Political advocacy means flawed political thinking

Garbage in, garbage out

Politics consists of a lot of garbage in. Its not surprising that most of what comes out is the same. We get garbage from pundits, politicians, ideologues and special interests. For them, politics isn't about informing the public. It is about winning arguments and influencing opinion. Standard tactics include deceiving the public with irrational arguments, false conclusions and bad facts, i.e., it's much easier to cheat than win on the merits. For the most part, partisan politics is pure, raw advocacy. In the context of lawyers fighting in court, pure advocacy may be OK or even necessary. But, in the context of politics it usually leads to waste and failure. Failure is what we have today - in abundance.

What are garbage and bad facts?: Those are fair questions. From the point of view of service to the public interest over special interests, garbage is reasonably defined like this: Garbage is political arguments based on bad facts and flawed reasoning. When a partisan ignores, denies or distorts information and rationales that undermines the partisans' desired point or logic, you have bad facts.

That is standard politics. Of course, partisans/special interests would dispute that characterization of reality. For them, bad facts are good facts because winning the argument and votes in congress (or elsewhere in government) is the point, not informing the public or serving the public interest. It all depends on your point of view.

An example

Now that don't ask, don't tell is no longer an issue, the next gay rights battle is probably going to be over gay marriage. Some religious social conservatives are arguing that allowing gay marriages will infringe on their free speech and/or religion rights. The rationale is that if gay marriage is allowed or legalized, clerics will be subject to hate speech lawsuits for preaching that gay sex and gay marriage are evil, sins, abominations and so on. If clerics are subject to such legal threats, they will no longer be able to freely exercise their speech and religious rights.

On its face, that sounds like a legitimate argument. But is it the whole story? Is anything missing?

Of course, something is missing. That argument, like most in politics, is pure advocacy. What is missing are facts and context that undermine religious attacks on gay marriage and gay sex. Here is some context, a couple of facts (not opinions) and an opinion that put this "logic" in a different light.

Context: Many churches condemn all sorts of activities that are common and legal in our secular society, e.g., birth control, abortion, fornication, gambling, pornography, belief in false Gods or prophets (Jesus, Allah, Vishnu) and so on. 

Fact: Churches have been preaching, sometimes vehemently, for decades (centuries, actually) that gay sex is a mortal sin and a horrible, evil abomination. 

Fact: With very few exceptions* no U.S. church has ever been sued for (1) hate speech or anything else like that because of preaching or belief that gay sex/marriage is a mortal sin or (2) the other legal things that U.S. churches like to condemn.

Opinion: If a church were to be sued for hate speech, the church would win in court and once that was finally decided, the issue would be completely dead. No court, not even a "liberal" court, is going to touch any church's capacity to hold or advocate almost any religious belief. This stuff is outside the court's jurisdiction for the most part.

Assuming you agree that my context, facts and opinion are relevant, how persuasive is the church's argument that if same sex marriage is legalized they will be prevented from doing what they already routinely do? Less persuasive, isn't it? That's why you will almost never hear the contrary context or facts from advocates against gay marriage.

Context and facts weakens or completely kills their "rationale", which is based on religious faith for the gay marriage issue. That might carry weight in a theocratic dictatorship like Iran or Saudi Arabia. However, America is a secular democracy. In that context, religious faith alone usually just doesn't cut it.

That is why churches and anti-gay rights advocates ignore, deny or distort valid context and facts. Their arguments can't win on the merits alone. To win public opinion, they have to cheat. Partisan advocates give essentially no weight or credibility to opposing opinion, regardless of how much weight or credibility it may have from a fair and neutral point of view. They argue for their special interest, not the public interest.

Uninformed and deceived

The gay marriage issue is just one example of pure partisan political advocacy. It leaves the public uninformed and misled, which is exactly what it is intended to do. Unfortunately, partisan advocacy happens all the time. It is routine. The advocacy tactic applies to almost all other political arguments you hear from almost all partisans nearly all of the time for all contested issues. Partisans are rarely or never honest about context or facts that undermine their political positions or agenda. 

The dominance of that kind of partisan advocacy is a big part of why our political institutions and policies have failed so badly. That is why we are up to our eyeballs in nasty alligators.

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* The exception is the bizarre case of the Westboro Baptist Church. It is being sued for celebrating the death of a U.S. marine at the marine's funeral. The Westboro Baptists believe that when our soldiers die in combat, that is God's punishment of America for tolerating homosexuality. The marine's family sued the church for invasion of privacy and a few other things. That behavior isn't just preaching from the pulpit - it is an in your face celebration of death at your son's funeral. That arguably is hate speech depending on the facts of the case, e.g., how far from the funeral were church members picketing and what exactly were they saying. Let the courts decide.

Afghanistan - If we don't know it, can we succeed?

This story comes from an acquaintance whose offspring is a U.S. military officer at Baghram airbase in Afghanistan. This officer was recently deployed to Afghanistan. It raises some questions. One is why our government wants to keep the American public in the dark about the reality of Afghanistan. Another is how we can expect to "succeed" in view of the tenacious culture of that country. Although America has been at war since October of 2001 the press is just now getting around to reporting this, or some aspects of it. 




The sad story: There is a weekly get together or party that goes on among some Afghani troops and/or police on the airbase itself and maybe elsewhere in Afghanistan. Our troops call it Thursday man-love night or something close to that. At Baghram, the weekly Thursday night party starts with Afghani men listening to music and chatting. At some point, young Afghani boys are brought to the party room. Over time, the men and boys pair off and leave the party. They go someplace semi-private on the airbase and the men have sex with the boys. Our troops know about the sex because of the sounds of the man love. According to CNN, there are variations of this theme.

The Afghani cultural context: Why does this happen? Apparently, this happens on Thursdays because Friday is prayer day for Muslims and the men have to behave, more or less. So, they party on Thursday, maybe as a way to prepare for the following day of prayer and good behavior. It is OK for the Afghani men to do this because they are not having sex with Muslim women, something apparently forbidden. And, it is OK for them to have sex with the boys because they do not love the boys. If they loved the boys they had sex with, that too apparently would be forbidden under Islamic religious law.

The American troop context: American troops are under orders to not interfere with the local culture, including the Thursday man-love night parties. For many of our troops, this is demoralizing. They just want to beat the Afghani men senseless. Reactions from our troops range from outrage to dejection.
 
One can argue that we know little or nothing about Afghanistan, its culture or its people. It is reasonable to expect "success"? What is success? During his time in office, President Bush did nothing about Afghanistan after we were told that we "won" the war. That was the Bush administration strategy and most of congress endorsed it. It took President Obama about a year to decide on a new strategy, i.e., a troop surge. Nobody much in politics opposed the new strategy, implying that the old Bush strategy of doing nothing failed.

Success or a fireball?: How will it end, if it ever does. What should we expect after years of war and U.S. government sanctioned public ignorance? The surge is now officially  deemed to be some feeble sort of "success", as narrowly defined by the U.S. military. It definitely does not mean establishing some sort of modern culture. Nor does it mean getting a functioning government in the sense that Americans understand it. We will never change the Afghan government from anything other than a hopelessly weak and corrupt failure. After all this time and money (about $370 billion so far), why do we still know essentially nothing about Afghanistan? Maybe our government wants to keep the public in the dark so that resistance remains politically tolerable. What that will accomplish in the long run is anyone's guess.

Post #4 - The ideal political party

To a non-ideologue, none of the established political parties out there are appealing. They have their ideology, entrenched interests and a few other flaws, e.g. political donors asking for what they want. For a pragmatic realist, the ideal political party might look something like this.

• Pragmatic and grounded in reality because ideology distorts reality, limits creative thinking and usually delivers failure, which is what we have lots of at the moment
  
• Strong enough to reject special interest money and "campaign contributions".
• Committed to find and implement policies, when it can be done, based on honest cost-benefit analysis using unspun data (not using the vacuous smoke and mirrors normally used by special interests, including the Democratic and Republican parties, labor unions, business interests and all the rest)
• Committed to shrewd and intelligent use of government to foster America's economic global competitiveness as opposed to the usual blind and inefficient reliance on government by many Democrats or the blind and inefficient hate of government by many Republicans; if this means more government or regulation, then fine and if it means less, that's fine too
  
• Committed to maximizing transparency of government operations, particularly interactions between public and private sector special interests (for example, by requiring all contacts between lobbyists and government officials to be made public to the extent it is reasonable)
• Committed to reestablishing the draft (or a draft/public service peacetime option), with no exemptions for anyone (particularly children of wealthy people and politicians), to limit the hideous penchant of our politicians, especially Republicans, to send our troops into unnecessary (Iraq) and incompetently conducted (Iraq and Afghanistan) but unfunded wars (if it is your kids going to war, then maybe you will be (i) just a bit less supportive of getting into a war unless it is really, really necessary and (ii) just a bit less tolerant of incompetent civilian leadership)
• Committed to requiring, except in the case of a true emergency (not a smoke and mirrors emergency that politicians always conjure out of nothing), that major spending programs, e.g., wars and health care programs, are at least 70-80% paid for by tax increases and/or spending cuts before one penny is spent
• Committed to a brutally honest but fair assessment of our public education system and if the best option appears to be privatizing it, then working to implement privatization or at least creating competition between privatized and public schools (because our public education system is in failure mode)
• Committed to allowing as much personal freedom as society can reasonably accommodate, e.g., legalized abortion, legalized same sex marriage and legalized marijuana (maybe other drugs, depending on a careful but fair cost-benefit public health and economic analysis)
• Committed to reducing the influence of religion in government including the military, e.g., by vigorously fighting to maintain as much separation between church and state as possible; religion should not have much of a role in a secular democracy; if people want more religion in government, they should first carefully and honestly consider interesting places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Ecuador or the Vatican City - be careful about what you wish for because you just might get it and find that you don't like it
• Committed to showing the American public the awful scope and depth of the failures of our political institutions, especially the Democratic and Republican parties, and most of our political policies since the end of World War II (nobody can blame our messes on the Libertarians, Greens, Nazis or Communists)
• Committed to reworking our tax code to make it simple and transparent, while phasing out tax loopholes and breaks immediately or over a few years if a cost-benefit analysis shows they are economically not beneficial (the cost to the US economy for mere tax compliance is in the neighborhood of $200 billion per year; needless loopholes cost at least another $100 billion per year (probably about $200 billion) - all of that is wasted effort and weakens our economic competitiveness)
• Committed to implementing public financing of elections to the maximum extent allowed by law - this is the only politically possible counterweight to at least partly offset the corruption of politics by special interest money
• Committed to ending (or vastly reducing) America's dependence on foreign energy, which is a true and urgent national security crisis, by the the most efficient and reliable means now available based on a transparent and brutally honest cost-benefit analysis (meaning it probably isn't going to be building wind farms or solar panel factories, it probably is going to be nuclear power) (for every $10 increase in the cost of a barrel of oil, our economy has to pay about an additional $200 billion per year, mostly to our enemies - that is another unsustainable and stupid burden on our competitiveness)
• Committed to use public funds to implement a national energy independence strategy, e.g., by building nuclear power plants if that is what makes sense, even if it means using eminent domain to sweep aside the screaming NIMBY folks (and private property rights freaks) and waiving every environmental regulation there ever was (like President W. did when he was building the US-Mexico border fence); then provide that energy to our economy at cost and in direct competition with private sector energy providers none of whom care much about the American economy or people (there is nothing like a little competition to focus business interests and reduce costs, at least that is what Adam Smith thought)
• Committed to immediate conversion, for new employees at least, of public sector employee retirement fixed benefit pensions to the wonderful but often useless 401K type plans the rest of us private sector folks enjoy; don't you just love those "flash crashes" that blow out a chunk of your 401K in about 35 minutes - you can safely bet that most public sector employees don't ever face that kind of real world risk; it time to have them face the same reality we face
  
• Committed to fostering conversion of public sector employees from unionized to not unionized
• Committed to returning essentially all American troops from Japan, Europe, South Korea, and all of the Middle East as soon as reasonably practical, i.e., within about 2 years (the second world war is over and our allies have recovered and can take care of themselves; the Middle East can and will do what it wants because our troops can't stop them; you can see the civil war coming to poor forlorn Iraq - it is only a matter of time before the blood starts flowing again)
  

The list could go on for a while, e.g., fixing bad infrastructure, etc. The point is that what we have now is a lot of failure. Some of the things on the list have more than a little to do with that failure, e.g., corruption of politics and politicians by special interest money. Despite the fury of the November elections, it is now apparent that nothing much new is on the political horizon.

However, one must wait to see what the Tea Party folks might do differently once they get settled into power in January. If they can get past their blinding political and religious ideology and act like pragmatic realists, then maybe they will be helpful. If not, then probably not.