Teleologic Blog: September 2006 Archives

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September 28, 2006

Is Islam Compatible with Democracy?

I have talked about this problem before. A year ago I gave a qualified yes. Now I am not so sure. This comment from a post by Donald Sensing captures the problem very neatly

Here is the root of the problem: Islam does not respect other religions. Or to put it in base terms: Islam is incompatible with religious freedom.

I’ll repeat what the whole problem with Islam and how it relates to the West, other cultures, other religions, etc:

Islam does not tolerate religious freedom.

And therefore we can easily gauge when we know we will have won this war: When Islam tolerates religious freedom (including apostasy from Islam). The “war on terror” is really a war for religious freedom. I wish we fought it in those terms. I wish our policies were based around that simple fact. But they are not. And we are floundering because of it.

So we have been fighting this war from the wrong angles. Unfortunately, most of the western world will not fight for religious freedom (the secular left); in fact they are finding common cause with the Islamists on this main account alone. So we have a internal rift in the West based largely on this fact. And the Islamists know it and have exploited the “useful idiots” of the secular left to maximum effect.

One thing can be said to be at the root of all “modern” democracies: They tolerate religious freedom not just in law, but in principle and practice of its populations. That is why the Islamic world is having a hard time with democracy; they cannot get the most basic tenet of modern democracies: true freedom of religion. Their people (Muslims) don’t believe in it, aren’t taught it, and abhor the thought of it. That is why even Turkey struggles with it.

So I rather argue that our goal in this war must be one that has one simple premise: We must find a way to force Islam to accept religious freedom (including apostasy). We have the obligation. If Islam cannot reform this basic tenet by itself (and the odds are highly against that) then we must do everything we can to make them.

I think that’s what makes this war against Islamists so very much different than our other wars against ideologies. We have failed to outline what the real problem is. We are afraid of pointing out the real problem:

And the root problem is that Islam does not tolerate religious freedom (including apostasy).

This is a huge problem and the author is correct, it is quite real in Islam. Another way of putting the issue was expressed by this post

I suggest, based on the examples of so-called majority muslim “democracies” that democracy and islam can coexist in a state of varying degrees of tension, but they are inherently incompatible. It is impossible for islam, even if most of its more violent features are sublimated, to be fully compatible with any social or political scheme that fundamentally relies upon freedom of individual thought and action and political/legal equality of all such free actors. If a muslim cannot decide to renounce islam and/or sharia and voice that decision, even submit it for discussion and vote by the community–and we know that’s flatly verboten even under relatively progressive islam–then islam and democracy are fundamentally at odds. I find it hard to comprehend why this rather obvious circumstance would even require discussion.

It is hard to square the idea of democracy with the problem of a rejection of Islam by a former adherent. They have got to drop this concept of aposty = death. They must. No ifs, ands or buts. Period.

Posted by rakhier at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2006

Ms. Applebaum is very angry and I agree with her...

I'm not sure I've read a more angry Op-Ed piece in a major American newspaper. At least as I read it, this is pretty close to fury. But see for yourself:

But Western reactions to Muslim "days of anger" have followed a familiar pattern, too. Last winter, some Western newspapers defended their Danish colleagues, even going so far as to reprint the cartoons -- but others, including the Vatican, attacked the Danes for giving offense. Some leading Catholics have now defended the pope -- but others, no doubt including some Danes, have complained that his statement should have been better vetted, or never given at all. This isn't surprising: By definition, the West is not monolithic. Left-leaning journalists don't identify with right-leaning colleagues (or right-leaning Catholic colleagues), and vice versa. Not all Christians, let alone all Catholics -- even all German Catholics -- identify with the pope either, and certainly they don't want to defend his every scholarly quotation.

Unfortunately, these subtle distinctions are lost on the fanatics who torch embassies and churches. And they may also be preventing all of us from finding a useful response to the waves of anti-Western anger and violence that periodically engulf parts of the Muslim world. Clearly, a handful of apologies and some random public debate -- should the pope have said X, should the Danish prime minister have done Y -- are ineffective and irrelevant: None of the radical clerics accepts Western apologies, and none of their radical followers reads the Western press. Instead, Western politicians, writers, thinkers and speakers should stop apologizing -- and start uniting.

By this, I don't mean that we all need to rush to defend or to analyze this particular sermon; I leave that to experts on Byzantine theology. But we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech -- surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts -- and of the press. And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns. By "we" I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News -- Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between. True, these principles sound pretty elementary -- "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" -- but in the days since the pope's sermon, I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.

All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously?

Maybe it's a pipe dream: The day when the White House and Greenpeace can issue a joint statement is surely distant indeed. But if stray comments by Western leaders -- not to mention Western films, books, cartoons, traditions and values -- are going to inspire regular violence, I don't feel that it's asking too much for the West to quit saying sorry and unite, occasionally, in its own defense. The fanatics attacking the pope already limit the right to free speech among their own followers. I don't see why we should allow them to limit our right to free speech, too.

It is long past time that we stop appologizing for our right to say what we want to say about the Islamic world and its people and their beliefs.

The idea that we can't comment about their religion of hate, about their history of murder and oppression. The idea that the leader of the Catholic Church can't actually critique a religion which is dedicated to the destruction of his own religion. It just boggels the mind. Who do they think they are? They act like they already rule the world and that everyone now has to submit to their laws or pay the penalty (death, its always death for them).

Posted by rakhier at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

The Geneva Convention Doesn't Apply to When its Not Followed by the Other Side

This post is yet another arguement for why the Geneva Conventions do not apply to terrorists or to any prisoners of a country which is not abiding by the conventions. The conventions are a pure example of "tit for tat". They only apply if both sides follow them. As soon as one side breaks them in its treatment of POWs, the other side can break them also. Period.

Granted, the Geneva Convention could be of use in the unlikely event that we were to get into a war with Belgium, Italy, Spain or some other Western European nation. However, isn't the argument we're hearing from Europeans and American liberals that we should treat the terrorists we've captured by the rules of the Geneva Convention (as a matter of fact, better than the rules require) despite the fact that they haven't signed onto the treaty? Since that's the case, why wouldn't the same rules apply to any signatories of the treaty that we fought with? Even if, theoretically, we were doing something as evil as kicking their captured soldiers into industrial paper shredders for fun, shouldn't they give our soldiers every benefit the Geneva Convention requires?

What's that, you say? If we don't do it for their soldiers, why should we expect them to treat our troops with respect? Great! Now why doesn't that apply to our troops and Al-Qaeda? If Al-Qaeda is torturing and murdering our troops, why should we treat their captured prisoners as well as, say, American soldiers that are thrown into the brig? Why should we treat some terrorist from Saudi Arabia who wants to kill American citizens like he's a uniformed soldier who follows the rules of war or worse yet, like he has the same constitutional rights as an American citizen?

We shouldn't!

If the Geneva Convention were actually being properly applied, it wouldn't apply to terrorists. If people, including irresponsible Supreme Court Justices, want to pretend that it actually does apply to terrorists, then the Geneva Convention has outlived its usefulness and should be abandoned.

Found at Right Wing News.com.

The example by President Lincoln is instructive. When he learned that the Confederacy announced they would execute any former slave found in a Union Army uniform, he announced that for every member of the Union Army that was a POW and then killed, he would order the execution of a like number of Confederate soldiers. Period. No "oh we are better than they"; no "Oh those poor black soldiers, too bad we have to abide by the rules of war in dealing with their soldiers". Nope, Lincoln said if they kill one of ours, then we will kill one of theirs.

Faced with this threat, the Confederacy did not "officially" execute any black soldiers in the Union army.

This is how we should deal with the people we capture. Pure "tit for tat" behavior. You saw off the head of one of our POWs, we hang one of the POWs we have captured. Very simple, easy to understand logic. You torture our POWs, we torture yours. This applies across the board. None of this "we will treat them better than they treat us". Such a policy is stupid and counter productive. What incentive do our enemies have for treating our POWs better? At the moment, none at all. This needs to change.

Posted by rakhier at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2006

American Education vs. Thinking

Robert Samuelson writes in the Washington Post a essay in which he suggests there is a great deal more education going on than what simply meets the eye. His essay is worth reading here.

At this back-to-school moment, the riddle is worth pondering. Those dismal comparisons aren't new. In 1970, tests of high school seniors in seven industrial countries found that Americans ranked last in math and science. Today's young Americans sometimes do well on these international tests, but U.S. rankings drop as students get older. Here's a 2003 study of 15-year-olds in 39 countries: In math, 23 countries did better; in science, 18. Or consider a 2003 study of adults 16 to 65 in six advanced nations: Americans ranked fifth in both literacy and math.

In trying to explain the riddle, let me offer a distinction between the U.S. school system and the American learning system .

The school system is what most people think of as "education." It consists of 125,000 elementary and high schools and 2,500 four-year colleges and universities. It has strengths (major research universities) and weaknesses -- notably, lax standards. One reason that U.S. students rank low globally is that many don't work hard. In 2002, 56 percent of high school sophomores did less than an hour of homework a night.

The American learning system is more complex. It's mostly post-high school and, aside from traditional colleges and universities, includes the following: community colleges; for-profit institutes and colleges; adult extension courses; online and computer-based courses; formal and informal job training; self-help books. To take a well-known example: The for-profit University of Phoenix started in 1976 to offer workers a chance to finish their college degrees. Now it has about 300,000 students (half taking online courses and half attending classes in 163 U.S. locations). The average starting age: 34.

The American learning system has, I think, two big virtues.

First, it provides second chances. It tries to teach people when they're motivated to learn -- which isn't always when they're in high school or starting college. People become motivated later for many reasons, including maturity, marriage, mortgages and crummy jobs. These people aren't shut out. They can mix work, school and training. A third of community college students are over 30. For those going to traditional colleges, there's huge flexibility to change and find a better fit. A fifth of those who start four-year colleges and get degrees finish at a different school, reports Clifford Adelman of the Education Department. Average completion time is five years; many take longer.

Second, it's job-oriented. Community colleges provide training for local firms and offer courses to satisfy market needs. Degrees in geographic information systems (the use of global positioning satellites) are new. There's been an explosion in master's degrees -- most of them work-oriented. From 1971 to 2004, MBAs are up 426 percent, public administration degrees, 262 percent, and health degrees, 743 percent. About a quarter of college graduates now get a master's. Many self-help books are for work -- say, "Excel for Dummies." There are about 150 million copies of the "For Dummies" series in print.

Up to a point, you can complain that this system is hugely wasteful. We're often teaching kids in college what they should have learned in high school -- and in graduate school what they might have learned in college. Some of the enthusiasm for more degrees is crass credentialism. Some trade schools prey cynically on students' hopes and spawn disappointment. But these legitimate objections miss the larger point: The American learning system accommodates people's ambitions and energies -- when they emerge -- and helps compensate for some of the defects of the school system.

In Charlotte, about 70 percent of the recent high school graduates at Central Piedmont Community College need remedial work in English or math. Zeiss thinks his college often succeeds where high schools fail. Why? High school graduates "go out in the world and see they have no skills," he says. "They're more motivated." The mixing of older and younger students also helps; the older students are more serious and focused.

This fragmented and mostly unplanned learning system is a messy mix of government programs and private business. In some ways it compares favorably to other countries' more controlled governmental systems. Of course, that isn't an excuse for not trying to improve our schools. We would certainly be better off if more students performed better. Nor should it inspire complacency. "Other countries are picking up these models of community colleges and online learning," says Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a research group.

But the American learning system partially explains how a society of certified dummies consistently outperforms the test scores. Workers and companies develop new skills as the economy evolves. The knowledge that is favored (specialized and geared to specific jobs) often doesn't show up on international comparisons that involve general reading and math skills. As early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans are addicted to practical, not abstract, knowledge. That's still true.

I would argue the following points

The U.S. K-12 and College educational system is wildly variable. There are schools where the average student is super and they all do their homework and the juniors are seniors are disapointed if they get less than a 5 on the AP Tests. Then there are schools where very few students do the homework and most school time is spent keeping some semblance of order in the classroom.

At the college level there are huge differences between a college like Bennington and MIT.
They have such different goals, students, educational philosophy that they really don't even belong in the same category.

So, huge disparities in the U.S. Educational system makes generalized statements about it nearly valueless.
The primary goal of education is teach people how to think about problems using logic and reason. Imparting specific knowledge is a secondary (though important) goal, it is not primary. However, most standarized tests look for student mastery of information (i.e. what they have learned) and they do not seek to find out if the students know how to think.

The American educational system, despite its many weaknesses, does actually try to get the students to think. Other systems (like Japan) do not. Japanese students test well but the system does not promote thinking nor does it reward students who can think. In Europe, both France and Germany split children off into different tracks at a very early age (12-14). Nearly half of a child's compulsory education is spent on a track which either leads to a trade or to the elite general purpose colleges. This early split means that a large group of people who develop a mentally somewhat later, will find it very hard indeed to move into Ph.D. programs. I could list hundreds of famous scientists who started showing real promise only after age 17. By and large, the European model losses these people for good.

Posted by rakhier at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2006

Why Global Warming Does Not Worry Me

Global Warming doesn't worry me.

Let me explain why. Using facts, at least as we understand them.

It is a fact, well accepted in the scientific comunity of paleo-climatology that the Earth's average temperature (on land) has been much hotter than the present day average. Not a bit hoter but much hotter. "Our present-day Arctic Ocean is about 10-15°C cooler than it was at the time of the dinosaurs for almost all of the time from about 2 to at least 200 million years ago". It is a well established fact that for most of the last 500 million years there was no ice on our planet's poles. No ice. Antarctica was fully forested as recently as 45 million years ago. Take a look at this chart if you don't believe me.
It is a fact that all the major species of life which we see today were alive and well back through the time when the Earth was "hot".
It is a fact that right now (2006) in the midst of the "hottest years of the last 100 years" that we are still no where close to even the average Earth temperature of the last 500 million years. The Earth has been "cold" for the last two million years, frequently colder than now but still, "cold". It has yet to warm up to the average temperature of the planet from even five million years ago.
There have been many (and by many I mean more 15) different periods of glaciation on the Earth over the last 2 million years. Glaciers, by and large, destroy life. It is a fact that almost no life can live on solid ice. Glaciers and glaciation are, by my definition, bad.
With a rise in average global temperatures there is a rise in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (higher temperature = more evaporation from the Earth's oceans). There is a direct connection between the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere and the amount of rainfall. In other words, higher temperatures = more evaporation from the ocean = more rainfall. As you can see from this map showing the world climate of 50 million years ago, there is a lot less desert (arid terrain) than there is today. Desert is complicated so I can't state for a fact that higher temperatures equals less desert but that certainly seems like a reasonable historic assumption (Compare this map from 14 million years ago to today's map).
Life, as we know it, will survive quite well on a hotter Earth. This is a fact. Individual species will be effected, some will go extinct, others will flourish but as a whole, global warming is not a problem for life on this Earth. Species have been going extinct since the begining of life. This is normal. Change is normal.
It is a fact that we do not know why the Earth's average temperature has changed in the past. Clearly we can see the Earth has changed. Clearly it was hotter 50 million years ago and has cooled fairly steadily since then. No one knows why the Earth has been in a glacial period in the last two million years. No rational person argues that the temperature fluctuations we see in the past were due to human activity. Is the warming trend we have observed in the last 100 years due to human activity? We don't know. It is possible, even likely, in my opinion but quite clearly, the Earth has warmed up before, many times, without any human activity. I fail to see why this time, it is certainly human activity which is causing the warming while the other times, it wasn't.

Isn't it likely that the same processes which caused warming in the past are at work today? Given that we can't explain prior warming episodes, it seems rather unscientific to argue that we do know the cause of this warming trend.
Life for some humans, perhaps many humans, will get harder in the future if the warming trend continues. This is a fact. Humans have built cities next to oceans, which are going to rise as more ice on or near the poles turns to water. Humans have built farms in areas which get rain now, but may get less rain (or too much rain) in the future. Some countries (island nations) may actually be drowned by the ocean. Other regions may become uninhabitable.

Conversly, some areas which are uninhabitable now are going to become habitable with a rise in global temperatures. With changes in rainfall, some areas which are arid now are likely to become farmable in the future.

To all this I say: change is coming. We humans don't live on a static, unchanging world. 5,000 years ago most of Iraq was the best agracultural farmland in the world. Now it isn't. This is just one of thousands of changes that have occured just in the last 5,000 years of human history. Changes happened before then, and changes were going to happen to our world no matter what we did, or didn't do.

Some people seem to think that if we just "left the Earth alone" then the world wouldn't change. This is a delusion. The Earth is a dynamic system, vastly more complex than we understand and subject to forces and processes about which we know little and can predict little.
Some people have argued that the world's major industrial nations need to reduce their "greenhouse gas emissions". The Kyoto Protocol was an attempt to formalize this idea. I have many objections to the Kyoto Protocol but I will list just one: China.

China over the last decade has been growing economically at a rate of above 8% per year. It has the world's largest population and it is burning coal to power its cities and it is burning oil to power its fleet of cars. According to the Economist, China will surpass the U.S. in the production of "greenhouse gases" by the year 2030. China is a major world power, ruled by a small "party" of around six million people. Its government is not subject to the will of the people nor is it subject to international law or world pressure. There is, in my opinion, no chance that China will change its policies from its current policy of "nationalistic self interest". China has followed this policy for the last 2,000 years, it won't change in my lifetime. Unless it can be shown that it is in China's self interest to reduce "greenhouse gas" emissions, it won't happen.

No power on Earth can (or will) control China. Either the Chinese will do it themselves, or it won't be done. Given the massive growth in China's emissions, no possible reduction by other industrial nations can make up for the increase coming out of China. So, the chances that the world will, as a whole, stablize the global emissions of "greenhouse gases" are, in my opinion, just about zero. Baring a radical change in the Chinese goverment (or energy production technology), Chinese (and by extension the world's) emissions will continue to grow for the next 50 to 100 years.

The bottom line is: there will be more carbon-dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere in the future. Period.

Based on the above analysis, I do not view this as a disaster. The Earth has been much warmer before now and life was fine. Humans may have problems and we may have to spend a great deal of money solving those problems but, change was invevitable. Perhaps colder, perhaps hotter, but it wasn't going to stay the same. Look at the temperature graphs. They do not show long periods of no change.

I do not see the increase in global average temperature as remotely threatening human life on Earth. I futher think that if human civilization is going to be destroyed, the odds of the destruction resulting from the stress caused by global warming is low. Human civilization is under threat from many directions, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on trying to prevent the Earth from warming up a few degrees is, in my analysis, a giant waste of resources.

This is why I'm not worried about global warming.

Posted by rakhier at 02:13 PM | Comments (0)

The Plame Affair... An Outrage...

For the last three years, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson has been loudly claiming that the Bush administration is composed of criminals who delibrately leaked secret information about his wife (a C.I.A. agent) to the writer Bob Novak. Why? Because they were attempting to punish him for his op-ed (published in the New York Times in July of 2003). His essay stated that the Bush White House statff knew that Iraq had never attempted to obtain uranium from Niger but went ahead and claimed it was true in the president's 2003 State of the Union address.

Now (as of September 1, 2006) we know that everything Wilson claimed to be true was, in fact, false.

We know that Iraq did try to buy uranium (either that or cattle) from Niger in the mid-1990s. Oddly, Wilson knew this was true because he talked to the government minister of Niger who had talked with the Iraqi official. So the entire idea behind his op-ed essay in the New York Times was false. The Bush White House speech writers had good reason for putting the text in the speech. It was false for him to assert that they knew it was a lie at the time they wrote the speech.

And now we know that it was not Bush White House officials (such as Karl Rove or Vice President Richard Cheney) who revealed his wife's secret. It was the Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, who revealed the information to Bob Novak.

For years Wilson has been going around the country making speeches in which he attacked the Bush White House staff for illegal and immoral behavior and all the time he was wrong.

The behavior of Mr. Armitage now seems both illegal and immoral. He could have come forward any time and revealed the truth. He could have privately told Mr. Wilson that his story was actually all wrong. But instead he stayed silent, while the country was divided and bitter accusations were thrown at the President, the Vice President, and his staff.

Thanks so much Mr. Armitage. You really have helped the country with your years of silent denial of responsibility.

Let me finish with a quote from the September 1 editorial of the Washington Post:

It now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

Yes, it is sad. Its sad that people are willing to say things that that they know aren't true because it happens to fit their world view. Its sad that people who did know the truth didn't feel there was any good reason for them to step forward and set the record straight.

In a better world we would have a lot of people appologizing to the Bush White House staff for their false accusations on this matter, but I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by rakhier at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)