The big lie... the old technique

I have no time to post today (as I need to meet deadlines for writing some things for which I'll actually get paid), but I just can't resist...

AJ at Americablog discusses what seems to be a directed effort to repeat the Iraq-invasion-era misguiding of the American public, no doubt to offer some political cover for the beleaguered administration. Every day we hear the same mantra from the White House, that we face the epic battle for the future of Western civilization in confrontation with Al-Qaeda in Iraq (usefully conflated with Al Qaeda more generally), who will follow the troops home if they aren't first defeated in Iraq, and who therefore represent the principal threat there. As AJ writes,

This is, quite simply, completely and totally false.

Anyone who claims that the so-called al Qaeda in Iraq group is the "principal threat" to anything in that nation -- whether its citizens, the government, the political process, or any specific ethnic or sectarian group -- is either grossly ignorant of the realities of the Iraq war or blatantly lying. I honestly have no idea which it is in this case, though it's worth noting that the chief U.S. military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, was employed as a Special Assistant to the President prior to his current appointment.

Most reliable estimates put the fundamentalist/jihadist/al Qaeda actors in Iraq at around 3-5% of the total insurgency, with virtually no approximations exceeding 10%. I really cannot overstate how misleading it is to focus on al Qaeda when the driving forces of the conflict are average, native, very pissed-off -- but not religious fundamentalist -- Iraqis. The vast majority of the Sunni population is relatively secular (more secular, in fact, than Iraqi Shia), and even tacit support of jihadists is founded in anti-American sentiment. Even the sectarian violence is fueled more by localized conflicts between Sunni and Shia families, tribes, and militias than by al Qaeda.

It is true that AQI groups commit the most spectacular attacks, including the vast majority of suicide bombings, but if the underlying problems were solved, or even addressed (including, but not limited to, oil revenue sharing, federalism, de-Ba'athification, provincial elections, etc.), AQI would lose most of its ability to operate because it would have no support on the ground.

As Ian Welch points out at The Agonist, what's most disturbing is the stark effectiveness of this old technique of telling the Big Lie often enough until most people believe it:

The administration just keeps saying it, and saying it and saying it and the media, including the print media, just repeat it. Which, I'll point out, is propaganda rule #1. I'd love to see a poll showing how many Americans think AQ is the primary enemy in Iraq - I'd be quite surprised if it isn't a majority.

This is why decision making in the US is so broken, because it's based on lies and those lies are established through, honestly, no exageration, classic Big Lie propaganda techniques right out of a 1930's handbook.

Some of you who visit The Social Atom now and then may recall the post of a few days ago on recent psychological experients on how people form opinions about what the majority thinks. The clear conclusion is that a few voices, repeating the same claims persistently and loudly, will make their way into our brains and have a singificant influence on our thinking. This isn't rocket science, as they say, but the simple dynamics of the human brain. Unfortunately, the White House understands this all too well, while our media seems bizarrely naive and unprepared to recognize the way they're being played -- to our immense collective cost.

The expertise of the ignorant -- Mark Buchanan

I was just about to post something on the science of climate change -- and on how people form their opinions about it -- when I happened upon several must-read posts on a similar theme. Chris Mooney has two pieces (here and here) in the Huffington Post exploring how public opinion has "tipped" in recent years, bringing the urgency of climate change much more into mainstream thinking. And there's a wonderful post by Orac at Respectful Insolence looking at the bad arguments that get repeated interminably by climate change "skeptics" -- how can there be warming if it's so cold today?, etc. If Mooney's evidence is correct, then these skeptic red-herrings aren't standing up so well as they used to, which is a good thing.

Personally, I'd been stirred by Camille Paglia, responding to her readers. Paglia often says insightful things on any number of topics, but she seems to go off the rails when it comes to climate change. I'm not sure why. One reader, a self-proclaimed expert in nuclear design and atmospheric modeling took issue with Al Gore and the "hysteria" over climate change, and Paglia loved every word of it:

"Bravo for your invigorating deconstruction of current propaganda! I too am very concerned about the potential damage to Democrat credibility coming from the grab-bag Gore crusade, with its wild exaggerations and hypocritical sanctimony. It does make liberals look like ditzes -- the last thing the party needs in a presidential campaign where no-crap national security issues will be paramount. Environmentalism is of vital importance to our future, but it cannot be based on lies."

It's mysterious to me why concern over the Earth's future climate would make liberals "look like ditzes." Somehow it seems more likely that those who continue to deny any link between human activity and global warming, in the face of the consensus opinion of the worlds' scientists -- who've actually spent time studying the problem in great detail -- would be more deserving of ridicule.

But the skeptics clearly don't accept the idea that climate scientists might know more than the average citizen, or that their models deserve more consideration and weight than off-the-cuff observations of about local cold spells and the like. It's a peculiar view, and it raises an interesting point.

How do we make up our individual minds about any scientific issue, including climate change? Let's be honest. On almost any scientific issue, none of us has really investigated all (or even a little bit) of the evidence to the point of becoming an expert. Rather, we form our opinions by learning a limited amount, and by weighing the words and arguments and reputations of others. We're finite beings in a hugely complex world, and we really have no other choice but to learn (or attempt to learn) from others.

I've never performed careful experiments to test the principles of relativity, but I believe in it because I've worked through the logic of the mathematics, which has a beautiful coherence, and I've read the papers (or textbook discussions) documenting the important experiments that support the theory. And I've experienced the workings of the scientific process, which makes it in the interests of many others to point out any errors or mistakes in such experiments.

Suppose I were to ask Camille Paglia what she thinks about the prospects for, say, spintronics to be a commercially viable technology in the next five years (the idea is to design devices that would use the spins of electrons, not only their charges, to carry information). My guess is that she hasn't studied the latest papers in Nature or the Journal of Applied Physics describing key advances in the technology, and the hurdles that remain, and so to come to an answer she'd consult some experts. She'd call up physicists involved in the area, a range of theorists and experimentalists, and try to form some consensus of their views. She might try to read some review papers by those experts, and so on. This would be a sensible approach for anyone -- talk to some of the people who know.

I imagine that Paglia, or any other intelligent person, would use the same strategy in trying to come to an informed and accurate opinion on just about any scientific matter, ranging from the causes of deep earthquakes to the puzzle of high-temperature superconductivity. She knows that on these matters she doesn't know anything, but that there are people who've devoted their intelligence and energy for decades to building an understanding.

But then when it comes to climate change, suddenly everything changes....the scientists can't be trusted. Paglia and other skeptics don't look to the views of the IPCC, or to the vast majority of other climate scientists who express similar views (or see far more extreme outcomes as likely), but instead accept the slogans of those with obvious political interests, or the views of a very tiny minority of scientific skeptics.

Why is that? Frankly, I don't have an answer. But unfortunately, the very complexity of the climate system adds to the problem. It's easy for skeptics to make up some story about how its all the sun causing the warming, or how today's warming isn't anything special relative to the past, and so on. They offer up simple stories and explanations that stick in the mind. Meanwhile, it's not so easy for climate scientists to explain the results of computational models that for accuracy have to include a multitude of nonlinear feedbacks, and in many ways have become as complex and difficult to understand as the climate itself. There are no simple stories to tell. But that's the situation we're in, and this is the best science we currently have.

Richard Feynman had a great definition of science. "Science," he said, "is belief in the ignorance of experts." He was implying that science is not about accepting claims based on faith, or because they're proclaimed by some famous and esteemed professor, but because they're supported by evidence. Experts ought to be questioned and challenged, and they are, everyday, in the ordinary workings of science.

But belief in the ignorance of experts isn't the same as belief in the expertise of the ignorant, which is what the skeptics often seem to embrace.

State the obvious

In this review over at Salon of Michael Moore's new film Sicko, Stephanie Zacharek makes a powerful and rather obvious point, but one that we do not, strangely enough, hear very often:

"There's something desperately wrong with a nation whose healthcare system... exists not to keep people well and healthy but to make a profit off them."

One day, perhaps not too far from now, a good historian will write the story of how our "system" became so distorted. I think it will have a lot to do with the sorry state of economic science, and its almost religious belief in the power of greed and free markets. In fact, one writer, Robert Nelson, has already explored this theme in his brilliant book Economics as Religion. It's the best thing I've ever read about economics.