Agnoiologist

This is entry 31 for March.

From March 1:

I have a goal for March: I will have written 31 weblog entries for the month. I need to sharpen my writing skills and develop talking points. I need to commit my political talking points to memory.

Well, I didn’t really develop talking points, but I did begin to sharpen my writing skills. I wrote several longer pieces this month, which I haven’t done in a while.

I’m pretty excited about achieving the goal of 31 entries. It always feels good to set a goal and achieve it. I think I’ve made weblogging a habit once again, and you can look forward to many more entries in the future.

These Snickers commercials are genius.

By the way, does anyone know why YouTube is suddenly incompatible with Opera?

I feel like my brain is running on a treadmill and the treadmill won’t stop. It’s been running for who knows how long, and I’m starting to go crazy.

Maybe TV will help stop my brain’s constant frenetic activity.

UPDATE: And that’s why I can’t survive without television.

Isn’t this the opposite of what the surge was supposed to accomplish? We were supposed to have space for political reconciliation. This open warfare between factions is precisely the opposite of political situation. Propping up Maliki has led to this.

The American presence is supposed to prevent civil war, and here we are, our military supporting one side of a civil war.

Also, saw this: “The Turkish military said Saturday that it had killed 15 Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq on Thursday using long-range land weapons, Reuters reported.” in a NY Times article. I got to find out what’s going on with that.

I’m doing my best to stay informed on the violence in Basra, and the rest of Iraq. Here’s some random links:

Slate: Warlord vs. Warlord

The fighting this week in Basra may be a prelude to the moratorium’s collapse and, with it, the resumption of wide-scale sectarian violence—Shiite vs. Sunni and Shiite vs. Shiite.

Many Shiites believe—not unreasonably—that Maliki ordered the offensive in Basra now in order to destroy Sadr’s base of support and thus keep his party from beating ISCI in the upcoming provincial elections.

NY Times: U.S. Planes Attack Militia Strongholds in Basra Fighting

Violence also broke out in Kut, Hilla, Amara, Kirkuk, Baquba and other cities. In Baghdad, where explosions shook the city throughout the day on Thursday, American officials said 11 rockets struck the Green Zone, killing an unidentified American government worker, the second this week.

Yahoo! News: US airstrike kills at least 4 in Baghdad

“He imprisoned and displaced thousands of Iraqi people under the name of democracy. He is killing the citizens in the south of Iraq,” Sheik Jalil al-Sarghi said, referring to al-Maliki as U.S. helicopters buzzed over the office where the prayer service was held.

[...]

The prime minister put his credibility on the line by flying down to Basra on Monday and issuing a weekend deadline for the surrender of Mahdi Army militiamen loyal to al-Sadr.

When the surge was first proposed, I said it was a foolish thing to do. I conceded that it could temporarily dampen violence. However, we were like Sisyphus, rolling the stone up the hill, and before it reaches the top, it will roll down again. With the outbreak of violence in Basra, I fear that Sisyphus’s boulder is rolling down the hill again.

Conservatives like to say that liberals take glee every time there’s bad news from Iraq. We don’t. We (well, I’m not quite a liberal) are angry because this was preventable. Our soldiers are dying because you sent them on a fool’s errand. We take no delight in being prescient about disaster. Instead, we are aghast that you are so detached from reality.

I’ve said that the surge has been a strategic failure (no political reconciliation, which was the stated purpose of the surge by surge-proponents), but now I want to go even further. As we continue with this boondoggle, we pump billions of dollars in Iraq. Much of this money simply disappears. The Iraqi government is a thinly veiled sectarian stronghold and some of this money undoubtedly goes into weapons. At the same time, we are bribing Sunnis not to kill us and not to kill other Iraqis. Undoubtedly, some of that money will go into weapons. The longer we stay in Iraq, the more money we dump into a civil war. We are fanning the flames. We are making the situation worse.

The surge was limited and we could maintain that troop level only for so long without breaking our military. That is why I predicted that any gains would be transient. We simply do not have the troops to pacify Iraq without a draft. Furthermore, because we do not have the necessary economic plan to rebuild Iraq and because we still do not enough people who speak their language, we cannot make the correct long term investments to make any real gains in Iraq. We’re attempting to nation-build with the military, which is the wrong approach. It is like trying to turn a screw with a hammer.

While I do recognize that leaving Iraq will not be a cakewalk, it is abundantly clear that the only correct option is to withdraw our troops. It is impossible to do what the proponents of war want us to achieve. We do not have enough men or cultural awareness. Our presence destabilizes Iraq while it bankrupts us. That is enough to discredit the pro-occupation stance.

A couple weeks ago, I blogged about the faulty logic behind Clinton’s Big State Argument. I wanted to add a caveat to Clinton’s New York victory. How come Clinton’s win in New York counts, but Obama’s win in Illinois does not? I did some simple addition using this handy chart from the New York Times. One of her “big state” wins is from Ohio, which has 141 pledged delegates. Compare this to Illinois, which has 153 pledged delegates. How come Illinois doesn’t count? Oh wait, maybe we should only count electoral votes! Hm… No, Illinois has 22 while Ohio has 21.

So either Illinois is not a big state, which means Ohio can’t be either, or Illinois doesn’t count because it’s Obama’s home state, which means New York doesn’t count for Clinton. Either way, it adds another nail to the coffin of her big state argument.

Oh well, I’m sure Clinton can come up with another reason why Illinois doesn’t count as a big state.

I picked up Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely several days ago. It was a quick read; I finished it on the airplain ride to Baltimore. Dan Ariely is a Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT. The book’s about how the human mind makes the same kinds of mistakes over and over. We’re irrational, but not randomly irrational.

The book occasionally delves into speculation about policy implications, but it got me thinking more abstractly. I thought about political philosophy in general. Certain ideologies, such as radical libertarianism, are very wedded to the power of the free market. However, these ideas are based on a model of economics which are in turn based on a faulty theory of mind. In fact, inside any political philosophy, you’ll find a theory of human nature. If we’re finding out new things about human nature, shouldn’t our political philosophies reflect those new discoveries? Shouldn’t old political philosophies be tossed aside?

It’s not that I haven’t had the time to say things. I just don’t have much to say. Don’t worry, I’ll think of things. I have to. I’m behind in my goal for 31 entries for March.

A long time ago, I disabled hotlinking to my websites. That is, one could not put an image of mine (src=”mywebsite.com/blank.jpg”) on their own website. I had a very good reason. People loved posting my Chalkboard Manifesto comics on other people’s MySpace pages. On my old host, the amount of hotlinking from MySpace made me go over my bandwidth limits. I switched to a new host, but I was still using bandwidth at an alarming rate. I had to disable hotlinking.

Although I’m still with that same host, they’ve since upped my bandwidth (and space). I’m reconsidering lifting that hotlinking ban. It’s amazing how little bandwidth and server space costs these days.