut and dried than this, in my view, and I've been following this more and more closely for almost a year.  We warned this might happen if gain of function research was carried out, and sure enough a pandemic emerged right at the spot where such research was carried out.  So what we do we do when common sense defies what our authorities are telling us?  When we attack the credibility of our own tribe (NY Times, NPR, Democrats), are we not on the verge of nihilism?  Do we need Democratic authority to prevent the even more corrupt and nihilistic Republican authority?  

Perhaps it is common sense that we ought to question?  Certainly, common sense yields different conclusions for different people.  My common sense might be wrong, and the evidence for that might be that the NY Times, NPR, and the Democratic leadership disagree with me.  Certainly their accumulated wisdom and credibility surpasses that of me and my fringe fellow travelers.  Shouldn't I just realize that I am probably wrong and shut up?

The question answers itself in the context of our democratic values.  In the United States, we are encouraged to participate in public discourse even if we disagree with the authorities, and this is a good thing about our country.  On the other hand, my understanding is that in other large and successful countries such as China, public disagreement with the authorities is discouraged much more severely.  Further complicating matters is that fact that modern China is quite successful as a culture and nation and as an alternative model to western democracy.  Maybe we need to emulate the Chinese a bit and tone down our anti-authoritarianism.

Let's see if we can untangle the above using a bit of common sense.  Of course those parties who unleashed the global pandemic via careless gain of function research will try to protect themselves.  This is human nature and is quite understandable.  This extends to Chinese researchers, U.S. researchers, parties that functioned the research such as Peter Daszak's nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, and U.S. government agencies such as the NIH that were involved in such funding.  Mistakes were made resulting in almost 4 million deaths globally and the shutdown of much of society around the world for over a year.  Common sense tells me that we've arrived at something of a global reckoning.  The authorities made massive mistakes, but they remain the authorities with massive power to brush aside questions and complaints.

Let's look at other current examples of authority in conflict with common sense.  

1. Global warming.  The earth has a carbon cycle.  In the last couple hundred years we have been releasing carbon reserves (oil, gas, coal) that were sequestered in the earth over hundreds of millions of years.  Common sense would indicate that such a disruption of the earth's atmosphere would have a significant effect, and that's what the evidence on global temperature and melting glaciers confirms. Republican authorities have been unwilling to accept this and work toward solutions.
2. Weapons of mass destruction.  We've seen the power of nuclear weapons and it's widely accepted that they could decimate humanity if ever used in an all out war.  Now we've seen that biological engineering can create pandemics.  The destructive potential of our advanced technologies is plain to see.  Yet the Republican authorities in the Trump Administration seemed intent on dismantling international cooperation to deal with such existential threats.  And the Democratic authorities have provoked Russia and tried to back this nuclear powered rival into a corner.
3. Autonomous vehicles.  Artificial intelligence would obviously pose a threat to humanity, which now occupies the highest rung of intelligence and consequently dominates all other species.  Why would we want to create new forms on intelligence that could prove superior?  Nevertheless, our corporate authorities have poured billions of dollars into the development of self-driving cars and trucks.  Common sense would dictate that we pour our resources into dealing with the existential threats to humanity rather than such inane, yet potentially dangerous, pursuits.

The pattern that emerges is that common sense points in the direction of dealing with existential threats to our species.  The dangers are obvious, as are the vested interests that keep us from dealing adequately with the existential threats.  We need to elevate such common sense ideas to global mythological status.

All hail the new gods of technological restraint 

and intertribal cooperation