Isegoria

I didn’t catch The Case for the Empire when it came out (with Attack of the Clones):

So under Imperial rule, a large group of regional potentates, each with access to a sizable army and star destroyers, runs local affairs. These governors owe their fealty to the Emperor. And once the Emperor is dead, the galaxy will be plunged into chaos.

In all of the time we spend observing the Rebel Alliance, we never hear of their governing strategy or their plans for a post-Imperial universe. All we see are plots and fighting. Their victory over the Empire doesn’t liberate the galaxy — it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one.

Which makes the rebels — Lucas’s heroes — an unimpressive crew of anarchic royals who wreck the galaxy so that Princess Leia can have her tiara back.

I’ll take the Empire.

I love the opening to Adventures of a True Believer, Gary Shteyngart’s review of Vladimir Voinovich’s Monumental Propaganda:

If Russia weren’t governed by fools and reprobates, if the roads were smooth and wide and free of bandits, if Russia were suddenly a modern European country as far removed from Stalin’s legacy as today’s Germany is from Hitler’s, three groups of citizens would suffer the most: corrupt traffic cops, oligarchs, and satirists.

(Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily.)

DefenseTech noted that an Iraqi Insurgent Sniper Training manual has been translated and turned into a PowerPoint presentation (which has been translated into HTML). Naturally, the manual’s pretty creepy, presenting photos of various scenarios and asking, “If you had only one shot, who should you kill?”

Michael Specter’s Higher Risk is about “crystal meth, the Internet, and dangerous choices about AIDS.” It reads like a piece devised specifically to horrify social conservatives:

The first thing people on methamphetamine lose is their common sense; suddenly, anything goes, including unprotected anal sex with many different partners in a single night — which is among the most efficient ways to spread H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. In recent surveys, more than ten per cent of gay men in San Francisco and Los Angeles report having used the drug in the past six months; in New York, the figure is even higher.

After years of living in constant fear of AIDS, many gay men have chosen to resume sexual practices that are almost guaranteed to make them sick. In New York City, the rate of syphilis has increased by more than four hundred per cent in the past five years. Gay men account for virtually the entire rise. Between 1998 and 2000, fifteen per cent of the syphilis cases in Chicago could be attributed to gay men. Since 2001, that number has grown to sixty per cent. Look at the statistics closely and you will almost certainly find the drug. In one recent study, twenty-five per cent of those men who reported methamphetamine use in the previous month were infected with H.I.V. The drug appears to double the risk of infection (because it erases inhibitions but also, it seems, because of physiological changes that make the virus easier to transmit), and the risk climbs the more one uses it. Over the past several years, nearly every indicator of risky sexual activity has risen in the gay community. Perhaps for the first time since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the number of men who say they use condoms regularly is below fifty per cent; after many years of decline, the number of new H.I.V. diagnoses among gay men increased every year between 2000 and 2003, while remaining stable in the rest of the population.

An illustrative anecdote:

“I asked him to explain. And he told me, ‘I go online and put out my stats — if I am a top or a bottom, what I like to do. I am a top, I am H.I.V.-positive. So I will say, “Does anyone want to be topped by an H.I.V.-positive guy?” ’ ”

Klausner continued to recall the conversation: “ ‘I’ll get five responses in half an hour. And then I will speak to them on the phone. If I like their voice, I will invite them over and look through my window. If I like what I see, then I will be home, and if not I can pretend I am gone. It’s been great. I don’t have to talk to anybody to do it. I don’t have to go out of the house. I can get it like this,’ he said, and snapped his fingers.”

The amphetamines, combined with Viagra, allow the men to “party” for hours, and the Internet lets them find anonymous partners. Modern HIV drugs have removed the fear (and stigma) of disease. But here’s where it’s particularly crazy:

But the average age of newly infected gay men in New York and San Francisco is nearly forty. The real problem lay not with naïve youngsters but with those who had been aware of this epidemic virtually their entire adult lives.

(Hat tip to 2blowhards.com — which suddenly sounds lewd.)

Here’s what happens when you don’t have a good intuition for numbers, or Number Gut:

For example, there was news story published back in the late 80s that reported that the state of New Jersey produced 50 billion used tires every year which caused a huge environmental problem. The story got widely disseminated before somebody pointed out that since New Jersey had a population on only around 8 million, 50 billion tires a year came out to 6,250 tires per capita per year. The story got play because the editors had no intuitive feel for the significance of 4 orders of magnitude difference between the size of the population and the tire consumption.

A more recent (and even more political) example, the Lancet Iraqi Mortality Survey (LIMS):

A lot of people who would know better in another context seem perfectly willing to swallow the estimate of 300,000+ dead that LIMS reports with the Falluja cluster included. Examined in detail, LIMS reports that of those 300,000, roughly 250,000 died from violence, and of those something like 220,000 died from Coalition airstrikes. The LIMS authors even suggest [p6 pg7] that this is likely an underestimate.

Anyone with a good number gut for such phenomenon would immediately recognize such numbers as implausible.

Why couldn’t 250,000 be dead from violence? Well, the first clue is that the total population of Iraq is around 25 million, so 250,000 dead represents 1% of the entire population. That means if LIMS is accurate then 1 in every 100 Iraqis were killed in the war up to Sept 2004. So what? After all, it’s a war and lots of people die in wars right? Well, not as many as most people think.

For example, during WWII the Japanese mainland suffered the most extensive aerial bombardment in history. Every major urban area save one (Kyoto) was burned to the ground. On march 10th, 1945 the great Tokyo fire raid burned down a third of the city and killed 100,000 people. Two major cities were nuked. Japan at the time had a population of 78 million, so 1% of the population would have been around 780,000. Now, what is your guess as to the number of Japanese killed on the Japanese mainland?

Did you guess around 500,000? Under 1%? Well, that is in fact the number (note: that’s only dead, not dead-and-wounded).

Michael Blowhard’s Fact of the Day (from The American Enterprise):

According to Bureau of Labor statistics, 5,559 Americans were killed by workplace injuries in 2003. 5,115 of these people were men.