World War II Envy
It has struck me that the neocons' root dysfunction may be a deep-seated envy of the previous generation. Bush Sr. fought in World War II and Bush Jr. had to hear about it all his life — even while he was dodging the Vietnam draft. I imagine similar influences on other folks sympathetic to the neocon worldview. They want to remake the Middle East into modern democratic states, as MacArthur did with Japan. What they don't understand is that Japan and, say, Iraq aren't interchangeable. Japan felt national shame at its defeat, while Iraq was not even a nation but several nations confined within a state, and none of them felt any shame at Saddam's defeat. I don't have a lot more to say here except that I guess this is one chunk of thought in an ongoing series of mine to try and figure what makes these guys say and do stupid things, because the simplest explanation — that they are stupid — is too easy.
Modern Luddism
I don't want to turn this blog into a series of links to Salon articles with redundant little "me too" tags. But this bit says what I've been thinking and saying for years now: The religious right are the modern equivalent of the Luddites. The difference between my position and that of the article is that the article seems to think we are already out of the woods and just don't know it, but I suspect things will get worse before they get better. The only thing of which we can be certain, of course, is that the Luddites will never surrender, and complacency would be dangerous.
Ashcroft's freedom
There is little doubt that John Ashcroft's tenure as Attorney General has been very destructive, as this article enumerates. His use of the word "freedom" in his letter of resignation (and in previous communications) has puzzled me a bit, but I think I have a grasp of it now. Given his record, he cannot possibly mean what the rest of us mean by that word. I think he uses it to refer to a fuzzy romantic notion of American superiority. It's a sort of grade-school nationalism in which an adult has mouthed some compulsory curricular platitudes about America being the greatest nation on earth, and from somewhere in the surrounding dribble a child might pluck the word "freedom," not knowing what it means in a social context but associating it with the general tone of venerating the homeland. Remember Ashcroft's attempt at song, which I found embarrassing due less to his performance and more to the gratingly mawkish sentiments expressed. Without any real concept of "freedom," is it surprising he has regularly acted to curtail it?
Election technology: There's only one problem.
If the issues surrounding the introduction of new election technology seem confusing,
the problem isn't in your head. We're trying to solve too
many problems at once, and, in particular, we're trying to solve the problems of
ballot creation and precinct reporting at the same time.
The latter problem is much more difficult to solve; electronic precinct reporting implies innumerable security and privacy sub-problems. This makes it tremendously "interesting" to an engineer's mind, and engineers are very prone to losing focus in the presence of an "interesting" problem. Ask any non-engineer and you'll discover that improving precinct reporting isn't actually urgent. It only seems urgent because the engineering mindset got attracted to the "interesting" properties of the solution, and now we're bogged down with a lot of hand-wringing about modems and encryption and verifiability and the reliability of flash storage devices and all the rest of that crap. Adding insult to injury, precisely no one was clamoring for a solution to the precinct reporting problem in the first place.
What's actually urgent is solving the ballot creation problem. There's good reason to believe the 2008 election may well be just as close as the 2000 election (remember Florida) and the 2004 election (remember Ohio). Our very topmost priority ought to be eliminating the possibility that anybody ever again will wonder about the meaning of hanging chad. And when you limit yourself to solving the single most urgent problem, surprise surprise, it turns out to be much more tractable. Here's how simple it could be:
You walk into your local polling place and find a dozen computers. They're not fast, but they all have touch-screens and slots for ballots. You approach the usual tables staffed by Nice Old Ladies, they check you in the way they always have, and they hand you a paper ballot the way they always have. You go to one the computers and feed in the ballot. You waltz though a series of screen images and touch the parts you like. There aren't any "interesting" computer problems to solve, because when you're done voting, you tell the computer and it prints your ballot in an OCR font and spits it back out of the slot in the computer and into your very own hot little hand. This is key. You can read the ballot, it's on paper, and you deposit it yourself in the ballot box just like you always have. The county recorder picks up the box and transports it to the recorder's office when the poll closes just like they always have. They count your ballot with a big computer just like they have for years now, except now the big computer can read your ballot exactly the same way you can because it's printed in an OCR font. They store your ballot just like they always have in case there's need for a recount. End of story.
Ask yourself why we don't hear of simple plans like this one to address the ballot creation problem. Is it because governments don't know any better than to let engineers get carried away with "interesting" problems we don't actually have? Is it because the firms which build these systems see a way to make more money by solving problems nobody cares about? Is it because politicians award contracts to their friends instead of smart people? Being more certain about the results of close elections is just not a very difficult problem to solve. We're making it more difficult for no good reason.
The latter problem is much more difficult to solve; electronic precinct reporting implies innumerable security and privacy sub-problems. This makes it tremendously "interesting" to an engineer's mind, and engineers are very prone to losing focus in the presence of an "interesting" problem. Ask any non-engineer and you'll discover that improving precinct reporting isn't actually urgent. It only seems urgent because the engineering mindset got attracted to the "interesting" properties of the solution, and now we're bogged down with a lot of hand-wringing about modems and encryption and verifiability and the reliability of flash storage devices and all the rest of that crap. Adding insult to injury, precisely no one was clamoring for a solution to the precinct reporting problem in the first place.
What's actually urgent is solving the ballot creation problem. There's good reason to believe the 2008 election may well be just as close as the 2000 election (remember Florida) and the 2004 election (remember Ohio). Our very topmost priority ought to be eliminating the possibility that anybody ever again will wonder about the meaning of hanging chad. And when you limit yourself to solving the single most urgent problem, surprise surprise, it turns out to be much more tractable. Here's how simple it could be:
You walk into your local polling place and find a dozen computers. They're not fast, but they all have touch-screens and slots for ballots. You approach the usual tables staffed by Nice Old Ladies, they check you in the way they always have, and they hand you a paper ballot the way they always have. You go to one the computers and feed in the ballot. You waltz though a series of screen images and touch the parts you like. There aren't any "interesting" computer problems to solve, because when you're done voting, you tell the computer and it prints your ballot in an OCR font and spits it back out of the slot in the computer and into your very own hot little hand. This is key. You can read the ballot, it's on paper, and you deposit it yourself in the ballot box just like you always have. The county recorder picks up the box and transports it to the recorder's office when the poll closes just like they always have. They count your ballot with a big computer just like they have for years now, except now the big computer can read your ballot exactly the same way you can because it's printed in an OCR font. They store your ballot just like they always have in case there's need for a recount. End of story.
Ask yourself why we don't hear of simple plans like this one to address the ballot creation problem. Is it because governments don't know any better than to let engineers get carried away with "interesting" problems we don't actually have? Is it because the firms which build these systems see a way to make more money by solving problems nobody cares about? Is it because politicians award contracts to their friends instead of smart people? Being more certain about the results of close elections is just not a very difficult problem to solve. We're making it more difficult for no good reason.
Rice to run State? You must be kidding.
Condoleezza Rice demoted and ignored Richard Clarke largely, according to him, because his role was an innovation of the Clinton administration. Then, unsurprisingly, the administration lost any grip it might have had on Al Qaeda's activities and the World Trade Center came down and a big chunk of the Pentagon collapsed. Rice finally ran back to Clarke for help. Then she denied the President could have known about Al Qaeda's intent to attack the United States before reading out the title of the President's Daily Briefing which would have been a savage blow to the face with a clue-by-four for anyone else. So what does Bush do? Promote her to a position which requires tact, wisdom, and subtlety. Genius!
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