I tend to agree with one reaction I've seen that the most offensive part about all this is Allen saying "Welcome to America" to an American--particularly one who's young and politically involved.

I find the "macaca" business intriguing though. There's enough circumstantial evidence to connect it with a racial slur, and I find that fairly convincing. I just wonder if Allen was completely aware of what he was saying.

I was reminded of a post on Brad DeLong's blog about Jeb Bush's reference to "unleashing Chang." In DeLong's analysis, this came from Bush Sr.'s allusion to Chiang Kai Shek http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/10/unleash_chiang_.html but the Bush kids remembered it without really grasping what he meant.

I can picture Allen simply remembering his mom using the funny name "macaca" for some people and intuitively attaching it to Sidarth without ever making any rational connection of why. This hardly excuses the behavior. I just find it interesting to speculate on what could have been going through his mind. Somehow I doubt he said "Heh, I can throw in an obscure French racial slur here and no one will ever be the wiser."

Posted at August 16, 2006 1:50 PM in response to Of Monkeys and Senators

Yeah, Topcat: I get it.

Pedantic people focus on who is specifically responsible for 9/11 when "the American public" knows the cause was the more general, systemic problem of r------s.

Liberals like Matt and I instinctively "blame America first" whereas good Americans blame the r------s first.

It's a big waste of time "quibling over irrelevant details" such as which r------s to bomb.

I'd say that's a pretty fair summary of your position and that of a large (though minority) segment of the American public, right?

Posted at August 13, 2006 4:20 PM in response to Hey! Al-Qaeda!

I'm not sure what Matt thinks I "overlooked" or whether his statement is true about some other "liberals." I have never suggested that creationists are a "lunatic fringe." They're just ignorant and wrong about an area of science. That's not insane, but par for the course. Many people believe wrong things about science or are just entirely ignorant of it.

For instance, I always have to scratch my head a little to remember how to do a Fast Fourier Transform, though it's one of the most elegant numerical algorithms and shows up in many applications. Most people haven't been exposed to it at all, and if they have been exposed, for instance, to the method of multiplying polynomials in high school, some of them might literally disbelieve me if I asserted that FFTs could be used to do the same operation much faster, and unless they were patient enough to follow my explanation, they would continue to disbelieve me. It's really not obvious (note: critical thinking is not just kneejerk contrarianism but sometimes a willingness to hear out a difficult argument with an open mind). Many would accept an assertion backed by an authoritative reference, so I could just break out my old algorithms textbook. If even that wasn't enough, it would be a little quirky, but I would not call them lunatics just wrong and willfully ignorant.

If 20% of Danes are willfully ignorant about evolution, that's not so surprising. Fortunately, there are still 80% who accept it, though I am not optimistic enough to think that they all accept it for good reasons. I would be happy if the percentage in the US was even close.

People with severe mental disorders make up far less than 20% of the population, so I agree with Matt that we're not talking about a lunatic fringe. In the US, we're not even talking about a fringe, but sadly, a mainstream belief that just happens to be entirely wrong, and which has a lot of financial backing to pollute our public education with that wrong belief.

If creationists were a lunatic fringe (like those people who thought they would be taken away by the Hale-Bopp comet for instance) then there would be nothing to worry about. What makes the trend worrisome is that this is a flawed normative belief that is poised to hurt scientific progress.

Posted at August 11, 2006 7:00 AM in response to Evolution

Another thing I don't get about al Qaeda (and I guess "al Qaeda inspired" terrorists). What is it with these guys and airplanes? I don't want to send the wrong message here. I hope that they will continue in their historical total lack of imagination about what to attack. I definitely hope that they won't turn their sights to container ships, other transport networks, or industrial infrastructure. It's already enough of a problem detecting plots when they're limited to a narrow spectrum. But the modern world is incredibly insecure and there are massive opportunities to to widespread damage that will we never be able to secure fully.

If I thought I could avoid terrorism merely by eschewing air travel and staying away from a few, mostly Northeastern, landmarks, then the world would be relatively safe and predictable. I'm too much of a pessimist to really believe that, but recent history has done little to contradict that simplistic view.

Posted at August 10, 2006 8:59 AM in response to Hey! Al-Qaeda!

Perhaps people will remember that al-Qaeda is the enemy that hit us on 9/11

Perhaps, but I'm not holding my breath. So far, every conceivable threat has been leveraged into a general claim that we need to "get tough". Large numbers of people apparently evaluate proposed responses to terrorism not based on whether they address the actual problem but on whether they are drastic enough.

I thought people would develop a little more sense when it turned out that nearly everything Bush said about the Iraq war was wrong, but clearly that didn't happen. What did happen is that people got pretty complacent about domestic security and very tired and anxious about a foreign war whose stated reasons had already been forgotten. Let's not forget that's what makes the war unpopular: Americans are getting killed and most people have little recollection of what they're doing there in the first place.

Now we're back to the dreary old high threat level, need to "get tough" pattern. I expect that this will bump up Bush's popularity as well as polls on whether the Iraq invasion was a good idea. It sounds crazy, but so far every terrorist act and thwarted attempt has helped him. The only thing that will stake the vampire of post-9/11 conservativism will be a return to normalcy and a robust peacetime economy.

Posted at August 10, 2006 8:51 AM in response to Hey! Al-Qaeda!

OT, but I lived in Zurich for a year and did get the impression that the Swiss have a subtly different idea of the role of government from Americans. It seemed more along the lines that laws are a benevolent force that can add structure to society. I would contrast this from the typically American view that government is a necessary evil (just how necessary and how evil are the disagreements that determine our political affiliations). It comes down to a burden of proof question. By the necessary evil principle, you'd look at every law as an infringement of freedom and only consider it if there is a substantial, demonstrable public good. While I understand that Switzerland has been a Republic for a very long time, I don't think this burden of proof test is even applied in principle. A law is put there if there's a consensus along the lines of "good people live this way." I guess it would be a little like having a country run by your home owners association. I think it works for them because of shared cultural assumptions.

Posted at July 22, 2006 8:19 AM in response to Selling the Product

If you'd said in March 2003, "look, the UN inspectors are in, they're not finding any WMD; there's no need to start a war now, there's no immediate threat and it looks like there may not be any threat at all; if we invade, we'll topple Saddam but actually running Iraq is going to turn out to be really difficult -- years from now our troops will be fighting a guerilla war, the situation will be a terrible mess, and nobody's going to have any good answers" you probably would have wound up in some hot water politicially. But you'd be looking pretty smart by November 2004, and really smart by November 2006.

Smart or not, people who said this are still not getting much airtime. Scott Ritter said something more precise, that there would be no WMDs at all except for some non-functional chemical weapons left over from the Iraq/Iran war. This turned out to be right on the money, but as far as I can tell, he's still treated as a pariah by most of the media.

Posted at July 22, 2006 8:07 AM in response to Selling the Product

Or the ring could create a literal bakery, oven and all, through which all the elements of a pepperoni pizza were assembled by green wraiths and greenly cooked into an honest to god real full colour pepperoni pizza. All the green lantern would need would be his will power and the necessary real ingredients.

Now I feel like an idiot. That's a great point and I'm embarrassed for not thinking of it. At the risk of sounding like a geek... oh wait I am a geek... it reminds me of the standard trick for creating a new compiler that does not require proprietary code. Say it's a C compiler. You write your new compiler in C and compile it in the old compiler. But that executable still has proprietary code from the old compiler's code generator. So you use that compiler to compile your code again. Now you have an executable with no proprietary code. GNU has this in its C compiler make file for instance.

So, yeah, provided you can develop the green manufacturing process for your non-green item, you can get it. I suppose you can call up the green plans and team of engineers for anything even if you don't know how it works ahead of time.

Note: US and Israeli foreign policy bears little resemblance to this process.

Posted at July 19, 2006 7:31 PM in response to Green Lantern in the Levant

I have never read Green Lantern (or any comic books really) but it seemed that in your description, the Green Lantern's ring was limited to producing green stuff. So if the solution to some problem was, say, a pepperoni pizza, then Green Lantern would be out of luck no matter how strong his will. He could make some green energy thingy that looked a little like a pepperoni pizza--he could make it really big or make it spin really fast--but it would not have any of the pertinent properties that would make a pepperoni pizza the solution to the problem. I think that this is at least as big a problem as the fact (also true) that our powers are limited by things other than our strength of will.

But I agree with the main point as I understand it. There is just way too much magical thinking going on among the punditry.

Posted at July 19, 2006 12:01 PM in response to Green Lantern in the Levant

Matt: I appreciate the spirit of this post. I wish you'd taken the time to proofread it though (typos: "a liberal is somewhat who", "right the saga up"). The main point is that you formulated a hypothesis favorable to your worldview, tried to verify it, instead refuted it, and then reported on it instead of burying it. You're getting dangerously close to the scientific method here. That is what we expect from the reality-based community, right?

Posted at July 18, 2006 6:54 AM in response to Got Me!