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They're dead; are they winning?

The basic feature of Islamic terrorism is so painfully obvious, I often marvel at the number of people who keep forgetting it, who miss the point: our enemies kill themselves in order to kill others, and this deed is its own propaganda. Fighting them requires a fair deal of sophistication, for one must fight their propaganda above all else. Indeed, one must undermine their propaganda at every step. In doing actual fighting — you know, the killing that our military is trained to do, and that Republicans so much like ordering — we must not prop up their propaganda.

My critique of George W. Bush and his evil side-kick/mastermind Dick Cheney is that they do not understand this. They think killing, conquering, and rebuilding is all that it takes. They are fools. Consider this latest from Cheney:

The fanatics may have thought they could attack us with impunity — because terrorists had done so previously. . . . They did not know America, and they did not know George W. Bush.

The fanatics did attack with impunity. They are dead. And they got precisely what they wanted: they exchanged their lives for many more thousands of Americans dead. There is absolutely nothing we can do about them.

What about those who supported them? Funded them? Trained them? Many of them are now dead, too. And they got what they wanted.

What did they want? The fulfillment of their own prophecies. They want America to behave like a conquering, anti-Islamic empire. America, in the way it over-reacted and under-reacted to the tragedy, did just that. America solidified its military bases in the mid-East. It lashed out, seeking to conquer. In the course of its war first with the Afghan government and then with the Iraqi government, it has killed thousands upon thousands of innocent Islamic people. All proving how evil an empire it is. All feeding the frenzy to turn yet more poor Islamic trash (and not-so-trash) into terrorists willing to exchange their lives for others.

America can win against people who risk their lives to kill American soldiers on the battlefield. And the world's sole Super Power can certainly win against people who are not its enemies, who are collateral to any fight; just bomb then into non-existence. But what about armies of those who sneak around, killing themselves so others may be killed?

They are nearly unstoppable, because in a free society there are so many ways to bring oneself into contact with many others, and press DETONATE or otherwise kill by explosion . . . or infection.

The key in any war on terrorism is to present decreasing incentives for those who hate you to switch from normal hatred to terrorist suicidal mass-murderer.

In their conduct of the war since 9/11/01, the people in America's Bush administration have done just the opposite. They've increased the incentives for Islamic men to become terrorists. Democratic Senator John Kerry would no doubt have botched the response, too — he seems to be a hopelessly misguided fellow when it comes to defense — but even his worst would not have been as bad as what America got, with the best that the Bush administration delivered.

No nation under attack should rationally encourage a suicidal mindset in its enemies. Especially in the nuclear age . . . or in an age when biochemistry is giving anyone with technical savvy the power to kill millions.

Americans should not be asking if this foreign government or that is sorry for 9/11/01. There should be no sense of triumph for any conquest of any government. Because the enemy is not a government. The enemies who attacked nearly three years ago are all dead. And yet they may be winning.

Designations   |   September 2, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   ThinkingMatters

Two Haiku Suggesting the Reason I Wince When I See Pierced Tongues

the tip of my tongue
remembers old surgery
with exquisite pain.

where a scalpal sliced,
years ago, and needles pierced,
now maimed neurons skirl.

Designations   |   September 2, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   ThinkingMatters

Deserving to lose

Reason's editor, on Hit and Run, appears more impressed with Debra J. Saunders's squib Deserving victory than am I:

Saunders is right to suggest that a party that nominates a candidate at odds with its core beliefs is a party in trouble. This helps to explain weak and inconsistent messaging on the part of the Democrats. And it also suggests John Kerry may need to become more vocally anti-war in Iraq to mollify the Democratic base — a tactic that will only lend more weight to the flip-flop millstone around his neck.

[T]he central difference between the GOP and the Democrats: The Democrats were willing to — no, they chose to, by nominating Kerry — sell out their core issue in order to beat George W. Bush.
That's how fanatical their hatred is.
Republicans, on the other hand, are willing to lose an election for a cause they believe in. Bush knew when he began that the war in Iraq could cost him the election, but he did what he thought was best. And he still isn't flinching.

Well, this casts the Democrats in the worst possible light, and the Bush administration in the best. Does it really make sense?

Kerry won the nomination because many Democrats believed they had to pick a pro-war candidate in order to beat Bush. They were able to look at Kerry's vote against the Persian Gulf War and determine that he did not believe his 2002 Iraq vote and does not mean the pro-war statements he has made during the campaign.
Some of the very folks who bellow, "Bush lied," are crossing their fingers in the hope that Kerry lied.

But are the kinds of lies really the same? No. Not really.

The lies she's writing about are by voters and supporters who have to accommodate other voters in a very bad system. After all, the primary process places too much power in the whims and velleities of a few quirky conservative-moderate voters of very odd states, thus leaving the rest of the nation's party activists — of either party — stuck with candidates who possess momentum and little else. So their lies are little more than what they tell themselves to not give up hope entirely, after being screwed by numbskulls in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But what of Bush lies? She keeps mum, and goes on to quote Churchill:

And many Democrats think that they're going to lose. A famous wartime poster had Winston Churchill's face looming over the words, "Deserve victory." You deserve victory when you believe in a cause so much that you are willing to take risks for it.

But deserving victory is not just about one's confidence in one's beliefs. It is also about the rationality of those beliefs, how one has come to hold them and how one defends them, and the rightness of those beliefs, too.

And the Republicans are simply wrong on the issue of 9/11. They traded an effective response to terrorism with a sweeping, counter-productive response, including war with a country that had little to do with those who attacked us. And to engage in this eagerly sought-for but mostly irrelevant war, the Republican leadership lied and lied often about the facts. They also put blinders on (one could see them going up; I commented on this from day one), and soon they could not recognize a fact if it stared them in the face.

This does not make them deserve to win. For lying to the American public, the Bush administration deserves to lose. And more. The president, the vice president, and several prominent members of their cabinet deserve to be impeached and removed from office, and then . . . can we try them for treason? (And can the people execute a leader who's betrayed them and the Constitution? Probably not, alas.)

So, no, I don't agree with Ms. Saunders's argument. The Democrats have indeed chosen a terrible candidate, and have done so at the cost of their integrity. Yes. But that's nothing compared to the betrayals of the Republicans.

Designations   |   September 3, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   ThinkingMatters

Shoddy technology

As I was tearing apart an old, unworking Hammond organ today, I thought of shoddy technology. I can't say I'm all that impressed with the organ's keyboard mechanism. Now that I've looked at the insides of a Hammond, I see why the keys have the characteristic clicking sound that some people love and others hate.

As I took the pictures of the organ, in its destroyed state, I thought of another bit of shoddy tech: Microsoft's Explorer browser for Windows.

I have to think about that terrible browser too often, as I make pages for the Web. It is, after all, the most commonly used browser. And yet it sucks, sucks like the Hammond organ's keyboard sucks. Well, worse. One can get used to the clicking sound of the Hammond, consider it the natural sound for that instrument. But with the Windows Explorer browser, you just can't do as much as you can with other browsers, particularly Mac browsers, including even Microsoft's Explorer for the Macintosh OS. It's like needing a hammer and making do with a shoe.

Example? On my Macs, I use two browsers most often, Explorer and iCab. Both allow me to hold-click (what amounts to a right-click in Windows terminology) and get to a menu that allows me to view any image in its own separate window. I can download it, too.

But often I just want to view it in a separate window (or, in iCab, a separate tab). Can't do that on a PC, at least running Windows Explorer.

This means that I have to put special links to each image I place on these pages. I make the images bigger than I want them to appear on this page, the main blog page of Designated Semiotician. Viewing them on a Mac, one can simply open the image in another window/tab, and see them full size. But without this ability, on a PC, if I have neglected to put in a link to the image, then you have to download the image. And often even that doesn't work.

I'd like to be able to take a hammer to the Windows browser, but it's a virtual existent, not a thing in the normal sense. Can't destroy it. I just have to wait for the Windows Explorer team to bring their product up to snuff. Ain't gonna happen any time soon, I suspect. Shoddy, shoddy workmanship.

Of course, I should say that every browser I've worked with has problems. It's odd that iCab, one of the most finicky browsers regarding the purity of a page's code, has recently displayed these pages — and one (now abandoned) attempt at an improvement — far better than Explorer for either Windows or Mac. As far as I'm concerned, the browser wars aren't over, they've barely even properly begun.

Designations   |   September 9, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Dunce upon a time

I've long deemed George Walker Bush a bit of a dunce. His sub-intellectualism is plain — Jesus as political philosopher indeed! (Intelligent Christians squirmed at this; know-nothings cheered.) His discomfort with ideas, even with talking, evident in almost every phrase, every stumbled statement. (But is this a family trait? His father was a master of the malaprop and the inadvertant noema.) The extreme simplicity of his imagination is also readily apparent, as his insistent insinuations of a Saddam/Osama connection demonstrate.

But is he a true dunce?

Well, we know he wasn't much of a pilot. And we know he wasn't much of a student. Now the exact nature of his poor studentship is revealed: One of his college professors speaks out, in an interesting article in Salon, by Mary Jacoby.

I've no interest in commenting on the bulk of it, but I do want to make one point:

Tsurumi told Bush that someone who avoided a draft while supporting a war in which others were dying was a hypocrite. "He realized he was caught, showed his famous smirk and huffed off."

If Bush were smarter, he could've defended himself. Of course he was not being a hypocrite, per se. If he had been, so is every liberal taxpayer I've met. Just as it is not hypocritical to advocate higher taxes AND take every legal loophole to lessen one's taxes, so it is not hypocritical to support the draft and a war, but still seek legal means to avoid service in that war.

This is really basic stuff; a smart man would have been able to see through it.

But Bush is not a smart man.

But then, Tsurami is not exactly a genius, either. Oh, well. He's probably a much nicer guy than our president.

Oh, and to those of you who think, mistakenly, that every evaluative dissonance amounts to hypocrisy, I'll concede this much: Bush the draft avoider was not rising to any high level of soul, just as liberal tax-avoiders show an ignobility and cravenness that in their rhetoric they eschew. But dissonance is not enough for hypocrisy. There's a higher bar for qualification for that term of opprobrium.

Designations   |   September 17, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Epigram

There's nothing so endearing
As a God-fearing man with an earring.
But everyone gets distressed
When an atheist pulls a Bible from his vest.

Designations   |   September 19, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Random Thoughts

I watched Cellular last night. This is, I think, a near-perfect thriller. Not high-minded or arty or profound. Just fun. Well-made, well-conceived, well-acted. And though I do not own or use a cell phone, I did figure out the Big Surprise, the clever use of modern mobile telecommunications technology, in advance of the revelation. Still, it didn't spoil the movie.

The theater I saw it in was a Regal Cinemas theater. I signed up for their special card — billed by the attendant as like a Safeway card — called the Regal Crown Club card. Then I sat through a rather dark screening. Yes, Regal's regional theaters are horrible offenders in the Dim Bulb Projectionist problem: that is, making do with dim bulbs, unduly extending the life of bulbs, even deliberately turning down the bulbs. (This is a problem not only in my neck of the woods, but in far away Austin, Texas, too.) It makes for a less-than-perfect experience. I may not use my Regal card all that much.

Now. Speaking of dim bulbs. To what extent is the difference between Red and Blue states, and Republicans and Democrats in general, a cultural element of Christendom? The Apostle Paul said that God chose the foolish things of the world that he might put to shame those who are wise. Well, George W. Bush confounds his enemies, that's for sure. I can't abide his obvious stupidities and anti-intellectualisms. But to people reared on (and, more importantly, accepting of) the New Testament, this is no argument at all. Bush seems a fool to the smart set? All the better!

Unfortunately, dyed-in-the-wool Republicans don't take to heart the statement that follows in 1 Corinthinians: God chose the weak things of the world, that he might put to shame the things that are strong. There are few things stronger than the rich old men and the brash young things who run the G.O.P. They may choose and manipulate the foolish, to confound the wise, but they, being wise as serpents, do it only for power. (Could it be ideology? What ideology? Big government and the hope of a totalitarian future? That's what they are unleashing on us . . .)

I bought an old Chevy Cavalier last week. Actually, my ownership of it is the result of a volley of gift exchanges. I like spontaneous gift exchanges, when not at Christmas and birthdays. But I do not have the leftist (Maus/K. Polanyi) love of them. To me they are all tinged by the darkness of the soul that the Chinooks' Potlatch system bred. But still, they can be fun; they are a kind of sport: no way to run a society full out, but a nice reprieve from haggling. And besides, I got a working automobile out of it, and got to give away a television, a computer, and (in the future) a stereo.

Though I've been driving since I was young, I haven't owned that many vehicles. A Rambler, first; I sold it for what I paid for it: too cheap. I had a Citation in usufruct. I then bought a Datsun longbed pickup. Then I got a Honda SilverWing, as a nice bonus for overworking myself. Then I bought the best car I ever owned, a Geo Prizm. I sold that, walked for year (riding my SilverWing for trips out of town), and then bought the worst car I've ever owned, a Ford Aspire. I still own it; it just doesn't work. Now I own the Cavalier, the doors of which I must fix. The first thing I did with it was buy a fluffy fake-fur seat cover. The second thing I did was get frosting on that cover.

I am reading Danny Bonaduce's memoirs, Random Acts of Badness (Hyperion, 2001), right now. Why? He's my age, and we have . . . almost nothing in common. Still, it's a fun book. There are reasons some people and not others belong in the public eye. Bonaduce is one who does belong, his crazy years notwithstanding. He's smart enough to mouth off in amusing ways. He's not your usual Hollywood lackwit; he entertains. The book ain't bad, though it be about badness.

Well, according to some, I've just sunk to the lowest — confessing myself a fan of Mr. Bonaduce. But hey: in a world where badness is not exactly random, some sorts of excellence deserve rewarding. Anyone who can string together wisecracks and still promote the bourgeois virtues in a consistent, entertaining way deserves popularity. Of a sort.

Obviously, though no fan of popular music, I have some attachments to our popular culture. I do not think it all dreck, all bad. Capitalism does strive to promote some general sense of excellence. If not of the highest moral quality, or aesthetic, it is nevertheless not a wholly evil culture. (I can say this, in part, because I avoid rap, country-and-western, and most of the shows on television; to be an optimist, one must program for oneself.)

In short: I'm no conservative. Nor pretentious liberal.

Designations   |   September 21, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Dialectics: Periphrastic? Inutile?

Karen De Coster, a writer with the a sharp quill — and who brashly calls herself The Queen of Political Incorrectness — often criticizes other libertarians. So much so that she prefer Lew Rockwell's weird term paleolibertarian for her calling card. Sometimes she chastises libertarians for being just weird or eccentric (and thus not culturally traditional enough), sometimes for being not hard-core libertarian enough, other times for being . . . too wordy.

That's her most recent complaint, anyway. In her blog post Libertarians for Useless and Wordy Argumentation, she asserts that any good writer will teach one to drop the weighty words, make it clear and concise, and to the point, in as few words as possible. The academic libertarian bloggers who disobey this are, well

the same folk that chit-chat and twitter about, engaging in what appears to be more of a dollars-for-words marathon, as opposed to concise argument. 'Tis the academic way. Those of us in business know better. Personally, I can't stand the word-a-thon stuff.

I followed the links to an offending dispute, on the History News Network. The discussion there didn't appear to me as horribly periphrastic, and the debate there in fact addressed some important issues in a clear-headed way. And yet, this interesting dialectic was described by another blogger (seconded by Ms. De Coster) as soporific.

So, is the debate in question sleep-inducing? Do the writers go out of their way to use big words? Well, if it were not blog-writing, the writers would likely have cleaned up what they had written. But they did use some awfully short sentences and some straight-forward language. So what gives?

De Coster and Barganier seem mainly annoyed that people could still be debating what is settled in their minds. Barganier makes this explicit: I can't go to a libertarian site without enduring some soporific marathon debate about a no-brainer, i.e., that waging preemptive (read: aggressive) war (read: death and destruction) to impose democracy (fer Chrissakes!) on people who never even posed a threat to us is, uh, wrong. De Coster takes an aesthetic approach: Those people are obscenely obsessive about engaging in insane argument over each and every remark, point, word, notion, or piece of punctuation.

And yet, in her preferred business world (a world with which I'm quite familiar), some of the worst writers are businessmen, people addicted to cliche, fashion, hype, bombast, and meandering gobbledygook. That's why businessmen hire writers. Have you ever read a businessman's first attempt at a Vision Statement?

The libertarians they complain of are simply engaging in the philosophic mode. Often they are merely making their first feeble essays in that direction. Or, like Gus DiZirega on the site I cited earlier, they are accomplished dialecticians. What offends is not their language, I think, so much as their thoughts. They're still arguing what De Coster and Barganier think settled.

Compared to Aristotle or Aquinas or Averroes or many another dialecitician, ancient or modern, these libertarians are breezes to read.

So, really, I'm not buying the criticism. Mencken used to argue the same thing, with more force. Because he often dipped his pen into the same inkwell as the Great Ones of philosophy, and showed that one can indeed write clearly on obscure issues, his critiques carried a bit more weight. But he also over-simplified. And, let's face it, he was committed to the philosopher's greatest sin: he confessed to never changing his mind! Well, most philosophers don't change their minds often enough, but would be deeply ashamed to admit it. And rightly so. Because thinking should lead to revisions of belief. If it doesn't, it's just so much rationalization.

And the writing out of such rationalizations? Propaganda. Advertising.

That's something businessmen understand. But those committed to truthfulness can't practice propaganda alone. Prior to, and often as an alternative to, any straightforward rhetoric, there must be open-ended dialectic. And it will often contain stylistic inelegancies. Why? Because when the end in mind (truth) is by definition only feebly grasped, this manner of approach can only contain stumbles. Dialectic — or, less vaunted, the rhetoric of inquiry — will always seem less polished than demonstrative reasoning, or the rhetoric of conclusions. Why? Because in the latter one knows ones goal inimately, and can hone one's words to yield maximum economic effect. In case of the former, well, the goal is partly unknown.

I don't consider such stumbling around useless. It is stumbling around with a purpose. The bumblers, puzzlers, periphrastic dialecticians, what-have-you, these people, they stumble around a contested goal: truth. Without such stumblings, at least as a limiter on the rhetoric De Coster praises, the most confident arguments come to stink of dogmatism, and will likely be left behind as error, sooner than its adherents might think. (And why? Because the rhetoric of conclusions rests on a inquiry that was cut short, and failed to find enough truths.)

The continued existence of libertarian argument — no matter how soporific — is actually the best news I've heard about the libertarian movement in some time.

Designations   |   September 21, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

The Obvious Parallels

Paul Craig Roberts, a well-known conservative writer, and The Daily Show's Steve Colbert both had the same idea: draw out the parallels between CBS's credulous handling of a faked document and the administration's credulous handling of the information it had on hand, the information that suggested war with Iraq was a good idea. Roberts played it serious, Colbert for laughs. The parallel is both funny and serious.

We know how the Bush administration got its misinformation: it demonstrated over and over again what it wanted, so it didn't take long for the underlings to send up the right smoke signals, blowing it up the asses of their superiors. And that's probably how the CBS crew got the document it needed, just by saying that the story was meaningless until it got some documentary corroboration. Say it to your interviewees enough times, they get the idea.

But there's no smoking gun in either case. So neither will be pinned down.

Of course, there is the smell of burnt gunpowder and bullet holes aplenty. But in modern discourse, that doesn't amount to a smoking gun. You see, almost no one will ever admit anything bad about one of theirs. If you do that, you simply cede to your enemies. That was one of the great lessons of the Clinton Era. Stonewalling works. Stand by your man. Deny your misdeeds twice, thrice, forever. And for some reason the public can't go the distance and bring the stonewaller down. It is, as Roberts' title suggests, about attention spans.

Paul Craig Roberts looks good in all this. He's a conservative. And he's completely turned on the neo-imps in the Republican Party. With even some libertarians supporting the Vile Imperialist Partisans, he deserves a special honor.

Designations   |   September 22, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Aletterations?

According to an email I've received umpteen times, The Washington Post's Style Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Among the 2003 winners is my favorite:

Reintarnation:

Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

Very funny joke. Here're a few more, my own coinages this morning:

abscent:

The smell covered up by another smell.

zhero:

A person who, after doing a good deed, can't say anything in public.

defacet:

To speak ill of a diamond (curse word at DeBeers).

tenderfoots:

Newcomers to (novices of) the English language, especially its grammar.

spacific:

A very particular kind of bathing, using the ocean (specifically, the Pacific) as a spa.

sousephone:

A large Beer Hat with the tubes circling the body, like a tuba.

saunah:

What you say when someone offers to put more water on the hot stones.

Hmmm. That sousephone joke seems awfully familiar.

Designations   |   September 23, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

The plural of grouse is grouse
and there's no use grousing

I grew up eating wild game — often. Pigeon season and grouse season were great times of the year. There's nothing quite like grouse soup.

Alas, pigeons are nowhere near as common as they used to be. Pigeons' Bluff, nearby, is bereft of the birds that once crowded its rocks. But grouse are coming back to this neck of the woods, here at the mouth of the Columbia. Perhaps because the logging companies no longer poison their trees with insecticide, at least to the extent they did in the late '70s and '80s. Lots of fauna are coming back. (Still haven't seen a flying squirrel, though.)

My sister's dogs nabbed a few grouse, recently. So, grouse soup was on her menu. Remembering the toil of plucking the birds — the downside to living off the land is the work involved — she postponed plucking and called my brother-in-law about preparing a grouse, to see if he had any hints. And right away he said, Well, don't pluck it!

It turns out that one can peel off the skin of a grouse without a knife. Wash away the fat, and you have a very low-fat game-bird ready for your meal. My sister didn't know that. I didn't know that. My parents obviously didn't know that, because, way back when, there was a whole lot of plucking going on.

Well, that's one thing that I'm glad is gone. Plucking doesn't need bringing back, either. Let some traditions pass away, that's what I say.

Hey, where's the talk of plurals? The title is illusory! Yup. No grousing about that, neither.

Designations   |   September 23, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Why is this picture blurry?

I suppose I could have gotten a little closer. And had I not been holding a broom in my other hand, the camera hand might have shaked less. And if the subject of my snapshot had been anything other than a bat, I would have been calm, cool, and free of collywobbles.

Great. A bat in the hall. I left the door open to the office building, and after I type this, I guess I'll take that broom again and either kill it — or shoo it down the hall and into the great outdoors.

Trouble is, I've been hearing stories of rabid animals in these parts. . . .

This is not my first experience with bats. A year or so ago I wrote:

So I get home, sit down in a rocking chair, and there, beside me, a book bag hisses at me. Empty book bags are not supposed to hiss. I gingerly pick it up and carry it to the back deck. I set it down and out crawls a bat! It wouldn't fly away. It just hobbled away from the bag and hissed some more. Regrettably, I broke a broom over it. Not exactly a clean sweep. What would Ben Tucker say?

And years earlier, while painting a house, I was high atop a ladder, spraying yellow paint onto the shingles near the peak of the porch. And out from a crack appeared a bat! What to do? I normally would let bats go their way, but hey: I was not in a very good position to retreat; the ladder wobbled. So I sprayed the bat. It hissed and crawled backwards into the attic. I kept on painting. Moments later, the bat reappeared. I sprayed it again. This routine repeated a few times, and finally, the yellow bat inched a bit further forward than before. I jumped off the ladder, at least three yards down, and the bat flew away into the forest. It could almost have passed for a goldfinch, that painted bat.

Except of course that a finch sort of twitters its flight from tree to tree, bush to bush; that bat flew like a bat out of . . . er, well, hell.

Designations   |   September 26, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Ad hominem, ad infinitum

Tom Palmer kicked up a ruckus, recently, with several posts to his blog regarding the Mises Institute, some associations of a few people associated (whew!) with the Mises Institute's founder, Lew Rockwell, and regarding Hans-Herman Hoppe, who somehow became the intellectual giant at the institute. Palmer, like not a few decent people, won't tolerate people who are soft on anti-semitism; like a good intellectual, he hates idiotic arguments. On the former issue, he castigated Lew Rockwell's eponymous site for printing and associating with people who attend historical revisionist conferences and white-racist organizations. On the latter, he argued against and mocked Hoppe's case against open immigration.

Now, I like the Mises.org website, especially since it contains so many classic texts. And I've read some good articles on LewRockwell.com. Unfortunately, these allied organizations possess more of the free-wheeling Rothbardian flavor than the more polite Misesian one. Hence we get a lot of vituperation, on a regular basis, from Mises people directed towards the more mainstream libertarian outfits, such as the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute. Not being a member of the LP, or an employee of Cato, I can't take personal offense, but I must say that, in reading the criticisms of these two groups, I often (though not always) find myself leaning towards the maligned Cato and LP, and not the group that holds the name of one of my favorite economists.

I must say — since I've said it before — I'm no great admirer of Lew Rockwell. He has never seemed like a very tolerant guy, though I'm sure he's nice to his friends. (All sorts of people are. Being good to one's friends is pretty easy. But when I first saw him, he was playing the part of a bully. He angrily demanded something from a person he had never before met, something that he would have gotten had he politely asked. He also implied that the object of his ire deliberately slighted his organization, when I know that person did not do so. Further, Rockwell used his ties with another person to throw his weight around, getting special treatment. It was quite an ugly moment. That may have colored all my later views of him.) His Paleo Turn struck me, from the beginning, as an excuse to engage in hatemongering. But I disagreed with so many specific positions of the Paleo ethos that those were more than enough to leave any suspicions aside and reject his schism with libertarian movement on the philosophical grounds alone. Because of this, I've not followed, closely, the published writings on LewRockwell.com. And so I'll ignore them for now.

I can't ignore the Mises Institute, though. I'm an admirer of Mises, though prior to reading anything by him, I noticed that some of his admirers are a bit too worshipful. I'm not one of the worshipful ones.

The worst thing about the Mises Institute are those who continually make the same intellectual mistakes. Hans-Herman Hoppe, for instance, is not merely an intellectual lightweight; he's an intellectual black hole, sucking up reason all around him, not shedding any light. And then there are those amongst the Mises Institute crowd who over and over prove themselves unsubtle and unschooled in the basics of discourse. Take, for instance, the charge that Palmer, merely by attacking Hoppe, is engaged in the argumentum ad hominem:

Ad Hominem alert!
(This post has been deemed irrational and engages in pointless attempts at fueling Personality Wars. Total disregard of Hoppe's main points, addressing only Hoppe himself and how his arguments would affect him personally.)

That's what one of the Friends of Hoppe wrote, with a fake name (and a fake email address, to boot), Logic Police.

Of course, Palmer did not engage in an ad hominem. An ad hominem argument is one that attacks the proponent of the argument rather than the argument itself. It should be obvious to every reader: Palmer did indeed tackle the argument that Hoppe made. But he also attacked Hoppe himself, for making such a bad argument, and for being an unpleasant, uncivil debater, and also used Hoppe's own circumstance and self-contradictions as further evidence of the argument's . . . but whoa! Aren't we now in the realm of the argumentum ad hominem tu quoque?

I don't think so. On first glance, I thought that Palmer might be guilty of the fallacy had he not written his second paragraph of An Immigration Policy that Would Exclude Its Own Author. There is a lot of nastiness and character abuse in the piece. But in that second paragraph Palmer does use actual arguments to indicate the idiocy of Hoppe's thesis. But, on second thought, I realize that's not quite the point. Remember, also, that Palmer in this piece has a thesis not that Hoppe's argument about immigration is wrong, but that it is remarkable to find someone so lacking in awareness of self, or in the ability to perceive himself as others might perceive him, that he would announce an immigration policy that . . . would have barred him from entering the country.

It is remarkable, which is why Palmer makes the remark. What Palmer aims, in the blog entry as a whole, is to show that Hoppe is a rather clueless individual. To back this up, he shows how, by Hoppe's own argument, he should not have been allowed into the United States.

Yes. This is an attack upon a character. But it is not an illegitimate attack upon a character.

And since the character in question (and what a character!) has himself rested his whole normative philosophy on a rather strict reading of performative contradictions, to then attack the man for something like a performative contradiction is pretty rich. (It is not, exactly, a performative contradiction; it is more a sign of a cognitive dissonance based on circumstance. But need I get pedantic? I mean, more pedantic?)

Ideally, in philosophy proper, we do not attack the character of a person making an argument, only the argument itself. But when the philosopher in question himself makes the mere fact of arguing a proof of his own position, I think it is understandable that we give the attacked collocutor some lattitude. Hey: if the person I'm arguing with thinks that merely by arguing with him I've conceded the point, well, a great deal of lattitude is in order. The man I'm dealing with is not being logical. And if the person himself engages abuse, dismissal, and other unscholarly debating techniques, then I will indeed attack his character.

You see why, perhaps, Palmer is justified in attacking Hoppe as he has done?

I've been in a similar position to Palmer's. Years ago I wrote a review in which I argued against Ayn Rand's egoism. I have numerous troubles with Rand's egoism. For one, I dislike the term; it is poisoned fruit, and she prided herself on how she sold it. For another, she presented herself as a moral exemplar. So, in addition to arguing, on straightforward grounds, against her construction of ethics as properly egoistic, I thought it appropriate to show that her errors of logic allowed her to behave in precisely the strawman way that she flouted when she took up the term of opprobrium and made it her ideal. And I also argued that her followers did much the same thing, to their own peril.

And yes, of course I had numerous Rand fans claim that I had engaged in the argumentum ad hominem. This was especially droll, since Rand herself liked to engage in something similar to what I had done, though with less justification, I think. (I had not initiated the moral-exemplar gambit, for instance.) The more rabidly one admires Rand, the more witless one's defenses become.

Designations   |   September 26, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

How to stop global warming

Mount St. Helens, one of my favorite mountains — I remember good times sledding there, good times watching it huff and puff, good times breathing (cough) its ash — is on the move again:

Small explosion at St. Helens possible within days
A small explosion of rocks, ash and steam could occur within the next few days within the crater of Mount St. Helens, where earthquake activity has been steadily building for nearly a week, scientists said today.
"It could certainly happen today; it might not happen for weeks or months," said seismologist Seth Moran of the U.S. Geological Survey's Cascade Volcano Observatory.
... Scientists are "not sure where this is going and it's really hard to communicate this succinctly," he said.

Actually, a simple we don't know much of anything and can't predict worth a damn statement does suffice.

This story follows a lot of other stories asserting that recent weather around the world (especially, most ominously, in the Antarctic) indicates climate changes, that is, global warming and a possible rise in sea level. The juxtapositoin of the stories suggests something.

Let St. Helens provide a clue to how to deal with global warming (if it is occuring, and if its results will truly be catastrophic): seed volcanic activity to elicit a major eruption. Volcanic activity in the early 19th century made 1816 the Year Without a Summer. If the globe is getting toom, why not try something practical to stop it?

Confession: I'm not quite serious. But a lot of things I'm not serious about happen, so . . .

Concession: What I know about vulcanology could fit on a stamp. And the seeding of a volcano? Could it work? We can seed clouds, and effect rain; why not seed a magma burst? It was done, after all, in a Rick Brandt Science Adventure (a great Stratemyer Factory kids' sf series from the '50s, I believe). In one installment, Rick's father, Dr. Brandt, and his team place a nuclear device into a hole dug into the side of a volcano to direct the flow of a lava away from human habitation and to the sea. Nuclear bomb saves the day! That's sf for you.

Yup. Some of my ideas come from kids' lit. I am unashamed.

Designations   |   September 28, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Two death-o-versaries

Last week a man I knew and admired was killed, by gunshot. Murdered. By his own son:

8:15 a.m. - Homicide investigation
[Jonathan Scott] Mitchell was involved in a domestic disturbance with his father, Ronald Scott Mitchell DOB 6-19-52 (52) when the father was shot. The victim was found deceased by officers upon their arrival and Mitchell had left the scene.

The picture of the son, at left, shows a very disturbed young man. Mental problems, the news reports tell us. Drug addiction. Violence. (The picture looks strikingly like the young psychopath imagined and described by a friend, in the novel he's writing. Chilling. And yet it also looks an awful lot like his father, who did not look chilling at all.)

His father was a pastor at a church in Beaverton, Oregon. I knew him when he pastored a church in southwest Washington. Scott Mitchell, as he was called, was kind, soft-spoken, a good listener. The news reports say he was great at counseling men. He just couldn't counsel his son. (One news report makes that concept its title theme.)

We're often told it's hard to be a preacher's child. There are probably several reasons why. I met Jonathan only when he was a little boy, I think, and he was a very reserved kid. I do not know what he learned at school (probably some bad lessons from the tribals), I don't know why he came to hate his church, I don't know how he reacted to his father and mother. I haven't known the family, really, in years.

I did confide in Jonathan's father, Scott, once. He was good, but there was nothing he could do for me, in part because I asked nothing. He confessed to being a detail man. My concerns about Big Questions, as found in cosmology, ontology, psychological theory, etc., were in a sense too big for him. He bundled all such questions into a faith in God.

His mastery of details could not reach his son. This is tragic. For him, and for his son, who is now (I suppose) utterly lost — by both Scott's criteria and mine.

A year ago today my mother died. I am still learning to live with that. It seems wrong, in some vaguely existential sense (throw the word in, why not?) that her existence is no more. Part of my life has always been oriented by the existence of my mother. Of course, by her own beliefs, she's greeting Scott, now.

At my mother's funeral, Scott's brother-in-law gave a great sermon, for its kind. He presented an old thought: for those who believe as my mother did, the sorrow is not so great as for the rest of us. Scott, at that funeral, could hope to see my mother again, have a nice chat. I have no such hope. For me, death can only be forever, each death a cessation, a de-systemization, a bursting of the bubble caught in the eddy of life. Loved ones' deaths means never, ever seeing them again alive.

Epicurus, who believed this also, looked on the bright side of this. If death be cessation, death is nothing to fear. For, when we are dead, we will experience nothing; there's quite literally nothing to fear!

But as existentialists were wont to put it, there is Nothingness to dread. We taste of existence, and experience much. To imagine experiencing nothing sends a chill to the spine. It's frightening not in a scary sense, but in an unsettling sense, like living without gravity. To hover over an abyss, falling without ever hitting bottom. But . . . it is impossible to imagine. It gets to the heart of Being, the exitentialists were right. But this heart of Being, being in some sense nothingness, cannot help but puzzle. It's all so weird. The very nature of life, so explicable in its details, doesn't seem so explicable in the Big Picture. It seems as strange as quantum physics, as unsettling as the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

Epicurus saw that abyss and laughed. I've long done the same, regarding the brevity of my life, my eventual death. My death ain't my problem! But it's much harder to brush it off when people you love die. The sorrow and the longing . . . they get in the way.

For weeks and months after the death of my mother, I could get no real work done. On the day I learned of the news of the death of Scott Mitchell, I made no headway on my professional writing, though I could blog, here, as a sort of distraction. I felt that many people I knew were going to think upon the death of Scott in sort of horror, perhaps for the rest of their lives. Not merely because he was dead, but because someone else they love, Jonathan, had killed his own father. I can imagine few things worse than this. In a sense, I dedicated one day of my life to the contemplation of a horror; they have the rest of their lives to do so. And then I think of those who are always ready to war, and of the devastation they inflict upon people in distant lands. Some anger emerges, simmers. I place it on the back burner, for now. But it will go to boil soon.

Designations   |   September 29, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

The shark, he has been jumped again

Jesse Walker recently blogged that the phrase jumping the shark has itself jumped the shark. Very droll. But perhaps he spoke a bit too soon.

I've been watching a bit more TV than usual, and I've noticed an ad for a refrigerator that has a television on its front door. You see people eating in the kitchen, mesmerized by the TV. On the larger door of a European-styled fridge. A lovely woman eats grapes, watching a soap. A boy and his father are eating desert, watching some s-f flick or horror movie. And not one of these true blue Americans is overweight!

It is obvious that the conveniences of capitalism have brought Americans to the Fat and Less-than-happy state of the present time, with a minimum of exercise and a maximum of food and "entertainment." I don't blame capitalism for this, since people (including myself) could choose differently: eat less, walk more, play more, sit in front of CRTs and LCDs less. (Hint: Typing is not exercise.)

But hey: this fridge is the last thing anyone needs. It is the reductio ad absurdum of American consumer capitalism. Americans, even now, are realizing that some of their habits are, well, bad for them. This fridge is a glaring challenge to that realization. It marks a milestone in our culture. The trend towards more convenience and less works will continue, but beyond this point consumer goods will be self-parodies and tired, badly conceived efforts. Happy days aren't here again; Happy Days' latter days are.

In other words, capitalism itself has jumped the shark.

OK, Jesse, now I'll quit using the phrase!

Designations   |   September 30, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   ThinkingMatters

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