War Handwavium

Al Jazeera reports that it has obtained a copy of a “Code of Conduct” book issued by Mullah Omar to the entire Taliban.

One of its rules: “Whenever any official, soldier, contractor or worker of the slave government is captured, these prisoners cannot be attacked or harmed,”

The Taliban have repeatedly used suicide bombings across Afghanistan, the book says that they should be used only on high and important targets.

The book also states that anyone who does not follow these rules are not true Taliban.

Part of the reason for the book could be because Mullah Omar is trying to centralize Taliban power to himself. Currently the Taliban is extremely decentralized. Individual Taliban commanders are basically warlords in one area of Afghanistan or Pakistan. Some are motivated by religious extremism. Some are motivated by their opposition to the official Afghan or Pakistan government. Some are motivated by their opposition to American influence in the area. And some are motivated simply by the attraction of power and money that being a warlord can achieve. The code of conduct book states that anyone who does not follow these rules is not a part of the true Taliban. If a Taliban group is not following these rules, the book states they should be disbanded.

All of which would centralize power under Mullah Omar.

But another reason for these rules might be an effort for the Taliban to win the hearts and minds of the local populations.

One of the reasons the Taliban came to power in the first place was because the power vacuum left after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan allowed warlords to move in and fill the void, and some of these warlords were extremely corrupt. When the Taliban warlords overthrew an extremely corrupt warlord, the locals supported the Taliban. What is happening now is that Taliban itself is becoming corrupt because some of its local commanders are corrupt, kidnapping people for money, operating with little regard for civilian casualties.

This code of conduct book might in part be an attempt to shift the Taliban into something that could win the hearts and minds of the local population again.

Right now, it’s only words. It’s only a book. Only time will reveal whether the local commanders heed these orders or not.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/07/20097278348124813.html

Racism exists in America today. Racial profiling by police has been documented numerous times and numerous cities. Looking at who the police in a stop in an area, the percentages of who was stopped, when broken down by race, should roughly follow the racial makeup of that area. If you’re in an area that is 80% white and 20% black, but the police records show their stops break down into 70% black and 30% white, you can assert that racial profiling is taking place.

But just because you’ve proven that racial profiling is occurring in a department or a city or a state or even a country, that does not mean you can pull out a specific incident of a police stop, and assert it was racially motivated without looking at the individual merits of that specific case.

To take one incident and demand that it follow your chosen general principle is a logical fallacy called “A Dicto Simpliciter”.

To commit the dicto simpliciter fallacy with racism is to argue that a particular incident must be racially motivated because racism exists in this country.

This recently happened with a case involving Sgt. James Crowley (white) responding to a 911 call about a breakin at the Cambridge, Mass. home of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. (black)

Gates had come home from a trip overseas to find his door jammed shut. He asked his cab driver (also a black man) to help him force open the door. A neighbor saw two black men forcing the front door open and called 911 to report a possible breakin. Crowley was first on the scene and found Gates in the home. Crowley asked to see Gates’s identification. What exactly happened after that depends on whose version of the story you read. Crowley says Gates would not show an ID. Gates says he did show his id but then Crowley refused to identify himself or give his badge number. What exactly happened, no one may ever know. But it ended with Gates being arrested for disorderly conduct. The charges were dropped several days later.

When the story first hit the news, some folks immediately reported it as obvious and blatant racism by a white cop arresting a black man for no reason. Even though they had little or no information about what actually happened or the character of the two people involved.

These people committed a dicto simpliciter, demanding that this particular white cop arrested Gates out of racism, because racism exists in the US.

It appears now that more information has come out about Crowley that this particular incident was likely not motivated by racism. Crowley was hand picked by former Cambridge Police Commissioner Ronny Watson (black) to teach sensitivity training to keep cops from racial profiling. A Boston cop, Lawrence Hickman, (also black) who teaches at the same academy and has worked alongside Crowley for years has nothing but the highest respect for Crowley.

What must be separated in the discussion of racism is the general principle versus a specific incident which may or may not be racially motivated.

Some people demand that this particular (or any particular) incident be labeled as “racism!” out of a conflated idea that since there is racism in general, this must be racism. And they may be motivated out of fear of the converse: If this particular (any particular) incident is NOT racism, then there is NO RACISM IN GENERAL in the country.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Racism in America exists today even if this particular case involving Gates and Crowley was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to have nothing to do with racism.

But jumping to the conclusion about a particular incident being racially motivated only to have it turn out to not be the case can only result in losing support from people against the very real fight against very real racism in America. The story goes that the little boy cried “Wolf!” three times when there was no wolf. The forth time, there was a wolf, but no one would listen to him.

So don’t commit the dicto simpliciter fallacy. Just because there is racism in America in general, doesn’t mean that a particular incident must be racist.

As for why Crowley charged Gates with disorderly conduct, it seems more a clash of egos than racism. How much ego Gates brought to the incident is not yet exactly known, though he has admitted to bringing some ego by getting angry at Crowley. We know for a fact that Crowley brought enough ego to arrest Gates for trivial reasons. (The fact that the charges were dropped so quickly would seem to indicate they lacked merit.)

The Iraqi prime minister recently said that American troops might remain in Iraq after 2011 withdrawal deadline.

No, really?

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/07/2009723181757315574.html

Israel defies US demands to stop illegal settlements in Palestinian lands, claims it owns all of Jeruselem.

There will be no peace between Israel and Palestine so long as Israel insists on throwing a temper tantrum every time the world tells it to stop hitting its brother.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/07/200972014225118853.html

I was looking at this book:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060598999

via Boing Boing

And the byline I imagined was this:

“The Invisible Hand of Capitalism has Hairy Palms”

The book itself isn’t about war handwavium but it is about economic handwavium, and the book appears to address the handwavium directly. And anything that helps people become aware of how language is used to misdescribe reality is a good thing.

The “Invisible Hand” was a metaphor created by Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations”, written in 1776. Smith used the term “invisible hand” once in the entire book, when he was discussing how capitalists in one country would be kept from moving their capital out of the country to another country where the labor was cheaper. Smith said an “invisible hand” of their own nationalistic interests will compel them to support their home country, and thereby strengthen the country that they live in.

The idea of the “Invisible Hand” has come to mean that if you do not have government regulation of markets, that this “invisible hand” of self interests will spontaneously emerge some higher order of organization better than any regulated market possibly could.

What is funny is how the current issue of “oursourcing” jobs to foreign countries where labor is cheaper essentially proves that capitalists don’t care for their country and only care for their profits, essentially disproving Smith’s one and only use of the term “invisible hand”. And yet, laissez-faire idealogues not only continue to push the concept of “invisible hand”, but push it far beyond the very limited sense that Adam Smith had used it.

The “Invisible Hand” is pure economic handwavium. And given how it is driven purely by self-interest and self-satisfaction, on some level it qualifies as a kind of masturbation. While there’s nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalists masturbating themselves with fantasies of spontaneous emergence, it’s pure fantasy and certainly doesn’t qualify as any sort of real-world relationship required for a monetary transaction between separate individuals in an economy.

When you hear “invisible hand of capitalism”, you should immediately imagine some laissez-faire capitalists masturbating to some economiic porno with “Bow chicka bow wow” replaced with “cha-ching cha-ching”.

Liz Cheney pushed her father’s version of reality in the Wall Street Journal today. Dick Cheney is a crazy neocon paranoid moonbat, so it isn’t too surprising to see that Liz is also crazy.

The spark for her shpeel is that she didn’t like a speech Obama gave in Russia recently because it wasn’t sufficiently full of nonsensical black/white delineations between the USSR and USA during the Cold War.

Liz Cheney says:

The truth, of course, is that the Soviets ran a brutal, authoritarian regime. The KGB killed their opponents or dragged them off to the Gulag. There was no free press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of worship, no freedom of any kind.

One wonders how Liz could possibly have managed to miss the fact that her father, as Vice President of the United States, spread lies to invade Iraq under false pretenses. Could Liz possibly not know that her father approved a torture program that dragged people off to black site Gulags (Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Graib) without due process and tortured them for months and sometimes years. Could Liz possibly not know that her own father was behind the massive wiretapping scheme that violated the civil rights of innocent Americans?

Later on, Liz says:

America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the Cold War.

Could Liz possibly not be aware of America’s hand in “Operation Ajax” during the Cold War? Does she not know the CIA was behind overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 and installing the brutal dictator, the Shah, who had his own secret police and Gulags? Is she ignorant of how America kept the Shah in power for a quarter century, until 1979, even as the Shah expanded his torture prisons?

Is she completely clueless? Or is she willfully ignoring the facts? Or is she totally aware of the facts and yet manages to believe a black-and-white version of reality that only exists in the insane minds of neocon nutjobs?

Liz then finishes her article with an interesting strawman. She portrays Obama’s approach as nothing more than an attempt to make America appear meek and mild and inoffensive to our enemies. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

What Obama is doing is applying a little honesty to history and to international relationships. America has clearly NOT been the white knight who does no wrong, while America’s enemies such as the USSR during the cold war are purely black hearted devils.

No, what Liz can’t seem to wrap her mind around is that an honest reporting of history means that she must give up her America-is-perfect-and-everyone-else-is-evil-incarnate version of history. And what Liz has done is argue that the world should continue her fantasy, black and white, version of history, and to portray anything that represents the realities of history as the shades of grey that they are as making America “weak” and bowing to our enemies to make ourselves look “inoffensive”.

There is no weakness in honesty. There is great weakness in dishonesty.

And in that, Liz and her father are some of the weakest individuals in America.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124744075427029805.html

The former speaker of the US House of Representatives has said that the US should “sabotage” Iran’s oil and gas infrastructure as part of its efforts to bring down the government.

Apparently, to Newt, the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953 didn’t cause quite enough backlash in the form of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. No, Newt wants the US to meddle with Iran even more to make sure we angered every man, woman, and child in that country.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/07/200971023542914638.html

Iranians gathered on July 9 to protest the presidential election. They were motivated in part because it was the ten year anniversary of student unrest in 1999.

Authorities have banned all gatherings and protests of any kind. Police used tear gas and physical force to disperse the protesters.

That protesters are braving riot police at this point indicates strong unrest in Iran. But how much of it was motivated because of the anniversary remains to be seen. The question is whether the protesters can continue to make public demonstrations or whether the military crackdown will finally silence them.

At this point, anything could happen. Only time will tell.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/07/200979134022271172.html

According to CIA Director Leon Panetta, the CIA has been lying to congress about significant actions since 2001.

What those actions are has not yet been revealed.

But this news comes out the day before the House discusses a measure that would increase the number of people in Congress who must be notified of covert intelligence operations from the current 8 to more than 35.

The White House opposes the bill.

Given how poorly these 8 members have been doing currently, I’m inclined to support the idea of expanding the number of congresspeople who must be informed of CIA operations. Makes it harder to hide bad operations under a few members of congress.

I’m wonder what the “significant actions” have been. It would be purely speculation, but it might be that the amount of torture and rendition and so on has been far worse than reported even now.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20090709/pl_bloomberg/avp991mwyfpe

Glenn Greenwald found this bit about a skit that took place on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” show back in 2004. It isn’t specifically about language misdescribing violence, but it’s close.

I’m a reporter, Jon, and my job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called “objectivity” — �might want to look it up some day.

News “Reporters” have found it easier to simply parrot what the politicians babble than to take down their words, investigate the claims objectively, and call them on their lies. If you call politicians on their lies, they might not give you “access” any more, and many news “reporters” have given high priority to “access” than to truth, honesty, or integrity.

So, the short of it is this: any newsperson who takes down what people say and then mindlessly parrots those words and pretends that’s “objective” news, those people are NOT reporters, they’re stenographers.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/02/npr/index.html

http://www.fair.org/extra/0411/stenographers.html