Paul Krugman, in a rare burst of sanity, has joined Gregg Easterbrook in calling for the end of the manned space program. On the other side, innumerable commentators, such as Glenn Reynolds, Charles Krauthammer, E. J. Dionne, and a parade of NASA veterans such as Jay Buckey and Buzz Aldrin, have endorsed the continuation of manned space missions, using woolly justifications like "the spirit of adventure", "mankind's destiny", and so on.

Now, I don't necessarily agree with these space travel enthusiasts, but let us suppose for a moment that I supported their goals, at least in the long run. It doesn't necessarily follow that I'd consider the best way to advance their cause right now to be continued launching of manned missions at all costs. After all, any such efforts today would involve only known, well-understood technology, and are more likely to lose public support, by failing spectacularly, than to garner votes by serving as a platform for performing the standard, tired "stupid weightless astronaut tricks" in front of a TV camera.

Real progress towards space travel would require first solving some of the daunting problems that make long-term human habitation of space so difficult. Here, for example, off the top of my head, are three avenues of scientific research, enormous progress in each of which is absolutely essential for any large-scale manned space travel to be possible. Moreover, they can all be pursued today without the cost and risk of actual manned space missions, and they also possess enormous potential for beneficial technological spin-offs quite apart from their space travel applications.

(Mostly) self-sustaining environments. The failure of the Biosphere II project demonstrates that even under the most ideal circumstances, and even given huge resources, creating an environment capable of sustaining humans with no input of resources from outside (apart from energy) is exceedingly difficult. Even inventing better technologies for partially recycling life-essential materials would not only make space travel more plausible, but may also be profitably applicable to other settings where resupply is difficult and costly, such as submarines, desert or (ant)arctic stations, and drilling platforms at sea.

Energy-harvesting. Solar energy conversion is obviously already an established research field, as is geothermal energy. In space, still other forms of energy, such as "solar wind", may conceivably be exploitable, not only by future manned missions, but by unmanned spaceships and satellites as well.

Large-scale upgradeable systems. Today's aircraft industry builds extremely complex, highly reliable systems that must be maintained over many years. Their solution is to spend enormous effort creating and thoroughly testing a single modular design, keeping it unchanged over the lifetime of the system by replacing worn parts with identical substitutes. The downside of this solution is that it does not accommodate upgrades, such as technological improvements, very well at all. Spacecraft involved in long missions may not have the luxury of airline-style maintenance practices, and need to be designed with many more contingencies in mind than the average aircraft faces. Under those circumstances, a more variable, upgradeable design may be necessary--without losing any reliability.

I predict that if these (and a few other) fundamental research problems are successfully addressed, then the advances in "core" space travel technology--rockets, orbital vehicles, and so on--needed to make space stations, moon bases and even mars missions possible will be a relatively simple afterthought.

A notorious Muslim cleric in Britain has described the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia as "a punishment from God". And of course, some Palestinians celebrated the event, suggesting that the shuttle's real mission was to spy on Arab and Muslim nations.

It has apparently not (yet) been rumored that the Israeli astronaut aboard was warned of the crash in advance, and didn't show up for work on Saturday morning.

An update: the comments feature was briefly malfunctioning, but should be in good working order now. Apologies for the technical glitch.

As an experiment, I have introduced a new "comments" feature. Readers are invited to pipe up with their responses to any of my postings by clicking on the "comments" link underneath it. If the volume of replies (or the feedback, via either comments or email) suggests that readers appreciate the feature, then I'll keep it around; otherwise, I'll return to my previous practice of shouting incoherently into a silent, passive cyberspace. It's up to you, folks....

Oxblog's Josh Chafetz dismisses the significance of the latest match between chess champion Garry Kasparov and a computer. "Chess is a fully self-contained world, with a fairly simple set of rules," he writes. "The day is still, I think, a long way off that computers will be able competently to navigate the real world, because the real world does not have a set of easily understandable rules."

Actually, computers are perfectly capable of navigating the real world competently. I've never seen one trip and fall, for example, or injure itself accidentally. Computers are rather passive, sedentary creatures, of course--they don't tend to move, being content to let others place them where they please. But does that make them incompetent?

The answer, of course, is that it depends on the rules of the game. There is currently a large number of well-defined "games", such as go, face recognition, or basketball, at which humans are still much better than machines. But we can easily conceive of the day, however far off, when we might lose to the world's best robot/computer at just about any such well-defined game, including these three. Our natural reaction is therefore to come up with games (such as "navigating the real world", "appreciating a rose or a symphony", or "pondering the meaning of life") for which the rules are sufficiently ill-defined that we can smugly declare ourselves the winners. The point of these nebulous "games", in truth, is that to "win" at them is simply to be human, and since a computer will never be a human, we thus win by default.

The fallacy here is not underestimation of the potential of technology, but rather overestimation of the indefinability of human nature. We assume that because we have virtually no understanding of the "rules" by which we play our various human games, the rules are therefore undefinable. In fact, we may be far more well-defined than we realize, behaving according to a set of rules that are encoded in our genes and expressed in the structure of our nervous systems, and can in principle be programmed just as easily into an appropriately designed computer.

Of course, the games we play are not necessarily the ones we would want a computer to play. Do we really want to build computers that--following the rules of our own "game"--overeat, stupefy themselves with mood-altering substances, slack off at their jobs, get into petty fights with each other, and routinely make careless errors? Obviously not; why on earth would we build a machine to do what we do so naturally, all by ourselves?

No, we would inevitably choose to build our computers to do what we can't do, such as work tirelessly and without error at some immensely taxing yet deadly dull cognitive task--like, say, generating and evaluating millions of chess moves. And that is, in fact, precisely what the designers of Garry Kasparov's computer opponent have done. They have not, it is true, created a human. But if that had been their goal, then why would they have bothered to tinker with computers at all, when the old-fashioned way is surely faster, cheaper and more fun?

The explosion of the space shuttle Columbia has resulted in the exhumation (by Mickey Kaus, for instance, and Andrew Sullivan) of Gregg Easterbrook's 1980 Washington Monthly article on the shuttle program. Easterbrook, with seeming prescience, pointed out a number of risks inherent in the shuttle design, including its inability to withstand either a failure of the solid rocket boosters (as in the 1986 Challenger disaster) or damage to the heat-shielding tiles that are now being considered as a possible cause of the Columbia's demise.

The article's supposed prescience is actually seriously overstated; Easterbrook was in fact merely playing the easy game of listing the known, understood risks and problems with a new technology and then snorting, "it'll never work". For example, he never mentioned anything at all about the possibility of a leaking solid rocket booster (that is, of a massive jet of flame shooting out the side of the booster, igniting the main fuel tank). Rather, he concerned himself with the more prosaic risk of a booster simply cutting out in flight. (No such failure has occurred to date.) Easterbrook also "anticipated" the extreme difficulty of maneuvering the cumbersome shuttle to a safe landing without test flights, wondered whether the main engine, which kept blowing up during test firings, could ever be made reliable, and noted "residual doubt" about whether the heat-shielding tiles "can be relied on at all." The shuttle, he wrote, is "several years behind schedule, with no imminent prospect, despite official assurances, that it will fly at all." Columbia's first launch was about a year after his article's publication.

Fortunately, Easterbrook's recent reaction to the Columbia crash avoids technical gripes and unjustified "I-told-you-so"'s, and concentrates instead on the real strength of his earlier article: its critique of the space shuttle project as a failure of science and technology policy. On these matters, Easterbrook is generally quite sensible: the space shuttle and its companion project, the space station, are far too expensive for their very limited payoffs. For commercial and military tasks such as satellite launches, disposable rockets are far cheaper and more dependable, and for scientific research, unmanned missions are much more efficient. The whole space program desperately needs to be rethought in terms of its specific goals and the most cost-effective means to achieve them, and it's almost certain that neither the shuttle nor the space station could survive such a rethinking.

The worst outcome of the Columbia tragedy would be a technical witch-hunt that seeks out the people and parts responsible for this particular failure, then metes out punishments and effects repairs, ignoring the more fundamental doubts that Easterbrook and others have raised about the entire program. Unfortunately, the path of least resistance for any journalist right now is to indulge in "unheeded warnings" blame-mongering--not to risk irritating audiences with the unsettling suggestion that the lives of seven brave astronauts may just have been wasted on a completely pointless mission.

Those of you whose thought processes are as twisted as mine will be relieved to learn that there have actually been six previous astronauts "from Jewish families". Moreover, at least two, David Wolf and Jeffrey Hoffman, with eight successful shuttle flights between them, have even spoken publicly about their identities as Jewish space travellers. So while 100% of shuttle disasters have involved a conspicuously Jewish crew member, it is not necessarily fatal to have a Jew aboard your spacecraft.

One takes one's solace where one can, I suppose.

According to Calpundit, Oxblog's David Adesnik believes that "throwaway posts are often the most revealing aspect of a blog." Okay, wiseguy--what does this one tell you?

In the New Republic, Economist.com's "countries editor", Robert Lane Greene, argues that Europe's current spate of anti-Americanism is a kind of substitute identity for Europeans who sense that their continent's spirit of unity has failed to develop as hoped. "The further along the Europeans get in their project of integration," he writes, "the more apparent the differences among European countries become, and the more they struggle to decide what a united Europe will actually mean. Increasingly, most Europeans, usually led by France and Germany, can agree only on what they're not, which inevitably brings them to facile denunciations of American policy."

I have no idea whether Greene's thesis is correct, of course, and I'm reflexively disinclined to believe anything that emanates, in any form, from The Economist. But for me, the claim's credibility is bolstered by its unmistakable ring of familiarity. Greene's description of Europe's turmoil bears an uncanny resemblance to Canada's last quarter-century of inane political, cultural and (especially) constitutional wrangling that rivals Dobby the House Elf's similarity to his supposed model, Vladimir Putin.

Consider: "It has a flag, an anthem, and a currency, its own citizenship....And nobody seems to know how it all fits together. A constitutional convention, begun last year to replace the EU's various founding treaties with a single document, is supposed to help sort that out....

"When Schroeder and French president Jacques Chirac attempted to hammer out the contours of the European presidency over dinner in early January....critics quickly complained of a sloppy back-room deal. But if back-room deals between two men are sloppy, the EU's more formal way of resolving these problems is often even worse. After the 2001 Treaty of Nice made the EU's already bewildering institutional framework even more so to prepare the Union for enlargement, Irish voters promptly stunned the rest of the continent by rejecting the treaty in a referendum....

"Europe is as confused on its so-called collective policies as it is about its own design....The goal of a vigorous common foreign policy is hamstrung by miserly defense spending. And domestic economic policy is a mess....It is against this backdrop that Europe's current tense relationship with the United States, typified by its criticism of American policy towards Iraq, must be understood. Sluggish economies, institutional confusion, and distant elites have helped maverick and xenophobic parties (most of which loathe the EU itself) score victories in recent years....To defuse this growing threat without addressing its own malaise, the European political class increasingly changes the question from 'What's wrong with Europe?' to 'What's wrong with America?'"

To my Canadian readers: sounds familiar, eh?

Andrew Sullivan notes the extent to which domestic American opposition to an attack on Iraq is intertwined with intense, visceral, personal hatred for George W. Bush, and suggests that the fury may be "[p]ayback, in part....for conservative demonization of Clinton." Sullivan clearly misunderstands the phenomenon. Clinton and Bush II, like Reagan and Roosevelt before them, arouse bitter hatred for two reasons: they are iconic leaders of one wing of the political spectrum; and they are spectacularly popular, successful politicians.

Ineffectual failures like Carter and Bush I are disliked by their opponents, of course, but with contemptuous disdain, not bitter, helpless rage. Successes like Clinton and Bush II, on the other hand, are much more disturbing to their opponents, because they represent a challenge to those opponents' cherished beliefs. The latter, after all, would like to think that their ideas are clearly correct and convincing, and that the public are either already on their side or ripe for conversion to it. How can it be, then, that someone stupid enough to adhere to an obviously misguided set of political views can somehow win a solid majority of voters over to those same misguided views?

There are only two possibilities: either a naive public are being ruthlessly deceived by a hateful, scheming master of evil, or else perhaps his ideas aren't so misguided after all. Guess which point of view tends to have more appeal?

....And while I'm in dead-horse-flogging mode, Jack Balkin, whose racial preferences sophistry I just finished dissecting, has now published a New York Times op-ed on Roe v. Wade. (He also expands on these ideas in a blog posting.) After noting the rather obvious fact that Roe has served Republicans well as a rallying point for "pro-life" conservatives, Balkin proceeds to claim that the decision was in fact "good for the country as a whole and for the democratic process" (my emphasis). "By taking certain issues off the table in religious-based controversies," he writes, "the courts enable political parties to organize around bread-and-butter issues like the economy and national defense." Moreover, he asserts, Roe "functions as a lightning rod, drawing political heat away from the democratic process and onto the Supreme Court itself."

Now, a naive reader, unblessed with Balkin's superlative perspicacity, might have failed to notice this supposed "lightning rod" effect. After all, literally dozens of countries have dealt with the abortion issue through the normal democratic process; they range from Ireland, which only very recently lifted an outright ban on the practice, all the way to the very liberal France, which pioneered the widespread use of the "abortion pill" RU-486. And to the best of my knowledge, in only one country in the world has the abortion debate become so acrimonious as to spawn a real, live terrorist movement responsible for multiple murders--and oddly enough, it's also the one country where the the abortion issue was taken "off the table" by judicial fiat. It's a strange lightning rod, indeed, that increases the number of victims of the violent fury it's supposed to divert harmlessly.

But it seems pointless to quibble with this specific case when Balkin's general argument is that by abrogating majority rule and imposing arbitrary diktats regarding major political issues (and he openly concedes that they are political), the Supreme Court can actually make democracy function better. The sheer Orwellian audacity of the claim is just breathtaking. I don't know whether it's more frightening to think of him as merely engaging in lawyerly casuistry, or to contemplate the possibility that his "less is more" approach to democracy is perfectly sincere.

No sooner do I post what I hope will be my last word on the subject of racial preferences, than a New York Times columnist seizes the moment and publishes a defense of it so reprehensible that it fairly begs to be refuted. Nick Kristof, acknowledging that both he and President Bush benefited from preferences of one kind or another when applying to college, warns that "it would be a mistake to consider preferences for blacks in isolation. How can we evaluate the justice of preferences that favor blacks without considering preferences that benefit whites (legacy), athletes (football players), the wealthy (children of donors), and farm kids from Oregon (me when I applied to colleges)?"

Yes, let us consider them. Awarding undeserved college admission to the children of wealthy donors is obviously a kind of corruption, but at least it's a fairly frank, undisguised form of corruption, and its victims and beneficiaries are thankfully few in number. The college athletics system, on the other hand, is an appalling travesty that cheats and exploits many thousands of "student athletes", a population of disproportionately poor, minority youth who earn billions for their colleges while being prevented by the NCAA cartel from earning so much as one red cent for their (all-consuming, largely education-free, and often health-destroying) labors.

As for the absurd practices of granting "legacy" and "geographic diversity" preferences, there is good reason to believe that both were originally at least partially intended as a form of racial discrimination. They were introduced into Ivy League admissions procedures in the early part of the twentieth century, at a time when immigrant families from Southern and Eastern Europe, mostly living in the urban Northeast, began producing college-bound children in non-negligible numbers. Needless to say, they also both had the effect of favoring corn-fed WASPs over the new immigrant stock. (Other, more explicit policies, such as ceilings on the number of Jews admitted, were instituted around the same time.) Like today's "affirmative action" advocates, the inventors of these policies were simply trying to engineer what they deemed a more suitable racial and ethnic composition for their student bodies. Today, of course, we would excoriate them as ugly racists.

Or would we? Kristof happily swallows the claimed justification for "geographic diversity", as though it was the most natural thing in the world that college admissions officers a century ago would have believed, like Kristof, that "[i]t's good for colleges to have hicks from the sticks." He even has a good word for preferences that explicitly favor wealthy scions like George W. Bush: "The affirmative action succeeded. If he was in part a diversity candidate, so what?" In other words, in his desperate desire to defend "affirmative action", Kristof finds himself defending a representative pillar of the entire edifice of institutionalized racism that "affirmative action" was originally intended to counteract.

Peter Beinart, in The New Republic, has also recently compared racial preferences with other currently popular forms of discrimination, but at least he never denies the immorality of all the practices involved: "Republicans aren't wrong to espouse merit and color-blindness. They're wrong to espouse merit and color-blindness while ignoring the ways in which they violate those principles themselves." It's a fair criticism--witness William F. Buckley's nauseating defense of alumni legacy preferences in the New York Times. But if many conservatives are hypocritical for supporting some of these odious practices while condemning others, what should we say of the many liberals, like Kristof, who enthusiastically embrace all of them?

What does a society that is not ready for democracy look like? Amira Hass, in Ha'aretz, paints a vivid portrait of one. The Palestinians she writes about are all fervently hopeful for a Labor Party victory in the upcoming Israeli elections, because they believe that Labor's leader, Amram Mitzna, will loosen the tight military control that the current Israeli PM, Ariel Sharon, has imposed on the occupied territories. This unrealistic hope, writes Hass, "shows, in particular, just how much people need to hold on to their illusions and outside factors, and do not believe that any change can come from within Palestinian society, Palestinian politics or the ways in which the Palestinian Authority is contending with the Israeli occupation." Says a Palestinian journalist quoted by Hass: "The Palestinians know that they have no influence at all on the Palestinian leadership....all they have left is to dream."

To be fair, the creation of a civil polity capable of standing up to the armed thugs that wield power in one's neighborhood is no easy task. On the other hand, recent public opinion polls show strong support for the current leadership, with Arafat, imprisoned Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti and Hamas leader Ahmed Yasin garnering, between them, the endorsement of seventy percent of the population. Apparently, the poll respondents felt safe enough to offer a wide variety of choices from amongst a diverse list of (mutually somewhat hostile) leaders, including some relatively democratic ones. Yet they still mostly endorsed the current collection of terrorists, who are immiserating them, and over whom they recognize that they have absolutely no control. While nothing is impossible, it's hard to be optimistic about a democratic renaissance being in the offing for them under those circumstances.

The Bush administration has filed an amicus brief arguing for the unconstitutionality of the University of Michigan's policy of racial preferences in admissions, and Yale law professor Jack Balkin has responded with a long, involved sequence of arguments to the effect that the constitution in fact never mandated governmental colorblindness. He finishes by asking provocatively whether the first President Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court--a decision almost certainly influenced by race--was unconstitutional, and if not, why "affirmative action" in university admissions should be considered any less constitutional than "affirmative action" in Supreme Court nominations.

Now, my opinion of "affirmative action" is quite settled: I consider it morally indistinguishable from the myriad forms of racial and ethnic discrimination that preceded it. As I mentioned in a previous posting, I have yet to hear an argument in its defense that wasn't also used in the past to justify more "traditional" forms of discrimination. In fact, supporters of racial preferences themselves often implicitly acknowledge its flagrant injustice, by directly equating it with practices, such as "legacy" preferences (that is, favoring children of alumni when determining college admissions), that they more or less admit are transparently unfair.

Whether racial preferences are constitutional, however, is another question entirely. These days, of course, such questions are matters of religious exegesis that only the initiated can properly delve into, and I will therefore leave the task of theological interpretation to the true believers. A more interesting question, to me, is whether they should be constitutional. That is, should consideration of racial or ethnic criteria in government decisions be an option that a democratically elected government is free to embrace or reject?

Three observations lead me to lean towards the answer, "yes". First of all, "discrimination" is a continuum that includes everything from racial discrimination, at one extreme, to the consideration of perfectly valid criteria (such as competence at certain relevant tasks), at the other. And even in the case of racial discrimination, cases come up (the casting of actors, for instance) where discrimination is arguably legitimate. For forms of discrimination that are more justifiable, the line between "just" and "unjust" becomes murkier and murkier, less and less fundamental, and less and less amenable to purely judicial analysis. For example, the decision as to whether, say, single-sex junior high schools deserve public support is a matter for the societal consensus of the moment--not a single 200-year-old document (and certainly not a panel of nine lawyers who got promoted)--to decide.

Second, as a matter of history, the courts have been spectacularly unsuccessful at preventing discrimination. Plessy v. Ferguson, the decision that endorsed "separate but equal" treatment (i.e., legally enforced racial segregation), was a classic case of the courts pandering to the prejudices of their time; Brown v. Board, in contrast, was a classic case of the courts being ahead of their time--and thus utterly ineffectual: school desegregation in the south had to await federal legislative action before it was enforced, more than a decade later. The more recent Bakke decision, as well, though it ostensibly declared strict racial quotas unconstitutional, hardly prevented racial quotas from being implemented widely, both implicitly and explicitly, at all levels of goverment.

Third, constitutional rulings, even when both justified and enforced, can only take the fight against discrimination so far. It was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for instance, that outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations--and even so shamelessly despotic an institution as the Supreme Court would never dare find in the text of the Constitution an excuse for imposing such a rule upon private commercial concerns. Since the people must thus be relied on for most of the task of combatting discrimination, perhaps it is just as well that they be relied on for all of it.

Hence, while I fervently hope that racial preferences disappear soon, I find that I cannot in good conscience root for the US Supreme Court to declare them unconstitutional. The fault, to paraphrase Shakespeare's Cassius, lies not with the courts, but with the American people themselves; if they embrace discrimination, then the court is ultimately unlikely to interfere effectively, and if they shun it, then the court's intervention is simply unnecessary.

(As an aside, although I'm not a high-level constitituional cleric like Balkin, I believe his rhetorical question is actually a matter of private, voluntary, individual actions vs. public, mandatory, collective ones, and has nothing to do with racial preferences in particular. For example, suppose that the first President Bush happened to have begun his deliberations on his Supreme Court nomination choice with a fervent prayer to God to grant him the wisdom to make the best selection. Would that make his nomination of Clarence Thomas unconstitutional? And if not, would it then be constitutional for the University of Michigan to require its admissions committee to begin their first meeting each year by joining in a similar collective prayer?)

Last month I suggested that the path to success for liberals is to consider conservative positions as if they were the widely accepted conventional wisdom, and start figuring out, as outsiders, how to take potshots at the more politically vulnerable ones. Of course, it's difficult to adopt such a posture if you don't actually believe in its premise, and there are certainly good reasons for skepticism. Another one just showed up in the Wall Street Journal: Bob Bartley hailing the advent of a new, Republican "Establishment".

Bartley quotes the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of "The Establishment,": "a social group exercising power generally, or within a given field or institution, by virtue of its traditional superiority, and by the use esp. of tacit understandings and often a common mode of speech, and having as a general interest the maintenance of the status quo." In other words, one thing an Establishment doesn't do is write self-congratulatory op-eds celebrating its new ascension to Establishmenthood. Such a tactic is more typical of an insurgent movement celebrating some recent victories, and optimistically hoping for lots more of the same.

That's not to say, of course, that there's a healthily regnant Democratic Establishment, either; witness last year's book by Judis and Teixeira, entitled "The Emerging Democratic Majority". Obviously, an ideology in firm control of the culture doesn't produce heavy tomes pronouncing its own impending victory; it simply assumes its continuing dominance as given.

It's certainly an interesting time for American politics to be in a state of flux. Ideally, a condition of general turmoil--war abroad, economic troubles at home--would be a usefully challenging crucible in which to test various competing political ideas and ideologies, and determine their relative merits. In practice, however, difficult times tend to push societies towards a simple, coherent consensus, so as to minimize conflict. In other words, one of these two predictions is likely to be correct; we just don't know which one yet.

Michelle Cottle, who apparently covers the "men are pigs" beat at The New Republic, is now complaining about the misogyny of "Joe Millionaire". The "reality TV" series presents a bevy of women attempting to win the heart of a fabulously wealthy heir--who is in fact a penniless construction worker set up with a mansion and butler by the show's producers. To Cottle, the scenario "plays to the basest stereotypes about...the shallow, bitchy, gold-digging, back-biting ways of women." (Andrew Sullivan agrees, although he considers the women's gold-digging to be defensible as "self-protection" and "prudence". Then again, he doesn't have to worry about offending a wife or girlfriend.)

Now, I haven't seen the show, nor have I even discussed it with anyone who has--and perhaps that's the point. While I'm not much of a television watcher in general, there are few shows that I would be less interested in watching than this one. And without having studied the Nielsen demographics, I'd be shocked if the gender breakdown of "Joe Millionaire"'s viewership weren't roughly approximated by that of its cast. Reality TV-minded men--if any exist--are surely much more likely to check out "The Bachelorette" for tips on scoring with a hot ex-cheerleader, than to watch a bunch of shallow, bitchy, gold-digging, back-biting women fight over some loser. (Not that catfights can't be entertaining, of course--it's just that they have to be the right kind....)

If I'm right, then Cottle has no business pointing her accusing finger at the network that serves this stuff up, when all it's doing is catering to the millions of women who are flocking to watch it. Besides, the show could have been much crueler; for example, it could have offered the women the chance to date a penniless construction worker, only to reveal him later to be a multimillionaire computer nerd. Now that would have been a nasty deception!

In the Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell complains that nepotism in government is increasing because "public life has been depoliticized" (his emphasis). "It used to be that 'the issues'--as they're nostalgically called--were so important that a familiar-sounding name was insufficient to win a voter's trust," he writes. Now, though, "[p]eople no longer care enough to look beyond a surname."

Of course, he doesn't mention the unexpected flameouts of political scions Andrew Cuomo and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. These two were among the most promising-looking of the current second-generation crop, but they ran ineffective campaigns and failed to win office. For that matter, he also neglected Jean Carnahan, who, even with the advantage of incumbency, could not convert her late husband's memory into a second election victory. What do these three lack that Caldwell's numerous examples--Bush, Clinton, Chafee, Dole, Sununu, Bentsen, Udall--don't?

The obvious answer is "competence". Politics is not becoming "depoliticized", as Caldwell asserts, but rather professionalized, with a host of management and communications skills necessary where a backroom endorsement once sufficed. Party "machines" once looked for respectable frontmen, but modern parties, shorn of their financial and political resources, now look for candidates who know the trade--raising money, hiring and managing a campaign staff, raising more money, handling the media, raising still more money, and occasionally helping formulate policy. As in all professions, family members of superstars in the field get the huge advantage of learning the ropes from within, at the highest level, and can carry that inside knowledge and experience with them when they make their own runs. (They also have the advantage of being inured by familiarity to the absurdities and unpleasantnesses of the political life, and hence of being more likely willing to embark upon it.)

Of course, in the grueling competition of modern politics, even major-league experience can't compensate for innate talentlessness of the kind displayed by the aforementioned political losers. But their failures demonstrate that voters aren't simply voting the name; they expect, first and foremost, professional-level political skill. Why should they care if it happens to have been learned at a family member's knee?

Eugene Volokh nicely dissects Julian Bond's bizarre characterization of "affirmative action" as the "righteous spoils of a just war". He leaves out perhaps the most disturbing irony of Bond's claim, though. From Locke's Second Treatise of Government (Chapter 4: "Of Slavery"):

Indeed, having by his fault forfeited his own life by some act that deserves death, he to whom he has forfeited it may, when he has him in his power, delay to take it, and make use of him to his own service; and he does him no injury by it....This is the perfect condition of slavery, which is nothing else but the state of war continued between a lawful conqueror and a captive.

I've long argued that every justification for "affirmative action" is merely a recapitulation of some argument used in the past to excuse more "traditional" varieties of discrimination. But the Bond argument's antecedent is, I would say, particularly embarrassing. "Just spoils", indeed!

It's probably just coincidence, but two commentators on economics have almost simultaneously published exasperated critiques of the current state of computer technology. Robert Samuelson's latest column complains that the "Internet century" turned out to be an "Internet nanosecond" that was followed by three years of failing to deliver on the hype-ridden promises thrown around at the peak of the bubble. "The obvious truth about the Internet", he claims, "is that it's not especially important....if the Internet collapsed tomorrow, most Americans would go on with their lives in a way that would not be true if, say, they could no longer drive their cars." Samuelson blames the Internet technology industry for (1) failing to innovate sufficiently quickly and (2) failing to engineer enough reliability into its products.

Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley's chief economist, Stephen Roach, took a break this week from his usual macro forecasting to launch into an uncharacteristic tirade on the unreliability of computer technology. "For years, we’ve all heard about the Promised Land of the New Economy," he writes, after recounting a litany of personal horror stories about computer and network failures. "A funny thing happened on the road to that revolution. First, the asset bubble popped. And then the technology disappoints."

What's striking about both essays is that they eloquently testify to the falsity of their own main premise. In fact, in the go-go days of the Internet bubble, computer and network technologies were enormously less reliable than they are today. Few noticed at the time, though, because the services they delivered were intriguing novelties, and users were impressed that they worked at all. Today, Samuelson thinks nothing at all of the Internet's everyday uses ("We e-mail. We buy from eBay. We get homework from the Net. We have access to vast stores of information."), and instead gripes about how people "want them to work -- all the time, not 88 percent of the time." Meanwhile, Roach whines about the failure of an overseas videoconferencing link, the unreliability of his laptop's operating system, and the proliferation of the passwords he needs to remember in order to access various resources over the network, as if these technologies have been working conveniently and flawlessly for decades, only to suddenly go awry all at once. In fact, what has happened is that they are now so commonplace that the likes of Roach and Samuelson can feel quite within their rights to get indignant when they fail to work perfectly. That's as clear a demonstration of the technology's spectacular progress as I can imagine.

Tennessee law professor Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, in his new role as professional blogger (I guess he lacks a Nigerian trust fund), has joined Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig in ridiculing lawyers for the Sony corporation. The lawyers had threatened suit, under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), against a programmer who had posted to the Internet a method to "hack into" Sony's Aibo "electronic dog" to make it do a new trick. Both Reynolds and Lessig consider the decision to be commercially nonsensical. "Management should begin to demand a business justification for copyright litigation. How does this legal action advance the bottom line?", advises Lessig. "Will calling our customers criminals increase consumer loyalty?" Reynolds goes further:

Lawyers don’t think enough about business considerations, it’s true. But the people whose job it is to think about business considerations need to do some thinking too. Then they can clue in the lawyers.

What did Sony have to lose here? If the trick worked, it could only result in more pleased Aibo owners, and thus more Aibo sales. If it didn’t work, Sony wasn’t going to get the blame. And, who knows, Sony’s engineers might have learned something from the trick, too.

Now, I grant that no population in the world is more renowned for their legendary marketing savvy than law professors. (That's why the law profession's "brand" is so universally beloved, after all.) But even a techie like myself, reading excerpts from Sony's letter to the Aibo hackers, can see why Sony's business people--not just their lawyers--might find publication of the hack worrisome:

The letter claims that the hack reveals Aibo software that had been encrypted. There may be trade secrets inside that code that Sony had wanted to preserve.

The letter also claims that the hack involved circumventing the content protection mechanism in Sony's Memory Stick technology. The same circumvention could presumably also be used on Memory Sticks used for other purposes--such as to protect digital entertainment content. Putting aside the whole issue of the effectiveness and advisability of copy-protection technology, it's easy to see why Sony management would view the breaking of their own version of it as a major danger to their company's commersial interests.

Even taken as a hack of the Aibo tout court, it could easily be used to get the Aibo to do much more embarrassing things than mere dancing. And for a toy to come to be associated with the wrong "uses" can obviously be a marketing disaster. (Sony did eventually provide alternate means to write customizing software for the Aibo, but that only demonstrates that they found the threat of illegal hacks more frightening than the threat of brand-damaging customizations--not that they were necessarily thrilled about the latter.)

Of course, Reynolds and Lessig, both longtime opponents of the DMCA, didn't really oppose Sony's lawsuit because they stay up at night worrying about the interests of Sony shareholders. Their commercial advice to Sony is in fact based on their own personal preferences regarding the structure of intellectual property markets. And while they probably genuinely believe that their preferences are also in the long-term best interests of corporations like Sony, it might behoove them to show just a little bit of deference to the dedicated employees of a company that has for decades been spectacularly successful at a task (marketing consumer electronics) about which Reynolds and Lessig obviously know, for all their bravado, less than nothing.

Then again, what do I know about marketing? I'm no law professor, after all.

A few months ago, in response to Daniel Gross' silly Slate article on the S&P 500, I argued that uninformed stockholders were being ruined by their mindless recitation of the "stocks outperform bonds" mantra. When I posted my comments to the Slate Fray, one reader responded tartly, "[l]ong term the S&P does well. Read the facts." Clearly the cult of retail stockholding dies hard.

I was reminded of this incident on reading Daniel Drezner's amusingly self-mocking cultural analysis of his mutual fund's annual report. Apparently, his fund is using the excuse of "corporate greed and ambition" (i.e, various accounting scandals) to explain its abysmal performance, and Drezner now wonders whether this contemptuous attitude towards aggressive capitalism is necessarily the frame of mind he wants his investment managers to cultivate.

Now, Drezner seems like a bright guy--not many people can blog their way onto my "better than their exposure" list, after all--and perhaps his life savings have been allocated with much greater caution than his complaints would suggest. But after three years of overall market decline, and with the price-earnings ratios of the major indices still well above their traditional "sell" tripwire levels, outghtn't he at least begin to consider that the stock market might just be the wrong place for his money? And if he doesn't, what on earth will it take before he and millions of his fellow unquestioning shareholders finally get the message?

Mark Kleiman has brought to our attention a discussion in Brad DeLong's blog of the well-known Newcomb's problem. The problem is described as follows: a hyperintelligent extraterrestrial alien who can model and predict individual human behavior with perfect (or near-perfect) accuracy offers you a choice between A) the contents of a locked, opaque box, and B) the same contents plus $10. The catch is that the alien has already predicted which you will choose, and previously placed $1,000,000 in the box if he/she/it has predicted you would choose (A), and nothing otherwise. Which do you choose?

The problem is actually a little misleading; it's cast as a decision theoretic puzzle, but it's really just an illustration of the incompatibility of the idea of free will with the idea of a deterministic universe. Viewed as a decision problem, it produces an odd result: even though choice (B) is in every case strictly better than choice (A) (by exactly $10, in fact), it's not obvious that it's preferable. The real issue becomes clearer, though, if the problem is simply changed slightly: let the box be transparent. Now you can see exactly what the alien predicted, and you have no incentive to pass up the extra $10. Or do you?

Well, it depends on what you are, really. If you're possessed of free will, and can truly decide on the spur of the moment to take the $10, then you obviously would, if you see the box full of cash--precisely because the alien wouldn't be able to predict such an action in advance. (After all, if you see the box is empty, you can always decide to decline the $10, just to prove the alien fallible. That's what free will means, right?)

If, on the other hand, you're a deterministic algorithm forced by the laws of nature to make a predetermined choice, then that choice could as easily be to forgo the $10 as to grab it--but in that case, there's no point asking "what would you do?", except as a purely empirical question (i.e., "what would you have no choice but to do?"). You can believe yourself to be one or the other--but Newcomb's problem asks you to believe both at the same time, and is therefore fundamentally self-contradictory.

Oxblog's David Adesnik--yes, democracy's evangelist extraordinaire, of all people--has declined to echo my searing condemnation of Amy Chua's "market-dominant minorities" thesis. He takes his cue from a recent Michelle Goldberg book review in Salon, which characterizes Chua's position as more democracy-skeptical than capitalist-minority-bashing--a sort of academicized Robert Kaplan-style appreciation of a good strongman capable of restraining the racist rabble. (How odd, then, that Adesnik would spare it his usual righteous pro-democracy fury....)

Now, I myself have been known to express a version of the Kaplan/Chua position, conceding that it's pointless to try to foist democracy on societies whose enthusiasm for it is weak. (The same could be said of free markets, for that matter.) But Chua's claim is that free-market democracy itself creates dangerous opportunities for racist violence. In fact, as her own examples (Zimbabwe and Indonesia--the ones I cited previously) amply demonstrate, corrupt kleptocracies are more likely to foment ethnic conflict, as a means to bolster their own political power, than to suppress it. Democracy, then, is no more the source of these troubles than it is of, say, the horrors of Islamic fundamentalist violence--which happened to gain strength from democratic elections in, say, Algeria, but certainly depended on ruthless dictatorships in plenty of other countries. The lesson of cases like Algeria is not that democracy is dangerous, but rather that the failure of democracy is dangerous, and that it should therefore not be tried in places where it's obviously doomed to fail.

Eugene Volokh notes the interesting story of the scandal that has just brought down the government of Greenland. Apparently, the Danish province's chief civil servant, Jens Lyberth, "called upon the services of a healer to drive evil spirits from the government's offices in Nuuk, Greenland's capital." A major party has quit the governing coalition in disgust.

Heck, now that I think about it, if I found myself living in Greenland, I'd probably assume I'd been cursed by evil spirits....

With war threatening in the Middle East, Rep. Charles Rangel (D - NY) has proposed reinstituting the draft. "A disproportionate number of the poor and members of minority groups make up the enlisted ranks of the military," he writes, "while the most privileged Americans are underrepresented or absent." He also hypothesizes that "if those calling for war knew that their children were likely to be required to serve.... there would be more caution....in dealing with Iraq."

Well, here's a modest proposal: Rangel's office claims that over 30 percent of military personnel are minorities, but according to Julianne Malvaux, "African Americans [alone] are about 11 percent of the labor market, but 28 percent of our nation’s postal clerks." Malvaux wonders if the deaths of postal workers during the anthrax-letter crisis might have been at least partly due to neglect on the part of the authorities for the safety of a poor, disproportionately-minority workforce. An obvious solution presents itself: the dangerous, soul-destroying, poorly-paid burden of moving the nation's mails must be borne equally by all Americans. If everyone, rich or poor, white or black, were required to give a few months of their lives manning the sorting bins and service counters of the postal system, Americans might have second thoughts, not just about the difficult working conditions of postal workers, but even about the wisdom of having a national postal system in the first place.

Wouldn't that be a breakthrough for all those downtrodden minority USPS employees!

If you're like me, you're no doubt appalled at Robert Mugabe's campaign of terror against white farmers in Zimbabwe, and you consider him guilty of cynically exploiting racial tensions to maintain his hold on power. You would also have been disgusted by the brutal carnage of the anti-Chinese riots that convulsed Indonesia in 1998, many of them instigated by the military in an attempt to divert anger away from the soon-to-be-deposed military government there. In short, you would see state-sanctioned violence against minority groups as most often simply a product of ugly collaboration between racist populations and ruthless demagogues.

Unless, of course, you were visiting Yale law professor Amy Chua, who (I'm not joking) blames "free-market democracy" for creating (again, this is really her phrase) "market-dominant minorities". "[T]he pursuit of free-market democracy," she writes in the New York Times, "often becomes an engine of ethnic nationalism, pitting a frustrated indigenous majority, easily aroused by demagogic politicians, against a resented, wealthy ethnic minority." That's right--freedom, prosperity and democracy allow envy and racism to surface, and the problem, in places like Zimbabwe and Indonesia (she explicitly cites those two examples), is therefore with freedom, prosperity and democracy. "[I]f global markets are to be sustainable," she warns, "ways must be found to spread their benefits beyond a handful of market-dominant minorities and their foreign investor partners."

In fact, brutality towards affluent minorities is by no means universal. Many nations do destroy or drive out their mercantile classes--and invariably pay the price in economic ruin. But others--modern America being an obvious example--treat such groups with tolerance, and moreover usually end up sharing in their economic blessings.

Indeed, one wonders how many of her own "benefits" Prof. Chua, a native Chinese speaker and well-paid professor, is prepared to spread around to help protect her own conspicuously successful minority from a vengeful American majority. Perhaps she should specify exactly what fraction of her own income and property angry white American racists are entitled, in her view, to extort from her, before she no longer accepts their demands as natural and inevitable.

Then again, I suppose I should be thankful that she didn't mention the original "market-dominant minority", famous for sucking the blood of its majority hosts, in league with fellow rootless cosmopolitan "foreign investor partners". If only Amy Chua had been there at various opportune moments in history, she might have been able to suggest various ways to spread their predatory profits beyond their greedy, clannish hands, and to offer a shrugging I-told-you-so each time a "frustrated indigenous majority", aroused by demagogic politicians, rose up against them.

Fortunately, such outdated apologias for crude racism are normally considered monstrously uncouth in civilized countries like America--though I hear they've been making a comeback, of late, in places like the offices of the New York Times and the halls of Yale Law School.

The Bush administration is now proposing eliminating the tax on shareholders' dividend income. The claimed practical justification for the move is that it will function as a fiscal stimulus to the economy; I will leave it to others to criticize it on that score. Personally, I continue to doubt (as I have mentioned before) that a fiscal stimulus of any kind will be any more effective at curing America's post-bubble malaise than have the trillions spent over the last decade building bridges to nowhere in Japan.

There is also, however, a "principled" argument being made for cutting taxes on dividends: that dividends are "double-taxed", since they are drawn from profits that are themselves subject to a corporate income tax. Of course, all other business expenses, from purchased merchandise to employee salaries to interest on loans, are drawn on those same profits. The special status of dividends is thus based on a presumptive difference between owning a share of a company's stock (and hence a claim on a share of its profits) and merely providing it with a service (such as floating it a loan or working for it as an employee).

As a practical matter, though, that difference is becoming fuzzier all the time. On the one hand, instruments such as mutual funds erode the "control" aspect of ownership to the point of negligibility; on the other, complex modern financing arrangements can make bondholders' returns very nearly as much a function of market performance as common stock. Indeed, if the tax cut goes through, I would expect to see numerous future issuances of "preferred stock" under terms that make them look remarkably like bonds, with promised dividends in place of promised loan repayments. Encouraging lending and investment to be cosmetically restructured in this manner to satisfy arbitrary tax rules can't possibly be economically useful. Or can it?

I am referring, of course, to the elephant in the room that gets passing mention but whose shocking implications are rarely addressed head-on: that the dividend tax cut may well be a naked attempt to influence the stock market. As the estimable Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley has pointed out, it is tempting for policymakers to try to juice the market, thus creating a more generally optimistic economic outlook, which may encourage spending and investment, thus restarting the stalled economy, in a replay of the virtuous circle that took hold during the nineties. It's hard to imagine a more explicit white flag of surrender to that temptation than a tax cut designed to encourage people to run out and buy dividend-bearing stocks.

Now, as ICBW readers know, I'm not exactly thrilled about measures that increase ordinary investors' naive faith in the stock market as the repository of choice for their entire life savings. And today's valuations don't exactly suggest an investor so consumed with revulsion at the thought of taking a chance on equities as to need an incentive in that direction from Uncle Sam. Under these conditions, one might have thought that the authorities would hesitate before attempting to reinflate the disastrous bubble that popped (or rather, began its gradual, long-term and still-incomplete collapse) only three years ago. It appears, though, that one would thereby be placing a little too much faith in the responsible sobriety of the current administration's economic advisors.

The recent double suicide bombing in Tel Aviv has overshadowed an interesting related development taking place next door in Egypt. According to the Jerusalem Post, President Mubarak has delivered an ultimatum to Hamas, demanding that it accept an Egyptian proposal for a ceasefire with Israel, or else be branded an "enemy of peace". The Egyptians for some time have been trying to broker a ceasefire deal between Israel and the combined Palestinian factions (they claim to have the PFLP and DFLP aboard already); however, they appear of late to be pressing their initiative with unexpected urgency. An obvious motivation is their desire to establish some kind of stability in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before the US attacks Iraq, thus defusing anticipated domestic protests that the Egyptian government's (at least mildly) pro-US stance amounts to a "sellout" of the Palestinians.

If correct, this interpretation of events directly contradicts the argument raised by opponents of military action in Iraq (most notably Brent Scowcroft) that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute should be given priority over the Iraq issue. Scowcroft, among others, warned that dealing immediately with the problem of Saddam Hussein would be perceived as neglecting the Palestinian problem, and would thus inflame anti-American outrage throughout the Arab world. In fact, Scowcroft et al. got it exactly backwards: by forcing a confrontation with Iraq, the US appears to have improved prospects for progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front as well.

Many predicted, of course, that the departure of the Iraqi leader from the scene might, by eliminating an enthusiastic regional troublemaker, set the stage for a reduction in hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians. How many, though, anticipated such an effect from the mere possibility of an impending American attack against him?

Lisa Dusseault raises a couple of interesting questions about the nature of fear in modern society. Why, she (implicitly) asks, do people's specific fears often correlate so poorly with the real dangers they actually face? And why are overall levels of human anxiety still so high in our society, given that our lives are spectacularly safer, by every rational measure, than ever before in history?

Well, I'm no behavioral biologist, but I figure I can construct "just so stories" with the best of them. So here goes....

Fear is a biological reaction, like pleasure or rage, and is designed to perform certain basic survival functions, like triggering avoidance of certain perennial dangers (snakes, heights) and assisting us in learning to avoid newly encountered threats (hot stoves, musclebound bullies). Like other limbic-system mechanisms that tie into higher congitive layers, though, it is prone to the creation of accidental superfluous associations. (A single adverse reaction to eating a particular food can cause a lifelong aversion to the taste of that food, even if it's normally safe and nutritious. And I'll just mention, without elaboration, the word, "fetish".) From an evolutionary point of view, this is perfectly reasonable; after all, it's far better for an individual to develop an unnecessary fear of, say, rabbits than to fail to develop a fear of tigers.

The lack of a correlation between overall fear level and overall safety level is perhaps more interesting, because it's even more strongly counterintuitive. Our anxiety levels do seem roughly to track our relative perceived danger levels; that is, we tend to get more fearful when we sense great danger. Shouldn't there also be, then, some correlation with absolute danger levels, which have in fact declined markedly over the centuries?

I can imagine a number of possible answers:

We really are less anxious than our ancestors. How do we know how much anxiety people felt during the Middle Ages, anyway? Or even people in dire circumstances elsewhere in the world today? Sure, footage of people living in squalor in third-world hellholes shows them seeming remarkably at peace with themselves and the world compared to Western city-dwellers, but perhaps that's just an illusion or cultural misunderstanding. For example, it may just be that....

The wages of fear have declined. One characteristic of modern, affluent, free societies is that betraying one's anxiety levels carries essentially no price. In other times and places, showing fear may well have meant quick death in many common circumstances, and fear would therefore have been suppressed much more often than it is in today's Western culture. It may therefore be that we actually do experience much less fear than people used to--but we talk about minor fears the way no one would have discussed even deathly terrors in the past. Or perhaps the reverse is true: we work ourselves into frenzies of panic today where our ancestors would have "managed" their fears more effectively by stifling their expression.

There's more to life than survival. That which may reduce mating potential, for instance, or safety of relatives, or their mating potential, ought to be viewed with as much alarm as that which may reduce lifespan. And threats to attractiveness (such as highly attractive competitors with large stores of resources to offer) certainly haven't declined along with physical dangers.

Fear of the inevitable is useless. A relatively likely threat about which nothing can be done is less worth fearing than a rare danger whose likelihood can be substantially reduced. Now, it sometimes seems as though the opposite is true: we tend to fear situations characterized by helplessness (such as airplane travel) much more than those where we maintain control (such as driving), even when the latter are considerably more dangerous. However, the fear in those cases exists to deter us from getting into situations of powerlessness in the first place--an act we often have a choice about. People who find themselves in dangerous situations they truly have no choice but to endure--those whose neighborhoods have become war zones or high-crime areas, for instance--often quickly become inured to their new risks, which they feel powerless to reduce. The same goes for people who live in circumstances where injury, disease, famine and violence are endemic and essentially unavoidable. However, the myriad options we enjoy in our lives also give us lots of opportunities to fear making dangerous choices that will send us hurtling ineluctably toward disaster.

To paraphrase the old joke, I don't have to outfear the bear, I just have to outfear you. In the pre-civilized world, dangers would always have been abundant enough to saturate our ability to fear them. There would thus have been an optimal "fear rate" (anxiety level) which would have provided the best possible tradeoff between the danger-avoiding benefits and the distraction from productive tasks provided by fears. This level would have been selected for through competition between human populations for survival, resulting in our current range of anxiety levels. (Variation in anxiety levels would also be advantageous; a community consisting of fearless warriors and panicky lookouts would do better than a uniform population of either.) Today, our anxiety levels, like our appetites for sugar, are relics of the age of never-ending threats, and we simply distribute them among more and more trivial worries.

Ignorance is bliss. In other times, people had very little access to information about dangers, and thus were happy to rely, of necessity, on authorities to tell them comforting (if largely fanciful) stories about how to protect themselves. Today, on the other hand, we have a world of highly decentralized information, in which even the government cannot really be trusted to give reliable information--to say nothing of that ignoramus posting reckless, completely uninformed speculations about the evolution of human nature to his blog. What a frightening state of affairs!

A deranged German man stole a small plane at an airfield near Frankfurt today and threatened to crash it into a skyscraper. His claimed motive was to call attention to his idol, astronaut Judith Resnik, who was killed in the Challenger disaster in 1986. He was talked down and arrested before causing any injuries or damage.

We can be thankful, I suppose, that he didn't try to stab Sally Ride....

It has recently been revealed that the British government secretly considered forcible relocation of hundreds of thousands of Northern Irish thirty years ago, during a particularly severe flare-up of Catholic-Protestant violence. The plan involved the "separation" of the Catholic and Protestant populations of Northern Ireland, by relocating some 300,000 Catholics and 200,000 Protestants so as to create two religiously homogeneous regions, and then splitting the territory in two accordingly, merging the Catholic portion into the Irish Republic. The plan was abandoned as unlikely to be accepted peacefully by those slated to be uprooted.

But there's more to the story: at around the same time, Her Majesty's representative in Jerusalem, Gayford Woodrow, was urging "understanding" of the terrorists who had just perpetrated the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. And a few weeks later, David Gore-Booth, a first secretary at the Foreign Office, explained that the hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner by PLO terrorists that achieved the release of three of their comrades captured at Munich was "a manifestation of the Palestine problem". "Before we shed too many tears about the Lufthansa hijacking", he wrote, "it would be as well to ask ourselves what the implications are so far as the Arab/Israel dispute is concerned."

As the saying goes, one man's "terrorist" is another man's "freedom fighter"--which is not to say that he's not still a terrorist, of course. The PLO apologists at Whitehall cannot plead woolly-minded naivete about terrorists in general, since they were at the same time contemplating the most drastic measures to deal with their own set of brutal thugs. The only possible explanations for their callous double standard are cynical expediency and irrational prejudice. It's hard to know which is the more likely culprit.

But the implications of the Israel-Northern Ireland analogy hardly end there. For example, what might have happened if the British government of the day had instead offered to forcibly remove only Protestants from the designated "Catholic" portions of Northern Ireland, setting up the latter as an independent Northern Irish state at the conclusion of a "peace process"? Would public opinion have found this one-sided "evacuation of the settlements" more palatable?

Of course, the IRA would never have accepted such a compromise, any more than they accepted the compromise that established all but the northern counties of the Emerald Isle as the Irish Free State in the first place. (And they would quickly have moved to gain de facto control over the newly independent territory, establishing it as a terrorist base and sanctuary immune to British or Irish policing.) Then again, the Unionists, faced with such a bitter, violent rejection of their concessions, might have retained a clearer picture of the IRA's utter implacability, and thus avoided their more recent disastrous flirtation with it.

On the other hand, Northern Protestants, in yet another Middle Eastern parallel, currently face a terrible demographic problem; they now comprise only a bare majority of Ulster's population. Israel proper (excluding the occupied territories) appears to have at least a few generations left before reaching that particular crisis. Perhaps she will somehow find a peaceful means of avoiding it before it's too late.

Two new studies of global climate change have concluded that the habitats of various Northern-Hemisphere species have moved noticeably northward. A biology professor involved in one of the studies called the results disconcerting, and suggested that some species may even become extinct as a result of these northward shifts.

Now, nobody knows if the current brief spell of "global warming" is the beginning of a major long-term trend or just a tiny blip that is about to disappear into the noise of normal climactic fluctuations. Nor is it known whether what we've seen so far (and any continuation of it that we might see) is a man-made or natural phenomenon, or a combination of both. But I simply cannot believe that one of its effects, if it persists, wouldn't be a marked increase in the world's biodiversity, since warmer climates are on average far richer in species than colder ones. It would thus surely benefit far more species than would suffer--and the net beneficiaries would likely include humans as well. (The two regions mentioned in the study--Europe and North America--would almost certainly experience an increase in comfortably habitable land area as a result. As a Canadian, I'd say my country clearly has everything to gain.) Indeed, if the effect were somehow determined to be a completely natural one, it might well be viewed as the equivalent of the end of an ice age--an excitingly rapid efflorescence of abundant new life.

Why, then, would any nature-lover view its potential onset with alarm? Because its cause might be at least partially artificial? Why would that make any difference to a nature-lover....as opposed to a human-hater?

Two bloggers have now commented on phenomena subtly related to my recent post about the political victory of taxation-bashers. Mark Kleiman discusses a New York Times article analyzing the repeated failure of liberal efforts to match the success of conservative commentators in media such as talk radio and cable television. Meanwhile, Daniel Drezner asks why liberals often seem (to him, at least) so touchy about brickbats from across the ideological aisle, in comparison to conservatives.

My answer to both inquiries is the same: liberals have simply failed to acknowledge the political defeats they have suffered, let alone to begin to use that realization to help them regroup and counterattack. Believing that they are (still) the voice of common sense consensus, they often disdain opposition criticism as impudent carping from ignorant yahoos, and assume that their ideas are being rejected only because they lack of a sufficiently loud megaphone. Such attitudes betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the recent conservative insurgency in American politics.

Liberals like to portray conservative activists and commentators as ideologically dogmatic robots, a kind of brainwashed army of catechism-spouting aliens ("propaganda organs for the Republican Party", in the words of another blogger, "Hesiod"). Many of them are, of course, committedly partisan--as are many liberals--but careful examination of their tactics shows them to be far more agile and opportunistic than their liberal caricature would suggest. The populist firestorm of conservative support unleashed by talk radio was not generated by earnest students of Hayek or Oakeshott (or Ailes or Rove) repeating their holy writ into the microphone ad nauseam; Limbaugh et al. were in fact extremely astute about spotting and exploiting weaknesses in the underbelly of liberal conventional thinking that would arouse their listeners against a liberal "establishment".

Conservative commentators generally don't pay much attention to popular, moderate liberal proposals (in areas such as health care or education, for instance); in fact more often than not they'll back down and mute their opposition rather than engage on such issues, and move on to "red meat" issues ("affirmative action", crime and punishment, school prayer) where they see more opportunities for rallying support. This kind of pot-shot-taking is the mark of an "outsider" political movement attempting to weaken an established conventional wisdom; it implicitly recognizes that the public are not necessarily on their side by default. Only political alliances that are convinced (correctly or not) they have the public firmly in their corner dare dismiss their opponents and their criticisms as marginal and irrelevant.

Liberals used to understand this dynamic much better; in the wake of the 1994 Republican landslide, former president Clinton and his supporters were extremely adept at compromising where necessary (welfare reform being the obvious example) and carrying the battle to their opponents' turf where feasible. However, the political ground has shifted markedly since then. As I long ago explained, the current "liberal" consensus is for the most part the collection of opinions and values held by the upper-middle professional and upper classes, and that cohort understandably finds it difficult to make pragmatic concessions to its opponents in a heavily class-polarized political environment. (It also has understandable difficulty letting go of its perception of its own views as dominant in the country at large.)

That's unfortunate (from their point of view), because the growing success of conservative ideas and politicians is creating opportunities for creative liberals that are ripe for exploitation. The tax issue is obviously one; if the Wall Street Journal is really pining for the days when it still had lots of taxpayers to win over, then there must be plenty of political weaknesses in this unquestioned anti-tax consensus for liberals to poke at. To succeed, though, they'll have to give up their cherished belief that their opponents' ideas are crazy fringe opinions that can be brushed aside, and start treating them the way '80's conservatives treated liberalism: as a huge, crumbling edifice of popular, established conventions that needs to be undermined, one decayed platform plank at a time, until it collapses.

Following the lead of the Volokh Conspiracy's pseudonymous Philippe DeCroy and The New York Times' William Safire....

OFFICIAL ICBW PREDICTIONS FOR 2003

A year from now, Iraq will be where Afghanistan is today: a troubled but largely ignored backwater where things are much better than before the US invasion, and American troops help minimize the chaos, but there's still plenty of turmoil, and the long-term political structure of the country has yet to be fully sorted out.

Another terrorist "mega-attack" will occur, this time somewhere in Western Europe.

Yasser Arafat, Kim Jong Il, Ayatollah Khamenei and Hugo Chavez will (barring death by natural causes) still be clinging to power in their respective political entities at the end of the year, although perhaps somewhat more precariously than at present. The "engagement" strategies pursued by the UN, EU, OAS and other multilateralist organizations with respect to these leaders will have absolutely no effect on their strength or belligerence levels. Their satrapies will suffer further declines in living conditions, but will otherwise (and, particularly, in political terms) remain largely unchanged.

The major American market indices will experience yet another year of net decline, as will the US Dollar and real estate market. The American economy will have dipped back into recession by the end of the year, and the domestic American political debate will have largely shifted from international politics to economics. The president's popularity will suffer significantly as a result, although not as severely as his father's did.

Japan will at last begin adopting some necessary financial reforms. Their short term effect on its economy will be markedly negative.

A note on the method: The ICBW prognostication technique is a carefully calibrated, high-precision process, consisting of the following steps: (1) Observing the current state of affairs; (2) Considering that things usually don't change all that quickly, and that rapid changes are usually highly unpredictable, anyway; (3) Assuming that most things will stay more or less the same, except where change appears inevitable; and (4) Where change is inevitable, assuming that the outcome will be, at best, not particularly positive.

Mark Kleiman and Sasha Volokh are engaging in an interesting debate on the "precautionary principle" as it applies to public health policy and government regulation of technological innovation. The essence of the question at hand is: should some human actions be forsaken merely on the grounds that their unforeseen consequences might conceivably be catastrophic, even in the absence of any evidence that such a consequence has any significant likelihood of coming to pass?

Both Kleiman and Volokh (now) seem inclined to give at least some credence to the principle, on the grounds that an unknown risk at least contains a scintilla of a possibility of a disaster, and hence should be averted where possible. As Volokh puts it, "you shouldn't just compare the mean estimates of the benefits but....you should also take into account the variance, that is, figure out which of the alternatives has more uncertainty and possible unknown bad outcomes and be a little bit biased against it." Or, in Kleiman's words, "any proposal where a plausible story can be told of truly catastrophic risk (i.e., risks equivalent to substantial fractions of total national or world wealth) ought to be forbidden until the probability attached to the risk can be plausibly quantified".

I believe these arguments miss the important distinction between an unknown probability and an unknown (probabilistic) outcome (with a known probability distribution). When Volokh treats an unknown probability as a(n implicitly known) distribution with a high variance, and when Kleiman invokes the word "plausible" to implicitly ascribe a (known) non-negligible probability to a bad outcome, they are effectively contradicting their own claim of ignorance about the probability of a catastrophic event. This insinuated substitution of "known, small but non-negligible probability" for "unknown probability" is certainly intuitively tempting, but I believe it leads to an important error.

The problem is that this implicitly estimated tiny-but-significant probability is then being compared with another unknown probability--the probability of a catastrophic outcome from inaction--that has in fact been implicitly replaced with "a negligibly small quantity". This latter substitution also has an obvious intuitive appeal, of course--"don't upset the applecart", "don't ruin a good thing", etc. etc. But in practice it is almost always disastrous to avoid change completely, if one considers a long enough timescale. Certainly, if our society had refused to change over, say, the last two hundred years, then the results would have been disastrous (by comparison with our current state). This principle is even enshrined in the structure of life itself, which is built to evolve and vary genetically over time, to avoid presenting a sitting target to both the three p's (predators, pathogens, and parasites) and unexpected environmental changes.

Oddly enough, environmentalists--usually the most enthusiastic proponents of the precautionary principle--are happy to recognize the dangers of stasis when it suits them. One might have thought, for instance, that a radical reduction in the world's fossil fuel consumption might have all sorts of unexpected side-effects, some of which might even prove to be disastrous. However, the (extremely ill-understood) threat of global warming is enough to convince many that inaction is even more dangerous than action in this case. (It all depends on one's baseline notion of "inaction", I guess.)

Now, it may be that in some cases there are fairly well-defined, quantifiable threats that make a precautionary stance reasonable. (For example, by Kleiman's calculation, even a 1% chance of a deliberately induced smallpox epidemic would make pre-emptive vaccination a worthwhile countermeasure. One could easily imagine a defensible model based on real-world knowledge that placed the threat above that threshold.) But in these cases, the "precautionary principle" no longer applies, as the risks are no longer being thought of as unknown and unquantifiable. Conversely, if the risks of a given action--say, that genetic modification of plants could lead to a "superbug" that decimates humanity--are poorly understood, then they cannot automatically be assumed to be greater than the risks of failing to take that action--say, that a "superbug" will arise naturally that only genetic modification technology can prevent from decimating humanity.

In general, the human instinct to identify consistency with safety is understandable, since arbitrary changes to the status quo are much more likely to be seriously detrimental than beneficial. (Again, our genes lead the way in this respect, attempting to replicate themselves perfectly, within limits.) However, in genetics as in life, the absence of small gradual changes with no obvious harmful effects can be as disastrous as the presence of large, radical changes with unmistakable harmful effects. The precautionary principle fails to take the former danger into account, and thus deals with all changes as if they belonged in the latter category. That makes it a poor guide to evaluating, for example, the risks of new technologies.

Oxblog's David Adesnik, and Reuel Marc Gerecht (whose opinions I usually agree with) in the Weekly Standard, are both concerned that the Bush administration might be wavering in its commitment to establishing democracy in the Middle East. Gerecht complains that "the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, William Burns, articulates counterterrorist, not democratic, priorities", and suggests that the region's despots "probably ruminate on how good it is to rule in an age when non-Muslims show such deference to the culture and traditions--many of which arrived via London, Paris, and Berlin--that give them unchallenged dominion." Adesnik is even more blunt: "As a passionate advocate of promoting democracy in the Middle East, I am often told to get real. Don't I know that Muslims can't handle democracy?....I'm not giving in. The desire for freedom is universal."

Now, ICBW readers know that I am second to none in my enthusiasm for democracy--in the Middle East or anywhere else. And I sincerely hope that it takes that benighted region of the world by storm as soon as possible. But if the universal desire for freedom were the only prerequisite for its establishment, then one might have expected it to have appeared in the wild on a large scale before a couple of centuries ago, and certainly to be the overwhelmingly predominant system of government in the world by now.

In truth, nobody really knows how or why democracy succeeds in some places and not others. There appear to be certain positively correlated factors: widespread affluence and literacy; political and social stability; a large, established professional and commercial middle class; past experience (however perfunctory) with democratic forms and procedures; a culture of religious moderation. But clearly not all of these are necessary, nor are they all sufficient (which does Singapore lack?). All we can say is that based on the current and historical records of most of the countries in the modern Middle East, the prognosis for their democratic evolution is, well, not stupendously encouraging.

That's not to say, of course, that the US should simply abandon the whole region to groan under the inevitable yoke of brutal tyranny. Encouragement--rhetorical, political, financial, even military--towards liberalization of the area's authoritarian regimes would certainly be the geopolitical equivalent of a good deed, in those cases where it is likely to succeed in fostering real democratization. However, Gerecht and Adesnik seem to assume that it would invariably succeed, and is therefore always correct policy. Unfortunately, it is more often than not likely simply to fail, sometimes with serious adverse policy consequences for America.

Gerecht mentions Algeria, for instance, as a country whose ruthless military dictatorship benefits conspicuously from American willingness to indulge repression in return for cooperation against terrorism. What Gerecht does not mention, of course, is that Algeria was on the verge a few years ago of voting a radical Islamic theocracy into office--completely democratically, in a free and fair election--and was prevented from doing so only by the military takeover that resulted in the current regime. Had the US successfully intervened back then to protect the inchoate democratic process there, Algerians would probably not be better off today for their state having been forcibly Islamicized, and America would certainly be in a worse position as a result.

In Afghanistan, and probably soon in Iraq, the US will be faced with a similar choice. It can try to cobble together a not-too-horrible candidate government, perhaps organizing some kind of democratic ratification process, and then step back and let the nearly-inevitable authoritarianization occur; or it can pour billions of dollars, thousands of personnel, and years of effort and attention into trying to build resilient democratic institutions pretty much from scratch. Of course, an Afghanistan or Iraq ready for EU membership would be a wonderful thing, and probably an excellent boost for American interests abroad, as well. But if the whole project's likelihood of success is virtually nil, as I suspect it will be, then it can't possibly be worth the investment.

It is important to note that the realism I'm advocating is by no means equivalent to cynical, callous pursuit of American self-interest. On the contrary, freeing Afghans from Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, and freeing Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, are supremely selfless acts of kindness, for which those respective inhabitants ought to be hugely grateful (though, realistically, they almost certainly won't be for long, if at all). To paraphrase the Talmud, it is not America's task to finish the job of creating paradise on earth; it suffices for them to contribute to it. And one can do so without necessarily converting the entire Middle East into a second Scandinavia; for many of the region's countries (and people), even Jordan or Tunisia would be a major step up.

I've been quite forthright in my criticism of instances of liberal bias in the press, but I'm well aware that conservative commentators often confuse lack of conservative bias with liberal bias. A perfect example appeared Thursday in James Taranto's "Best of the Web" in the online Wall Street Journal.

Taranto complains, quite justifiably, about the New York Times' lack of attention--even in an article about prominent Democrats' positions on anti-terrorism measures--to Senator Patty Murray's bizzare comments about Osama bin Laden (she suggested that his support in the Arab world stems from his alleged good works there). But Taranto then lumps that article in with a Seattle Times editorial defending the Washington Democrat's remarks. After noting that "Seattle is a haven for wacko anti-Americanism", where a majority opposes an attack on Iraq, Taranto cites these instances of "[t]he Murray whitewash" as "an example of....liberal media bias".

Let us put aside for the moment the absurdity of citing an editorial in a single newspaper as an example of "liberal media bias" (especially after having just cited another, nearby newspaper's editorial expressing the exact opposite view). In truth, even if all of Seattle's newspapers consistently editorialized in favor of left-wing positions, it would be ridiculous to accuse them of left-wing bias if Seattle's population is in fact solidly left-wing. "Bias" is meaningless without a baseline, after all, and the only independent one available is the one drawn by the center of (a particular audience's) popular opinion. That's why it's not "bias" for newspapers to stand uniformly on one side of consensus issues like the evil of murder or the goodness of charity, or for Seattle newspapers to oppose the invasion of Iraq. That's also why it is an example of bias that the New York Times, which bills itself as an authoritative national newspaper, instead usually reflects the baseline views established by its liberal urban New York readership rather than a more national one.

It's unfortunate that most "media criticism" these days is largely partisan, and consists of complaints that the press is insufficiently biased in favor of the critic's personal views. A more useful role for media critics would be to identify disconnects between the press and its audience that might lead to the latter being poorly served or feeling alienated from its main news sources. But perhaps in today's fragmented, polarized media market, there is no room for such dispassionate analysis (apart from the odd, forlorn blogger).