We Should Live - Ben Bateman

English speakers often assume that a firestorm must be like a rainstorm, only with fire.  But the correct meaning is more complicated.  A firestorm, properly understood, is a powerful wind that springs up around a huge fire.  The heat from the fire creates an enormous column of hot air rushing upwards into the sky.  As that air moves upwards, some other air must move in to take its place, and much of that air comes from near the ground.  So if you stand near a large enough fire, then you will feel a wind sucking you in towards the fire.  That wind is the firestorm.

Some firestorms may occur naturally, but the only ones I’ve read about occur in war.  My favorite is the September 1812 fire that began in Moscow shortly after Napoleon captured it.  Although that fire’s origin is unclear, I suspect that the Russians set it themselves to deny the invaders comfortable lodging.  In any case, the whole city was made of wood.  It burned most spectacularly.

My guess for the largest firestorm to date would be the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945, which may have killed more people in a single attack than either of the atomic bombs.  Favorable winds that night helped destroy 31 square miles of the city, which was made mostly of wood and paper.

It’s nice to know what a real firestorm is, but you’ll rarely find opportunities to use its proper historical meaning in casual conversation.  As with ‘decimate’, the popular meaning is more vivid than the historical one.  You’re welcome to choose either as far as I’m concerned—but understand the choice that you’re making.

Michael Williams scoffs at the parent in this article who allows her teenage daughter to wear a t-shirt bearing a sexually suggestive statement. As Michael sees it:

As I’m learning with dogs and dominance challenges, if you expect to lead the pack then it’s important to win every single time. Parents who aren’t willing to fight and win every battle probably discover soon thereafter that they aren’t able to lead and control their child. I suppose that this dominance role should diminish as the child gets older and takes control of her own life, but I don’t think that transition should be allowed to complete until the child is self-sufficient.

I disagree. The difference between a child and a dog is that you expect the child to grow up into a man or women. I’ve seen pushover parents ruin their children with too much permissiveness, but I’ve also seen parents destroy their children with too much control.

In the minds of these over-controlling parents, growing up is always something that the child will do out in the future sometime, but never right now. Right now the imperative is always to keep the child on a tight rein. Then these parents are astonished to discover that their heavily controlled 18-year-old has the mind and impulse control of a 12-year-old.

If you want your child to grow up, then she needs to be in the habit of making decisions for herself and experiencing the consequences. If you don’t give her a steadily increasing diet of decisionmaking authority over her own life, then of course she’ll go out of control when she gets full authority dumped on her around 18.

What control-oriented parents get wrong is the assumption that the child is a wild animal constantly on the verge of doing something horribly wrong. That assumption makes itself true. Children naturally tend to agree with their parents. So if the parents believe that the child is basically a wild animal, then the child will probably believe it, too. She will believe, as her parents do, that she is incapable of self-control. And she will act accordingly, prompting the parents to exert even more control, and so on.

It doesn’t have to work that way. The amazing gift that children give their parents is an immense store of credibility. The little tykes will believe whatever you tell them—as long as it’s consistent with their reality. Many, perhaps most, parents destroy this wonderful asset by directly contradicting the child’s daily experience, usually by stating wishes as facts, or by making impossible demands, e.g.:

• “Some day I’ll take you to Disneyland.” And then there’s no trip on the child’s very short time horizon.
• “You better stop that or I’ll come over there and . . .” And the parent drifts back into the TV show.
• “That retarded child is really just like everybody else.” Except for all the obvious ways in which he’s totally different.
• “If you’re just friendly with other children, then they’ll be nice to you.” Even that kid who beats you up after school every day.

And to the teenage girl: “You don’t need to be thinking about boys. Just focus on your schoolwork.” Even though her raging hormones are forcing her to think about boys, sex, babies, or marriage several times an hour—including while she’s asleep.

From a very early age, you have a chance to present your child with your worldview, and the child is naturally inclined to accept that worldview—but only if it makes sense in the child’s world. So the real challenge of parenting is a challenge to the parents’ worldview. You get to put on a sales pitch, as it were, trying to convince the child to see the world as you do. And if your vision is incomplete or incoherent, then how can you blame the child for not adopting it?

The linked article provides a dramatic example. Sure, adults cringe when teenage girls wear slutty shirts. But should we force them to wear demure pants and long sleeves every day?

The reality is that those girls are full of estrogen, and at a very deep level they want to make babies. They know that they shouldn’t, and they generally don’t. But the desire, the pressure, is always there. That is their reality. That is their subjective experience morning, noon, and night. Adults who try to chase away the manifestations of that very natural desire seem to think that they can make it go away. But all they accomplish by denying reality is to make the adults’ worldview less appealing to the teens.

It’s stupid to tell a teenage girl that she can’t try to attract the attention of boys until she’s 18—you might as well try to hold back the tide. And it’s reasonable to discourage her from acting on that interest on the basis of the practical dangers involved. But it’s best to say: “Of course you want to attract boys. And that’s great. So let’s talk about how you can do that while being safe and without coming across as a slut.”

When you leave the adult’s reality and speak from within the child’s reality, then you’re making it possible for her to agree with you and share your worldview. But if you stay in the adult’s reality and insist that your little girl not think those dirty thoughts about boys—well, you might as well try to convince her that grass is purple and the sky is green, because you’re directly contradicting a basic fact of her daily life.

You can cling to the adults’ idealistic notion of what a teen’s life ought to be like, or you can view the teen’s life as it really is and influence it. But you can’t do both.

Some Bin Laden humor, via RightWingSparkle:

Little Melissa comes home from first grade and tells her father that they learned about the history of Valentine’s Day.”

“Since Valentine’s Day is for a Christian saint and we’re Jewish,” she asks, “will God get mad at me for giving someone a valentine?”

Melissa’s father thinks a bit, then says “No, I don’t think God would get mad. Who do you want to give a valentine to?”

“Osama Bin Laden,” she says.

“Why Osama Bin Laden,” her father asks in shock.

“Well,” she says, I thought that if a little American Jewish girl could have enough love to give Osama a valentine, he might start to think that maybe we’re not all bad, and maybe start loving people a little bit. And if other kids saw what I did and sent valentines to Osama, he’d love everyone a lot. And then he’d start going all over the place to tell everyone how much he loved them and how he didn’t hate anyone anymore.”

“Her father’s heart swells and he looks at his daughter with newfound pride. “Melissa, that’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I know,” Melissa says, “and once that gets him out in the open, the Marines could blow the @#*@ out of him.”

The New York Times has again published state secrets for political gain.  As Jack Kelly explains here, this time it’s a National Intelligence Estimate that the Times claims supports the idea that the Iraq War is fueling terrorism rather than suppressing it.  This has pushed Pres. Bush to declassify parts of the report to push back against this nakedly political attack.

In a sane country, this is what would happen when someone intentionally releases state secrets to our enemies:  Everyone involved in the publication of those state secrets should be fined and jailed.  This would include the reporter and editor.

But that’s just the beginning.  We should launch a manhunt to find out who, exactly, was entrusted with classified information and leaked it to the press.  That person, when found, should be hung by the neck until dead, in public and on television.

That may sound harsh, but it’s simple mathematics.  These people want to kill us, thousands at a time if they can.  And they can.  And they will, in time, unless we take seriously the task of stopping them.  The NYT has already published details of secret programs designed to detect and foil terrorist plots.  How many innocents did the Times condemn to death with those articles?

The choice is simple: We can hang one criminal who abused his trust in leaking classified information for political gain.  Or we can ignore his crime, even leave him at his job to encourage others like him to betray us—and risk the deaths of thousands of innocents.  It isn’t mercy to let the traitor go unpunished.  It’s laziness.  Lethal laziness.

Life continues to swirl chaotically around me, but I want to immortalize in the web a paragraph from the most recent dead-tree version of National Review. Rob Long visited China and nearly North Korea, and in reporting on the trip he offers various observations about despotism and the Far East’s future. In this paragraph he explains succinctly my own view on the Iraq situation:

The North Korean situation—millions of hungry people, living in a paranoid socialist nightmare led by a despotic, rat-in-a-coffee-can leader—has no solution. No good solution, anyway. The trouble is, we Americans are solution oriented. “What’s the plan?” we ask ourselves. One of the more bitterly enjoyable tropes of the anti-Iraq War Crowd has ben their childish—and classically American—insistence that a lack of “planning” could somehow soothe the toxic brew of Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd. Somethings are just disastrous messes, which doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing.

This doubles to two (myself included) the number of people I know of who publicly understand that both war and foreign policy are usually messy, dirty, and inherently distasteful. It was an anomaly in WWII when Patton nearly lost his command for slapping a soldier who had lost his courage. It became a public relations nightmare, despite its obvious silliness. Thousands and thousands of men lay dead or dying on Sicily, and the civilians were worried about a young man who had merely been slapped.

It’s worse today.  Back then, individual civilians felt themselves qualified to evaluate the methods used in the heat of battle to inspire men to fight and win.  Today, individual civilians feel themselves qualified to second-guess and deride every aspect of the Iraq War, including and especially those aspects about which they know nothing at all.  Today a smattering of facts and a carefully nursed sense of despair fully qualify any American to declare the war to be a comprehensive failure.  If we want our military leaders to be fully effective, then perhaps we might assure them that their every professional decision won’t be second guessed by a hoard of loudmouthed amateurs.

Isn’t this how Athens fell?  I’m no expert on ancient Greece, but I seem to recall that the Sicilian expedition was in large part doomed because the fickle crowd back home was swayed not only to withdraw much of its support from its overseas troops, but also to indict and sentence to death the expedition’s commander, Alcibiades.  We have no reports on whether Alcibiades ever slapped a cowardly soldier, and translation issues make it difficult to determine whether his political enemies back home often used in their orations some Greek word that eventually became ‘quagmire’.  But the problem seems systemic to democracy.  They were fools to betray Alcibiades.  They were fools to humiliate Patton.  And they’re fools to loudly proclaim disaster when our troops can’t resolve in a few years feuds that were centuries old when Columbus discovered the Americas.

Life is messy.  Deal with it.

I’ve spent many a night in hotel rooms the past few months, and hotel desk clerks baffle me. I know that they must not be paid much. But is it too much to expect them to know a few things about the world outside the hotel?

How far is your hotel from the airport? How long does that drive take? Where are the nearby restaurants? How long will it take me to get from your airport to the conference / tourist attraction at this time of day? Is there a drug store nearby, and can you give me directions?

These questions frighten and confuse a solid majority of hotel desk clerks. It’s as if neither they nor their superiors had ever considered that many of their hotel guests might be coming from the aiport. Or the interstate. It’s as if they don’t expect that the hotel’s guests will get hungry.

Contrast this with car-rental companies. They probably don’t pay their front-line workers much more than hotels, but they have the map thing all figured out. Car-rental maps are usually the best way to understand a new area’s major streets and highways. Couldn’t the hotel manager sit down on a slow afternoon and hammer out good answers to fairly obvious questions? Couldn’t he whip open Google and print up some maps showing the locations of likely destinations?

Maybe it’s an incentive problem. Even if a hotel does a great job serving its guests, it’s unlikely that that hotel will enjoy much repeat business from that happy guest. The repeat business will instead go to some other hotel in the chain. So it’s the chains that should require their hotels to have useful information on hand about the local area.

Thinking about this further, hotels don’t have the sort of customer-service orientation that you might find in, say, a restaurant. At many restaurants they are eager to please, but hotel check-in proceeds at a dreamlike pace. “A credit card,” the clerk thinks to himself, “Hmm, what was it that I was supposed to do with credit cards?”

With little likelihood of repeat business, the incentives simply don’t line up for customer service. Instead, the way that you make money at the local level with a hotel is by controlling costs. And that’s where hotels excel.  If you study a hotel room, it’s amazing how efficiently they find and use fixtures and furnishings that look fairly nice while being durable and inexpensive.  The key to making money in the hotel business is probably not having too many rooms torn up.

Maybe a good analogy for the hotel business is with taxicabs.  Your cabbie has little incentive to leave you with a particularly warm and fuzzy impression, because that’s irrelevant to the economics.  Whether you will need another cab depends on factors completely beyond the cab company’s control.  A cab company focused on hiring friendly, pleasant drivers, but no success in that area would increase the overall number of people who use cabs, and it’s unlikely that a cab company could keep costs down.  I bet that in the cab business you make money by keeping costs down, which is why the emphasis is on keeping costs down, such as having the driver own his own cab.  Long-haul truck drivers work much the same way.

So I will struggle to forgive the glassy-eyed hotel clerks I’ve met recently who seem thunderstruck by my question about nearby restaurants.  And I’ll try to stay calm as check-in and check-out proceed at their usual dreamlike pace.  It all comes back to that global rule of economics: People are all pretty much the same, but they act very differently depending on their incentives.