Right and Left, on Proliferation -

Whatever happens, we have got
The Atom Bomb, and they have not

Pat Buchanan writes on The Great Equalizer:

God may have created all men, but it was Sam Colt who made them equal. So it was said of the Old West, where Colt’s six-shooter gave the small man a certain equality. In the 21st century, the atom bomb is the great equalizer. No matter how evil the outlaw regime, acquisition of an atom bomb can earn it respect. When one has the bomb, attention must be paid.

Compare how America treats Kim Jong Il, the Stalinist who has starved millions, and Saddam, who has gassed thousands.

Meanwhile, writing in the Nation, Jonathan Schell writes a very interesting (and much longer) piece about the war. Some excepts:

Wars, let us recall, are not fought for their own sake but to achieve aims. Victory cannot be judged only by the outcome of battles. In the American Revolutionary War, for example, Edmund Burke, a leader of England's antiwar movement, said, "Our victories can only complete our ruin." Almost two centuries later, in Vietnam, the United States triumphed in almost every military engagement, yet lost the war. If the aim is lost, the war is lost, whatever happens on the battlefield. The novelty this time is that the defeat has preceded the inauguration of hostilities.

The aim of the Iraq war has never been only to disarm Iraq. George Bush set forth the full aim of his war policy in unmistakable terms on January 29, 2002, in his first State of the Union address. It was to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, not only in Iraq but everywhere in the world, through the use of military force. ...

The Bush policy of using force to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction met its Waterloo last October, when Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs James Kelly was informed by Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju of North Korea that his country has a perfect right to possess nuclear weapons. ... "We will not permit..." had been Bush's words, but North Korea went ahead and apparently produced nuclear weapons anyway. The Administration now discovered that its policy of pre-emptively using overwhelming force had no application against a proliferator with a serious military capability, much less a nuclear power. North Korea's conventional capacity alone--it has an army of more than a million men and 11,000 artillery pieces capable of striking South Korea's capital, Seoul--imposed a very high cost; the addition of nuclear arms, in combination with missiles capable of striking not only South Korea but Japan, made it obviously prohibitive.

Schell is, of course, against the war. But unlike Buchanan, Schell has a positive agenda as well. He thinks the issue of nuclear weapons does deserve attention.

The Administration has embarked on a nonproliferation policy that has already proved as self-defeating in its own terms as it is likely to be disastrous for the United States and the world. Nevertheless, it would be a fatal mistake for those of us who oppose the war to dismiss the concerns that the Administration has raised. By insisting that the world confront the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, President Bush has raised the right question--or, at any rate, one part of the right question--for our time, even as he has given a calamitously misguided answer. ... the issue of proliferation must be placed at the center of our concerns. For example, even as we argue that containment of Iraq makes more sense than war, we must be clear-eyed in acknowledging that Iraq's acquisition of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction would be a disaster--just as we must recognize that the nuclearization of South Asia and of North Korea have been disasters, greatly increasing the likelihood of nuclear war in the near future. These events, full of peril in themselves, are points on a curve of proliferation that leads to what can only be described as nuclear anarchy.

For a global policy that, unlike the Bush policies, actually will stop--and reverse--proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction is indeed a necessity for a sane, livable twenty-first century.

I tend to agree that proliferation is bad. But I don't think it's a disaster. States, thus far, have been pretty sane about (not) using them. Only one did, and that in the depths of war-feeling that I doubt most people can imagine.

What I worry about more than states having nukes, is that the more nukes there are, in the hands of weak, corrupt, and impoverished states, the more likely it is that some will leak out to non-deterrable actors - "terrorists", or "freedom fighters", or perhaps just criminals of some ilk.

Buchanan's allusion to hand guns is useful here. There is definitely an analog between international arms control, and gun control. I shan't spell it out since probably everyone reading this can easily enough. If it is right, then controlling nukes is not a good idea - they are needed for deterrence. But I think the analogy fails in mapping individuals onto nations. It is possible to selectively attack individuals with guns. But it is not possible to selectively attack states with nukes - to kill one Saddam and the other high ministers of his evil state, you end up slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent people. This is unacceptable. So the question arises, is there any moral use for nuclear weapons? Should one use them even in self-defense?

This is one of the reasons I am an anarchist. Anarchists don't have to be moral, and can cut off the moral problems associated with the extremal problems of rights-based philosophy. Rights are a good and handy way of approaching almost all political problems, rather like Newton's laws are sufficient for almost any practical physics you could do. But push hard enough, and "rights" collapse into contradiction. Anarchocapitalism generates most of libertarianism without reifying rights. (Push hard enough on Newton - very high speeds, for instance - and you break it, and need relativity. Push even harder and you need, well, some grand unified theory that does not yet exist.)

Anyway, back to nukes. Leaving aside the morality of their use, it is hard to question that they do seem to bring stability to the world. But they would do so in much smaller numbers than currently exist. The US could easily drop down perhaps several hundred nukes in existence, not tens of thousands.

Schell has this interesting observation about possession of nukes:

Nuclear arsenals are endowed with a magical quality. As soon as a nation obtains one it becomes invisible to the possessor. Nuclear danger then seems to emanate only from proliferation--that is, from newcomers to the nuclear club, while the dangers that emanate from one's own arsenal disappear from sight. Gen. Tommy Franks, designated as commander of the Iraq war, recently commented, "The sight of the first mushroom cloud on one of the major population centers on this planet is something that most nations on this planet are willing to go a long ways out of the way to prevent." His forgetfulness of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might seem nothing more than a slip of the tongue if it did not represent a pervasive and deeply ingrained attitude in the United States. Another revealing incident was Secretary of State Powell's comment that North Korea, by seeking nuclear weapons, was arming itself with "fool's gold." But the military establishment that Powell once led is of course stuffed to bursting with this fool's gold.

Schell goes on to argue existing nuclear arsenals are quite visible to the non-nuclear club, as is the prestige of possession. And this, ultimately causes further proliferation. Thus we (and other nuclear powers) cause the problem of proliferation, or at least contribute to it. Yet, as he says above, we are largely blind to our own possession.

The world's prospective nuclear arsenals cannot be dealt with without attending to its existing ones. As long as some countries insist on having any of these, others will try to get them. Until this axiom is understood, neither "dialogue" nor war can succeed. ...

The days of the double standard are over. We cannot preserve it and we should not want to. The struggle to maintain it by force, anachronistically represented by Bush's proposed war on Iraq, in which the United States threatens pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons to stop another country merely from getting them, can only worsen the global problem it seeks to solve. One way or another, the world is on its way to a single standard. Only two in the long run are available: universal permission to possess weapons of mass destruction or their universal prohibition.

Just so. Worth thinking on seriously. I don't think it will end up as universal "permission" - who permits? It will end up as universal possession, though, permitted or not. And that's a pretty scary thing.

Universal possession of nukes may or may not make war obsolete. But it will certainly speed the day when the first terrorists get a nuke. On that day, I want the US to be living at peace with the world, and I want the US to have had been living at peace with the world for many long years. Safety via innocuouty.

I highly recommend reading the whole piece.

Introversion - Jonathan Rauch writes about introversion. I reckon this puppy is gonna shoot up blogdex. It's far too precious, too funny, and (alas) too true for a red-blooded blogger to pass up.

Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.

I bet a majority of bloggers are introverts. Or at least, a majority of the people who write blogs about politics, systems, and things.

African AIDS Scandal - If this turns out to be true, it's a huge scandal. Review of Research finds most African AIDS caused by dirty needles.

United States researchers [found that] most HIV infections in Africa result from dirty medical needles.

The suggestion that the spread of the virus that can cause Aids is closely linked to unsafe medical care challenges widely held scientific views.

The research estimates that about 60% of people with HIV in Africa become infected mainly through contaminated needles rather than through sexual contact, but the UNAids organisation puts the figure at nearer 5%. ...

The US researchers reviewed hundreds of studies on HIV transmission across Africa, going back 20 years, and concluded the main cause was the use of dirty needles for medical injections.

Here's some commentary at medpundit:

My very first thought when I read this was, “My God! Medical professionals reuse needles in Africa?” My second thought was, “Why would any organization object to the findings?” It’s much easier to provide clean needles than to change people’s sexual behavior.

Then, I read the study. It turns out that the crux of its argument is that before 1988, when the public health community adopted a consensus opinion that AIDS was transmitted in Africa mostly through heterosexual sex, there was plenty of statistical evidence that the HIV epidemic in Africa was caused by dirty medical needles. That evidence, according to the authors, was not only ignored, but suppressed by the world public health community...

A link to a pdf file of the study can be found at medpundit.

Monopoly Protection Agency - chasing referrers, I came across the Improved Clinch blog. Some interesting stuff there, and the guy who runs it, John Venlet, seems to post a lot. So check it out. One particular item of interest to me was this first-hand account of dealing with the police. Nothing extraordinary. Police appear at his doorstep looking for a visitor, and are rather pushy. Venlet deals with them firmly, not letting them in his house with no warrant. And he manages to deal with the visitor's situation probably better than the police would have.

How Democracy Actually Works - I laughed out loud reading this: 'McCain-Feingold School' Finds Many Bewildered. It seems that politicians did not really know what was in McCain-Feingold. They just voted for it.

It began as a modest idea: a series of small seminars by Democratic Party lawyers for elected officials, political consultants and Congressional aides on the intricacies of the new McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. ...

By the end of last week, that low-key undertaking had drawn more than 400 people over the course of a month, a turnout that has astonished its organizers. ...

"We sometimes leave our audiences in a state of complete shock" at what they hear, said Robert F. Bauer, a lawyer for the Democrats' House and Senate campaign committees. "A sort of slack-jawed amazement at how far this thing reached" is not uncommon at the seminars, Mr. Bauer said. Nor are "a lot of very anxious questions."

Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a Republican Party lawyer who has conducted seminars for the other side of the aisle, said lawmakers were startled to hear that once-standard practices like acting as host at a fund-raiser for a home-state governor might now be illegal. "There's an initial stage where the reaction is, 'This can't be true,' " Mr. Ginsberg said. "And then there's the actual anger stage."

Hoist on their own petard, as it were. This is the fun part:

The new chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Representative Robert T. Matsui of California, who voted for McCain-Feingold, says he has been surprised by its fine print.

"I didn't realize what all was in it," Mr. Matsui said.

Radley Balko has a nice commentary on the piece:

Now, if Rep. Matsui votes for and vigorously endorses legislation directly affecting him, without reading or really understanding said piece of legislation, imagine how much attention he gives legislation that affects only you, or me -- or minutia-laden OHSA or HIPAA regulations -- before he blindly casts his vote.

Yup.

IE - dealing with technical difficulties.

The Personal Defies the Political - The recent NYTimes magazine had this fascinating article by a disabled person, Harriet McBryde Johnson, discussing her interactions with Peter Singer. (The NYTimes will try to charge for the article eventually; if so read it here or google for it.) Singer has pushed his liberal utilitarianism to the point where many people feel uncomfortable. In particular he propounds the idea that infanticide is acceptable in some circumstances - in particularly, when the infant is profoundly disabled. Naturally this makes Johnson, who was such an infant, very angry. She wants to hate Singer. Yet, she cannot. She ends up with respect for Singer:

The tragic view comes closest to describing how I now look at Peter Singer. He is a man of unusual gifts, reaching for the heights. He writes that he is trying to create a system of ethics derived from fact and reason, that largely throws off the perspectives of religion, place, family, tribe, community and maybe even species -- to ''take the point of view of the universe.'' His is a grand, heroic undertaking.

But like the protagonist in a classical drama, Singer has his flaw. It is his unexamined assumption that disabled people are inherently ''worse off,'' that we ''suffer,'' that we have lesser ''prospects of a happy life.'' Because of this all-too-common prejudice, and his rare courage in taking it to its logical conclusion, catastrophe looms. Here in the midpoint of the play, I can't look at him without fellow-feeling.

I am regularly confronted by people who tell me that Singer doesn't deserve my human sympathy. I should make him an object of implacable wrath, to be cut off, silenced, destroyed absolutely. And I find myself lacking a logical argument to the contrary.

I am talking to my sister Beth on the phone. ''You kind of like the monster, don't you?'' she says.

I find myself unable to evade, certainly unwilling to lie. ''Yeah, in a way. And he's not exactly a monster.''

Well worth reading, for the philosophy (though they're both wrong), and for the very honest and refreshing view of people with authentic, real, and painful differences. Yet they nonetheless interact personally with friendship and even grace. The personal, here, is not the political. It's worth thinking on why that is or how it can be.

I think Singer is wrong not in drawing out the implications of his philosophy, but in advocating utilitarianism to begin with. The problem with any philosophy grounded in utility is that utility can not be seen, nor measured. Absent that, problems crop up exactly like the one at the heart of the article. Johnson feels her life has value, to herself, and to "society". Probably Singer agrees, or at least he treats her that way. But how can either of them know whether or not her life (or his!), "really" is of positive utility? They cannot. Utility - of her life, or of his - is not measurable. There is no such thing as a "utilitometer" we can point at a person and objectively measure with.

Absent that, there is only opinion. Opinion can be wrong. I think that Singer grasps this, at least somewhat: otherwise he might advocate that the state should kill infants. After all, if someone's life is objectively going to suck, then it is not merely a "good idea" to kill them. Rather it is the duty of the utility-maximizing demos; and it should not be left to the parents to decide.

There are other, further, problems with utility. Here's one: the "utility monster". It may be that some people experience pleasure and pain much more strongly than other people. Take, for example, a psychopath who achieves tremendous sexual pleasure from torture. To a utilitarian, the psycho's utility must be measured against the disutility to potential victims. If his is greater, then society should condone torture (by him) - greatest good to the greatest number, you know. His victims can take solace in helping to create, overall, a happier world. This is, to a rights-theorist like me, horribly wrong. People are not means to the ends of other people, even if that would increase "utility". But you will never get that result in utilitarianism.

A final problem for utilitarianism is the problem of comparability. In the "utility monster" problem, and more broadly in utility theory, it is assumed that the utility that different people experience is comparable. My pleasure in eating an apple is greater than yours, or it is less than, or it is equal to. If utility is a single number, that must be true. But what if utility is not that simple? What if my utility for an apple is not a scalar - "1", but a vector - "(1,5,3)"? If yours is then "(2,4,2)", is overall utility increased if you get the apple instead? We simple cannot say - vectors are not simply compared as are numbers.

So, enough potshots at utilitarianism. Now I want to discuss Johnson. Her ideas are not as clear from the article as Singer's are. Nonetheless, I can see two big holes in her argument.

First, she is vehement that disability is not utility-reducing:

What has him so convinced it would be best to allow parents to kill babies with severe disabilities, and not other kinds of babies, if no infant is a ''person'' with a right to life? I learn it is partly that both biological and adoptive parents prefer healthy babies. But I have trouble with basing life-and-death decisions on market considerations when the market is structured by prejudice. I offer a hypothetical comparison: ''What about mixed-race babies, especially when the combination is entirely nonwhite, who I believe are just about as unadoptable as babies with disabilities?'' Wouldn't a law allowing the killing of these undervalued babies validate race prejudice? Singer agrees there is a problem. ''It would be horrible,'' he says, ''to see mixed-race babies being killed because they can't be adopted, whereas white ones could be.'' What's the difference? Preferences based on race are unreasonable. Preferences based on ability are not. Why? To Singer, it's pretty simple: disability makes a person ''worse off.''

Are we ''worse off''? I don't think so. Not in any meaningful sense. There are too many variables. For those of us with congenital conditions, disability shapes all we are. Those disabled later in life adapt. We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own. We have something the world needs.

I believe being disabled would lower my utility. (My few weeks of life on crutches definitely seemed lower in utility, but maybe it just that I was not used to it.) But as I said previously, that's not actually measurable. So it remains just an opinion of mine, although, an opinion I feel that most sensible people would share.

The problem is, that opinion, even if widespread, cannot justify anything. It can certainly prevail de-facto in a democracy. But that does not make it right.

I do wonder, if Johnson were presented with a magic button that would heal her: would she press it? I believe she would. It is hard to see why unless you think that she thinks that her life would be better without being crippled.

But then again, I have seen reports of deaf parents selectively aborting to get deaf children. Perhaps Johnson feels that the challenges she overcomes are worth it. I don't agree with that, but then, in my hypothetical the button-press was not mine, but hers. If the button were presented to me (which would heal her), I would consult her if I could. If I could not for some reason, I would press it. That's my prejudice showing.

I definitely disagree with Johnson's ideas that "society" owes disabled people care. No, we are not born with positive claims on each other. Indeed, in the article Johnson makes it clear how much she depends on modern technology.

The sight of me is routinely discombobulating. The power wheelchair is enough to inspire gawking, but that's the least of it. Much more impressive is the impact on my body of more than four decades of a muscle-wasting disease. ...

I am in the first generation to survive to such
decrepitude. Because antibiotics were available, we didn't
die from the childhood pneumonias that often come with
weakened respiratory systems.

What of disabled people born 100 years ago? If we are to construct, as Singer wants to, an ethical theory that applies to all people, at all times, then it is obvious that disabled people cannot be "owed" antibiotics and power chairs, no more than they are "owed" corrective genetic manipulation by nanobots. Yet neither Singer not Johnson appear to notice this; I assume since they are both philosophically attuned to John Rawls.

Indeed, the very idea that disabled people are owed anything by their society, is an admission that they have "needs", which is to say, that they would be worse off than average people without extra help. And if one believes in scalar utility (I don't, but at least Singer does), then there is no way to avoid the idea that disabled people have lower utility, unaided. This is, in fact, common sense. Johnson seems not to see it, even though she certainly does see the ways in which her life is exceptional.

Truth Police: The "truth police" is how I refer to my own scepticism, scientism and other strategies for trying to believe only true things. I am always surprised to find people that believe in astrology, afterlives, the Force, meaning in coincidence, etc. Where's people's Truth Police? With God at least I can see how people get sucked in - parents, long history, tradition, etc. But most of the modern superstitions seem to come from nowhere and promise little. Why believe in that stuff?

Science rolls on, even in the matters of human belief. In the Telegraph, discoveries about people who think they have been abducted by aliens. Seems they have a common feature: "a personality profile of 'abducted' people showed that almost all suffered from sleep paralysis, a condition in which terrifying sensations and sinister figures from the world of dreams intrude upon the waking brain."

In a related vein, this research into false memories.

With a little ingenuity and the power of suggestion, it really is possible to make people believe the improbable -- that they kissed a frog or shook hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.

The findings are among the latest work on false memories by UC Irvine cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and her researchers. ...

"Give me enough time with somebody, and I'll make them believe in just about everything," Loftus said.

Even easier when people have, seemingly, near-zero scepticism and other mental defenses.

War by Propaganda - something I did not notice last fall when it was first published. But worth meme-spreading. 40 years ago, the Joint Chiefs of Staff Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba. Provoke, as in, Gulf of Tonkin:

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. ...

America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

When you look at American history, it seems as if not a single war actually started "fairly" - with the American people knowing the truth about what was going on in the executive branch. Well, the Revolution.

One must naturally wonder how much of the current information about Iraq that is coming from "official sources" and intelligence agencies, is nothing more than warmongering lies.

Amen, Brother: Having attended the recent "commie" peace rally, I felt just like Peter Bagge evidently did in Observations from a Reluctant Anti-warrior:

(Hippie addressing crowd): "... It's so great to look down upon this sea of diversity I see before me..."
(Bagge thinks): "Diversity"? All I see is a bunch of middle-class, college educated white people!

So did I. And I have to love this observation:

Let's face it: masculinity and pacifism are an awkward match.

Yes. The only way is armed neutrality. Libertarians can pull it off with a modicum of masculinity. Coming from liberals it just looks like wimpiness.

RKBA on the march: A judge has ruled that Ohio's law against carrying a concealed weapon is unconstitutional:

"The statute deprives Ohio citizens of an effective means of self-defense," said Common Pleas Judge Michael P. Kelbley in an 18-page ruling filed Tuesday. "The Constitution states in clear terms that the people of Ohio have the right to bear arms."

Kathryn J. Howard, 28, 1208D Peeler Drive, Fostoria, was facing one count of carrying a concealed weapon stemming from a June 2002 traffic stop in Fostoria in which a loaded 9mm pistol was found under her seat, according to papers in the now-closed case.

Coming soon to a jurisdiction near you!