But if you want to see propoganda in the making…

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…just look at this:

The economy of pushing bits around representing money is doing relatively well.

The economy of making stuff and selling it each other – not so much.

And as much I detest the thought of an economic future where my kids either engage in a tournament to see if they can get jobs at Goldman, or decide that making or selling luxury crafts to the people who do is their plan – it’s worse, because it’s unsustainable.

(h/t The Money Game)
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…I’m not sure what I could possibly add.

(h/t The Monkey Cage)
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Rev. Sensing has a post up that mirrors what I was going to write about nuclear deterrence.

I’ll be honest enough to say that I don’t know enough – yet – to know what impact the new agreements really will have; that’ll take some time.

But for myself, I kinda liked bipolar nuclear deterrence – and I think we’ll all miss it.
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*Sometimes not possible. If not possible replace with being beaten mercilessly about the head and shoulders, complaining about being beaten mercilessly about the head and shoulders, etc.

Littlest Guy just put together a document on his plans and commitments for the year…this is the footnote.
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Over at progressive defense blog, Democracy Arsenal, Michael Cohen gives a great insight into progressive defense thinking.

He’s passionately arguing that the Surge in Iraq didn’t work…

Well those “other factors” are actually quite important – in fact, they are likely the dominant reasons why violence decreased in Iraq during 2007 and 2008 (and Andrew leaves out a critical one; the sectarian cleansing and subsequent ethnic enclaving that took place in Baghdad in 2007 and 2008, which contributed mightily to the fall in civilian casualties). In other words there were very specific factors that allowed the surge to “succeed” in decreasing sectarian violence in Iraq.

and

Of course we’ve had the debate many times – but we need to keep having it over and over again; because the debate over the “success” of the surge is, in my view, the single most important foreign policy debate in this country. I make this argument for two reasons.

What are his reasons?

But that notwithstanding, the implications of the pro-surge narrative is far more dangerous because it presupposes that the US “gets” counter-insurgency; that it can be fought in a manner that minimizes civilian casualties (which didn’t happen in Iraq); and above all the US military has the capability to successfully wage counter-insurgencies and that this core competency can be replicated elsewhere . . like Afghanistan.

and

So when many people say the surge worked in Iraq (and I’m excluding Andrew here); they are implicitly arguing that counter-insurgency worked in Iraq and the policy outcome is that COIN is seen as a feasible means of waging war by the United States. But if in fact Iraq’s emerging political stability was the result of a multitude of indigenous and exogenous factors of which the United States only played one role among many – then one would draw very different conclusions about not only the surge, but also the US military’s effectiveness in waging counter-insurgency. That is a pretty important debate to be having.

So, as I take Cohen’s core point, the Surge can’t have worked in Iraq…because if it did, we’ll think that we can actually fight and win these small wars, and so we’re likely to be too bellicose.

Each of these debates, in their own unique way, has informed the conduct and direction of US military and security policy. Indeed, if there is one lesson to be derived from these “lessons” it is that the historical interpretation of past conflicts can have an enormous impact on future wars.
Indeed, if you need any more evidence look to Afghanistan where the COINdinistas “lessons” from Iraq are being used to support military escalation and a dubious political/military strategy. So yeah, debating the surge matters and all of us who care about national security policy need to keep engaging in this conversation.

You know, I’ve got a lot of issues with what we’re doing in Afghanistan.

In the video I did with Uncle Jimbo, I said (starting about 2:50 in) “…to be honest, if you’re not a heroin addict in New York City, I’m not sure what America’s strategic interest in Afghanistan as a country really would be.” And I meant that, and mean it today.

If my son is fighting only to bring civil society to the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, eff it – bring him home tomorrow. Bring all of our sons and daughters home tomorrow.

I need to hear some kind of broader explanation of what we’re doing there and what we hope to accomplish through our efforts there – not only in Afghanistan itself, but in the region and in the rest of the world.

Craig Mullaney had the beginnings of some answers when I got to talk with him.

And I really do think we’re flunking Harry Summers’ basic test – the reason he gives for our failure in Vietnam:

In Vietnam we also did what we knew. As was said in the introduction to this book, in “logistics and in tactics . . . we succeeded in everything we set out to do.” But, as we have seen, our failure in strategy made these skills irrelevant. This is the lesson we must keep in mind as we look to the future. While we will still need “deeds of valor” and proficiency in logistics and tactics, we must insure that these skills are applied in pursuit of a sound strategy.

Now I’m guessing that Cohen and I will disagree pretty strongly on what that ‘sound strategy’ ought to be. I’m willing to have the debate.

Cohen wants to stack the deck and make sure the debate never happens. He wants to do that by writing history to suit his beliefs about where it should go, as opposed to his observation of where it’s been. That’s an incredibly, insanely bad idea.

Ask Enron, or any one of a host of other failed businesses.
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WASHINGTON (AP) Taliban release video showing American soldier captured [six months ago] in Afghanistan.

PFC Bowe Bergdahl is shown in the video, and appears to be in good health. My thoughts are with him, his family, and the troops we know are looking for him right now.

More here
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Ex-Un envoy to Afghanistan and Kurdish oil speculator Peter Galbraith just can’t get enough press for himself

Ex-U.N. envoy: Karzai may have drug problem
Peter Galbraith questions Afghan leader’s mental stability

Look, I’ve got a lot of issues with what’s going on in Afghanistan, but this kind of fantasy regency from afar does nothing but make things worse.

Galbraith needs to stick to silent influence-peddling and profiteering; it seems he’s better at that than diplomacy.
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Other than the obvious political reasons (I didn’t like the process, lack of transparency, messaging), I’ve been unhappy with the Healthcare Reform bill(s) because they were healthcare finance reform, not healthcare cost reform.

And no matter what financial engineering you do to hide escalating costs, eventually you have to pay them.

Here’s a great presentation from Kaiser CEO George Halvorsen – forgive me if it’s been passed around – that nails my objections and talks about solving the problems in ways that make sense to me.

Smart people do not kill the geese who lay lots of golden eggs.

Health care is awash in both golden eggs and very smart people.

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Patterico posted an extension of the comment he made here about intent, interpretation, and meaning.

As I take his post, it suggests that he broadly wants to push back against intentionalism, and to suggest that the plain meaning of language – as interpreted by a reasonable listener – should rule our understanding what a speaker or writer means. Narrowly, he wants to push back against the use of legislative intent to frame the meaning of law, and return priority to the text itself.

This is murky damn water to be diving into; philosophy of language and understanding is one of the muddiest, hardest to navigate forms of philosophy that I’ve encountered. It’s very much a product of a Godellian problem – the structure of discussion of the problem contains the problem itself (Godel specifically said that “any axiomatic system of arithmetic would have true but unprovable statements — and that any formal system would therefore always be incomplete.”

I disagree (with Patterico, not Godel).

As my opening argument, please accept the following:

Here we have people who – through no fault of their own and with the best intentions – respond to being arrested by shouting “My nipples are bursting with desire!!” -because that’s what the phrasebook which they puchased told them was the translation from the Hungarian.

In court, the author of the phrasebook asks to plead “Incompetent.”

And in fact, at some level, all of us are incompetent in using our native languages. We do well enough to get our dinner orders right, but on many things we are unable to accurately express complex concepts (yeah, yeah, spare me the comments about my blogging…).

I live in the world of technology, specifically often software. Software is made of words – words with highly, incredibly, specific syntax and meanings that in turn create certain explicit behaviors on the systems decoding those words.

People spend years and years structuring statements in those complex, highly specific languages in order to make machines do specific things.

And interestingly, on adequately complex software projects, we find a class of problems called ’emergent’ in which they (ideally) arise from unforeseeable interactions (but often from ones that had simply not been planned for).

The brutal part of what I do, however, comes in the boundary between the mechanistic language of machines and the desires of the humans who want the machine to do something from them.

Requirements analysis is an immensely complex part of software development, and one that is – historically – very badly done. Badly enough that the best models for developing software today often skip formal written requirements in favor of rapidly evolving prototypes which users and developers sit together and build.

Translating the ambiguity of business processes and human behavior into highly structured steps that a machine can interact with is hard at the best of times.

And we haven’t even got to meaning or intention yet. My point? That text is something we create sometimes sloppily, sometimes well, and that on one hand I believe in making the plain meaning of phrase the way I take it – I also am sympathetic to context and, indirectly to intention.

I’ve worked doing legislation. A bunch of really smart people argue over every word, and work hard to make sure that laws are clear and unambiguous…unless the same smart people are working to insert a loophole, or to build in careful ambiguity to win support from opposing interest groups.

There’s no way that our body of laws as it stands today doesn’t have ’emergent bugs’ in it, and as strongly as Patrick will defend the absolute and literal meaning of the words in the law, there is no way that he or anyone else would be willing to live under a regime that didn’t mediate the law with the wisdom and consideration for these ambiguities that people like Patrick (who run our legal system) bring to bear.

But beyond the systems issues, I think that you have to embrace some level of intentional ism in the course of everyday language.

Let’s take a firebreathing case.

If I’m talking to a friend and I say “My nigger?” your interpretation is going to be different if we’re both white, both black, of different races, or are walking out of a screening of ‘Training Day’ (a great film where that line figures prominently).

Here there’s room for ambiguities of interpretation which range from – I’m a racist tool deliberately insulting a black man – to we’re buddies and speak in ghetto slang – to we’re re-enacting scenes from a film we’ve just seen. Leaping to judgment here is fraught with danger – but the worst case interpretation is so bad that we tend to avoid the words entirely, lest we say ‘niggardly’ when we mean cheap and lose our jobs.

And that case is one where I pivot, and say that the range for ambiguities of interpretation is very limited in scope and that it’s easily possible to go far too far.

In a paper I did a billion years ago on the subject, I discussed language as a map (I was reading Alford Korzybski at the time).

The point I made in riffing on his metaphor is that we all draw imperfect maps for each other, and yet most us manage to use them to get from here to there. Children draw maps that leave out whole continents, and yet their maps have a kind of coherence and integrity that usually makes them understandable.

We accept the imperfection of our maps, and use our awareness of what we actually see in the world to correct for the errors in the map – sometimes automatically, as we drive. And sometimes we get completely lost – even with good maps.

I just knocked this out between dinner and a drive to the symphony…what I wrote imperfectly represents the arguments in my head – because of the intentional and conscious nature of language.

But it’s good enough to get a language game going…
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