Franklin Graham Doesn’t ‘Get It’

By now, most folks who worry even a bit about religion and morality or knows someone who does has heard about or read Franklin Graham’s Facebook post regarding encounters between Blacks, Hispanics and the police.  His thesis can be summarized as sit down, shut up, do what your told and “…submit to your leaders and those in authority because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account“.  Franklin Graham doesn’t get it – on a great many levels.

Constraints on Government:  Our founding fathers went to some lengths to limit what government could do.  They wrote the constitution to grant to federal government ONLY those powers enumerated in the constitution and reserving all other powers to the states and the people.  Many State constitutions are written with the same constraint, reserving anything not specifically allowed to the people – That’s you and me, regardless of origins race etc.  If a policeman orders me to do something that he does not have the power to tell me to do or that violates my civil rights, then I will tell him that.  (Caveat – I plan to always do what someone tells me to when they have a gun pointed at me – but only until I get to the point where I can do something about it.  That may be immediately or it may be much later – in court).  The problem in Ferguson and many other locations is with the phrase “…must give an account“.  Often there is no way to immediately hold accountable authority figures who perform illegal or corrupt actions.  I certainly don’t want to wait for the afterlife to hold them accountable.

Rule of Law:  “…submit to your leaders…” is an appeal to ‘rule of man’ rather than ‘rule of law’.  This is another aspect of what our Founding Fathers were careful about.  They saw the abuses that can happen when men were anointed by the Church to rule arbitrarily (Divine Right of Kings) and they carefully crafted the separation of Church and State in our new nation.  We are seeing, even now, a really, really good “bad example” of rule of men  with the ‘governance’ being provided (or not provided as the case may be) by ISIS in the Middle East.  And they are doing it with EXACTLY the same moral logic that Franklin Graham has just used with respect to Blacks and Latinos.

Equal Treatment Under The Law:  One of the items to come out of the DOJ report on the Ferguson Police Department was the outright bias against the black community that was reflected in the hard data on arrests and ticket writing.  I would challenge Franklin to point to a bible verse that says “thou shalt treat other races more harshly than your own”.

Certainly  – be polite but also be firm in defending and exercising your civil rights.

Ukrainian Dialogue

I want to expand on some of the ideas in the previous post.  PeetyBee0 forwarded to me an article he had posted some time back concerning U.S. Syria relations.  His full blog is at SpreadAnIdea.   In that article, PeetyBee0 makes a valid point about the difference between Ideals and Practicalities.  While we may want “Rule of Law” for all, when we’re on the short end of that equation, we tend to practice what we can get away with.  In the international arena, where there is no universal policeman to enforce the law, then “what we can get away with” can be a very broad category of activities that would get you and I locked up in a heartbeat.

Further on in the article he expands on the theme of Ideal vs Practical:

…Imagine that a scientist trained in the scientific method conducts some experiments, not to discover the laws of nature, but to discover the laws of man (and women). After conducting a series of experiments over the last several of decades, lets say, would our scientist conclude that the operating law is the “Rule of Universal law” or would the scientist conclude that it is “Rule of Law in the context of a Dominant power”?

I got to this portion of the article and said “hey – wait a minute – that’s already been done” – and in a format that is directly applicable to this discussion.  Before I get into the results, I need to set up the context and explain what the scientists were after.

The Prisoners Dilemma

The classic description of this nonzero sum game is that of two bank robbers have been caught and placed in separate cells for interrogation.  The police approach each one with a deal:

• If A confesses but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 20 years in prison (and vice versa)
• If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on a lesser charge)
• If they both confess, then they each serve 5 years

Looked at from A’s standpoint, if he confesses (defects) and B does not (cooperates) then he gets off scott free.  If A confesses AND B confesses, then he serves 5 years versus the 20 years.  Regardless of what B does, A is better off confessing than if he doesn’t.  The problem is that B sees the same logic with respect to what A does.  Thus they both logically conclude they should confess and spend 5 years in jail rather than trusting their partner and both staying silent  thus serving only one year each.

Now this may seem somewhat abstract and it is, so let me show you as practical example:  Two neighboring countries prepare their military budgets.  Each wants to feel secure, which means each wants a bigger military than their neighbor to preclude their neighbor from getting adventuresome and they spend accordingly.  Thus each nation ends up poorer than if they had cooperated.  If this example sounds familiar, it should.  The financial burden of keeping up with the U.S. military expenditures helped drive the Soviet Union into collapse and eventual breakup.  (… as well as the inherent inefficiencies in a centrally managed economy based on lies and deceit.)

Now the description above was based on a single trial of the game.  What happens when the game is repeated continuously and the players can remember the previous moves.  Robert Axelrod conducted a computer based experiment of this back in the late seventies.  He asked experts in game theory, social interactions, political theory and so on to submit a computer program that would play the prisoners dilemma for the submitter.  It could cooperate or defect and could use whatever strategy the submitter could program it to do.  He wound up running multiple tournaments with the programs.  In one tournament, he pitted all programs against each other in a round robin format.  He fed the results back to his expert contributors, allowed them to modify and update their programs and then ran an evolutionary tournament where the most successful programs from each generation’s tournament were replicated in the next generation and the tournament repeated for a number of generations. Strategies ranged from always cooperate to always defect.

The Results

The results of the tournaments were surprising.  Over multiple tournaments the strategy that did the best overall was called Tit-For-Tat.   As Axelrod analyzed it, Tit For Tat had three properties that enabled it to do well regardless of who it ‘played’ against.  These properties were Niceness, Provocability and  Forgiveness.  Tit-For-Tat started by assuming cooperation (Niceness).  It responded to defections by defecting on the next play (provokability) and cooperated when the opponent showed a willingness to cooperate (forgiveness).

Turning back to International politics, The Tit For Tat model works ONLY for the country that can actually implement it.  If a country doesn’t have the ability to respond to provocation, then all bets are off.  That puts us back into the article by PeetyBee0.  Countries – or more precisely, the leaders of countries will do what they want subject to other countries ability to be provocable.  In an era of terrorism, I would also have to add “accountable”.  Knowing who sponsored or committed an act of war has become important as well.  PeetyBee0’s concept of “universal law” as an ideal is only effective if it can be backed up by a countries ability to be “provocable” and their ability to identify the accountable parties.

It is readily apparent watching the news from Ukraine that almost all parties are being non-cooperative.  Western Ukrainian folks have forced Yanukovich out of power,  Russia has sent troops into Crimea.  The U.S. is “being provocable” and sending in air cover and talking about sanctions.

At this point, I want to remind folks of an assumption in the Prisoners Dilemma game.  The game structure and analysis assumes all players are rational.  I’m not sure that assumption applies to the leaders in the Ukrainian crisis.  National security, bias, prejudice, hatred and all sorts of emotional baggage can prevent the leaders from acting in a rational manner.

Post Script:  I want to thank PeetyBee0 for responding to my posts.  This is exactly the kind of dialogue I hoped for when I started writing this blog.  I would also recommend “Game Theory” by Morton D. Davis, as I based my discussion of the prisoners dilemna from that book

Some Ukrainian Realities

In the last post I tried to strike an optimistic tone.  I was called on it by PeteyBee0 who was quick to point out that the Ukrainians have a long ways to go yet:

“Don’t get too excited. We just spent a bunch of money to chase out the Russian puppets and put in our puppets. They are no angels either- a mix of fairly innocent nationalists, ordinarily corrupt politicians, neo-nazi thugs (no joke! look up Pravy Sektor and the Svoboda party), and IMF bankers who would like the chance to loot the country as they did Ireland, Spain, Greece, Italy, etc.

I firmly believe the people of Ukraine ought to have the choice of getting screwed by the Russians or by the US/NATO/IMF, so it is a good thing that Yanukovich is gone. But we should keep our eyes open.

Moreover, Russia’s actions are similar (though thus far less unlawful) than things the US has done in the last 10 years, when our own interests were at stake. The Bush Doctrine of international law has established that it is legal for us to intervene in other states when it is a matter of national interest, so Putin is following in well worn footsteps with his “Putin Doctrine” of doing the exact same thing that the US has been doing. Only he is less original…”

I’ll speak to the cynicism later.  For now I want to look at some of the differences between Ukraine today and the American colonies back in 1776.  When we broke with England, we had a few things going for us.

First was distance.  It was a fair distance across the ocean and it took time to get communications back and forth.  Unless you were ships crew, it was also not a voyage you did often.  That limited King George and his people in how much they could micro manage and influence affairs in the colonies.

Second was France, Germany and a few other countries on the European continent who were England’s competitors.  They realized that helping the colonies break away weakened England and that was a good thing for them.  They jumped in with both feet, selling the colonists all sorts of weaponry and eventually sending troops as well (remember Lafayette and the Prussians?).  So you could say that America was born partly as a result of a proxy war between England and the rest of Europe.

A third thing we had going for us was the Enlightenment.  This was a cultural movement beginning in late 17th- and 18th-century Europe emphasizing reason and individualism.  One of the proponents of the enlightenment was John Locke whose  ideas figured prominently in the founding fathers thinking.  This gave the colonists a huge head start down the road to rule of law and away from strong man rule.

The reality for Ukrainians is that they have almost none of these advantages and thus they have a much bigger hill to climb to get to a rule of law situation.

There is no barrier of distance and time to slow down a Russian response.  Ukraine is on the Russian’s doorstep.  Russia has always looked at Ukraine and their other border states as a buffer zone.  [I’ve always thought Russian leadership was xenophobic mainly because of their insistence on keeping as large a buffer zone as possible.  Given the history of invasions by Vikings, Huns, Mongols, Muslims, Nazis, et.al, I suppose that’s understandable]  Given that paranoiac mindset, they will go to considerable lengths to hang onto that buffer zone.  I suspect that they will interpret ANY interest by Western powers in a freer Ukraine as a direct threat to their sovereignty. Their recent actions certainly seems to support that viewpoint.

The Western nations are supportive of efforts by Ukrainians to move towards the rule of law.  Even though we live in a modern age of transportation and communications compared to the 1700’s, the decision making processes in democratic governments do not move any faster than they did in colonial times.  It takes time for people to confer and come to consensus on actions.  Where the 1700s European powers acted separately, today’s governments are used to coordinating and conferring on joint actions – which stretches out the decision cycle.  Where the American Revolutionary War lasted a number of years, it would be quite possible for the fighting in Ukraine to be over in a matter of months or weeks, long before the Western powers could get their diplomatic and military act together [Does anybody reading this remember the Israeli-Arab six day war?].  Along with that is the comparison to the European nations who saw advantage in weakening England.  Russia is already weakened and no longer a major power.  The Western powers may not see advantage in weakening Russia further and may even conclude that doing so would push Russia to do desperate things to re-establish their prominence. [I know we have transferred the nuke weapons from former Soviet republics to U.S. custody – but I find it hard to believe that the Russians did not hold a few back]

Although the enlightenment was a European phenomena, I’m afraid it does not have currency in the Ukraine of today.  The movement led to the creation of the United States because many of our founding fathers were closer to the times and were heavily involved in thinking and reasoning out what it meant to have good government.  They also had the freedom, in the colonies, to do that thinking and eventually, to act on it.  The Russians, on the other hand, have spent nearly the last century stamping out any trace of independent thinking and free thought in their former empire.  Thus Ukraine does not have a core of philosophical thinkers to coalesce around nor any experience with freedom to draw on.  Their only example, from childhood on, has been strong man rule.  Although many of them may want the freedoms we have, they have no concept of how to make them work plus the temptation to BE the strong man is so omnipresent.

As I said above, the Ukrainians have a steep hill to climb of they want an honest government.

As to the comment above it appears that PeteyBee0 is down on governments in general and also a believer in conspiracy theories, as in the western powers got together and decide to rip off Ukraine after ripping off a few other nations.  Sorry – I can’t buy that.

First is the fact that we have freedom of speech and the press.  Anybody who tried what PeteyBee0 is implying would be found out and exposed.  Remember Watergate?  That was a very small conspiracy and fell because other people saw advantage in exposing it.  The Washington Post expected prestige and sales, their source Deep Throat, saw a chance to right a wrong and the politicians that piled on saw a chance for political advantage. If there was a concerted effort to ‘rip off’ a whole country or several, then I would expect someone to speak up and present credible evidence.  [Now in the former soviet empire, conspiracies can work – mainly because the penalties for speaking up can be so very fatal.]

Second is that I believe that the PIIGS countries did it to themselves without anyone else helping them along.  You can’t pay people government benefits consistently in excess of your government revenues without either bankrupting your country or printing so much money that inflation bankrupts it for you.

Third is that s*&t  happens.  Our involvement in Iraq was a a two stage affair.  Iraq invaded Kuwait.  Kuwait asked for help and the international community lead by the U.S. under Bush Sr. kicked them back out and eliminated their ability to invade again.  Then along comes Bush Jr. who decides (for whatever reason, legitimate or not) to do daddy one better and practice regime change.  I never did wholly agree with going into Iraq –  I figured it was a case of “you break it – you buy it” – which our soldiers did for many years without a clear militarily achievable objective.  Then 9-11 happened.  The United States was attacked by terrorists who were state supported if not outright state sponsored. Our response to that put us into Afghanistan – also with a you break it – you buy it result.  Bush Sr knew the limits of what the military could achieve and planned his strategy to incorporate those limits.  Bush Jr. did not.  PeteyBee0 might have a case where Bush Jr. and Iraq is concerned, but not for Bush Sr. or for our involvement in Afghanistan.  While I support the rationale for going into Afghanistan, I must also conclude that the strategic thinking by Bush Jr. and his advisers was woefully inadequate.

As always, comments are welcome