The blue screen of death

Via Patrick Appel for Andrew Sullivan, an article at Slate by William Saletan about the use by the U.S. military of drones that kill through a remote video game-like interface:

But the world on the screen isn't ordinary. It doesn't even feel like life.

Is the "synthetic environment" real? That depends on which end of the missile you're looking at. In the targeted car, it's as real as death. But from the console, it looks more like virtual reality. If the drone goes down, you're not in it.

The tone of the article is somewhat disconcerting, as it seems we're supposed to disapprove of this manner of waging war:

If you've seen combat in the flesh, you know what the fireball on the screen means to the people in the car. But to a teenager raised on Doom and Halo, it looks like just another score. He can't feel or smell the explosion. He isn't even there. The eeriest thing in the demo video is the total silence that accompanies the car's destruction. The only sound that follows is the pilot's triumphant verdict: "Excellent job." It's like something you'd read on the screen after getting a high score at an arcade.

I am certainly no fan of war, I didn't miss Vietnam by so many years that I do not feel relief at the accident of birth that kept me from that conflict. But, if we must fight a war (and I think we need to set the bar higher than we did, for example, in Iraq), we should fight it according to a simple objective, that it's about killing more of the other side than we lose.

As such, there is no particular nobility in mano-a-mano battle. Despite a certain romanticism that we get from old movies, one of the very real goals is to avoid "combat in the flesh." Older people get it; I knew very few of my parents' friends who had a problem with the A-bomb, as there was a real fear of the meatgrinder that would have been the invasion of Japan (to be fair, there were some qualms about the second).

So what is Saletan's point here? Perhaps we get some glimmer from the final paragraph:

Forty-one years ago, John McCain was shot down over Vietnam. He broke three limbs and spent five years in brutal imprisonment. Anyone who has been through such hell knows that drones do a great service by protecting American pilots. But kids with PlayStations live in a world where the pilot—the console operator—is the only real human being. They don't understand war's horror the way McCain does. And he isn't the military of tomorrow. They are.

OK, I think I get it now, we're supposed to fear that the ease of fighting war from an ergonomic chair 8,000 miles away will spur us into easier conflict, that a no-loss war will provide an incentive to rush to arms against anyone who looks cross-eyed at us.

Compelling though this point may be, I think Saletan picked a bad example. It seems that McCain is more willing even to Bush to commit troops in spite of his "understanding" of "war's horror." Figuring this out is one of the key components of comprehension of McCain's approach to world events, and, until someone can help me get this, I would find it quite difficult to vote for Mr. Straight Talk.

Truth vs. politics

We often make false dichotomies, the kind of arguments that start, "There are two types of people...." Most of these arguments are false, as people are not usually that easy to categorize. But I'm going to make such a dichotomy in this post; understand that I'm presenting these as absolutes, rather than the tendencies they more likely are.

There are two types of people, those who seek truth wherever it takes them, and those who believe that facts can be used selectively to advocate one position or another. I like to think of myself as in the former camp, that I can be convinced by a compelling argument or a changing situation that something I believe is wrong.

For example, I believe that the minimum wage is a good thing, that it represents a floor below which society is arguing that companies must not go, that they cannot use their power to withhold their share of this country's inherent bounty from other citizens. Every job has some minimum value because every person has some basic value, and this country is better when we recognize that. That doesn't mean that I know the exact number at which this minimum should be pegged, so there is still a discussion to be had.

But I am reasonable. If it could be proven, proven beyond reasonable doubt, that eliminating the minimum wage would create vast amounts of wealth, and that wealth wouldn't simply be concentrated in the hands of a few, I would change my position. If I were convinced that the nation would be better off, and no one would be irreparably damaged, I would be the first to argue for the abolition of the minimum wage.

At least I hope that I could shed my long-held beliefs so easily. And I would like to believe that most people are that way as well, but that's a big "like to believe," because I know that many find it hard to abandon the ideas that have lived inside them for years.

But today I'm talking about the people, a large number, for whom truth is largely irrelevant. Their interest is not in perceiving reality, but in self-enhancement. These are folks who find truth inconvenient, and the pursuit of it a waste of time. Sadly, many of these people are very successful and influential.

When we see Hillary Clinton insisting that the votes in Florida and Michigan be counted, while we know that, had Obama won those states, she would be at the forefront of those calling for strict rule-following, or we see her claiming that sexism is a larger force in her campaign than racism, it's hard to see her as a seeker of truth. I think one of the reasons we've come to mistrust politicians so thoroughly is that we sense that they have a wanton disregard for any truth that conflicts with the expedient positions they take.

And that is why I'm so disheartened by the public regard for CEOs (I discussed this last week in more detail). These are not men and women who have any interest in the truth, but we want to believe they have some insight that has been denied the rest of us (look how much money they have).

So Congress wants to believe that Bill Gates will express truth about H-1B visas because he's so obviously smart, and therefore is a truth-seeker. But he's not, he's an advocate; if you convinced him that more H-1B visas would hurt Microsoft, he would argue precisely the opposite of what he did contend two months ago.

We need to get a lot smarter about this, distinguish the truth-seekers from the self-servers, evaluate arguments on their merits and not their supporters.

By the way, this should not be read as an anti-Hillary post - her reluctance to discard a lost campaign clearly comes from a deep-seated place that I don't profess to understand (though Andrew Sullivan has an idea) - but I have reservations as to whether anyone in the political arena can be a seeker of truth. I can only hope that the eventual president is closer to that than we have had for the last eight (or more) years, because we have a lot of growing problems that need to be looked at from a stance of reality, not self-loving positioning.

We're going to pump you up

Via Kevin Drum, an article by attorney Phillip Carter, who spent time in Iraq with the U.S. Army, discussing the president's most recent comments about the war:

If security conditions improve, we'll stay longer in order to consolidate those gains and facilitate political progress. And if security conditions deteriorate, we'll stay in order to restore order and prevent chaos. How exactly does this translate into anything other than an indefinite stay in Iraq?

Carter goes on to quote Bush from a Friday interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC:

RADDATZ: But the overall thing -- when you say, "We're winning," you know what the American people hear. You know how that will play.

BUSH: Well, yes. I think we -- and I wanted -- that's as much trying to bolster the spirits of the people in the field as well as -- look, you can't have the commander in chief say to a bunch of kids who are sacrificing either, "It's not worth it," or, "You're losing." I mean, what does that do for morale? I'm the commander in chief of the military as well, obviously, as, you know, somebody who speaks to the country. And if you look at my remarks, they were balanced. They weren't Pollyannaish.

Carter has a problem with this:

The dissonance between the rhetoric from Washington and our experience in Iraq was stark. We knew the ground truth. Being deceived by our senior political leaders certainly didn't change that, nor did it help morale at all. If anything, it hurt morale by undermining confidence in the chain of command. Put bluntly, if you can't trust your generals and political leaders to tell you and your families the truth, how can you trust them at all?

It's disappointing to hear now, two years after the fact, that the president was knowingly bull----ing us the whole time. And that he justified such dishonesty in the name of supporting the troops and protecting their morale. That's an insult to America's men and women in uniform (and their families), who deserve to be told the truth by their political leaders about what's going on. It's also an insult to us, as voters, who deserve the truth so we can make the right decisions in the voting booth.

But, of course, this is the spirit of the times. People in power, across all walks of life, tell the people what they think they want to hear, especially if it lets them get out of the room without having to answer tough questions. I worked in a company in which the CEO would conduct these town hall meetings, where he or another executive would speak about something, usually very positively, then take questions from the employees. Invariably, as this company slid down into the post-tech boom abyss, real events would contradict the rosy picture within a week or two of the town hall meeting.

One time, the CEO said that he had seen no plans for future layoffs. That may have been true, but the plans must have been put in the limo for his trip back to HQ, because they came pretty soon after that statement.

Look, "morale" is a smokescreen. Everyone in that company knew fully well how poorly things were going, and, if they had missed it, they got it after the first round of layoffs. Morale was lousy, but we didn't have a lot of alternatives as to where we might go.

If you have a brain, you realize that your "leadership" is either lying to you, or very, very stupid (and you can never rule out both). And these lies aren't strategic, they aren't part of a plan to maintain the spirit of the workforce. They're simply ways of avoiding an unpleasant subject.

We're hearing the same rhetoric about the current economic difficulties. If we'd just stay positive, spend those rebate checks on consumer goods, and keep in that mellow mood, everything will turn out OK.

Except that it won't, and no amount of cheerleading will change those fundamental realities.