- ABC, "Has Iraq Passed a Tipping Point to Peace?"

Not only was this literal, it was quite literal. Wow.

In fact, if we count the headline and the lede of this story, this is also sort of a triple mixer, as the title of this post suggest. I say again: wow.

In a NYTimes editorial:

"Nigeria is changing," says Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the country's finance minister. She suggested thinking of America and the West as the parent and Nigeria as the child: "If your child has been doing bad things - drug abuse or alcohol - and they come to you and say, 'My mother, I want to change; please help me,' would you say, 'No'? Would you say, 'You are hopeless; you can't change'?"

"It's got to be the beginning of a thaw. It's like a family that got a divorce. You have to kiss before you go to sleep."

Why would a human ever say this? Why the hell would the NYTimes ever print it?!

I'm thinking basically a live-action Disney scene where helicopters scare a bunch of horses into a truck and the protagonist-type young horse is getting kicked and stuff by the scared, bigger horses. [Don't show any cobwoys participating -- they're too sympathetic. Only machines do the dirty deed.] Weave a real 30-second narrative, here. It should feel like the terrible stampede scene in Lion King, and be as manipulative as Johnson's daisy ad, but better produced.

I'm currently reading Follow the Story -- a book on how to write non-fiction, by former WSJ front-page editor James Stewart -- and he includes this bit:

These results were of less concern to the paper as a whole than they were to me as the front-page editor. On any given day, there was a broad enough range of news that something in the paper appealed to just about everone in the Journal's constituency. But the front page carried only three stories a day, stories that received dramatic display, took up a lot of space, and demanded a far greater commitment of time from the readers. On average, only about 17 percent of the readers were reading these stories in their entirety, which meant that 83 percent were not interested enough to bother. Although these same studies showed a high level of satisfaction with the front page -- a sign that sooner or later readers found something that interested them -- I thought we could do much better. For from the point of view of the reporter or writer, who might write only a handful of front-page stories in the course of a year, I found the surveys dismaying. I myself didn't want to write a story that would be read by only 17 percent of the paper's readers.

When thinking about potential stories, I began to focus on what I estimated to be the 90 percent of readers who were not interested in the proposed subject. Indeed, I consciously tried to ignore my own particular interests, fiding that I was far more effective if I could act as a surrogate for readers who weren't interested. After all, I wasn't worried about losing the readers who were interested in a given subject, but in attracting those who weren't.

Of course, this doesn't excuse making big mistakes in reporting a big court case. But it might give one look inside the journalism mentality that make legal reporting look pretty stupid to the small fraction of people that know the ins and outs, but makes the coverage more interesting to the big majority that knows nothing about the law. When thinkness rules the universe, reporting will totally succeed in every dimension.

The first problem is that he says, "a critic recently caricatured intelligent design as the belief that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by an omniscient creator. That's misleading."

What a shitty form of arguing.

Then, he never actually says what's "misleading" about the quote! Well, he does say that ID makes no overt claim about a Creator -- but he never fills in the very critical question of who, then, is directing these evolutionary steps.

For some reason, Behe doesn't go into the most central claim of ID, which is that many biological systems are "irreducibly complex" -- like the parts in a watch, they are very tightly connected together and have no use when separate. They therefore must have arisen together as created by some intelligence. Funny how Behe just forgot to mention in his op-ed that his "INTELLIGENT design" theory necessarily includes some intelligence that guides this non-Darwinian view of evolution.

The op-ed gets even worse at parts. Take this:

We can often recognize the effects of design in nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore. Of course, we know who is responsible for Mount Rushmore, but even someone who had never heard of the monument could recognize it as designed. Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology.

What the fuck? "Mount Rushmore was made by humans, and we know that, and we could probably tell even if we didn't know. Which proves that natural biological features are designed by some intelligence." Huh? I would say this is begging the question, but it seems like he catastrophically missed in his effort to assume the proposition to be proved.

The whole problem here, guy, is that Mount Rushmore is nothing like evolved biological features. Mountains in South Dakota are under no selective pressure to end up looking like four American presidents, so it makes sense that they naturally don't. Organisms, however, have been under selective pressures to find food, mate, compete, etc., for hundreds of millions of years. Selective pressure + billions of iterations = biological complexity. Fully reducible.

One very interesting thing about Wired's recent cover story on ID was that they showed that many ID people think they don't have to put forward a very reasonable theory about evolution -- they just have to plant seeds of doubt in people's minds, and many people will be charmed into an intelligence-based theory of the origin of species. It seems like Behe is using just that technique: don't explain your own theory at all [i.e., don't mention the "intelligence" in "intelligent design"], and wave your arms a lot, hoping the confusion will give people an escape route back to what is essentially updated creationism.

The NYTimes is now reporting on some psychiatrists who are going in the opposite direction, saying that some of the worst criminals, the real psychopaths, are actually "evil." Again, there are not necessarily very specific suggestions about how this changes the criminal justice system.

I'm starting a new category called Lakoff the Genius. I read his book Don't Think of an Elephant and it significantly affected the way I look at politics [as it has for many people; not like I discovered some obscure hermit, or anything]. The book is short and good, but you can really get the gist of it from the first chapter, which is posted online.

You can get the real important part of the gist right here:

- Most people use heuristics rather than detailed data to make political decisions.

- The most important heuristic model in politics is the family, because people look at government like this most fundamental social unit. Conservatives want government to be led by a metaphorical stern father. Liberals/progressives want government to be led by a nurturant parent.

- Everyone has both models inside their heads to some degree. About a third of people are pretty committed to the stern father, a third committed to to the nurturant parent, and a third somewhere in the middle, basically up for grabs.

- Liberals can win by activating the nurturant parent model in the middle third of people. This largely involves showing how the values promoted by the nurturant-parent model echo those values held by the middle third.

- Conservatives have for decades effectively used strategic initiatives to erode liberals' power. Tort reform and tax cuts are good examples.

- Liberals have not yet launched good strategic initiatives, although there are some potential candidates. One example is what Lakoff calls The New Apollo Program, which is a huge effort to get the US to use renewable power. I think the name "New Apollo" is pathetically derivative, but the overall point about how such a strategic initiative works is exactly right. This is the sort of thing I was advocating in the previous post.

- People use different family models in different parts of their lives; in his real family, for example, GWB seems to be a pretty lax rather than stern father.

Yes, time-pressed reader, I have just shrunk the most important liberal treatise of this millenium into three minutes of reading.

You're welcome.

Now the Washington Post has a very similar story about evangelical Christians who are down with environmentalism, except they call it "creation care," because "environmentalism" sounds like faithless, secular, liberal shenannigannery to them.

"We affirm that God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part," said the statement, which has been distributed to 50,000 member churches. "Because clean air, pure water, and adequate resources are crucial to public health and civic order, government has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation."

Signatories included highly visible, opinion-swaying evangelical leaders such as Haggard, James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship Ministries. Some of the signatories are to meet in March in Washington to develop a position on global warming, which could place them at odds with the policies of the Bush administration, according to Richard Cizik, the association's vice president for governmental affairs.

Also last fall, Christianity Today, an influential evangelical magazine, weighed in for the first time on global warming. It said that "Christians should make it clear to governments and businesses that we are willing to adapt our lifestyles and support steps towards changes that protect our environment."...

In Seattle, Hedman says that evangelicals should worry less about the moral authority of the president and more about their biblical obligation to care for Earth.

"The Earth is God's body," Hedman said in a recent sermon. "God wants us to look after it."

Pretty cool, huh?

One interesting thing to note is that both stories -- particularly the Post's evangelical article -- mention some of the difficulties of traditional liberal environmental groups in forming alliances with basically conservative groups on this issue. It is really important that liberals figure out how to sell these ideas to make them resonate with conservative values, which are, in some way, also liberal. Conserving is liberal. This coincides with Lakoff's point [of course] about progressives needing to make arguments based on values.

From a more practical political angle, I see this issue as having lots of potential to succeed. The Bush Administration has done a pretty good job of holding together three main power blocs, the three legs that hold up the stool: social [including religious] conservatives, neoconservatives/national greatness conservatives, and economic conservatives/libertarians/pro-business conservatives. It's hard to hold this coalition together because their interests often clash.

With environmentalism, I think progressives could bring along the neocons and religious conservatives with a grand plan for energy independence and environmental responsibility. Heck, it might even be worth launching this broad mission with some "creation care"-like rebranding so that it doesn't turn off conservatives; if this joint venture were to work, progressives would have to scupt it so as to be inclusive. The major obstacle would the the pro-business energy-company whores, but if you knock out the other two legs of the stool...

As I suggested to the official brother of thinkness:

[We should] make energy efficiency a matter of American we-can-do-it -- tell the guys in the Rust Belt and Sun Velt that they could have jobs building the next generation of power plants, supplied by sunlight and wind we get right here in America, and help cut off funding to Saddam-types. Really drive home an appeal to the good ol' days when coal fueled those communities in Middle America.

I'm picturing an ad with big burly guys standing outside the closed steel plant with their sad-lookin' wives and kids, and in the next shot swingin' big sledgehammers and driving backhoes while building the new windfarm. *And* at the end, the kicker is their 19yrold son coming into frame saying he was proud to serve in Iraq, but 3 tours of duty was enough. [Dad playfully noogies son, knocking off military hat.]

Perhaps mix this in with more ads that appeal to the humans-as-stewards-of-the-Earth idea, too.

During WWII, the entire country rallied around the idea of conservation in the form of rationing. [As Bill Maher has pointed out.] I reckon we can do it again.

Although there were ostensibly nothing in particular that linked these films, they seemed to me to be a troika, a group of three powerful waves from the wake of one giant passing ship, each of which crashed over the deck of the USS Thinkness. While thinking about them moments ago, I realized [with an assist from the official roommate of thinkness] that all three movies are about writers who have just completed autobiographical novels. Isn't that weird? What should I make of this?

More recently I've come across Bhutan's plan to aim its public policy at maximizing "Gross National Happiness." The theory is that increasing GNP doesn't necessarily make people happier... which is of course absolutely right! [One interesting sub-note is that even per capita GNP is deceptive, because while a certain amount of economic robustness does definitely help, when going past a certain point you get rapidly diminishing returns. Which is part of the reason why Sweden is right to focus on different criteria than the standard GNP-type stuff, as I recently blogged.] Bhutan's effort is actually starting to get some press attention. I really want to go to their next big conference on GNH.

Then there's also Daniel Kahneman, who has devoted the recent part of his work toward finding out what actually makes people happier, or less unhappy. From one of Bhutan's seminars on GNH [this is a pdf]:

In his introduction to Well-Being: the Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (63), Daniel Kahneman expresses the hope that hedonic science will prompt economics to shift its focus from 'those aspect of life that can be traded in the marketplace' to desirable goods such as love, mental challenge and (reduction of) stress'.

I have to admit that I have some misgivings about this approach of trying to quantify everything: personality, happiness, pain, etc. In addition to the fact that this stuff is so subjective and confusing -- and there's a certain beauty in leaving it outside the reach of our grabby, analytical minds -- it seems to me there are just bound to be lots of mistakes in terms of how people measure this stuff, and it will lead to much trouble.

Still, there is a certain fairly persuasive argument that nothing in our society and our world really gets recognized until it can be identified, isolated, and quantified. Such is a part of the human experience. GNP is a steamroller of an idea partly because it's so clear, universal, and easily measurable. When people have an easy grasp on something like that -- a quantity that can in their mind approximate "goodness" of an economy -- they will use it. Humans attain a lot of power using heuristics like that.

Along these lines, I spoke recently with this professor, David George, who says -- somewhat rhetorically -- that people should assert property rights over their desires. The idea is that companies affect what we want by, for example, advertising. Say someone is trying to quit smoking, but he is constantly reminded of smoking by ads in his magazines, and he ends up smoking again. George calls this "preference pollution": the company has interfered with what he wants to want, or polluted his preference. [I love this saying: "You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want."] But if he says that his preference not to smoke is something he owns, then by interfering with that the company has damaged his property and it owes him money. George doesn't actually believe this would really work, but it's an interesting thought experiment. Donno how he would actually want to enact this sort of idea, now that I'm thinking about it.

Say you look at a child and are overwhelmed with the cuteness of this creature. This is a beautiful moment, a connection with not just a human but with humanity, a type of bond that keeps us [and children] from being alone. Wearing a different hat, you could say that this is obviously just some evolutionary response -- humans have evolved so that children are cute, and that adults are vulnerable to their cuteness. And then you say, Shut up, brain, I was having a nice moment. The world works better for me when I don't think about that. Which is what gave me at least a little deeper understanding of conservative political thinking.

I think everybody has their own lines where they say Yeah, I could probably be more correct if I thought about this harder, but I don't want to.

The unexamined life is not worth living, but ignorance is bliss.

Damn dismal science.

Also, it seems that Paul Krugman is a card-carring Lakoffnik. [He says Alan Greenspan is a "stern father" when it's a Democrat putting his shoes up on the Oval Office desk.]