this is pretty compelling, as far as graphs go.
i was going to post some personal anecdotes about the tendency to take action based on past decisions, regardless of how poorly those decisions were made, but I don’t need to. we’ve all been there. so what’s happened to our ability to admit failure/wrongdoing/ineptitude and move on? it’s not too late to change course. i promise.
I just finished reading a great article on terrorism, and our response to it. Articles like this remind me of how easy it is to get stuck in the “this article was written over a year ago, so some of the things it says are probably out of date” mentality. Does my tendency to do this have something to do with the fact that I obtain my information from high-throughput media on the internet? Is it because we’re being overwhelmed by data, and place too much emphasis on the age of the information and not the content/accuracy/importance? Sometimes it’s easy to forget that logical reasoning built on sound evidence doesn’t diminish in value over time. Speaking of things that are worth reading, I suspect that some of the points Al Gore makes in his latest book will also have a long shelf-life.
I’ve been enjoying Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason, although it’s too depressing to read more than a chapter or so at a time. I was pleased to see that he mentioned Bruce Schneier’s metaphor describing our surveillance program: We’re dumping more hay on our haystack (the one we’re trying to find the needle in), and what we actually need is more analysis, not more data. So it’s not just illegal, it’s ineffective! In the corporate world, I imagine it would be called a ‘worst of breed’ solution.
Sadly, ‘illegal’ and ‘ineffective’ aptly describe many of this administration’s policies. Our treatment of ‘enemy combatants’ is a good example. Gore covers a lot of ground, and there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the Bush administration’s disgraceful assortment of constitutional infractions that are worthy of serious criticism. As Naomi Wolf would say, ‘history is instructive.’ Have we encountered any of these issues in the past? Winston Churchill was a good guy, right? Let’s see what he has to say about our policy on ‘enemy combatants’:
The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
Our current regime - totalitarian? He said it, not me! And then there’s waterboarding. At least we prosecuted foreign soldiers for using this type of torture on American troops, so it’s reprehensible, even by American standards… right? Right?
I’m glad K and Oz are spreading the word about the impeachment efforts, but why has it taken so long, and why aren’t we aiming higher? Given such low approval for this administration, I’m surprised at the lack of political results. Fingers crossed that some of the consolidation of executive power will be reversed with the next president, if not before then.
