Safety in Numbers?

John Isaacs and Travis Sharp of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation have produced a side-by-side comparison of the military capacities of American and Iranian forces, which illustrates the staggering disparity between the two countries. America will spend almost 100 times as much on defense as Iran does in FY09 ($711b vs. $7.2b). We have almost 35 times more armored infantry fighting vehicles and over 17 times more helicopters than the Iranians do. We have 170 long-range bombers and 53 airborne early-warning aircraft; the Iranians have none of either.

Isaacs and Sharp, along with Matt Yglesias, cite these numbers as proof that Iran doesn't pose the "existential threat" that some in Washington have been saying it does. And that is true. But I think that saying so fundamentally misses the point. Haven't we learned anything from Iraq? If we had done the same side-by-side comparison in February 2003, the Iraqi military would have looked about as pathetic as the Iranian one does today. And, true to the predictions, the Iraqi military did fall without much resistance when the Americans rolled in.

Unfortunately, though, it's no longer that simple. The report mentions (but only in the fine print at the bottom) that estimates of the number of paramilitary forces available in wartime range from 450,000 to 12.6 million, the latter figure being the Iranian government's (probably overstated) estimate. If we assume that we send a force into Iran that is roughly comparable in size to the one we sent into Iraq (which would be tactically questionable but probably all that the military could get politically), we'd be outnumbered anywhere from 2.5-to-1 all the way up to 63-to-1, assuming an American invasion force of 200,000. And this is in addition to the 900,000-strong Iranian Army - remember that while that number is substantially smaller than the size of the American Army, the Iranians would be able to bring a hefty percentage of their total forces to bear in the defense of their homeland.

So Yglesias, Isaacs, and Sharp make the right point, but for the wrong reason. We should not invade Iran, partially because they are unthreatening, but mostly because it would be counterproductive. In the old days of warfare, technology and manpower dictated the outcome. But these aren't the old days, a fact which the Iraq debacle should have indelibly stamped into our collective consciousness. The road to Tehran, should we make the colossal mistake of invading, will look much like the road to Baghdad: littered with IEDs, car bombs, and all of the other fiendishly clever and frighteningly effective cards up the insurgents' sleeves. It happened to the British and Russians in Afghanistan, it happened to us in Iraq, and it would happen to us again in Iran, APC counts be damned.

The Dislocation of Relocation

(Cross-posted from the Breakthrough Generation blog)

Much as I love my fellow leftists, we have the habit of continually making some pretty crippling oversights in our political views. For example, we very often underestimate the importance of community and social connections. Nowhere is this more evident than in proposals, such as the 1994 “Moving to Opportunity” initiative in Chicago to move massive numbers of families out of poor urban neighborhoods and disperse them into the suburbs: proposals that are not nearly as uniformly beneficial as many leftists would like to think they are.

Such ideas are fundamentally flawed insofar as they fail to take into account the non-material impacts of picking a family up and moving them to a new subdivision, neighborhood, or town. Moving, particularly when it involves crossing racial and/or socioeconomic lines, is a difficult thing to do. You arrive in your new “home” as a stranger in a strange land, a de facto outsider even in the most welcoming of communities.

But community is not just a network of acquaintances: it is a set of practices, customs, and shared understandings that can only be fully grasped over time. Rather than being something that simply exists, every community is actively created, and then sustained, by its constituents. The practices can be as weighty as voting, as mundane as putting out the recycling for pickup on the correct day, or as ingrained as using the correct local slang words. But they are all essential to the character of a particular community. To do them, and do them correctly, is to be included; to fail to do them, even if you tried your best, is to be marked as outside the shared experience of the locals (epitomized by that most exclusionary of questions – “you’re not from around here, are you?”).

Relocating people out of urban ghettos and into the suburbs flies in the face of this notion of community. The newly-settled often find themselves unmistakably differentiated from their new neighbors, be it by skin color, preferred style of clothing, accent, or any number of other characteristics. After all, the whole point of these programs is to bring people out of the cities and into areas with a “healthier” culture, which must necessarily be different from that of the urban areas in at least a few important ways.

It is likely that at least some of the values, support systems, and norms of suburban communities are indeed healthy ones, ones that we would like to see develop in all groups of people. But relocating people to the suburbs fails to highlight these contrasts, or if it does, it highlights them in a way that serves to alienate and discomfit the new arrivals. The poor may end up making more money after moving to the suburbs, but the act of moving tears them from the fabric of their community and then clumsily tries to incorporate them into a fully-developed suburban social scene. The aftereffects of this often mitigate the quality-of-life improvements stemming from increased income.

So how do we address the very real problems of life in urban ghettos without destroying communities? To me, the solution is to go directly to the urban areas themselves. Fix up inner-city schools rather than busing kids out to the suburbs. Invest in after-school programs and other extracurricular activities. Rebuild dilapidated buildings, creating jobs in construction as well as in whatever companies end up occupying the new spaces. Yes, any sort of intervention will inevitably force some aspects of an existing community to change, and as such, these types of efforts are not entirely free from the destructive effects I described above. But by allowing people to stay in the same homes and social networks, we would preserve quite a lot of what made that particular community what it was, something that is far more important than most leftists are willing to admit.

Ceci N'est Pas Un Choice: Musings on Paternalism

Paternalism. These days, the word has taken on an almost entirely negative connotation. And yet, paternalism is everywhere, whether we realize it or not. By manipulating subtle things like the order in which food is presented in a buffet line, or the particular type of voting procedure used in an election, authority figures can steer us toward making a particular decision without our ever being consciously aware that they are doing so.

Sometimes this is a good thing: in the buffet line example, putting dessert at the end of the line makes people less likely to eat it, which in the long run probably rebounds to their benefit. On the other hand, many people derive great pleasure and enjoyment from things that paternalistic worldviews would advocate abolishing, such as gambling, smoking, and other risky endeavors.

We do not encounter paternalism solely on a personal scale, though. Much of international relations, such as attempts to spread democracy into the developing world, can be conceptualized as paternalism writ large. Even if it is true that Country X would be better served as a democracy than as whatever it currently is, as soon as another country does anything more than talk to them about it, they have crossed the line.

Most discussions about paternalism get bogged down here, as they attempt to decide whether paternalism qua paternalism is a good or a bad thing. I don’t want to do that. Paternalism is inevitable. We are human beings, and one of the things that human beings do, particularly in politics, is try to win other human beings over to their side of an argument. Clearly there should be some limits on what sorts of persuasive tactics are acceptable: rational discourse is OK, Russian roulette is not. But paternalism, or at least all but the most heinously coercive forms thereof, must fall within the acceptable realm. How would you outlaw it without simultaneously preventing experts from using their knowledge to improve people’s lives?

I am of course willing to acknowledge that at times, paternalism may impinge on an individual’s “freedom of choice.” But there are also instances when it is unarguably better for the person in question to make one decision or the other. It is impossible to eliminate bias and outside influence from any human decision, and to rail indiscriminately against paternalism is to attempt to do so. Furthermore, to say that paternalism is unequivocally bad is to commit the very offense that is being condemned: attempting to impose your view of what is best for people upon them.

So what can we do? Tell people about ways in which sleazy salesmen might try to scam them; make psychological research commonly available; refuse to use military force if another country wants to continue to do things its own way. All of these are productive ways to combat malicious forms of paternalism. But don’t crusade against paternalism per se in the name of Choice.

How Neighborly of Them

As if it weren't already obvious enough that John McCain is quite a different animal from most of his compatriots in the Republican Party, to say nothing of the rest of the country, consider these numbers from Gallup, courtesy of Matthew Yglesias. 79% of Democrats and 70% of Independents favor negotiations with "enemy" leaders, as do a surprising 48% of Republicans. This, of course, begs the question of how exactly such negotiations go against "what America stands for," as McCain has alleged previously.

In other news, the Obama campaign had it exactly right when they said recently that the Iraq War "has done more to dramatically strengthen and embolden Iran than anything in a generation," and that McCain's argument that withdrawal from Iraq would be a boon for Iran should therefore be taken with a vein of salt. Indeed, just about the only thing the Iraq War has accomplished is giving the Iranians confidence and object lessons in how to stand up to the Iranian military, much as Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 2006 did wonders for Hizbullah's popularity and influence.

Furthermore, it's not exactly like the American presence in Iraq is preventing the Iranians from doing much of anything. The centrifuges at Natanz and Bushehr are still spinning away, and while Ahmadinejad's recent showing in the parliamentary elections may not be a vote of confidence for him in particular, the radicals show no signs of closing up shop in the Majlis. We would be leaving Iraq in a state of disarray, and the Iranians couldn't exactly waltz right through it on the way to Israel - even ignoring all of the IEDs and roadside bombs, the large Sunni population in Iraq probably doesn't have particularly high opinions of Iran (both because of Iran's Shi'ite tendencies and because of grudges from the brutal Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s). And don't talk to me about how we can't let the Middle East descend into general chaos: America, not Iran, is far and away the most destabilizing presence in the reason.

Beware the Reductio ad Hitlerum

President Bush's "appeasement" comments really annoy me. The rhetoric itself is bad enough - yes, I know he didn't refer explicitly to Senator Obama, but really, did anyone out there think for a second that he was talking about anyone else?

But what really gets me is how factually wrong Bush is (although I guess I should have gotten used to this a long time ago). Obama is not calling for appeasement, and never has. Let's take the case of Hamas. Obama has explicitly said that he wants Hamas to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel, but, unlike the administration, he has also said that he will not insist that Hamas must comply before any negotiations can begin. This is not appeasement. Appeasement would involve us trying to figure out a way for Hamas to keep doing whatever they want to do, preferably with as few casualties of our own as possible. Appeasement derives from the verb "to appease," which has a connotation of making the other party content/happy/satisfied. Something tells me that Obama's demands aren't going to leave Hamas happy or satisfied. But in order to get anything from them, we have to be willing to compromise, and compromise happens over a negotiating table, not at gunpoint.

Finally, one thing that Bush said in the article linked above really stood out to me as emblematic of why his administration has failed so spectacularly in the Middle East. In straw-manning Obama's motives for calling for negotiations, Bush derisively said that Obama must have the intention of "persuad[ing] them they have been wrong all along." No, Mr. President, that's not the goal. We're not going to persuade them that they're completely wrong, because no one likes to be told that, and all it does is put people on the defensive and make them more hostile to you. You went into Iraq determined to prove that the Iraqis were wrong about everything, and it blew up in your face. Even though these groups may have methods and/or visions for the future that we don't entirely love, they certainly do some things right, and they also have the support of a lot of people on the ground. We're not going to get a surrender out of Hamas, or Ahmadinejad, or any of them, so we have to try for a compromise. And compromises don't happen without respect or without dialogue. Obama is far more invested in both of these than the current administration ever was. This doesn't make him an appeaser; it makes him a realist.

John McCain: He Was In Favor of Hypocrisy Before...Wait, He Still Is

So the latest piece of news out of the McCain camp is that his choice for RNC Chair spent some time in 2002 working for the military junta in Myanmar. And this wasn't exactly pro bono representation, either: they were paid over $300,000 to lie about the junta's generally reprehensible (mis-)treatment of its citizens.

So basically, John McCain called out Barack Obama because Hamas independently came to the conclusion that they "support" Obama, while at the same time retaining someone who had actively worked for the brutally repressive Myanmar junta. And it's not like he made these accusations at a time when it was unclear that the Myanmar thing would come to light: he made them on Friday, multiple days after the cyclone had hit and the junta's nature had come to light. Can someone--anyone-- explain his logic to me?

Letting sleeping dogs lie

Matthew Yglesias writes that Hizbullah's actions in Lebanon over the past few days demonstrate that it is primarily focused on gaining power within Lebanon, rather than attacking Israel or the West. Of course, such sentiments trigger a flood of "Are you kidding me?????" sentiment, based on Hizbullah's repeated declarations about how much it hates teh Jewz.

But Yglesias is completely correct in his assessment, and here's why: if Hizbullah really were interested in attacking Israel, it would never begin by taking over the government of Lebanon. Israel, for all of its faults (of which it has many), is a very, very powerful military force, one that has proven itself capable of defending itself against, oh, the entire Arab world (cf. the Six-Day War). The IDF is extremely well-equipped, possessing state-of-the-art weaponry on land and in the skies, along with the world's only operational anti-ballistic missile system. On top of that, the Shin Bet (Israel's internal security service) and the Mossad (foreign intelligence) are among the most feared and respected such organizations in the world.

The thing is, though, that Israel has shown itself to have the same problem as America: it's good at conventional warfare, but bad at fighting asymmetrical wars. So, if you were Hizbullah and intended to put yourself in the best position to strike at Israel, why in God's name would you start by taking over the Lebanese government? All that that would do is expose you to being targeted by the IDF! Remember what happened to America in Iraq: we were great at taking down Saddam's regime, but terrible at rooting out the insurgency afterwards. Governments are easy to attack, seeing as how they tend to have very obvious and vulnerable institutions (such as Parliament buildings, courts, and other such things). They have to be visible to their people, and in doing so they make themselves visible to the enemy.

What Israel learned in 2006 was that all Olmert's horses and all Olmert's men couldn't root out a determined, battle-tested, and (most importantly) agile insurgent group. If Hizbullah were to succeed in carrying out a coup d'etat in Lebanon, it would sacrifice a critical piece of that agility. I don't mean to imply that Hizbullah would necessarily be destroyed by Israel if it tried to launch an attack after establishing itself as the ruling party in Lebanon: its bases of support in the countryside are likely too strong, and Israel may prove to be more wary now than it was back in 2006. But Hizbullah would certainly be inviting a serious body blow, and courting disaster is not something that any successful resistance organization wants to do. Hizbullah may want power in Lebanon. It may want to attack Israel. But I seriously doubt that it wants to do them in that order.

Why isn't Michel Aoun a household name yet?

Surprise, surprise: Beirut is a war zone again. And, even less surprisingly, the tangle of alliances resembles a veritable Gordian knot.

But it's worth looking into who's fighting whom here, because no one seems to be talking about the most important piece of it. The media has been telling the story of a conflict pitting Hizbullah and its allies, whoever they may be, against the Western-backed government, led by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. When reported this way, the conflict looks like nothing more than the same old song and dance: an Islamist organization, seething with hatred for All That Is Good And Holy (read: the West, particularly America), grabs up weapons and starts trying to impose its vision of a new societal order, dissenting opinions be damned.

If you read between the lines, though, the story gets much more interesting. Because, you see, Hizbullah's allies aren't the radical Islamists that everyone seems to assume they are. In fact, their most powerful ally is none other than the Free Patriotic Movement, a political party led by a former army commander named Michel Aoun, who just happens to be a Christian. Yes, that's right: Hizbullah, the "terrorist organization" which the American government says is following in the ideological footsteps of Ayatollah Khomeini, is allied with a Christian. (Digression: this is further evidence that the American government actually has no idea of what's going on in the Middle East. No organization that supported Khomeini's belief in vilayet-i faqih would ever ally itself politically with a party headed by a non-Muslim. In order for vilayet-i faqih to work, the Jurist in charge has to actually be a Muslim.)

And there's more. Not only is Hizbullah allied with the FPM, but two years ago it signed a public memorandum with them outlining the goals of their partnership. There are a lot of interesting words in there, but Section X is far and away the most surprising. In that section, which talks about protecting Lebanon's sovereignty, the two groups address the issue of Hizbullah's (substantial) military capacity. While no solution is explicitly given, the document quite definitively states that any acceptable solution must "objectively define conditions that would eliminate the reasons and justifications for keeping these weapons." In other words, two years ago Hizbullah signed a document in which it promised to disarm itself, making no mention of the obliteration of Israel as a precondition.

Why isn't this being talked about? Am I the only one who sees it as a good thing that Hizbullah has allied itself with the Free Patriotic Movement, which calls for, among other things, women's rights, adherence to international laws, and democracy in its charter? Hizbullah probably doesn't like Israel any more now than it did before it entered into this alliance, but this type of gesture, crossing religious boundaries to further objectively positive ends (i.e. the disarmament of the Lebanese militias) should cause people to stop and take notice. Terrorist organizations don't do this sort of thing, Mr. President.

I've saved the best part of this story for last: according to Hizbullah's website, al-Qaeda has declared war on Hizbullah. The stated reason is that al-Qaeda wants to "defend the Sunni community of Lebanon." I'd be shocked if Hizbullah's alliance with the FPM weren't part of the calculus as well. Either way, Hizbullah is clearly starting to run afoul of at least one segment of the radical community. Those of us who have an interest in winning some support in the region might do well to ask why.

With Friends Like These...

So Larry Lucchino, president and CEO of the defending world champion Boston Red Sox, came to speak at Calhoun yesterday. He said a lot of interesting things, but what struck me the most were his thoughts about payroll disparities in baseball. We aren't talking about a minor phenomenon here: Alex Rodriguez makes more money than the entire Florida Marlins roster combined, and the Yankees roster in total makes only slightly less money than the rosters of the Nationals, Pirates, A's, Rays, and Marlins put together. Revenue sharing has helped the situation somewhat - while the Yankees are still far and away the most profligate spenders, there are now 12 teams with payrolls between $138m and $98m, ranging from big-market teams (Red Sox, Mets) to small-market ones (Blue Jays). But the problem with revenue sharing is that it lacks an accompanying salary floor. The opposite of a salary cap, a salary floor is a minimum amount of money which must be spent on player salaries. It is designed to make sure that teams actually take their revenue sharing checks and put them to their intended use (i.e. paying players) instead of siphoning off the money into the owners' bank accounts and continuing to field a cheap, mediocre team.

On its face, a salary floor seems like a good idea, and one would assume that the players' union would be behind it - after all, unions have long championed minimum wage laws, which is basically the concept behind a salary floor (albeit applied to the collective wages of all players, not to each individual). Surprisingly, though, the players' union is vehemently opposed to a salary floor. The rationale, at least according to Lucchino, is that the union opposes any attempt to regulate salaries at all, fearing that it would be the first step on the road to salary caps (either for a team or for individual players).

Basically, the players' union is allowing its irrational fear of a slippery slope of regulation to dominate its thinking, resulting in a situation where the Marlins can field a team with an average salary of about $650,000 while the average Yankee makes just over 10 times that much. Is it just me, or does this scenario run counter to the raison d'etre of unions? Unions are supposed to look out for all of their members, not just the powerful ones. Instituting a salary floor does not necessarily mean that a salary cap is coming, and even if it did, why would the union give preferential treatment to the elite players (whose exorbitant salaries would be reined in somewhat by a cap) instead of the average players (whose low salaries would be increased by a salary floor)?

The free market may be good for some things, and it may allow certain individuals to reap enormous rewards, but it is emphatically not an egalitarian system - the strong survive, and the weak are trampled down. Unions are, at their core, supposed to be a way to counterbalance these Darwinian tendencies. Maybe someone should tell the MLB players' union this...

Please excuse the lack of posts

Have been swamped with work for the past few weeks, and now it's reading week, followed by finals week. Will try to get in a post or two, but either way I'll be returning with a vengeance around mid-May.

How do you say "Gallup Poll" in Hebrew?

The Economist has a very interesting piece on its website today about the opinions of residents of the Middle East regarding the upcoming elections. Not surprisingly, their preferences are most influenced by the candidates' views on foreign policy, but two things really jumped out at me.

The first thing is how close the ratings of McCain and Clinton are in the Israeli press (7.75 and 7.5, respectively, on a 10-point scale with 10 as the best - Obama gets a 5.12). McCain and Clinton obviously differ in their predictions and prescriptions for Iraq and the Middle East, but, at least in the Middle East, those differences clearly aren't seen as being all that important. Unfortunately, the article doesn't include any rankings of Bush, so we can't say for sure whether they see any difference between Bush's policies and those of Clinton/McCain. But if the view that McCain is just a wrinklier version of Bush is anywhere near as prevalent in Bethlehem, Israel, as it is in Bethlehem, PA, then the perceived similarities between McCain and Hillary can't be a good sign for her.

The other thing that stood out was Obama's support among the Arabs. Most interesting was the note about how badly the "Barack Hussein Obama" disparagements have played in the Middle East. Again, guys, the Middle East situation is as much about perception and framing as it is about actual policy. If we elect Hillary, not only will we have elected a president whom the Arabs are less enthusiastic about, but we will have failed to elect someone whom they do seem to support. I'm not sure which would hurt us more...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection: Forcing You to Check Your Dignity at the Gate Since 2007

(This was supposed to be posted shortly after I arrived home from Turkey last week, but the vagaries of my college schedule conspired against me)

So it's about 2:15 p.m. in the afternoon the Saturday before last, and I've just landed at Logan International Airport (that's in Boston, for those of you from outside the New England area) after a seven-hour flight from Frankfurt. At this point I've been traveling for 18 hours, so I don't really feel like I'm in any condition to get riled up about anything. Once my family and I finally get off the plane (good lord, 747s take a LONG time to empty out), we head to Customs, where I am greeted by the sight of non-US citizens waiting in line not only to have their passports checked, but to be fingerprinted.

Yes, that's right. EVERY SINGLE NON-US CITIZEN had to get fingerprinted - all four fingers and the thumb on both hands, using some little gadget installed at the little Customs booth where the guy in the uniform sits. I nearly blew a gasket when I realized what was going on; it's probably a good thing that I didn't, because my doing so probably wouldn't have gone over too well with the Customs officers.

But this new "security measure" (read: procedure by which civil liberties get further curtailed) has continued to gall me ever since I saw it. First of all, is this really a good time to make America seem even more paranoid to all of the 5.5+ billion humans who don't happen to hold one of our passports? We're not going to negotiate with the U.N., we're not going to sign global warming treaties, and now we're going to fingerprint everyone who wants to come to our country? This is sure going to help our image in the Middle East, guys. Although, to be fair, at least we can't be accused of racial profiling if we subject everyone to this nonsense.

I expect that most rebuttals to my indignation would be something along the lines of, "Adam, you're being ridiculous - September 11 changed everything." Whether it did or not is neither here nor there (it didn't, by the way). Even if it did, what possible purpose does fingerprinting everyone who enters the country serve? Someone should inform the Bush administration that, much as it might surprise the denizens of the White House, terrorists aren't actually stupid. The vast majority of the plotters either have no criminal record or have taken the necessary precautions to make sure that they won't be caught on a cursory background check. And an even vaster majority of the actual bombers/hijackers/operatives who carry out the attacks are recruited from madrassas, slums, or rural villages - bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and unencumbered by any criminal history. So the likelihood that fingerprinting will actually catch any of the fish that the police are presumably looking for is, quite frankly, astronomically small.

What about the few terrorists (be they masterminds or operatives) who do have existing criminal records? Or what about the theory that we should get everyone's prints on file so that, while they may not be heading for a car-bomb appointment this time, they'll be caught when and if they attempt to do so in the future? To both of these questions, my response is simple: are our neighbors doing this, too? If a terrorist wants to set off a bomb in America, he's not going to mind flying to Guadalajara or Toronto or even Buenos Aires, hopping an appropriately stealthy means of ground transportation, and entering the country overland. Unless everyone starts checking all incoming passengers, all we've done is add a little detour to the travel plans of the terrorists from whom we are trying to protect ourselves.

Yet again, the American government has proven its ability to adopt comparatively ineffective defense mechanisms in the most egregiously offensive way possible. In the modern world, terrorist operatives are extremely hard to pick out of a crowd, and terrorist masterminds never need to leave the comfort of their home half a world away from their target(s). And while America is protected by two rather large oceans, it's not as if the only way to get to America is to fly into an American airport and pass through Customs. But despite these glaring flaws in their strategy, the Bush administration continues to beat on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

If A Muezzin Shouts In A Forest, And Nobody Prays...

Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, southwest of Reykjavik.

Currently sitting on the plane back from Istanbul, where I have spent the last eight days – apologies for the hiatus in posts, but sacrifices must be made at times.

Turkey is a very interesting country in many ways, quite a few of which will find their way into my writing in the coming days. But I want to begin with the most salient one to any visitor: the omnipresence of the muezzin, and its incongruity given the general balance Turkey has historically struck between religion and secularity.

The muezzin, in case you are unaware, is the guy who issues the call to prayer five times per day by bellowing…something…in Arabic from the minarets of the local mosque. There are approximately 2,000 mosques in Istanbul today, all of which resound with the more-or-less sweet strains (depending on the quality of each mosque’s loudspeaker system) of the muezzin at the five predetermined times: pre-dawn (approximately 5:40 am), noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and “nightfall” (sometime around 8 pm).

As any visitor to Istanbul will readily attest, you can’t escape the muezzin when the time comes. The only time during the eight days I was in Istanbul when I was awake and didn’t hear him was while sitting on the tarmac at Ataturk Airport (more on him later) for my flight home.

Yet for all of their volume and effort, the muezzins had no visible influence on the Turks. I was in Istanbul for eight days, and I saw no one – I repeat, no one – stop to pray when the muezzin started up. Of course, sometimes this was because I was in my hotel room, or in a tourist-heavy locale where all of the people around me were either non-Muslims or had been trained to ignore the call to prayer for fear of scaring away the tourists and their wads of cash. But even when we were wandering around the residential sections of the city, where no one around us spoke anything other than Turkish, the muezzin’s call went seemingly unheeded.

So what does this say about Turkey? Perhaps it just means that the government's famous commitment to enforced secularity has won out over any Turk's instinct to publicly express his or her religious convictions? But the muezzins are Turkish government employees: the government owns every mosque in Turkey, and the calls to prayer are thus explicitly sanctioned by the government. The answer is clearly not that Turks are not religious people: there are 2,000 mosques in Istanbul alone, and over 80,000 in the country (according to our Turkish guide).

The most obvious answer would seem to be that prayer has simply been relegated to the private sphere: if you are in private when the muezzin starts up, you pray; if you are in public, you don't. But if prayer is a private endeavor, why is the call to prayer such an obtrusively public one? The Turks have a long and proud history of iconoclasm when it comes to their religious institutions, starting with Ataturk's abolition of the caliphate after a nearly 1300-year run. So while some countries might broadcast the calls just out of deference to tradition, Turkey would not seem to be one of them.

I am not in a particularly great position to posit explanations for the behavior of the 15,000,000+ residents of Istanbul, nor to generalize it to apply to the rest of Turkey. In the more conservative eastern and southern portions of Turkey, for example, I would bet a lot of money that when the muezzin shouts, many more people stop and pray. But the fact that I am not a Turk, nor was meant to be, does not make what I observed any less striking to me. If nothing else, the observations of foreigners may at least help to dispel stereotypes.

And the award for the most ridiculous excuse ever goes to...

...Ms. Geraldine Ferraro, for her response to the backlash about her comments that Barack Obama owes his success to his being black. Ms. Ferraro, who apparently has a history of saying stupid things about presidential candidates, said on "The Early Show" (CBS vintage) that "it wasn't a racist comment, it was a statement of fact."

If you read the article linked above, you will see that this woman has too much of a history of saying this sort of stuff for her response to have been anything other than dead serious. Leaving aside the logical Mobius strip that Ms. Ferraro must have been traveling down in order to believe that the statement-of-fact comment was a good thing to say, this sort of thing worries me. As I blogged about previously, it is a known psychological phenomenon that the mere mention of an idea, no matter how outlandish it is, will convince at least a few people that it is true. So while the vast majority of people have reacted to Ms. Ferraro's rantings with the contempt that she deserves, there will be at least a few voters who will believe her. And in a race as close as this one, that is a problem.

But what bothers me most about this whole thing is the lack of outrage from the Clinton campaign. The only thing that we've heard on the matter from a Clinton spokesman (one not named Mark Penn!) is that they "do not agree with" what Ferraro had to say. Notice that they didn't say anything about how disgustingly wrong-headed the comments were, or about how such words are a clear violation of the style of campaign that Hillary initially promised to run - that is, one free of attack ads and other staples of negative campaigning. They're desperate for anything they can get now, particularly after watching the minuscule gains they made on March 4th evaporate, and then some, with the results from Wyoming and Mississippi. But have they really fallen far enough that Ms. Ferraro is no longer worthy of their contempt?

Looking Gift Horses in the Mouths

For those unfortunate ones among you who aren't from Boston, the title refers to our often-trashy tabloid newspaper, the Boston Herald, which is good for Red Sox coverage, intolerance, and little else. Unfortunately, we appear to be dealing with the second category here - specifically, an article by the Herald's Michael Graham about Harvard's apparently reprehensible practice of clearing one of its gyms of men for some period of time six days per week to allow orthodox Muslim women to use the facility in accordance with a shari'a. The article goes on to detail other scandalous practices that Harvard engages in, such as accepting a $20m gift from a Saudi sheikh designated to fund the study of Islam - scandalous because the same sheikh also gave money to a fund to support the families of suicide bombers.

With all due respect to Mr. Graham, I am appalled. His views on the gym-use regulations are actually the least offensive of the positions he takes in the article: I don't have a problem with accommodating the Muslim women, but I think that one might perhaps be able to make a case that Harvard could have found a less intrusive way to do so.

But that's not what has me incensed. Graham's disgusting rants about Sheikh bin Talal are. Let's be clear about this. As far as we know (or at least as far as Graham knows), bin Talal did not finance suicide bombers. He did not train them, arm them, or aid them. What he did do is to aid the families of said bombers AFTER THE BOMBERS HAD KILLED THEMSELVES. Graham's argument is that the bombers, armed with the knowledge that "their kin will benefit financially" thanks to bin Talal's funding, are more likely to go ahead and blow themselves up, and therefore supporting bin Talal is akin to supporting suicide bombings.

Umm, WHAT?!?! Maybe it's just me, but I have a hunch that an Iranian feels grief just like an American does - while I have never experienced it personally (thank God), losing a child/brother/sister must be one of the most devastating things a person can be forced to endure. Simple human compassion and empathy would seem to dictate that we try to help people in such terrible positions. Furthermore, if we are trying to figure out ways to reduce the prevalence of suicide bombings, mightn't the parents and relatives of deceased bombers be persuasive and provocative spokespeople for our cause? The bombers themselves can't come back to talk about how much (or little) their act actually changed things, but their families can.

On a more basic level, though, Mr. Graham glosses over the actual purpose of Sheikh bin Talal's gift: ISLAMIC STUDIES. Whatever his previous associations may have been, bin Talal is quite clearly not intending to spread terrorist ideologies (or whatever other nefarious plots Mr. Graham may want to ascribe to him). On the contrary, he is actively trying to increase understanding of his religion, his homeland and his people, and he is doing so at one of the most respected institutions of the country to which radical Islam is supposed to be opposed! This is an olive branch if I ever saw one, a clear attempt to open a dialogue with rational Americans and increase awareness of a chronically misunderstood culture.

Sheikh bin Talal's gift is a welcome change from the usual anti-American rhetoric, and has the potential to redound to the benefit of all parties involved, American and otherwise. But it will apparently only do so if people like Mr. Graham are not on the receiving end.

Still waiting for the stump speech conducted entirely in charades from the campaign that says words don't matter.

During Hillary's speech in Ohio tonight, CNN cut to a shot of the crowd chanting something that sounded remarkably like "Yes we can."

Good job, Hillary. You've inspired chants you can Xerox.

A funny thing happened on the way through the blogosphere

So imagine my surprise and delight when I saw yesterday that Matt Yglesias had posted something about John Rawls on his blog. I think I largely agree with his criticism of A Theory of Justice (TOJ), but I wanted to put my two cents in on the issue.

First of all, for all of his strengths as a philosopher, Rawls was a mediocre writer at best, and a downright awful one at worst. This flaw is on full display in TOJ, in which Rawls is maddeningly prone to rambling, obfuscation, and general failure to do his ideas justice with his prose. And Yglesias is correct to point out that for all of Rawls's verbiage, he has remarkably little to say about what his ideas mean for the real world.

That being said, I think Rawls deserves more credit than Yglesias gives him. I have always been a big fan of the veil of ignorance as a theoretical construct - it is elegant, well-described, and potentially quite useful. Rawls's difference and maximin principles are similarly well-developed, and also have the advantage of being surprisingly concise, at least as political philosophy goes. The veil of ignorance is hugely impractical, of course, and can never be implemented in its purest form: we all have our biases, and all of our thinking is irreversibly influenced by our socioeconomic background. Nevertheless, it can often be a useful exercise to try to imagine how one might feel if one were in stuck on a significantly less desirable rung of the social ladder, and by doing so we can often get a good enough idea of what the less well-off experience to be able to more effectively combat it. [Editor's note: Now that was a sentence worthy of a philosophical treatise, lengthwise if not content-wise]

So while TOJ is not a silver-bullet solution to the problems of establishing justice, it certainly contains some interesting insights and a few cleverly-designed tools to use in evaluating individual circumstances. And given the general lack of silver-bullet solutions to philosophical quandaries, that's a pretty respectable accomplishment on Mr. Rawls's part.

Weirdest Campaign Memo EVAR

Was checking what Matt Yglesias has to say for himself today, and saw a post about this campaign memo sent out by the Clinton campaign today.

If you're resorting to stuff like that, Hillary, it's time to throw in the towel. Obama's lead in Texas, according to the most recent American Research group poll, is 7%, and he's closing the gap in Ohio. Hell, while walking to Rite-Aid earlier today, I saw on the ticker of the New Haven NBC affiliate that Obama is within 6% in Pennsylvania. I read the memo above as a shockingly blunt quasi-admission of defeat. Hillary has been trumpeting Texas and Ohio ever since Super Tuesday; to see her already pre-spinning anything short of an Obama sweep is astounding. The memo says that if Obama fails to sweep, "there's a problem" for the Obama campaign, because he will look bad after pouring resources into losing efforts. Maybe it's just me, but didn't he pour resources into California? He lost that one, but it doesn't seem to have affected him all that much - and that defeat came before the Hot Streak.

But the single most bizarre (and, in my opinion, most damaging) line is the last one, which asserts that anything short of an Obama sweep would demonstrate that the Democratic voters "have their doubts about Senator Obama and are having second thoughts about him as a prospective standard-bearer." But the entire memo up to that point seems to be doing nothing but demonstrating how the Clinton campaign is having second thoughts about its own ability to secure the nomination. Projecting their own self-doubt, perhaps? Freud would have a field day...

In other news, John McCain can't seem to figure out how to classify himself politically. Yglesias makes a good point about why Republicans are having a hard time reconciling themselves to McCain, and his calling himself a "liberal Republican" sure isn't going to help matters. And anyway, shouldn't the pilot of the Straight Talk Express be able to refrain from describing himself as "conservative" and "liberal" in the same breath? I realize that this is politics we're talking about, but contradictions in terms seem to be a bit beyond any conceivable definition of "straight talk."

Light dawns on marble head(s)?

Took the RNC long enough, but it looks like they finally got around to denouncing the Tennessee Republican party's ridiculous insistence on using Obama's middle name all the time. Now, I wish we lived in a world where saying someone's given name didn't inherently damage their reputation. Hussein is one of the most common names in the Arab world, one which, unfortunately for Obama, also happened to be shared by a certain dictator. But any rational person should be able to realize that there is no connection between Senator Obama's middle name and Saddam, right?

...right?

Tell that to Senator McCain and his illegitimate black child from way back in 2000. One idea from psychology is the so-called "Spinozan system" of belief formulation, whereby we see something and immediately make an assessment of its validity without seeking any further evidence - only later might we try to validate or disprove our initial judgment with, oh, I don't know, facts. So when a source we'd like to trust, such as someone in the government (or at least someone associated with it), puts forth a piece of "information," there is a decent chance that at least some people out there will use this irrational-yet-effective Spinozan system and blindly accept a patently ludicrous proposition. The more credible the source appears to be, the more likely this blind acceptance becomes.

So we have something of a perfect storm: ignorant Americans who only know "Hussein" as referring to Saddam, not to the thousands of other people with that name; the Spinozan belief-formation system, and its unthinking acceptance of absurdities; and the credibility that information gains by being distributed by the government. It was a pretty ingenious piece of propaganda on the part of the Tennessee Republican Party. But really, guys, couldn't we be putting that ingenuity to better use?

Starting a blog in the middle of midterms is probably not the most fruitful of endeavors. But I really couldn't let it sit empty for the next little while. So while you may have to wait until the weekend for any actual content, at least there are words now.