Posts Tagged ‘Politics’

Beat the Press

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

Ed Kilgore notes :

… the traditional print news organizations have created many of their own problems, from bad business decisions that have nothing to do with journalism, to professional inbreeding and elitism, to very slow adjustments to technological changes and the quickening of news cycles

But another problem with mainstream news is how poorly it functioned as a filter for conventional opinion.

Kilgore once tried to move from a job in government to a job as an editorial writer for a small newspaper. He was told that

…such positions were the rabbits that kept underpaid reporters running around the track for so many years, so nobody without a journalism degree and experience as an ink-stained wretch, regardless of writing skill or substantive expertise, need apply.

In other words, newspapers underpay their reporters but keep them on the job with the promise of a plum, future job as an opinion writer, regardless of whether their opinions are worth reading.

Kilgore’s closing comment seems exactly right:

Before too long, we may look back at today’s MSM as anomalous and wonder why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to set up news monopolies run by corporate oligarchs and staffed by trained and accredited serfs. But the transition to the shape of things to come is going to be painful and messy.

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Climate Change Deniers

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

[Cross-posted at Philosophy on the Mesa]

I’m curious. What makes people cavalier about making the earth uninhabitable?

Freeman Dyson is without question a brilliant physicist (although not a climate scientist). But, as this recent NY Times article reminds us, he continues to claim that we ought not do much about global warming?

The consensus among climate scientists that anthropogenic climate change is real is substantial. I understand that there are some scientists who question the models on which projections of global warming are based. But how confident can we be in these dissenting opinions given the substantial consensus? Scientific consensus is sometimes mistaken, but it isn’t typically mistaken, and is seldom entirely wrong about very settled beliefs. Getting on board with the deniers seems a risky bet. It is possible that our climate models are wrong but surely the probability is relatively low.

I understand that there is considerable uncertainty regarding the effects of climate change. How large the climatic effects will be, what parts of the world will be most affected, etc. cannot be known at this point, although we can make some highly educated guesses. But why would it be rational for any country to gamble that they won’t be affected given the potential for catastrophic outcomes?

And there is justifiable controversy over how much the mitigation of the effects of climate change will cost and who will bear these costs. There are clearly opportunity costs to spending lots of resources on mitigating climate change—the money could be used to alleviate poverty, for instance. But most current models of the effects of climate change predict significant disruption in agriculture and habitation patterns that promise substantially more misery than the disadvantaged experience today. If we ignore climate change, we are taking great risks with their lives.

Moreover, there is credible evidence that new green technologies will be a powerful stimulus to economic growth both in developed and underdeveloped countries.

My problem with global warming deniers is not merely that they are opposing the scientific consensus. Science often advances when qualified scientists challenge the consensus. There will always be scientists who devote their lives to showing an hypothesis to be false, if they can. That is their job. My problem is with the judgment that we ought to base policy on this aspiration to be iconoclastic.

Risking lives on the basis of a belief one knows to be probably false is a case of bad moral judgment. This is true even if one has doubts about the climate models. The issue is not so much a matter of science but of morality. It is morally wrong to risk great harm based on a hypothesis that is likely to be false.

Like Wall St. bankers, climate change deniers think they can make risky bets and someone else will pick up the tab.

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Posted in Environmental Issues, Ethics, Philosophy | 1 Comment »

The Road To Imperial Ruin

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Cross-posted at Philosophy on the Mesa.

One of the main themes of Reviving the Left is that the ethics of care is relevant in the political arena in areas such as foreign policy.

Unlike moral theories that strive for universality, and thus focus on what human beings have in common, the ethics of care rests prescriptions on knowledge of particular persons, their circumstances, and their differences, and the cultivation of empathy and perceptiveness to gain such knowledge.

Matt Yglesias makes a point about our approach to Pakistan that implicitly reinforces the importance of an ethic of care.

In responding to the argument that we may not be able to trust the Pakistanis to root out the Taliban and Al-Quaeda from tribal areas he writes:

“This sort of thing is, in my view, really the achilles heel of the American imperial project….And when we get involved in things like the internal politics of Pakistan, or political reform in Egypt, or wars in the Horn of Africa, and so forth we’re dealing in situations where the level of understanding is incredibly asymmetric. If you go to pretty much any country in the world, you’ll find that educated people there know more about the United States than you do about their country. Nobody at highest levels of the American government speaks Urdu. Or Arabic. Or Amharic or Somali or Pashto or Tajik.

Lots of people at high levels in the Pakistani government speak English….they have a vast bounty of media outlets to peruse to gather intelligence. And year-in and year-out Pakistan cares about the same smallish set of countries—Pakistani officials are always focused on issue in their region and issues with the United States. Our officials dance around—the Balkans are important this decade, Central Asia the next, Russia and the Persian Gulf flit on and off the radar, sometimes we notice what’s happening in Mexico, etc.

In other words, in a straightforward contest of power between the United States and Pakistan, we can of course win. But in a scenario where we are trying to manipulate the situation in Pakistan in such-and-such a way and Pakistani actors are trying to manipulate the situation for their own ends, the odds of us actually outwitting the Pakistanis are terrible. They’re in a much better position to manipulate us than we are them.

This is one reason why so many of our foreign policy and foreign aid initiatives go wrong. We assume that other people are like us. We assume they share our interests, habits of communication, and ways of looking at the world because we assume our way is simply the human way.

And these assumptions are encouraged by our dominant moral theories (e.g. Kantian or utilitarian theories) that enjoin us to act only on prescriptions on which it would be rational for anyone to act. Our moral reflection tends to take place on a very general and very generic level.

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Posted in Ethics, Foreign Policy, Political Theory | No Comments »