Annie Gowen of the Washington Post says that “the rat population around the two Occupy D.C. camps at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza has ‘exploded’ since protesters began” according to the director of the District’s Department of Health. Gowen noted that city health inspectors had seen “rats running openly through both camps and spotted numerous new burrows and nests underneath hay-stuffed pallets occupiers are using for beds.”
It would be ironic, but not unusual, if something — in this case Occupy — which imagined itself a solution turned out to be the genesis of another problem. As Michael Crichton described in his classic speech on complexity, Park Service attempts to manage Yellowstone Park for the good had created a new situation, but not the one they imagined.
It was his third visit. Roosevelt saw a thousand antelope, plentiful cougar, mountain sheep, deer, coyote, and many thousands of elk. He wrote, “Our people should see to it that this rich heritage is preserved for their children and their children’s children forever, with its majestic beauty all unmarred.”
But Yellowstone was not preserved. On the contrary, it was altered beyond repair in a matter of years. By 1934, the park service acknowledged that “white-tailed deer, cougar, lynx, wolf, and possibly wolverine and fisher are gone from the Yellowstone.”
What they didn’t say was that the park service was solely responsible for the disappearances. Park rangers had been shooting animals for decades, even though that was illegal under the Lacey Act of 1894. But they thought they knew better. They thought their environmental concerns trumped any mere law.
Nature never stands still, but man often wants to compel circumstances into some imagined ideal. For many people, the world consists of problems that need solutions; but as detective novelist Dorothy Sayers observed, the human tendency to view things in these terms has created endless difficulties.
What is obvious here is the firmly implanted notion that all human situations are “problems” like detective problems, capable of a single, necessary, and categorical solution, which must be wholly right, while all others are wholly wrong. But this they cannot be, since human situations are subject to the law of human nature, whose evil is at all times rooted in its good, and whose good can only redeem, but not abolish, its evil …
I do not say that it is impossible to view all human activity, even the activity of the artist, in terms of “problem and solution”. But I say that, however we use the words, they are wholly inadequate to the reality they are meant to express …
It is here that we begin to see how the careless use of the words “problem” and “solution” can betray us into habits of thought that are not merely inadequate but false. It leads us to consider all vital activities in terms of a particular kind of problem, namely the kind we associate with elementary mathematics and detective fiction. These latter are “problems” which really can be “solved” in a very strict and limited sense, and I think the words “problem” and “solution” should be reserved for these special cases. Applied indiscriminately, they are fast becoming a deadly danger.
The chief difficulty with regarding the world as a detective problem where a culprit only has to be tracked down in order to solve it, is it assumes things can be subjected to human will. That given enough power one can ‘fix’ things for good; a process which the President feels is well within his grasp. As he recently told an interviewer, his accomplishments in the first two years have already made him at least the fourth greatest President in American history.
The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president – with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln – just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.
So the world can be fixed. We can fixed. All President Obama needs is enough authority to do it. He said, “I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer” as he asserted the power to make recess appointments even over the objections of Congress, which is Constitutionally charged to review them.
And why not? What is the value of what one pundit called ‘a hundred year old document that nobody understands’ when set against the need to solve a problem? It is nothing surely.
But President Obama may find, like the Park Service and like Occupy Wall Street before him, that things aren’t quite that simple and that every one of our ‘solutions’ simply gives birth to a new problem. What is worse, many of those new problems will come as a complete surprise and may be orders of magnitude greater than anticipated. Faced with that eventuality, an Obama-like ‘solution’ will be as predictable as it will be futile: a demand for more power and still ever more power.
But the essential difficulty is the nature of the Obama-like control system itself. A linear, bureaucratic management system can never adequately ‘fix’ a complex and chaotic world. It wasn’t always like this. As Sayers pointed out, not everyone regarded the human condition as a problem that needed to be solved and fixed, like a thermostat superglued into a final setting. There was a time when men felt they were exploring an enormous riddle; moving through a beautiful and frightening place that was at once greater and more worthwhile than mere politician’s schemes; where the new was to be sought and not feared.
No man can die more than once; but great disasters, great pestilences, and above all great wars, cram our eyes and ears with the detested knowledge that life intends to kill us.
Because of that, we would not risk war, for right or justice, or even in the hope of preserving peace. We threw down our arms, crying, “No More War!”, and so delivered up Europe.
Yet we know perfectly well that the paradox “he that will lose his life shall save it” is a plain and practical fact. Unless we are willing to risk death by jumping from a burning house, we shall most certainly be burnt to death. Indeed, had not the will of our physical nature been ready to accept death, we could never have been born.
The “problem of death” is not susceptible of detective story solution. The only two things we can do with death are, first: to postpone it, which is only partial solution, and, secondly, to transfer the whole set of values connected with death to another sphere of action-that is, from time to eternity.
There is, in Sayer’s metaphysical observation, something of Crichton’s argument that complex systems are not susceptible to linear management. They are governed by a logic we can’t fully understand, at least as yet. Any attempts to subject them to a Five Year Plan will result in unexpected consequences. Therefore any wise governance should allow for other processes — other wills — to operate besides those of bureaucrats in the capital city.
One of the greatest advantages of America till now was its foundation of on the idea governance should be contingent; based upon the chaos of freedom and individual choice rather than upon the smooth workings and false calculation of a Chinese politburo-style plan. The Founding Fathers didn’t see the world as a problem. They perceived it as an opportunity.
If Occupy and President Obama are solutions, then what is the problem? Perhaps it is the notion that there is a privileged point of view; a correct perspective from which teaching moments can be delivered, from which answers can be handed down. In that world, in which some are more equal than others, there will be the rulers and the ruled.
But that would be a mistake if nature had other ideas.
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De Plague, de plague
LOL, one of the funnier ones.
“If Occupy and President Obama are solutions, then what is the problem?”
To answer this question one only needs a mirror. Hold the mirror up to Occupy and President Obama and voila! – the solution is the problem.
We are on the wrong side of the mirror. That’s the real problem.
In one of the early Dune novels, Herbert put forth assertion that life was not a problem to be solved but an experience to be lived.
FWIW.
Now what was that Gandalf quote that would fit here …?
Crichton explored the theme of complex systems as chaos theory in Jurassic Park. The best-laid plans of the park developers would not contain what they had created.
America was always supposed to be about creative chaos, with the only boundaries being set by societal norms and limited government. This ideal is a bug, not a feature, to progressives. It requires too many of them to have to settle for regular jobs doing useful stuff that other people actually want — can’t have that, no sir. Obama is living the ultimate post-modern power trip fantasy: he has it all without ever having to do anything of real substance and utility to get to his position. We let this happen: we let others mind our business, so this is what we get as our reward.
Remember:
There are always more people who want power than there are people who deserve power
Yes–perhaps the greatest sin that can afflict the high and mighty is to believe that just because they are good at one thing, such as community organizing, that they will be equally good at doing everything else.
What that results in is spoiled children playing with dangerous things that they do not understand, and little good ever comes of that. The history of central economic planning illustrates that pretty well.
Wretchard, embedded in your numerous brilliant essays is, what seems to me, a perverse tendency to take the TPOTUS at face value, even while you are exposing the logical fallacies of its utterances. When it is difficult to imagine how a Manchurian Reader could have been more effective, it is much easier for me to believe that its results are intentional rather than the result of incompetence. You are so universally insightful that I suspect a devil’s advocate. The alternative is also too horrible to contemplate.
perhaps the greatest sin that can afflict the high and mighty is to believe that just because they are good at one thing, . . . . that they will be equally good at doing everything else
A benign example of that are major sports franchise owners; wealthy people who got that way because they were good at something, but who then manage to run their franchise into the ground.
Not so benign is the buffoonish Trump thinking he can be President (hey, Obama did it!) or solve world problems.
Now what was that Gandalf quote that would fit here …?
The relevant Tolkeinesque text is the Fall of Numenor, where Sauron comes to the King of the Numenoreans as a prisoner, but eventually convinces him that with more power, the King can escape death and rule even the Valar. They then prepare a Great Armament and invade Valinor the better to seize their power. But the unexpected happened. The world is broken and they have only dirt and foam and surf where they would find magic. Interestingly, the Valar had before the invasion come to the King of Numenor and told him that ‘death was not a punishment’, but he could not understand these words. Sauron’s found a more fertile ground in his heart.
Tolkien was intentionally setting the stage for his main thesis: the peril of power. But the peril, come to think of it, is less in the power than in the pride. We want to remake the world according to our own poor conception of perfection. And as a first step we stop listening to others; the great consider their voices too small or rustic to weigh seriously. Interestingly, unlimited power almost always produces grotesques. The tyrants erect monuments which they cannot see are disturbingly ugly. To their eyes such monstrosities are ‘beautiful’ and that is often the most telling indication that they’ve lost their ability to see. In Tolkien’s world, power lives in the Dark, alone in its own negative fire. There is in this, something of 1 Corinthians 2: “None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
In some ways this passage speaks of the ways in which we can “see Yellowstone” yet not see it; of how we can gaze out over humanity and never see ourselves as one of them. It’s an old, old idea. But we have to rediscover it with each passing generation.
As regards the intentions of President Obama, the safest approach is not assume a malign intent but to view his actions on their objective merit. We can only guess what is in his heart, but we can know for a fact what he does.
Therefore if the actions of his administration fail the minimum case of competence that is enough; Malice can be an aggravating circumstance, but it doesn’t change the essential calculation and therefore can be left outside the essential reckoning.
From the polemical point of view, there is some chance of convincing others on the external facts but less of convincing others by an appeal to the internal state of the President which is not observable, unless he somehow is overheard by a live mike or if his diaries or memos come to light.
Ultimately the only safe estimates are those based on capability. Intent is important, but it’s hard to get a handle on it.
Replacing God’s law with mans law has brought small thinking on a small scale, thus the unintended consequences that effect multitudes of other scales that man cannot and will never be able to comprehend. Man refuse the truth because man wants to create his own but man has no power to change the truth of the past nor the truth of the future, the truth of the present will appear as an infected sore that man does not understand with man’s limited comprehension, if man continues to accepts what man wants to create as the truth the cycle of insanity will commence again only to get worse with each cycle!
Winslow @7 — I agree. To accept that the past three years have been part of an intentional plan to reduce the strength of the United States and purposely render America militarily and economically weaker is the stuff folks with tin foil on their heads propagate. But really there are only a few parsimonious explanations.
1. He is incompetent.
2. He is a sincere leftist who genuinely believes that his programs will be good for America.
3. He is some sort of cynical leftist who wants to weaken America.
Of course, all three could be true. It is generally wiser to attribute things to incompetence first, as this is the most common cause. But in this case hypothesis 3 seems to me to fit the facts most closely.
Heaven help us.
Addition/Revision: Wretchard posted at #9 while I was writing this. You make a good point that rhetorically it is best to focus on actual deeds rather than try to divine motives. However, because intentions are so much more important to the left than they are to the right, intentions do become important to address.
The left can say that thus and such action might have caused unintended harm, but they INTENDED it to be good, and therefore they see it as being good but just not working out. It is important to address their motives, as they have been hiding behind the “good intentions” shield for decades.
Yes, we cannot KNOW what is in another’s heart, but we can and do make reasonable inferences all the time. If I see a man in a dark alley reaching into his coat it is reasonable to worry whether he is grabbing his gun, though he might just be taking the banana out of his inside coat pocket for a late night snack.
And it does make a difference whether violating a Constitutional provision is merely an act of incompetence, or is based on ignorance, or is for a single expedient, or is part of a corrosive attack against the Constitution itself.
I admit to a certain curiousity as to the reaction if and when there is an outbreak of Yersinia pestis at one or more #Occupy sites. What basis can they have to blame Bush, Wall Street, Capitalism, or their student loans?
Subotai Bahadur
Perhaps my problem is that I live in a population who so trust the lack of malevolence (good intentions)that they are unwilling to look at the contradictory evidence.
Thanks for the POV. As I often suspect, you play a deeper game.
for the fsb/kgb guys on the board here’s an iteresting news item that states that now the Russian foreign ministry officially regrets iranians activity.
Published 19:08 10.01.12
Latest update 19:08 10.01.12
Russia ‘regrets’ reported Iran nuclear activity in Qom facility
Russian Foreign Ministry official says uranium enrichment in Fordo location shows Iran is not responding to concerns on its nuclear program.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/russia-regrets-reported-iran-nuclear-activity-in-qom-facility-1.406555
…………
now granted the russian foreign ministry might well be a foreign country to the fsb/kgb. however to everyone else it looks like russia officially regrets Iranian activity.
While Obama’s actions and their results may indeed be due to incompetence, there is great utility in a down-and-dirty election to convince a lot of voters that Obama’s actions are deliberate malice. I know how amoral that sounds, but one needs ask: is Obama’s defeat of paramount importance?
As to what this “incompetence” is comprised of: are we saying that he’s incompetent in carrying out a progressive agenda, or is the agenda itself an incompetent one?
Barack Obama released three top Taliban terrorist leaders from Gitmo this week.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/220174.html
No malevolence here!
I’m confused. Was the Washington compost speaking of four legged rats or two.
The Second Law of Problems is that all solutions create more problems.
The first Law is also called Mencken’s Law;
“The perfect solution is impossible to implement.”
Mencken was a smart fellow;
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken
“The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people’s money. No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.”
If Occupy and President Obama are solutions, then what is the problem?
Obvious: rat deficiency.
There was a time when men felt they were exploring an enormous riddle; moving through a beautiful and frightening place that was at once greater and more worthwhile than mere politician’s schemes; where the new was to be sought and not feared.
Was there? There was a little Michael Swanwick story, but it only repeats the theme from C. S. Lewis, in which Merlin is seen as the symbol of those who want to control everything. Well, in “That Hideous Strength” it turns out to everyone’s surprise that Merlin knows the limits is actually on the Christian side.
The riddle is infinite in both scope and detail, this is perhaps the FACT that the dimbulb progressives like Algore do not grasp, that we can control this much but never all, and (contra Douglas Adams) a little perspective on things, not to mention modesty, is entirely necessary if one is not to be a fool.
The paradox is this: there is room for infinite progress,* but you won’t make much of it if you focus on the wrong things.
*Infinite progress still does not exhaust or fill an infinite universe even at the same order of infinity, if you can believe any of that stuff.
“…because they are good at one thing, such as community organizing…”
Community organizing is about the aggrieved identifying an enemy and convincing government to join you in fighting it. Community organizing is more about Marxist class warfare and the promotion of social justice which is one and the same. Freedom and merit don’t factor into it, on the contrary power and enmity do.
The problem with social science and political science is that they are not measurable in any way that can be used to build models where experiments can be made and reproduced to “prove” theories. If these “sciences” were likened to Newtonian physics and the Bohr atomic model, they fail to account for a Heisenberg world of quantum particles or strings that produce them the forces between bodies. Merit is what the individual makes of himself not what is fair or could have been, born by the artificial pressure of desire. The equilibrium in a closed system is brought about by regulating outcome whereas a free system rewards the wise, the hard working, and the lucky. It is notable that god helps those who help themselves. Resentment for this condition has become the currency of the Left since Marx and probably back into biblical times.
The purpose of our political system was to protect the citizen from over reaching government. For the sin of our forefathers it has evolved into a political system that protects itself and a select group of groups from its citizens.
Accountability is lost with assertions that if we didn’t initiate TARP, quantitative easing, action X, then Y would have happened. We saved 7 billion jobs from being lost.
What is important is the underlying principle in which we engage the world. To do well by oneself and to be able to provide for ones progeny out of a penchant for good, or is the subject of the state too inherently evil not to be held in contempt before the law. Generation of the unborn are destined to be “not born” (incised with cold steel) or taxed and excluded from the family of man because we are to learn that our forefathers were evil, not just in our time but in their own time and time of all of eternity. Deconstructionism requires the context of the future divorced from the past.
Charles, maybe they didn’t get the memo.
Wretchard – thank you for the honor of your extended reply, featuring JRRT, no less.
I think conservatives should engrave the second part of your comment on stone as they prepare for the election. Conservatives will only break themselves against the rocks by alienating the middle of the electorate if they indulge in extended mediations on the “evil intentions” of Obama … the effect of his policies are bad enough.
Dang Tattoo, I know you are far from a mental midget but please dont criticize the NPS while I am in the midst of trying to obtain a permit! Do you have any idea how long these things take if you are not a liberal in need of a place to protest?
Wretchard – thank you for the honor of your extended reply, featuring JRRT, no less.
I think conservatives should engrave the second part of your comment (#9) on stone as they prepare for the election. Conservatives will only break themselves against the rocks by alienating the middle of the electorate if they indulge in extended mediations on the “evil intentions” of Obama … the effect of his policies are bad enough.
Or there’s the old “spook” adage:
Once is an accident.
Twice is coincidence.
Thrice is enemy action.
HERCULES INVICTUS
In the third century BC the people of the new Roman republic accepted the view that they were of Trojan lineage, that the god Heracles had founded the city of Rome, and that Aeneas and Achilles had fathered Romulus and Remus. This acceptance of the Greek view of the world, and Rome’s place in that Greek world, put Rome in direct conflict with Carthage, whom the Greeks despised as barbarians. This conflict led to the eventual destruction of Carthage, and the eventual destruction of the Roman republic as well. Yet who would have thought that the Greek myth of Heracles driving the cattle of Geryon south through Italy and thus to Pallanthium, the site of a future Rome, and the people of Rome embracing that myth, would lead to the world we live in today.
Hercules Invictus
How gods laugh as they inflict us
With the thought that we could understand the world
Though we wonder and we labor
Neither arquebus nor saber
Ever answered questions while the bagpipes skirled
For the stars remain in silence
As they look upon the violence
Of the salted cities midst the women’s cries
Yes we think we are exalted
And we never can be faulted
But the gods know we are smart but seldom wise
More from H.L Mencken:
“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Baltimore Sun (26 July 1920)
“All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.”
Smart Set (December 1919)
“My old suggestion that public offices be filled by drawing lots, as a jury box is filled, was probably more intelligent than I suspected. It has been criticized on the ground that selecting a man at random would probably produce some extremely bad State governors. [...] But I incline to believe that it would be best to choose members of the Legislature quite at random. No matter how stupid they were, they could not be more stupid than the average legislator under the present system. Certainly, they’d be measurably more honest, taking one with another. Finally, there would be the great advantage that all of them had got their jobs unwillingly, and were eager, not to spin out their sessions endlessly, but to get home as soon as possible.”
Minority Report : H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956)
Mencken was a bit of a curmudgeon, but somewhat observant.
This thread the short coarse, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”
Bruce 24,
That was by Ian Fleming in “Goldfinger.”
I would submit that the Left’s pursuit of the myriad of today’s ‘ problems” is only a smokescreen for a plot to gain greater control and power. When confronted with a Leftist I often ask why hasn’t the Left, if it so compassionate and out for the greater good, looked critically at those pieces of Leftist dogma that have clearly failed and tried another approach. That is what a person truly interested in solving whatever problem is before him does. They take stock of their performance and make adjustments to improve that performance. But this is exactly what the Left refuses to do. A clear giveaway that the Left is really not interested in the greater good.
Looking at things another way; in problem solving methodology defining the problem is always key to a good solution. If the problem is poorly or inadequately defined, it is highly unlikely that one will stumble on to a proper solution.
But with the Left, all problems must be defined in marxist or pseudo marxist terms. New approaches or accurate definitions of our real problems outside the box of marxism are not allowed. As a result, we as long as we acquiesce to the fashionable marxist thinking of the Establishment Ruling Class, we will be stuck in this marxist box unable to solve our real problems.
In his first inauguration Pres G.W. Bush summed it up very well, in a statement that no doubt went over most people’s heads and beneath other’s dignity, if indeed they noticed it at all:
“An angel rides the whirlwind.”
If there is indeed a master plan at work, likely it is beyond our ken.
Wretchard’s comments on Tolkien reminds me of the author’s later musings on Sauron when he wrote that, even as late as the start of the Second Age, after the War of the Jewels and Melkor/Morgoth’s destruction, the Dark Lord ‘was not indeed wholly evil, not unless all ‘reformers’ who want to hurry up with ‘reconstruction’ and ‘reorganization’ are wholly evil, even before pride and the lust to exert their will eat them up.” Accordingly, “it had been [Sauron’s] virtue (and therefore also the cause of his fall. . . .) that he loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction. . . . [I]t was the apparent will and power of Melkor to effect his designs quickly and masterfully that had first attracted Sauron to him.”
But “bereft of his lord. . . . [he] fell into the folly of imitating him. . . . Very slowly, beginning with fair motives: the reorganizing and rehabilitation of Middle earth, ‘neglected by the gods,’ he becomes a reincarnation of Evil, and a thing lusting for Complete Power.”
“[T]hough the only real good in, or rational motive for, all this ordering and planning and organization was the good of all inhabitants of Arda (even admitting Sauron’s right to be their supreme lord), his ‘plans,’ the idea coming from his own isolated mind, became the sole object of his will, and an end, the End, in itself. … [H]is capability of corrupting other minds, and even engaging their service, was a residue from the fact that his original desire for ‘order’ had really envisaged the good estate (especially physical well being) of his “subjects.”
The problem with social science and political science is that they are not measurable in any way that can be used to build models where experiments can be made and reproduced to “prove” theories.
Exactly right. “Social science” is not science at all. Its an attempt to graft on to the good reputation of science quack nostrums which are supported not because they are true, but how good it would be if they were true (at least for the folks who insist its true).
And most people who wish to attach the label of science to their own immutable set of precious unassailable beliefs in order to anchor them as truth don’t even understand what science is. The goal of science is not to establish the truth. The goal is to demonstrate what is false so that such notions may be discarded when they are found to be so. Science didn’t collapse because Newton’s concepts of physics were shown to be wrong at a later date. It got stronger–mainly because it had no stake in determining absolute truth. That’s not what its for.
By any and all objective standards in terms of creating models that predict the future with any accuracy astrology should be included in the “social sciences.” And no, I don’t believe in astrology, I’m just suggesting it has a like probability of predicting the future as do the acknowledged social sciences.
I think it was Winston Churchill who said that the word “social,” when used as an adjective, tends to negate the noun it modifies, as in terms like “social worker,” “social justice,” and so forth. And so it is with “social science.” Never accept the conclusions of social scientists until you consult with your astrologer about the potential accuracy of their predictions first.
Slightly off-topic and a bit scary, refer to:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/hyperinflation-comes-iran
The Moonbats and Libertarians over at Zerohedge are lamenting that Obama is creating the same economic desperation for Iran that the US created for Japan prior to WW-II (lots of barking about “false flags”, etc.).
No doubt Obama would like a boost in his popularity but the Iranian nuclear weapons situation demands resolution. If we can not stop it directly by attacking their nuclear weapons sites then imploding the Iranian economy is the next best option. If the Iranians feel the need to go to war over their economy then so be it. It’s a disgrace that the Iranian theocracy has lasted as long as it has.
Also here’s some comic relief concerning Iranian high tech:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/iran-ufo-drone/
Wretchard @ 34 and Roughcoat @ 30:
Starting with the argument that “history is written by the victor”, one could claim that Sauron was the “good guy” trying to create a modern and progressive society in Middle Earth only to be thwarted by Gondor which was a dying regime and the residue of a failed society.
31. Tcobb
Here is Denis Prager explaining social justice. (ht smalldeadanimals)
Roughcoat,
Very good.
Devils are in the last analysis, Fallen Angels. They are those who went a step too far. Their rebellion is commonly described in terms of pride. Pride, as distinguished from honor, is not confidence in oneself. Ultimately pride is the desire for power over others.
The real paradox of freedom is that it redefines greatness from power over others into power to be all that we can be. The pursuit of Happiness is not the same as the lust for power.
But I fear this may be too metaphysical. The basic problem is well known. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
At the risk of going back on my own declaration to stay away from the metaphysical, this observation is also a clue to why God, if He exists, is a God of freedom. He has denied himself absolute power over His creations, and consequently, in some subtle way that is hard to grasp, He may not be corrupted. By putting away power, He is master over it, an observation which Tolkien also makes about his heroes in the Lord of the Rings.
Nonsense. The problem is that the material sciences are easier than the social sciences. One deals with objects that lack free will and behave according to predetermined laws and the other deals with infinitely more complexity.
We can determine, for example, what the average performance of a particular group on a particular type of task is. Exactly. Now, making judgments about an individual’s capability based on such a group-determined norm is a different and much more difficult problem, but to argue that the scientific tools of statistics and probability can’t be applied to human behavior with some modest success is just silly.
Don Rodrigo #15:
I recall a statement by George Will in May of 1993, following a news item about the Clinton Admin’s halting, hapless, and often bumbling efforts to fill all of the positions in its new cabinet.
“I disagree that the Administration is in disarray. This is what liberal government looks like.”
It is a matter of some concern and considerable amusement that those most inclined to a dictatorial viewpoint toward government intervention in the lives of others are among the least capable of carrying out the actions associated with their views of the world.
And of course it has to be that way. Since their views are so incompatible with reality, it must always be that they are surrounded by incompetents and/or the victim of evil designs by their adversaries.
In other words, Obama, Sharpton, Jackson, the whole of the Black Caucus and the entire Democratic Party could not organize a midnight raid on a watermelon patch. So they want the watermelons delivered to them by people not inclined to theft.
God, if He exists
You know He does. No need for political correctness in your own house.
The powers that be made it illegal to hunt Deer or Coyotes in the suburbs now the suburbans are screaming about their cars hitting deer and coyotes eating their dogs, cats and kids.
Solving the problem of evil men hunting Bambi and wily did create the problem of car wrecks and coyotes hunting in their manicured back yard.
Now they have a government department to handle these man created problems called “animal control” these are people paid and trained to come kill or remove the unwanted natural animals in the suburbs.
Men are still hunting Bambi and Wily but they don’t get pleasure, hide or meat they get paid by the state.
Back in the days of Kings owning the Crowns deer these folks were called Ghillies and only the elite could hunt them the poor had to eat what was provided by the King from their labors.
Which with the democrats and Obama is exactly where we are heading. Would anyone here be really surprised if Obama gets not only a second term but a third? By hook or crook the democrats and Obama will be in power as long as they can swing it.
Me? I’m voting for any Republican candidate even if I have to hold my nose to vote for him/her.
…but to argue that the scientific tools of statistics and probability can’t be applied to human behavior with some modest success is just silly.
I suppose that all depends upon what your definitions of “modest” and “success” are. Yes, statistically people in a burning building scream and try to escape it. Yay!!! Social science predicted it! It works every time! But what, out of anything but predicting an obvious outcome has it really ever done? And I’m talking about predictions for the future here, not post-mortems on why X, Y, or Z happened, and I’m not talking about one out of fifty different predictions coming true–I’m talking about any social science prediction for the future that 80% or more of these scientists insisted was going to come true that did, or at least something that 80% of four year old children didn’t predict with as much accuracy.
Any examples?
#12 Subothai Bahadur
“What basis can they have to blame Bush, Wall Street, Capitalism, or their student loans?”
You left out devout Christians, but otherwise you nailed this.
#9 Wretchard
Akallabeth is, of all the tales in the Silmarillion, one of the most instructive of our time. It should be required reading to get a bachelor’s degree.
A tale of a people who had greatness of technology and shipping and commerce and architecture, a long life, fecundity, and the favor of the gods, but grew to hate having children (who reminded them of their mortality and interfered with their enjoyment of the present), grew to hate other humans who weren’t one of their own elite group, and mock/oppress them (to assert their superiority and status in any way), and grew to have pretensions of being godlike themselves. They forgot the great commandment of “count your blessings” and willfully chose to ignore the gods’ promise of life in the beyond after death on earth – something that even the elves could never have.
If this doesn’t sound like the fallen ruling leftist elite in the West, I don’t know what does or can.
Tolkien saw, metaphorically or otherwise, that the price to be paid for this attitude was destruction of Numenor, and a reduction of the few remaining Numenorians who weren’t caught up in the attempt to supplant the gods into creatures with much diminished lifespans and kingdoms of much diminished size, power, and virtue. Maybe he saw our own future.
tc @ 39: But what, out of anything but predicting an obvious outcome has it [social science] really ever done?
Well, queuing theory that quantifies who will walk away from too long a line. Lots of results on what choices people will make given various risk and reward alternatives, like the prisoner’s dilemma. Las Vegas could hardly stay open without such observations, predictions, and actions on the foolish decisions individuals make. Statistics on how quickly (if at all) people will adapt to change. Stuff like heirarchy of needs that describes priority that people give to decision making. What it takes to teach a lesson to an average subject. What the capacities are for human reasoning. What comprises a grade school versus a college level of grammar and vocabulary. How quickly rumors spread and mutate in games like “telephone”. Reaction times in traffic so roads can be well designed. Other physical and medical norms, though perhaps we’re drifting out of “social” sciences at this point.
What any science really does is change just what is “obvious”.
What I was trying to say and failed in regards to social sciences is that it is incapable of determining right. The UN has its set of grievances with Israel but can it prove that the suicide bombers of the Palistinians are objectively right? And if not, then what is the point of trying to order a world around grievances big and small? Why an Israeli homeland but not a Kurd? In a time when geography meant distance it was easier to establish a homeland through the use of force. In post modern times those boundaries are drawn up by the very political elite of whom we speak. Not selected because of their ascendence over the world but because they are on the top of the heap intellectually and politically in East Krapistan. Like Marxism, it has never worked where it has been tried.
But President Obama may find, like the Park Service and like Occupy Wall Street before him, that things aren’t quite that simple and that every one of our ‘solutions’ simply gives birth to a new problem. What is worse, many of those new problems will come as a complete surprise and may be orders of magnitude greater than anticipated. Faced with that eventuality, an Obama-like ‘solution’ will be as predictable as it will be futile: a demand for more power and still ever more power.
This is Austrian Economics, and this is also the message that Ron Paul has consistently pushed for decades. That is why both sides hate him, because this type of thinking leads to their loss of a job.
Following in this “unintended consequences vein”, we see Libya’s nasty new friend. Ron Paul would have known that no US politician is capable of pulling off this kind of coup in the “best interest of America”. Every one of them belongs to groups behind the scene. Like so much that Obama does, we can hope that it is just his ineptitude while we fear that it is actually far worse than that.
I never heard a peep about Bashir during the Libya coup and I am now convinced that Sudanese oil has a lot to do with Kadafy’s execution. It looks ever more to me like TPTB have decided that it is time to shuffle the tinpot despot cards to eliminate the problematic despots and reward those that go along, pour encouragier les autres. In the end it is about establishing a world elite that knows what it is. As long as each leader or leadership group goes along to get along then all of the worlds elites can play the game together. The problem is how to unite these elites in such a fashion that all realize that it is far better to unite to plunder the serfs than it is to try to bash the other budding neuveau aristocrats. Its a big tent, but every now and then it has to be straightened out a little bit, especially when big cultural events are at foot that are magnified by economic cycles and demographic crisis.
Descartes, tree of knowledge is very different from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of eden.
Descartes tree of knowledge places metaphics at the root; philosphy at the trunk and all the various sciences, math physcics, biology etc in the branches. In the branches there also is religion/witchcraft.
Notice that God himself in the garden of eden remains outside of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Notice too that descartes places religion/witchcraft as a sub sub category of metaphysics and a subcategory of philosophy. Whereas, in truth something like witchcraft can be fairly described as a primitive science. But theology is not even a part of the same tree of knowledge.
Why? Because ontologically the knowledge of God begins with the premise that God is the measure of all things.
Whereas ontologically descartes tree of knowledge begins with the premise that Man is the measure of all things.
Is God sovereign? Yes. Is Man free? Yes. Ah and there’s the rub.
Is Jesus fully God? Yes. Is Jesus fully man. Yes.
Deuteronomy 29:29
The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.
The proverbial man in the street may think that a miracle (like jesus) is “contrary” to nature; Augustine was more savvy: a miracle, he said, is an event contra quam est nota natura, i.e. contrary not to nature as such but to what is known of nature. Many (contemporary)scientists themselves, humbled before the inexplicable thereness and counter-intuitive bizareness of the world, and the incomplete and provisional nature of their knowledge of it, are happy with this definition and no longer dismiss miracles tout court as “impossible”…
what does bizarre otherness mean in this case? well consider a recent science series on tv called NOVA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLgo4zd5NhI&feature=youtu.be
they clearly suggest that ultimate reality is not just stranger than we know but stranger than we can know. That God is not just God of the gaps.(in our knowledge.)
Cant & the original peaceniks.
“crying, “No More War!”, and so delivered up Europe.”
…-
“The League held its first meeting in London on 10 January 1920. Its first action was to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, officially ending World War I.”
“The concept of a peaceful community of nations had previously been described in Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace.”
http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/league-of-nations/origins.html
I do not want to get into a Ron Paul debate.
It does make me curious. He has done very well. He applies a very linear philosophy big L libertatianism, to a very complex system.
I personally have been around and appreciate libertarian ideals. If you asked me my basic stance in political theory it would be libertarian.
Yet he came up as a physician, an OB/GYN. This requires a thought process which involves problem solving in a linear way. It also requires ability to understand that the application of that is limited. Humans, bless their hearts, do not follow simple rules.
Perhaps that is why he went for politics. He can apply a basic set of rules. He does not need to worry that they do not always work. He gets results because people really want to make sense out of chaos. Politicians can distance themselves from the individual in ways that a practicing physician cannot. Failure or success are only statistical and measured with yourself as the reference point.
Yet libertarianism is a philosophy centered at the individual even at the expense of the whole.
Ron is a white rabbit.
41. Josh
With all due respect, most of your examples don’t involve the “social sciences” at all. Many of them involve game theory which is a branch of mathematics. I hesitate to quote from Wikipedia, but:
Social science is the field of study concerned with society.[1] “Social science” is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences, usually excluding the administrative or managerial sciences. These include: anthropology, archaeology, criminology, economics, education, government, linguistics, international relations, political science, sociology, geography, history, law, and psychology.
And as to all of your examples, I’m sure no one in the distant past had any inkling of such notions until modern day social science came into existence, especially in regard to gambling establishments, which I suppose only became profitable after social science showed them the way to do so.
And as to education, well what can I say? Obviously we are doing better now in educating our young than in the days before the rise of social science. Back then they were all taught to read. And how do we compare now? This is better?
Its all due to better living through superstition–oh, excuse me, I meant social science.
@44 Charles
I have recently listened to a few podcasts of debates between the new atheists and Christian apologists over the existence of God, the meaning of evil, etc. and I noticed something quite unexpected.
The Christian apologists argued their case 100% from a scientific and logical basis, while their opponents, unable to discredit the science/logic, had to rely on something very similar to magic – the appearance (some day) of new universes without Newtonian or quantum physics.
These debates took place in the UK in 2011.
tc @ 47: game theory tells you the math, social science tells you what people do. most of the stuff listed is taught in social science courses, fwiw. I didn’t even get into linguistics, is law a science? much of social science is descriptive, statistical, but useful for all that. what about archeology, digging stuff up is revealing, although not terribly useful as predictive. we do NOT have the mythical science of psychohistory of Hari Seldon in Asimov’s Foundation stories, in spite of the 19th century sociologists’ idea that we do, or would, or should (which is what Asimov based his ideas on, of course). but what we have is still significant. knowledge is not less valuable just because it is not omniscience, though it is certainly worthwhile to tell the one from the other.
sorry if this is 5 of 4 again.
… so I won’t even get into AM @ 42, darn it.
A socialist revolution that peters out into squalor and misery? Imagine my surprise.
I can abide entropy. Good for creativity. I cannot abide anarchy or stupidity. They are not good survival tools on any level. It is a shame we have to go through the latter and their nasty consequences. Relearning the lessons of the past wastes so much time, but it seems we have not the will to do what is right or at least not stupid. **sigh**
game theory tells you the math, social science tells you what people do.
But does it consistently do so over time so that it has predictive power? That is the mark of science, and that is why I consider the very notion of social science to be an oxymoron.
When the statistical truths of the day vanish in the tomorrow that comes it isn’t science or truth that we are talking about. The main products of the social sciences are talismans we can throw up to support or discredit ideas which bear the false label of science. Even the wicked are supposed to be able to wield a cross to repel the vampire. And so the intellectually vacuous are supposed to be able to use social science to drive away arguments based on reason.
I don’t know about crosses and vampires but the social science talismans seem to work fairly well.
Well, TCobb, if you don’t like Josh’s examples, then you should spend some time reading up on attachment theory. If we could jettison the liberals’ religious allegiance to daycare, we might start uncovering a lot of the reasons our kids are out of control. You should also take a look at racial and sex differences in neurocognitive functioning. It will explain a lot.
Now, back to Wretchard’s terrific take on the Rats of OWS, it would be interesting to speculate about what will fester, or is festering, in the WH and the administration.
Something is clearly rotten in Denmark. We ought to be able to figure out who or what will play the part of the rats in the drama that is likely to unfold.
The unproductive are characteristically anxious about their place in society and always fear that they will be discarded in times of hardship. Consequently, they often seek to create an environment in which their lack of real contribution is replaced by an invented crisis for which they bring a ready-made intellectual “solution”. In this way, they hope to persuade others that they are indispensable. When desperate, these know-it-all parasites will even attack and attempt to destroy the host that sustains them.
#48 Peter Boston The Christian apologists argued their case 100% from a scientific and logical basis, while their opponents, unable to discredit the science/logic, had to rely on something very similar to magic – the appearance (some day) of new universes without Newtonian or quantum physics.
Indeed, their own faith creates an infinite number of universes in order to dispel one infinite God. Oh the irony!
Wretchard: “De Plague, de plague”
Speaking of plagues, the newest I’ve heard about is “TDR-TB”, cases of which have recently turned up in India.
Never heard of TDR-TB? That’s “totally drug resistant tuberculosis.” That’s right, absolutely nothing we have today will touch it.
Now imagine, thanks to the wonders of our Globalist Interconnectedness, this stuff starting to spread across the world.
Like the poet said, “Imagine”. It’s easy if you try.
W @34: “God, if He exists, is a God of freedom”
There really is no other alternative if you think about it.
Totalitarian states are uniformly mass murderers of their peoples because of the probelms of ineffiency and scale that acrue in rigid command structures that are involuntarily enforced.
It’s a matter of efficiency really. Consider a hypothetical: there is a desert island with a population of 2 where each person has an independent will. there are 3 possible scenarios. #1 if they choose to work separately then each of them produces 1 man/day of output per day for a total output of 2 (though perhaps not on complementary tasks). #2 if working together then they can produce 2 man/days of output per day (synergy potentially kicks in if they are working on the same task so it may actually be higher). but in #3 one of them decides to enslave/coerce the other resulting in the total output of the system being reduced by the amount of energy that is needed to maintain control over the slave. this makes #3 clearly less effecient than either of the other 2 scanarios. Scale it up to 10 and the probelm scales up with it. Scale it to 100 to 1000 or 7 Billion and its the same. Its a kind of friction.
The only time it makes sense to run the system this way is when the goal is control of the other rather than units of output. [insert deep thoughs about the nature of power from Tolkien and W here] Scary i’n'it?
Too many people is a real problem for hardcore totalitarians. Thats why they place such a low value on human life (beyond a certain population size the value they assign to human life goes negative and you get mass murder). So when God promised Abraham multitudinous decendants he was clearly not encumbered by this “friction” that the totalitaians face.
Freedom and voluntary compliance would appear to be the only way to “govern” a population that large.
Freedom – it works.
also, they just plain enjoy mass murder.
If Occupy and President Obama are solutions, then what is the problem?
The “problem” is too few people who really understand where the water comes from when they turn on the faucet, or how the arrugula ends up at the grocery store. Obama could only be elected by an electorate so long accustomed to prosperity that they could no longer conceive of poverty. OWS could only be spawned by people insulated so well from real work with real feedback that the very notion of consequences is incomprehensible to them, and thus they see the natural consequences of their actions as evil curses cast on them by some villan or other. Both Obama and OWS are the products of people who live in a fantasy world less believable than Tolkein’s Middle Earth.
BTW, when I was just getting started in my career, someone told me “most problems started out as solutions.” The longer I live, the more true I find that to be, at least with regard to human organizational behavior.
28 @Unsk
Category Error.
Which reminds me of one of my favorite essays on the net. The infamous Dan Simmons time traveler story from 2006. It may have been a bit off on the dates, but it’s quickly looking more and more relevant.
@46. Spindok
“libertarianism is a philosophy centered at the individual even at the expense of the whole.”
This should read: “libertarianism is a philosophy that protects the individual against the whim of the whole.”
One of my pet peeves is when a politician says something like “the American people… aren’t about that” or “that is not what America is about” or “the American people want…”. What gives these guys the power to claim that they know what the values and wants of “America” is? It is always the fanatics at the fringe who claim to represent “the whole”, and it is the libertarians that want to protect us from these guys. Ron Paul far more resembles Alice’s sister who would be waking the Alice (the US) up from its fiat currency induced journey through corrupt money land than the white rabbit (who would be played by Ben Bernanke).
40. They forgot the great commandment of “count your blessings” and willfully chose to ignore the gods’ promise of life in the beyond after death on earth – something that even the elves could never have.
Eru Iluvatar never explicitly promised Men life after death. Such things as the participation of Men in the Second Music of the Ainur are human traditions rather than divine revelations. You see this process of adding to what is written with our own scriptures, when people speak of their dead loved ones going to heaven. The scriptures speak only of a resurrection at the end of history when the dead are re-animated, and the New Jerusalem comes down to Earth to be the abode of the blessed.
Tcobb, I think you’ve been dead on, and I hate to say this, but Maineman, I think you are missing the point completely.
Your example of “attachment theory” is a perfect example of the rot in modern mainstream thinking. Of course many, many children are being raised badly today – but the idea of “attachment theory” is simple the fancy word we use to try to reteach ourselves the knowledge that all previous generations have known and which we, in our arrogance, threw away as too “old fashioned”.
How do you raise children so that they turn out well? Of course many children are as resilient as weeds and thrive even in poor soil, but generally the best results come when there is a family unit with two parents, one male, one female, (the influence of BOTH genders is very important!) both committed to the child, who work to involve the child in their daily lives, who constantly strive to teach them their values, to integrate them in to their parents society, to help them find a place in the world, and to always make sure that they know that they are loved and wanted.
Successful parents in the 19th century knew this, as they did in the 15th century, as they did in the first century, and I would hazard a guess that it was already known at the time the last Ice Age ended. No one needed a fancy word like “attachment theory” to tell them this; it was simply the obvious way the world worked. But we, in our arrogance, have decided to throw away all the common knowledge of previous generations and now we have to come up with scholarly papers presided over by circles of PhD’s to tell us what the poorest, most uneducated peasant took for granted centuries ago.
Of course don’t take this to mean that there weren’t poor parents then – people living their lives stupidly is a constant of the human condition, and that certainly applies to raising children. But all of us here today are almost certainly the descendants of those who Got It Right, for the simple reason that those who consistently get it wrong tend to burn out their lineage fairly quickly.
This is the category error: “statistics”, when applied to social issues, is just our cultures inferior substitute for the applied common knowledge of the previous 500 generations of humanity. And that’s when our modern mages get it right – when they get it wrong it is nothing but dangerous and destructive nonsense that we would all be better off without.
Life and death……… survival of the fittest……
The Left embraces and worships the usefulness of death in weeding out the weaker evolvees of the natural system of life. Witness the acceptance of the theory of evolution.
How strange it is that they cannot accept that evolution also provides a useful and necessary function in the most resilient of all economic systems, ie., capitalism. It is necessary for the weak and in-efficient to “die” in order to allow the “good” to prevail.
Hangtown Bob #64:
A while back I noted that while the Left believes in evolution in the natural world it does not believe in the concept when it comes to human-created institutions. The U.N., numerous government agencies and even whole governments – both foreign and domestic, welfare programs such as SS and Medicaid, unions, private firms and certain of their products, and “alternative lifestyles” must be preserved and protected as if they were handed down from on high as attachments to the Ten Commandments.
For that matter, the Left does not believe in evolution as it applies to snail darters, delta smelt, spotted owls, some species of fly, lizards in west Texas, and the like.
62/Teresita, re “Eru Iluvatar never explicitly promised Men life after death. Such things as the participation of Men in the Second Music of the Ainur are human traditions rather than divine revelations.”
You are right about Eru never explicitly promising men anything, but wrong about the rest. Tolkien’s writings about his own work clearly indicate that men will indeed be united with God, and that belief that this will occur is not merely a product of human tradition. That is why the messengers of the Valar tell the Numenorian king Tar-Antamir that death is in fact a “gift” and not because it consigns them to oblivion and nothingness. “The mind of Illuvatar,” they state,”is not known to the Valar, nor has he reveal all that is to come. But this we hold to be true: that your home is not here, nor anywhere in the circles of the world.” But there is a home for men, which is contra-indicative of oblivion. “Hope rather that even the least of your desires will have fruit,” is their council; “the love of Arda was put in you by Eru, and he does not plant to no purpose. Nonetheless, many ages of men unborn will pass ere that purpose is known is known, and to you it will be revealed not the Valar.”
See also in this regard “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth,” the “Converse of Finrod and Andreth.” It is true that the converse articulates what is characterized as a tradition–but a tradition based on divine revelation and insight. The Messengers of the Valar most certainly do not urge men to hope that “even the least of their desires will have fruit” as a way of leading men on.
If you want to go toe-to-toe with me on the Tolkien canon, I’m ready.
HB@ 64
Evolution is at work in nature and is abundant in society as well. We play games as children that teach us that there are winners and losers. Those who chide us to take away the stakes of the game, everybody gets a trophy and are heroes, themselves have won at the paper chase and ascended to relevant status by virtue of their PhD. A credential that was most likely awarded for narrowly defined group think inside of the “social science”.
My problem is that we can use hard sciences to build better things but can we use social sciences to build a better society? If so, who had it right, national socialists in Germany or post Apartheid South Africa? Social science may be interesting to define statistical behavior but it will never predict the actions of an individual anymore than Heisenberg could find the position and velocity of a particle. If that is so then our system of government finds that we are innocent until proven guilty, not that statistically we will be guilty therefore we must be restrained from free action before the fact, a future crime if you will. Social science makes nice theories and we can use those theories to inform our thinking. But aside from being an economist, Marx was a “social scientist”. The practice of “social science in the 20th century though was pure evil.
wws, I suspect you are not familiar with attachment theory. maineman is correct that attachment theory is an extremely good example of how science actually can be used to understand human behavior.
It is a very respectable and serious body of work. It is not a recent thing–your impression that it’s part of the “rot of modern mainstream thinking” is incorrect. (Perhaps you have read some misinterpretations of attachment theory by rotten modern theorists.) The field is about 50 years strong, and it stands up extremely well. Yes, it has predictive power.
It’s an exciting time in psychology because we now have the tools to begin integrating our knowledge of the mind with our knowledge of the brain (and nervous system–we are now realizing that the mind is not just in the brain). Tools like fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging–you can look at brain function while the person is doing, thinking, feeling, or saying something) are making it possible to bring more and more biological science to bear on psychological questions. In many cases this is obliterating past views (about how the brain grows, for example, and about the nature of the infant mind), but in the case of attachment theory, that body of knowledge is being confirmed.
Attachment theory is not about parenting (although of course there is an intersection of the two topics). It is much more fundamental than that. It turns out that biologically, the experiences of the pre-verbal infant in relationship with its caregiver have a crucial impact on how our minds form. Attachment theory thus explains the hidden emotional substrate that underlies our personality (the part that cannot be explained by temperament, which we are born with).
For those who may be interested in this topic, there is a good recent book by David Wallin–it is written for therapists, but is very accessible and includes a pretty good overview of the history of the field.
http://www.amazon.com/Attachment-Psychotherapy-David-Wallin-PhD/dp/1593854560
For more about the science-based revolution in psychology I recommend Mindsight by Dan Siegel:
http://www.amazon.com/Mindsight-New-Science-Personal-Transformation/dp/0553386395/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326296369&sr=1-1
So many interesting thoughts on this thread!
On the issue of Obama: incompetence or malice? If he were incompetent, he would fail in various directions (i.e. rightward and leftward). However, just as the “objective” media never seems to have a “woops” moment that hurts the Left, so Obama never has such a moment that moves the ball to the right. 100% consistency is not a sign of incompetence.
Of course, it’s clear by now that he is lazy, ignorant, petulant and foolish. But he also has plenty of people around him who are satanic in their deviousness and quite competent indeed. Stupid and competent are not mutually exclusive. Evil and competent are not mutually exclusive.
Take Obamacare, for example. It is simply brilliant. Does it “mandate” that private insurance go out of business? Not at all. However, it sets up a landscape where private insurance simply cannot profitably exist. Hence it will achieve its true goal while providing a perfectly plausible excuse: “we didn’t require private insurers to go out of business. They were simply unable to meet the needs of the American people.”
This isn’t incompetence. It’s strategic genius.
Once again I must bring up the old saw from James Burnham: “The difference between a Liberal and a Communist is that the Communist knows what he’s doing.”
Obama is a Liberal, a particularly nasty and extreme one. He is handled by Communists.
So does attachment theory apply to political science or education?
http://psychology.about.com/od/loveandattraction/a/attachment01.htm
AM, neither. It is a psychology theory. Since ALL psychology is BS, the theory is BS. QED.
Basically, attachment theory says that if you love someone, you want to be around them. It’s a reasonable assumption that this theory took millions in grant money to develop.
Psychology is a scam.
65. RWE
Progressives abhor nature while pretending to be its chief defender. Human nature in particular gives them fits. All they want from nature is to be able to control it, or at least “manage” it. It does not matter to them whether they are succesful stewards of the Earth, only that they be the stewards.
RWE/65
I don’t think the Left actually believes in evolution. More like it believes in anything other than Christianity. Evolution gives them an altenative to believing we were created by a deity, which is all they want as it frees them from any allegiance to religious concerns. Beyond that, the details are irrelevant and generally ignored.
Like Sauron, (or even better, Sauruman after his fall), the Left cares nothing for anything that can’t be used as a club to beat their opponents. And so it turns everything it lays it’s hands on into a rude cudgel. Hand them a Stradivarius and they won’t play it. They’ll swing it at your head.
RWE/65
A while back I noted that while the Left believes in evolution in the natural world it does not believe in the concept when it comes to human-created institutions.
I don’t think the Left actually believes in evolution. More like it believes in anything other than Christianity. Evolution gives them an alternative to believing we were created by a deity, which is all they want as it frees them from any allegiance to religious concerns. Beyond that, the details are irrelevant and generally ignored.
Like Sauron, (or even better, Sauruman after his fall), the Left cares nothing for anything that can’t be used as a club to beat their opponents. And so it turns everything it lays it’s hands on into a rude cudgel. Hand them a Stradivarius and they won’t play it. They’ll swing it at your head.
Annoy Mouse @ 67 said:
“My problem is that we can use hard sciences to build better things but can we use social sciences to build a better society?”
Hard science is ultimately empirical and rational. I can use the Gibbs free energy method to predict the outcome of a chemical reaction and then create the same reaction as an experiment. If experiment matches theory then I have a good theory and valid experiment. How does one do a similar process with a political system? Perhaps it’s a mistake to call “political science” a “science”? Maybe “political science” should be tossed into the same bucket with religion and simply called “faith”?
Annoy Mouse then said:
“If so, who had it right, national socialists in Germany or post Apartheid South Africa?”
That’s the $64.000 question? In the beginning, I’m sure Joseph Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot thought they were doing the “right thing”. Rudolf Hoess was the main enabler of the Holocaust (he was the first commandant of KZ-Auschwitz). He was also a Catholic, devoted father, skilled leader, German patriot and courageous soldier. Hoess had convinced himself that it was moral to enable the Holocaust and bring about industrialized genocide. What was the thought process that convinced an intelligent, moral and courageous man into becoming one of history’s worst mass murders?
I have no answer but this issue concerns me when I wonder whether or not my own political beliefs are correct.
Getting back to social science versus hard science: There is one political principle that almost has the rigor of hard science, namely:
“No taxation without representation”.
Putting this more simply, a person’s political rights should scale with the amount of tangible wealth that he has invested into the political process. If a person has invested nothing tangible then all he has are the so called “natural or inalienable rights” that have no real economic value, e.g. right of assembly, freedom of religion, etc. Carrying this forward, if a person is accepting wealth from the political process as socialism then there is actually a cost in the loss of political rights and freedom. Likewise a person can gain greater political power by buying into a political process through either campaign contributions, lobbying or outright bribery. I suspect that a truly democratic political system requires that all voting citizens have only one vote and are only allowed to contribute the same in the form of taxation. Greater payment to gain greater political power is prohibited. If a person can not pay their fair share of taxes then their right to vote is suspended. Obviously there is “devil in the detail”, e.g. how does contribution through military service stack up in terms of voting rights? Also bribery is a fact of life. Perhaps bribery should be channeled into the political process, e.g. if you want to have more control over the process then you have to pay more tax money. There are lots of details to work out but I think this is the starting point for an ethical and rational political process.
Oh, stop it. You guys are way over the top. I’ll be the first to chime in about the limitations of contemporary social science, including the descent into insanity by psychology and psychologists in general, particularly the American Psychological Association’s recent endorsement of the destruction of the family and of contemporary culture (i.e. same-sex marriage). But the simple point is that there IS a science there and it has managed to come up with some very useful things.
The article in Psychology.com is so lacking in information as to be both useless and misleading. It’s a cartoon version of what Sarah has correctly outlined above. But even a cursory consideration of the history of child-rearing disputes the idealistic notions put forth by some here about what we’ve supposedly known since time began. For most of history, child abuse has been the norm, much of it based on the misguided assumption that the lack of expressive capacity of children meant that they are without depth and simply objects to be used and molded. Proving that not to be the case is obviously helping to build better families and cultures. Now, you can argue that divine inspiration gave us the same truths, but that is also something that is coming clear for other sciences as well: the apparent existence of the big bang makes atheism impossible, and other aspects of science have now shown that Darwinian evolutionary theory is bogus.
Try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater is all I’m saying.
Maineman, I’d add that Eggplant shouldn’t be so quick to label Zerohedge as moonbattery, even if plenty of moonbats and or young testosterone-fueled anarcho-libertarians hang out in the comments threads there. It ain’t moonbattery to point out the obvious that the mullahs are being backed into the corner out of which ends with them surrendering all WMD capabilities Gaddafi-style (look how that worked out for the Duck of Death — good luck hoping for that) or double down on getting nukes before Obama starts dropping bombs. And the end result is no amount of printing money being able to paper over the economic misery worldwide that ensues, though perhaps if Russia and North America opens the spigots we can replace Iran’s current output within a year or two after all the oil terminals get wrecked and starvation ensues within Iran…
You don’t even have to worry about whether any of the GOP candidates will pull the trigger cuz our Nobel Peace Prize winner is ready to launch a war the Weekly Standard editors say will assure his re-election. Or maybe he doesn’t even want to win reelection or has seen the internal polls that show a yeller dawg or even Romney can beat him. And Obama figures he might as well get a fat paying job with the MIC or speaking engagements at $1 mil a pop all over the Gulf States (our new Islamist-funding friends the Qataris, cough cough) when he leaves office.
http://www.youtube.com/user/thealexjoneschannel?blend=1&ob=4#p/u/2/tBG6oIseSvc
Fox News thinks most viewers are sheep — in XMas cards! Even Alex Jones can’t make this stuff up — Saudi royal family owns a big chunk of FNC — don’t look behind that curtain
$225 a barrel and $8 a gallon here we come. I’m sure all the good people of Pennsylvania and Ohio will thank Rick Santorum when lining up to pay that at the pumps.
The main theme of this comments thread — that we should all feel the Sauron/Ring of Power draw within and not just without — still stands. Or as Solzhenitsyn put it, the line between good and evil is not drawn between nations or ‘systems’ but through every human heart.
All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it–
Samuel Johnson
Man cannot foresee his own advance–
Frederick von Hayek
all I can say about the debate here about science in general and social science in particular is omg.
even the hardest sciences we have can be extended and overturned, and even the softest ones can be insightful and useful. sometimes you need a feather duster and not a hammer. and neither may do you any good if you stick it where it doesn’t belong.
Viktor (Not That Victor) @ 77 said:
“… I’d add that Eggplant shouldn’t be so quick to label Zerohedge as moonbattery, even if plenty of moonbats and or young testosterone-fueled anarcho-libertarians hang out in the comments threads there.”
Most of the feature articles at Zerohedge are very interesting and useful towards understanding the various frauds and deceits that are destroying our economic system. Unfortunately the comment sections at Zerohedge are dominated by libertarians and moonbats. Also there are some regular feature article authors at Zerohedge who wear tin foil hats, e.g. George Washington.
I read Zerohedge everyday and believe it to be more insightful than the MSM financial websites. Unfortunately, I’m almost at the point of no longer reading Zerohedges’ comment sections.
At the risk of this becoming a big endian versus small endian debate I will add that no physical science has failed to produce predictable results on anything I ever worked on. Maybe because I do not work with near light speed, sub-atomic particles, or people directly.
re: (Dr.) Michael Crichton, taken from us far too early.
A pity his heirs and/or publishers have deleted the critical (of leftist ideology) essays and talks from his website.
Thank goodness the Internet Archive has yet to adopt the PC religion and edit its “history.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20050831124155/http://www.crichton-official.com/
Note that you have to navigate the archive by date to find various articles, speeches and transcripts. I haven’t been able to find a coherent independent snapshot (I expect due to copyright issues and pursuit by his estate).
@80. eggplant
“Unfortunately the comment sections at Zerohedge are dominated by libertarians and moonbats. Also there are some regular feature article authors at Zerohedge who wear tin foil hats, e.g. George Washington.
I read Zerohedge everyday and believe it to be more insightful than the MSM financial websites. Unfortunately, I’m almost at the point of no longer reading Zerohedges’ comment sections.”
One of the differences between the comments section on ZH and this blog’s comment section is similar to liquidity. As with transactions at stock exchanges, the number of comments and readers makes a market (blog) more liquid while making it more difficult to manipulate. Throw in ZH’s fight club atmosphere and laxer censorship rules and you end up in a market place that is much freer in the exchange of ideas than BC. Sure, you have to sort through a lot more noise, but in the end you can stay far more current and broad minded than by just reading comments at blogs with less traffic where everyone has similar viewpoints.
I also object with your characterization (and many others here) of Ron Paul as some kind of unelectable moonbat. What is really telling is that all of you Paul haters keep repeating the same mantra but seem unable or unwilling to explain exactly what makes Ron Paul a moonbat or unelectable. If you think his libertarian non-institutional viewpoints should be taboo on subjects such as the war on “drugs”, gay marriage, states rights, immigration, the threat from Iran, etc, then please have at it. But for the love of god stop acting like a bunch of warmists insisting that the science is settled and that Ron Paul is an unelectable moonbat. In a free market for ideas something always beats nothing, and plastic puppets like Romney are unable to compete when they are lying and spinning and selling out whatever principles they may or may not have remaining.
Discussing motivation is difficult. You usually can’t prove it, so when you assert a nefarious motivation, the discussion turns to how can you be so mean to that nice Mr. Obama who only wants the good. It obscures the discussion of the actual action–generally on purpose. And it discredits the asserter.
OTOH, the issue is that if we correctly discern the motivation, we may be able to figure out what the next step will be if the motivation is as we presume. Could be possible to be prepared.
And on the other other hand, you have to wonder if incompetence is sufficient. Yes, somebody might be stupid as hell, but isn’t there a maximum to the stupid effect that is less than some possible actions which go further? If so, we need another motivation.
Terisita
I guess your scriptures don’t include Luke 23:43
43 And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.
or luke 16:19-31 either. Im sure others could point out additional examples but these are what came to my mind first.
ConfederateH @ 83 said
“I also object with your characterization (and many others here) of Ron Paul as some kind of unelectable moonbat.”
A point about terminology: A moonbat is what Vladimir Lenin referred to as a “useful idiot”. They’re fools who think it’s cool to wear a Che Guevara tee shirt but have no idea who Che Guevara was or that Che Guevara was a mass murderer. Moonbats repeat all the MSM leftist narratives because everyone else in their peer group are doing so. A moonbat likes to present himself as a hard core leftist but has no clue about the moral implications or have any insight about Marxist theory. Libertarians are not leftists and therefore not moonbats.
ConfederateH also said:
“But for the love of god stop acting like a bunch of warmists insisting that the science is settled and that Ron Paul is an unelectable moonbat. In a free market for ideas something always beats nothing, and plastic puppets like Romney are unable to compete when they are lying and spinning and selling out whatever principles they may or may not have remaining.”
As I have said more than once in earlier comments, I actually agree with most of Ron Paul’s views about finance reform and the federal deficit. I lean towards the Austrian School of economics and believe that Friedrich Hayek’s views are essentially correct. My main issue with Ron Paul concerns his foreign policy which is essentially isolationism.
We’ve been there and done that with isolationism. IMHO, anyone who advocates isolationism disqualifies himself from public office even if his views on finance are spot-on.
I’m bordering on despair concerning Romney.
The good news: Romney will probably crush Obama in the general election thus embarrassing the MSM.
The bad news: After Romney repeals the immediate damage due to Obama, he will do nothing to correct the deep problems that we were facing as a nation before Obama made things worse. Romney will just kick the can down the road (again) until there is either no more can or no more road. Also, as an aeronautical engineer, my blood went cold after I heard Romney making fun of Gingrich for Gingrich’s support of the Space Program. Romney is completely without vision. He is merely a competent technician who knows how to get elected but has no clue what to do after getting elected. At least he’s not hopelessly incompetent like Obama.
[post #4 of 4, I'm done for this thread]
To elaborate a bit on the dynamics of what came down in the 1930s at Yellowstone, and at other similarly managed public lands…
It was generally then believed that desirable higher populations of attractive, non-dangerous grazers like deer and elk –generally-protected from hunting (in the National Parks, at least)– could be achieving by suppressing their natural predators: wolves, grizzlies, big cats, etc. This was accomplished very effectively by government hunters and by private bounty hunters.
As predicted, deer and elk population in the parks rose astronomically… so astronomically that the supporting vegetation was damaged irrecoverably by overgrazing. As an inevitable consequence of the reduced food supply, leading to less healthy and robust individual animals, less capable of surviving winter stress, etc., the protected grazer populations then crashed radically.
But the semi-stability of the previous, relatively-productive ecosystem was –at least though the near- and middle-term– replaced by a simplified, semi-stable, but vastly less productive (in terms of biomass and biodiversity) degraded ecosystem, with in which neither the predator nor the prey populations could reach their previous densities.
Thus, a new but suboptimal equilibrium state was inadvertently achieved. This lesson was hammered repeatedly, through later decades, in Wildlife Management 101. (If indeed, anybody still enrolls in Wildlife Management 101 these days.)
In re: Unsk #28 Haven’t read all subsequent posts, but in my observation the left, Thomas Sowell’s “the anointed” cares little whether their actions do nothing to solve problems or make them worse, they do only what makes them feel good.