Monthly Archives: August 2021

My hope to analyze the various contents of an email from a conservative source on a daily basis appears to have been ill-considered, so I’ll apologize for forgetting and then analyze.

But, of course, they don’t fact-check their own cartoon. If you speak to an election official, regardless of party, they will tell you that each ballot is carefully checked, especially those mail-in ballots that have received so much … I cannot call it criticism, because criticism must begin with a well-informed mind … simple-minded sliming. Indeed, they use bar-codes, which are checked against databases of eligible voters and databases of who has already voted. In the twenty+ years of mail-in balloting, no systemic cheating has been detected.

But notice the sleight of hand going on here. “Every tweet and meme must be fact-checked.”

Really?

REALLY?

Since when does that happen? Yeah, you’re right: it doesn’t. Fact checking of tweets, even today, doesn’t happen in most cases; only in a very small proportion of tweets, mostly involving vaccines and Covid-19, does fact-checking occur, and even then we’ll see plenty of misinformation slip through, at least initially.

And fact-checking memes? As there is no official meme-source, fact-checking of memes doesn’t happen. Period.

The entire cartoon, in reality – and go check on this and don’t take my word for it – has it all backwards. Tweets and memes are not fact-checked outside of a small selection of topics (and, speaking as a software engineer, checking all tweets at present volumes and range of topics isn’t practical). Ballots and voting are carefully checked. There is no evidence of systemic cheating in the electoral system, if I may be rigidly correct in my logic, and the only circumstantial evidence amounts to nothing more than the distressed wailing of candidates unable to accept that they’ve lost.

Yeah, the emotional five year olds.

This is another attempt to drive a wedge between citizens and the officials that they themselves have voted into office. Distrust is not harmless; it makes necessary cooperation more difficult and even impossible, leads to civic chaos, and a disrespect for the law that can get people killed.

Something a national adversary will love.

Source: Dari Panama

Having read a few insta-reactions to the Afghanistan situation from such folks as Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Erick Erickson, Kevin Drum, and Andrew Sullivan, in terms of analysis I’m finding that defending President Biden’s decision is, interestingly, far easier than it is to condemn it.

Let’s start with metrics. The various commentators are trying to measure different things without sometimes understanding the problem of separating one from the other, while others do. Erickson wants to condemn Biden for the pullout but not the termination of the war, while Rubin and Boot, on different sides of this issue, are not nearly so clear.

If we take these separately it may become more clear. Insofar as the war itself goes, Biden has been against this war for a long time, and this is well-known. He did not accept the military’s official evaluations of the war, and as the war dragged on for an unprecedented 20+ years, it’s become more and more clear that he is right. The publication of The Afghanistan Papers more or less put an exclamation point on the matter.

To his credit, he followed through on his judgment. And I think we’ve waited long enough – twenty years – to pass judgment on the conflict.

The second point, his decisions regarding the actual withdrawal, requires more time for appropriate appraisal. When I see someone like Erickson crying out that Biden should resign in disgrace, I read his justification and shake my head – because the judgments are on points that are not yet clear. Indeed, exactly on what grounds he calls for resignation isn’t clear. In simple fact, such a call recalls Trumpian projection: Many people called for my [Trump’s] resignation, therefore we’ll paint Biden with the same calls and make it a moral equivalence.

Look: an approach often used in technical fields for measuring success or failure is to define a measurement that would indicate complete success, and then ask what a comparison with a real world measurement tells you. And I’m having some real trouble coming up with that ideal measurement. What does it mean to have a well-run withdrawal in the real world?

After a while, I have to ask: Are we seeing it right now?

Boot thinks it’s a disaster, yet every point he raises in his article I thought dubious. For example, We could have disregarded Trump’s agreement with the Taliban and stayed on without further losses. Well, no. Abstractly, people make decisions based off current status and expected events. Concretely, the Taliban have fought for nearly twenty years, at the time, when they got the Trump agreement which would hand them the country on a platter. Why launch more attacks and endanger the prize? Trump’s a chump, a demonstrated fact, so let him remain a Trump and have the prize drop into our laps. Boot’s point evaporates.

Erickson wants to hide behind an alleged claim that we should have withdrawn during the Afghanistan planting season, not the fighting season, and then the collapse of the Afghan Army wouldn’t have happened. The problem is that Afghanistan is a huge prize, and the Trump agreement enriched Taliban fighting forces with roughly 5000 previously imprisoned fighters. But the Taliban had already secured the mass defection of Afghan forces; the fact that the former Afghan President jetted on out of Kabul within days convinces me that the defection was well-known within Afghanistan, and possibly by American forces and key American politicians as well.

Erickson, because he made the mistake of taking Limbaugh’s radio chair and must accede to his ready-made audience’s demands, has to be completely invested in the idea that Biden is as bad, or worse, than former President Trump, and he thinks this is the chance. But if he can’t make a convincing point, it’s really a disaster for him.

The other points I’ve seen made in support of Biden’s condemnation are similarly weak. They can be, with varying amounts of thought, either completely discredited, or at least be unproven as of yet. I shan’t cover them because of time considerations.

To the extent that it matters what my opinion might be on Biden’s decision, I’m going out on a limb as I make public my premature – thoroughly premature – opinion and suggest that this event, so thoroughly condemned by the right and a matter of concern – rightly – to the independents, center, and the left, may become, in the eyes of non-partisan historians, if not the right, a signature decision, an important course correction to the American polity, and one of finest … not accomplishments … but decisions taken by President Biden.

But assessments of how well we evacuate Americans and Afghan allies that are in distress will affect that determination. I think anyone who’s already decided on their assessment of this Biden decision is merely a partisan, and possibly a hack, unless they back off and admit it:

We’re not ready to make this judgment just yet.

Everything’s connected, Mr. Boot.

Some lovelies fresh from the garden today.

It was a bit windy.

Fulminate:

v. ful·mi·nat·ed, ful·mi·nat·ing, ful·mi·nates
v.intr.

1. To issue a thunderous verbal attack or denunciation: fulminated against political chicanery.
2. To explode or detonate. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Trump & Co. engineered the pullout from Afghanistan. Now they criticize it,” Max Boot, WaPo:

“Aww, damn! There’s something in my eye!” “CUT! TAKE 37!” “Come on, Leonardo, get it together!”

Atlantic Rim: Resurrection (2018) is part of a genre called mockbuster: movies that pretend to be part of a blockbuster movie’s universe, but are almost certainly not, made and released to take advantage of audiences who fail to do the research, like me, that would make them realize this is not an official product of the blockbuster’s producers.

But a cheap ripoff.

And so it is with Atlantic Rim: Resurrection. Set years prior to the fabulous Pacific Rim (2013), it follows the trials – no lawyers – and tribulations of a military force attempting to stand up the giant robots later used in Pacific Rim to defend the world. Battling mysterious lags buried in the robots’ programming, a couple of kaiju, a horde of child kaiju, malfunctioning weapons, and some innovative ideas for monsters working together, the whole smorgasbord is driven along by meaningless side plots that trail off, characters with potential that are under-used (Go Bugs!), and the inevitable outcast scientist who knows better than everyone else.

While programming in … Python. Yeah, no kidding. Yes, there is such a language. No, it’s not a heavy duty AI language, at least not that I’ve ever heard.

A very sloppy plot, crappy special effects, actors who can only do so much with bad dialog, and some historical inaccuracies which will irritate those with at least a little knowledge of US Naval history^[1], overwhelm some right ideas, such as killing off good guys and some monster ideas that I thought were interesting. This made for a movie that will not be forgotten, but not for the right reasons.

¹ Oh, you want to know? The movie opens on a battleship firing on a kaiju. It’s clearly a battleship, as that’s a three gun turret with what are clearly 16 inch caliber guns. The US Navy retired its last battleship sometime in the 1990s, and even that was a “reactivated” battleship that was in service only for political purposes. I do not believe any are even functional at this time, much less in service.

Motte-and-bailey [fallacy]:

The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions which share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the “motte”) and one much more controversial (the “bailey”).^[1] The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position.^[2][3] Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte)^[1] or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte). [Wikipedia]

The article, above, is fascinating for those who, like myself, have wondered at the advancement of such philosophers as Foucault and their what often appears to be philosophical nonsense. I recall once, long ago, reading that a graduate student assistant to one of them had once muttered something like, “It must be important, it’s so hard to understand!” Unless it’s quantum physics, it shouldn’t be.

Noted in “Two Men Falling,” Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish:

[Biden’s critics] say they’re just decrying the way we left [Afghanistan]; but of course, this is the motte, not the bailey. Read any of their screeds, and you’ll see they still want us to stay. They still think they are right and that the American people are wrong, still believe they have the moral high ground, even as their morality has led to strategic blunders, and hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths. Bill Kristol — I kid you not — actually wrote another article condemning the withdrawal, quoting Churchill and Munich! How dead can a brain be?

Reading this WaPo article on Facebook’s measures of page popularity made me uneasy:

We all know what kinds of posts we see when we open Facebook. But what is everyone else seeing in their personalized feeds? And just how much of it is divisive, misleading, or outright false?

Those questions have never had a definitive answer, partly because Facebook keeps secret much of the relevant data. Analytics tools such as Newswhip, which is independent, and CrowdTangle, which Facebook owns, provided windows into what’s trending on the social network. And a Twitter account called Facebook’s Top 10, run by New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose, drew on CrowdTangle’s data to produce weekly lists of top-performing U.S. Facebook pages — many of which turned out to be conservative or even right-wing political personalities. Meanwhile, Facebook has endured harsh criticism from President Biden and other officials who view it as teeming with conspiracies and misinformation.

Facebook has long argued such“top 10”lists present a skewed view of its platform, making conservative commentators such as Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and Franklin Graham seem more popular than they really are. But it struggled to back up its claims without offering more data of its own.

On Wednesday, the social giant announced that it will begin publishing a quarterly report of its own, called the “Widely Viewed Content Report,” that slices its data along new lines to produce a very different set of rankings. Instead of presenting Facebook as a hotbed of right-leaning politics, the company’s inaugural report presents a far weirder, messier, and spammier picture: the news feed as a junk-mail folder.

And then comes this:

“It’s like ExxonMobil releasing their own study on climate change,” said a former Facebook employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to a nondisparagement clause. “It’s something to counter the independent research and media coverage that tells a different story.”

Pravda. Pravda was, and is, the name of the lead political newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and was well known, during the Soviet era, for hardly ever telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Today it has faded into obscurity.

And that’s what Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and company may be practicing.

I have to wonder if this quarterly report is going to sink right into the ocean and be ignored, or if it’ll be picked apart by Facebook observers who find its results to be ridiculous.

Yeah, sort of a rather large Protoceratops. The lack of nose protrusion makes identification with a Triceratops species a dubious adventure. The spinal ridge does raise questions concerning cross-breeding with a Stegasaurus species, but those critters had these tiny little heads, so the deduction may be on shaky ground. Although not shaky because of Godzilla, as the big guy does not make an appearance in this episode of Let’s Kill a Kaiju! Reportedly, his demands are considered excessive, and he may never make an appearance.

Gamera vs. Jiger (1970) exemplifies the dangers of archaeological theft. A fair-sized statue on a far away island is being removed for display at Expo ’70, being carried away by jet-powered helicopters. Even the displeasure of Gamera (“Friend to all children!”) doesn’t discourage the weaseling. Conveyed to a waiting ship, it begins the journey to Tokyo. On the way, the crew begins to fall ill, much to the puzzlement of the ship’s surgeon.

Meanwhile, Gamera finds himself (herself?) attacked by a kaiju emerging from the sand on the island, and is left squirming on his backside when the attacker, Jiger, shoots spears from her face into the legs of Gamera, thus incapacitating the eponymous kaiju. But Jiger doesn’t take the time to slit the great turtle’s throat – perhaps a wise decision, given the flamethrower implanted in Gamera’s mouth, which opens questions in my mind as to whether the plastic surgeons are going too far these days – and immediately sets out swimming across the ocean in pursuit of the statue. Or perhaps he’s an Expo ’70 fan.

He’s clocked at 190 MPH, surprisingly, at least to me, lacking a bow wave. Upon arrival in Japan, the local forces try to discourage his attendance, but Jiger’s heat ray is an unwelcome surprise and the local forces back off.

Back on the island, Gamera shows some cleverness in removing the spears, and sets out in pursuit of Jiger via his spinning rocket mode of travel. Once in Japan, he bounces Jiger around a bit, but in an ill-considered move, he ends up on top of her and suffers a piercing wound to his lung. He drags himself off to the beach, where he appears to begin suffering white nose syndrome, which is really more of a bat thing than a flying turtle thing, but, you know, poetic license and all that rot.

But the kids! Oh, again there are kids. Grabbing that submarine from the last episode, they slip into Gamera’s mouth and go to the lung, as directed by the scientists who somehow took an X-Ray with only half a device, and discover the piercing wound deposited an egg, which has already hatched and is killing Gamera from the inside. They discover that the baby is susceptible to white noise, which matches up with what the ship’s crew had claimed had made them sick: noise coming from the statue. The statue had served to keep Jiger quiescent for millions of years.

Bad archaeologists!

The adults rig up speakers that spit out white noise on a bigger scale, making Jiger dormant while the kids close up their incision and Gamera recovers from his surgery. Then the battle is on, with a highlight being Gamera sticking telephone poles in his own ears.

Yeah. Almost worth watching the movie just for that little bit.

Eventually, the statue kills Jiger and the fun is over with.

Thank god.

I was trying to get a picture of a bumbler, but all I really trapped was tomato blossoms a couple of days ago:

In this short feature I’m examining parts of an email from the conservative email bloodstream, and the first is here. Here’s the second:

So this one seems harmless enough out of context. But in context?

This is a reinforcement of natural, but socially undesirable, xenophobic impulses. The idea that the world’s richest country should not be helping out unlucky countries, along with being desperately un-Christian, is also undiplomatic. By being generous, we earn favorable views of America and Western Civilization from the citizens of other nations – an important consideration in an era where autocratic, or -leaning, governments such as those of China, Russia, Hungary, Iran, and The Philippines, are making the case that autocracy is a better form of government than old, slow liberal democracy.

Never mind what has happened in the past to citizens of autocracies (see: Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or most absolute monarchies), or is happening today to the Uighurs of China, the Tibetans, disfavored minorities (pick your country), etc. Just don’t look, keep favoring the strong-man style of government, surely that can’t happen to you, hey?!

And, for those readers who think foreign aid is overwhelming the Federal budget:

Opinion polls consistently report that Americans believe foreign aid is in the range of 25 percent of the federal budget. When asked how much it should be, they say about 10 percent. In fact, at $39.2 billion for fiscal year 2019, foreign assistance is less than 1 percent of the federal budget. [George Ingram, Brookings.edu]

The careful stripping of context, which is a regular feature of these conservative messages, and the constant din of xenophobia, look innocent enough, but reinforce anti-government messages such as They’re throwing our money away! and It’s all a hoax! and They’re taking away our rights! (but don’t look at the alternative).

Well, no. This is a fallacious view of reality.

Maybe it’s all just Halloween fun?

The Creeping Flesh (1973) combines some fine acting, competing subplots, excellent cinematography & generally good-to-excellent technical work, with a plot that seems to careen along mostly on coincidence, bad science, and, well, general yuckiness, all bookended by suggestions that this is the delusion of a madman.

The story opens in Victorian England on the occasion of Dr. Emmanuel Hildern returning home from New Guinea with a monstrous, huge skeleton in tow. What has he found? He believes he’s found the source of all evil, and he hopes to use this skeleton to produce a vaccine for evil in the usual way, producing antibodies for it that can then be used to inoculate sufferers.

But he arrives to find his rather magnificent home in figurative disarray: half the staff dismissed, his finances in ruin, although there’s a lovely prize dangling out there for the next big scientific breakthrough, a letter stating that his wife has passed away, and his twenty year old daughter, hopped up on the usual hormones, desperate for his attention even as she continues to desire to know more about her long-dead mother.

Who died last week.

E. Hildern must visit the insane asylum, run by his most ambitious half-brother, Dr. James Hildern, who informs him  that, along with the death of his insane wife, he is also no longer supporting his brother’s research. This is but one more worry for E. Hildern, already trying to study pure evil, concerned that his daughter has inherited her mother’s madness, his own petty delusions when it comes to his late wife’s former occupation as a dancer and flirt in the raucous houses of Paris, the lack of staff.

And, it turns out, the sticky fingers of one half-brother.

And what about this painting habit of his? Aren’t we worried about that, too?

But this all seems curiously unconnected. Perhaps his wife went mad; why worry about the daughter? Is she going off her rocker? How convenient it is that a madman breaks loose and terrorizes the town, is it not, just as the daughter finds said rocker, along with a piano to play?

And why does he fear that rainstorm?

In the end, the plot seems to be a mishmash with no unifying theme. It’s a pretty movie, as in it looks authentic, and the actors take creditable turns, but in the end it’s hard to take seriously. Perhaps, for a horror aficionado, this is a delectable piece of pie, but it all left me a bit cold.

Robert Carlin on 38 North discusses the correspondence of former President Trump with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. Communicating with the DPRK is via a slender thread: these letters and dubious propaganda are two of the more common methods. Carlin’s money quote on this particular collection:

The amount of attention commentators and reporters devoted to the unctuous opening sections in the letters has helped foster the sense that this was an effort by one leader to tap dance on the other party’s head. To be sure, President Trump’s letters reflected what some in the business world might consider good psychological tactics, buttering up the opponent. It’s not clear how effective this was with the North Korean leader. Some of Trump’s tactics, oozing praise for Kim, may have struck Pyongyang as belittling, in effect patting Kim on the head—nice doggie. Thus, concerns that Kim was trying to bamboozle the president with flattery need to be balanced against the realization that the president was playing the same game. If Pyongyang was only judging by the president’s glowing public characterizations of Kim’s letters, it might have concluded its approach was working. However, a close reading of Kim’s letters to Trump makes clear the North Korean leader could see that, whether or not his flowery words really touched the heart or fed Trump’s ego, they were clearly not having an impact on US policy.

And how much was that Trump being smart, and how much of that was his advisor’s digging in their heels? Maybe we’ll know in twenty or thirty years.

It’s been a while, but one of my conservative contacts finally sent some toxic email. Rather than ripping apart as is my wont, I’m going to take this series of cartoons and explain why each is toxic in separate, daily posts.

To the right is the only one that made me laugh.

So the first that annoyed me involves the deliberate mis-statement of science.

But, until the recent advent of the delta variant, a vaccination trumped all else:

The NBA and the Players Association agreed to change their health and safety protocol for those within the league who have received their full COVID-19 vaccine, according to ESPN.

The changes, per the report, will apply to anyone who is “two weeks past their final dose” and for “any team where 85% of players and 85% of staff are fully vaccinated.” The NBA and NBPA sent a memo with the new protocols to teams on Wednesday night. [Yahoo! Sports]

I didn’t see any recent changes, but an exacting account of the rules isn’t really the issue here, since this is almost certainly a couple of months old. The real point of this picture is to encourage disdain and distrust for science. Never mind the actual rules and facts on the ground, this is the sort of propaganda that encourages folks to stick their noses in the air and practice their haughty My common-sense is better than your science! pose.

It’s crap like this that gets people killed, injured, and crippled.

If my conservative reader is offended at my skepticism concerning the superiority of their common-sense, I suggest they consult a bit of history which happens to be most entertaining: Nuts! (2016).

A reader writes regarding my provision of a source for finding out about future gerrymandering with a personal experience:

The city of Chaska[, Minnesota] was horribly gerrymandered when we lived there. It still is today, but less so. For the curious, look at the linked map. Notice that the downtown section, bottom center, is split between 2 wards. It used to be split between 3 or 4 of them. It really should be not split at all. But doing that gives the “up the hill” suburban types all the power to fuck things up, regardless of the amount of opposition from the downtown folks.

Oh, a link to that map. Sorry.

The problem of representative democracies, at least in my mind, is how to be representative, isn’t it? Arrange lines one way, one group is in control. Arrange in another way, the other group has control.

And a third way, and a relatively minor group holds the balance of power.

Even with limited government, it’s still a mess.

Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) has …

1. Decided to seek vengeance on the Democrats for suggesting former President Trump was, and remains, a flying nutcase;
2. Received orders from on high – perhaps from flying nutcase former President Trump – to push this attack;
3. Decided to cover up for Governor DeSantis’ (R-FL) incompetency (this one courtesy Chris Cillizza of CNN/Politics);
4. Engage in a weird relative of moral equivalence;
5. Decided it’s time to launch Rick Scott for President in 2024;

What’s making me laugh and wonder why I didn’t predict this all along?

After the disastrous events in Afghanistan, we must confront a serious question: Is Joe Biden capable of discharging the duties of his office or has time come to exercise the provisions of the 25th Amendment? https://t.co/l1bFrUdZH9

— Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) August 16, 2021

Given what little I’ve seen out of Senator Scott over the years, he’s not capable of confronting serious questions, just political questions of power.

For the record, here’s my take on the contents of his, errr, concerns:

• No, inflation is not raging. Show me an annual rate of 20% and I’ll express some concern.
• The debt ceiling is a Congressional responsibility, not a Presidential responsibility. Perhaps you should see if you can possibly address the issue without looking like a great hypocritical goof, Senator. Maybe you should agree to raise taxes, Senator. Maybe you should raise funding of the IRS so we can catch the cheats. You know. Do your job.
• The entire border crossings thing, whatever the details may be – I have not followed it closely – does not necessarily condemn the Biden Administration. It may signal that problems in Central America have worsened and need to be addressed, an issue I’ve ranted on before.
• And, yes, Afghanistan has gone from the forgotten war to front page news. We’ll need our experts – and, no, Senator Scott, you are not one of them, and I’m not particularly interested in your blathering – to investigate whether this collapse was predicted or not, and what went wrong over the four administrations responsible for this debacle. I suspect a shit-storm of blame will hit all four President in about 50 years, when today’s political polarization is no more than a chapter on madness in history books, and a fair assessment can take place. My suspicion: “nation-building” is simply hubris, and former President Bush (R) will bear most of the responsibility.

Meanwhile, the economy has come roaring back, foreign relations, with the notable possible exception of Afghanistan, is recovering from the debacle of the Trump Administration as shown in overseas polls and a general lack of drama, and we’re moving forward again with an adult in the Oval Office, rather than the boastful, vain child to whose ass you shoved your nose.

What a hollow grandstander this Senator has turned out to be.

I see Erick Erickson is carrying the ball for the anti-experts in the far-right extremist crew today:

The experts said if Trump withdrew from the Iran deal, there’d be war and Iran would have nukes. The experts were wrong.

The experts said if Trump moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, there’d be war. The experts were wrong.

The experts said if Trump killed Qasem Soleimani, there’d be war. The experts were wrong.

The experts said if Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban would not sweep back into power. The experts were wrong.

Is it any wonder we are all less likely to listen to the experts? This has spillover effects because Americans don’t distinguish “foreign policy experts” from “public health experts” so they are no more likely to trust the expert saying to get vaccinated than the expert saying Biden could pack up and leave Afghanistan.

So – just to be contrary – I note the following:

1. No links. Frankly, Soleimani was dead before we had even heard of him. I doubt anyone predicted war with any certainty. In fact, since Soleimani was killed outside of Iran, in Iraq, I suspect the experts simply shrugged, predicted some loud mouths but no real actions, and ate their breakfasts. At least some of this feels like propaganda, designed to enrage rather than inform.
2. He’s not talking about simple stuff here, is he? Foreign relations is among the most difficult of subjects. His desperate need for 100% certainty is not the mark of a mature judgment.
3. Experts do not express themselves in certainty in most cases; they typically express themselves with percentages, or proxies for percentages – Good chance, almost certain, almost certainly not. Erickson’s failure to acknowledge that experts traffic in probability is another mark of his failure of judgment.

But, for me, what really signals his lack of good judgment is that he doesn’t take into account what the experts leave unsaid because everyone knows it: If this goes on, If no one does something about it …

Experts are pointing out where they think this will go if no one does anything about it, and that’s the role they play – the big red flag being waved at those who have the power to affect things.

Take that first example. Trump irresponsibly junks the JCPOA and the experts sounded the alarm – and leaders of the European powers started talking to Iran about what it was going to do. And perhaps delivered some warnings and promises of their own. It was quite noteworthy how Iran decided to hang around until Trump was thrust out of power, and now we’re back to the sad little negotiating dance that was entirely unnecessary, but forced upon us by a yokel.

The experts aren’t wrong. They’re part of the process. If we don’t do anything about this is the unwritten rule of how this works.

And if, truly, conservatives are using this to distrust public health, well, that’s on them. If they don’t understand that expert evaluation is part of the process, then they need to learn more.

Now, Erickson’s post was all about Afghanistan and Biden not addressing the nation – which he later did. This is the point where we know the experts’ next step – but I’ll point it out anyways. Assessment. How wrong were we, what didn’t we consider, and how can we do better next time?

And that takes time. As I’ve mentioned before, I think it’s worth patiently awaiting results and assessments, rather than jerking off at the very thought of Biden being wrong. Yes, it does look like the general assessment of how fast the Kabul government would collapse is wrong. This is what happens when you telegraph your next move.

Like Trump did – the guy who caused this in the second place (first goes to Bush). Like Obama did.

Hysterical instant assessments such as Erickson demonstrate a tension I’ve recently recognized to be inherent in democracy: The expert vs the clod who thinks his opinion is as good as the next guy’s. After all, it is a democracy, we’re all supposed to be equal … even if we forget that part about before the law.

Perhaps something more on that subject anon.

You know your favorite pundit is an inferior, knee-jerk hack if, concerning the conclusion of the Afghan debacle, they fail to note the following facts:

1. This intervention, war, whatever you call it, was started by President Bush (R) following the attack on and destruction of the World Trade Center, along with the attack on the Pentagon. While the top line goal of killing head plotter Osama bin Laden was not accomplished by Bush and his war, other objectives were accomplished, as pointed out by Jonathan Rauch.
2. Obama tried various tactics to overwhelm the Taliban, before suggesting we would be leaving near the end of his term.
3. Trump did little until the final year of his term, when, in a highly criticized move, he released several thousand Taliban prisoners in exchange for a cease-fire; he later promised that the United States would leave Afghanistan by September of 2021. Professor Richardson’s summary of events is useful. SemDem on Daily Kos, while inevitably biased, also has a useful summary.
4. Acts in the past influence events in the future. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Yet, many pundits have and will caper about as if Trump’s deal with the Taliban didn’t occur or should have been ignored. Neither is an honorable option, once the deal was struck.

In the end, Biden had to leave by September. As shocking as the fall of Kabul has been, it’s important to keep a few facts in mind:

1. How many American lives have been lost in this sudden crash? None.
2. How many Afghani slaughters have occurred? None reported so far.
3. What has hurt the most so far? American pride at failed nation building.

That, of course, is not the end of the matter for evaluation purposes. We need to worry about future events, future facts if you will: how many slaughters will still occur? Will Taliban oppression result in offenses against humanity? What of the Afghan translators who should have been given asylum?

The near-immediate fall of Afghanistan, so far, has not been a humanitarian disaster, although it could still become such a thing. The real disaster may be for an American military caught lying to multiple civilian administrations, unable to accomplish a mission that was often ill-defined, and the follow-on hit to its pride. The fact that Afghanistan was not a center for terrorism is, I fear, going to be forgotten by a mainstream (and far-right) media that has been trained to shallow thinking and quick-draw blame.

The messaging challenge for Press Secretary Psaki is going to be immense. I wish her luck.

And for you and your pundit? Remember, it’s ok for a pundit to make major mistakes, so long as they recognize them, apologize, and self-analyze. My favorite pundit, Andrew Sullivan, initially backed the Iraq invasion; when the consequent CIA torture sessions were revealed, he reversed positions, apologized, admitted actual shame, and then self-analyzed. For that, I respect him.

If you have a pundit that knee-jerked like, say, Erick Erickson did, I hope they soon apologize, too.

The American withdrawal from Afghanistan has attracted conservative criticism (such as here and here), but what I’ve read is operational criticism of the withdrawal, or that we’ve left at all. Liberal journalist Jonathan Rauch takes the longer view, suggesting that our failure to install a permanent Western-style government in Kabul (the President of Afghanistan has already fled) does not mean we’ve wasted our time, money, and lives in Afghanistan, particularly if our ideas have spread throughout the country:

Those are a lot of lives saved and improved. Even at their most monstrous, the Taliban cannot roll back all the gains of the past 20 years. In fact, back in power, they would find a different country than the one they left: one with a substantial Western-educated elite and a population that has known peace and progress. “That’s what’s going to challenge the Taliban or anyone who comes in to take over leadership,” Shuja Rabbani, an Afghan expatriate and son of a former president, told me. “They’re going to have a very different kind of fight to put up.”

Indeed, assuming this WaPo report is accurate …

Some of the restrictions the militants are imposing — burqas for women, long beards for men, forced attendance at mosques — hark back to their rule of the late 1990s. But new restrictions are intended to rein in 21st century technology and advances in women’s rights.

Mah Jan, who taught under Taliban rule, said militants monitored teachers and their relationships with aid groups before they were toppled in the 2001 U.S. invasion, but they were not coercive. Now, she said, “the Taliban have grown very brutal.”

… suggests the Taliban may be painfully aware that the population of Afghanistan, exposed to Western ideas and technologies for twenty years, may not be as easy to control as they were prior to the Western invasion. That might contribute to the explanation for what appears to be greater brutality in their rule.

So President Biden decided to end a war that, incidentally, Trump wanted to end. Biden must be aware of the problems of simple humanity in the machine of war: an evasion of responsibility, just as credit is unjustly pursued when available. Here’s Kevin Drum:

There’s no question that the US policy class has a lot to answer for here, but the bulk of the blame has to be placed on the army. They were the ones on the ground. They were the ones who built an Afghan military that was completely unsuitable to the country. They’re the ones who apparently never grasped the full extent of the corruption they were up against. They were the ones who advised four different US presidents that things were going well if they could just have a little more time and a few more troops.

The US military is hardly the only organization that hates to be the bearer of bad news. Nor are they the only organization that hates to admit they can’t do the job they’re being asked to do. But an unwillingness to do these things was one of the primary reasons we lost Vietnam, and our military leadership at the time swore it would never happen again.

But it did, just as soon as they found themselves in a similar situation. I remember years and years of blathering about counterinsurgency during the aughts, with army officers insisting that we could learn how to do it and skeptics pointing out that there were practically no examples of successful Western counterinsurgencies in the entire era since World War II. But after David Petraeus left the scene everyone got tired of this stuff and the nation’s op-ed pages moved on to other things.

If Biden was uncertain that he was getting accurate information, given the fog of war, along with deliberate misleading reports, he may have decided to stop trying to perform a miracle and get out. The fact that the Afghan government forces are collapsing like dominoes may not – may not – suggest a Biden botch, but that we, as a corporate intelligence, really didn’t understand the situation.

Rauch’s conclusion:

For all of those reasons, I am resolutely agnostic on Biden’s withdrawal decision. Anyone who thinks the answer is obvious hasn’t thought seriously about it. Given the many imponderables and unpredictables on both sides of the equation, the intuitions of the president and the public may be a better guide than any stack of white papers.

Regardless, consigning Afghanistan to the “lost wars” category is a mistake. Even if withdrawal brings chaos, that does not mean the operation was a failure. Decisive triumphs like victory in the Cold War are grand but rare; more often, liberal countries succeed by muddling through, temporizing, and preventing the worst rather than achieving the best. In Afghanistan, the U.S. did not achieve the best, but a generation-long dividend of security, stability, and decency is something to appreciate and learn from, not something to condemn and dismiss.

I am inclined to agree. Jumping to conclusions, such as that Biden should resign!, strikes me as a rush to judgment, especially from the right, who have been trained since the Reagan era to rush to judgment whenever that judgment can be thrust upon a Democrat. Rauch notes that the war achieved a number of objectives; a populace brought under Taliban rule is already known to be losing much of its younger generation, and it may find its remaining subjects to be restive. Given the number of arms available, the Taliban may find itself suffering unexpected losses as it attempts to clamp down.

I could be wrong. The immediate collapse of the Afghan government forces is a bit shocking and suggests they were never really ready. Time will tell.

Fellatial:

1. Of or suitable for a blowjob.
2. Of the nature of blowjobs, servile, fawning, with involvement of the mouth in a hoovering motion.
3. Ready to suck off those in authority, usually in exchange for favors, prestige or political appointments.
4. The way things work in Washington. [Arnold Zwicky, Language Log]

That definition is merely part of a much larger discussion of fellatial and other words in its family. However, please note that it’s rather explicit and vulgar in its word selection, so readers of a tender or prim disposition may wish to skip that reading.

In any case, fellatial is noted in “The Price Of Tucker Carlson’s Soul,” Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish:

And in his fellatial conversation with Orbàn, Tucker actually allowed the prime minister to give the impression that Hungary was now dealing with immigration from other European states, when, of course, it’s Hungary that’s fast losing its younger population to freer societies like Germany and the UK. He also let Orbàn give the impression that he was defending a Christian country against secular nihilists, when, in fact, post-communist Hungary is profoundly secular, and Orbàn’s adherence to Christianity is about as credible as Trump’s. The transactional cynicism of this money-grubber is world-class. And the simpering flattery of Tucker made Sean Penn’s interview with Fidel Castro look like hard-hitting journalism.

Both Zwicky’s definition and Sullivan’s dissection of Carlson’s visit to Hungary as little more than manipulative entertainment are a reminder that the position of reviewer, pundit, and/or critic has, as its salient feature, an independent and fair-minded aspect to it that bans the quelling of criticisms of ideological allies. That is, an ideal specimen, despite necessary opinions and inclinations, discounts implicit alliances and applies critiques regardless.

Anything else is intellectual dishonesty, and the perceptive reader soon learns to discard such claimants to the position of critic, as they are unlikely to share a single observation that is both honest and surprising; more likely, they will be dishonest in service to their evil master, which is, oddly enough, loyalty.

Carlson is not a journalist, despite his claims. He’s, at best, an inept entertainer, trading in hatred and anger; at worst, he’s a propagandist for the worst in human nature.

Your anxiety makes me want to punch you out!

In the murder mystery Scoop (2006), the emphasis isn’t so much on the mystery at hand – who’s killing this string of women of a singular physical description? – as the promotion of two of the stars. While there’s nothing new or wrong about such star vehicles, it is disappointing that a more intriguing plot couldn’t be put together for these up and comers – Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson.

Sondra is an American journalism student attending a magic show in London, and finds herself on-stage and participating in a magic trick. The box is shut, she disappears, and a recently deceased and famous journalist pops up and tells her who he thinks is responsible for the activities of a serial killer.

How does he know? He just interviewed the most recent victim on the other side. And he has problems of his own.

With the bumbling assistance of the bumbling – but very sincere – bumbling bumbling magician, Sondra plunges into investigating Lord Peter Lyman, rich, famous, politically ambitious – and single. One thing leads to another, and our youngster journalist believes she’s cleared her love for further assignations and eventual wedded bliss.

Meanwhile, the reluctant bumbler happens to have some mystical logical inductions of his own, and, sadly, ends up driving on the wrong side of those darned English road – it turns out being from Brooklyn while in the middle of England is decidedly a curse in this story.

In the end, this story just doesn’t quite work, as characters who should perhaps care for each other more just fail to do so. I found myself wondering just what was wrong with these people that someone ending up dead didn’t really seem to affect at least one other person; meanwhile, the murder victims exacted more tears than goggling we usually see on the screen. This make Scoop interesting but, ultimately, disappointing.

And, personally, I was cheering on the late journalist, hoping he could piss off Charon, who always comes off as too cold.

A bit of fun.

NBC News reports on the travails of Rep Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) at a fundraising event:

Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, was heckled at a fundraising event Wednesday night when someone in the audience rebutted him for saying the 2020 presidential election wasn’t stolen.

In the clip, posted to the YouTube channel of Bobby Piton, a Republican Senate candidate in Illinois, Crenshaw says: “Don’t kid yourself into believing that’s why we lost. It’s not.” Piton appears to interrupt Crenshaw by shouting, “You’re wrong,” and saying he has “plenty of proof” that the election was fraudulent.

Crenshaw’s response?

Crenshaw responds: “Five different states? Hundreds of thousands of votes? You’re kidding yourself.”

A better response?

“Really? That’s great news! You know, if you have evidence of a crime, you’re legally bound to report it to law enforcement, so, tell you what, I’ll escort you right to the FBI’s local office so that you can make this important report. Who knows, maybe the former President will give you a hug when he’s reinstalled in the Oval Office. OK, let me take this microphone off and I’ll be right down, you grab your coat!”

Don’t bother to mention that lying to the FBI is also a crime, as the extraordinary debacle of retired General Michael Flynn is still an object lesson. This Piton character is signaling his loyalty to the failed former President, attempting to claim a portion of the MAGA base for his campaign run.

Poor guy. He looks like an idiot.

Quinceañera:

The quinceañera is a Mexican-heritage right of passage that celebrates a girl’s transition into womanhood on her fifteenth birthday. It is usually commemorated with a simple or elaborate party, or one somewhere in between. It’s akin to a Sweet 16 celebration, but done at 15 or “quince.” [Tribune-Star/Brazil]

Noted in “A Colorado county offers glimpse of America’s future,” Silvia Foster-Frau, WaPo:

As she makes her way to her restaurant each morning, she passes by quinceañera venues, a tamale cafe, a Mexican candy store and shops for wire transfer services. Her customers often greet her in Spanish, standing at the counter below a string of papel picado — colorful Mexican banners — and in front of a menu with a mix of Spanish and English words, advertising items like “chicken nuggets con papas” — with fries.

There were in bloom and looking great.