“The Dupe has been sounding-off again”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2121674/ , this time about the inappropriateness of anti-war people asking of pro-war people whether they’d send their kids to fight in Iraq. Like many columns of his, this one has been cited as an example of his perspicacity and genius by his blogospheric admirers. So let’s set them straight.
Correct claims by Hitchens (2)
1. The question of whether the war in Iraq is a good, moral, just, etc. cause is logically independent from the question of whether pro-war advocate X is willing to “send” his or her children to fight there.
2. Talk of whether people should “send” their kids is misplaced where we are dealing with adults whose decision to enlist or not is their own.
Commentary on those claims:
1. It is perfectly reasonable to ask of someone who advocates a policy that involves people in significant personal sacrifice whether they would be willing to incur or risk that sacrifice themselves. A person who says “I favour X, but I want to offload the cost of X onto others because I’m unwilling to bear my share of the burden of realising X” is a hypocrite. Not all pro-war types have children, and arguments for or against the war should be conducted on their merits. But a person who favours the war but would try to dissuade their children (if they had any) from enlisting or who would (if they could) try to exploit connections (family, friends, business associates, etc.) to enable their children to avoid a draft (if there was one) is a despicable hypocrite whose prattlings do not deserve the attention of reasonable people.
2. Rhetorical insistence on the voluntary nature of the choices made by those who do enlist is misleading and disingenuous if not accompanied by due acknowledgement of the circumstances in which such choices are made. No such acknowledgment is made by Hitchens (of course). Those who fight are disproportionately drawn from the poor and the non-white, whose menu of career choices is typically less appetising than that available to the children of politicians and the wealthy members of the commentariat.
Here endeth the lesson.
Update: Matt Yglesias writes to say that the claim I make above that “those who fight as disproportionately drawn from the poor and the non-white” is not accurate. I’m happy to accept that correction in the light of “this”:http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=700477 . So let me amend that claim to read “Those who fight are disproportionately drawn from layers of the population whose members typically have a menu of career choices less appetising than that available to the children of politicians and the wealthy members of the commentariat.” That I’m fairly confident, remains true.
{ 59 comments }
Ray 07.01.05 at 6:47 am
“Like many columns of his, this one has been cited as an example of his perspicacity and genius by his blogospheric admirers. ”
You have got to be fucking kidding.
The point of asking whether someone would be willing to send their kids to fight is clear and obvious (and explained well in your commentary). Equally clear and obvious was Hitchens’ unwillingness to address that question. Anyone citing that column as anything other than an example of deliberate obtuseness is being, well, deliberately obtuse.
RS 07.01.05 at 7:04 am
On the other hand, while I believe that fighting the Second World War was morally necessary, I think I may well have tried my hardest to avoid being plonked into an infantry unit. I.e. I can recognise the moral case for an action to be taken by a country, but have a perfectly justified sense of self preservation. I may be somewhat hypocritical, but it is also quite understandable. Can you really claim you’d have been happy mucking out with the grunts if you could have got away with avoiding it?
Darren 07.01.05 at 7:08 am
Question … was it Major Boycot who said … ‘if they think that they can intimidate me by killing my gamekeepers they’ve got another think coming’!
Bravo, Boycot. Stick it up ’em!
Tom T. 07.01.05 at 7:29 am
Point 1 strikes as overreaching a bit. I favor the fighting of fires, but I’m much too fearful and clumsy to become a firefighter myself, and I would certainly make some attempt to persuade my child to consider another career (perhaps as an ambulance driver). Is it thus hypocritical of me to vote for county administrators who fund firehouses?
For point 2 to be entirely accurate, you may wish to note that, according to the military, minorities are over-represented in the armed forces as a whole, but under-represented among combat troops.
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20030121/4794964s.htm
More generally, it seems to me that your point 2, however valid, is entirely independent of Hitchens’ point 2. Hitchens would likely respond that the parents of poor children are no more able to “send” their children to the military than any other parents. While your point 2 may be a good one (but note your shift from “adults” in recounting Hitchens’ point back to “children” in making yours), I suspect he would think that it is not disingenuous or misleading of him to forego acknowledging a point that is unrelated to his own.
moni 07.01.05 at 7:40 am
It feels like being stuck in a time warp, doesn’t it?
Does Iraq have to be destroyed with a laser beam by alien terrorists, for Hitchens & co. to give it a rest?
soru 07.01.05 at 7:40 am
—
1. It is perfectly reasonable to ask of someone who advocates a policy that involves people in significant personal sacrifice whether they would be willing to incur or risk that sacrifice themselves.
—
Would that make it fair to ask of those advocating an immediate withdrawl from Iraq whether they would be prepared to go and live in the resulting situation?
soru
abb1 07.01.05 at 8:03 am
Yeah, hate to admit it, but Hitchens does have a point there.
But a person who favours the war but would try to dissuade their children (if they had any) from enlisting or who would (if they could) try to exploit connections (family, friends, business associates, etc.) to enable their children to avoid a draft (if there was one) is a despicable hypocrite whose prattlings do not deserve the attention of reasonable people.
Trying to dissuade their children is OK, as Tom said, not hypocritical (or not necessarily hypocritical). To enable their children to avoid a draft is not OK, but there’s no draft, so they are safe in this respect.
This ‘son’ thing is pretty much the same fallacy as ‘since you liberlas like taxes so much why don’t you just pay double and live me alone?’ It’s perfectly fine to advocate higher taxes while trying to minimize your own tax bill.
cs 07.01.05 at 8:04 am
Seems to me that hypocrisy is applicable only if there is some coercion in the process. If a draft exists, and a war supporter does everything he can to maintain the existence of the draft and war, but also does everything he can to get deferments for his children, then that would be justly derided.
As long as the war is a volunteer effort, there’s no shame in advocating the war while avoiding service for yourself or your children.
Brett Bellmore 07.01.05 at 8:07 am
We all the time “offload” tasks we’d rather not personally perform, by finding somebody willing to do them for pay. By definition, if the person has a choice about taking the job for the offered pay, they’re NOT “making a sacrifice”, and to claim otherwise is to deny them the respect of allowing them to have their own relative valuations. (Of course, “liberals” DO tend to discount other people’s preferences, I’ve noticed.)
Second, I don’t personally know of anybody who supports the war in Iraq, who wouldn’t be quite proud to have one of their children volunteer for the military. Not that this is really relevant either, as we pay people to do a lot of dirty tasks we wouldn’t want our children to be doing. Must you want your child to quit college and become a garbage collector, or be a hipocrit if you don’t collect your own garbage?
Now, to support conscription and help somebody evade it would indeed be hipocricy, but anybody who’s paying attention will notice that the only people talking about a draft are opponents of the war.
Which brings us to the old, “Not being independently wealthy is the moral equivalent of conscription!” argument. No, it isn’t.
Indeed, you’ll notice that even most poor people somehow manage to avoid ending up in the military. Strange, that, if being poor leaves you no choice in the matter.
You really miss the draft, don’t you? It sure was handy being able to conflate the immorality of conscription with the morality or lack thereof of a war you opposed for other reasons.
Ray 07.01.05 at 8:15 am
“Trying to dissuade their children is OK, as Tom said”
Not if you’re trying to persuade other people to volunteer. It makes you a hypocrite. It means you’re arguing that the war is so vitally important that other people should be willing to die for it, but not important enough for you to risk your own kids.
“This ‘son’ thing is pretty much the same fallacy as ‘since you liberlas like taxes so much why don’t you just pay double and live me alone?’ ”
Again, no. If I argue for taxation to be increased, I’m arguing for it to be increased on everyone, me included. Calling for other people to go and fight on your behalf, is the equivalent of calling for other people to pay higher taxes, while you are exempt.
(The inevitable objection is that I might call for taxes on the rich to be raised, which means I want other people to pay more, but not me, because I’m not rich. If you think _that_ is just self-interest talking, what do you call it when someone calls for the wealthy to be taxed more, becomes wealthy, and then starts calling for the wealthy to be taxed less?)
Bad as I think those arguments are, they at least address the issue, which is more than Hitchens managed.
kth 07.01.05 at 8:35 am
I favor the fighting of fires
Most firefighting analogies are flawed: fires just happen, this war didn’t but was a deliberate and controversial choice. However, I’ve thought of a valid firefighting analogy.
Suppose the industrial sector of your town had an old abandoned warehouse, and suppose further that the fire chief proposed using TNT to demolish the building. Then suppose, instead of a tidy little demolition, the whole block went up in flames, and dozens of firemen were killed battling the blaze.
Suppose, further, that the fire raged for weeks, and that people quit signing up to be firemen as a result. Suppose, finally, that though there was a shortage of firefighters in the city, the ones who were the most vehement advocates of blowing up the building were just the ones with the least interest in joining the fire dept.
Then, just maybe, you might have a valid firefighter analogy.
Ben 07.01.05 at 8:36 am
As Ted so aptly pointed out many moons ago, the parallels are too close to resist makinge the comparison:
“Some of you are going to die, but its a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
– Lord Farquad, Shrek
abb1 07.01.05 at 8:49 am
Ray, I agree that if you’re trying to dissuade your child to volunteer, you shouldn’t try to persuade other people to volunteer.
However, I think one can be pro-war without caring who is volunteering: hey, it’s pretty much a mercenary force, just balance the risks by rewards, that’s all. This way you are not calling for other people to go and fight on your behalf, you’re simply employing them, paying for their services.
Of course if you are simultaneously trying to portray this war as some kind of a great patriotic war – then you certainly are a hypocrite. But you don’t have to be. For Hitchens it’s simply a mission to defeat Islamic radicals worldwide, he thinks it’s a worthy goal, so here’s what happens: he pays taxes and his taxes hire solders to do the work. Where’s hypocrisy?
Jeremy Osner 07.01.05 at 8:54 am
the only people talking about a draft are opponents of the war.
Go read Redstate sometime.
moni 07.01.05 at 8:57 am
abb1: but taxes are paid by everyone, so there’d be no situation where people volunteer to pay more because they are in favour of more public spending on welfare or education or health or the arts or whatever, and others are free to decide they don’t want to pay any because they don’t want to subsidize any of those things.
The analogy would be more accurate if you were comparing taxes to the draft, not to voluntary military service.
I’m not fond of these arguments either, precisely because there is no draft. But the hypocrisy in being enthusiastically pro-war and enthusiastically against enlisting is striking. When it’s someone else going to war, not you, you should be even more hesitant in singing the praise of war. If only for the sake of politeness.
Ben 07.01.05 at 9:01 am
“However, I think one can be pro-war without caring who is volunteering”
You certainly can be, but the not caring bit implies both selfishness and hypocrisy. It comes down to the playground level scolding; “you can’t do x, little Johnny, because if everyone did..” etc
I think you also based your argument about liberals and taxes on a false premise. Those arguing for higher taxes would be arguing for higher taxes for all, and would be prepared to pay them on that basis, otherwise they too would be hypocrites.
They would say that the person who replied “you pay double, I’ll pay the same” was missing the point – that higher taxes would bring greater community benefit and you can’t take that benefit but not be prepared to pay for it.
Uncle Kvetch 07.01.05 at 9:06 am
Jesus. People are still taking Hitchens seriously?
Ray 07.01.05 at 9:06 am
“hey, it’s pretty much a mercenary force, just balance the risks by rewards, that’s all”
But again, the situation is that Hitchens (for example) is saying that the rewards and risks _don’t_ balance, because he is actively dissuading his kids from joining that mercenary force. If Hitchens thinks it’s a worthy goal, and a good cause, why persuade his kids not to get involved? Surely the conclusion is that he thinks its a good enough cause for _other people’s kids_ to die for, but not his own.
Brett Bellmore 07.01.05 at 9:09 am
As I said, you can want garbage collected, and still not want your children to become garbage men.
abb1 07.01.05 at 9:13 am
Well, you guys view a soldier as someone who’s sacrificing him/her-self for some lofty purpose. That’s one way to see it. Another way to look at it is that it’s a job. In an empire it’s simply a job, get used to it. Dirty and dangerous government job, that’s all.
Uncle Kvetch 07.01.05 at 9:15 am
As I said, you can want garbage collected, and still not want your children to become garbage men.
And when collecting garbage involves killing/maiming other people and accepting a very high risk of being killed/maimed oneself, this analogy will be relevant.
nikolai 07.01.05 at 9:24 am
Perhaps there’s slightly different approach to “would you send your kids to fight in Iraq” line which would be more successful.
Hitch is right that the question of: (1) whether the war in Iraq is moral is independent from the question of whether an advocate would want his or her children to fight there; but I’m not sure it is independent from the question of (2) whether it is justified in compelling someone elses children to fight there. The difference between them is the difference between: (1) Hitchens taking up the mantle of George Orwell and travelling to Iraq to kill Fascists and (2) Hitchens encouraging people to force others to travel to Iraq to kill Fascists. The “would you send your kids to fight in Iraq” line tries to illustate the difference.
People who support the war do want to “send” other people’s children to fight in Iraq. Once you’ve enlisted you don’t have a choice about where you are sent, nor do you have a totally free choice about being able to leave. I don’t think think the fact that people chose to enlist justifies people totally disregarding their wishes, on the basis that they’ve signed them away. First, because I suspect the contract may be unfair, and second, because I think we have obligations to those who have enlisted that go beyond treating them like chess pieces in whatever game politicians decide to play.
So I think what I’m trying to say is that a war can be good, moral, just, and so on, but it can still be legitimate to oppose forcing those who enlisted in a volunteer army to fight in it. I’d also note that soldiers sign up in part because they want to defend their country, not because they wish to fight any war deemed “good, moral or just” – for other reasons – that comes up in future.
Ray 07.01.05 at 9:28 am
Dirty and _dangerous_ government job, yes, which is why Hitchens doesn’t want his kids doing it.
If I was persuading my son not to be a garbageman, it would be because its poorly paid, unstimulating, with few opportunities for self-improvement or advancement. Risk of death or maiming would not be a factor.
The US army argues that it offers a lot of opportunities for personal improvement and advancement, and the pay is at least better than being a binman. So we’re back to being happy enough for other people to die in a cause for which you don’t want to risk your own kids.
BigMacAttack 07.01.05 at 9:33 am
‘Those who fight are disproportionately drawn from the poor and the non-white, whose menu of career choices is typically less appetising than that available to the children of politicians and the wealthy members of the commentariat.’
Not true
Would you send you son into Afghanistan to look for Bin Laden? Have you volunteered to look for Bin Laden in Afghanistan?
Do you subscribe to the talking point that the occupation in Iraq diverts resources from the war on terror?
If the above is true do you have an abstract moral, not utilitarian, objection to US troops supporting the democratically elected government of Iraq?
If the answers are no,no,yes,no you are a chx hawk and hypocrite.
If the last answer is yes, you are a selfish conservative %#6!8%$, who doesn’t think US lives are worth sacrificing for Iraqis.
Here endeth the lesson on the idiocy of the hypocrite/chicken hawk argument and the baseless prejudices of Chris Bertram regarding the make up the men and women fighting and dying in Iraq.
roger 07.01.05 at 9:33 am
The point for anti-war people is to take up the Hitchens challenge and act non-hypocritically themselves. If we believe this war is a crime against both the American soldiers (who are sent to fight in what is essentially a vanity project to uphold an Iraqi government that, in its essentials, differs little from the Iranian government that was just elected) and against the Iraqis, who are being used as the bleeding patsies in the middle — we can discourage people from enlisting. We can cut off their supply of new recruits. It is possible to deny Bush and CO. the weapons of mass destruction. Go to this site: http://rncwatch.typepad.com/counterrecruiter/. The volunteer army is an expression of political will. So, express your political will. No political party is going to stop this war — the dems are as essentially into it as the republicans, in that mushmouthed, Joe Biden, more in sorrow than anger way. Who cares? The political parties are so over. Strike.
Lee 07.01.05 at 9:38 am
kth – nice analysis. All too often, people present tightly controlled, simplistic hypotheticals or situations and then attempt to analogize to a messy, complex situation (e.g since you would pick up a rifle and cleanly kill the lone psychotic holding your daughter you must favor war to protect your country from terrorists).
It can be a rhetorically powerful way to argue, even if it is logically is weak.
Brett Bellmore 07.01.05 at 9:40 am
Since only a moron signs up with the military, not realizing that they’re agreeing to spend a period of time subject to being ordered off somewhere to kill or die, a volunteer force STILL isn’t the equivalent of conscription.
Ray 07.01.05 at 9:43 am
Wow, the self-defeating post. Bigmacattack says its not true that ‘Those who fight are disproportionately drawn from the poor and the non-white’, posting a link to an article that says “whites from small, mostly poor, rural areas were a disproportionately large percentage of the casualties in Iraq.”
Chris Bertram 07.01.05 at 9:53 am
Note that I’ve posted an Update above that changes the claim I make about the military demographic in the light of (justified) criticism.
george 07.01.05 at 9:54 am
What a weak, pissy post.
Barry Freed 07.01.05 at 10:11 am
As I said, you can want garbage collected, and still not want your children to become garbage men.
It has been my experience that garbage does not take potshots at its collectors. Nor does it, in general, have a tendency to explode in close proximity to them.
jet 07.01.05 at 10:17 am
Chris you made a point of saying that the military was disproportionately filled with minorities, but when that proved false you didn’t make a point of explaining why it was disproportionately filled with whites. Why is that? Didn’t fit your argument, so you ignored it?
And you might want to rethink this
A 2nd lieutenant with a wife that works are immediately in the upper percentage or earners, and those officers that make a career of the military will do even better. So I would think you assumption is not obvious to everyone if even a small proportion of enlisted men are not from lower income families (given that the entire officer corp is counted in the middle-upper income brackets).
BigMacAttack 07.01.05 at 10:17 am
Ray,
It doesn’t seem so self defeating if you know the meaning of the word and. It is even less self defaeting if you understand the difference between fact and opinion which the author of the piece does.
‘It’s difficult to make a good comparison because the Pentagon does not break down casualty information by household income.’
Chris, I would be a little less confident and little less sure how well disproportionately characterizes the make up. I share your revised prejudice but is it really accurate and to what extent are important questions.
All,
Asking the question would you serve or would you tell your children to serve has an important place.
But if you support any war effort, like the WOT or Afghanistan, you should ask yourself the same question.
And you should do so without providing yourself glib self rationalizations about how it is different in the case of wars you support.(IE no need for more troops, who decides ohh you of course, in my wars etc)
A probably fairly common set of beliefs not enough troops, diverting resources, look at that despicable chx hawk Goldberg is fairly ridiculious combination that requires a good deal of twisting rationalization.
We share each other’s weaknesses they are not unique to those we disagree. Dismiss with care.
Barry Freed 07.01.05 at 10:36 am
Chris you made a point of saying that the military was disproportionately filled with minorities, but when that proved false you didn’t make a point of explaining why it was disproportionately filled with whites. Why is that? Didn’t fit your argument, so you ignored it?
You’re wrong jet, where was this proved false. African-Americans, make up about 12% of US population and about 18% of US armed forces. That sounds like pretty disproportional to me.
Perhaps you meant to specify those in combat arms specifically in which case you would be correct.
Ray 07.01.05 at 10:37 am
Bigmacattack – do you want to argue whether Chris was talking about (the set of X) AND (the set of Y) or (the set of x AND y)? It might distract from the piece you pointed to which made the exact opposite argument from the one you thought it made.
On the general point of my kids joining the army, I’d tend to be against it, precisely because once in they wouldn’t have a choice about whether they’d be fighting in causes they thought were just or ill-judged empire-building. But if I supported a war, and my son wanted to fight in it, I would find it extremely hard to try to persuade him not to.
Sven 07.01.05 at 10:45 am
Hitchens, as usual, has created a homme de paille(see George Packer’s riposte at the bottom for an indication of how badly he misrepresented the New Yorker article).
The issue at hand is not whether one has to have a child in the military in order to have moral standing the war debate. The question is what we are asking our volunteer army to do.
Yes, we look to firefighters and police officers to do jobs we don’t like to do ourselves. But we don’t ask them to put themselves in mortal danger for no good reason or if the chances of success are virtually nil. That’s what Richard Cohen says in the column Hitchens cites – the war was supposed to be about self defense, and now appears to be some nebulous idea about spreading freedom. Whatever the goal is, most indications are that things are going very badly.
It’s war supporters’ refusal to acknowledge reality that’s most damning. Some may truly believe that everything is going to work out in the end. But at some point, it makes one wonder whether they’re asking people to die – not their children, natch – just so they can save face.
Andrew Boucher 07.01.05 at 11:17 am
While we’re talking about hypocrisy…
Ask yourself whether you would condemn Hilary Clinton as a hypocrite for voting for the war even though Chelsea hasn’t volunteered…
joel turnipseed 07.01.05 at 11:31 am
A couple quick points…
1) Class/Education. The military is disproportionately drawn from the undereducated and lower to lower-middle class; also, rural, south, and western America; blacks also enlist at fairly disproportionate rate relative to their ratio of society (about 150%). While those who say the military (even enlisted ranks) is made up of morons are clearly wrong, what is not often pointed out is that a) there are a lot of people who would be better off if they could join the military (those without a high school degree–and there is no comparable welfare/training/personal development program in civilian world… perhaps there should be) and b) I’ve never seen a statistic about ratio of enlisted men who go on to college, as compared to cohort of high school degree holders who go on to college–my guess, based on personal experience, is that it would be lower (when, given college benefits, it should be higher). So, if you move in upper-middle class professional world, you will meet very few people with military service and it’s not surprising that the general sense among the educated that the military is “less educated” –they are better educated/trained than the least well-off quartile, and less well educated than the top quartile of educated persons who run the country.
2) Sacrifice. While the rhetorical trope of “would you send your son to die” can be illogical and even, sometimes, hysterical, it’s not far from the mark and it arises from longstanding experience in this country of injust drafts, low military pay, and a sense (frequently correct) that those who urge us to war do not make the same sacrifices as those who fight the war (this raised to a fever pitch post-world war I, culminating in disaster of Bonus March/Isolationism and extreme generosity of WWII’s GI Bill). It must be said that most of these grievances pale by historical comparison today (but are still, pace Bush’s tax cut for the rich/wartime deficit spending, with us).
So, for me, what galls about the Hitchens piece is it’s absolute failure to account for any truth in 2), and to how it is related to fact that those who would have to make sacrifices required by non-hypocritical stance w/r/t to 2) generally do not belong to class denoted by 1).
moni 07.01.05 at 12:36 pm
Another way to look at it is that it’s a job. In an empire it’s simply a job, get used to it. Dirty and dangerous government job, that’s all.
I agree, abb1. I don’t have any romantic notion of being in the miliary as a lofty ideal thing.
It’s when it’s made into a lofty romantic thing for a war whose justifications are very thin and yet is praised as a patriotic sacrifice that is absolutely necessary and impossible to criticise, that it all becomes hypocrite.
I think Sven nailed it:
The issue at hand is not whether one has to have a child in the military in order to have moral standing the war debate. The question is what we are asking our volunteer army to do.
BigMacAttack 07.01.05 at 12:39 pm
Ray,
There you go –
‘The ” · ” symbolizes logical conjunction; a compound statement formed with this connective is true only if both of the component statements between which it occurs are true. Whenever either of the conjuncts (or both) is false, the whole conjunction is false. Thus, the truth-table at right shows the truth-value of a compound · statement for every possible combination of truth-values for its components.
In ordinary English, grammatical conjunctions such as “and” and “but” generally have the same semantic function.’
I am thinking of a number please tell me what it is.
David Gross 07.01.05 at 12:40 pm
Is there an equivalent problem of hypocrisy for those of us who are against the war? In other words, are there “chickendoves”?
Henry David Thoreau identified just such a creature:
“I have heard some of my townsmen say, ‘I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico, — see if I would go;’ and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war…”
[from “Resistance to Civil Government” http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=rtcg%5D
abb1 07.01.05 at 12:42 pm
So, for me, what galls about the Hitchens piece is it’s absolute failure to account for any truth in 2), and to how it is related to fact that those who would have to make sacrifices required by non-hypocritical stance w/r/t to 2) generally do not belong to class denoted by 1).
Joel, it seems to me that you’re talking about a more general sort of hypocrisy: idle rich folks lecturing the rest of us about hard work being a virtue. That’s true, it sure is hypocrisy, but it’s not necessarily war-specific. It sure is a bit more apparent in the war context.
theCoach 07.01.05 at 12:49 pm
I was under the impression that signing up for the military required one to commit.
Once the Iraq war was decided by Bush, enlistees were not given the option of whether or not they wanted to continue volunteering. I was also under the impression that there were even stop loss orders.
When considering whether or not to volunteer for someone who is war averse, the calculation (compensation/Risk of war in 2000) is a very different calulation than (compensation/risk of war in 2005).
I am not sure what the word is for it, but Volunteer does not seem quite right.
Matt McGrattan 07.01.05 at 1:13 pm
Bigmacattack:
It’s far from obvious that ‘and’ functions in exactly the same way as the standard logical connective. Ordinary language is full of elision, implicit clauses, ‘anaphoric’ expressions and so on. There’s far from a straightforwardly isomorphic fit between the semantics of logical connectives and the semantics of ordinary language.
I can say something like “influenza is mostly fatal in the very old and young” — I’m emphatically NOT saying that it primarily kills those who are both old _and_ young [a logical impossibility], but rather that it kills the old and that it kills the young.
It was pretty obvious from Chris’ original post that he meant that military recruitment drew disproportionately from the poor and disproportionately from ethnic minorities and spuriously appealing to the semantics of logical connectives is largely irrelevant.
BigMacAttack 07.01.05 at 1:36 pm
Matt McGrattan,
(This awfully silly but WTF)
Chris’s statement was either wrong or his statement was wrong. It is just a matter of which statement was wrong.
It is emphatically not clear how he meant to use the word and. Not at all. I will freely admit he might not have meant to use it as a logical connective. But as I noted above he would still be wrong.
So no matter how Chris used the word and he was wrong. And my statement that he was wrong was correct. And Ray’s assumption that I thought both halves of Chris’s statement were incorrect or wanted to prove both halves incorrect was completely unwarranted.
engels 07.01.05 at 2:32 pm
I also like Hitch’s claim that this line of criticism is “an implied assualt on civilian control of the military”… probably makes more sense when you’re drunk.
Ray 07.01.05 at 2:38 pm
If
Chris was talking about the single set (the poor and the non-white)
AND
the article that bigmacattack linked to (“whites from small, mostly poor, rural areas were a disproportionately large percentage of the casualties in Iraq.†)
THEN
Chris was right to say that the set he identified are bearing a disproportionately large burden.
Next week on Crooked Timber – Truth trees, multi-valued logic, and modal logic.
There will be a test.
fifi 07.01.05 at 3:21 pm
To be fair, cowardice is underrated.
BigMacAttack 07.01.05 at 4:34 pm
Ray,
Perhaps. Ok sure. I was wrong.
But if we take the set of delicious chocolate treats and dog crap and state that people are disproportionately choose their deserts from our set I think it is at least useful to point out that not many are selecting dog crap.
Ray 07.01.05 at 4:44 pm
That’s true, but it would invite the question why you’ve grouped those two things together. I don’t think the same question arises with the set (the poor and the non-white).
Mill 07.01.05 at 6:23 pm
Ha! Ha! You called him “the Dupe”! It’s witty because… oh, wait, no it isn’t. It’s just childish. Why not go all the way and call him “the Doody-Head” next time?
abb1 is right. It’s not hypocritical to advocate for war but try to keep your DNA out of it, iff there is no conscription. On the other hand, it is very hypocritical to criticise others (even implicitly) for not enlisting when one did not do so/encourage one’s kids to do so oneself.
(Also, there might be some conscription-like moral issues involved with people who signed up for the military before 9/11, assuming that in the modern age it would only get involved in wars of defence against active enemies, rather than straight-up invasion and occupation. Those people have a moral right to call bad faith on the part of the government, IMHO)
M. Meilleur 07.01.05 at 6:49 pm
Funny–I looked through all the comments and I didn’t see what really bugged me about Hitchens’s post.
The ethically sound reasons to ask why the Bush twins and the 101st Fighting Keyboarders aren’t enlisting are that (1) we don’t have enough troops to sustain our role (whatever that is, exactly) in Iraq without shortchanging whatever other national security goals we might have, and (2) the military is having difficulty sustaining its recruitment goals, and the problem is getting worse.
It may not be unethical to stay out of combat while supporting that combat, under the conditions that Hitchens described (there are people to take the place of the fallen). But if your position is that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, and you know–or should know–that we don’t have the staffing in the military to keep up the fight as you think it should be fought, and that things in that department are getting thinner by the month, then it *is* hypocritical and cowardly to shirk combat by refusing to volunteer. And coming up with reasons like Jonah Goldberg’s–“I’m out of shape and I have a family”–is really shameful in those circumstances, since that applies as well to all to many who end up going to Iraq anyway.
For Hitchens to vent his ample spleen on the weakest version of the “Why aren’t you fighting?” argument is, sadly, typical of his writing since 11 September, and it gets worse the more untenable his position gets. Pity.
Don Quijote 07.01.05 at 8:12 pm
While we’re talking about hypocrisy…
Ask yourself whether you would condemn Hilary Clinton as a hypocrite for voting for the war even though Chelsea hasn’t volunteered…
She is, has been and always will be…
But not anywhere near as big as Bush is, when are jenna and Not Jenna going to enlist? When are his nephews & nieces going to enlist?
After all, it’s his war!
RS 07.02.05 at 5:49 am
To reprise what I said before, it is only natural to try and keep yourself and your loved ones out of harms way. I’d still like that assurance from people like Chris that he’d be the first to muck in on the front line in the event of a justified war.
We know that America’s aristocracy is always going to use its power and influence to prevent harm coming to it kids. But then perhaps that is where the force of the question about whether you’d send your own kids comes from, it makes you think ‘well he wouldn’t send his kids because they might get killed, maybe he should be thinking a little harder about whether this cause justifies getting someone else’s kids killed’.
Redleg 07.02.05 at 1:16 pm
Even though the “kids” have choice about whether to enlist, the military understands that parents are a lever who influence the choices of kids one way or the other. Recruiter rely a great deal on getting the parents on board because many kids would not enlist without their parents vocal support.
This points was in fact stated by Gen. Schoomaker just this week during his Senate testimony.
BigMacAttack 07.02.05 at 4:57 pm
Ray,
Exactly. Which is why it is important to point out that in this instance they don’t ‘go together’. No whites are not dying at higher rate.
M. Meilleur,
Those reasons for every able bodied man to join not just Jonathan Goldberg.
abb1 07.03.05 at 3:55 am
…it makes you think ‘well he wouldn’t send his kids because they might get killed, maybe he should be thinking a little harder about whether this cause justifies getting someone else’s kids killed’
Well, you rightfully call them ‘America’s aristocracy’, so why would they be thinking about something like that? They are aristocracy, you’re cannon fodder; it’s all right, don’t be silly.
RS 07.03.05 at 5:19 am
“Well, you rightfully call them ‘America’s aristocracy’, so why would they be thinking about something like that?”
Because the question as to why you wouldn’t send your own kids, while directed at America’s aristocracy, has another target audience, normal people, watching you ask them the question, and thinking “well he wouldn’t send his kids because they might get killed, maybe he should be thinking a little harder about whether this cause justifies getting someone else’s kids killed”.
Ray 07.03.05 at 5:11 pm
bigmacattack, I’m afraid you’re misunderstanding again. I’m not talking about going to the casualty figures, finding which demographic groups are over-represented, and then constructing a set that contains those groups. I’m talking about constructing a set _that has some other thing in common_, and then going to see if that set is over-represented.
If you go back to your dog shit and ice-cream example, you can see what I mean. They wouldn’t be grouped together by the first method, because ice-cream is a popular dessert and dog shit isn’t. If they’re to be grouped, it must be because they have something else in common, that makes you think the combined set would get you interesting results when you go to find out if the set is popular dessert. Which is why I said, you are inviting the question about why they were grouped. Do you see what I mean?
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