...but the reason that Reyes doesn't know these things is because you and your fellow citizens also don't know them - so he knows that he doesn't have to. I guarantee there's a hell of a lot of technical minutae bearing on his re-election that he's master of. It flatly is the job of you and your fellow citizens to know this stuff at this elementary a level - you have 150 thousand plus people out there at the sharp end. The fact that they're out there whacking the living shit out of one of the great historic societies of the Middle East with very, very little idea of the ultimate consequences is in very large part due to the fact that the vast majority of the American electorate couldn't have placed Iraq on a map until late 2003 and still doesn't know what the difference is between Sunni and Shia.

I'm pushing a major deadline until Christmas, but I'll try to find the time between Christmas and New Years to knock out a couple thousand words covering the highlights.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

Yes, true - ultimately the buck stops with the citizenry. But we can assign blame far more directly along the way. Please reserve some of that scorn for the failure of the expert class we employed to act in our best interests.

It's the citizenry's job to know far more things than they'll ever have time to know; staying informed would be a double full-time job even if we already knew in advance what topics we'd have to be up on to be prepared for every eventuality. If people really spent the time to personally know everything that they might potentially need to know - even the most important things - commerce, industry and medicine would all screech to a halt.

Yes, it might have been good to have all the facts at our fingertips on the difference between religious groups in a civil war ten thousand miles away that we are still told to this day is not actually taking place.

That might make the importance of al Q being Sunni or Shiite somewhat more relevant. Naturally the American public was first told by their leadership and their compliant media that there was no insurrection, and next that it was all al Qaeda vs. loyal Iraqis.

So forgive John Q Public and his representatives the fact that they're scrambling now to get information that they're only now learning is relevant by completely ignoring their own leadership ; as recently as his last speech, Bush was still saying the violence comes from al Qaeda and there is no Civil War.

The public is coming to this late because nobody told them it was remotely relevant until this year.

Some stone IT department nerd might lecture you as if you were mentally retarded because you didn't know the precise steps to secure the computer you use every day, and thus lost data to a hacker - saying "this affects you directly - what excuse can you give for not being informed?" What answer do we give to him when he says precisely the same thing you're saying? He's equally correct, and equally incorrect.

What do I want my oncologist doing in his miniscule moments of spare time? Learning how to secure his home network? Absorbing the concept of "the far enemy"? Learning how to decipher a bowl of alphabet soup's worth of obscurantist militarese bafflegab acronyms so he can even decode what the debate's topic is?

Or figuring out how to shrink a tumour faster and less invasively?

God help us if we ever need an oncologist and we get one who's politically terrifically well informed. Perhaps we'll be able to have stimulating policy debates while we're dying from his neglect of some development in his own field in order for him to stay abreast on the historical differences in religious observation between two cultures that live ten thousand miles away - and whose land we were lied into being on in the first place by a man who himself, according to Bob Woodward, didn't understand the difference - which is the only reason this is even important information today.

There's just too much information. Even the process of triaging the essential from the noise floor to know what topics we should be better informed about absorbs more time than we have in an "employer friendly" work climate where people work longer hours to stay afloat because responsibilities one has to undertake for the same relative wage are higher. Some people work multiple jobs to stay afloat.

And thus we created expert systems to "know these things for us by proxy". We created classes of wonks and pundits and academics and intel and military to separate the wheat from the chaff, to triage and filter and present the information on our behalf and to our benefit.

The citizenry has responsibility, but they didn't fail because they "didn't directly know things" which they didn't even know they needed to know - they failed because they trusted a class of experts that has failed, a class of experts now riddled with the corrupt, the politicized and the purchasable, which slowly pandered away its integrity by caving to political pressure to produce pre-ordained politicized analyses, and gradually but inexorably whored itself for fellowships, or increased ratings driven by false controversy, or military fiefdoms, or a cushy corporate sinecure upon retirement - bribes both direct and indirect.

Some members have certainly retained their integrity - but unless we have detailed knowledge in each field ourselves far transcending that of the laity, how are we even to know which aren't? Quis custodiet custodes? How do we separate the wheat from the chaff amongst those who we trusted to sort our wheat from our chaff?

Some people, myself included, spend a lot of time keeping themselves informed, yet I see no guarantee, as much better informed as Agonists generally may be than the "man in the street", that we can reliably answer that question every time. In fact, the crediblity of sources is a frequent discussion point here. Some non-credible sources are obvious - some not.

How long has it been since the term "think tank" signalled "truthseeker" instead of "rented minds searching for arguments to support a previously-decided conclusion"?

The enormity of the betrayal of that trust is upon us; we now have academics like this character who incredibly has risen to the status of premiere expert on the clash between two cultures while apparently having next to zero involvement with one side, who receives virtually all of his funding from one side, rarely speaking in front of an audience of the other side, having precisely zero community involvement except with one side.

That's how closely "academic" maps onto "truthseeker" in this age of politicization and corruption of our expert systems. Apparently you can get all the truth you need to rise to the position of major expert on a politicized and propagandized conflict between two parties while staying utterly and completely immersed in one alone. You'd have a hard time directly blaming that on the citizenry who didn't vote to put him at the ear of policy makers.

So yes, the citizenry bears responsibility. But it isn't for not knowing. It's the same responsibility that an employer bears when their employees betray them.

...Shia and Sunni and the significance as it specifically applies to the two terrorist groups with the most accomplished and enduring track record against the United States isn't what I'd call wonk-centric. The notion that knowing the single most important major axis of variation for a group of significantly over a billion people, many of whom sit on top of the world's premiere strategic resource is wonkish is, IMNSHO, symptomatic of the problem.

I don't buy the notion that the citizenry shouldn't be blamed because the deceitful experts misled them - they got sold a bill of goods by ratings-selected hucksters because a politically significant chunk of them from both sides of the aisle wanted to buy it and all the post facto searching for an attractive goat ain't going to change that one bit. When the employees and management conspire to betray the enterprise systemically by making short-sighted and stupid decisions over the course of forty years I'm just not going to accept that they, the board, and the shareholders don't all share roughly equivalent amounts of the blame.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

Active-Duty Military Personnel Will Protest War in Iraq on Wednesday

- Wednesday, more than a hundred members of active duty military, reserve, and National Guard will speak out against the War in Iraq. Organizers say this will be the first time active servicemembers will voice a protest since the United States entered Iraq in March 2003.

Senior Navy Seaman Jonathan Hutto will be among them. He wants to make it clear. He's not against war, "I want to state that we're not pacifists here." He's just against this war: The one placing U.S. troops in Iraq.

Wednesday, Hutto will be part of a national call to get military against the U.S. presence in Iraq to go to www.appealforredress.org.

more at link

also: Like the Nation, Military Families Divided on Iraq