Crooked Frames

Ilya Pozin penned an interesting column on LinkedIn about a week and half ago, and in doing so, painted a big, red bullseye smack in the middle of his forehead. His prescription that people devote part of their Sundays to prepping for the work week ahead was met with withering scorn.

I wonder if Mr. Pozin was surprised at the reaction to his article. I certainly see where he's coming from, as an entrepreneur. The business world never sleeps, and if you want to keep up with it effectively, you never really get "a day off." If "thank God it's Friday," rings true for you, you're likely not doing something that you love enough to want to do the work that it's going to take to keep up. Being an entrepreneur or CEO is not a trivial undertaking. These are people who put in some VERY long hours, and likely, aren't in a position to completely ignore things on Sundays because they can't force all of the various parties that they do business with to do the same. While it's true that even the high-powered must take some time away from the office, and have a bright line between their work and home lives, it's unlikely that they simply box out the weekend as a block, and leave it at that. And, more than like, many of Mr. Pozin's critics understand that.

But I think that Mr. Pozin primed people for a negative reaction to this article with the title: "Why Productive People Work On Sundays," and the opening: "Sundays aren’t just for rest and recuperation. When used wisely, they’re actually the perfect way to start your week with a bang." (Emphasis mine.) Whether or not he meant it that way, I think that a lot of people took him to be saying that people who do not use Sundays to prepare for the week ahead are being unproductive through an unwise use of their time. People (especially Americans) are (very) sensitive to being excluded from virtues in this way, and tend to respond badly. And so the responses were predictable, especially those where people framed spending Sunday as a work-free day as a matter of necessity, rather than choice.

Bucking conventional wisdom isn't easy under the best of circumstances. And when that conventional wisdom is backed up by people's self-interest, that hardly counts as the best of circumstances. A good point, incorrectly framed, can easily become lost in the negative reaction to the framing. "What you say" is always important, but "how you say it" can never be taken for granted.

I Only Count Four

"Here's what I'll tell you. I'm tired of the U.S. getting involved in every country's individual disputes. As sad as what happened is, I do not intend to support the resolution. The reason I'm hesitant there is I would ask you to give me a little bit if leeway in that if we have intelligence that shows those chemical weapons being transferred to Hamas where they could potentially be used against Israel, then I would be in favor of destroying those weapons."
Representative Austin Scott (R-Georgia)
"Rep. Scott: Tired Of U.S. Getting Involved World's Disputes"

States that begin with the letter "I."
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa

I do not see Israel on this list. Were they admitted to the Union when I wasn't looking? If not, why are Israel's problems something that the United States' has to do something about when no-one else's are? Israel has an army, an air force and a navy. If they're concerned that the Syrians might allow chemical weapons to wind up in the hands of someone hostile to them, and the United States can't be bothered with "every country's individual disputes," let them deal with it.

I understand that Israel is, for the United States, the exception to the saying that nations do not have allies, they have interests. The United States has taken broad responsibility for protecting Israel from everything from outside threats to breaking international laws, seemingly in return for nothing other than hastening the Christian End Times. Yet we keep trying to jump start a peace process as if we were an impartial third party. Maybe if we stayed out of that "individual dispute" and allowed/forced the parties to work it out for themselves, the process might actually get somewhere, and our desire to wash our hands of the problems of other nations would seem less hollow.

Peace In Our Time

Secretary of State John Kerry told House Democrats that the United States faced a “Munich moment” in deciding whether to respond to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government.
[...]
Kerry’s derisive comments on Assad and his reference to the 1938 Munich agreement between Adolf Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain — after which Chamberlain infamously declared it would lead to “peace for our time” — showed the hard line the White House is taking in its drive for congressional approval of the Syrian resolution.
John Kerry to Democrats: ‘Munich moment’

It seems to me that the single best argument against the constant comparisons of today to 1938 can be summed up in a simple question:

Do people still judge the United Kingdom on Prime Minister Chamberlain’s actions? Is the international community still convinced that London will sit on its hands because of Munich?

It seems to me that regardless of how apt or inapt comparing President Obama to Prime Minister Chamberlain is, the fact remains that Chamberlain’s actions and stance on war stopped being relevant more or less as soon as he was no longer in office, and people don't treat them as relevant today, and likely haven't for decades now. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, they did so because they sincerely believed that the islands rightfully belonged to them, not they looked back on the Munich agreement and determined that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would necessarily be just as invested in a peaceable solution.

Why should President Obama’s actions today have any more bearing on what people think the United States will do 50, 20 or even 5 years from now? Why should anyone believe that a nation that can turn over nearly the whole of its elected government in the span of a decade will behave the same way over the years? Arguments about the credibility of the United States and how history will look at these events are misguided (when they aren't simply disingenuous) for these reasons. Leaving aside the fact that, like any other nation, the United States tends to place its perceived security and economic interests ahead of moral consensus, a nation is not a person. And to the degree that nations are consistent in their behavior, it’s not because their leadership is locked into the paths that their predecessors have taken.

Are Musicians Allowed?

 

Don't Worry Charlie - I've Got an Angle

Behind every nation's military interventions, there is an agenda, even in the cases of "good" wars. The United States is not alone in this. It's vanishingly rare for nations to expend resources and lives solely for moral concerns. Agendas may be primarily political in nature or they may be driven by security concerns or what have you - and they're not always hateful conspiracies against the cause of right and justice.

The issue that United States has right now is that more or less no one believes that President Obama is motivated solely by the plight of the civilian population of Syria. (Then again, neither is anyone else.) Yet his now widely understood as unwise and naïve "red line" rhetoric on the use of NBC weapons in the conflict is fueling claims that both his and the nation's credibility are on the line. But the United States has already lost the credibility war - the very fact that so many people, within the United States and without, sincerely regard the talk of chemical weapons as cover for a nefarious (and possibly trivial) plot is proof of that. The idea of the United States as a heroic defender of freedom and democracy has faded into the distant past, and been replaced by an image of a powerful, yet waning, nation that lashes out around itself; cloaking increasingly desperate attempts to preserve the power, prestige and hegemony that its faltering economy depends on in the soaring, threadbare rhetoric of peace and justice. (While, at the same time, insisting that it be above the judgment of other nations.)

I don't think that anyone suspects that, left to its own devices, the Syrian Civil War will end well. (After all, name one that has.) There also seems to be a widespread lack of confidence that the situation can be de-escalated in a manner mutually acceptable to everyone involved by any outside parties, alone or in concert. This has created a dynamic where it is taken for granted that outside intervention will assuredly do more harm than good, providing the basis for a general understanding that any action must be self-serving.  But since a clear national interest (for anyone) is so difficult to identify, the assumption that there is a hidden (and destructive) agenda becomes the default.