Political Weenie Report: Why Cure a White Male Disease?

I went to Carleton University in Ottawa, the 2nd coldest capital city in the world (Moscow is 3rd). Served a year as VP of the student council there, after running on a campaign slate named Apathy that used posters including Darth Vader ("tired of choosing the lesser evil?") and George Santayana (included list of broken campaign promises from last 2 years, followed by "people who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it" quote). It was a lot of fun, and it didn't end with the campaign. As one example among many, I'm sure my parents still remember me showing up for High Holidays with a Mohawk. I had promised to get one in public if the students raised $50,000 for Cystic Fibrosis research in the annual Shinerama charity fundraiser. They did. So I did.

Only one problem: where the hell do you find a square yamulkah? But so what. I had a childhood friend with CF, a disease that drowns kids. Making a dent in that is something to be proud of.

I will say, though, that the people involved in student politics were a very different population from the university students at large- and not always in salutary ways. Recently, that was illustrated by a motion to stop supporting cystic fibrosis as Carleton's orientation week charity. Why?

Because it "has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men."

read the rest! »

The Times Video Guy

As you doubtless know, the LA Times is sitting on a video of Obama at a Palestinian event honoring Rashid Khalidi, who I now believe has Edward Said's chair at Columbia. Their journalistic integrity precludes them from releasing the video. Yes, I'm being ironic, and yes, I will do something on journalism in light of this and the Nir Rosen story.

But for now, I did a tiny bit of digging around, and found a Eric Martin post at American Footprints which included a Juan Cole post which - shockingly! - calls 'racism' in the attacks on Khalidi, and extols this article in the Nation as an example of the kind of good influence he could be on the Middle East.

So let's go look at it.

read the rest! »

Racist Encyclopedia of Race and Racism

Macmillan Reference USA has just published an 'Encyclopedia of Race and Racism'. I'm inherently wary of efforts like this, but this one is over the top...

Harry's Place points out that, first it has a category for 'Zionism' and next that that section was written by a noted anti-semite and the author of the webzine 'Race Traitor'. You can imagine what he wrote.

Go over and read about the whole shameful episode. My personal favorite is the response from the publisher of the encyclopedia, Frank Menchaca.

"After careful review of arguments from both sides," he wrote to David Harris, "neither Mr. Moore (John Hartwell Moore, the encyclopedia’s Editor in Chief) nor I feel we can operate as arbitrators of these controversies."

Right. having published this calumny, they can't be responsible for standing behind its validity. It's as though they hired Velikovsky to do the section on the solar system.

I am passionately opposed to efforts to limit free speech, but I am equally passionate about truth in advertising. This book is no more an 'encyclopedia' than this blog is, and I'll both be letting the folks at McMillan know my feelings about it and I'll be visiting my local library. I have no problem with the library holding this book - just as I'd have no problem with the library holding Mein Kampf or State and Revolution. But let's not offer it the authority of being considered an encyclopedia.

Ah, It's Fall

...and it's time for the "college fiction teacher explains why he's sorry for the troops" oped. This one is in the Boston Globe.

My first impulse is to say, "I'm sorry to hear that." Because I am. I'm sorry to know that the person I'm talking to might someday be maimed or killed on the job, or might someday kill someone else. Or refuel a plane that drops bombs on buildings.

I can't see how anyone who calls himself or herself Christian - or human, for that matter - wouldn't be sorry.

The fact that we have an army, that we need an army, is inherently tragic. It's an admission that our species is still ruled by fear and aggression.

read the rest! »

When Bad Ideas Collide...

People ask me: "How do you come up with all those cool blog posts?" Not really.

But one surefire way is actually to do kind of a large-hadron collider (it should be the super-bozon collider, given most of what I read, but there are no bozons in physics, sadly...just bosons) and just slam one thing I read into another and see what kind of connection comes out.

With that as a preface, let me collide two things I read today: Thomas Frank's column about the American slander on elites in the WSJ, and an article on the EU's latest scheme to pull power away from those pesky people.

read the rest! »

The Big Sort: An Inadvertent Experiment

[Edited by Nort with permission of the author]

A few weeks back I ran a survey related to the notion of a 'Cold Civil War' on this site. When I reported the results of the survey, I mentioned that I was also going to do some analysis with more powerful tools and report if I had found anything else interesting. Well, I did and I have.

Really short form: The Big Sort (see below) is likely onto something. I have some modest statistical evidence that WoC denizens are behaving in the way Bishop (the author of The Big Sort) suggests, and those who think Bush stole 2000 are somewhat more likely to 'sort' themselves out.

I detest when the MSM trots out "the study showed" and gives no idea how the conclusion was reached. So here are the details: first my impression of "The Big Sort" hypothesis, and then my detailed description of what I think I am seeing in the survey data and why.

The Big Sort

In the discussion of the survey, a commenter suggested a relationship to a just-published book called The Big Sort, by Bill Bishop (reviewed by the WSJ here). I haven't read the book yet - it's on order from Amazon - but the thesis is easily described: "Like-minded people increasingly tend to live near like-minded people, thus amplifying the beliefs people hold." The author has an overview website, and here's a set of slides (PDF) from a presentation of his material (found here), that provides the basic talking points. One of the most important is that Bishop is not just regurgitating the Red vs. Blue state themes of the MSM, but looking at a finer geographical grain: "Not red and blue states, he is quick to insist; he calls that cliché an illusion. The reality is red and blue wards and precincts, suburbs and counties."

The 'Big Sort' is about the country turning into a collection of echo chambers, about networks becoming more disjoint over time. Not only was that shift in networks the logic behind the experimental design of my own survey, I'd asked a question about moving for political reason in the original survey. Bishop's hypothesis came my way just as I was trying to make sense of the further analysis of the survey. Explaining the intersection takes some further (and unfortunately lengthy) description of the process:

Data Mining the Cold Civil War

I started by importing the survey results into the R statistical system. This is a freeware analytics program cloned from a famous Bell Labs package. I described the whole process at my home blog for those curious. (R is perhaps overkill for an experiment of this size, but learning my way around it was an additional goal beyond political curiosity.)

The test I used on the survey results is called correspondence analysis. Fortunately for me, two of the best known experts in this procedure had provided code to implement it in R. Correspondence analysis is a form of factors analysis suited for use with categorical data, like survey answers. If that didn't make any sense, think of it as a type of data mining, attempting to find relationships among variables by analyzing a large number of samples.

What you're looking for in such a study are covariance patterns, ways in which some observations (survey responses in this case) correlate to and might predict other responses or characteristics. I obviously believed there would be such correlations and some particular underlying themes, or I wouldn't have named the survey after the hypothetical Cold Civil War, and based the questions on the notion of a breaking of personal networks as being diagnostic of its existence. It turns out such patterns do exist, and they shed some light on the notion of a Big Sort.

read the rest! »

Playing Winter Soldier

The "Winter Soldier II" conference is on, and I'll have a lot more to say about it later today. For now, let me suggest that you read two things:

Wintersoldiers.com - 'Busted by the Historians,' an account of how the original Vietnam-era 'Winter Soldiers' claims were pretty thoroughly eviscerated. Which makes one wonder why, exactly, IAVA chose to wave that flag.

Democracy Project - 'Washington Post Duped Instead of D.U.P.E.S.'

I'm certainly not shocked that IAVA is raising the stakes on the war at a time when it might et them political leverage; Move America Forward is doing the same thing. I am more than a little shocked that they would hitch themselves to as discredited an example as the John Kerry/Winter Soldier drama. And I'm deeply shocked that the Washington Post is doing such a piss-poor job of covering it.

More later.

Another Moral Heavyweight Steps In

Brian Leiter, from the cushy chair he occupies at UT Austin, weighs in to defend Bertram's air kiss to Castro:

Political philosopher Chris Bertram (Bristol) offers some sensible observations about Cuba on the occasion of Castro's retirement, observations that wouldn't be remotely controversial in most of the world. But since Professor Bertram's blog also interacts, in some measure, with the right-wing American blogosphere, the reactions from the undereducated and suitably indoctrinated has been predictable.

Golly, I'm sure feeling bad about being edukated by people like Wolin, Schaar and Rittel - whose books Leiter isn't fit to dust. Because as much as they maintained radical views of the American project, they had a very strong sense of what they believed in and who they were. As opposed to simply defining themselves as a teenager does by who they are not.

Leiter isn't brave enough to have have comments, but here's what I would have asked him:

Exactly what do you object to when I say "If the price of universal literacy is prison camps for writers, count me out"?

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Chris Bertram on Cuba and Castro (entire post):

I haven't looked yet, but I've no doubt that there'll be lots of posts in the blogosphere saying "good riddance" to Fidel Castro (especially from "left" US bloggers like Brad DeLong who never miss the chance to distance themselves). And, of course, Castro ran a dictatorship that has, since 1959, committed its fair share of crimes, repressions, denials of democratic rights etc. Still, I'm reminded of A.J.P. Taylor writing somewhere or other (reference please, dear readers?) that what the capitalists and their lackeys really really hated about Soviet Russia was not its tyrannical nature but the fact that there was a whole chunk of the earth’s surface where they were no longer able to operate. Ditto Cuba, for a much smaller chunk. So let’s hear it for universal literacy and decent standards of health care. Let’s hear it for the Cubans who help defeat the South Africans and their allies in Angola and thereby prepared the end of apartheid. Let’s hear it for the middle-aged Cuban construction workers who held off the US forces for a while on Grenada. Let’s hear it for Elian Gonzalez. Let’s hear it for 49 years of defiance in the face of the US blockade. Hasta la victoria siempre!

You know that whole thing about the values of the Left having eroded into simple anti-Western Imperialism? There may be something to that, you know...

...and that's a Left I'm happy never to have been a part of, and never to be a part of. If the price of universal literacy is prison camps for writers, count me out. If the price of "decent standards of health care" is lavish living for the Party cadres and grinding poverty for everyone else, count me out. If the price of resisting apartheid is brutalizing and murdering your own citizenry - in essence creating a contest between two brutally repressive governments - count me out.

How, exactly, does Bertram keep any claim to moral authority after writing this?

Welcome visitors from The Leiter Report; please note my reply here.

Weekend Must-Read #1

Over at Kings of War, a post about a UK study on media and Islamic radicalization. He discusses a paper by:

Nick O’Shaughnessy, Professor of Communication, Queen Mary University of London, author of Politics and Propagnda: Weapons of Mass Seduction. He presented the research he has done with colleagues Paul Baines (Cranfield University), Kevin Maloney and Barry Richards (Bournemouth University), and Sara Miller and Mark Gill (Ipsos MORI) on The British Muslim Response to Islamist Video-Polemic

and describes the paper

There is much talk and concern nowadays about the radicalization of Western Muslims which it is argued at least in part is caused by Islamist propaganda but there is not much empirical data in support (or otherwise) of this thesis. What O'Shaughnessy et al's exploratory research suggests is that the linkage between cause (Islamist propaganda) and effect (radicalized Western Muslims) is weaker than is often thought. The truth is rather more alarming, in my view: some Western Muslims are self-radicalizing through a process of small-group socialization fed by images from the Western media which Islamist propaganda confirms and reinforces rather than initiates; meanwhile, a large number evince understanding and even sympathy for terrorist protagonists as victims, resorting to desperate measures out of frustration; and there is a growing belief in the fundamental Islamist proposition that there is a real war against Islam.

Read and discuss. The implications are kind of significant, as I see them.

Armed Liberal on Torture - 'People should not fear their government, their government should fear the people.'

So on to the issue of torture.

I've wrestled and wrestled with the issue; torture is obviously bad, but what is it about torture that is so expressly bad - why is it worse than the death and suffering that comes in war, or in the daily violence police officers do as a part of their jobs?

In large part, it's the fact of violence against captives; against the helpless, the unarmed, those incapable of resisting. But that didn't get to the heart of what cleaves torture as an issue from violence as an issue. And why I - as someone who is decidedly not nonviolent - am so decidedly against and uncomfortable with issues of torture.

I came to an answer, as I usually do, in an unplanned realization while reading a book.

read the rest! »

A Hundred Silly Things

I'm not sure at what point Arthur Silber became unhinged; when I started blogging he was an interesting guy who linked to smart topics; he was one of the first bloggers who reached out for and got public support, and I helped steer a little his way; and then he re-emerged with a chestbeating rant against the war, and now has written the pluperfect bodice-ripping essay about the situation we're in.

read the rest! »

Cherrypicking Weber

It's just so damn much fun to read Yglesias again - I'd dropped him from my blogroll, but people I read (Crooked Timber, in this case) keep linking to things he says and I just can't help myself; his posts are a kind of intellectual pinata; a gift that just keeps giving.

In this case he cites Max Weber's 'Politics As A Vocation' - an essay Schaar drilled us on relentlessly one class - and cherrypicks a cite that he claims justifies his moral certitude about the war:

read the rest! »

Rorty on Patriotism

Wandering the Net for a good way to condense Habermas into a blog post (a laughable effort, I think - but my familiarity with Habermas is close to twenty years old, so should be refreshed), I tripped over this, which seems dramatically relevant to the enterprise of this blog and to the point I'm trying to make about patriotism:

Rorty's last words on Habermas!

"When I was told that another figure much discussed in Tehran was Habermas, I concluded that the best explanation for interest in my work was that I share Habermas’s vision of a social democratic utopia. In this utopia, many of the functions presently served by membership in a religious community would be taken over by what Habermas calls "constitutional patriotism." Some form of patriotism - of solidarity with fellow-citizens, and of shared hopes for the country’s future - is necessary if one is to take politics seriously. In a theocratic country, a leftist political opposition must be prepared to counter the clergy’s claim that the nation’s identity is defined by its religious tradition. So the left needs a specifically secularist form of moral fervor, one which centers around citizens’ respect for one another rather than on the nation’s relation to God.

My own views on these matters derive from Habermas and John Dewey. In the early decades of the twentieth century Dewey helped bring a culture into being in which it became possible for Americans to replace Christian religiosity with fervent attachment to democratic institutions (and equally fervent hope for the improvement of those institutions). In recent decades, Habermas has been commending that culture to the Europeans. In opposition to religious leaders such as Benedict XVI and the ayatollahs, Habermas argues that the alternative to religious faith is not "relativism" or "rootlessness" but the new forms of solidarity made possible by the Enlightenment.

The pope recently said: "A culture has developed in Europe that is the most radical contradiction not only of Christianity but of all the religious and moral traditions of humanity." Dewey and Habermas would reply that the culture that arose out of the Enlightenment has kept everything in Christianity that was worth keeping. The West has cobbled together, in the course of the last two hundred years, a specifically secularist moral tradition - one that regards the free consensus of the citizens of a democratic society, rather then the Divine Will, as the source of moral imperatives. This shift in outlook is, I think, the most important advance that the West has yet made. I should like to think that the students with whom I spoke in Tehran, impressed by Habermas’s writings and inspired by the courage of thinkers such as Ganji and Ramin Jahanbegloo, may someday make Iran the nucleus of an Islamic Enlightenment."

from here

[emphasis added]

From Ali Rivizi's blog "Habermasian Reflections"

...Some form of patriotism - of solidarity with fellow-citizens, and of shared hopes for the country’s future - is necessary if one is to take politics seriously. Rorty says it far more clearly than I have managed to so far. But then, he was a famous philosopher, and I'm a high school dropout...

Welcome Instapundit readers...it appears to be 'patriotism' week here, so please check out the four posts I've done this week on the subject: 'Patriotism - Goldberg to Couric to Yglesias', 'You've Got To Be Kidding Me', 'Patriotism Rears Its Head Yet Again', and 'Rorty on Patriotism'

Patriotism Rears Its Head Yet Again

The Atlantic Magazine email I got today leads with

The Future of the American Idea. As The Atlantic celebrates its 150th anniversary, scholars, novelists, politicians, artists, and others look ahead to the future of the American idea.

So I click through the link, and I get to (subscriber-only, I believe):

read the rest! »

You've Got To Be Kidding Me

Yglesias has his response on patriotism up at the Atlantic, and I'm wondering if he can get some of his Harvard money back.

Patriotism is - wait for it - just like being a Knicks fan. There are good Knicks fans, and bad ones.

The attitude toward America that conservatives like to champion is like this latter batch of Knicks fans -- not people animated by a special concern for our fellow-citizens and a special appreciation for our country's virtues, but by a deep emotional investment in a certain kind of national hagiography and myth-making.

The patriotism = fanboy equivalence is one that's often made by people who don't believe - or know - much in patriotism. It makes patriotism cute, and kind of demeans it is a backhanded way. because you, know, my wife is still a Cubs fan even twenty years after she left Chicago, so isn't that just cute?

But the most obsessive Cubs fans don't get linked to a polity of other Cubbies fans with whom they have to share power.

The mechanisms by which our - or any - political structure are maintained within our culture are kinda significant if we want those structures to survive. Habermas has the best (if most awkwardly written) description of this process, I think, in 'Legitimation Crisis' - I'll try and do a post on this over the weekend.

Yglesias goes on to recommend Anatol Lievin's book on American nationalism - which, based on the Publisher's Weekly review, seems shockingly predictable:

In this provocative and scholarly work, Lieven, senior associate at Washington's Carnegie Endowment, argues that normative American patriot ism ...an optimistic "civic creed" rooted in respect for America's institutions, individual freedoms and constitutional law - contains a monster in the basement: a jingoistic, militaristic, Jacksonian nationalism that sees America as the bearer of a messianic mission to lead a Manichean struggle against the savages.

plus,as a bonus...

Lieven's provocative final chapter argues that much of U.S. support for Israel is rooted not in the "civic creed" (e.g., support for a fellow liberal democracy) but in a nationalism that sees the Israelis as heroic cowboys and the Palestinians as savages who must be driven from their land, as Jackson did the Cherokees. Throughout, Lieven takes to task the American liberal intelligentsia for abandoning universalist principles in favor of ethnic chauvinism and nationalist fervor.

...I can't wait to read it...

Welcome Instapundit readers...it appears to be 'patriotism' week here, so please check out the four posts I've done this week on the subject: 'Patriotism - Goldberg to Couric to Yglesias', 'You've Got To Be Kidding Me', 'Patriotism Rears Its Head Yet Again', and 'Rorty on Patriotism'

Patriotism - Goldberg to Couric to Yglesias

Update: go check out the comments on this at the NY Times 'Opinionator' blog...OTOH, they did call us 'idiosyncratic', so I'm happy...

Jonah Goldberg is contemplating patriotism in the LA Times.

I've come around to the view that the culture war can best be understood as a conflict between two different kinds of patriotism. On the one hand, there are people who believe being an American is all about dissent and change, that the American idea is inseparable from "progress." America is certainly an idea, but it is not merely an idea. It is also a nation with a culture as real as France's or Mexico's. That's where the other patriots come in; they think patriotism is about preserving Americanness.

I'm not sure I completely agree with him (more in a second) here, but I think he's hitting on the divide that I think matters.

read the rest! »

Juan Cole, Thoughtcrime, And Morality

I still read Juan Cole, although it's hard for me to be moved to write about anything he says - I glean interesting nuggets of information for future research or thought, but it's long been clear to me what and how he thinks - and, sadly, he's one of those people who are busy making reality conform to their theories, rather than trying to improve their theories against reality.

But I caught this this morning - a response to Professor Cole from Yaacov Lozowick, the Director of Archives at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and it had two points - one brutally negative one about Prof. Cole and one so right on point in terms of the moral center of balance required of actors in the world that I thought I'd link and cite.

read the rest! »

The Left Speaks Up

Check out the talk by Alan Johnson (UK Labor politician, trade union leader, and contender for the PM role w/Gordon Brown professor and editor) over at Harry's Place.

Our children are going to need to live in a combative democracy in which the mass media and the political and intellectual class are comfortable with the proactive defence of the liberal constitutional order and the open society.

Being ‘comfortable’ for us in the UK means two things, I think.

First, having the will and the resolution to promote that order and that society as non-negotiable normative ends. So enough with the apologetics for them and the self-hatred for us.

Second, understand that when we wage the battle of ideas and defend our way of life we must live up to the highest ideals of our democratic inheritance. We must honour the memory of those who fought and died for it. And are dying for it. So enough with rendition, ghost sites and torture.

Let’s pass our democracy on to our children, but let’s make sure its one they feel such pride in that they will defend it in turn.

Interesting, good stuff, with concrete suggestions for UK policy.

Truth, Speach, Philosophy, Duke

An old post from armedliberal.com back in 2002 which seems highly appropriate in light of yesterday's Duke acquittals, and this post at Maggie's Farm:

The War on Bad Philosophy continues.

I'm still working today, so I can't give this the depth it deserves, but I want to point folks to an article on Free Speech and Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks, a Randian liberal arts professor, and commentary on the article by Arthur Silber on his blog Voice of Reason. (link originally via Instapundit)

First, I'm not a big fan of Rand and Randians. As a group, they tend to exhibit the confusion between logic and reason that many bright teenagers display (I should know, I've got two...). But while there is a framework in both articles I'd take some exception to (and will when I get a moment), there are a couple of 18kt gems worth pulling out and handing around. From Hicks:

What we have then are two positions about the nature of speech. The postmodernists say: Speech is a weapon in the conflict between groups that are unequal. And that is diametrically opposed to the liberal view of speech, which says: Speech is a tool of cognition and communication for individuals who are free.

read the rest! »

War for Profit

And why that is a sign of hope.

The '300' Rorschach Test Redux

Matt Yglesias leverages the film 'the 300' to explain that it's based on our sympathy for all people who fight invading empires.

When you see it in a movie that aims to make the defenders out to be heroes, everyone sympathizes with this attitude. It's called "patriotism," it's called "nationalism" and it's the deadly enemy of empire-builders everywhere. People, simply put, don't enjoy submitting to foreign domination, even to foreign domination that presents itself as well-intentioned -- even to foreign domination that is in fact well-intentioned. Bush says America is merely midwifing the birth of a world of liberty, that "freedom is the Almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world," and American power merely God's servant. Xerxes makes it simpler and says he literally is a God. The movie even gives him a more-than-human voice to prove the point.

I probably would have let this pass except for the scare quotes around "patriotism" and "nationalism", and my belief that this is a handy hook to hang an important point from. Yglesias actually makes a useful (and nuanced) point, and his post is worth reading - I'll try and write about it tomorrow when I talk more about Tom Friedman - but he's someone who seems incapable of saying patriotism without scare quotes, and without making the followup point that there are other patriotisms and that - like being a fan of a NFL team - they are equivalent.

read the rest! »

Once Upon a Time in the West (Midlands)

ENGLAND. THE YEAR, 2007.

My name is Adil. I have been born and raised among dutiful and obedient Muslims, and I aim to misbehave.

Already I have fallen from grace. I am no longer one of them, a reason sufficient for their delicately-placed wrath to have me consigned, in this world and the next, to the most grievous of penalties; for what else should the reward be for those who behave like me, they would say if they knew, but disgrace in this life? So no matter where I go in the realms of Islam, I am a hidden traitor to my people, a renegade without honour to be executed. And for them to know of my apostasy is to know of their fear.

Still, now and again I silently walk among the Muslim flock, to observe their incessant bleating and guilty straying, and see how readily they run to the call of their watchful masters, appointees of God who oversee the enjoining of what is good and the forbidding of what is not. And they remind the herd that He is not unmindful of what they do.

Neither am I.

read the rest! »

Robespierre And Ecstatic Communalism

Here's something that bugs me...

...about the current state of left intellectualism (not the Euston folks...). From the L.A. Times review (yes, not the book, and a cautionary note must be inserted) of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book "Dancing In The Streets"

...[her] rhetoric reaches a fever pitch in her description of France in 1790; she gets caught up in the public celebrations on the first anniversary of the revolution, and her unabashed intellectual enthusiasm electrifies these pages. "With the shared wine and food, the dancing that wound through whole cities and out into the fields, this has to have been one of the great moments, in all of human history, to have been alive."

Yup. 1790 in Paris. One of the great moments in human history to have been alive. See also 'Romanticism and Terrorism'...

Denazification of America

In response to the recent George Soros quip and the debate over it (here) I went through the Wikipedia entry on Denazification in the American sector of Germany and simply changed the names and dates and a few other details to make it the future, not the past. So this is what these people approve of for America, eh?

The Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 directed President John Edwards’ policy of deNeoconization.

The United States initially pursued deNeoconization in a committed though bureaucratic fashion. For this process five categories of responsibility for anyone over the age of 18 residing in the U.S. were identified: major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, followers, and exonerated persons. Ultimately, the intention was the "re-education" of the American people.

In early 2009, 90,000 Neocons were being held in concentration camps, another 1,900,000 were forbidden to work as anything but manual labourers.

A report of the Institute on re-education of the Red States in June 2008 recommended: "Only an inflexible longterm occupation authority will be able to lead the Americans to a fundamental revision of their recent political philosophy." On 15 January 2009, however, a report of the Democratic National Committee (classified as restricted) stated: "The present procedure fails in practice to reach a substantial number of persons who supported or assisted the Neocons." On 1 April a special law therefore transferred the responsibility for the deNeoconization process to the White House chief of staff, who established 545 civilian courts to oversee 900,000 cases.

The deNeoconization was now supervised by special ministers like Dennis Kucinich in Ohio. By 2010, however, with the Islamist War now clearly in progress, American attentions were directed increasingly to the threat of jihad; the remaining cases were tried through summary proceedings that left insufficient time to thoroughly investigate the accused, so that many of the judgments of this period have questionable judicial value. For example, by 2012 members of the Republican Party like Rudy Giuliani could be declared formally deNeoconized in absentia by a government arbitration board and without any proof that this was true.

In December 2009 U.S. President John Edwards justified his refusal to alleviate the induced famine of the Midwestern population: “though all Red Staters might not be guilty for the war, it would be too difficult to try to single out for better treatment those who had nothing to do with the Neocon regime and its crimes.”

The Information Control Division of the White House had by July 2009 taken control of 37 newspapers, 6 radio stations, 314 theatres, 642 movies, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, 7,384 book dealers and printers. It’s main mission was democratisation but part of the agenda was also the prohibition on any criticism of the White House.

In addition, on May 13, 2010 the White House council issued a directive for the confiscation on all media that could contribute to Neoconism or militarism. As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were now banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed, the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offence.

[edited: Typo fixed]

More Arkin: US Soldiers are the Enemy

The Washington Post's resident military "expert," William Arkin, has reaped a certain amount of attention for his recent comments in print. What Marc printed here in "William Arkin, anti-chickenhawk", however, is just a small slice of his soldier-hostile thinking. Some quotes from "The Troops Also Need to Support the American People":

"...the recent NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer - force that thinks it is doing the dirty work."

Nice to finally get an admission of his opinion. By the way, you blithering windbag, the troops are American people, and the choice of whom to support is theirs. Then, of course, comes the topper, his hilariously-titled: "The Arrogant and Intolerant Speak Out" - later pulled off the blog's front page, but still available for now at this link:

"These men and women are not fighting for money with little regard for the nation. The situation might be much worse than that: Evidently, far too many in uniform believe that they are the one true nation. They hide behind the constitution and the flag and then spew an anti-Democrat, anti-liberal, anti-journalism, anti-dissent, and anti-citizen message that reflects a certain contempt for the American people."

Uh-huh. Those who believe the war is necessary but haven't served can have no legitimate opinions about the war, as the liberal-left is so quick to remind us. Should anyone heed this message and volunteer wear to the uniform, serve on the front lines, and believe the reality they see is poorly-depicted by a liberal-left media - or just disagree with the anti-war line - then they are "mercenaries" displaying "contempt for the American people" - and their opinions are illegitimate.

The answer is that our opponents' positions are not just wrong, but illegitimate. The questions will be changed without any regard for truth or consistency, in order to get that answer. While calling our opponents anti-dissent, in a nice Big Lie type twist. An opponent with this mentality is immune to civic debate or persuasion - and as I've described elsewhere, that has significant and often violent real-world consequences for any polis/civis in which this kind of warfare mentality becomes widespread.

There is not one shred of honesty in Mr. Arkin's writing, or in the Left's position. Not. One. Nor is there room for civic society. What there is, clearly displayed in abundance, is a totalitarian impulse that would rather silence opponents than debate them. Something the liberal-left have managed to impose on their madrassas in various universities via speech codes et. al., but not yet on society at large. In all this, they are at one with their frequent allies and co-belligerents the Islamists. Arkin again, in his now-pulled clarification "The Arrogant and Intolerant...":

read the rest! »

Simmering Frogs (Updated)

The recent disclosure of a confidential White House memo about Nouri al-Maliki's ability to cope with the rumbling insurgence of Muqtada al-Sadr--a revelation resulting in the cancellation of the proposed summit between the heads of state of Jordan, the US, and Iraq--ought to be the last straw in the trend of US administrations since Watergate to allow carte blanche for anyone intent on promoting US impotence, by deftly opening a vital artery. The Bush administration has, on many occasions, chosen to eschew prosecution either of those breaking a national security oath, or of the Press' active solicitation of such illegal and unethical activity.

read the rest! »

Dumb and Dumber: Australia's Grand Mufti

John Kerry truly is the gift that keeps on giving, but when it comes to saying dumb thing on public, he has a ways to go before he could even be within sighting distance of Australia's Mufti Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali. The latest furor was triggered by this little bon mot on the subject of female fashions, during his post-Ramadan sermon this year:

"If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will it be, the cat's, or the uncovered meat's? The uncovered meat is the disaster. If the meat was covered the cats wouldn't roam around it. If the meat is inside the fridge, they won't get it."

Now there's a twist on "she was asking for it" you probably hadn't heard before. One with special import given the trends in France, in Sweden et. al. that display at the very least a permissive attitude toward rape in Muslim communities - and at worst the use of rape as an deliberate Islamist weapon designed to impose gender and community apartheid. This t-shirt response is funny, but the clear threat is not - and as Tim Blair notes, the generally recognized leader of the Religion of Peace™ in Australia has in the past voiced support for terrorism, said he'd apologize for the rape comment "After we clean the world of the White House first," and offered up other revealing gems.

Of course, the Left can't work hard enough to shill and spin on his behalf - and why shouldn't they?

read the rest! »

Bypassing the Media - Pentagon on the Offensive

A major newspaper prints a story which DOD believes is factually incorrect in important ways. The newspaper not only refuses to issue a correction, it refuses to publish a letter to the editor or an op ed with DOD's position. It also refuses to publish a letter from 5 senior generals speaking in their capacities as citizens who are also military leaders.

This happens, with minor variations, again and again.

What to do? Bypass the dying print media and open a website that gives blow by blow accounts of the interaction and sets the record straight.

The Bogus "655,000 Dead" Study

It didn't take a genius to guess that something was fishy when a John Hopkins study (coincidentally released very conveniently near the election) trumpeted a figure for Iraqi dead that exceeds even far-left body counts for Iraq by a factor of about 5, and reliable estimates by a factor in the double-digits.

It may take a fairly smart person to explain exactly what was wrong with the study, however, and how it produced such laughable results. Fortunately Steven E. Moore, who has been doing survey work in Iraq for over 2 years, can. He steps up to the plate and deservedly destroys the study as a effort that would flunk a grad student. That it was a work of political agitprop rather than anything honest or serious was obvious from the get-go - but it's always good to understand the whys and hows of its shoddy dishonesty, because you'll see this again and again in future.

The Horns Of A Dilemma

Leftist Muslim blogger Ali Eteraz has been beating the drum about the Pakistani divorce reform proposal, and feeling kind of lonely in doing so.

Today, he uses this history to talk about the interaction between domestic reformers with the Muslim world and Western progressives.

This might be part of the reason that so many Muslim 'reformers' like Irshad Manji, Hrsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, end up becoming a "chamcha" (joke for insiders) to the neo-imperial right. They become unhappy with the progressives for seeming so "distant" from activism and so flock to those who seem "all up in the bizness" (even if its the worst way to do bizness). It's a sort of Reformist Dilemma I discussed earlier.

read the rest! »

The Lotus-Eaters

Roger Scruton, wise man of England, writes on a famous speech from 1968. Its subject was immigration, and it cost its author his career.

�Human kind cannot bear very much reality,� said T. S. Eliot. It is not one of his best lines, but he used it twice�in Murder in the Cathedral and in Four Quartets�and in both places its prosaic rhythmlessness reinforces its sense, reminding us that our exaltations are invented things, and that we prefer inspiring fantasies to sobering facts. Enoch Powell was no different, and his inspiring fantasy of England caused him to address his countrymen as though they still enjoyed the benefits of a classical education and an imperial culture. How absurd, in retrospect, to end a speech warning against the effects of uncontrolled immigration with a concealed quotation from Virgil. �As I look ahead,� Powell said, �I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see �the River Tiber foaming with much blood.�� These words were addressed to an England that had forgotten the story of the Aeneid, along with every other story woven into its former identity as the �sweet, just, boyish master� of the world�to borrow Santayana�s luminous phrase. It is hardly surprising that Powell�s words were instantly converted to �rivers of blood,� and their speaker dismissed as a dangerous madman.

Scruton is right that the old stories are no longer remembered by most. Yet how to speak of these matters at all without invoking them? All the lessons of the ages are encoded in them.

Lacking common stories, misunderstanding is certain. What is left, but to try to teach your stories to those who misunderstand? And yet Aristotle warns us that without that common understanding, ethical discussions are doomed to failure.

H/t Arts & Letters Daily.

September 11, 2006: Today's Required Reading

No, not my compilation of 9/11 related links. Nor Trent's piece re: North Korea's coming nuclear test (and indirectly Iran's if he turns out to be right, with all of the implications that carries).

Instead, I recommend "The Time Traveler," from Dan Simmons. And its outstanding May 2006 follow up, discussing the piece, the thinking behind it, and the nature of Dan's craft. Mr. Simmons, you see, is a science fiction writer, and The Time Traveler is very much a standard story within that genre - albeit one that's closer than most to current situations and trends.

I've written about our darkening sky vis-a-vis Iran, and a related Postcards from the Edge piece looked at trends within our own society as well as Iran...

read the rest! »

Caricature

It has become common to think of 'The West', as depicted by Cox and Forkum, as clueless -- groping at any hope for peace with its enemies. Cox and Forkum's 'The West' character looks like a middle-aged geek with thick glasses, tie and soft belly, comfortable on his knees; he's an apparachik of the easy life, submissive before any appeasement that guarantees another meal.

Of course, this is a cartoon. A cartoon makes caricatures of people and things in simple, pointed exaggerations. But it is still instructive in terms of how we see ourselves.

read the rest! »

Some Thoughts On Violence, Suicide, And Bad Philosophy

I wrote this a little while ago, had some dialog with neo-neocon about it (it touches on her domain pretty closely, and I believe she will have a parallel piece soon), and then two things combined to get me to pull it out, add a few things, and put it out here for discussion.

Obviously, one of the things was the murder in Seattle, in which a - troubled - young Muslim man shot up a Jewish Federation office in Seattle; an office much like the one where my mom used to work here in Los Angeles.

Another was an interview by Andrew Cochran at the Counterterrorism Blog with filmmaker Pierre Rehov, who just finished a documentary on shahids (suicide bombers).

...I became fascinated with the personalities of those who had committed those crimes, as they were described again and again by their victims. Especially the fact that suicide bombers are all smiling one second before they blow themselves up.

In my original post on Seattle, I asked if the assailant had been a "mucker" - someone who simply went amok from the strains of modern life (the word comes from John Brunner's great ripoff of Dos Passos - "Stand on Zanzibar"). In Brunner's 2010, muckers are common enough that they are discussed like the weather.

read the rest! »

Hawkish women

Since 9-11, I have noticed a counter-intuitive trend: Of couples I know, the husband is usually more dovish or more assured of the efficacy of diplomacy, and the wife is usually more hawkish, less squeamish about war.

Go figure.

Anyway, this trend seems to be holding with economists Milton and Rose Friedman:

read the rest! »

War Is Peace

Victor Davis Hanson makes a plea for national clarity, lamenting the Bush Administration's inability to articulate the broader context of the war. He points out that there is precedence for the wartime suspension of civil liberties to serve a greater cause:

It is worth reminding the American public that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and shut down newspapers; that Woodrow Wilson imprisoned prominent dissenters like Eugene Debs; and that Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-American citizens and secret military tribunals for German saboteurs (six of whom were executed) and allowed for the cover-up of military catastrophes (such as the hundreds killed during training exercises for the Normandy landings).

Mr. Hanson has a salient point. In wartime, special allowances must be made that impinge on our rights as free citizens, so we can defeat our enemy. In the present conflict, bending civil liberties involves wiretapping, intrusive security and Gitmo detainees imprisoned without trial.

But Mr. Hanson misses something that has no precedent in the present war. FDR, Wilson or Lincoln could essentially contend, "I authorize the suspension of some civil liberties so that we will be victorious against our declared enemy. One day, the war will be over and our rights fully restored."

Let's face it. This war will never be over. The war against terrorism is a permanent condition of modern existence. Our most organized, ideologically potent and empowered enemy today is primarily Islamic, but that needn't always be the case. The terrorist's toolbox fits with any ideology that has a significant enough beef with its enemies.

read the rest! »

...an unadmirable country...

So I've been reading some materials suggested to me by Mark Perry, which I'll try and set out for discussion in a bit, but I tripped over one thing which ought to explain why it is that I don't automatically genuflect when someone explains that they are a professional diplomat or otherwise have expertise in diplomatic affairs and go on to make an argument from authority.

Over at the 'American Educational Trust' website, they ran a criticism of a Washington Post review of Mark Perry's book, 'A Fire in Zion'.

The substance of the book is interesting, but more interesting to me is this side comment by the author:

A shameless example of the other kind of book review, blasting it so that it won't be read, was the Post's hatchet job two years ago on The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present, by former Deputy Secretary of State George Ball and his son, Douglas Ball. A professional and deeply compassionate study by the now deceased diplomatic and business titan and his historian son, The Passionate Attachment was nevertheless belittled by the Post's reviewer, Walter Laqueur, a career apologist for Israel.

Laqueur could not refute the Balls' facts and their conclusions that Israel was an unadmirable country enabled to exist only by annual multibillion dollar gifts from a neo-Rothschild, the American taxpayer. So, ignoring the book's actual contents, Laqueur snidely intimated in what essentially was a non-review that since the Balls' complaints were so numerous, both they and their book were somehow discredited.

[emphasis added]

The author of this piece?

Andrew I. Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, was U.S. ambassador to the state of Qatar at the time of his retirement from the U.S. Foreign Service. He also served in London, Augsburg and Frankfurt, Beirut, Jerusalem, Amman, Baghdad, Dhaka, Tehran, Manama, and Wellington.

Obviously an experienced professional diplomat. Who believes that Israel is '...an unadmirable country...' Nice locution, isn't it?

Limits

A friend of mine said yesterday that he believes Israel and the United States have reached the limits of their power. He believes the battle is joined, is highly asymmetric, and has ground American and Israeli forces to a halt. He wasn't gloating, but was hypothesizing.

He might be wrong. Having power assumes a monopoly of violence. As we restrain our power to appeal to our allies and win friends on the ground, Islamicists do everything they can to monopolize violence through random acts of terror. They're quite unrestrained in that pursuit, and on that level, we are neck-and-neck with them for control on the ground. The battle for the monopoly of violence is symmetrical in this war because we restrain ourselves from unleashing our full fury. My friend assumes that we will restrain ourselves indefinitely, and so we have reached the limit of our power.

read the rest! »

These Are the Times ....

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated ...

I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent.

Neither have I so much of the infidel in me, as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils; and as I do not, I cannot see on what grounds the king of Britain can look up to heaven for help against us: a common murderer, a highwayman, or a house-breaker, has as good a pretence as he.

-- The Crisis, Thomas Paine, December 23 1776

What Does Academia Celebrate on Independence Day?

As some here may know, my "day job" involves exposing an increasingly anti-American, and anti-Enlightenment cult within academia. I recently took part in an informal project that, in part, compared academia to the blogosphere. We analyzed the results of Google searches on the internet sites of the top 100 colleges and universities in the nation, wanting to observe how frequently the word "diversity" came up, in comparison to the more conventional ideological and political terms: "liberty", "freedom", "equality", and "democracy". We figured this would give us a rough idea of how preoccupied academia has become with some of the faddish counter-enlightenment concepts of the "left of the left" that Howard Dean seems to think will soon redefine politics in America.

read the rest! »

Haditha, the Marines, & the Obligations of Citizenship

In the comments section over the weekend, Andrew J Lazarus made a one-sentence comment that provides a revealing window into the Left's mentality, its real feelings about the military, and its notions of both justice and citizenship. The latter elements are especially important, and so I thought I'd discuss the civics of it.

What Andrew said was this: