Prager on Hamastan

I usually bring Dennis Prager up only to slam his foolishness du jour concerning secularism, which he consistently and deliberately conflates with leftism in order to make the former look ridiculous. But today, I will give the angels their due, so to speak. He is pretty much on the money in many respects makes a couple of good points today regarding the recent parliamentary elections in Hamastan.

Like some other commentators, he notes that the election will bring some moral clarity to the situation.

But for those of us who believe that clarity is the prerequisite to moral progress, the landslide victory of the terrorist organization Hamas in Palestine has a silver lining.

First and foremost, it proves what people who perceive reality have been saying for decades: The great majority of Palestinians -- like the majority of Arabs elsewhere and like vast numbers of non-Arab Muslims -- want Israel destroyed. Even granting legitimacy to the argument that the complete moral, financial and political corruption of Fatah was partly responsible for the Hamas victory, those who voted for Hamas did not find that organization's terror, religious celebration of murder or charter calling for Israel's destruction an impediment to their vote.

He notes further that the elections "[reveal] the falsity of the worldwide Left's view of the Palestinians as committed to peace [and] that Palestinian terror is supported by a small minority of the Palestinian population."

He makes his best point when he discusses the basic error made by many leftists: "On just about every issue, the Left lives in a childlike fantasy realm. Their views are expressions of what they wish for, not what actually is." (I would disagree only in that I think Prager is discussing better -- and almost entirely younger -- idealistic leftists. Other leftists who know better on some level cynically cultivate such views and manipulate those who hold them.)

But Prager says this after first revealing himself to be guilty of the same error with respect to Bush's foreign policy. Of the "forward strategy of freedom", he says, immediately after the block quote above:

That is one reason why the Bush doctrine -- we need to spread democracy everywhere possible, including, or even especially, in the Arab world -- is so valid. You cannot deal with any problem in life -- from the most personal to the most macro -- by engaging in wishful thinking and denying reality.

Two things are grossly wrong with this. First of all, democracy is unrestrained majority rule -- which all too often results in exactly what we saw in the Hamastani elections. The last thing we need to do is waste blood and treasure merely spreading democracy. We should instead work to promote the spread of governments that respect individual rights.

Second, while I support such a policy where that is possible, it is clearly not possible in Hamastan. When we cannot reasonably expect to establish a government that will respect individual rights, we should either govern those areas or mercilessly keep them downtrodden. As I said long ago:

The short list of ways to emasculate our Islamofascist enemy after the September 2001 atrocities would include (1) obliterating as many capitals, large cities, and military installations in hostile Islamic countries as deemed militarily necessary, or necessary to serve as an example of what any survivors could expect if they continued to tolerate Islamofascism in their midst; (2) military takeover of any important facilities, such as oil fields (and in the latter case auctioning them off to American companies whenever impossible to show ownership prior to their nationalization by these states); (3) total blockade (If they don't need "infidels", they don't need their wheat, either, do they?); (5) prohibition of travel into America by anyone from a hostile Moslem nation; and (6) deportation of anyone from such a nation. The proper way to deal with the suicide cult of Islamofascism is to give its followers what they would get without us in the world to shield them from their own irrationality: death. The infidel Atlas should shrug.

This hints at some better options with regards to Hamastan and some other parts of the Middle East. Prager apparently does not wish to consider any of them.

Prager is correct when he says, "You cannot deal with any problem in life ... by engaging in wishful thinking and denying reality," but he needs to practice what he preaches.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 15

Word to the Wise

Yet another reason I'm glad I switched to Linux....

The clock is ticking on a dangerous computer virus programmed to delete millions of Word files stored on PCs when it reaches the end of its countdown on Friday.

Experts have warned that the Blackworm virus, which has also been named Blackmal, Nyxem, MyWife and Tearec, could destroy vast amounts of information when it is triggered, and could send unprotected businesses into chaos. The malicious software strikes against machines powered by Microsoft's near-ubiquitous Windows software.

...

If activated, the virus attempts to disarm a PCs security programmes and steal e-mail addresses to spread further. The virus also automatically downloads updates that could allow it to "mutate" and become even more dangerous.

And, from the technical site linked in the story.

Anti virus vendors offer removal tools. Microsoft provides detailed instructions for manual removal. However, there are two important reasons to rebuild "from scratch":

1. BlackWorm uses the same tricks to install itself as other viruses/worms. It may not be the only one on your system. Antivirus will not detect all viruses, and the removal tool will only remove this specific worm.

2. BlackWorm will allow remote access to your system, and additional malware may have been installed via this backdoor.

Wow! I don't know what would irritate me more were I a Microsoft customer: the fact that I might have to "rebuild from scratch" or the fact that this is the second major problem to pop up from the Internet in less than a month.

Meme Game Players

I recently decided to play the blog game I first saw Myrhaf and Jennifer Snow play -- and rename it "The Meme Game" in Myrhaf's honor.

Since I said I'd note other players later on, I'll link to four here today. First of all, Blair independently of me decided to play over at Secular Foxhole. Then Martin Lindeskog decided to remove his nose from the grindstone long enough to post his answers over at Ego. (And hooray for someone taking up the beer gauntlet.) Third is Ian Hamet, whose blog Banana Oil! is a good read, though it seems he is also very busy these days. He played the game independently of the folks in my neighborhood, but rates special mention for at least bringing up beer (as a food). Finally, I learned this morning that submarine blogger Alex Nunez also played, including the fabled Beer Question.

What if Katrina had never hit?

As someone who has seen his home town transformed over the span of two decades from a pleasant, prosperous small city to a dangerous, poverty-stricken shell of its former self, Robert Tracinski's famous column -- on the real disaster (the welfare state) that Katrina merely exposed -- really hit a chord with me.

Today, I saw a story about Detroit, Michigan, which will soon be playing host to the Super Bowl. This city, which was once Houston's size, now has less than a million inhabitants and sounds like the ghost city that New Orleans became almost overnight. From the Detroit story:

The scenery along Van Dyke Street near [Arthur] Lauderdale's home would be familiar to anyone who has seen "8 Mile," Eminem's movie about life in Detroit. The street's once-bustling commercial section is dominated by boarded-up stores, charred buildings and vacant lots. The only signs of activity are at storefront churches and the occasional liquor store and hot-dog joint.

...

Lauderdale's neighbor, 56-year-old Lenerle Workman, said she recently moved back to Van Dyke Street, where she grew up, only because of special tax breaks for homeowners in the neighborhood. She recalled a time when the street was lined with trees and a florist occupied what is now an empty lot across from her home.

"There's blocks where there's only one house (left) on the block," she said. "Where did all those people go?"

Compare this to these recent descriptions of parts of the Big Easy after its recent devastation and so-far anemic recovery.

(1) Three blocks north, Interstate-10 speeds by. Behind this concrete curtain lies mile after mile of a major American city still in total darkness. Just past dusk, nearly three months after Katrina, these streets are pitch black, save for occasional lights at several padlocked, yet illuminated, gas stations.

(2) Around the city, second-floor dwellers are easy to spot when night falls. High above a pitch-black street, a candle flickers at the end of one block. A few streets away, the darkness is broken by the intermittent beam of a flashlight.

Before Katrina, New Orleans was already heading the way of Detroit, just like my home town. A hurricane simply speeds up delivery of what fifty years of neglect and vandalism will get you. And, as I noted before, race is not an issue, but a distraction.

Today, in an installment of a series by the newspaper in the town where I grew up, I saw exactly the same phenomena: people refusing to help themselves (and suffering from the consequences) and news reporters missing or evading some obvious questions.

...

[T]he prevailing attitude towards the poor, which many of them evidently share [is] that they are not active, responsible participants in their own lives. Until this changes, places like Jackson won't need hurricanes. The people themselves, idle because they have been made able to remain alive without effort on their own behalf, and so existing without meaning or purpose, end up doing nothing at all or acting destructively.

...

And while the Katrina story and the decline of Jackson[, Mississippi] are both treated as if race were the major issue, it is the destructive culture of the government-subsidized poor which is the issue, as attested to in part by the fact that Jackson's "white flight" has recently been joined by middle-class "black flight" to the suburbs.

If Katrina hadn't hit New Orleans, the Big Easy would stil be decades away from the recovery it now faces because its slower self-destruction would have continued for some time. As it stands, the city, already badly sapped by decades of decline, faces a recovery that would already be hard enough for any city.

-- CAV

Updates

7-4-06: Added hypertext anchor.

Yes. He really said that!

I occasionally read an article that makes me especially grateful that Ayn Rand was so dedicated to the cause of individual rights. I wonder, with the education I had up to the point I encountered her writings, whether I would have been able to untie the following tangle of contradictions so easily without having made her acquaintance.

No copyright, no publishing revenue. No revenue, no new books. If Google is to have a second stage of life, it will have to accept the reality of intellectual property. After all, Google has accepted the reality of China.

If it sounds to you like that the author, William Rees-Mogg, has just equated censorship with copyright, you have a good ear. That is exactly what he did!

Let's see how he got there. We will see, in the process, what is wrong with the above paragraph. You will notice that as I go along, I will frequently refer to the concept of "individual rights". This concept is conspicuously absent from Rees-Mogg's argument, and if you aren't used to thinking about individual rights, his argument will therefore sound semi-plausible.

Rees-Mogg starts out with an admission: He claims that current efforts by Google to index scholarly texts as threatening the whole notion of copyright, and that his business depends on copyright being protected.

When I write about Google I have to declare an interest. I am the chairman of a small academic publisher; Pickering & Chatto was founded in 1820 and refounded in 1983. We publish scholarly texts and depend on our copyright for the sales of our books. Google threatens that copyright, along with the whole copyright structure of authors, editors and publishers of printed books and, indeed, e-books.

Since copyright is protected by the government, if Google actually does violate copyrights, there is a remedy already in place to any predations Google may undertake. Given that Rees-Mogg has just noted (in his title) that Google accepts censorship, I would be suspicious of his motives. Very suspicious. The businessman doth protest too much.

However, copyright is not the only problem raised by the success of Google's wonderful search engine. Along with copyright, and the revenue based on it, there are the issues of political and social censorship. Google has been forced by the Chinese Government to agree to political censorship. There will be only minimal reports of Falun Gong, Tiananmen Square or Tibet on Google's China service. The majority of Google's Chinese customers will not be told what the rest of the world knows on the subjects.

Rees-Mogg prevaricates. The Chi-Comms did not "force" Google to do anything. Google willingly submitted to government censorship without a fight. Note that Rees-Mogg slips in the qualifiers "political" and "social" for censorship. He has a reason for this, as we shall see soon enough.

Here again, I must declare an interest. I have been a quasi-censor. I accept that there should be some social censorship of the internet. In 1989, before the internet became important, I agreed to be the first Chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council. We were not formally censors -- we had no powers -- but we did study and discuss what would be appropriate to show on television, including the limits for sex, violence and bad language, and the need for the protection of children.

The issue of what is appropriate for children to see on television is certainly a valid concern -- for their parents. Efforts to get the government involved in the infringement of free speech are often done in the name of the "welfare" of children. Just ask the news media in Venezuela some time.

But we can cut Rees-Mogg some slack for the moment. There is nothing wrong with a private group doing something like rating the appropriateness of shows for young audiences in an effort to help busy parents. Indeed, a private broadcasting corporation would be entirely within its rights to "censor" the shows it airs since it is not obligated to show anything.

Furthermore, unlike the government, which can legally use force against citizens, such a corporation is unable to prevent someone from seeing whatever it chooses not to show. That is the essential difference between private censorship, which derives from property rights and violates no one's right to free speech, and government censorship, which always violates the right to freedom of speech and can often violate property rights as well.

Surely, all Rees-Mogg wants is private censorship, isn't it?

On most public issues I come down on the libertarian side, but I accept the need for some social protections. Indeed, I think it important that editing in the public interest should be done by reasonably liberal-minded people. They must accept criticism and suspicion of their work. Censors are always unpopular and sometimes ridiculous, but they may be necessary. [bold added]

"Editing in the public interest", eh? The hallmark of anything being done in "the public interest" is that it is manifestly not being done in someone's self-interest. Oh. So Rees-Mogg does accept government censorship for "social protections", as if the ability to speak freely is not the greatest "social protection" we have against tyranny, and so long as "liberal-minded people" like himself are doing the censoring! (Those who support tyranny would do well to stop indulging in the fantasy of themselves as benevolent dictator. The body- and spirit-crushing realities of dictatorship always have an ugly way of conforming to some thug's most perverse desires.)

By what standard is government censorship to be judged "necessary"?

Google, and other global operators on the internet, does in fact accept the principle of social censorship, however little they like it. There is an obvious example in paedophile pornography, which is almost universally banned, at least in theory. There are also types of adult pornography, such as "snuff" films, in which real murders are, or purport to be, shown; nobody defends them. I do not know how its security systems work, but I do not think that snuff films would get through Google's safeguards. They would not certainly not be compatible with its famous motto, "Don't be evil".

So is shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater no longer an "obvious" example of something not protected as free speech? Or does pedophilia make it easier to equivocate between legitimate restrictions on what can be said (i.e., things that violate someone's rights) and theTrojan Horse of "social censorship"? Child pornography at some point involves violating the rights of a child, who cannot give informed consent to pose in pornography. Snuff films, as documentaries of murders, by their nature can serve only as evidence in a trial, involving as they do, the violation of someone's right to live.

To refer to the fact that child pornography and snuff films are illegal as "social censorship" is doubly wrong. (1) It ignores the fact that one man's rights do not supercede another's. And (2), it uses the name of a violation of the rights of one man to refer to what is actually a protection of the rights of another! This would be like pointing out that policemen sometimes have to kill criminals, and saying that sometimes it is necessary to have "social murder".

And where does Rees-Mogg go in his Trojan Horse?

The real difficulty comes in the area between social and political censorship. Most of us are agreed that child pornography should be banned, both because it necessarily invokes the abuse of children and because it may feed an addiction to paedophile conduct. Most of us are agreed that there should be no censorship of political information or political criticism.

Note that he said nothing about "rights", which exist whether or not "most of us agree" that they do, and whether or not a government chooses to protect them.

Google may have felt there was no commercial alternative to agreeing to the Chinese request. That was the only way it could remain in the Chinese market. Nevertheless Google itself regrets the compromise it believes that it had to make.

If Google truly "regretted" its "compromise", it would have stopped doing business in China or at least done something about renegotiating the terms under which it operated there. No. Google feels like making a quick buck at the expense of its independence and in direct contradiction to its stated, older policies of not censoring search results or "do[ing] evil".

This censorship is also damaging to China's reputation. No regime that cannot afford to have its policies examined can be really secure. Nothing could be more absurd than to see the great world power of China shrinking back from the spectacle of Falun Gong like a timorous old lady shrinking back at the sight of a mouse. It devalues China. In any case, the Chinese are clever people, operating with world networks, and with millions of computers. Attempts at this sort of censorship are bound to fail.

"Attempts at this sort of censorship are bound to fail." And if they do, the tanks will roll. The inability of an oppressive regime to wage a successful war against the reality that it cannot control everybody all the time will not stop it from trying. This is so much pap designed to soothe the reader. Here's a translation you won't get at google.cn: "Even those evil Chinese censors won't really work, so why not let a 'liberal-minded' 'quasi-censor' like me have my say over Google in the realm of what I feel to be copyright?"

And, now that "social censorship" has been equated with the banning of child pornography and "political censorship" dismissed as so much harmless fluff, Rees-Mogg cashes in on the confusion. (In fact, now that "social censorship" has served to smuggle in the notion that governmental censorship is OK, Rees-Mogg admits that he sees it and "political censorship" as merely different points on a morally grey continuum!)

Midway between social and political censorship, there arises the issue of terrorism. I am sure that terrorists could use Google as an element in their training schemes. Indeed, many of them must already have done so. Yet, in principle, governments have every reason, and surely every right, to try to make the terrorists' task more difficult. Presumably the CIA has inserted its probes, human and electronic, into Google. Where terrorism is relying on Google information, the CIA is justified in doing so. Terrorism attacks liberty in two ways, by its frontal assault and by the legitimate reaction of governments. Google cannot be immune to this process.

Yes. Our government collecting information to prevent terrorists from blowing us to bits is, in Rees-Mogg's mind, not so different than what the Chinese are doing when they seek to stifle political dissent. He does throw the term "liberty" in twice, but this is not because he relates it to copyright. The first time is just to cause panic in the audience long enough, he hopes, to make us not see this crucial difference. And the second time, he insinuates that a proper response of our government somehow "attacks" liberty" with the implication being that little "attacks on liberty" (e.g., censorship) are a normal function of the government.

Again, the CIA is protecting individual rights. The Chi-Comms are violating them. Even if the technology employed by both were identical, that would mean nothing. Why each did this would be what is important. This is a black-and-white difference. There is no continuum of moral grayness between the actions of the CIA and those of the Chi-Comms.

And, for the final cashing in: Rees-Mogg, who either fails to understand the concept of rights entirely or hopes no one else does, paints a portrait of dire doom should Google -- not a government entity -- somehow "abolish" copyright.

Copyright is the other great issue. It is an issue that extends well beyond Google and well beyond publishing. Copyright is the basis for the remuneration of invention; indeed, the only other substantial basis for financing invention, in all areas, is government expenditure, and that is much less effective. If there were no copyright, there would be no money to finance newspapers (a quickly muted hoorah from the Liberal Democrats), books, films, recorded music, new drugs or the development of the internet itself. Copyright is the mother of invention. No copyright -- no revenue -- no innovation.

But how would Google end copyright?

Yet there is a conflict of interest between search engines and the right to intellectual property. Google plans to put whole libraries on to its system, and offer free copying rights to its users. Searches would throw up key passages in all the books in a library. Google requires owners of copyright who do not want their books to be copied and extracted to inform the company that they do not agree to this copying. But that is the opposite of the normal procedure in which the copier has to approach the copyright holder. The danger -- put simply -- is that people will not buy books; they will wait to download them free from Google.

There is indeed a strong tradition among internet users that as much as possible on the internet should be free, and that nothing should be censored. As ideals, these may seem reasonable enough. The issue in the case of literary copyright turns on this question: is the free communication of free information more valuable to society than the financing of future publications? Would we benefit by having free J. K. Rowling in the present at the cost of having no J. K. Rowling in the future?

This scenario is absurd. I assume that British law has some species of "fair use" for short passages of books. For longer passages or entire books, that can get very inconvenient and very expensive very quickly. Who wants to sit around while the printer -- if it doesn't jam, run out of paper or ink, or otherwise malfunction -- spits out the 900 pages of his "free copy" of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? And who wants to read that thing in loose-leaf form? Furthermore, I am sure that even a country that can produce someone as befuddled as Rees-Mogg has legal provisions to stop some publishing house from mass-producing books from Google results. I haven't even addressed the flip side of Rees-Mogg's argument: That the ease of finding and sampling from some otherwise obscure books might even increase their sales.

This is not to pooh-pooh the idea that there could be legal issues raised by Google's penetration into and potential mastery of Rees-Mogg's domain, but I think his concerns are overblown. And worse, by equating copyright with censorship, he has injured his own cause:

No copyright, no publishing revenue. No revenue, no new books. If Google is to have a second stage of life, it will have to accept the reality of intellectual property. After all, Google has accepted the reality of China.

If copyright is to survive, people like Mr Rees-Mogg need understand the reality of China. And to do that, they must first rediscover individual rights. A society that confuses censorship and copyright will soon not have to worry too much about copyright -- and I don't mean that in the way Rees-Mogg hopes.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 14

Harrop: Blame it on Greenspan!

Froma Harrop, although she writes well and occasionally makes very good observations, is, for the most part, content to remain centered in the box of liberal orthodoxy. So why bother reading her at all? For the occasional incisive observation (not my subject today) and because she's a pretty good indicator of how the left might spin a given issue.

With the departure of Alan Greenspan from the Federal Reserve, Harrop reveals how the left hopes to spin the economic chaos it hopes will occur in his wake. It will blame Greenspan!

[Greenspan] will be remembered for encouraging Democrats to dispense the harsh medicine needed to deal with budget deficits, then helping Republicans fill the punch bowl.

In 1993, Greenspan was all for the tax increases in Clinton's deficit-reduction budget proposal. The plan, which passed without one Republican vote, signaled to the financial markets that America was serious about taming deficits. Thanks to a booming economy and new tax revenues, Clinton left the White House with a federal budget surplus of $127 billion -- and projected surpluses of over $5 trillion.

Come 2001, Republican George Bush is in office, and Greenspan is giving the nod to steep tax cuts. The surpluses vanish, and deficits metastasize. The federal budget deficit this year is expected to top $400 billion. (The Bush people, who insisted that the projected Clinton surpluses were never real, nonetheless used them to justify their tax cuts.)

Greenspan started expressing concern over the mounting budget deficits, but never fully disavowed the tax cuts. Last year, he said he'd prefer to leave the tax cuts in place and instead reduce Medicare and Social Security benefits.

Harrop, who advocates socialized medicine (first link above), spends several paragraphs making Greenspan sound like a hypocrite before perfunctorily noting that he actually did say that tax cuts must be accompanied by spending cuts.

But obviously, to a liberal anyway, we can't cut spending, so Greenspan is a quack.

There are plenty of reasons to be unhappy with Greenspan, who once advocated a return to the gold standard, but failing to rein in spending (which he could not do) and supporting tax cuts while a supposedly small-government party controls both houses and the Presidency are not among them.

The Google Archipelago

Diana Hsieh shows us, through the miracle of modern technology, what the difference is between freedom and censorship.

In the meantime, the Gaijin Biker speculates on a new corporate motto for Google in the lead-in to a roundup.


Multiculturalism vs. Hermione Granger

Via Bothenook is a story about how one courageous British school has moved to end the barbaric practice of -- gasp -- permitting kids who know their lessons to raise their hands in class.

Pupils in an East London school have been banned from raising their hands to answer questions in class because their teachers fear it leads to feelings of victimization.

"No hands up" notices have been posted in every room at the Jo Richardson comprehensive school in Dagenham, as a reminder that the teachers will decide who should answer.

The principal, Andrew Buck, said it is always the same children who wave their arms in the air, while the rest of the class sits back. When teachers try to involve less-adventurous pupils by choosing them instead, that leads to feelings of victimization.

Next, the practice of laughing at wrong answers would have to be banned, were it not for the happy coincidence that the concepts of "correct" and "incorrect" were done away with long before.

Hugo Chavez: Philadelphia's Kingmaker?

Eric Scheie elaborates on something I mentioned here before: Hugo Chavez's "foreign aid" to Democrat politicians. He first mentions a public relations photo-op with the following provocative caption:

Celebrating the heating oil shipment in West Oak Lane were (from left) home owner Geraldine Shields, Felix Rodriguez of Citgo, U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, former U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy 2d, and Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez.

He then notes that Chaka Fattah is positioning himself to run for mayor of Philadelphia. Read the whole thing.

I can't believe that something like this is being permitted to go on.

Why They Fund Their Own Destruction

Via The Dougout, I learned of the following explanation for why there are wealthy people and corporations supporting campaign finance "reform".

Ayn Rand, the novelist-philosopher had a deft explanation for why wealthy people who, presumably, would be against governmental intrusion into the economy and civil society out of self-interest, often were at the forefront of promoting such schemes. They wanted, Rand wrote, " ...an Aristocracy of Pull" where the well-born and the politically connected parvenu alike could make common cause to institutionalize their comparative advantages. The Supreme Court, reflecting the attitudes our elite law schools, has been increasingly friendly to oligarchical policies , as exemplified by the Kelo and McConnell cases, that cement insider positions and hedge against the rest of us. The issue is not Left or Right but In or Out - and most of us by definition are "Out" in terms of power.

And the Beltway political class aims to keep it that way. This trend is being driven by liberal Democrats in Congress and through various foundations and activist groups but they are being helped in no small measure by Republicans like John McCain and wealthy, GOP-supporting, corporations.

Two by Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn writes on the Canadian elections and the final triumph of thug worship in "Palestine".

On the Canadian elections, which he calls an "act of political hygiene", he notes the importance of intellectual argument in the government of a free society.

Canadians have been reluctant in the last four years to accept that we no longer live in an "it's probably nothing" world. Many Continentals feel the same way. Unlike his hollow predecessor, Stephen Harper is a thoughtful man who understands the gulf between self-mythologizing and the harder realities. You can't change a free country unless you persuade free people to change their minds, and he will at least start that tough job. He doesn't have to be George Bush's best friend, and he may even be more effective at opposing him on trade and agriculture disputes. But he could try being Tony Blair's and John Howard's best friend and reconnecting us with other traditional pals from whom Canada's become increasingly estranged. He could honor our small but brave contribution to Afghanistan by flying out and meeting them on the ground.

Incidentally, Amit Ghate points to some Wall Street Journal commentary on these elections by John Fund and makes an interesting point:

[T]here is no a priori reason to dismiss a one party state, much less a "one-and-a-half party state" (whatever that means), if that party respects rights and governs properly. Should we indict George Washington's government simply because it was a "one party" government, or should we look at how the country was governed during his tenure and evaluate it on that basis?

Getting back to Mark Steyn.... On "Palestine", which I shall henceforth call "Hamastan" instead, he narrowly misses making a profound point. (Not to take anything away from his overall point, that Joel Stein and Hamastan were at least being honest about where they stand with respect to American troops and Israel's existence.)

Joel Stein (no relation) of the Los Angeles Times took a lot of heat last week for coming right out with it and saying that he didn't support the troops and that it was a humbug phrase that he and his anti-war comrades shouldn't have to use as cover for their position. Good for him. He's right. It's empty and pusillanimous, the Iraq war's version of "But some of my best friends are Jewish . . ." If you're opposed to the mission, if you don't want to see it through, if you're supporting a position whose success would only demoralize those serving in Iraq and negate their sacrifice, in what sense do you "support the troops"? Stein ought to be congratulated for acknowledging that he doesn't. We armchair warmongers are routinely derided as "chickenhawks," but Stein is a hawkish chicken, disdaining the weasel formulation too many anti-war folks take refuge in.

What I wish Steyn had done was make the explicit connection between those who bandy the term "chickenhawk" around and what they are doing. A "chickenhawk" is being damned for his intellectual and moral support of the war effort. But his accuser necessarily drops context: By pulling the rug out from under America's troops, the one who uses that insult is necessarily doing precisely what he is condemning the chickenhawk for -- but in the aid of the enemy war effort, and covertly at that.

Steyn then relates an incredible fact: That a mother who has convinced half of her children to blow themselves to bits was elected to parliament in Hamastan.

So I'd like to believe this was a vote for getting rid of corruption rather than getting rid of Jews. But that's hard to square with some of the newly elected legislators. For example, Mariam Farahat, a mother of three, was elected in Gaza. She used to be a mother of six but three of her sons self-detonated on suicide missions against Israel. She's a household name to Palestinians, known as Um Nidal -- Mother of the Struggle -- and, at the rate she's getting through her kids, the Struggle's all she'll be Mother of. She's famous for a Hamas recruitment video in which she shows her 17-year-old son how to kill Israelis and then tells him not to come back. It's the Hamas version of 42nd Street: You're going out there a youngster but you've got to
come back in small pieces.

On the subject of Hamastan, Andrew Dalton pretty much is on the same page as I when he says:

Well, now they are Hamastan, and they can't pretend to be anything different. Let Israel wall them off, and the Palestinians will cut each other to pieces. They deserve no better.

If Israel has a lick of sense, that is exactly what these life-haters will get, and the sooner the better. So long as the only lives they ruin are their own.

-- CAV

Our Mixed Economy Redux

Not too long ago, I discussed how the general consensus of the body politic can affect the psychoepistemology of our lawmakers. I made the following two observations at different points.

[Cause:] A republic whose citizenry does not regard the protection of its inalienable rights as the purpose of its government is doomed to get a government that violates those rights in some way.

[Effect:] Instead [of treating the rights of their constituents as their highest priority, and] knowing that their voters accepted the premise that somebody should be taxed for disaster relief, our government officials were concerned with striking some murky compromise between being not sacrificing enough for the refugees and sacrificing too much.

On Saturday, the front page of the Houston Chronicle featured a report detailing the aftermath of the various murky compromises of countless public officials. It was headlined above the fold thus: N.O. GANG WARS SPILL INTO AREA. Next to the headline were a map of Houston showing the locations of nine fatal shootings related to the gang activity of Katrina refugees. Its caption notes that authorities have apprehended eight suspects and are looking for three more. The three are pictured.

There are several things about the story I wish to discuss, but before I do so, I want to review another point I have made, the one I feared would come home to roost the day the buses crammed with refugees began heading to Houston amid reports of violence in New Orleans.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll again repeat just what it was that moved our officialdom down here to set a pack of wolves loose on the general public without at least the small courtesy of a warning.

People's lives were in danger and no one would warn us (publicly anyway). So do the alleged sensibilities of a minority group supercede the safety of a city's citizens (about a third of whom belong to that same minority)?

We were not warned. Why?

It would be little exaggeration to say that our nation's state religion is multiculturalism, and that our public officials, far from being free of its grip, are offering us citizens up as sacrifices to its deities.

Let's take a brief look at the real-world consequences of the ivory tower theories that are gagging our public officials and, at least in Louisiana, were setting criminals free.

We'll start by becoming a little bit better acquainted with a few of the helpless evacuees we welcomed to Houston after Katrina hit.

Citing a wave of violence rooted in turf battles back in New Orleans, Houston police on Friday identified 11 Hurricane Katrina evacuees as suspects in a string of homicides, robberies and kidnappings since November.

Eight of those men are already in custody. One of the three still at large is Ivroy Harris, 20, who goes by the nickname "B-Stupid" and was charged in the slaying of a man during a child's birthday party in New Orleans last May. [Why wasn't he in jail, then? -- ed] At 16, Harris also was wanted in connection with a shooting outside a public housing complex after several people opened fire and one man was killed, according to a published report. [He's a repeat offender to boot?!?!?! --ed]

Also wanted is Travis Jordan, 21, who in 2003 was seen picking up a 9 mm pistol after a man was shot while watching a Mardi Gras parade. The outcome of the earlier cases against Harris and Jordan could not be determined Friday. [How do we know about all these details, and yet not the outcomes of these serious cases? --ed]

Good thing Chief Hurtt et al. didn't fan the flames of racism in September by ratting out criminals like these who, as they used to say back in the sixties and seventies, "just happen to be black".

Not all the news is bad, though. For example, I noted previously that while multiculturalism holds enough sway to make our officials reluctant to say that the refugees might pose a problem, it did not keep then from discussing such problems among themselves privately. Furthermore, our criminal justice system is not, thank goodness, as hobbled as the one in New Orleans apparently is.

HPD homicide Capt. Dale Brown noted that many of those charged have extensive criminal records in New Orleans and that some had been jailed but were out on bail.

"We're going to hold them to the justice of Texas law," Brown said. "We think they are going to find things are a little bit different than in Louisiana. We're very aggressive in enforcing our laws in Texas. We're going to take care of our business."

That would be me you hear in the "Amen corner". This is what I had hoped would be the response of Texas law enforcement way back when I titled a post "Next Stop: Jail?" It is also something that City Journal writer Nicole Gelinas anticipated when she issued this warning for New Orleans.

[O]fficials in Louisiana and in New Orleans should view the increased crime woes of its western neighbor as a warning. As Louisiana begins to spend the $6 billon in federal grants for New Orleans's reconstruction, it should earmark some of that money toward building a top-notch justice system -- or the Big Easy's displaced criminals will surely return home in droves from less hospitable climes.

If, that is, these miscreants escape from jail or survive at all after getting convicted for murder in Harris County, which our liberal newspaper calls "a pipeline to death row", and which has alone convicted more than a quarter of the 242 inmates Texas has executed since the death penalty was reinstated over 20 years ago.

It is interesting to note the different reactions that have occurred at the different levels of officialdom. Unsurprisingly, law enforcement officials are most in tune, overall, with the proper purpose of a government. But even among police officers, there are distinctions. I have already noted that Chief Hurtt, who holds the most "political" position in the force, mouths multicultural pieties far too much while Captain Brown sounds like a real police officer.

Ayn Rand often commented that a big difference between America and Europe was that in America, there is a significantly bigger gap between the beliefs espoused by the leftist intellectual elite and those of the man in the street than in Europe. I would add that among our political officials, those from the rank and file of the police force are much closer to the man in the street, and so are more prone to take individual rights seriously, at least on a non-intellectual, "gut" basis. Unfortunately, elected officials, who must pass muster, at least to a degree, with the liberal media, are more prone to not take individual rights seriously.

These "gaps" (people vs. intellectuals and politicians vs intellectuals) also vary from one part of the country to another. This difference between New Orleans and Houston shows up on a national county-by-county map of the results of the 2004 presidential election. Orleans Parish went for Kerry whereas Harris County went for Bush, indicating that a least on a gross level, Houstonians are farther apart from the leftist elite than New Orleanians. At the level of officialdom, a reading between the lines of the first paragraphs of the story from the Houston Chronicle would indicate to me very lax courts and demoralized or corrupt police prevail in New Orleans. This does not seem to be the case in Houston.

We are lucky here in Texas that, even if some public officials will loose wolves upon us, at least others are here to clean up after them.

-- CAV

I'm Gonna Regret This

'Cause this flirts with inviting (Plug your ears, Myrhaf.) meme tags.

I had a backlog of unanswered comments from yesterday, so I decided to take care of them this morning. And then I remembered seeing that both Myrhaf and Jennifer Snow played a "nameless game". I normally don't blog on Saturdays, but this diversion differs almost in kind, so my weekly break is somewhat preserved.

Here goes. For Myrhaf's benefit, I'll call it ...

The Meme Game

Four Jobs I've Had in My Life

McDonald's Crew (I love the contrast with the next three.)
Junior Officer, Los Angeles Class Nuclear Submarine
Teaching Assistant for Vector Calculus
Research Fellow

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over, and Have

Citizen Kane (This captures certain elements of my sense of life perfectly.)
The Lord of the Rings
Office Space
The Austin Powers "Trilogy" (We all have our vices.)

Four Places I Have Lived

Jackson, Mississippi -- born and raised there
Rome, Italy -- semester of college
Manchester, Connecticut -- "Stranded 1n Connecticut", as they used to say in the Navy
Houston, Texas -- now

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch

I am not much of a television addict, I'm afraid.

Seinfeld
South Park
Keeping Up Appearances (This is a masterpiece of British comedy. Patricia Routledge's Hyacinth is freakin' hilarious.)
Antique Road Show (See. I'm out of ideas already. This I watch occasionally. I'd far rather blog than spend time watching television. I own the boxed sets of the other three, of which only South Park is still being produced.)

Four Places I Have Been on Vacation

Melbourne, Australia -- honeymoon
London, England -- after a scientific conference
Vinalhaven, Maine -- with relatives
St. John's, Antigua -- a port call, but I'm counting it anyway

Four Websites I Visit Daily

Netvibes (Which is how I keep up with all my favorite blogs, including Myrhaf and Literatrix.)
Drudge Report
Instapundit
Capitalism Magazine

Four Favorite Foods

Calimari
Boiled Peanuts -- a southern roadside delicacy
Raw Oysters -- a dangerous delicacy
Corn

Four Favorite Beers

How in the world could this be missing from any questionnaire about me?

Kostriker Schwartzbier -- a dark lager from eastern Germany
St Arnold's Elissa -- a local India Pale Ale
Avery Czar Russian Imperial Stout -- My review: "The iron fist of the alcohol is felt through the velvet glove of the mouthfeel."
Lindemans Gueuze -- a lambic, which I can't get in Texas

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

You mean, "besides Houston, Texas", right?

Melbourne, Australia
New Orleans -- before the storm
Rome
London

Four Peo--

I don't tag, but let me know if you do this one. You may leave out the beer question.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 13

Google Gallery

Wednesday, I blogged about Google's capitulation to the demands of Chinese authorities that they censor search engine results at their new cn-domain address. Via David Veksler is a link to a gallery of screen shots of search results from google.cn and google.com shown side-by-side.

"Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results. To learn more about Google's search technology, please visit ..."
-- Google's full help entry on "Principles - Does Google censor search results?" (January 26, 2006).

A Military for the Mind

No sooner do I post a list of Objectivist mil-bloggers does one of them, Nick Provenzo, decimate an article by one Henry M. Bowles III in a student newspaper that protested on-campus military recruitment and said, "Less intelligent people are better equipped for most military positions, and have far less to lose." His reply was excellent and included the following.

The irony of this position is that the left that has consistently relied upon appeals to mindless obedience as part of its ideology. Consider for example the 19th century socialist ideal espoused by Elbert Hubbard in his famous pamphlet "A Message to Garcia." There, Hubbard cast the perfect man as one who acts without any question toward the goals he has been given by his superiors.

He even resisted the temptation to say that military recruitment of idiots would scuttle our national defense by filling its ranks with the likes of Bowles. You are a stronger man than I, Mr. Provenzo!

Jason Roberts ...

... is back, baby!

The links are in order of length. All are good. Go to the short one if pressed for time, or the long one for a good read. But if you don't read them all, promise yourself you'll go back later.

Topics are, in order: (1) the importance of a nation's moral character, (2) "We are what we repeatedly do.", and (3) a quality lacking in one Henry M. Bowles III.

Why did we not invade Syria?

Both Mike and Bubblehead link to a New York Sun story in which a former Iraqi official says that Saddam's WMD's were moved to Syria before we invaded Iraq. From the Sun.

The discovery of the weapons in Syria could alter the American political debate on the Iraq war. And even the accusations that they are there could step up international pressure on the government in Damascus. That government, led by Bashar Assad, is already facing a U.N. investigation over its alleged role in the assassination of a former prime minister of Lebanon. The Bush administration has criticized Syria for its support of terrorism and its failure to cooperate with the U.N. investigation. [bold added]

I would love it if we'd invade Syria -- or even let Israel do it -- and end up finding the WMDs. Of course, the loony left would just say that we've had lots of time to fabricate the WMDs and plant them in Syria for propaganda purposes. But for the rest of the American electorate, the debate really would change.

Our debate would no longer be slowed down either by Bush's mistaken overemphasis on WMDs in his rationale for invading Iraq or by the undeserved credibility the left gets from the "missing WMDs". Instead, the debate would more easily go exactly where it should: Why we did not invade Syria? And, more importantly, why have we not started bombing Iran?

Blog Improvements

I have made a few more improvements to my blog. These are:

(1) Added new content to the "News and Opinion" area.
(2) Rearranged some of the sidebar content.
(3) Moved Letters from an Enthusiast out of the list of "Inactive" blogs.
(4) Placed Anger Management on my list of inactive blogs.
(5) Added a link to a donation page.

Once in a blue moon, someone asks how they can leave a donation. Who am I to frustrate the occasional generous impulse?

Stupid Car Quiz

Via Instapundit, I learned about this quiz. I'm a Porsche 911.


You have a classic style, but you're up-to-date with the latest technology. You're ambitious, competitive, and you love to win. Performance, precision, and prestige - you're one of the elite, and you know it.

Peter Ladefogod, R.I.P.

Reader Adrian Hester informs me that the Peter Ladefogod, a giant in the study of phonetics, has just died. He also pointed me to a very good article about him. Fans of the 1964 movie My Fair Lady should read it.

Rex Harrison almost made an enemy when he extinguished his cigarette in Peter Ladefoged's mouth.

Never mind that the oral cavity was only a dental cast. Ladefoged, a distinguished linguist, planned to use the plastic replica of his upper jaw in his research on word formation. That is, until Harrison started hunting for an ashtray on the set of the 1964 movie "My Fair Lady."

"I was rather annoyed," Ladefoged recalls.

But four decades later, "Rex Harrison’s ashtray" is the second most colorful souvenir of Ladefoged's stint as technical consultant on the set of the beloved classic about a phonetician.

Update on China's Submarine Fleet

Lubber's Line has posted a good update on something I have expressed concerns about before on this blog: the concurrent buildup and drawdown of China's and America's respective navies, submarines in particular.

I read (here) that China's military buildup is hollow when it comes to submarine capabilities. However, if the QDR recommended submarine production increases are true then the Pentagon sees a challenge coming over the procurement horizon.

I spotted that Strategy Page link recently myself, but managed to completely forget about it.

Molten Eagle on Gore '08

I wonder whether Vigilis was moved to propose some anti-Gore bumper stickers by my occasional "Idiot Bumper Stickers" series. Seeing his post caused me to come up with one of my own, whose only redeeming value is that it is funny.

Wooden Indians Belong in Cigar Shops ...
... NOT the Oval Office

Hmmm. In our culture's sorry state, I doubt this would ever see mass production. And I bet that it would be sufficent "provocation" for some leftists to vandalize cars that chose to display it.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: There are reports of an accident involving a German submarine. To follow further developments, I recommend the sites Ultraquiet No More and The Sub Report.

1-29-06: (1) Corrected bad hyperlink (second in this section), HT Adrian Hester. (2) Alex Nunez, who made good use of German sources and madern technology, was all over the German submarine story and reported a rescue soon after my first update.

China Needs Flash Mobs

The Chinese government wants to have its silicon chips and eat them, too. It wants to harness the vast promise of lightning-fast information exchange brought by the Internet while at the same time controlling the flow of information, something it admits it can't do without the Three Stooges. (No, not Larry, Curly, and Moe. The other Three Stooges: Larry, Sergey, and Bill.)

In the meantime, the government's efforts at physical control of the Chinese populace ever more closely resemble a man trying to hold the lid of a boiling pot down with his bare hands, as I have blogged before.

First, via Matt Drudge, I encountered a news story about China's admission that there is a problem which took the form, of course, of a threat to its own citizens. And then, in TIA Daily, Robert Tracinski pointed out an even better story on the situation there, from which I quote two paragraphs.

These "sudden incidents" or "mass incidents," in official parlance, are presenting Chinese officials with a serious problem that goes beyond the negative image of China they project to the outside world. The sheer numbers are noteworthy. In August 2005, the country's public security minister, Zhou Yongkang, announced that some 74,000 such events had taken place in 2004, an increase from 58,000 the year before. According to Zhou, 17 of the 74,000 involved more than 10,000 people, 46 involved more than 5,000 people, and 120 involved more than 1,000 participants. But many believe the actual figures are higher.

...

Of even greater significance is the fact that in August 2005 the People's Liberation Army Daily warned the country's two million soldiers that they would be severely punished if they participated in demonstrations. This warning, doubtless prompted by recent demonstrations in Beijing by demobilized soldiers demanding better pensions, suggests that China's leaders are worried not only about the grievances of displaced peasants, but also about disaffection among rank-and-file members of the military. [bold added]

It's always a good sign when a dictatorship has to start worrying about its own army.

But something about the official terminology used to describe these protests that have the Chi-Comms worried jogged my memory. "Sudden incidents?" Reminds me of an old internet fad a few years back, the flash mob. And what's really ironic is that the lead paragraph in the Wired News article even evokes the Chinese peasant uprisings!

There were no peasants waving torches or pitchforks in this crowd, no procession up a winding, eerie mountain road to flush out the monster who'd been terrorizing their town.

The mob that gathered in Manhattan on Tuesday night was looking for something they referred to (without explanation) as a "Love Rug." Or at least that's what the couple of hundred people who gathered in Macy's department store told a bemused salesman, who may or may not have believed he was dealing with a commune of carpet-craving eccentrics.

The crowd of people was participating in the Mob Project, an e-mail-driven experiment in organizing groups of people who suddenly materialize in public places, interact with others according to a loose script and then dissipate just as suddenly as they appeared. [bold added].

I have been lucky enough not to have to fight for my freedom against a regime like that in Beijing, so I risk sounding both clueless and presumptuous in kibbitzing about how best to overthrow this regime. But flash mobs (or some variant thereof) sound like they'd be a good diversionary tactic in any upcoming revolution of the Chinese "proletariat". If similar methods aren't being employed already....

Here's hoping that the Chinese people show their slavemasters what "sudden" really can mean.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 12

I normally have a meeting first thing in the morning on Thursdays, and it's business as usual this week. So I'm composing this "morning post" Wednesday evening still tired after yesterday's blogging marathon and in a bit of a hurry.

As you might expect, this post will be mostly light.

You might be a redneck...


(HT: Hannes Hacker, whose email title I also ripped off.)

Objectivist Mil-bloggers

When I first encountered the term "mil-blogger", I thought about bloggers whose primary or only focus is the military. But over time, I came to realize that the term covers two partially overlapping sets of people: those with military experience and those who do a substantial amount of their blogging about their area of military expertise or interest.

Consider some examples from the submarine bloggers in my neighborhood. Bubblehead, author of The Stupid Shall Be Punished, is a retired submariner whose passion is submarines, although he'll blog about almost anything else when the news about submarines is slow. He is a mil-blogger in both senses of the term. Alex Nunez of The Noonz Wire, on the other hand, is a civilian with a strong interest in submarines -- a civilian mil-blogger. Yours truly served for awhile as an officer aboard a fast-attack submarine and writes only the occasional post on submarines. I was a little surprised at first to find myself called a mil-blogger since I blog almost exclusively on political and social issues, but I've since gotten used to the idea.

Over the course of blogging for the past fifteen months, I've become acquainted with a decent number of Objectivist mil-bloggers. Here's the list. (And please let me know whether I have missed anyone.)

Robert Tracy of Illustrated Ideas, is a Jarhead who focuses on art and aesthetic issues. He blogs more about the military than any of the other Objectivist mil-bloggers.

Myrhaf used to translate Chinese for the Air Force -- during the Carter years.

Classics blogger Jason Roberts recently said in passing that he is serving in the military.

Nick Provenzo recently mentioned having served in the military. Turns out he's another Jarhead.

I make five with my experience in the submarine force.

Blogging Milestones

The Secular Foxhole recently saw its 10,000th hit. Congratulations, Blair!

And the same to Alex Nunez on his 15,000th site visit at The Noonz Wire.

Posing with Balls ≠ A Ballsy Pose

Instapundit says, "If Kanye West had balls, he'd pose as Mohammed."

The Gaijin Biker similarly thinks that a certain student protest would take more cajones to carry out in China.

All I'm Going to Say About Joel Stein

Read this column and take it as a little reminder that the battle of ideas is not over in this war. The fifth column is alive and well in America and must also be defeated.

Innovation in Astronomy

Reader Adrian Hester relayed this link to me, which describes the most earth-like extrasolar planet discovered yet.

Prior to this discovery, the smallest extrasolar planet found around a normal star was about 7.5 Earth masses. Earth-sized planets have been detected, but only around dying neutron stars.

The newfound planet, named OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, is probably too cold to support life as we know it, astronomers said. With a surface temperature of -364 degrees Fahrenheit (-220 degrees Celsius), it is nearly as frigid as Pluto.

It was discovered using a technique called "gravitational microlensing," whereby light from a distant star is bent and magnified by the gravitational field of a foreground star. The presence of a planet around the foreground star causes light from the distant star to become momentarily brighter.

Astronomers hailed the discovery as the first of a new class of small, rocky worlds located at far-out distances from their stars.

The planet and star are separated by about 2.5 astronomical units (AU). One AU is equal to the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Until now, no small planet had been found farther than 0.15 au from its parent star.

The finding means planet hunters are one step closer to detecting their holy grail: a habitable Earth-like planet that can sustain liquid water and support life. [most links omitted]

JIB Awards, Round II

Cox and Forkum are in the running for "Best Jewish Humor Blog" and "Best Overall" stop by to lend them your support.

-- CAV

This was posted in advance.

Censorship in Venezuela

There's a post over at The American Thinker about recent efforts by Hugo Chavez to censor the press in Venezuela.

Reporter Patricia Poleo, someone they've hated for a long time, was accused of the actual murder of the prosecutor, something utterly unlikely, and has fled to Peru. Another of the accused was an owner of the television station Globovision. He's sitting in jail. And now his own television station has been told that if he airs anything about this case, including the dodgy, gamy, utterly false witness the government has hauled out to accuse him of the crime, he will be guilty of yet another crime!

In a stunning development, Globovision has said it has no intention of obeying this government censorship. I spent time at this station when I was in Caracas, talking to the reporters, and know how professional they are. But to take a risk like this is significant in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

Meanwhile, other papers vow to defy this brash act of censorship as well, as Daniel's post shows here. Francisco Toro, meanwhile, a former New York Times reporter who quit his job on principle over its Chavista slant, and who was asked to leave based on his marching in the streets of Caracas to defend press freedoms,has some particularly good commentary here, here, and here. [bold added]

(Quick side note: If I could believe that the Times gave a hoot in hell about fredom of speech, I'd accuse them of cowardice. But I don't, so I won't.) Note the courage shown by Globovision (and the other journalists) in Venezuela, and contrast it to the cowardice of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who live across the Pacific Ocean from China, and yet capitulate to the Chi Comms without the pretense of a fight.

-- CAV

Around the Web on 1-25-06

Google tops the list of topics for this week's edition of "Around the Web".

Google stands up to its own country's government.

Blair at The Secular Foxhole points to a Slate story about Google's refusal to turn over records of your browsing to the Feds. From the story:

[E]very single search you've ever conducted--ever--is stored on a database, somewhere. Forget e-mail and wiretaps--for many of us, there's probably nothing more embarrassing than the searches we've made over the last decade. Google's campus LCD sounds like it's just fun and games, but when a search can be linked to you (through the IP address recorded by Google), that's a lot less fun. And when, as we're seeing, it can all be demanded by the government, that's no fun at all.

I would be glad that Google is doing this were it not for the fact that....

Google is kowtowing to the Red Chinese.

Via Matt Drudge, it turns out that Google has agreed, for the short-term goal of increasing its customer base, to help strengthen a country committed to stopping the unimpeded flow of information (aka Google's lifeblood), not to mention compromise its reputation as a reliable information provider in the process.

By creating a unique address for China, Google hopes to make its search engine more widely available and easier to use in the world's most populous country.

Because of government barriers set up to suppress information, Google's China users previously have been blocked from using the search engine or encountered lengthy delays in response time.

...

To obtain the Chinese license, Google agreed to omit Web content that the country's government finds objectionable. Google will base its censorship decisions on guidance provided by Chinese government officials.

Although China has loosened some of its controls in recent years, some topics, such as Taiwan's independence and 1989's Tiananmen Square massacre, remain forbidden subjects.

Google officials characterized the censorship concessions in China as an excruciating decision for a company that adopted "don't be evil" as a motto. But management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice.

"We firmly believe, with our culture of innovation, Google can make meaningful and positive contributions to the already impressive pace of development in China," said Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel. [all bold mine]

So let me get this straight. The way to make a search engine "more widely available and easier to use" is to cripple it. I guess that would follow from the same sort of logic that would interpret "don't be evil" as "help strengthen an oppressive regime".

Ian Hamet comments, "The Chinese will not respect you for this. Read The Art of War. They won, and got you to give them the victory on a silver platter. You are now the Communist government's bitch, whether you know it or not."

Precisely. Except that Google have also just told every thug in the world that they are potentially their bitch as well. I now prefer to think of Google as the "sweetheart of the world's cell block".

Which makes me think that ...

The Google Founders Deserve a "Hippy"

Nick Provenzo over at the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism, has proposed three new awards: (1) The Tonya Harding Award for Achievement in the Advance of Antitrust. (2) The Hypocritical Capitalist Award for Making a Lot of Money While Undermining the System that Made it All Possible. (3) The Looting Politician Award for Unprecedented Generosity with Other People's Money.

Of the second award, the "Hippy", he writes:

The "Hippy-Capitalist" should bring attention to the businessman or woman who does the most to undercut (or perhaps misdirect) the moral case for capitalism, yet makes a pile of money for themselves regardless. For this honor, its going to be hard to beat Microsoft's Bill Gates, who along with his wife Melinda, have given millions of dollars in handouts to relieve African poverty while simultaneously ignoring the fact that Africa's woes are caused by dictatorship, tribalism and the absence of the rule of law. There are other businessmen and women out there who are at least deserving of Honorable Mentions, and I ask your help in finding them.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin must have gotten wind of this competition and decided to give Bill and Melinda Gates a run for their money. Forget Honorable Mentions. For pretending that a communist dictatorship is just as good a place to do business as the United States of America, .... For showing the thugs of the world that you'll stand up to them only so long as they do not threaten your short-range profitability.... For pretending that censorship is perfectly compatible with the business of providing fast and accurate search results.... I nominate Larry Page and Sergey Brin for the first "Hippy Capitalist" Award.

As a sidenote, I have the following question for Page and Brin. Is the only thing stopping you from divulging our search results to the government the fact that it hasn't threatened you enough?

That's what I have concluded from Google's actions over the past couple of days, and that is what any power-lusting government functionary who wants to make a name for himself will conclude, too.

Fighting on the Home Front

Robert Tracy relays an amusing and encouraging story from Jack Wakeland about a counterprotester who has found an interesting way to aid the war effort.

A pro-American activist "Concrete Bob" acquired demonstration permits for last Friday night for the curbs in front of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. By applying for the permits before the "Code Pink Women for Peace" did, he pushed them a block away from the hospital...and out of sight for the severely injured soldiers back from Iraq, who are being treated there (including some of the 350 or so amputees the war has produced among American servicemen and women).

"Concrete Bob" is fighting on a front that is becoming as important as Falluja, Tal Afar, Baghdad, and Wiziristan. He's fighting against the anti-American fifth column, their champions in the MSM, and their champion on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. He's fighting to keep Congress from de-funding the war in Iraq and handing victory to al Qaeda, Iran, the Islamists of Iraq, and the Bathists of Syria and Iraq.

And speaking of America's fifth column....

Who is William Blum?

I was going to blog this myself, but Grant Jones beat me to it. Daniel Pipes wrote a column on the first author to be featured in Osama bin Laden's Holy Text of the Month Club. Quoting Pipes:

Asked if he was queasy about bin Laden's urging listeners to read his book, Blum replied: "I'm not repulsed, and I'm not going to pretend I am." Quite the contrary, he said: "I'm glad. It's good publicity for my book." And, indeed, it was: Thanks to bin Laden's promotion, Rogue State ascended from 205,763 to 26 on Amazon.com's ranking of most-ordered books.

Blum explained his response by saying he found bin Laden no worse than the U.S. government: "I would not say that bin Laden has been any less moral than Washington has been." He even refused to distance himself from bin Laden's views: "If he shares with me a deep dislike for certain aspects of U.S. foreign policy, then I'm not going to spurn any endorsement of the book by him. I think it's good that he shares those views." [link omitted]

Pipes makes the point that the left is functioning as a valuable American ally of the Islamists on the home front and underscores his point by noting that "Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone, Gore Vidal, and their ilk have lavished praise on his work."

Hmmm. In light of the fact that bin Laden and Noam Chomsky have both recommended Blum's book: Would Chris Matthews have gotten away with saying, "Bin Laden sounds like Noam Chomsky?"

That was, of course, a rhetorical question.

-- CAV

This was posted in advance.

Updates

Today: (1) See more on google.cn at i, Egoist. (2) See what "freedom" gets at the Chinese site over at Phatic Communion. (This is a parody.)

How Not to Promote Religious Tolerance

In the January 20 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is an article by Daniel C. Dennett called "Common-Sense Religion", in which the author attempts to make a case for religious tolerance. The article is remarkable because its author makes a fundamental error that undercuts him every step of the way. Namely, he does not appeal to his reader's implicit (though perhaps delimited) acceptance of the idea that man's life is the standard of value by which to judge ethical decisions.

I intend to quickly outline how one should approach the issue of promoting religious toleration, before moving on to explore a few of the many interesting ramifications of the particular form Dennett's error takes, which is to attempt to appeal to his reader's religious convictions after first implicitly challenging them.


How to Promote Religious Tolerance

The fundamental problems presented to society by religion are (1) that a religion offers ethical guidance for its followers, (2) part of that guidance very frequently includes orders to oppress or murder those who do not follow all the rules of that religion, and (3) that it is held on faith, without evidence or proof. In order, this means that religion (1) attempts to fill the need for human beings to have some sort of guidance for their actions, (2) makes its followers "other-directed", and (3) preempts rational debate when there is disagreement about whether some action is in accordance with its strictures or even about what those strictures say. In short, as thousands of bloody years of history have shown, there is never enough room for two religions (or sometimes even one) in one place -- unless enough followers from each value their "earthly" lives enough to set aside the requirements of their faith to enforce it on others.

How do we promote religious tolerance (i.e., a respect for the rights of those whose opinions differ) among people who will not simply abandon religion? In the Christian West, where many sects have coexisted at once (but not always peacefully), the hard lesson that religious differences promoted bloodshed was gradually learned. Countless individuals, wishing to live their lives, even if only by the (remaining) lights of their respective faiths, agreed to lay off the murder and mayhem. This was because these men implicitly held their own lives as the standard of value, at least in matters pertaining to how they chose to react to the fact that someone did not agree with them on religious matters. The way to encourage and spread this attitude among the religious is not by appeals to religion, but by appeals to objective self-interest, namely, to the desire to remain alive and free. Such appeals would be educational in nature, and would focus on ensuring that the lessons of the past are not forgotten.

This will not, of course, convince everyone who adheres to a given sect to practice religious tolerance, for some emphatically do not value their own lives. But I am not speaking of such lost causes here. And, of course, even though most religious people in the West implicitly value their own lives, many do not fully appreciate that certain laws they advocate based upon their religious beliefs violate the rights of others. Thus, so long as a a large portion of a population remains religious, there is always a danger posed to individual freedom.

How NOT to Promote Religious Tolerance

But Daniel Dennett does not appeal, even implicitly, to his (religious) reader's love of his life when he makes his argument for religious toleration. Instead, he goes to great lengths to outline his explicit position that one should not challenge religious beliefs at all (while smuggling in moral relativism), and then attempts to smuggle in his idea of an appeal to reason -- based on those religious beliefs and some other premises he smuggles in.

Here is why Dennett argues as he does.

Many would say that without [religion], their lives would be meaningless. It's tempting just to take them at their word, to declare that nothing more is to be said -- and to tiptoe away. Who would want to interfere with whatever it is that gives their lives meaning? But if we do that, we willfully ignore some serious questions. Can just any religion give lives meaning, in a way that we should honor and respect? What about people who fall into the clutches of cult leaders, or who are duped into giving their life savings to religious con artists? Do their lives still have meaning, even though their particular "religion" is a fraud?

...

Dilemmas like that are all too familiar in somewhat different contexts, of course. Should the sweet old lady in the nursing home be told that her son has just been sent to prison? Should the awkward 12-year-old boy who wasn't cut from the baseball team be told about the arm-twisting that persuaded the coach to keep him on the squad? In spite of ferocious differences of opinion about other moral issues, there seems to be something approaching consensus that it is cruel and malicious to interfere with the life-enhancing illusions of others -- unless those illusions are themselves the cause of even greater ills. The disagreements come over what those greater ills might be -- and that leads to the breakdown of the whole rationale. Keeping secrets from people for their own good can often be wise, but it takes only one person to give away a secret, and since there are disagreements about which cases warrant discretion, the result is an unsavory miasma of hypocrisy, lies, and frantic, but fruitless, attempts at distraction. [bold added]

So we are to smugly regard the beliefs of others as "life-enhancing illusions" and tiptoe around them! In fact, by considering the religions of others as illusory, the reader is basically told to play the game of treating his own religion as such.

What if Gortner were to con a cadre of sincere evangelical preachers into doing his dirty work? Would their innocence change the equation and give genuine meaning to the lives of those whose sacrifices they encouraged and collected? Or are all evangelical preachers just as false as Gortner? Certainly Muslims think so, even though they are generally too discreet to say it. And Roman Catholics think that Jews are just as deluded, and Protestants think that Catholics are wasting their time and energy on a largely false religion, and so forth. All Muslims? All Catholics? All Protestants? All Jews? Of course not.

This, he says just before noting that (1) Mel Gibson believes his wife is going to hell because she is not Catholic and (2) many religious people do not accept their religions' own teachings about the fate of loved ones not of the same faith (let alone whether any religious differences merit persecution).

At this point, I was wondering where Dennett could possibly be going. As it turns out, he is behaving much like a preacher setting up his congregation to accept his moral dictates by making them feel guilty.

So we've got ourselves caught in a hypocrisy trap, and there is no clear path out. Are we like the families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults' fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that! In the adult world of religion, people are dying and killing, with the moderates cowed into silence by the intransigence of the radicals in their own faiths, and many adherents afraid to acknowledge what they actually believe for fear of breaking Granny's heart, or offending their neighbors to the point of getting run out of town, or worse.

Here is what I would get from Dennett if I were religious (I am not.) and tolerant: (1) "Your religion is an illusion." (2) "You are a hypocrite because you are tolerant." And here is what I have not gotten: A good reason to be tolerant. In other words, Dennett has failed to appeal to his religious readers as rational adults, opting instead to focus on an unnecessary challenge to that person's deepest convictions and delivering an insult in return for what is really a virtue: love of one's life. Worse still, he has indicated that religious tolerance -- what he is trying to promote -- is immoral! (I am not saying that one must pretend to be religious or withold one's own views on religion. But I am saying that this issue is irrelevant and counterproductive in this context.)

Dennett then pursues the "life-enhancing illusion" angle for quite some time, hoping to confuse the reader enough to get him to throw his hands up and agree that he can't be certain of the dictates of his own faith. He tries to have things both ways. He will not openly challenge anyone on his religion and yet he makes a big deal of the fact that it's a confusing world out there and others believe other things just as strongly as his reader, with the clear implication that his reader might just be wrong.

Importantly, one must rely on others to interpret one's own religion. Dennett then seizes on this intellectual division of labor to make an argument I've never heard before. Basically, it goes along the lines of "Even if you have very good reasons to trust your own moral authorities, you should appreciate the fact that others may not see why you trust them." Applied:

Notice that my stand involves no disrespect and no prejudging of the possibility that God has told you. If God has told you, then part of your problem is convincing others, to whom God has not (yet) spoken. If you refuse or are unable to attempt that, you are actually letting your God down, in the guise of demonstrating your helpless love. You can withdraw from the discussion if you must -- that is your right -- but then don't blame us if we don't "get it."

The first thing that one could say to this argument is: "Well, Dr. Dennett, don't blame me if I don't 'get' your argument." The second thing is: "God told both of us the same thing and you clearly didn't listen." The third thing is: "Who said we had a 'right' to withdraw from such an important discussion."

As if all this weren't bad enough, Dennett then ends by smuggling in his own idea of what constitutes a God "worthy of worship".

It is time for the reasonable adherents of all faiths to find the courage and stamina to reverse the tradition that honors helpless love of God -- in any tradition. Far from being honorable, it is not even excusable. It is shameful. Here is what we should say to people who follow such a tradition: There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict. Consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God pleased by displays of unreasoning love is worthy of worship.

How does one know he can trust this stranger Dennett? And how does this potentially false prophet Dennett know what pleases God? If there is one thing that the religion I am most familiar with, Christianity, made abundantly clear, it was that mere mortals should not question the divine. If Dennett hasn't lost a Christian reader yet, this will probably do the trick. And if not, he was only preaching to the choir anyway, since no one who believes in a vengeful God is going to buy this.

It is useless to attempt to base a rational argument on arbitrary premises. As we have seen, Dennett never offers his reader an earthly reason -- his continued existence -- to be tolerant. He promotes religious tolerance while making the point that it is hypocritical (at least for the reasons he claims people are tolerant). He thus comes across as something of a weasel, and as impugning his reader's character. He spends a huge amount of time pretending not to challenge his readers' beliefs while in fact doing just that. Having thus told his reader that his God is a "life-enhancing illusion", he then claims to speak for this illusion in order to get him to do something. If anyone comes off as the hypocrite, it is Dennett, and if anything bad, it is religious tolerance!

-- CAV