I’ve been remiss in acting – both personally and as a blogger – to assist some of the great charities helping our wounded soldiers.

Today, Emily Cochran emailed Joe and me, and asked for our help in putting out the word on ‘Helping Our Heroes Foundation‘ a 501c3 charity that makes small cash grants to needy families of injured troops. They also undertake morale programs for the patients and staff at Walter Reed hospital. It’s a great cause, and I just PayPal’d $50.00 – my lunch budget for the week. I’ll do this every other week for a while.

I can brownbag for a week, and so can you.

Today was the traditional time-trial (solo ride against the clock) prolog to the Tour de France, where media darling (and damn good cyclist) Lance Armstrong will be going for #7.

Over the next three weeks, the peleton will be riding over 2,100 miles at race pace on a high-stakes trip around Europe.

Check out this post and photo, showing Lance catching (and then passing) one of his major rivals, Jan Ullrich – who started the course one minute before him.

Lance finished second by two seconds to US phenom (and ex-teammate) Dave Zabriskie, with Lance’s main defender George Hincapie in 4th.

It’s going to be a great three weeks…check out the great TDF blog for frequent updates and be cooler than everyone else at the office.

Allez, Lance!

Law professor – and apparently legend in his own mind – Brian Leiter has a post up rationalizing his lack of civility in blog discourse.

There’s not a lot new here – it’s a well-picked over field. But I want to take a moment and add my own spin to the well-deserved criticism he’s getting.

And note if you will that it applies to Duncan Black, Tbogg, Yglesias (all too often) and others on the left…it’s a variant of “I just can’t believe you aren’t bowing the ineffable rightness of my positions” that we’re used to seeing from the smart fat guy in the isolated cubicle – the one who knows more than anyone else about the fine points of the interactions between the Venice Specific Plan, the California Coastal Act, and Los Angeles planning law, or multi-threaded processing on early x86 chips, or the student films of George Lucas, or prewar Hegelian theory in the works of Lukacs.

But very few of them have much to say about how things are actually run.

They do coalesce into groups, sometimes – in my own experience I’ve run into them acting in concert primarily in evangelical religion, and in the net-based Randian community. It’s virtually impossible to have dialog, in the traditional sense, with many members of either group, because once you point out that you don’t accept the basic premises their worldview is crafted from, you’re simply not worth talking to. It’s a colloquial version of the Stalinist “if you don’t support us, you must be crazy” model. Lately, I’m seeing them coalesce more and more into the Opposition to Bush.

Leiter stands foursquare in the middle of that intellectual style:

These questions, and many others, are easily addressed in the blogosphere, since there is no serious–or at least no honest or intelligent–dispute about the epistemic merits of the possible answers. Where I get into “trouble,” of course, is with those who can’t tell the difference between the two kinds of questions, the ones who think that the dialectical care, caution, and intellectual humility required for the genuinely “hard” questions ought to apply to the easy questions as well. These folks are a bit miffed when I dismiss their positions out of hand. But that is what their positions usually deserve.

Boy, there are so many problems here.

Let me suggest three, two of which are grounded in my own intellectual history, and cite thinkers I’ll happily hold up against Professor Leiter on their worst days, and one which is based in reality.

Leiter explains that the following are “easy” questions, which have yielded to his towering intellect the only true and correct answer possible:

Was the U.S. justified in invading Iraq?

Are Bush’s economic policies in the interests of most people?

Is Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection a well-confirmed scientific theory?

Is there a social security “crisis”?

All of these – based as they are in complex questions of history, economics, sociology, and history of science are what Horst Rittel meant when he talked about “wicked problems.” I’ve blogged about these before, but let me touch on a few highlights. They set out ten rules for defining wicked problems:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy in representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
10. The planner (designer) has no right to be wrong.

Other than #10 and the question of Darwin, these rules seem to apply fairly well to all of Prof. Leiter’s “easy questions,” making them all, in my mind, pretty clearly wicked problems. What do Rittel and Weber suggest is the solution to wicked problem in the real world? In a gross simplification, dialog.

Before I studied with Rittel, I studied American political theory with John Schaar.

Prof Schaar wrote a lot about the failure of progressives in the 60’s to capitalize on their success and radicalize the American population. He harped on one these:

“Finally, if political education is to effective it must grow from a spirit of humility on the part of the teachers, and they must overcome the tendencies toward self-righteousness and self-pity which set the tone of youth and student politics in the 1960’s. The teachers must acknowledge common origins and common burdens with the taught, stressing connection and membership, rather than distance and superiority. Only from these roots can trust and hopeful common action grow.”

I’m interested in advancing progressive ideals – which I see in large part as using the power of government in favor of the less- rather than more-powerful. While I don’t spend a lot of bandwidth gnashing my teeth over what I see as Republican policies that favor the wealthy and powerful – as an institutionalized value – when it comes to applying the power of the law, it’s something that causes me a lot of distress.

I want to see a viable, powerful progressive movement in this country. I want this because those are my core values, and in part because we need the kind of back-and-forth dialectic that comes from two strong political wings to keep refreshing our politics. In large part it’s because I’m afraid of what politics a class-stratified America might tilt toward.

And, to point out a small fact to Professor Leiter, the Democrats are getting their ass handed to them. The latest Democracy Corps poll shows a downturn in public regard for the Republicans, matched by a bigger downturn in regard for the Democrats.

With all due respect, I’ll suggest that one of President Bush’s – and the Republican Party’s – greatest assets is their ability to relate to the “folks.” Whatever innate feelings of superiority they may hold, their affect is lacking the obnoxious certainty that’s displayed by Professor Leiter or the air of superiority and entitlement shown by both the Professor and his candidate, Senator Kerry.

Which beings us to the title of this piece.

I said a long time ago that the current Democratic leadership was actively harming the poor by failing to become an effective force in arguing for their interests. The wealthy and comfortable apparachniks of the Party, and the tenured supporters of the party like Leiter, live well while the poor and near-poor struggle.

If they were doing their jobs – if they were building a powerful and effective force for progressive values in this country – no one would mind that they were doing well by doing good. But the reality is that they are marching the Democratic Party off a cliff, and their arrogant blindness – and the fact that they revel in their arrogance – is one of the main reasons. Not only does it drive away what Leiter calls the “brainwashed” “cowed” and “fooled” by it’s affect, but it leads to a myopia and unwillingness to change, react, and cope with the reality that is far from “easy.” So we get bad people expounding bad politics.

But they have tenure, and high self-esteem.

The fact that they are losing – and worse, harming the people who depend on them winning to survive by losing – is something they can talk about on their blogs, in the therapist’s office, or over a nice Viognier.

Have one for me, Professor Leiter. Drink to another decade of corporatist Republican power – brought to us by you and your arrogant, immature, and foolish colleagues on the Left.

Update: Here’s an image that pretty much sums up my view:

–

From the Zaman Daily News (hat tip to Harry):

The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) composed of various international non-governmental organizations, academics, including professors of law, lawyers and judges have found US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair guilty of the war in Iraq. [ed. – they say this like it’s a bad thing…]

…

Bush and Blair were found guilty on the following charges:

Primary charges in symbolic verdict

Planning an aggressive war and implementation by violating the United Nations (UN) Convention and the Nuremberg Principles

Targeting Iraqi people and the infrastructure of Iraqi society, using limitless power and arms

Implementing fatal violence against peaceful demonstrators

Implementing torture and ill-treatment on Iraqi soldiers and civilians

Willful destruction of the environment during clashes

Obstructing the right of information and censoring of the media.

(emphasis mine)

As I said before:

Because on some basic level, we assume that we’re the TV cowboy, and that the bad guys can fire all the bullets they want and the only thing that will happen is that our authentic Western sidekick will get a hole in his hat. They assume that we’re omnipotent and omniscient.

From the Register:

The India Times continues:

If the recent visual footage acquired from strategically placed cameras in a leading Mumbai-based business process outsourcing (BPO) unit showing a couple having sex in an office cubicle is anything to go by, workplace sex is no longer an aberration for most couples working in India’s sunrise sector. With work schedules stretching into long hours, and bonding happening between emotionally lonely employees, sex is just a manifestation for physical needs as two individuals try and seek a connection.

And what do the clients make of this? Well, According to BPO hotshot Prakash Toppo: “Since most of our customers are influential, they want cameras as they are dealing with a lot of sensitive information. For the couple caught in a sexually compromising situation, the one question that arises is why were they doing what they were doing in the office premises.”

We can answer that one for you Prakash: You spend 12-13 hours a day sitting in a room attempting to seek a connection with irate BT customers. After a while, your emotionally loneliness kicks in and you decide to seek a connection closer to home. Suddenly, in walks Ashish Gupta with a “let’s go to fourth base you call centre minx” look in his eye…

Anyone reading this who has recently outsourced his or her call centre operation to Mumbai should not, however, imagine that the BPO management is going to take this rampant promiscuity lying down. J Kalyanaraman, Human Resources supremo at HCL Comnet, asserts: “Filming is essential as it is in tune with keeping the faith of employees. It’s not a breach of employee privacy as there is a huge amount of customer-sensitive information involved, so it makes good sense to impose surveillance. First instances of compromising behaviour (kissing, smooching in the office premises) are let off with a stern warning as such kind of behaviour is similar to misuse of facilities given by the organisation and is therefore liable for punishment.”

Quite what this punishment is, we do not know, but it likely involves being locked into a secure cubicle for a month and put on conservatory sales cold-calling duty. Or worse – three months on the BT overdue bill roster. Cor blimey.

The world is …flat… indeed.

Intel Dump‘s Phil Carter and I went to dinner last night; it’s something we’d been talking about doing for a year and not gotten around to, but when I got word of his impending deployment I emailed him and simply said “When and where?”

We met in Santa Monica, at the ‘Library Ale House’ on Main Street; and after a few Anchor Steams (him) and Jamaica Red Ales (me) managed to lay out the problems in the world. We may have even solved a few, but for the life of me I can’t remember exactly how.

Phil is in person exactly what he seems online. Thoughtful, smart, funny, reflective. Even when we disagree – which happens seldom, but happens – I find myself happy to be involved in a dialog with him because I know we’re engaged in the same project – trying to solve the problems we say we’re trying to solve because we’re in them together, rather than using the problems and arguments as a level to elbow one another aside.

Then we had a funny thing happen…For those of you not from Los Angeles, please understand that if the Blue states have a beating heart, it’s located within a block of where we were eating. I’d bet serious money that Chirac would easily beat Bush in an election held there, and that “W-’04” bumperstickers are only found on the trucks of the tradesmen doing work there.

A guy walked up to us, excused himself, and said “Pardon me, but you just look really familiar to me. Did we know each other in Iraq? I was in Mosul.”

Phil and I looked at each other, surprised, and Phil explained that no, he hadn’t been there yet, but would be within 90 days. Our visitor (and I’m kicking myself and apologizing for not noting down his name) explained that he’d been injured when an IED flipped his vehicle, and had come home to have orthopedic surgery and recover.

Phil and I wished him well, and thanked him for his service. He’d been in for 15 years, and wasn’t sure what he would be doing next. We suggested that getting better ought to be the first step, and then all kinds of possibilities would open up.

We all shook hands and he left with his fiancee.

Phil then pointed something out to me that I hadn’t thought about until then.

Five years from now, guy like this – Iraq veterans – are going to be an incredibly powerful interest group. Neither of us would be surprised to see them start running for office in significant numbers (note that Blackfive already points to one who says he will). And that has some serious and interesting implications for the Democrats if they continue to be painted as the antimilitary party, and for the Republicans if they don’t back up their pro-troops rhetoric with serious veterans services.

And in case you’re wondering, of course I bought.

I’ve been meaning to blog about the discussion around the “Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo” – the interesting article by Rick Perlstein, but it was promptly covered by most of the rest of the world, but in case you missed it, he argues, in short, that Boeing was a great company because it worked to ‘break the model’ with planes like the 747. It then became stalled as it trimmed it’s strategy to the quarterly flow of the markets, and drifted.

I think that’s a useful model, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which his that I think that what people want is a sense of being led toward a vision in which they could share, and that leaders who had integral visions, and could articulate them, had the chance to break open the day-to-day tactical struggle in business or politics and reshape the world.

I like that metaphor, and believe strongly that the Democratic Party is going to be a opposition party until they get that pesky vision thing down and have a vision that is more concrete than “speak truth to power” “peace” “justice” and “impeach Bush.” Those phrases bring back warm fuzzy memories of my own youth, but even then on my most pot- and jug wine addled nights I never expected anyone to actually run a country based on them.Reihan (who’s really smart and you should be reading, BTW) challenges this notion, and points out that Boeing has, once again ‘broken the model’ with the 787 Dreamliner, which appears to be beating Airbus up, eating their lunch and then making them do the dishes to boot.

Conveniently, the ad copy neglects to mention that Perlstein hangs his analysis on the many failures of Boeing, a company relentlessly focused on the “stock ticker” — i.e., short-term financial gains — as against Airbus, for decades a government-backed consortium that engaged in all of that “long-term planning,” what some might call crony capitalism, Atari Democrats loved in days past. Old habits die hard. It’s a compelling narrative. Old Europe is teaching Boeing a few new tricks, or so Perlstein, clearly not a very keen student of political economy, would have you believe. The trouble is that Boeing is kicking Airbus’s ass.

Reiohan, Reihan..it’s a metaphor. It’s not meant as a literal model for how the Democrats should be (Make the Democratic Party more like Airbus Industrie!!…no). It’s a useful way to explain the difference between what the Democratic Party actually does – which it to set policy by some arcane combination of scrivening of entrails (sadly, not those of the political consultants who keep leading it off cliffs) and a secret Esalen encounter group between interest group leaders – and what it should be doing, which is to sit down and craft an explicit vision of how it will make life better and more secure for the vast majority of Americans who are looking down the barrel of unstoppable globalization. Or something, anything that implies a solid connection to the future.

Valentino Rossi became the first Yamaha rider ever to win five consecutive premier-class races after another authoritarian performance in the 75th anniversary Gauloises Dutch TT, where he was joined on the podium by his Gauloises Yamaha team-mate Colin Edwards.

Yamaha press release

I hope they didn’t mean to use that word…but it leads to an amusing reverie in which dictator Valentino Rossi insists that we all laugh and wear funny costumes while riding 200mph motorcycles.

I wonder how the liberty-loving blogosphere would react to that…

From the excellent “Counterterrorism Blog“:

Today Italian newspapers announced that authorities in Milan have indicted 13 CIA operatives for the kidnapping of Abu Omar, a radical Egyptian cleric that “disappeared” from the streets of the northern Italian city in February of 2003. The step represents a major upset to the CIA’s “rendition” policy and could create a potential rift with one of its closest allies in the War on Terror.

I’ve argued in the past against the notion presented by some opponents of the war in Iraq that an – equally tough on terror – policy is to simply hunt down and kill or capture the terrorists wherever they happen to be.

This is a horrible policy for a large variety of reasons, one of which is that it simply doesn’t work well – the Clinton Administration actually did a pretty good job of identifying and prosecuting the perps in terror attacks, and Al Qaeda managed to flourish regardless. Another is – as noted above – that it violates the sovereignty of other countries (and is itself, I believe, an act of war in a certain sense).

Another issue, I strongly believe, is the culture created by emphasizing this kind of covert activity. I don’t think we need a lot of secret warriors, and I don’t think that such an army would be good for us in any way.

We need some – I have no illusions otherwise – but if they become the primary means or even a primary means of force projection, we’re in trouble. And I don’t just mean with Italian magistrates.

Just a moment to waste your time and publicly brag about members of my family (and maybe point you at a neat film).

Today, Middle Guy graduates from high school. He had an amazing run, did well academically and in his activities – but most of all, managed to build himself a cadre of incredible and admirable friends. I tend to judge people a lot by who they surround themselves with – and in his case that judgement is overwhelmingly positive. They are headed off to universities all over the country, from Harvard and West Point (yes, Robin is going to get one of them) to Berkeley and U.C. San Diego, which is where he’ll be headed.

I couldn’t be happier or prouder for him today.

And TG was out last night watching herself in a documentary – “The Grace Lee Project.” It sounds delightful and fun, as Korean-American filmmaker Grace Lee decided to do a documentary on all the Grace Lees she could find.

TG is a wonderful woman, and I’m a lucky guy, and now she’s famous!!