Two medical disorders that owe their existence to political advocacy: Crack babies (via Reason and Slate ), and Alzheimers .

Crack babies are now not just exploded theory, but unhip and superseded by meth babies.  That decade old Mother Jones article is eloquent on its popularity:

The crack-baby myth was so powerful in part because it had something for everyone, whether one's ideological leanings called for enhancing public programs to meet the crisis, or for punishing the drug-addicted mothers seen as responsible for it.

Eventually it folded in the face of controlled blind trials (grad students observation, not controlled feeding of crack to babies). Alzheimer's, by contrast, has enough clinical evidence to thrive as a disorder, though there's still dispute over where the line should be drawn, and how common or natural are its distinctive postmortem brain plaques, still the only way to diagnose it.

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Should we have a health topic?

Reason asks three questions of numerous commentators and punditry in Iraq Progress Report - Advocates for liberty weigh in after three years . Since reason didn't ask me, I thought I would answer anyway from an Australian context.

1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?

No. I don't recall fully believing all the claims of weapons and threats that were being touted by US, UK and Australia. I thought at the time it was pretty flimsy and looked more like manipulating public perception than genuine evidence.

2. Have you changed your position?

No. I remain convinced that the weakness in most despotic systems is their desire for western legitimacy by holding corrupt elections. This was how Indonesia over-threw Suharto. I suspect it will be how Iran, Egypt and others transition to liberal democracy as well. Saudi Arabia remains a problem due to its lack of elections at all.

3. What should the U.S Australia do in Iraq now?

I advocated in the past that Australia ditch Iraq as an American expedition and return to the original goal which was the eradication of Al Queda and the Taliban in Afghanistan .

How Others Replied

Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings wrote to question one;

No. Hayek does not stop at the water's edge. What the hawks proposed to do to Iraq was just the foreign policy version of central planning and likely to work as well.

Has Christopher Hitchens changed his position?

Not in the least: I wish only that Saddam had not been able to rely upon Russian and French protection and the influence of oil-for-food racketeers and other political scum.

Has John Mueller changed his position?

Hardly. The main issue now is whether the war has become the greatest debacle in American foreign policy history or only the second greatest, after Vietnam.

What does Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute think the US should do in Iraq?

Damned if I know.

Micheal Young of the Beirut Daily Star offered a more detailed response to the final question;

It [US] should maintain its military presence, even if that means modifying it in such a way as to avoid the semblance of military occupation. It should plan to stick around for the long term, regardless of domestic pressures. And it should oversee a genuine, consensual process of national dialogue and stabilization in Iraq, not a self-defeating handing over of power to security forces that are, in reality, cover for sectarian militias. This continued American presence is essential—to buttress democratic forces elsewhere in the region, to counterbalance Iran's growing power, and to prevent the outbeak of civil war in Iraq.

Embracing a form of federalism with each ethnic group having an autonomous area in conjunction with a staged withdrawal of troops seems to be the another offered suggestion as to what to do in Iraq.

Michael Gerson has an article in the WaPo which argues that atheists are unable to explain how someone is moral without their being some theistic intervention in the natural world; acknowledged by the individual or not. Gerson discredits Kantian morality and Bentham's utilitarianism in coming to the conclusion that without understanding that the moral qualities of "love, harmony and sympathy" flow through God as creator then morality becomes a cruel joke of nature and is deprived of goodness or moral quality.

The core question Gerson asks is:

So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: "Obey your evolutionary instincts" because those instincts are conflicted. "Respect your brain chemistry" or "follow your mental wiring" don't seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: "To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I'm going to do whatever I please." C.S. Lewis put the argument this way: "When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains."

Because atheism does not recognise a god, creator or an omniprescient entity, then it cannot understand good, only want. Gerson is arguing that atheists understand only selfishness, and not selflessness. For Gerson this does not stop atheists acting morally, but the consequence is:

Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.

Kantian morality and Benthem's utilitarianism both cover that aspect. Kant argues that reason makes an individual capable of seeing and understanding the 'supreme good'. Kant writes:

For reason recognizes the establishment of a good will as its highest practical destination.

Reason does not prohibit the understanding of moral attitudes and actions of others. According to Kant, the better developed an individuals reason, then the better capable they are of judging moral acts; and not necessarily their own.

So Gerson's argument is that an atheists ability to reason is absolutely selfish and only knowledge of god enables selflessness. Kant's morality disproves this, as it only requires one atheist to reason whether another has acted morally or immorally to make Gerson's conclusion false.

As an example, South Sea Republic focuses heavily on the morality of republicanism and the morality of democracy. Which Avocadia described in the past as having to serve the 'morality of liberty'. We spend a lot of time discussing what are immoral acts toward republican governance, of which tyranny is the most immoral.

This is not unique to South Sea Republic, Australian Republicans such as Dan Deniehy and Charles Harpur rooted their republicanism in the morality of liberty. In this environment if an atheist is capable of recognising tyranny and reasoning its destructive conclusion, then an atheist is just as capable of moral understanding in a social, cultural, economic and political environment as a theist is.

Gerson's other argument for atheism's inherent limited moral faculties is that:

In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature -- imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

Gerson is arguing that materialism equates to immorality, and that theism's faith in God and presumably the infinite space of heaven, allows the theist to understand the immorality of materialism and atheism; where an atheist who has reasoned there is no valid proof for a supernatural being cannot.

Theism undeniably has a blind spot for reason. The thesis that atheists cannot recognise immorality in others must necessarily skip past the capability of atheists to reason.

More: Discussion at HuSi and x-posted to Gary Sauer-Thompson's website. Interesting discussion at Rebecca Hartong's site too.

Update: It appears Gerson was trolling. Hitchens has replied with polemics.

Carl Schmitt argued that without a friend-enemy distinction there was no 'political'. Increasingly that division is rotating around the distinction between reason and irrationalism. Reason is often construed as a political outlet for liberalism.

Conservapedia recently challenged scientific data for a bacterial experiment. From the article:

Of course, that lack of understanding [scientific illiteracy] might be expected from someone who seems to believe that there are distinct conservative and liberal forms of science.

Still, you can sense the beginnings of a response to the fact that the situation may be spiraling out of Conservapedia's control.

When a contributor suggested the exchange was making the site look bad, the response indicated that the any problems could be dismissed as a case of biased perception: "What sort of Liberal defeatism are you bound up in, and why do you assume, without examining the facts of the matter, that this has not gone well?"

The division is not really scientific, it is political with the friend-enemy distinction being enunciated clearly. Barry Ritholtz has a similar issue with how the economy is portrayed through media:

We have heard longstanding charges of liberal media bias, going all the way back to Spiro Agnew's Nattering Nabobs Negativism (September 11, 1970). Whatever validity that Trojan horse might have ever had has now jumped the shark. ...

Indeed, the bias is precisely the other way -- between reality and ideological absurdity

It is too easy for those immersed in irrationalism to discard reason, data or rational methods and explain away an inconvenient world-view. Under liberalism and the dominance of the individual as a political entity the debate, too-and-fro of politics is supposed to establish a principle of the least dissatisfaction within constitutionalism.

Liberalism is intended to diminish the foe within, or the enemy of the state, by elevating the individual above the state. The friend-enemy distinction allows for the justification and establishment of the state of exception where the state can act in a manner that is repugnant to the doctrine of inalienable political rights. Effectively placing an individual outside of the judicial order.

Arguably the danger in the friend-enemy distinction is that it aids an environment where the executive can claim emergency and operate under a state of exception.