Walk Like An Egyptian

As everyone waits to see how the current situation in Egypt will play itself out, I find myself wondering what will happen if the Mubarak regime is toppled. There is a chance, how much of one I don't know, that the Islamic Brotherhood could rise to the top of the new power structure.

This would leave the United States in quandary. Any action taken against the Brotherhood would not go over well in the Islamic world, not to mention Egypt itself. But the United States has shown that it's not comfortable with Islamist governments, and the American public would likely be alarmed by a hostile regime in Egypt, and this would put pressure on the Administration to do something about the situation. Of course, the Egyptians wouldn't be happy with this, as they're already not very happy with the United States in the first place, given that we've been propping up Mubarak in exchange for his being "on our side."

Prescience

"But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power."
Richard Hofstadter "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Harper’s Magazine. November 1964.

While I suspect that right wing of today is significantly different than the right wing of 47 years ago, I am still amazed by the fact that if you didn't put a date on Hofstadter's statement, you'd have no way of knowing that he hadn't coined it just yesterday.

Raising the Volume

I know that I should probably quit writing about things that I see on other people's weblogs, but this caught my attention. Seth Godin leads in with what everyone who has studied human reactions to risks is well aware of:

The perception of risk is skewed when bad outcomes are vivid, personal and immediate.

He later ties this into the role of the media in prompting people to misjudge risk.

This is one reason why the media is so complicit in many of the issues of the day... they take concepts that were previously abstract and relentlessly make them vivid, personal and immediate. It amplifies the risks around us and easily sells us on a cycle of dissatisfaction.

A bit too caught up in blaming, perhaps, but a wise observation nonetheless. But he loses me here:

If you want to create action on the important, figure out how to make it vivid, personal and immediate.

Rather than advising us on how to better judge risks, Seth veers into the idea that it's important that each of us leverages the mechanisms of misjudgment to influence people to act on our priorities. With all due respect, everyone already knows this - the world is full of media promising all sorts of vivid, personal and immediate bad outcomes to our not acting on "the important," which can be anything from buying the newest acne medication to repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. I don't understand how adding yet more voices to the cacophony helps anything other than sales of advertising space.

The Soft Zen of Low Expectations

I was reading a recent entry on Man Bites Blog, and it was clear to me that John was upset. I mentioned this in comments, and he confirmed it. And then I didn't know what to say. It was clear that John felt belittled and insulted by the way the debate over values and the effects of rhetoric (and actions, for that matter) on society, and I could sympathize with that, but I was having a hard time linking into it, so that I could empathize with it.

Earlier today I was directed to an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal: "Toward a 21st-Century Regulatory System," written by none other than President Barack Obama. If you really want to, you can go over and read it for yourself, if you haven't encountered it already, so I won't bore you with the details. But the general jist of it can be summed up with the idea that regulations are out of whack, so the President is signing an Executive Order to fix the problem. "This order requires that federal agencies ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth," the President tells us. Later, in summing up, he says: "Regulations do have costs; often, as a country, we have to make tough decisions about whether those costs are necessary. But what is clear is that we can strike the right balance."

Really? It's clear that we can strike the right balance between safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth while obtaining consensus from "experts, businesses and ordinary citizens?"

Yeah. Uh-huh. Sure it is, Mister President. Sure it is.

Nearly the entire time that I was reading the President's Op-Ed, I was thinking to myself: "This man must think that I'm an idiot." But then I realized that I wasn't bothered by that fact. I can remember a time when I would have been livid nearly to the point of incandescence. But now, my reaction is closer to "meh, whatever." Of course President Obama trots out a wild oversimplification of an issue and treats it as an accurate picture. Of course people on one side of an issue treat people on the other side as idiots. What more do you expect?

And maybe that's the problem. Maybe I should expect more. Maybe I should be angry when the President (or, more likely, one of his staff) pens an Op-Ed that seems predicated on the idea that I'm about as intelligent as a clam. Maybe I should be angry when partisans on either side treat me like a coward for not being firmly in one camp or another.

I'm starting to think that perhaps I've let going with the flow and not getting bent out of shape mold itself into a cover for a sort of genial contempt. It could be that I owe it to people to let them spark some outrage now and again.

An Unacceptable Outcome?

It's amazing how quickly a "dynamic entry" on a drug bust unfolds. There's a video that goes along with this story. It's less than a minute long, and the setup eats up all of the first quarter of the video, and then some. To say that things get chaotic is to vastly understate what happens. I know that I'm watching a video of a police raid, but when the police first start shouting "Police! Search warrant!" it takes me several seconds to untangle their competing voices and understand what is being said. It's no wonder the homeowner came out brandishing a golf club. It seems to me that these sorts of entries into homes are intentionally designed to be disorienting - but the suspects are still expected to act as if they know exactly what is going on. It's a wonder that more of these don't end in tragedy.

“We’ve discussed a couple of ways as to how we can be more careful,” [Ogden Utah Police Chief Jon Greiner] said without elaborating. “The problem is, what you’re looking for could easily be destroyed and there’s generally weapons. ... I just don’t know an easy way to get in there.”

Okay... so let's say that the suspect destroys the drugs he has in the home. It doesn't seem that this would close the door on police efforts to arrest him forever. Drug dealers and drug abusers aren't known for quitting cold turkey on a dime. But let's say that one did. Because the police officers took their time getting into the home, the suspect flushed the drugs down the toilet. Realizing that he was basically seconds away from doing some pretty hard time, the guy swears off the stuff forever, and stays clean. The police never get another crack at him, because he stays on the straight and narrow.

Would that really be so bad?