NPR Debate on Iran

NPR's Intelligence Squared debates recently featured a debate called "Is diplomacy with Iran nowhere?" I found it very interesting, and the most persuasive speaker is without a doubt Nick Burns, a former Undersecretary of State.

Here's where you can hear the debate.

Burns is the one who is impossibly calm during the entirety of the exchange. I found the whole thing to be very heartening, and quite educational.

New Computer

So my old laptop finally hit the 3-year mark and, true to that series' form, the motherboard died. It would cost as much to replace the motherboard as it would for me to get a new, teeny-tiny netbook, which I assumed would be less powerful but still do everything I need.

I was more than slightly wrong. What I ended up with was a 11.6" Acer Aspire One. It cost me $319, all told. It has 2gb of RAM and 160GB of hard drive space, which matches the stats on my old, $700 15.4" laptop.



Except this weighs in under 3lbs, has a three hour battery life, a comfy keyboard, and is quite literally the equal of my old laptop in any realm where it is not much better already. I can play all my old games, and I don't get any new ones so I'm set.

I'm pretty happy with it. My old laptop had turned into a desktop and I stopped taking it anywhere unless I was going to be there for a few days. I couldn't count on the battery for more than an hour and a half in any power setting, it didn't fit in a normal backpack, so it was pointless in lecture halls. This is much more mobile, without being so compact that it's painful to use or impossible to see.

Let's hear it for student aid money, making my life easier one more time.

Provoked Musings: Conservatism in Science

I ran into an interesting argument yesterday in my public opinion class. Our professor stated that "social conservatism is an elite construct built to manipulate the lower class". The argument was that prior to the Reagan administration, your place on the liberal/conservative spectrum was based almost solely on your economic stance. Reagan "invented" social conservatism to win the votes of people who would have no economic interest in voting for him, which is an assumption.

This is not science, and I have a hard time believing it as a result. Social conservatism is much maligned for being based in protestant christian moral precepts, which predate Reagan by something to the tune of 300 years. The US was well established as a largely protestant nation fairly early on, even to the point where immigrating Catholics were discriminated against. It's not valid in any way to suggest that people did not use these values to determine how they would vote prior to Reagan, or that they were manipulated into suddenly and against all reason obeying their moral compass. Which brings up an interesting question.

Why are political scientists so comfortable judging conservatism so harshly? This is not scientific neutrality. Conservatism is in very many ways like a sort of tribalism. Religion features heavily in both day-to-day activity and large decisions; kinship bonds (read: family values) are regarded as of critical importance, social roles are very important, they have a separate economic system they believe strongly in, and a great deal more value is often placed on working hard than obtaining education. Explained this way, American conservatism reminds me of a wide variety of stateless and indigenous societies all over the world, every one of which gets far more respect from both liberals and political scientists practicing neutrality.

In all honesty, it appears to me that all the old complaints that indigenous peoples had about colonialism are many of the same complaints now harbored by conservative cultures against the left. In turn, the left appears very much to harbor the same culturally damaging imperialist impulses that it condemns so harshly throughout history.

Scientific neutrality would mean speaking about conservatism too as a different culture and respecting it as such, but that's not what we did.

I tried to point out this blind spot, and it didn't go well. It turned into an argument about left versus right and who was morally correct, which - if you're familiar with scientific detachment - was completely pointless and absolutely not my intent. The point was to explain that we were not being scientific and we were letting our biases creep into our work. That I was the only one who saw this bothers me quite a bit.

I'd really hate for all that talk about the liberal elitist professors biasing our education to be true.

Seriously?

Yesterday, the new professor claimed that the US has killed more civilians in Iraq than in any other war. "They've never seen it this high, and it's because of how we're fighting - more guerilla-style".

She failed to substantiate this statement, and when she said it I got really angry. I didn't say anything, and I couldn't even identify the source of the anger. The statement was so blatantly false that it blasted through my crap detector like a shot from a rail gun.

Unless I'm sorely mistaken, terms like "firebombing" and "nuclear bombing" and "strategic bombing" did not come about as a result of the Iraq war. They came about as a result of the Allied air war in World War II, which makes a lot of sense because that's when these things were used. They were used there because World War II was an inter-state war and there was a need to break states as a whole. I don't really need to elaborate because anyone with a 10th grade education knows the rest.

I'm going to say something with no qualifiers, that is an absolute truth and short of a nuclear bombing campaign in Iraq, will always be true:

More civilians were killed by the US in World War II than in Iraq.

The idea that this surprises anyone or runs counter to their conclusions is baffling, given the difference in scale, strategy, and purpose of the two wars.

This professor is not tenured. I can see why.