Monday, July 25, 2011

False arguments

In a recent issue of Esquire magazine, Stephen Marche wrote of the Obama presidency,


Because twenty years from now, we're going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph. Whatever happens this fall or next, the summer of 2011 is the summer of Obama."




Aside from the insipidness of the content of Marche's comments, the objection I have is to the use of the words "twenty years from now." This is becoming a common rhetorical device, evoking the authority of history to stamp one's opinion with some sort of unassailable imprimatur. Other ways of putting it include: "history will show," or "future generations will recognize," etc. And it's time to bring it to an end. It resembles the logical fallacy of appeal to authority where the truth of a point is proven by simply pointing out that a higher authority has pronounced it true. For example, global warming exists because the United Nations panel says it exists. 


Obviously it's not true that Stephen Marche knows what people will think twenty years from now. No one does. So why does he use this rhetorical phrase? To invest his lame argument, really a non-argument, with a phony and cheap authority which it doesn't possess if left all by itself.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Star Trek TNG reevaluated

After all these years, I'm sad to say that Star Trek TNG doesn't hold up. It's pieties and worldview are false and here's why.

 Look at the episode called Redemption, the one about the Klingon civil war. The Federation, personified by Captain Picard, are allied with the legitimate government of the Klingon empire, personified by their council leader Gowron. But the rival Klingon Duras family, backed not-so-secretely by Romulans, have launched a coup that has turned into a civil war. Picard, obsessed with the non-interference dictum known as the prime directive, refuses to involve the Federation in the fighting, despite the desperate pleas by Gowron, his ally.  Picard knows he must help or else the enemy Romulans, the power behind the coup, will control the Klingon empire. So, in keeping with the prime directive, Picard devises a non-violent solution. Set up a blockade of Klingon space to catch the Romulans bringing in aid to the rebels. Once the blockade exposes the Romulan role in the civil war, the theory goes, the Romulans will back down and the coup will fail. And this is precisely what happens.

The non-interference, non-violent policy advocated here is not far off from what is put forward by some in the world today: Expose the bad guys for what they are, but don't get involved in fighting them. War is bad. The only problem with this paradigm is that it doesn't work. And that it doesn't is something that is easily proved. Just look at a real world example that parallels the Redemption plot almost exactly: the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939.

In Spain, there was a legitimate government, left of center, which was allied with such countries as Britain and France. A coup was launched by General Franco's rightists and a civil war ensued. Despite pleas from the legitimate and elected Spanish government (known as the Republican side), France and England and the United States refused to come to their aid, and France was even a socialist government ideologically sympathetic to the Spanish Republicans. Instead, Britian and France instituted, like Picard, an embargo on Spain to prevent any country from supplying aid to either Franco's Nationalists or to the Republican side. The idea was to let the two sides would fight it out themselves. If another country attempted to supply war materiel or aid, the embargo would expose them and presumably they would therefore back down.

But in real life the opposite occurred. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, the main sources of aide for Franco, were caught many times breaking the blockade-Italian troops were even captured in Spain during battles-but naturally they didn't back down for a second. Mussolini even signed onto the embargo, but he regarded it as a joke. So did Hitler (see Guernica). German ships running the embargo even fired on British ships enforcing it, but there were no repercussions for the Germans. For the truth is that when people like Hitler and Mussolini see that you're not going to do anything to stop them except a toothless embargo, they will go ahead and do whatever they want. Eventually, the Republican side had to pay millions in gold to the Soviet Union to get their help and by that time the embargo was a joke for everyone. The ultimate result: the Republicans lost and Franco was dictator of Spain for the next thirty-six years. And that is the true lesson of Star Trek TNG's Redemption episode.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Greg Morris has my eternal gratitude

I truly believe the actor Greg Morris, who played Barney in the original Mission Impossible, understood the difference between his show and the Tom Cruise version. That's why he walked out of Tom's premier and called it an abomination. The original show was principally about the Cold War. It viewed America and the American government as a source of good and freedom and liberty in the world. The IMF would go behind the Iron Curtain or into a Third World dictatorship and subtly shake things up in the interest of freedom and democracy. The men and women on the IMF weren't realists as the term is known today, but idealists in the best sense of that word. Tom's version, aside from being mostly incoherent, is the opposite. It's about the evils of the American government and the West. It's like the Bourne movies: the U.S. government is the enemy, the source of corruption and all things bad. It's the modern, Hollywood, progressive ideology. Vanessa Redgrave was Tom's co-star. What more has to be said? I'd like to think that Greg Morris realized all this, he must have, and that's why he walked out of Tom's premiere. And for that, I am eternally grateful.  Simon