I’m not talking about a morality that appears when you mix two components; I’m talking about a morality that can only exist in one of two states: “bad” and “good”.

I’d been thinking about a kind of ‘Gresham’s Law’ of morality, in which weaker moral judgments make it increasingly impossible to make strong ones, when I read Orson Scott Card’s column referenced below.

What I’d been thinking about is a kind of moral refinement in which any bad thing is so bad that it immediately becomes the equal of the worst thing….A good example is the column on immigration referenced by Dean Esmay. His comment sums up the issue perfectly: “Apparently, bureaucratic hassles = police state.” It’s the same process that leads us to the foolish trope that “Ashcroft’s treatment of Muslim immigrants=Kristallnacht.”

No it doesn’t.

No one who knows anything about history can begin to claim that they are equivalent events. When challenged, the response is that morally, they are the equivalent – that it is just as bad to interview (and often intimidate) people, and occasionally to incarcerate them – typically with some cause, sometimes without – is the equivalent of sending the brownshirts through Dearborn, destroying, looting, and beating. I’m not a fan of most of the domestic security steps that have been taken, so don’t take this that way. But you can argue against them without this kind of nonsensical exaggeration.

It’s fundamentally a way of taking morality out of the equation; since I can find some stain on everyone, it must be true that they are all equivalent – that bombing a Passover seder full of Israelis is the same as bombing an apartment building housing a leader of Hamas. So it’s a matter of picking a team; kind of like choosing the NASCAR driver you are going to root for. You can’t judge, because you’ve given up any criteria on which to judge.

I choose this example (bombing that killed Salah Shehada) carefully, because to me it is the closest kind of call we have to make. Innocents die on both sides, and to me both are impossibly tragic. Yet to me, they are as clearly distinct – morally – as noon and midnight.

Adulthood is about being confronted with tough moral choices…between varying shades of grey. Children can throw their hands up and say “it’s all bad”; when I hear that from an adult, it makes me quite dismissive of that person’s judgments. Because yes, it is all bad, it is all good, there are no clear bright lines we can use to sort the saints from the sinners.

But if you’re willing to look hard, to get your hands dirty, to act like Hoderer and say: “Do you think one can govern innocently? Purity is a matter for monks, clerics, not for politicians. My hands are dirty to the elbows. I have shoved them in filth and blood,” (in Sartre’s ‘Dirty Hands’) you can act in the world, and in turn ultimately stand to be judged on your actions.

Morality is not a binary function, and cannot be reduced to one. People who say it can be are selling something.

— UPDATES —

• Anticipatory Retaliation comments: SRBM: Moral Equivalence and Economics.

• Inkgrrl commented a while ago: The Sliding Scale of Atrocity.

Over on Politech, Declan McCullagh has a press release on Big Internet’s ambivalent relationship with spam.

It appears that Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo teamed up to block a California anti-spam law, according to a press release from the office of the bill’s author, CA Senator Debra Bowen:

Backed by Microsoft, America Online (AOL) and Yahoo!, the Assembly Business & Professions Committee today refused to permit a vote on SB 12 by California State Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), a bill that sought to create the country’s toughest anti-spam law by requiring advertisers to get permission from computer users before sending them unsolicited ads.

Continued…

…

Today in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft announced it filed 13 civil suits against U.S. spammers for sending unwanted, deceptive, commercial e-mail to Microsoft customers. Meanwhile, at that same time, Microsoft was testifying in Sacramento, California, before the Assembly Business & Professions Committee against Senator Bowen’s bill, that would have banned spam and created an “opt-in” system for sending unsolicited commercial e-mail. If enacted, it would be the strongest anti-spam bill in the country, but Microsoft opposed it because it would have required businesses to get permission before sending e-mail ads (a concept known as “opt-in”) and would have allowed individual e-mail spam victims to sue spammers for $500 per spam.

…

“Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo! sit in committee with a straight face, saying they’re trying to improve the bill, while at the same time they’re back in Washington, pushing measures to wipe out this bill and every single anti-spam law that states have adopted over the past half-dozen years,” continued Bowen. “Why? Because they don’t want to ban spam, they want to license it and make money from spammers by deciding what’s ‘legitimate’ or ‘acceptable’ unsolicited commercial advertising, then charging those advertisers a fee to wheel their spam into your e-mail inbox without your permission.”

Bowen is a pretty damn trustworthy legislator, who has historically been on the right side of privacy issues.

(edited to correct missed word in Bowen’s description)

For those of you who don’t believe that – as an alternative construction – the devil is in the details:

“Buried deep within the latest news report on the deadly ambush of the 507th Transportation Maintenance Co. in Iraq on March 23, 2003, was a chilling nugget of information. It now appears that the soldiers who were killed or taken prisoner in that now-infamous firefight shared a common misfortune.

Their rifles had all jammed.”

Why did they jam?….

“The probable cause of this widespread weapons failure has been blamed on a government-issued lubricant known as “CLP” that has been provided to many … but not all … U.S. Army soldiers. A number of Army veterans and contractors have denounced CLP as totally ineffective in preventing sand and dust buildup in weapons in Iraq.”
…
“What is bewildering to veterans such as these is that there is a product that has proven effective in desert combat. MILITEC-1 Synthetic Metal Conditioner, manufactured by the company of the same name, has been approved for Army use and is already widely used by the U.S. Coast Guard, FBI and a host of other federal police agencies. But the Army apparently is still shipping CLP en masse to the troops and has resisted ordering the synthetic lubricant, forcing unit commanders to pay out of their own pockets to acquire it.”
…
“The problem, Kovacic said, is that the Defense Logistics Agency allegedly refused to ship MILITEC to a number of units heading for combat in Iraq, despite previous approval of the product for Army weapons. “So, if front-line commanders order this product,” he asked, “where does DLA have the authority to stop shipment? It is the brigade commander�s butt in battle and if he wants to use a different lubricant, because the government stuff does not work, he can.”

For want of a nail…

Actually the interesting lessons here are: a) the length of the feedback loop for procurement; and b) the importance of the smallest things.

Some of my shooting friends and I sent weapons cleaning kits as part of our contribution to the war effort; I’m happy to say that mine included no CLP…the units who we sent things to has specifically requested Militec.

One thing that got lost in this whole “leading a real life” thing I’ve been sucked into was a reply to Porphy concluding our discussion of the French censorship truc below.
G Gonzalez (in the comments) is definitely right, and so is Porphy. I let my distaste for media overkill (remember, we’re the house with no T.V.) tip the balance too far. Porphy’s comment nails it:

However, judging from Armed Liberal’s initial post, he didn’t know, either, that Eva Joly was involved in the case. His post seems to imply that third parties (say, journalists or others looking into the case on their own account, but not part of the trial proceedings) not only can, but should, be gagged by judicial decree.

This is not part of normal jurisprudence. I would ask if Armed Liberal thinks that third parties (reporters, bloggers, writers and the like who are otherwise involved in the proceedings but do “investigative reporting” into the matter and then write – either for publication in a newspaper, magazine, or book – on the topic, or speak on it – say, on radio or TV or even at a public forum somewhere) can and should be kept from talking about it, by court decree?

Je me rends (I surrender)…

Blogging has been light lately, as work has heated up a bit at the same time that my oldest son (Biggest Guy) came home from his first year at college, and my other two sons (Middle Guy and, unsurprisingly, Littlest Guy) finished out their school years, which always seems to involve a lot of interaction for me as a parent, both in terms of one-on-one with the boys, and in terms of school activities which I just can’t bring myself to miss.

Actually, that’s a misstatement – it’s not that I can’t bring myself to miss it, in the sense that it’s a chore I endure – but that I’ve come to delight in it.

Part of the philosophical change I’m going through is an appreciation of the pleasures of this kind of everyday life; in my own life it’s a true gift to have learned that I can have as much fun sitting at Little League closing ceremonies chatting with my neighbors as I can have doing the other, higher-profile things I love.

Much of what I plan to write about in the next month or so is both critical – of the fact that we seem to have trouble with the mundane details of things, and that we look on them as obstacles to the grand Romantic gestures that too many of us convince ourselves are what matter – and hopeful, because when you get away form the Washington-New York-Los Angeles media axis, and out to the Little League fields, lots of people do center their lives around the small accomplishments that real life is made up of.

I don’t deny the attraction of Romantic acts, or of introspection, or even of snobbery and elitism – and I think that a world made entirely of dutiful suburban communities would be horribly bland.

But somehow, the pendulum has swung a little to far from those kind of virtues, and I’d like to see it swing back.

I’ve been blessed to be led there by my three wonderful sons – for those of you who don’t have children, or who have young children, I cannot tell you what quiet elation comes from sitting with your son and realizing that you like and admire the man he is becoming. The credit is his alone, but the pleasure – that’s mine.

Scanning Instapundit, I notice that Glenn has a blurb up that says:

STILL MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: This time in France, where a book on the ELF scandal is being suppressed.

Amnesty International? Reporters Without Borders? Go to it.

Clicking through to Porphy’s site, I find:

This speaks for itself:

A Paris court last night halted publication of a book by a former investigating magistrate that claims France is institutionally corrupt.

The book by Eva Joly, who uncovered political and financial corruption at the Elf oil company, is the first by a judge to have been blocked by the French courts.

The stay is only “temporary”, but the precedent it establishes is. . .telling.

Arnaud Montebourg, a Socialist MP, said she should be given the Legion d’Honneur rather than be attacked for her honesty.

Mme Joly, 57, said the French establishment was one of the most rotten in Europe. “It is a country of networks that don’t like to be challenged.”

Yes. Quite. And the EU is a rough beast being born in its image.

Clicking through to the original story, I find:

A Paris court last night halted publication of a book by a former investigating magistrate that claims France is institutionally corrupt.

The book by Eva Joly, who uncovered political and financial corruption at the Elf oil company, is the first by a judge to have been blocked by the French courts.

The court ruled that publication of Is This The World We Want To Live In? might prejudice the trial of former Elf executives, now in its third month, which has already revealed the extent of political and financial corruption in France.

The court ordered that publication, intended for today, must be postponed until the trial is over. Mme Joly said she would appeal.

(emphasis mine)

The last thing I’d do in the world is try to argue specific issues of law with a law professor (something about an ear full of apple cider…). And I’m interested in how U.S. courts would deal/have dealt with similar situations.

But on its face, the request to delay publication until the trial is complete – ostensibly to improve the chances of a fair trial – doesn’t seem outrageously repressive to me.

But what do I know, I don’t think the French are evil, either.

Over at Armed Liberal, I’ve put up a list of favorite L.A. eating places. Go check it out (secretly, I’m hoping that commenters will lead me to some new places…)

There’s been a discussion on Sharon’s attack on Rantisi by David Adesnik on Oxblog, as well as Michael Totten, Dan Simon and Martin Kimel. I’d been meaning to comment on it, and jumping into this discussion seems like a good place to start.

I think the attack (the unsuccessful helicopter attack by Israel on Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of the political heads of Hamas) was charitably, a bad idea. In fact I think it was colossally stupid…It was a bad idea for two reasons:

First and foremost because while the drama in Israel and Palestine is written in the blood of the residents there, it is being played out for an audience of three.

The United States, the EU, and the Arab states. When these three drama critics make up their minds, we will have peace – almost regardless of the desires of the residents of the area.

The PA is funded by these three, and Arafat stays in power by distributing the loot. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the multiplicity of splinter groups are funded, primarily by the Arab states. They are also funded, both directly and indirectly by the EU, as well as by the rising Arab population in the EU (who act as the Irish population of Boston and the Northeast did and does in supporting the IRA) and to a small extent by the Arab population of the US.

“No bucks, no Buck Rodgers,” is how Tom Wolfe once described the space program.

I’ll suggest that martyrdom on an industrial scale is also an expensive proposition, and that subsidizing the infrastructure that proselytizes, recruits, equips, and delivers terrorists – and rewards their families when they have committed their acts – is the driving engine of the intehfada.

“No bucks, no booms,” is the way I’d put it.

What needs to happen – and what I believe is primed to happen, given the facts on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq – is the slow drying up of the resources that support the terrorist infrastructure.

The PA is slowly lurching toward financial transparency, and the intense pressure of the US on the EU, and the concerns of the EU about terrorism have the potential to show results in managing the PA’s own cash flow.

The Arab states, who have this year seen anti-Western terrorist acts on their own soil, are beginning to take some tiny steps toward limiting their cash subsidy of Palestinian terrorists.

By launching what was widely perceived as an unprovoked attack on Rantisi, Sharon allows himself to be cast as the heavy in this little drama, and made it possible for the forces that succor the terrorists to justify acting just a little more equivocally for just a little while longer. And the resources that feed the terrorist infrastructure – from the schools that teach hate, the media that broadcast it, the recruiters who find the candidate terrorists, to the terrorists themselves – who often admit they are doing it for the glory and financial security of their families – those resources will flow for a little while longer.

The second reason it was a bad idea is practical and tactical; if you have to fight, you always want to choose the time of the fight to your advantage. If your opponent is getting relatively stronger, act sooner. If the opponent is weakening in relation to you, wait. The politics within Palestine, and the politics between the Palestinian terrorists and their sponsors are complicated and chaotic. But all appearances are the that people whose opinions count are stepping away from Hamas and Hezbollah. The Iraqis aren’t writing any checks these days. The Iranians have their hands full. The Saudis are reviewing their positions.

Now much of this doubtless is dissembling, and I don’t doubt for a minute that the diplomats are good at telling us what we hope to hear.

But I don’t see anything that suggests that the ties between Hamas/Hezbollah and their sponsors in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the EU will be stronger in three months than they are today.

So attacking Rantisi three to six months from now wold have offered three advantages:

First, it is narrowly possible that they could have grudgingly accepted the roadmap and agreed to move toward a political solution (sure, I could win the Tour de France this year, too…). Not likely, but barely possible. I lost $5.00 Sunday night to someone who pulled the only card that would save their hand at the river (last card dealt in seven-card stud)…a 1 in 52 shot, and it came across.

Next, waiting weakens Hamas/Hezbollah as their funding is reduced and their legitimacy challenged by opposing forces within the Palestinian proto-state. They rely not only on a core of committed soldiers, but on a wider group of ‘casual combatants’; street kids up for a fight, a collection of the momentarily enraged, all financed by people whose career options are limited to cart vending and terrorism. Some of those may begin to see other options.

Finally, waiting strengthens Israel’s claims on the U.S., as it is seen as complying with yet another peace plan in the face of violent rejection by the other side. Right now, more than at any time since the Suez crisis, the opinion of the U.S. matters.

Sharon’s no idiot; no one in a position like his is. And he certainly has access to information that none of us out here in the safety of the Blogosphere have. But I’m hard-pressed to put together a logical or moral justification for the attack.

I’m sure some readers can suggest a few…

I had an interesting personal experience that gave me some insight into the capabilities of our Special Forces, and the power of the kind of 4th Generation management which they represent.

As a part of maintaining my own “Armed Liberal” skills, I had arranged to be part of a class taught by a former Special Forces instructor now instructing law enforcement and private classes while also contracting back to the military. At the time, I was also contracting for a large software development company, sorting out one of their troubled engagements….I had walked into a situation in which the team was not only disorganized and badly led, but had that wonderful sense of ‘geek entitlement’ that was so prevalent during the .com boom years. That spirit is one which suggests that half-efforts by technically competent people are really all that can be expected, and that the messy heavy lifting involved in actually getting things done is somehow less of a concern than shopping for a new Acura or standing in the dining room chatting.

As my loaded tone suggests, it’s not a work style with which I fit particularly well, and at one point I was louder and doubtless less diplomatic with two of my team members than I might have been. They had inadvertently shut down the client’s system and gone to lunch early, which was a Bad Thing because the system was an e-commerce system which made the client about $100,000 an hour. The client called and was extremely unhappy, and I paged them back to the office and we conferred.

We were in a corridor, and as my voice rose, doors started to open and we collected quite an audience.

One of them was the CTO of the company, my contract officer, who asked me to join him in his office, where he suggested that my skills at managing less-motivated team members might – as he put it – need improving.

He knew that I was taking the class, and hosting the instructor at my home. He suggested that as a former senior NCO, the instructor might have some helpful suggestions to make on ‘managing the unmotivated.’

So after I picked the instructor up at LAX and got him set up in the guest room at our house, we went off to dinner.

“I have a funny question,” I opened.

He gave me a concerned look, assuming that I was looking for some violent or secret inside stories, which we had agreed in advance would be off-limits.

I went on to explain my problem, and ask him the question: “How did you deal with unmotivated troops?”

He started laughing and sprayed some of his Bohemia beer on the table.

“Your boss doesn’t understand. There are no unmotivated troops in the Special Forces. That’s the biggest reason why they are special. Most militaries go into fights full of people who would rather be somewhere else, doing something else. The Special Forces are full of people who want to be right here, right now.”

He explained that as a trainer for Special Forces medics, one of his jobs was explaining to the physicians who rotated into camp clinics and hospitals that unlike regular troops, who used medical conditions as an excuse not to perform their duties and so exaggerated them, that they had to be alert to Special Forces troops who would mask the extent of their injuries because they did not want to miss training or duty.

“The problem isn’t getting them going, it’s holding them back,” he explained to me.

He then spent dinner explaining his interpretation (and since he’d Been There & Done That, it’s the most relevant data that I have on the subject) of management in the Special Forces universe.

My notes are pretty simple (note that the simplistic bullet-point conceptualization is entirely my own, and that his discussions were appropriately complicated, anecdote-filled, and rich in meaning and context):

SELECT – pick your people carefully

PROTECT – protect them from the inevitable petty nonsense, but make sure they know there are consequences from within the team for doing wrong

EXPECT – make it clear that you expect them to succeed, and that you expect that they will help the rest of the team do what it takes to succeed

INFORM – keep them well-informed of what’s going on, not only in their immediate environment, but on the broader levels as well

LISTEN – make sure they know that when they speak they are heard and responded to

GET OUT OF THE WAY – once you’ve set objectives and metrics, let them do their job

I took his advice, and – as I should have done sooner, and have done ever since – on returning to work had the offending sysadmins removed from the project. It worked, and it was the beginning of a long process that eventually got the project turned around.

Expat Scott M, over at Pedantry blog makes an interesting point in his post on the Israel-Palestine impasse (note that he’s wrong, but nonetheless gives us an interesting way to look at things).

He says:

There is a very simple notion in political science, one that goes back to Max Weber: A state possesses, by definition, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and it protects that monopoly. When a state is unable to protect that monopoly, it isn’t a state. There is no Palestinian state, and a non-existent state can not have a monopoly on violence. There is no possibility of anti-Israeli terrorism ending until there is a genuine Palestinian state with a monopoly on legitimate violence to protect. Any decision not to negotiate or make concessions until the violence abates is nothing but a cheap rationalisation for maintaining the status quo indefinitely.

[Update: Just found Donald Sensing’s post on the same subject…]

Continued…Here he’s quoting Weber who says, in Politics As a Vocation:

‘Every state is founded on force,’ said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy,’ in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state–nobody says that–but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions–beginning with the sib–have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

Scott misses last part of the same paragraph, in which Weber makes a key distinction:

Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the “right” to use violence. Hence, “politics” for us means striving to share power, either among states or among groups within a state.

To Scott, the unassailable fact that the PA cannot control sub-entities within the territory means that they, unlike Israel, cannot be held accountable for the actions of Hamas et al, and that Israel should ignore the provocations of other groups.

To me, it has the opposite sense; what standing does the PA have to negotiate as a state if they can’t act as a state and control “the “right” to use violence”?

I’ll suggest that we have a different problem to solve, which suggests a different set of solutions.

The typical path to statehood is tribe – nation – state.

What we have in Palestine is an attempt to create an artificial state directly from a set of tribes. It worked in Israel, because most of the Israeli immigrants came from established states, so the superstructure of a state was familiar to them.

It isn’t so familiar to the people who live in the West Bank and Gaza. This isn’t some racist argument that they can’t create or live in a state; it is just that they haven’t – ever. And to expect them to suddenly develop democratic institutions and accept the rule of law because we want them to – without having formed a nation, or any of the other intermediate stages of political development – is to engage in the worst kind of wishful thinking.

And when we assume that the forms of diplomacy and politics that work between states can work between a state and a non-state, we’re wishing as well.