The "Name One Exception" Challenge

Last time, I shone light briefly on the "name one exception" challenge. This is an argument device that makes it difficult for your opponents to weasel out, using the usual polemical tricks. Under normal circumstances, such stark and spectacular challenges should only rarely be available, since they expose the other person as painted into a corner of his or her own making. Alas, in this era of declining reason and logic -- and skyrocketing dogmatism -- it is actually all-too easy. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

The example I gave last time had to do with the top excuse given by certain Asian-mercantilist states, for their relentlessly predatory trade practices. "We are only taking reparations for the harm done to us under brutal colonialism," goes the justification. Only I then ask: 

"Across four millennia, name for us one example of a great and loyal foreign friend that your nation ever had? One powerful friend who ever came - voluntarily and repeatedly (though not always vigorously or intelligently or with complete purity of motives) - to your nation’s aid, in times of need?"

It's a good example of this method, in practice. Worth reading... and socking away for the international arguments to come.

== The Challenge to our Dogma-Blinded Neighbors ==

But of course, the most worrisome plummet into fact-free dogmatism is happening in the USA, once a domain of moderate-pragmatists. For more than a decade, I have been searching for ways to get around the rigid, defense mechanisms that keep so many of our fellow citizens locked into rigid ideologies, along an insipidly lobotomizing "left-right axis." 

It's not easy! Some brilliant (if traitoriously cynical) minds have concocted rationalizations and incantations that keep radicalized voters murmuring: "I know my side is crazy... but our opponents are worse!"

(Aside: if you visit this space often, you know that I believe one end of the political "spectrum” to be more dangerously crazy, right now. But don't you worry, far-leftists, I spare some jaundiced ire to aim in your direction, now and then. Your wing of craziness is far, far less dangerous to the Enlightenment Experiment at this point in time. But we remember the USSR.  “Less crazy, less numerous, less anti-science, less-often wrong and less dangerous” is hardly an encomium. (Watch:  Why Our Politics Doesn’t Work.) But sure. Let’s turn back to the worse crazies.)

To the point: I have found that my “name one exception” challenges are very effective at weaning intelligent conservatives away from the Confederacy. For example:

“Name one statistically significant and attributable metric of U.S. national health that improved across the span of either Bush administration.”

Or: “Name more than a couple of statistically significant and attributable metrics of U.S. national health that did NOT improve dramatically across the span of either the Clinton or Obama administrations.”

Or: “Name one “winner” of the Bushite wars, other than Iran, the Saudis and Bush-Cheney family companies.”

Or: “Name one industry that - for all their talk - Republicans ever actually deregulated, other than banking-Wall Street and resource extraction… and we know how those sweetheart deals worked out, for the 99.99%.”

(In fact, democrats did all the effective loosening of government in this last half century: from the ICC and CAB and ATT to GPS and the freaking Internet… and any libertarian who ever votes republican is -- to put it frankly -- a hypocrite.)

Or this great old standby:  “Name one accurate prediction ever made by Supply Side “economics.”

I have a ton of these “name one exception” challenges, any one of which woud prove that the GOP should never again be trusted with a burnt match.  

Only now I guess there’s two of them I will have to retire!

== Okay, Okay, so you got me, this time… ==

The problem with the "name one exception challenge" is that sometimes, even members of a crazy movement are actually able to meet the challenge.  They are able to come up with an exception.  In fact, here are two of them that were answered!

“Name one fully-red state that has done a damn thing about the utterly criminal cheat known as gerrymandering.”   

 …and…

“Name a red state that has joined two dozen blue states in (variously) backing out of the insane so-called War on Drugs.”

Taking them in order: more than a dozen blue states have seen citizen revolts to end gerrymandering’s foul, evil and treasonous practice, plus a few purple ones. (Illinois and Maryland are still blue cheaters. Hey, I admitted there are scoundrels on the left. They’re just not as numerous or anywhere near as perfectly disciplined-organized.)

Red citizens and states, in contrast seem perfectly happy with monstrous, vote-stealing cheat-crimes like tortuous districts… except, as someone recently pointed out…

"Prior to 1994, the Idaho Legislature was responsible for redrawing its own districts. In 1993, the Legislature passed SJR 105, creating a constitutional citizen's body that would instead be responsible for drawing the districts. The voters of Idaho passed that constitutional amendment in 1994, with 64% in favor and 36% against." ‪

Idaho did that? Dang! This is the first of my "name one exception" challenges that I am gonna have to retire, then. (I’d still like to see how it worked, in practice. In fact, Idaho is so deeply red, they probably figured it didn’t matter.)

Likewise… it turns out one red state has joined the blue surge against the Drug War.  It is Alaska. Though seriously.  You’d have to call sourdoughs anomalies. Perhaps they’ll lead the libertarian exodus, at long last, from the GOP.  Start a genuine guns n' get govt outta my face party, instead of remaining lap dogs to the Grand Oligarch Party?  Hey I could respect that.

Okay, that’s two cases where challenged folks came up with an actual counter-example! 

Rats. I have found the "name one exception" riffs to be very effective at showing still-sapient conservatives how spectacularly vile the hijackers of their once-proud movement have become. But by revealing a single red state exception, in each case, at least my honestly shows. (Try it, some time. Letting a fact affect your dogma. Especially re climate change.)

I now have to say;

“NEARLY ALL red states support criminal gerrymandering" instead of all. 

And “NEARLY ALL red states support the staggeringly insane and evil Drug War" instead of all.

I can respond to data and change my assumption sets.  Can you?  Then name exceptions to my other challenges.

 == Oh... by the way...  ==

ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... and
ocean acidification...

How is that a “name one exception” challenge?  It amounts to the same thing. Name a way that the debasing of the seas is not (1) blatantly happening, (2) blatantly dangerous to us all, and (3) blatantly the result of atmospheric carbon dioxide created by humans burning Koch/Saudi/etc. products.

The method works.  I got a ton of ‘em.  And so should you.

OH... AND BY THEY WAY,  in case you denialists averted your gaze, let me force you to face the basic fact... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification... ocean acidification...

== Another “Name an exception” challenge. ==

Here’s another:

“Can you point to a single positive item on the Republicans’ agenda, now that they control Congress?”

(Other than Keystone XL, which will give the US zero actual oil.)  

 It’s one thing to disagree over agendas.  It’s another to have NO agenda, except versions of “no.” Again, the challenge — name one positive-assertive republican goal.

Banish the Export Import Bank that gave taxpayers a net profit all but one year out of the last forty?  Sure, it benefits exporters of goods and services, not resource extractors, so off-with-its head! But that’s a negative. 

Reverse Obamacare? (Without offering the 6-years-promised replacement?) Ambitious… but negative. 

Same with reversing Obama’s immigration moves. He said he’d stop them the instant Boehner put a credible bill on the floor, like one the GOP leadership agreed-to, six years ago. But no. With American politics killed-dead (deliberately murdered) we’ve been operating on *continuing resolutions* for ages. Now even those are impossible.  And so we lurch. Lurching is the new normal. It’s hilarious and sob-inducing to watch a sane conservative blink and try to talk sense.

Or making a real budget. Take Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, who said he hoped his colleagues had learned to “stop making the perfect the enemy of the good.” …and… “You make the progress and the deals you can. You’re going to have to bargain, and that means the other side has to get something, and in this House, you have to understand that beating on the table and yelling doesn’t turn 54 into 60.”

Poor Mr. Cole sounds like a republican of the Eisenhower days. Heck, Nixon negotiated. Even Reagan did. Mr. Cole is like a sincere missionary urging a mob of zombies to use a knife and fork while eating braaaaiiins.

What does it mean, when your side has nothing but negatives to put on the table? Not one tangible proposal of any kind... about anything at all?  Seriously, this has nothing to do with "left-vs-right."

It is about being the deep-depressive side of our national bipolar disease.  (Hey dems!  Guess what that makes YOU!)

== More on morons moving the goal posts ==

We have got to do something about the troglodyte tactic called “moving the goal posts.”  That is, declaring that science cannot prove something and then - when it is proved - drawing a new line in the sand and proclaiming this is what we really meant, as the line you’ll never cross! 

In another place, I dissected how this has been the core process by which climate denialism maintains itself. A decade ago, that cult declared that glaciers were advancing everywhere and the real danger was from an ice age. Then it became “what warming?”  Then “Okay the North Pole is melting, but not the south!”  Then: “Okay ice is collapsing in north and south and Greenland, but it’s all natural!”

Such agility is actually quite impressive!  See it also illustrated here, with the latest snarky position of the creationist cult’s Discovery Institute, who used to pooh-pooh the possibility of planets beyond our solar system… in part because that would entail admitting that the light from those worlds was emitted more than 6000 years ago.  Now that we’ve lately discovered thousands of other planets out there, implying truly vast numbers across the univers? Those trillions of planets and galaxies out there are just the natural “slosh” and spillover from God’s process of perfecting one Earth, one sapient species, intended to last just 6000 years.

Until recently, even the possibility that microbial life might exist out there was ruled not only heretical, but also impossible (via crackpot mathematics.) Now? According to this report, the intelligent design crowd doesn’t any longer rule out the existence of what it calls “simple life” on other worlds. However, “we likely won't be satisfied with microbes barely surviving on a moon. … We are looking for much more complex life, with a brain capacity similar to our own, and the ability to modify its surroundings into complex technology.”

That admission would have been anathema, just a few years ago! Now they admit life might evolve?  Just not into anything impressive! And so here we return to the Moving Goal Posts Problem.  The tendency of fanatics to deal with any factual challenge by redefining, with great agility, their own arguments and goals.

Do not think for an instant that this is solely a province of the Mad Right!  A lesser version of the same reflex can be seen in those sectors of the left that utterly refuse to accept the notion that we’ve made real progress, as a species, nation and civilization.  While rightfully demanding further movement against racism, sexism, poverty and environmental neglect, too many activists deem it anathema ever to admit that past actions, by millions of sincere citizens, actually made things better, bringing us to a higher plateau  and raising our standards. 

While the liberal version of Goalpost Shifting may be less harmfully crazy, it is still kind of nuts.  And ultimately unhelpful.

Campaign 2012: What's the Fundamental Issue?

We'll conclude this election season with some hard-hitting facts and a bit of entertaining polemic... followed by an appeal for us all return to the sci fi mentality of optimism and rising above petty squabbles.  Because we all should - along with our civilization - go "back to the future."

Me? I'm going to surprise you all by saying that I have not completely made up my mind for whom my presidential vote will be cast! 

As a registered republican who admired Goldwater and Buckley and who pushes the writings of Adam Smith, I am deeply saddened to see the Republican Party fallen into its sorry state, unable to point to a single unalloyedly positive accomplishment in the last 25 years or to a "record" as their basis for demanding votes. Their campaign amounts to: "Please don't ever ask us about our extensive record of governance over the United States, nor ask about our former president, the bills we passed or their outcomes! Instead, look here at these assertions, distractions and promises!"

Given their war on science, their incompetent and horrifically costly fumblings at war, their economic voodoo, and their glaring propensity for cheating, I have to conclude that Pax Americana hasn't faced a recent danger worse than these fools who most rabidly wave its flag. (Click to look over my careful compilations on each of those subjects.)

In fact, the fate of our very species may depend on good, smart conservatives rising up and taking back their movement from the loonies who have hijacked it. From the shills of Rupert Murdoch and his petro-prince co-owners of Fox, whose transformation of conservatism has Barry Goldwater supplying half the power in Arizona -- from the spinning in his grave.

== What is a smart-decent, science friendly conservative to do? ==

I know many such good, smart, pro-science conservatives... men and women who believe in facts and professionalism and who want small government without needing to reflexively hate all government. To denounce even the word: "government" and to declare it a hopeless fraud. (Have you ever actually read Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address? Go and re-read the last few lines right now!)  Some of these good folks know that the GOP will only reform itself after a good trouncing! So they are holding their noses and voting Democratic down the line.

Others, knowing that tax rates are at their lowest in 70 years, that the federal share of the economy at its lowest in 50 years, and with discretionary spending the smallest contributor to the deficit, aren't even holding their noses. They are the adaptable ones who know that threats to freedom can come from any direction. They know that our biggest danger right now is not from pathetic, declining labor unions, but from an oligarchic clade that wants to buy our democracy and bring us to wealth and income disparities as bad as France in 1789.

More on that, in a minute.

== The Gary Johnson Option! ==

Other decent, smart conservatives - like author scientist Gregory Benford - have done something eminently fine this year, throwing their support behind Gary Johnson, by far the best candidate ever fielded by the Libertarian Party in 48 states. A moderate and not a dogmatist, whose small-government notions and fiscal restraint come unencumbered by the crazy stuff that too often accompanies those things, crammed at us by the culture war inciters on Fox. If Johnson does well, this time, if his version of the movement jumps ahead to just the 5% threshold, he'll be in the debates next time, and everything will change. Smart, reasonable, science-friendly small-government types will find they have a home, for the first time in 20+ years.

I sent Johnson some money. And I try to vote for at least one libertarian every year. Indeed, because I can vote in California after 5pm, when projections are coming in from the east - I might even vote for Johnson for president! If I know by then that the country is safe from Bush III. You other westerners, consider it!

But if you are in a swing state... or on the east coast... or if the popular vote looks tight... it is the wrong thing to do.  We are in a fight for civilization, so prioritize.  You pot-heads in Colorado, you know I'm talking to you! Go ahead and vote for the legalization initiative and try to talk your Oregon pals into voting Johnson for you.  But don't let Romney get your state's electoral votes and thereby turn yourself into one of those folks who curse themselves forever, for voting Nader in Florida in 2000.

As for you surfers in Hawaii? And you Alaskan sourdoughs? Vote libertarian without a moment's hesitation! Boost Johnson's numbers. Do it for the rest of us!

(* Alert! Monday evening at 9pm Eastern the Small Party Candidates will hold their own pre-election debate.)

== The core question ==

Again... the challenge that has gone unanswered for six years! Name for me one unambiguous statistical metric of US national health that clearly improved across the span of and because of Republican Rule. 

One. Just one! Democrats can do this, easily, for their own (shorter) spans in power! Bill Clinton filled his convention speech with dozens of clear metrics that you can check, including vastly more jobs created and rising health of the middle class. And yes, more startups and entrepreneurship and return on investments... and investment in science, by far.

Not one of the erudite and knowledgeable conservatives I've challenged -- for 6 years -- has met this dare or come up with such a counter-example to the stark and utter uniformity of bad outcomes from GOP rule. Bill O'Reilly offers the lame excuse "Bush is gone!"  (What a terrific campaign slogan!)  But look who surrounds Romney. The entire Cheney team... and you'd hire them back?

== The deeper matter at stake ==

Here's the deal.  Americans are raised under memes of Suspicion of Authority (SOA). Each of us thinks he or she invented it and that the potential Big Brothers we hate are the only possible threats to freedom.  It is rare to be agile enough to turn your head and look at threats that might arise from your own, favorite side. Indeed, your most-hated boogey men may not be this decade's main danger.

I am not a "liberal" in any pure sense and have given speeches to libertarian gatherings, spending long sessions with pals in that uniquely American movement. I despise true leftists. I lived in Europe and saw the dogmatic left's foolishness. I fought the USSR and know dire threats can come from that direction.

But the soviets are gone and we've proved smarter than the Europeans in some (not all) ways.  Our banks are healthy now while theirs are wrecks. And US manufacturing hasn't been this optimistic in 20 years.  I'm investing in export companies.

It is simply monomaniacal, at a time when we're facing a frontal onslaught from the Olde Enemy of freedom... the one that crushed it in 99% of human societies... the foe whom Adam Smith denounced and our Founders rebelled against... it is simply narrowminded and foolish for smart people to declare obstinately that freedom and markets can only be threatened by pathetic declining labor unions and demoralized bureaucrats and taxation (when we currently have the lowest tax rates in 70 years.) And to wave away any reminder about Adam Smith's warnings. About the Olde Foe of freedom.

That is just as stupid as the American socialists of 1945 who refused to admit that Uncle Joe Stalin could possibly be a bad dude.  Yes, that is an exact parallel. 

To ignore the oligarchs' skyrocketing accumulations of wealth and conniving monopolistic power and ability to manipulate and crush competition, with wealth and income disparities now approaching the same levels as 1789 France... you can talk yourself into ignoring that?

All good things can go toxic... when they get too concentrated in one place. 

Water, food,  oxygen -- and yes, even the wealth that propels market enterprise and capitalism. 

Yay wealth! Yay entrepreneurial enterprise! 

But dense concentrations of wealth can be toxic too. As Andrew Carnegie proclaimed!  As Henry Ford said!  As Warren Buffett and Bill Gates tell us! As almost every decade of almost every society in human history shows.

If you deny this... jeez... please finally actually read Adam Smith.  Or else admit that you are a Tory. Hang a picture of King George.  And get ready for the revolution, because Blue America will reach a point (as in 1861) when we've had enough.

== And now... onward...  

I am guardedly optimistic. Whoever wins the White House will inherit an economy clearly on the mend, in less recovery time than the historical average for deep recessions.  
The wave of new sustainable technologies are paying off big time, with car mileage rates climbing and new kinds of energy booming and we'll all benefit from the new US energy independence.

Our fundamentals are good and the next president will get credit.

But it actually belongs to us.  And if we can rediscover the normal gifts of peacetime -- especially our treasured national talent for calm argument, negotiation, pragmatic compromise, mixed solutions, scientific curiosity, willingness to recite "I might be wrong about that"... and to accept the contingent hopefulness of a gaze that looks ever FORWARD and not into a nostalgic pretend-past...

...then yes, I think the prospects are good.  Not just for America, or Pax Americana, or the Periclean Enlightenment that reaches now into most continents, or civilization as a whole, or humanity or Planet Earth.  

As I discuss in both EARTH and EXISTENCE, so much more may be at stake. 

We are the chance, the possibility.

And the galaxy may be waiting for us.