Bill's Notes

Glenn Greenwald links to our humble site. He was responding to a series of a responses to a post of his on the thought processes of Bush supporters. His argument boils down to a very reasonable position, which is that generalizations are not absolutes. No argument here.

I recognize my post was disorganized and not that clear. It's also unclear how much Greenwald is responding to IndustrialBlog as opposed to other bloggers who took him to task for generalization.

My only quibble is this: What I was getting at in my earlier post was less about generalization or even fairness, but about the human tendency to demonize opponents and see them as unreasonable, benighted, wicked or stupid.

Greenwald insists that his conclusions are well-taken. I don't. But I do agree, however, that he has every right to draw general conclusions without getting criticized for "making generalizations."

Where I think he's gone wrong is at this point: He considers the Bush Administration to be a deep threat to the American system of governance and (possibly) appears to consider Bush's actions to be the precursor to some kind of dictatorship or some kind of radical departure with activities in the past.

Um. From about 1965 to 1975, our country engaged in a series of cloak-and-dagger games and we had trained, professional assassins on the government payroll. And these assassins were killing people. Around 1975 we stopped doing it, to the best of my knowledge. Bush is certainly not extreme in the historical context of the United States. Dear God — we invaded and colonized the Philippines. We exterminated the Indians. We were one of the last civilized nations to ban slavery, and it took a Civil War. We started a war with Spain. We invaded Latin America pretty much whenever the fuck we felt like it. Bush I did it. Clinton did it. Noriega pissed us off, and so did some tinpot dictator in Haiti, and we invaded and deposed them both. We grabbed a big-ass piece of Mexico in a war of aggression. We allowed refugees to invade Cuba from our soil. J. Edgar Hoover spied on all sorts of people, and the FBI papers on Martin Luther King's assassination are still sealed, so we don't know if the government is involved. WTF, over?

Anyway, here's what Greenwald says:

But the combination of factors and circumstances which have defined the Bush presidency — an extreme event (the 9/11 attacks), extreme imbalance in our government (accounted for by pro-Bush domination of all three branches of government), and extremists at the highest levels of the executive branch — have made the Bush movement uniquely radical and extreme.

The first item has nothing to do with Bush. The second is hyperbole used to describe the fact that Republicans control Congress and the presidency, but one would be hard-pressed to say "Pro-Bush" forces control the Judiciary. So it's arguable. The third point (extremists at the highest levels) is arguable and probably false. It's only extremism if you're standing where Greenwald is standing.

Next, let's look at this statement:

The "Left," or any other group, controls virtually nothing. Our country is governed with virtually no opposition by the Bush movement and its defenders, and as a result, the corruption, dishonesty and abuses of power which one finds among them are the ones which, in my view, are the ones most worth talking about and battling against.

Um, you have the press, the media, the N.Y. publishing industry and Hollywood, the universities, virtually the entire elite culture in all our major cities, and a good chunk of the blogosphere. Trust me. It's hard to see it. But you give as well as you get.

I was encouraged by Greenwald's post, for the most part. The point I'm trying to make in all this is this: We need to talk to each other like adults. And adults don't go around calling each other evil, wicked, benighted and stupid. Even if they're right and the other side is wrong.

And yes, I myself have violated this rule. It doesn't mean I think it's right to do so, or that I've forgotten it. It just means I don't always live up to my principles.

To put things in perspective. World War II was was triggered by Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. It ended with all the nations of Eastern Europe falling under Soviet domination. And in today's press, that's how it would read. (Hitler would've been provoked, for example, into invading France, attacking Britain, and the like.)

To see a funny example of how today's press would view the war then, check out David Foster here.

Arios makes sense in this entry here. I particularly like this part:

I've written before about the tendency of many people of all ideologies to have an unhealthy obsession with their own personal belief in an inevitable impending End Times. Whether your favorite bringer of doom is the Rapture, environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, a cataclysmic economic event, plague, general breakdown of civil society, etc... depends in large part on your ideology. But whatever that ideology is, many people seem to have a strikingly sharp belief that the End Is Nigh unless people Understand The Truth They're Preaching.

I ended up taking another look at the Left, to see if about my theory about renewed confidence. I judged too quickly. Another few looks and what I see is not confidence, it's contempt. It's a deep contempt.

To many on the Left, we on the Right are stupid, we are dupes, we are in denial, we refuse to think, we have severe psychological disturbances, we're desperate to prop up a worldview with fantasies, and we're uneducated.

Even though I'm just benighted, let's take a look-see so others can enlighten me:

Atrios: "The point is the wholesale embrace of manufactured horseshit to desperately prop up their collapsing worldview."

Crooks and Liars: "Bush followers are lucky. They have an outstanding capacity to create their own fantasy world where any facts which reflect negatively on the Leader are simply discarded and ignored. Just this last week alone provided numerous, glaring examples of how this disturbing fact-denial process works."

Glenn Greenwald: "They [Bush supporters] are not susceptible to challenge or reconsideration because they are the by-product of faith and desire and not a critical or rational assessment. They believe these things because they want to believe them, they have to believe them, because the whole world-view on which their identity and purpose has come to be based — the brave, heroic President leading the great conservative nation in glorious, epic war-triumph over the evil Muslim enemy — depends upon believing these myths. No facts can shake these beliefs because they aren't grounded in facts and aren't the by-product of rationality."

Atrios again: "History. Read some, morons."

My Left Wing: As the Senate gears up to bring up the immigration issue again and the Department of Homeland Security's recent round-ups, it is not hard to spot the private prison profiteers because they are the ones currently with dollar signs in their eyes as thousands of undocumented immigrants are being dumped into their torture chambers depriving them of all that makes a person human.

Commenter at My Left Wing: "Arizona has a draconian prison system that looks like a Gulag: forced labor camps that have resulted in the death of at least one young prisoner."

Daily Kos (Susan G.): The Republican Party seems riddled from top to bottom, from bench to pitcher's mound, with players more concerned with small-minded vengeance and limited information access than with actual governing, openly and competently."

Well. That was a lot to share. Is getting all this contempt and loathing out helping you in your daily lives? Does it make you feel better? Are you happy?

Maybe, just maybe, that all the strawmen you've created aren't real. Maybe there are smart people on the right and the left and maybe there are more things in the middle of the road than white lines and dead armadillos.

Of course, the Left is far from alone in this. There is a universal tendency to assume that those who disagree with us are stupid, uneducated, ignorant, mentally unbalanced, or wicked. Indeed, any attempt to argue any of these points successfully requires us as writers to take this universal tendency into account. So if I say to myself, "Democrats are evil," I have to think, well, am I just indulging in the same open contempt they are? If not, how do I know it?

Are Democrats wicked? No. Do the Democrats support wicked policies. Some. Can the Democrats support their policies with facts and argumentation? Yes. Does that make it right. Not necessarily. There may be other facts and other arguments.

I get frustrated on a couple of issues.

But I try to understand where people are coming from.

Why do women support abortion? Because they don't like or want anyone telling them what they can and can't do with their bodies. It's an emotional response, and more than a little deeply felt. There's also a couple of thousand years of non-choice and women being raped and exploited through their children and other fears beyond that, if you're a believer in things like a collective unconscious. It's not an irrational emotional response. It's the wrong conclusion, but I understand where it's coming from.

Why do men support abortion? For three main reasons. One, they want sex without consequences. Two, they're cowards. Three, they don't think a woman should be told what to do with her body. The first two reasons are contempible, but the third is rational. It's wrong, but rational.

Why do people think there's such a thing as same-sex marriage? Because they think marriage is a social construct, and the definition can be changed without consequences. Marriage means a loving commitment to them, nothing more, and so they are willing to abstract this one concept and abandon the rest of the definition. They're wrong, marriage flows from natural law, which cannot be violated without consequences. But to believe my point of view, you need to accept natural law. And very few people do.

Immigration. Israel. Taxes. School choice. Do we oppose the president during wartime? There are arguments for and against, and let's not pretend there's some easy answer that every rational person can agree with. If there was, we'd all agree on it. But where you come out depends a lot on who you believe will give you an accurate rendering of facts and how those facts fit into your predetermined worldview.

George W. Bush may be a heinous, corrupt president and the worst one in human history. Or he may be an upright man who's doing his best, and history may have a nuanced rendering.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not playing all nice here. I still hold that the Dems are wrong about more things than not — it's not so much the facts that are the problem, but how they assemble them and how they interpret them. As the old joke goes, if you accuse a Jesuit of killing two men and a dog, he will produce the dog alive to refute your argument. Anyone can take the most extreme views of their opponents, or catch them in error, and make broad generalizations about them. It's a little more difficult to actually think.

I switched political parties for a lot of reasons. Like most people in both parties, I have reservations about various aspects of the GOP. In my case, I'm not a rah-rah capitalist by any means. I distrust large organizations of almost any kind, but recognize that large organizations are often the only defense against the tyranny of petty local tyrants. I think long arguments about government miss the point, which is this: A virtuous people needs less government than a vice-ridden one. If people exercise self-restraint, understand cause and effect, are enterprising and hard-working, work to remove their own ignorance, take responsibility for their actions, and can be trusted to keep their word, you wouldn't need a lot of government. But if people are eager to exploit the commons, exploit their neighbor, and exploit themselves, you'll need more government.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact. But it's not a guarantee. It was an agreement among people to act according to certain rules. If we insist on over-reacting to every event by creating more rules instead of punishing wrongdoers, we'll be even more choked with them than we currently are. People think I'm kidding when I saw we should have hanged Ken Lay and Bernard Ebbers, but I'm not. Instead, everyone was punished with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Instead of having common-sense regulations against weapons in school, we get the mechanistic overreaction of "Zero Tolerance." And these kind of sentimental, emotional reactions are common in both parties.

The city looked good. Better than it has in years. Went to a HR conference at the New York Hilton at 52nd and 6th, and walked up to St. Patrick's for noon Mass. Beautiful day, and got lots of good stuff, and a couple of good interviews. Only downsides: I forgot what a breakfast buffet at a Hilton costs in New York ($24) and my windshield got nicked nastily on Route 78 and needs a $60 repair job.

Here.

but no more politics for the week!

By the way, if you're ever wondering why I tee off on the occasional Democrats, it's because I sometimes read entries like this one.

Liars and Torturers

Yglesias writes:

But, of course, if you think that leaking classified information in order to expose illegal conduct by high government officials is the same thing as high government officials selectively releasing classified information in order to bamboozle the public into supporting a strategically daft invasion, then you're out of your mind. The issue, though, is that a certain number of people think that bamboozling the public into supporting the Iraq War was a good and noble thing to do, and a largely overlapping group of people think that arbitrary detention and torture are so vital to American national security that a little lawbreaking and secrecy is a small price to pay to ensure that the job gets done. Others of us hue to an anti-bamboozlement, anti-torture line and, naturally, don't think the president should be able to cover up his illegal conduct by slapping a "classified" label on all the evidence.[Italics from IndustrialBlog.]

This is something we all forget from time to time, those of us who have a knee-jerk faith in general human goodness and decency. Whether it's the administration, elite pundits, or blogospheric idiots, we are dealing with liars who support torture. Once we understand that, it all makes a bit more sense.

-Atrios 10:37 AM

Yeah, Duncan. The problem is you're too nice and too trusting. The problem is you've given the GOP and Bush the benefit of the doubt too often.

Excuse me. I have to go back to pulling wings off of bugs now.

You should read this post by the Anchoress.

This post was not about politics. It was a link only :)

BTW, I will not be following the McCarthy scandal. I have no idea what it's about, and I don't care. You say leak, and I think of my friend John's Ghanaian friend John, who didn't understand the Americanism, "to take a leak." Instead, he'd say, "I am leaking."

I deleted the Toms River post. It was dumb. Removed on grounds of excessive dumbness.

I have a headache.

"I was going to join the Marines, but they wouldn't let me in because my parents were married."

So, the return of politics post-Lent really kicked up a lot of comments. Next week: No politics for the week. Only stories about HBC.