The Continuing French Intifada

Via RealClear Politics is a very good article by Fred Siegel on a subject I have intended to blog for awhile, but never got to for one reason or another: The ongoing French Intifada, which exploded to prominence last year in the form of a nationwide rash of arson and violence on the outskirts of the major cities of France.

For the moment, the French are breathing a sigh of relief, as the anniversary of last year's three weeks of rioting by Muslim youth passed with much fanfare but no widespread disturbances.

...

The 2005 Ramadan Riots, which saw some 10,000 cars torched and 300 buildings firebombed, have been followed by a yearlong, lower-grade rolling riot - what some in the French police are calling a "permanent intifada." Nationwide, this works out to 15 attacks a day on police and firefighters, and 100 cars set ablaze nightly. And for the first time, the police are being subject to well-planned ambushes.

So when the Oct. 27 anniversary of last year's violence was met with "only" 277 torched cars, the Interior Ministry declared it "relatively calm."

But the trends are not good. While last year's violence was disorganized (rioters armed only with bricks, crowbars and Molotov cocktails) and largely confined to heavily immigrant Muslim and African neighborhoods, this past week saw a half-dozen well-organized attacks on public buses in non-immigrant neighborhoods by "youths" armed with guns. In some cases, they ordered passengers out at gunpoint, then firebombed the bus. In others, they've tossed Molotov cocktails into buses with the passengers still aboard.[bold added]

Remind me to stay the hell out of France!

If this state of affairs comes as a surprise, perhaps the role of the left -- which is dominant in France -- in fostering it will make it less so.

The Fifth Republic's foreign policy, which sees the Arab world as a counter-balance to U.S. and Israeli power, has unintentionally legitimated some of the violence. French television, its perspective an extension of the nation's ruling elites, has tried to incorporate young Muslims by depicting the conflicts in the Middle East largely from a Franco-Muslim perspective. On many nights, the TV news glorified the intifada against Israel. In the "al Dura affair," French TV went so far as to fabricate images of a Palestinian boy supposedly killed by Israelis.

The Muslim underclass, not surprisingly, identified with the "youths" attacking Israelis and sees in their own violence a heroic extension of the battle against the enemies of Islam.

...

But the old Socialist opposition - which had already managed to finish third in the 2002 presidential elections, behind the fascist Jean Le Pen - have been unable to capitalize on the nation's troubles. The Socialists, who largely represent government bureaucrats and professionals, are as cut off from popular sentiment as Chirac. They are, explains American expatriate writer Denis Boyles, so ardent in their courtship of the Muslim vote as to be literally tongue-tied when it comes to the violence. [bold added]

So one set of leftists glorified Moslem violence abroad and another set can't bring itself to condemn the violence at home even if doing so would make it more popular with the French electorate! This reminds me of nothing more than liberal criminal-coddling here in the United States. Leftist milquetoasts will deliver a litany of reasons why anything but the criminal is to blame (if his efforts aren't admired outright as a blow against an evil system) and at the same time work to defang the criminal justice system and disarm law-abiding citizens.

Believe it or not, the article ends on a hopeful note. Interior Minister (and political enemy of Jacques Chirac) Nicholas Sarkozy, who has achieved some success at curtailing the violence, stands to gain politically as a result. The man professes an admiration of Rudy Giuliani and of America. France needs a leader like this, and America could use such an ally. But is France already too far-gone for one man to make a difference? I hope not.

-- CAV

The Return of Myrhaf

After a long absence from blogging, Myrhaf, whose blog became one of my favorites in a very short amount of time, has returned to blogging.

I stopped blogging because it was taking over my creative life. When events happened in the news, I found myself wanting to sound off, but I resisted because I did not want to commit to blogging again. I even wrote a post during the Israel-Hezbollah war and posted it, then I deleted it. (I think I will repost it in a few days. It's old news now, but the principles I discuss are timeless.)

I will try blogging again, but I'm giving myself permission to ignore this blog for long stretches at a time. I need to do that so that my subconscious mind does not have a standing order to think of good blog posts every day. We'll see how it works out.

How often to blog is, in my opinion, one for the most vexing problems of this activity, and one I have been mulling over quite a bit lately myself. It looks like Myrhaf has found the answer that best suits his situation. I hope he is right, and not just because I want to see him posting for quite some time.

Welcome back, Myrhaf!

-- CAV

Two on China

My expensive (time-wise) civics lesson continues today. In the meantime, I noticed these two news items on China on a quick visit to The Drudge Report.

Nuremberg Defense Updated

In an article that says Reporters without Borders is pressuring American companies that sell Internet-related equipment and software to China, I read the following:

China is the world's second-largest Internet market.

It employs an estimated 30,000 people to trawl Web sites for subversive material and is a leading jailer of journalists, with at least 32 in custody, and another 50 Internet campaigners also in prison, according to Reporters Without Borders.

The largest U.S. network equipment maker Cisco and several other U.S. technology companies, including Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., are facing the ire of some U.S. lawmakers, activists and investors for their alleged complicity in allowing the Chinese government to commit human rights abuses.

...

Microsoft senior policy counsel Fred Tipson defended Cisco.

"The condition of doing business in a country is to abide by the law in that country," Tipson said. [bold added]

I can only assume that Tipson is as big a fan of antitrust legislation as he is of Chinese restrictions on freedom of speech. If so, Microsoft at least has the legal representation it deserves.

Interestingly, this is (or promotes) the same error that some anti-immigration types make when they decry illegal immigration simply for being illegal. The fact that something is encoded in law does not exempt it from critical evaluation. Laws are creations of man, not metaphysical facts. They can be changed, and I always suspect the motives of those who want me to forget that.

Gertz on China and Nuclear Proliferation

This Bill Gertz article is a must-read.

China helped North Korea develop nuclear weapons and in the past year increased its support to Pyongyang, rather than pressing the regime to halt nuclear arms and missile activities, according to a congressional report.

The final draft report of the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission also says that Chinese government-run companies are continuing to threaten U.S. national security by exporting arms to American enemies in Asia and the Middle East.

The report is based on public testimony and highly classified intelligence reports made available to its members and staff. It indirectly criticizes the Bush administration for failing to pressure Beijing into joining U.S.-led anti-proliferation programs and calls for Congress to take action to force the administration to do more.

"China has contributed at least indirectly to North Korea's nuclear program," the report stated, noting that China was a "primary supplier" to Pakistan's nuclear-arms program.

--CAV

Why I Fear the Left in Power

Myrhaf came out of retirement yesterday to urge his fellow Objectivists to "Wear a Gasmask and Vote Republican", making him among the few who, like me, have publicly disagreed with Leonard Peikoff's election advice and advocated keeping the Republicans in power. His main reason is the same as mine: The Republicans are dangerous, but the Democrats pose the far greater immediate threat to America particularly due to their desire to quash freedom of speech.

Our campaign to spread Objectivism needs the right to free speech more than anything. The Democrats are the worst threat to this right. Political correctness, campus speech codes and thuggish attempts to shut up free speech are old news on the left.

Myrhaf does a pretty good job fleshing this point out with several recent examples of how hostile today's left is to the free expression of ideas it deems unacceptable. But if you need even more evidence, stop by Spiked and read this article by Brendan O'Neill on Wendy Kaminer. The article looks at threats to freedom of speech from across the political spectrum, but it quickly becomes clear that it is the left that has been working overtime to destroy freedom of speech.

Like a recent skewering I blogged of George Lakoff by a fellow leftist, this article describes the criticisms of the left by a leftist -- Kaminer was a former member of the National Board of the ACLU -- who is objective enough to see that the abuses of many of her fellow travellers could even be causing the left to get in its own way. O'Neill quotes her:

Looking at the history of the US, it is hard to imagine how any of our truly progressive movements could ever have advanced if people were not free to assemble and speak -- and in ways that other people often found offensive! One hundred and fifty years ago people thought that women shouldn't speak in public; that was a violation of God's law. It was only by violating God's law -- and in the process offending a lot of people -- that women's rights were put on the agenda. It is sometimes by being offensive that we push society forward.

I am no fan of the left, nor would I ground a defense of freedom of speech in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, but this is plainly true.

O'Neill paraphrases Mill in his attempt to explain why freedom of speech is important:

In modern English, truth, whether you are right or wrong, can only be established through full and rigorous public debate. And those who seek to stifle public debate -- because they presume that they're right and their opponents are wrong/corrupt/hateful -- denigrate truth by turning it into something that, by necessity, must exist separately from that messy marketplace of ideas.

This is an okay first stab, except that one need not necessarily consult with others to reach the truth: It merely becomes, when freedom of speech is protected by the government, far easier to do so -- and about many more things than one could alone due to division of intellectual labor . Those who stifle public debate make it far more difficult for large numbers of people to learn from each other factual information, including the merits of various ideas, progressive or not.

Since we need information to live and guide our lives by philosophical principles, those who seek to stifle public debate do not simply "denigrate the truth". They threaten our very lives. Thus freedom of speech is important to each of us, personally.

This weakness of the article aside, it has value in demonstrating to those who may not have been paying much attention lately to the out-of-power American left just what type of fire they play with in advocating its return to power. Here are some examples of what life is like when today's left is given free reign. They are taken from universities on each side of the Atlantic.

1. [A] "mob of students" at Brown University in Rhode Island ... stormed the offices of the student newspaper The Brown Daily Herald and seized its entire print run after it ran an advert paid for by a right-wing politician who denounced reparations for slavery....
2. [T]he Sussex University Students' Union [in Britain] has banned the right-leaning tabloid the Daily Mail for being "bigoted" ..., leading one Sussex student to complain that the union is "treating us like babies"....
3. At the School of Oriental and African Studies in London the union has banned Israeli Embassy representatives from speaking because part of its union policy states that Zionism is racism, and racists should "not be given a platform".
4. Other unions have banned the sale of Coca-Cola and Kit-Kats in protest at the working practises of their parent companies.
5. "Kids come to college, and for the first couple of weeks of freshman year they're in a sensitivity course, where they're told what they're allowed to say and what they're not allowed to say", says Kaminer. "They are subjected to thought-control programmes the minute they arrive. That is not a very good start." [Actually, that sounds like the beginning of the end. --ed]
   

I have no doubt that given half a chance, the left would be happy attempt to model our larger society on the universities it already controls.

I will close by quoting Kaminer:

One of the saddest trends among people who consider themselves liberal or progressive over the past 10 or 15 years has been this increased intolerance of free speech, and this notion that there is some right, some civil right, not to be offended, which trumps somebody else's right to speak in a way that you find offensive. It is like a disease, an infection, that has taken hold on the left. It is an incredibly regressive notion. [bold added]

Like I said, "This is not your father's Democratic Party."

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 113

Connectivity at home is dodgy this weekend and Monday promises me a whacked-out schedule along with little or no access to the Internet, so this might be it until tomorrow evening.

Useful Idiot Materializes from Nowhere

I do not really know exactly where the idea originated, but I recall -- from my D&D-playing youth, a Monty Python skit about "Orgo", the movie Dogma, and (most recently) a really messed-up episode of South Park -- that simply mentioning the name of a demon is supposed to conjure him up out of thin air.

Well, the other day, I said of the remarks of the Australian Imam who sermonized that rape is the woman's fault:

Remember this the next time you hear a Moslem whine about being "offended" by intellectual criticism of his religion. And the next time you hear some useful idiot insinuate that Islamic headdress for women is somehow "liberating" to them. [bold added]

Well, that "weapon" "used by 'Satan' to control men" (as said Imam might put it) wrote a particularly silly column under the nom de guerre of Yvonne Ridley. It appeared in today's Houston Chronicle saying exactly that. The crux, so to speak, of her "argument" is that:

... A careful reading of the Koran shows that just about everything that Western feminists fought for in the 1970s was available to Muslim women 1,400 years ago. Women in Islam are considered equal to men in spirituality, education and worth, and a woman's gift for childbirth and child-rearing is regarded as a positive attribute.

Too bad we have the words of an Imam against this neophyte's to the contrary. [Memo to Useful Idiot: The better-versed person here just happens to be male, biologically speaking anyway.] We also have a whole laundry list of actual Islamic practice to boot. Incredibly, she ticks these off and then immediately pretends that Islam has nothing to do with them in the paragraph immediately preceding the one above!

But this level of evasion pales in comparison to her conclusion.

Violent men don't come from any particular religious or cultural category; one in three women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime, according to the hotline survey. This is a global problem that transcends religion, wealth, class, race and culture.

But it is also true that in the West, men still believe that they are superior to women, despite protests to the contrary. They still receive better pay for equal work -- whether in the mailroom or the boardroom -- and are still treated as sexualized commodities whose power and influence flow directly from their appearance.

And for those who are still trying to claim that Islam oppresses women, recall this 1992 statement from the Rev. Pat Robertson, offering his views on empowered women: Feminism is a "socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." Now you tell me who is civilized and who is not. [bold added]

What balls, Mizzzzzz Ridley! How can you seriously pretend that women are treated the same or better in the Islamic world than in the West? How the hell do you presume to know what I think about women? And how dare you take Pat Robertson -- although he is partly right in the above quotation -- as my spokesman? You and he -- who both claim to take orders from God -- have much more in common with each other than with me.

And one more thing:

... What is more liberating: being judged on the length of your skirt and the size of your surgically enhanced breasts, or being judged on your character and intelligence? In Islam, superiority is achieved through piety -- not beauty, wealth, power, position or sex.

Everyone, regardless of sex, is judged according to their identity and standards (which may or may not be valid). To hold Islam as "liberating" (i.e., superior) because it tosses everything aside in favor of "piety" (i.e., total surrender of one's mind to its dictates) is to attempt to treat the Nuremberg defense as if it were a moral ideal.

Well. Okay. She got that part right. To those who wish to avoid the burdens of rational thought and personal responsibility, it would seem that Islam is the path to "liberation".

Michael Hurd on the Elections

Michael Hurd favors a Democratic Congress, but stops short of Leonard Peikoff's advocacy of voting only for Democrats. Hurd makes several good points, but he fails to take into account the danger of the Democrats pulling a "cut and run" (which Hurd himself is against) via de-funding of the war if they do win Congress.

Also, I have a roundup of other Objectivist commentary on the elections at the end of this post.

Hugo Chavez to Steal Election?

The feds are now investigating something I sounded the alarm about long ago: Venezuelan involvement in a firm that manufactures electronic voting machines!

The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez.

...

Since its takeover by Smartmatic in March 2005, Sequoia has worked aggressively to market its voting machines in Latin America and other developing countries....

Given the collusion between Chavez and Democrat politicians in the Northeast and the dictator's meddling throughout Latin America, I am glad, on the on hand, that this is being looked into. I am a little concerned, on the other hand, that we are already so close to an election.

Oh yeah, and that's not the only problem with electronic voting.

Pipes on Iraq

Daniel Pipes writes an interesting column that advises the United States to pull out of the populated areas of Iraq, but remain there while "protecting borders, keeping the oil and gas flowing, [and] ensuring that no Saddam-like monster takes power".

This isn't quite "take over the oil fields and let Allah provide for his followers", but it is very encouraging to see a major figure like Pipes reject the notion that the United States has an obligation to rehabilitate the nations it invades in order to protect its interests.

Benedict Deeply Mistaken

One Richard Winkler writes a good piece on the recent controversy surrounding remarks made by Pope Benedict on Islam.

Force is the only way for men to deal with each other when they choose not to live by reason. When animals are forced by circumstances to compete against each other for territory or some other value, their only resort is to attack or run away. Reason is not an option for them; that is why we do not call an animal a "murderer" when it kills.

Recent remarks by pope Benedict quoted in two separate articles in the Wall Street Journal: "Benedict the Brave" and "Pope Provocateur", frames this issue clearly, even as he commits to the same mistaken ideas that weaken the West in the battle of ideas against Islam.

I fully agree when Winkler calls the attempt to "reconcile" reason and faith,"the untenable compromise the West has attempted to live by for the last 700 years."

--- CAV

Anarcho-Tyranny

This is slightly old news that managed to slip under my radar, but hearing about it right after encountering a description of Britain's increasingly Orwellian method of rationing medical care does make me wonder whether we should start calling the place "Airstrip One".

In any event, it seems that a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl was recently arrested (HT: What Would Charles Martel Do?) for the heinous crime of asking to be transferred during a group activity in the classroom to -- gasp! -- a group of students who -- brace yourselves -- speak English!

The Brussels Journal quotes The Daily Mail:

A teenage schoolgirl was arrested by police for racism after refusing to sit with a group of Asian students because some of them did not speak English. Codie Stott's family claim she was forced to spend three-and-a-half hours in a police cell after she was reported by her teachers. According to Codie, the five -- four boys and a girl -- then began talking in a language she didn't understand, thought to be Urdu, so she went to speak to the teacher.

"I said 'I'm not being funny, but can I change groups because I can't understand them?' But she started shouting and screaming, saying 'It's racist, you're going to get done by the police'." Codie said she went outside to calm down where another teacher found her and, after speaking to her class teacher, put her in isolation for the rest of the day.

A complaint was made to a police officer based full-time at the school, and more than a week after the incident on September 26 she was taken to Swinton police station and placed under arrest. "They told me to take my laces out of my shoes and remove my jewellery, and I had my fingerprints and photograph taken," said Codie. "It was awful."

[...] Robert Whelan, deputy director of the Civitas think-tank, said: [...] "A lot of these arrests don't result in prosecutions -- the aim is to frighten us into self-censorship until we watch everything we say."

Whelan hits the nail on the head, but it's even worse than that. Quite a while back, I noted that "hate crime" legislation in America penalizes individuals for their beliefs to the extent that it assesses additional penalties for actual crimes based upon the motivation for these deeds. This is even worse. In Britain, people can apparently be charged for the "thought crime" itself, without even having to commit a real crime as a pretext for doing time for their beliefs! Yes. The goal is certainly self-censorship, but the groundwork for outright government censorship has already been laid through precedents like this.

The Brussels Journal ends by making the following excellent point.

... The less control the authorities have with Muslims, the more control they want to exercise over non-Muslims. This strange mix of powerful censorship of public debate, yet little control over public law and order, has by some been labeled anarcho-tyranny. The reason why European authorities are becoming increasingly totalitarian in their censorship efforts is to conceal the fact that they are no longer willing or able to uphold even the most basic security of their citizenry. [italics added]

This is almost completely on the mark, although it does miss the original motivation for the censorship: the doctrine of multiculturalism, which holds that all cultures are equally good. To quash criticism of other cultures -- even criticism which exists in the imagination of some minor functionary upon hearing a schoolgirl's request to be able to understand her classmates -- is the real goal of this censorship. That such censorship can also hide the ugly results of implementing this doctrine just happens to serve the purpose of exempting this doctrine from objective evaluation.

Government is the only institution in Western society that can legally wield force -- the delegated retaliatory force of its citizens. For that force to be used to prevent these citizens from stating the obvious about members of other cultures (including when some of them pose an objective threat to their well-being) is to hand our delegated power of self-defense directly over to those who would do us harm. As the term "anarcho-tyranny" implies, this combines the worst of the worlds of anarchy and of tyranny.

Europe is in serious trouble.

-- CAV

Around the Web on 10-26-06

Today, I find myself getting back into the blogging groove after an insanely busy last couple of days. Lots of good stuff here, and I just barely skimmed through the feeds. Here are today's finds in the order I encounter them on my browser tabs....

***

Neil Davenport of Spiked describes what sounds like a real travesty of a televised bull session. "[BBC Channel 4 newsreader Jon] Snow summed up the mealy-mouthed character of the programme by declaring that, 'Perhaps free speech is a high price to pay for a multicultural society'."

Such affairs not only fail to address the relevant issues rigorously, they provide false "evidence" that public debate is a waste of time and therefore not really worth defending anyway.

***

Yesterday, I posted on "Physicians as 'Little Dictators'". Andrew Dalton of Witch Doctor Repellent provided another example (physicians being conscripted as informants) of how government management of medicine opens up whole new frontiers to the abuse of government power. And he caused me to remember another example of further potential abuse down the road.

***

Little Green Footballs relays the following example of the moral poverty that goes hand-in-hand with Islam's total abdication of reason in favor of a mountain of holy decrees. This comes from a sermon about some gang rapes that occurred in Sydney, Australia.

In the religious address on adultery to about 500 worshippers in Sydney last month, Sheik Hilali said: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?"

"The uncovered meat is the problem."

The sheik then said: "If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred."

He said women were "weapons" used by "Satan" to control men. [bold added]

So women are "meat" and men are "cats". I guess if I had such a low opinion of myself, I might be susceptible to Islam, too.

Remember this the next time you hear a Moslem whine about being "offended" by intellectual criticism of his religion. And the next time you hear some useful idiot insinuate that Islamic headdress for women is somehow "liberating" to them.

The carte blanche granted to Islamic "men" to rape women, however, is more than balanced by some rather curious restrictions.

***

According to the Czechs, Egyptian airline passengers have been probing in-flight security measures. Quoth a Norwegian paper, "The crew on board discovered the three Egyptians trying to open the door into the cockpit. When the stewards intervened they immediately gave up their attempts and gave the excuse that they were looking for a staff member because they wanted to buy chewing gum."

Going to the cockpit to buy gum? Horse Mohammed!

***

The Gaijin Biker relays news that sanctions against North Korea are being felt already. (Or that North Korea is making sure reports to that effect are getting out to the West, anyway.)

Given our record with the "Palestinians", perhaps I stand to make a quick buck by laying bets on when sanctions against North Korea will end -- without causing any substantive change in its capacity to build nuclear warheads, of course.

Kim Jong "Mentally" Il is not exactly the brightest bulb (and his country shows it), but he knows that too many of his colleagues are even dimmer.

***

Cookie posts a very funny sea story over at Ultraquiet No More.

Now...it don't take genius to figure out just who had to clean up all the shit. The coffee urn...a total loss...oh it was fixed and cleaned...but ain't nobody would ever drink outta it after that...includin me....the boat had t'get a new one.

Hey! I can't help it if so many of the best ones are about blowing sanitary tanks!

***

Is it really worth your while to check on a blog in a language you don't understand? It certainly is if you're an American named Gus Van Horn (whose "second language" is classical Latin) and the blogger in question is Carl Svanberg.

Svanberg links to quite a gem from USA Today. Heather MacDonald:

What are we supposed to learn when a candidate talks about his faith: That he is a good person? The rich history of religious bounders and charlatans should give the lie to that hope. Nor has a sincere belief in God prevented behavior we now view as morally repugnant. There were few more religious Americans than antebellum slaveholders and their political representatives; their claim to a divine mandate for slavery was based in unimpeachable Scriptural authority.

Or perhaps a politician's discussion of his prayer habits should reassure the public he'll make the right decisions in office. But what if opposing candidates declare themselves supplicants of the divine will -- how will a voter decide who is most likely to receive divine guidance?

Anyone who has ever sneered in derision when listening to some piece of human refuse babbling about "finding Jesus" during an interview from behind bars would do well to remember that emotion -- and why he felt it -- the next time he hears the same sentiment uttered by a politician.

Both want to use the moral blank check that people grant to religion as a means of purchasing positions of power for themselves.

***

And then there were [some number less than three].

Via Randex, it now seems that the producer of the Atlas Shrugged movie(s) are no longer going to make a trilogy.

I know that movies and books are different genres, and I never expected the movie(s) to have everything that is in the book. Nevertheless, I have serious doubts that anything less than a trilogy can be adequately faithful to the book.

***

Andrew Dalton remarks on the government's curious difficulty in grasping the purpose of public bathroom segregation by sex.

***

Andy has jury duty.

That reminds me. If I suddenly disappear for months after some time next week, it won't be because a competent defense attorney rejected me on sight during the selection process.

And look in the papers for either a harsh verdict or a hung jury in a high profile case.

That also reminds me that I need to make up my mind on whether jury nullification is a valid concept.

***

Daniel Rigby says "Screw Ageism". I would add that for demonstrably dangerous activities, such as driving vehicles when one is incapable of operating them safely, it is not an unwarranted government intrusion to intervene.

***

The man with the apt nom de plume of Toiler points to a story I intend to read. "Notice that artist Chris Miles is not just engaged in a sensuous dance with his on-again, off-again muse. It's also a lot of damn hard work and learned skill."

Labor of love. Not labor of lust. Not labor of amorousness. Not labor of commitmentphobia. Not labor of convenience.

Love. And love, like all worthwhile things, is often difficult.

***

As usual, Cox and Forkum nail it. Title: "Give War a Chance". Caption: "meanwhile, in Fallujah..."

Soldier One: We've given Iraqis food, money, clean water, schools, hospitals, freedom ... even our very lives.... What did we miss?

Soldier Two: Defeating them.

And as has been usual lately, Blogger problems are preventing me from uploading the image.

***

Hannes Hacker recently emailed me a lnk to this very funny Onion article the other day: "Mars Rover Beginning to Hate Mars".

That was right up there with "Coke-Sponsored Rover Finds Evidence of Dasani on Mars"!

-- CAV

Gus Van Horn Turns Two!

History repeats itself! As on my first blogiversary, I find myself tired -- I was working until 3:00 a.m. last night. -- and not really in the mood to write.

But I do very much like the sentiment I expressed last year, so I will express it again:

Today, I will simply celebrate my blog's first birthday by thanking all the wonderful people I have met in the process of maintaining my own web log and following those of my fellow bloggers. Although I enjoy writing in and of itself, the friendships I have made along the way have made this pastime all the more enjoyable!

I started this blog for many reasons, but I did not see it as a social undertaking. I saw this blog primarily as as a way to get myself into the habit of writing regularly and to launch my career as a social and political commentator.

But as it turns out, the many new friends and supporters I have gained along the way have been by far the greatest boon this blog has given me. It has also helped me as a writer to remember that the kind of writing I want to do, although it is a solitary activity, is ultimately a social undertaking. For both of these things, I thank each of you.

-- CAV

Physicians as "Little Dictators"

At Spiked is a chilling article by Rob Lyons that describes what can happen if we delegate to the government all control over the medical sector: Doctors in Britain are beginning to refuse certain forms of medical treatment to people who smoke, drink, or are obese.

In the latest example of this trend, health chiefs in Norfolk and Newcastle-under-Lyme have decided to refuse certain kinds of non-urgent surgery to smokers --- including hip and knee replacements. Both [National Health Service] areas are in financial crisis and are looking for ways to save money -- and the government's relentless campaigning against our bad habits have made smokers, drinkers and the overweight an easy target for these bean-counters.

...

Whatever happened to humane medicine? It is one thing to advise a patient that giving up smoking or losing a few pounds will aid their recovery or increase the chances of success. It is quite another to refuse treatment altogether.

There is also the small matter of patient autonomy. While rationing of one form or another has been ever-present in the NHS, there has been the general principle that patients will be treated on a first come, first served basis, regardless of their income or lifestyle. Using access to public services to modify behaviour is something more closely associated with dictatorial regimes. The result is a peculiar form of torture. Those who require hip or knee replacement operations are clearly in pain, and usually severely hampered by their condition. This is coercion through healthcare, as surely as twisting someone's arm. The defence of autonomy, our freedom to live as we choose rather than as our government or our doctors see fit, is far more important than balancing the books of a cash-strapped NHS. [bold added]

When a good is offered for "free", as medical care is in Britain, shortages occur and rationing becomes inevitable as pricing information is unavailable to consumers about the state of the demand for that good versus its supply. Furthermore, given that the government must pay for medicine there, unhealthy habits by patients therefore become the business of the government to the extent that it will attempt to remain accountable to those whose wealth it expropriates in the process of providing that "free" service. Some form of government interference in the personal habits of Britons was an inevitable consequence of this scheme.

It should be obvious that such a situation provides all the rationale needed for any " little dictators" who happen to practice medicine to refuse to treat smokers and drinkers who might be well able to afford the operations in a free market system.

As objectionable as the behavior of the physicians is, it is absurd to complain on the one hand about a loss of "personal autonomy" and yet on the other to leave the system that makes their behavior possible unchallenged. The only way to preserve personal autonomy -- be it the freedom of a doctor to run a private practice (which seem not to concern Lyons), of a patient to look for the best physician he can afford, or for a patient simply to get care at all -- is to return to the system that protects it, capitalism.

And those who want to import this hideous system to America whine that some cannot afford medical care or medical insurance! Their "cure" for poverty is clearly worse than the disease!

-- CAV

Moral Minority

Glenn Reynolds points to an interesting book, Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, by Brooke Allen, about the religious views and practices of six of our Founding Fathers. He also points to two interesting reactions to the book.

George Will gives the book a mostly favorable review, although he does note that the author -- as one might expect of many of today's nominally secular intellectuals -- tends to do a little "baptizing" of her own.

Not since the medieval church baptized, as it were, Aristotle as some sort of early -- very early -- church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America's principal founders as devout Christians. Such an attempt is now in high gear among people who argue that the founders were kindred spirits with today's evangelicals, and that they founded a "Christian nation."

This irritates Brooke Allen, an author and critic who has distilled her annoyance into "Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers." It is a wonderfully high-spirited and informative polemic that, as polemics often do, occasionally goes too far. Her thesis is that the six most important founders -- Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton -- subscribed, in different ways, to the watery and undemanding Enlightenment faith called deism. That doctrine appealed to rationalists by being explanatory but not inciting: it made the universe intelligible without arousing dangerous zeal.

...

In a grating anachronism unworthy of her serious argument, she calls the founders "the very prototypes, in fact, of the East Coast intellectuals we are always being warned against by today's religious right." (Madison, an NPR listener? Maybe not.) ...

Forget NPR. How 'bout fighting a war against our European betters? That aspect of the book sounds irritating, but at least I've been warned.

Will is mostly spot-on, although he fails to credit sufficiently the realization (often from cruel experience) among the Christians (nominal and otherwise) of early America that religious persecution is something the government can prevent only by not being the agent of any particular faith. The opposite, the placing of force at the disposal of religious authorities is one of the best ways to make the unverifiability of religious dogma particularly dangerous. The Founding Fathers, religious or not, understood this point well. Hence Thomas Jefferson's insistence on a wall between church and state. And adoption of same by his colleagues.

But what I found even more interesting was the kind of argument presented by Michael and Jana Novak in reaction to the idea that more than one of our Founding Fathers might not have been Christians. They do offer good evidence that at minimum many were not simply just Deists. And they do raise many good points. But I laughed when they had to throw in the towel and agree with another author that Thomas Jefferson, the quintessential Founding Father, was an "outlier".

The Novaks write a piece that, again, brings up several good points, but its lynchpin is the following very interesting bit of context-dropping:

Beyond that, one must consider the full implications of Allen's fundamental thesis, as stated by Will: This tiny minority of six expressed a very different set of beliefs privately from those they showed in public. The usual term for that species of action is hypocrisy. Its ingredients are a lack of candor, if not outright dishonesty, and an exceedingly low sense of honor. One has only to express this implication to grasp either its moral repulsiveness or its implausibility. For George Washington, it is out of the question. [bold added]

Would the Novaks (or anyone else), if they consistently followed the code of self-sacrifice called for by their own religion, be nearly as well-off materially, as they are now? I doubt it. Would they, were religious education as prevalent now as it apparently was in Massachussetts in John Adams' day, even belong to their present sect? And by what standard does one religion tolerate the existence of another? And do any such faiths withstand encounters with nontolerant ones like Islam? Religion demands that its followers guide their lives by following arbitrary (and often, astoundingly ridiculous) dictates. Propriety forbids that I inquire about whether these authors regard their own sexual conduct as moral. Nonethless, I will note that propriety has never stopped religious zealots from passing out orders on such a sacred and personal matter. Quick! Ask a Shaker -- before they die out!

The arbitrary dictates of religion are precisely the opposite of how man, the rational animal, must guide his life. Consequently, hypocrisy is a direct consequence of the religious moral code. The Novaks have no business calling anyone on that.

Furthermore, it is interesting that the Novaks point to the following passage from a letter he wrote to the President of Yale as "evidence" that Benjamin Franklin took religion seriously.

I believe in one God, creator of the universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals, and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England some doubts as to his divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.

Is this second paragraph confidence on Franklin's part, as the Novaks claim, that he "will meet Jesus Christ after death, to see the evidence for [himself]"? Or is this a great way to get a pest off of one's case? Or both? I don't know, but if I recall my own religious training correctly, to believe all the more sincerely because something is ridiculous is a far greater badge of honor in religion than to demand evidence.

Franklin's opening credo to the contrary, his questioning approach is essentially different than the truly religious approach. That stuff flies over the heads of religionists all the time -- at least when they don't have the apparatus of the state at their disposal....

The Novaks, mischaracterize and damn as "hypocrisy" the kind of attitudes and behavior that rational men transitioning away from religion before their time (and having to navigate a more religious society) would almost inevitably display. On the other hand, the Novaks were correct about our age being more "secular" in one sense, only they used the wrong word. "Profane" or "nihilistic" would have been far better. Given that philosophy was not yet developed enough to provide a better alternative, our Founders appear to have relied upon reason in their daily lives. But they also valued moral guidance and had an appreciation for the sublime. I don't damn them for having to resort to religion for those things. And I do not regard that as hypocrisy in any meaningful sense. They were not, after all, trying to perpetuate a fraud. They were, to the extent they did not take orders from zealots, escaping from one.

The question of what religious beliefs were professed by the Founding Fathers and what observances they made are interesting and important, but of far greater import is how they approached knowledge. Did they tend to blindly accept things on faith or were they fundamentally rational? This is the really important question.

And it is in that regard that the Founders resemble neither the theocrats nor the followers of the liberal faith of today.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected typos and made some clarifications.
10-27-06: Corrected more typos.

The Politics of Emergencies?

I her essay, "The Ethics of Emergencies" within The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand makes a clear distinction between the normal metaphysical conditions of man's existence and emergency situations when examining a type of fallacious argument in favor of altruism. "The principle that one should help men in an emergency cannot be extended," she warned, "to regard all human suffering as an emergency and to turn the misfortune of some into a first mortgage on the lives of others."

Case in point: Some city officials in Omaha, Nebraska, are urging its citizens to call 9-1-1 to report violations of a new smoking ordinance as if the effects (real, or imagined) of "second-hand-smoke" are an "emergency" of the same order as a three-alarm fire or a violent crime in progress!

The Nebraska city's elected leaders and police department are urging residents who see violations to call the 9-1-1 emergency system for an immediate response.

Omaha banned smoking in public Oct. 2. Penalties are $100 for the first offense, $200 for the second and $500 for the third and subsequent infractions.

Teresa Negron, sergeant in charge of public information for the police, explained the department encourages observers of infractions to pick up the phone to report the infraction -- just like they would for any other crime they observe being committed. [link dropped]

The article goes on to note that:

The Mayor's Hot Line hasn't had any complaint calls, the 9-1-1 dispatch director said call volume related to smoking complaints has been "insignificant," and city prosecutor Marty Conboy said he hasn't had any citations cross his desk.

"We're very grateful people in the city have taken it seriously," Conboy told a local television station. "So far, we have not seen any reports or citations. And as near as I can tell, there have not been any arrests."

I wish I could believe that the low volume of calls is because Omaha's citizens, at least, can still make a rational distinction between what constitutes an emergency and what does not -- but then they were the ones who elected these clowns in the first place....

But at least they have given the rest of us a clear-cut case of why a common confusion -- between emergency situations and the metaphysically normal -- cannot lead us to rules of conduct appropriate to normal lives as men.

On one last note, I think we have here something else of interest. Leaving my sarcasm about the low call volume aside, this is an excellent example of the government abdicating its proper role, as defender of individual rights. At the moment, the only thing between a few lit cigarettes and a total collapse of the ability of the police department in Omaha to respond promptly to an emergency is whatever residual rationality the public has left. And that rationality has to be implemented in the form of breaking the law -- by turning a blind eye to a "crime" in progress!

Rule of law and respect for rule of law are in for a beating in Omaha. But then this is true with all instances of nonobjective law. This is just one of the most clear-cut examples yet. More, I fear, are on the way.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 112

Light Blogging Possible

From now until Wednesday, I will be busy enough that I may post less regularly than usual.

Google Ads

I have briefly fooled around with the ad filter for Google Ads, but have so far found (incorrectly, I hope) that the only way to be selective with the ads is to blacklist individual URLs. It also takes far longer than the advertised four hours for such ads to disappear.

Given the kind of ads I have been drawing as pro-war blogger, this filtering strategy strikes me as being about as effective as -- oh, I don't know -- treating every single terrorist as if he were a lone criminal rather than an enemy combatant in the service of a death cult.

I have only two questions at this point: (1) Why would any of my regulars -- besides the occasional blogger in need of material -- click on any of these ads? (2) How useful is this to me as a someone who wants to generate income?

I don't expect to agree with every ad that gets placed here, but this is a little ridiculous.... I will either find a better way to filter or I will drop Google Ads.

Karl Marx wins "Greatest Philosopher" at the Beeb.

Reader Apollo notes, "The BBC decided to do the 'Greatest Philosopher in our Time Vote'. And of course Ayn Rand wasn't even mentioned, and even worse Aristotle wasn't number one." [link added] Unfortunately, given the cultural climate of Europe, I find neither the omission nor the final result too surprising.

Ain't Nothin' on Mine!

After asking, "What's on your iPod?" Craig Ceely notes a strange coincidence: The Beirut Bombing and the introduction of the iPod share an anniversary.

My wife got me an iPod for my birthday recently. And then she exchanged it for a better one she found at the same price. The fun will begin Thursday, when I have some time to iron out a kink and figure out which software is best for making it talk to my Linux computer!

Greg Packer

Somehow, I don't think that Ayn Rand was thinking about this guy when she used the colloquialism "the man in the street" in some of her writings and lectures.

He's not just another face in the crowd at concerts, book signings, and sporting events. Somehow, over the course of 10 years, one man has managed to become the media's go-to guy, quoted more than 100 times in various publications, including several prominent newspapers. Greg Packer is the "man on the street."

Packer, 40, of Huntington, N.Y., arrives early to media events. His latest accomplishment: being 15th in line in Washington, D.C., to pay his respects to former President Ronald Reagan. "I'm the best person to come to -- anywhere," says Packer. "I always give time, and I always have an answer."

While Packer says "honesty is very important to me," he does admit that about 5% of the time, "I'm making stuff up to get in the paper." A Boston newspaper, for example, quoted him as saying he had a ticket for the 1999 baseball All-Star Game there when he really didn't.

For awhile, this guy was getting into the papers so often that the Associated Press put out a memo for its reporters to avoid him! And yet he still gets in!

Of course, if I were Jackie Harvey, I'd probably be thrilled that someone from Noodle Food is doing so well at getting an Objectivist perspective out to the popular media.

Your contribution has been matched by: Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan

Via IMAO, there is a link to some Democrat blogger who first gets wildly paranoid about whether the donation matching site for the Democratic Party has been hijacked. Then he and his pals suddenly talk tough about crime. Then he tells other potential pranksters exactly how to do the same thing!

Now if you click that link, you'll see that ANYONE is able to select an amount and leave a message for the donor that they will be matched with. This will allow two grassroots donors to come together and possibly build a lasting relationship via their donations. This is a GREAT idea, that's why I wanted to be a part of it. BUT what happens is that as the person making this pledge, I don't have to submit a credit card or be verified in ANY WAY. Let me say that again, the person making the pledge is not verified in ANY WAY! That person also doesn't have to put money in upfront, so they can submit cute messages like I got and suffer nothing. This is a gaping hole in the plan and allows other donors to get these stupid messages and defeat the purpose of the matching program.

Yeah. No verification. Sort like the way you birds would have it at the polls on Election Day!

This was a surprise? Yeah. Yeah. I know.

-- CAV

Two Objectivists on the Election

Note added on Novermber 17, 2006: After careful evaluation of the evidence and some of the views pointed to here on my own, I have changed my mind. I was mistaken to side with Robert Tracinski. Some of my reasoning can be found at the above link.

Via Noumenal Self and The Primacy of Awesome comes Leonard Peikoff's take (apparently from a recent Q&A) on the upcoming elections. Because there does not appear to be a permanent link (and it is relatively short anyway), I will quote it in its entirety, minus the question.

How you cast your vote in the coming election is important, even if the two parties are both rotten. In essence, the Democrats stand for socialism, or at least some ambling steps in its direction; the Republicans stand for religion, particularly evangelical Christianity, and are taking ambitious strides to give it political power.

Socialism -- a fad of the last few centuries -- has had its day; it has been almost universally rejected for decades. Leftists are no longer the passionate collectivists of the 30s, but usually avowed anti-ideologists, who bewail the futility of all systems. Religion, by contrast -- the destroyer of man since time immemorial -- is not fading; on the contrary, it is now the only philosophic movement rapidly and righteously rising to take over the government.

Given the choice between a rotten, enfeebled, despairing killer, and a rotten, ever stronger, and ambitious killer, it is immoral to vote for the latter, and equally immoral to refrain from voting at all because "both are bad."

The survival of this country will not be determined by the degree to which the government, simply by inertia, imposes taxes, entitlements, controls, etc., although such impositions will be harmful (and all of them and worse will be embraced or pioneered by conservatives, as Bush has shown). What does determine the survival of this country is not political concretes, but fundamental philosophy. And in this area the only real threat to the country now, the only political evil comparable to or even greater than the threat once posed by Soviet Communism, is religion and the Party which is its home and sponsor.

The most urgent political task now is to topple the Republicans from power, if possible in the House and the Senate. This entails voting consistently Democratic, even if the opponent is a "good" Republican.

In my judgment, anyone who votes Republican or abstains from voting in this election has no understanding of the practical role of philosophy in man's actual life -- which means that he does not understand the philosophy of Objectivism, except perhaps as a rationalistic system detached from the world.

If you hate the Left so much that you feel more comfortable with the Right, you are unwittingly helping to push the U.S. toward disaster, i.e., theocracy, not in 50 years, but, frighteningly, much sooner.

With the approach of another election, we once again see a difference of opinion between major Objectivist intellectuals. Robert Tracinski, in a much longer article, recently discussed his initial leaning in the same direction, followed by his settling on the opposite conclusion -- to vote for the Republicans.

[I]f you want to have a debate over how to fight and win the War on Terrorism, you'll have to have it within the right. The left contributes nothing but proposals for surrender, appeasement, and passivity. As far as the war is concerned, that "D" next to a candidate's name on the ballot stands for "defeat."

A loss for the Democratic Party in November's election would be a crushing blow. If they lose when every short-term political trend was in their favor, everyone will see it as a public repudiation of the Democratic Party. I advocate this outcome, not because I think it will cause soul-searching and a change of policies within the left -- though that may well be the short-term result -- but simply because the decay of the left is the long-term trend of the past three decades, and we should do everything we can to hasten it.

The more the left fades from the scene, the more the national political debate will be a debate within the right. The American system is not friendly to monolithic one-party rule. The moment one party begins to dominate, it tends to split apart along its internal fault lines. The more the Republicans dominate American politics, therefore, the more intensely they will debate among themselves -- precisely the kinds of debates I have described above.

I can't guarantee that such a debate would produce the best result -- I would like to see the emergence of a small-government, pro-immigration, pro-war, secular right -- but I can guarantee that such a debate would be more interesting and much more productive than the debate we're having with the left right now. [bold added]

Each man makes very good points, although I disagree with Peikoff that "anyone who votes Republican or abstains from voting in this election has no understanding of the practical role of philosophy in man's actual life".

Why? First, the manner in which electoral results affect the nation's public debate is a complicated topic. As things currently stand -- with small government and religious conservatives allied against the socialists -- each election ends up being exactly the kind of "choice" Peikoff describes. But what if the left were finally quashed in this election? Although a political realignment might also happen through the left joining forces with the religious right (e.g., via the environmentalist agenda) I think Tracinski has a good point.

Second, there is the only slightly less complicated matter of how we should best recover from our poor prosecution, so far, of the war. I do not simply hate the left blindly. I have noticed that they have no interest in fighting the current war at all and -- far worse -- I fear what kinds of restrictions they would quickly impose on freedom of speech if they ever were to regain power. No freedom of speech coupled with a huge overdose of multiculturalism will also put a "rotten, ever stronger, and ambitious killer" in charge. It will just be the other rotten killer: Islam rather than evangelical Christianity. The left in power again would manage to degrade our position in this war no matter where we started.

Even aside from that, I am not so sure that kicking the Republicans out will necessarily slow down efforts to inject religion into government -- because the left has shown that it is not above pandering to religionists, including the Christians they allegedly hate. (Where were Ralph Nader and Jesse Jackson during the Schiavo debacle? Hint: Not defending Mr. and Mrs. Schiavo's previous agreement to "pull the plug" or the scientific evidence in the case or the rule of law.) At present, the religious right are allied with small government conservatives and the left is trying to court the religious right. We can continue having three factions, two of which compete to make the religionists the kingmakers. Or we can knock out the left and have two clearly opposing factions. I would far prefer the latter scenario, if at all possible.

In addition, I see the left as tending towards totalitarianism if in power (See "restrictions" above.) and -- as we saw in numerous incidents of violence and vandalism in the last presidential election -- irrational to the point of violence under the right conditions.

It is interesting that I learned of the Peikoff piece today since two postings at Sister Todjah, a conservative blog, had me thinking about just these issues. First, there is the matter of religious conservatives being unreliable allies of limited government, which Sister tells you in her "About" entry:

I've never looked back nor regretted my change from liberal to conservative, even when my party has sometimes not acted conservative - but that mostly seems to be happening on fiscal matters.

So the goals of the socialists are, apparently, tolerable so long as the government, say, forces our kids to pray in public schools (rather than abolishing them). Great.

But then we also have this (via Glenn Reynolds), which Sister quotes from The Huffington Post:

But whether it is hubris, loony tunes, or both, the White House's freakish calm about the elections makes me as nervous as the hell we seem to be headed for. Therefore we should all be on alert. If for whatever reason we don't win back Congress in November the only real answer will be to take to the streets. [formatting removed, bold added]

And this is what they're like without fangs....

This is a step beyond Al Gore's attempt to steal the 2000 election and reminds me of the following quote of Ayn Rand's that I dredged up when the loser -- a leftist -- of Mexico's recent presidential election did just that.

The only power of a mob, as against an individual, is greater muscular strength -- i.e., plain, brute physical force. The attempt to solve social problems by means of physical force is what a civilized society is established to prevent. The advocates of mass civil disobedience admit that their purpose is intimidation. A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes -- the physical intimidation of some men or groups by others -- loses its moral right to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow. [Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 256]

I think the left is dying out, knows it, and will try to take us with it if it gets the chance. I think having the left in power remains a greater short-term threat (due to their suicidal levels of nihilism) than having the right remain in power. I'm with Tracinski on this one.

-- CAV

Updates

10-23-06: (1) Peikoff's Q & A now appear at Capitalism Magazine. (2) The Inspector voices concerns similar to mine.
10-24-06: (1) Mike N argues for split government here and here. (2) Via the trackback to Primacy of Awesome are links to two related discussions.
10-27-06: (1) Nick Provenzo agrees with Peikoff, but is unhappy with the way he presents his argument. (That's me in the "Amen corner" on the latter count.) (2) The original thread from Objectivism Online is here.
10-29-06: Michael Hurd weighs in in favor of a Democratic Congress, but stops short of Peikoff's advocacy of voting only for Democrats.
10-30-06: (1) Myrhaf says to "Wear a Gasmask and Vote Republican". He gives excellent examples of the threat to freedom of speech posed by democrats, as well as of their totalitarian tendencies. (2) Also, via Myrhaf's post are several others: Zach Oakes also advocates voting Republican. Advocating votes for the Democrats are Diana Hsieh, David Landy, and John Lewis.

The last of these gives the best rationale for voting Democratic.

In my view, if our choice is between two forms of welfare redistribution and military timidity, we would be best off with a president who openly espouses these ideas, and makes no claims to support the opposite. This would not lead to better policies, but it would result in clarity, a point of focus for an opposition, and a better chance for a true alternative to take hold.

If I thought freedom of speech could survive the rule of the left as it is today, I would be far closer to being on board with that.
11-1-06: (1) I have not read any of these yet as of this morning, but they are all "pro-" Democrat except the last: Craig Biddle, John Lewis, Andrew Medworth, and Myrhaf. (2) Added second link for Mike N.
at 10-24 update.
11-17-06: Added prefatory note on withdrawing my agreement with Tracinski.

Lakoff's Latest Assault on Debate

It seems that George Lakoff, famous as the author of Don't Think of an Elephant, has a new book out called Whose Freedom?, which reviewer Steven Pinker nicely summed up as, "the latest installment of the linguist's efforts as campaign consultant". There is a reason I wondered why, at first, I was reading a new review of a book that has been out for at least two years now.

I am not at all familiar with Pinker, but my impression of him from this review is that he is of that vanishing breed I call the "better liberal". This means that Lakoff is being attacked by someone who, while he might wish Lakoff were entirely correct, is objective enough to consider the merits of Lakoff's case, and sane enough to throw the flag if he finds it wanting. Even though he takes his obligatory swipe at Ayn Rand ("Other than the Ayn Randian fringe, has anyone recently proposed abolishing [the income tax]?"), this Objectivist found his review to be very solid work.

I have mentioned Lakoff here before and pointed to some conservative criticism of his earlier book, but it was really nice to see in one place an executive summary of his argument along with the gist of what is wrong with it. For the uninitiated, Pinker gives the essentials of Lakoff's idea.

Political debates, according to Lakoff, are contests between metaphors. Citizens are not rational and pay no attention to facts, except as they fit into frames that are "fixed in the neural structures of their brains" by sheer repetition. In George W. Bush's first term, for example, the president promised tax "relief," which frames taxes as an affliction, the reliever as a hero, and anyone obstructing him as a villain. The Democrats were foolish to offer their own version of tax relief, which accepted the Republicans' framing; it was like asking people not to think of an elephant. Instead, they should have re-framed taxes as "membership fees" necessary to maintain the services and infrastructure of the society to which they belong. Likewise, the lawyers who are said to press "frivolous lawsuits" should be reframed as "public protection attorneys," and "activist judges" who "legislate from the bench" rebranded as "freedom judges."

Lakoff's latest book, then will consist in his attempt to re-frame the concept of "freedom". He does not succeed, and Pinker shows us exactly why.

But first, he notes some other serious shortcomings of the book.

There is much to admire in Lakoff's work in linguistics, but Whose Freedom?, and more generally his thinking about politics, is a train wreck. Though it contains messianic claims about everything from epistemology to political tactics, the book has no footnotes or references (just a generic reading list), and cites no studies from political science or economics, and barely mentions linguistics. Its use of cognitive neuroscience goes way beyond any consensus within that field, and its analysis of political ideologies is skewed by the author's own politics and limited by his disregard of centuries of prior thinking on the subject. And Lakoff's cartoonish depiction of progressives as saintly sophisticates and conservatives as evil morons fails on both intellectual and tactical grounds. [bold added]

Ouch! But then, there is a reason constructive criticism can be the hardest to take. What follows is a lengthy excerpt from the latter half of the review. The whole thing is worth a read, and that is what I would recommend.

This put-up job is typical of Lakoff's book. While he ostensibly offers a scholarly analysis of political thought, Lakoff cannot stop himself from drawing horns on the conservative portrait and a halo on the progressive one. Nowhere is this more egregious than in his claim that conservatives think in terms of direct rather than systemic causation. Lakoff seems unaware that conservatives have been making exactly this accusation against progressives for centuries.

Laissez-faire economics, from Adam Smith to contemporary libertarians, is explicitly motivated by the systemic benefits of the market (remember the metaphor of the "invisible hand"?). Lakoff strikingly misunderstands his enemies here, repeatedly attributing to them the belief that capitalism is a system of moral reckoning designed to reward the industrious with prosperity and to punish the indolent with poverty. In fact, the theory behind free markets is that prices are a form of information about supply and demand that can be rapidly propagated through a huge decentralized network of buyers and sellers, giving rise to a distributed intelligence that allocates resources more efficiently than any central planner could hope to do. Whatever distribution of wealth results is an unplanned by-product, and in some conceptions is not appropriate for moralization one way or another. It is emphatically not, as Lakoff supposes (in a direct-causation mentality of his own), a moral system for doling out just deserts.

...

"You give me a progressive issue," Lakoff boasts, "and I'll tell you how it comes down to a matter of freedom" [Where have we heard that before? --ed] -- oblivious to the fact that he has just gutted the concept of freedom of all content. Actually, the damage is worse than that, because many of Lakoff's "freedoms" are demands that society conform to his personal vision of the good (right down to the ingredients of food), and thus are barely distinguishable from totalitarianism. How would he implement "pay in proportion to contributions to society through work"? Will a commissar decide that an opera singer deserves higher pay than a country singer, or that a seller of pork rinds should earn less than a seller of tiramisu? And his freedom not to be harmed by "hurtful language" is merely another name for the unlimited censorship of political speech. No doubt slaveholders found the speech of abolitionists to be "hurtful."

...

Probably not since The Greening of America has there been a manifesto with as much faith that the country's problems can be solved by the purity of the moral vision of the 1960s. Whose Freedom? shows no trace of the empirical lessons of the past three decades, such as the economic and humanitarian disaster of massively planned economies....

The problem is that the misrepresentations are harmful both intellectually and tactically, and will backfire with all of this book's potential audiences. Any of Lakoff's allies on the left who think that their opponents are the imbeciles whom he describes will have their clocks cleaned in their first debate with a Young Republican. Lakoff's book will be red meat for his foes on the right, who can hold up his distortions as proof of liberals' insularity and incomprehension. And the people in the center, the ones he really wants to reach, will be turned off by his relentless self-congratulation, his unconcealed condescension, and his shameless caricaturing of beliefs with which they might have a modicum of sympathy. [bold added]

The mind reels when it contemplates what amusing paroxysms this review might have already caused among the Kossacks! I almost want to visit Daily Kos for a little bird hunting, but my plate's full for the day and the weekend. If anyone else feels a similar urge and finds anything good, the comment section beckons!

The whole problem with the left these days is that it seems to have developed an allergy to the practice of checking its premises against reality. Pinker is indulging in similar wishful thinking if he really believes his review, as good as it is, will do any good -- for the left, anyway.

After the purge, perhaps he and Todd Gitlin could co-found a support group for the excommunicated. Might I suggest Lefty Adults Kicked Out For Fault-finding?

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Corrected a typo. (2) Adrian Hester points out a good review of Lakoff's reply to Pinker's review.

Around the Web on 10-19-06

No Bulwark against Tyranny, Part I

No sooner do I complain about Al Gore seeing fertile ground for global warming hysteria among evangelical Christians than I learn (via Glenn Reynolds) that the World Council of Churches is in favor of having the United Nations regulate new technology! Blogger Christine cites a report on nanotechnology by the WCC:

Firstly, society must engage in a wide debate about nanotechnology and its multiple economic, health and environmental implications. Secondly, some civil society organizations have called for a moratorium on nanotech research and new commercial products until such time as laboratory protocols and regulatory regimes are in place to protect workers and consumers, and until these materials are shown to be safe. Given the regulatory vacuum and inertia by leading nano nations to act, the call for a moratorium is justified and deserves public debate... [bold added]

Christine correctly notes that this call for "democratic control" at the world level by Christians is very naive, but she is herself very unclear over whether any government control of new technology would be proper and, if so, why it would be or what it would properly entail.

When the defenders of freedom offer only murky objections to the most outrageous proposals, they fail to address the underlying incorrect argument and end up coming down for what amounts to the very same thing, only incrementally. To wit, this blogger ends with the following:

This is not to say that we might not need some kind of international organization someday to deal with, say, nanoweapons. I expect we will. But the ETC proposal is not the way to go. The WCC might want to start looking at this whole topic in a broader way, rather than relying on one external organization so heavily.

No. It isn't that the WCC is looking at only one organization. It is that they seek to trample the freedom of scientists to innovate rather than simply address legal questions -- within the framework of protecting individual rights -- brought up by the new technology. You don't want or need a world authority to do that at all. And as for a world body dealing with nanoweapons, if one of those is desirable at all, a better model than the UN is obviously needed.

No Bulwark against Tyranny, Part II

And if defenders of science from government control are rendered ineffective without proper principles, so are those who would keep the government from robbing the public in the name of promoting science.

Although Martin Fridson makes a number of good points in his TCS Daily article against our government funding a "Manhattan Project" in the name of breaking our "addiction to oil", he never really questions the propriety of the government interfering with the allocation of resources (and time) towards research that our private sector would be better off doing itself. Here is his conclusion:

If something beyond the ordinary profit motive is required to bring forth the means for greater energy independence, the government should follow two principles:

• Encourage scientific exploration on multiple fronts, rather than put a thumb on the scale for any single technology.
• Spend the taxpayers' money on outputs, rather than inputs.

On what basis is one to determine that "something beyond the ordinary profit motive" (i.e., government force) is needed for "greater energy independence"? And more importantly, why should this "something" be used at all to take money away from American citizens to do what Fridson suddenly seems not-so-confident that private enterprise can do -- rather than being used to part hostile regimes from oil wealth and secure our supplies of cheap energy?

UN "Oversight" of Art

Cox and Forkum once again hit the nail on the head with this cartoon on some attempted UN oversight of art done at the behest of religious authorities.


And be sure to read Allen Forkum's partial fisking of the Kofi Annan's remarks at the UN's asinine "Unlearning Intolerance" seminar.

Oh yeah. Their upcoming book is nearly out the door!

A Threat against Reliant Stadium?

This article in the Houston Chronicle is the first I've heard of the home stadium of the abysmal Houston Texans specifically appearing in the crosshairs of terrorists. With the Texans Foundering at 1-4, perhaps their management could claim to be doing its best to keep fans safely at home! They need to put a positive spin on something this season.

Wrong Actress, (and now,) Wrong Writer

On October 18, Michelle Malkin said, "I really can't believe this soft-headed starlet is going to play Dagny Taggart. Blecch."

And on that very day, Mike informed us that the people behind the (latest overhyped) effort to make Atlas Shrugged into a movie have switched writers. "[T]hey've changed the writer after ... pimping [James V.] Hart for the last year."

The new writer has Pearl Harbor among his "credits".

My eyepatch joke looks more and more like a prediction every day.

300 Million!

"Or 957 trillion, if you work for Lancet ...", as Tim Blair put it in this very nice photo-blog in commemoration of America's latest milestone.

Since so few US media outlets were inclined to celebrate this non-grim milestone, the job was outsourced to a little Australian blog. Following is a small sample of Americans, from which you may reasonably extrapolate a figure of 300 million.

Thank you, Mr. Blair! (HT: Isaac Schrodinger)

William "Effin'" Buckley Rides (in Plumber Pants) Again!

Diana Hsieh catches a longstanding enemy of Ayn Rand being openly dishonest again. Here's the quote:

It is widely noted that for all that [North Korea's dictator Kim Jong Il] thinks of himself as a leader with a divine afflatus to bring to his people and the world the fruits of Juche (the North Korean variant of Leninism, with a little Ayn Rand mixed in), he is himself a man of total self-indulgence, devoted to porn, Scotch, and Daffy Duck cartoons.

Often, at times like this, I get a kick out of an old fisking I wrote, of a hack job by one of Buckley's -- erm -- underlings, Andrew Stuttaford, to "commemorate" the 100th anniversay of Ayn Rand's birth. His whole brilliant conclusion was basically that Ayn Rand was "strange".

"Of course he does," is all Stuttaford can think to say about the fact that Rand got a lift from Cecil B. DeMille. This isn't a damned cliche! It really happened, and I think it's pretty neat that it did. Stuttaford is then confronted by the fact, obviously unpleasant to him, that a small group of people regularly met with Ayn Rand after she became famous, to discuss philosophy.

Frat boy makes the following scintillating observations: (1) Rand was (twitter) "the sage of selfishness." (2) Those people sure were creepy. Call me crazy, but here's what I find creepy: people who meet regularly "at the feet" of some cleric to take whatever he says on faith, and then practice ritual cannibalism. Oh! But I'm wrong because more people do the latter. [with minor editing]

Enjoy!

A Bleg

Daniel Rigby is curious about Typepad. Drop by and give him the straight dope if you are so inclined.

NOFORN

CONFIDENTIAL-ly, Bubblehead may think he has cornered the market on increased gummint blog traffic through his prostitution of such terms as "top secret" and "for official use only", but he forgot a few key words. I leave further such similar abuse to my more, um, enterprising compadres, but in the meantime, that smacking sound is me at the public trough!

-- CAV