The sky is falling
Ross, over at spiral dive, is the only one who showed any interest in my police state post. (Scroll down to the second entry. Unreconstructed luddite Ross doesn't have permalinks for individual entries.) (Wah. Not that he bothered to tell me. I actually had to go read his blog, the bastard.) While I posted a version of this in his comments, I found it sufficiently interesting to post over here. (And remember, I do this for my amusement, not yours.)
Ross says:
The question is, can the system come apart? In the environment and in our political system I believe we are truly faced with the systemic question. Will the system survive the stresses we place upon it?
He then mentions the environment and the brittleness of our political system, as examples that we are skating on the edge of disaster. He continues:
Do you really believe that we can just muddle along on these issues? Do you really believe that there just can't be a downside, that nothing can and ever will befall this country? After all, nothing ever has.
(Read the whole post to get a sense of where he was coming from.)
Not normally one to kick at long term consequences, I have to say that sticking a knife in our economy now on the chance that we may prevent a 1 degree increase in the average world temperature over a century seems a little too forward looking.
In my post, I was talking about the ultimate collapse of government. But to answer your question, yes, I think we will muddle along. Every issue has its downside, every decision has its consequence. This is the core of conservative thinking - the law of unintended consequences. We need to defend the country, that costs money. The boomers want their entire existence subsidized. That will cost a lot of money. The government decrees that cars must be fuel efficient, so people by minivans and SUVs which are classified as light trucks. You can't have a solution just by wishing it so, or because it would be fair, or just, or whatever.
While political systems are not in general fast reacting - dedicated as they are to the status quo - the US has a government whose reaction times have been reduced to a world record generation or less. If something starts going wrong, we can take advantage of our adaptable system to put in a correction. The openness of the system allows people to organize to achieve this.
Over the last two centuries, history shows us that people have always felt that we were on the brink. Somehow we never went over, or maybe we weren't really on the brink after all.
There are problems. Likely, someone has a solution or at least a start on one. None of these problems are catastophic, at least that I can see. So unless we get hit by an asteroid, I think we'll be alright for the time being.
Unless we go to war with China
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See that little # sign at the
See that little # sign at the bottom of my posts? That is your permalink. I am not a luddite. I am just subtle. ;)
My point is that it boils
My point is that it boils down to probabilities...exactly how much of a chance do you want to take with this stuff? What effect does a 1 degree increase have on the environment? What effect does a 2 degree increase have? You don't know, and I don't know. Maybe nobody knows. In general, a system that is in balance is usually pretty finely tuned, in a mathematical sense. Knocking these variables out of whack because we'll "probably" be ok just doesn't seem very conservative to me.
Doesn't "sticking a knife in the economy" seem a little far-fetched to you? Bush 1 and Clinton raised taxes, and that didn't seem to kill off the 90s.
As for the knife, I wasn't
As for the knife, I wasn't referring to taxes, but rather the costs of complying with Kyoto. I should have been more clear. (Clinton cut several key tax rates in the mid nineties.)
The jury is very much out on the whole climate thingy, and risking vast damage to the economy on unproven computer models that only predict very small changes over very long periods seems unwise.
Also, climate change happens over time regardless. The little ice age in the late middle ages saw several degree drops over most of the northern hemisphere, and no one that I'm aware of says that people were the cause of that. It is far to early to start assessing blame for recent climate changes.
Buckethead,
Buckethead,
I apologize for not jumping in on the police-state question. Partly this is because I've weighed in on this before, and partly it's because I've spent most of the day extracting data from statistical tables until my head pounds.
Some thoughts:
1) Environment
Kyoto as written: bad idea
Some version of Kyoto: very necessary.
It's not enough to say "oh, climate change happens anyway." In an earlier post, Buckethead, you mentioned environmental stewardship as a winning issue for a demagogue, and with good reason. The right question is not, "will climate change happen anyway," but rather, "do we really know the long-term consequences well enough to disregard the worse cases?"
2) On the breakdown of society
Also, society has been on "the brink," as you put it, since the dawn of society. Plato had the same beefs as Allan Bloom, if you can believe it. That is a permanent feature of human society. But neither does our permanent stance on the brink mean that it doesn't matter.
3) Synthesizing the two
As regards the environment, it comes down to a very simple maxim which applies anywhere: don't shit where you sleep, and clean up after yourself. Even dogs know this.
4) Yes, we will always muddle through. People always muddle through. The entire POINT of civilization is to make it possible to do more than muddle.
I place less faith than you
I place less faith than you do, Buckethead, in the inertia which is typical of government initiatives. Why? Because the inertia of the populace is at least as great. Most people don't think twice about giving out their social security number over the phone, much less about using a credit card to buy sex in Singapore.
The rising wish to construe a "privacy right" in the 4th Amendment is as far as I know fairly recent. As a historian, I know that when something like this gains cultural currency, it is probably addressing a newly realized need. In this case, some people are beginning to realize that achieving privacy takes effort.
I understand that it's a long leap from "people worry about their privacy more now when the chips are down than they used to" to "a police state is imminent," but I swear to you, my friend, it's a sign.
A police state is not imminent. But what is imminent is a dual trend: greater government scrutiny of common citizens and their actions; and more vehement resistance against these intrusions. Not a police state, exactly, but rising tension between watchers and watched.
A final question: When's the last time a cop stopped you in the car or on the street, and you felt anything but nervous? For better or worse, it's almost impossible to talk about police states without remembering that.
And now I must ruminate on the panopticon.
Buckethead, you seem to be
Buckethead, you seem to be relying more than usual today on the "ah well, whaddaya gonna do?" school of conservatism.
That's not like you. Kid keeping you up late?
On the topic of Mr. Judson's
On the topic of Mr. Judson's post about showing ID to fly (also described as "showing [our] papers), I totally agree. He wrote "At some point we need to grow tired of "showing our papers" each time we wish to live our lives. It is doubly important in that we gain nothing by showing them." This paper-showing is one of the ways in which, as Buckethead puts it, government "ratchets up" their role in government. B, I think you're totally wrong to reject the "ratchet effect" as bunk based upon the repeals of war legislation after WWI and II. Those grand gestures are anomalies. Bureaucracies, like coral and volcanoes, only grow. The slow, banal erosion of our rights is based upon (in-)convenience, habit, and bureaucratic policy. You can't rent a car or get on an airplane without presenting a credit card:convenience. Vendors ask you for your social security number over the phone all the time: habit. They need to do a background check before you can meet the President: policy. These things don't get repealed, and most of the time they don't get noticed. But they, not the big wartime gestures, are the true foundation of a potential police state. David Brin makes a good point that the watchers can also be watched, but most people are not shit-hot hackers. Most people just want to buy the damn ticket, rent the damn car, and see the damn movie, and if it takes a retinal scan to get inside, hey, whatever.
I thought I was relying on
I thought I was relying on the optimistic, actions of free citizens will save us school of conservatism.
I am tired, though.
More on this over the weekend, or even this evening.