I’ve been wanting to write about the recent revelations about the abuse of Iraqi detainees by coalition forces. I’ve been reluctant because I was finding it hard to indicate that there were important differences between this abuse and the abuse that was common in pre-liberation Iraq
(and much of the rest of the Middle East) without being misinterpreted as understating the severity of the coalition behavior.

Fortunately, Michael Young has written an editorial that says what I wanted to say. Please read it.

There is no perfect governmental system. All of them will be abused. The best we can hope for is a system that will get things right most of the time, and can correct its errors and improve over time. These abuses have been identified and are being addressed. That’s what should be learned from this.

People who use this episode as confirmation that America came to abuse Iraqis, rather than to liberate them, are drawing the wrong conclusion and are missing the point.

Steven Den Beste has a good post about the all-too-common mistake of trying to assert independence by opposing the position of authorities, whatever that position may be.

What I didn’t like about it was the tone set by his first sentence:

It’s a pretty standard failing of the young to assume that disagreement is a demonstration of independence.

We hear this kind of thing a lot. It seems to be commonly-held notion that young people suffer from some kind of natural stupidity that leads to many errors that they eventually grow out of.

While it’s true that young people make a lot of mistakes, it’s not because of stupidity, or hormones, or anything like that. It’s because they are thinking. They’re playing with new ideas and often getting them wrong before they figure out how to improve (or reject) them.

Is it fair to say: “It’s a pretty standard failing of the young to fall off of bicycles.”? Of course they fall off bicycles more than adults do. But, it’s because they’re more likely to be learning how to ride, not because they suffer from poor coordination!

If I had to make a generalization about the thinking of young people vs. older people, I’d have to say that I think young people do it better. For example, I suggest that it’s more likely that a fifteen-year-old will correct the error that Den Beste describes than that a thirty-year-old who makes that mistake will correct it.

I’m not claiming that Den Beste thinks that young people are stupid. His post just reminded me that many people do.

And that they’re wrong.

I’ve blogged about happiness before.

There’s an interesting article at The Edge by Martin Seligman (President of the American Psychological Association), about the prospects for psychologists to help make us more happy (as opposed to less unhappy).

Interesting reading.

Hmm…

Ok, so I finally break down and change my side-bar on the right to include an entry for “Jew” to help knock a certain anti-semitic organization out of the #1 result spot on Google, when I find that that site no longer seems to appear in the search results at all.

Google’s letter of explanation about offensive results appears, though.

Then I found this article: (ADL Praises Google for Responding to Concerns About Rankings of Hate Sites) that implies that Google agreed to manually intervene in the results in order to remove the offensive site.

I wasn’t sure whether I was happy about this or not. On one hand, I’m happy to have that nasty site lose influence. But, on the other hand, I don’t want Google to be responsible whenever somebody is offended by automated search results, nor do I want political campaigns to force Google to reduce the effectiveness of its searching in order to be “politically correct”. The strength of Google’s automated search results is that they do very well at predicting the sites that the average searcher will be most interested in. I like that, and I don’t want it to suffer from the oversensitivity of the community.

On reflection, though, I don’t think this instance of manual intervention will reduce the quality of the search results, and if Google wants to occasionally intervene in a way that makes sense to the company, then they have every right to do so. And, if they limit it to cases like this, it’s probably a good choice for them to make.

I only hope that this intervention doesn’t set them up for some stupid law suits in the future from people upset by results in cases where they chose not to manually intervene (or were simply unaware, or chose to intervene and upset others…).

UPDATE: Nevermind!

It seems like that site is back on the top of the results. I saw somewhere that it just got temporarily dropped from the results because the home page was down for a while.

Oh, well…It’s still an interesting issue.

Military conscription has been a recurring topic in the news (where liberal Democrats like Rangel, Stark, Conyers, Hollings have proposed it as a tactic
to make going to war less likely, and recently Republican Chuck Hagel proposed it as a means to spread the burden and to boost military manpower),
and the blogosphere (where liberal Matt Yglesias thinks compulsory service is a fine idea, and libertarians like Will Wilkinson, Julian Sanchez, Tim Lee think he’s wrong on many counts, including liberalism).

I think that contemplating military conscription as a teenager is what led me to libertarianism (long before I’d ever heard the word). It made me think carefully about individualism and collectivism and force and governments. It seemed clear to me that slavery is wrong, whether by private citizens or governments. Not because it’s out of fashion but because the nature of human beings makes their autonomy important. To hijack their lives for your own purposes is to lack the proper respect for people and their rights to direct their own lives. If you want their help you should try to convince them, or pay them. If you have good enough arguments, or have enough economic demand for their services then you’ll be able to get it voluntarily. If you can’t do that, then you should leave them alone.

Now, I admit that in emergency circumstances I’d probably resort to hijacking somebody’s life in order to save my own or the lives of others (if I had no better options), but I’m extremely resistant to institutionalizing this as a government policy.

On the practical side (which, unsurprisingly, often correlates highly with the moral side) the case for military conscription is very weak. Currently, the military is doing very well with recruitment efforts and troop quality and has no interest in a draft. Also, it seems to me that if you want to have a check against a military going out of control, it is better to rely on young people’s unwillingness to volunteer for ill-conceived campaigns, than to rely on others applying democratic pressure to protect their drafted relatives. And, if there is a genuine emergency in which the country needs to quickly boost its military troop levels, there shouldn’t be (and has never been) a problem getting sufficient volunteers. It seems to me that a country that can’t get people to volunteer to defend it, is likely to not be worth defending.

So, I think that people who favor a draft don’t do it because it makes practical sense as a means to improve military capability. They usually do it to effect sociological changes. Some want to make rich people die along with poor people. Some want people to become more compliant with governmental authority by going through a military (or other “national service”) experience. What all of these people have in common is that they don’t take the rights of individuals to control and direct their own lives seriously. This, to me, is highly immoral.

Because this site is the first result for a search of “toilet paper man” (without the quotes) in MSN Search, but doesn’t even show up on a Google search (of course, that will change after this post).

Note: I learned this by looking at referrer stats, not because I was doing a search for toilet paper man (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Since beginning to diet in November, I’ve lost forty pounds as of this morning.

I think that’s a pretty dramatic success, and I’m proud of it. I’ve met (and even surpassed) the goal I set for myself when I began.

I’m still in the overweight range, and I’ll continue to try to improve my fitness gradually, but I don’t think the extra weight I carry is a significant health risk any longer.

WooHoo!

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian about Daniel Dennett. It seems to be in the book review section, but doesn’t really review any book. It’s more of a mini-biography.

It does note that he’s working on a new book called Breaking The Spell that “Will attempt to extirpate supernaturalism.”

I wish him luck.

I think supernaturalism does a lot of harm. But, it seems to present most people with the most convenient remedy for various psychological/emotional/philosophical problems that they face. I think it will take some work before our culture evolves enough to make natural, true, explanations more popular than supernatural ones.

I like Dennett very much. His writing is a joy to read. I really enjoy books by brilliant people who write and explain things well. I read The Mind’s I years ago, Freedom Evolves recently, and have Consciousness Explained on my bookshelf, thus far unopened (I should do something about that).

Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan yesterday.

Tillman gave up his multi-million dollar NFL career after 9/11 to serve as an Army Ranger.

He was a brave man who was willing to risk his life to further values he judged to be worthwhile. He died doing that. I don’t want to die, but Pat Tillman’s life and death remind me that it’s noble to live, and possibly die, promoting great values.

I think that’s what we should all strive to do.

UPDATE: Just to be clear… I don’t think he’s more of a hero because he died. I think he was heroic when he signed up with the intention of serving as a Ranger to defend us against islamist terrorists. All of our soldiers are brave, but his decision was more heroic than most because he had to explicitly choose between a conventionally glamorous life and a much more dangerous, less glamorous, path that he correctly judged would do more good for his values. His death is just sad.

He didn’t do it for attention and glory; he shunned those. He did it for liberty.

I don’t have anything new to say about the recent bombings in Basra except to agree with what Andrew Sullivan said.