Professor Froward's Slough of Despond

Now It Can Be Told

2007-02-23T12:14:00.000-05:00

A commenter at Althouse notices that Prof. A. looks photoshopped into this picture. He's right. That picture of Althouse is really from this previously suppressed image of the Reichstag fire:

Wow. Just... Wow.

2006-09-28T18:49:00.000-04:00

Over at Foreign Policy, Carolyn O'Hara thinks the poor Muslims in Thailand should be given prizes for decapitating schoolteachers and Buddhist monks. She thinks they should be given more autonomy. Why? Because they kill schoolteachers, that's why. If the Ku Klux Klan started decapitating teachers in Georgia, surely she'd want to reward them too? No? Gee. Go figure. She refers to psychopaths murdering teachers and monks as "fighting". No, that's not fighting, that's psychopaths murdering people. But there is not a single hint in the piece about the actual nature of what's going on there. It's just "fighting".

She quotes some other moron, John Brandon of the Asia Foundation. He's pleased that one of the leaders of the recent coup is a Muslim. Obviously both morons approve of the coup; they're humanitarians, and the deposed government was democratic. Three guesses what kind of "intellectual" this guy is, and the first two don't count:

[The insurgents] feel that he will be able to work with Muslim insurgents in the south and create a strategy that promotes peace and security.

"A strategy that promotes peace and security"? What planet is this clown from? Maybe he means that when all non-Muslims in that part of Thailand are dead, things'll be quiet for a while. Until the Muslims attack the rest of Thailand. Moron.

Sic. Sic as a dog.

2006-08-15T14:55:00.000-04:00

Norm Geras has an open letter to Jews [sic] for Justice [sic] for Palestine [sic].

P.S. They say you don't have to attribute when you quote the Bible; surely the same applies to Dorothy Parker?

Espionage!!1!

2006-07-05T17:09:00.000-04:00

What a shame these people didn't sell secrets relating to national security instead of the Coca-Cola formula. They'd be on the lecture circuit instead of in jail.

Patriotism Questioned

2006-06-23T12:02:00.000-04:00

A typically savage Nazi-style Rovlerburtonlerian attack on dissenters:

Outlining an alleged plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago and a federal building in Miami, Gonzales told a Justice Department news conference: "They were persons who for whatever reason came to view their home country as the enemy."

This is terrorism, plain and simple. There is no other word for it. To question the patriotism of an American citizen is terrorism. It is utterly beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse. It is also un-American. Gonzales, objectively an anti-American terrorist, has a lot of nerve calling hismelf a patriot, as he implicitly does. Any fool can see that he is not. Naturally, he maintains plausible deniability by not actually mentioning patriotism, but that is what his code phrases mean, and we all know it.

In fact, viewing your home country as the enemy is the highest form of dissent, and therefore the highest form of patriotism, as Patrick Henry so famously observed so many years ago. Gonzales is attempting to peddle the radical right-wing fringe extremist rightwingwingnuttianwing extremist fringe-radical Sharonist-Likudist neoconlerburtonposition that only those mindless sheeple who slavishly neglect to blow up their fellow citizens can qualify as patriots. But the great American public would see through these pathetic, laughable lies, if only they hadn't been brainwashed to agree with the frighteningly extreme views of the neocons.

But how can we reach them?

Perhaps we can shock them into seeing the reasonableness of our position by calling them brainwashed sheeple anti-American asshole terrorists. It's worth a try.

Women and Children Hardest Hit

2006-05-17T14:38:00.000-04:00

From the Associated Press via Yahoo (thanks to Tim Blair):

Hawaiian Waters Grow Crowded with Whales

...

Environmental groups call the trend alarming...

Fortunately, I'm semi-hoaxing you (that there ellipsis after the headline covers a lot of ground): The environmentalists in question are actually alarmed (this time) about an increase in collisions between whales and boats near Hawaii; the increase appears to be a statistically inevitable result of that environment being richer in targets, whale-wise.

The UN

2006-05-07T23:22:00.000-04:00

Have you ever heard anybody admit that the UN is fundamentally broken, but then go on to say that we should support it blindly and unconditionally anyway, because "it's the best we've got"? I have, though not in the last year or two.

Well, it occurs to me that stewbums drink Sterno for precisely the same reason.

Where Are the Moderate Muslims?

2006-02-08T13:45:00.000-05:00

Here's a couple; scroll 'way down down for comments by "Natasha Khan" and "Sanaa Khayat". Sorry about the scrolling, but the Sun doesn't seem to have mastered modern octothorpe technology just yet.

Yes, I agree that the Sun is an offensive caricature of a newspaper. It's the reader comments I'm recommending, not the article itself.

"You cannot hope to bribe or twist..." Honestly, that paper's a hoot in moderate doses, though I don't bother unless somebody links it. Do I completely misunderstand the British sense of humor, or are they giggling as they write most of that stuff? It just doesn't seem quite serious to me.

Bill O'Reilly: Idiot

2005-12-06T00:52:00.000-05:00

Who is this moron? Is he on TV or something? He must be.

Gas prices are down "because they're afraid they'll go to jail"? When the hell was it a crime in the United States to charge what the market will bear?

...in those meetings they look for every way to jack up oil prices after Katrina, every way...

How many ways do they need? How many are there? Exactly one: Charge. People. More.

Halfwit.

Left-wing arithmetic

2005-12-02T19:39:00.000-05:00

Somebody in Hollywood (where else?) thinks 2000 votes can swing a US election. He also thinks he knows more about what "the troops" think than they do themselves.

Not very bright, those lefties, are they?

Jimmy Carter: Liar, Imbecile, Swine

2005-12-01T00:05:00.000-05:00

This is nauseating.

It's not often that I feel real personal hatred for lefties, but I do right now. In the LA Times, our former Bootlicker in Chief, champion snivelling bellycrawler of the great state of Georgia, devoted fellator of every military dictator on Earth, claims that for the last 230 years, the core principles of the United States have included: Massive foreign aid; a supine unwillingness to do anything without "international" approval; doctrinaire green-party environmentalism; obsessive erasure of all traces of religion from public life; and whatever else Eurolefties are peddling this week. He's either insane, or even more shameless than I'd thought:

...church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.

I simply don't believe that he doesn't know he's lying. It is beyond imagining that anybody could be that stupid. He's an old man; he was an adult already in a time when the US government was far more infested with Christianity than any of us youngsters can really comprehend now.

He also babbles insanely about our historic committment to "economic and social justice". No, Jimmy. Wrong, Jimmy. We are not "committed" to "economic and social justice", and whatever minimal interest we have in that nonsense is recent. That's why everybody calls us a capitalist country, Jimmy.

In general, this repulsive whining little toad has picked up one of the most insane lies the left likes to tell these days: That their lunatic flavor-of-the-instant schemes are all Traditional American Values, and all this self-reliance/give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death stuff is just a sort of weird, temporary abberation that sort of sprung into being some time around 1994. Have any of these dingbats ever glanced at the Constitution, or read anything any of our founders wrote?

Jesus wept! That creep would steal opium suppositories out of his grandmother's butt.

Chomskian bellylaugh of the week

2005-11-22T23:22:00.000-05:00

Oliver Kamm notes two items:

Chomsky demanded that the Guardian remove from its web site an interview with him in which the interviewer asked some tough questions, because he felt that his views were "inaccurately" represented.
Chomsky believes that the "freedom of speech" of one of his journalist friends was atrociously violated because a publisher decided not to publish her book. The publisher's decision had a lot to do with people feeling that she had "inaccurately" represented certain recent historical events.

A-hem.

And it gets better: The "inaccuracy" Noamster was upset about was that the interview made it sound like he hangs out with people who deny genocide. His friend got into hot water for claiming that the Bosnian genocide was largely a hoax.

Chomsky likes to claim that all things absolutely must be said, indeed shouted from the housetops, whether they're true or not: It's the principle of the thing! A glorious universal principle! Actually I've heard of much worse principles, if it were pursued honestly. But it's funny, how few cases he thinks this principle actually applies to, and how much they have in common. And of course it never applies to anybody saying anything uncomplimentary about him.

The genius of democracy

2005-11-22T22:55:00.000-05:00

The genius of democracy is a lot like that of capitalism: You can't get rid of ambitious loons, and if you did, the ambitious loons next door would move in and helotize you. So you harness them. You provide them with a relatively safe and convenient path to advancement, and you arrange it so they'll benefit everybody by getting ahead (in the case of capitalism), or, in the case of democracy, they'll at least do somewhat less damage than they otherwise would.

If you don't let people gain wealth or power more or less honestly, they'll do it as dishonestly as they must. Remember the Soviet Union?

The key is understanding that neither democracy nor capitalism is perfect, nor is intended to be. We have merely struck a deal with these people to get them more or less off our backs. Though if it gets to be too much less, with those clowns in DC, we may have to hang a few to encourage the others.

Gay Republicans

2005-11-16T00:54:00.000-05:00

It's hideously sad when Democrats lash out at gay Republicans. We're at a point in time when most conservatives see the war as a very important issue: The dividing line between left and right these days is whether you hate the United States, or you don't. If you don't, you're One of Us. That's not interesting, coming from me; I never gave a rat's ass who you slept with anyway. But there are a lot of people in the GOP who, right now, have a compelling reason to accept gay patriots as "us". Who would you rather have a beer with, a queer who loves his country or a straight kid who loves Noam Chomsky instead? Who would you rather have swearing an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution? What's more disgusting, really, somebody who does gross things in private, or somebody who very publically calls on our troops to kill their officers? First things first.

Those gays who come out as conservatives are doing something inordinately valuable. If the GOP learns to live with gay Americans, who will be left in national politics to kick gay Americans around? Nobody. That might be a disaster for the Democratic Party, but it'd be a great day for everybody else.

Law

2005-11-12T11:17:00.000-05:00

People pass the strangest laws, laws that can very easily be abused: In the UK, they now have the religious vilification law and the 28-day suspension of habeas corpus; in Canada, they can lock you up for "advocating genocide" or some such thing; in the US, we have RICO. When these things are being proposed and people object, the advocates always say that their law could be abused, in theory, but in practice it won't be.

Well, that's like saying that if you throw somebody out of an airplane, in practice he'll always land on a trampoline.

Veterans Day

2005-11-12T00:04:00.000-05:00

What he said.

"Regards to everybody, no need to be desperate."

2005-11-11T14:26:00.000-05:00

The last message written by Captain-lieutenant Dmitri Kolesnikov aboard the Russian submarine Kursk:

"It seems like there are no chances... Here's the list of personnel from the other sections, who are now in the ninth [compartment] and will attempt to get out. Regards to everybody, no need to be desperate. Kolesnikov."

Via Chicago Boyz. It reminded me of something I read over at Tim Worstall this morning.

Meg...

2005-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

...is making all kinds of sense. Go figure.

...we are not going to turn into a race of Spocks, and it wouldn't be a good thing if we did.

Correct.

Torture and the loss of our national soul

2005-11-10T18:16:00.000-05:00

If you disagree about anything at all with some people who accuse the US of torture, they'll accuse you of supporting torture, no matter how often and how loudly you affirm that you oppose it. Of course, you shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that these clowns are necessarily wrong in opposing torture, just because they happen to be infantile, fanatical, and pervasively dishonest hysterics. Their disapproval of torture (unless it's done by Islamists or Communists, obviously) has nothing to do with whether torture is good, bad, or indifferent. You know what they say about broken clocks.

It's a bit of a minefield, is all. Over at the Corner, Jonah Goldberg takes a fine stroll through it, and addresses one of the more plainly absurd arguments we hear about the matter. Yes, he prefaces the thing with a ritual assurance that he's not arguing in favor of torture, but rather noting flaws in an argument against it. That distinction is far too subtle for the "nuance" crowd, obviously.

The argument that using horrible tactics will cost us everything is predicated on the assumption that such tactics have never been used. For if torture costs us our soul and destroys our civilization, how is it that we have a soul or a civilization to lose at this late date to begin with?

I like Jonah Goldberg because he's a wiseass, but I like him even more when he writes stuff like this. He recognizes nonsense as nonsense, and objects to it because it's nonsense. We live, these days, in the teeth of a howling blizzard of utter nonsense, most of it blowing in from somewhere off to the left. The left has, really, completely broken with reality: They consider it irrelevant and uninteresting.

UPDATE 11/13/2005: They're hammering away at him for "supporting torture" — regardless of how often and loudly he affirms that he opposes it.

Assimilationist France

2005-11-09T23:25:00.000-05:00

Chez Naawm, Sophie Masson discusses something a lot of us tend to forget, if we ever knew it at all: France isn't suffering from "that multicultural crap" in the Canadian sense. Their official policy on immigrants is assimilation:

The French method of absorbing immigrants traditionally aims at effacing ethnic identity in the one, indivisible, secular French Republic.

The fact that they have a "method" on this is strange and depressing — benign neglect worked fine for the generations of US immigrants whose children and grandchildren run the country now — but they at least grasp the fact that a nation is something more than a purely arbitrary assortment of people who happen to have similar license plates.

But make up your own mind; read it. There's too much uninformed yap about this issue.

She also says what a lot of people have said, but says it better than most:

This ... is the traditional Paris mob, feared since 1789. And the government's reaction, veering in panic-stricken indecision from one wildly contradictory solution to another, is also traditional.

I'm not laughing at them, by the way. It really just isn't funny. Were the Detroit riots in 1967 amusing?

The Politics of Panic

2005-11-09T14:07:00.000-05:00

Never mind the Politics of Fear. Jeremy Rifkin is ahead of the curve, as always. IF USED CAR TIRES MUTATE INTO GIANT KILLER TURTLES, IT COULD CAUSE UNTOLD ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATION IN THE YEARS TO COME!

Well, sure, but... that's a mighty big "if".

Via Instapundit.

Arab anti-Americanism

2005-11-06T22:18:00.000-05:00

Amir Taheri takes a look at anti-Americanism in the Arab world:

A Kuwaiti friend withdrew his son from an American university to "protect him from [being] brainwashed into hating the United States."

The picture he paints looks improbably rosy to me, but what do I know?

DNC HQ RAIDED

2005-11-06T14:30:00.000-05:00

No, really, just read between the lines:

Neighbors had complained of finding partly nude corpses in plain view...

"Children matured sooner in Russia than in the West"

2005-11-03T23:54:00.000-05:00

There aren't many lies too preposterous for your really devoted political theologian to tell himself — and you too, if you're willing to listen:

When the Kremlin gave the public order during the terror of the 1930s that not only the wives of the victims but children as young as 12 were to be shot, the French communists were reduced to arguing that children matured sooner in Russia than in the West.

Such servility seems incredible in retrospect, but one of the main points of Conquest's new book is that the human capacity for self-delusion is limitless in all eras.

Boy, is it ever. The servility seems downright homey, if you pay much attention to the Michael Moores and Ken Livingstons of the world. Plus ça change, eh, copain? The Left marches on.

Via Nawwm.

Levees, levees, levees

2005-11-03T15:35:00.000-05:00

Remember the levees? In New Orleans? That, uhh, hurricane thing, the one Karl Rove caused with the weather machine?

Well, people are digging through decades of decisions on this stuff, and it turns out that the sole cause of the failures was not George Bush not having voted in Congress for an eight-year-long project four years ago, or whatever. In fact, the Army Corps of Engineers did something dumb in 1965, and "environmental groups in the 1980s derailed plans to erect a structure to block storm surges from Lake Pontchartrain", and Congress pulled a real boner in 1992. Those are some high points. Before, since, and along the way, everybody else did everything wrong, too.

Would a stronger central government have helped? There's nothing about "strong central government" that guarantees competence or good sense, while there's a lot about living in the actual flood plain that ought to inspire sincere interest in the levees (though in this case it seems it didn't). The lefties admire the way Cuba and the PRC handle evacuations; they also admire the way those two garden spots handle everything else.

Should we drop everything and devote all our national energies to dealing with hurricanes? Yes, by all means, now that the horse has bolted, let's put everything we've got into the barn door. At least until the roof blows off.

But that's not really fair, because we can fix the door and do other things, too. We can ignore the really deranged hyperventilators who want to keep our entire military home all the time, just in case a tree blows down.

Nations run into these things, and they deal with them without hiding under the bed.

By contrast, the Netherlands decided to protect itself against the worst storm possible in 10,000 years after more than 1,800 people died in a massive levee failure in 1953.

...and having built it, they now put a little time and money into maintenance every year and spend most of their time worrying about other things. Never mind the "contrast"; there isn't one. They had inadequate levees right up until over a thousand people died, and then they got to work on the barn door. Just like us.

Rioting in Froggy-sous-Bois

2005-11-03T14:09:00.000-05:00

Hang on a minute. Nobody's reporting any fatalities at all, since the initial two kids were electrocuted.

Arson is not a harmless prank, nor is throwing rocks at cops. The French have a genuinely serious problem on their hands. But unless a lot isn't being reported, the rioters are not killing anybody. Those calling this a "civil war" or an "intifada" are a bit premature.

UPDATE 11/4/2005: Okay, it was premature yesterday, but not so much so today:

A handicapped woman was doused with petrol and set on fire by youths during another night of rioting in Paris.

That "Miranda Merde"

2005-11-03T12:31:00.000-05:00

Never mind "Paul Cruce's" bizarre notions about the rights of the accused; I think Simon fell for a hoax.

On the whole, I'm not quite sure what to make of this post at Roger L. Simon. I'd like to see poll numbers to confirm his (admittedly anecdotal) impression of pro-Americanism. But here's the part I really don't much like:

The judges act as something of a grand jury with sentencing powers and can decide whether or not you get a jury trial. Thus the muslims who were arrested last Thursday night in Clichy-sous-Bois went to prison on Monday! None of that Miranda merde here!

Maybe the guilty are all Muslims, but I'm pretty sure that not all Muslims are guilty. Not all young Muslim men who get arrested are guilty. Not all people who wander into a riot and get arrested are guilty. Not all of a witness's next-day recollections of a riot are perfectly reliable. Even assuming the best will in the world on the part of the cops fingering the accused, it's hard to believe that all of those sentences were deserved. Oh, and I do like the right to a jury. I love the right to a jury.

If what this guy means by "prison" is what we'd mean in the US (tried, convicted, sentenced), then what he's describing is not justice as we know it. Under the circumstances it might make sense to declare martial law and throw a lot of people in drunk tanks (les réservoirs ivres?) for a few days until there's time to let them go or give them a fair trial, but you just can't go around putting people in prison on some judge's whim. It's madness.

UPDATE: I went back and read the comments. Quite a few objections on factual points; I wondered myself about what French soldiers were doing with AK-47s instead of those FAMAS things. I didn't know enough to have an opinion about the presumption of innocence issue.

I suspect it's fake, and Simon got taken in by a troll.

UPDATE #2: I forgot to mention "Paul Cruce's" bizarre misspelling of "Napoleonic": "Napoléanic"? The guy supposedly speaks French. Perhaps he can't spell? Yeah, maybe not, but when he gets everything else wrong too, you really have to wonder.

And read the comments. I don't believe it's real.

"Too good to check"? Sure looks like it. Let's see, Dan Rather still hasn't quite admitted that he screwed up after more than a year... So I'll be expecting a correction from Roger L. Simon no later than, let's say... Dinnertime today? California time? That sounds about right.

UPDATE #3: Okay, maybe we'll be waiting a bit longer than I thought for that correction. I hope this doesn't turn into one of those bad-penny stories, like the "anti-racist math in Newton, MA" thing.

UPDATE #4: Paul Cruce, or some American in Paris with that name and in the same line of work, has a blog. Go figure.

Dear Prince Charles,

2005-10-29T22:57:00.000-04:00

Fuck off.

Sincerely,

How many fingers, Winston?

2005-10-29T10:24:00.000-04:00

CNN.com runs a Reuters report on rioting in a suburb of Paris:

Hundreds of French youths fought with police and set cars ablaze.

...

[Police] were unable to give figures for the number of protesters hurt.

"Protesters"? It's a riot. Some of them seem to have started the day as protesters, but after they started rioting, they were rioters. That's what you call somebody who's rioting: A rioter. Why the confusion? Because they were "protesters" in the same sense that people who machine-gun little kids are "activists":

Firefighters intervened around 40 times on Friday night in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois where many of the 28,000 residents are immigrants, mainly from Africa...

How delicately put that was. The reader need not be told that "suburb" in France is a euphemism for "immigrant ghetto, generally with astronomical unemployment and crime", and "immigrant from Africa" is a euphemism for "Muslim". Clichy-sous-Bois described as "a suburb of high-rise social housing": "Social" housing? What's that? It's "social" in the European sense: The "-ist" is silent.

And what was the riot about?

...two teenagers were killed and a third seriously injured on Thursday night when they were electrocuted in an electricity sub station as they fled from police investigating a break-in, media reported.

The rioting grew out of "a silent march in honor of the two dead teenagers". Words fail me here. They really do. What are the kids being "honored" for? For acting like idiots and getting themselves killed — when there happened to be police nearby. Because the proximity of cops makes the decedents "victims", you see, and the only way to make it right is to set fire to a convenience store.

UPDATE 10/29/2005: It gets better. This from the BBC:

Thursday's violence broke out after youths attacked firefighters who had been called in to help the two victims, who were aged 15 and 17, and a third youth who received serious burns.

You read that right: Three "yoots" did something stupid and got hurt. Firefighters tried to help them. More "yoots" blamed the firefighters for the problem they had come to fix, and tried to prevent them from fixing it. Got that straight?

This stuff makes Lord of the Flies look optimistic.

Oh, and... "victims" again?

Attack of the 50-Foot Metaphors

2005-10-16T09:53:00.000-04:00

In the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash needs a vacation:

Even if this lady chancellor is made of iron, a messy, unstable coalition will ensure that her feet are stuck in clay. All Europe will keep limping as a result.

Spam of the day

2005-10-14T09:05:00.000-04:00

This odd little missive just floated to the surface of my inbox:

From: Scott Kohlhaas <XXXXX@draftresistance.org>
To: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX@gmail.com
Date: Oct 14, 2005 3:35 AM
Subject: www.draftresistance.org

Hello.

Would you be willing to spread the word about www.draftresistance.org? It's a site dedicated to shattering the myths surrounding the selective slavery system and building mass civil disobedience to stop the draft before it starts.

Our banner on a website, printing and posting the anti-draft flyer or just telling friends would help.

Thanks!

Scott Kohlhaas XXXXX@draftresistance.org

PS. When it comes to the draft, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

"Selective slavery system"? And it's in a spam, for good measure.

Yeah, good luck persuading anybody who bathes.

Fall, rise, whatever...

2005-10-12T18:52:00.000-04:00

This is slightly odd:

...during the Clinton years, the Democratic percentages of the popular vote for the House of Representatives fell to 45 percent in 1994, 48.5 percent in 1996, and 49 percent in 1998 and 2000.

1994 was a very bad year for the Democrats in Congress, but if they then went from 45 percent to 49 percent of the popular vote over the next two elections, is the word "fall" really well chosen?

DESPOTIC INTERNATIONAL SOCCER RULES VIOLATED

2005-10-10T15:54:00.000-04:00

Figured I'd try to beat Tim Blair to that headline.

Scribal Terror has a very fine soccer fatwa. Among other things, it explains that the only legitimate reason to play soccer is "training to run, attack, and retreat in preparation for"... an "inner struggle for virtue" of some kind, apparently.

13. If one of you inserts the ball between the posts and then starts to run so that his companions will run after him and hug him, like the players in America and France do, you should spit in his face, punish him, and reprimand him, for what do joy, hugging, and kissing have to do with sports?

HAARP strikes again

2005-10-08T19:35:00.000-04:00

But seriously, this is horrible.

Nawwwm!

2005-10-06T18:39:00.000-04:00

Norm gets it. But you knew that.

Here's a hypothetical situation. A certain newspaper carries, week in and week out, articles of a political complexion that one of its readers judges to be dreadful. Not all readers do, but she — for it is a she — does; and her view is shared by a lot of other people. This reader, alienated, one day heaps a bucket of excrement over the head of a pedestrian walking along the street in a city of the country in which the newspaper in question is published.

If A kills B, C kills D, to even things out: To a certain kind of leftist, it is unimaginable that this might not be reasonable, if C happens not to like the West. There's a short circuit there. It's hard to figure out the left-wing fetishization of violence against unarmed civilians. They certainly fetishize their own self-perceived weakness, and fantasize about the unstoppable, undefeatable, remorseless jihadis. To my ears there seems to be an eerie, triumphal, bragging quality when they claim that there's no defense against terrorism. They want it to be true. But they don't fetishize all violence against civilians. Sometimes it genuinely seems to bother them. Or is it just that they get excercised about it in cases where it's likely to provide some value of C, with an excuse to kill some value of D?

If you think Norm's analogy is broken because not all Brits are associated with the ~~Guard~~hypothetical paper he's talking about, just change it to the equally preposterous BBC, which is an arm of the British government.

Not 2,000 buses after all.

2005-10-05T23:22:00.000-04:00

So these guys, Media Matters, claim that all the conservatives were claiming that there were 2,000 buses sitting in New Orleans after Katrina went by.

I don't recall that figure myself, but they link to LGF, and sure enough, LGF quoted a column mentioning that figure. They also claim that Gingrich and Stephanopoulos were quoting it all over national TV. I won't dispute that; I emptied a magazine into my TV years ago, when I learned that Sam the American Eagle on the Muppet Show wasn't real.

But there it is: Media Matters says there were only about seven hundred buses, school buses and municipal buses combined, controlled by the city of New Orleans at the end of last month. They may be right. Assume they are. Why not? It's a nice round number. There's one question they very carefully avoid: Why in the name of God did nobody use those buses to evacuate the poor, like the plan called for? Media Matters proudly observes that not all of the poor could have been evacuated; assuming the oft-tossed-around figure of 46 adults per bus, that'd be 32,000 people in one trip, which is only about a third of the number left behind. To a lefty, that's quite clear: If you can't save absolutely everybody, you don't bother trying to save anybody. Leave 'em all to die; you've got a good excuse, so that makes it okay. Now, some of us wacky right-wingers might suggest that you turn around and make a second trip... but that's much too complicated for lefties.

The "chickenhawk" thing

2005-10-05T13:43:00.000-04:00

What they're saying is that if you express the views of the majority of US military on active service, you should be excluded from the debate — unless you are already excluded from taking a very active part in the debate, by being in Iraq yourself.

ICANN

2005-10-03T21:27:00.000-04:00

So, the PRC says it's "undemocratic" for ICANN to be controlled by a democracy, rather than by a committee of dictatorships. The EU, naturally, can't see anything wrong with that logic.

Let's not go into the fact that if the EU is a girl who can't say "no". What's really creepy about this nonsense is that we built it, we kept it free enough to become enormously valuable to everybody, and now the shitty little dictatorships of the world are saying they've got a right to grab it and destroy it, because it's worth so much to them. Because we have given them so much by letting them play in our sandbox, these dismal parasites demand sole ownership and control of it. Once they become dependent on your generosity, they decide that you're a "resource" and they own you. Reads like an Ayn Rand situation, doesn't it? But it's real, it's happening. I don't think much of Rand as a novelist or a philosopher, but as a social critic she really hits the nail once in a while.

Horse hockey. It's ours. You're more than welcome to keep playing there; that way we all win. But we are not going to hand it over and let you destroy it.

So the "poverty draft"...

2005-10-03T01:42:00.000-04:00

...is just another lie. Which ought not to be a surprise: Lefties don't check the numbers. They just make stuff up that "sounds right".

UPDATE 10/3/2005: It's irrelevant anyway. The logic behind the "poverty draft" talking point is that if military service is not the worst imaginable option for somebody to choose, than he is being "coerced" into choosing the military. It follows that if the military were made less appealing — for example, if there were no veterans' benefits — that it wouldn't be coercive any more. The implication seems to be that the lefties in question would call that an improvement. Are these the same lefties who hyperventilate about the administration "stabbing the troops in the back" by not spending enough money on them? What do you think?

But never mind how it conflicts with other talking points; the bottom line is, it's absurd: Offering somebody more and better options is not coercion. Unless you believe that the government is solely responsible for poverty, and could cure it at any time by waving a magic wand... come to think of it, lefties generally do believe that.

Heh

2005-10-01T23:52:00.000-04:00

Profiling made simple.

Dumb Bumper Sticker Watch

2005-10-01T15:37:00.000-04:00

Newton, MA:

Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven.

Oh, please.

The "International Freedom Center"

2005-09-29T15:28:00.000-04:00

The "International Freedom Center" at the WTC site has been 86ed. Now, I'm not excited by the way that this story attributed to "Reuters, AP" repeats the IFC crowd's spin outside of quotation marks, as "fact"; that's business as usual:

[Some 9/11 families] said it would dishonour the victims by fostering debate about the attacks and other world events.

They didn't say that, and I doubt very much that the reporter really believes they said it; he's just in a snit because his side lost and he's kicking the bereaved because, well, that's what the bereaved are for, if they're not willing to be politically useful.

This is just as good: They say the IFC was about...

...presenting the September 11 story in a broader context of a global struggle for freedom over the centuries.... Martin Luther King Jr....

How very delicate of Reuters and/or the AP, not to mention that the people the IFC equated with MLK Jr. were, in an ironic twist, fascist/theocratic mass-murderers, savagely opposed to everything MLK Jr. ever believed in.

So that's all well and good, but here's the punchline: The IFC people have been denied center stage, but they were offered another venue somewhere at the site. On being informed, they threw a tantrum and refused to settle for anything less than everything:

...less than an hour later, organisers of the planned centre said there was no other location worth looking at... "We consider our work, therefore, to have been brought to an end."

They're adults! They're six years old! They're our moral and intellectual superiors, self-appointed! They're... the left!

"What do they know? They don't live on the estate"

2005-09-28T21:15:00.000-04:00

What really killed the left, I think, was when it moved up-market. Back in the days when middle-class kids turned lefty by way of pretending to "join" the working class, those kids may have been silly, but now it's middle-class kids turning lefty to reaffirm the fact that they're privileged, college-educated "intellectuals". There's also a leavening of working-class kids kids joining for the sake of cultural upward mobility: Leftist radicalism is a quick and easy way to pass for middle class, if you're from the wrong side of the tracks. In college that can mean a lot. And that's how you get a bozo like Ted Rall bragging about how leftists like him are superior to the working class, because he makes more money and buys better consumer goods.

And you get this report via Norm Geras about some folks from Respect/SWP/whatever calling the actual working class (or poor, or whatever) "class traitors" for... wanting better housing? Hard to be sure; it seems the SWP showed up somewhere to act as the Voice of the Downtrodden, but the actual Downtrodden showed up too, with their own voice, and the SWP told them to shut the hell up and not interrupt their betters.

Sobering reality check

2005-09-28T11:43:00.000-04:00

In the cold light of (relatively) hard information, how much of what was reported about New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina was accurate?

A lot of us fell for some real nonsense. It's natural: You want to believe you know what's going on. You want a frame to put the story in. You want a "good story", too, and fiction usually beats reality by that measure.

"Natural" or not, we should have done a lot better. This time next year, we'll know more than we do now, and Gateway Pundit's list will have to be revised.

The "first draft" versions, the myths, are much more colorful and exciting than the facts, aren't they? More appealing, if you're up for a dramatic break from the everyday routine — as long as it's happening to somebody else. "Myth" is exactly the word: Infotainment is one of the older professions. The uninformed speculation and the rumors made flesh will live on in conspiracy theories, of course. In Conspiracy World, there are no debunked chow-line rumors, only supressed facts. Their favorite version is always the one with the least hope of accuracy. Some people are more desperate to escape their everyday routine than the rest of us.

UPDATE 9/28/3005: And again, chez Blair: "What I saw in the Superdome was just tremendous amounts of people helping people." Are we too eager to believe the "good news after all"? Oh, jeez. Ask me in a year.

Catching up with Instapundit...

2005-09-27T20:12:00.000-04:00

...after a few days away from the 'net.

Via Insty: Heh, heh, and double-heh in the last paragraph.

And this:

As I said before, if there were an authentic grassroots anti-war movement, then the rallies wouldn't be dominated by fringers.

Bingo!

...I'm not afraid of an intellectually and morally serious antiwar movement.

Yeah, well, I'm not afraid of the Wicked Witch of the West. Not afraid of zombies either, nor the Green Men of Mars.

Ugh

2005-09-27T16:39:00.000-04:00

Back from vacation.

I don't waste much time watching TV news; not having a TV helps. But I happened to be subjected to an hour or so of it last night. Some yap about "anti-war" "protesters", of course, but not a word about this "pro-troops protest" covered on Instapundit. To be fair, it's not clear whether the "Washington" in question is DC, or somewhere north of Oregon; judging from the scenery in the photos it could very well be the latter.

In other TV-news news, some wretched news show had a pro-war lady saying that we should support the Commander in Chief because... well, she just seemed to think it was pretty important that he was the Commander in Chief, or something. The host also claimed that in polls, 63% of Americans now favor immediate withdrawal from Iraq, which bears astoundingly little resemblance to poll numbers I heard last week. So I was really rolling my eyes over all this crap, and then their counterpoint to the pro-war lady came on. They didn't get Cindy Sheenan, of course, because Sheehan has those little "episodes" on camera. They don't need some werewolf yodelling about "occupied New Orleans". They did, however, find another lady who was a Gold Star Mother, or who claimed to speak for them, or something, but who was stable (or medicated; she looked a bit Berkeley to me) enough to stay on message. And you know what she had to say? Pretty much what the first lady had to say: Feelings. Fluff. No facts, no logic, no nothing, just fluff. And then they switched to some jackass with tenure and a beard who sat in front of a backdrop of the Esplanade in Boston (yay!) and rambled aimlessly about Vietnam.

Kill. Your. Television. I'm serious. That garbage would insult the intelligence of a goddamn coelenterate.

I did, however, catch an episode of a comedy program called Seinfeld, and it was very funny. They tell me it's been around for years. Go figure.

Dumb Bumper Sticker Watch

2005-09-21T20:41:00.000-04:00

Davis Square, Somerville, MA: A center of hogwash production second only to Cambridge, around these here parts.

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Hog. Wash. If there is any "highest form" of patriotism, that'd be signing up to get your ass shot off for your country. It would not be sitting around fat dumb and happy in a coffeehouse in Somerville, telling yourself how much better than everybody else you are because you don't like George Bush. Passive self-congratulation is not the highest form of anything worth mentioning, Beavis. But that's the left: It's all about striking dramatic poses in front of the mirror. Narcissism elevated to a form of theology.

Well, this time around, the fool probably at least bothered to vote. So he's got that going for him.

I've only seen that one once. You see "Dissent is patriotic" stickers around here regularly, and that's a less aggressively absurd form of the same sentiment, though still risible. Say for example you "dissent" from the notion that the US should continue to exist, or from the Bill of Rights. How about the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments? Some "dissenters" don't like them one damn bit. How about if your "dissent" takes the form of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union? What about the German American Bund, who "dissented" in favor of Hitler during World War II? I'm sorry, but that's not "patriotism". It may be a lot of things, but "patriotism" is not among 'em.

Instances of dissent may be patriotic, but they are not necessarily patriotic. Dissent and patriotism correlate¹ arbitrarily² at best.

Catskills Dept.: Oh, hey, and isn't patriotism "the last refuge of scoundrels", therefore making dissent the highest form of scoundrel-refuge, or something? Rimshot! I seem to have heard that one recently from some folks off to my left. Well, you know, hardy har har and all that.

¹ Look it up.

² Look. It. Up.

Levees not up to spec?

2005-09-21T10:00:00.000-04:00

In ongoing Katrina news, hmmm:

"This should not have been a big deal for these floodwalls," said oceanographer G. Paul Kemp, a hurricane expert who runs LSU's Natural Systems Modeling Laboratory. "It should have been a modest challenge. There's no way this should have exceeded the capacity."

If he's right, that's a hell of a way to find out the contractor stiffed you. Haven't people been saying the spots that gave way had been fixed recently?

UPDATE 9/21/2005: More detail over at Mudville.

Just say "please".

2005-09-20T15:07:00.000-04:00

You'd think that at some point, the EU would lose interest in letting Iran make fools of them.

Now the EU plans to "table" a resolution (as in "put forward", not "set aside") at the IAEA, but not ask the board to take any action on it. For the EU, this is a highly pro-active and aggressive move: They're not just going to sit there thinking about bleating helplessly. They're going to talk out loud about bleating helplessly. But don't worry, don't feel threatened: They won't actually bleat. That would be rash. And vulgar.

Their plan to eclipse the US as the major world power consists solely of strategies for getting their name in the paper. That's their entire foreign policy: Create a millimeter-thin impression of importance by grabbing lots of headlines. I never thought of Europe as an irrelevant backwater until they started trying to prove otherwise.

The "political class" over there are not adults.

UPDATE 9/22/2005: They've dropped their "threat" to talk about whimpering impotently.

Pull the other one

2005-09-20T14:43:00.000-04:00

Fashion retailer H&M has dropped Kate Moss because she's a cokehead.

Yeah, nobody ever associated cocaine with the fashion industry before. Good thing they nipped that one in the bud.

Meanwhile, the last H&M ad campaign I noticed involved a stunned, bruised-looking young lady who could hardly stand. Imagine Keith Richards after a rough six-month weekend, but without the charm. So make a note of that: Stick with opiates and you'll make a better impression.

Earnings per share

2005-09-19T23:22:00.000-04:00

The Great Burger King Ice Cream Flap is overrated, I believe. The fools threatening jihad do need to get a grip (threatening to decapitate random civilians over an ice-cream cone? The Catholics would just sell the damn thing on EBay and get on with their lives), but big companies cave on that kind of nonsense pretty lightheartedly if they think it'll cost them money not to. That's really all there is to it. In the words of John Fort, who preceded Dennis "Employee Loan" Kozlowski as CEO of Tyco (and followed, after the indictment):

The reason we were put on Earth was to increase earnings per share.¹

Within the law, thankyouverymuch. But that is their job, and when they do their job, your pension fund wins, their employees win, and they win. This game is called "it's not the Middle Ages any more, okay?"

¹ "Earnings per share", not "share price". There's a big difference. I like that guy. He's an engineer. The quote is from The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2003, page 135. I keep that issue around for a killer John McPhee piece that hasn't been collected yet, but the Fort line is nice to have too.

See you in eight years and four months, Dennis

2005-09-19T14:10:00.000-04:00

Superstar crook Dennis Kozlowski has been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He'll be eligible for parole in eight years, four months.

Glad to hear it.

UPDATE 9/19/2005: Maybe he should try it in Canada next time.

UPDATE 9/20/2005: Roughly speaking, Prof. Bainbridge thinks the Kozlowski case is arguably a matter of stupid, rather than criminal, business decisions. My understanding has been that Kozlowski was engaged in what amounted to embezzlement, which isn't often considered a legitimate business practice on this planet. However, I'm not familiar with precisely what exact offenses he was charged with (that'd be why I'm hedging so frantically here), and Bainbridge is the law professor, not me. But if Bainbridge gave a few more specifics I'd be more sure what he was getting at.

Of course, there are some shambling knuckleheads who want Kozlowski in prison simply because he had a job. Or maybe they suspect him of bathing? There's not much you can say about people like that.

What I Saw at the Hearings

2005-09-15T00:19:00.000-04:00

SENATOR QUAGMIRE: What about robbery, if the... the defendant is accused of [consults notes] robbery? Guilty, or not guilty?

JUDGE WHATSISNAME: I promise to convict, sir.

SENATOR QUAGMIRE: Very good. I'm... The American people and a... have a right to know, to rely on that. I would like to share with the people of this great land... [indistinct] of [indistinct] and I am opposed to robbery, staunchly opposed to robbery. And [slurred, unclear] impending, consequential uhh... derivative with... or under [indistinct] propagating [indistinct, indistinct, unprintable, indistinct] as a member of the fine Party I have the honor to represent.

WIND WHISTLES EERILY THROUGH ABANDONED STREETS OF ONCE-GREAT METROPOLIS

2005-09-13T19:58:00.000-04:00

From The American Enterprise, which seems to be a publication of the sublimely non-partisan¹ American Enterprise Institute, a factoid of epic proportions:

An analysis of recent census numbers indicates that white immigrants to New York (the vast majority of whom are from Europe) represent the largest number of contributors to the net growth of educated young people in the city. Without the disproportionate contributions of these young Europeans, New York would actually have suffered a net outflow of educated people under 35 during the late 1990s.

NYC is a very silly place. Stands to reason nobody but Europeans wants to live there. When the novelty wears off, they'll bail, too. I grew weary of the dump years ago. Imagine being surrounded by New Yorkers 24/7; in Indiana, that only happens if you violate too many commandments, and even then only after you're dead.

Yeah, well, it's probably just that it's so freakishly expensive to live there, is all. Like Yogi Berra said: Nobody wants to live there any more; demand has driven the price out of reach.

¹ As very great American used to say, "that's a joke, son". While we're on the subject, Google's translator gives you a "printable version" link, when what I usually want is an unprintable version. They call this "not being evil"?

Don't bother signing in.

2005-09-12T01:38:00.000-04:00

The first sentence is the joke and the punchline. See how many misconceptions (and for all I know, conscious lies) you can count in those twenty-seven little words.

Go, Krugman, go!

I used to make a hobby of writing parodies of paranoid political extremist nonsense. This guy is a real craftsman. Unless he's serious. Then he'd be pathetic.

P.S. Lefties really love the word "contempt" these days, don't they? But usually it's their own contempt (or that of Our Betters™ in Europe) for the rest of the human race, not George's contempt for anybody. But hey, what the heck, when the deadline looms, you've use whatever words you can remember. Krugman's paid to be pissed off, not to make sense.

9/11/2001

2005-09-11T10:28:00.000-04:00

Sorry if this "inflames" anybody.

Dumb Bumper Sticker Watch

2005-09-09T21:56:00.000-04:00

Where else but Cambridge, MA?

Praise the children and they will bloom.

Raising our own little Noble Savage, are we? How clever.

Painful disappointment for the left

2005-09-09T16:38:00.000-04:00

"Fewer Bodies Than Expected Found in Sweeps".

If this development pans out, conservatives are going to be very pleased, but we should try to understand the anger and frustration that many on the angry left will feel at being denied the body count they were hoping for. Be sensitive and gracious. Consider their feelings. Don't rub it in.

UPDATE 9/11/2005: Changed "left" to "angry left" in second paragraph. As some commenters observed, the generalization was maybe a little too flawed.

The "Where are they now?" file

2005-09-09T14:04:00.000-04:00

What ever happened to all those New Orleans residents who evacuated before Katrina came ashore? Most of them were black, but "racism" doesn't seem to have robbed them of the means or the foresight to get out while they could. It wasn't "the black population of New Orleans" that stayed behind; it was a fraction of the black population of New Orleans along with a fraction of the white population of New Orleans.

What happened to the majority who bugged out? How are they doing now? Where are they staying? It's as if they simply vanished.

Unexploited Meme Alert

2005-09-09T09:08:00.000-04:00

It appears that as of the last time Google updated its cache, nobody online had yet called the Superdome mess an "intifada". C'mon guys, it's a natural, isn't it? Members of a designated victim group inflicting mindless violence on random civilians! They're not "looters shooting at rescue workers"; they're "resistance fighters". Please make a note of it.

Clown at Huffington Post...

2005-09-08T19:01:00.000-04:00

...mistakes good manners for weakness.

Yeah, morons do that a lot.

No rest for the weary

2005-09-07T22:24:00.000-04:00

So people are reporting — fragmentarily, without serious confirmation — that things in the Astrodome are starting to go to hell as they did in the Superdome.

Okay, so they tell us the situation in the Superdome was caused by flooding, lack of food and water, lack of FEMA employees, and the like. Not a single one of the refugees can ever be held responsible for anything, we are commanded to believe. But the same ugly minority of refugees is reported to be behaving the same way in Houston, and once again (if the reports are true) too few of the peacable majority are banding together to put a stop to it. Most are waiting for somebody to fix it for them.

I wonder how much worse this is than an average night three weeks ago in underclass neighborhoods in New Orleans. Worse, definitely, what with dislocation, confusion, and no front doors to lock.

Am I "blaming the victim"? If somebody's sitting next to a dead body that he doesn't care to be near, and he continues to sit there for three days without moving the body himself, and he's complaining the whole time about how somebody should do something about it, then what are you to make of that guy's attitude? Unless there's a whole lot more to the story than meets the eye (if he's quadraplegic, he's got my undiluted sympathy — but then why isn't anybody else helping?) I'm not saying the guy deserves the things he can't conceivably control, but if he's going limp on the things he can control, there's something wrong. And there are always things you can control, or at least influence. Always.

Most lefties would be very upset with me for saying these things. That man is a victim, isn't he? They're all victims. Therefore, they get a blank check. Their Moral Authority Is Absolute, right?

Wrong. Not all of them. Not the ones who couldn't be bothered banding together for mutual defense (many did, just not nearly enough). People who help each other in disasters deserve not just sympathy (with its undercurrent of contempt), but plain admiration: How about the eighteen-year-old kid who comandeered a bus, filled it with refugees, and drove it to Houston? Who taught himself how to drive it along the way? Now there is a man who did not sit down and complain. He's one of the best of us, the real thing, like the ones who started in a small corner of Kenya and dominated every environment from the Cape of Good Hope to Tierra del Fuego, with nothing but stone tools, travelling on foot, in the space of a few thousand years, eating every damn animal that crossed their path along the way. Those guys didn't get to make excuses. If they had a problem, they had no option but to solve it themselves, or die trying. They did their best with what they had, and they didn't lay down and die just because what they had looked inadequate at first glance (N.B. many of you will never believe this, but you can often make the inadequate more than adequate by ingenuity and determination). When you're a hunter-gatherer, you don't get to hand teacher a note excusing you from hunting that day. "Teacher" is nature, and nature doesn't care. You're on your own out there.

The left would have us believe that the descendants of those paleolithic ass-kickers and name-takers are, if they happen to have more melanin than the average lefty, inherently incapable of looking after themselves unsupervised. The left thinks these folks are inherently incapable of feeding themselves without white middle-class liberals to hand the poor dears a check.

That's crap. People are people are people, and once they get used to the idea, people can feed themselves just fine. Everybody on earth survived for tens of thousands of years, in conditions generally harsher than modern Americans can even begin to imagine, before white middle-class liberals existed in their modern form.

Nobody genuinely needs the Great White Father. You (you personally) were born with the potential to kill wooly mammoths for dinner. You were not destined at birth to require a gilded nursery like welfare or tenure to protect you from the elements. The left, after all, is as dependent in their own way as the "minorities" they patronize (most of the rest of us are more upholstered than we ought to be, too). They blame everything on Bush because they think the Republicans are the grown-ups, the ones who take responsibility and get things accomplished. They really do think he's responsible for everything. They're the grasshopper, conservatives are the ant. When the left fights tooth and nail against flood control for decades, when they loudly ridicule any effort at disaster preparation as fearmongering and survivalist lunacy, they're doing these things in the sincere belief that it's all just play. They don't really believe Daddy will actually let them screw themselves. Not really. Daddy wouldn't let us experience consequences, would he? He'll always fix it somehow, right?

Right? That's what they're all shrieking about right now: "Why didn't you protect us from our own irresponsibility? Isn't that your job?"

Well, aren't we creative!

2005-09-05T15:24:00.000-04:00

In the Jerusalem Post, Khaled Abu Toameh reports that a Muslim mob has attacked Christian village in the West Bank:

...The incident began on Saturday night and lasted until early Sunday, when Palestinian Authority security forces interfered to disperse the attackers. Residents said several houses were looted and many families were forced to flee to Ramallah and other Christian villages, although no one was injured.

The attack on the village of 1,500 was triggered by the murder of a Muslim woman from the nearby village of Deir Jarir earlier this week.

...

"More than 500 Muslim men, chanting Allahu akbar [God is great], attacked us at night," said a Taiba resident. "They poured kerosene on many buildings and set them on fire. Many of the attackers broke into houses and stole furniture, jewelry and electrical appliances."

"Triggered by the murder..."? Sounds like the usual sad story: People from ethnic or religious group A are accused of murdering somebody from group B; members of group B form a mob and retaliate against randomly selected members of group A. Right?

In this case, wrong: The woman was murdered by her own family, and everybody knows it. A perfectly normal everyday "honor killing". And that is why the murdered woman's village attacked the other village.

The 30-year-old woman, according to PA security sources, was apparently murdered by members of her family for having had a romance with a Christian man from Taiba.

Somehow I don't feel refreshed by the break from routine here.

The IDF is responsible for security around there, but they didn't respond. Should they have? In this case, I doubt that trucks full of heavily armed Jews would have calmed the Muslims down. The Muslims would have opened fire and/or thrown firebombs at the troops, people would have been killed, and the whole mess would have turned into a triumphant tranzi/UN/media finger-pointing frenzy. The Christians in the village would have lost more than they did.

In the long term, I'm not even sure the Christians would be better off if they'd shot back. They're a hopelessly outnumbered minority that exists only on sufferance, and there is no law for them to turn to. If they resisted, they'd be wiped out: A couple years ago, one village in Egypt organized an ambush with automatic weapons and murdered virtually the entire male population of another village. And that was only an ordinary feud, not an Islamic thing. As it is, the Christians have to put up with property loss now and then, but at least they're still alive. You can expect people to risk their lives for liberty and self-respect, but this more like "certainty" than "risk".

Via LGF.

Canard du jour

2005-09-05T00:04:00.000-04:00

Some anti-self-defense activists claim that it's wrong to stop a burglar or a rapist by shooting him, because the law doesn't provide for the death penalty for those crimes.

Okay, what can you do?

Can you hit him over the head with a frying pan? No. That might kill him, and even if it doesn't, surely we don't see bailifs hitting convicts over the head with frying pans and then setting them loose, their debt to society having been paid. That would be cruel and unusual.

Can you hit him with anything else? Nope, same reason. Stab him? Of course not. Same again.

How about punching him? No. Our just laws wisely forbid corporal punishment, unless your cellmate inflicts it.

What can you do?

Can you lock him up for ten years, with a TV and a gym? As long as you let him out in five? Nope. That'd be kidnapping, if you do it; the state and the individual aren't the same at all, as far as the law is concerned. N.B.: The left wishes me to inform you that you are absolutely forbidden to imagine that the preceding statement might have any wider bearing on the issue at hand.

So. Let's leave aside the difference between a private citizen dealing with an intruder at 3:00 AM in his underwear, and a judge dealing with a handcuffed defendant in a courtroom full of cops. Let's not mention the difference between prevention and punishment. We won't even get into the fact that a mugger pointing a loaded gun at your head hasn't shot you yet, and so arguably hasn't committed any crime (you really think a lefty wouldn't argue that?).

There is absolutely nothing that you can conceivably do in self-defense which would qualify as a legal punishment under United States law. Nothing.

So let's not hear any more about how "it's not a capital offense". Neither is it a punching offense, nor a stabbing offense, nor a blow-to-the-head-with-a-rubber-mallet offense. Whatever it is. If he hits somebody over the head with a rubber mallet, he will not be punished by being struck on the head with a rubber mallet in return, nor even by having a nun throw chalk at him. He will not be spanked, slapped, or even yelled at.

If anything you might do in self-defense is forbidden, self-defense is forbidden. That's the meat of the matter. Are people who use the not-a-capital-offense argument sincerely opposed to self-defense in all cases, in principle? Probably not; they support self-defense in principle; it's just that they always seem to end up opposing every single real-world instance of self-defense (like anti-American "patriots", who approve of the US in principle, but just happen to find some particular localized reason to consider it worse than Hitler every time anything happens in the real world). Most of them think it's a valid argument, that's all. They're just confused. A "commendable excess of zeal", a lefty might call it.

But really. The argument is crap.

Remember when...?

2005-09-03T01:40:00.000-04:00

Shortly after Fonzie went the way of the hula hoop (remember the hula hoop?), but well before the Red Hat IPO, remember... the "Webby Awards"? Of course you do. Suck.com used to make fun of them (remember Suck.com? Sigh...). They were lame, and irrelevant even by the shatteringly low standards of the late '90s, when people theoretically bright enough to feed themselves genuinely cared about theglobe.com.

Still, a few clueless baby boomers at rags like Newsweek (mis-)took them seriously for a little while, the same way the previous generation at Newsweek used to interview nehru-jacketed squares like Tom Wolfe to find out what the hippies were up to. Trying to get in touch with the kids, you know. Take the pulse and all that. "It's something with computers now, Bernie, who'd'a thunk it? You ever seen one o' them? Yeah, me neither..." But an awards show, that was safe and familiar. The oldsters could "relate", as they used to say back when Donovan strove with diplodocus in the primeval swamps. These were the same oldsters who used to write articles about dot-coms without mentioning the URL. They didn't know what URLs were; they "researched" those pieces over the phone.

Well, the Webby Awards still exist, by golly. Some poor dumb bright-eyed bastard is still trying to push that ghastly atavistic endeavor uphill, and still getting nowhere. Awards shows are so... old media, ahhhn't they? Squaresville, baby. A stone drag.

They at least got Vint Cerf to show up this year, and that's cool. Cerf's not small potatoes, but he was the only real "somebody" they could get their hands on. The rest of the guests were B-list nonentities, desperate to get their pictures taken, even by C-list nonentities like the Webby people. Al Gore, for example. I guess Leif Garrett was busy that week. Or is he dead?

Puppet Show

and

Former Vice President

You know how the Romans used to say "23 Skiddoo", right?

Clear days at the BBC

2005-08-31T21:24:00.000-04:00

Yeah, the fun never stops:

Salman Rushdie earned notoriety for the fatwa he provoked after writing The Satanic Verses.

He "provoked" them? And he did it "after" writing the novel?

The BBC: "Even if we were sane, we'd still be uninformed."

Kyoto and Katrina

2005-08-31T17:10:00.000-04:00

James K. Glassman over at Tech Central Station, commenting on the envirovultures trying to cash in on Hurricane Katrina to sell their favorite Protocol:

Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.

He's making a little joke there. Kyoto fans couldn't care less about reducing emissions. It's the meaningless political sacrament of ratifying the treaty that matters. We must suffer for their piety. Why? Just... because. Remember what Dr. Johnson said about bear-baiting? Their demented threats of worldwide catastrophe are just a sales tactic.

Imagine a left wing without the politics of fear...

Yeah, neither can I.

Aside from the lunacy of blaming this stuff on our unwillingness to sign a treaty whose most enthusiastic signatories have yet to implement it significantly (New Zealand is only just starting to talk about it seriously, and they've already got cold feet), it's ahistorical to blame George Bush even for our reluctance to sign: The Senate rejected Kyoto overwhelmingly. During the Clinton Administration. The Senate is part of the legislative branch of our federal government. The President is in charge of the executive branch. The executive branch does not ratify treaties. George Bush does not have the legal authority to do a damn thing about Kyoto. It's called "separation of powers".

The left is usually just underinformed and overemotional, but it's very difficult in this case to imagine that none of them are aware of Kyoto's history in this country.

"Fears over missing Eminem fan"

2005-08-30T22:34:00.000-04:00

They fear she's still alive, I assume.

Saints preserve us!

2005-08-28T23:45:00.000-04:00

Boffo yocks at Captain's Quarters. He quotes a Saddam-Hussein-era Iraqi newspaper editorial about what a great guy Osama bin Laden is. It seems that their man bin Laden...

...will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs.

Dear God! How can our feeble civilization possibly stand up against a man like that, a man of such courage, a cold-eyed righteous killer so stone cold Islamic that he's immune even to the charms of Ol' Blue Eyes? We're doomed, man. Doomed. May as well surrender now and get it over with.

Peter Singer on Starvation and Charity

2005-08-26T13:08:00.000-04:00

Tim Worstall just mentioned Peter Singer, so I thought I'd try actually reading something by Singer. Google coughed up Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972), wherein Singer says we should all be sending a significant portion of our income to starving Bengalis, or whoever's starving at the moment.

It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.

But in fact, giving to a neighbor is preferable, in Singer's terms, because he sets an upper limit on what people are required to give:

...if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.

If we help our neighbor, we benefit by the improvement in the neighborhood. In effect, it's a rebate, which lets us give more at the same net cost to ourselves. Therefore, we can reasonably give more to a neighbor than to some arbitrary Bengali. This is realistic; people pay extra to live in nicer neighborhoods all the time (though others prefer New York). If the cost to the giver is a legitimate consideration, proximity has to be a legitimate consideration as well. Again, this is in Singer's terms, which assume that writing somebody a check reliably translates into benefit for him.

So his conclusion on that one looks very wrong to me. Onward:

...anyone who accepts certain assumptions, to be made explicit, will, I hope, accept my conclusion.

He makes other assumptions which are not made explicit: First, that the only way to help poor nations is to write them checks. Second, that writing checks to poor nations actually helps them. Third, that relatively wealthy nations can give as much as he wants us to without affecting how much we'll able to give next year, nor affecting how much poor nations will need next year: Is it true that if we buy a new car only when the old one is absolutely worn out, UAW members and General Motors executives will still be able to give just as much as they can now? Is it true that if we stop buying new clothes "not to keep ourselves warm but to look 'well-dressed'", the poor in China and Central America will be no more needy next year than they are now? If we're morally obligated to help, we're morally obligated to keep our economies healthy enough that we can help. We should be able to establish an optimal mix of consumption and giving in the first world, one which would provide for maximum ongoing cash payments to dependent nations (ensuring that they remain dependent, as all good "ethicists" demand). Regrettably, this optimum would probably permit us to buy new shirts more often than Singer would like. This further implies that if Dr. Singer is consuming below the optimum level, he'd best get his ass over to Banana Republic and do his part.

An argument in his favor would be that if we give a significant chunk of our money to poor countries, then they'll be buying the cars and polo shirts we've forgone (and they'd be justified in doing so because they don't have old but still-serviceable polo shirts to hang on to). At the risk of pretending to be an economist, do the economies and living standards of major aid recipients really bear that argument out?

I mention polo shirts only as an example of something which is costly, yet ideally worthless. I wouldn't wear one at gunpoint myself.

UPDATE 9/6/2005: About the near vs. far thing, consider it this way: It's probably instinctive for us to care more about those nearest to us, and you'll get more done by working with the current than against it. Consider the positive social value of self-interest in a market economy, and how destructive it turns in a command economy where corruption is the only way to get ahead (not that the value of liberty would cut much ice with Singer). Instincts aren't a product of "logic", so people like Singer consider them "unscientific", and conclude therefore that it's "scientific" to pretend they don't matter. If the problem is maximizing donations to charity, you take into account all the factors that affect how much people donate. Like all "idealists", Singer makes rules designed for machines, but demands compliance from people.

If men got pregnant...

2005-08-26T10:14:00.000-04:00

"If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament". Yes, and if men got abortions, Andrea Dworkin would have spent her declining years out in front of a clinic, waving a bloody fetus and swearing that abortion was "violence against unborn women".

Neither remark illuminates the issues one bit. I just thought it was funny.

P.S. I'm pro-choice.

Law

2005-08-24T12:22:00.000-04:00

While considering the fine sentiments expressed in the old Ba'athist Iraqi constitution, Tim Worstall takes a spin on one of my favorite hobby horses:

The words on the paper are not quite so important as how they are interpreted and used.

Well... That depends in part on how much your political culture values rule of law for its own sake, or in other words whether, given good laws, it can sometimes rise above its own worst instincts. Rotten laws faithfully upheld are no bargain, but it's easier to fix broken laws than broken culture.

Feel better now? Don't. All other things being equal, a bad constitution is a bad thing.

The 9/11 Memorial

2005-08-23T21:37:00.000-04:00

It's not a sign of "national self-confidence" when a nation spends tax dollars telling itelf how rotten it (allegedly) is. Self-confident nations — like this one, for example, in its misspent youth, and most of it even now — are too exhilarated by their strengths to sit around all day brooding about imagined inadequacies, and blowing their flaws wildly out of proportion. They've got better things to do. People are the same: Healthy young people look to the future. It's the neurotics and old people who mope about the mistakes they made and the chances they missed. They've got nothing better to do. The same goes for Europe, and for old hippies with tenure.

Let Europe and the bitter, frustrated old hippies mope around all they like, but no civilized person should be made to watch, much less pay for it. Let them crawl away to die someplace where they won't block the sidewalk.

There's life in this republic yet. If it were as nearly dead as the fools who want to turn the memorial into a why-we-hate-us extravaganza, don't you think the said fools would have welcomed public input, instead of avoiding it at all costs?

Americans are damned self-confident (that's supposed to be Why They Hate Us, remember?). That's precisely why we don't care to sit still for this crap. This is just the left resorting to playground taunts, as they so often do: How many times have you heard lefties claim that anybody who disagrees with them is a wussy boy, of one kind or another?

Media and War

2005-08-22T22:19:00.000-04:00

The UK has centuries of proud military history to commemorate and an attic full of honorable debacles, but you'd hardly guess from the Imperial War Museum's web site. Quite a remarkable number of left-leaning exhibits there, to my American way of thinking, but maybe to a Brit, hagiography of Greenham Common "peace" kooks looks centrist by now. I mean, they weren't explicitly chanting "We All Deserve to Die!", were they? Which puts them well to saneward of George Galloway.

What's more interesting is IWM's guide to techniques of war propaganda, which very charmingly describes eurolefty "discourse" about Americans:

Talk of defending a way of life, standards of living, rights and freedoms.

Disrespect the 'other': do not see them as equals. Mockery and sarcasm used to degrade, belittle, insult or ridicule others.

Dehumanisation [sic]: depict the 'other' as diabolical or inhuman.

Use of atrocity stories.

Warn of the threat posed by the 'other'.

Etc., etc. All of this applies even more plainly to European media coverage of Israel. Here's a good one: "Use abstract and general language — it is easier to kill 'things' than to kill human beings." Yes, indeed, and it's easier to approve when others kill "things", than when they kill human beings. For example, if your friends massacre a bus full of civilians, you might want to describe the civilians very briefly as "targets", without any names, ages, or details, and then move onto a nice sympathetic profile of the mass-murderer. If he died in the "operation", you could show his grieving family. The "targets" don't have grieving families, of course; "things" never do.

Remember, this is like the diagnoses in the DSMV IV: None of the "symptoms" counts unless it's happening consistently, and to a pathological degree. A sniffle is not pneumonia. Washing your hands twice a day doesn't make you obsessive-compulsive. Every undergraduate who ever took Psych 101 spent the semester diagnosing his friends with exotic psychiatric disorders, but in truth most of them were just run-of-the-mill losers with a few harmless quirks. The IWM's web site does not bother to make this point.

What's funny is the solemnly unironic tone. The left's been warning about "dehumanization" of "the Other" for quite a while now, and they've got a point. They just also happen to believe, as a matter of principle, that they don't have to worry about doing it themselves. They're preternaturally innocent, for ontological reasons: They belong to a category that can do no wrong. It's not them that goes around dehumanizing people; it's the Other doing that stuff. They're just defending their rights and freedoms against the stupid, inferior cowboy barbarians who kill all those kids in their quest to rule the world.

A corollary which ought to be obvious is that you and I are no more immune than the BBC is.

Thanks to Kim du Toit for posting a link to the IWM a while back. Always follow the links, folks.

This is your brain on drugs, forty years later

2005-08-22T11:55:00.000-04:00

Joan "Blackface" Baez rears her empty head at Camp This Country Is Not Worth Dying For. She concludes that it's, like, heavy, baby:

"It was the final tear for the overflow and you can't stop running water," she said. "Cindy's was the final tear."

In 1966 you could talk like that and at least claim to be fashionable. In the '80s, girls at my high school wrote poetry like that and people laughed cruelly. Don't you just cringe for these aging baby boomers? They have no shame at all. Never start your second childhood until you've finished your first.

Via Althouse.

Under the iron bootheel of capitalism...

2005-08-22T00:11:00.000-04:00

...the poor suffer primarily from too much food, too much free time, and too many recreational drugs.

Oh, the monstrous injustice of it all.

Beanstalk

2005-08-21T20:32:00.000-04:00

Space elevators: Cheap cheap cheap!

That shouldn't be too surprising; space, after all, is much closer to my house than Detroit is. More to do there, too.

Peace Haiku

2005-08-19T01:41:00.000-04:00

Dear mother Sheehan
Do yourself some good — look up
'Volunteer' real fast

Found that in the comments on this post.

Nobody needs fresh air for self-defense.

2005-08-18T14:27:00.000-04:00

Inspiration strikes over at mASS BACKWARDS: People (especially THE CHILDREN!!1!) die by falling out of windows all the time. Shouldn't they be subjected to strict controls? Nobody needs windows.

One thing he missed: With no windows, criminals can't get into your home. See? Windows increase crime!

Jesus, I live on the third floor. That makes me the fresh-air-and-sunshine equivalent of the Michigan Militia: A Radical Ventilation Extremist. I drive a convertible, too!

DDOSBlogging: A lousy idea

2005-08-18T09:29:00.000-04:00

I bow to few in my admiration for Kim du Toit, but he's wrong to put people's phone numbers in a blog post.

It's wrong when "their side" does it, and it's wrong when "our side" does it. It's harassment. He writes "Be polite if you call these bureaucratic dickheads", but as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, many of them won't be. You can't wash your hands of that by tossing in a pro-forma disclaimer when you know damn well some belligerent boneheads will ignore it. It seems more reasonable to post an email address; text on a screen isn't the same as a live irate blog-reader yelling into the phone. And don't forget that those irate callers won't be yelling at the bozo in charge. No, they'll be yelling at somebody with who's paid eight bucks an hour to answer phones. That person may not like the bozo in charge any better than you do, and certainly didn't make the decision you're angry about.

Not to mention that it's probably harder to DDOS a mail server than a phone switchboard, too. There's no reason to make ACC's admissions department unavailable to the students they're not screwing (if any).

Tactics like this may work. They may influence what these clowns do. But it's just plain wrong, not to mention that it makes your side look ugly.

Our Lady of Publicity Stunts

2005-08-17T00:23:00.000-04:00

Our Lady of the Eternal Press Conference?

Chuckle.

Drug war in Mexico

2005-08-16T01:32:00.000-04:00

Drug war in Mexico, saith Power and Control. 600 people killed this year.

He thinks legalization is the answer. You mean legalization in the US? For starters, yes, but it seems to me our suppliers would have to legalize too, for it to mean much. Are they keeping drugs illegal only because of us? If so, we're at fault for everything, but if we legalize and they prefer not to, we'll be even more at fault for even more of everything (Simon at P&C isn't saying that; somebody would). Are we the only nation on Earth to whom it ever occurred that drugs are bad? Dunno. Nor do I know whether legalization is as wonderful as all that anyway. It was a good idea with alcohol, but heroin isn't alcohol. It's heroin. I'm suspicious of the theory that anything which is good in principle must necessarily be good in practice, and drug legalization is a classic libertarian application of that theory. We did get through the 19th century okay, but I'm not sure we can go back there again. The law of unintended consequences applies to libertarians, too.

600 people killed this year.

The problem would probably diminish if demand did. Realistically, demand isn't going to change. You, as a customer of drugs imported from Mexico (if you are one), might have to work out with your own conscience whether you want to help fund this mess or not. Personally, I don't believe I'd want to.

Side note: In some of the quoted text it says that if Canadians go along with Americans on legal matters, that's "appeasement". If we go along with them on anything, saaaay the death penalty, that'd be something more like "America belatedly and shamefacedly admits to being invariably wrong, evil, and just plain bad". Yawn, snore.

Transhumanism, futurism, gibberish

2005-08-15T09:43:00.000-04:00

Reynolds mutters about the "singularity", which is the idea that technology will, finally, after all these millenia, change us instead of just our diet and our commuting habits. It's not far from the usual "futurist" nonsense (the clueless technopundit kind, not the Italian art movement). "Futurism" is normally the practice of picking trends so glaringly obvious that even a "futurist" will notice them, and mechanically extrapolating them into the future to generate predictions about where society is going. The problem is that the obvious trends have already run their course, mostly. This method of augury therefore has the unique property of guaranteed failure; unlike reading chicken guts, there's no hope of a one-in-a-trillion lucky guess. Back in the 1990s, some people charged money for this crap.

The "singularity" idea attempts to work around the guaranteed-failure feature by recognizing that you can't actually predict anything. If you can't predict the future, they reason, the future must be infinitely weird, so weird that when we get there we'll be infinitely weird ourselves. That's just silly, and a non sequitur too. It's an SF idea, literally. Not serious stuff.

It reminds me of the "transhumanist" folks who used to run around loose during the tech bubble. As I recall, the leading lights were mostly dot-com millionaires who mistook the brownian motion of greater-fool speculators for evidence of their own business genius. They're still around, though. The World Transhumanist Association's website says they're "for the ethical use of technology to extend human capacities". Well, they haven't extended their own capacities far enough to use GIFs instead of JPEGs for text: Look at the logo, top center on the page. It's all speckly around the text where it ought to be white. Lossy compression, guys. Bad choice for line art. Someday, my descendants will still be hairless apes, while theirs may be tentacled biocomputers in a methane atmosphere, but I bet their web site will still look like crap.

Babbling giddily about "the future" doesn't make you futuristic yourself, any more than babbling about Darwinism makes you fit to survive, or marching in protests makes you virtuous, or reading Ayn Rand turns you into an industrial genius, or betting on the Preakness makes you a horse.

1947: Quite a year

2005-08-14T22:47:00.000-04:00

Just read an interesting and chilling piece about a nation founded in 1947 by UN fiat, with much movement of populations and so forth. Over at Fjordman. Worth reading, I think.

The Great Raid

2005-08-14T20:06:00.000-04:00

Just got back from The Great Raid. Not a bad flick. A real war movie, with plausible characters instead of cartoonishly distinctive "personalities". You know the drill: There's always one guy who rips the sleeves off his uniform, and the one who has Issues with Authority, and so on. Reviewers have therefore been complaining that the characters in this one are interchangeable, but those clowns watch too many movies. Have you learned to tell your friends apart? You'll do fine.

You'll know who's who on the screen, but you'll never know which actors played them. They all call each other "Major" or "Colonel" or whatever: "Major, tell the Captain to send the Lieutenant over". "Yes, sir". In the cast list at IMDB there's no way to tell one Lt. from the next. The sole exceptions are 1st Sgt. Sid "Top" Wojo, who everybody calls "Top", and the General, because there's only one of each of those ranks in the movie. There's some guy they call "Red" who might be a Captain Redding, but then again he might just have had red hair; hard to tell. The color was a bit washed out, deliberately so. I can state with confidence that the blonde knockout is Connie Nielsen, who looks a bit like Nicole Kidman might have looked before she went on the Bataan Death March Diet.

What I thought was odd about the movie was that American soldiers were portrayed as... soldiers. Not war criminals, nor stupid, terrified, trigger-happy teenagers, nor helpless victims of society. Neither victims nor monsters, but normal people doing a dangerous and difficult job that they trained for. They're not necessarily fearless, but they cope with it like serious adults. I don't have a TV, but I gather this is not a common view of the US military in the media these days. Given the hurricane of militaristic propaganda to which some people think we're being subjected by the Bushitlerianneoconiburton War Machine, you'd think there'd be more than one war movie in the theaters this season portraying our boys in uniform in a positive light.

You'd also think there'd be more movies about atrocities committed by real pros, to put our loud Britney Spears records and halal menus in perspective. There are Japanese atrocities in this movie. They're historical, and they're gruesome. Japan's such a nice place to visit, it's odd to think that these nice folks' grandparents burned prisoners alive. Heck, Germany's a nice place to visit, too. Such civilized, cultured nations. So well organized. Good thing the lefties have figured out that fascism only happens when you let the rubes watch NASCAR and otherwise do as they damn well please.

Another issue comes to mind: The Rangers lost two men in the raid. There was also a group of Filipino guerillas who kept a vastly superior Japanese force off the Rangers' backs, and lost twenty-one men doing it. It looks to me as if those guys had the tougher part of the job: They were veterans, fighting on their own turf, and had greater losses than the Rangers, who were mostly new to combat as well as the Philipines. The film gives them credit, and commenters in this discussion say some real Filipino actors got roles, which is cool (not enough screen time, though). I would've liked to see more about them, simply because I've read quite a lot about Americans in the Pacific war, and very little about Filipinos.

But never mind politics and history. It's a movie, not a seminar. And it's a believable movie, not badly marred by wooden acting or dumb dialog, and blessedly free of Big Stars. It held my interest throughout. It had me on the edge of my seat a few times, and I sniffled when Nurse Hottie was reunited with... er... Major. Yes, that was his name. Major.

Worth seeing.

UPDATE 8/16/2005: Here's a much more thorough review, by somebody who knows the history. Makes my effort look pretty weak.

Are you listening, Dr. Lakoff?

2005-08-13T19:46:00.000-04:00

"Socialism" is such a boring, dowdy, negative term. No wonder it doesn't go over well. Why not rename it? I've even got a suggestion:

"Intelligent Design Economics".

UPDATE 8/16/2005: Turns out the same idea's been expressed twice this year already, that Google knows of, in the same exact words. Damn.

Progressive victory in Thailand

2005-08-12T19:15:00.000-04:00

"They just shot my relative this morning while he was on his way to collect rubber just a short distance from here," he said.

Peaceful Islamic activists in southern Thailand have been doing a lot of random killing lately. Then they ordered everybody, Muslim or otherwise, not to work on Fridays. People complied. The Islamists promptly ordered everybody not to work on Thursdays either.

So the progressive view is that we should give terrorists whatever they demand, right? Because then they'll stop demanding. Right. Got it.

Via RWDB.

UPDATE 8/12/05: Added rivetingly dramatic blockquote and clarified which part of Thailand it is.

UPDATE 8/12/05 #2: Corrected spelling of "UPDAGE" in previous update.

Monitoring cell phones

2005-08-11T13:18:00.000-04:00

At Instapundit, Michael J. Totten notes a horrible development: It seems you can "remotely install software onto a handset to activate the microphone even when the user is not making a call".

That's ugly news, if true (the source is the Guardian; nothing to do with their politics at all, but "technical" reporting tends to be surreally clueless even from relatively qualified journalists, much less yer liberal-artsy types). The question is, can you replace the firmware in your own phone with a modified version which won't let anybody else install anything, or which will notify you of an attempt and require your permission to let it happen? I'm guessing you can. I'm sure hoping you can. It's proverbially difficult (if not provably impossible) to make a device secure against the guy who's holding it in his hand; see DeCSS for a classic example.

I believe I'll dig around Google and see what turns up. I'm sure some Spock-eared knucklehead or another has ported Linux to any popular cellphone you can name.

What, you say we can just pass a law against it and that'll fix the problem? Yeah, you go do that.

UPDATE 8/11/2005: Note that hacking your cell phone may, now or at some time in the future, be illegal wherever you are. So this is just an intellectual exercise — which it probably would be anyway, considering how few people can usefully modify binary code.

UPDATE 8/12/2005: Then again, you could just yank the damn battery out when you want some guaranteed privacy. But that's too easy! In any case, this is weirder than traditional wire-tapping and bugging, but it's not a fundamentally New Thing.

Oh, look — a Vietnam analogy!

2005-08-11T12:52:00.000-04:00

In Vietnam, didn't the US rely on body counts as an indicator of success largely because we couldn't find much else that made us look like we were winning?

That's not to say that the NY Times et al. are necessarily flogging body counts of our own guys for exactly the same reason, but I do think some people on the left have an exaggerated faith in those numbers as proof that their guys are winning.

PLANET-HATING MONSTER CONFRONTED

2005-08-11T12:15:00.000-04:00

Tim Blair is a Very Great Man.

We Are All Canadians

2005-08-10T20:28:00.000-04:00

In the dark and savage corner of Massachusettstan where I live, you see a lot of bumper stickers. I saw one today that broke my heart: "Boycott Canadian Seafood", with a picture of a sad little seal. The lefties have turned against Canada?! Now, that's harsh. Next thing you know they'll be letting Zarqawi down.

As for me, I stand in solidarity with my Canadian brothers and sisters. I will eat Canadian seafood. Canada and I have had our differences in the past, but as long as they eat meat up there, some fundamental bond of affection must remain.

Today, I am a Canadian.

Styles of Radical Schtick

2005-08-09T15:48:00.000-04:00

The thing about making an ass of yourself in public is you constantly need fresh material, unless you're a comedian. Or Woody Allen.

Noam Chomsky's got a pretty good schtick going. He just picks up the Globe every morning, finds the worst thing on the front page, and makes up a reason to blame it on the US. He doesn't have to think of anything new, because he can go on forever applying that one silly idea to an inexhaustible supply of depressing news items. We have six billion people on this planet, every one of us is screwing up everything he can reach, 24/7, and it's all grist for the mill. On a slow news day, when the wellsprings of human idiocy run dry, he's got 229 years of old catastrophes to choose from. This is not unlike what Glenn Reynolds does, except that on slow news days Reynolds posts cat pictures. I prefer Reynolds, but then I'm fond of cats.

The people who get into trouble are the ones who haven't figured out the news gimmick, the ones who depend for novelty on breaking new theoretical ground rather than mechanically applying the same old theory the way ol' Noam does (heck, I don't believe Chomsky even admits to having a theory in any broad sense). Professional radicals can very easily get sucked into a radicalism arms race where "new product" requires saying something crazier than whatever they said last week (Ward Churchill, anyone?) — and crazier than whatever the guy in the next office is saying, too. Work smarter, guys, not harder. There's a reason why Chomsky is still cheerful and spry at an age when most professional lunatics have worried themselves into the grave: He's got a more efficient algorithm for generating hooey, and he's a happier man for it.

The left finds God — and welcome to Him

2005-08-08T23:03:00.000-04:00

Fun post over at Neo-Neocon: Thoughts about what the left is really looking for in their admiration of terrorists. She sees it in terms of psychology, and it looks sensible to me, though my opinion isn't worth squat in that field. I have my own thoughts, besides.

A lot of people believe in God, and find value in their faith, because of the moral-order issue: God punishes the wicked and rewards the just, and He never gets it wrong because He's infinitely wise.

The left assigns that just-punishment-of-the-wicked job to Osama bin Laden. In terms of this one aspect of faith (there are others), they worship that dingbat.

Some versions of Christianity have reinvented God as a non-judgemental, non-punishing, non-rewarding nonentity. Aren't those the ones who drift hard to the left and start apologizing for terrorists? By and large, yes.

Religion — hard-ass, "thou-shalt-and-thou-shalt-not"-style religion — hasn't been invented and perpetuated in so many human societies just by chance; it fills a need, one that some evangelicals both fancifully and irritatingly call "a God-shaped hole in your heart". It's an annoying phrase, but it nails the idea.

Nature abhors a vacuum, I guess, as much as it abhors a metaphor left unabused: Some of us are sufficiently miserable, misanthropic, and depressing that we can leave that hole empty or else fill it with dry, nerdy crap like "market forces", but most people aren't. They empty it out, and something else fills it, often something worse. It's the same argument I have against anarchism: Something will fill that "government-shaped hole in your society"; are you real sure your friendly neighborhood robber baron will suck less than what you've got?

And this is why I'm not a libertarian. Remember the brass screw joke, where the guy unscrews the brass screw in his bellybutton and his ass falls off? It happens every day.

UPDATE 8/9/2005: If ObL's their God of Wrath, who's in charge of mercy? That'd be the UN, I guess, and the NGO swarm.

Ad Hoc Definition Syndrome

2005-07-30T21:19:00.000-04:00

I've decided to start collecting instances of a few categories of characteristic left-wing logical and rhetorical habits.

Here's a fine post over at Tom Hamilton's Let's Be Sensible, concerning some "anti-war left" rhetoric about "moral agency". The whole thing is worth reading, but the AHDS outbreak appears early, in the quoted text:

...the contention that terrorists are possessed of 'moral agency', i.e. they possess the capacity to make rational, self-interested moral judgements and take actions which are in accordance with morality...

Hamilton writes that this sentence "...shows one of the strangest understandings of the concept of moral agency I've ever seen." It does indeed, but it's not really an "understanding of moral agency"; it's a a refusal to admit that the concept of moral agency even exists, a refusal so forceful that the writer insists that the very phrase actually refers to something else.

The punchline is that this "definition" of moral agency, this "dangerous bullshit" that our lefty ascribes to the Diabolical Pro-War Left, approximates the very common anti-war left belief that violent Islamists are in fact acting rationally and morally, in their own accurately-perceived self-interest, and can therefore be negotiated with. It is axiomatic to (much of) the anti-war left that all of Osama bin Laden's demands on the West are reasonable, and that bin Laden can be trusted to honor any bargain we strike with him. I have personal doubts about the wisdom of any policy that relies on the infallible wisdom and sweet reasonableness of a religious fanatic who massacres civilians for a living, but maybe that's just me.

Then again, our lefty loses interest in this ridiculous "definition" almost immediately (I don't blame him; it's useless for his purposes). When he goes into detail about why the pro-war left are wrong to believe it, he starts accusing them of other things entirely. Hamilton goes over all that in detail; read it, it's good.

UPDATE 8/10/2005: Added "(much of)" to the stentorian "It is axiomatic..." line, because somebody in comments pointed out that, erm, well, it's really not quite all of them, is it? Quite a few, certainly, but not all.

The Fishwife Left

2005-07-27T11:01:00.000-04:00

So how about those "progressives" who decree that we must call them patriots?

I don't doubt that any allegedly patriotic lefty worth a damn could, if asked, instantly invent a shiny new definition of "patriotism" off the top of his head which fits him like a glove and excludes you. Ask him tomorrow and he'll invent another. But we'll skip that, since it's meaningless.

I prefer a conventional definition, the kind that describes what most people mean by a word when they say it. The OED thinks a patriot is "one whose ruling passion is the love of his country". Oddly enough, I think that one may apply to most "progressives" after all, in an eerily pathological way: Consider the abusive spouse. Not physically abusive, necessarily, but the kind who rakes his partner over the coals for anything that goes wrong, and most of what doesn't. The "I'd better do this myself because you always screw everything up" type. The "look what you've gone and made me do" type. The type who's never been pleased and never will be, but who always insists that he could very easily be pleased, if only his beloved would just try a little harder.

I think your average fishwife (or fish-husband, if applicable) gets a cozy, comfortable sense of moral and intellectual superiority out of all this. And they sincerely believe that they're just trying to help their partner improve. They're just trying to help. Isn't constructive criticism a good thing? Isn't there room for that in a relationship? And if constructive criticism is good, isn't more of it better?

Some people call that "love", and they honestly mean it.

The analogy breaks down at the edges. A nation is not a romantic relationship. In a relationship, the usual advice is to ditch the creep and get on with your life, maybe with a restraining order. But a democracy can't deport people for being neurotic losers. We also didn't choose them: There was no first date, years ago, when they behaved themselves. They just sprout up in our midst, whether we like it or not.

If you're utterly blind to somebody's faults, you're probably a doormat, and that's not healthy either. But if you never, ever give the benefit of the doubt to people you care about, you've got a problem. It may be "rational" to give your spouse precisely the same slack and consideration that you give a perfect stranger or a mugger you meet in an alley, but it ain't the way healthy human beings operate. Giving your spouse less consideration is nuts.

Cuban defectors

2005-07-27T02:39:00.000-04:00

It seems that 49 members of a Cuban dance troupe defected to the US — but two of them (*cough*political minders*cough*) went back to Cuba! Which, if I were a lefty, would be clear proof that Cuba really is a paradise and it's really sad and dishonest of those rotten right-wing tools to concentrate on the minority of bad apples who were, after all, only a mere 96% of the dance troupe after all, anyway, and I mean, hey, it's not all of them, right? I mean, if anybody would choose to return there, it must be a nice place!

Like that character in Australia who thinks Douglas Wood was "well treated" because after the goons abducted him, and while they were keeping him tied and blindfolded and executing other hostages in the room, they fed him... every day! Think of it: Every single day! What kind of a churlish freak would demand more than that out of life?

UPDATE 7/28/05: 49 is not 98% of 51; it's in the neighborhood of 96.078431372549019607843137254902%. So I fixed it.

Michelle Malkin: Optimist at large

2005-07-26T03:05:00.000-04:00

Quoth Malkin:

...America's nuttiest professor, Ward Churchill.

Emphasis mine. I'd dearly love to believe that Churchill is the most irrational assclown in American academia, but I doubt it. We should be so lucky.

UPDATE 8/9/2005: Welcome Worstallians! Darn, I wish I'd baked a cake.

"Root cause" theology

2005-07-25T15:19:00.000-04:00

Brian O'Connell over at Spartac.us has nailed it beautifully, barring one big caveat that I'll get to in a moment:

...This is typical of the Left. When the terrorists act, it is as a force of nature, like animals responding to stimuli. Blame or responsibility for their actions cannot be assigned to them. It is proper, in this view, to trace back the terrorist response to the most recent Western stimulus, because it is only to the Westerner that responsibility can be assigned or in whom the status of moral actor can be invested.

When the West acts it is responsible, morally and otherwise, for the consequences of its actions, and for others' responses to those actions. This is a one-way street. Non-Westerners are never blamed for Western actions.

Emphasis mine. He's got a point: In the standard narrative of the "anti-war" left, Muslims are exactly as capable of moral choice as animals are. But that's not the whole picture, and I don't believe simple racism is the sole "root cause" of the left's view.

Here's why not: Shortly after the Iraqi elections in January 2005, I recall seeing a lefty (it might've been a commenter at Harry's Place) claim that the elections proved that bin Laden was a great benefactor of humanity, since 9/11 set in motion the chain of events that led to the elections. This is a corollary to standard root-cause theology, less commonly invoked but hardly unknown: If they do evil, we made them do it; but if we do good, they made us do it. If your rhetorical point of the moment says 9/11 was bad, you follow the chain back to the first non-Muslim and blame him; but if you're saying that 9/11 was good, why then the buck stops at bin Laden and he gets all the credit.

So it's really just yet another case of the left inventing a distinct and specially-tailored set of Absolute and Permanent Universal Principles to support each distinct rhetorical point, though this one sure does get re-used a lot more than most.

Thank you, ancestors, for leaving Europe.

2005-07-13T03:02:00.000-04:00

Oh, goody: The EU "seeks to regulate television on the net":

Brussels is considering regulating areas such as taste and decency, accuracy and impartiality for internet broadcasters.

I don't give a rat's ass about "taste and decency"; they're not my field. But "accuracy and impartiality"? What does that mean, exactly? If you've got a better guess I'd love to hear it, but to me it looks like some media outlets will be required to pretend that "reality" is whatever the EU says it is. What kind of "accuracy" will they want to enforce when it comes to reporting on the EU itself? This is unhinged. Do they already have laws like that for other media? If so, the excuse will be that they haven't been abused yet, or at least not abused very outrageously, or some such thing, but that's howling, gibbering bullshit of the first order: You don't want government to abuse excessive powers? Simple: Don't give them excessive powers. What they get, they'll abuse, sooner or later. It may take decades, but it will happen.

But then they throw in a laugh-line, just for fun:

...the rules for websites will be less strict than those currently applying to the BBC...

No comment.

No, there won't always be an England

2005-07-13T02:24:00.000-04:00

Saith Austin Bay:

The London bombing, instead of producing a new crop of Zapatero appeasniks, may prove to be a sea-change in the information [war]. Time will tell.

He precedes this with all manner of evidence. Still, I don't believe him. Let's remember that on September 12^th 2001, a lot of us looked around and thought there was some clarity on the subject in the United States, on both sides of the aisle. By the following spring, most Democrats had reverted to form (those of us who didn't revert are mostly calling ourselves "Republicans" now). And the UK is a lot farther gone than we are.

Here's a prediction: What little clarity they have now, will evaporate in the next six or eight months at the latest. And it's only a little clarity, to begin with: They're talking about ID cards (?!), letting the police arrest more people, and so on. What it adds up to is battening down the hatches at home. That's nice, I guess, assuming there's any sense in further whittling away the few civil liberties they've got left. But are they more, or less, committed to establishing reasonably sane governments in Iraq and Afghanistan? Are they less, or more, committed to funding Hamas? I'm betting on zero for two there. I'm betting that internationally, they'll lick the boot and hope it'll keep them safe at home.

Oh, and they just criminalized criticism of Islam. It's beyond me how anybody could be optimistic about the UK.