Kauffman's Rules: The Final Seven

by Sara

I've been on the road since Friday, and plagued by a lack of time and funky Internet access for most of that. But I seem to have found a quiet corner with reliable wifi, and some time to finish this mini-tutorial on thinking systemically and realistically about the situations we find ourselves in.

So here they are: Draper Kauffman's last seven rules on reality hacking:

21. Remember the Golden Mean. When people face a serious problem, they tend to overvalue anything that helps solve it. They mobilize their energies and fight hard to solve the problem, and often keep right on going after the problem is solved and the solution is becoming a new problem. When most children died before their tenth birthdays, a high birth rate was essential for survival and societies developed powerful ways to encourage people to have large families. When the death rate is reduced, a high birth rate becomes a liability, but all those strong cultural forces keep right on encouraging large families, and it can take generations for people's attitudes to change.

Like the man who eats himself to death as an adult because he was always hungry as a child, people tend to forget that too much of something can be as bad as too little. They assume that if more of something is good a lot more must be better--but it often isn't. The trick is to recognize these situations and try to swing the pendulum back to the middle whenever it swings toward either extreme.

What Kauffman is describing here is a feedback delay. Systems often fall apart because the feedback mechanisms that keep them within an optimal range don't return current information; or because there's a disconnect between the feedback mechanism and the rest of the system that keeps that information from being acted on in a timely way. Creating a feedback delay is one of the better ways there is to wreck a functioning system.

Unfortunately, one of the greatest weaknesses of democracy is that has a stronger structural tendency toward feedback delays than most other forms of government. In monarchies or oligarchies, you only have to convince a few people to take action; and once they're convinced, things happen. But in a republic, you have to convince everybody -- and they have to convince their representatives -- and that takes time.

A lot of us knew a decade ago that global warming was going to be a defining issue of our time. In this case, the feedback delays are killing us.

22. Beware the empty compromise. There are also times when the middle ground is worse than either extreme. There's an old, old fable about an ass who starved to death halfway between two bales of hay because it couldn't make up its mind which one to eat first. Sometimes you just have to choose, because a compromise won't work. The only way to tell is to examine the entire system carefully and try to anticipate what the results of different decisions will be.

Twenty-two rules in, it's still amazing to me how many of these rules W violated on his way to Iraq. (Which, I guess, proves that he doesn't listen to his cousins -- Draper Kauffman's mother was Prescott Bush's sister -- any more than he does the rest of us.) The road to Iraq was a succession of empty compromises; and the longer we're there, the more of them seem to crop up.

23. Don't be boiled frog. Some systems are designed so that they can react to any change that is larger than a certain amount, but they can't respond to changes that are below that threshold. For example, if a frog is put in a pan of hot water, he will jump right out. But if he is put in a pan, of cool water and the water is then gradually heated up, the frog will happily sit there and let itself be cooked. As long as the change is slow enough, it doesn't trigger a response. Sometimes a country can use this tactic to defeat an enemy in a patient series of small steps. Each step weakens the opponent a little bit, but is "not worth going to war over" until finally the victim is too weak to resist an attack. (These are sometimes called "salami-slicing tactics". "Divide and conquer" is another version of the same thing.) While a healthy system shouldn't overreact to small changes, it has to be able to identify and respond to a series of small changes that will bring disaster if allowed to continue.

Rule 19 said that loose systems are often a good thing, because they can adapt. But, sometimes, you can adapt yourself right out of existence…or at least a perfectly decent Constitution.

24. Watch out for thresholds. Most systems change pretty gradually. But some systems are designed to switch abruptly from one kind of behavior to a completely different kind. Sometimes this is a defense against the "boiled frog" problem. ("He's meek as a lamb until you push him too far. Then you'd better watch out!") In other cases, it's a way of avoiding "empty compromises" (#22). But most often it's because the system, or a subsystem of it, has exhausted its reserves for coping with some pressure on it. This can be disastrous if you are relying on a system that has seemed able to absorb a lot of abuse and it suddenly collapses as a result of something apparently trivial. Democracies, market economies, and natural ecosystems are all prone to behave in this way. They seem so sturdy that we can kick them around, interfere with subsystem after subsystem, increase the load more and more, and they will always bounce back. But we can never be sure which straw is going to break the camel's back.

Actually, if we're watching the right spots closely and interpreting feedback correctly, we can get a pretty good idea of just how close we are to loading that last straw. The trick, of course, is figuring out which spots are the right ones, and reading the feedback rightly.

25. Competition is often cooperation in disguise. A chess player may push himself to the limit in his desire to defeat his opponent, and yet be very upset if he finds out that his opponent deliberately let him win. What appears to be a fierce competition on one level is actually part of a larger system in which both players cooperate in a ritual that gives both of them pleasure. Not "doing your best" is a violation of that cooperative agreement. Similarly, the competitions between two lawyers in a courtroom is an essential part of a larger process in which lawyers, judge, and jury cooperate in a search for just answers. Businesses cooperate to keep the economy running efficiently by competing with each other in the marketplace. Political parties cooperate in running a democracy by competing with each other at the polls. And so on.

How do you tell cooperative competition from destructive competition? In cooperative competition, the opponents are willing to fight by the rules and accept the outcome of a fair contest, even if it goes against them.' One reason extremist or totalitarian movements are dangerous in a democracy is that they turn politics into destructive competition.

Kauffman wrote this upwards of 30 years ago -- but was prescient about the way in which the right wing has decimated our ability to engage with the right on the same field, under the same rules, for cooperative control of our government. They took their ball, went home, and came back with guns. And, at that moment, any possibility of democracy as usual vanished.

26. Bad boundaries make bad governments. Unlike most cities, St. Louis is not part of a larger county. St. Louis County surrounds the city and keeps it from expanding its city limits. As a result, the communities in the county have become parasites on the city, using the city's commercial and cultural resources but contributing nothing toward the cost of maintaining them. As long as there is a boundary that splits the metropolitan area in half, and no government with authority over the whole area, the county will keep getting richer and the city will keep getting poorer until urban decay completely destroys it. Similar boundary problems afflict states, nations, ecosystems, and economic regions. As a general rule, the system with responsibility for a problem should include the entire problem area; authority must be congruent with responsibility, or commons problem (#27) results.

The CFC/ozone hole problem was a major landmark in human history, because, for the first time, the boundary of both the problem and its solution transcended the boundaries of individual countries. We needed to mount a planet-wide response, and we did.

The fact that we successfully rose to this first-ever global challenge bodes well for our ability to deal with the other challenges that are now rising ahead of us. However, it also means that we're headed into a century in which we'll have extend the strength and reach of our international political, scientific, legal, and other institutions -- because they're the only ones with boundaries large enough to deal with the issues raised by economic globalization, global warming, rogue states, environmental refugeeism, and so on.

27. Beware the Tragedy of the Commons. A "commons" problem occurs when subsystems in a competitive relationship with each other are forced to act in ways that are destructive of the whole system. Usually, the source of the problem is the right of a subsystem to receive the whole benefit from using a resource while paying only a small part of the cost for it. The solution is either to divide the common resource up (not always possible) or limit access to it.

The only real solution to a commons problem is to form a government to regulate access to the shared resource. Much of the violence that the GOP has done to the American body politic over the past 30 years has resulted from the fact that the right wing a) does not recognize the concept of the commons in any way, shape or form (that's what all their talk about privatization is about -- eliminating any commons, anywhere); and b) does not recognize the legitimate right of government to regulate the commons that do exist. These people want to privatize our air and water, and sell it back to us for a price. For them, the only valid function of government is to protect the property rights that allow them to own things, and charge for access to them.

Of course, the Earth is reminding us that this is wrong-headed: nobody can possibly own the atmosphere and the oceans, unless we all do -- and manage them accordingly. It's coming clear now that our very survival depends on creating institutions that are big enough and credible enough to handle this job.

28. Foresight always wins in the long run. Solutions to problems affecting complex systems usually take time. If we wait until the problem develops and then react to it, there may not be time for a good solutions before a crisis point is reached. If we look ahead and anticipate a problem, however, we usually have more choices and a better chance of heading the problem off before it disrupts things. Reacting to problems means letting the system control us. Only by using foresight do we have a real chance to control the system; or: those who do not try to create the future they want must endure the future they get.

Unfortunately, in a democracy, it's very hard to summon the will for change until most of the voters are convinced change is needed. And, in most cases, that's not until they've already felt the brunt of a crisis -- by which point, any action will be strictly reactive, instead of preventative.

Sources: Although some of these guidelines are associated with particular people, it is impossible to trace most of the concepts back to specific originators with any confidence. Rules 1, 3, and 5 were either coined or popularized by Barry Commoner. Rules 2, 14, 16, and 27 are associated with Garrett Hardin. Number 4 is associated with Commoner and science fiction author Robert Heinlein, among others. Number 6 is an old idea, but the words apparently come from humorist Will Rogers. Number 7 is associated with Jay Forrester. Number 9 is also an old idea; it has been emphasized by Isaac Asimov, Paul Ehrlich, Hardin, Forrester, and Donella Meadows, among others. Number 15 is a quote from John Platt's book, The Step to Man. The Boulding quote in number 17 is from The Meaning of the 20th Century. Most of the rest are "in general use"--i.e., not especially associated with an originator or a popularizer. They have generally been paraphrased or re-stated for this list.

Coulter, the right, and gays

If nothing else, you have to admire Ann Coulter's tenaciousness -- one might call it psychotic denial, but hey -- in defending her recent ugliness at CPAC, wherein she displayed herself, once again, as the flaming bigot we've known her to be for some time now. My, how surprising.

But Coulter wants to assure us she isn't expressing any kind of anti-gay bigotry by using a well-known anti-gay slur. That's because, in real life, Coulter has a lot of gay friends, including Matt Drudge. So you could find her hiding out on Fox and vaguely backtracking while going on the attack, accusing liberals of engaging in Soviet-style thought control tactics in denouncing her use of the slur. Best of all, she tried to paint the slur as, well, not a slur, but a taunt, as though they were mutually exclusive:

"'Faggot' isn't offensive to gays; it has nothing to do with gays. It's a schoolyard taunt meaning 'wuss,' and unless you're telling me that John Edwards is gay, it was not applied to a gay person."

Pam Spaulding nailed this claim to the wall rather handily, noting that the word "faggot" makes a frequent appearance in the perpetration of hate crimes:

Again, this is less about Coulter than it is about the fact that she is a proponent of homophobia (and clearly schoolyard bullying) if she is going to spew it's a harmless word without a specific and well-known meaning.

People die, lose their jobs, are beaten and harassed because of homophobia. Is this what the GOP and the conservative movement stand for? That's fine with me, just don't try to pretend that's not what Coulter is saying.

Ah, but it's all just a joke, Pam. We've heard that before with Coulter.

Earlier, Coulter had actually tried to claim that the conservative movement is pro-gay by a bizarre misrepresentation of their position regarding crimes against gays:

Well, you know, screw you, I'm not anti-gay. We're against gay marriage. I don't want gays to be discriminated against. I mean, I think we have, in addition to blacks, I don't know why all gays aren't Republicans. I think we have the pro-gay position, which is anti-crime and for tax cuts. Gays make a lot of money, and they're victims of crime. I mean, the way -- no, they are. They should be with us. But the media portrays us.

Actually, the media tends to give conservatives a pass on their anti-gay bigotry by writing it off to "religious beliefs," as though such a thing could justify any kind of bigotry. It's not so easy when it comes to secular conservatives like Coulter, who have to make all kinds of bizarre contortions, such as this, to justify the actual record of movement conservatives when it comes to anti-gay crimes.

Lane Hudson saw some hope from this passage:

Hmmmm.....was that a tacit endorsement of including gays, lesbians, and transgenered folks in hate crimes law? I think it is!

So, the real story is that the right wing devil herself has endorsed pro-gay legislation. She may have even inadvertantly suggested that she was in favor of the Employment Nondiscrimation Act.

No, actually, I expect that Coulter will make the usual movement-conservative bleatings about hate-crime and antidiscrimination laws being about political correctness and shutting down opposing discourse (she has before), and therefore would not endorse a federal hate crimes law like the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act. But but but you see, in Coulterland, the GOP wants to get tough on enforcing the laws on the books, you see. That would benefit gays more than a hate-crimes statute.

Well, just for the record, let's recall that in fact the GOP has killed a federal hate-crimes law not once but three times in the past six years. And their reasons for it revolved around opposition to including sexual preference among the categories of bias crime:

That didn't matter. What mattered to Republicans was the freedom to bash gays.

Oh, we know they hide behind phony and nonsensical arguments like "all crimes are hate crimes" and "these laws create thought crimes." But let's get real about what's really happening here: These laws are not being passed because the Republican leadership -- including George W. Bush -- is determined not to allow any improvement in the laws for gays and lesbians.

The reality is that Republicans have established credibility with their base -- especially fundamentalist Christians -- by making emotional appeals to their "values"; this is, as many observers have noted, an essential element of their ability to persuade working-class people to vote for an agenda clearly at odds with their own self-interest. And, after abortion, attacking the "homosexual agenda" is easily the most prominent and flagrant of these "values."

Republicans also like to talk about the need to live up to the consequences of their actions. And one of the real consequences of the House's refusal to pass this legislation is that more hate crimes will occur.

Here's a reality check for Republicans:

-- We know, from FBI statistics, there are at least 8-9,000 hate crimes committed in this country every year.

-- We also know, however, from Justice Department studies, that these statistics are horribly unreliable because hate crimes are egregiously underreported every year.

-- The magnitude of the underreporting is substantial. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the number of hate crimes in this country annually approaches closer to 40,000. That means roughly 30,000 hate crimes are going uninvestigated and unprosecuted every year.

-- What all of this underscores is the fact that, even though we passed a law in 1989 ordering the collection of hate-crime data, we still don't have firm handle on the scope and depth of the hate-crime problem nationally. And we won't until law enforcement at all levels -- particularly on the local level -- are adequately trained at identifying and investigating hate crimes.

-- The LLEA's main provisions, as its name suggests, are devoted to enhancing the ability of local police and prosecutors to obtain training in hate crimes.

-- However, it also expanded the federal categories of hate crimes to include a bias against gays and lesbians. For that reason alone, it was killed by the House leadership despite its broad support.

The end result: Tens of thousands of hate crimes that go unreported and uninvestigated, and no end in sight. This problem is especially acute among gays and lesbians, most particularly in rural areas, where their quite reasonable fears of being outed often prevent them from even reporting such crimes. And of course, those same rural areas are nearly uniformly Republican; the coalescence of attitudes with top-down political leadership is hardly accidental.

In other words, Republicans' actions directly make lives more miserable for gays and lesbians and their families, all of whom have to deal with the trauma and tragedy that inevitably results from the violence and intimidation that is the essence of hate crimes.

If Coulter were serious about protecting her gay friends from crime -- the kind of crime where such "schoolyard taunts" as "faggot" are accompanied by extraordinary levels of violence -- she would take a contrarian stand in favor of a hate-crimes law.

But of course, she never will.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out the Young Turks' analysis.

Sunday funnies

Max Blumenthal has been wandering the CPAC conference and videotaping, with some noteworthy results. Of course, he captures Ann Coulter's ugliness (as well as her inability to respond to a simple question about her hypocrisy regarding the "sanctity of marriage"). Some other highlights include the defensive reactions from Tancredo supporters to pointed questions about their efforts to defend white culture, followed by another Tancredo backer hurriedly hiding his Confederate flag lapel pin.

But my favorite is the opening sequence, wherein Max approaches Malkin with a request to sign a photo taken from the Manzanar Relocation Center.

Blumenthal: Hi, Michelle, I’m Max Blumenthal from The Nation. I love your book, In Defense of Internment, I was wondering, uh --

Malkin: Oh, I don’t think you did.

B. -- can you make this out, ‘To Max’?

M: I’m not going to sign that.

B: Why, what’s the problem?

M: I’m not going to sign that.

B: Well, why not?

M: [lifts head haughtily] I’m not signing.

[Points finger] Let me tell you something since you are filming this. I am all for honest intellectual debate. I have had extensive exchanges with critics of my book. I put up an errata page, I invited the major –

B: You had to put up an errata page?

M: Excuse me -- exactly! I did!

B: So you’ve made a lot of errors?

M: I’ve made a lot of errors and I’ve acknowledged several errors in my book. And I absolutely detest your initiative in trying to smear my work without even reading it, thank you very much.

[Walks away. Max follows her, trying to ask her a question about Jamilgate.]

M: I was wondering if you had learned any lessons, journalistically, from –-
[Malkin disappears into crowd.]

Also note how Malkin described the encounter on her own blog:

Interlude: Two punks from The Nation with a camera stopped by my book signing to ambush me about In Defense of Internment. Have they bothered to read the book? No. I look forward to their butchering of my comments and the predictable unhinged reaction.

Indeed. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn!

All I can add is a note regarding Malkin's claim that she eagerly addresses her serious critics: As one of Ms. Malkin's most persistent and still consistently polite critics, my several extended arguments (including the Afterword of a published book) regarding her work, and the shoddiness thereof, have never even been acknowledged by Malkin, let alone engaged.

Fearless, schmearless. Malkin runs when confronted with the very serious ramifications of her work. Always has, always will.

Coulter and the rest of us

by Dave

Ho hum. Another year, another CPAC conference, another contrived Ann Coulter Controversy, just like last year. Once again, we get a kabuki dance from movement conservatives who denounce the remarks themselves but neglect to go any farther.

As I noted last year:

Across the board, would-be mainstream conservatives behave the same: they invite her onto their talk shows, book her for their conferences, and buy (and promote) her books by the bushel. Then, when she says something outrageous, either simply pretend it didn't happen or sniff that no one takes her seriously.

Conservatives, in fact, have been happily swimming in the Coulter cesspool for a long time and have not only failed to notice the stink, they've positively extolled its virtues.

The extent to which conservatives willingly turn a blind eye to what Coulter represents is reflected in their abject unwillingness to confront it.

Perhaps part of the reason for this is what happens to conservatives -- like, say, Dan Borcherd -- who actually do: they get roughed up by Coulter's goons -- another incremental step in the right's thuggishness. Now they're tossing out genuine Republicans who were actually invited to their events. (Recall, if you will, Coulter's call for students to behave as goons on her behalf at a campus appearance last year.)

Unsurprisingly, the talk as usual has focused on Coulter's rather naked bigotry. But it's also worth observing the context in which she placed it:

Oh, and I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards. But it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word "faggot," so I'm -- so I'm kind of at an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards. So I think I'll just conclude here and take your questions.

The reason Coulter is worth watching is that she serves as a kind of advance bellwether -- watch how she forms her argument, because it will become a template for the rest of the right in the coming months and years. She made her bones promoting the Myth of the Clenis in the '90s, and her "treasonous liberals" meme is now a ceaseless favorite of her fellow movement ideologues. The underlying tenets of last year's "raghead" remark -- that Muslims themselves are not merely "the problem" but The Enemy, and that they deserve not just our everlasting contempt but persecution -- are now being eagerly bandied about on cable TV by the likes of Glenn Beck.

Watch what comes out of Coulter's mouth now, because you'll be hearing variations on it for the next several years. All slightly less noxiously, of course, but the underlying logic (or rather, the lack thereof) is the same.

Coulter's mockery in this case is aimed, of course, at the "political correctness" that conservatives love to inflate as a sign of liberal hypocrisy and stupidity, and perhaps overweening authoritarianism. In Coulter's world, calling someone a "faggot" requires rehabilitation or "reeducation." Pity the poor schlubs, she's telling us, who just want to call a faggot a faggot.

In the real world, of course, calling someone a faggot isn't cause for forced rehab -- though it is the kind of ugly, hateful remark that may indicate a deeper problem (such as, say, substance abuse) that does require rehab. Coulter herself may want to look into this. She can ask her pal Rush for pointers, though I don't think he'll be much help.

Deeper issues or not, what it does indicate is that the person wielding it is a thoughtless bigot whose opinions and beliefs are forever tainted by that bigotry. It is the kind of remark that should, in the real world, permanently discredit whatever that person says.

But not in Wingnuttia. As Glenn Greenwald adroitly observes:

Anyone who went to this event -- and that includes Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Dick Cheney -- knew exactly what they would be getting. Coulter's face was prominently plastered on the promotional material. The right-wing political candidates who accepted the invitations to speak there knew exactly the type of people would be there -- namely, the type who continously cheer on Ann Coulter's bigoted and nakedly hateful screeds. Anyone who makes themselves a part of that event is purposely associating themselves with those sentiments. That is what this Conference is for.

The right has been feasting at Coulter's Diner for several years now and just loving the shit sandwiches she serves up regularly. They may cough and choke a little, but they all settle back and let her be the face of the movement, because it serves them well. After all, Coulter can trot out the latest bullshit, take all the lightning hits because that's what she does, and it just promotes her image in the media.

The "edgy" hate talk that she has been pushing for some time now especially appeals to the frat-boy level of sophistication that is her intended audience, and this latest iteration is all about justifying the new bigotry. Coulter's underlying logic is simple: Bigots are just people with different ideas, not hateful misanthropes whose beliefs are innately poisonous.

Expect to hear a lot of iterations of this. Already you can see it having an effect on the campus level, where right-wing acolytes of the Coulter School of Pseudo Fascism have been holding "Find the Illegal Immigrant" games or "South of the Border" parties, and mock MLK Day parties, and the like. Bigotry, with this crowd, is "edgy."

Greenwald also remarks on a related point:

But we should, at the very least, be able to have a moratorium on all of the scandals driven by their claims to be so offended and upset when anonymous commenters on a blog say mean things, or when bloggers use curse words, or when Senators transparently botch a joke. The ugliest and most obscene sentiments are openly expressed not by their blog commenters or even bloggers -- though that is true -- but by their most admired and successful political leaders, the ones whom their presidential candidates desperately seek to embrace and for whom their most committed throngs cheer wildly.

Unfortunately, I think Greenwald misses an important nuance to the dynamic at work here: The endless accusations of ugliness and "unhinged" behavior on the left are actually part of the right's general projection strategy, of which Coulter, Limbaugh, and Malkin are the chief heralds. These accusations are not only flung in the face of reality, their very purpose is to obscure and distort it -- and to justify the right's own behavior.

After all, since liberals are so clearly unhinged -- as Howard Kurtz will happily parrot for you -- it's only natural that they get their faces slapped a little in return, right?

Pretty soon, of course, we'll be hearing all about left-wingers' supposed desire to do away with, and inflict violence upon, conservatives -- that is, after all, an important subtext of Coulter's latest controversial jibe. That should be the warning sign that they're justifying their own future actions. With Coulter, no doubt, leading the charge.

Mr. Robinson Speaks

by Sara

Mr. Robinson was, in fact, our original family blogger. His Mischievous Ramblings actually probably pre-date Orcinus, which is getting back there pretty far in blog years. He doesn't post often, and his readership mostly consists of fellow geeks who really care about arcane computer hacks and techno-toys and software engineering and management issues (oh, and Kipling: Mr R. will Kipple at considerable length if you ask -- and too often, if you don't); and his readership is generally low except for those rare occasions when he gets Slashdotted.

Last night, though, he put up one that I thought belonged here.
________________________________________________________

Late to the Party

"Forgive. Sounds Good.
Forget. I'm Not Sure I Could."

The experience of the Dixie Chicks says a lot about America. Not only are they a rags-to-riches story in the best country-western music tradition, they're also a great example of "sticking to your guns" in the face of tremendous pressure to change fundamental beliefs.

"I've paid a price, and I'll keep payin' "

Natalie Maines never tried to blame anyone else for the firestorm of criticism that hit the band after her off-the-cuff remark in London. Her partners (Emily Robison and Martie Maguire) never blamed Natalie for their being booted from country radio. The Chicks accepted responsibility for Natalie's remark, clarified their support of the troops (just not of Mr. Bush) and moved on.

In contrast, all of their detractors blamed the Chicks for everything from supporting al-Qaida to how badly the war in Iraq was going. And as the war news worsened, it seems as though the "country right" blamed the girls more and more. Even now, when the dismal results of Bush's policy of preemptive war are obvious, country music can't acknowledge that Natalie was right: George Bush is an embarrassment to the State of Texas and to the United States of America.

Instead, country music is claiming that the Grammys don't represent country music, that the Chicks aren't country anymore, and that the intelligentsia of the left have subverted the awards process.

The contrast is overwhelming. The Chicks accepted responsibility for their actions and worked hard to find themselves another (more tolerant of freethinking) audience. Country music pushed responsibility for failure in Iraq onto the shoulders of three "Chicks" from Texas instead of back onto the slumping shoulders of Mr. Bush.

Natalie was magnanimous at the Grammys when she said "I'm ready to make nice." She was remarkably adult about it, considering that the country right acted like six-year olds throughout the ordeal.

"It's a sad, sad story when a mother will teach her
daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger"

"that they'd write me a letter sayin' I better
shut up and sing or my life will be over"

The eliminationist Right stood up and said that the Chicks should be killed for expressing their opinion about the pResident. The country music establishment backed dollars over free speech, and if country listeners had a tenth of the patriotism they claim to, they'd boycott every company advertising on a radio station that stopped playing the Chicks.

But it's not a surprise that country listeners didn't. Country listeners are overwhelmingly rural and largely Southern. According to [David Hackett Fischer's book] Albion's Seed, the American South (and much of the rural west) was largely settled by the Cavalier and Borderer waves of English immigration. The Cavalier concept of freedom is a bit different from the rest of us. Specifically, freedom is something that depends upon your social class (higher classes have more freedom).

Yeah, that's right. Freedom is not something everybody gets -- it's something of which the lowest classes have a little (at the sufferance of their "betters") and of which the upper classes (the wealthy, members of the legislature, lawyers, etc.) have a great deal.

Kinda puts that whole slavery thing into perspective, doesn't it? Reinforced by the natural xenophobia of the Borderers, the classism of the Cavaliers has descended from the 1600s to the present day south lock, stock, barrel, racism, and "y'all ain't from around heah?"

As women the Chicks are automatically lower on the class order. As economically lower class women (as they all were before they hit big), they're even lower on the class order. As such, their freedom of speech is less important to the country listeners and establishment. And to the Right in general.

"I'm not ready to make nice. I'm not ready to back down.
I'm still mad as hell and I don't have time to go round and round and round."

This song isn't just the Chicks talking about their experience. It's not just a source of strength for everyone who's ever been domestically abused (as part of that group, I find it incredibly powerful). It's not just a liberal anthem, or a Democratic anthem against the war or the Right. It's a small-d democratic anthem reminding us that the south and the Right were both late to the democracy and freedom parties.

If we want to keep those parties going, we have to outnumber the south and the Right, and work hard to bring as many of them as possible to the democracy party.
________________________________________________________________

I've been reading Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America over the past couple weeks, and we've been having some lively discussions around the house about it. Fischer's research illuminates the ways in which the Yankee North and Dixie came to have very different cultural beliefs about freedom, rights, class, power, and tolerance -- some of which have their roots in English history going all the way back to the Middle Ages -- and how those attitudes clashed and blended to create the nation we ultimately became. I'm going to to blog at greater length on the book's premises and their implications for American authoritarianism over the next several days; but the saga of the Chicks is, as Mr. R. notes, yet another shouting match in an ancient and ongoing dialogue.

I can't recall the last time I left the house and got back without hearing Not Ready To Make Nice playing somewhere. And I take it as a good sign. We're due for a liberal anthem -- one that reminds us (every 20 minutes on the radio) that, after all the extremist right has put us all through over the past 25 years, we have well and truly earned the fury we feel. We are nowhere near being ready to make nice, and probably won't be for a long time to come.

Apologies first. Restitution next. And then, perhaps, we'll be ready to discuss forgiveness.

Kauffman's Rules, 15-21

by Sara

The next installment of Kauffman's Rules: more stuff to think about, and more to talk about.

15. High morality depends on accurate prophecy. You cannot judge the morality of an action unless you have some idea of what the consequences of the action will be. According to this point of view, an action cannot be good if it has evil results, and everyone has a moral obligation to try to foresee, as well as possible, what the results of various decisions will be.

Another of my favorites. We tend not to consider good foresight essential morality -- but foresight is nothing more than forward-looking judgment; and we know that real- world morality (as opposed to the synthetic fundamentalist product) has everything to do with sound judgment.

This explains why double-highs (people who are high in social dominance, and also in right-wing authoritarian traits) are unfit to hold positions of political or cultural leadership. Double highs don't look much farther ahead than their next conquest; and morality has no place in their worldview at all. You might as well put your future in the hands of a Class V hurricane rather than hand it over to people who are constitutionally incapable of assessing or accepting the results of their own decisions. (Oh….right. Never mind.)

16. If you can't make people self-sufficient, your aid does more harm than good. This usually comes up in discussing problems of poverty or hunger, where temporary relief often postpones the disaster at the cost of making it much worse when it comes. It is not really an argument against helping, but an argument against half-way measures. Ghandi said the same thing in a more positive way: "If you give me a fish, I eat for a day; if you teach me to fish, I eat for a lifetime."

Or, as another beloved freedom-fighting guru of a later generation put it: Do or do not. There is no try.

Partial fixes that are focused one part of the system alone almost always make the situation worse. They're usually just big enough to throw the system out of balance, forcing it to adjust elsewhere to compensate. And that adjustment, more often than not, creates a bigger problem than the one your tweak was trying to solve. In other words, the road to unintended consequences is paved with quick patches.

17. There are no final answers. As Ken Boulding put it, "If all environments were stable, the well-adapted would simply take over the earth and the evolutionary process would stop. In a period of environmental change, however, it is the adaptable, not the well-adapted who survive." This applies to social systems as well as natural ones. In a time of rapid change, like the present, the best "solution" to a problem is often one that just keeps the problem under control while keeping as many options for the future as possible.

I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who think that the way things are now is the way they're always going to be. (Again, it's probably a more common conservative habit of mind -- was it only a year ago that the GOP was gloating they'd be running the show for the next generation?) But the fact is that change is the only constant -- and there are a lot of serious people who think we're going to keep seeing more and more of it in the decades ahead.

The future belongs to those who stay open to constant adaptation. But people who allow themselved to be seduced into thinking that it's all settled, and they can relax now, are setting themselves up for disappointment. It's never been true, and never will be. Life is flux. Get over it.

18. Every solution creates new problems. The auto solved the horse-manure pollution problem and created an air pollution problem. Modern medicine brought us longer, healthier lives--and a population explosion that threatens to produce a global famine. Television brings us instant access to vital information and world events--and a mind-numbing barrage of banality and violence. And so on. The important thing is to try to anticipate the new problems and decide whether we prefer them to the problem we are currently trying to solve. Sometimes the "best" solution to one problem just creates a worse problem. There may even be no solution to the new problem. On the other hand, an apparently "inferior" solution to the original problem may be much better for the whole system in the long run.

Kauffman is foreshadowing Smart's Second Law of Technology here: All new technologies are inherently dehumanizing in their first iteration. Whenever we step beyond the limits of our current experience and understanding, we're forced to guess. We're doing something that's never been done before; we have no idea what the consequences will be; and so there's no real way to prepare ourselves. All we can do is take the best precautions we can, test small before going big, and remain open to the option of turning back if it proves too dangerous to continue.

19. Sloppy systems are often better. Diverse, decentralized systems often seem disorganized and wasteful, but they are almost always more stable, flexible, and efficient than "neater" systems. In Boulding's terms (#17), highly adaptable systems look sloppy compared to systems that are well-adapted to a specific situation, but the sloppy-looking systems are the ones that will survive. In addition, systems which are loose enough to tolerate moderate fluctuations in things like population levels, food supply, or prices, are more efficient than systems which waste energy and resources on tighter controls.

This is why central planning usually fails; and why small distributed networks are a much better environment for almost everything from moving data to moving food to ensuring economic risks are shared rather than concentrated. It's also the ultimate indictment of monopolies.

20. Don't be fooled by system cycles. All negative feedback loops create oscillations--some large, some small. For some reason, many people are unable to deal with or believe in cyclical patterns, especially if the cycles are more than two or three years in length. If the economy has been growing steadily for the last four years, nearly everyone will be optimistic. They simply project their recent experience ahead into the future, forgetting that a recession becomes more likely the longer the boom continues. Similarly, everyone is gloomiest at the bottom of a recession, just when rapid growth is most likely.

Another example of that common fallacy: It's no different now than it's ever been. Yes, it is. The question is: is the current situation within the normal parameters of past cycles -- or are we headed into uncharted territory here? You may recognize this frame as a favorite of global warming skeptics, who still don't think there's anything at all out of the ordinary about the fact that it's the first of March and I'm writing this in a snowstorm.

21. Remember the Golden Mean. When people face a serious problem, they tend to overvalue anything that helps solve it. They mobilize their energies and fight hard to solve the problem, and often keep right on going after the problem is solved and the solution is becoming a new problem. When most children died before their tenth birthdays, a high birth rate was essential for survival and societies developed powerful ways to encourage people to have large families. When the death rate is reduced, a high birth rate becomes a liability, but all those strong cultural forces keep right on encouraging large families, and it can take generations for people's attitudes to change. Like the man who eats himself' to death as an adult because he was always hungry as a child, people tend to forget that too much of something can be as bad as too little. They assume that if more of something is good a lot more must be better--but it often isn't. The trick is to recognize these situations and try to swing the pendulum back to the middle whenever it swings toward either extreme.

I consider this a restatement of #20, but from a different angle. The main caution here is: just because a tool always worked before, don't expect it will continue to deliver the same results in the future. Every situation's different, and deserves its own unique response.

All right: that's the third set. Stand by for the fourth and last set. And thanks to those of you who've grabbed on to this and are playing with it. These rules are delightfully simple stuff; but once I started working with them, I found they made a sweet little shift in how I approached people and problems that used to just drive me to despair or annoyance. I found I could forego being annoyed at foolish people (who usually can't be changed), and instead focus my energy on foolish systems (which often can be).

And in these rough days, anything that gets us out of our stuck places is worth looking in to.

Baaaaack

I'm back from the Yucatan but am exhausted today. So in lieu of actually writing something, thought I'd toss you this image and see if anyone can correctly identify where it's from. Have fun. Now, back to my previously scheduled nap.

UPDATE: For those interested, these sculptures are from the relatively recently excavated pyramid at Ek Balam. [More here.]