"Buy all the opium in Afghanistan, you say?!"..."Brilliant!"

I once sat on a bus coming back from Strasbourg with a good buddy of mine and we got into a difficult conversation with another American there about the war in Afghanistan. He began his argument with the idea that the US just needed to buy the opium from the farmers in Afghanistan to limit the flow of illicit drug money to the Taliban. So far, so good. It got difficult when he began arguing that the US would then just need to decriminalize opium, could sell it and tax it, thus creating a market for Afghan farmers and funding redevelopment efforts.

An elegant plan, I must say, but one that my friend and I pointed out had a few political hurdles (legalizing opium for one..) and that maybe a more practical plan could be thought of. He was having nothing of it, and insisted that if the US government were to just buy, legalize, and distribute opium, then the war in Afghanistan could be won.

I hadn't thought about this incident for a few months when i came across this article. Seems like there are a few thoughts along the lines of buying the opium from the farmers, and even a pretty good suggestion of what to do with it (hint: not pimping it to Americans). Theres a much more detailed argument here, which also lays out some of the UN hurdles that would have to be jumped if such a plan were to work.

I will say though, that i question the government's ability to control the flow of money between the farmers and the Taliban. Even if we buy the crop the, the Taliban is going to see a percentage of the money we give them as a part of bribery, extortion, and some good old fashioned bullying. Until we can offer the afghan farmers physical protection, i think its going to be hard for them to do business with us legitimately. That being said, it may well be in our interested to buy the opium, accept the inefficiencies and the fact that we're giving the Taliban money, and find a legitimate world market for Afghanistan's major crop.

Origins and Names

After a discussion with the brilliant Mrs. Klein, my fervent anti-spiritualism might be toning down somewhat. Still, I ran across this article that gives a brief status report on the idea that religion is the result of biological evolution, like teeth and male nipples. The sides presented are more or less that it is either literally a genetically-conditioned form of social organization evolved to provide competitive advantages on its carriers (like haplodiploidy), or that it is generally helpful, could have spread memetically (like fashion trends), but is really more cultural than genetic. The author tries to give a solomonic solution by calling cultural evolution 'an exaggerated metaphor", and granting that there's more to humanity than our genetic hard- and software.

Have both sides forgotten their Popper? Is a little falsificationism too much to ask? This is a debate about which there is an objective fact of the matter. It's more like asking whether more people have black hair or blond hair than it's like asking why Beethoven is better than Mozart (or vice versa). The way the debate is pitched, both sides are arguing for their own just-so-story. Religion as a biological trait to increase cohesion within the group sounds plausible enough, but if that's so, find the gene(s)! Just because it sounds plausible, doesn't mean it's true.

I have the feeling that scientists trying to make the God-is-a-product-of-biology argument would expect vindication if they could find that gene, as if that would be the final nail in the theist/deist coffin. The natural (I mean 'theological') reply to the question of how that gene got there, would of course be something like "Magic man dunnit". I recently remarked that I couldn't understand how an intelligent person could hold religious faith, and while that might still be true, the faithful as a group are capable of some first rate sophistry. Still, how religion is related to evolution is an empirical question, and I accept no substitutes.

I also saw this kind of travel diary by an 'Indian' who visits 'Indian' casinos. I remember when I was a kid growing up in western Canada, 'Indian' could be used to describe the pre-16th century inhabitants of the Americas and their descendants without denegration. That didn't last long before the term 'native' became more politically correct. (I had a problem with this even in grade-school, because both of my parents are first-generation immigrants to Canada (from different countries), and I was born there, so how were they any more native than I? If the plan was to ship all the colonists home, where was I to go?) Then 'aboriginal' was en vogue. (It's an etymologically interesting term with similarly disturbing connotations for me. 'More original than original', which would leave me, where?, just original?) Now, I think First Nations is the PC nomenclature, which can lead to some pretty awkward sentences ("This First Nations' gentleman has lost his hat! Has anyone seen the First Nations' gentleman's hat?"). My point is that Canada has really torn itself up over relations with First Nations (although we still call the responsible governmental department "The Department of Indian and Northern Affairs"), as one can clearly see from the terminological gymnastics of the last 30 years, but the Americans seem comfortable with good ol' 'Indian'. I wonder why.

My guess is that it has to do with Canada's multiculturalism. In Canada, I think we're pretty happy to call people whatever they please, but more importantly, the social ideal is cultural diversity, and some might need extra measures to stand out in the cacophony of different titles and tongues. We have many wheels, but only the squeaky ones get greased. In the States, there seems to be more of a integrationist, melting pot ideal in which all comers are meant to assimilate. Standing out might be a bad thing, so only the biggest minorities can withstand the resistance that hopping on the euphemism treadmill attracts. If there are costs to standing out, only those strong enough to assert themselves will even try. Hmm?

Small Goverment, No Government

I just read this article on the Beeb about the possibility that protests against the democrats' health care plans might be phoney, staged events put on by "birthers" and bitter republicans. I confess, I don't really care. What did bother me is this line:

...'small government good, big government bad' is the Republican motto.

Are you sure? Lazily, I'm going to take some figures from the Wikipedia to show that this is profoundly misleading. Let's have a look at deficits as a percentage of GDP. Negative numbers indicate surpluses and positive ones indicate new debt. Generally speaking, a number under 3% (the EU's allowable limit) is pretty respectable. Let's eliminate the figures for Roosevelt/Truman because winding down WWII was bound to save a lot of money, and that trend continues through Eisenhower, so let's start with Kennedy/Johnson. The average deficit as percentage of GDP for democratic presidential terms since Kennedy is -5.7, for republicans in the same period, it's 7.0. In recent history, republican presidents lose slightly more money than democrat ones save. If we look at just the most recent two-termers for the most recent trend, we get -4.4 for Bubba and 9.3 for Dubya. You can give Clinton a handicap because he inherited a big deficit from Bush senior that he was able to turn around, whereas GWB inherited a handsome surplus from Clinton that he managed to run into the ground.

The so-called Blue Dogs have been getting a lot of press lately, and their message of fiscal conservatism is music to my liberal ears (though I do support universal health care for fiscal and normative reasons). I would like to submit, though, that even the reddest (as in "most commie") democrat would have a hard time beating a republican in terms of fiscal profligacy. There is an old idea in American foreign policy analysis that republicans can be more dovish because other countries expect them to be the toughest hawks, and democrats have to be more hawkish than they would like, because nobody will take them seriously otherwise, assuming they're a bunch of softies. The same seems to be the case in fiscal policy: people assume republicans will save, so they have the freedom to spend and bloat government. It's perverse. Don't buy it.

Other news that caught my eye (for the anarchically and totalitarian-inclined):
Living human rights advocates in Chechnya are becoming about as common as Aung San Suu Kyi's days at the beach.

There also seems to be a growing movement to have children-free zones in public places in Germany. Thank goodness! There was a smoking law in my hometown for a while that allowed restaurants and bars to admit minors or smokers. Being a childless smoker at the time, I was very satisfied. Even after having quit, I'd still prefer second-hand smoke to first-hand brattiness!

Hooray! I mean, Good. I mean, Oh Crap.

I saw an article today talking about the falling tendency for political collectivities to go to war against each other. I had heard the same argument before from Steven Pinker (who is actually referenced toward the end) and on a slightly more academic level from John Mueller (whose new stuff is poorly referenced). And I thought to myself, "Sweet! Everybody is jumpin' on board. Pretty soon this will be a big, unstoppable idea! Violence is over! Hooray!" This elation was predictably short-lived.

Of course war is becoming less common. An old reason for war, conquest, doesn't fly anymore. Ch. 1, Art. 2 of the UN Charter is pretty clear on this: political settlements are the only legitimate means to gain territory. There are some tricky questions remaining about national self-determination in different corners of the world, such as northern Sri Lanka, Tibet, S.E. Turkey, and Quebec, but the geopolitical map of the world is fairly stable as far as conquest is concerned. Ideology is also slowly harmonizing, which was another big cause of war, and international and colonial wars are just generally out of fashion. I'll leave it to you to decide whether going into a failed state without a proper government counts, as was the case with Ethiopia's incursion into Somalia and NATO's invasion of Afghanistan. Still, it seems that international wars are becoming less common, and fewer are dying in the wars that do happen.

So why am I not rejoicing. Well, I ran into this article that snapped me back into reality. There's still a lot of violence going on inside borders. Granted, the male rapes in Congo they mention happen in Kivu, and that's not exactly the pinnacle of civilization. It's been a miserable corner of the world at least since its neighbour, Rwanda, tore itself apart in 1994, and it has experienced other rough periods too. The recent domestic violence in Iran, Pakistan, Xinjiang and Nigeria mustn't be forgotten either. There is still plenty of room in the world for violence at a national level.

Well, I thought further, at least modern democracies should be free of the scourge of violence. I mean, sure there is going to be some level of hockey fights, crime and accidents in any society, but we can at least get close. Their views would also be especially important because they (who'm I kidding - we) tend to be rich and make most of the rules for the rest. Before I jumped on this hopeful new train of thought, I reckoned it might be a good idea to find an indicator of attitudes toward violence in these modern democracies. Just as I was giving up hope, not having access to the means to launch a big international survey and evaluate the results, a proxy landed in my lap. The Economist printed this graph that shows attitudes toward torture in several countries, many of which are modern democracies. I figured that the practices I was worried about were fairly similar to torture - at least at the level of attitudes. I mean, by granting that "some degree of torture should be allowed", you're essentially saying "other things being equal, it's okay sometimes for some person I've never met to do nasty violence on some other person I've never met for some unspecified purpose." If that's a fair extrapolation, it just might be the indicator I was looking for!

So what does the graph tell us? It's hard to say, which also means it's hard to be optimistic. The western Europeans are predictably anti-torture (peaceful). They're modern democracies, so points for optimism. On the other hand, the figures for the US are close enough to be poll results from a post-convention presidential race, and Turkey and India, which are also modern democracies (seven times out of ten in months with an "r") actually favour using some torture.

As a pleasant surprise, China's figure is lower than expected, as is Russia's. Even Egypt's is lower than I would have expected. My enthusiasm in these cases is muted because these countries have particularly unresponsive governments that take the attitude of "like it, or we'll beat you up!" If you can't get your preferences into a judicial system and make them stick, they lose normative potency.

I suppose the take home message is that you can sleep soundly that you are less likely to die or be harmed in an international war than your grandparents, but watch out for your neighbours and officials if you live outside the EU (and maybe Canada). And it started out so wonderful.

Framing the Debate postscript

Not much from me here, but a great article from Nate Silver on the polling data that supports my position that the Administration is botching the framing of the healthcare debate. I am particularly proud of the fact that he comes to pretty much the same conclusions that I did: That Obama and the democrats have failed so far in selling this to the public, that they need to emphasize what it's going to do for Americans in general, and that Obama can probably only do so much at this point without over exposing himself.

Silver is a better writer than me though, and he's got data. So it's worth a read :-)