While popular leftist lecturers may preach the evils of capitalism to the brethren, it doesn't stop them from asking very hefty speaking fees in exchange for imparting their wisdom and excoriating the greed of the fat cats as Jacob Laksin reports.
Care to hear Noam Chomsky skewer America's soulless, capitalist wealth and privilege? It will set you back $12,000, roughly one-fourth of the average MIT student's tuition. And Chomsky's leftist academics-in-arms have similarly immodest asking prices. Take Princeton's resident race baiter, Cornel West. With an official per-lecture fee of $15,000 plus first-class traveling expenses, West ranks among the priciest academics. Recently he spoke at Denver U. for $35,000. For one hour.
West's pal Jesse Jackson also demands the big bucks. When not extorting money from Nascar (the "last bastion of white supremacy"), Jackson demands between $10,000 and $20,000 for appearances. This is the same Jesse Jackson who spent the Sixties urging the nation to accept socialism, a "person-centered" rather than a "profit-centered" economy. Today, it seems, he's discovered that profit isn't all that bad.
Nor is he alone. Few may be shocked to learn that Michael Moore's speaking fee, like Moore himself is, well, hefty. The left-wing filmmaker asks $15,000 to $20,0000 per speech. Similarly, the fact that "comedian" Al Franken doesn't joke around about his $25,000 fee is unlikely to raise many eyebrows. (He has to make up for his gratis performance on Air America somehow.)
Slightly more surprising is the fact that even the Greens, the Left's self-styled "principled" base, like to see green. Look at Winona Laduke, Ralph Nader's running mate in the 1996 and 2000 elections. She will help college students save the earth -- for only $8,500. But then fellow Green Party activist Jello Biafra, will do the same speechfor onl $7,500. Enviro-activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s cash intake is nearly double that, at $16,000 bills. (So much for saving the trees.) As for perennial Green nudnik Ralph Nader, he comes with a price tag anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000. (Staff at his D.C. campaign headquarters were none too eager to specify an exact amount.)
That goes for leftist "journalists," too. Socialist essayist Barbara Ehrenreich, who groused about spending a year working minimum wage jobs in her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, is a long way from the $7-an-hour experience now. She charges $15,000 (plus hundreds of dollars in expenses) for speaking engagements. The better to pontificate about class inequality, one assumes.
Radio lefty Nina Totenberg's NPR salary doesn't prevent her from charging $15,000 a pop to lecture the kiddies. Lefty scribbler Molly Ivins, meanwhile, has been known to ask a very unprogressive $25,000 for an hour of her conspiracy theories. Molly Ivins Can't Say That -- unless there's a paycheck involved.
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The selfless leaders of the Left don't just speak for the money, of course; there are also the perks. The director of one D.C.-based booking agency tells me her leftist clients require the works from their hosts (usually colleges): a room at one of the area's nicer hotels, meals, travel fare and a car. Lest you think they're all closet high lifers, she helpfully notes that, in some instances, the car "doesn't even have to be a limousine."
But, then again, some pigs are more equal than others.
Gerard Van der Leun at American Digest has coined a new word: Liberalosis, and shows how it can be applied to Slate's William Saletan.
Liberalosis is a psychiatric classification for a mental state in which the perception of political reality is distorted. Persons experiencing a "Liberal episode" may experience hallucinations (often Clintonesque or Deantastic hallucinations), hold paranoid hate of the United States and/or its President or delusional beliefs in Utopia, and exhibit disorganized thinking such as "...it would be better to let America’s enemies strike first", and "...a Democrat can be elected President by promising to raise taxes and pin a big “Kick Me” sign on America." This is often accompanied by a lack of insight into the unusual or bizarre nature of their behaviour and a compulsion to give money to any number of Democratic losers.
Liberalosis is one of the symptoms of severe political illness such as Deanophrenia and metrosexual disorder (manic gender confusion in hope of votes). It may also occur in severe cases of out-of-power depression, self-inflicted brain injury, decades of bong overdose or unusual negative reaction to political drugs (particularly Ecologine and hallucinogenic drugs such as Sharptonine or Hillaryine), or extreme personal stress brought on by six to ten gender reassignments. Liberalosis triggered by stress in the absence of any other mental illness is known as brief reactive Liberalosis and can be soothed by electing a local interior decorator dogcatcher.
Phyllis Chesler wonders if some on the left are suffering from mass psychosis.
Given that we are under attack and at war, a certain fraying of nerves is understandable, but outright insanity is not. Lately, I have observed some fairly psychotic behavior in public places, mainly among the chattering classes, not among ordinary civilians who better understand that the terrorists mean to kill us and that appeasement is not an option.
For example, in the midst of a quiet cafe dinner, a soft-spoken artist friend suddenly began screaming: "I hate President Bush, I wish he was dead." Her face got red, and she screwed up her eyes. I was taken aback. Her rage was irrational and out of context; we had not been discussing the upcoming election or the ongoing war in Iraq. And, how could anyone be so angry, or rather so irrational, about a political figure?
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I can understand marshalling arguments, point by point, against a particular political policy. I can understand faulting President Bush for either not going far enough to win the war in Iraq or daring to begin that war at all--as long as the person is speaking in a reasonable, rational way. I can respect a balanced analysis--such as the recent one by Mark Helprin in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (5/17/04) in which he describes "the Democrats (as) guilty of ideological confusion about self-defense, the Republicans of willful disdain for reflection, and both... for subjecting the serious business in the life of a nation to coarse partisanship."
But I cannot understand what is going on when presumably enlightened artists and scholars reduce complex realities to slogans, and create straw men against which to vent vast, irrational rage. This is precisely what frenzied Islamist mobs do when they burn the American flag and lynch and mutilate corpses of American soldiers.
The western multiculturalists insist that we have dangerously "humiliated" the Iraqi male prisoners because we put women in charge of naked men and then subjected those naked men to further humiliation by posing them in pornography-like photographs, and forcing some men to wear pink women's undergarments.
In my view, this is possibly the result of a culture saturated with runaway pornography. It is disgusting and I oppose it, but it does not compare to the be-heading of Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg or to the real torture practiced by Saddam Hussein in Abu Graib and most Arab and Muslim despots against their own people.
The multiculturalists do not protest at all when male Palestinian terrorists dress as women in order to kill Israelis (which they have done at many an Israeli checkpoint). They did not condemn the Palestinian terrorists who shot and killed an eight-month pregnant Israeli woman and her four children, aged 2 to 11 at point-blank range; rather, they blamed the woman for "provoking" her own murder by living in Gaza. The multi-cultis did not cry "humiliation foul" when two other Palestinian terrorists dressed as women in order to shoot down the mourners at this poor woman's funeral.
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Something has gone very wrong in America among its Thinking Classes who hate the very country that allows them to publicly criticize its policies and who love those countries in which dissent is punished by torture and execution. Stalinism, Hitlerism, totalitarianism--long nurtured by the former Soviet Union through both the United Nations, the Arab League, and the PLO--are living and breathing among our intellectuals, academics, and left-liberal media. American intellectuals also slavishly follow the lead of their European counterparts.
As a psychologist, I must ask: are our intellectuals brainwashed? What cult has done this to them? How might they be de-programmed? Are such accomplished and privileged adults still angry at their parents, spouses, or employers or are they angry at themselves for having failed to "overthrow capitalism" in their lifetime? If so, do they think that we all deserve to die for their failure? Do they honestly believe that the jihadists will provide the socialist or feminist Paradise for which they long?
I do not think I can persuade such intellectuals to understand that their lives and ways of life are in serious danger and that self-defense is crucial; that there is nothing we can do that will "appease" Islamist rage (sacrifice Israel, retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, veil our women, allow Arab honor killings to be carried out in both Eurabia and North America).
Glenn Garvin reviews the new book by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, "
In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage.
In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system."
Barely six years later, the Soviet empire began falling apart. By 1991 it had vanished from the face of the earth. Did Professor Byrnes call a press conference to offer an apology for the collective stupidity of his colleagues, or for his part in recording it? Did he edit a new work titled Gosh, We Didn’t Know Our Ass From Our Elbow? Hardly. Being part of the American chattering class means never having to say you’re sorry.
Journalism, academia, policy wonkery: They all maintain well-oiled Orwellian memory holes, into which errors vanish without a trace. Stern pronouncements are hurled down like thunderbolts from Zeus, and, like Zeus, their authors are totally unaccountable to mere human beings. Time’s Strobe Talbott decreed in 1982 that it was "wishful thinking to predict that international Communism some day will either self-destruct or so exhaust itself in internecine conflict that other nations will no longer be threatened." A Wall Street analyst who misjudged a stock so badly would find himself living under a bridge, if not sharing a cell with Martha Stewart. But Talbott instead became Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, where he could apply his perspicacious geopolitical perceptual powers to Osama bin Laden.
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The end of the Cold War has produced many such numbing silences. The speed with which the Soviet empire imploded and the economic ruin and popular revulsion that were revealed have made it clear that baby boomer intellectuals and journalists, viewing the world through the distorted lens of Vietnam, overwhelmingly got it wrong. Peasants ate less and were slaughtered more on the other side of the Iron Curtain; the jails were fuller; the KGB’s list was a lot longer and a lot deadlier than Joe McCarthy’s. A team of French historians calculated the worldwide death toll of communism during the 20th century at more than 93 million. When Hoover Institution historian Robert Conquest used newly available data from the Soviet Union to update The Great Terror, his account of Stalin’s murderous purges of the 1930s, his publishers asked for a new title. "How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?" Conquest suggested.
The Conquest anecdote comes from In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, an improbably riveting dispatch from the battlefields of historiography by scholars John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.
Chilling and often perversely funny, it details the intellectual sleight of hand to which many American historians of communism and the Soviet Union have resorted as newly revealed archives in Moscow and Washington suggest they were, well, fucking fools.
Their efforts haven’t been very successful. As Haynes and Klehr note, the world’s final redoubt of communism is not Havana or Pyongyang but American college campuses: "The nostalgic afterlife of communism in the United States has outlived most of the real Communist regimes around the world....A sizable cadre of American intellectuals now openly applaud and apologize for one of the bloodiest ideologies of human history, and instead of being treated as pariahs, they hold distinguished positions in American higher education and cultural life."
Follow the link and read the rest, or better yet, buy and read the book.
John Kekes has an excellent essay on the problem with the egalitarian dreams of the left and the absurdities inherent in such positions. (It's from 2001, but more timely than ever.)
The most celebrated public philosophers of our time—our Rousseau and Voltaire, so to speak—are John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. Prophets of a non-Marxist socialism, they provide the rationale for the domestic agenda of the left wing of the Democratic party, and they are in large measure responsible for the Left's remarkable success in occupying the moral high ground. They have convinced the nation's elites that it is a matter of simple justice for our society systematically to deprive the large majority of citizens of a sizable portion of their legally owned property to benefit a much smaller minority—an Orwellian redefinition that mocks as well as violates justice. In their egalitarian philosophical system, there's no need to debate the merits of progressive taxation, anti-poverty programs, socialized medicine, affirmative action, and welfare legislation: a society that lacks them is, by definition, not a just society.
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Unlike the traditional defenders of legislative injustice, who asserted the supposed excellences of those who benefited from unjust laws at the expense of others, Rawls and Dworkin defend injustice on the basis of the deficiencies of those who benefit from it. The mere fact that some people in a society own less property than others, they claim, is a good reason to try to equalize the difference between them. After all, a just government ought to treat everyone with equal consideration, and, they assert, doing so requires legislation aimed at the equalization of property. This economic egalitarianism goes far beyond the uncontroversial claim that people should have equal political and legal rights. Economic egalitarianism requires depriving the 86 percent of citizens who live above the poverty level of a substantial portion of their legally owned property in order to give it to the 14 percent who live below it.
The impassioned egalitarian rhetoric that asserts this supposed obligation cows many people into acquiescence. But no such obligation exists, and the appeal to it is absurd, because it requires the equalization of the property of rapists and their victims, welfare cheats and taxpayers, spendthrifts and savers. No reasonable person can believe that we are obliged to treat the moral and immoral, the prudent and imprudent, the law-abiding and the criminal with equal consideration. While we may have an obligation to help those who are poor through no fault of their own, it is absurd to suppose that if, as a result of bad choices, people find themselves below the poverty level, then it becomes the obligation of the government to help them by confiscating a considerable portion of the property of everyone else.
It may be thought that no one could seriously hold such an implausible view. But Rawls and Dworkin do hold it, and they have persuaded many highly intelligent people to share it by giving systematic expression to the unwarranted but pervasive guilt that many affluent people feel about poverty and by proposing elaborately reasoned policies that assuage this guilt. Their reasons, however, fly in the face of common sense, repudiate the conception of justice that has been fundamental in the Western tradition, and have consequences that would outrage the moral sensibility of reasonable people, if they perceived them.
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Rawls's two principles of justice cannot deliver what they promise. The first promises extensive liberty; the second, economic equality. But, given the obvious fact of great individual differences, how people exercise their liberty will result in economic inequality. Similarly, economic equality requires curtailing individual liberty. Rawls sees this conflict, and he copes with it by allowing only as much liberty as is compatible with economic equality. He thus begins in the liberal tradition of Locke and Mill, by promising liberty, and ends, in the socialist tradition, by stifling liberty for the sake of economic equality.
It reminds of a comment made by P.J. O'Rourke, I believe, about the French when he noted that their revolutionary slogan: "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" was based on a contradiction. Pure liberty and pure equality cannot exist simultaneously for the very reasons noted by Kekes above.
To make concrete what this theory regards as justice, compare two of our society's worst-off. The first, a mugger who has never held a job, is vicious when he can get away with it and spends his ill-gotten gains on drugs. The second, a mother of three, has been abandoned by her husband; she earns the minimum wage at a menial job and is trying hard to raise her children well. According to what Rawls calls justice, these two are entitled to the same resources from society simply because they are among the worst-off. The mugger's viciousness and lack of effort and the mother's decency and struggle create no morally relevant difference between them.
Now change the scenario a bit. The mugger continues as before, but the mother's efforts have borne fruit. She has found a better job and is doing well at it. Her family now is moderately secure and comfortable but hardly affluent. On Rawls's view, justice requires taking some of the mother's resources in order to give them to the mugger.
In deeming this blatant injustice just, Rawls repudiates the conception—accepted from the Old Testament to recent times—that justice consists in giving people what they deserve: reward for good conduct and punishment for bad. Justice requires protecting people, like the mother, in the enjoyment of their legally owned property against the depredations of criminals, like the mugger, and the confiscatory policies of egalitarians. The efforts to equalize the property of the deserving and the undeserving, as Rawls advocates, is not justice but its opposite, no matter what Rawls calls it.
Follow the link and read the rest. It is a relatively long essay but well worth your while.
Read the piece blogged below first (Does this explain liberal anger) and then this to see the effect of the liberal mindset on the lives of the underclass
Are Liberals smarter? Read this and decide if the author has dissected the Liberal mindset.
Dennis Prager explains why world opinion and U.N. moral standing aren't worth the hot air expended to defer to them.
Israel has killed Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the Hamas terror leader, and almost every nation in the world and the nations' theoretical embodiment, the United Nations, have condemned Israel for doing so.
World leaders and the world organization have said almost nothing about Communist China's ongoing destruction of one of the world's oldest civilizations, Tibet. World leaders have said almost nothing about the Arab enslavement and genocide of non-Arab blacks in Sudan. But they convene world conferences to label Israel, one of the most humane and decent democracies on earth, a pariah.
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I have contempt for "the world." I cherish and admire countless individuals, but I have contempt for "the world" and "world opinion." "The world" has never cared about evils inflicted on human beings. The Communist genocides meant nothing to humanity. The Holocaust meant nothing. With almost no exception, the mass atrocities since World War II have likewise absorbed humanity less than the Olympics or the Miss World Contest.
I have contempt for the United Nations. It is one of the great obstacles to goodness and decency on this planet. Its moral record -- outside of a few specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization -- is almost entirely supportive of evil and condemnatory of good. It is dominated by the most morally backward governments in the world -- those from the Arab and Muslim worlds, the Communists during their heyday and African despots. It appointed Libya, a despotic, primitive state, to head its Human Rights Commission, whose members include China, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Neither the United States nor Israel sits on the Commission.
I regard the European Union with similar revulsion. With little opposition, Europe murdered nearly every Jewish man, woman and child in its midst, and a half-century later provides cover for those in the Middle East who seek to do to the Middle East's Jews exactly what the Nazis did to the European Jews. For the European Union to condemn Israel's killing of a Hamas leader, when Hamas's avowed aim is another Jewish genocide, is so loathsome as to board the incredible. For Germany and France (who, unlike America, have almost never shed blood for the liberty of others) to do everything they can to undermine America's attempt to liberate Iraq is similarly repugnant.
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I love learning and revere the title of "professor," but with few exceptions, universities, too, merit contempt. The vast majority of professors who take positions on social issues are moral fools. They teach millions of students that America and Israel are villains and that the enemies of those decent societies are merely misunderstood victims who are often justified in their hatred. And they loathe the American Judeo-Christian value system that has made the United States the world's land of opportunity and beacon of liberty.
Check this out. Lileks fisks Sullivan's piece on how we should raise gasoline taxes. By the way, when I first skimmed the bleat, I thought he was fisking a SF Chronicle columnist.
Thanks Mr. Kerry, and the other anti-war activists then and now. You empower this kind of savagry.
Hundreds gather at killing fields
From correspondents in Phnom Penh, Cambodia
April 17, 2004
HUNDREDS of people gathered at Cambodia's killing fields today to mark the country's fall to the Khmer Rouge 29 years ago and mourn the 1.7 million people who died during its four-year rule.
More than 50 monks chanted prayers for the souls of the people killed under the radical communist group, which stormed Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, and forcibly evacuated its population.
They gathered at Cambodia's most notorious mass grave site on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Chhoeung Ek, where 20,000 people were killed and buried in shallow graves. More than 80 of the graves still contain bones, and the area is now a tourist destination.
In a bid to create a communist agrarian utopia, the Khmer Rouge abolished money, education and religion, and emptied the cities to start up massive rural communes.
An estimated 1.7 million people died from starvation, disease, overwork and execution during the regime's rule.
Fisking Edward Said's concept of orientalism.
Israel is the foremost victim of the West's forgetfulness; the Arab world has been its chief beneficiary. And nothing illustrates this truth more neatly than the popularized version of Edward Said's celebrated concept of Orientalism.
Orientalism is based on the astonishing premise that it is wrong for the West to try to imagine what life is like in the East, because (guess what!) the way the West imagined the East often differed from how the East really was, thereby presenting a distorted view of the East.
When given the opportunity to pay more taxes in Mass. that bastion of liberal thought, they turn a deaf ear as shown below.
Tax form check-off bounces in stingy Bay State
By Elisabeth J. Beardsley-Boston Herald
Friday, April 2, 2004
Paying higher taxes to protect services - a liberal drumbeat on Beacon Hill - has resulted in an underwhelming response from Bay State taxpayers, even from those in the tony suburbs.
New tax data reveal a teeny and shrinking number of taxpayers are checking the box to voluntarily cough up 5.85 percent of their income, rather than the mandatory 5.3 percent.
The state check-off was created two years ago by GOP lawmakers, who were annoyed with liberals' tax-hiking efforts.
Only 510 people have elected to pay higher taxes, out of the 1.6 million taxpayers who have filed to date, or .03 percent of the population - and that's down nearly half from this time last year.
``It's tax me more, but as long as everybody else pays,'' grumped House Minority Leader Bradley H. Jones (R-North Reading).
Top liberal lawmakers dismissed the check-off as a gimmick. ``My voluntary contributions are called donations,'' sniffed Rep. James Marzilli, who personally pays for plants to spruce up his Arlington district.
Geographic data showed high concentrations of people opted last year to pay higher taxes in urban areas like Boston and Cambridge.
But the affluent suburbs seem to be stingier - with only five taxpayers apiece in Weston and Wellesley ponying up extra dough, and none in Hyannis or Dover.
For more information go to this site.
First it was unnamed foreign leaders that endorsed Kerry and now it's Noam Chomsky.
Well, that leads to a question for Senator Kerry: Do you share Mr. Chomsky's view that America deserved 9/11? And, if we derserved 9/11 shouldn't we deserve another terrorist strike?
The Sierra Club has long ago stopped being an environmental issues oriented organization.
McCarthyism among the redwoods
Sunday, March 14, 2004
The cheap charge of racism has become the last refuge of the scoundrel in American politics today.
If you doubt that, I invite you to consider the current battle over the leadership of the Sierra Club. The 750,000 members of the environmental group are now voting to elect five members of the 15-person board of directors. The central issue is population growth and how to contain it.
This should be a rather dry, even boring debate. The population of America is growing by X people per year. These people will use up Y resources each year. Multiplying X times Y will tell us just how much environmental impact this population growth will cause.
The issue is simple. More than 30 years ago, the club adopted a policy of supporting initiatives "that will bring about the stabilization of the population, first in the United States and then of the world."
This was uncontroversial back when the main cause of population growth was high birth rates. But American birth rates stabilized in the 1970s. Now immigrants and their children are the primary cause of population growth. Legal immigrants enter the United States at the rate of about a million a year, illegals at perhaps half that rate.
Ergo, anyone who opposes population growth in America should oppose immigration.
That logic is inescapable to Ben Zuckerman, a professor at U.C.L.A. and a member of the Sierra Club's board. For years Zuckerman has been calling on the club to come out against the massive immigration levels fueling America's current population boom. He is fond of noting that just 50 years ago the county in which he lives, Los Angeles, was the leading agricultural producer in the United States. Now it is paved from end to end -- and it's still growing.
For years I've been speaking with Zuckerman on the phone and exchanging e-mails with him. I'm a conservative and he's a liberal, but we're both nature- lovers. And I can testify that Zuckerman is in no way a racist. He is simply an unabashed tree- hugger of the first rank. When he's not on his bicycle, he drives a hybrid.
Zuckerman, a professor of astronomy, may have his mind in stars, but lately he's found himself fighting in the gutter.
"One of my colleagues heard a report on National Public Radio, and he was distressed to hear me being described as a right-wing racist," Zuckerman told me the other day.
That was typical of the media coverage of the issue. Newspaper articles have focused not on the debate itself but on charges of racism. Club executive director Carl Pope has gone on the record as stating that while Zuckerman and his allies are not racists, "they are clearly being supported by racists."
One of those allies, a candidate for the board, is Frank Morris, an African-American with a background in civil rights who has no tolerance for racism. But it's easier to talk about racism than to confront an issue that is very touchy for liberals, says Zuckerman. He makes a distinction between thinking liberals and knee-jerk liberals.
"The problem with knee-jerk liberals is they can't understand that not every situation is a win- win situation," Zuckerman said. "These people are not willing to make hard choices. They're not willing to be thought of as not nice."
So instead of confronting the immigration issue, they attack those who bring it up. The charges of racism emanate from Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who is a candidate for the board. Dees is a perennial alarmist who has built a personal empire out of leveling charges of racism that often are unsubstantiated. The law center's Web site terms Zuckerman and his allies "radical anti- immigration activists." Articles on the site attempt to portray a number of mainstream immigration-reform advocacy groups as mere stalking horses for racists and hate groups.
Zuckerman questions why a social activist is running for a seat on the board of an environmental organization. He says it's because the Sierra Club is no longer an environmental group. It has been taken over by people who believe in so-called "environmental justice."
"The whole environmental movement has been taken over by the environmental justice people," he said.
The Sierra Club home page, for example, features a prominent endorsement for the April 25 "March for Women's Lives," a cause that has nothing to do with the environment. The page also offers calls for Americans to practice birth control to achieve zero population growth. But it says nothing about the population growth caused by immigration.
You could argue that this growth is good. The Bush administration certainly thinks so. But the Sierra Club is supposed to put the environment first.
And from an environmentalist's perspective, there's no doubt immigration should be capped. At current rates, America will grow by 119 million people in 50 years, enough people to create a city as dense as Manhattan and as big as New Jersey.
New Jersey's crowded enough as it is, which is why I agree we need to cap immigration. But that doesn't make me a racist. It doesn't make Zuckerman one either.
"I've never seen so much hate as I see coming out of people from the Sierra Club," said Zuckerman. "I truly know how people must have felt 50 years ago when Joe McCarthy was attacking them."
Generally I'm not too sympathetic to charges of McCarthyism. But in this case I'll make an exception.
Paul Mulshine is a Star-Ledger columnist.
I don't consider NewsMax an extraordinarily reliable source (then again, I don't consider the NY Times an extraordinarily reliable source), so take this with a grain of salt. They reported a couple of weeks ago, that our junior Senator praised Saddam for his treatment of women.
Sen. Hillary Clinton said this week that Iraqi women were better off under Saddam Hussein, arguing that when the brutal dictator ran the country women were at least assured the right to participate in Iraq's public life.
In comments that went unreported by the mainstream press, the former first lady told the Brookings Institution on Wednesday that since Saddam's removal from power, Iraq's postwar governing councils had engaged in "pullbacks in the rights [women] were given under Saddam Hussein."
Sen. Clinton noted that while Saddam had been "an equal opportunity oppressor," women were at least assured certain constitutional guarantees.
Hmmm, would those guarantees include the right to be raped repeatedly while your husband and children were made to watch? Being fed head first into the industrial shredders rather than feet first? The right to vote for Saddam and no one else?
The interim constitution guarantees:
Article 12.
All Iraqis are equal in their rights without regard to gender, sect, opinion, belief, nationality, religion, or origin, and they are equal before the law. Discrimination against an Iraqi citizen on the basis of his gender, nationality, religion, or origin is prohibited. Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the security of his person. No one may be deprived of his life or liberty, except in accordance with legal procedures. All are equal before the courts.
Now I know as well as anyone that a constitution frequently isn't worth the paper it's written on, but on what possible basis could Ms. Rodham Clinton presume that women were in any way better off under Saddam and his great feminist sons Uday and Qusay?
Sidney Goldberg discusses the new book "In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage" by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr and asks why Stalin and the other murderous Communist dictators of the 20th century don't receive the same opprobrium that has been visited on Hitler. In fact, in many circles, Stalin, Mao, Castro and others are still widely admired. It's a very good question and one that we have asked in many posts on this site. We still haven't heard a good answer to it.
I used to have a thirty-second quiz to determine someone's political positioning: "Who was better, Batista or Castro?" "Who was better, Mao or Chiang?" If the person answered that Castro and Mao were better, I would know it would be a long, hard night before an inch of political education could be accomplished. Often the rationale was "Well, at least Castro and Mao weren't corrupt" -- as if corruption were the worst evil of the century, and ignoring the fact that Mao was corrupt on a scale magnitudes beyond anything Chiang ever dreamt of or that to this day Castro lives like a potentate on the backs of his people.
Haynes and Klehr make the point that Germany underwent denazification after World War II, a lustration that went down to the lowest party levels, making it virtually impossible for a Nazi party member to hold office in the new Germany, so that the relatively unblemished mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, became Chancellor.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, on the other hand, did not result in a decommunisation. There was no equivalent of the Nuremberg trials, and indeed most high offices to this day are occupied by Communists or former Communists, tens of thousands of them with blood on their hands. The supreme insult is that the president of this vast political enterprise is Vladimir Putin, a former high-ranking Communist in the Soviet Secret Police. The equivalent of this would have been the inheritance of the government of Nazi Germany after World War II by the Nazi gauleiter of Poland.
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What Haynes and Klehr relentlessly expose is the unwavering dedication of American Communists to a regime that slaughtered more innocent civilians than Hitler did, counting up the Jews, Poles, Gypies, and the other poor souls that fell victim to Hitler's dementia. Robert Conquest, the historian who chronicled what took place in the Soviet abattoir, says that 20 million were slaughtered.
But "In Denial" is mostly about the American Communists' reaction to these events. The book is exhaustively researched, so that there are virtually no crumbs of doubt left for die-hard Stalinist defenders to nibble on -- except in academia, where so many professors refuse to believe the facts, even now when they can be etched in stone. The professoriat, in so many universities, still believe that McCarthyism was a greater evil than Soviet communism.
But Haynes and Klehr don't let them get away with anything, from the lingering lunatic refusal to accept the guilt of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, to the seemingly small deceptions, such as the Communist claim that the U.S. Army tagged veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, after the Spanish Civil War, as "premature anti-Fascists" and stamped "PA" on their army documents so that they, in effect, could be watched and harassed throughout their army careers.
Exhaustive research by the two authors proves, well beyond any reasonable doubt, the army never did this and knew nothing about it, and that this label was concocted entirely by the Communists. (It was cooked up during the confusing times of the Nazi-Soviet pact, during which the Communists had to stop opposing Hitler -- and Franco -- and fall in line with the new parade, opposing FDR and Churchill.)
Arnold Kling takes on comments by the chairman of Duke University's philosophy department, Prof. Richard Brandon, who posited that the reason academia leans left is that conservatives are basically stupid. Kling offers his own views, which I largely agree with, on academic tendency to lean left.
People with certain traits tend to choose particular occupations. Someone who is afraid of heights is unlikely to become a firefighter. Someone who is repelled by the sight of blood is unlikely to become a doctor. Someone who is impatient with details is unlikely to become a bookkeeper.
A fancy term for this is "self-selection." We say that people select activities and occupations that are suited to their temperaments.
If your temperament favors freedom without responsibility, then there are certain occupations that are a good fit. Academic life is one of them, as I pointed out in Real World 101. A professor has very little of what most of us would consider responsibility. Teaching, which is the most responsible activity that a professor must perform, is considered a minor part of the academic's life. Almost all professors seek to lower these modest responsibilities even further by seeking reduced teaching loads.
The trick to having freedom without responsibility is to get paid without having to worry about where the money comes from. Most professors do not worry about fundraising or attracting tuition-paying students.
In general, wherever creative individuals receive incomes without having to worry about the "business aspect" of their organizations, you have freedom without responsibility. In print journalism, reporting is kept separate from advertising or circulation. In the arts, commercial success is so difficult to predict that few writers, composers, or actors want to deal with the business aspect of their endeavors.
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When we see leftist ideology statistically predominant among college professors, news reporters, or open-source software advocates, what we are seeing is self selection. What Richard Florida dubbed The Creative Class is a self-selected group that seeks freedom without responsibility in their professional lives. Thus, we should not be surprised that their ideological bent is toward modern liberalism, which translates this personal preference into a political platform.
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The libertarian critique of Freedom Without Responsibility is that taking away responsibility leads to taking away freedom. The only way to provide collective benefits is by taxing those who work, save, and innovate. The more you try to alter market outcomes, the more you have to take away people's freedom. Friedrich Hayek warned that this was The Road to Serfdom. What he saw was that under both Communist Socialism in Russia and National Socialism in Germany, the loss of individual responsibility was accompanied by the eradication of freedom. This dark side of socialism was also the concern of novelist George Orwell.
Freedom Without Responsibility does not scale up to the level of society. As government takes over more responsibility from the individual, rewards start to accrue to the most ruthless and effective political operators. Work and production are crowded out by confiscation and bribery.
As government tries to second-guess market processes, it makes matters worse instead of better. A remote central government is not suited to playing the role of what George Lakoff calls a nurturant parent. The attempt to do so leads instead to an impersonal, maddening, stultifying bureaucracy.
I would add to this argument another form of self-selection in academia. Many of the 60's left, stayed in school to get higher degrees so they could get deferments. This created a large group of people who leaned left, who found it useful to get higher degrees. Since the degrees tended to be, not in fields like science, engineering, economics or other 'difficult' subjects in which 'real' jobs were available, but rather in soft fields where you could basically bullshit your way to a PhD, especially in the postmodern, Foucault/Derrida era of everything means anything you want, but which created skills that were only employable in academia, the universities were basically bombarded with post-60's leftist applicants. Once they took over the university departments in the 70's the process became self-sustaining as they mostly hired only other like-minded folks, while telling themselves all along, like Prof. Brandon above, that those that didn't agree with their point of view were not quite up to snuff.
Hey, Jimmy, how about some structural changes in the way these poor countries operate. How about some private property rights. How much cotton does Mali export to France? Did you ever hear of Egyptian cotton, the most expensive of cottons. Speaking of terrorists did you happen to notice that the 9/11 murderers were not poor. Oh, never mind. It's just easier to blame America for everything.
Ethan Davis explores the renowned leftist tolerance and support for free speech as practiced at that great liberal bastion of higher learning...Amherst.
You would think that a sitting Supreme Court Justice would be treated with respect pretty much anywhere. But not at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where on Tuesday Antonin Scalia was forced to pick his way through crowds of jeering protesters just to get to his lecture.
Once inside, Justice Scalia spoke eloquently, lucidly and politely on originalism in constitutional law. Interpreting the Constitution as it was originally written, he argued, is the only way to restrain liberal and conservative judges alike from imposing their personal preferences on the country. Five out of nine unelected lawyers, Scalia said, should not be legislating for the entire nation. If the Supreme Court makes a mistake, the people can only rectify it by constitutional amendment. Directed by their professors to believe that Scalia would engage only in "vitriolic name-calling," the audience was temporarily mollified. There were embarrassed looks as some of the less radical ones quietly removed their black armbands, and Scalia spoke without interruption for close to 45 minutes. During the question and answer period, some protesters tried to get the speech back on track with long-winded, accusatory questions (defying their own instructions to refrain from dialogue), but the speech ended without major incident. The next evening, with Justice Scalia safely out of the way, the campus gathered for a "debriefing." Tony Marx, the newly inaugurated president of Amherst College, moderated the discussion, which quickly turned into an assault on the legitimacy of Scalia's presence on campus. Because President Marx allowed each person to speak only once, the four or five conservatives present, including political science professor Hadley Arkes, bore the brunt of the exchange.
Austin Sarat, the professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought who was one of the signers of the faculty boycott letter, delivered a long monologue. "The scope of legitimate debate on a college campus is narrower than in the world at-large," he declared. "Whether homosexuals are covered under the equal protection clause is not a debatable subject on a college campus." Furthermore, Professor Sarat announced, he did not find Antonin Scalia to have an "interesting mind." He would have much rather seen another justice, such as Sandra Day O'Connor, onstage.
Members of the College Democrats proclaimed that Amherst had exceeded the bounds of acceptable dialogue by inviting Scalia. Parroting the professors' letter of protest, they again condemned Scalia's alleged "vitriolic name-calling" and unwillingness to engage in reasonable dialogue. When asked about their curious silence on September 11, when Barbara Ehrenreich called President Bush a "moron" and expressed her fear that George W. Bush was going to "bomb a bunch of brown people," the Democrats changed the subject. The "discussion" then dissolved into a spat between the far-left and the moderate-left over whether Scalia violated Amherst's Statement of Respect for Persons. How strange that this endorsement of reasonable dialogue came from the same students who had been wearing black armbands and chanting profanities the evening before.
President Marx? How appropriate.
A British "ethics" professor joins famed Princeton "ethicist", Peter Singer, in declaring infanticide acceptable in certain cases.
Professor John Harris, a member of the British Medical Association's ethics committee, said that it was not "plausible to think that there is any moral change that occurs during the journey down the birth canal" - suggesting that there was no moral difference between aborting a foetus and killing a baby.
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Prof Harris, who is also a professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, was asked what moral status he accorded an embryo and he endorsed infanticide in cases of a child carrying a genetic disorder that remained undetected during pregnancy.
He replied: "I don't think infanticide is always unjustifiable. I don't think it is plausible to think that there is any moral change that occurs during the journey down the birth canal."
Hmmm....isn't that the exact argument used by anti-abortion forces? Why stop at infants, what if the genetic disorder isn't discovered until age 10? 20? 50? Let's just kill everyone who doesn't fit into our view of perfection. Who gets to decide, what criteria should be used to determine if someone is fit to live? Well there's the rub, perhaps a large government bureaucracy...something like:
...The Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Hereditary Ailments (Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung von erb- und anlagebedingten schweren Leiden) was the preeminent body dealing with racial hygiene and population policy in Nazi Germany. Its members belonged to the creme de la creme of the medical establishment at the time. The Reich Committee planned, organized, and implemented the mass murder of handicapped children.
For administrative support the Reich Committee relied on the Subdepartment for Heredity and Race of the Reich Ministry's of the Interior Health Department (Unterabteilung Erb- und Rassenpflege der Abteilung Volksgesundheit im Reichsministerium des Innern) headed by Ministerialdirigent Dr. Herbert Linden. The Chancellery of the Fuehrer (Kanzlei des Fuehrers, or KdF) under Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler assumed the political management of the Reich Committee. More importantly, Hitler named his personal physician (Begleitarzt) Dr. Karl Brandt and Bouhler plenipotentiaries for the forthcoming killing operation and gave them oral authorization (Fuehrerermaechtigung) to proceed.
In October 1939 the planned killings of handicapped children commenced. Between 1939 and 1945, some 5,000 infants, children and juveniles fell victim to Nazi Germany's first killing operation. In more than thirty children's wards of state hospitals and nursing homes (Heil- und Pflegeanstalten) in Austria and Germany the perpetrators murdered their victims by administering lethal doses of medication or by starvation. Tragically, the end of the Second World War in Europe did not put an end to the murder of handicapped children. "Twenty-one days after Germany's unconditional surrender, Richard Jenne, just four years old, became the last victim of the euthanasia killers"(p.163). This happened on 29 May 1945 in the children's ward of the Kaufbeuren-Irsee state hospital in Bavaria, more than three weeks after U.S. troops had taken the town!
Eugene Volokh takes some of the Rosenberg apologists to task.
A little bit of embarrassment seems to be in order: An article in Sunday's L.A. Times Calendar section (seems to be unavailable unless you're a subscriber) reports on a new documentary about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg ("an exceptional documentary, short-listed for this year's Academy Award, a compelling emotional narrative laced with explosive political material"), who were convicted in the 1950s of spying for the Soviets, and executed for it. The documentary was directed by their granddaughter, Ivy Meeropol. The article is not by any means entirely pro-Rosenberg, but I was still struck by the second paragraph below:
But what also drove [Ivy] was the fact that "I was tired of the simplistic version of this story, what history remembers, the way everyone thinks they stole the secret of the atomic bomb. I knew this wasn't true, I knew they were more than that, and I wanted to bring their story to people who don't know it or have closed their minds to it. And I needed to know what was worth standing up for, what they were willing to die for."
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Now I'm sure that some, perhaps many, American Communists, including those who continued supporting the Soviet Union into the 1950s -- past the Ukrainian famine, past the purges, past the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, past the enslavement of Eastern Europe -- were misguided "idealists with good intentions." True, to remain "misguided idealists," they had to have willfully blinded themselves to the reality of what the Soviets were doing. But human beings have a remarkable capacity to do that sort of thing.
Still, the fact remains that either these "left-wing activists" were evil (i.e., not really misguided idealists, but people who fully supported slaughter and tyranny in the name of Communism) or fools: People who failed to realize that Communism would create more hunger and privation, as well as suppressing freedom and killing people. And at the same time, history shows that many of those who didn't "feel radical change was necessary" (a category that of course includes many New Dealers, conservatives, moderates, and many others) -- who were supposedly "dead from the neck up" -- were smarter, wiser, and more humane.
Thomas Sowell examines the true state of poverty in the U.S. and distinguishes it from the leftist spin.
What do you do when you don't have as much of something as you need? One of the things you can do is stretch it out to make it last as long as it can.
That is what the political left is doing with the poor. A lot of noise is made about how we are "running out" of this or that natural resource -- almost always falsely -- but the real problem of the left is that they are running out of the poor, who serve as a justification of the left's drive to extend their power over all the rest of us.
Not only is the average real income per person rising in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution, people seldom stay in the bottom brackets for more than a few years. Over the course of their lifetimes, most of those same people are in the top 20 percent at one time or other.
What is the left to do when they find themselves running out of the poor? They must stretch the poor to make them last -- even if that requires stretching the truth.
First of all, the left cannot let the public know that most of the people in the lower income brackets are just passing through, instead of being stuck there for life. Moreover, the statistics presented to the public cannot be in terms of real income per person, because that is rising, which undermines the left's vision.
Instead, the liberal media must restrict themselves to discussing family income or household income statistics, because families and households are getting smaller over the years. That conceals the rise in income per person.
He then offers this typical example of NYT spin:
The subject of this huge expenditure of ink is a woman who has held a string of low-paying jobs and encountered the kinds of problems in her life that not having much money can bring. As a leap of faith, let us assume that the New York Times is telling the truth about the facts. What does this one woman's story prove in a country of more than a quarter of a billion people?
The Times story gets around that problem by simply declaring her to be like "millions at the bottom of the labor force" who are part of "the hidden America." This unsubstantiated assertion is crucial to the point that they are trying to make. But what if your faith can't leap that far?
First of all, most of the people at the bottom of the labor force are young and this is a middle-aged woman with grown children. There are undoubtedly individuals who, for one reason or another, have not moved up over the years, but transforming these exceptions into the rule is part of the magic of left-wing rhetoric.
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The reporter refers to employers sarcastically as "untouchable" and declares: "Wages and hours are set by the marketplace and you cannot expect magnanimity from the marketplace." Or a straight story from the New York Times.
What does "magnanimity" mean in this context, except having somebody else pay for what this woman wants? If she goes from the night shift to the day shift, somebody else is going to have to go from the day shift to the night shift.
Other people -- notably the taxpayers -- have already paid for her in terms of subsidized housing, government-provided dentures, and job training. Moreover, she has also helped herself to more than $10,000 of other people's money by running up credit card debts that she avoided paying by declaring bankruptcy. But it is never enough.
Nothing is easier than for third parties to think up things that can be done at somebody else's expense. That is what the agenda of the left largely consists of.
Richard Baehr has a long and thoughtful essay examining why the Left hates Israel (and America).
For decades, most American Jews have believed there were far greater threats from the fringe right than the fringe left in this country. While this view may have been reasonable in the past, it is certainly not so today. The fringe right still exists- the neo-Nazis in Northwest Idaho, Matthew Hale, and David Duke, and the remnants of the KKK. But the views of the fringe right have been marginalized by their repudiation by virtually all mainstream elements on the political right.
The fringe left, on the other hand, has evolved into a broader left, and become more mainstream. The political perspective of this new left is vehemently anti-Israel, and the power and reach of this movement represent a real threat to Israel, and by extension to Jews who support Israel.
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Opposition to the recent American invasion of Iraq is not a defining characteristic of a leftist. You could be opposed to the war, without being a leftist. However, some, perhaps many, of those who opposed the war are leftists, by the definition I provided above. While I was a supporter of the war effort, there were legitimate reasons to be opposed to going to war, that do not in any way raise a question of someone?s patriotism.
However, when a demonstrator carries a sign in an anti-war rally saying Stop AmeriKKKan Imperialism, or America and Israel are the Real Axis of Evil, that I think is different, and reflects not a reasoned consideration of the Iraq question, but a worldview that is anti-American, hence leftist, and guarantees opposition to the war effort. Only one other country other than the US was ever named in a sign carried by a demonstrator at the marches or rallies I saw, and that of course was Israel and always negatively.
I happened to witness several anti-war demonstrations. There were always many printed signs attacking Israel, signs in other words produced by groups that participated in anti-war demonstrations, and thought it was entirely consistent to be both against the war with Iraq and anti-Israel. Think about this issue this way: was there a single pro-war rally in the country in which there was an anti-Israel sign? I don?t remember seeing one or hearing about one. During the period leading up to the war and in the months since, has there been any supporter of the war on any talk show or newscast, or in any op-ed, gratuitously attacking Israel?
What is it about Israel that brings forth this ill will from the left? Why this exceptionalism about Israel? Alan Dershowitz once wrote an article describing a visitor from another galaxy who comes to earth, and spends several weeks visiting major American colleges and universities. At the end of his tour, the visitor would learn that of all the nations of the world other than the one he was visiting, only one is subject to a divestment effort for a university?s endowment, only one is viciously described in literature regularly distributed to students on campus, and in essays and editorials in college papers and magazines, and only one is discussed in classes across the humanities curriculum with relentless rebuke and scorn. And this country is not, say Sudan or Nigeria, where millions have died in vicious civil wars perpetrated for the most part by Muslims against Christians, or other countries in Africa that still practice slavery, or Saudi Arabia, where women have no rights, and those who try to practice a religion other than Islam are arrested or expelled, or the Palestinian territories, in which homosexuals or those suspected of being homosexual, are tortured or mutilated in the same way as captured Israelis. It is not in fact, any of the dozens of other unsavory places on the planet that provide little or no freedom for their citizens and ruthlessly exploit their country?s workers and resources for the benefit of the ruling few. This much maligned country of course is Israel.
It's a long piece and I've only excerpted a small part of it. Please follow the link to read the entire thing.
I've finally had a chance to catch up on the always rewarding essays of my second favorite curmudgeon, after our own Jerry Scharf, Francis W. Porretto. Here are some of the highlights, although all are well worth reading.
The first is a little dissection of the leftist tendency to regard any conservative position as the product of evil or stupidity therefore releasing them from any need to address the facts.
Argument about anything is premised upon the supremacy of facts and logic, measured against a common, honorable standard of evaluation. Whether a fact is brought into play by Albert Einstein or the village idiot is supposed to make no difference. If it is verifiable and relevant, it must be admitted on an equal plane with all other facts. Whether a skein of implication is proposed by Mother Teresa or Satan, honor requires that we ignore its provenance and judge it according to its logical soundness and predictive accuracy.
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For quite some time, left-liberals have preened themselves for their moral superiority -- what Thomas Sowell calls their "vision of differential rectitude" -- to those who disagree with them. On the strength of that assumed superiority, they have deemed themselves exempt from the requirements for courteous persuasion, for demonstrable results, even for candid presentation of their intentions to us benighted ones. Instead, they've used political power of several forms to impose their preferences on the country, have retroactively revised their goals when they failed to meet the ones they originally stated, and have increasingly turned to stealth to get their way. They have disdained to stand to account for any failure, be it practical or moral. They have shielded those of their own who've demonstrably exploited political privilege for personal gain, though they've condemned the ordinary self-interest of private citizens and have done all they could to thwart it.
Today, the consequences of the highest-profile left-liberal policies have become too obvious to conceal. The tide of sentiment against them has propelled their opponents to political dominance. But increasingly often, left-liberals disdain to argue or explain. Instead, in Sparkman's fashion, they dismiss their opponents as either stupid or evil.
How many arguments would you expect to win with tactics like those? How many converts to your convictions would you reap, if you started every pitch by castigating your targets?
Though your Curmudgeon disbelieves in left-liberal doctrines, he believes strongly that they should be argued for -- that men of wit and knowledge should undertake to defend them with all the logic and evidence they can muster. This is important precisely because they are opposed to the ideas of freedom, the free market, inviolable individual rights to life and property, and a system of justice founded on objective law, objective evidence, and unbending rules of procedure. We must know how to defend these things logically. If we're never required to do that, we will forget why they're important, and will fail to do them justice when they're attacked by force or guile.
Mark Steyn on the double standards at the BBC.
Let me see if I understand the BBC Rules of Engagement correctly: if you're Robert Kilroy-Silk and you make some robust statements about the Arab penchant for suicide bombing, amputations, repression of women and a generally celebratory attitude to September 11 ? none of which is factually in dispute ? the BBC will yank you off the air and the Commission for Racial Equality will file a complaint to the police which could result in your serving seven years in gaol. Message: this behaviour is unacceptable in multicultural Britain.
But, if you're Tom Paulin and you incite murder, in a part of the world where folks need little incitement to murder, as part of a non-factual emotive rant about how "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead" because "they are Nazis" and "I feel nothing but hatred for them", the BBC will keep you on the air, kibitzing (as the Zionists would say) with the crème de la crème of London's cultural arbiters each week. Message: this behaviour is completely acceptable.
So, while the BBC is "investigating" Kilroy, its only statement on Mr Paulin was an oblique but curiously worded allusion to the non-controversy on the Corporation website: "His polemical, knockabout style has ruffled feathers in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive." "The Jewish question"? "Notoriously sensitive"? Is this really how they talk at the BBC?
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One reason why the Arab world is in the state it's in is because one cannot raise certain subjects without it impacting severely on one's wellbeing. And if you can't discuss issues, they don't exist. According to Ibrahim Nawar of Arab Press Freedom Watch, in the last two years seven Saudi editors have been fired for criticising government policies. To fire a British talk-show host for criticising Saudi policies is surely over-reaching even for the notoriously super-sensitive Muslim lobby.
But apparently not. "What Robert could do," suggested the CRE's Trevor Phillips helpfully, "is issue a proper apology, not for the fact that people were offended, but for saying this stuff in the first place. Secondly he could learn something about Muslims and Arabs ? they gave us maths and medicine ? and thirdly he could use some of his vast earnings to support a Muslim charity. Then I would say he has been properly contrite."
Extravagant public contrition. Re-education camp. "Voluntary" surrender of assets. It's not unknown for officials at government agencies to lean on troublemaking citizens in this way, but not usually in functioning democracies.
When Catholic groups complain about things like Terrence McNally's Broadway play Corpus Christi (in which a gay Jesus enjoys anal sex with Judas), the arts crowd says a healthy society has to have "artists" with the "courage" to "explore" "transgressive" "ideas", etc. But, when Cincinnati Muslims complained about the local theatre's new play about a Palestinian suicide bomber, the production was immediately cancelled: the courageous transgressive arts guys folded like a Bedouin tent. The play was almost laughably pro-Palestinian, but that wasn't the point: the Muslim community leaders didn't care whether the play was pro- or anti-Islam: for them, Islam was beyond discussion. End of subject. And so it was.
Keith Windschuttle, who's book "The Killing of History" I highly recommend, reviews Steven A. LeBlanc's book "Constant Battles", which refutes the Rousseauian notion of the peaceful, noble savage which has influenced so much modern leftist thought.
Prehistoric warfare is a topic that matters very much today because it has the ability to tell us a great deal about the human condition and even the human future. The nature and extent of warfare deep in our tribal past can help throw light on whether human beings are a fundamentally warlike or peaceful species. If the human condition has always been bound by warfare then a pessimism about the prospect of changing this and an investment in a heavily armed nation state would be the rational choice.
But if human nature is ultimately peaceable then it makes more sense to be optimistic, to believe all disputes can eventually be resolved nonviolently, and to work for an international order dedicated to negotiation and conciliation.
It is no secret that Western society is today radically divided by these assumptions, between Americans from Mars and Europeans from Venus. Moreover, most Western countries are themselves internally divided along similar lines, between pessimistic, hard-headed conservatives and optimistic, soft-hearted liberals.
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Since the 17th century, a great debate has raged within Western culture about the original condition of humankind. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that in the state of nature life must have been miserable, brutal, ignorant and short. Only with the advent of civilization did people come to enjoy comfort, peace and longevity. A century later, the French Enlightenment's Jean Jacques Rousseau turned all this on its head, arguing that the first humans lived in simple happiness, at one with the natural environment. Civilization was a corruption of this idyllic golden age, a falling from grace.
Both perspectives were entirely speculative. Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau ever made an empirical investigation of the real world of tribal societies. Nonetheless, their analyses subsequently exercised a powerful hold on the Western mind.
Among intellectuals in the humanities, especially those drawn to the field of anthropology, the radical optimism of Rousseau has long held sway. Right up until the present, the majority of anthropological studies of primitive societies have been conducted on assumptions derived from the French Enlightenment's disdain for the burdens of civilization.
Phyliss Chesler, radical feminist comes out for Bush and excoriates the lib-left for their pro-feminist rhetoric and anti-women's rights realpolitik.
An interesting bio presented by Edward Feser:
He had been something of a bohemian in his youth, and always regarded young people and their idealism as the key to progress and the overcoming of outmoded prejudices. And he was widely admired by the young people of his country, many of whom belonged to organizations devoted to practicing and propagating his teachings. He had a lifelong passion for music, art, and architecture, and was even something of a painter. He rejected what he regarded as petty bourgeois moral hang-ups, and he and his girlfriend "lived together" for years. He counted a number of homosexuals as friends and collaborators, and took the view that a man's personal morals were none of his business; some scholars of his life believe that he himself may have been homosexual or bisexual. He was ahead of his time where a number of contemporary progressive causes are concerned: he disliked smoking, regarding it as a serious danger to public health, and took steps to combat it; he was a vegetarian and animal lover; he enacted tough gun control laws; and he advocated euthanasia for the incurably ill.
He championed the rights of workers, regarded capitalist society as brutal and unjust, and sought a third way between communism and the free market. In this regard, he and his associates greatly admired the strong steps taken by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to take large-scale economic decision-making out of private hands and put it into those of government planning agencies. His aim was to institute a brand of socialism that avoided the inefficiencies that plagued the Soviet variety, and many former communists found his program highly congenial. He deplored the selfish individualism he took to be endemic to modern Western society, and wanted to replace it with an ethic of self-sacrifice: "As Christ proclaimed 'love one another'," he said, "so our call -- 'people's community,' 'public need before private greed,' 'communally-minded social consciousness' -- rings out?! This call will echo throughout the world!"
The reference to Christ notwithstanding, he was not personally a Christian, regarding the Catholicism he was baptized into as an irrational superstition. In fact he admired Islam more than Christianity, and he and his policies were highly respected by many of the Muslims of his day. He and his associates had a special distaste for the Catholic Church and, given a choice, preferred modern liberalized Protestantism, taking the view that the best form of Christianity would be one that forsook the traditional other-worldly focus on personal salvation and accommodated itself to the requirements of a program for social justice to be implemented by the state. They also considered the possibility that Christianity might eventually have to be abandoned altogether in favor of a return to paganism, a worldview many of them saw as more humane and truer to the heritage of their people. For he and his associates believed strongly that a people's ethnic and racial heritage was what mattered most. Some endorsed a kind of cultural relativism according to which what is true or false and right or wrong in some sense depends on one's ethnic worldview, and especially on what best promotes the well-being of one's ethnic group.
No, not the Howard Dean bio...
Who was he? He certainly sounds like the ideal presidential candidate of a Pacifica Radio Network listener or Mother Jones subscriber -- or, to make a more timely reference, a contributor to MoveOn.org. It can only add to his appeal for such people that he was a target of American and British bombing raids and had to flee to the safety of an underground hide-out. And he was none other than Time magazine's Man of the Year for 1938: Adolf Hitler.
Follow the link and read the rest. Max and I formed a similar little quiz awhile ago. The association of the Nazis with conservatives or libertarians has been one of the great propaganda coups of the left in the 20th century. Winston Churchill was a conservative, Hitler was a radical as was Mussolini, who broke with the Socialist party to form the Fascist party. Here is a much more extensive survey of Fascist history. The estimable John Ray has also done numerous essays on this subject also here and here.
The always interesting Keith Burgess-Jackson describes his journey from liberal to conservative.
"A young person who's conservative has no heart; an old person who's liberal has no brain." Have you heard this saying? There are two ways it can be interpreted: as a statement of fact (about people's actual political trajectory) and as a judgment of value (about which trajectory is good). I read it as both. It says that as a matter of (natural) fact, there is a progression from liberalism to conservatism; and it adds (quickly) that this is good. The saying is both descriptive and prescriptive, like "S is lazy" and "T is a coward." It commends young liberals and old conservatives. It condemns young conservatives and old liberals.
I used to be liberal. When I was, I thought conservatives were uncaring, unintelligent, irrational, and obstructionist. They seemed to resist every attempt to make the world a better place -- by my standards. They seemed stuck in the past, oblivious to changes that were taking place in technology, demographics, and world affairs. Didn't they see the threat to the environment posed by global warming? Didn't they see that their cramped understandings of marriage and family were doing real harm to people? Didn't they see that their opposition to redistributive taxation was perpetuating -- indeed, exacerbating -- poverty, sickness, and illiteracy? Didn't they see that in affairs of state, no less than in personal relationships, force never solves anything but only makes things worse?
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Reading my journal of twenty years ago is amusing as well as instructive, because I invariably hold the opposite of each view I held then. I was adamantly opposed to capital punishment, for example. Now, like John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, I support it. I took the moral permissibility of abortion for granted, thinking that only a misogynist could oppose it. Now I am convinced of its immorality, having been persuaded by Don Marquis's brilliant essay, "Why Abortion Is Immoral," The Journal of Philosophy 86 (April 1989): 183-202. (Please write to me if you want a copy.)
I thought Ronald Reagan was a national embarrassment: a smiling, well-coiffed dolt. Now I consider him one of our greatest presidents and thank goodness for his strength, leadership, and vision. I defended redistributive taxation. Now I oppose anything more than a Nozickian minimal state. I shared the feminist belief that women are oppressed by men. Now I think men are just as oppressed as women, albeit in different ways. I also think that feminism has done real damage to women, despite its protestations to the contrary.
What changed? How did I go from left to right on the political spectrum? My critics (including several former friends from whom I've grown apart -- in some cases because of political differences) will say that I became meaner. I got mine, they will say, and closed the door behind me. I lost my compassion, my decency, my sense of fairness, my very humanity. I became a misanthrope. I smile at these insults, because I know I didn't get meaner. I got wiser. I grew up. They didn't. Maybe they will -- I hope they will -- but they haven't yet. The good news is that as long as one lives, one can be saved into conservatism. It is never too late to let the heart be ruled by the brain.
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What is wisdom, anyway, and why does it come with age? Wisdom is understanding and judgment rooted in experience. A wise person examines all aspects of a problem, not just one or some of them, before rendering a judgment. A wise person asks what effect welfare has on its recipients (besides providing for their material needs). Does it undermine their self-respect? Does it decrease their self-sufficiency? Does it destroy incentive? Does it, in the end, undermine or erode their personhood? A wise person thinks through the implications of a solution before offering or adopting it. For example, what effect will homosexual marriage have on childrearing and child development? What effect does living with homosexual parents have on one's character, sexuality, self-image, and values? These are not idle questions. They're real questions with real answers, even if the answers are (currently) unknown. And they're important questions, questions that bear on our communal life.
Wise people are discriminating. They appreciate that the moral life is complex and that details matter. To paraphrase Judith Jarvis Thomson, "There are cases and there are cases." A seemingly small difference between two cases can make a large moral difference; and, conversely, large differences sometimes make no moral difference at all. Wise people concern themselves with the unintended and unforeseen consequences of action as well as with those that are intended and foreseen. They attend to the realities of a situation and not just to ideals. They are oriented to particulars, not just to universals. They work from the ground up, as it were, not from the top down. They have the capacity for practical judgment -- what the Greeks called phronesis.
A wise person, in short, brings all relevant considerations to bear on a problem, assigns them their proper weight, and resolves it. Humbly. A wise person understands that even when one acts rightly, all things considered, important moral values may go by the board. This is cause for regret. Nobody, not even the great Socrates, is perfectly wise, but some people come nearer to it than others. We should all strive to be wiser.
Young people, bless their idealistic hearts, have no experience. Actually, it's a mistake to say that they have no experience, for experience begins with birth (or before); but young people don't have as much experience as their elders. They are, to use the argot, experientially challenged. The world, to the young, came into existence with them and exists to be manipulated by them. What came before is to be questioned and, if found wanting (as it usually is), abolished. The world is to be built anew, from the ground up, using only our ideals and our technology. Instead of punishing people, let's understand why they commit crimes and try to help them. They're victims of their environment, not malicious choosers. Instead of threatening other nations, let's build bridges. Let's tolerate the wonderful diversity of religions and ways of life. Let's stop thinking of our own way of life as superior to that of others. That creates resentment, animosity, and ultimately violence, which is the summum malum. If we talk, we won't fight.
With regard to wealth, why should some people have more of it than others? Let's take wealth from the haves and distribute it to the have-nots. There's plenty of wealth to go around, after all; it's just maldistributed. This goes not only for the citizens of this country but for people around the world. Americans consume and pollute too much. They -- we -- must cut back for the good of all.
And while we're at it, let's take wealth out of the political system. Everyone's voice should be heard, whether rich or poor. Why should a corporate executive have a greater say in policy matters than the person who cleans his or her office every evening? Law should equalize income and wealth, or at least move in that direction. It is obscene that some have so much while others have so little. How did we let things get this way? It is entirely up to us how wealth, status, privilege, and other social goods are distributed. A choice not to redistribute these goods is a choice to accept the existing (unjust) distribution.
Follow the link to read the entire piece.
It in many ways mimics my own conversion although I have always had a strong libertarian streak and distrust of government. I have never understood why so many on the left, who also claim to distrust and dislike government, always want to give the government more power over everyone's lives. I have never kept a journal like Keith, but I can track my general views by the saved magazines from times past. I (actually my wife) just two years ago threw away the 10 years of issues of the Nation, Progressive and Mother Jones from the mid 70's to the mid 80's that I had stored in boxes in the garage. Of them all I tired of the Progressive last. I kept getting the Nation for several years just to read Hitchens, Cockburn and Trillin. I gave up Mother Jones first and started subscribing to Reason in about 1980 (and still do).
Victor Davis Hanson has a superb essay about those afflicted with the 'Western disease'. An often debilitating condition that prevents clear thinking and causes various delusional behaviours.
After watching a string of editorial attacks on America both at home and from abroad in the aftermath of Saddam’s capture, I thought back to the actual record of the last two years. In 24 months the United States defeated two of the most hideous regimes in modern memory. For all the sorrow involved, it has already made progress in the unthinkable: bringing consensual government into the heart of Middle Eastern autocracy, where there has been no political heritage other than tyranny, theocracy, and dictatorship.
In liberating 50 million people from both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein it has lost so far less than 500 soldiers — some of whom were killed precisely because they waged a war that sought to minimalize not just civilian casualties but even the killing of their enemies. Contrary to the invective of Western intellectuals, the American military’s sins until recently have been of omission — preferring not to shoot looters or hunt down and kill insurgents — rather than brutal commission. While the United States has conducted these successive wars some 7,000 miles beyond its borders, it also avoided another terrorist attack of the scale of September 11 — and all the while crafting a policy of containment of North Korea and soon-to-be nuclear Iran.
Thus by any comparative standard of military history, the last two difficult years, despite setbacks and disappointments, represent a remarkable military achievement .Yet no one would ever gather even the slightest acknowledgment of such success from our Democratic grandees. Al Gore dubbed the Iraqi liberation a quagmire and, absurdly, the worst mistake in the history of American foreign policy. Howard Dean, more absurdly, suggested that the president of the United States might have had foreknowledge of September 11. Most Americans now shudder at the thought that the former might have been president in this time of crisis — and that the latter still could be.
Often American and European writers echo the fury of Gore and Dean. For example, on the day before Saddam Hussein was captured, one could reread in the International Herald Tribune a long reprinted rant by Paul Krugman, the Princeton professor. He exclaimed, “In the end the Bush doctrine — based on delusions of grandeur about America’s ability to dominate the world through force — will collapse. What we’ve just learned is how hard and dirty the doctrine’s proponents will fight against the inevitable.” Krugman was apparently furious that American taxpayer dollars were going to be used to hire exclusively American and Coalition companies to rebuild Iraq rather than be paid out to foreign entities whose governments opposed the removal of Saddam Hussein. “Hard and dirty?”
On the same page Bob Herbert assured his foreign audience that “The Republicans are hijacking elections and redistricting the country and looting the Treasury and ignoring the Constitution and embittering our allies.” That outside entities and media have confirmed the vote counts of the Florida election, that Congress must approve federal spending and pass laws, that an independent judiciary audits our legislation, and that 60 countries are now engaged in Iraq meant nothing. “Hijacking and looting?”
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I could go on, but you get the picture of this current madness. There is something terribly wrong, something terribly amoral with the Western intelligentsia, most prominently in academia, the media, and politics. We don’t need Osama bin Laden’s preschool jabbering about “the weak horse” to be worried about the causes of this Western disease: thousands of the richest, most leisured people in the history of civilization have become self-absorbed, ungracious, and completely divorced from the natural world — the age-old horrific realities of dearth, plague, hunger, rapine, or conquest.
Indeed, it is even worse than that: a Paul Krugman or French barrister neither knows anything of how life is lived beyond his artificial cocoon nor of the rather different men and women whose unacknowledged work in the shadows ensures his own bounty in such a pampered landscape — toil that allows our anointed to rage at those purportedly culpable for allowing the world to function differently from an Ivy League lounge or the newsroom of the New York Times. Neither knows what it is like to be in a village gassed by Saddam Hussein or how hard it is to go across the world to Tikrit and chain such a monster.
Our Western intellectuals are sheltered orchids who are naïve about the world beyond their upscale hothouses. The Western disease of deductive fury at everything the West does provides a sort of psychological relief (without costs) for apparent guilt over privileged circumstances. It is such a strange mixture of faux-populism and aristocratic snobbery. They believe only a blessed few such as themselves have the requisite education or breeding to understand the “real” world of Western pathologies and its victims.
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If we accept that our aristocratic Left mutters exactly the sort of nonsense described by a host of critics from Aristophanes to Juvenal to Tom Wolfe, then just as bizarre is the Muslim world’s reaction to capture of the murderer of more Muslims than any living Muslim in the Muslim world. On reports of Saddam’s demise the same networks that aired Western professors fretting about his rights were interviewing weeping women in Palestine, somber coffeehouses in Cairo, and pompous intellectuals in Lebanon. In lockstep concern they all bemoaned the ignominious circumstances of his capture: He was found in a hole! He was dirty! And an American medic inspected him like an infected deportee! Alas, he fired not a shot.
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Both Western pontificators and the mob in the Middle East feed off each other. Paul Krugman would rarely write a column about how abjectly immoral it was that thousands mourned the death of a mass murderer when one can say worse things about an American president who chose not to use American dollars to hire French companies to rebuild Iraq. Bob Herbert can falsely rant about a Florida election “rigged,” but seldom about an election never occurring in the Arab world.
The so-called Arab street and its phony intellectuals sense that influential progressive Westerners will never censure Middle Eastern felonies if there is a chance to rage about Western misdemeanors. It is precisely this parasitic relationship between the foreign and domestic critics of the West that explains much of the strange confidence of those who planned September 11. It was the genius of bin Laden, after all, that he suspected after he had incinerated 3,000 Westerners an elite would be more likely to blame itself for the calamity — searching for “root causes” than marshalling its legions to defeat a tribe that embraced theocracy, autocracy, gender apartheid, polygamy, anti-Semitism, and religious intolerance. And why not after Lebanon, the first World Trade Center bombing, the embassies in Africa, murder in Saudi Arabia, and the USS Cole? It was the folly of bin Laden only that he assumed the United States was as far gone as Europe and that a minority of its ashamed elites had completely assumed control of American political, cultural, and spiritual life.
Hatred of Israel is the most striking symptom of the Western disease. On the face of it the dilemma there is a no-brainer for any classic liberal: A consensual government is besieged by fanatical suicide killers who are subsidized and cheered on by many dictators in the Arab world. The bombers share the same barbaric methods as Chechens, the 9/11 murderers, al Qaedists in Turkey, and what we now see in Iraq.
Indeed, the liberal Europeans should love Israel, whose social and cultural institutions — universities, the fine arts, concern for the “other” — so reflect its own. Gays are in the Israeli military, whose soldiers rarely salute, but usually address each other by their first names and accept a gender equity that any feminist would love. And while Arabs once may have been exterminated by Syrians, gassed in Yemen by Egypt, ethnically cleansed in Kuwait, lynched without trial in Palestine, burned alive in Saudi Arabia, inside Israel proper they vote and enjoy human rights not found elsewhere in the Arab Middle East.
When Europe frets over the “Right of Return” do they mean the over half-million Jews who were sent running for their lives from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq? Or do they ever ask why a million Arabs live freely in Israel and another 100,000 illegally have entered the “Zionist entity”? Does a European ever ask what would happen should thousands of Jews demand “A Right of Return” to Cairo? (hat tip Mal)
Please follow the link and read the whole thing.
Kathy Shaidle talks about her long years of darkness. Yes, she was once a clueless anti-American Canadian leftist, but she received some shock therapy and is now well on her way toward a full recovery.
When my hometown of Toronto awakened to the news that Saddam Hussein was in custody, we reflexively switched on CNN in my house. Why? Because Fox News still isn't available up here (although, in the spirit of "multiculturalism," Al-Jazeera's broadcast application proceeds apace).
At our only other option, the state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corp., commentators repeatedly hoped Saddam Hussein would receive "a fair trial" through "an international tribunal" that "reflected Canadian values" – presumably the same "Canadian values" former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien invoked when refusing to send our troops (such as they are) to Iraq in the first place.
Such smug, pseudo-sophisticated "insights" would be only slightly less offensive if they weren't being paid for by my tax dollars.
I once was one of those smug sneerers at our southern neighbor, the product of a typical Canadian upbringing: my memorizing Trudeaupian doctrine about our superior "cultural mosaic" and the Yanks' inferior "melting pot."
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So, what happened?
Well, I am a recovering liberal, and Sept. 11 is my dry date.
That morning, my leftist life flashed before my eyes. I remembered to my shame all of those "Yankee, go homes" I had chanted as a Reagan-era peacenik. And rolling my eyes at the tacky teddy bear memorials at the Oklahoma City bombing and muttering, "You would think a building never had blown up before."
How sophisticated I was. And how sick.
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A few thousand of us attended a pro-U.S. demonstration in April. We gathered at City Hall, where I had demonstrated against the United States on a regular basis all of those years ago.
A dozen very young counter-protesters showed up, too. Those kids chain-smoked, swaggered and even sang "Give Peace a Chance."
The deja vu was dizzying. I pitied the angry, stupid girl I used to be, and I fumed while the arrogant little brats booed a speaker at the podium whose father had died on Sept. 11.
Their hatred of Mr. Bush is palpable. I had hated Ronald Reagan just as much. Then, I had started hearing about parents in the former Soviet Union who named their children "Ronald."
I believe I am on the right side of history now. Just on the wrong side of the border.
Jeff Jacoby details some of the most egregious hate speech of the Left in 2003.
IN DECEMBER 1994 I wrote the first of what would become a yearly series of columns on the subject of liberal hate speech. That was the year Republicans swept the midterm elections to win control of Congress, and ideological passions were running high. I had noticed that when a prominent Republican or conservative said something offensive about liberals, it typically set off a storm of media condemnation, while an anti-conservative smear voiced by a liberal or a Democrat rarely drew any protest. There was no end of sour commentary, for example, when Newt Gingrich recommended that Clinton Democrats be portrayed as "the enemy of normal Americans." It was an outrageous remark, and Gingrich deserved the drubbing he received.
But when Jesse Jackson explicitly likened the proposals of the new majority to Nazism and apartheid -- "If this were Germany, we would call it fascism. If this were South Africa, we would call it racism" -- there wasn't even a ripple of disapproval. Julianne Malveaux, a radio host and USA Today columnist, caught no flak when she prayed aloud for the death of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. "I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease," she snarled on PBS.
What was true in 1994 remains largely true today. MSNBC fired right-wing talk host Michael Savage in July, and rightly so, when he told a gay caller to "get AIDS and die, you pig." The liberal Nina Totenberg, on the other hand, suffered no ill effects for saying, during the flap over General Jerry Boykin's views of Islam and the war on terrorism, "I hope he's not long for this world." When the startled host asked if she were "putting a hit out on this guy," Totenberg backtracked and said she only wanted to see him expire "in his job."
But this isn't the first time the NPR diva has publicly wished death on a conservative. "I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind," she said of Senator Jesse Helms in 1995, "because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will."
Such venom should be beyond the pale. But too many liberals would still rather dismiss conservative ideas with an ugly slur than actually grapple with them on the merits. Debating the pros and cons of racial preferences or US foreign policy can be difficult; much easier to simply hiss "Racist!" or "Nazi!" or some equally poisonous insult.
Tom Krannawitter has a fine essay on the intellectual errors inherent in multiculturalism.
This is the intellectual basis of multiculturalism, and its emphasis on "diversity" and "non-judgmentalism." As there are many interpretations of right and wrong, the only thing we can know is truly wrong is the belief that we can know true right from true wrong. It means, therefore, it is wrong to think we can objectively distinguish civilized peoples from barbarous peoples. To the degree to which the modern academy rests on modern philosophy, this is the basis for much of what is taught under the name "higher education."
Immediately, however, certain problems arise for the multiculturalist. First is the obvious fact that multiculturalism is a product of one culture, or sub-culture, modern Western philosophy. Consider that nowhere in tribal Africa, or in the Balkans, or among militant Islamists, or in Iraq, or in Communist China or North Korea is there any demand for multicultural "diversity." In short, multiculturalism is, itself, not multicultural.
Second is the fact that multiculturalism, built as it is upon a denial of universal human nature, appeals unwittingly to that classical premise in its focus of study. What, or who, after all, comprises the many cultures it studies and celebrates? Human beings. Were they to reflect on this simple observation, multiculturalists would recognize that Aristotle and the other classics might in fact have much to teach them.
Most problematic is the fact that multiculturalism claims to tell us something true about the human world, yet it is founded upon the denial that objective truth is possible. In its celebration of the diversity of cultural perspectives—and in its denial of any objective or true point of view—multiculturalism becomes just another perspective. That is, on its own ground, multiculturalism cannot defend itself as any more (or less) true than non-multicultural perspectives.
Let us turn to the politics of multiculturalism, and in particular what it means for American politics. Rejecting the waves of modern philosophy crashing down on Europe at the time, the Americans in 1776 attempted something never before attempted: they founded a nation upon a self evident truth, a truth bound up in the "laws of nature and of nature's God." As Abraham Lincoln reminded us at the Gettysburg cemetery, "our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." That proposition has been the single greatest cause of the rise of American freedom, happiness, and prosperity. The entire American experiment in free government stands or falls by the principle of equality, and whether Americans remain dedicated to the cause of defending it.
But Americans will not defend what they do not believe to be true. Under the influence multiculturalism, increasingly the upper intellectual ranks of Americans have come of the opinion that there is nothing they believe to be true, and they persist in teaching that to our children. Indeed, the most sinister aspect of multiculturalism, politically, is that it teaches American students and citizens to discard their loyalty to the United States, in the name of "diversity," and to abandon anything that smacks of "patriotism."
For a nation such as the United States, one dedicated to the natural rights of man, this is problematic—especially in a time of war. It is from multiculturalists that one hears the resurrected phrase, "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Of course, even some multiculturalists winced when those "freedom fighters" crashed airplanes into their cities, murdering their friends and relatives. But not all of them. Today one can still read in the journals of the multiculturalist left, such as the New York Times or The Nation, that America was ultimately to blame for September 11th, and that we should focus our efforts on reaching out to the "others" who live and think differently than do we.
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Let us conclude here. Intellectually, multiculturalism is indefensible. As I believe I have shown, it is embarrassingly inconsistent. It is refuted and undermined by its own argument. Politically, multiculturalism is dangerous. Multiculturalism represents nothing less than the political suicide of the West, and in particular the crown jewel of the West, the United States of America. Multiculturalism attempts to undermine the good principles upon which America is built, and it is corrosive of the patriotic spirit that fills the hearts of free men and women. Though it operates much more subtly, multiculturalism is no less a threat to our free institutions than the terrorists who attack our cities with airplanes. It is the test of the American people whether they have the intelligence to identify multiculturalism for the mistake it is, and the resolve to ensure that it does not triumph over this, the last best hope of mankind. (hat tip Power Line)
Frederick Turner has a long and thoughtful essay on the clash between supporters of the 'law of the good' vs the supporters of the 'law of the right'.
Now that Saddam Hussein has been captured, and the long process of restoring the Islamic world to full participation in the human community has begun, perhaps we can take note of the very strange period through which we have just passed -- a period in which it is as if many among the old elites of the West seemed almost to be taking the side of the dictator against his people and against their liberator.
Observers of the mysterious ebbs and flows of cultural emotion have been almost at a loss, for example, how to account for the recent toppling of a makeshift statue of George Bush in London during the President's visit to our old ally. The symbolism is rich and strange indeed -- it would seem to mean a desire to bring about the restoration of Saddam Hussein, whose statue was pulled down by Iraqi supporters of George Bush. How could such decent humane people as the pacifist protesters want such a restoration? Were they just clumsy in their iconography? But the semiotics of the act are complex and not entirely unambiguous. There is an odd echo of the liberty statue at Tiananmen Square that will need to be explained if we are to understand what is happening here. That this cultural current runs deep needs no more indication than the recent British movie Love, Actually in which the hero is a British Prime Minister who defies a bullying American President to great applause, a movie which begins by pooh-poohing the importance of the destruction of the World Trade Center, and stars -- as a Prime Minister who dates a smitten junior employee -- an actor once caught in America in an act of fellatio.
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The same phenomena are occurring, more amazing still, in the United States of America, where many once temperate liberal commentators have cheerfully declared their hatred for George Bush. This rage has been accompanied by an open contempt for and dismissal of the 2/3 of the Iraqi population who, by the evidence of the polls, welcome the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Again, the semiotics point to an intense though repressed sympathy for the former Iraqi regime and a profound fear of what Bush intends to bring to Iraq -- that is, an empowerment of its people and a proof of the efficacy of freedom.
How to explain what is going on? The resurgence of anti-semitism in itself can only be part of the answer, despite Abraham Foxman's perceptive analysis in his recent book Never Again? The deep psychological markers of mourning for Saddam and hatred for his destroyer are found quite as frequently among American liberal Jews as among gentiles. Usually if we cannot understand something by the arrangement of its parts at any given moment, we will find the explanation in its history.
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So let us take a look at history, especially the history of our most fundamental intuitions about the nature of law. Laws seem, as many philosophers have opined, to be based on one of two foundations: what is good, and what is right. Very roughly, the distinction can be found in the difference between our own two traditions, of Roman law, and English common law; further back, between the ancient Hebrew ritual law, and the code of Hammurabi. Legal experts will, I hope, forgive the many exceptions to these generalizations for their usefulness as an analytic tool of thought.
The distinction, even more generally, is between what is commanded of us by the gods or God (or, in later ages, by Humanity, by Nature, by Reason, or by Popular Will) on one hand; and what is required of us in the honest fulfillment of a contract, on the other. The former, which finds its Western origins in ancient Israel (and can be found also in the Confucian legal system of ancient China), sees law as a way to enforce the good -- the good as a transcendent endowment of human society that we can partly intuit, especially if we are talented, trained, learned, and morally upright. The latter, which can be identified roughly with the Hammurabic, Solonic, and English Common Law traditions, sees laws as the way to make sure the humble contracts that human beings make with each other have the support they need over and above the natural sanctions built into our families, our markets, and our practical agreed systems of mutual trust. The first emphasizes the good, the second, the right.
It is a long piece, but well worth the time. Follow the link to read the entire piece.
Update: Be sure to read Francis Poretto's very trenchant criticism of Prof. Turners argument.
George 'Moonbat' Monbiot who had a brief brush with sanity recently has apparently stopped taking his meds again. His latest column in the Guardian, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers first flight, describes airplanes as the 'world's most effective killing machine'. WWI managed to kill tons of people with very little assistance from the air. Hitler was quite effective using the simplest of means. Gee, George, even your pals Stalin and Mao managed to do quite well murdering the masses with very little technology. Like almost all Monbiot pieces it is filled with incorrect information, unsupported conclusions and a healthy dose of George's special brand of anti-Americanism and leftist lunacy. It revives the standard Luddite argument that if technology produces anything bad, no matter what the benefits, it is bad and should be stopped. It is a view that takes into account the liability side of the ledger while ignoring the asset side. You can find fiskings by Emily, Tim Blair, and Peter Briffa plus some factchecking by Warren Smith
Orson Scott Card gives some advice to his fellow Democrats -- if you want to be elected you have to come back from the leftist brink and stop being so irrational.
In one of Patrick O'Brian's novels about the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, he dismisses a particularly foolish politician by saying that his political platform was "death to the Whigs." Watching the primary campaigns among this year's pathetic crop of Democratic candidates, I can't help but think that their campaigns would be vastly improved if they would only rise to the level of "Death to the Republicans."
Instead, their platforms range from Howard Dean's "Bush is the devil" to everybody else's "I'll make you rich, and Bush is quite similar to the devil." Since President Bush is quite plainly not the devil, one wonders why anyone in the Democratic Party thinks this ploy will play with the general public.
There are Democrats, like me, who think it will not play, and should not play, and who are waiting in the wings until after the coming electoral debacle in order to try to remake the party into something more resembling America.
But then I watch the steady campaign of the national news media to try to win this for the Democrats, and I wonder. Could this insane, self-destructive, extremist-dominated party actually win the presidency? It might--because the media are trying as hard as they can to pound home the message that the Bush presidency is a failure--even though by every rational measure it is not.
And the most vile part of this campaign against Mr. Bush is that the terrorist war is being used as a tool to try to defeat him--which means that if Mr. Bush does not win, we will certainly lose the war. Indeed, the anti-Bush campaign threatens to undermine our war effort, give encouragement to our enemies, and cost American lives during the long year of campaigning that lies ahead of us.
Osama bin Laden's military strategy is: If you make a war cost enough,
Americans will give up and go home. Now, bin Laden isn't actually all that bright; his campaign to make us go home is in fact what brought us into Afghanistan and Iraq. But he's still telling his followers: Keep killing Americans and eventually, antigovernment factions within the United States will choose to give up the struggle.
It's what happened in Somalia, isn't it? And it's what happened in Vietnam, too.
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Am I saying that critics of the war aren't patriotic?
Not at all--I'm a critic of some aspects of the war. What I'm saying is that those who try to paint the bleakest, most anti-American, and most anti-Bush picture of the war, whose purpose is not criticism but deception in order to gain temporary political advantage, those people are indeed not patriotic. They have placed their own or their party's political gain ahead of the national struggle to destroy the power base of the terrorists who attacked Americans abroad and on American soil.
Patriots place their loyalty to their country in time of war ahead of their personal and party ambitions. And they can wrap themselves in the flag and say they "support our troops" all they like--but it doesn't change the fact that their program is to promote our defeat at the hands of our enemies for their temporary political advantage.
Think what it will mean if we elect a Democratic candidate who has committed himself to an antiwar posture in order to get his party's nomination.
Our enemies will be certain that they are winning the war on the battleground that matters--American public opinion. So they will continue to kill Americans wherever and whenever they can, because it works.
If you can't get to the WSJ article (you might need to be a subscriber), you can read the entire original article in the RhinoTimes here
The Heinz Endowments have teamed up with a secretive left-wing group
The Left wants transparence for everyone but themselves. The tax exempt nature of these foundations needs to be reviewed.
For those, who unlike Frank Rich, are not convinced that Tony Kushner is the greatest playwright since Shakespeare, Yale Kramer has some choice comments about Tony Kushner and the new HBO movie version of 'Angels in America' plus an abridged version of the review-essay he wrote in 1993 on the occasion of the Broadway opening.
This time the hype is so profuse that it took up almost three full pages in last Sunday?s edition of the Times. There Kushner was, big as life, in a photo covering almost half of the front page of the Arts & Leisure section?dreamy-eyed, wearing an ankle-length black coat, poetically mufflered?our resident, aging (now he is forty-seven), genius. The ladies of the press left no detail of his creative life to the imagination. They included in a sidebar a list of some of the young genius?s more profound ideas: ?Bush out of the White House in 2004; the retirement of Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas; Instant free psychoanalysis for anyone who owns or is thinking of buying an SUV; FREE! PUBLIC! SUPERB! NURSERY SCHOOL TO Ph.D.? These and several others are listed as his current political preoccupations?mind you, not dreams, or hopes, or wishes, but ?political preoccupations.?
The interviewer seemed impressed by what she called his ?verbal barrage.? ?His conversation is quick, emphatic, torrential?? She quotes some of his brilliant conversation: ?Brecht was like a light bulb going off.? [What he means is ?like a flash bulb going off,? or ?like a light bulb going on.? But he is too much of genius to care, apparently.] ?He [Brecht] teaches you that within what is apparently a naturally occurring event lies a web of human labor and relationships. [Apparently he has discovered that human relationships are complex.] ?He teaches you to see that something can be the thing it?s supposed to be, and not.? [It?s not clear whether he is referring to paradox or the difference between appearance and reality. In either case these are ideas that are taught at any decent college in the freshman year.] In this sample of his pretentious speech one can easily see that what passes for brilliance is a combination of name-dropping, pseudo-mastery, conviction, and above all else the uncritical sense he has of his own genius.
Is it unfair to make these generalizations about Kushner from a sentence or two in an interview? No, because much of his writing has this incoherent, incompletely thought-out quality. This is why most critics who characterize his writing as profound cannot really say in what his profundity consists. Much of what he says amounts to a torrent of buzz words and simplex ideas that get signal responses from his worshipful audiences.
Horsefeathers has a fine dissection of modern therapeutic liberalism as specifically evinced by this weeks NYT column by Thomas Friedman.
Tom Friedman is the NYTimes exemplar of contemporary liberal thought, such as it is.
For a full Sunday dose of liberal utopianism coupled with self flattering condescension see here.
"...Moreover, the Bush team is such a partisan, ideological, nonhealing administration that many liberals just want to punch its lights out..."
Here we see revealed the mindset of contemporary liberalism. If only the Bush administration took a more ?healing? approach to the world?s problems. If only the President did as Tom does and listened to his wife before making policy: ?I have great sympathy for where the left is coming from. And if I didn't, my wife would remind me?? Well Tom, your subtle post-modern, multicultural, feminist sensibility may cut it on the upper west side, but in a war to the death with Islamo?fascists, Horsefeathers would prefer a man who doesn?t consult his wife before deciding to kill the enemy. While acknowledging the excesses of the left, Friedman refuses to question the assumptions underlying contemporary liberalism, for after all, liberals are caring, empathic and morally superior. If they lapse from this it must be in response to the harshness of the brutish and moronic conservatives who comprise the Bush administration.
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Where liberals once took their cue from Lionel Trilling who argued that liberalism, to remain vital, had to engage in self criticism, had to acknowledge basic, harsh truths of human nature, now all criticism is directed outward at the uncaring meanies in the Bush administration. Contemporary liberalism, as exemplified by Friedman, regards a ?healing? attitude as more important than subduing our enemies by force. It has devolved into a stance, a pose, and central to that stance is the assumption of superior virtue. Thus the tone Friedman adopts is one of intellectual and moral superiority to his presumed inferiors like Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney. Horsefeathers too has been to upper west side parties where the reigning assumption is exactly this one, and therefore no argument is necessary. The tone is so automatic that Friedman is completely unaware of it, yet it leaks out in his standard pomposities and condescenscion, as in: "the right liberal approach to Iraq is to say: We can do it better. Which is why the sign I most hungered to see in London was, "Thanks, Mr. Bush. We'll take it from here." Apparently the risky work of waging war is to be left to the brutal Mr. Bush and his military, but the truly important therapeutic work of, in Friedman?s words, ?partnering with the Arab world to dig it out of the developmental hole..? is too important to leave to such clods.
Jamie Glazov has a fascinating interview with John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the authors of "In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage".
As an émigré from the Soviet Union, whose parents were dissidents and were persecuted by the KGB, I grew up in this society completely bewildered and baffled by the Left. From a very young age, I was shocked to observe leftists minimizing the evils of communism and painting their own society as not only just as evil, but even more evil than the Cold War enemy.
Throughout my life, I argued with myriad leftists about communism, trying to convince them of its perniciousness. During my doctoral years in the field of Cold War History, I spent an inordinate amount of time debating with my colleagues about who was responsible for the Cold War.
My colleagues, of course, always howled with one another about my views.
I remember how they reserved special mockery for Reagan?s reference to the Soviet system as an 'Evil Empire.' As I continue to reflect on what happened to my own family under communism (i.e. both of my grandfathers were murdered by the Soviet secret police), and what it means that communism extinguished 100 million lives in the 20th century, I remain befuddled by what exactly was so laughable about Reagan?s reference.
In any case, when the Soviet archives were opened after the fall of the Soviet tyranny in 1991, I hungrily devoured all the information inherent in the revelations in declassified documents, disclosures from former Soviet officials, etc. They all confirmed and substantiated what conservatives had been arguing for decades -- and what common sense had long ago instructed -- that the Soviets were totalitarian, power-hungry and expansionist brutes that started and prolonged the Cold War.
When I approached my colleagues with this new evidence, ranging from everything from the issues of the Korean war, Berlin, Soviet espionage, American communists? links with the Soviet regime, etc., I showed how I had been correct on every issue that we had argued about for years.
And yet, instead of hearing a mea culpa, a stated regret or admission of some kind of lesson learned, all that I witnessed, in a manner that remains extremely eerie for me to remember, was a callous indifference and smug contempt for the issues at hand. Some of my colleagues articulated a few incomprehensible justifications of their positions; others just switched topics with remarkable speed and ominous neglect. All of them condescended to me for being interested in something so 'old' and 'ancient.' They patiently counselled me, with a disdain and arrogance that I will never forget, to stop chasing ?old ghosts? and ?engaging in necrophilia.?
And these were historians.
Follow the link to read the interview.
Favorite leftist moonbat, George Monbiot, has obtained the first glimmer of a clue.
The biggest question of all is the one concerning the c-word. We have little difficulty in dealing, in theory at least, with the medium-sized issues: What should be done about the World Bank? How can the anti-union laws be reversed? But we have scarcely attempted, as a movement, to tackle the big issue: what should be done about capitalism? Whenever anyone in Paris announced that capitalism in all its forms should be overthrown, everyone cheered. But is this really what we want? And, if so, with what do we hope to replace it? And could that other system be established without violent repression?
In Paris, some of us tried to tackle this question in a session called "life after capitalism". By the end of it, I was as unconvinced by my own answers as I was by everyone else's. While I was speaking, the words died in my mouth, as it struck me with horrible clarity that as long as incentives to cheat exist (and they always will) none of our alternatives could be applied universally without totalitarianism. The only coherent programme presented in the meeting was the one proposed by the man from the "League for the Fifth International", who called for the destruction of the capitalist class and the establishment of a command economy. I searched the pamphlet he gave me for any recognition of the fact that something like this had been tried before and hadn't worked out very well, but without success. (Instead I learned that, come the revolution, the members of the Fourth International will be the first against the wall, as they have "obscured the differences" between Marxism and its opponents.)
It seems to me that the questions we urgently need to ask ourselves are these: is totalitarianism the only means of eliminating capitalism? If so, and if, as almost all of us profess to do, we abhor totalitarianism, can we continue to call ourselves anti-capitalists? If there is no humane and democratic answer to the question of what a world without capitalism would look like, then should we not abandon the pursuit of unicorns, and concentrate on capturing and taming the beast whose den we already inhabit? (via Samizdata)
On the occasion of Bush's visit to Great Britain, the Guardian solicited letters of greeting from various Brits and Americans. Most of them are fairly predictable standard Guardian leftist fare such as this gleaming literary gem from that great British playwright, Harold Pinter.
Dear President Bush,
I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments.
Harold Pinter
Playwright
and this from DBC Pierre
Dear Jorge,
Look out! Behind you!!
Hahahahahahahaha, only kidding.
Love,
DBC Pierre
Novelist
Ah, those British intellectuals, so witty and erudite. (Actually Pierre is Australian, winner of this years Booker prize for his 'satirical novel' about a boy who is accused of being responsible for a high school massacre...hilarious).
Actually there were a few refreshing entries, especially this entry from Frederick Forsythe:
Dear Mr President,
Today you arrive in my country for the first state visit by an American president for many decades, and I bid you welcome.
You will find yourself assailed on every hand by some pretty pretentious characters collectively known as the British left. They traditionally believe they have a monopoly on morality and that your recent actions preclude you from the club. You opposed and destroyed the world's most blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable.
I beg you to take no notice. The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin.
It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. Broadly speaking, it hates your country first, mine second.
Eleven years ago something dreadful happened. Maggie was ousted, Ronald retired, the Berlin wall fell and Gorby abolished communism. All the left's idols fell and its demons retired. For a decade there was nothing really to hate. But thank the Lord for his limitless mercy. Now they can applaud Saddam, Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il... and hate a God-fearing Texan. So hallelujah and have a good time.
Frederick Forsyth
Novelist
Rob at Businesspundit has an interesting review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, “Nickel and Dimed" comparing the observations detailed in the book about working in low paid jobs with his own experiences.
Glenn Reynolds presents a timely parable about predators and prey in his TCS column.
Cougars were once regarded as timid, fearful of humans, and far more likely to flee at the sight of people than to regard us as food. Of course, there was a reason for that: for millennia, humans had attacked Cougars whenever possible, regarding them as a menace to safety and as competitors for valuable game. Showing one's face around Indians produced arrows, spears, and torches; later on, appearing around European settlers produced a faceful of lead. Aggressive cougars tended to die young, or to receive sufficient aversive conditioning to learn to leave humans alone.
Later on, a generalized revulsion against predators set in. As Baron notes (it's the source of his title, in fact), meat-eating was supposed by some to have begun with Original Sin -- "carnivores" in the Garden of Eden were said to have eaten fruits. In the post-lapsarian world, however, hunting was long seen as something manly, championed by those, like Teddy Roosevelt, who feared that excessive urbanization and industrialization would cause Americans to become too distanced from the reality of nature. But as that distancing took place in spite of Roosevelt's efforts, what is now called "fluffy bunny" syndrome appeared, and predators were regarded as inherently evil. Coupled with stockmen's continuing aversion to having their cattle and sheep eaten by predators, this produced programs of predator eradication that led to the near-extinction of cougars' only natural enemy, the gray wolf, and the removal of cougars from all but the most remote areas.
But then "fluffy bunny" syndrome extended itself to become "fluffy mountain lion syndrome." Government-sponsored cougar hunting ended, bounties were removed, and cougars started to make a comeback. Boulder's inhabitants disliked hunters, and liked the idea of living with wildlife, causing populations of deer in residential areas to explode. Meanwhile low-density housing meant that more and more people were living along the boundary between settled and unsettled areas. As cougars, their fear of humans having dissipated after years of not being hunted, moved into semiurban areas bursting with deer, they acclimated to human beings. People were no longer scary and, after a while, started to look like food.
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In the end, of course, people started to be eaten, and the bureaucracy woke up to a degree. There's lots of interesting stuff in Baron's book about ecological change, and the folly of seeking "wilderness" without recognizing humanity's role in nature, but to me the most interesting behavior isn't the predatory nature of the cougars -- which are, after all, predators -- but the willful ignorance of human beings. So many were so invested in the notion that by thinking peaceful thoughts they could will into existence a state of peaceful affairs that they ignored the evidence right in front of them, which tended to suggest that cougars were quite happy to eat anything that was juicy, delicious, and unlikely to fight back.
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Nonetheless, the same strand of wishful thinking appears: perhaps this time, the cougars won't want to eat us. Some people, apparently, would rather be dinner than face up to the fact that nature is red in tooth and claw, and that -- in this fallen world, at least -- the lion lies down with the lamb only after the lamb's neck is broken. (Worse yet is the noxious strand of liberalism that suggests we somehow deserve to be dinner.)
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The effort to remake the world so that it is safe for predators seems rather odd to me. What sort of person would rather be prey? The sort who lives in upscale neighborhoods, and campaigns against hunting, apparently. I suspect that over the long term this isn't a viable evolutionary strategy in a world where predators abound.
Aaron compares the Generosity Index, an index that compares a states charitable contributions with its wealth, to the Red/Blue Bush/Gore split. The results are illuminating, but when you expect the gubmint to take care of everyone why should you give any of your own money to charity, right?
John Ray has a very good short post on moral relativism and the confusion between moral relativism and moral indifference. I not sure I agree that there are no timeless judgements of right and wrong I'm sure I could construct examples of things we would consider moral absolutes, but that doesn't counter his main point that many 'moral' judgements are subject to current mores and values but that fact doesn't mean that moral judgements can't be made.
Leftists make great hay out of the fact that moral absolutism is virtually impossible to defend philosophically. And I agree with them. I too am a moral relativist -- i.e. I believe that there is no timeless and forever fixed right and wrong and that what is right and wrong varies from society to society and has no meaning other than that. That does NOT mean, however, that all ways to live are equally wise -- which is the extension of moral relativism that Leftists usually glide into without people noticing. In other words, some ways of living lead to generally desired outcomes and some do not. That is a simple empirical proposition for which there is much evidence. Most people, for instance, desire material prosperity but only some ways of living lead to that. Laziness, for instance generally does not lead to prosperity so laziness is generally unwise, or, in shorthand, “bad” or “wrong”. So don’t let the sophomoric philosophical debating points of Leftists embarrass you into abandoning talk of “right” and “wrong”. Such terms do have real and important meanings -- even if you are a moral relativist.
And at least from Edmund Burke onwards, conservatives have taken the matter one step further. That some value is merely the custom of a given society is taken by Leftists to imply that the value concerned is NOT worthy of respect or continuation. Conservatives draw precisely the opposite conclusion. That some custom has evolved through trial and error over a long period of time is seen by conservatives as indicating that it is probably a wise and valuable custom that should not be abandoned except for very strong reasons. The custom may not be “right” in any absolute, immutable or unimprovable sense but it may still be very wise and valuable in enabling a civil and healthy society to function and give its members what they desire -- such as peace, security and prosperity. In that sense, courage, honesty, democracy and the rule of law are “right”. Countries where such values are widespread generally have more peace, security, freedom and prosperity than countries where such values are not widespread. Values and standards of behaviour are very important matters indeed.
Thomas Sowell analyzes the war against success.
Name some of the things that make us so much better off than Americans of just a couple of generations ago.
One of the most important things are new medicines that not only prolong life but leave us vigorous at ages when old folks used to sit around in rocking chairs. Airplanes have put the whole world within our reach. Computer operating systems have enabled people with no understanding of the science and technology of computers to use them nevertheless to do innumerable things.
You might think that those who created these things would be among our heroes. On the contrary, they are demonized in the media, harassed by the government and sued by lawyers.
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It used to be said that nothing succeeds like success. Today, nothing draws fire like success. Just as editorial office heroes criticize how the police handle dangers that these writers have never faced, so they second-guess how people run businesses that editorial saints have never run.
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A whole vocabulary has grown up among the intelligentsia to downplay or dismiss the achievements that create our standard of living and the longevity that allows us to enjoy it more fully. Where some achieve more than others, that is not seen as a special contribution to society that should be appreciated but as a grievance to be resented by others, in the name of equality.
Achievements are called "advantages" or "privileges." Even writings that have stood the test of time by becoming classics to generation after generation are called "privileged" writings by the politically correct in academia and are often displaced from the curriculum by writings more in fashion at the moment.
Why is it that achievements -- whether in medicine, business, literature or wherever -- draw such negative reactions?
Eric Hoffer may have put his finger on it when he said: "Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words."
Thomas Sowell offers a fine little rant on the Left Coast.
To liberal fundamentalists, the answer to all problems is higher taxes. The very thought of cutting spending is taboo to them.
Even amidst widespread hand-wringing about California's record budget deficit, bums on the streets in San Francisco still get monthly incomes of several hundred dollars each from the taxpayers, quite aside from what they can get panhandling on the streets. Every little city or county government offers all sorts of services free or at subsidized prices, even in the most affluent communities.
Since local governments are subsidized by the state government, all this free-spending largess comes home to roost in the state budget. Its deficit is like the ghost of Christmas past -- only every day is like Christmas in California, with the taxpayer in the role of Santa Claus.
Generosity toward those who are not producing is matched by hostility toward those who are. The greatest hostility is toward those who are producing what the state most needs -- more housing. The very word "developer" is anathema in California.
This has already been out for a week, but if you haven't done so already then as soon as is possible, go and read Bill Whittle's latest essay "Responsibility"
Keith Burgess-Jackson has an interesting essay on why 'Liberals Think Conservatives Are Stoopid'.
Here's what has always puzzled me. It seems clear that intelligence is unrelated to (i.e., uncorrelated with) political ideology. For every brilliant liberal mind, there is a brilliant conservative mind. For every liberal dunce, there is a conservative dunce. I would be very surprised if a rigorous social-scientific study found a correlation between what one values (politically or otherwise) and how intelligent one is. This is half of my puzzle. The other half concerns how conservatives are viewed by liberals. My sense, from years of careful observation both as an engaged citizen and as a detached philosopher, is that liberals are far quicker to ascribe low intelligence to conservatives than conservatives are to ascribe low intelligence to liberals.
I won't bother with citations (you can provide your own), but I've heard conservatives referred to as "idiots," "morons," "dummies," "hayseeds," "yahoos," "hicks," "rubes," and "rednecks." The clear implication is that their minds don't work well. Not long ago someone circulated a document on the Internet which purported to rank United States presidents in terms of intelligence. It came as no surprise to me that it ranked liberals significantly higher than conservatives, for that is the prevailing stereotype. Think back to the jokes about Ronald Reagan, who was treated by liberals as a buffoon. Dan Quayle, who was smart enough to earn a law degree and pass a bar examination (no mean feat!), was derided as an intellectual lightweight. (His besetting sin seems to have been lack of facility in spelling, which makes one wonder about the intelligence of those who took this as a sign of low intelligence.) Our current president, George W. Bush, despite his impressive academic credentials and obvious intelligence, is mocked for his mispronunciations and garbled syntax, as if those were adequate reflections of his intelligence or character. On the other side of the ledger, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the most recent liberal presidents, were usually characterized as "sharp," "intelligent," "worldly," and "savvy." Ask yourself what reputation for intelligence each of the past ten presidents has had, and notice the correlation with ideology. Keep in mind that a correlation doesn't have to be perfect in order to be a correlation. (via Obnoxious Fumes)
Amnesty International gets a good fisking in of all places the SF Chronicle...though only as a commentary piece.