Detailed Abstractions

To me, and indeed historically, that a fear society & freed society are mutually exclusive.

& like all consistent lessons from history, we haven’t seemed to have learned this lesson and seem to be determined to repeat it.

Towards that end, the Wall Street Journal online published two articles on Friday, under the shared title, Undressing the Terror Threat. The first article by Paul Campos & Nate Silver explains correctly:

…The world’s greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and

(2) If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on Christmas Day. For two weeks now, this mildly troubling but essentially minor incident has dominated headlines and airwaves, and sent politicians from the president on down scurrying to outdo each other with statements that such incidents are “unacceptable,” and that all sorts of new and better procedures will be implemented to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Meanwhile, millions of travelers are being subjected to increasingly pointless and invasive searches and the resultant delays, such as the one that practically shut down Newark Liberty International Airport last week, after a man accidentally walked through the wrong gate, or Tuesday’s incident at a California airport, which closed for hours after a “potentially explosive substance” was found in a traveler’s luggage. (It turned out to be honey.)…

The authors make a very good point here, though I do object to the term “rather pathetic aspiring terrorist”… as I saw on a blog somewhere in retort “What you really need are suicide bombers with experience!”.

Beyond that, they then try to take some statistics too far.  Using murder & suicide rates to show how are fears aren’t lined up with a real assessment of risks, they write:

…The country’s homicide rate is approximately six times higher than that of most other developed nations; we have 15,000 more murders per year than we would if the rate were comparable to that of otherwise similar countries. Americans own around 200 million firearms, which is to say there are nearly as many privately owned guns as there are adults in the country. In addition, there are about 200,000 convicted murderers walking free in America today (there have been more than 600,000 murders in America over the past 30 years, and the average time served for the crime is about 12 years)….

Taking those numbers, they conclude that which doesn’t follow:

…Given these statistics, there is little doubt that banning private gun ownership and making life without parole mandatory for anyone convicted of murder would reduce the homicide rate in America significantly….

& Even though they aren’t advocating such a policy, they basically state that the number of guns in private hands necessarily affects either homicide or suicide rates.

I think this ignores the historical evidence that governments typically ban weapons prior to mass murdering their own citizens, but it also isn’t proven by the numbers they give.  Because regardless of how people kill themselves or others, removing the primary instrument doesn’t necessarily means those actions will halt.  Lastly of course, even that assumes the government has the ability to remove the primary instrument in question, which is highly unlikely.

Either way, overall they use the example that is hysteria over terrorism to show parallels to the war on drugs, traffic accidents, and other risks to conclude:

…What then is to be done? A little intelligence and a few drops of courage remind us that life is full of risk, and that of all the risks we confront in America every day, terrorism is a very minor one. Taking prudent steps to reasonably minimize the tiny threat we face from a few fanatic criminals need not grant them the attention they crave….

The thing is that I agree with the authors’ basic premise, or what seems to be their basic premise, that fear based policies are wrong, even though I disagree with the facts they’ve lined up and think that using terrorism as too narrow an example has severely undermined their case.

First, while it’s certainly true that the gap between objective terrorism threats and hysterical policies seems large, there are valid reasons for that.  They discuss one, which is we need to focus money on preventing mass catastrophes such as a nuclear detonation, but they fail to mention the organizations themselves and how they differ from murder in general.

It’s true, that in any free society, a lone nut, bent on killing others, will have the opportunity to do so and there’s little we can do, while maintaining a free society to prevent that from happening.

However, were terrorism and even gangs, the mob, and other criminal organizations differ is that we have to attack those organizations directly.  Dealing with each instance of terrorism as non-related criminal events is exactly what allows their organizations to gain grounds on operational abilities.  Ignoring the organization therefore, seems to dictate a increase in the likelihood of a major incident.

Outside these specific critiques however, I think our society has become very easily motivated by fears instead of reason and logic.  When we allow victims of drunk driving incidents dictate the driving laws, or say a murdered victim’s family members to seek emotional healing through a policy of revenge, or use those in the most destitute of scenarios to control medical policy… whatever it is, if  we allow fear to take a hold of our government policy, new legislation, or even on a personal level, allowing fear to control our own lives… if we allow this, we should at least be doing so with the knowledge that it’s not conducive to freedom.

Detailed Abstractions has more articles about fear based policies here, here, & here.

Over @ The Economist’s new-ish debate section, they are currently debating the proposition This house believes that China is showing more leadership than America in the fight against climate change and currently, 74% believe in this proposition.

I know I’m unlikely to change many minds, but it’s always seemed to me that when trying to evaluate one country’s international progress on any one specific ideal, we end up narrowing the debate to such an extent as to make the question irrelevant.

In what seems to be a strong desire to answer questions objectively without respect to questions of ethics or other governmental policies, the intelligent ones among us miss the forest for the trees.

Towards that end – my two cents:

Dear Sir,

It seems maybe we should define leadership to an extent that either includes ethical behavior or can exist without ethics. For as long as the term leadership includes some notion of ethics, “ability to move fast” or the ability to put up light rail for the Olympics, simply can not matter in light of governmental policies designed specifically to limit the freedom of the individual and make the peasant serf work for the state.

Even *if* one wants to make the argument that ethics aren’t integral to the question, it’s still useful in evaluating “leadership”. For instance, when China starts implementing new green policies and initiatives, what’s the likely source of technology they will use? American? German? British? Swedish?

& Why? Because when people are allowed opportunities to flourish through a system that protects them with basic contract rights, innovation will flow much more easily. This is why China might manufacture most of the toys and basic electronic gadgets in the world, but the design process certainly came from someplace else.

An an example, they only recently successfully launched a satellite into orbit.  Prior to 1996, 2 out of 3 attempts ended in massive failures, meanwhile those freer countries had hundreds of them for various purposes including GPS, with even private companies using the technology successfully as well.

& lastly – it’s unlikely China would even admit a problem at all if they still retained the control that was possible just a few short decades ago. Today, they try to control press from earthquakes, the forceful removing of millions to make Olympic Village, their crime rate, and any number of other things they consider “bad” press.

Due to the explosion in the sharing of global information however, China finds it difficult to hide as much as they used to. Even the very closed off North Korea is finding this difficult as well.

So long as they continue to hide bad press, there’s no reason to think this “leadership” is anything other than a play at international recognition while hopefully strengthening their core domestic support.

In strategic thinking, this is known as a two-fer.

Either way – both goals have only one thing in common – staying in power and retaining as much control over the population as possible.

Removing ethics and the results of their standard operating procedure seems the only way to think of China as leading the world in anything.

In a story that might have more than it appears, GM announced it will not go through with a deal it announced in early summer to sell their German division Opel.

The story really first appears as the auto company bail-out was in full swing in the US.  GM had pushed a reorganization plan that cut jobs in all countries.  With German Chancellor Angela Merkel getting pressure due to the global economic crisis and facing a re-election, Opel became more important than first assumed (@BusinessWeek):

….On Tuesday, though, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Opel was not a “system-critical” corporation. “There are system-critical financial institutions,” she told her conservative party’s parliamentary group, according to the Rheinische Post newspaper. “But there are no system-critical industrial firms.” It was Merkel’s indirect way of saying that Opel is less important to Germany than its crisis-stricken banks. Her statements were intended to counter earlier comments made by the head of the left-leaning Social Democratic Party that Opel was indeed “system relevant.” She added, however, that Opel should be given a chance to survive and that like all companies, it has the “right to apply for state aid.”…

It not only became more important, but Chancellor Merkel started treating it as imperative to re-election (@France24.c0m):