Conservatives should know this word

Iatrogenic is a word us conservatives should learn, use, and teach. From what I'm reading, Sen. Moynihan first used it in relation to the government. It didn't go far. It hasn't gone far. Until about this week. I've read it in three separate, apparently unrelated blog posts.
Let us quote: "Induced in a patient by a physician's activity, manner, or therapy. Used especially of an infection or other complication of treatment." Scratch the word "physician" and you've got your term. Also change "a" to "an" so that it still squares grammatically. Quit bitching! Jesus, make an effort.

I was having a conversation with a lefty this week. A teacher. She was "undecided" twixt Bush and Kerry. I'm with Jonah Goldberg on the saintly "undecided" voters. If they really don't see a difference between a Democratic or Republican candidate, after a year of campaigning (especially in primaries), EVEN if they only watch a single, national TV news program every night, and can't tell a single difference between the candidates, maybe they shouldn't vote. Or vote for Nader. Too often I get the feel that the "undecided" voters are really more concerned about which candidate will give them things. So they're Democrats at heart and should vote thusly. Look, if you're looking for people to give you things, a conservative probably isn't your best bet. A conservative may have read Max Weber's Capitalism and the Protestant Work Ethic and isn't necessarily predisposed towards giving people things for free. Please note I said conservative, not Republican. If it's frustrating for you to have to deal with that parsing, imagine how frustrating it is for a conservative Republican.

Enough of that. What the hell was I talking about? Ah, my conversation with the teacher. So she starts in on the, what, 2-year-old No Child Left Behind program and starts blasting it. Because she's a teacher. I don't fault her for this. I think it could work better. But I think it lit a proper fire under the educational establishment. This person I was talking to is a good teacher. It'd be nice if there were more good teachers, and it'd be nice if there were less bad teachers (numerically, not percentagewise). NCLB helps that, or is meant to. It should. But it's 2 years old. If it was 30 years old and didn't do what it was supposed to do, we'd call it the EPA. Or OSHA. Or the Department of Education, or Labor, or Health and Human Services.

What the hell am I saying? I'm saying if NCLB doesn't work (which could be true!) it should be changed. Like Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid or AFDC or WIC or... what? Those dinosaurs! There were unintended consequences of the welfare state. If people get money for not working, they won't work. If they're getting money when they turn 65, they won't invest their own money for retirement. When people get free healthcare, they use a whole helluva lot more of it than people who pay for it. Unintended consquences that (in some cases) have only recently been remedied. After being in place for 30 years--that's 2 or 3 generations simply laid waste! In education, that means huuuge portions of a population that simply can't perform at even basic levels to sustain an economy or themselves. Why was this allowed? Because people meant well. How do you argue against a series of policies that really nice people agree with? You're spending money for schools! And books! And students! Sure, there are some problems, like spending all that money on schools and books and students and the students can't read, but that's because you didn't spend enough. Ever. In history. Except when you didn't spend enough (by modern standards, even accounting for inflation) and all those people not only learned to read, but they learned to read some pretty impressive literature. This, in part, is how a conservative thinks, by the way: Some things work, or worked. What worked about them? Why did they stop working? What about stuff that didn't work? Any idea why that didn't work?

Iatrogenic policies are thine enemy. Spot them early. Correct them or excise them.

Grok and Other Nerd Words

Since we're talking about Stranger in a Strange Land, I had a quick note about language. The word "grok" is very important in this book--it means (roughly translated) to Know. If you know any Spanish, it's the difference between conocer and entender. To know a fact (entender) and to know deeply (the other one). It's an important and good word and it's important to point out that it simply doesn't translate to English well. But of course only nerds know it. Remember "I Grok Spock?"
I would have liked to use this word in everyday conversation (like I do thee and thy and thine and other stuff that gets lodged in my head), but it's not widely enough known, except as a word that extreme nerds use. Damn nerds.
Reminds me, I named a project I'm working on at work "Mjolnir". That's Thor's hammer. The people I work for really like acronyms, so they tend to spell it out rather than say it ("mi-yoll-near"). I named a server Valkyrie once, too--I figured it was a nice common word. The guy that rides a motorcycle to work picked it up immediately. Otherwise you'd think it was a random collection of vowels and consonants and the letter Y. It's not a Czech name!
Anyhow, more later.

Write What You Know

Howdy, true believers. It's been a weird couple of weeks here. I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and adored it. I hate to say it's about comic books, but it is, kinda. It's really about people who make comic books--like historical fiction about the Golden Age of comics. Read it.
Then I figured I was in the mood for some Robert Heinlein, so I started up on Stranger in a Strange Land. It's interesting to read about what The Future was like in the 1950's and 60's. Heinlein missed somewhat (somewhat), but I think he has a good grasp of what a culture is like. For those of us who aren't despicable nerds like me, the book is about Valentine Michael Smith, who would be Mars's equivalent of Tarzan. Raised by Martians, brought back to Earth 25 years later, he has, shall we say, learned some rather interesting things. I won't go into detail. Read it yourself, lazy ass.
Anyhow, Heinlein Gets politics. Not just politicians, but the whole funny jibberjab--international relations, religion, war, etc. Too many science fiction writers (the great Arthur C. Clarke among them, Orson Scott Card not among them, though his strength is international relations) take rather simplistic notions of what it's for, what it's about, and so forth. If they do get too far into it, the writing has all the feel of Being Researched. Think about a Dean Koontz book. Okay, wait, think about the Dean Koontz book, then think about the various bases wrapped around that book. I'm not saying don't do research--you gotta do research. But even with a depth of sources and so forth, all that info seems pasted on.
Let's compare and contrast here. The author of Kavalier and Klay, Michael Chabon, loves comic books. He was in last year's History Channel documentary. He lives in that world to some extent, and you get that feel from reading this book. He did research--he talks about it in the Afterword (and I was a little envious)--but that was mining for facts, probably for anecdotes, timelines, etc. He already lived in that world and he brought you into it and made you love it with him. Yeah, I was already there. The Pulitzer Prize committee probably was not. The friend that recommended it to me lives in the medical world and has only read the comics I send to her.
Heinlein deals with (admittedly flawed) futuristic politics. Interplanetary law is not set in stone and a known quantity, it's set forth in a series of agreements and an important court case that one of the main characters disagrees with. And interplanetary law is unimportant to non-humans. The president is both parts bastard and nice guy, because presidents and politicians as a whole have to be. The legal system (not the justice system--the entire legal system) is pretty radically changed, but not in some ridiculous post-modern perfected human way. Heinlein has an enthusiasm for politics, if not a great love of it. His storytelling tends to be better in this book than in a lot of other science fiction I've read, including other Heinlein.d