Terrorism and Cancer

I agree with your sentiments, but I was recently thinking about the federally funded War on Cancer. It’s been going on since the 1970s, and everyone agrees it has been a failure, at least in comparison with the advances in some other areas of technology. Back in the late 1970s, researchers never would have thought that by 2005 so little progress would have been made in treating cancer. (Yes, there has been some progress, but not what many expected.)

And yet compared to the War on Terrorism or the War on Drugs, the War on Cancer continues with little public criticism. It’s easy to find people who have all sorts of negative opinions about the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism, all sorts of people who would like to shut these wars down or complain about how they are conducted and collateral damage. But there is no public outrage about the War on Cancer and its failure. If they can fire Mike Brown over Katrina, maybe they should fire someone at the National Cancer Institute over colon cancer.

Well, if terrorism is like cancer then cancer is like terrorism; so are you arguing that cancers shouldn’t be treated until their root causes have been determined? Or that the mere fact of malignancy isn’t enough to justify treatment, even if the only treatments available are quackery? Or that medical schools should hold symposia on cancer from cancer’s point of view?

A weak analogy and a cheap shot in return.

Also, to follow on from John Emerson says in #4, it is important to note that many diseases have been reclassifed or recognised as cancers in the last 40 years leading to far more people dying of cancer statistically – it is critical to look at the success rates for any particular cancer rather than generically. Not that this has anything to do with trying to make terrorism and cancer analogous, which is just silly.

attacks on cancer researchers for seeking to ‘understand’ cancer

I see such attacks rarely on those genuinely trying to understand cancer, often on those using cancer as a marketing tool for their pre-existing quack cure.

even more attacks on anyone trying to find ‘root causes’ for cancer in the environment, such as exposure to tobacco smoke

I do think the idea of a single, objectively identifiable ‘root cause’ in any complex situation involving multiple independant, interacting and conflicting actors is simply and obviously logically wrong. As such, it is unlikely to be used by anyone smart without some intent to mislead.

soru

For #3 and 4, just head over to the right side of the blogoshpere, the AEI/whorosphere, and the right wing of the MSM.

If Mr Quiggin is suggesting that deliberate, intentional human action should not be thought of as fundamentally different from natural phenomena like disease, it is surely inconsistent with such a view to blame anyone who disagrees for not seeing the truth of it. On such a view, that would be like blaming cancer — or terrorists. A thoroughgoing application of the view would immediately destroy the basis of human interaction.

If, on the other hand, he is merely noting an inconsistency in a certain sort of conservative anti-terrorist zealot comparing terrorism to cancer, but then showing no interest in identifying the sorts of condition that tend to foster it, then fine. But we shouldn’t forget that not all ‘root causes’ talk is honest or helpful. Norm Geras has argued persuasively that some ‘explanations’ of this sort are nothing more than exculpatory special pleading in denial of the morally obvious (eg that no grievance justifies murder). Few apologists are crass enough to claim explicit justification, but such a claim is often enough entailed by what they do say.

Soru, are you saying that tobacco is the root cause of lung cancer, but that there is no root cause of terrorism? Or are you saying that tobacco is not the root cause of lung cancer? I agree with the first, not the second.

What about the forfeited war on cybercrime/terror? Welcome to the latest turn in the Bush Security Grift.

chb ranteth: http://cardcarryingmember.blogspot.com/2005/12/downloading-dollars.html

Based on what you said, I can’t take Geras seriously. As I recall, he’s a hawk.

Soru, are you saying that tobacco is the root cause of lung cancer, but that there is no root cause of terrorism?

I am saying that there is nothing that qualifies as a root cause of terrorism in anything like the sense that smoking qualifies as the root cause of cancer, and that there is nothing surprising or unusual about that, at least to anyone who is not some kind of extreme Skinnerian Behavioralist.

The usual candidates for such a root cause (poverty, Islam, imperialism, tyranny) can be unambiguously ruled out with the 30 seconds of evidence gathering required to find the equivalent of millions of non-smokers dead of lung cancer, or large groups of smokers with near zero cancer rates.

Of course, it might turn out to be the case that something like a 40Hz tone and blue light of a particular frequency, a particular gene secquence, or environmantal oestrogen, might turn out to be a root cause in that sense. If any research along those lines gets published, I’d look at it with a skeptical but open mind.

soru

Aaron, Capitalism magazine was simply pointing out that the FDA has some destructive incentives: They get the blame if anything bad slips through, but no credit if something good is approved. Ergo, they error, and rather heavily, in the direction of obstruction. An error which costs lives. And that they’re doing so can be objectively established, by comparing the performance of our FDA to other nations with less restrictive drug regulation.

You might add to the list their obstruction of folic acid suplementation, for years after the link between folic acid deficiency and spinal bifida was established.

The FDA is, in fact, a major cause of death and suffering in the US. That’s not speculation, it’s easily proven.

The non-profits always seem to become ‘money pits’.

The salaried folks populating the organization
seem to have budgets that grow at the expense of
pure research grants. Are they truly MOTIVATED
to find a cure? It is a thought.

The war on terror is creating it’s own cottage
industry with service companies, security firms
and of course the ubiquitous ‘private contractors’
(Mercs). Are they really motivated to kill
this cash cow, this sugar daddy known as the
Pentagon?

And that they’re doing so can be *objectively established*, by comparing the performance of our FDA to other nations with less restrictive drug regulation. [Emph mine.]

Only if you can isolate the effects of the FDA and its foreign counterparts in the entire milieu of drug research, approvals and distribution, which is most definitely assuming facts not in evidence.

The FDA is, in fact, a major cause of death and suffering in the US.

The beauty of this sentence is that it could mean one of two different things, and that while an argument for one has been presented in the post (though not terribly convincingly), I’ll wager that it’s the other we’re supposed to hear. To wit:

1) The current policies of the FDA are suboptimal.

2) The very existence of the FDA is the problem — the true (root?) “cause” of all this death and suffering.

The former proposition is certainly arguable, though I’m not particularly convinced that the solution is to weaken the FDA; the latter is laughable on its face, which is why I suspect it wasn’t made explicitly.

It struck me that, to make this metaphor exact we’d need…

Attacks on anyone who fundamentally disagrees with the three prongs of treatment for cancer: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. All three brute force but robust cancer killing methods.

I just finished E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life on Earth. Cancer’s a pretty strong metaphor for a pimple on a circus elephant’s ass, IM new O.

D2: Come off it, man. By “argue persuasively” I meant argue persuasively. If there’s something wrong with Norm’s arguments, you need to let me know what it is. As for the rest of what you say, I don’t think I disagree. I’m fortunately not accountable for the views and attitudes of everyone who might assent to the words “no grievance justifies murder.” I’m interested in the sense in which it’s true, which is the same as the sense in which it can go missing in some purported ‘explanations’ of atrocities. When it does go missing, it’s no less shocking than the opposite ideological illusion, that murder is somehow not quite murder when it’s committed by people in uniform at the behest of a democratic state.

Could someone find Soru, take him by the hand, and lead him back to the actual argument?

Davies was talking about a civil war situation, specifically in Israel. Geras was applying an absolute moral standard to one side and not to the other.

A conservative political argument can be made for favoring the established authorities over insurgents in almost all circumstances, but it’s not “morally obvious”. And “no grievance justifies murder” is just not true at all, except tautologicaly or for pacifists.

By “argue persuasively” I meant argue persuasively.

just poking a bit of festive fun at this philosopher’s use; surely “persuasively” has to be a word which is intrinsically self-indexed; there is no objective standard of what’s persuasive so it means “well, it persuaded me”.

If there’s something wrong with Norm’s arguments, you need to let me know what it is.

My specific problem with the argument is that one of its premises (the factual claim that moral exculpation of atrocities is common on the European left) is false; I argued against a much more ridiculous version of the same claim made by Jeff Weintraub a while ago.

There are certainly a few people who appear not to believe that dead Israelis are dead, and they’re bastards. But there are quite a lot more people (including Norman G at least some of the time) who either make exactly the mistake you describe, or believe that the fact that Martin Luther King once won a liberation struggle without terrorist violence (and we hear about this so much because it’s just about the only time it happened) that this is the only morally permissible way to have one.

How does the resistance by the chastity cops to the HPV vaccine fit into this schema?

and we hear about this so much because it’s just about the only time it happened

Well, and Gandhi and Mandela.

Which I think, with the somewhat debatable exception of the Sandanistas, makes close to 100% of the successful liberation struggles, those that actually improved things for anyone except the new ruling elite.

I suppose somewhere out there, there are probably people who glorify cancer, claim it is just the bodies way of sending you a message about your lifestyle or something, maybe even put pictures of a free radical up on their student bedroom wall…

soru

Is that the Nelson Mandela who founded Umkhonto we Sizwe after concluding that only armed struggle would lead to liberation, or are you talking about someone else, soru?

Can I suggest a good history of the period, like Meredith’s ‘The State of Africa’?
It sums up the campaign on p125:

most of the attacks were clumsy and innefectual, and caused no lasting damage

Now, I suppose if you were sufficiently desperate to make a case for the effectiveness of armed struggle, then I suppose you could somehow say that those few clumsy attacks were somehow, 30 years later, responsible for the democratisation of South Africa, and not the moral persuasion and economic boycotts that actually preceded negotiations.

But frankly, I could make up a more persuasive case for cancer being sometimes benificial.

soru

Soru, what’s your reference reality? Pacifist literature?

ANC supporters regularly murdered people by hanging burning tyres around their necks. Winnie Mandela made a very public speech in favour of this practice and Nelson did not by any means immediately disassociate himself from it. It might just be my memory, but I seem to remember that “the Left” (as “the Decent Left” used to be called) managed to keep their thinking pretty straight on a) whether this was murder or not (it was), b) whether it completely undermined the status of the ANC as a legitimate liberation movement (it didn’t) and c) whether one had to make a ritual condemnation of necklace killings before one said anything nasty about apartheid, to avoid “singling out” the South African state (one didn’t). It must have been a single, never-to-be-repeated moment of moral clarity.

Gandhi’s own view on the legitimacy of violence in liberation struggles is set out pretty clearly in his autobiography and he’s not actually against it.

OF COURSE the US isn’t morally responsible for the insurgency’s killings. Are Iraqis not moral agents in their own right, perfectly capable of deciding for themselves whether or not to embark on a killing spree aimed at grinding other Iraqis under the boot heel of oppression?

We launched a war to remove a murderous dictator, and that war succeeded with remarkably few casualties. THAT war we were responsible for. The insurgency, after that success, started the war we’re currently fighting in along side the new Iraqi government. They, not us, chose to have this war. They, not us, are the agressors. They, not us, are responsible.

If I walk through a dark alley in a bad neighborhood, I may be imprudent, but the mugger is the one who’s morally responsible for the subsequent mugging. I may have made the decision to be there, HE made the decision to attack.

I find the left’s denial of moral agency to everybody but us, in order that we can be blamed for evils other people have chosen to commit, rather offensive.

Daniel, quite true: Gandhi was not philosophically dedicated to pacifism, he simply regarded it as the smartest strategy in the face of an opponent which both possessed overwhelming physical force, AND moral scruples. And which thus could not be beaten on the battlefield, but could be shamed into retreat. He was quite clear about it not being a universally appropriate strategy.

“Brett, if our war to replace Saddam replaces himself with a dictator or dictators equally bad, “ Which it is most likely to do if we follow the Democratic policy of cutting and running before the job is done.

Yeah, I do allow violence by the good against the bad, and not by the bad against the good. And that IS a moral principle, morality having to do as much with what you’re trying to achieve, as the means you are using.

If I walk through a dark alley in a bad neighborhood, I may be imprudent, but the mugger is the one who’s morally responsible for the subsequent mugging. I may have made the decision to be there, HE made the decision to attack.

Don’t the police enter into the equation somehow? If they’re supposed to be walking the beat on the block where you’re mugged, but they’re not there because–oh hell, I don’t know, the new police chief decided he could get the job done with 1/3 the previous number of beat cops–don’t they bear at least a teensy smidgen of responsibility here too, if only in an abstract sense? They’re charged with (and paid for) maintaining public security, after all.

I don’t really expect to get very far with Brett with this line of argument, because it requires that one accept the factual reality that Iraq is still, for the time being, under United States military occupation, and thus the United States bears the primary responsibility for the safety and security of the Iraqi people. Over on the other side of the mirror, of course, Iraq is a free and sovereign nation (purple fingers! purple fingers!), the Iraqis are solely responsible for their fate, and our 100,000+ soldiers on the ground there are just…well, here’s where I get confused. Just what the hell are they doing there, Brett?

The real difference between the PLO and the ANC is that while both are political movements of those who have been colonised and ethnically cleansed by the west, the ANC could rely by 1970s and 1980s on massive interest goups mobilisation in the West against aparteid, by both ‘liberals’ and the African-Americans as an ethnic group, which meant that there was a road to decolonisation via Western power, rather than violence.

Whereas even now western ‘liberals’ cannot bring themselves to forcefully condemn or act against jewish colonisation in Palestine, instead advocating a refugee bantustan solution which was specifically rejected for South Africa. The ethnic interest group mobilisation in the West is overwhelmingly in favour of further colonisation and ethnic cleansing. So there’s no road to decolonisation via Western power for the palestinian arabs, so there is much less incentive for the decolonisation struggle to be sensitive to western liberal scruples.

The analogy doesn’t really hold, because doctors don’t SAY they’re trying to stop cancer while really trying to foment it. This whole “war on terrorism” is all about building up “al Qaeda” into a formidable enough enemy to sustain the neocon dream of permanent war. Bush had no intention of ever catching Bin Laden (why would he? Their familes have done business for 4 decades) and in fact let him go. According to some reports, the CIA provided him with a plane, and he is being sheltered in Pakistan with full knowledge of Musharraf.

So flawed premise, flawed conclusion here. Don’t buy into the neocon bullshit, folks. This has nothing to do with terrorism. It has to do with the military neocon regime’s plans of global imperialism and American rule.

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#3 Nice try, but your “patient” is a straw man. No one’s proposing to not address terrorism until its root causes have been determined. And, yes, if the only treatment available (and this does draw a great analogy to Iraq) is known quackery, then it would be most prudent to not proceed–since quackery doesn’t really DO anything to help–and may do additional damage. And as much as you want to make fun of the idea of understanding a phenomenon as a step toward dealing with it, understanding the root causes of terrorism seems like a pretty rational action to take if you want to come up with a real plan to deal with it. That is, unless you really like quackery, which, from your post, it appears is the case.

ANC supporters regularly murdered people by hanging burning tyres around their necks. Winnie Mandela made a very public speech in favour of this practice and Nelson did not by any means immediately disassociate himself from it. It might just be my memory, but I seem to remember that “the Left” (as “the Decent Left” used to be called) managed to keep their thinking pretty straight on a) whether this was murder or not (it was), b) whether it completely undermined the status of the ANC as a legitimate liberation movement (it didn’t) and c) whether one had to make a ritual condemnation of necklace killings before one said anything nasty about apartheid, to avoid “singling out” the South African state (one didn’t).

Then again, “the Left” made similarly generous judgments about Mugabe’s ZANU, Mao’s and Castro’s Communist Parties, and any number of other horrible, brutal regimes that they mischaracterized as “legitimate liberation movements” even as they were slaughtering their own citizens and ruthlessly suppressing political freedoms. Those leftists may have kept their “thinking pretty straight”, but it was generally in a badly misguided direction.

In fact, the practice of certain kinds of violence–not just any kind, mind you, but certain kinds, such as the targeting of innocent civilians, and most certainly the sadistic lynching of civilians declared persona non grata by the leadership for political reasons–is a fairly (though imperfectly) reliable indicator that the guilty movement is not a “legitimate liberation movement” at all, but rather a totalitarian dictatorship in the making. That occasionally a movement can rise above its ugly past practices, as the ANC did, and lead a reasonably democratic government, doesn’t erase the correlation between politically motivated violence against civilians and totalitarian ambitions.

Where’d you get the idea that the assumption was unstated? It’s both clearly stated, AND the left’s rejection of it is the biggest problem they have getting anywhere with the American people.

Normally you don’t sort individuals into good and bad before using that information to decide whether their actions are good or bad. Normal you judge individuals by their acts.

Normally you don’t sort individuals into good and bad before using that information to decide whether their actions are good or bad. Normal you judge individuals by their acts.

We’re not a “normal” country, John. We’re America.

I’ve always wondered why we in the US use the phrase “My country, right or wrong” as a shorthand for simple-minded, unthinking nationalism. It’s clear that in the case of many Americans, a more apt phrasing would be “My country is never wrong.”

Neil, OT (on-topic) posts are not allowd at CT.

The mechanics of one particular incident are described in the wiki article about Mohamed Atta:

In Germany, Atta was registered as a citizen of the United Arab Emirates. His German friends describe him as an intelligent man with religious beliefs who grew angry over the Western policy toward the Middle East, including the Oslo Accords and the Gulf War. MSNBC in its special “The Making of the Death Pilots” interviewed German friend Ralph Bodenstein who traveled, worked and talked a lot with Mohamed Atta. Ralph said, “He was most imbued actually about Israeli politics in the region and about U.S. protection of these Israeli politics in the region. And he was to a degree personally suffering from that.”

ABB1 — I actually disagree. Sometimes oppressed peoples are completely intimidated and servile. Terrorism seems to come when such peoples have a window to the outside world and see themselves on the global stage, possibly with international support, and have some source of financing.

For example, terrorism in Bolivia is fairly recent (last several decades), but I can’t believe that Bolivia was less repressive in the 1930’s or 1940’s.

To me terrorism is a slippery concept which is often used self-servingly in the Bellmore manner (“violence by bad people”).

Sometimes a heavy smoker lives 100 years and never gets lung cancer. Sometimes a non-smoker gets lung cancer. Nevertheless, the connection is obvious.

That would be a valid explanation for why some individuals suffer oppression and don’t become terrorists, and why some millionaires sons do. That’s not what is being pointed out, what you actually see is the equivalent of French people not getting lung cancer.

That should be a clue a less simplistic model is needed.

soru

Petri dish ethics: Everything is good, because the victor writes the history and enjoys reading it.

Postmodern ethics: One thing is certain, we cannot be certain when it comes to ethics … or anything else.

Traditional Christian ethics: I know good when I see it, and I know bad when I see it. Good, good. Bad, bad.

Street ethics: All is bad, and don’t blame me, you created this mess.

Terrorist ethics: I know good when I see it, and I know bad when I see it. Good, bad. Bad, good.

Yeah, I do allow violence by the good against the bad, and not by the bad against the good.

To most people — including many of the American people for whom you falsely pretend to speak against “the left” — “good” and “bad” are defined by actions and their consequences. If you don’t grasp this, you’re living in a comic book and frankly don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

And that IS a moral principle, morality having to do as much with what you’re trying to achieve, as the means you are using.

I’m sure Stalin would have agreed with you…

Reading abb1’s comments is just so depressing. It’s like starting work on Jan 2nd, and seeing a vast warehouse, stretching as far as the eye can see, all full of misconceptions that you have to clean up.

Best make a start on it.

What makes you connect:

a clerical reformer like Luther, author of against the murderous theiving hordes of peasants.

an intellectual like Engels (who did actually fight in the 1848 revolution in Germany, but as part of an organised army)?

a revolutionary like Castro?

a terrorist like zarqawi (or pick any other one that is actually a terrorist, not a mislabelled ?

What definition covers those four, that doesn’t amount to ‘notable person’? A famous successful terrorist will probably share some traits with famous successful people in other fields (revolutionary, but also rock star, politician, actor, …), but I don’t think that explains much.

Whatever his other opinions, Trotsky was very sound on terrorism:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1909/tia09.htm
However, in order to murder a prominent official you need not have the organised masses behind you. The recipe for explosives is accessible to all, and a Browning can be obtained anywhere. In the first case, there is a social struggle, whose methods and means flow necessarily from the nature of the prevailing social order; and in the second, a purely mechanical reaction identical anywhere – in China as in France – very striking in its outward form (murder, explosions and so forth) but absolutely harmless as far as the social system goes.

soru