put not your trust in princes 5 November 2008
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
The quote is usually attributed to Otto von Bismarck, though it has the hallmarks of being apocryphal. Lots of variants, some pithier than others; assignments to other famous people; all the usual signs.
Still, the reason it’s survived is because it captures a profound truth: “A special Providence protects fools, drunkards, small children, and the United States of America.”
The workings of such providence aren’t always easy to understand.
In this election there were no conservatives running, merely an idiosyncratic but admirable maverick and the most liberal member of the the US Senate. Not theology but natural law suggests that isn’t going to end well.
The more so because of the bizarre cult surrounding Obama.
The human impulse to be religious is universal, though it varies in strength, and is independent of belief in the supernatural. Many so-called “nonreligious” people have trouble recognizing this and therefore misunderstand their own actions. For my part I think of “religiousness” as the degree to which you incorporate your view of your activities into a larger story of cosmic significance. People who don’t accept the supernatural but who still were born pretty high on the “religiousness” scale wind up separating their papers from their plastics with impressive if misguided devotion, and complaining about people who don’t, independent of actual calculations of the energy budget of the process but because they believe it’s helping save the Earth. They simply transfer their worship elsewhere.
Broadly speaking, liberalism is secular and conservatism is religious; this isn’t because of any greatness or holiness of conservatives, but because the Right’s philosophy — being necessarily tragic and constrained (in Tom Sowell’s “Clash of Visions” sense) — leaves space for the divine in a way that the closed and self-contained unconstrained vision of the Left doesn’t. When man is silent, God will speak.
Which means, in short, that I don’t need to vote for a Messiah. I already have one. Investing such dreams in any man for me would be blasphemy. I understand they call it hope.
Those who seek salvation — even purely secular salvation — in politics are doomed to disappointment, and I’m a little worried about what will happen when the absurdly unrealistic expectations of many of Obama’s followers aren’t met. Given the opportunity for painful self-criticism or for doublethink and accusations of conspiracy by the wreckers, most of us have a preference.
The next few years are going to be interesting ones, in the ancient curse sense of interesting. The many blessings God has given the Americans don’t include freedom from consequence.
Foreigner that I am, my greatest concerns at the moment aren’t for the Americans, who always seem to muddle through, but for the Israelis, who will lose their greatest friend ever to hold the office for a man with decidedly moral-equivalence tendencies — and in a world where they’re so hated, that’s a considerable problem — and the Iraqis, as Obama may find it politically difficult to respond to changes in the situation if things take a turn for the worse. Obama could suddenly reveal such courage, of course, but it would be somewhat unprecedented, to put it charitably.
Senator McCain once said, regarding Iraq, that he would rather lose an election than lose the war. He has done the first, but his lonely support of the surge — his keeping his head when all about were losing theirs — may have prevented the latter. I’ve always found it difficult to forget his terrible “campaign finance reform” (read: “Incumbent Protection Act”) which made hash of the First Amendment, but I will never forget his unwillingness to lose a nation to terror and hatred when it didn’t have to happen.
Congratulations to President-elect Obama, and — especially? — to Senator McCain. May God continue to watch over the Americans, and shower them with mercies as He has done for centuries.
I had a dryly witty conclusion in mind for this point, with just the right helping of sophisticated and detached cynicism, but: No.
God bless America, and the Americans.
of hatred and love 25 September 2008
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
The inimitable Jay Nordlinger writes at the Corner of a friend of his:
[..] she said to me, out of the blue, “What do you think of Sarah Palin?” And while I was drawing breath to answer, she said, “I hate her.”
That kind of took my breath away — because this friend of mine is no hater. But she said it with firm, horrible conviction. She said it with true emotion in her eyes.
I have similar stories. I’m reminded of my very first CASCA meeting at Vancouver (the main Canadian astronomy association), at which a very famous astronomer — a genuinely friendly guy — went into a long spit-filled rant about how much he hated Christians. It was so over-the-top that I actually found myself somewhat amused, both at the impressive degree of malice and the fact his prejudices completely blinded him to the possibility that the person he was talking to was one of the Dreaded.
We wound up having lunch together the following day, and as is my wont I crossed myself before eating. He noticed, and spoke about it quite civilly, apparently having completely forgotten who he’d been speaking to the night before when he was revealing his true feelings. It was all I could do not to break out laughing: in vino veritas.
Contempt such as he had poisons everything you do. You can get away with it to some degree in science, but it’s much harder in the arts. Orson Scott Card says it well in a recent review of a movie that left him unimpressed with the scriptwriters, to put it mildly:
We blame the writers and only the writers [for the movie not being funny].
Here’s why: They hated every major character in the movie. All the comedy depended on our seeing these characters with the amused contempt that the writers had for them.
The trouble is, the actors were too good. They kept inviting us to see these people, not as cardboard cutouts the way the writers did, but as living breathing people.
The directing style was hyper-realistic, in a sort of art-house movie way. The acting was low-key and frightfully earnest. [...] So we had these earnest people trying to be likeable, and everything they had to say and do made them stupid and vile. The kind of people who, if they were sitting at the next table, you’d leave the restaurant without finishing your meal.
[...]
When I said the writer hated all the characters, that was not strictly speaking true. There is a blip of a character — the reviewer for the high school paper. This reviewer wrote an intellectually pretentious, sneering, savage review of the main character’s production of a play version of Erin Brockovich.
It was obvious that this was the one character the writers had respect for. The superior, condescending tone of his review was identical with the superior, condescending tone the writers have toward everyone in the movie.
Mr. Nordlinger is wrong on one point, though; his friend *is* a hater, as proved by the fact she hates. Sweet tea doesn’t become bitter if its cup is knocked over, much less merely because someone else is drinking coffee. Unfortunately, that doesn’t distinguish her from any of us.
There but for the grace of God go we. I think if you genuinely find yourself hating complete strangers on account of, well, practically nothing, it’s time to spend less time following politics and more time at prayer.
no thanks, I already have plans 17 September 2008
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
The school term is starting again here at Queen Mary, which means it’s time for the usual “Grants Not Fees” booths advocating the idea that students should not have to pay to spend time reading books in these buildings, but other people who don’t get to read what they want to should pay for it instead. I certainly understand why that appeals to them; I’ve never quite understood why they think others should work and they should eat (as it were), or why this should appeal to the workers, or why it’s in the workers’ interest. By “workers” here I mean the people who are actually working, not those students who seem to think they shouldn’t have to on account of their intellectual prowess but call themselves the working class anyway.
I did get a kick out of the poster sales, though: on the same billboard, there were two communism-related posters, one above the other. I guess the poster company had put them together because they were both “progressive” or something.
The one on top read “Welcome to the Party” and had various famous socialist thinkers. Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Marx, and of course Mao Zedong. (One can only imagine Hitler’s annoyance; how many millions of people do you have to kill in the name of socialism to get some respect? That Marx guy was all talk!)
And underneath it? A poster saying “Free Tibet“.
Ah, the Left.
mocking the Inquisitor 13 January 2008
Posted by DSM in Canada, human rights, politics.comments closed
Ezra Levant, former publisher of the Western Standard, appeared before the bizarre pseudocourt that is the Alberta Human Rights Commission, and took them to school. Video and transcripts are available at his website; his opening statement is a thing of beauty.
For those unfamiliar with the case, you may recall that a complaint was launched regarding the Western Standard’s publication of the Dread Cartoons of Blasphemy. In a nice move, Ezra (he’s one of those guys you think of by their first names; not sure why) republished the Dread Cartoons on his website the day he had to appear before the court. For the record, the image of a man in a bomb-turban remains my favourite; most of the rest are bleh, and poorly drawn to boot, although I think the “we’ve run out of virgins” one is kind of funny. (Incidentally, there’s an interesting theory that the “virgins” in question are actually “pure white grapes”. Read up on Christophe Luxenberg’s arguments about the Syriac origins of the Qur’an. I’ve probably mentioned this before. I think it’s both persuasive and hilarious, and those are the best kinds of theories.)
The free speech rights of Canadians have never been more under attack than they are now — Free Mark Steyn! — but this is also a major opportunity for us to end this ludicrous charade once and for all. As Ezra told his Inquisitor:
I have no faith in this farcical commission. But I do have faith in the justice and good sense of my fellow Albertans and Canadians. I believe that the better they understand this case, the more shocked they will be. I am here under your compulsion to answer the commission’s questions. But it is not I who am on trial: it is the freedom of all Canadians.
You may start your interrogation.
The text itself doesn’t capture the sheer scorn with which each syllable drips. There are times for courtesy, and there are times for plain anger. This is one of those times.
The only downside I see is that now that bland Inquisitor Shirlene McGovern has become a Youtube star, it’s probably less likely that we’ll get to see Steyn do likewise.. and I’d pay heavy coin to see that.
good on you, Rex 5 January 2008
Posted by DSM in Canada, politics.comments closed
A few months back I wrote the following, Jeopardy-style, to a graph theorist friend:
A: Hockey. And Rex Murphy.
where the question I had intended was
Q: What are the two best things about the CBC?
Well, Murphy recently addressed the Mark Steyn case — hat tip Kathy Shaidle — and he’s in classic form. It might be time to put hockey second (especially seeing how awful the Leafs are this year.)
It’s not difficult to predict where Murphy would come down, of course– despite the devastating and sharp wit for which he’s justly famous, and which tends to be associated with the political right, he’s at heart a moderate. And the good kind of moderate: no wishy-washy averaging of different views for him. Instead, he simply brings his special brand of brutal reasonableness to everything. Even when I disagree with him — on Trudeau’s greatness, for example — he respects the issues.
And as he explains, it is brutally unreasonable for a so-called human rights commission to be involved in suppressing the free speech of columnists and magazines.
Once when I was living in Toronto I was walking in front of the CBC building in the early evening and saw the man himself. I thought to introduce myself and offer a few words of fanboy praise but decided to let him be. After years of being one of only a few CBC figures willing to wander past the fences of acceptable central-Canadian (l/L)iberal-wisdom, he’s more than earned the privilege not to be disturbed by the likes of me.
free Mark Steyn! 22 December 2007
Posted by DSM in human rights, law, politics.comments closed
The recent attempt by several members of the Canadian Islamic Congress to silence the inimitable Mark Steyn — not by disproving his thesis that because of demographics Islam is on the way up, of course, but by charging him with blasphemy before the Inquisition — enrages and disturbs on every level.
I don’t mean to be metaphorical. I’m entirely serious in describing this as a blasphemy prosecution, and the misnamed human rights commissions as an Inquisition. Whether he’s convicted or not is less significant than the fact there is an official body empowered to determine whether or not he’s blasphemed.
Canada has an official belief system (half-affectionately, half-derisively called the multicult), and we’re required to make obeisance or risk punishment. Our religion doesn’t have many explicit dogmas, per se, but you can still come to understand it pretty well. In classical negative theology, you come to understand God by saying what he’s not; similarly, in our new faith, you come to understand the boundaries of Accepted Truth by what people are punished for, or threatened with punishment for.
These days, no one’s worried about being fined by the government for sympathizing with the non-Chalcedonian Christology of the Coptic Orthodox. Come to think of it, you can probably count one one hand the number of members of the various Canadian HRCs who know what I’m talking about. Questionable Trinitarian theology just isn’t something they concern themselves with, and if I tried to bring a formal heresy charge against an Egyptian friend then the Commissars would laugh.
“Settle this between yourselves,” they’d say.
They’d throw out the case like Seneca’s older brother, the Roman jurist Gallio, threw out the case against St Paul where the locals claimed that Paul “persuades men to worship God contrary to the law”. (Acts 18).
Gallio interrupted before Paul even began his defence, because he wasn’t interested in handling philosophical disputes between one group of Jews (the local synagogue) and another group of Jews and assorted Gentile hangers-on (Paul and coworkers). He was only concerned with dealing with matters involving “some misdemeanor or serious crime“.
Instead, he explained, “since it involves questions about words and names and your own law—settle the latter yourselves. I will not be a judge of such things.“
And he kicked everyone out of the courtroom.
It’s mildly astonishing that a few words from an irritated Roman proconsul two thousand years dead show more sense than a modern nation’s enlightened political structures, but there you go. Whether you view our innovations as inventing new thoughtcrimes or as broadening the traditional exceptions to free speech beyond all sense, the end result is the same: we’ve criminalized the expression of perfectly reasonable ideas, and the space in which our thought can move and play and explore grows ever smaller.
For Steyn’s argument, right or wrong, the natural battlefield is the page, not a kangaroo court.
It’s been noted — I think by the man himself — that the complainants almost always win in these cases, and so the odds aren’t good. I’m not so sure. It may be that if we cast enough light then Steyn might be found not guilty, for fear of throwing the entire HRC project into disrepute– freedom could win by losing. I’d hope so, anyway, but the many previous attacks on free speech in Canada via the Inquisitions have generally passed unremarked, in typical Canadian style.
It’s time for that to end. All those who support free speech — right, left, centre, other — must oppose the so-called “human rights” end-run around our ancient liberties in the Friendly Dictatorship.
Free Mark Steyn, to free us all.
the falling standard 9 October 2007
Posted by DSM in Canada, politics.comments closed
From Jonathan Kay, on the collapse of Ezra Levant’s Western Standard, like its predecessor the Alberta Report:
All this bloodless market analysis notwithstanding, I was still upset to hear last week’s news – and not just because I felt bad for Ezra, whom I am now happy to call a friend. In many ways, Ezra and his magazine serve as metaphors for red-meat conservatism itself in this country: feisty, iconoclastic, resourceful and clever, but ultimately marginalized by an eastern Canadian intellectual establishment still beholden to the left-wing dogmas and anti-Western antipathies of Trudeau era.
To be fair, the standard-bearer of American conservatism in the U.S. is the National Review, and despite an illustrious history and enormous influence I don’t think they’ve ever turned a profit. Could an offbeat Canadian Western-focused conservative-libertarian magazine with limited audience and no large donor base really survive? It was, to quote one of my favourite Python skits, “an act of purest optimism to have posed the question in the first place.”
And of course now there’s one fewer destination for Colby Cosh’s writing, and that’s a tragedy: albeit not an uncommon one for freelance writers in general, and for him in particular. (Now less “lance”, as a friend of mine might put it.)
To take this in a different direction, Michael Novak has done his best to rehabilitate the idea of business in Catholic moral philosophy. Among other things, he emphasizes that the man who employs others in good and lawful tasks is doing an excellent and praiseworthy thing, not merely by achieving a good end (providing service to his customers) but giving his employees the opportunity to do the same and legitimately earn a living. Doing good to make it possible for others to do good is itself a good.
Honourable failure in such a task — whether it’s related to the always quixotic missions of Canadian conservatism or not — isn’t reason to celebrate, obviously.. but there’s no shame in it either.
Cheers to Levant and company for holding the banner.
reconfiguration time 3 October 2007
Posted by DSM in Canada, politics.comments closed
Steve Janke lays it down in a fascinating post entitled “Canada needs the NDP” (no, but seriously):
For a conservative, a liberal serves the purpose of contrasting his views and highlighting to the voter the potential futures at stake. The same goes for the liberal. An honest liberal or conservative would admit that, once in a while, the other side has a better take on an issue, or at the very least, is offering up something worth considering. But for the Liberal Party of Canada, other parties serve no purpose, because as a party without vision, the Liberal Party doesn’t require contrast. How can the other parties have a better take on the issue of the acquisition of power and money by the Liberal Party? It makes no sense when those are the only issues that matter. The Liberal Party doesn’t need opinions, all the Liberal Party needs is votes when an election happens. Best if these other parties were gone altogether in order to make the elections simple. The choice to voters: confirm the Liberal Party’s position of power or…well, nothing else, really.
I find myself agreeing with him. My Dipper friends have an almost endearing lack of connection with reality, but on their good days they can be touchingly earnest. I think his argument that Canada will be better off for having the NDP as the alternative to the Conservatives is correct.
There’s another excellent reason for conservatives to prefer having the NDP in opposition: as Janke notes, they will inevitably become more centrist, which should allow the misnamed “Conservative” party to move to the right.
My insistence on the point may be tiresome, but it’s still true for all that. The CPC made a deliberate decision to abandon many historic principles of Canadian conservatism on the grounds that more centrist goals were the only ones achievable. I disagreed with the choice at the time, and complained about it loudly at the pub.. although the narrowness of the last election suggests they may have had a point tactically. I’m still not convinced it was the right decision strategically.
Anyway, Janke offers much food for thought for observers of the Canadian political scene.
there but for 2 August 2007
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
Modified from a comment I added to a thread at the Volokh Conspiracy, regarding the Minneapolis bridge collapse:
“I find it a tad distasteful that certain comments seem to hope that the injured parties are not among the group identified as “the rest of our colleagues and friends.” Why can’t we just wish for GENERAL non-injury?”
I don’t think it’s distasteful at all.
Something is wrong with a man who reacts the same way to the news that a stranger has died as he does to the news that his friend or his brother or his wife or his child has died.
Human beings all have their own networks of attachment and relationship, and it is both natural and right to be concerned with those we’re connected to. This is not exclusive of a hope for general non-injury, nor does it mean that each of us doesn’t have ties to the entire human race. It’s a recognition of the joys and sorrows of the particularities of human life.
To my mind, feeling relief that it wasn’t a friend honours the loss of life more than treating the lost as interchangeable does.
marching ever onwards 18 July 2007
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
Warning: cranky rant follows.
Reading a blog post a while ago, I was struck by the repeated references to “social progress”. What got me thinking is that the author’s a secular materialist, and as far as I know doesn’t accept any teleology in nature. (I could be wrong on this, but I’d be very surprised, given which evolutionary biologists he’s expressed a fondness for in the past.) So how are we measuring “progress”? What defines the goal that a bunch of overgrown apes are progressing towards? We can all paint pictures about the world we’d like to live in and then define approaching that picture as “progress”, but since most of our dreams are incompatible, how is there an objective direction?
Admittedly I’ve never understood how secular types believe that ethics works. Sure, I can imagine how certain patterns of behaviour (more altruistic ones, say) might lead to improved reproductive success of a group even if it’s not always for the best for the individual members. What I don’t get is why someone who believes that there isn’t an ontological weight to moral matters thinks that that this actually binds anyone, which is why I’ve never been able to make sense of the various original-position Rawlsian arguments about justice. If there’s no actual correlate to any of this, if good and evil are nothing more than labels, why should I take any of it seriously? Or if you claim that I “shouldn’t” do X because the strategy of generally not doing X has led to benefits for my ancestors, why isn’t the correct reply “so what?” I don’t think you need to invoke God per se to get around this, not at this handwaving level, but I do think you need a pretty rich metaphysics (at least comparable to Platonic or Buddhist ones), and a decidedly nonmaterialist one.
Setting aside my incomprehension, in the absence of a fixed moral order then it seems to me there can’t be much content to this goal we’re progressing towards. That is, the goal has to be defined by abstract principles. From my perspective, “progress” seems to be increasingly efficient implementation of principles like “everyone should be equally able to do whatever they want”. After all, anything more concrete would involve specific arbitrary features of the world which are purposeless anyway and only have such meaning as we attach to them.
Everyone’s favourite Confucian-influenced Catholic Jim Kalb discussed this theme yesterday with reference to multiculturalism:
Big changes in popular habits are no doubt part of a whole network of other changes, so it’s hard to point to specific causes and effects, but isn’t there a distinct connection between young adults’ acceptance of multiculturalism and their total lack of interest in public affairs? To me it seems glaringly obvious that multiculturalism makes public life impossible even in concept. There can’t be public life unless there is public discussion and decision. That requires a public that’s coherent enough to have thoughts and reactions and take action, at least to some degree. The point of multiculturalism, though, is that no particular culture—no particular pattern of thoughts and reactions and no particular history of action—is allowed to determine things. If that’s so, though, how can public life exist? Multicultural government is “free to be you and me” turned into universal law. Under such conditions, there can be no politics and we have to be ruled by experts, therapists and money instead. If the only legitimate role for ordinary people in politics is to parrot the line taken by New York Times, because they’re not experts and if they act on their non-expert prejudices they’ll just mess things up, why shouldn’t they concentrate on their personal affairs and ignore things they have nothing to say about anyway?
If we describe perfectly reasonable but non-multicultural action as unacceptable, then reasonable people respecting social boundaries will be shamed into doing nothing; and by construction, their replacements will be either unreasonable or without shame. We’ll find ourselves ruled by such creepy new aristocracies as “the Teen Titans to the council of elders’ Superfriends”, to quote Mark Steyn (hat-tip Kathy Shaidle): descendants of various famous people, gathering together to share their wisdom with the world.. and the distribution of power comes full circle.
Social progress indeed.
UPDATE:
Whoa, spooky! Regarding Hitch, Ramesh Ponnuru over at the Corner writes (about an hour after I posted, assuming their timestamps are in EST):
An account of morality could be given that is consistent with a non-theistic religion, or even types of atheism. What renders atheism incompatible with a coherent account of morality, when it is incompatible, is physicalism (or what is sometimes described as reductive materialism).
Compare with my above:
I don’t think you need to invoke God per se to get around this, not at this handwaving level, but I do think you need a pretty rich metaphysics (at least comparable to Platonic or Buddhist ones), and a decidedly nonmaterialist one.
“Fools seldom differ,” as they say; but I’m happy with the company.
typically inane 4 July 2007
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
I don’t know if you’ve been following the Scooter Libby “scandal” in the US; from outside it looks remarkably insignificant. The original proposed storyline — that Libby was part of an orchestrated campaign to out a covert agent for political reasons — fell apart when it became known that Richard Armitage had been the leaker, and Armitage is with State and about as far from a Bush loyalist as it’s possible to be, etc., etc. Finally the case turned in a Martha Stewart direction (among other reasons, because it’s not clear the agent in question was actually covert either de jure or de facto), Libby was convicted not of an underlying crime but of lying during the investigation, and recently Bush commuted the sentence.
But I’m not interested in the story whatsoever. All that is merely by way of set-up for the following question at a press conference, which exasperated me to no end (hat-tip Powerline):
Q: Was the President scared that if Scooter Libby went to jail that he might then talk about some secrets in the White House that would damage the President?
My proposed answer begins “Why, yes! He was indeed. The secrets in question are as follows,” and goes on from there.
*rolls eyes*
The other questions the Powerline guys quote are much of a piece with that one.
Let’s assume that indeed Libby knows all the deep dark mysteries of the Bush administration. Guantanamo prisoners being taunted by the reanimated corpse of Walt Disney who is really not happy about being brought back early, and so forth. Let’s further assume that the commutation was completely quid pro quo, right down to a signed contract stored in the Pentagon vault swearing that if Bush springs Libby then Libby will go to his grave without saying a word.. and no one will ever know about the Second Flood plan to fight terrorism by legislating that cars be less efficient, requiring more and more fossil fuels, thereby inducing massive amounts of global warming and putting the entire Middle East underwater by the autumn of 2009. (Israel will of course be spared by raising the country three metres on a giant platform known as the Ark, which will be paid for by taxing single-mother welfare recipients and built by hordes of enslaved actors and musicians under the terms of Patriot Act II.)
So let’s grant the tinfoil-hat-American community anything they’d like us to stipulate to, even that this massive conspiracy decided to let the media guy in on all the juicy above-top-secret details for some reason.
Why on God’s green Earth would Tony Snow fess up to this at a freakin’ press conference?!
Some questions are intended to get answers. Others are designed merely as political theatre on the part of reporters, a kind of self-important performance art.
The observed ratio between the two categories makes it impossible for me to take much current journalism seriously.
OMG ponies!!! of war 30 April 2007
Posted by DSM in Canada, politics.comments closed
As a rule, I avoid stepping into comment sections for other than one-timers.. but I’ve thrown my hat into the ring over at David P’s blog.
We consider the idea that “in long periods of war, violent crime tends to increase as people become more and more desensitised to violence”, and the IMHO farfetched possibility that such an effect involving the UN-sponsored Afghanistan campaign will result in higher Canadian crime rates. Homicide rates in the UK and in the US are discussed.
birthday wishes 23 April 2007
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
I hope everyone had a great Lenin’s Birthday yesterday! Appropriate celebrations include slaughtering millions, but I’ll understand if you only tortured and murdered a handful of your political enemies; these are busy times for everyone, and a communist’s work is never done.
Fortunately fellow travellers around the world are doing their part, and there are even encouraging signs that in Great Mother Russia power is returning to the true Vanguard of the People.
Long live the Revolution!
Karl, set tea for two 28 March 2007
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
Unparalleled independent journalist Michael Totten does it again, with another series of engrossing reports from Iraq. My favourite part:
Iraqi Kurdistan is technically occupied by a foreign power, but this occupation surely ranks among one of the most absurd in human history. Dr. Ali Sindi, advisor to Prime Minister Nechervan Barzani, told me that South Korea is the official occupier of “Northern Iraq.” Korean soldiers are stationed just outside Erbil in a base near the airport. He laughed when he told me the Kurdish military, the Peshmerga (“those who face death”), surround the South Koreans to make sure they’re safe.
The South Koreans, as present-but-absentee imperalist overlords, being protected by their nominal wards! You can’t make this stuff up, which is why Totten’s such a treasure.
He also has an interesting story about what happens when you’re planning to meet with the kind of communists who want to sip overpriced coffee and talk trade unions and foreign films and letter-writing campaigns, but due to driver error instead meet up with the kind who use mounted belt-ammunition machine guns and who don’t like the sellout coffee-drinkers very much.
Fortunately everyone comes out of it alive, thanks to the apparently boundless Kurdish hospitality. In fact, even after the mixup is discovered and the guests are revealed as would-be acquaintainces of the hosts’ enemies, the revolutionaries gave our heroes a tour of the camp!
There must be something in the Kurdish water: even their communists are friendly enough. Time to bottle it and ship it south, I think.
down with equality 27 March 2007
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
John J. Miller has a dispiriting article on scholastic Leftism gone mad: some Seattle types banned Legos because of the ungood concepts of social injustice that playing with them instilled in the kids. Only after imposing the rules that “All structures are public structures”, that “Lego people can be saved only by a “team” of kids, not by individuals” (whatever that means), and that “All structures will be standard sizes”, were the students allowed to return to “playing”.. or whatever you call it after all the fun has been removed.
I think the last command, that no structure will be bigger than any other, is what set me off, because it’s not merely idiotic but profoundly dangerous if such a lesson is extended to the larger world. It’s even more, well, flattening, than the rejection of private property and individual enterprise in the first commands.
Look: any two things which aren’t the same thing differ in some way, and are therefore unequal. The entire universe is one incredibly large study in the countless ways objects can be unequal, and people are no exception. Some are tall, some are short, some are good at one thing, some at another. These differences among people can’t help but lead to distinct outcomes, whether in significant accomplishments — I’m never going to design a cathedral, or write a symphony — or less significant ones, such as Lego construction.
Teaching students right at the start that being able to do better than other people isn’t a gift which you should put to a useful purpose but instead something to be suppressed lest your capability being realized (both in the sense of being noticed and in the sense of being effected) cause social injustice is inane at best and and disastrous at worst.
Kurt Vonnegut’s unforgettable story Harrison Bergeron says it better than I ever could. Imagine a world where the champions of Lego social justice were in charge, and shudder.
Or, for a more charming but equally thoughtful take, see Brad Bird (which marks the second time I’ve posted this bit — man, I loved The Incredibles):
Helen: Dash, this is the third time this year you’ve been sent to the office. We need to find a better outlet. A more.. constructive outlet.
Dash: Maybe I could, if you’d let me go out for sports.
Helen: Honey, you know why we can’t do that.
Dash: But I promise I’ll slow up! I’ll only be the best by a tiny bit!
Helen: Dashiell Robert Parr, you are an incredibly competitive boy. And a bit of a showoff. The last thing you need is temptation.
Dash: You always say, “Do your best.” But you don’t really mean it. Why can’t I do the best that I can do?
Helen: Right now, honey, the world just wants us to fit in, and to fit in, we just gotta be like everybody else.
Dash: Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of. Our powers made us special.
Helen: Everyone’s special, Dash.
Dash [sullenly]: Which is another way of saying no one is.
golfing for dollars 20 February 2007
Posted by DSM in politics, sports.comments closed
Work is continuing to expand to fill all available time. But it’s going very well — every crazy thing I try these days seems to work, even coming up with stranger and stranger transition functions for my integrations — so I shouldn’t complain, even if it interferes with my blogging! (And my email replies. Sorry again to everybody, but it’s partly your own fault for sending twenty-screen messages that take hours to respond to..)
I had to link this, though: Tom Sowell is a treasure. (I think that line’s due to Jay Nordlinger.)
San Francisco has six municipal golf courses — and they are losing money. Now there is all sorts of hand-wringing over what to do about it.
An economist might see this as a non-problem. If the golf courses are losing money, then get rid of them. Given San Francisco’s sky-high land prices, selling the land that the golf courses are on would bring in millions, if not billions, of dollars.
But such advice is why so few economists get elected to political office.
A politician has to be all things to all people — a friend of the golfers, a protector of the workers who maintain the golf courses, and of course a believer in mother and apple pie.
Even the suggestion that the golf courses might be turned over to some private operator of golf courses has caused opposition. One golfer declared: “Privatization would raise greens fees. Nobody could afford it.”
This is the kind of talk that has to be taken seriously by elected officials, even if an economist would dismiss it as sheer nonsense. Have you ever heard of any business raising its prices to the point where it no longer had any customers?
Read the whole thing and enjoy the clear-headed conclusion:
The great allure of government programs in general for many people is that these programs allow decisions to be made without having to worry about the constraints of prices, which confront people at every turn in a free market.
They see prices as just obstacles or nuisances, instead of seeing them as messages conveying underlying realities that are there, whether or not prices are allowed to function. What prices are telling San Francisco is that municipal golf courses cost more than they are worth — not in my opinion, but in the actions of people who are spending their own hard-earned money.
