|
Saturday, December 18, 2004Here's Little Green Footballs with not one but two stories about thoughtcrimes in the Anglosphere. One hopes the U.S. does not follow the Brits and Aussies in confusing blackmail by bigots with sensitivity. Here are the links: The Brits. The Aussies.This is why the TurkeyBlog sometimes likes the loathed ACLU as well as the NRA. One to push for free speech rights, the other to enforce them. When the sensitivity mavens are on the march, you need all the resources you can get. 
posted by gbarto at 11:18 PM Awwwwwwwwww.
posted by gbarto at 10:22 PM Is adultery the public's business? If the public wants to know in their scrutinizing of public officials, yup. So sayeth Cicero. One is free to disagree with the public's tastes in these matters, of course. Journalists can even downplay such stories if they want, so long as they're willing to risk losing audience. But the will of the public, right or wrong, is a driving force in democracy. Denying citizens information they feel is relevant to the practice of self-government, particularly in the selection of those who will have power, is therefore a big no-no. One wonders where the liberal defenders of Mr. Clinton are now that it is Mr. Kerik who has been put through the ringer. But the general public seems to have been consistent in this, taking an interest in both stories. The primary thing of interest is that Republicans caught in these situations resign or shuffle off to the sidelines. Democrats stand and fight. That is because the first party values its standards, the second its power.
posted by gbarto at 10:03 PM Very cute story about God, geese and faith over at GuyTak. Be sure to have a look.
posted by gbarto at 9:46 PM Friday, December 17, 2004Kaus is writing about "The Trouble With Beinart," specifically Beinart's call for the Democrats to stand up to Islamic extremism just as the best of the party stood up to the Communists.An e-mailer to Mickey notes: The e-mailer doesn't get it. We aren't going to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world by reassuring the clerics and Muslims but by marginalizing them the same way Western culture has marginalized the priest and the pastor. Lest we forget, a few centuries ago we had Christians by the boatload ready to die for Jesus. They called it the Crusades. From priests to bishops to the Pope himself the judgment was made that there were tons of young men who had nothing better to do with their lives than get speared by a Saracen in the hopes of recapturing the same ground the Jews and Palestinians are fighting over even today. This did not stop because Islam found a way to reassure Christian civilization that everything was cool, no need to worry about us, but because for the West 1) the missions weren't going well and 2) people therefore found better things to live and die for. Likewise, lest Beinart critics forget, Communism didn't fall because we reached an understanding with it. It fell because we faced it down. Kruschev said, "We will bury you." Reagan said, in effect, "You can't make enough shovels," and launched the arms race. What emerged from that little experiment is that the Soviet Union couldn't make decent toilet paper, let alone a worker's paradise. And so it crumbled away, less a threat than an embarrassment and evil not for the danger it posed to the world but for the human aspirations it stifled. In engineering the demise of Islamism, we do well to look at how we faced down Communism, for in both cases we are up against the same thing: An ideology that believes that the world works other than it does, that believes its failure in the world is a failure of the world and not of its own and that the dreams crushed and souls lost in its name are small potatoes contained with the glories it holds in store. The enormity of Islamism is greater in ways, lesser in others, than that of Communism. But in the end, it is another bit of absurdist arrogance in which the mass of man is chained to the ambitions of a combination of unrestrained megalomaniacs and unscrupulous managerial types, the first to break the system and the second to pretend it's still working. The solution, as with Communism, is to break it and show it's broken, to hold it up as an embarrassment of social management and a crime against humanity and watch the stinking mess crumble when the managerial side sees the handwriting on the walls and bails. What we're doing in Iraq is painful, it's tedious and it's beautiful. Day after day, the mullahs call on the armies of God. But where is God? Easy. He's watching the infidels take block after block, city after city. Even when the Americans are having troubles, what's God's great role? Oh yeah, He lets Islamists blow themselves to bits - you only get one or two missions if you're an Islamist - and if you're lucky He lets you hide undetected a little longer. Bit by bit, one suspects, the man in the street is beginning to wonder who this Allah is and what's taking Him so long if He's really so gung ho for this to go on. Eventually the idea seeps in that the store's been closed for six months now so that single men who aren't providing for families can play soldier of God and patience starts to run thin. This is happening. It would be crude to run into Islamist dens screaming "Where's your God now?" but it's a fair question. The real problem for Islamism, though, is not on the battlefield, any more than the USSR's real problem was military. The problem is the whole thing doesn't work. The Taliban took less than a decade to turn back the clock in Afghanistan by centuries. That may have suited the leadership just fine, but keeping the masses happy in such circumstances is challenging. As time goes by, the leadership keeps turning over and turning over till all of a sudden your country's being run by a Saudi financier and a one-eyed sheik and even Oliver Stone won't make your movie because the script's too implausible. And then really stupid things happen, things like you challenge the most powerful nation on earth to a duel. Oh sure, Osama's still alive. So is Barbra Streisand, but that didn't keep Bush from being reelected. One word, people: pathetic. When the Islamists ran Afghanistan, even the self-winding watches stopped working. We know they didn't educate the girls, but it doesn't look like even the young men were learning very much. I mean, Blowing Up Buddha 101 sounds so Berkeley, doesn't it? And so when the decadent Americans and their buddies on the ground joined up, the mighty Taliban and the triumphant Al-Qaeda saw there was just one thing to do: turn tail and run. As fast as they could. Sure they lived to fight another day, to shit in someone else's soup. But wrecking the bouillabase and building a working society are different tasks calling for different skills. And the Islamofreaks don't pass muster. We must do to Islamism what we did to Communism. Blue jeans, cell phones, Starbucks. We need Muslim teenagers sitting angst-ridden in their bedrooms: Sure if I'm an Islamist I get to die in a mess of guts and plastique, but what if the bomb doesn't accessorize with my cellphone? I'd die of embarrassment. We need Palestinian men looking at would-be suicide bombers and growling, "Get a job." We don't need to find a way to make it okay to oppress women, stone homosexuals and mire your people in the twelfth century as long as you promise not to bomb us. We need to make it clear that Islam can dump the Islamist strain and adapt itself to the 21st century or the whole thing might join Communism on the ash heap. Our most potent weapons in the fight against Islamism are Western commerce and Western ideals. What we are doing in Iraq is to try to start a small-scale Enlightenment. It won't be easy and it will take time. After all, the French launched the first one and even they didn't really catch on to what they'd done for more than a century. What we're going to do is to start with the base questions: Why can't I have a cell phone? Why can't I drive a car? We're going to move to the political: Why does he get to be in charge? Since when does reading the Koran make you a better city planner? In time, when everybody else is too busy with other things to care, the thinkers will move from memorizing passages of the Koran to thinking about what they mean, whether they square with reality and whether what the imams say seems appropriate either to modern life or the teachings of the Koran. When we're done, it will not be up to the people to prove themselves worthy before the mullahs, but up to the mullahs to prove themselves relevant to the people. One wishes them well. They've got a pretty good book, even if it's not the one I believe in. They've got some decent historical lessons to build on. They've even got a history as a learned and cultivated people. The smart and thoughtful mullahs will be able to deal, showing how the age-old lessons of their holy books help one find solace and stability in a turbulent world. They'll create a modern Islam in Iraq that is already found elsewhere, one that helps its adherents stand strong, do right and live well. The cranks will have sway for a time, but like the cranks here, their congregations will splinter, their followers will drift and their teachings will fade in importance. And thank God for that. It is amazing to me that there is a strain of liberalism that can fail to abhorr, to have its stomach turned by a movement that lets depressed teenagers make themselves into bombs to fulfill the ambitions of religious authority figures. What is the Left for, if not to rise in outrage against such things? Hitchens was right (no link, don't remember where he wrote it) to note that Voltaire today would be screaming "Ëcrasez l'infâme!" at the top of his lungs to anyone who would listen about the Wahabbists. People like Kissinger are supposed to utter horrid remarks about "the enemy of my enemy..." while Leftists decry the fascist running dogs we're hanging with. And so Beinart's call is reassuring, indicating that there is still a sane Left, however small. Beinart is right. As I've argued, Islamism can be defeated. Can be stared down and laughed off the human stage, making way for a better life for 21st century Muslims and a safer world for us all. The Left should be a part of that. Sure, Islamism will have its flirters - even the Communists got sympathy from the likes of Kennedy, Dodd and Kerry. But the sooner the main of the Left recognizes the real oppressors of our age and joins in the fight to liberate their victims the better.
posted by gbarto at 4:30 PM Just in case anyone was afraid of withdrawal now that the Peterson trial is wrapping up... Stolen Fetus Believed Found Alive Police Await DNA Test Results Baby cut out of slain eight-months-pregnant woman found in good health in Kansas, cops say; two adults found with infant being questioned
posted by gbarto at 4:14 PM Wednesday, December 15, 2004Picked up a copy of the new Scientific American Mind, which is really pretty good. But on page 7, there is this bit:Voters Fear Death The article is about how people with fears about terrorism were more likely to support Bush: [P]sychologists proposed that Bush might have been viewed favorably because the participants saw him as a leader who could be "a protective shield against death"...The article goes on to quote Sheldon Solomon: If you ask people to think rationally, the effects like these are minimized or completely eliminated...The article isn't too badly written and the research question isn't without interest. But is it likely Rutgers would have planted scenarios about the difficulties of lacking health insurance with its subjects, noticed a blip up for Kerry in their polling and proposed ways of correcting for their irrationality? Even when the academy does good work, biases do tend to seep through. Of course I could just be a paranoid in need of counseling for thinking so. We Bush voters are, you know.
posted by gbarto at 8:04 PM Tuesday, December 14, 2004Cicero looks at the vision of Ron Paul, libertarian, as it relates to nation building, the Constitution and more. Cicero's most important point:Well, surely the truth is that America today, if it were asked to adopt a constitution and could somehow agree on one, would certainly not agree on anything like either the original written document, nor that plus the first 10 amendments, nor that plus the whole string of them.He is right, of course. Which is unfortunate for us. On the up side, we do have our good old Constitution in place, however much we ignore it. And for this, we ought to be thankful. Much of Europe has newer, more relevant constitutions in place. They're generally atrocious. What has made our Constitution last is that it doesn't contain a specific enumeration of the extent of duck hunting rights, mandatory minimum hospital stays or the maximum length of gummi worms (maybe I'm exaggerating how ridiculous they get, but not by that much). As such, we have a fairly short document that spells out what government is about, not how the society it's in is supposed to work. Which is why the finger-in-everyone's-pudding types have messed up all the modern constitutions. All hail to ours, so outdated it's ever relevant.
posted by gbarto at 11:24 PM Monday, December 13, 2004Barbarism MultipliedThe shocking thing about the latest in the Peterson case is not the verdict, which was widely if not universally expected. What disturbs, rather, is the apparent jubilation that came with the announcement of the verdict. What are we? Romans at the Coliseum? The TurkeyBlog is, of course, on the record as opposing capital punishment for reasons based on belief about Christian redemption and a libertarian distrust for giving the state such power over its citizens. But... If we are to have the death penalty, and indeed we do, a certain measure of sobriety is called for in its application. Let us consider what the death penalty means in a society shaped by a Judeo-Christian ethic with a government whose philosophical origins are indisputably Lockean. From the religious perspective, we have the warnings about "judge not lest ye be judged" and the bit about casting the first stone. These are not merely calls to play nice; they are founded in the understanding that we are all bathed in sin and all ultimately lost without Christ's redemption. Denying another's opportunity for redemption by the abridgment of his life is, in this context, pretty heavy stuff. Stuff that Scott Peterson apparently did. Do we want to join the party? As for the governmental question, the reasoning is thus: Man has come from a state of nature into a state of civilization in which we are protected from violence from others in abjuring it ourselves. Within the state of civilization, that is, we give up the right to exercise physical and other powers we might if unconstrained by society. If you blow this, you're in a state of nature where society can hunt you down like an animal inasmuch as you threaten it in the manner of an animal - no guilt, no remorse, just action. We stretch this out by use of trials to among other things decide if a person really fits this category - the death penalty phase really is, in a sense, an effort to determine whether a person continues to exist as a person in the eyes of the state or if he or she is now an animal, too devoid of humanity, too soulless, to be allowed to exist in our midst. The religious and social contract questions are in some senses separated, but they are largely intertwined because, history shows, it takes an ethos pretty close to Judeo-Christianity to wind up thinking about things in such a way that you create a contract society. So, what sayeth society today? It declares through the agency of a jury, people's representatives, that the continued existence of Scott Peterson is an abomination unto the land that must be stopped. If that is the verdict, it is not a cause for rejoicing, but only sadness that this is what has become of a human being. Those who cheer may be less violent, but they are no less animal. Let's hope that as the jury did its work and as subsequent courts do theirs there was and is a greater comprehension of the enormousness of what is at stake lest Scott Peterson's fate prove as great an enormity as his crime.
posted by gbarto at 7:33 PM Sunday, December 12, 2004Instapundit is writing about bloggers, their backers and ethics. For the record, this site receives a few nickles when you buy a book or CD from one of the links. If you haven't done this before, you should try it. It's loads of fun. In fact, if you really wanted to, you could click on every link and buy each item. If you do this, send me an e-mail and I'll put up more items so your fun can continue.The TurkeyBlog does receive the occasional contribution though most book purchases and contributions for gbarto.com originate at The Hugo Pages, The Language Pages and the Multilingua site. For those interested in language and literature, we suggest you check these out. We're particularly proud of multilingua.info, which is so neatly organized you'd never believe it came from the creators of the TurkeyBlog. As for people paying us to push certain opinions... alas, we haven't received a single bribe. The closest we've come is when the Bushies asked us to put their campaign blogstrip thingy in a corner of the site, but that turned out to be a mass e-mailing with no money involved, so... Anyway, if you want to bribe a blogger, now's your chance. Send us your talking points and a check - at least four digits before the decimal point, please - to get six months of rabid enthusiasm for your cause, renewable with special discounts. Act now, before this opportunity passes...
posted by gbarto at 10:22 PM from the e-mail bag: Hillbilly Love Poem Suzie Anne done fell in love; She planned to marry Joe. She was so happy 'bout it all She told her Pappy so. Pappy told her, "Susie gal, You'll have to find another. I'd just as soon yo'Ma don't know, But Joe is yo'half brother" So Susie put aside her Joe And planned to marry Will. But after telling Pappy this, He said, "There's trouble still... You can't marry Will, my gal., And please don't tell your Mother, But Will and Jo and several mo' I know is yo'half brother" But Mama knew and said, "My child, Just do what makes yo' happy. Marry Will or marry Joe You ain't no kin to Pappy.
posted by gbarto at 10:13 PM Whither Europe? Nowhereville, unless they read their Tao... Note: The TurkeyBlog has been fighting with one of those colds that don't leave you coughing and sneezing but do leave you tired and all stuffed up - his favorite, offering all the fun and none of the sympathy of a regular cold - hence the light posting. Europe doesn't seem to know it, but it's digging itself into a hole right now. This is not, of course, news. What's more interesting is the "why" of the whole thing: Europe is declining in status because of its conscious striving to ascend in status and a fatal miscalculation in its strategy for doing so. The fatal miscalculation, of course, is deciding to challenge the United States. Not that the U.S. will smack them down. Or do much of anything about them, really. Sure, we've had our own silly moments with "Freedom fries" and the like. But for the most part, Europe is something we read about and get in high dudgeon about, not something we actually bother with. The problem with challenging us, or - the French here is better - trying to rivaliser with us is the comparisons it invites. At the center of Europe's mess is the Franco-German axis. From the early 1800s through the 1940s, this bunch entangled Europe in war a half-dozen times and roped the whole civilized world into the mess a few of those times. Then they invented the EU to counterbalance the two. This did much to keep war from breaking out between those two people. It did little to tame the egos of the French and the Germans, particularly the French. I've lived in France, and one of the striking things I've noticed is the way that political programs become articles of faith. I had a long "discussion" with a French woman one evening in which she conceded that yes, people were getting increasingly limited and ineffectual treatments, yes, the government could not even afford these and yes, the whole thing could collapse any year now. So, I asked, what next? The answer was that you couldn't change the Securité sociale, it was a critical part of the fabric of French society symbolizing the way in which all the people are together as one, etc. In a country where the state tried literally to take the place of God on a few occasions the notion that policies bound up in national identity could be altered is not merely wrongheaded, it's alien. One of the beliefs of Europe, once upon a time, is that it had a mission civilisatrice, that it could bring the Third World out of darkness and into the wonderful modernity that it knew. Today, it's ambivalent. They'll send troops to former colonies, of course. And they can't bring themselves to discuss how bad it sounded to teach generations of Algerians about their Gaulish ancestors. But they generally favor collective civilization, that is that the world would be brought out of darkness by coming into their orbit with tales of the advantages that come in being European. But what is European? "European," today, doesn't stand for as much as it once did. For one thing, they've shirked Europe's two greatest creations, capitalism and the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, incidentally, is not the same thing as the French Revolution and all that other mishmash, it was an intellectual movement that called on people to, in Diderot's words, "remove the eyes of habit" to see what was actually there. Here, especially, Europe has done itself in, strapping on goggles with visions of European superiority, socialism's inevitability and collective peace painted on the lenses. Their biggest mistake, however, is getting bass-ackwards how these three would interact if they came to the fore. Many Europeans think just a little bit too much about the United States. Sure, we've bailed their asses out in a couple world wars, the Cold War, etc. And sure, we're in serious competition with them to be the most powerful entity in the world. But it's a one sided competition. When you pick up Le Monde, the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung (spelling), Corriere della Sera and most other Western European newspapers, the U.S. is somewhere on the front page, often above the fold. When you pick up an American newspaper, news from Europe is on page A12 - they are, they'll be cheered to know, still the first folks we look at in International News. Coming back to the bass-ackwardness of Europe's push for European superiority, socialist progress and collective security... Europe's focus on the U.S. isn't merely embarrassing, it's dangerous and foolish. What makes it foolish is that they confuse ends and means. What makes it dangerous is where this leads them. Which brings us to the Tao in this mess. In the Tao we are given dozens of little aphorisms like this: There is work being done but there is no one working. And we are advised up front that the Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way. Warnings about striving - warnings we too need to heed - abound. The point is this: To become the sage of the Tao - or the leader of the world, for that matter - you must shift your focus from ego to the work at hand. You must not do things so that you will have done them, but merely so they will have been done. Finally you must realize that the Way cannot be found, but only followed, that if you do what must be done you will be on the path but if you strive to find The Way, you'll miss it. Europe, alas, has not read the Tao. Ministers wake up every morning and ask themselves, how can we challenge the US? How can we establish European superiority? What formulae will enable us to finally achieve the dominance we should know? So... How did the U.S. stumble into the American century? Kicking and screaming. We avoided World War I. We avoided World War II. We argued about whether we really wanted to get messed up in post-war Europe. We argued about whether we really had to act to counteract Cuba in the Caribbean and Central America. Different American leaders may have wanted to act, but what won public support for most of the actions that established American supremacy in the 20th century was not that it would enhance our prestige or bring us glory, but, to the contrary, that it had to be done now or else something else would have to be done later. We did our work, work that we had to do because no one else had the combination of power and will necessary to do it. The other stumble the U.S. avoided on the way to the American century was thinking that it had found the one best way. From the New Deal to the New Frontier to the War on Poverty, we tried. But as these things failed to bring paradise, we pruned the most embarrassing bits. And in the world sphere, we focused less on our own power than on limiting that of the Soviet Union. Grenada, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Afghanistan - places we acted with good or bad results. But they did not become American satellites or outposts. Most tellingly, at the height of our powers, we did not turn Iraq into an American oilfield, but packed our bags and left once Kuwait was liberated. We did our work but did not presume to remake the world in our image. Europe's problem today is that it doesn't understand how to surpass the U.S. anymore than Sun Microsystems knew how to surpass Microsoft. It works like this: Do it better. Look at the European vision of collective security... isn't it great? Everyone comes together and asserts the sovereignty of everyone else. Their charters all say that if you're in the group, your security is assured by the collective will of the European Union. It looks like one hell of a deal. You do your part and your safety is assured... The U.S. has a vision of collective security. It goes like this: Yeah, right. The U.S. sends troops because it serves its purposes. Joins alliances primarily to keep down enemies. Sends foreign aid a little more generously, but if you want the big bucks your interests had better align with ours. A slightly more expanded of our vision of collective security is this: We fight for and alongside those with whom our interests are intertwined. So... why isn't everyone signing up for the Europe plan? Here's the funny bit: The Europeans live in a post-moral age. They're sophisticated. They're world-wise. And the average small country trusts them with their security about as much as they'd trust their wives with a Frenchman. The U.S. is big, lumbering and thoroughly backward. Under the influence of Christian morality and other hocus pocus, we believe in things like souls, free will leading to self-determination and God knows what else. Small countries know too. They know that if their safety is intertwined with our world vision they're in good shape. And strangely enough, because of the expansive definition of our interests that arises from our moral conceptions, that fits the bill in a lot of places. End result? In a lot of cases, the best ticket to security is having an understanding with or provoking the sentiment of the U.S. Ask the Bosnians. The Kosovars. The Poles. The Latvians, Letts and Estonians. And, heh heh, the French of the 1930s. The Europeans, like Sun, have tried suing for supremacy. They've got the U.N., the ICJ and a million other international bureaucracies on their side. But they're getting nowhere. They've tried arguing they're superior. To little avail. In fact, in their efforts to establish superiority, they're actually going downhill. Because they keep trying to challenge the U.S. In the runup to the Iraq war, Old Europe made several heavy-handed attempts to get Eastern Europe on the same page. Getting messed up in Iraq, they said, is dangerous, unnecessary, foolhardy. Trust the U.N., trust international institutions. We'll get it worked out diplomatically. Trust us. The Poles, the Latvians, the Letts, the Estonians, the Czechs... they'd heard that before. When the issue was their domination by the Soviets. In the post-Cold War age, Europe hasn't done much better. From Bosnia and Kosovo to Iraq and now the Ukraine, Europe has thought too much of Europe, and of its "rival," the U.S. It has thought too little of the Bosnians, the Kosovars, the Kurds and Shiites and the people of the Ukraine. It has thought too much of ego, of itself, and too little of the work at hand. We've heard a lot of talk about Europe taking the lead. About their industrial planning, their use of international institutions, their vision of collective security. The only thing in their favor, though, is the occasional American politician's blather about a second American century, suggesting we might fall to the same hubris. Fortunately the people at the top seem too busy managing events to get swept up in such nonsense. They're doing their work. And so long as we keep it that way, European dreams of greatness are better termed delusions of grandeur. Bottom line: It is not important who crushes despots, who liberates the oppressed, who succors the sick, who keeps shipping lanes open, and so forth. What is important is that despots be crushed, the oppressed be liberated, the sick be succored and free flow of goods, services and people be assured. If you do these things, you need not strive for greatness. You're already there. If you strive for greatness without doing these things, however, you will never get there because you're on the wrong path. Which is why so long as America keeps doing what it thinks needs to be done, and Europe keeps trying to revitalize Europe, we're in for another American century by default, as unfortunate as that is for us. If, however, Europe gives up its quest for greatness and shifts its focus to bringing to the world the best of the Enlightenment she unleashed (whose products include her "rival," America) we might get something even better: The Western Century. I know. It'll never happen. Nice thought, though.
posted by gbarto at 11:43 AM |
Archives
|
Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
