I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
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...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
BIOWARFARE AS A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION: NO, REALLY: I've now engaged in two sets of discussions about Gregg Easterbrook's TNR article: in comments to this entry and here.
I was distressed to see the estimable Matthew Yglesias, whom I considerably respect, say:
Gregg Easterbrook makes the excellent point that chemical weapons don't really work [...] Similarly, bioweapons, though they seem to have the potential to cause mass suffering on a scale exceeded only by, well, regular plagues have a record that, in practice, is not very impressive when compared to that of bullets. His argument is that in the case of Iraq it's really only nuclear weapons that we need to be worried about. [...] [the international] bans [on chemical and biological warfare are] not really as well-motivated as one might have thought.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of the most brilliant people I've ever known, and there is no one I respect more, thought Easterbrook's piece "interesting," and apparently took away from Easterbrook that:
biological and chemical weapons are overrated as "weapons of mass destruction."
I observe that Easterbrook's piece is a tissue of misleading falsehoods, omissions, minimalizations, and distortions.
Patrick said of Easterbrook's piece:
It pointed out that, by and large, they haven't been anywhere near as efficient at quickly killing large numbers of people as nuclear weapons are.
Well, yes, what else could kill hundreds of thousands of people in an instant? I wasn't aware that this was even remotely a point anyone needed clarifying.
But, as I pointed out to Matthew Yglesias, influenza killed more people in 1918 than everyone killed in WWI. Without the intentional aid of a single human being. Without any genetic engineering. Without any refining.
Between September 1918 and March 1919, an epidemic of Spanish influenza swept through the United States and the world. The flu virus caused the deaths of more than 500,000 Americans and 25 million people worldwide.
The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history.
[...]
It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy (Deseret News). An estimated 43,000 servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza (Crosby).
No one has ever said biowarfare could kill even tens of thousands of people in an instant. Or a day. That's not the question. The question is: could biowarfare kill tens, or hundreds, of thousands of people, in a month, or a few months? And the answer is: yes, yes, yes.
Why this is reassuring, I do not understand. What comfort, of any sort, or what information of any value, was in Easterbrook's piece, I'm utterly failing to get. That's why I'm completely puzzled at people citing it as "interesting" and "worthwhile."
What Easterbrook said, in many cases, wasn't true. From his piece:
Chemical weapons are dangerous, to be sure, but not 'weapons of mass destruction' in any meaningful sense.
False. They can, and have, killed hundreds of people at a time. That's "mass" enough for me. Drop ten missiles loaded with the right gas, at the right time and place, and you can kill thousands. That's mass enough for me. Let alone twenty or thirty missiles, or more.
In World War I, casualties from gas were: Total British Empire: Non-Fatal: 180,597; Deaths: 8,109; Total: 188,706
Grand Total: Non-Fatal: 1,205,655; Deaths: 91,198; Total: 1,296,853
If that's not "mass," I don't know what is.
Let's not forget, as well, the other mass use of chemical weapons in war in modern times. Who did that? Oh, yes, Saddam Hussein.
Similarly, biological weapons are widely viewed with dread, though in actual use they have rarely done great harm.
This is a dishonest side-step. It's like declaring in July, 1945, that not a single human being has been killed by a nuclear weapon, so obviously they are not a weapon of mass destruction. I've already dealt, briefly, with why this is an irrelevant point above, and I'll deal below with why it's also false. I'd like to presume Easterbrook isn't deliberately underplaying, but I don't understand why he's making such an irrelevant, and misleading, point that adds up to an (deliberate or not) untruth from one angle, and is outright false from another.
Japanese attempts to use biological weapons against China during World War II were of limited success.
Before making their escape at the time of Japanese surrender, Japanese in Unit 731 set free scores of thousands of infected rats that caused widespread plague in 22 counties of Heilungchiang and Kirin provinces that took more than 20,000 Chinese lives.
Either 20,000 people are "a limited success" and not "mass," or Easterbrook is telling a monstrous lie, whether deliberately or somehow ignorantly.
Sheldon Harris, a historian at California State University, in Northridge, estimates that more than 200,000 Chinese were killed in germ warfare field experiments. Hams - author of a book on Unit 731, 'Factories of Death' also says that plague-infected animals were released as the war was ending and caused outbreaks of the plague that killed at least 30,000 people in the Harbin area from 1946 through 1948.
But I'm less sure of these figures.
Easterbrook's piece is full of smaller misleading statements leading up to a terribly untrue set of conclusions which it's important people not believe.
Deliberate, systematic distribution of weapons-grade anthrax in the United States in 2001 killed five people--terrible, but hardly "mass destruction...."
Technically true, it's close to a untruth by omission. He implies that this is somehow relevant to a serious enemy unleashing anthrax in any sort of mass, or even significant, way on a civilian population, but, of course, it was no such thing. It was five letters. Imagine if 5,000, or 50,000, had been mailed out. Which is scarcely a truly unusually huge bulk mailing. Imagine any number of other possible forms of delivery. Worse, imagine a contagious disease being deliberately vectored, which anthrax is not.
Because actual attempts to use bioweapons have been few, it's hard to be sure; but it may well be that, like chemical weapons, biological agents will prove less dangerous than conventional arms, as well as more difficult for armies or terrorists to use.
"It may well be," and "it may not be," and then again, what does this actually mean? Conventional arms have slaughtered hundreds of millions of people in the 20th Century. This is reassuring? And most non-small arms are "difficult" to use; use of an M1 tank is darned "difficult"; not to mention use of an F-117; particularly, kids, don't try planning your own large-scale coordinated aerial bombing raid, or armored division assault, or artillery bombardment, let alone coordinated full-scale all-arms attack, at home.
The phrase "weapons of mass destruction," then, obscures more than it clarifies. It lumps together a category of truly terrible weapons (atomic bombs) with two other categories that are either less dangerous than conventional weapons (chemical arms) or largely an unknown quantity (biological agents).
Not really, no, and no. It lumps together nuclear weapons whose primary effect is instantaneous and kills thousands then, and an order larger over time, with chemical weapons whose primary effect may be an order smaller, or may not, over an hour or several hours, and with biological weapons, whose effect very well could, over a couple of orders of time larger, also be a couple of orders more deadly than nuclear weapons.
This conflation, moreover, muddies the American rationale for military action against Iraq. That rationale should be to prevent Saddam from acquiring atomic weapons. This alone is reason to go to war.
I can't see at all how. I'm sorry, but I'll be just as upset at a hundred thousand, or ten thousand, or one thousand, people killed by biowarfare, as the same number killed by nuclear warfare. I'll also be just as upset at ten thousand, or one thousand, killed by nerve gas.
I won't even be very happy at dozens of missiles with chemical weapons raining down on Israel, or, heck, even Saudi Arabia, or Jordan, or another neighbor of Iraq. I wouldn't even be happy to see it happen to Syria . I'm just funny that way, and think preventing that, if that's what it were to come down to (which is a stipulation, and an entirely separate discusion), sounds like it's a likely candidate for being worth risking war.
Fewer than 1 percent of battle deaths during World War I, the only war in which chemical arms were extensively employed, were caused by gas.
This ignores how horrible it is to have been blinded for life by gas, to have lost most of your lungs, to be scarred for life.
The most lethal of all the poisonous chemicals used during the war, it was almost odourless and took twelve hours to take effect. Yperite was so powerful that only small amounts had to be added to high explosive shells to be effective. Once in the soil, mustard gas remained active for several weeks.
The skin of victims of mustard gas blistered, the eyes became very sore and they began to vomit. Mustard gas caused internal and external bleeding and attacked the bronchial tubes, stripping off the mucous membrane. This was extremely painful and most soldiers had to be strapped to their beds. It usually took a person four or five weeks to die of mustard gas poisoning. One nurse, Vera Brittain, wrote: "I wish those people who talk about going on with this war whatever it costs could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke."
But it took twelve hours to take effect, and four or five weeks to die, and lots of victims didn't die, so it's neither truly a "weapon of mass destruction" or a "truly terrible weapon." Check. And that's not getting on to the nerve gasses.
Then there are biological agents. Supposedly these weapons kill very rapidly in huge numbers.
This is a classic straw man argument. No one serious has ever thought that the threat or point, so by knocking down the straw man, we're supposed to learn that bio-agents aren't "weapons of mass destruction," or worth worrying about in the same way as nuclear weapons. But, of course, they could potentially kill far more people than nuclear weapons. Not as rapidly as blast effect, but possibly more quickly, and in larger numbers, than radiation effects.
The same uncertainty of effect that Easterbrook cites in a negative fashion also applies in a positive fashion.
So Easterbrook's argument that bioweapons are not "weapons of mass destruction" or "truly terrible weapons" worth considering as serious a threat as nuclear weapons is utterly false.
And on and on it goes in his piece, with untrue statements, omissions, straw men, and wrong-headed comparisons. I'll bore you to death if I pull each later one apart, if I've not already, so I'll stop here.
In summary: Easterbrook's claim that nuclear weapons are inherently several orders of magnitude more dangerous than biological weapons is false. His claim that chemical weapons aren't serious weapons of mass killing is false. His claim that only nuclear weapons are worth going to war over: well, you'll have to decide for yourself. I don't buy it, myself.
ADDENDUM: Bruce Rolston of the fine Flit, whose military expertise I greatly respect, responds (though I only found it because I happen to read his page; apparently my belief that it's a courtesy to let people know when you link to, mention, or respond to, them, is a rarity in the blogoverse).
Unfortunately, I think in this case Bruce's military perspective steers him a bit wrong, because he chides me for not responding about the tactical utility of these weapons, and because I instead discuss them primarily as weapons of terrorism. Well, yes, I thought it was entirely clear I was doing so. Regrettably, Bruce starts by saying:
Easterbrook is talking about the value of "weapons of mass destruction" as military weapons...."
This is, alas, not borne out by Easterbrook's text. The opposite is the case. Easterbrook introduces us to the topic with his lead graf, saying he is responding to Dick Cheney's statement that:
"These are not weapons designed for the purpose of defending Iraq. These are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale."
Which says nothing about "military weapons." Easterbrook continues with numerous more references as to what he aims to refute, specifying eight mentions in the State of the Union message -- none of which refer to "military weapons." He quotes Bush:
In his 2002 State of the Union address, for example, the president stated that the United States would not "permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most dangerous weapons," citing chemical, biological, and atomic arms as equal concerns.
See anything there about Bush only discussing battlefield use? Easterbrook cites 250 articles in the New York Timesand makes no mention of "military weapons." And so on.
That, having introduced the topic of debate as to whether these weapons are useful for "the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale." and proceeding to his task of attempting to refute that, Easterbrook then slides into the intellectual sidestep -- among others -- of discussing biological and chemical weapons as if battlefield use were the only relevancy as to whether they could be used to "threaten us" -- before then dancing back to discussion of general use of these weapons, leaving behind the odd logic that having critiqued their limitations on the battlefield, that such a critique is relevant to their use against civilian populations -- was one of my main points.
That battlefield use is beside the point of whether chemical and biological weapons can "threaten us" was my point.
Bruce also, regrettably, fails to distinguish that I distinguished between Japan's mass killings of prisoners with biological agents, and the use of biological weapons in the wild in China. So, no, by "Farber's standard, wouldn't we consider the gassing of Jews a successful example of chemical warfare, too?" No.
Bruce says:
Easterbrook says that bioweapons have not yet been successfully militarized... but influenza has killed millions, Farber responds, completely beside the point.
It thought it sufficiently obvious a point that if an epidemic, without the aid of man, can do this, it wasn't necessary to hammer away at the logic that, obviously, a human-aided epidemic might be able to do even worse, or at least as well. And, yes, that seems a worthwhile point to me. That it's besides Bruce's concerns with battlefield use isn't my point.
Bruce concludes that:
The simple counter-argument to Easterbrook, of course, the one that Farber does not make, is that successful battlefield use is not the only criterion anymore.
I thought that was the topic I was addressing from the start, that this was primary to my overall point above. Obviously I wasn't clear enough. I specifically said in the comment I linked to in my lede graf that:
If one wants to argue for the limits of battlefield utility in the modern day of chemical weapons, sure, they are limited as a decisive weapon, without question. Anyone who knows anything about military tactics and procedures knows that.
But I'm guessing Bruce didn't bother to read that, and it's my fault for not having repeated it in the text above, though I was trying to limit my repetitions of myself.
In the end, I can't see anywhere Bruce is actually disagreeing with me, except that he focuses only on Easterbrook's emphasis on the use of these weapons on the battlefield, and my point was that the use of these weapons on the battlefield is scarcely the prime concern.
Passing note: at the moment I write this, Blogdex says this is the 26th most-linked post.
Thomas Nephew writes a post paralleling mine. Jim Henley responded to both of us. Bruce Rolston responded to my response. Eugene Volokh posted on the topic and added a link to my piece with a couple of observations on it. Joe Katzman wrote this at Winds of Change. I neglected to mention that Matthew Yglesias quite promptly posted:
After reading Gary Farber's reply to WMD naysayers I think I'm convinced that biowarfare is massively destructive enough to be worried about. [....]
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