My take on the inaugural address is that Obama is on the verge of being seduced by the Great Republic. He made a number of obligatory references to left-oriented talking points, particularly regarding ecology and "global warming" (which I sure wish would hurry up, given how brutally cold it is at the moment in the northeast) but I think there's a chance that we'll pursue pretty much the same strategy, under a different label. A lot of Democrats are convinced that we're about to abandon Iraq, with very good reason, but essentially all they mean by that is that we'll leave the bulk of the fighting to Iraqis, and that's what one would expect. The notion that we'll abandon the "neocon strategy" of promoting liberal democracy behind the threat of a rather capable military seems something of a pipe dream. There really isn't any alternative to that strategy, so it'll just be re-labeled and re-marketed. That's basically what happened when Eisenhower took over the "containment strategy" established by Truman. There just aren't that many ways to skin the cat.

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Let me expand a bit. I purchased a mobile phone recently, and had a number of problems. No big deal, but as usual I turned to user groups to provide some answers and insights. I was rather astonished to find that not only were my questions usually left unanswered for days, or weeks, but that there were often a large number of similar queries that also had been ignored... for months or years in some cases. For instance, there are a lot of people wondering how one can determine the model of phone one possesses, so that one would know what kinds of features to expect, either before or after purchase. Whether a model allows memory expansion is important technical information, but the ability to discover which model you own is something I figured a user group would find “elementary.” Well, pardon my naivete’. There were almost no coherent answers to such simple questions. For example, one of the more coherent responses was “Which model does it look like?” My assumption that there must be some objective procedure to identify model, and that this would be a rather simple matter for user groups, was misguided. It turned out that not only are most users ignorant about how to determine what model they own, but there aren’t enough knowledgeable users to inform the ignorant. I found this situation sufficiently “odd” that it required some sort of theory. I have several, including the possibility that people are just tired of providing expertise for which they aren’t compensated, or the possibility that systems have become so complex that most users no longer understand them. But those are just theories.

To take another example, I’ve had a number of significant problems with equipment more costly than a mobile phone. My MacBook recently started shutting down. I’d be typing away on some project and would suddenly get a dialog box asking me if I really wanted the system shut down? Well, I obviously had expressed no such desire, but unless I could click “cancel” within the blink of an eye the system would just drop dead as a doornail. No recovery, and apparently the system didn’t even know that it had shut down. Everything was just... gone. No memory, like a nightmarish version of Momento. In fact, it happened while I was typing this description a few minutes ago, and I had to restart everything from memory. So I’m saving everything I type from now on, obsessively. If I type a semicolon, I save it.

I figured the place to go for some insight about this problem might be the Mac user discussion forum, maintained by the manufacturer. So I went there and as a first approximation conducted a search to see if someone had already discussed the problem. Apparently MacBooks have been shutting down unexpectedly for awhile, but Apple claimed to have resolved the problem by issuing a firmware update. The problem was, my firmware is up to date... so I wondered if anyone had discussed the problem more extensively. Strangely, the threads related to the problem didn’t have much discussion, and no answers other than the firmware thing, so I started my own thread... and waited for a response... and waited... and waited... and waited... which struck me as odd, at least relative to my past experience of user groups. As a general rule they’re very prompt and helpful, even when they don’t have immediate answers.

So I expressed a little consternation about the lack of response to my query, and the absence of depth in previous discussions of similar problems. Shortly thereafter some user suggested that perhaps no one had responded because no one had any ideas about how to solve my problem, which I allowed was unfortunately the case. But my prior experience of user groups suggested that a specialized “solution” wasn’t necessarily a bar to analysis. So why the lack of response?

It’s irritating to have a computer system that one relies upon just go blank without any warning, but it’s even worse when no one in the user group expresses the slightest interest in such behavior. After awhile I drafted what I thought was a fairly literate post about how the user forum wasn’t much help to me, although I admitted that I didn’t really have any explanations for the reticence. But apparently the user group found my suggestion that they hadn’t been enormously helpful so offensive that my post was deleted as a “non-technical rant.” I began to suspect that there might have been other “non-technical rants” on the topic that had just disappeared into the vapors. But I wasn’t really ranting. I just found the inadequacy of responses odd. On the other hand, the unwillingness to even allow such inadequacies to be discussed was a little more... troubling. I could understand how there might be a lot of questions short of answers in such a system.

The experience suggested that there might be a conflict of “values,” that places “feelings” above logic and coherence. Now, this was a really radical theory, and perhaps it’s based on a rather unjustified generalization, but I’m just reporting my own experience here. Maybe my experience is idiosyncratic, but it seems to me that user groups like the Mac discussion group could have became “Marcusean free speech zones,” and that the suppression of any uncomfortable observations might be creating knowledge gaps. Have the values taught in our universities for the past 40 years or so, since Lipset and Ladd’s epic studies for the Carnegie Foundation in the 1970s, and documented by watchdog groups like FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Freedom, begun to impact the “nuts and bolts” of the the society? Might we be in danger of losing the ability to reliably find the thread size for a bolt, if the quest offends someone?

Mark Bauerlein wrote a book recently that goes to the heart of this unwillingness to tolerate offense, with the profoundly challenging title: The Dumbest Generation. He suggests that the “digital age” is making young Americans stupid, by placing social considerations above values of logic and coherence. The subtitle of Bauerline’s book is: “How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30).” This is not a new debate, but it may be reaching an unprecedented level of urgency. Mortimer Adler suggested in an essay entitled “This Postwar Generation” (referencing the generation born after World War I) that knowledge is, itself, a virtue... and that Bertrand Russell’s ridicule of such a virtue, in defense of a sentimental preference, was indefensible. Russell’s response was so incoherent, even in his own ears, that he simply took his seat...

The quality of information is becoming subordinate to the intent associated with its expression. For instance, there’s a notion being propagated in universities that gender parity in the sciences is more important than science itself. Such sentiments suggest that information content is not merely becoming subordinate to intent... it’s in the process of replacing coherence with intent.

Again, I realize this is a radical indictment. But it’s profoundly demoralizing to consider that significant swaths of the US population seem to think it’s fair to lob missiles into a civilian neighborhood in a neighboring country, and that it would be patently unfair for the country on the receiving end of the launches to use sufficient military force to ensure such an onslaught won’t be an ongoing “fact of life.” Even Harry Reid, bless him, seems to think this might be beyond the pale.

To be honest, I would prefer to think that the two realms are unrelated--that the quality of technical user forums is unrelated to the quality of political judgment, but I’m beginning to suspect that such optimism is a little unrealistic. It might be wishful thinking.

Now, for a slight time warp:

Almost 150 years ago my ancestors were living a troubled existence in northwestern Arkansas. Their neighbors apparently considered it tolerable that they be conscripted into the Confederate Army at the point of a gun, in order to defend the right of the Confederacy to institutionalize chattel slavery. In late 1862 two of four brothers in my family who’d been conscripted by force into Confederate units were seriously wounded in a battle against Union forces (probably at Prairie Grove), and were listed in company rolls as has having “died at home.” My grandfather always thought they had deserted and had been tracked down and killed by the conscriptors in reprisal for their unwillingness to serve the cause. However they were not listed on company rosters as deserters, so they may have simply been mortally wounded and sent home to die. (Perhaps someone knows whether Confederate units did such things routinely during this period, but it seems likely to me.) Around the same time several pubescent members of my family were also killed by marauders, so my grandfather’s conjecture may have had merit. At any rate, in late 1863 an assemblyman complained to the Governor of Arkansas, Isaac Murphy (a Confederate sympathizer), that these several counties in northwestern Arkansas (Washington and Sebastian) had been “virtually de-populated” in reprisal for their support of the Union. Shortly thereafter the third brother in my family deserted the 35th Arkansas Confederate Infantry, and re-enlisted in the Union 1st Arkansas. The fourth brother, my great great grandfather, deserted the 35th Arkansas and remained in hiding until the end of the war. At the time, his wife was pregnant with my great grandfather, which may be why he didn’t re-enlist for the Union. (She gave birth about two months later.)

Now, I’m aware that finding a connection between current events and the chaos of the Civil War in northwestern Arkansas 150 years ago is a slender thread. But again, I’m more worried about the consequences of not taking that relationship seriously, than of over-emphasis. One might have thought that the issue of slavery was rather straightforward. It certainly doesn’t seem controversial now, but apparently there were large swaths of the population who thought that one had a right to enslave another as a matter of state sovereignty; and that the defense of such a “principle” not only justified forced conscription but the execution of those who disagreed. The majority of my forebears, at least in that branch of the family, did not survive that “disagreement.” I like to think their objections were based on principle rather than sentiment, but they were certainly stumbling in a principled direction... and I sometimes wonder about the fate of Palestinians who might be stumbling toward a principled disagreement with Hamas and Hizbollah over the fate of Israel. How will their sentiments make their way into the public record, if their expression is considered heresy? What sort of world does this create?

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