Daniel Drezner looks at Russia and Pakistan and wonders whether the Bush administration isn’t really committed to democracy-promotion after all.

Notwithstanding my political leanings and well-documented opinions about the President, I really do try (like John Rawls with his philosophical predecessors) to give people the benefit of the doubt, imagining that their hearts are in the right place even if perhaps we differ on certain particulars of strategy. And I make a good-faith effort to steer away from the far fringes of cynicism and paranoia. (Readers are welcome to comment on my success.)

But the following thought experiment occurred to me: Imagine that we were governed by an administration that was truly driven by absolutely nothing other than a desire to increase the wealth of the very wealthiest Americans. They don’t care about democracy, terrorism, other countries, any of that. Perhaps they give lip service to such goals as a way of promoting their central agenda, but only for reasons of practical politics. Just imagine how they would act.

Now that you’ve finished imagining — is there way in which the actions of such an administration would be incompatible with the acts of the actual administration currently in power? Any way at all? (I’m open to the possibility that there are, let me know if there’s something obvious that I’m missing.)

For extra credit, discuss the conclusions that would be drawn from this thought experiment by a Comtean positivist, a Machiavellian realist, a Deweyan pragmatist, and a Popperian natural scientist.

Tony Auth:

Tom Toles:

Ben Sargent:

In honor of Ye Olde Phart, who is going on vacation (hopefully temporarily).

Fafblog! has another hard-hitting political interview, this time with that wacky duo, God and Satan.

FB: What can we do to make sure that American politics is Godly politics?
GOD: Vote for Godly Republicans, like Tom Coburn and Alan Keyes! You will know them by Mine mark: they will be alight with the Holy Spirit, and shall speak in strange tongues – equating the estate tax with slavery, and calling for the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions on rape victims!
SATAN: No, Fafnir, listen to me, and be seduced to the Dark Side by my vile policies of nuclear non-proliferation, equality of all citizens, and fiscal discipline! BLAAARRRRHHH!

(Is it me, or does Satan sound like Howard Dean?)

But the best part was the link to the always-zany Presidential Prayer Team. With the power of prayer on their side, the visionaries at the PPT are never afraid to confront the difficult questions that bedevil those of us of lesser virtue. Consider for example today’s PPT Poll Question: “Have you, personally, grown spiritually stronger since September 11, 2001?” Happily, we click on the link to discover … Yes! Most of us have grown stronger! Only a tiny fraction have declined, or merely maintained their previous level of spiritual strength (no distinction between these two possibilities was made in the poll). And perhaps they clicked the wrong choice by accident (for example, if they were from Florida).

We fear, naturally, the creeping menace of sample bias — perhaps only PPT visitors have grown spiritually stronger? What if the rest of the country has weakened in the face of adversity? Pray harder!

Leave it to Umberto Eco to draw together the recurring themes of the humble blog before you. From Arts and Letters Daily, a link to a rumination by Eco on Stephen Hawking’s recantation of his previous stance that black hole evaporation destroys information. Eco uses the occasion of Hawking’s flip-flop to draw a distinction between science and idealistic philosophy. (Thanks to Norman Graf for the last link.)

It’s a distinction well worth drawing. One of the reasons why it’s hard to define “science” is that the nature of scientific theories keeps changing, with concurrent debates about what really counts as scientific (e.g., whether entities we can never in principle observe should be part of a respectable scientific theory). But the distinguishing feature of science is not the theories it produces, but the methodology it uses for getting there. Eco labels the crucial feature of this methodology “provando e riprovando,” Italian for “try and try again.” That is to say, we propose all sorts of ideas, not because we have convinced ourselves that they are right, but because we don’t know what is right and we’re searching through all of the possibilities. Ultimately, agreement with the data will be the deciding factor, and often we can be very surprised at what kinds of theories come out on top (quantum mechanics being the most notable example.)

This strategy is something that non-scientists have trouble really believing in, even those who rub up against science every day. For example, I have been heavily involved in studying models of dark energy, or more broadly why the universe is accelerating. One idea that received some attention is the possibility that Einstein was wrong, and we have to modify gravity on cosmological scales. In talking to journalists, they would often ask me to explain why my theory was better than the alternatives. I had to explain that I didn’t think it was better than the alternatives — it was interesting and provocative, and it had a chance of being correct, but I didn’t necessarily believe that it had a better chance than anything else. We don’t only propose ideas we are convinced are right; we propose lots of things and let the chips fall where they may.

Even scientists and other academics don’t always quite get the idea. I recall a talk given by an evolutionary psychologist, about the new center he was trying to found. The point of this center, according to his conception, was to demonstrate how important behaviors can find their explanations in the evolution of adaptive strategies. This is a terribly depressing mistake; the point of science is never to “demonstrate” anything, it’s to sift through the interesting alternatives and decide which works the best, keeping an open mind at all times. (There is some art, to be sure, in deciding which alternatives are even worth our attention, and at what point a question can be considered to be satisfactorily settled.) If the “physics envy” felt in other disciplines were directed toward this kind of open-minded methodology, rather than to the impressively quantitative final products of physics, the world would be a better place.

It’s not a coincidence, of course, that Eco also wrote the article on fascism that I commented about a sort while back. Nor is it a coincidence that scientists are especially riled up by the transgressions of the Bush administration (much more so than their general liberal tilt can explain). The distrust of indecision and ambiguity that is a hallmark of our current administration is an especially anti-scientific attitude. So you see, the science and politics posts here at Preposterous do share deep connections. Still no explanation for the posts about poker.

By Wendy Cope.

I am a poet

I am very fond of bananas.

I am bananas

I am very fond of a poet.

I am a poet of bananas

I am very fond.

A fond poet of ‘I am, I am’-

Very bananas.

Fond of ‘Am I bananas,

Am I?’- a very poet.

Bananas of a poet!

Am I fond?’ Am I very?

Poet bananas! I am.

I am very fond a ‘very’.

I am of very fond bananas.

Am I a poet?

Okay, John — what’s with the shorts?

A great post by Belle Waring on Why I Was So Totally Wrong About Iraq. Her first few reasons for supporting the war:

1. This is the most personally embarrassing reason, but it has to be said: in the aftermath of 9/11 I lost my head a bit and wanted to take some decisive action. I realize that attacking party B after being attacked by party A shouldn’t be satisfying to the vengeful-minded, because it doesn’t make any sense. But, having just been in the odd position of agreeing with the Bush administration on a war (vs. Afghanistan), I somehow found the next war more appealing than I should have. Somewhere in here there must also be a kernel of “let’s smash something to show how powerful we are.” This is really poor reasoning and reflects badly on me personally. Nothing much I can say about it in my defense.

2. I had long thought our current Iraq strategy was very bad. The sanctions were harming innocent Iraqis rather than Saddam, but there was no substantive reason to lift the sanctions from the point of view of Saddam’s compliance. I supported the first Gulf War, unlike all my college friends, and I was dismayed by its denoument. I thought we had failed to finish what we started and had condemned many people to death after encouraging them to rise up against Saddam.

3. Saddam Hussein really was a particularly brutal dictator. Iraqis weren’t suffering as badly as North Koreans, or southern Sudanese people, but it was pretty bad. I thought that any new government would have to be a better government. But we don’t just go around deposing every dictator in the world, do we? Well…

Keep reading. I am fervently anti-war, but it wasn’t an open-and-shut case; Saddam was a bad guy, and people were feeling frustrated and needing to strike back somehow. I have the greatest respect for people like Belle who can fully admit that they were mistaken on this, more so than I have for people who are anti-war because they are anti-any-war-ever.

One aspect I think is not emphasized enough: the extent to which the desire to go to war was created, rather than just acted on, by the Administration. Invading a country is a big decision, not undertaken lightly, and there really wasn’t anything like a close connection between the Islamist fanatics behind September 11 and the secular fascists in Iraq. If a different set of people had been in the White House, the idea of attacking Iraq wouldn’t have ever gotten off the ground, even among the most pugnacious fringes of the punditocracy. Everyone would have been in favor of finishing the job in Afghanistan, followed by the tough decisions about how to handle North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.

Via uggabugga, a set of recommendations for what books voters should be reading to prepare themselves for the upcoming election, offered by our leading pundits (in the broadest possible sense of “leading”). To demonstrate that neither end of the political spectrum has any monopoly on self-importance, Ann Coulter and Gore Vidal vie for the title of most self-recommendations.

The best list was offered by the incomparable Jon Stewart, who is funny even when nobody is getting his jokes. Here are his recommendations for what voters should be reading.

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
• Warmed by Love by Leonard Nimoy.
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

“These form the core syllabus of modern voter education.” The amazon.com star rating from readers has been included, to help make decisions about which book you might want to start with. But it’s good to know that Stewart agrees with the consensus over at Michael Bérubé’s blog that an understanding of Pynchon is necessary to follow the current campaign.

I just noticed that Preposterous is getting occasional hits from the University of Chicago admissions site. They are letting the prospective students know that I have a blog, as if that’s a good thing!

So I guess I might as well point out that the UofC has been ranked Number One in the Best Overall Academic Experience for Undergraduates by the Princeton Review. Not too shabby for a place known lovingly as “Where Fun Goes to Die.”

There’s a nice article at the Chicago Sun-Times about the scenario Jennie Chen and I are developing to explain the relationship between inflation and the arrow of time. I promise to say more about it once our paper is actually written. Real soon, honest.