Yes, because I'm so shy at writing about Iraq. You got me: it's all that repression of opinion spilling out.

Gary, it is in fact possible to concentrate on several different elements of a problem at once. There's the question of problem-solving, governance, decision-making. And then there's decency, truth and honor. Both seem important to me. If you don't think Chertoff's statement is either a bald lie on his part, or evidence that he can't be bothered to pick up some baseline information about the job he's supposed to be doing, then I don't know what to say to you. Really. Who's in a rush to score cheap points here? Me or you? Do you have trouble concentrating on more than one aspect of a complex situation for some reason? You've got no shortage of invective when you're talking about environmentalists, experts or others that you think are involved in malpractice, right up to and including assessments of their motives, character and honesty. Why suddenly so fastidious?

Chertoff is irrelevant, a side show less interesting or significant than pro wrestling. That he is behaving indecently is no surprise because practical politics is all about indecency. We hear the same breast beating no matter who is in power since they are all indecent. The only thing that changes is who is wailing since political fans wink at the indecency of their bastards, so long as they have the thrill of spewing at their foes. Also, kill the ump.

However, there is a real issue here, one that is worth working, one that we haven't had an opportunity to focus on for quite a while, and that is that our system of flood management is broken. The feedback loop between those who pay and those who benefit, or suffer as the case may be, is broken. Politicians captured the power by making sweet promises, and now use that power for political purposes. Spend a lot of FEMA money in the states you need to carry, etc. We have lots of recent examples. The real need for careful planning and swift response is secondary at best to the pork barrel uses of that power.

If you read the post again you may notice that the issue of politicization of environmentalism is explained. And, there's also a long running theme here and at Crumb Trail about the politicization of science, including the scientific aspects of environmentalism. It was one of the opening points in the previous post quoting Roger Pielke Jr.

Your repeated digressions into angry speech, dismissing those who disagree with you and even those who think your concerns are beside the point, is a good example of the point I was making about political nonsense displacing thoughtful analysis. And since you were so involved in the previous post it made sense to use you as the example though there are many, many, many others. There is a feeding frenzy going on.

I know that your are proud of your anger and that many applaud your expression of it. I don't. So what? Do you really expect everyone to applaud your displays of anger? Turn it around. You are challenging the friends of the Republicans (which does not include me) to stand up and refute Chertoff for transparent excess in political speech. This post, in part, is the friends of Burke (which does include me) standing up to refute transparent excess in political speech.

You are used as the example of the behavior not the only or chief perp. The argument that such indulgence is peeing in the pool and that it makes it harder to have a sensible conversation about real issues may seem priggish to you, but I think it is a key reason why society has such a difficult time understanding and supporting useful policy initiatives. I have no expectation that this will end, recall that this sort of dysfunctional behavior is part of the old truck analogy of the previous post, but that doesn't mean that it should be ignored. It means that the best one can hope for is lowering the volume a bit, but there is some obligation to object even if it has no effect at all.

"You've got no shortage of invective when you're talking about environmentalists, experts or others that you think are involved in malpractice. . . Why suddenly so fastidious?"

I'm an environmentalist - a boots on the ground, every day environmentalist. I criticize pseudo-environmentalists, and call them that repeatedly, since they are merely politicians trying to use environmental issues to gain power.

I'm an expert. Not a credentialed expert, but a real world practicing expert. All of the things I criticize others who claim expertise for doing, and the advice for improvement, apply to me too. I listen to my own advice and try to walk the talk. Many experts are merely politicians trying to use their field of expertise to gain power. I hope you read and understood the previous response to your false claims that it is experts or expertise that I criticize. It is pseudo-experts, like pseudo-environmentalists, that I criticize. There is a second expertise related theme in group problem solving, but try to grasp that it is experts thinking about how to be effective experts, and the vulnerabilities that come from group think. And finally there is an emerging trend, what some call the professional-amateur revolution, that is an aspect of the growth of information and communication technologies. Enthusiasts are increasingly able to access information and communicate with others, enabling them in some cases to perform more effectively than cloistered academics.

Politicians are like actors. You can critique the performance, but it's usually a mistake to confuse the actor with the character acted. It isn't an interesting or important field to me. The quality of their performances isn't something I spend energy judging. The worrying bit for me is when they start fouling an issue that seems important as part of their tawdry struggle with their equally tawdry opponents. It's like when a couple of brawling drunks bump into your table and spill the drinks. You really don't care if they beat one another to pulp, but it's irritating when their irrelevant disputes intrude on your space.

Lying is not a sideshow.

Honor is not an irrelevance.

What do you think it is that prevents some people from shallow politicization of their professional practice, anyway? Since it is not an indiscriminate or universal failure. What is it that directs the intellect to something greater?

Honor is an ethos.

It is not irrelevant to ask for honor in power, whether the power is vested in a technopolitical institution like policy-making science or a political leadership like a Presidential Administration.

It is not wrong to be angry when honor is lacking. Especially when other people make excuses for it, rubbish their own standards, make a mock of principled argument.

What is also wrong is for you to make an ad hominem argument of a particularly weak sort: that my point about Chertoff is motivated by some kind of repression of my views on Iraq (plainly empirically false) and by nothing more than partisanship, by a calculatingly *instrumental* perspective which senses weakness and acts accordingly, playing the game for its own and to no deeper or more principled ends.

If you don't think Chertoff is the issue, fine. Just say that. Don't play the cheap game of dismissing my thoughts on him as motivated by some hidden psychological or shallow instrumental end. There's a reason why people of good faith avoid those kinds of assertions of hidden motives and subterranean drivers. Your feeling that Chertoff is a diversion is perfectly sufficient as a response: you need only say that there is no point to getting drawn into discussing him. That's a fine, perfectly sage observation on the economy of argument. I happen to disagree in this case, but it is perfectly possible for you and I to disagree on that without any ad hominem. Anything further is as suspect as partisanship as anything you claim to abjure. You don't want to be seen as offering sympathy for Chertoff, or obligated to rise in defense of the current Republican leadership. Fine. Do me the courtesy, as a long reader of my writings, of recognizing that I have no more a brief for the current Democratic leadership than you do a Republican, and that whatever anger I bring to bear on Chertoff comes from somewhere other than a calculating long-game instrumentalism contained entirely within the conventional orbits of political punditry. I'd never accuse you of being a flack for the Republicans even when you make observations that seem to me to be uncommonly generous to them or their policies: so why the fuck, excuse my French, are you doing that in return?

The value I vest in honor and integrity in public leadership (as well as expert and academic practice) is a long-standing and completely non-partisan commitment of mine. I have and will direct fire about that value system to any targets I think warrant it. You can take a different perspective that says that honor and integrity don't matter, that they're too granular in the face of the larger systemic crises that are important, or too old-fashioned a kind of way of thinking about leadership and professionalism. That's fine. We disagree. It's an interesting disagreement. Kindly keep it in the form where it's interesting.

Politics is a side show.

No politician is honorable.

It is foolish to "ask for honor in power" because you will never get it. The incentives are against it, which will always bring greater success to those with a cavalier attitude to honor. You get what you manage for whether you grasp what that will be or not. Get the incentives right and the results will improve. Easier said than done.

"What is also wrong is for you to make an ad hominem argument of a particularly weak sort: that my point about Chertoff is motivated by some kind of repression of my views on Iraq"

You came into the discussion paragraphs later, as part of the "sterile gotcha debate" not the Iraq part. The accusation is focusing on trivial and entirely predictable political posing as if this was something unusual when it is what every politician everywhere and every when does for a living. I realize that this is dead common, that for many it serves the same purpose as soap operas do for the house bound (and baseball players on the road in hotel rooms a lot), but it's just a TV show. The characters aren't real, they are actors playing roles.

"I'd never accuse you of being a flack for the Republicans even when you make observations that seem to me to be uncommonly generous to them or their policies: so why the fuck, excuse my French, are you doing that in return?"

I'm not. I'm criticizing the politics game, just as I would an obsession with soap operas. In one sense it's an innocent hobby, but in another it obscures the issues and prevents good decision making. I just posted about the politicization of science, a long running theme here, that explores the concept in more detail. As some have said, it's the politicization of the politicization of science that is the real problem.

"Kindly keep it in the form where it's interesting."

I think that if you read what is written with an open mind you'll hear different things. I may not write well enough to communicate clearly, or something. It may not be worth your time to translate and decode this stuff, I can understand that.

Almost no one reads this stuff and even fewer comment on it. It won't offend me if you go back to ignoring the posts as you have for so long. I was surprised that you reacted since you almost never do so. I'll even stop using your posts as examples and inspirations if it bothers you. I can make my points without dragging you into it.

See, I think I'm right about this stuff, that politics is an ugly and destructive impediment to good governance. I think it's worth saying, worth repeating, with examples from the news cycle to illustrate just how the focus on politics necessarily leads to bad governance. It's a large part of what this blog has been about, though most of the examples are from things I know well such as environmental and agricultural practice and theory. Even the stuff about mental tools, group problem solving, ICT and the evolution of expertise, information theory, etc. relates to that theme as well as one another.

The idea that governance will ever be free from politics--or that politics is some disease of the political, and not present in everyday life--seems to me as much a kind of conceptual folly as the wildest fancies of the experts you criticize. It's imagining a kind of technical solution to a philosophical condition, as if we could somehow do governance so "right" that politics would vanish from it. It makes as much sense as Karl Marx thinking the state would someday wither away come the revolution.

I'm with you on politics as it is practiced in the contemporary United States. But that's different than what you're saying here. In any event, we can disagree on this important, major point, without you fundamentally mischaracterizing, in an ad hominem way, the nature of my concern with people like Chertoff. To me, they matter because politics in the broader sense matters and because every man is responsible for behaving ethically and honestly, and those who have power, or represent institutions that matter, are even more responsible--or their responsibility matters more. That concern, I invite you to disagree with. Just don't offer cheap readings of its psychological sources or instrumental intent.

Old truck. Knowing and saying that politics is a disease doesn't mean that I expect it to go away. It's part of the cobbled together, clapped out, good enough but needs work system we have. Speaking aginst politics is truck maintenance, doing road side repairs. The truck will never be pristine, it never was pristine, it's a never ending chore.

As noted in other responses, I don't think that ethics, honesty, honor or any of the personal virtues are relevant for politicians. Anyone who goes into politics burdened by such concerns is soon road kill. Those who claim concern for such virtues are acting, something like the way they become pious and go to church when they seek high office.

There is an inverse relationship between the amount of power of a political office and the virtue of those who seek it. The higher the office the creepier the candidate. It's the same in business BTW, only it's the management ladder.

I don't think it is a waste of time to imagine governance systems that dispense with as much as possible of these old fashioned practices. That's why the idea of subsidiarity gets mentioned so often. It is not only not necessary to centralize power, it's remarkably ineffective. This also improves the incentives. When individual political offices have less power they attract a better sort of candidate, or more accurately, they don't attract the consumate predators. They change their line of work to something more profitable.

Your argument is almost curiously Marxist in an odd sort of way: that systems and structures make human agency and human character. Change the system, you change what people are, in your view. If the system is right, the people will be right; if the system is wrong, they automatically become scoundrels and knaves. Which, of course, raises the same question that much Marxist political thinking struggled with for a long century: from where does the political desire come for a revolutionary change in the system, if the system creates and constrains what it is to be human in accordance with its limitations? Marxists had the dialectic to look to, that the system cannot help but create its opposite. You may be able to draw on something similar, that large centralized systems automatically generate robust, decentralized shadows, and hence, people who are "less creepy" or power-driven.

But this may be the source of our disagreement: I think individualized human agency counts, and is the primary source of ethics. I think if you see clearly what needs to be done, you yourself are the primary explanation of that, not your immaculate distance from power. I think there are people across the distributional spectrum of politics and the professions who try their best to do right by the world, from the top to the bottom of the rungs of power. You are of course right if you observe that highly centralized systems provide the creepy at the center of power with far more awesomely destructive capacities than decentralized and robust systems (though the latter also lack some of the most awesomely creative or generative capacities of command systems, too). In any event, I think this is a point of profound philosophical disagreement: you think systems make people one thing or the other, better or worse. If nothing else, this to me too closely resembles the kind of totalizing proposition of most utopian dreamers: that all we need is the right system, and we will have the right people.

Hmmm, no, not Marxist. Marx was confused about a lot of stuff, reversed causation and such, and had too narrow a conception of humans, life, the girl, the gold watch and everything. But the stuff he chafed about in his muddled way is real and there is a large body of thought about it that existed before him and continued after. He didn't invent socialism, and socialism isn't the original or only idea about governance for the benefit of society.

It isn't "that systems and structures make human agency and human character". It is that systems and structures favor one thing over another. You get what you manage for, or you at least get more of what you manage for than that which you stacked the deck against.

"Change the system, you change what people are, in your view."

Backwards. Change the system and people, being what they are, sort themselves differently. Those best suited to the system prosper while those at cross purposes have a harder time.

"If the system is right, the people will be right; if the system is wrong, they automatically become scoundrels and knaves."

Darwinists would call this Lamarkian thinking, and it is indeed attractive to old time Marxists. But it's wrong, backwards, a sort of magical thinking; click you heels three times and wish real hard kind of stuff.

"But this may be the source of our disagreement: I think individualized human agency counts, and is the primary source of ethics."

I think you just aren't reading well, as if you want to find something to argue about because I pulled your chain about anger management. I'm sorry. Go ahead and be angry. It was just an example of the ugliness of politics and how that interferes with governance.

"I think this is a point of profound philosophical disagreement: you think systems make people one thing or the other, better or worse. If nothing else, this to me too closely resembles the kind of totalizing proposition of most utopian dreamers: that all we need is the right system, and we will have the right people."

You get an F for reading comprehension. Or maybe I get an F for composition. But you have things exactly wrong. And this is curious because we didn't just meet. You know full well that what you are claiming is bunk.

Think ecology. If you disturb some soil weeds will grow. The soil and other plants don't become weeds, it's just that weeds do better in disturbed soil so any weed seed that arrives on the wind or in bird droppings will prosper. If you have some weeds butterflies will eat them and lay eggs on them. The weeds or other insects don't become butterflies, it's just that they prosper and may increase in numbers. Follow that chain of logic back, as I have in other posts. The full story is that wolves bunch up cattle with fear. Cattle munch grass short and even. Rabbits love short even grass and dig burrows there. The subsoil they bring to the surface is weed habitat. Weeds attract butterflies.

People differ a bit since they act due to internal motivations too. This muddies the neat logic a bit and makes their behavior more variable. They are even subject to mass delusion. But these are excursions from the norm that take a lot of energy to maintain, and tend to die back to the norm in time. You can usefully anticipate behaviors over a large enough group over a long enough time using the same sort of logic as for other animals in the ecology.

In short, piles of dung draw flies. Piles of power draw monsters. Flies do not spontaneously generate from dung or carrion, and monsters are not created by power. Flies and monsters are available in suitable quantities at all times. If you feed them they will proliferate.

I make my observations above because it seems so odd, and so unlike what I understand you to normally argue, to suddenly be claiming that how people in power behave is a consequence of the way power is, rather than something they're ethically responsible for.

The updated version you offer here is: people are what they are. Change the incentives systems provide, and the right kind of people end up having more influence.

Here it is that people are whatever they are, and the only thing we need to do is match systems and people better. That the flies and monsters who inhabit politics at present are in your account intrinsically flies and monsters, and the main problem is that we have a system full of dung and monster pits so that they're suited for it. How is that any less magical an idea than the other you recognize is magical?

I'm keeping at you on this one because it seems to me that you want to indict "being political" and discard any concern for the individual ethics of politicians and professionals in a way that contradicts much of what you normally write and think. Normally it seems to me that we share some concerns about individual ethics and professionalism, about the character of individuals as well as their match to systems that allow for the expression of character. I just feel that you set out to dog people for "politicizing" and got yourself in a rhetorical cul-de-sac. I really don't think I'm the one looking to find something to argue about: I think you wanted to score some points and got away from some of the things you ordinarily care about. I still struggle to understand why Chertoff is a diversion but Paul Ehrlich is not. Surely if one is epiphenomenal, the other is; surely if one is a fly who has found his dunghill, the other is. Surely if Mooney is someone you can find time to call a wanker, an accusation of personal responsibility for intellectual or institutional failure, then condemning political or bureaucratic leaders for failure is no more or less beside the point.

It's only beside the point if you think that politics literally doesn't matter--which you don't, or you wouldn't worry about the politicization of science. Or if you think the criticism of Chertoff is wrong on the particulars. Something you say you don't care about.

It's how incentives work. If you have a system that rewards ruthless power seekers then those who have the ability to be ruthless power seekers will exercise those talents. It may be that they have other talents. If not then they will just be local despots, petty tyrants, wife (or child or husband etc.) beaters, whatever. Kids will grow up dreaming of being ruthless power seekers, like their heroes.

"I'm keeping at you on this one because it seems to me that you want to indict "being political" and discard any concern for the individual ethics of politicians and professionals in a way that contradicts much of what you normally write and think."

And I appreciate your taking the time and giving me the attention. I'm unworthy.

It isn't that I have no concern for ethics, it is that there are far more powerful forces that almost guarantee that those who focus on ethics will never rise above the lowest levels, and so we will never see it in those seeking high office. We see the act, the pretense, the claims and rhetoric, but not the substance. They play on our feelings like Hollywood stars play on our emotions. Sociopaths are exceedingly skilled at this. You don't even suspect that they are insincere until you notice the knife sticking out of your heart.

"Normally it seems to me that we share some concerns about individual ethics and professionalism, about the character of individuals as well as their match to systems that allow for the expression of character. I just feel that you set out to dog people for "politicizing" and got yourself in a rhetorical cul-de-sac."

I think it's an important issue. Practical politics is a nasty business, and the higher the office the nastier it gets. This isn't news. Nearly everyone will readily agree that the leadership of the party they hate are monsters, and are suspicious of anyone who supports them. "Screw them", was I believe the term of art. How difficult is it to see that there is an equal and opposite view, and that the sum is that all politicians are monsters? It's just their bastards and our bastards. Worse, those bastards are corrupt, have no interest whatsoever in good governance. It's not just that they are creepy, it's that they are harming us all.

"I still struggle to understand why Chertoff is a diversion but Paul Ehrlich is not."

Chertoff is a flack catcher, a hired underling, who may or may not be good at what he does but farted on TV. Actually, I hear that he is a fine prosecutor but not such a good manager, but have no solid information. Ehrlich is an activist who has spent decades attacking others and publishing nonsense that has been demonstrated repeatedly to be not just wrong, not just a mistake, but wrong due to bad methods and assumptions. He isn't just an underling that no one had heard of until he farted, he has played a leadership role in some of the most destructive groups.

They are not comparable. I might be able to find fault with Chertoff's management or even his work as a prosecutor, but that isn't what he is being denounced for now. He is being denounced for farting in public. It smelled terrible, and his subsequent attempts at rephrasing to carry a less pungent meaning are like fluffing the blankets to let the farts out. He is clearly not very good at being the front man, not good at taking the heat and saying the right thing when things go wrong. But it is only in an essentially trivial activity like politics that this is a hanging offense.

"Surely if Mooney is someone you can find time to call a wanker, an accusation of personal responsibility for intellectual or institutional failure, then condemning political or bureaucratic leaders for failure is no more or less beside the point."

Someone who writes essays for years, writes a book, and builds a career out of essentially groundless political attacks which obscure real issues is a wanker. Someone who says something stupid in an interview isn't even remotely comparable. If you can establish that Chertoff has a record of behavior that is objectionable then do so. That would be a legitimate critique. If he has a body of essays, blog posts, even a book which says the same farts he said on TV then yes, he's a wanker too.

This is perhaps the heart of the problem here. You are condemning someone for a stupid remark without any knowledge it seems of their abilities and worth. I suspect that those abilities may have been discounted to zero because he plays for the other team, but perhaps you have other, non obvious reasons. Even if you have better reasons, I'm pretty sure that most of those who are having coronaries about it have no clue at all. It's just politics.

Politics is irrelevant to good governance. It doesn't much matter who gets elected, we don't get good governance. We need less politics, less centralized power. It isn't just that each monster would have less power, it is also that those who waste their time paying attention to activities thousands of miles away, while ignoring the dirt in their own yards, would have reason to focus closer to home. It would be less about entertainment and more about governance. At a low enough level it becomes less important if the candidate is unfashionable so long as they do good work.

I take Chertoff's "farting", as you call it, as precisely indicative of some of the deeper ills in the current leadership: an indication of his own moral vacuity, whatever his previous career, but also a representative kind of vacuity characteristic of his political associates. I don't think it was a chance misstatement: I think it was the kind of thing that a morally bankrupt leadership says when confronted with the fact of their bankruptcy . These ills you appear to regard as the accursed inheritance of all politics, and express disinterest in them because you see them as an indiscriminate attribute of the entire system rather than the particular failure of a particular subset of leaders. From your perspective, it seems that anyone who regards a particular subset of politicians as more responsible for failure and misconduct, more ethically contaminated, is a silly little partisan whose views can safely be ignored because they appear partisan. You don't even have to argue against the specific views: they are definitionally silly in your view because they can be said to regard one group of political leaders as more ethically suspect than the next. This is a kind of funhouse mirror Naderism: Democrats, Republicans, politicians, they're all the same, do the same things, no distinctions can or should be made.

Because you're viewing the political from some immaculate distance where it all appears equally grubby. Indeed, this seems to be how you recognize whether people are dirty or clean: by their proximity to politics and power. The closer they are, by your apparent reckoning, the more they must be *inevitably* contaminated, and thus claims of their particular type of contamination are at the least unimportant and more likely an indication that the person so claiming is also political and polluted. The further they are from politics (or institutionalized expertise), they are inevitably cleaner, at least if they're at that distance by choice or instinct.

This is why I'd say that in this case, you appear disinterested in the question of any individual ethics, because you're more or less saying it doesn't matter what people individually do; you don't expect variations in their ethical conduct or moral compass if they are too close to the orbit of power or the political.

And yet suddenly you do appear interested in Chertoff's whole career, and the question of the whole career of everyone, that you don't judge for single statements or actions or initiatives. You do suddenly want to make fine judgements about culpability and ethics despite someone being well within the belly of the political beast. On the flip side, Mooney's *just* a wanker, the armies of science-politicizers motivated by nothing but self-interest, all the people out there cranks and creeps and immoral exploiters motivated by their own needs and nothing more. You're worried about the totality of someone's career one moment, quick to dismiss someone else on the basis of a mere statement the next. Critical of the stupid or self-aggrandizing invocations of "we" in bad hysterical writing about Katrina one second (and I completely agree with you on your characterization here of much of what you're reading) but speaking the language of "we" yourself by the time you wend to the end of your own entry. One moment politics matters, the next it is the silly preoccupation of silly (or corrupt) people, someone else's problem. One moment it is ridiculous (or even unfair) to care about what one man says as an important leader, the next it's perfectly righteous to rip into some writer or blogger or guy for what they say because you think words and ideas have power. (And indeed they do.) One kind of words are just "farting", even when they're spoken by a political leader in the middle of a grave crisis; another kind written by some guy named Alex Steffen warrant opening both barrels.

I'm just trying to figure out how the calibration on your scales gets adjusted.

"This is why I'd say that in this case, you appear disinterested in the question of any individual ethics, because you're more or less saying it doesn't matter what people individually do; you don't expect variations in their ethical conduct or moral compass if they are too close to the orbit of power or the political."

You missed the important bit. Individual ethics is important, and we are unlikely to find ethical politicians who survived infancy. They were eaten by their creche mates.

"And yet suddenly you do appear interested in Chertoff's whole career, and the question of the whole career of everyone, that you don't judge for single statements or actions or initiatives."

This isn't sudden, it is the core of my approach. Farts don't count. Everybody farts. Check out Higher and Deeper, a post that selects a comment from a reader on your blog which points out that the Army Corps of Engineers' efforts had been widely misunderstood because some official had used the phrase "Cost Benefit Analysis". My comment on this was that "It's useful to look at this big picture and physical reality as environmental and political predators roam the land pointing fingers and looting our social capital. No one connected to any aspect of this hammered system will escape criticism. No person or institution looks good when their affairs are opened up and publicly examined as always happens when great tragedy happens. Nobody's closets are that neat."

The big picture is the most useful. Farts don't count except in politics.

"You're worried about the totality of someone's career one moment, quick to dismiss someone else on the basis of a mere statement the next."

You get another F for reading comprehension. In each case it is the body of work that matters.

"One moment it is ridiculous (or even unfair) to care about what one man says as an important leader, the next it's perfectly righteous to rip into some writer or blogger or guy for what they say because you think words and ideas have power."

Body of work. If you check out other posts you will find that I don't call Alex Steffen "the poseur" on a whim. This is one of many instances in which he has done the same sort of crime and I have busted him for it. He didn't just acquire the "poseur" nickname, he's had it for a couple of years. In the same vein, that wasn't the first time I took Chris Mooney to task for his nonsense. And in all cases it isn't for a single mistaken statement in a pressure situation, it is for repeated crimes. There's no possibility that they mispoke, or that they would handle things differently given a second take on the scene. They do the same thing repeatedly, intentionally. It isn't a fart, they smell that way all the time.

You are consistently wrong in your comparisons, and in a way that is revealing. You aren't really thinking about this stuff, have no background information or a guiding body of thought. You're winging it. Doing pretty good, but still just winging it. And it's also clear that you don't read my blog unless it refers to your posts, and so have little idea what is going on here. Can't blame you for that. Few read it. I even refer to it from my other blog as if it was written by someone else, someone that I don't quite approve of.

"I'm just trying to figure out how the calibration on your scales gets adjusted."

Hopefully you have the information now. Body of work. In game theoretic terms it's a variant of tit-for-two-tat, TFTT. I allow more than two tats before ceasing to cooperate, but not a lot more. I'll continue to cooperate the first time you cheat, and usually the second, and sometimes more if it isn't clear that you are just a hopeless wanker. Once there is a body of work to judge, once it is clear that you are a rat, then I stop cooperating. Of course, I fart too.

Gary: I read this and Crumb Trail regularly. I've commented on threads here for goodly while when they've got nothing to do with what I write. I understand that you're talking about bodies of work; I'm just observing that to me, you appear to have a strangely composed apparatus for passing judgement that is, from my perspective, something of a Rube Goldberg machine. No doubt this is true of me, as well: I have my blindspots and my hobby horses. I'm really just puzzled by the degree to which you think that everyone else who is interested in "politics" in some way that you are not must be operating from hidden motives, bad-faith instrumentalisms, superficialities, rather than long-established, internally consistent and principled arguments with which you happen to seriously disagree. The latter wouldn't bother me for a minute. The former, as a fairly blanketing and generic assumption, bothers me intensely and seems deeply contradictory to the specificity and depth of many other postings.

OK, I'll try to work up a good answer. It'll take a while, reality intrudes, and I'll pop it out as a separate post.