Friday

Friday Links:

More on the surfer who solved the world. There's a useful analogy to an earlier point in physics. As the article notes, the coolest thing is that the theory is testable. That's science.

Did "thousands of people [die] because of Kissinger's activities"? Some discussion. The things for which he really seems to be condemned are things he didn't try to stop: Cambodia, Laos, West Pakistan. To what degree is it fairly the fault of the United States of America if people kill each other in Cambodia? We had the power to stop it, perhaps, had we backed South Vietnam past 1972. (An alternative argument: being a democracy, we did not have the power to stop it, as the people were flat out tired of war in southeast Asia; in which case, the government may not have had the strength to stop the war in any case.) Even granting, for the sake of argument, that we had the power, does the failure to use that power make it Kissinger's fault that Man X murdered Man Y?

If so, that's an idea with consequences. If I see my neighbor about to shoot his wife and don't stop him, I'm a murderer. I guess we'd better start building new prisons.

What seems more likely to me is that Kissinger's power is greatly overestimated by historians and journalists alike; and that they are not able to see the opportunity costs attending every choice he made, whether to do or to not do. Those costs aren't always apparent from the outside even at the time. They're likely to become less and less obvious as the decades roll away.

That's not to absolve him of guilt, but neither is it to blame him. A historian has enough work just trying to sort out what really happened.