Rachel Maddox, secret CNAS fellow?

Hey guess what I'm going to talk about? thats right counter insurgencies! More particularly Rachel Maddow being awsome about them.

So first off, Nagl the president of CNAS was on, talking primarily about the future of Afghanistan

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Abu M (who now works with both Nagl and Kilcullen) points out what is so great about this clip:

And out of no where, Rachel Maddow -- Rachel bleeping Maddow! -- calls my boss to task and asks him if being a strategic thinker means more than tweaking our operational design. Damn! When pressed, to be fair, John gives his fellow Rhodes Scholar a pretty good answer about the costs of failure in Afghanistan. But who would have thought that lefty smart-ass on MSNBC would be the one asking the key questions? (Rumor has it that Afghanistan is actually one of Maddow's pet subjects. Good on her, I say.)

This is the type of reporting that TNC points out (in a different context) is missing in so much of the current reporting, which often lacks both intelligence and creativity. What Maddow is doing here isn foaming at the mouth or arguing about the facts on the ground. Instead she has perfect respect for Nagl's knowledge on the topic, but she still pushes him on what the role of experts should be. I've seen a lot of interviews with Nagl and others like him, and very few reporters have asked this, seemingly obvious, question.

then David Kilcullen is on tonight about halfway through this clip, basically talking about his new book... which one of the first things on my reading list, post-BA.

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Also check out this piece in the Post that outlines his views on A-stan. Given what I know about the book, I think that it is actually of much broader relevance than this article seems to imply.

And her she is making cocktails.... while threatening to make move people talk about COIN (sadly she doesnt follow through on that one)

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Why am I Watching the Watchman?

Yeah I wasn't a fan, for reasons ranging from a bad mood that in retrospect was the first sign of my body turning into a post-apocalyptic wasteland to alarm at some of the people I go to school with. Below, I rant about some of my more substantive complaints, cause my brain is too fired to actually work on my BA.

WARNING
*SPOILERS BELOW*
for both the comic book and the movie. You've been warned.

Problem number 1. the sound track. Aside from the opening credits (which deserve every bit of praise they've gotten) the music is frankly bizarre. Despite using tons of songs I love to death (including the singles cut of simon and garfunkles sound of silence that is SO much better then the more common album version) the timing of alot of it made no sense, and really detracted from the mood. Often, song that I think of as being INCREDIBLY tied to a particular period (Purple Haze anyone?) were used as the backdrop to scenes set in totally different time periods. Fine in a different film maybe, but for one that is working so hard to take place as historical time passes, and to work with the events of the specific times, I found the anachronistic music really distracting. Also, often either the lyrics, or the emotion of the song seemed out of place. We can argue back and forth about "Hallelujah" (which I hated), but Hendrix's "All allong the watchtower" isnt a go out and fight for humanity song (particularly not after you've heard a version that is exactly that).

Also, i'm a girl who likes ass-kicking in my action movies, and soundtracks are often what gets your gut into it. Its not a good sign when the far less violent previews for terminator and startrek seemed harder core then what was on the surface a very violent movie, cause my adrenaline just wasn't in play the way it should have been.

Problem number 2: Laurie Juniper. Right, so first of all, just weak casting to have to hold her own against Billy Crudup and the amazing blue penis (i read an entire review of the penis, which I wanted to include for EconMAN's benifit, and now cant for the life of me remember were it was, but now have a really awkward set of search strings in google's memory...). but my bigger problem?

She didnt smoke. (H/T Helen)

This isn't even a reflection of my own issues with my own vices. honestly, she could have been doing something other than smoking and I would have been fine. Chewing her nails, pulling her hair, eating, twitching, whatever. But part of Lauries deal is that she is a mess when shes not in costume (just as much as Dan and his Hallelujah issues), and her chain smoking is a huge part of how that is convaid to the reader. Without it, there little sense as to why she needs the mask, the way there is for the men, making whats already not the most funcional character even lamer.

Also it totally took the legs out from under my favorite joke with the lighter/flamethrower. Thanks, I could have used that laugh Zach.

Problem number 3: Adrian. The Intrepid Spenser has an interesting read of what the problems here were.

"He's icy and menacing throughout the whole film, rather than detached and outwardly gentle, which diminishes the impact of the big reveal... Making him and not Captain Metropolis the leader of the Crimebusters/Watchmen team in the 60s makes him appear to be ruthless. It's not obvious that Adrian really does want to save the world -- and perhaps Zach Snyder decided he doesn't; he wants to rule it... That would make for a more coherent portrayal of Adrian. But also a far less interesting one."

I agree that this was a problem (though frankly the symbolism has always bothered me, but the explanation for that would involve me geeking about ancient history too much to happen today), but I think the bigger problem in the film was the weird gay vibe he had going. Dont get me wrong its there a bit in the novel (all those purple turtle necks), but making him physically less impressive, putting him in front of Studio 54 and making the bit with the cat creeper than necessary definitely pushed Adrian from 'possible' to 'firmly implied in the world of Hollywood cliches'.

That bothers me because it comes hand in hand with Adrian becoming more simply evil. And its a bit troubling that those two trends seem somehow ties together, particularly because of the extent to which Watchman is a commentary on superheros as a cultural form.

Also, what happened to him being the smartest man alive? If i have just seen the movie, I would have thought he was cool cause he was fast, not cause he could out think everyone. Again this plays into Spences point about losing the detached, absents minded professor thing, which I've always liked (shhh peanut gallery).

Problem 4: deterrence dont work like that. but thats true in the novel too, so ill swallow it.

Problem 5: Perhaps my most bizarre complaint? seeing the movie made me realize I had misread a critical part of the book.

I admit to being a total Johnny-come-lately, and didnt read it until January, very late at night, while not feeling well. Apparently there was a very good reason I wasnt trying to do homework at that moment, because when I hit the final pages of the book, I somehow brain seized when I read the panel in which Sally Juniper kisses the old photo, and thought that instead being a confirmation of Laurie's father being the Comedian (one of the big ethical reveals of both the novel and movie), that there was a second switch, and she actually indicated Hollis (ie Nite Owl I) to be her long lost love. After a protracted whiny argument with the people I was with I got home, to discover to my chagrin that I was totally wrong, that I was blind, and it totally was the Comedian.

I was not amused.

Beyond being disgruntled at being wrong (oh horrors!), I was also pretty irate, because I realized that I liked my version of the story better than what Moore actually wrote. In my version the final moral is not that people make inexplicable choices about who they love with some thoughts about what part violence play in our relationships thrown in for good measure (which, frankly, I dont find terribly interesting or novel in a world of BSG and Tarrentino), but rather about the way in which humans perception is limited.

If Laurie and Jon are wrong in how they stitch together Laurie's half remembered hints from childhood, Sally's crime is not loving her rapist, but only an affair with a man who has been portrayed through the book as a decent guy. Hardly a sin at all in comparison to everyone else's moral elasticity. In fact, it ends up saying almost nothing interesting about any of the old Watchman. What it does do is radically challenge Dr. Manhattan's omnipotence, and how that impacts his view of humanity.

In this reading, Dr. Manhattan, despite being about to literally see everything, is still capable of putting the pieces together wrong. I think this is interesting both because it de-elevates him from his godlike position, and because it specifically shows that he shares in the very human trait of expecting the worst out of people. We like scandal, we like twisted sex, and we are perfectly happy to put the jigsaw puzzle of facts together wrong if it supports out ability to find that part of human nature. In a novel that deconstructs the tropes of cultural icons in order to create just such moral darkness, I like the implication that this process is more complex then we may think.

I also like the idea of Dr. Manhattan being in some way a reader of fractured events that his mistake suggests, because it creates a common bond not only with the detached scholar Adrian, but with the reader that I find really intriguing.

A friend pointed out halfway through my ranting explanation of this that I was actually confirming one of his favorite aspects of Scifi and its derivatives, which is that you can walk down the roads not taken by both reality and the author in philosophically interesting way in playing with the ends of these novels.

He's right.

But i still like my story better.

A common Ground for Poli Sci

Greg Mankiw spends so time talking about core beliefs shared by most if not all economists. his point has everything to do with restoring faith in academic economics after watching the interdepartmental fights of the last six months, but a friend of mine raised an interesting issue.

Could a Professor of Political Science make such a claim? could and Anthropologist? could a Historian?

I think the answer is a pretty resounding no, though it could be interesting to try to come up with one. But my instinct is at the end of the day, your ideological bend, or the 'school of thought' to which you belong within these disciplines is just to critical to your understanding of the world to be able to find much in the way of common ground.

Part of me feels that this may begin to touch on what the true split between social science and science lies. Scientist not only agree on the way in which inquiry is pursued (lots of historians share notions about what constitutes valid historical proof as well), but also a key notions about how the universe operates. Regardless of whether you think AIDS research breakthroughs will come from one line of drugs or the other, there is a shared understanding about how the disease functions, what its effects on the host are, and what the end goal of stopping the disease looks like.

Equivalent problems in other fields, like 'the rise of democracy in previously autocratic nation' have to grapple with issues like what democratic process is, how a society becomes democratic, and what a democracy in its final form should look like. While social science may try to incorporate the methods of science, it lacks the level of definitional and mechanical clarity that true science posses.

And that's what makes it fasinating.

Happy Valentines Day

Sorry for the drop in posts/ the role... conference takes it out of a girl.

so to make up for it im posting this gem by Mr. Walt of Canbridge, Mass (H/T to my father... who might know me too well)

At any rate I'm happy to say (respectfully) that, seeing as Realist are all a load of crap, I follow very few of the following dictates:

To begin with, any romantic partnership is essentially an alliance, and alliances are a core concept on international relations. Alliances bring many benefits to the members (or else why would we form them?) but as we also know, they sometimes reflect irrational passions and inevitably limit each member's autonomy. Many IR theorists believe that institutionalizing an alliance makes it more effective and enduring, but that’s also why making a relationship more formal is a significant step that needs to be carefully considered.

Of course, IR theorists have also warned that allies face the twin dangers of abandonment and entrapment: the more we fear that our partners might leave us in the lurch (abandonment), the more likely we are to let them drag us into obligations that we didn't originally foresee (entrapment). When you find yourself gamely attending your partner’s high school reunion or traveling to your in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner every single year, you’ll know what I mean.

Realists have long argued that bipolar systems are the most stable. So if any of you lovers out there are thinking of adding more major actors to the system, please reconsider. As most of us eventually learn, trying to juggle romantic relationships in a multi-polar setting usually leads to crises, and sometimes to open warfare. It's certainly not good for alliance stability.

IR theory also warns us that shifts in the balance of power are dangerous. There's an obvious warning here: relationships are more likely to have trouble if one partner's status or power changes rapidly. So that big promotion that you both celebrated may be a good thing overall, but it's likely to alter expectations and force you and your partner to make serious adjustments. The same is true if one of you gets laid off. Bottom line: it can take a lot of patience and love to work through a major shift in the balance of power within a relationship.

Even the best relationships have their bumpy moments, of course, because even human beings who love each other deeply can have trouble figuring out what the other person wants and why they are acting as they are. IR theorists have written lots of smart things about misperception, and it's good to keep some of them in mind. We tend to see our own behavior as constrained by our circumstances, for example, while attributing the behavior of others to their own attributes and wants. "I'm doing this because I have to, but he's acting this way because that’s just who he is!" This sort of perceptual bias is potent recipe for conflict spirals, something IR theorists have long warned about. A small disagreement occurs, and each person's attempt to defend their own position starts to look like an aggressive and unjustified attack. And so we discover another core IR concept: escalation.

I'm hoping a few readers are nodding their heads in agreement at this point.

Which brings me to an especially helpful IR concept: appeasement. The term has been unfairly denigrated since Munich, but it is a critical strategy for preserving any romantic relationship. And if you don't believe me, ask my wife, who made me put this paragraph in.

So maybe learning some IR theory can actually help your love life. If it does, and you're lucky enough to find the right person, and then you might decide you want to institutionalize the relationship by getting married. (This assumes that you're straight, of course, or fortunate enough to live in a part of the world that recognizes the rights of gay people to marry as well).

And then the two of you might also decide to mobilize your combined resources and grow your own alliance network -- i.e., have kids -- either via the traditional method or by adopting. If you do, you'll get to learn about a whole new set of IR concepts, like deterrence, coercion, salami tactics, and overcommitment. But that's another set of problems, and maybe I'll wait till Father's Day to blog about them.

Happy long weekend to all, and good luck to the Harvard delegation.

Hey Brooks decided to respond to my post too!

What Life Asks of Us

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

This approach is deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness. But there is another, older way of living, and it was discussed in a neglected book that came out last summer called “On Thinking Institutionally” by the political scientist Hugh Heclo.

In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.

Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations. They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them. A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relation to her land is not an individual choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. Her social function defines who she is. The connection is more like a covenant. There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.

In 2005, Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. Heclo cites his speech as an example of how people talk when they are defined by their devotion to an institution:

“I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg motioned to those inducted before him, “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up.

“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect ... . If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game ... did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

I thought it worth devoting a column to institutional thinking because I try to keep a list of the people in public life I admire most. Invariably, the people who make that list have subjugated themselves to their profession, social function or institution.

Second, institutional thinking is eroding. Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction.

Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity.

But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.

Patriotism, First Principles, and a UChicago Education

Hey duck- sorry its been so long sense I last posted. I have a long piece on Gaza, that I just never managed to get updated quickly enough. If the cease fires holds for a few days I'll try to wrap that up soon.

In the mean time, I'm carrying a conversation I've been having with many of you over the past few weeks onto the blog, that for a miracle of a change has nothing to do with irregular warfare, the Middle East, South Asia or any of my other typical soup boxes.

As many of you know I'm applying to a number of government jobs for next year. as part of the application they almost all ask some variation of "why do you want this job". And here's where I run into trouble. This SHOULD be totally straight forward, right? A second grader knows the answer here... "Because i want to serve my country though X department". And I'm a perfectly good MUNer, i should be able to write something compelling. But (much to the vexation of all you poor suffering souls who have had to listen to me work on these) that doesn't seem to be happening. Patriotism just seems to be this fundamentally problematic concept for me.

Some of this is undoubtedly from my liberal construction of patriotism:

If conservatives tend to see patriotism as an inheritance from a glorious past, liberals often see it as the promise of a future that redeems the past. Consider Obama's original answer about the flag pin: "I won't wear that pin on my chest," he said last fall. "Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism." Will make this country great? It wasn't great in the past? It's not great as it is?

The liberal answer is, Not great enough. For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law. American history is a chronicle of the distance between those ideals and reality. And American patriotism is the struggle to narrow the gap. Thus, patriotism isn't about honoring and replicating the past; it's about surpassing it.

Because I see a gap, rather then a concrete culture, theres more room for my native cynicism to creep into my world view. But i just dont think that is the entire sum of the problem.

But I have good news.

I've found someone to blame.

Better yet, I've found someone interesting to blame.

No, not the very evil Bush administration, that's just not sporting, and its not in the spirit of these days of change.

I blame the University of Chicago education that I've loved so much, including my time in MUN.

There are two reasons that I'm choosing to lay the blame at the foot of our gargoyle decked ivory towers. The first (and frankly rather uninteresting one) is that the U of C make us all perfectionist that think about things too hard. yaddad yadda yaddad... academics can't deal with the real world, ect ect. Believe me, I'm not dismissive of the problem that this creates (ask me about my family some time), but this is water thats been gone over many many times, so I'll save us the air space.

The second, and more pertinent, piece of the puzzle has to do very specifically with the U of C education, enshrined in the General Education Core Curriculum. While I'm not disputing that there are other acceptable Core sequences, my own selection of PIR, Philosophical Perspectives and Western Civ (ok Italian, but its the same narrative arc) can certainly be classed as a good model for the education the U of C advertises. Covering a massive chunk of the western cannon in philosophy, political science and pre-modern European history, these are the classes that are intended to form the bedrock of our education, that provide "opportunities for critical inquiry and the discovery of knowledge [by] studying original texts and of formulating original problems based on the study of those texts."

But in the University's quest to train us to evaluate a range of primary texts, there is also a silent privileging of a specific type of argumentation. We are trained to dissect the logic of philosophers, either by breaking down the argument of a specific thinker, or by putting different descriptions of the ways in which things work into dialogue with one another. And in this we receive a world class education. But where the University misses the boat is that all of this is all done at the level of second order arguments, rather than by examining the validity of First Principles.

First Principles are those awkward fundamental assumptions that underpin all this arguments, including claim about what we should be aiming for, what we should care about, and sometimes, what human nature is. Statements like "human life has value", "pain is bad", and "justice is important" are certainly things we grapple with in Core classes, but when it comes time to write a paper we argue not that "Nietzsche is wrong because he doesnt place a high enough premium on human life" but instead that "Nietzsche's arguments are fundamentally flawed, because his assumptions about humanity's capacity for empathy are contradicted by his understanding of family relations". Please note that my argument isn't that First Principle argument are in any way more important then Second Order analysis (I think both are critical). Its that there is a massive privileging of one over the other.

This same problem also exists in MUN. Never, in four years of staffing and competing have I heard anyone I respect make arguments about First Principles. In fact, I'm usually among the first to start mocking the "human rights kids" (add the derogatory drawl to that intonation please) who occasionally try. Instead, good delegates debate how to construct policy given pre-established ends, and how to spin our positions to garner support.

The problem is that all of this has not only made me somewhat clumsy at articulating these underlying principles though lack of practice, it has made me fundamentally uncomfortable using them in anything I see as being "intellectually serious" discourse. And so "America is a good thing" goes from being something that I can articulate and grapple with in a rational way, to being a scary blob of emotions, something indelicate to talk about. I have to be argued into a corner to admit it, and then feel compelled to redefine a poke at it until I'm blue in the face.



So how about it kids? Do you think that our education is slanted the way I do? Is it a problem that it is? and how about this country of our (hey it inauguration day, it seems fitting)? or is Auntie el-Belle just crazy?

UPDATE:
Or I could have just waited for today's speech, and had the answer handed to me:

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honour them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

How to find your favorite think tank. Seriously, I'm still not over how FP went from being the home of uselessness to the source of all that is good in the universe.