A defense of religion that even Dawkins might understand (albeit I expect he'd still object to it).

I think it's harder to understand the role of religion over the bulk of human history from the perspective of the 'enlightened' 21st century. PERSONALLY, I think the social 'sciences' broadly do a horseshat job of understanding just about ANYTHING contextually given contemporaneous beliefs, conditions, values, etc.

For example, while we all recognize there are many things we don't know, the bulk of what we see and do every day is explainable. We know why the sun moves across the sky, we know where infections come from, we understand why those people have different color skin than we do. Hell, kindergartners understand and accept germ theory, the big bang, atomic theory, gravity, etc. For people even a handful of centuries ago, all of this was systemically inexplicable. Some people got sick and died, we don't know why. Half of all children or more, dead, in many cases inexplicably. Some people started behaving crazily, again, no idea why, nothing to do but conk them on the head and chain them up in the barn until they died.

Some brave social anthropologists have done research that suggests strongly that:
a) religion simply made people behave better generally. With small children, the idea that there is an 'invisible grownup' in the room made them much less likely to cheat, much more likely to follow rules, much more likely to cooperate. Is this a 'control' mechanism, or was it observationally true that people who belonged to church (and in most places there WAS only one, so there was no confusion about which was 'right') cooperated better and were simply generally more successful
b) adherence to the visible tenets of a religion (going to temple regularly, observing the dictated trivial restrictions, etc.) was a strong correlative to people who could behave according to the accepted rules of a society. If they could discipline themselves enough to wear a little hat (for example), or so the theory goes, they could be expected to discipline themselves to follow other, more critically-important rules of a society.

Did it mean that in some cases outsiders were treated harshly? Yep. But again, omlettes and eggs. Today, we have an extraordinarily resilient society, we can tolerate assholes. But if you're barely surviving in a lifeboat, you need to pitch the boat-rockers out to save the rest. And let's recall further that the definition of outsider - while fixed and generally unchangeable so seemingly harsh from our view - was rarely arbitrary. Generally the 'rules' were determined and understood for generations if not centuries.

Again, secularists LOOKING to call this 'control' miss the boat.
When a small group/clan/village/whatever is riding barely above the margin of sustainability over long spans of time, this sort of consensus (call it a consensual delusion if you need to salve your modern sensibilities) meant that some communities survived, where others didn't.

And really, isn't that pretty much the only yardstick we HAVE for "success" in the real world?

Miscellaneous points today as things seem to be spiralling downhill ever-more-quickly lately...

A question for the Left:

So, how's that 'living' interpretation of the US Constitution working for you, then?

Are you still with Thurgood Marshall's interpretation "...he argued that the Constitution must be interpreted in light of the moral, political, and cultural climate of the age of interpretation..." in which changing circumstances allow changing interpretations of inferred language?

I've always been a strict constructionist, for the inimitable (but apocryphal) lesson of Thomas Moore in "A Man for all Seasons":

Quote:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

The Devil is turning, gentlemen. And you quite specifically have been the ones spending the last 30+ years shredding that very Document, that Creation of Man, that could have protected us.

_______

Re California's letter to Bitcoin demanding they cease operation or face aggressive prosecution for money-transmission without proper licensing/approval:

Dear Bitcoin:

We are uncomfortable that your fiat currency is a) starting to make our fiat currency look a little silly, and b) circumventing our ability to control the public. Please stop or we will have to get rough.

Signed,
California and the Fed

_________

Re Mr Obama's soon-to-be-formally-announced big plans to address Climate Change:

To my public, and in particular former supporters,

Since everything else seems to have gone in the shitter, I come back to you with a message that seemed to sell well in both campaigns: the environment.

I look forward to again gaining your broad support with a campaign of platitudes, anthemic one-word slogans, and statements that make me appear sympathetic to your issues, while actually resulting in policies that either ossify the current corporation-based lobbyist-driven structure, or expand the pervasive control of the Federal government ostensibly for good reasons but which will in fact be used to incrementally decrease your rights vis a vis that "Constitution" thingy, which I will continue to re-interpret as really not relevant to today's realities anyway.

Signed,
Your President.

Ends, means, and certainty.

Holy crud, 2 posts in ONE DAY?
The end DOES justify the means.  It's a foundational concept of LIFE, particularly social organization.
For example, for most people, work sucks.  But they do it, why?
Imprisoning people is fundamentally a mean thing to do, but if someone murders someone else, we put the murderer in jail.  Why?
We CONSTANTLY do unpleasant or unhappy things, because they will ultimately result in better things (or at least good things).

Now, we can argue about the relative merits of ends vs means, but I'm really fecking tired of people claiming that "justifying the method by the result" is somehow inherently morally flawed.

And yes, I understand that I'm invoking Godwin's Law here but also yes, I get it: Himmler no doubt felt he was doing the RIGHT thing as much as we feel we're doing the RIGHT thing fighting terrorism.  Does that make us morally equal?  Ultimately, I find the intellectually-simple shortcut of thereby equating us is intellectually laze and frankly reprehensible.  At some point an adult has to grow up and decide that some things are good and some things are bad, and stop excusing the bad because it might be unpleasant or uncomfortable to fight it.

Personally, I suspect that avoiding moral certainty is based in cowardice: Ultimately, since according to the relativists there is no actual God, there is no ACTUAL moral yardstick; what is "good" is determined by the simple will of the majority around us.  Those afraid to take a stand are afraid they might be wrong, and that the majority will turn on them, so they advocate tolerance of everything to ultimately protect their own ass.

So yes, taking a moral position is *risky*.  It takes some courage to say "THIS is what I believe, and f' you all if you disagree".  But that's being a grownup.

THE GUBBERMINT IS SPYING ON ME.

Rage all you want against the 'terrifying new revelations' about government data collection, this is the INEVITABLE arc of human societies.

I know Toynbee may socio-historically old-fashions, but it seems a never-ending repetitious cycle:  humans scrabble their way out of chaos and savagery, build cohesive societies that take care of basic needs freeing their citizenry to think and dream and grow.  Ultimately, the weight of a society exceeds its carrying capacity (largely through the people's ignorance of how great they have it compared to the alternatives) and everything collapses in anarchy and violence, until some inspired individuals lead the way back out of chaos again.

But we're social animals (emphasis on the latter).  Freedom is HARD; look carefully behind a student's eyes on graduation day, and you'll see a core anxiety "OK WTF do I do NOW with my life?"

(As an aside, I believe that this is the core reason that college is perceived to be so necessary to job-hunters today.  It's not the commonly-ranted "companies are demanding college degrees for everything" complaint, that's confusing cause/effect.  I believe that the comfort-value of a life-on-rails with few meaningful choices has kept people in school longer and longer.  It's simple, lazy, expensive procrastination of "real life" for another 4+ years.  Faced with a ridiculous excess of applicants with college degrees, wouldn't you as a business likewise begin to demand them if only as a first-tier way to weed out candidates who ostensibly have fewer skills?  If you think about it, it's actually contrary to what they should WANT in an employee, and why a thoughtful HR department should consider carefully if they really want degree-holding applicants, if the degree isn't directly pertinent to the job.)

You can see it too if you play a face-to-face roleplaying game with today's teens, they are literally paralyzed with choices, as opposed to the linear games with fixed, obvious options that they're used to from their PC or consoles.

In a couple of moments of startling clarity from an otherwise vapid film:
"Loki: I come with glad tidings of a world made free.
Nick Fury: Free from what?
Loki: Freedom. Freedom is life's great lie.
...
Loki: Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It's the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel."

They are lines that are supposed to enrage, of course, to light the righteous indignation in freedom-loving Americans (and in fact it's immediately followed by the formulaic 'defense of the lone guy brave enough to stand up' and Capt America's line "You know, the last time I was in Germany and saw a man standing above everybody else, we ended up disagreeing."
ANYONE who watches that and doesn't immediately recognize the historical truth of Loki's statement hasn't been paying attention.

As artists have a particularly skillful ability to be succinct (I don't know the artist):

Personally I suspect that freedom on the level of that envisaged by the Founding Fathers is unsustainable, because it demands a broad level of intelligence, education, the leisure to care about things larger than ones' next meal, and the willingness to put in the WORK.  Lying in your hammock isn't freedom, it's the reward of freedom.

Either people are generally too indolent to be willing to work for it (think herd of sheep or cattle, happy to merely have food and get milked/sheared once in a while in exchange for perceived comfort & safety - until the farmer needs meat, but that's in the distant future...), or the governments have figured out that the way to ensure their grip on power is to opiate the masses.  Either way, the masses are largely happy with it and always have been.

So stop your screaming and shouting.  Ecce homo, indeed.

And, if you need a little humor on this subject - the Onion nails it again: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-outraged-his-private-information-being-co,32783/

Regarding the Difficulty of "Winning" Counter-Insurgency Conflicts

The problem is the definition of "winning" in a COIN conflict; it's often neither conclusive, quick, nor politically appealing.

Vietnam was indeed a military victory, but was politically a complete rout - validating Clausewitz and thus invalidating everything the military actually accomplished.

The War Powers Act has historically been seen as a check on the power of the Executive, this is completely turned around in the modern era.  Since about 1947, there has been a tacit (if not explicit) collusion between the Congressional and Executive branches of government: the Congress will let the President deploy troops pretty much however he wants to with only a little public bleating, in exchange for his not demanding the War Powers Act.  They both win - he gets flexibility in policy, they don't ever have to take a public position on what he's doing.

I find this deeply broken, and leading not only to bad public and geopolitical policy, but bad for our soldiers.

Yes, FORCING Congress to pass a War Powers resolution before a CiC can deploy troops abroad would act as a check on the power of the President.  But it would also require consensus, and this means that the People would have to largely be behind it (for the cowards in Congress to crawl out from under their rocks and actually support it in the record).  FORCING such public and shared culpability means that if stuff goes sideways, we ALL have to recognize our parts in the choices being made.

To the original point, I submit that the "Lesson not learned" from Vietnam was clear; while our military has gotten even more crazy-proficient at what they do, and the force differential made the military victory even more foreordained, the failure was identical in 2003-2011 as it had been in  1961-1975: if you cannot sum up the goal of the conflict in two or three sentences (or ideally, one), you are going to be stuck there for a long time.

Part of a War Powers act MUST, therefore, include "Why are we fighting?" and "What conditions must be met to bring home our troops?"  Not 'most' of our troops.  Not 'pretty much all' of our troops.  ALL of them.  If the goal of 2003 had been "topple the Iraqi government" - pretty much everyone would have been fine with that.  In that case, our forces would have returned in 2004.  If it had been - as it turned out to be - "Topple the Iraqi government and rebuild it as a modern Liberal Democracy and then leave some bases in place to try to secure the security situation in the heart of the mideast with American forces for the indefinite future"....well, I think the public response would have been immediate, colorful, and probably used some very old Anglo-Saxon words.

To the OP: COIN conflicts are inevitable, with any non-peer opponent today.  Dealing with them REQUIRES competent politicians as much as generals, both at the front end and the back end.   Unfortunately as skilled as our troops are, our political leaders of both parties are far more capably incompetent.

Edit (addendum)

Yes, I'm aware that getting a War Powers act would be harder.  That is, I think, healthier.  It should be hard for a country to go to war.  REALLY hard.

Further, as much then as we'd share the blame if things go wrong as a result of issuing such, we ALSO would have to face the consequences of NOT doing anything which is often much worse.

Yes, this requires an actual 'adult' conversation about the situation (as complex as it may be) and the ramifications of doing something vs. doing nothing, and getting some sort of consensus out of a public more enamored with this weeks American Idol voting than issues of substance.  So be it.

The threat (?) of China

I doubt China would ever deliberately just "attack the US".  There's just nothing in it for them.

However, the odds that China ends up in a REGIONAL war that ends up with them fighting one of our allies (Taiwan, Japan, even India), and us getting sucked in are certainly uncomfortably greater than zero.

Then you have a Japan 1940 situation: an untested but arrogant and growing military power, clearly a regional power, trying to shoulder its way amongst other regional powers, but intelligent enough to understand that ultimately the guarantor of the status quo is the US.

Then what?

Then China's motivation becomes a game of poker; to what level must it raise the geopolitical ante, such that the US will walk away from the game?

THIS is the critical, one might say almost existential, question of the next 20-30 years between the US and China.  I fear it won't take longer to resolve than that.  Perhaps much less.

The calculus here is complex and not encouraging.
China is a burgeoning economic, demographic, exuberant 'growing' power.  The US is the pre-eminent military power bar none, but its economic system is a sham, its leaders (on both sides of the political fence) feeble, incompetent, and utterly self-interested.  The US public is lazy, apathetic, ignorant, and cheerfully distracted by TMZ.

On the other side, of course are a few critical questions:
- How much of China's economic clamour is real, and how much is Potemkin smoke and mirrors?
- China has severe demographic issues regarding gender balance, youth, and the growing bitter gulf between the haves and have-nots both within China and compared to the rest of the world.  These are only getting worse, and are amplified by a government that seemingly likes to toy with jingoism - neglecting the lessons of history that suggest in the long term it's something nearly as dangerous to the sponsor.
- Russia is a dangerous wildcard, remaining a revanchist proto-Soviet state under Putin.  Wide, empty, resource-rich spaces of Eastern Russia make this an extraordinarily sensitive spot for a Russian military already overstretched.  Russian ego-investment in their far-eastern districts is also not insignificant.  Their participation in any conflict would be opportunistic, aggressive, and extremely brittle.
- India, likewise, is extremely wary of a growing Chinese state lurking not-far-enough-away on the other side of the Himalayas.  The 'great game' West of Mongolia has been quiet since WW2, but it's been in play since the late 1800s and certainly isn't resolved yet.

All of these are a subtle confluence of varying factors; the reality of each doesn't even matter so much as the Chinese PERCEPTION of reality.  And this introduces what I think is the absolutely greatest wildcard: Chinese understanding (or lack thereof) of the US.

The US population is largely lazy, overweight, and apathetic.  Would an actual attack on the US be enough to rouse them from their torpor?  I honestly don't know, but I'm absolutely CERTAIN China has no clue.

What I fear is the habitual misunderstanding - and critically, underestimation - of US culture by others.  As much as any "foreigner" can fail to understand any culture (the US trying to understand China, for example) the US seems to regularly and particularly baffle outsiders, even people from relatively close cultural analogues as Germany, or France, much less China.

What I fear specifically is that the Chinese mandarins will, wearing the same blinders that Chinese have had for at least 2000 years, dismiss the US's potential response.  Like the belief in some quarters pre-GulfWar2 that the US "won't put up with casualties, ergo they won't get involved" - this both right and desperately, critically wrong.  The US public does habitually have an intolerance for suffering, no question.  But the lesson of history is that when enraged, we're capable of rationalizing and accepting staggering violence in the pursuit of "justice".  Even the relatively showy but strategically trivial attack of 9/11 motivated us to deploy our ground military for 10+ years WITH NO STRATEGIC GOAL.  Heck, we didn't even really use our air force or navy.

If there was an actual, direct attack on US citizens, I genuinely fear the response of the US public, and I'm not sure China does.  And in that inequality lies a terrible, terrible danger.