Month: June 2007

Venezuela Is an Old Story, But Some Have Not Discerned the Plot

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In Black Dogs, a novel that describes the tenuous hold Westerners have on civilization and the nearness of our more primal selves, Ian McEwan sets a dramatic scene in Berlin; Berlin, of course, has been a setting for much real and fictional drama in the twentieth century and may in the twenty-first. In While Europe Slept, Bruce Bawer describes his anger at the parade of Che shirts as he sat in a Berlin Starbucks. He describes his reaction:

I should have been inured to Che’s ubiquity by now. But it angered me to see his face in Pariser Platz, where his cause had once won a nightmarish, and seemingly irreversible, victoria. Some would ague that his reduction to an image used to sell leisure wear represented a “commodification” of Communism, and therefore a victory for capitalism. But looking at those shirts, I felt no sense of triumph.(129-30)

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The Vietnam War (eventually) resulted in an American victory

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There is a pretty heated discussion about the war in Vietnam, among other things, in the comments of this post by Ginny, so these observations by Jerry Pournelle should contribute some useful context:

Viet Nam was a US success because a great part of Soviet transport production including trucks and such was built in the USSR, transported at great expense to Viet Nam and destroyed by USAF. When North Viet Nam invaded the South in 1975 they had more armor than the Wehrmacht had at Kursk, and more trucks than Patton ever had in the Red Ball Express. This was all replacements for similar amounts of materiel destroyed in 1973 when the US at a cost of 663 US casualties aided ARVN in repulsing a 150,000 troop invasion — fewer than 40,000 ever got back home — bringing with it more tanks than the Wehrmacht had at Kursk and more trucks than Patton ever had — none of which ever got home.
 
Viet Nam helped convert the USSR into Bulgaria with missiles. They neglected their own infrastructure to send materiel to Viet Nam for us to destroy.

As Pournelle also writes in his post, Afghanistan was yet another war of attrition that finished them off. One important reason why the Soviets didn’t realize all that in time was that they lied to each other. If displeasing your superiors with reports about problems is risky, you simply report successes all the time. The West in turn didn’t notice what happened because our spies didn’t get to hear anything but the misinformation Soviet officials were feeding each other. That’s also why the victory in Vietnam didn’t feel like one for decades. While Iraq isn’t Vietnam (it can’t be repeated frequently enough), the example of the long-term success that the Vietnam turned out to be should serve to demonstrate the virtue of patience. Iraq will only turn into a defeat (in the long as well as the short run) in case of a premature troop withdrawal (but that is an issue for another post).

Trucks, road damage and road tolls

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Recently I have become interested in the problem of increasing road congestion. This post is just meant to be a kind of general introduction to the issue, and also to demonstrate how damaging the increasing freight transport via trucks can become if the ensuing problems aren’t addressed properly soon. In follow-up posts the main focus will be on the situation in Europe, where complete gridlock will become inevitable if we don’t do something about current developments. I’ll also write about alternative means of transportation and new technological developments in this area. As a layman, I’d also be grateful for feedback from people who have first-hand knowledge of the industry and will incorporate it into my future posts; I’ll also be happy to correct any mistakes I have made with this one. Provided that any specialists are interested in this post post at all, I’ll very likely get quite an earful… :)
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Accommodation Versus Innovation

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Appleton covers more thoroughly the ground mapped out by Barone; a useful discussion that touches on some of this is John Jay’s post. Advocates of global warming make it increasingly clear their interest is less in solutions than political & cultural revolutions.

It’s harder to take Al Gore seriously if you reread sections of Wigglesworth’s “Day of Doom” every semester and have some sense of human nature. We love to create a certain frisson of terror at the results of our own evildoing. I’m not sure that is all that bad – we aren’t truly innocent and a real if controllable fear helps reign in our willfulness. Besides, well, it’s human nature. Poe & Hitchcock, artists who strive primarily for effect (Poe’s primary goal), derive their power from recognizing we like to be scared; bogeymen buried in our consciousness want out out every once in a while & we like to feel a little horror of recognition before we pop them back. And we know, without often expressing it or acknowledging the appropriate gratitude we should feel, that life is easier, than it has perhaps ever been: we live in a world in which entertainment is one of our larger budgetary expenses. We feel a little guilt.

Measuring the Political Temperature, Josie Appleton discusses less the effects of global warming than the context in which it is posed – finding motivations less in tune with science or technology than patterns in our cultural history and human nature. (Arts & Letters links to a Spiked review.) She introduces her argument by noting the patterns of the use of science:

But there is another way to approach this question, which is to look at the political circumstances in which climatic science is produced, a process that also has its own laws and patterns. It is strange, at a time when the social construction of science is an established idea (Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he describes science’s progress through ‘paradigms’, is on every undergraduate’s reading list) that nobody thinks to look at the social construction of global warming theories. Global warming science is being produced in highly febrile times; and history tells us that the more the political temperature rises, the more science’s view of nature is distorted.

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