Stardate 20021021.2325

(On Screen): Every parent dreads the point where their children learn that most powerful of words: "No!" Suddenly, nearly everything that a parent wants to do is greeted with a peremptory No! from the child, and a battle of wills ensues.

But kids equally learn to hate a word. They think of something they want to do, and ask their parents to take them to see a particular movie, or to go to the amusement park, or the beach, or to go get soaked in the computerized fountain at the mall. And the parent says, "Later."

Not no but later. For a kid it's frustrating as hell; I know I always hated it. I think parents have been doing this as long as there have been kids, and kids have always hated it. The problem with later is that it deprives the kid of all weapons. If the parent says no then the kid can ask "Why not?" and try to engage mommy in a discussion. But when mommy says later then she's already acknowledged that it's a good idea. Only problem is that it still doesn't happen, and the kid is left with the problem of trying to argue about timing and scheduling.

Which is, of course, why parents do that. If they outright say "no" then they know they'll have to defend the decision. Sometimes in that case they have to fall back on naked power: "Because I said so."

Of course, it isn't just parents who use this tactic against their children. It has a long and glorious history as a tactic of obstruction; it's a classic way of subverting actions and policies indirectly.

It is, for instance, a very common tactic in the legislative process. Someone introduces a bill you despise, but rather than try to directly rally opposition to it, you work in the rules committee to make it so that this bill will need approval from 9 different committees and sub-committees before it can even be considered on the chamber floor.

And if your legislature is bicameral and if you have a like-minded colleague in the other chamber doing the same thing, then you work to make it so that even if it looks as if the bill will pass, that the versions of the bill in the two chambers will be amended in different ways. That means that after both chambers pass it there will have to be a conference to resolve the differences, after which the revised bill will have to again pass both chambers. If you can put enough hurdles in the way, it will still be in process at the end of the session when Congress adjourns, at which point all pending bills are dead.

If there's something you oppose on general principles, but you don't think you can get a law against it passed, then another approach is to try to work with the bureaucrats to increase the regulatory burden as much as possible. It is perhaps fortunate for us that this concept didn't really get going until the last few centuries. For all his achievements, Rameses the Great sure hadn't figured it out. Otherwise we'd have seen something like this:

"Why, yes, Moses; letting the Hebrews go free would be an excellent idea. If you could please fill out these forms and make a detailed proposition, we'll take it up at our next council meeting. Of course, we'll have to negotiate a process whereby the extraction of Hebrew slave labor out of the Egyptian economy is gradual so as to not kick us into recession, but that's just a detail. Oh, by the way, before you can have permission to bring a plague of frogs on Egypt, or make the Nile run red with blood, you'll need to file an Environmental Impact Statement. You do understand, don't you?"

And fifty years later Moses would die of old age while waiting for consideration of the ninth version of his request for freedom, the previous eight having been returned for further enhancement pointing out all the subsidiary forms and studies he hadn't yet done.

The Environmental Impact Statement is easily the greatest achievement of the environmentalist movement. Imagine: an entire government bureaucracy was created for the sole purpose of forcing anyone who wants to build anything anywhere to spend vast amounts of money on studies and create truly awesome reports, all of which can then be used by enemies of the project to work against it. (After all, it isn't possible to build anything without affecting the environment.)

It certainly isn't leftists alone who do this; it's been a favored tactic by everyone forever. The tobacco industry managed to defer the day of reckoning for the death-toll caused by smoking by a continued insistence on more and more studies and a continued claim that a true cause-and-effect relationship between smoking and cancer has not actually been found. Yes, it was true that there was one of the strongest documented statistical correlation between smoking and such diseases as emphysema, but that doesn't prove that smoking was the cause, does it?

Equally, in the days before the founding of the EPA, polluting businesses used this, too. What, you say our factory is killing all the fish in the river? Why, we'll get right on it! We'll have to do a lot of studies first, of course, to try to understand just what it is that's happening; probably take ten or fifteen years. We'll get back to you...

Engineers do this, too, though we are somewhat less subtle about it. One classic form is "That's a version 2 feature."

In all cases, the idea is to delay so much that eventually the proposal becomes moot, or the proposer dies of old age or gives up out of sheer frustration