2012 July

July 30, 2012

Nonpartisan Military & Justice

For many officers in the U.S. military, registering as a nonpartisan voter was an ethic which told the American people that the non-ideological officer would serve the country–all of the people–regardless of which political party elected the Commander-in-Chief. For instance, after World War II both major parties approached Dwight Eisenhower to be their candidate for President. Neither party knew what the politics were of the the General of the Armies because he had never registered in one party. He voted, but as an ‘independent,’ today’s word for ‘nonpartisan.’

Isn’t this a rather attractive personal ethic? If you work in government, your service is all the more legitimate if it is more nonpartisan than partisan. The government worker could still join a socialist labor union and still vote for whomever they choose, but they would not be a member of any political party.

Perhaps this ethic would not be feasible for the the bulk of unionized government workers, but certainly it fits the military, and arguably also the justice system. Why not have federal judges and prosecutors be as impartial and independent as generals and admirals? If there are any two government vocations which the American people rely upon to be professionally impartial, they are the military and judiciary.

Let’s amend the Constitution, since this ethic is not going to be adopted voluntarily by the lawyers. Proposed: “The President shall appoint life-long nonpartisans or bipartisans to be federal prosecutors, judiciary, and members of the military General Staff.”

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July 28, 2012

Is ‘Honor’ Gone, Or Is It The Best Way To Dominate A Dispute?

By Don Kirk in Ethics

For thousands of years, societies have adopted honor codes as a form of moral rectitude. In a Fox News segment, Dr. Charles Krauthammer today publicly belittled the White House for its lack of honorable behavior in a personal dispute concerning a bust of Winston Churchill. One rarely hears anyone talk of ‘honor’ as a standard of proper behavior. There is no such thing as an American politician resigning as a ‘point of honor,’ so why is Dr. Krauthammer, an eminent psychiatrist, invoking the lack of honor in criticisms against him?

Honor is a code of conduct most often found in military societies. As examples, the Prussian and the samurai bushido are famed honor codes. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point invokes honor. Honor codes are the moral glue in aristocracies, while ‘virtue’ is the glue in republics. As a quadruple paraplegic Dr. Krauthammer is no militarist, but do aristocrats–believers in the rule by elites, such as highly educated scientists–offer a code that a modern post-industrial democratic society would find attractive?

Much has been written about the deliberate abandoning of honor codes in the wake of World War I and the folly of whole nations going to war as a matter of honor. The senseless slaughters of trench warfare and poison gas attacks ended the glorification of honor as a moral glue for a modern people.

Still, one can easily see Dr. Krauthammer’s point. Honor has its attractions as a moral code.

In practical matters however, honor is too severe for three reasons. One, an honor code often brutally represses female sexuality. Second, the honor code inhibits negotiation and compromise as methods to resolve differences. And third, the deep problem with honor is that it demands suicide as the ultimate punishment for miscreant behavior, and it much too easily extends the necessity of committing the suicide to thousands of people who had done no wrong (entire armies of men had to commit suicide if the army lost a battle).

If Dr. Krauthammer simply characterized the White House as “ill-mannered,” then perhaps he could have expressed the same criticism but by employing a less obsolete moral standard. Good manners trump an honor code as a moral standard. Yet notice how much more effective it is to label your opponent in a dispute as a ‘man without honor,’ than to label him ‘ill-mannered.’ “Ill-mannered” applies to a child’s misbehavior; ‘dishonorable’ applies to the lack of adult character.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net].

July 26, 2012

The U.N. and its Discontents

By Don Kirk in Foreign Affairs, Philosophy of Human Rights, World Freedom and World Peace

Ken Anderson, professor of international law and a human rights stalwart, had an article yesterday in ‘Defining Ideas,’ the blog of the conservative Hoover Institute. It’s always good to see a conservative intellectual committed to human rights; wish there were more listing the Philosophy of Human Rights to be one of their three philosophical specializations at the Philosophical Documentation Center.

Professor Anderson’s article enumerates the many shocking failures and moral short-comings of the U.N., and argues that the institution loses legitimacy as a result. Worse, the legitimacy is reduced to the ephemeral eternal hope that the U.N. will somehow get better in the future. This is the same kind of ‘hope’ that gives Marxism and socialism and all monistic (Platonic) ideo/theologies their legitimacy: the eternal monistic idealistic hope that all the past failures are merely a prelude to getting it finally right sometime in the distant future. So, armed with such ghost-legitimacy idealism (Plato again), the U.N. merely marches in place, never moving forward but always in motion. The good professor calls this U.N. phenomenon, ‘perpetual immobility.’

Despite his use of the word, “perpetual,” Professor Anderson never mentioned the original concept of the U.N. and the League of Nations is from Immanuel Kant’s essay, “Perpetual Peace,” where Kant disdained short-lived peace treaties and argued instead that an enduring world peace will never be possible until a world freedom is constructed first. The League of Nations–his league of peace–would be an organization made up of the few free nations, and then all of the many un-free nations would voluntarily join the league. By the association with free nations, over time, the un-free would gradually become free.

Kant’s formulation is working. In the 65 years since the United Nations was created, for every year that the world is less-free, there are seven years where the world is more-free. As Kant pointed out, it is the positive correlation ( currently .67) between freedom and prosperity that attracts the un-free nations to membership in the free nations’ United Nations, not the monistic ideal of peace. A word to all Platonic monistic idealists: freedom is a moral and plural; peace suffers as a monism and an ideal.

Certainly the U.N. requires major reforms. However, it is not simply marching in place and should not be scrapped. The United Nations is steadily–if all too slowly and even unknowingly–achieving what Kant designed it to do two hundred years ago: achieve world freedom. World peace will be the indirect result.

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July 24, 2012

Is Voting Moral?

By Don Kirk in Ethics, Philosophy of Freedom, Political Psychology

Bahavioral economist Dan Ariely, famous as the author of Predictably Irrational, had an article in the Wall Street Journal four days ago answering a question about voting. Dr. Ariely differentiated between incentives to vote and motivation to vote.

An incentive would be to receive a double-scoop ice cream cone for voting, while a motivation would be to effect a change in policy or government. We neither reward nor punish for voting in American politics, relying solely on motivation to get citizens to vote.

Some argue, voting is a responsibility of citizenship, and as soon as ‘responsibility’ is introduced then a moral argument is being made. Under this argument, not voting is irresponsible, implying immorality.

However, doesn’t not-voting represent a kind of voting, where the negative feelings about the politics motivates citizens to avoid voting? If more than 50% of potential voters refuse to vote (as frequently occurs during off-year election cycles), then isn’t that a message that those who are elected represent only a minority of the voters, and are therefore less legitimate than those elected with greater than 50% turnout? If all choices are unacceptable, doesn’t not-voting send a clear message that there is no over-riding motivating influence to vote, such as good governance?

The responsible-argument has a trump card, however. By not voting, the undesirable politics is perpetuated. So, the moral conclusion is: Voting is a responsibility of citizenship, and is arguably even more of a responsibility for those who dislike their politics. ‘Dislike’ is a motivation; passivity–lack of motivation–is not moral. Deliberate forebearance from causing harm could be moral, but it always ethical.

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July 22, 2012

The Kurds and Freedom

By Don Kirk in Foreign Affairs, Philosophy of Human Rights

After months of merely tsk-tsking the slaughter in Syria, suddenly there are rumblings that the U.S. is going to assemble an international coalition that will address the civil war in Syria. The ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were broadly based, but the uprisings in Libya and Syria are largely ethnic and tribal. The international intervention in Libya preserved the ethnic divide, and apparently any intervention in Syria will likewise preserve existing nation-state boundaries that merely divide ethnic and tribal peoples. If so, this is a great opportunity lost.

This map of Syrian provinces does not show the ethnic divide, but the northeastern-most province of al-Hasekeh (shown here as purple) is majority Kurd. Syria is majority Sunni with an Alawite minority government; the Syrian Kurds are a repressed majority in the northeastern province.

When Winston Churchill carved up the Middle East after the Ottoman Empire lost World War I, he gave all but one of the Muslim peoples from Morocco to Arabia to Iran a new nation with a king. The only Muslim people he did not give a country and king were the Kurds. He divided the Kurds when he drew the map lines for Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, and there they still sit with their own language and culture and traditions, governed by other peoples in Kurdish lands.

It is in the interest of freedom that the Kurds in Syria be recognized as a Kurdish enclave, perhaps as a semi-autonomous region that will eventually join other Kurdish regions as an independent nation-state. Kurd independence is long overdue, and if the U.S. does actually intervene in Syria, righting Churchill’s wrong should be a priority.

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July 21, 2012

Stagnant Wages

By Don Kirk in Economics, Prosperity vs. Poverty

From Dr. Perry’s excellent Carpe Diem blog, his chart from the Fed showing the half-century relationship of wages to inflation. His argument is, since wages are down inflation is not a pending problem.

Another argument could be made that the chart reveals wage increases are at their lowest in more than a half-century, and appear to be heading further downward. What this chart fails to show is the increases in American productivity during the same years. If the increased productivity is currently greater than the increase in wages, we are going broke.

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July 20, 2012

Jobs go Begging

By Don Kirk in Optimists and Pessimists, Prosperity vs. Poverty

North Dakota has the nation’s lowest rate of unemployment (2.9%), because of the oil-field boom in the state. The shortage of workers has more than 336 drilling wells standing idle, waiting for crews to put them into operation.

Nevada has the nation’s worst unemployment rate (11.2%), because of the bust in housing. Presumably, idle construction workers in Nevada’s busted housing industry have the hard-hat skills that could quickly be re-trained to operate an oil well.

But if you walk downtown Reno in northern Nevada on any one of 300 sunny days, you will be repeatedly accosted by beggars asking you to give them your ‘change.’ On the main street of Reno, the beggars are lined up along both sidewalks between the major casinos, panhandling the tourists walking from one casino to another.

There is no data on how many Nevada unemployed construction workers even bother to seek a paying job in North Dakota, but the permanently unemployed in Nevada apparently make too much money begging to risk going to find work in the booming oil fields half a continent away. The labor shortage in North Dakota oil fields is so great that local McDonald’s pay between $15-20 per hour (which is fully double the pay rate in Nevada), so begging in Nevada appears to be quite competitive.

Or could it be, that there exists a human psychology which prefers impoverity to risk-taking?

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July 18, 2012

Saviors or Arrogance

By Don Kirk in Free Markets Myth, Keynesian Myth-Math, Politics

In a little more than 100 days the American people will vote for who will be their President during the next four years. If the last three elections are any guide, the American voters will pick a man who believes in the myth-math of Keynesian economics and who sees himself personally as a savior.

Both Republican George Bush and Democrat Barack Obama are Keynesians, believing that the sharp increase in government spending ‘stimulates’ aggregate demand, causing a ‘multiplier’ in employment. But if one actually reads Keynes and uses proven data to measure his theories on how to implement Fabian socialism as the counter-cyclical to capitalism’s business cycle, the ‘multiplier’ is a fraction, the increase in employment is only for government workers, and the stimulus merely increases the costs to the economy both faster and greater than the increase in benefits.

Both men have something of a Savior Complex. There is no such thing in the psychiatric profession, but there is a ‘savior complex’ or ‘god complex’ in pop psychology. To the professionals, there is megalomania, not a savior complex.

George Bush, in his own words to explain his imperial use of taxpayers’ money in the TARP bailout, “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.” More than a little absurd, since there is no such thing as a ‘free market,’ and just how does one rationally save something by abandoning the principles which build it? Only if one is a god can such an enormous thing be accomplished.

In his words, Barack Obama “saved the American auto industry.” No, not even close to the truth. There are sixteen auto companies with factories in the United States, and Mr. Obama bailed out only two. Those two are unionized (13 of the other 14 are not unionized), and since labor unions form the backbone of Mr. Obama’s re-election efforts, he actually only bailed out his personal constituency using taxpayers’ money while claiming credit for bailing out the entire national industry. Only a god could accomplish such a monumental deception.

No one knows yet whether Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, is Keynesian and has a savior complex. He is notably inept at explaining how his leadership at Bain Capital saved several troubled companies and he is reticent about his Mormon faith, so perhaps he lacks the god complex. If so, then he likely will lose in November, because we Americans like politicians who crush the economy and are self-delusional about their role in the crushing.

July 15, 2012

Negating Blackmail

By Don Kirk in Foreign Affairs, Theofascism

The United Arab Emirates today opened an oil pipeline terminal just outside the Persian Gulf, reducing the amount of oil transport through the Gulf subject to Iranian blackmailing threats of closure. Here’s a map of the region, showing the diversification of oil terminals being built or planned that will reduce or perhaps even eliminate the Iranian theofascist threat to the 40% of the world’s energy supplies traversing through the Hormuz Straight.

The new Fujariah terminal is still very close to Iran, and could be easily attacked by Iranian gunboats, warships, aircraft and missiles.From the map and the location of the new pipeline terminal just barely beyond the choke-point, however, it’s clear the U.A.E. is counting on any attack outside the Persian Gulf as being a provocation and violation of international waters which will draw an American military response.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

July 14, 2012

Talons and Teeth, Restraining or Goading?

By Don Kirk in Foreign Affairs, Rationality vs. Irrationality, Theofascism

Ninety days days ago, the United States Air Force sent an unspecified number of the new F-22 fighter aircraft to their new home at a military base just 200 miles from Iran. The fifth generation fighter has a reputation for chronic problems with its internal air circulation system, but it also has a reputation for its lethality and complete air dominance against all other military aircraft in the world. A single F-22 is designed to take on–and defeat–a small squadron of opposing fighters. No F-22 has ever been defeated in combat trials, but its new position near Iran sends a clear message that the Air Force is willing to test the new technologically-advanced fighter in actual combat.

Next month, a fourth U.S. battle group will join three other battle groups already steaming in the Persian Gulf. A single American battle group has more fire power than all of the combined armies of the world in all of history. ‘Lethal’ does not come close to describing such overwhelming military power of a single group; four groups is the threat of complete annihilation four times over. Even if Iranian missiles, gunboats, mines and submarines managed somehow to defeat one, two, or even three battle groups of surface ships, they could not prevent all of the battle group carriers from launching their nuclear-armed aircraft. The surface ship battle groups are centered around the nuclear aircraft carriers U.S.S. Enterprise, Dwight Eisenhower, Abraham Lincoln, and John Stennis, each armed with its own air force.

The massive buildup is designed to make the theofascist government in Iran think rationally about the military consequences if it honors its threat to close the Straits of Hormuz, the choke-point for shipping 40% of the world’s entire energy supplies. So in this respect, the American military buildup wants to avoid war by the threat of certain complete destruction of Iran if it behaves irrationally.

But will the U.S. buildup discourage Israel’s Air Force from attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, or instead, will the amassed American firepower encourage Israel to strike sooner rather than later at Iran? Israel is not simply an important U.S. ally. The American election of a president is to take place in four months, and if millions of Jewish-American voters en masse were to abandon either major party candidate for the presidency, he would lose.

Therefore, the buildup to discourage war might act to goad Israel into waging war, and both by defense treaty with Israel and domestic politics, the U.S. is then at war with Iran in the weeks shortly before or after the American national elections.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

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