I’m already getting polite reminders that it’s time for the Monday message board, where you are invited to post your thoughts on any topic. Civilised discussion and no coarse language please.
Iraq: A War of Liberation
Supporters of both sides in the war in Iraq, and particularly those who are or were associated with the left, have described it as a “war of liberation”. Here, for example, is John Pilger and here is Norman Geras. Presumably Geras and Pilger each think the other is wrong.
The obvious position for an opponent of the war is that both are wrong. On reflection though, I think that Geras and Pilger are both right.
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What I’m reading
Contact by Carl Sagan. It’s a novel (his only one?), now apparently out of print, about contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence. I’ve decided to start a process of discarding books I’m never going to read again, and I recall finding this one a bit disappointing the first time I read it, so it’s a candidate for the recycle bin. I’m only a couple of chapters in, and it starts off well enough, so maybe I’ll keep it.
This got me thinking about SETI in its various manifestations. It’s of interest as a distributed computing project, but I don’t know much about that side of things. More relevantly, I think the fact that nearly all the visible sky has been searched for radio signals, with no result, leads to some interesting and disturbing thoughts. A useful place to start is the (in)famous Drake Equation, which might be better referred to as the Drake Identity.
I won’t spell out the details, except to say that I think we can now assert, with high confidence that there are many planets (billions) and very few radio-using civilisations (probably none within thousands of light years of us[1]).
One implication that is fairly solid, I think, is that, either intelligent (radio-using) life arises extremely rarely (say once per galaxy) or interstellar travel is impossible. Otherwise some species would have colonised some planet in our neighbourhood. Either way, it seems certain that we will never have either physical contact or meaningful two-way communication with any other species.
The other implication is that radio-using civilisations either don’t arise often or don’t last long. I tend to favor the first implication. Even now, it would probably be possible for humans to set up a radio beacon in space that would last more or less indefinitely, and would serve as a permanent memorial if we managed to blow ourselves up (or back to the Stone Age). But even with civilisations lasting 100 000 years and arising on thousands of planets in our galaxy, the chances of actual contact (say, two civilisations existing simultaneously within 100 light years of other) would be minuscule.
fn1. In reference to planets a thousand light years away, it would be more precise to say that there were none a thousand years ago.
Parkinson’s Law
Tony Parkinson raises an important issue as to whether the principle of not bombing civilian targets can survive conflicts like that in Fallujah. But in rightly condemning the tactics of the insurgents, he makes absurd claims on behalf of the Americans, who are already violating this principle on a massive scale. Estimates of civilian fatalities, mostly arising from American bombing range from a minimum of 15 000 (these are deaths credibly reported in news media) to 100 000 (based on a recent population survey). In this context, something like this is just absurd
The Americans, in conjunction with Iraqi officials, have steadily built up networks of informers in the Sunni cities. They have trained small, mobile units to set up sophisticated aerial and ground surveillance, and have been studying extensively the counter-terrorism methods used by the British and Israelis in urban settings. Here is perhaps where comparisons with, say, Grozny, begin to falter.
Far from having sophisticated networks of informers, the Americans have consistently shown that they lack even basic knowledge about the insurgents, even in places like Baghdad which are more or less under their control. They don’t know who the insurgents are or what their objectives might be, let alone where to find them. They had no idea how many were in Fallujah, or whether the (unidentified except for Zarqawi) leaders had stayed or fled.
Yet in the leadup to the Fallujah assault, the Americans mounted nightly bombing raids, supposedly on targets precisely identified by intelligence in a city to which they had had no access for months. The targets included restaurants and many private homes. It’s obvious that the claims about intelligence were lies, used to justify a major breach of international law. The Americans were bombing to wear down the resistance of the locals, hitting any target that might possibly have an insurgent connection, regardless of civilian casualties. There is only one word for the practice of using bombs, aimed at civilian targets, to terrify your enemies into submission.
If Parkinson had really been concerned about the principle of excluding civilian targets, he would have opposed the war from the outset, or at least from the point, some months ago when the Americans started using air raids in an occupied country, a clear breach of all the relevant laws and conventions.
Weekend reflections
This is your chance to make comments on any topic of your choosing, to be written and read at the leisurely pace of the weekend. I welcome pieces a little longer than the usual comments, but not full-length essays. If you want to draw attention to something longer, try an extract or summary with a link. As usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language.
The greatest of crimes
November 11 marks the armistice that was supposed to bring an end to the Great War in 1918. In fact, it was little more than a temporary and partial truce in a war that has continued, in one form or another, until the present. Hitler’s War and the various Cold War conflicts were direct continuations of the first Great War, and we are even now dealing with the consequences of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement.
The Great War was at the root of most of the catastrophes that befell the human race in the 20th century. Communism, Nazism and various forms of virulent nationalism all derived their justification from the ten million dead of 1914-18. Even the apparently hopeful projects that emerged from the war, from the League of Nations to the creation of new states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia ended in failure or worse. And along with war, conquest and famine came the pestilence of the Spanish Flu, which killed many more millions[1].
And yet this catastrophe was brought about under the leadership of politicians remarkable for their ordinariness. Nothing about Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Bethmann Holllweg or the other leaders on both sides marks them out for the company of Attila or Tamerlane or Stalin. How could men like these continue grinding their populations through years of pointless slaughter, and what led people to follow them? In retrospect, it is surely clear that both sides would have been better if peace had been made on the basis of any of the proposals put up in 1917 on the general basis of of “no annexations or indemnities”. The same was true, in reality, at any time from the outbreak of war in 1914 until the final collapse of the Central Powers, and even then the terms of 1917 would have been better for all than those of Versailles.We should think about this every time we are called to war with sweet-sounding slogans.
War is among the greatest of crimes. It may be the lesser evil on rare occasions, but it is always a crime. On Remembrance Day and always, this is what we should remember.
fn1. It’s not clear whether the War exacerbated the pandemic, for example through massive movements of people and widespread privation. But it seems right to consider them together when we remember the War.
US trade deficit
The US trade deficit came in marginally lower in September, but still above $US50 billion. There’s some evidence that the appreciation against the euro over the last four years is finally having an effect, and the more recent decline of the dollar to record-low levels against the euro may have more. But the improvement also included some surprising features like a decline in the value of oil imports, unlikely to be repeated any time soon. As General Glut notes
September’s trade deficit was still the third largest in history. The four largest in history have all occurred over the past four months.
He has a lot more posts with useful and interesting details
Pandagate
For those with fond memory of the good old days of university student politics (and for that matter, for any younger readers who are still looking forward to these delights) the blogosphere brings you Pandagate, a ripping yarn which combines all the usual fun of the fair, including incomprehensible diatribes and juvenile electoral dirty tricks, with the Internet refinement of spurious identities. An added bonus is observing supposedly serious journalist, Andrew Bolt, join the fray, exchanging vitriolic emails with a spurious prankster. Robert Corr’s Kick & Scream is a good place to start.
Risk and government
I was in Canberra on Monday, giving a talk at a symposium for the Academy of Social Sciences on Government and the Risk Society. Those interested can click on the link for the PowerPoint presentation. As is my current pattern, I’m promising to write it up as a paper, in due course.
Also, I talked to a workshop here in Brisbane about abolishing our fuel subsidy and using the proceeds to finance infrastructure investments. As I well, I did my usual critique of Public-Private Partnerships. For this one, I’ve already written the paper, which is here.
Whole language (crossposted at CT)
I have no particular axe to grind in the war between advocates of whole language and phonics as methods of teaching reading. In the spirit of wishy-washy compromise, I suspect that both have their place.
But it strikes me as a rather odd feature of the debate that advocates of phonics should also be the ones most concerned about spelling. The vast majority of spelling errors arise from the use of the obvious phonetic spelling rather than the “correct” spelling that is part of the whole language. So one of the costs of the phonic approach is the need to learn, by rote, the vast number of exceptions and special cases that make spelling English such a miserable experience for the uninitiated.
Phonics phans never seem to recognise this.
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