Is Dubai the key to peace in the Middle East? I've been taking another look at this Wired article on Dubai and reading some others as well.

I'm pretty much convinced by Steven Den Beste's arguments that humiliation is as important as poverty as a key to understanding terrorism, and that those who identify with the Islamic terrorists are much less likely to do so when they have successful modern economic achievements to replace pride with humiliation. Steven has also pointed out that this kind of humiliation can be made worse rather than ameliorated by handouts. So in opposition to Steven, I believe that to all the other obstacles to America building a successful capitalist democracy in Iraq we must add the danger that they will on some level fear that having American 'help' will make this modern economy into another handout. And those other obstacles are formidable.

I still hope that we can prevent Iraq from turning into a complete disaster, but at best we can hope it will follow the example of Dubai rather than lead the Arab world. While attempting to prevent collapse in Iraq, we must look to Dubai for actual progress.

There is a sort of irony, since at least in the short term this progress would presumably mean loss of American jobs, as with India and China, and Japan in previous decades. It may even be that major economic rethinking on the order of Adam Smith's genius is required for us to absorb this, since on the path we are following now may lie eventual precipitous decline in the value of the dollar, which might well cause a collapse in the world economy. But things cannot continue otherwise, since pretty much everyone agrees successful Arab economies are the only long term cure. Major restructuring of the world economy must be the subject of another post; this one is about Dubai.

Dubai is far and away the most welcoming country for tourism in the Arab world. It is a regional hub for banking and shipping - which I believe merely means large shares of very small pies. They are building internet and industrial parks, but although they have made deals with major corporations, building may only be beginning. Still, they have made a start, and we must do whatever we can to encourage it, because progress there is not seen as synonymous with being an American puppet. I'm not sure precisely what we can do - but nobody has a plan for Iraq either, and this tiny Emirate is in much better shape.

Update: Jason doesn't feel the way the rest of this post says. See the link below.

http://iraqnow.blogspot.com/2004/08/edwards-s-corporation-tax-shelter.html

Jason Van Steenwyk of Iraq Now is convinced the press is biased against Bush, but he still took the trouble to question a NY Times story critical of Kerry.

So what, exactly, is the tax shelter the New York Times is playing 'gotcha' with?

John Edwards, a high profile professional in a business with significant potential for malpractice liability...

wait for it...

owns an S corporation.

That's it. That's all.

And that generated a big-assed story in America's Newspaper of Reckless, with its clueless political reporters having to bother to ask "is it ethical?"

Yes, it's ethical. It's more than ethical. S corporations are a standard practice in law firms, medical practices, accounting firms, and other professional practices.

In view of this, perhaps Instapundit needs a correction. The last four words are not part of what Instapundit is quoting, they're from Reynolds.


Here's something that could have been a front-page story, but which the NYT put at the bottom of Page 15 and other papers ignored. John Edwards, the self-proclaimed champion of the little guy, used a tax shelter to avoid paying $600,000 in Medicare taxes--this from a man who made $27 million in the four years before entering the Senate and had criticized tax shelters for undermining Medicare. What would the media reaction had been if Dick Cheney was found doing the same thing?


I think we know.

Mailed to Reynolds about 10:30 PM est Monday July 14.

Instapundit watch:

In other words, a pointless exercise driven by social conservatives to fire up their base. But I wonder if people are thinking this through. If the amendment fails, as expected, isn't that going to be read as a defeat for the anti-gay-marriage folks, and as implicit permission for states to go ahead? It seems to me that it will be (which is fine with me, since I'm okay on gay marriage), but that makes me wonder why anti-gay-marriage folks are doing this. Am I missing something, or are they being played for suckers?

UPDATE: More thoughts here. And Eric Scheie has this observation: "I think that the proponents are more cynical than they might appear. I think they know they are going to lose, and therefore they'd rather lose in a big public way -- before the election."

Many neocons who favor Bush seem to think this way. They are Iraq hawks and favor tax cuts for the rich, but they can't quite believe Bush means what he says on social issues. Myself I would consider being willing to use the trust of those who rely on you against them something of a character issue. At any rate, the evidence is against calculated betrayal. If anything, some of the stuff quoted here risked offending religious supporters with hubris. If Bush is really pandering to the right with some of his statements - rather than humoring the center with the rest of them - I haven't seen an analysis to prove it, or even a serious attempt to make a case for it. It just seems natural to people who share his political beliefs but have no personal contact with serious evangelicals.

Why is Glenn Reynolds so willing to believe 'straight talker' Bush is involved in setting up some of his supporters, if not an odd combination of blind faith in some of his politics and the idea that he could not seriously believe a certain set of his religeous protestations? I disagree with them, especially the political positions often derived from them, but would require strong evidence to call someone who professed them a hypocrite.

Aside from lucrative tax incentives and ultramodern infrastructure, "it all boils down to leadership," he says. "You have to be open minded - open to international companies to come invest in your country and to let them also take a piece of the pie."

Yet more evidence they have the right idea in Dubai. India and China have become globally competetive in certain areas by their own efforts - why not the United Arab Emirates?

"Land and property has become the safe harbour for a lot of Arab capital that flow from Western capital markets following the latest development. Dubai has attracted large number of individual and corporate investors from overseas with attractive return on investment. In fact many small national and AGCC investors seem to have joined hands to buy lands and properties in last the few years sending the market rates high," added Al Ali.

Is this article from the Khaleej Times overoptimistic? Perhaps. Yet at least Dubai (in the United Arab Emirates) is trying. Most of the big post world war two success stories of liberalization which ultimately produced stable democracies, such as South Korea and Taiwan, started with serious government efforts to modernize and join the global economy. There may well be more cause to hope for the birth of a liberalizing example in the middle east here than in Iraq.

I've often thought the ombudsman column at the New York Times was a great idea well implemented, and that many critics of the Times should try something similar. I've never before seen them use the excuse that everyone else did the same thing or worse (although it is often true) until now.

If out-of-tune headlines required apologies, the newspaper business would soon turn into a cacophony of confession.

I'm always annoyed at those who ignore glaring distortions by media reflecting their own political viewpoint while bashing the New York Times for much smaller errors. As an admirer of the Times, I think it's worth pointing out they have fallen short of the example they wish to set.

I'm sure the ombudsman can't change industrywide standards for headlines, or even NYT's standards. Many people get their news on some subjects from the headlines - perhaps more than read any given story to the end. This problem is worth thinking hard about, and now would have been a great time to start. Ah well.

(Mailed to NYT ombudsman 6/28/04).

A much fairer minded commentary on the torturing of Iraqi prisoners than I've seen on either the left or the right comes from The Religious Policeman in Saudi Arabia:

However I would make one point. What the Coalition troops did in Iraq prisons is appalling, and very much undermines any case they make for bringing “Western Civilisation” to Iraq. However the West does have press and TV media that highlights and exposes these “dark corners”, and a political and judicial system that will, eventually, get to some sort of truth and bring about some sort of justice. In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, the government can do what it pleases, it is never subject to internal criticism, or brought to account. So, whilst we’d rather not have your interrogation techniques, we’d very much like your free press and independent judiciary.

The ironic part is that some conservatives are always saying how our overly liberal media are undermining us in Iraq. Those very media are one reason many still consider our culture desirable.

A few decades ago, there was much worrying when JFK ran for President. Because he was a Catholic, people wondered if the Catholic Church would try to exercise undue influence on our government. Eventually, he announced that he did not speak for the Church - and the Church did not speak for him.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) -- The bishop of Colorado's second-largest Roman Catholic diocese issued a stark warning Friday, saying voters should not receive Communion if they back politicians who support abortion rights, stem-cell research, euthanasia and gay marriage.

It is now officially an act of courage for a Catholic to support any politician who supports any of those, and I want to say how proud I am to live in a democracy where there are so many who do so.

This essay on anger and war by Armed Liberal of Winds of Change is even more topical now than when I bookmarked it a couple of months ago intending to blog about it. I've been deleting many such bookmarks unblogged, but this doesn't deserve to be one of them.

He discussed the danger of acting out of anger - or fear - in Iraq. Unlike me, he doesn't believe those two emotions were in fact the driving force behind this war - and its' Achilles heel. This is the only writing I've found about the effects our collective emotions have been having on us though.

One of the reasons I call this blog the Art of Peace is because I consider peace an art. You can't sustain it merely by not hurting anyone, or even being so powerful no rational actor would attack. As Sun Tsu recommended in another case, you must understand both yourself and any potential enemy.

The emergent result may well be that some will exhibit behavior indicating intelligence at a level beyond that of individual humans, capable of "thinking" thoughts no single human could conceive of. Even with industrial-level technology, that's already happened. Science, in particular, is such a thing, as is modern engineering. Engineering at a primitive level has been with us since the creation of the first stone tools. But science as we now know it is very recent, only going back about 500 years (though one can identify predecessors extending back millennia before that).

I've already commented on this USS Clueless post, but I'm going to do so again. Partly this is because one of the major focuses of this weblog is about how we can help catalyze the self organization of such a mind, and there aren't that many posts in the blogosphere on this subject. This particular one interests me especially because it is from an engineering rather than a new age perspective. The point here is not that I'm convinced all new age ideas are wrong, but that none of them provide concrete approaches we can pursue insofar as I know. Engineering after all is about designing and builiding, which is close to what I am interested in. Unlike Steven, I tend to think it makes more sense to think of the whole memeosphere as a single mind, (also here). I'd like to think more about how that mind works. In many ways it's still embryonic, but as Steven has pointed out, it has already begun to successfully explore and manipulate the physical world. In my opinion it is still not functioning effectively in most ways - all the more reason to examine the ways in which it is, and think about what might be going wrong.

The emergent result may well be that some will exhibit behavior indicating intelligence at a level beyond that of individual humans, capable of "thinking" thoughts no single human could conceive of.. In some sense it should, or what's so special about it? On the other hand, the brain has trillions of neurons, and the world only has billions of humans. It seems very unlikely an individual neuron can have a concept of a brain or even a neuron, but a human can think about a global hive mind. Perhaps we can come close to understanding those thoughts by thinking about the trends, practice, and history of science - and perhaps attempting to do so will even contribute a tiny bit towrds crystallizing and clarifying the thoughts of the nascent global brain.

What Steven Johnson refers to as emergent intelligence seems to operate by huge number of low level systems obeying a set of mechanical laws. This may not be quite the case with the Global Brain, so perhaps quasi-emergent intelligence is a better name for it. Scientists are largely concerned about their own prestige, security, and income. To the extent they are driven by the love of knowledge, it is probably more often a specific type of knowledge than science in the abstract. Yet scientists also have opinions about science in general, how it should be done and where it is going. Since fame and prestige (even after their death) is one of the major payoffs for being a truly great discoverer, it is harder to 'game the system'. An economic system may be designed to reward those who contribute to the economic well being of the community, but once the rules are set in stone it is inevitable some people will find ways to profit which don't produce a net benefit for the group which made the laws but follow the laws as they are encoded. But if you care what people will think in one hundred years about how you got your data and how you gave credit to prior work, it is by definition impossible to exploit loopholes. The people who write histories of science and the people who read them are all part of the system.

Also needed is a consensus that progress is possible and necessary. This may seem too obvious to state, but many religions consider it sacriligious to suppose that gifted individuals can improve on received dogma short of a singular revelation, and many consider it unpatriotic to suggest there is something fundamentally wrong with the way their government works. It is hard enough for someone with an idea that contradicts the established orthodoxy to get a hearing, even though many of the members of that established orthodoxy established their reputation by proving that an older accepted idea was in fact wrong. Yet the idea that evidence and argument can and should be enough to prove that what the entire establishment believes is wrong is very deeply built into science. Irony of ironies, students of the history of science have with careful research asked questions about the received story of Galileo - yet even as a founding myth, it is a very good one for science.

How can our ideas about religion and government be reshaped so we will be on a steady course towards wonders now unimaginable? To ask the question is to deny that we have reached Fukuyama's end of history. For myself, I think it is worth thinking about even in retrospect - are there workable changes in both these institutions which could have kept us from the problems we confront now?