Sisyphus Understands

My friend Andrew has been guest posting over at Obsidian Wings lately, and this post makes me think that perhaps the issues between the left and right go deeper than he may imagine.

Andy's point seems to be that a lot of the acrimony we see on the web (and in the MSM) stems from an inability for those on the extreme ends of the spectrum to see past the stereotypes they impose on their opposite numbers. To a certain extent, I believe that he's correct in this - if you honestly bellieve that your opponent is evil and stupid, why would you listen to what they have to say?

But I don't think he's gone deep enough with this. Sure, stereotypes can be tough to overcome, but an intelligent, reasonable person will recognize that he or she has biases and do their best to try and work around them once they know what they are. But that makes two assumptions, neither of which I am certain holds true in the majority of the American population.

Assumption #1 - we are all speaking the same language. This is a pretty big one here - and its not what you might think, either. I'm not talking about English versus Spanish, or what have you. What I see is a much subtler divide, almost an issue of dialect. As a military officer, I have learned over the years just how important it is to define our terms in a mutually understood framework. For instance, ask a field artillery officer for his definition of "destroy" (30% of the enemy forces combat ineffective) and then an armor officer for his (every last armored vehicle on the battelfield a smoking hulk), and you'll see how critical that can be. Ask the artillery to destroy an approaching enemy, and you may be unpleasantly surprised by the result if you don't know this minor factoid!

So, what if the folks on the left and right are using the same words, but with different meanings? In such a case, there is really no chance they can ever come to an agreement, or in fact, see each other as anything but imbeciles. Obviously, if the other guy doesn't even know what "X" means, how can we have a meaningful discussion?

Assumption #2 (and this is the big one) - everyone involved actually understands their own position. I'm going to pick on the left wingers for a minute, only because they are usually the ones I end up arguing with (I seem to have a dearth of friends on the far right, at least any who are willing to go head to head with me). How often have you heard phrases like "No blood for oil" or "War never settled anything"?

On more than one occasion, I have seen the face of someone spouting one of those phrases go completely blank when met by a civil request to explain what they meant. The simplest request ("Prove it") to the chant about war not solving anything seemed to perplex them. "Everyone knows it" seems to be a comment retort - to which I reply that everyone knew the Earth was flat, too. Apparently, they had never actually put serious thought into what they were saying, merely repeated something that someone else had said. Catchy slogan, yes. Serious argument, no.

And there I think the root of the problem lies. We are seeing, across the nation, people who have never learned, or choose not to exercise, the ability known as critical thinking. They are told things by others, that they take at face value without ever pausing to question the basic facts. Perversely, this tends to make them defend their position even more passionately, as no one likes to admit that they might be wrong. And so the positions on both sides become entrenched, with no hope of crossing no man's land to find any kind of common ground.

I honestly don't know what can be done about this. Using one's brain, thinking about basic concepts that others take for granted - that takes effort. And effort seems to be one thing that a lot of people take great care to avoid these days...

Seems I'm neither completely one thing or the other, when it comes to politics.

While I don't always agree with Victor Davis Hanson, he has an interesting piece in today's National Review Online. While I certainly can't speak from experience about the word games played in the 1930's to avoid facing Nazi Germany's aggression, the moral equivalence that I see in much of the media and the anti-war movement today is very troublesome.

I don't understand how these people, who seem very clear on the matter of intent when it comes to criminal prosecutions, can be completely blind to the importance of intent in wartime. It is absolutely critical, being the difference between a just action and a war crime.

Let's take a couple of examples. Last year, while I was deployed, there was a lot of media coverage of a Marine who shot an Iraqi insurgent during a raid. The insurgent in question was wounded and was later determined to be unarmed. The media coverage came from the fact that an embedded reporter caught the incident on tape, showing this Marine apparently executing the insurgent.

The subsequent investigation determined that the Marine had not acted in a criminal manner, and no charges were brought against him. Why? The investigators determined that the insurgents in the area where this unit operated often concealed weapons on their bodies (grenades among them), and would use these weapons to kill American soldiers and Marines who got close enough to them after the insurgents were wounded. The sudden motion by the wounded man caused the Marine to believe this particular insurgent might be one of those individuals, and he reacted instinctively to protect himself and his fellow Marines.

Was this young man mistaken? Yes. Was his action criminal? No. The Law of War ( and the Uniform Code of Military Justice) were both written with an understanding of the "fog of war." In the heat of battle, split second hesitations can often be fatal, and a servicemember acting on a reasonable belief that he is being threatened can take action to defend himself.

In the court of public opinion, however, the MSM and anti-war crowd did their very best to paint this Marine as a no better then the insurgents he was fighting. Now, considering that the insurgents we face in Iraq commonly target unarmed civilians, deliberately, how is that in any way equivalent to the previous example?

The same twisted philosphy is being spouted again, by the same people, in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. Here we have one side, which does everything in its power to avoid killing civilians (to the extent of dropping warning leaflets and calling cellular phones of people in an area where they will be attacking), even at the risk of alerting their intended targets. And on the other, we have a group that wants to kill as many civilians as possible, and to cause their opponents to kill as many civilians as possible in order to use that as a public relations ploy. Again, its all a matter of intent - if you're intent is to kill an armed opponent with a minimum of injury and death to those around him, you're good. If your intent is to simply hurt as many people as possible, regardless of who they are, and hopefully kill many of them - we call that criminal.

So I ask, who as the moral high ground here?

Just thought I would put my two cents in on the whole global warming thing. Those of you who know me will not be surprised that I'm a bit skeptical of the claims of the doom-sayers. One of the reasons that I have trouble taking them seriously is the fact that they rely so heavily on climate models that have not shown themselves to be very reliable.

One of the ways in which we test climate models (or any models for that matter) is to initialize them with a known state from sometime in the past, then feed it the data we have for the interval between the start date and the present. In theory, if our model is accurate, it should spit out an endstate that looks very similar to what we observe at our current point in time. Very easy to see if we got it wrong - if our model predicts freezing temperatures in Florida in August, we made an oops.

So what makes me bring up this whole dreary topic? I happened to read this article today (hat tip: Instapundit). It seems that, contrary to what the computer models based on last year's hurricane season predicted, this year's ocean surface temperatures (the driving force behind hurricanes) are not only normal, but below normal in some areas of the world. Which means a quieter than usual hurricane season.

Does this mean global warming doesn't exist? Not necessarily, but it does point to the dangers of making certain assumptions. Number 1 - never extrapolate from a single data point. Just because ocean temperatures were higher than normal last year, doesn't make a trend. Number 2 - don't ignore the role of nature in the climate. The oceans and the atmosphere can be tremendously variable, completely on their own without any man made influences (hence the difficulty in developing accurate climate models).

My position on global warming is this - the climate of the earth is changing. But that also happens to be its normal state. This planet is in a constant state of flux, with cycles of warming and cooling throughout history, not a static system at all. The influence of man is just a drop in the bucket - compare the amount of energy added to the atmosphere by man against the total influx from the sun, and your calculator will probably return an error message because it can't show a number that small.

I also have trouble taking people seriously when they talk about the changes in the polar ice caps, and how they will flood our coastal regions in the next 100 years. Sometimes I wonder if these people graduated high school.

For instance, the ones who are worried about the North Polar ice sheets (admittedly, they are in the minority, but nonetheless can be vocal about it). I'll admit, the North Pole melting would inconvenience more than a few people, not to mention the loss of a unique habitat for many animals, but it is not going to change the levels of the earth's oceans. THE ICE IS ALREADY IN THE WATER. Remember Archimedes? An object displaces the same amount of water that it masses - so a million ton iceberg will displace the same amount of water as a million tons of liquid water. Net ocean level change - zero. (Don't believe me? Try this - float a block of ice in your bathtub. Measure the water level before it melts, and after. Unless your drain leaks, it'll be the same.)

OK, on to Antarctica. Now here, we have a more serious situation. Most of the ice here is on land, so melting that WILL affect sea levels worldwide. By up to 50 meters, if estimates of the total volume are correct. And recently, we've heard about how the eastern ice shelf is melting faster than expected, dumping 36 cubic miles of water into the ocean last year. Of course, we only have one year of data on this, so remember rule Number 1 above - not a trend yet.

What you may not have heard is this - the interior of the continent is GAINING ice. That's right - 45 billion tons in the last year. Of course, same rule Number 1 applies here, but it makes you think doesn't it?

In the end, the planet is going to change - not really much we can do about it. Ask and paleontologist, and they'll regale you with all the changes in climate the earth has seen in the last 4 billion years. Trying to stop that is something akin to King Canute's fight against the tide, with about as much chance of success. Still, I can't help but feel that reducing our flow of pollutants into the environment is a good thing, if only from a cleanliness perspective. After all, its the only planet we have (currently), and we don't want the neighbors to think we're letting it get run down.

But I'm not about to panic yet.