Afghanistan: A cornucopia of lies, deceit and partisan recrimination and misdirection

We all expected it. We are going to get it. The lies are gushing from all over the place. Our former ex-president, Lyin Donnie, hacked up a hairball yesterday that immediately got a three Pinocchio rating from professional fact checkers, but rave reviews from fascist radical right media. The Washington Post fact checker writes: 

“ALL EQUIPMENT should be demanded to be immediately returned to the United States, and that includes every penny of the $85 billion dollars in cost.” 

This is a new claim. A version of this claim also circulates widely on right-leaning social media — that somehow the Taliban has ended up with $83 billion in U.S. weaponry. (Trump, as usual, rounds the number up.)

.... the equipment provided to Afghan forces amounted to $24 billion over 20 years. The GAO said approximately 70 percent of the equipment went to the Afghan military and the rest went to the national police (part of the Interior Ministry).

Of course, some of this equipment may be obsolete or destroyed — or soon may not be usable.

Even more problematic, there were not enough maintenance crews to maintain the aircraft. “Without continued contractor support, none of the AAF’s airframes can be sustained as combat effective for more than a few months, depending on the stock of equipment parts in-country, the maintenance capability on each airframe, and the timing of contractor support withdrawal,” the [GAO] report said.

“No one has any accounting of exactly what survived the last weeks of the collapse and fell into Taliban hands, and even before the collapse, SIGAR had publicly reported no accounting was possible in many districts,” said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In rough terms, however, if the ANDSF could not sustain it without foreign contractors, the Taliban will have very serious problems in operating it. That covers most aircraft and many electronics and heavier weapons.”

The Pinocchio Test

U.S. military equipment was given to Afghan security forces over two decades. Tanks, vehicles, helicopters and other gear fell into the hands of the Taliban when the U.S.-trained force quickly collapsed. The value of these assets is unclear, but if the Taliban is unable to obtain spare parts, it may not be able to maintain them.

But the value of the equipment is not more than $80 billion. That’s the figure for all of the money spent on training and sustaining the Afghan military over 20 years. The equipment portion of that total is about $24 billion — certainly not small change — but the actual value of the equipment in the Taliban’s hands is probably much less than even that amount.

Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions. This gets into the realm of "mostly false." But it could include statements which are technically correct (such as based on official government data) but are so taken out of context as to be very misleading. The line between Two and Three can be bit fuzzy and we do not award half-Pinocchios. So we strive to explain the factors that tipped us toward a Three. 

The WaPo fact checkers describe four Pinocchio statements like this: Whoppers.

Questions: 

1. Are the WaPo fact checkers biased in favor of Lyin Donnie because they should have rated his lying blither a four Pinocchio statement since the liar’s assertion of $85 billion was literally 100% false? In other words, the fact checkers let that literal lie slide.

2. Is this just the beginning of what is going to turn out to be a hell of a lot of lying, finger pointing, deceit, sleight of hand and so forth from all over the place, left, right, center, alt-universe, pragmatic rationalists, Christian nationalist, fascist, etc., or just from some of those places?

An abortion update

As expected, the Supreme Court is set to hear an abortion case from Mississippi that could wind up overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Anti-abortion states have been passing laws for years that cut back on abortion rights, but are intended to kill of Roe once and for all. Those laws are constantly being challenged in the courts, which is what the people who wrote the laws want. They all want to be the authors of the case that finally kills off Roe. The current case presents the court with an intermediate scenario that would require the court to (1) reverse its rule that abortions before fetus viability outside the womb are constitutional, (2) completely overturn Roe, or (3) reject the state law and leave things as they are for now. 

Option 1 would greatly limit abortions. Option two would either leave abortion law to the states, or outlaw most or all abortions in all states. The former is probably more likely than the latter.

Given that there now are six radical Christian nationalist judges on the court, all of whom were put there specifically to overturn Roe as their highest priority, this feels like the case that will probably see the demise of Roe, but opinions on that differ (see below). The New York Times writes: 

A major confrontation on the abortion battlefield looms this fall, when the Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments on whether Mississippi can ban abortion after 15 weeks. That’s roughly nine weeks before viability, the point at which states are now allowed to forbid abortion. To uphold Mississippi’s law, the court would have to eliminate its own viability rule or reverse Roe v. Wade altogether.

Given the composition of the court, there is a real chance the justices may overthrow Roe. But there is also the possibility that the court, for institutional or political reasons, may not yet want to upend that 1973 decision, which found the Constitution protects a woman’s right to have an abortion without undue government interference.

What then? A recent ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit seems tailor made for a Supreme Court that wants to look as if it cares about precedent while shooting a hole through that right. The appellate court relied on a past Supreme Court ruling to give leeway to the Texas Legislature to restrict a certain abortion procedure even though there was uncertainty about the medical consequences of the stricture.  

Texas is one of several states that functionally ban dilation and evacuation, the safest and most common abortion procedure used in the second trimester. In performing the procedure, a doctor dilates the cervix and then removes a fetus using forceps and possibly suction.

The NYT goes on to point out that the abortion-restricting law in Texas could be a pathway for states to get rid of Roe without overturning it.[1] That would leave a fig leaf of plausible deniability for the Christian nationalists on the court to falsely claim they are not political partisans. That Texas law is bubbling up and it might be the one the Supreme Court eventually chooses to uphold. By doing so, there would be a path to eliminate legal abortions without overturning Roe. The states could regulate legal abortions into non-existence but point to a meaningless Roe decision as being still valid law. That is a cynical political argument. However, the anti-abortion crowd does not care about cynical tactics. They care only about getting rid of abortions.

If the court chooses option 2 and leave abortion law to the states, women with the means to travel out of state to get an abortion will routinely do so. If the court decided to make abortion illegal everywhere, then women with the means to travel out of the country to get an abortion will routinely do so. If states makes it illegal travel to get an abortion, then depending on the penalty states decide to impose, life for those women could get complicated and/or dangerous. 

Questions: Should the Supreme Court overturn Roe and make abortions illegal in all states, or leave it to the states to make what laws they want? Is the Supreme Court mostly politically partisan or not, at least on politicized issues such as abortion, gun control, civil liberties and voting rights?

Footnote: 

1. The NYT writes on the implications of the Texas law: 

The Fifth Circuit decision, should it end up before the Supreme Court, offers an escape hatch for justices who might think it is prudent to take their time dismantling abortion rights.

The court’s institutionalists, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, do not want to crush respect for the federal judiciary. Honoring precedent makes the justices look more like jurists than partisans. And politically, overruling Roe also presents unique challenges.

Most Americans pay no attention to much of what the Supreme Court does, but abortion is different. A decision reversing Roe could energize abortion rights supporters to vote in 2022 and 2024 and also advance the cause of court reform. All of that means that the court’s conservative majority might hesitate to get rid of Roe quickly, especially without paying lip service to precedent.

That is the genius of the Texas strategy. There seems to be no trade-off between relying on precedent and gradually eliminating abortion rights. The message of the Fifth Circuit decision was clear: The court’s conservatives can have it all.

The court can pretend as hard as it can that it is not partisan political. That is just not true. 

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Chapter review: Levers of Influence: (Power) Tools of the Trade

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” -- Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Fail to Produce Responsive Governments, 2016

(Note: the argument in Democracy for Realists about the "average citizen" being too confused by the complexity and intricacy of the world to have a reasonable grasp of it, basically recaps Walter Lippman's classic argument to the same effect in Public Opinion (1922). In the end he concludes we need experts in communications-- propagandists he depicts as benign-- to interpret the world and spoon feed the masses the limited knowledge they can handle. Dewey and Lippman argued about this. Lippman said democracy is impossible, Dewey denied such a conclusion while recognizing that for it to succeed the mindset prevalent in our society would need to change. Hence his educational theories.) -- PD, comment here, Aug. 27, 2021 

If some form of pragmatic rationalism is to ever have a chance of making a significant difference regarding the human condition, public education will need to be significantly reoriented to focus on how the human mind works and fails to work and how it can be and often is deceived and manipulated. -- Germaine, Aug. 29, 2021

Chapter review

Levers of Influence: (Power) Tools of the Trade is chapter 1 of Robert Cialdini’s 2021 book, Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion. Cialdini is a leading expert on persuasion science. Some of his research was discussed here before. The book (446 pages, 41 pages of notes) is written for a general audience and is easy to read.

Cialdini starts out by noting that evidence from social science is settled that both humans and other higher animals often, maybe usually, respond to input information in what he refers to as an automatic “click-run” mode. This kind of behavior is formally called fixed-action patterns. These behavior patterns range from simple to very complex. A key trait of click-run mode behavior is that the behaviors in the pattern almost always play out is exactly the same pattern or sequence of behaviors. As Cialdini puts it: 

“It is almost as if the patterns were installed as programs within the animals. .... Click, and the appropriate program is activated; run and out rolls the standard sequence of behaviors.”

What is really interesting about click-run is what triggers the initial click. It often isn’t much at all, e.g., a patch of the right color instead of the same color as a whole animal threatening the turf of another animal. With humans Cialdini points out that the word “because” in a request for a favor is the trigger, not the reason for the favor that follows the trigger. Thus ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine because I'm running late and need copies right away’ is ~94% effective, ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine because I need to make some copies’ is ~93% effective, while ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine’ is only ~60% effective. The trigger is the word because, not the reason given.

Cialdini argues that humans have no choice but to rely on click-run, mental shortcuts and other tactics that reduce the cognitive load needed to navigate a world that is too complex for anything more than a superficial understanding or even a false impression of some understanding:

“Such automatic, stereotyped behavior is prevalent in much of human action because in many cases, it is the most efficient form of behaving, and in other cases it is simply necessary. You and I exist in an extraordinarily complicated environment, easily the most rapidly moving and complex ever on this planet. To deal with it, we need simplifying shortcuts. .... Without the simplifying features, we would stand frozen--cataloging, appraising and calibrating-- as time for action sped by and away.”

In addition to click-run mode, humans can respond to information by a process called controlled responding. This mode is slow and requires conscious effort. This requires both a desire to be more thoughtful and an ability to think the information through. There is a strong human tendency to operate in click-run mode when the effects of something are relatively modest or impactful on other people, but not themselves. Thus controlled responding tends to kick in and act as a safety net in situations where personal stakes are significant. 

We all know where this is going - the profiteers

Cialdini notes that complexity and time are not on the side of mindsets oriented to controlled responding: “I have become impressed by evidence indicating that the form and pace of modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even on many personally relevant topics.” Too often, issues are too complex, time too limited, distractions too intrusive and fomented emotional responses too strong for people operate in controlled processing mode, so we default to click-run mode. 

Professional influencers are aware of all of this. Propagandists have been aware of most of these things at least since the early 1900s. Some or most of these aspects of the human condition were intuited by careful observations of people ranging from Plato in ~400 BC to master propagandist Edward Bernays in the early 1900s to Walter Lipmann in the 1920s to modern corporate marketing and the Republican Party today.

Cialdini comments that most people know little or nothing about click-run mode and how it can be triggered to coax people to believe and/or do things they might otherwise not. He sounds a warning: “it is vital that we clearly recognize one of their [click-run] properties. They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone does know how they work.” He points out that humans share with other animals this aspect of behavior and the vulnerability it imparts on people and other animals.  

Businesses are acutely aware of this aspect of human behavior and they know how to hit triggers that lead to more sales and higher profits. We are rarely aware that we have been manipulated. For example, salespeople in clothing stores are instructed to always guide customers first to the most expensive item and then to a less expensive item. That is because once we have accepted a more expensive item, a lower cost item seems less expensive that it would if that had been the first thing the customer decided to buy. Some (most?) real estate salespeople show new home shopper a couple of undesirable but over priced properties and then show a couple of nicer properties. This contrast makes people more open to higher prices for a nicer home. 

Car dealers and salespeople use the same low-high contrast tactic, called perceptual contrast, to coax people into buying expensive options after a price on the car has been agreed to. By contrast with the cost of the car, the cost of various options or upgrades look cheap and are offered inly one at a time. They can easily add a lot to the final price the customer winds up paying. Cialdini sums this sales tactic up nicely: “While customers stand, signed contract in hand, wondering what happened and finding no one to blame but themselves, the car dealer stands smiling the knowing smile of the jujitsu master.” 

Questions: 

1. It is mostly legal, but is it immoral to trigger click-run behavior patterns or use tactics like perceptual contrast to coax people to buy and/or pay more than they otherwise would have? If one business doesn’t adopt such tactics, a competitor could or would, putting the less manipulative business at a disadvantage. 

2. Roughly, what amount of commerce in the US is driven by manipulation that increases buying and selling over mostly unmanipulated commerce, e.g., ~45%? Of that, how much is waste in the sense that added purchases turned out to be not needed, e.g., ~85%? 

3. Is the moral situation any different for politics compared to commerce, at least when they are mostly independent? What about when business buys legal favors from governments to more aggressively exploit consumers, at least in situations (i) without discernable beneficial impacts on society, or (ii) with discernable harmful impacts on society, e.g., freedom from pollution regulations?